Strategic Management and Organisational Dynamics
The challenge of complexity to ways of thinking about organisations
Renowned for its unconventional thinking, Strategic Management and Organisational
Dynamics continues to be a refreshing alternative for students and lecturers of strategic
management specifically looking for ‘something different’. Stacey challenges the
conceptual orthodoxy of planned strategy, focusing instead on the influence of more
complex and unstable forces in the development of strategy.
This book explores and challenges ways of thinking about strategy and
organisational dynamics and raises questions about systemic and responsive processes,
utilising insights from the complexity sciences. The purpose of this book is to assist
people to make sense of their own experience of life in organisations, to explore their
own thinking and to pay attention to and so what they do.
Ideal for advanced undergraduate and postgraduate study, this critically detailed
account deals with up-to-the minute issues, raising the challenge of complexity within
practice and theory. As such it remains unique amongst strategic management text books.
Table of Contents
1 Strategic management in perspective: A step in the professionalization of management
2 Thinking about strategy and organisational change: The implicit assumptions
distinguishing one theory from another
Part One – SYSTEMIC WAYS OF THINKING ABOUT STRATEGY AND ORGANISATIONAL
DYDNAMICS
3 The origins of systems thinking in the age of reason
4 Thinking in terms of strategic choice: cybernetic systems, cognitivist and humanistic
psychology
5 Thinking in terms of organisational learning and knowledge creation: systems dynamics,
cognitivist, humanistic and constructivist psychology
6 Thinking in terms of organisational psychodynamics: open systems and psychoanalytic
perspectives
7 Thinking about strategy process from a systemic perspective: using a process to control
a process
8 A review of systemic ways of thinking about strategy and organisational dynamics
9 Extending and challenging the dominant discourse on organisations: thinking about
participation and practice
Part Two – THE CHALLENGE OF COMPLEXITY TO WAYS OF THINKING
10 The complexity sciences: the sciences of uncertainty
11 Systemic applications of complexity sciences to organisations: restating the dominant
discourse
Part Three – COMPLEX RESPONSIVE PROCESSES AS A WAY OF THINKING ABOUT STRATEGY
AND ORGANISATIONAL DYNAMICS
12 Responsive processes thinking: the interplay of intentions
13 The emergence of organisational strategy in local communicative interaction: complex
responsive processes of conversation
14 The link between the local communicative interaction of strategising and the
population-wide patterns of strategy
15 The emergence of organisational strategy in local communicative interaction: complex
responsive processes of ideology and power relating
16 Different modes of articulating patterns of interaction emerging across organisations:
strategy narratives and models
17 Complex responsive processes of strategising: acting locally on the basis of global
goals, visions, expectations and intentions for the ‘whole’ organisation over the
‘long term future’
18 Complex responsive processes: implications for thinking about organisational dynamics
and strategy
560 pages, Paperback