Organizational Environments

This book showcases an interdisciplinary and comprehensive study of the issues related to communication in corporate environments. Including perspectives from psychology, sociology and management science, Communication in Organizational Environments analyzes original quantitative and qualitative research, and determines the functions, objectives and conditions of effective internal communication. In this book, the authors bridge the gap in the literature on the management of corporate internal communication, and provide a tool for measuring communication effectiveness. Useful as a guide for internal communication managers in various organizations, this book is also important reading for academics in corporate communication, public relations, corporate management and behaviour, and human resource management.

Diagnostic Expertise in Organizational Environments provides a state-of-the-art foundation for a new paradigm in expertise research and practice. Skilled diagnosis is essential for accurate and efficient performance across a range of organizational contexts, including aviation, finance, rail, forensic investigation, firefighting, and medicine. However, it is also a complex process, subject to the abilities and experience of individual operators, the culture and practices of organizations, the relationships between operators, and the availability and usefulness of technology. As a consequence, diagnostic skills can be difficult to learn, maintain, and evaluate. This volume is a comprehensive approach that examines diagnostic expertise at the level of the individual practitioner, in the social context, and at the organizational level. The chapter authors comprise both academics and highly skilled practitioners so that there is a clear transition from understanding the problem of diagnostic skills to the implementation of solutions, either through redesign, training, and/or selection. It will appeal to those academics and practitioners interested and involved in this field and also prove useful to students of psychology, cognitive science education and/or computer interaction.

This e-book provides insight into the link between employee health and productivity/performance, with a focus on how individuals, groups, or organizations can intervene in this relationship to improve both well-being and performance-related outcomes. Given the continuous changes that organizations and employees face, such as the aging workforce and continued economic turbulence, it is not surprising that studies are increasingly finding that employee health is related to job conditions. The papers in this e-book emphasize that organizations make a critical difference when it comes to employees' health and well-being. In turn, healthy employees help their organizations to flourish. Such findings are in line with the recent emphasis by both the International Labour Organization (ILO) and the United Nations (UN) on the importance of work for individual well-being and the importance of individual well-being for productive and sustainable economic growth (see e.g., ILO, 1985; World Health Organisation, 2007; UN, 2015). Overall, the papers report findings from a cumulative sample of nearly 19,000 workers and perspectives from 68 authors. They suggest that performance cannot be successfully achieved at the cost of health and well-being, and provide various perspectives and tools to guide future research and practice.

This study deals with the interfaces between bureaucratized social service agencies, social workers, and clients. Russell K. Schutt covers significant topics of the history and organization of labor unions. He illuminates important questions concerning the degree to which initially democratic organizations are overcome by economic forces and how organizational and environmental features play a role in allowing this to happen. The object of the study is large union of public welfare employees. Spawned in the turbulent 1960s, the young union--once pledged to reform the welfare system--had, by the 1980s, become a bureaucratic structure focused on traditional economic goals. Dr. Schutt has drawn on theory and research in the areas of organizations, social movements, and public welfare, and makes a unique contribution to each area. A combination of intensive interviews, questionnaire surveys, archival records, and observational notes provide the data for his analyses.

This book examines the management of multiple goals in organizations especially in today's increasingly turbulent business environment. In this book, authors develop a novel concept of goal polychronicity, wherein organizations may attend to multiple goals simultaneously, rather than mono-chronically through sequential attention. This book further investigates the impact of internal organizational control systems and external environmental turbulence on multiple goals management. Empirical evidence is drawn from in-depth interviews of top executives and large-scale survey of top executives from four countries (US, Australia, China, and Israel). The book enriches the understanding of multiple goals and provides evidence-based recommendations to researchers and practitioners in managing multiple goals.

The original edition of this important book has had a significant impact on organizational theorizing throughout the past decade. Meyer and Scott are both well known for their significant contributions to institutional theories of organizations and this Updated Edition blends original articles and compilations of other works to create the most complete explication of the authors' theoretical notions.

When Organizations and Environments was originally issued in 1979, it increased interest in evolutionary explanations of organizational change. Since then, scholars and practitioners have widely cited the book for its innovative answer to this question: Under what conditions do organizations change? Aldrich achieves theoretical integration across 13 chapters by using an evolutionary model that captures the essential features of relations between organizations and their environments. This model explains organizational change by focusing on the processes of variation, selection, retention, and struggle. The "environment," as conceived by Aldrich, does not refer simply to elements "out there"—beyond a set of focal organizations—but rather to concentrations of resources, power, political domination, and most concretely, other organizations. Scholars using Aldrich's model have examined the societal context within which founders create organizations and whether those organizations survive or fail, rise to prominence, or sink into obscurity. A preface to the reprinted edition frames the utility of this classic for tomorrow's researchers and businesspeople.