Approaches to leadership and management are still dominated by prescriptions – usually claimed as scientific – for top executives to choose the future direction of their organization. The global financial recession and the collapse of investment capitalism (surely not planned by anyone) make it quite clear that top executives are simply not able to choose future directions. Despite this, current management literature mostly continues to avoid the obvious – management’s inability to predict or control what will happen in the future. The key question now must be how we are to think about management if we take the uncertainty of organizational life seriously. Ralph Stacey has turned to the sciences of uncertainty and complexity to develop an understanding of leadership and management as the ordinary politics of daily organizational life. In presenting organizations as a series of complex responsive processes, Stacey’s new book helps us to see organizational reality for what it actually is – human beings engaged in many, many local conversational interactions and power relations in which they negotiate their ideologically based choices. Organizational continuity and change emerge unpredictably, rather than as a result of any overall plan. This is a radically different picture from the one painted by most of the management literature, which explains "organizational continuity and change" as the realization of the global plans and choices of a few powerful executives within an organization. Providing a new foundation for understanding complexity and management, this important book is required reading for managers and leaders wanting to understand the reality of complexity in organizations, including those engaged in postgraduate studies in leadership, organizational behaviour and change management.

Written to introduce readers to the experiences people have in organizations, this book provides a reality-based perspective on the everyday happenings in organizations at all professional levels. With current and informative readings that provoke reflection and discussion, this book gives readers a real-world overview of organizational behavior from executive managerial levels to those of lower level participants. For professionals with a career in organizational behavior, management, business relations, organizational psychology, communications, public relations, education, and social work.

Providing a critique of the ways that complexity theory has been applied to understanding organizations, and outining a new direction, this book calls for a radical re-examination of management thinking.

This text describes and assesses the impact of restructuring and downsizing on both employees and companies. It presents case studies showing how organizations have successfully managed restructuring, and discusses principles and practices for revitalizing companies affected by restructuring.

The central theme in this selection of readings is the importance of reflective action in the process of managing formal organizations. Contrary to traditional thinking in Organizational Behaviour (OB) which sees management in terms of social engineering, new thinking in OB highlights the subjective and reflective relationship between managers and the organizations they attempt to manage. Organizations are viewed as fluid, ambiguous constructions, the nature of which depends crucially on the interpretative frameworks applied to them. The articles chosen are all very recent, and written by leading authorities in the field. Although their authors elaborate on the main features of new thinking in OB, they do so through its juxtaposition with traditional theory. In his introduction, the editor has synthesized the arguments of the contributors within the new approach to OB as well as showing their connections to the wider literature.

Devoted to the study and management of misbehaviour in work organizations, this volume is divided into three parts. Part I discusses the prevalence of these phenomena; Part II explores important manifestations and antecedents; and Part III presents practical and methodological implications.

Organizations are increasingly facing continuous and highly complex changes that require more proactive strategies, policies and management practices. Conscious of this reality, this book provides information and debate on principles, strategies, models, techniques, methodologies and applications of organizational management in the field of industry, commerce and services. Organizational Management communicates the latest developments and thinking on the organizational management subject world-wide, and seeks cultural and geographic diversity in studies and uses of organizational management that have a special impact on organizational communications, change processes and work practices. With an emphasis on the way organizations define and develop their management policies and practices in order to acquire more competitive advantages in the global market, this book is crucial to any practitioner or researcher of current organizational management.