Search results for ""author mats alvesson""

With his usual engaging and inimitable style, Mats Alvesson takes the reader on a riveting journey through the diverse ways in which culture itself can be understood and how these powerfully inform organizational life.′ - Blake E. Ashforth, Arizona State University ′Understanding Organizational Culture comunicates complex ideas in a manner that will illuminate for those who are less familiar with the concepts discussed, as well as providing a depth and critique of interest to those familiar with the topics.′ - Claire Valentin, The University of Edinburgh Unlike prescriptive books about organizations, Understanding Organizational Culture challenges and provokes the reader to think critically. It provides an insight into organizational culture, aided by numerous empirical illustrations from ethnographic studies that develop and illustrate how cultural thinking can be used in managerial and non-managerial organizational theory and practice. Mats Alvesson answers questions of definition, explores alternative perspectives and exands on substantive issues, before discussing key issues of research and developing his framework. Further more, the advances in the field of organizational culture are synthesized for the reader by drawing upon the range of relevant literature within organization studies. Understanding Organizational Culture provides great breadth within a textbook approach - covering a wide spectrum of management and organization while at the same time developing a new theoretical approach to organizational culture. The new edition contains improved pedagogy and expanded coverage of topics such as identity and organizational change. It is essential reading for students taking undergraduate and postgraduate modules in Organizational Behaviour and Organizational Theory on Management and Organization Studies programmes, including MBA.

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Using eight original metaphors, this text presents a critique of interviewing methods and practices and encourages researchers to think about the issues surrounding their interview method.

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This authoritative title presents seminal papers from leading academics on the evolving field of management studies. It encompasses sections on organization theory, organizational culture and behaviour as well as management specialisms. Professor Alvesson has selected key papers to reflect the scholarly debates and pivotal arguments surrounding the development of this field of study.

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Praise for the Second Edition: "In opposition to most literature on how to conduct good social science research which is either empirically oriented or gives priority to theoretical and philosophical considerations, which tends to make empirical research look odd or irrelevant, this volume on ′Reflexive Methodology′ explicitly turns towards a consideration of the perceptual, cognitive, theoretical, linguistic, political and cultural circumstances as backdrop of data interpretation and research design. It showed up to be the most important and informative resource and a source of enlightenment to my lecture on methodology at our institute. I can highly recommend the volume to lecturers and students alike." Professor Sabine Troeger, Geography Institute - Library, University of Bonn Reflexivity is an essential part of the research process. Mats Alvesson and Kaj Sköldberg make explicit the links between techniques used in empirical research and different research traditions, giving a theoretically informed approach to qualitative research. The authors provide balanced reviews and critiques of the major schools of grounded theory, ethnography, hermeneutics, critical theory, postmodernism and poststructuralism, discourse analysis, genealogy and feminism. Useful reading for students and researchers across the social sciences. The first edition established itself as a ground-breaking success, providing researchers with an invaluable guide to a central problem in research methodology - namely, how to put field research and interpretations in perspective, paying attention to the interpretive, political and rhetorical nature of empirical research. The second edition introduced a new chapter on positivism, social constructionism and critical realism, and offered new conclusions on the applications of methodology. This third edition of Reflexive Methodology provides further updates on new research, including neorealism, and illustrations and applications of reflexive methodology in formulating research strategies, that build on the acclaimed and successful previous editions

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This title builds on the success of Doing Critical Management Research which has proven to be a seminal text in the 20 years since publication. In 2020, Alvesson and Deetz have broadened their focus and updated the original book to offer relevance to critical research across all of the social sciences. In reflecting contemporary theoretical and methodological turns over the past few decades, it includes coverage of key contemporary topics such as race, gender, postmodernism and intersectionality. With examples throughout, the authors provide an authoritative and insightful framework for navigating critical theories and methods and sets out a new agenda for critical research undertaken today.

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Functional stupidity can be catastrophic. It can cause organisational collapse, financial meltdown and technical disaster. And there are countless, more everyday examples of organisations accepting the dubious, the absurd and the downright idiotic, from unsustainable management fads to the cult of leadership or an over-reliance on brand and image. And yet a dose of stupidity can be useful and produce good, short-term results: it can nurture harmony, encourage people to get on with the job and drive success. This is the stupidity paradox. The Stupidity Paradox tackles head-on the pros and cons of functional stupidity. You'll discover what makes a workplace mindless, why being stupid might be a good thing in the short term but a disaster in the longer term, and how to make your workplace a little less stupid by challenging thoughtless conformity. It shows how harmony and action in the workplace can be balanced with a culture of questioning and challenge. The book is a wake-up call for smart organisations and smarter people. It encourages us to use our intelligence fully for the sake of personal satisfaction, organisational success and the flourishing of society as a whole.

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Empirical data is one of the cornerstones of knowledge in the social sciences, and yet the researcher often takes it for granted, reserving his or her imaginative faculties for finding a theory that ′fits the data′. This revealing account of the theory-data relationship calls this faith in data into question and establishes a reflexive framework and vocabulary to explore the creative, political and philosophical elements of data production. Rather than thinking about the theory-data ′fit′, Alvesson and Karreman will encourage you to consider the research process as one of theory-data interplay, asking if creative empirical material can challenge established theory and inspire new lines of development, and if breakdowns and mysteries encountered in research can be a constructive rather than destructive process. They will encourage you to think critically about empirical data in terms of construction rather than verification, and most importantly they will encourage you to develop theory that is interesting and novel, rather than naive or irrelevant, making this title essential reading for those who often find the traditional vocabulary and frameworks of social science research obvious or simplistic.

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Empirical data is one of the cornerstones of knowledge in the social sciences, and yet the researcher often takes it for granted, reserving his or her imaginative faculties for finding a theory that ′fits the data′. This revealing account of the theory-data relationship calls this faith in data into question and establishes a reflexive framework and vocabulary to explore the creative, political and philosophical elements of data production. Rather than thinking about the theory-data ′fit′, Alvesson and Karreman will encourage you to consider the research process as one of theory-data interplay, asking if creative empirical material can challenge established theory and inspire new lines of development, and if breakdowns and mysteries encountered in research can be a constructive rather than destructive process. They will encourage you to think critically about empirical data in terms of construction rather than verification, and most importantly they will encourage you to develop theory that is interesting and novel, rather than naive or irrelevant, making this title essential reading for those who often find the traditional vocabulary and frameworks of social science research obvious or simplistic.

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