Rethinking Organization

Over the past two decades, organization studies has become increasingly pluralistic, with a series of highly charged debates across intellectual `divides'. It is these debates and their consequences for the current position and future development of organization studies that Rethinking Organization addresses. The first section reviews and evaluates the most significant theoretical developments of the last two decades, focusing in particular on the various ways in which `organization' has been conceptualized as the basis for organizational analyses. The second section examines a range of issues related to the major transformations in organizational forms currently occurring throughout advanced industrial societies. Fi

"Buzzanell′s edited book has a poststructural sensibility in its emphasis on dialogue, absent voices, and the open-ended, constructed nature of knowledge. . . . In summary, I would recommend this book highly. . . Buzzanell′s reader would be a corrective for traditional texts used in communications, Master of Public Administration, and Master of Business Administration programs." -NATIONAL WOMEN′S STUDIES ASSOCIATION JOURNAL Rethinking Organizational Communication From Feminist Perspectives reconsiders organizational and managerial communication theories, research, and practice from multiple feminisms. Part I consists of theoretical analyses that reconceptualize and extend boundaries in our thinking about work and organizing processes. The chapters propose an alternative view of public-private discourse, stakeholder ethics, socialization processes, and negotiation by contrasting traditional approaches with feminist values. Part II presents women′s voices through interview excerpts, poems, diary entries, and stories and explores the ways in which these concrete details of ordinary lives represent missing facets and nuances of our organizational and managerial communication work. Part III contains chapters that rewrite organizational and managerial constructs. The authors not only offer alternative reconceptualizations, but also suggest specific tactics and long-term strategies devised from feminisms for revising organizational and managerial communication processes and practices. The final section of the book draws together the themes of the book and encourages a continuing dialogue on the issues.

The purpose of this book is to reimagine the concept of culture, both as an analytical category and disciplinary practice of dominance, marginalization and exclusion. For decades culture has been perceived as a ‘hot topic’. It has been written about and deployed as part of ‘a search for excellence’; as a tool through which to categorise, rank, motivate and mould individuals; as a part of an attempt to align individual and corporate goals; as a driver of organizational change, and; as a servant of profit maximisation. The women writers presented in this book offer a different take on culture: they offer useful disruptions to mainstream conceptions of culture. Joanne Martin and Mary Douglas provide multi-dimensional holistic accounts of social relations that point up similarity and difference. Rather than offering totalising or prescriptive models, each author considers the complex, polyphonic and processual nature of culture(s) while challenging us to acknowledge and work with ambiguity, fluidity and disruption. In this spirit writings of Judi Marshall, Arlie Hochschild, Kathy Ferguson, Luce Irigaray and Donna Haraway are employed to disrupt extant management cultures that lionise the masculine and marginalise the concerns, perspectives and contributions of women and the diversity of women. These writers bring bodies, emotions, difference, resistance and politics back to the centre stage of organizational theory and practice. They open us up to the possibility of cultures suffused with multifarious potentiality rather than homogeneity and faux certainty. As such, they offer new ways of understanding and performing culture in management and organization. This book will be relevant to students and researchers across business and management, organizational studies, critical management studies, gender studies and sociology.

Considers the major theoretical, methodological and substantive developments which have occurred in the field of organization studies between 1970 and 1990. This text also assesses the longer-term implications of these developments.

"The way we manage organizations seems increasingly out of date. Deep inside, we sense that more is possible. We long for soulful workplaces, for authenticity, community, passion, and purpose. In this groundbreaking book, the author shows that every time, in the past, when humanity has shifted to a new stage of consciousness, it has achieved extraordinary breakthroughs in collaboration. A new shift in consciousness is currently underway. Could it help us invent a more soulful and purposeful way to run our businesses and nonprofits, schools and hospitals? A few pioneers have already cracked the code and they show us, in practical detail, how it can be done. Leaders, founders, coaches, and consultants will find this work a joyful handbook, full of insights, examples, and inspiring stories."--Page [4] of cover.

What is organizational culture? Why does it matter? This book demonstrates that conventional wisdom on this fundamental business topic has surpassed its usefulness. The author wants neither to praise scholarship on culture nor to bury it – rather he wants to build something fit for purpose by reflecting on the power of stories and storytelling. Rethinking Organizational Culture argues that that the entrenched models of organizational culture wrench thinking, feeling, and action from a context that intuition warns us are complex and problematic. Arguing that novels and novelists offer an opportunity to redeem ‘organizational culture’, the text invites readers to recognise that stories of organization offer connections with organizational profanity, organized polyphony, and the organizationally prosaic. A stimulating and provocative read, this book will be welcomed by students, scholars, and reflective practitioners across the business field.

Rethinking Law as Process draws on insights from 'process philosophy' in order to rethink the nature of legal decision making.

In the twenty-first century, leaders are having to speak a new language, create fluid organic structures, and recognise organisations as systems with self-renewing capacity. This book explores what real leadership means, encouraging the reader to look within.