Striving to redirect the study of public administration toward innovation and imagination, deliberative democracy, knowledge transfer, policy making, and ethics and values--topics which for too long have been overshadowed by traditional problems of efficency, productivity, and instrumental-rational solutions--this book of diverse essays is certain to invigorate both scholarship and practice. Eighteen leading international scholars evaluate public administration's historical development and explore the significance and value trends in public administration from a variety of cutting-edge theoretical and practical perspectives. Aimed at students and practitioners alike, this collection of essays is certain to stimulate critical thinking and discussion of public administration's aims, mechanisms, and overall effectiveness, as well as the role it plays in democratizing countries.

This book describes what is argued to be the most effective way of doing public administration thinking. Its aim is to encourage governments to govern fundamentally better in terms of policy and administration. A better understanding of context and identities, imaginization, epistemic pluralism, anti-administration, and the context of economics are examples of what is critical for high effectiveness. The pieces included in this book have been handpicked from the vast academic collection that David Farmer has authored over the last thirty years and which were published in the Journal of Administrative Theory and Praxis and the Journal of Public Administration Education. Collectively, these chapters are intended to help governments use post-traditional public administration theory in order to achieve better praxis.

This book assembles multi-disciplinary contributions to delve deeper into ReThinking Management. The first part provides some foundational considerations and inspirations. Further chapters offer more specific links to the arts and creativity sectors as well as empirical research and case reflections. ReThinking Management pursues the main idea that management theory is not merely a sub-discipline of economics, but rather a cross-disciplinary and critical field of research and practice, with a decidedly cultural perspective. While questioning the status and practices of conventional management, the book opens up for new understandings, turns and perspectives.

Critical Social Theory and the End of Work examines the development and sociological significance of the idea that work is being eliminated through the use of advanced production technology. Granter’s engagement with the work of key American and European figures such as Marx, Marcuse, Gorz, Habermas and Negri, focuses his arguments for the abolition of labour as a response to the current socio-historical changes affecting our work ethic and consumer ideology. By combining history of ideas with social theory, this book considers how the 'end of work' thesis has developed and has been critically implemented in the analysis of modern society. This book will appeal to scholars of sociology, history of ideas, social and cultural theory as well as those working in the fields of critical management and sociology of work.

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 betweenpast and future approaches to MIS.

The purpose of this book is to reimagine the concept of culture, both as an analytical category and disciplinary practice of dominance, marginalization and exclusion. For decades culture has been perceived as a ‘hot topic’. It has been written about and deployed as part of ‘a search for excellence’; as a tool through which to categorise, rank, motivate and mould individuals; as a part of an attempt to align individual and corporate goals; as a driver of organizational change, and; as a servant of profit maximisation. The women writers presented in this book offer a different take on culture: they offer useful disruptions to mainstream conceptions of culture. Joanne Martin and Mary Douglas provide multi-dimensional holistic accounts of social relations that point up similarity and difference. Rather than offering totalising or prescriptive models, each author considers the complex, polyphonic and processual nature of culture(s) while challenging us to acknowledge and work with ambiguity, fluidity and disruption. In this spirit writings of Judi Marshall, Arlie Hochschild, Kathy Ferguson, Luce Irigaray and Donna Haraway are employed to disrupt extant management cultures that lionise the masculine and marginalise the concerns, perspectives and contributions of women and the diversity of women. These writers bring bodies, emotions, difference, resistance and politics back to the centre stage of organizational theory and practice. They open us up to the possibility of cultures suffused with multifarious potentiality rather than homogeneity and faux certainty. As such, they offer new ways of understanding and performing culture in management and organization. This book will be relevant to students and researchers across business and management, organizational studies, critical management studies, gender studies and sociology.

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.