Images of Organization ^{2nd Ed.}

Effective managers and professionals in all walks of life have to become skilled in the art of "reading" the situations they are attempting to organize or manage. Ways in which individuals can develop the art of reading and understanding organizational life are presented in this book. It focuses on the premise that all theories of organization and management are based on implicit images or metaphors that lead us to see, understand, and manage organizations in distinctive yet partial ways. Subsequently, each chapter employs metaphor to address different themes. These themes include organizations as mechanisms, as organisms, as brains, as manifestations of cultures, as political systems, as psychic prisons, as flux and transformation, and as instruments of domination. The text explores how each of these metaphors can create new management competencies.

• Part I: An Overview
1. Introduction
• Part II: Some Images of Organization
2. Mechanization Takes Command: Organizations as Machines
• Machines, mechanical thinking, and the rise of bureaucratic organization
• The origins of mechanistic organization
• Classical management theory: designing bureaucratic organizations
• Scientific management
• Strengths and limitations of the machine metaphor
3. Nature Intervenes: Organizations as Organisms
• Discovering organizational needs
• Recognizing the importance of environment: organizations as open systems
• Contingency theory: adapting organization to environment
• The variety of the species
• Contingency theory: promoting organizational health and development
• Natural selection: the population-ecology view of organizations
• Organizational ecology: the creation of shared futures
• Strengths and limitations of the organismic metaphor
4. Learning and Self-Organization: Organizations as Brains
• Images of the brain
• Organizations as information processing brains
• Creating learning organizations
• Cybernetics, learning, and learning to learn
• Can organizations learn to learn?
• Guidelines for "learning organizations"
• Organizations as holographic brains
• Principles of holographic design
• Strengths and limitations of the brain metaphor
5. Creating Social Reality: Organizations as Cultures
• Culture and organization
• Organization as a cultural phenomenon
• Organization and cultural context
• Corporate cultures and subcultures
• Creating organizational reality
• Culture: rule following or enactment?
• Organization: the enactment of a shared reality
• Strengths and limitations of the culture metaphor
6. Interests, Conflicts, and Power: Organizations as Political Systems
• Organizations as systems of government
• Organizations as systems of political activity
• Analyzing interests
• Understanding conflict
• Exploring power
• Managing pluralist organizations
• Strengths and limitations of the political metaphor
7. Exploring Plato's Cave: Organizations as Psychic Prisons
• The trap of favored ways of thinking
• Organization and the unconscious
• Organization and repressed sexuality
• Organization and the patriarchal family
• Organization, death, and immortality
• Organization and anxiety
• Organization, dolls, and teddy bears
• Organization, shadow, and archetype
• The unconscious: a creative and destructive force
• Strengths and limitations of the psychic prison metaphor
8. Unfolding Logics of Change: Organization as Flux and Transformation
• Autopoiesis: rethinking relations with the environment
• Enactment as a form of narcissism: organizations interact with projections of themselves
• Identity and closure: egocentricism versus systemic wisdom
• Shifting "attractors": the logic of chaos and complexity
• Managing in the midst of complexity
• Loops not lines: the logic of dialectical change
• Dialectical analysis: how opposing forces drive change
• The dialectics of management
• Strengths and limitations of the flux and transformation metaphor
9. The Ugly Face: Organizations as Instruments of Domination
• Organization as domination
• How organizations use and exploit their employees
• Organization, class, nd control
• Work hazards, occupational disease, and industrial accidents
• Workaholism and social and mental stress
• Organizational politics and the radicalized organization
• Multinationals and the world economy
• The multinationals as world powers
• Multinationals: a record of exploitation
• Strengths and limitations of the domination metaphor
• Part III: Implication for Practice
10. The Challenge of Metaphor
• Metaphors create ways of seeing and shaping organizational life
• Seeing, thinking, and acting in new ways
11. Reading and Shaping Organizational Life
• The Multicom case
• Interpreting Multicom
• Developing a detailed reading an "storyline"
• Multicom from another view
• "Reading" and emergent intelligence
12. Postscript
• Bibliographic Notes
1. Introduction
2. The machine metaphor
3. The organismic metaphor
4. The brain metaphor
5. The culture metaphor
6. The political metaphor
7. The psychic prison metaphor
8. The flux and transformation metaphor
9. The domination metaphor
10. The challenge of metaphor
11. Reading and shaping organizational life
12. Postscript

Sigh, a large book written by a psychologist. Unfortunately, you will learn a lot by reading it.