Recently the field of organization studies has been plagued by intense, disruptive controversy about what counts as knowledge. This book, written by the major researchers and voices in the field of organization studies, attempts to respond to this controversy by offering the topic of "generative uncertainty" as the primary vehicle for rethinking about this issue. The authors prefer admitting uncertainty to making unwarranted assumptions. The ideas about questioning the possibility of knowledge that is certain goes back to before the time of Socrates. This unique, historical look at the study of organization studies will be of interest to all students and scholars of this field.

This volume explores major issues and concepts in the field of international business and management and asks the question 'What is it that we know?' It examines key topics such as multinational enterprise and strategic management theory, post-merger integration, internalizing firms and the strategy-performance relationship.

In the mid-20th century, university-based business schools re-oriented themselves to increased alignment with the preferences of the university and decreased alignment with the preferences of business. This re-alignment has caused multiple observers to question the effectiveness of current-day business schools. For example, recent discussions have lamented that business schools are engaged in research that does not influence the practice of business. This book engages these debates, arguing that all judgments about the effectiveness of business schools are rooted in assumptions about what the purposes of the business school appropriately are and that many of those assumptions are unstated and not subjected to debate. The author weaves a unique blend of complexity theory, philosophy of science, and the nature of professions to articulate those goals and assess the effectiveness at meeting them. The book traces parallel discussions regarding the purpose of the university in the writings of Aristotle and Wilhelm von Humboldt and ties those discussions to current debates. This book will inform business faculty and administrators of the degree to which university-based business schools are balancing multiple purposes which include discovery of knowledge, creating knowledge that informs the practice of business, training professionals, and instilling ethical principles in its training of those professionals.

This book examines planning as the critical influence on performance at work and in organizations. Bridging theory and practice, it unites cutting-edge research findings from cognitive science, social psychology, industrial and organizational psychology, strategic management, and entrepreneurship, and describes the practical applications of these research findings for practitioners interested in improving planning performance in organizations.

The fields of organizational climate and organizational culture have co-existed for several decades with very little integration between the two. In Organizational Climate and Culture: An Introduction to Theory, Research, and Practice, Mark G. Ehrhart, Benjamin Schneider, and William H. Macey break down the barriers between these fields to encourage a broader understanding of how an organization’s environment affects its functioning and performance. Building on in-depth reviews of the development of both the organizational climate and organizational culture literatures, the authors identify the key issues that researchers in each field could learn from the other and provide recommendations for the integration of the two. They also identify how practitioners can utilize the key concepts in the two literatures when conducting organizational cultural inquiries and leading change efforts. The end product is an in-depth discussion of organizational climate and culture unlike anything that has come before that provides unique insights for a broad audience of academics, practitioners, and students.

Managerial and organizational cognition has sustained and gained the interest of researchers for over a quarter of a century. This volume takes stock of the methodological accomplishments of the MOC field in recent years, and it sets the agenda for the next phase of its development.

This book demonstrates the power of writing in informal and formal organizations in the past and the present. It shows how writing, despite long lasting criticisms that can be traced back to Plato, and in spite of its frequent definition as a mere recording medium is in fact a creative mode of communication that supports the expression of emotions, the developing knowledge, and the building of strong communities among faraway individuals. The first part of the book illustrates how this has been true historically. The focus on writing as a fundamental mode of communication - the other being speech or the oral mode - is still important in our technology-infused world, where writing seems to have been reduced to short cryptic text messages or tweets. Precisely because of their heavy reliance on technology, current practices are in need of a deeper understanding that focus on deep as opposed to surface features and unveil the four essential mechanisms - objectification, reflecting, specifying, and addressing - that give writing its creative powers. In the second part of the book, we use contemporary case studies and interviews to illustrate how shifting our focus from the media to the mode of communication and focusing on the mechanisms of writing allows us to go beyond current debates about the capabilities of various communication media and to understand better today's communicative practices. This book is an attempt to unveil the powers of writing as well as to highlight the implications for organizations of the potential loss of these powers in today's world where writing-based distributed collaborations, interpersonal relationships, and online communities are key sources of innovation and support for individuals and organizations.