This unique book provides a novel and challenging framework for understanding and influencing organizational change. It reimagines managing and leading change as the mindful mobilisation of maps, masks and mirrors.

This unique book provides a novel and challenging framework for understanding and influencing organizational change. It reimagines managing and leading change as the mindful mobilization of maps, masks and mirrors. The book challenges overly rational views of change management and leadership. Addressing the gaps, paradoxes and ironies of organizational change, it exposes how deep the faults of traditional change management lie. The authors successfully bridge the divide between scholarly treatises and textbooks on leading change. Summarizing and integrating the diverse literatures on change, this dynamic book is an invaluable resource for change researchers and specialists. Abundant with popular imagery, stories, case studies and reflective activities, Ironies of Organizational Change is the perfect companion and guide for lecturers and advanced students of business and organization studies. It also serves as a research based pragmatic handbook for practitioners looking to manage change more effectively.

Offering effective tools and strategies, this book covers how to encourage and strengthen skills in process analysis and investigation, align OD principles with transforming societal values, clarify communication processes and decision-making procedures, and isolate and resolve roadblock issues. Constructing a platform to assess large-system agendas, Ironies in Organizational Development, Second Edition is an outstanding text for upper-level undergraduate and graduate students taking organizational development courses in the departments of public administration, psychology, management, and sociology, as well as for in-service and professional workshops.

Organization politics can be seen as a game in which players compete for different kinds of territory such as status, power, and influence. In Power, Politics and Organizational Change, David Buchanan and Richard Badham ask: What’s the relevance of politics to change and innovation? What kind of game is this? What, if any, are the rules? How is the game played? What ethical issues arise? Should one play this game to win, and if so, how? How can you develop political expertise? The third edition has been thoroughly updated and revised. This includes discussion of current trends heightening the importance of developing political will and skill in a post-truth era, the rise of ‘new power’, the role of ‘BS busting’, the power of storytelling, and the politics of speaking up.

The notion of paradox dates back to ancient philosophy, yet only recently have scholars started to explore this idea in organizational phenomena. Two decades ago, a handful of provocative theorists urged researchers to take seriously the study of paradox, and thereby deepen our understanding of plurality, tensions, and contradictions in organizational life. Studies of organizational paradox have grown exponentially over the past two decades, canvassing varied phenomena, methods, and levels of analysis. These studies have explored such tensions as today and tomorrow, global integration and local distinctions, collaboration and competition, self and others, mission and markets. Yet even with both the depth and breadth of interest in organizational paradoxes, key issues around definitions and application remain. This Handbook seeks to aid, engage, and fuel the expanding interest in organizational paradox. Contributions to this volume depict how paradox studies inform, and are informed, by other theoretical perspectives, while creating a resource that enables scholars to learn about and apply this lens across varied organizational phenomena. The increasing complexity, volatility, and ambiguity in our world continually surfaces paradoxical dynamics. Thus, this Handbook offers insights to scholars across organizational theory.

There is a widespread discontent with the quality of education and levels of college student achievement, particularly for undergraduates preparing for the professions. This report examines the educational challenges in preparing professionals, reviews the specific types of curriculum innovations that faculty and administrators have created or significantly revised to strengthen college graduates' abilities, and focuses on the societal changes and expectations produced by the acceleration in technology.

The environment of modern organizations is so complex and volatile that we take for granted that organizational change is necessary for organizational survival. Yet the literature on organizations has for years described manifold obstacles to such change. First published in 1971, this book extracts from that literature and from experience a comprehensive yet concise overview of those barriers. Because these elements of the analysis are as valid now as when they were originally written, The Limits of Organizational Change is still widely read and cited nearly a quarter-century later. From the premises of this argument, Kaufman drew a number of conclusions about organizational survival and extinction, age and size, centralization and decentralization, and organizational evolution. Subsequent research and reflection induced him to refine and modify some of those inferences. The modifications are spelled out in a new preface that gives fresh relevance to his findings and his conjectures. Yet The Limits of Organizational Change is not a ponderous, labored work. As one reviewer remarked, it is "a delightful set of essays . . . a review of empirical research in a witty, conversational style. . . ." (The Rocky Mountain Social Science Journal). It is a book one can enjoy as well as profit from, and will be a useful tool for managers, organizational studies scholars, and sociologists.