Consultants and practitioners working with change can feel at a loss as to how to help their clients move forward. Organisations get stuck in routine ways even when they have innovations in mind. Consultants get stuck in familiar interventions which no longer prove stimulating or effective. Such challenges to practice can preoccupy and reinforce these stuck positions. Drawing on the authors' experiences of working with the professional development of consultants and change-agents over many years, this book provides an asset-based approach to consulting, where the resources to work at this 'stuckness' come from the way that we think about and use ourselves: our Identity and our Presence. The authors propose that developing capacities to recognise and analyse who we bring into our consulting, and how we bring ourselves is central to resource-ful practice. Without a skill-ful integration of these resources, the potential for change can be compromised. In handbook format, the book is structured in seven sections: Potential Space, Identity, Presence, Role Space, Practice, Change, and Future Developments.

The publication of this book coincides with a increasing recognition that the challenges facing society and organisations are not amenable to "quick fixes". The approaches to consultancy which underpin the cases presented here are particularly relevant in this new context. The contributors are graduates of AOC The Tavistock Institute Masters Programme in Advanced Organisational Change and Consulting and their associates; and the work they describe here is a testament to the quality of that programme and the learning that participants get from it.

Public-sector organizations are fundamentally different from their private-sector counterparts. They are part of the society’s political organizations and are major political actors. They are multifunctional, follow a political leadership and the majority do not operate in an external market. In an era of rapid reform, reorganization and modernization of the public sector, this book offers a timely and illuminating introduction to the public-sector organization that recognizes its unique values, interests, knowledge and power base. Drawing on both instrumental and institutional perspectives within organization theory, as well as democratic theory and empirical studies of decision-making, the book addresses five central aspects of the public-sector organization: ■ goals, values and motivation ■ leadership and steering ■ reform and change ■ effects, learning and implications ■ understanding and design The book challenges conventional economic analysis of the public sector, arguing instead for a political-democratic approach and a new prescriptive organization theory. A rich resource of both theory and practice, Organization Theory and the Public Sector: Instrument, Culture and Myth is essential reading for anybody studying the public sector. This second edition of the book contains a range of new and updated themes, examples and references.

Cheng, a former McKinsey management consultant, reveals his proven, insider'smethod for acing the case interview.

In his landmark study of exchange and power in social life, Peter M. Blau contributes to an understanding of social structure by analyzing the social processes that govern the relations between individuals and groups. The basic question that Blau considers is: How does social life become organized into increasingly complex structures of associations among humans.This analysis, first published in 1964, represents a pioneering contribution to the sociological literature. Blau uses concepts of exchange, reciprocity, imbalance, and power to examine social life and to derive the more complex processes in social structure from the simpler ones. The principles of reciprocity and imbalance are used to derive such processes as power, changes in group structure; and the two major forces that govern the dynamics of complex social structures: the legitimization of organizing authority of increasing scope and the emergence of oppositions along different lines producing conflict and change.