In the years following her role as the lead author of the international bestseller, Limits to Growth--the first book to show the consequences of unchecked growth on a finite planet-- Donella Meadows remained a pioneer of environmental and social analysis until her untimely death in 2001.

Meadows' newly released manuscript, Thinking in Systems, is a concise and crucial book offering insight for problem solving on scales ranging from the personal to the global. Edited by the Sustainability Institute's Diana Wright, this essential primer brings systems thinking out of the realm of computers and equations and into the tangible world, showing readers how to develop the systems-thinking skills that thought leaders across the globe consider critical for 21st-century life.

Some of the biggest problems facing the world--war, hunger, poverty, and environmental degradation--are essentially system failures. They cannot be solved by fixing one piece in isolation from the others, because even seemingly minor details have enormous power to undermine the best efforts of too-narrow thinking.

While readers will learn the conceptual tools and methods of systems thinking, the heart of the book is grander than methodology. Donella Meadows was known as much for nurturing positive outcomes as she was for delving into the science behind global dilemmas. She reminds readers to pay attention to what is important, not just what is quantifiable, to stay humble, and to stay a learner.

In a world growing ever more complicated, crowded, and interdependent, Thinking in Systems helps readers avoid confusion and helplessness, the first step toward finding proactive and effective solutions.

Business development in the contemporary world takes place in an economically, politically, and socially complex environment. Today, it is necessary to recognize the tremendous cultural diversity of the world and it is essential to consider the specific cultural values in managerial strategy and business practice worldwide. Organizational Culture and Behavioral Shifts in the Green Economy provides emerging research on the relationships between organizations in the context of culture and diversity within a sustainable economy. This book provides important insights into topics such as circular economy, green advertising, and sustainable development. Additionally, it addresses the significance of concepts such as culture, organizational culture, individual culture, and the style of leadership, which have been the concern of many management professionals and scholars. This publication is a vital resource for business managers, professionals, practitioners, students, and researchers seeking current research on the impact of organizational culture and behavioral shifts on sustaining a green economy.

"Culture eats strategy for breakfast". Peter Drucker's provocative statement points to the importance of culture for organizations. Depending on its characteristics, culture contributes significantly to the success or failure of for-profit and not-for-profit organizations. Hence, managers and leaders need to have an understanding of this important concept for best results. This book provides relevant knowledge about the concept of culture. This includes its major characteristics and dimensions, the way culture functions and influences both the internal life of an organization and the resulting performance. The book describes the emergence and development of culture over time as well as the formation and influence of subcultures. Even though culture is always present, certain situations call for specific attention such as fast growth or stagnation, strategic alliances, M&As or situations of change. The book describes how to go about understanding and assessing an organization's culture as a basis for culture change interventions as well as culture-sensitive and culture-mindful management and leadership.

Trust is an elusive concept, meaning different things to different people, and so needs to be clearly defined. By focusing on relations within and between firms, Bart Nooteboom undertakes to produce a clearer definition of trust and its role in the economy. Trust deals with a range of questions such as: what are the roles of trust? What can we trust in? Can trust serve as an instrument for the governance of relations? Is trust a substitute, a precondition or an outcome of contracts? The author then goes on to analyse what trust is based on, what its limits are, how it grows and how it can also break down. The role of intermediaries is also discussed. Bart Nooteboom argues that trust goes beyond calculative self-interest and that blind, unconditional trust is unwise. He then examines the paradox of how trust can be non-calculative and yet, not blind. The book also reveals ways to measure and model trust, its antecedents and its consequences.

Why does history matter to our understanding of management, organizations, and markets? What theoretical insights can it offer into organizational processes? How can scholars use historical sources and methods to address research questions in management and organization studies? This book brings together leading organization scholars and business historians to examine the opportunities and challenges of incorporating historical research into the study of firms and markets. It examines the reasons for the growing interest in historically grounded research in management departments and business schools, and considers both the intellectual and practical questions the endeavour faces. The volume is divided into three parts. The first part, History and Organization Theory, considers the relationship between historical reasoning and key theoretical schools of organizational thought, including institutional theory, evolutionary theory, and critical theory. The second part, Actors and Markets, considers how historical perspective can provide researchers with insights into organizational change, entrepreneurial processes, industry emergence, and the co-evolution of states and markets. In the final section, Sources and Methods, the contributors explicate historical methodologies within the context of other approaches to studying organizations and provide concrete suggestions for researchers in the field. The introduction places these issues within the broader context of developments in the fields of business history and organization studies, and orients readers to the 'future of the past in management and organization studies.'

Failures are a common phenomena in civilization. Things fail and society responds, often very slowly, sometimes inappropriately. What kinds of things go wrong? Why do they go wrong? How do people and organizations react to failures, and what are the best ways to react? William B. Rouse takes an analytic approach to these questions and addresses eighteen well-known cases of high-consequence failures. He employs a multi-level framework to integrate findings across the case studies, and in turn uses these to outline a conceptual approach to integrated failure management. Though diverse in their causes and outcomes, his analysis shows that the conceptual design of an integrated approach to failure management can encompass each of the case studies, all of which would have benefitted from the same conceptual decision support architecture. This enables cross-cutting system design principles and practices, assuring that failure management in every new domain and context need not start with a blank slate.

Globalization has made both operations and supply chains more complex than ever before. Inputs are sourced from many locations all over the world to serve different needs and market segments throughout the planet, making it a global challenge that necessitates a global strategic response. Managing Operations Throughout Global Supply Chains is a crucial academic resource that discusses concepts, methodologies, and applications of emerging techniques for operations and supply chain management processes that promote cost efficiency. While highlighting topics such as global operations, resource planning, and business forecasting, this publication explores how organizations manage the procurement of all necessary resources at every stage of the production cycle from the original source to the final consumers. This book is ideally designed for researchers, academicians, practitioners, professional organizations, policymakers, and government officials.

Building on the seminal work of David Teece, Kathleen Eisenhardt, Jeffrey Martin, and others, this volume applies the concept of dynamic capabilities to help readers understand how organizations can be successful in highly dynamic environments. The contributions, written by researchers who participated in the research program "Dynamic Capabilities and Relationships" and international researchers who participated in the program's international conference (both funded by the Dieter Schwarz Foundation), highlight state-of-the-art research on dynamic capabilities and relationships. They also put forward an integrated management approach for the purpose of understanding, analyzing, and managing the successful creation and adaptation of capabilities and relationships.

Jobs that were once well-defined are now multifaceted. New realities have placed a premium on employee cognitive processing to fulfill complex occupational roles. But human conscious cognitive capacity is limited, making it nearly impossible for employees to keep up without being overloaded. Stajkovic and Sergent refute the common assumption that technological automation is the only way forward. Instead, they directly tackle the issue of employee cognitive overload by proposing cognitive automation as an alternative solution. The authors present a sampling of cutting-edge research showing that conscious guidance is not required for all goal pursuits; goal-directed behavior at work can be automated via priming of subconscious goals. Building on research in social psychology and organizational behavior, Stajkovic and Sergent introduce four models to explain how subconscious goals are primed in organizations: *Auto-motive model: Repeated practice with a goal makes cognitive automation possible. *Goal contagion: Observing and inferring goals of others creates cognitive automation. *Means-goal priming: Confidence in your goal pursuit enhances cognitive automation. *A history of reinforcement: Money, feedback, and social recognition used to reinforce goal achievement become associated with the goal, resulting in cognitive automation. The authors canvas a broad range of knowledge concerning the problem of employee cognitive overload in contemporary organizations and rely on multidisciplinary research to propose cognitive automation as a solution that can address it directly. This book is a deep well of valuable information for those interested in solving real work problems with application of science of organizational behavior (SOB).

Developments in Organizational Politics presents a comprehensive analysis of organizational politics and its meaning and application for employees and managers in modern worksites. Eran Vigoda suggests an integrative model that tries to explain how politics, and especially perceptions of politics, emerges, transforms and affects employees' performance and other work related outcomes in organizations. The analysis is based on empirical data collected over almost a decade of field studies. This data uses a variety of scientific methods to demonstrate how internal politics may be related to job attitudes, behavioral intentions as well as actual behaviors of employees. Special attention is given to non-profit organizations but analysis of businesses and private firms is also included. The book will be essential reading for academics and researchers from the fields of organizational behavior, human resource management and is also useful for practitioners who struggle through the barriers of power, influence and politics in the workplace.

In A Theory of Environmental Leadership, Mark Manolopoulos draws on his original model of leading outlined in his cutting-edge book Following Reason to derive and develop the first properly systematic model of eco-leadership. Suppose humanity's relation with the Earth may be described in terms of leadership "stages" or modalities: once upon a time, the Earth led or ruled humanity, and now we humans rule or lead the Earth. When the Earth led, the Earth flourished; now that humankind leads, the Earth flounders - ecological crises multiply and intensify. However, there might be a third stage or modality of leadership: humanity leading for the Earth, leading in a way that allows the world, including humans, to re-flourish. What would be the nature of this truly environmental form of leadership? A Theory of Environmental Leadership identifies and critically analyzes the two basic and incompatible positions associated with the way we construe and interact with the non-human: anthropocentrism (human supremacism) and ecocentrism (ecological egalitarianism). By rigorously analyzing and leveraging this polarity, this book outlines an innovative theory of eco-leadership together with some of its confronting-but-necessary measures. Expansive and incredibly timely, A Theory of Environmental Leadership is ideal for a range of audiences, from scholars and students of environmental leadership studies to activists and policymakers. The book's remarkable clarity and engaging character also makes it suitable for the general public.

A volume in Research in Strategic Alliances Series Editor T. K. Das, City University of New York Managing Multipartner Strategic Alliances is a volume in the book series Research in Strategic Alliances that focuses on providing a robust and comprehensive forum for new scholarship in the field of strategic alliances. In particular, the books in the series cover new views of interdisciplinary theoretical frameworks and models, significant practical problems of alliance organization and management, and emerging areas of inquiry. The series also includes comprehensive empirical studies of selected segments of business, economic, industrial, government, and non-profit activities with wide prevalence of strategic alliances. Through the ongoing release of focused topical titles, this book series seeks to disseminate theoretical insights and practical management information that should enable interested professionals to gain a rigorous and comprehensive understanding of the field of strategic alliances. Managing Multipartner Strategic Alliances contains contributions by leading scholars in the field of strategic alliance research. The 10 chapters in this volume cover a number of significant topics related to the formation, operation, and performance of multipartner strategic alliances (i.e., alliances with more than two members) that are increasingly being formed in various industrial sectors. The chapter topics cover both the broader issues, such as the peculiar complexities of multipartner alliances that arise because of indirect or generalized reciprocities among its multiple members vis-a-vis the direct reciprocity within dyadic or two-member alliances, and the roles of power and multilevel embeddedness, and the more focused topics of managing triadic alliances, the evolution of an airline alliance, and the nature of value creation in a consortium. The chapters include empirical as well as conceptual treatments of the selected topics, and collectively present a wide-ranging review of the noteworthy research perspectives on the nature, management, and performance of multipartner alliances.

Introducing the idea of conversational storytelling interviewing (CSI) as an 'indirect' method of interviewing, David Boje and Grace Ann Rosile explore this innovative methodological framework as a way for respondents to tell their own story, without resorting to structured or semi-structured interviews. Bringing together theory, method and praxis of storytelling in an iterative process of self-correcting induction, How to Use Conversational Storytelling Interviews for Your Dissertation offers researchers ways to move beyond the bystander role, urging them to be co-creators of their findings. Complete with exercises to train practitioners in new methods of inquiry and in-depth discussions of an array of philosophical issues, this illuminating book illustrates how rigorous self-correcting methods move inquiry from conversation to storytelling science. Pioneering in both method and framework, this book is a crucial guide for using CSI in qualitative research for PhD students and researchers in management and organizational studies. Scholars of feminist and indigenous studies and other critical studies fields will benefit from alternative interviewing methods as these disciplines undergo an ontological turn.

Just after 9:00 a.m. on February 1, 2003, the space shuttle "Columbia" broke apart and was lost over Texas. This tragic event led, as the "Challenger" accident had 17 years earlier, to an intensive government investigation of the technological and organizational causes of the accident. The investigation found chilling similarities between the two accidents, leading the "Columbia" Accident Investigation Board to conclude that NASA failed to learn from its earlier tragedy.

Despite the frequency with which organizations are encouraged to adopt learning practices, organizational learning -- especially in public organizations -- is not well understood and deserves to be studied in more detail. This book fills that gap with a thorough examination of NASA's loss of the two shuttles. After offering an account of the processes that constitute organizational learning, Julianne G. Mahler focuses on what NASA did to address problems revealed by "Challenger "and its uneven efforts to institutionalize its own findings. She also suggests factors overlooked by both accident commissions and proposes broadly applicable hypotheses about learning in public organizations.

The ""new"" in new economy means a more stable and longer growth, with more jobs, lower inflation and interest rates, explosion of free markets world wide, the unparalleled access to knowledge through the Internet and new type of organisation which affects organisational change. Organisational change is the adoption of an organisational environment for the sake of survival. Namely, the old principles no longer work in the age of Globalisation. Businesses have reached the old model's limits with respect to complexity and speed. At the same time, the challenge which new economy brings to small businesses managers is the use of new business approach and the strong will for organisational changes and adaptation to global market demands. There are several types of organisational changes that can occur- strategic changes, organisational cultural changes; involve organisational structural change, a redesign of work tasks and technological changes. In line with these changes, there is strong expectation of employee to permanent improve their knowledge and become an integral part of successful business formula in order to respond to the challenges brought by the global economy. It means a request for learning organisation which is characterised as an organisation creating, gaining and transferring the knowledge, and thus constantly modifying the organisational behaviour. Reader will refine their theoretical understanding of globalisation by studying its concrete manifestations in three domains: organisational culture, behaviour, and gender.

Employees of different labor sectors are involved in different projects and pressed to deliver results in a specific period of time, which increases their mental workload. This increase can lead to a high mental workload, which in turn leads to a decline in job performance. Therefore, strategies for managing mental workload and promoting mental health have become necessary for corporate success. Evaluating Mental Workload for Improved Workplace Performance is a critical scholarly book that provides comprehensive research on mental workload and the effects, both adverse and positive, that it can have on employee populations as well as strategies for decreasing or deleting it from the labor sector. Highlighting an array of topics such as psychosocial factors, critical success factors (CSF), and technostress, this book is ideal for academicians, researchers, managers, ergonomists, engineers, industrial designers, industry practitioners, and students.

Wake up. Go to work. Prepare for war.

A tyrannical and irrational boss, job insecurity, unreasonable demands, stress from juggling home and family-these are just a few of the all-too-common grievances in the workplace today. Employees often live with resentment, frustration, and feelings of impending doom. They may not know what will happen next and lack a sense of control in their work lives. No wonder a workplace characterized by unanswered complaints is reminiscent of a combat zone.

"Workplace Warfare" discusses the high costs of stress and anger in the workplace. Written in a conversational style from the employee perspective, this practical guide goes beyond merely showing you how to make the best of a bad situation: its focus is on empowering you to understand the different kinds of situations you might face and to "take control" of your own responses to frustrating situations, especially when dealing with bosses.

Learn how to redesign your job to get what you want from work every day. Based on actual case histories, providing professional psychological and employment advice, "Workplace Warfare" offers readers higher levels of comfort and productivity on the job.

Taking an interdisciplinary approach, this volume focuses on the trust processes between people within organizations, with an emphasis on empirical studies. Rational foundations and psychological motivations for trust are taken into account through conceptual and empirical chapters. The authors begin by summarizing a number of key elements from the literature including how trust develops in time, and how its development is affected by social-psychological phenomena. This includes the notion of 'framing': the interpretive context in which actions are perceived and evaluated. A conceptual framework is then used to analyse trust and power in the internal relationships of the organization. The contributors take up this issue in an evolutionary analysis of competition between trust and cheating. The conditions for trust in teams, in terms of type of task and team composition are examined, and the effects on trust of different types of leadership are studied. In the concluding chapters, the relation between the control imposed by an expert system and the influence of users is analysed, and the relational signalling perspective is used for a study of norm violation and sanctioning, which in turn is used to analyse trust and trouble. The Trust Process in Organizations will be invaluable to students, academics and scholars of organization, management, organizational behaviour, HRM, organizational change and learning. In addition, those in the areas of trust, social capital, governance of relations, social psychology and leadership will deem this work essential reading.