Inside Organizations

Moving away from the common/traditional focus on studying organizations from a distance, this highly engaging book introduces the idea of studying them from the inside. Inside Organizations: Exploring Organizational Experiences guides placement students, and any student undertaking part-time work in an organization, through 'insider inquiry', helping them to develop key reflexive and critical thinking skills for their future careers. It encourages you to pay attention to what goes on in organizations, to question what you experience and ultimately to make sense of how organizations function, helping you to develop key reflexive and critical thinking skills for your future careers. This book is ideal for students on programmes with a placement or internship element such as business and management, nursing and health, and education and is especially useful to those doing reflective journals and essays.

Light-hearted yet profound, Inside Organizations will have a broad general appeal, complementing Handy's bestselling Understanding Organizations. It contains anecdotes, commentary and questions which challenge the reader.

Pt. I. Business -- pt. II. Science -- pt. III. Family, health, and welfare -- pt. IV. Development and politics -- pt. V. An ethical case study.

Describes the organizational aspects of contemporary society, explaining how organization occurs not only inside formal organizations, but also outside and among them.

The teaching of organization theory and the conduct of organizational research have been dominated by a focus on decision-making and the concept of strategic rationality. However, the rational model ignores the inherent complexity and ambiguity of real-world organizations and their environments. In this landmark volume, Karl E Weick highlights how the `sensemaking' process shapes organizational structure and behaviour. The process is seen as the creation of reality as an ongoing accomplishment that takes form when people make retrospective sense of the situations in which they find themselves.

Understanding Trust in Organizations: A Multilevel Perspective examines trust within organizations from a multilevel perspective, bringing together internationally renowned trust scholars to advance our understanding of how trust is affected by both macro and micro forces, such as those operating at the societal, institutional, network, organizational, team, and individual levels. Understanding Trust in Organizations synthesizes and promotes new scholarly work examining the emergence and embeddedness of multilevel trust within organizations. It provides a much-needed integration and novel conceptual advances regarding the dynamic interplay between micro and macro levels that influence trust. This volume brings new insights into how trust in groups, networks, and organizations forms, and why employees can differ in their trust in leaders and teams. Providing rich and nuanced insights into how to develop, maintain, and restore trust in the workplace, Understanding Trust in Organizations is a critical resource for scholars, graduate students, and researchers of industrial and organizational psychology, as well as practitioners in fields such as human resource management and strategic management. Chapter 8 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

These original essays describe the internal life of terrorist organizations in fascinating detail. They show how no description of terrorist behaviour is adequate without a grasp of the deep tensions that often characterize such groups, and an appreciation of how firmly implanted in our culture terrorist traditions have become, since the middle of the nineteenth century.

This book is the story of how four busy executives, from different backgrounds and different perspectives, were surprised to find themselves converging on the idea of narrative as an extraordinarily valuable lens for understanding and managing organizations in the twenty-first century. The idea that narrative and storytelling could be so powerful a tool in the world of organizations was initially counter-intuitive. But in their own words, John Seely Brown, Steve Denning, Katalina Groh, and Larry Prusak describe how they came to see the power of narrative and storytelling in their own experience working on knowledge management, change management, and innovation strategies in organizations such as Xerox, the World Bank, and IBM. Storytelling in Organizations lays out for the first time why narrative and storytelling should be part of the mainstream of organizational and management thinking. This case has not been made before. The tone of the book is also unique. The engagingly personal and idiosyncratic tone comes from a set of presentations made at a Smithsonian symposium on storytelling in April 2001. Reading it is as stimulating as spending an evening with Larry Prusak or John Seely Brown. The prose is probing, playful, provocative, insightful and sometime profound. It combines the liveliness and freshness of spoken English with the legibility of a ready-friendly text. Interviews will all the authors done in 2004 add a new dimension to the material, allowing the authors to reflect on their ideas and clarify points or highlight ideas that may have changed or deepened over time.