What are the costs and consequences of living in a society that has undergone an "organizational revolution"? To what extent is social life in the 21st century dominated by the rational control that is characteristic of bureaucratic organizations large and small? Organizations and Society addresses these broader human questions with a critical perspective, while at the same time explaining the main concepts and theories in the field. Students of all interests—those who wish to run organizations someday, study them, or simply understand their importance in the contemporary social order—will benefit from the insights and cogent arguments of this text for undergraduate classrooms.
Gossip is a complex and ubiquitous phenomenon, widely found and variously practiced. Gossip and Organizations provides the reader with an analysis of gossip and informal knowledge across different national, organizational and cultural contexts, drawing upon empirical findings and the author's experiences of researching gossip in nursing and healthcare organizations and higher educational institutions. Kathryn Waddington aims to dispel once and for all the myth that women gossip and men have conversations, shattering the illusion that gossip at work is trivial talk. This book challenges the assumption that gossip is a problem that should be discouraged. While there is undoubtedly a dark side to gossip, Kathryn Waddington argues that paying closer attention to gossip as organizational communication and knowledge enables exploration of other ways of seeing, interpreting and understanding organizations. Gossip is not merely an impediment of organizing, it is a form of organizing which shapes perceptions and actions, and can forewarn managers of future failure in organizational systems. The complexity of gossip is such that a of range inter-disciplinary explanations is necessary in order to account for this form of communication and knowledge across multiple levels and spaces in and around organizations. Waddington provides a new evidence-based framework incorporating ethics, emotion, identity, sensemaking and power as a guide future research, theorizing and critical reflective and reflexive practice in the field of organizational gossip.
It is often claimed that we live in an expert society, a society where more and more individuals take expert roles in increasingly narrow fields. In contrast to more traditional experts most of these new experts lack generally accepted mechanisms for the certification and legitimation of their expertise. This book focuses on these new as well as established experts and the efforts undertaken to secure and legitimate their expertise. We view these efforts as organizing attempts and study them on four different levels – the society, the market, the organization and the individual. Based on empirical studies on these four levels of analysis, The Organization of the Expert Society makes the argument that current organizing initiatives in the expert society are based in an objectifying view of expertise that risks concealing and downplaying key aspects of expertise. Well-intended organizing initiatives in the expert society thus run the risk of promoting ignorance rather than securing expertise. Focusing on a current, general and global phenomenon, the rise and organization of an expert society. The Organization of the Expert Society will be key reading for scholars, academics and policy makers in the management fields of Organizational Theory, Management Consulting, Organizations & Society, Critical Management Studies as well as the disciplines of Sociology, Political Science and Social Anthropology.
Organizations are ubiquitous, from clubs and associations to firms and public agencies. They confer meaning to all of us, and our attachment to and membership of organizations have a profound effect on all areas of our lives. However, in our increasingly turbulent world, these organizations run the risk of disappearing or losing their legitimacy, creating a sense of pointlessness and absurdity. Organizations, Strategy and Society: The Orgology of Disorganized Worlds draws on neo-institutional and strategy theories of competitive advantage and develops an integrative approach to theorizing organizations and their behaviors, termed ‘orgology’. It explains that organizations can act strategically to protect and renew the meaning that individuals give to their lives. In so doing, organizations that survive and thrive impose their logics on society, thereby influencing what is legitimate or not. In turn, individuals must reinterpret their multiple associations with organizations and contribute to reinforcing or inhibiting social evolutions. This new way of understanding organizations’ relationships with society results in a reconsideration of management and the role of individuals in building their future. This book will be of interest to students at all levels, to researchers in organizational studies, strategic management and sociology, as well as to people willing to reorganize their world.
Organization Development and Society: Theory and Practice of Organization Development Consulting offers a new approach for the practice of organization development (OD). The new approach, a habitus oriented OD (HOOD), sees consultees' thinking and behavior a result of habitus, a cognitive structure developed historically in endless interactions between human behavior and social structures. HOOD has two goals: The first goal is to redefine the objectives of individually oriented OD. The focus on habitus and social structure allows individually oriented OD scholars and practitioners to keep their subjective approach, which searches for consultees' inner world. However, this subjectivity searches not only for consultees' psychological but their social dispositions. It views the individual level, the habitus, as a site of social dispositions that from within the individual consultees generate thoughts and behaviors in a way that closely corresponds with the organization's social structure; with power relations and social positions and with accepted metaphors and common language. The HOOD links the concept of habitus to the field of OD and in so doing provides an alternative way to incorporate the individual and the social in OD. HOOD's second goal is to re/position OD between organizations and society and thus to produce a consulting practice that is both pragmatic and human. It is pragmatic since incorporation of habitus enables the consultant to liberate consultees' perspectives and behavior from the organization's social and structural hoops and to use these perspectives in processes of change and development. Considering the habitus as central to consulting projects is human since it enables consultants (and consultees) to identify the responsibility for organizational problems (and other phenomena) not only at the level of the individual but also at the level of the organization and the environment outside the organization.
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In this lively and wide-ranging essay, Göran Ahrne sketches an organizational theory of society. Combining the insights of organization theory with the traditional concerns of social theory, he makes an innovative and creative contribution to both fields. Using a broad definition of organizations, the author shows that what goes on inside, outside and among organizations is central to understanding social relations. Organizations provide people with resources and motives, and they set the frames for human action. Although organizations do not form societies or systems, society is shaped and changed through interaction between organizations. Drawing on various schools of organization theory, including institutional, ecological and contingency theories, the book shows how their synthesis with social theory clarifies the nature and effects of organizational interactions.
Organizations rely extensively upon a myriad of images and pictorial representations such as budgets, schedules, reports, graphs, and organizational charts to name but a few. Visual images play an integral role in the process of organizing. This volume argues that images in organizations are ‘performative’, meaning that they can be seen as performances, rather than mere representations, that play a significant role in all kind of organizational activities. Imagining Organizations opens up new ways of imagining business through an interdisciplinary approach that captures the role of visualizations and their performances. Contributions to this volume challenge this orthodox view to explore how images in business, organizing and organizations are viewed in a static and rigid form. Imagining Business addresses the question of how we visualize organizations and their activities as an important aspect of managerial work, focusing on practices and performances, organizing and ordering, and media and technologies. Moreover, it aims to provide a focal point for the growing collection of studies that explore how various business artifacts draw on the power of the visual to enable various forms of organizing and organizations in diverse contexts.
A critical examination of the social capital debate, which establishes a foundation for progressive reform in community development practice and local government. In response to the ongoing debate over the role social capital plays in the creation and continuation of a healthy civic culture, Community-Based Organizations in Contemporary Urban Society studies the close relationship that social capital shares with local context, social organization, and institutional structure. The book's timely analysis illuminates the institutional barriers currently affecting the mobilization of social capital and establishes a foundation for social and political reform in the future. All components of capital formation--including human, financial, and cultural capital--are identified and considered as they relate to the community development process, as well as how social capital relates to race, class, gender, and religion in urban society. Community-Based Organizations in Contemporary Urban Society offers vital extensions to existing literature on social capital and allows the reader to consider this topic from multiple perspectives through its broad spectrum of interdisciplinary essays by sociologists, political scientists, and urban planners. The essays discuss important steps in the mobilization of social capital, as well as its role in microfinance programs, community development corporations, homeowners associations, religious institutions, and neighborhood associations. Individual chapters present an array of theoretical arguments, empirical analysis, and applied case studies that are of interest to academics, practitioners, and activists in the community development field.
The relationship between media and the organizations they cover has changed dramatically in the last few decades, which have witnessed a huge expansion of news coverage focusing on different types of organizations and their activities. In parallel, organizations have dramatically increased their investment in public relations and other media-oriented forms of communication. Like other societal developments – globalization, marketization, individualization, scientification – mediatization has become an institutional force. This book analyses the mediatization of contemporary organizations and how individual organizations, industry or markets are scrutinized. It examines its key influence on the actions of organizations, and how it shaptes the entire landscape in which the organizations operate. What such a perspective provides is the accentuation of the interplay between organizations and different parts of the society as embedded in the media and its logic. This will be essential reading for professionals, academics and advanced students in organizational studies, public relations and media studies.
