Organizational Analysis of the FMC Corporation's Green River

Organizational Analysis of the FMC Corporation’s Green River Completed by University of Outline I. Background II. Situation Analysis III. Alternatives and Recommendations IV. Implementation This paper analyzes the structure, format, and practices prevalent at the Green River, FCO Corporation’s subsidiary in Wyoming and provides recommendations on the most appropriate organizational design for this particular company. In order to fulfill the task of choosing the best organizational design, four powerful themes -- incorporated in this analysis -- that have developed within the field of organizational analysis over the last two decades: organizational culture, the gendering of organizations, postmodernism and organizational analysis, and critical approaches to management. We view these themes as intertwined in research on the essence of organizational life with its multiple manifestations. In particular the paper reflects the growing interest in the impact of organizational identity formation and its implications for individuals and organizational outcomes in terms of gender. These themes are integrated through a focus on new and varied research designs, methods and methodologies by which the complex interrelationships between gender, identity and the cultures of organizations are submitted to our understanding and can be explored. Background FMC Corporation was a Chicago-based company with 1989 sales reaching $3.4 Billion. The operations of the corporation were spread in five different areas: industrial chemicals, performance chemicals, precious metals, defense systems, and machinery and equipment. Green River, the FMC’s subsidiary presented a facility that had a large underground mine employing 400 people and producing 5 million tons of trona ore annually; three large refineries, and three smaller plants that were built at the time the study was conducted.

Understandably the Green River’s mission and vision statements remained the same as the FCO Corporation’s. However, the goals and objectives set were formed in accordance with the Green River’s specifics to adequately address the peculiar needs of this company. The vision and mission statements of FCO Corporation are based on TRUST, a popular approach that builds the relationships in the company based on common goals, partnership, and less severe penalties to ensure the greater extent of team work and cooperation between employees. Unlike the traditional management systems, this structure allows managers to have the higher level of authority delegation and greater degree of personal responsibility at the work place. As suggested, there is a need to seek for new methods to study organizations and to find subjective concepts to replace the old objective concepts in order to understand organizational essence (Acker, 1992). At Green River, culture became a theoretical tool to cross over the traditional micro- and macro-level organizational analysis. In general, internationalization gave impulses to study cultural aspects of business communication. As it was mentioned in the case, the Green River’s site manager is includes to choose the FCO Aberdeen’s organizational design as the one that suits his organization the most. Yet the final decision should be based on careful analysis of the situation and all relevant aspects at Green River. Situation Analysis We can see the many groups operating at Aberdeen.

Their work is based on several theoretical and methodological contexts, and any idea of its simplicity, trend-like appearance or hegemony over other concepts, meets with a difficulty when facing this diversity. Such approach that is formed by the notion of organization as various mini-cultures combined together was raised by FCO’s top managers seeking more comprehensive ways of improving organizational behavior and management at Aberdeen. The initial debate on the ‘democratically formed groups’ structure encouraged research that explored the complex factors influencing behavior within organizations. The relationships between non-rational factors and multiple-level organizational outcomes were explored especially, and the focus was on the symbolism of organizational life in general. The first approaches of organizational culture at Green River should emphasize its invisibility, whereas then the multiple methodologies and methods of analysis and interpretations will become accepted. Exploring organizational cultures and their gendered nature means making them visible. Alternatives and Recommendations Natural bodies, voices and texts become questioned in Green River organization that is developing in the era of postmodernism. Postmodernist thought has strongly influenced the debate on gender, identity and the culture of organizations by highlighting the relationship between subjectivity and discursive organizational practices, while, at the same time, questioning the viability of gender and culture as categories of understanding. In all events, this has enriched the debate and sharpened the interest in identity and organizational analysis at Green River. Men and women in organizations can be seen not only as carriers of bodies and voices, but also of femininity and masculinity, which are both organizational and institutional categories.

Texts produced in organizational contexts are related to many questions of gender, not only as innocent and factual products by nature. The symbolism of organizational realities is seen in postmodernists’ understandings of organizations. Implementation The FCO Aberdeen organizational design should be implemented at Green River. However some adjustments are to be made at Green River because the facilities here largely differ from those at Aberdeen. Hence, a slightly different design is required. One has to note that as today’s organizations (FCO and its subsidiary Green River being the essential parts of this system) are almost like global, anonymous cities, individuals in their identity formation processes come up against organizational frames, and unavoidably meet gender aspects at the same time. They build their individual identities based on gender, and at the same time organizational identities become built. This edited collection reflects the growing interest in identity construction and the problematic of organizational discourse. Therefore, a gender adjustment is needed in the Green River’s organizational design. Apart from that, the system adopted at Aberdeen should suffice the requirements and needs of the Green River site. Organizational Behavior Challenges One of the biggest challenges of organizational behavior and management both at Aberdeen and Green River are the need to constantly re-train the employees and implement the new organizational values as the goals and objectives of the organizations change.

In other words, to be competitive, the FCO at Aberdeen and Green River will, inevitably, have to re-consider the way they operate and adjust their goals to meet the increasing demands of the modern customers. Although it is not suggested that the companies will have to completely alter their ways of functioning or that their current ways of operating are inefficient, FCO can’t expect to use the same procedures and rely on the original corporate culture as time goes by and new business opportunities arise. Another challenge is to understand the various interpretations of the organizational theories being presented and choose the most appropriate one. The challenge of organizational theory must be qualified in two ways. First, organizational science has already produced a vast range of theory. Second, from the postmodern perspective, these myriad formulations are not a deficit- an indication, in modernist terms, of the pre-paradigmatic and non-cumulative character of the science. Rather, each of the existing theories represents a metaphoric construction, which is available for many purposes in a variety of contexts. Hence, choosing the most appropriate one is the challenge in itself.