Written to introduce readers to the experiences people have in organizations, this book provides a reality-based perspective on the everyday happenings in organizations at all professional levels. With current and informative readings that provoke reflection and discussion, this book gives readers a real-world overview of organizational behavior from executive managerial levels to those of lower level participants. For professionals with a career in organizational behavior, management, business relations, organizational psychology, communications, public relations, education, and social work.

The third volume in a series of three focuses on myth in everyday organizational life. The mythical narratives presented in this volume serve as metaphors of an organizational issue that can take inspiration from or be better understood through the myth to reveal an archetypal dimension of organizing and organizations.

It's hard to be in the minority. If you're the only person from your ethnic or cultural background in your organization or team, you probably know what it's like to be misunderstood or marginalized. You might find yourself inadvertently overlooked or actively silenced. Even when a work environment is not blatantly racist or hostile, people of color often struggle to thrive—and may end up leaving the organization. Being a minority is not just about numbers. It's about understanding pain, power, and the impact of the past. Organizational consultant Adrian Pei describes key challenges ethnic minorities face in majority-culture organizations. He unpacks how historical forces shape contemporary realities, and what both minority and majority cultures need to know in order to work together fruitfully. If you're a cultural minority working in a majority culture organization, or if you're a majority culture supervisor of people from other backgrounds, learn the dynamics at work. And be encouraged that you can help make things better so that all can flourish.

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.

William H. Starbuck is one of the most creative, productive, and wide-ranging writers in management and organization studies. His work spans three decades and encompasses a whole variety of issues, yet it has never been collected together in one place. This book does just that - bringing together his most seminal writings, prefaced by a personal reflection on some of the themes and conclusions of that emerge from this, and the context in which they were written. What emerges from this is a picture of organizations and their strategies that emphasizes the characteristics of real-life human beings: their idiosyncratic preferences, their distrust for each other, their struggele for dominance, their personal interests which don't always coincide with the interests of the organization, and the internal politicking and contests between interest groups that take place in organizations. Some chapters review research literature, some report empirical findings, some propose conceptual reformulations, and some offer advice to managers. This book will be a unique guide to the work of an influential thinker in management and organization studies, and will be of interest to academics, researchers, and students of management, strategy, and organization studies.

William H. Starbuck, a key management thinker, has written on a wide range of issues relating to organizational behavior, theory, and strategy, which until now has only been available in a diverse range of publications. In this book, Starbuck has brought together his seminal writing to present for the first time a book-length treatment of his considerations on organizations.