Today there are more technology, technologists, knowledge and experts than at any time in human history; but from a global perspective, it is difficult to argue that this accumulation of knowledge and technology has put the world in an unambiguously better position than it was in the past. Business is not getting any easier to do and major corporate collapses based on poor decisions, poor conduct, and poor judgement continue to occur. In public administration too, basic institutions and se...

Building on lecture notes from his acclaimed course at Stanford University, James March provides a brilliant introduction to decision making, a central human activity fundamental to individual, group, organizational, and societal life. March draws on research from all the disciplines of social and behavioral science to show decision making in its broadest context. By emphasizing how decisions are actually made -- as opposed to how they should be made -- he enables those involved in the pro...

Public education, once considered a dogmatic institution in the 20th century, now finds itself challenged at almost every level in todays sociopolitical environment. New realities, as evidenced by the political complexities of the global village, widespread technological advances that undermine established educational practices, and ever mounting pressures on the curriculum to appease corporate interests have altered the face of public education forever, leaving educators seemingly strande...

Building on Richard Sennetts recent work this books tries to clarify the ethical significance of craftsmanship. According to Sennett, `learning to work well is a deep source of personal meaning and of fruitful cooperation. Moreover provides the foundation of citizenship. Learning to master a craft is learning to be curious and patient, to focus on relationships and learn the skills of anticipation and revision, in a continual dialogue with material that resists `quick fixes and turns the c...

Many of today’s books on the tools and techniques of leadership and management provide descriptions of long lists for use in decision-making, leading, coaching and project management. This book takes a completely different approach. It contests the claims that the tools and techniques are based on evidence and explains why human activities of leading and managing are simply not amenable to scientific proof and consequently, why long-term futures of organizations are unpredictable.T...

The Second Edition of Cunliffe′s Management covers topics that are central to management, organizational behaviour or leadership courses, with updated international content referring to current issues such as the economic crisis and unemployment.Conceived by Chris Grey as an antidote to conventional textbooks, each book in the ‘Very Short, Fairly Interesting and Reasonably Cheap’ series takes a core area of the curriculum and turns it on its head ...

Management and leadership are increasingly important within the organisation and delivery of social care services and now form part of the post qualification framework for social workers. Yet, whilst there is a relatively broad understanding of management concepts and their application in social care, their foundations often go unchallenged both by students and managers. Furthermore, leadership is open to a wide range of interpretations and is often ill-defined with the expectation that we...

This book has already been published in Italy by the university press Aracne (http://www.aracneeditrice.it/aracneweb/index.php/pubblicazione.html?item=9788854857957). Its twofold purpose is to define some dimensions of individual autonomy (in particular, existential, functional and relational autonomy) and promote their dissemination within society, mainly through the introduction of some legal and economic tools.Starting from references to authors such as Adam Smith, Immanuel Kant...

Despite the surge of interest over the last decade in cultural phenomena in organizations, researchers of widely differing disciplinary backgrounds, epistemologies, methodological preferences, and political ideologies continue to disagree about fundamental issues--with good reason. Consolidating a diverse array of theoretical and empirical studies into an analytical framework that clarifies and challenges the assumptions that have guided organizational culture research, this pathbreaking b...

In recent years, a succession of corporate scandals has rocked the international business community. As a result, many companies have invested considerable time, money and effort on the development of ethics management programs. However, in many cases, such programs are nothing more than insurance policies against corporate liability, designed merely to limit the fallout of scandals should they occur. In Business Ethics as Practice, Mollie Painter-Morland urges us to take business ethics s...

Making Sense of Social Theory opens by carefully exploring what it means to follow the scientific method in a field like sociology. The book goes on to analyze sociology as a genuine science with a body of explanatory insights. Sociological theory is applied in ways that make its relevance and power apparent so that theory no longer stands divorced from real world research or practice. Making Sense of Social Theory clearly establishes the pertinence of sociology's great t...

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...