Complexity, Organizations and Change

Complexity, Organizations and Change PDF Author: Elizabeth McMillan
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134379862
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 206

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Book Description
Available in paperback for the first time, this book describes and considers ideas and insights from complexity science, and examines their use in organizations, especially in bringing about major organizational change.

Complexity, Organizations and Change

Complexity, Organizations and Change PDF Author: Elizabeth McMillan
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134379862
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 206

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Book Description
Available in paperback for the first time, this book describes and considers ideas and insights from complexity science, and examines their use in organizations, especially in bringing about major organizational change.

Complexity and Innovation in Organizations

Complexity and Innovation in Organizations PDF Author: José Fonseca
Publisher: Psychology Press
ISBN: 9780415250290
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 154

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Book Description
Taking a critical look at major perspectives on innovation, this book suggests that innovation is not a designed functional activity of a firm or an intentional process through which firms anticipate changes in conditions. Jose Fonseca proposes that the concepts behind the innovation experiences cannot be traced to any particular time, space or individual, even if one person has figured prominently. The innovative ideas in the examples considered did not occur as a direct product of a purposeful search triggered by the perception of some problem to solve, nor did they result from a sequential process that was laid out in advance. Instead, innovative ideas were a product of streams of conversations that extended over long periods of time and were characterized by critical degrees of misunderstanding and redundancy. Fonseca's book presents innovation as new meaning potentially emerging in ongoing, every-day conversations. Drawing on the theory of complex responsive process, developed in the first two volumes of this series, Fonseca presents a particular way of understanding innovation. The experiences of innovation studied in this book suggest that innovations do not start with a match between a need to be satisfied and a set of competencies and tools purposefully brought together to meet the need. On the contrary, identification of need is a consequence of success, rather than a pre-condition. The innovations studied in this book (a selection of innovation experiences from Portugal are considered) were subject to constant and never ending redefinition.

Complexity and Creativity in Organizations

Complexity and Creativity in Organizations PDF Author: Ralph D. Stacey
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 336

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Book Description
Combining insights from the new science of complexity with insights from psychoanalysis, Stacey posits that repressing the anxiety caused by the unstable, ever-changing nature of today's business world also represses the creative impulses - the "spaces for novelty" - that allow members of a workforce to produce their best work. Using the science of complexity as a starting point, he pulls together many insights into behavior and organizational functioning that currently lie at the edges of research and practice. This book invites people to explore what the new science might mean for understanding life in organizations, and shows how it can be used as a framework for understanding the processes that produce emergence rather than intentional strategies. Stacey presents an entirely new perspective on what it means for an organization to learn.

Changing Conversations in Organizations

Changing Conversations in Organizations PDF Author: Patricia Shaw
Publisher: Psychology Press
ISBN: 9780415249157
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 204

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Book Description
Focusing on the essential uncertainty of participating in evolving events as they happen, this book considers the creative possibilities of such participation from a complexity perspective.

Complexity and Organizational Reality

Complexity and Organizational Reality PDF Author: Ralph D. Stacey
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135188661
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 695

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Book Description
Approaches to leadership and management are still dominated by prescriptions – usually claimed as scientific – for top executives to choose the future direction of their organization. The global financial recession and the collapse of investment capitalism (surely not planned by anyone) make it quite clear that top executives are simply not able to choose future directions. Despite this, current management literature mostly continues to avoid the obvious – management’s inability to predict or control what will happen in the future. The key question now must be how we are to think about management if we take the uncertainty of organizational life seriously. Ralph Stacey has turned to the sciences of uncertainty and complexity to develop an understanding of leadership and management as the ordinary politics of daily organizational life. In presenting organizations as a series of complex responsive processes, Stacey’s new book helps us to see organizational reality for what it actually is – human beings engaged in many, many local conversational interactions and power relations in which they negotiate their ideologically based choices. Organizational continuity and change emerge unpredictably, rather than as a result of any overall plan. This is a radically different picture from the one painted by most of the management literature, which explains "organizational continuity and change" as the realization of the global plans and choices of a few powerful executives within an organization. Providing a new foundation for understanding complexity and management, this important book is required reading for managers and leaders wanting to understand the reality of complexity in organizations, including those engaged in postgraduate studies in leadership, organizational behaviour and change management.

Complexity and the Experience of Managing in Public Sector Organizations

Complexity and the Experience of Managing in Public Sector Organizations PDF Author: Ralph Stacey
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134210523
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 210

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Book Description
A fundamental problem of public sector governance relates to the very way of thinking it reflects; where organization is thought of as a ‘thing’, a system designed to deliver what its designers choose. This volume questions that way of thinking and takes a perspective in which organizations are complex responsive processes of relating between people. Bringing together the work of participants on the Doctor of Management program at Hertfordshire University, this book focuses on the move to marketization and managerialism, paying particular attention to human relationships and group dynamics. The contributors provide narrative accounts of their work addressing questions of management, pressures, accountability, responsiveness and traditional systems perspectives. In considering such questions in terms of their daily experience, they explore how the perspective of complex responsive processes assists them in making sense of experience and developing practice. Including an editors’ commentary which introduces and contextualizes these experiences as well as drawing out key themes for further research, this book will be of value to academics, students and practitioners looking for reflective accounts of real life experiences rather than further prescriptions of what organizational life ought to be.

Complexity

Complexity PDF Author: Chris Mowles
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000505685
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 209

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Book Description
This book interprets insights from the complexity sciences to explore seven types of complexity better to understand the predictable unpredictability of social life. Drawing on the natural and social sciences, it describes how complexity models are helpful but insufficient for our understanding of complex reality. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, the book develops a complex theory of action more consistent with our experience that our plans inevitably lead to unexpected outcomes, explains why we are both individuals and thoroughly social, and gives an account of why, no matter how clear our message, we may still be misunderstood. The book investigates what forms of knowledge are most helpful for thinking about complex experience, reflects on the way we exercise authority (leadership) and thinks through the ethical implications of trying to co-operate in a complex world. Taking complexity seriously poses a radical challenge to more orthodox theories of managing and leading, based as they are on assumptions of predictability, control and universality. The author argues that management is an improvisational practice which takes place in groups in a particular context at a particular time. Managers can influence but never control an uncontrollable world. To become more skilful in complex group dynamics involves taking into account multiple points of view and acknowledging not knowing, ambivalence and doubt. This book will be of interest to researchers, professionals, academics and students in the fields of business and management, especially those interested in how taking complexity seriously can influence the functioning of businesses and organizations and how they manage and lead.

Cultural Complexity in Organizations

Cultural Complexity in Organizations PDF Author: Sonja Sackmann
Publisher: SAGE Publications, Incorporated
ISBN:
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 424

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Book Description
The multiple-cultures perspective advocated in this book suggests that culture in organizational settings is more complex, pluralistic, diverse and contradictory than previously acknowledged. Contributors address culture at various levels including national, industrial and organizational. Issues covered include: implicit managerial understandings and overt practices; the growth and decline of organizations with a focus on culture, managerial control strategies and subculture formation; change and temporary reconciliation; factors that influence homogeneity and heterogeneity and that contribute to a strong corporate culture; and issues of gender, ethnicity and social and organizational identity as concepts that may foster a better understand

Organize for Complexity

Organize for Complexity PDF Author: Niels Pflaeging
Publisher: Betacodex Press
ISBN: 9780991537600
Category : Complex organizations
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
The long-awaited update for work and organizations in the knowledge age

Complexity and Management

Complexity and Management PDF Author: Ralph D. Stacey
Publisher: Psychology Press
ISBN: 9780415247610
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 242

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Book Description
Providing a critique of the ways that complexity theory has been applied to understanding organizations, and outining a new direction, this book calls for a radical re-examination of management thinking.