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When Things Go Wrong
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When Things Go Wrong
Organizational Failures and Breakdowns

Edited by:
  • Helmut K. Anheier - Hertie School of Governance, Germany, University of Heidelberg, Germany


March 1999 | 328 pages | SAGE Publications, Inc
'The editor has worked well to achieve a coherent product which will serve as the authoritative and leading text in its area. The future research agenda is to combine economic and non-economic performance measures, as well a to differentiate failure as process and failure as an outcome.' - Gerald Vinten, Southampton Business Institute, British Academy of Management News

This book deals with the the multi-faceted nature of organizational failure through examination of the organizational, political, cognitive and structural aspects of the phenomenon. `Failure' is presented as a relative concept where the expectations and strategies of stakeholders make claims on the performance of the organization and the notion of success. The book also issues a challenges to future research in this field: It advocates using a combination of economic and non-economic performance measures in the assessment of organizational tendencies toward success and failure, and stresses the need for differentiation between failure as a process and failure as an outcome.

 
PART ONE: INTRODUCTION
Helmut K Anheier and Lynne Moulton
Organizational Failures, Breakdowns and Bankruptcies
An Introduction

 
 
PART TWO: ORGANIZATIONS AND FAILURE
Lynne G Zucker and Michael R Darby
Costly Information
Firm Transformation, Exit, or Persistent Failure

 
David Wilson, David J Hickson and Susan J Miller
Decision Overreach as a Reason for Failure
How Organisations Can Overbalance

 
Mark Hager et al
"Tales from the Grave"
Organizations' Accounts of Their Own Demise

 
Renate Mayntz
Organizational Coping, Failure, and Success
Academies of Sciences in Central and Eastern Europe

 
 
PART THREE: THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF FAILURE AND BANKRUPTCY
Wolfgang Seibel
Successful Failure
An Alternative View of Organizational Coping

 
Kevin J Delaney
Veiled Politics
Bankruptcy as a Structured Organizational Field

 
Mark Bovens et al
The Politics of Blame Avoidance
Defensive Tactics in a Dutch Crime-Fighting Fiasco

 
Terence C Halliday and Bruce G Carruthers
Creating the Agents of Corporate Rescue
Professionalization of Insolvency

 
 
PART FOUR: THE COGNITIVE CONSTRUCTION OF FAILURE
Lee Clarke and Charles Perrow
Prosaic Organizational Failure
Marshall W Meyer
Permanent Failure and the Failure of Organizational Performance
 
PART FIVE: STRUCTURAL FAILURES
Frank P Romo and Helmut K Anheier
Success and Failure in Institutional Development
A Network Approach

 
Helmut K Anheier and Frank P Romo
Stalemate
A Structural Analysis of Organizational Failure

 
 
PART SIX: CONCLUSION
Helmut K Anheier and Lynne Moulton
Studying Organizational Failures

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ISBN: 9780761910480
£81.00

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