This volume draws together critical assessments of Michel Foucault's contribution to our understanding of the making and remaking of the modern organization. The volume provides a valuable summary of Foucault's contribution to organization theory, which also challenges the conventions of traditional organizational analysis. By applying Foucauldian concepts such as discipline, surveillance and power/knowledge, the authors shed new light on the genesis of the modern organization and raise fresh questions about organization theory. The bureaucratic career is, for example, analyzed as a disciplinary device, a mechanism that seeks to alter rational choice rather than constrain bodies. This raises questions about Foucault's linking of the modern organization's birth with the enlightenment. Other contributions review the impact of totalizing managerial discourses and the limits and possiblities of resistance, and question the profound pessimism of Foucault. The volume concludes by examining the implications of Foucault's later work in which he suggests that people are much freer than they feel.
`This introductory book is really worth buying. It is accessible without being patronizing. It stimulates thought without using rhetoric. It offers exciting content on methods and techniques without being arrogant' - Organization Studies In this introduction to theory and method, students of organization will find a comprehensive view of the ......
An examination of the possibility of developing an aesthetics of organization as a field of inquiry within organization studies. Heather Hopfl and Stephen Linstead delineate the parameters of the field by bringing together key contributions, which: explain how meaning and order become real in an organization through the concepts of postmodern ......
This text enlivens the study of the organization by shifting the emphasis to examine how social practices are embodied. The contributors offer an alternative framework for understanding the interplay between individuals, institutions and work.'
`A major contribution of this exciting book is the perspective of the subsidiary manager operating network.... In its extreme version this means that all managers are subsidiary managers... challenging those who still view multinationals as hierarchies. With exceptional clarity of thought and writing, Julian Birkinshaw stakes out the ground as a ......
The `organization linkage' concept is relatively new. This book provides a unique and very valuable approach to the study of organizations - how do actions among individuals and groups affect (or not affect) organizations as a whole, and vice versa. This ground-breaking book show how to bridge the gap between the traditional `micro' and `macro' ......
In this provocative study, Paul du Gay makes a compelling case for the continuing importance of bureaucracy. Taking inspiration from the work of Max Weber, du Gay launches a staunch defence of `the bureaucratic ethos' and highlights its continuing relevance to the achievement of social order and good government in liberal democratic societies. ......
The relationship between workers and firms are changing worldwide. Nowhere is this more evident than in the psychological contracts of employment. This book combines the cross-national perspectives of organizational scholars from thirteen countries to examine how societies differ in the nature of psychological contracts in employment and how ......
Grassroots Associations is a comprehensive review and critique of empirical and theoretical research on grassroots non profit-making and voluntary organizations. David Horton Smith examines in depth the distinctive nature and characteristics of a previously under-studied area which includes such groups as Alchoholics Anonymous, community environmental action committees and church Bible study groups. He addresses: group formation, structure, process, leadership, and life cycle change; effectiveness; the influence such associations have on society; the future of grassroots associations, which he sees as integral to a postmodern society moving towards participatory democracy, self-determinism and individual choice.
