Organizational Realities

Book excerpt: 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.