New Managerial Thinking: Factors Affecting Training and Development at Work

Discusses the new managerial model of the 1970s and 1980s which emphasizes flatter, flexible, less bureaucratic organizations, with increased employee awareness through training and development, and suggests that actual research reveals frustration and opposition to these ideas from trainees and employees. Problems in transferring to the new model include the cultural difference between the UK and the originating country, Japan; a rejection of the accompanying evangelical language of America; the implication that those who oppose change are merely lacking in “faith”; a bureaucratic paradox, or the discrepancy,between claims and actual experience; and the selling of the model within a “prescriptive consultancy” framework.