Complexity and Organizational Reality: Uncertainty and the Need to Rethink Management After the Collapse of Investment Capitalism

ISBN-13: 9780415556460 / Angielski / Twarda / 2010 / 264 str.

Ralph Stacey

Opis

This volume updates, revises and builds upon Ralph Stacey's classic writings, offering an alternative way of thinking about management that is based on the ongoing management experience of uncertainty.

The recent collapse of confidence in the global business environment has stemmed from what is being referred to as unknowable 'black swan' events, which take stakeholders in society by surprise. Ralph Stacey's seminal work on the real life complexity of management and organizations raised many of these important considerations in the past.

 

Complexity and Organizational Realities updates, revises and builds upon Stacey’s classic writings to present a new introduction to management and complexity. New material includes:

 

• Themes such as values, leadership, spontaneity
• The emergence of global patterns in local interaction
• The role of abstraction and modelling in modern ways of thinking
• The role of diversity and conflict in organizational evolution

 

Providing a new foundation for understanding complexity and management, this important textbook will be required reading for advanced undergraduate and postgraduate students of organizational studies, organizational behaviour and change management, who want to understand the role of complexity in business.

Spis treści

Preface  1. Contradiction: Experiencing the Reality of Uncertainty but Still Believing that Executives choose an Organization’s ‘Direction’  2. How We came to Believe that Leaders and Managers choose an Organization’s Direction: Professional Identification with the Sciences of Certainty  3. Complexity and the Sciences of Uncertainty: The Importance of Local Interaction in the Emergence of Population-Wide Patterns of Continuity and Change  4. Complexity and What most Writers on Organizations do with it: Obscuring Local Interaction and mostly Re-Presenting the Dominant Discourse  5. Understanding Organizations as Games we are Pre-Occupied in: Finding Ourselves Immersed in Local Interaction and using Abstract Management Tools at the Same Time  6. Understanding Organizations as Social Processes: The Interplay of Abstracting and Immersing Producing Outcomes No-One Chooses  7. Managers Accomplish Whatever they Accomplish in Processes of Communication  8. Turning the Dominant Management Discourse on its Head: Organizational Continuity and Transformation Emerging in Local Interaction rather than being Chosen by Managers  9. Local and Population-Wide Patterns of Power Relations and Ideology: The Dynamics of Inclusion and Exclusion in Organizations  10. Implications of a Theory of Complex Responsive Processes for Policy Making, Consultancy, Leadership, Management, Organizational Research and Management Development

O autorze

Ralph Stacey is Professor of Management and Director of the Doctor of Management Program at the Business School of the University of Hertfordshire, UK.