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This classic in organizational theory provides a succinct overview of the principal schools of thought as it presents a critical, sociopsychological, and historical orientation to the field of organizational analysis. Vividly written, with theories made concrete by specific, student-oriented examples, it takes a critical view toward organizations, analyzing their impact on individuals, groups, and society as a whole. New chapters on economic theories of organization and the conditional power theory are among the features of this revised edition.
This new edition looks at the many recent changes in the arena of Human Sevices Organizations.
Over the past 40 years, there has been a growing trend toward the utilization of teams for accomplishing work in organizations. Project teams, self-managed work teams and top management teams, among others have become a regular element in the corporation or military. This volume is intended to provide an overview of the current state of the art research on team effectiveness.
Based on the experiences and ideas of over 100 matrix practitioners ... the frameworks, ideas and tips provided are shaped around the [seven] ... matrix mastery techniques"--Page 4 of cover
Explores the concept of complexity and analyses how organizational governance can contribute to environmental sustainability. A common theme in these chapters is that organizations actively engage with their environments. Consequently, organizational responses are partly the result of iterative processes with the environment.
The past decade has seen increasing focus on the importance of information and knowledge in economic and social processes, the so-called 'knowledge economy'. This is reflected in the popularity amongst practicing managers and organizational theorists of notions of learning, sense-making, knowledge creation, knowledge management and intellectual capital in organizations and more recently, of emotional intelligence as an important management skill. This insightful book: argues that the information processing view of knowledge creation held by systems thinkers is no longer tenable develops the alternative perspective of Complex Responsive Processes of relating, drawing on the complexity sciences as a source for analogies with human action places self-organizing interaction at the centre of the knowledge creating process in organizations. Learning and knowledge creation are seen as qualitative processes of power relating that are emotional as well as intellectual, creative as well as destructive, enabling as well as constraining, and the result is a radical questioning of the belief that organizational knowledge is essentially codified and centralized. Instead, organizational knowledge is understood to be in the relationships between people in an organization and has to do with the qualities of those relationships.
Chris Demchak explores the reasons why military machines surprise their users and how they can change both the complexity and effectiveness of tactical organizations. She uses the Army's experiences with its M1 Abrams tank, as well as other examples, to explain the interaction of complex technology and militaries that seek to control uncertainty. Under some conditions, Demchak demonstrates, complexity in critical machines induces increased complexity in the organizations that use them, and can produce an army different from the one that was intended. Drawing on organization theory and her data, she argues that understanding this interaction will heavily influence whether armed forces reductions, savings, and modernization produce rapid, successful military organizations or lethally unpredictable ones.
Managing the Complex is an ambitious title - and it would be an audacious one if we were not to begin with a frank admission: to date few to none of us have a skill set which includes managing the complex. We try various things, we write about others, and we wonder about still others. When a tool, perspective, or technique comes along which seems to evoke success, we emulate it probe it and recoil at the all too often admission that it was situation and context which afforded success its opportunity, and not some quality intrinsic to the tool perspective or technique. Indeed, if the study of complexity has done anything for managers, and for those who espouse managerial theory, it is in providing a ‘scientific foundation’ for the notion that context matters. Those who preach abstract ideas have then to reconcile themselves to the notion that situation and embodiment matters. Those who believe in strong causality and determinism are left to wrestle with the role of chance, uncertainty, and chaos. Those who prefer to argue that men move history are confronted with the role of environment and affordances, while those who argue the reverse are left to contend with charisma, irrationality of crowds, and the strange qualities we know as emotions. A series on complex systems has less ambitious goals to contend with than this. Such a series can deal with classifications, and categories, and speak of ‘noise’ as if it were not the central focus of the problem. Managing the complex is about managing ‘noise’ or perhaps we should say it is about ‘dealing with’ ‘accepting’ ‘making room for’ and ‘learning from’ ‘noise’. The articles in this volume and in volumes to come will each be considered as ‘noise’ by some and as ‘gems’ by others, but we hope that practicing managers and academics alike will find plenty of fuel to drive their personal explorations into understanding, and perhaps even managing, the complex.
In introducing this reader comprising three dozen articles and critiques in organizational sociology, Handel (sociology, U. of Wisconsin-Madison) overviews definitional issues over the term organization as viewed by rational theories and open systems theories. Starting with classic theories of bur