In May 2014, the French research laboratory ISEOR (Socio?Economic Institute for Firms and Organizations) and the University of St. Thomas co?sponsored a second conference on the application of the Socio?Economic Approach to Management (SEAM) paradigm and methodology in the United States. SEAM is a scientific approach to consultancy that focuses on uncovering the dysfunctions and hidden costs that exist in organizations, “hidden” in the sense that they are not captured by traditional accounting methods and financial analyses. Through intervention that encompasses the entire organization – what the ISEOR team refers to as the HORIVERT approach (combining horizontal and vertical intervention) – the underlying goal is to enhance organizational performance by attacking the “TFW virus,” a vestige of the early work by Frederick Taylor, Henri Fayol, and Max Weber that has sufficiently infiltrated our thinking about management and organization to the point where are falling well short of our own potential. The resultant dysfunctions this virus unleashes creates hidden costs that readily destroy a firm’s value?added possibilities. The volume captures the ideas, applications, and exchanges of that meeting, attempting to bring the reader into the conference itself. Chapters include the contributors’ presentations (“Chapter Prologue: Conference Remarks”), revised conference papers, and the question and answer dialogue for the session.

The result of half a century of research and experimentation in economics and management, this Treatise is intended for management practitioners. Socio-economic management (SEAM) makes the demands of humanism in professional life and sustainable economic prosperity compatible. It is illustrated with numerous cases from 2,150 companies and organizations from a wide variety of sectors and presents observed and measured results. Most of these chapters are written jointly by managers or executives of companies and organizations, and scholars or consultants involved in the pilot actions. This book is the work of 193 authors, from 16 countries and 4 continents, practitioners or academics in management sciences and management. This reflects the diversity of national and sectoral contexts of SEAM applications. Some chapters situate this concept in relation to the major currents of current thought. Each chapter is preceded by abstracts in French, English and Spanish. The prefaces, signed by Herman Aguinis and Rene Ricol, show the scope of socio-economic theory and management beyond the borders of the company. The book illustrates the international influence (48 countries) of the innovative and robust methods created and developed by the ISEOR team. Socio-economic theory constitutes a "breakthrough innovation", both in terms of its conceptual contribution and the practical methods and tools of its applications. This holistic approach touches on the different functions of the company and its multiple problems. It provides a structured change management method, focused on stimulating Human Potential and on self-financing the development of the company or organization, through the periodic recycling of hidden costs.

The Emerald Handbook of Management and Organization Inquiry provides new and innovative insights into the field of management and organization inquiry. It provides extensive coverage of the 7S structure that has been so transformational for the field: Storytelling, System, Sustainability, Science, Spirit, Spirals, and Sociomateriality.

This set of multi-reference works is meant to be read together as the five volumes interlace one another like the laces of a shoe in the famous painting by Vincent van Gogh. Who will wear the shoes is a question long debated in art history and philosophy. If we take these five volumes from different points of view on the theory and practice of business storytelling then we have a crisscrossing, a new and impressive dialogue for the reader. This set is presented as a new way to lace up the laces of business storytelling.Volume 1 aims to recount narratives in a variety of ways so that the precepts of entrepreneurial storytelling can be made accessible to a variety of audiences — academic, practitioner, student, and community member. Entrepreneurship has a long history and tradition but there are disputed ways of doing business storytelling in entrepreneurship that the next four volumes articulate.Volume 2 provides insights into stories fostering the idea of business (and not necessarily business itself). It focuses specifically on history — contributing to the current debates within management and organizational history around the idea of 'the historic turn'. It reflects on the idea of business and beyond; could there be more to history and business storytelling than what has previously been accepted in the field? This book sets out to explore a diverse array of alternative modes and multiple ways of storying organizations. The editors intentionally sought to involve an international network of authors with diverse storytelling accounts of history as a way of helping build out this new storytelling paradigm in a diverse and inclusive ethic. As a result, this volume showcases a broad spectrum of critical storytelling from geographically diverse authors working in universities, small businesses, and public service throughout Brazil, Canada, Finland, the United Kingdom, and the United States. To reflect these dynamics, and for the stories in this volume to fit together, chapters were organized into three themes: stories of processing history, tales of history-as-method, and narratives of history through a business opportunity.Volume 3 features stories that reflect the exacerbated inequalities of race, gender, and income across the world. These inequalities and power relations remain continuously con-tested, particularly in these trying times, despite being captive to a particular economic ideology built on the premise of exploitation and subjugation. The stories told in this volume tell against the orthodoxy, the colonizer, and the (seemingly) powerful. They are organized as stories of resistance, emancipation, and transformation. They invite us to rethink the multiple ways to (re)structure power relations between the colonizer and the colonized, and open up spaces for the marginalized underprivileged voices.Volume 4 is designed to create a new business storytelling paradigm that critically approaches business narratives that have historically privileged a corporate agenda. It explores the various ways that images of the other in business are developed, presented, and accounted for through powerful and dominant narratives. The stories in this volume, collectively, help readers to understand, resist, and provide strategies for change through various analyses of how business narratives come to develop, get written, are legitimized, are challenged, and get changed over time.Volume 5 brings together the practices specific to the socioeconomic approach to management (SEAM). SEAM is a method of change management developed through research interventions carried out in more than 2,000 companies and organizations since 1975. This method is systemic, it considers the whole company, and tends to simultaneously increase social and economic performance by focusing mainly on the development of human skills and behaviors, making it possible to reduce dysfunctions and recycle hidden costs into added value.

This Handbook develops a practical understanding of the new quantum storytelling consulting paradigm, providing case examples, ways to enact practices, and methods to conduct research into its impact and consequences. It will be essential reading for all scholars and practitioners of story and narrative consulting.

This volume is part of an ongoing partnership between the Research in Management Consulting book series and the Socio-Economic Institute for Firms and Organizations (ISEOR), located in Ecully, France, on the outskirts of Lyon. The socio-economic approach to management (SEAM) provides a pathway to creating more engaged, more responsible and responsive, and more productive organizations. In many respects this volume reflects a culmination of ISEOR’s work, drawing together Henri Savall and Veronique Zardet’s insights and framing them in the context of strategy creation and, just as if not more important, strategy implementation. This volume casts SEAM in the context of strategy development and implementation. Reflecting on the changing nature of work and the workplace, the potential power of—and need to develop and build on—human potential has never been greater. Savall and Zardet have always thought that the Western concept of human resources was misguided, that people are not a resource to use up but rather a source of potential to invest in, develop, and nurture. People bring their potential to the organizations in which they work—and it is their choice as to whether they will apply it in their jobs. Thus, a core managerial challenge is to create an environment in which that potential can be maximized. SEAM-based strategy builds on this premise, developing an approach to economic and social performance, providing direction as to how managers can create and implement strategies that enhance organizational effectiveness and efficiency. As Savall and Zardet argue, strategic vision does not have to be limited by constraints in the external environment—companies “are not compelled to enter in a ‘strategic’ tunnel” that mimics the competition and the market. Instead, companies can experience breakthroughs, turning constraints into opportunities by unleashing their internal energy, power, and cohesion, working and succeeding as a team. The SEAM approach to strategy is grounded in innovation and creation far more than imitation—and, as convincingly illustrated in the volume, that creativity can be self-financed through the value-added created by the elimination of organizational dysfunctions and the hidden costs they generate. The volume provides an insightful guide for enhancing economic and social performance, with a useful mixture of specific tools and techniques—grounded in a conceptual view of organizational life—interspersed throughout that illustrate how it can be done.

Volume 27 continues the diversity and inclusivity of the Research in Organizational Change and Development series through insightful, thought provoking chapters with new conceptual insights and robust empirical studies. This volume includes contributions from Australia, Canada, France, Ireland, Italy, United Kingdom and United States.