Prepare your students for management success with this engaging survey of modern management practice. UNDERSTANDING MANAGEMENT, 8E seamlessly integrates classic management principles with today's latest management ideas to create a responsive market leading text that captivates your students. Acclaimed authors Richard Daft and Dorothy Marcic cover management and entrepreneurial issues within small- to mid-size companies where most students will begin their careers, as well as within larger global enterprises. Many examples focus on the constantly-evolving entertainment industry. Students gain valuable insights into real, contemporary business as they examine today's best management practices. This edition helps students establish and build upon practical skills they can readily apply to future or current careers. Engaging examples and numerous skill-building and application exercises in every chapter help students deepen their understanding and refine their management abilities. With a streamlined format, this edition takes a close look at how change demands innovation and how innovation requires forward-thinking, flexible leaders and organizations. The book's complete ancillary package provides flexibility and solid support for your course as you use UNDERSTANDING MANAGEMENT, 8E to prepare today's students to seize business opportunities and lead change. Be sure to also investigate the menu of high impact digital options available with this edition, including Aplia and CengageNOW. Important Notice: Media content referenced within the product description or the product text may not be available in the ebook version.

Management is a fragmented and interdisciplinary area of study, with a lot of academic branches. Willman argues this tree is narrower at its roots, and these roots lie primarily in social science. Key to the purpose of the book is to present management theory as applied social science. Developed out of a core management course at Master's level, this book introduces the field to students who may have little prior knowledge of management. Willman interprets 'management' broadly to embrace the sub-disciplines of strategy, finance, accounting, marketing, organisational behaviour and operations management. The text aims to show how they arose and how they relate, thus engaging the reader in a little history. The book is integrative, in that it seeks to find common concerns in disparate literatures. It is also critical in that it seeks to comparatively evaluate contributions to the management field both in terms of theoretical contribution and practical impact. It is intended to be accessible to a range of readers, presenting technical materials in an informal way. Finally, it is introductory in that it assumes no previous knowledge of the academic management field.

In these times of global economic crisis, social unrest towards the powers that be, and a yearning for alternative systems and organization, it is now more relevant than ever for you to take a critical stance to your management studies in order to analyse, understand and question the world around you and the capitalist stronghold in which you live and work. This new thought-provoking text uses critical theory and revolutionary ideas to help you challenge the status quo and prevailing ideologies in management. It covers key issues, thinkers and topics in an accessible style to provide a broad and clear understanding of vital theory which is applied to the real world through international case studies and reflective questions and think points for you to carry into practice. A companion website provides additional learning materials for personal study and class activities. This text is essential reading for any undergraduate or postgraduate student studying critical management or any management course with a critical slant.

'These sections represent the clearest rendition yet of these subjects, with difficult concepts introduced in a digestible form for the neophytic (or not so neophytic) researcher. Whilst in a book this size not every argument can be presented, there is ample extra material to be found to encourage further engagement... At the end of each chapter, there is a very useful Further Reading section provided by the authors, which gives useful guidelines. I believe to be an extremely useful text, which addresses what has until now been a significant gap in the market. This book will be my first choice in the future for introducing doctoral students of management-related subject to the philosophical underpinning they require for their studies. There is no other text which covers this area so clearly, so succinctly and in language that is readily accessible to a wide range of researcher back-grounds. I can enviSAGE this being a valuable source book to which researchers return again and again in order to deepen their understanding as research projects progress; it certainly provoked some new questions for me. To conclude, an excellent buy' - International Journal of Entrepreneurship and Innovation This is an invaluable introduction for all students and researchers of management confronting a new research project. Understanding Management Research provides an overview of the principal epistemological debates in social science and how these lead to and are expressed in different ways of conceiving and undertaking organizational research. For researchers and students who are increasingly expected to adopt a reflexive understanding of their own epistemological position, the authors present a concise, accessible guide to the different perspectives available and their implications for research output. All students undertaking empirical research for theses and dissertations will find this book helps them comprehend the key ongoing debates and engage with their own pre-understandings when trying to make sense of management and organizations.

′A broad-ranging and highly intelligent account of key recent developments internationally which skillfully updates the public management and governance literatures′ - Ewan Ferlie, Royal Holloway ′Public management has been radically changed and reformed... this book gives students a fine introduction to these changes and to the theories dealing with them′ - Jørgen Grønnegaard Christensen, University of Aarhus An introduction and guide to the dramatic changes that have occurred in the provision of public services over the last two decades, this book combines theoretical perspectives with a range of case studies from Europe, North America and further afield to explain why, how and with what success liberal democracies have reformed the service role of the state. The book pays close attention to four major dimensions of this transition: " External challenges and opportunties: globalisation and EU integration " Reducing the role of the state: Liberalisation, privatisation, regulation and competition policy " Improving the role of the state: New Public Management, e-Government and beyond " Managing the New Public Sector: organisations, strategy and leadership This text is designed for undergraduate courses in public governance, but it also addresses the core components of MPA programmes - the parameters, tools, principles and theories of public sector reform.