Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

Images of Organization has already established itself as a classic that has influenced management thinking throughout the world. This Revised Edition takes Gareth Morgan′s achievement one step further, providing the kind of organizational `radar′ system needed to negotiate the demands of the twenty-first century.

In this monumental work, leading-edge theory is translated into leading-edge practice. The new edition carefully preserves the qualities and strengths of the original, while delivering new insights on today′s managerial challenges. Morgan shows the manager how to view the organization by using his renowned creative images and metaphors. In a sequence of path-breaking chapters he demonstrates how to mobilize the insights of different metaphors: to manage and design organizations in new ways; to develop novel understandings of the relationships between organization and environment; to create learning organizations with the intelligence of a living brain; to explore the intricacies of corporate culture and politics of organizational life; to understand the unconscious dimensions of organization; to translate the implications of the new science of chaos and complexity into practical management strategies; and to confront and deal with the negative impacts that organizations often have on society and the natural world.

No other management book covers so much ground while developing the implications for management with such force.

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

• Part 1 An Overview
• Introduction
• Part 2 Some Images Of Organization
• Mechanization Takes Command
• Organizations as Machines
• Nature Intervenes
• Organizations as Organisms
• Learning and Self-Organization
• Organizations as Brains
• Creating Social Reality
• Organizations as Cultures
• Interests, Conflict, and Power
• Organizations as Political Systems
• Exploring Plato's Cave
• Organizations as Psychic Prisons
• Unfolding Logics of Change
• Organization as Flux and Transformation
• The Ugly Face
• Organizations as Instruments of Domination
• The Challenge of Metaphor
• Part 3 Implications For Practice
• Reading and Shaping Organizational Life
• Postscript

Reviews provided by Syndetics

CHOICE Review

Morgan, a respected academic, author, and business consultant, here develops the theme that all theories are partial, illuminating one aspect of organization while leaving the others in shadow. Moreover, managers are not passive, objective observers of events; instead, they perceive situations through the lens of existing viewpoints, and their fragmentary interpretations then prompt actions. To alleviate this unavoidable self-construction of reality, Morgan urges alertness to the dilemma and awareness of alternative images (or metaphors). The metaphors are described in considerable detail in chapters on organization as machine, organism, brain, culture, political system, psychic prison, flux and transformation, and instrument of domination. In the process of explaining these metaphors, the author also provides a quite useful and comprehensive review of the literature on organizations. This book represents the key fact of organization theory over the past two decades: no theoretical perspective dominates the literature, so viewpoints must compete for attention in a marketplace of conceptual approaches. Though aimed at practitioners, students and teachers of organizational behavior will benefit from Morgan's insightful, well-written book on the troublesome, too often unrecognized, issue of seeing what we believe. Graduate level collections and above. C. Tausky; University of Massachusetts at Amherst