Daniel Ericsson

Monika Kostera

Narratives for a Better Future

Organizing Hope

Mary Jo Hatch

Andrzej K. Kozminski

The Three Faces of Leadership takes readers inside the minds of CEOs who have been celebrated by the Harvard Business Review over the last decade of the twentieth century. Drawing on interviews with these famous CEOs, Mary Jo Hatch, Monika Kostera and Andrzej K. Kozminski demonstrate how business leaders today use aesthetics, specifically storytelling, dramatizing and mythmaking, to lead their companies successfully. They look at how they inspire organizations through their creativity, virtue and faith, and thus show the faces of the artist and priest alongside the technical and rational face of the manager. The Three Faces of Leadership features clear and accessible explanations of the aesthetic philosophy of management: as applied to the concepts of creativity, imagination, courage, virtue, inspiration, faith and ethics. It presents techniques for developing these qualities as an essential part of leadership; together with the capacity to communicate them to others. Aesthetic leadership practices are linked to organizational culture, change, vision, values and identity. In this way, the book encourages students and executives to align the creative and spiritual aspects of business with their technical training and practice.

Manager, Artist, Priest

The Three Faces of Leadership

The second volume in a series of three focuses on organizational virtues and vices, as well as abilities of organizations, and legendary organizations that have become mythical in themselves. These narratives are presented as organizational sagas to reveal an archetypal dimension of organizing and organizations.

Tales of Organizations

Organizational Epics and Sagas

Heather Höpfl

Over the past ten to fifteen years there has been an increasing interest in emotion in organizations, in diversity, ethics, care and the ubiquitous pursuit of quality. These concerns, however, have consistently been reduced to issues of management and regulation. There is now a growing need to confront issues related to the dehumanization of organizations. This book brings these issues together, presenting an original construction of the organization via an emphasis on the (m)other. This book is not a feminist tract, nor is it primarily about the experiences of women in organizations. It rather argues that conventional representations of the organization are patriarchal, masculine, directed by the animus and that such representations reduce the notion of 'organization' to abstract relationships, rational actions and purposive behaviour. This challenging book will be of essential interest to all critical management theorists. With its innovative approach, it will also appeal to students, teachers, and all those looking for an approach to management that does justice to the complexity, ambivalence and chaos of the world of organizing.

Interpreting the Maternal Organization

Michael Pirson

This important book focuses on the role of human dignity, its protection and promotion in the context of organization and Humanistic Management. The recent phenomenon of humanism in management already has a rich body of literature and takes up many themes both theoretically, and from a practitioner perspective. Dignity and the Organization is the first book to explicitly deal with the topic of human dignity and management. The chapters address various aspects and problems from a humanistically-oriented perspective, taking up issues relevant for the contemporary management theorists and practitioners, and are concerned with organization, management and the social and cultural context. The book develops the notion of human dignity in conceptual and theoretical terms in its practical application, within the context of organizations.

Dignity and the Organization

Zygmunt Bauman

Jerzy Kociatkiewicz

Irena Bauman

Management has been one of the driving forces of the last century, indeed an idea and a language that colonized most other institutions, areas of human activity and walks of life, even those that had until recently been regarded as completely unmanageable, such as art, academia and creativity. Some it supported and others it destroyed, but there are few areas in modern societies that have been untouched by it. What is the meaning of management now almost omnipresent and all-powerful in our current bleak times, in our current state of ‘interregnum’ that is characterized by an increasing sense of insecurity and hopelessness, a time when, paradoxically, the seemingly omnipotent force of management does not seem to work? Does it have a role to play today and in the future? What can it become and whom should it serve when the interregnum is over and a new, hopefully more humane, system begins to dawn? These are some of the questions explored in this timely new book by Zygmunt Bauman, one of the greatest thinkers of our times, architect and Urban Studies professor Irena Bauman, and two organization and management scholars, Jerzy Kociatkiewicz and Monika Kostera.

Management in a Liquid Modern World

It can be said that our times are characterized both by the omnipresence of organizations and by the destabilization of organized social life, caused by the erosion of its structural and moral foundations such as long-term employment, social trust or an actual observance of the proclaimed codes of ethics. At the same time there is a huge and growing potential for organized change due to the amount of students and graduates of different types of management studies and programmes all over the world. The role of the state may become atrophied and corporations seem all too eager to seize ever more power while renouncing responsibility towards the environment and the employees, but a huge and unprecedented number of people from all walks of life, all social classes and all countries now have the qualifications to take over the responsibility for social organizations. The objective of Occupy Management: Inspirations and Ideas for Self-Organization and Self-Management is to make it evident to the student why and how he or she can manage without becoming part of corporate power structures. Aimed at postgraduate students studying organizational and management theory as well as social entrepreneurship, this book is not a simple repetition of essential knowledge in these areas, but a re-direction of such knowledge towards self-management and self-organization.

Inspirations and Ideas for Self-Organization and Self-Management

Occupy Management

Bogusław Nierenberg 

Od czasów Arystotelesa wiemy, że na każdy akt komunikacyjny składają się co najmniej trzy elementy: nadawca komunikatu, jego odbiorca i sam komunikat,

Komunikacja społeczna w zarządzaniu humanistycznym

Nancy Harding

Ethnography is at the heart of what researchers in management and organization studies do. This crucial book offers a robust and original overview of ‘doing’ organizational ethnography, guiding readers through the essential qualitative methods for the study of organizations.

Organizational Ethnography

Cezary Wozniak

This book is a reaction to the reductionist and exploitative ideas dominating the mainstream contemporary management discourse and practice, and an attempt to broaden the horizons of possibility for both managers and organization scholars. It brings together the scholarly fields of humanistic management and organizational aesthetics, where the former brings in the unshakeable focus on the human condition and concern for dignity, emancipation, and the common good, while the latter promotes reflection, openness, and appreciation for irreducible complexity of existence. It is a journey towards wholeness undertaken by a collective of management and organization theorists, philosophers, artists, and art curators. Reading this book’s contributions can help both academics and practitioners work towards building organizational practices aimed at (re)acquiring wholeness by developing aesthetic awareness allowing for more profound understandings of performativity, insights into the dynamics of power, appreciation of ambiguity and ambivalence, and a much needed grasp of complexity. The varied ways of engaging with art explored by the authors promote imaginative insights into and reflection on the beauty and vicissitudes of organizing, of management knowledge and collective expression. It will be of interest to researchers, academics, practitioners, and students in the fields of organizational theory and practice, business and management history, human resource management, and culture management.

Aesthetics, Organization, and Humanistic Management

Widely known as a leading intellectual, Zygmunt Bauman’s thinking is often categorized as sociology or philosophy. But his work has been hugely influential in other fields as well, not least within organization studies. From increasing management control and growing standardization of work activities, to the increase in uncertainty and insecurity experienced by contemporary workers, organizations themselves are becoming ever more ephemeral entities. Bauman’s themes: globalization, liquid modernity and postmodern ethics are arguably fundamental to contemporary notions of organization and management and his thinking has never been more relevant. However, despite the obvious and continuing influence of Bauman’s ideas on business studies, there has been no comprehensive attempt to chart his impact on organization theory. In this innovative and insightful collection, an international selection of leading management scholars explore key topics in current organizational discourse, including networked organizations, control and ambiguity, technologies, work and responsibility, extending Bauman’s liquid modernity to the "liquid organization". The book will be essential reading for scholars and academics and students in management and organizational theory, and also sociology, managing culture and organizational ethnography.

Zygmunt Bauman and Organization Theory

Liquid Organization

This book represents a narrative quest for a symbolic grounding to help leaders in times when stable social structures and institutions dissolve and disappear. Monika Kostera approaches this sense-making process through innovative research methods, collecting stories from participants and exploring plots and outcomes of an imagined meeting between two symbolic worlds: one of the internal and imaginative and the other of the external and corporate.

Spaces, Dreams and Places

The Imagined Organization

ïProfessor Kostera is a consummate writer whose studies stand out for originality of approach. Her contribution to our knowledge of the inner mechanisms and wider effects of organizations is impossible to over-value: indeed without KosteraÍs input, our knowledge of organizations, the successive reincarnations and strategy changes would be so much poorer. The book is pursued with exquisite consistency and sense of purpose. It is presented in all its enormous cognitive potential and exceptional analytical utility. A study of great value to both students and practitioners of organization.Í _ Zygmunt Bauman, University of Leeds, UK This book reflects on organizations through archetypical tales-stories particularly resonant with deep meanings present in culture and the soul. Archetypes are common patterns containing hidden images of human motivations, offering inspiration and awakening imagination. This book is a collection of such tales, connected to twelve organizational archetypes, where each are illustrated by more general theoretical reflections, current management and organization theory literature, as well as practical examples. Monika Kostera proposes an imagery and language for self-management and self-organization for non-corporate use including entrepreneurs and multipurpose NGOs. Stories and examples from and of, contemporary organizations in different contexts will prove insightful to students, academics and researchers of management, business, sociology and economics. Social entrepreneurs and NGO activists will also find plenty of invaluable information is this inspirational study.

Organizations and Archetypes

The Empty Space - Organizing Visible

Our times of crumbling structures and decaying social bonds are often depicted as apocalyptic. This book takes the apocalypse as a metaphor to help us in the search for meaning in our everyday realities. Yes, the apocalypse is when social structures and institutions fall apart and we are terrified and suffocated by the debris raining down upon us. But “apocalypse" also means “revelation”. The very collapse reveals what dissipating institutions were constructed upon: where there ought to have been foundational common values, most often there is violence and raw power. Yet the values are there, too, and they can be found. This book is a guide to these values, showing how they can be of help to organizers and organizational dreamers.

Finding Hope in Organizing

After The Apocalypse

Crumbling social institutions, disintegrating structures, and a profound sense of uncertainty are the signs of our time. In this book, this contemporary crisis is explored and illuminated, providing narratives that suggest how the notion of hope can be leveraged to create powerful methods of organizing for the future. Chapters first consider theoretical and philosophical perspectives on hopeful organizing, followed by both empirical discussions about achieving change and more imaginative narratives of alternative and utopian futures, including an exploration of the differing roles of work, creativity, idealism, inclusivity and activism.

Monika Kostera

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