What do business school graduates learn, and how helpful is it for managing in the everyday, messy reality of organisations? What does it mean to apply 'best practice', or to take up 'evidence-based management' and what kind of thinking does this imply? In Rethinking Management, Chris Mowles argues that many management courses still largely assume a linear and predictable world, when experience tells us that the opposite is the case. He questions some of the more orthodox conceptual assumptions that underpin much management education and instead, encourages leaders and managers to take their everyday experience of working with others seriously. People in organisations co-operate and compete to get things done, and constrain and enable each other in relationships of power. Because of this there are always unintended consequences of our actions - uncertainty is inherent in the everyday. Chris Mowles draws on the complexity sciences, the sciences of uncertainty rather than certainty, and the social sciences to explore more helpful ways to think and talk about our lived reality. He takes concrete examples from contemporary organisations, to argue that understanding the radical implications of uncertainty is central to the task of leading. Rethinking Management explores narrative alternatives to the ubiquitous grids and frameworks that are routinely taught in business schools, and encourages management professionals and educators to recognise the importance of judgement, improvisation and the everyday politics of organisational life.

This is a management book that challenges convention and aims to appeal to a wide target audience. It argues that while many commentators acknowledge command and control is failing us, no one provides an alternative.

This is a fundamental challenge to conventional thinking on management education and its strictly utilitarian relationship to management research and practice. Chapters cover critical theory, feminism, post-structuralist work and much more.

This book offers innovative ideas and frameworks for sustainable strategizing to advance business by scaling-up its positive impact, which is so urgently needed at this time in the 21st century. It shows practitioners how to effectively deal with socio-ecological systems’ disruptions to their operating environments and play an active role in transforming markets toward a sustainable future. In short, the book demonstrates how to make business sense of sustainability, highlighting new approaches and examples that translate sustainability into strategy and action. The ultimate goal is to provide a path toward a thriving future for both business and society. This book was written for strategy practitioners and decision makers who want to understand why sustainable strategizing is important in today’s business world and are seeking actionable business knowledge they can apply in their companies. It was also written for students of management and can be used as a supplemental text to support traditional graduate and undergraduate management courses.

This book examines influential ideas within Management Information Systems (MIS). Leading international contributors summarize key topics and explore a variety of issues currently being discussed in the field. They re-visit influential ideas such as socio-technical theory, systems thinking, and structuration theory and demonstrate their relevance to newer ideas such as re-engineering, hybrid management, knowledge workers, and outsourcing. In locating MIS within an interdisciplinary context, particularly in the light of rapid technological changes, this book will form the link between past and future approaches to MIS.

Although project management is a newly recognised profession, it deals with a number of significant challenges. We seem to operate in an unprecedented environment, rife with change, innovation and turbulence. Moreover, projects by their very nature tend to push boundaries, encourage novelty and demand engagement with the uncertain and the unknown. Indeed, projects reflect our organised impulse to constantly amend, shape, improve and refine our context. So how can future projects overcome the challenges? Rethinking Project Management for a Dynamic and Digital World makes a powerful and original statement equipping project leaders and managers with new approaches and frameworks for an increasingly demanding world where the traditional methods, models and mindsets no longer suffice. The book explores new trends, promising ideas and novel concepts and distils the fundamentals for marshalling a world concerned with people, communities and value by deploying innovation, rethinking purpose and acting responsibly. An increasingly borderless, upwardly mobile and entrepreneurial society requires a revamped and revitalised project perspective that is more dynamic, adaptive and reflective. This volume brings together some of the best writing by leading authorities on many key topics, including benchmarking, lean quality, communicating, teams and teamwork, followership, organising for project work, project frameworks, agile working, project portfolios, strategic initiatives, strategic alignment, trust, entrepreneurship, putting people first, social processes, positive organisations, rethinking progress, the hacker paradigm, community, stewardship and knowledge management. The collection thus offers an invaluable new resource for informed managers looking to engage with the latest thinking and research and for researchers seeking to reflect on how the discipline is changing.

This book challenges the roots and elements of the existing dominant paradigm of management, which can legitimize artless practices and result in dysfunction, and proposes an alternative based on a different understanding of human nature and social and economic life. This paradigm is designed to bring about the conception of organizations as wholes rather than assemblies of disembodied fragments, with managers as facilitators of the work of others and shapers of culture, with a clear sense of purpose and a moral compass. Such a paradigm would result in a practice of management that is more competent, more purposeful, and more ethical, based on a more accurate and complete comprehension of reality. This book sets forth a more optimistic understanding of human nature and collective life, and the hope that we can be and do better. It is a major contribution to the field of management and will benefit academics, managers, and consultants working in the fields of organizational development and strategic change.