Around 5,000 business and management titles are published every year, and increasingly, their preferred mode of presentation is centred on the creation and marketing of buzzwords and fads. This book argues that these management fads and buzzwords deflect critical inquiry and limit useful action because they present a 'ready made' view of the world, which rejects the benefits of theoretical analysis and reflection. Topics covered include: * the 'guru industry' * 'excellence' * business process re-engineering * empowerment * culture * knowledge work * globalization. 'Unpacking' the 'guru industry' and analyzing the fads and buzzwords, this book provides a 'critical-practical' analysis, designed to allow readers to locate, understand and critique management fashion.
Around 5,000 business and management titles are published every year, and increasingly, their preferred mode of presentation is centred on the creation and marketing of buzzwords and fads. This book argues that these management fads and buzzwords deflect critical inquiry and limit useful action because they present a 'ready made' view of the world, which rejects the benefits of theoretical analysis and reflection. Topics covered include: * the 'guru industry' * 'excellence' * business process re-engineering * empowerment * culture * knowledge work * globalization. 'Unpacking' the 'guru industry' and analyzing the fads and buzzwords, this book provides a 'critical-practical' analysis, designed to allow readers to locate, understand and critique management fashion.
Explores where new ideas come from, how to evaluate which ideas are worth pursuing, and how to customize ideas to suit and organization's unique needs.
This book takes a very critical look at management fads and fashions and shows that many do not stand up to scrutiny. It is believed for example that coaching is successful. What is the evidence for this? Selection procedures at interviews result in the right candidate being selected. Again what is the evidence? The author shows that many fads and fashions in management are short lived and based upon flimsy evidence, yet enjoy a period of support. His book will be an important tool for managers who want to understand the substance and rigour or lack of it associated with modern management ideas and concepts.
Managing Change: A Critical Perspective explores how and why change occurs in organizations and how the change process can be managed effectively. Complete with an appendix featuring twenty popular change management techniques, it is an ideal core textbook for change modules on HR and business degree programmes at both undergraduate and postgraduate level. It offers a critical perspective, challenging the main assumptions and ensuring that the complexity of the subject is understood and appreciated. This fully updated 2nd edition of Managing Change: A Critical Perspective includes new chapters on perspectives, power and politics, ethics, agents and agency, HRM and evaluation. Its revised structure reflects strategic, group and individual change, and a revised final chapter evaluates the practice and theory of change management. Online supporting resources include annotated weblinks for students, an instructor’s manual complete with commentary on questions and cases in the book and lecture slides and additional case studies for tutors.
Organizations change. They grow, they adapt, they evolve. The effects of organizational change are important, varied and complex and analyzing and understanding them is vital for students, academics and researchers in all business schools. The Routledge Companion to Organizational Change offers a comprehensive and authoritative overview of the field. The volume brings together the very best contributors not only from the field of organizational change, but also from adjacent fields, such as strategy and leadership. These contributors offer fresh and challenging insights to the mainstream themes of this discipline. Surveying the state of the discipline and introducing new, cutting-edge themes, this book is a valuable reference source for students and academics in this area.
Innovations in management are becoming more numerous and diverse, and are appearing in organizations providing many different kinds of products and services. The purpose of this book is to examine whether some widely-promoted examples of these management innovations – ranging from techniques such as Kaizen to styles of leadership and the management of learning – can usefully be applied to organizations which provide healthcare, and applied in different kinds of health systems. Management Innovations for Healthcare Organizations is distinctive in selecting a wide and diverse range and selection of managerial innovations to examine. No less distinctively, it makes an adaptive, critical scrutiny of these innovations. Neither evangelist nor nihilist, the book instead considers how these innovations might be adapted for the specific task of providing healthcare. Where evidence on these points is available, the book outlines that too. Consequently the book takes an international approach, with contributions from Europe, the Middle East, Australia and North America. Each contributor is an expert in the management innovation which they present. This combination of features makes the book unique.
This book provides a concise, critical expert overview of the elite group of consultants, analysts and commentators known as ‘management gurus’. Often dismissed as lacking in substance, this volume demonstrates that gurus must be taken seriously given their impact on the world of management. Noting that the gurus are very much products of the 1980s, the book accounts for the rise of this group while challenging those who have attempted to personify – to name and acclaim – the gurus. Reviewing the research on management gurus the book proceeds from a consideration of ‘guru theory’ to offer an analysis of ‘the guru industry’ and ‘guru speak’. Building upon this analysis the book offers a critical engagement with those who have sought to understand gurus as performance artists. Concluding with a radical agenda for future research which situates management’s gurus within the frame of stand-up comedy, this book will enlighten and entertain scholars across the business disciplines and beyond.
Management ideas, and their associated applications, have become a prevalent feature of our working lives. While their focus is familiar, such as efficiency, motivation, and improvement, they range from specific notions such as activity-based costing, to broad movements like corporate social responsibility. This Handbook brings together some of the latest research from leading international scholars on how management ideas are produced, promoted, and adapted, and their effects on business and working practices and society at large. Rather than focusing on specific management ideas, this volume explores their key socio-political contexts and channels of dissemination, and is organized around four core overlapping themes. The first section sets out the research field in general, in terms of both an overall system and of different perspectives and research methods. The second section explores the role of different actors and channels of diffusion, including the consumers and producers of management ideas and 'new' media, as well as traditional players in the management ideas field such as consultancies and business schools. The third section focuses on specific features or dynamics of the management ideas system, such as their adoption, evolution, institutionalisation, and resurgence, while in the final section, critical and new perspectives on management ideas are examined, highlighting specific socio-political contexts and the possibility of alternative ideas and forms of critique. With a broad range of perspectives represented, this Handbook provides a comprehensive, authoritative, and enduring resource for those studying management, innovation, and organizational change, as well as for those working in the management ideas industry.
