Particularly valuable to those involved in the management and organizational sciences, since much material from those fields informs the discussion, this book considers several answers to the question of the true nature of time. It demonstrates that humanity creates a variety of times and the times affect the experiences of life—as times vary, so does life.
What exactly makes the nature of organizations so miracular that their very purpose is “to achieve performance” and that it is now regarded, in this capitalist age of ours, as the central aim to be both possible and desirable for any organization? After all, there is simply no lack of organizations which “achieve performance” with questionable means and goals—be they about “greed” and “excess” in the corporate world, or “evil” and “injustice” in the public sphere, just to cite two main examples (although there are others too, of course). Contrary to the conventional wisdom preciously accepted by many contemporaries, this obsessive craze for organizational performance is fast becoming a seductive trend, such that the dark sides of organizational performance have yet to be systematically understood and that its very purpose is neither possible nor desirable to the extent that its proponents would like us to believe. Needless to say, this is not to suggest that the purpose of organizations is to reject performance, or that the literature in organizational studies (and other related fields like political science, media studies, and business management, for example) hitherto existing in history are full of scholarly worthlessness. The aim of this book, however, is to provide an alternative (better) way to understand the nature of organization, in special relation to communication, decision-making, and leadership—while learning from different views in the literature, without favoring any one of them (nor integrating them), and, in the end, transcending them in a new direction not thought before. This seminal project, if successful, will radically change the way that we think about the nature of organization, from the combined perspectives of the mind, nature, society, and culture, with enormous implications for the human future and what I originally called its “post-human” fate.
Systemic Structure behind Human Organizations: From Civilizations to Individuals shows how the systemic yoyo model can be successfully employed to study human organizations at three different levels: civilizations, business enterprises, and individuals. This monograph tackles managerial problems from an holistic perspective such as how a business entity grows and dies and how a CEO can manipulate the choices of long- and short-term projects in order to gain more control over the board of directors. By creating a uniform language and logic of reasoning, the book provides examples and convincing results. Additionally the book shows how the same model, thinking logic, and methodology of the systems research can be equally applied to analyze problems and situations considered in natural sciences, social sciences, and humanity areas. Therefore it offers knowledge of a brand new tool to attack organizational problems. By concentrating on difficult, unsettled issues in these varying areas, this monograph thoroughly explains how some laws of nature can be established for the common study of natural and social sciences.
Change management and organizational development is unthinkable without people. Human beings form its core as both subjects and objects of change. This volume attempts to cut through to the core of change management, to the people that stand at its heart and focuses on their intrinsic role in change management and organizational development. Topics covered in this volume encompass the human element within organizational change, how this impacts roles, dynamics of team interaction and affects the workplace in teaching and learning settings. It also addresses resistance to institutional and organizational change and the central role that agile management plays in this process.
Based on significant new research from multiple sources, Richard Barrett creates a compelling narrative about why values-driven organizations are the most successful organizations on the planet. According to Barrett, understanding employee’s needs—what people value—is the key to creating a high performing organization. When you support employees in satisfying their needs, they respond with high levels of employee engagement and willingly bring their commitment and creativity to their work. This book updates and brings together in one volume, two of Richard Barrett’s previous publications, Liberating the Corporate Soul (1998) and Building a Values-Driven Organisation (2006), to provide a reference manual for leaders and change agents who wish to create a values-driven organization. The text provides both a leadership approach, and a language, for organizational transformation and culture change that incorporates concepts such as cultural entropy, values alignment and whole system change. With an updated set of cultural diagnostic tools and a wide range of new and exciting case studies on culture and leadership development, The Values-Driven Organization will be essential reading for students, researchers and practitioners in the fields of organizational change, leadership and ethics.
Regarded as one of the most important sociological and business commentaries of modern times, The Organization Man developed the first thorough description of the impact of mass organization on American society. During the height of the Eisenhower administration, corporations appeared to provide a blissful answer to postwar life with the marketing of new technologies—television, affordable cars, space travel, fast food—and lifestyles, such as carefully planned suburban communities centered around the nuclear family. William H. Whyte found this phenomenon alarming. As an editor for Fortune magazine, Whyte was well placed to observe corporate America; it became clear to him that the American belief in the perfectibility of society was shifting from one of individual initiative to one that could be achieved at the expense of the individual. With its clear analysis of contemporary working and living arrangements, The Organization Man rapidly achieved bestseller status. Since the time of the book's original publication, the American workplace has undergone massive changes. In the 1990s, the rule of large corporations seemed less relevant as small entrepreneurs made fortunes from new technologies, in the process bucking old corporate trends. In fact this "new economy" appeared to have doomed Whyte's original analysis as an artifact from a bygone day. But the recent collapse of so many startup businesses, gigantic mergers of international conglomerates, and the reality of economic globalization make The Organization Man all the more essential as background for understanding today's global market. This edition contains a new foreword by noted journalist and author Joseph Nocera. In an afterword Jenny Bell Whyte describes how The Organization Man was written.
