Images Of Organization

Since its first publication over twenty years ago, Images of Organization has become a classic in the canon of management literature. The book is based on a very simple premise—that all theories of organization and management are based on implicit images or metaphors that stretch our imagination in a way that can create powerful insights, but at the risk of distortion. Gareth Morgan provides a rich and comprehensive resource for exploring the complexity of modern organizations internationally, translating leading-edge theory into leading-edge practice.

A provocative new book on how we can see, understand, and manage organizations in new ways.

Gareth Morgan’s monumental book, Images of Organization, revolutionized the field of organization theory. In honor of Morgan’s classic text, this edited volume, Exploring Morgan’s Metaphors: Theory, Research, and Practice in Organizational Studies, illustrates how Morgan’s eight metaphors inform research, practice, and organizational intervention in a variety of contexts. Including contributions from well-known experts in their fields, specifically, Joep Cornelisen, Cliff Oswick, David Grant, Hari Tsoukas, and Gareth Morgan, this new text offers fresh perspectives and sets forth new metaphors for conceptualizing organizations in today’s workforce. Readers will gain insights and guidelines into the different ways that Morgan’s metaphors and metaphorical thinking can be used to better understand organizational life, as well as how to study and develop organizations.

Includes excerpts from seminal works and summaries of key theoretical models that form the basis of the field of organization theory.

'The book is exciting. It opens up new ways of developing both organization and management. It inspires ideas of excellence and achievement and gives hope for this age. You can probably open this book anywhere and find something of value' - Business Age

Publisher description

This broad, balanced introduction to organizational studies enables the reader to compare and contrast different approaches to the study of organizations. This book is a valuable tool for the reader, as we are all intertwined with organizations in one form or another. Numerous other disciplines besides sociology are addressed in this book, including economics, political science, strategy and management theory. Topic areas discussed in this book are the importance of organizations; defining organizations; organizations as rational, natural, and open systems; environments, strategies, and structures of organizations; and organizations and society. For those employed in fields where knowledge of organizational theory is necessary, including sociology, anthropology, cognitive psychology, industrial engineering, managers in corporations and international business, and business strategists.

This book challenges traditional organizational theory, looking to representations of work and organizations within popular culture and the ways in which these institutions have also been conceptualized and critiqued there. Through a series of essays, Rhodes and Westwood examine popular culture as a compelling and critical arena in which the complex and contradictory relations that people have with the organizations in which they work are played out. By articulating the knowledge in popular culture with that in theory, they provide new avenues for understanding work organizations as the dominant institutions in contemporary society. Rhodes and Westwood provide a critical review of how organizations are represented in various examples of contemporary popular culture. The book demonstrates how popular culture can be read as an embodiment of knowledge about organizations – often more compelling than those common to theory – and explores the critical potential of such knowledge and the way in which popular culture can reflect on the spirit of resistance, carnivalisation and rebellion.

The second volume in the Perspectives on Process Organization Studies series focuses on the notion of identity, in particular how individual and organizational identities evolve and come to be constructed through on-going activities and interactions.