Modern Organizations: Organization Studies in the Postmodern World Book

Modern Organizations offers a stimulating critical overview of key issues in our understanding of organizations. Its wide-ranging analysis both explores current approaches to organization studies and relates the concepts of modernity and postmodernity to the realities of organizational structure and context. In surveying alternative perspectives on organizations in terms of ideal types, systems, contingencies, ecologies, cultures, markets and efficiency, Stewart Clegg demonstrates that no single approach is adequate to deal with the real-world variety of organizations that exist and work.Drawing upon unusual and revealing examples - the production of French bread, Italian fashion and `post-Confucian' Asian enterprises - he argues that their success cannot be reduced to `culture' but must incorporate a fuller understanding of the ways in which organizations are constructed and reproduced. This analysis is carried through in a detailed discussion of the debate over why Japanese organizations are so successful.As both a synthesis of current perspectives and an innovative argument based upon a broad international sweep, Modern Organizations will be an essential textbook in organization studies and related social sciences.Read More