Summary
Contents
Subject index
We are living in a turbulent world marked by fast, continuous social changes that affect the lives of individuals, families, communities, organizations, businesses, nation-states, and international networks. This fundamentally commits contemporary sociology to being a science of change.
This collection effectively mirrors this diversity and variety of transformations underway in today's societies and transnational spaces. Written by a group of internationally renowned sociologists, it offers a cutting edge understanding of what is happening in our life worlds, work lives and frames of social existence. Bringing up issues such as political turbulence, cultural and artistic dynamics, family changes, gender roles, migration flows and social movements, it is a timely contribution that discusses transformation and globalization and their consequences on diverse platforms.
Illuminating and comprehensive, this book will be of immense use for sociology students on all levels, as well as lecturers, researchers and others who are interested in social life and the consequences of human action.
Transforming Organizations
Transforming Organizations
Introduction
In this chapter I will first outline what was for much of the post-war era the dominant conventional approach to thinking about organizations, known as contingency theory. When contingency theory was first developed in the 1960s, looser organic organizations were a novelty and the dominant form was that of large mechanistic bureaucracies. How times change. Today, in the West, bureaucracies are giving way to new organizational forms that are much closer to organic organizations. Many organizations today are increasingly adopting a network form, with many of their inputs and activities hived off to other organizations with which they network. The most radical form of network is a rhizome, a free-flowing system of organic roots spreading and colonizing available environments. As older form manufacturing is increasingly shifted to organizations in Asia, the best hope ...
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