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Understanding Management
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Understanding Management

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April 1996 | 240 pages | SAGE Publications Ltd
This unique volume focuses on management as it is--a complex set of social and symbolic processes--often characterized by considerable ambiguity and paradox. In particular, Understanding Management contains a body of work concerned with building an experience-based grounded description and understanding of the processes of management and managing. The contributors to this volume explore and illuminate various themes including, the dynamics, subtleties, and complexities of managerial life; its informal, as well as formalized features and practices; and the significance of the cultural and symbolic in organizations. Concentrating on the meanings and relationship between managerial talk, thought, and action, the contributors examine issues like culture, myth, ritual, totem, and taboo. Drawing from both new and established anthropological concepts, this volume provides an in-depth analysis that enables the reader to understand the nature of managing. Understanding Management represents a fascinating and invaluable resource for all those studying, teaching, and researching management, and for those in organization theory, organization behavior, the sociology and psychology of organizations, and general management studies.

 
PART ONE: MAKING THE MEANING OF MANAGEMENT
Stephen Linstead
Understanding Management
Culture, Critique and Change

 
Dan Gowler and Karen Legge
The Meaning of Management and the Management of Meaning
David Golding
Producing Clarity - Depoliticizing Control
 
PART TWO: DEFAMILIARIZING MANAGEMENT PRACTICE
Omar Aktouf
Competence, Symbolic Activity and Promotability
David Golding
Management Rituals
Maintaining Simplicity in the Chain of Command

 
Michael L Rosen and Thomas P Mullen
There to Here and No Way Back
The Late Life of a Cocaine Dealer

 
 
PART THREE: RETHINKING SYMBOLIC MANAGEMENT
Steven P Feldman
Management in Context
Culture and Organizational Change

 
Stephen Lloyd Smith and Barry Wilkinson
`We Are Our Own Policemen!'
Organizing without Conflict

 
 
PART FOUR: CONSUMING AND CONSTRUCTING IDENTITY
Robert Grafton Small
Marketing, or the Anthropology of Consumption
Barbara Czarniawska-Joerges
Autobiographical Acts and Organizational Identities
 
PART FIVE: CHANGING IDENTITIES
Paul Jeffcutt
Between Managers and the Managed
The Processes of Organizational Transition

 
Hugo Letiche
Postmodernism Goes Practical

`A most interesting collection of critical current thinking' - Journal of Managerial Psychology

'12 articles that review management as a complex set of social and symbolic processes "often characterized by considerable ambiguity and paradox" is Understanding Management' - Long Range Planning

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Paperback
ISBN: 9780803989139
$69.00