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Managerial Strategy for the Future: Theory Z Management
Foss, Laurence
15/3  (Spring 1973): 68-81

If, as sociologist Rensis Likert urges, human organization is a relatively untapped company resource, and if these newer concerns constitute proper ones for a growing segment of the employee population, then sociologists may need to speak of a broadening of behavioral science categories as they pertain to organizational development. Theory Z structurally recognizes this motivational change and generalizes it to include all levels of employees. It is not just that in the last decade significant numbers of young employees and economically disadvantaged employees helped precipitate the need for this change among executives and managers and so, of course, themselves share these needs. By sensitizing business to the socio-ecological fallout of unlimited production, these employees and prospective employees changed the social climate. Until quite recently no public opprobrium attached to dumping waste chemicals into rivers, refusing to hire uneducated blacks or fulfilling military weapons contracts. The magazine "Fortune's" editor John McDonald says that as long as the old customs prevailed, businessmen never had to speak the language of corporate social responsibility, is the way. But these customs no longer prevail; new regulatory laws are being enacted and old ones enforced. And to a considerable extent business is shaped by law and custom and helps to shape them as well.

 

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