Introducing Organizational Behaviour and Management 1e

David Knights, University of Keele
Hugh Willmott, University of Cardiff
ISBN-13: 9781844800353
ISBN: 1844800350

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This eagerly awaited introductory textbook provides a fresh approach to the study of Organizational Behaviour and management. Seeking to make the subject matter more relevant and accessible, it treats Organizational Behaviour as a field of activity that has many parallels with what is experienced in everyday life. Students will find it easier to learn about organizations by appreciating how work relations and management activities are not so distant from their own everyday lives. Uniquely, this book presents two distinct and highly contrasting perspectives on Organizational Behaviour. Key elements of what is conventionally studied in the field are introduced and treated as a foil for introducing a critical, less orthodox perspective. Written with the introductory Organizational Behaviour student in mind, this exciting new text has a four-colour design and uses classic pedagogical features such as case studies, think points, discussion questions, learning objectives and linked chapter summaries in order to engage students and provide a stimulating learning - and teaching - environment.

Chapter Abstracts

• Ch. 1 The Human Dimension  [Purchase this echapter]
  Chapter One covers what organizational behaviour is
• Ch. 2 Motivation and the Self  [Purchase this echapter]
  Chapter Two covers the key mainstream approaches to motivation, as well as their limitations; some of the shared and opposed interests that shape motivation at work; how our sense of self is socially constructed and maintained; how our so-called 'ego needs' mean that we are always vulnerable to the attitudes of others towards us, and how they serve as a key way in which our conduct can be controlled and influenced and how power comes to work largely through processes of self-discipline in which we appraise and judge ourselves against an internalized standard of how we should be
• Ch. 3 Individual Differences Personality and Self  [Purchase this echapter]
  Chapter Three covers personality type theories and how they differ from what are called trait theories of personality; the development of personality type theories from the ancient Greeks through Carl Jung to the more recent experimental and laboratory-based work of the Eysencks and Myers-Briggs typeindicator of personality; the central ideas that inform what many people believe to be the biological basis of personality founded onresearch in neurophysiology and behavioural psychology
• Ch. 4 Groups and Teams  [Purchase this echapter]
  Chapter Four covers the traditional and mainstream views of teams at work and why they are important for work organization; the main contributions to the subject, and their differences, drawing upon various theoretical contributions andempirical studies; critical perspectives on teamwork, the political issues they highlight in terms of inequalities, identity and resistance and the opportunities they offer for understanding the difficulties and challenges of organizational life
• Ch. 5 Knowledge, Skill and Learning, The Organizational Dimension  [Purchase this echapter]
  Chapter Five covers the learning objective to critically assess the value of learning objectives in textbooks,the different conceptions of knowledge, connected with theoretical perspectives on learning and applied to approaches that facilitate learning in organizations, the different reasons why management knowledge, in the form of 'new' management ideas, is a dopted in organizations and the implications this has for organizational effectiveness and organizational theories and the idea that the relationship between power and knowledge is not simply associated with the view that those with knowledge have power, but that knowledge is power through delimiting what can be known and said and what is silenced, and that this has potentially both constructive and dangerous outcomes
• Ch. 6 Organization, Structure and Design  [Purchase this echapter]
  Chapter Six covers the assumptions and theories underpinning mainstream thinking, how ideas about the structure and design of organization are developed and applied in practice, with particular reference to a case study, alternative approaches and tensions associated with the design and control of organizations and a number of key concepts that are relevant to mainstream and critical analysis, such as effectiveness and efficiency, and performance and contro
• Ch. 7 Management and Leadership  [Purchase this echapter]
  Chapter Seven covers how ideas about organization, management and leadership are developed and applied in practice, with particular reference to a case study, some of the tensions associated with managing and leading staff, a number of key concepts that are relevant to mainstream and critical analysis, such as types of leadership and styles of management, how to develop an understanding of the assumptions and theories underpinning mainstream thinking on management and leadership and how to understand some important concepts relevant to mainstream and critical analysis, such as effectiveness and efficiency, and performance and control
• Ch. 8 Politics and Decision-making  [Purchase this echapter]
  Chapter Eight covers the key conceptual and theoretical ideas that form the pluralist model of organizational decision making, the disputes about their value with regards to effectively explaining the power dynamics of decision making, conflict resolution and goal achievement, the ideological issues that inform mainstream perspectives and yhe contribution of a critical perspective in outlining the importance of problematizing power and its operation in decision making
• Ch. 9 Culture and Symbolism  [Purchase this echapter]
  Chapter Nine covers the origins of the interest in organizational culture, the 'culture is something that an organization has' perspective, the central link this mainstream perspective makes between the 'right' culture and high levels of organizational performance and the 'culture is something that an organization is' perspective, and the important ways in which it challenges the orthodoxy
• Ch. 10 Change and Innovation  [Purchase this echapter]
  Chapter Ten covers the terms 'Fordism' and 'post-Fordism' as key concepts for describing the rise and development of contemporary forms of production and work organization, how and why post-Fordist forms of production and organization have come to replace conventional Fordist forms, how new, post-Fordist organizational forms are conceived to release the creative and competitive potential of employees in organization and how new organizational forms are seen by critical organization and management theorists as subtle forms of power, control and surveillance
• Ch. 11 Technology  [Purchase this echapter]
  Chapter Eleven covers why the role of technology in organizations has received so much attention, the main different approaches that have been used to analyse the complex interrelationship between technology and organizational behaviour, a number of major studies that illustrate the strengths and limitations of these approaches, the main disputes and debates about the value of the different approaches in explaining the patterns of potential relationships between human behaviour and technology and how the concepts of power, knowledge, freedom, identity, inequality and insecurity can be used in the analysis of these relationships
• Ch. 12 Strategy and the Global Economy, Ecology and the Environment  [Purchase this echapter]
  Chapter Twelve covers the concept of globalization, the economic factors that generate increasing internationalization of firms, the mainstream models of how multinationals should be structured, the potential barriers to an efficient multinational structure that come from national cultural differences, the limitations of the mainstream approach with regard particularly to the neglect of issues of power, control and inequality, the importance of understanding multinationals as concentrations of economic and political power, the impact that multinationals can make on governments and society more generally, the multinational as a transnational social space in which groups from different local contexts bargain and negotiate and the necessity for a critical approach to the study of globalization and multinationals
• Ch. 13 Bureaucracy and new organizational forms (networked organizations / virtual organizations)  [Purchase this echapter]
  Chapter Thirteen covers the two models of organizations - bureaucracy and post-bureaucracy - and what is claimed about the reasons for their existence and the benefits and limitations of each, the disputes about their value from the point of view of efficiency, but you should also understand that efficiency itself is a disputed concept, the different concepts of rationality in organizations and how these relate to the two models and the political and ethical issues that inform debates about the two models
• Ch. 14 Values at Work ? Ethics and Regulation  [Purchase this echapter]
  Chapter Fourteen covers the core assumptions of mainstream writers on business ethics, and be aware of how these assumptions limit the ethical questions that mainstream writers have been able to ask of business, the connections between mainstream academic writing on business ethics and contemporary organization's socially responsible image, that there is a wealth of other, more critical approaches to ethics that enable us to question the appropriateness of this socially responsible image and how some of these critical approaches enable us to undertake a deeper examination of the values underpinning modern organizations
• Ch. 15 Glossary
  Glossary covers 'Action' to 'Work-life' balance