Organizational Realities
Studies of Strategizing and Organizing
Published on 27. April 2006
Book
Hardback
656 pages
978-0-19-928851-9 (ISBN)
Description
William H. Starbuck is one of the most creative, productive, and wide-ranging writers in management and organization studies. His work spans three decades and encompasses a whole variety of issues, yet it has never been collected together in one place. This book does just that - bringing together his most seminal writings, prefaced by a personal reflection on some of the themes and conclusions of that emerge from this, and the context in which they were written.
What emerges from this is a picture of organizations and their strategies that emphasizes the characteristics of real-life human beings: their idiosyncratic preferences, their distrust for each other, their struggele for dominance, their personal interests which don't always coincide with the interests of the organization, and the internal politicking and contests between interest groups that take place in organizations. Some chapters review research literature, some report empirical findings, some propose conceptual reformulations, and some offer advice to managers.
This book will be a unique guide to the work of an influential thinker in management and organization studies, and will be of interest to academics, researchers, and students of management, strategy, and organization studies.
What emerges from this is a picture of organizations and their strategies that emphasizes the characteristics of real-life human beings: their idiosyncratic preferences, their distrust for each other, their struggele for dominance, their personal interests which don't always coincide with the interests of the organization, and the internal politicking and contests between interest groups that take place in organizations. Some chapters review research literature, some report empirical findings, some propose conceptual reformulations, and some offer advice to managers.
This book will be a unique guide to the work of an influential thinker in management and organization studies, and will be of interest to academics, researchers, and students of management, strategy, and organization studies.
More details
Language
English
Place of publication
Oxford
United Kingdom
Target group
Professional and scholarly
Academics, researchers, and students of management, strategy, and organization studies.
Illustrations
Numerous figures and tables
Dimensions
Height: 242 mm
Width: 163 mm
Thickness: 40 mm
Weight
1122 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-19-928851-9 (9780199288519)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Person
William H. Starbuck is Professor in Residence, Lundquist College of Business, University of Oregon. Author of numerous articles on a wide-ranging set of issues relating to organizational behavior and strategy, he is also a former editor of Administrative Science Quarterly and co-editor of The Handbook of Organizational Design (with Paul Nystrom, OUP, 1981).
Content
Preface: Realistic Perspectives on Organizing and Strategizing ; ORGANIZATIONAL GROWTH AND DEVELOPMENT AND ENVIRONMENTAL RELATIONS ; 1. Organizational growth and development ; 2. Organizations and their environments ; 3. Camping on seesaws: Prescriptions for a self-designing organization ; ORGANIZATIONAL LEARNING AND STRATEGIZING PART 1 ; 4. Responding to crises ; 5. Organizations as action generators ; 6. To avoid organizational crises, unlearn ; 7. Acting first and thinking later: Theory versus reality in strategic change ; PERCEPTIONS AND LEARNING PART 1 ; 8. Organizational facades ; 9. Executives' perceptual filters: What they notice and how they make sense ; 10. Challenger: Changing the odds until something breaks ; ORGANIZING AND STRATEGIZING IN KNOWLEDGE-INTENSIVE FIRMS, CONTROL SYSTEMS PART 1 ; 11. When is play productive? ; 12. Learning by knowledge-intensive firms ; 13. Keeping a butterfly and an elephant in a house of cards: The elements of exceptional success ; 14. How organizations channel creativity ; STRATEGIZING PART 2 ; 15. Strategizing realistically in competitive environments ; 16. Trying to help S&Ls: How organizations with good intentions jointly enacted disaster ; 17. Unlearning ineffective or obsolete technologies ; ANCIENT ISSUES IN ORGANIZING, CONTROL SYSTEMS PART 2 ; 18. Distrust in dependence: The ancient challenge of superior-subordinate relations ; 19. Ancient Chinese theories of control ; PERCEPTIONS AND LEARNING PART 2 ; 20. How organizations learn from success and failure ; 21. The accuracy of managers' perceptions: A dimension missing from theories about firms ; 22. Studying the accuracy of managers' perceptions: A research odyssey ; STRATEGIZING PART 3 ; 23. Which dreams come true? Endogeneity, industry structure, and forecasting accuracy