Organizational Realities Studies of Strategizing and Organizing

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 writing, prefaced by a personal reflection on some of the themes and conclusions of that emerge from this, and the context I 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 struggle for dominance, their personal interests which don't always coincide with the
interests of the organization, and the internal politicking and contests between interests groups that take place in organizations. Some chapters review research literature, some report empirical findings, some propose conceptual reformulation, 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.

1 - Organizational growth and development
2 - Organizations and their environments
3 - Camping on seesaws: Prescriptions for a self-designing organization
4 - Responding to crises
5 - Organizations as action generators
6 - To avoid organizational crises, unlearn
7 - Acting first and thinking later: Theory versus reality in strategic change
8 - Organizational facades
9 - Executives' perceptual filters: What they notice and how they make sense
10 - Challenger: Changing the odds until something breaks
11 - When is play productive?
12 - Learning by knowledge-intensive firms
13 - Keeping a butterfly and an elephant in a house of cards: The elements of exceptional success
14 - How organizations channel creativity
15 - Strategizing realistically in competitive environments
16 - Trying to help S&Ls: How organizations with good intentions jointly enacted disaster
17 - Unlearning ineffective or obsolete technologies
18 - Distrust in dependence: The ancient challenge of superior-subordinate relations
19 - Ancient Chinese theories of control
20 - How organizations learn from success and failure
21 - The accuracy of managers' perceptions: A dimension missing from theories about firms
22 - Studying the accuracy of managers' perceptions: A research odyssey
23 - Which dreams come true? Endogeneity, industry structure, and forecasting accuracy

William H. Starbuck is Professor in Residence, Lundquist College of Business, University of Oregon. Author of numerous articles on a wide-ranging set of issues relating to organizational behavior and strategy, he is also a former editor of Administrative Science Quarterly and co-editor of The Handbook of Organizational Design (with Paul Nystrom, OUP, 1981).