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Overview
Efforts by American companies to adapt to intense environmental pressures, arising from incessant technological innovation and fierce competition across global product markets, are dramatically changing how firms and their employees work. Daily headlines blare about corporate downsizings, strategic alliances, joint ventures, acquisitions and mergers, huge CEO bonuses despite stagnant wages and rising inequality. The economists' utility-maximizing efficiency theory offers useful but incomplete explanations of these events. Through its depiction of organizational activity as a socially constructed complex of institutions, the structural perspective on organizational change contributes crucial insights. It reveals how relationships among workers and organizations, embedded in complex network patterns, generate social capital, shape career opportunities, and change global competition between corporations and nations.In Changing Organizations David Knoke examines the formation of intra- and inter-organizational networks and their impact on the fates of employees, companies, and communities. He explores hot the network perspective—when used in conjunction with ecology, insitutionalism, power and resource dependence, transaction cost economics, organizational learning, and evolutionary theories—contributes to a more comprehensive explanation of organizational transformations. Written in an accessible narrative style for advanced undergraduate students in sociology, public policy, and business management courses, it draws heavily from contemporary cases to illustrate ideas. The book also offers readers a careful exposition of basic structural and network concepts and principles.Synopsis
Understanding organizational change requires viewing the American political economy as a system where money and power intimately intertwine at every level. Network relations are indispensable for analyzing continual transformations of organizational structures and actions. A comprehensive explanation of changing necessitates blending the concepts, theories, and data from the many disciplines comprising organization studies: sociology, business management, economics, law, political science, public administration, social psychology, history, and journalism. A multidisciplinary approach helps us to understand how corporations changed over the twentieth century, and where they may be headed in the new one.
Booknews
Knoke (sociology, University of Minnesota) outlines basic structural and network concepts and principles, and examines the formation of intra- and inter-organizational networks and their impact on employees, companies, and communities. He explores how the network perspective, when used in conjunction with ecology, institutionalism, transaction cost economies, and organizational learning, contributes to a more comprehensive explanation of organizational transformation. Written in an accessible narrative style for advanced undergraduate students in sociology, public policy, and business management courses. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)