Strategic management and organisational dynamics : the challenge of complexity to ways of thinking about organisations / Ralph D. Stacey.

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

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 provided by Syndetics

• 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 1 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 2 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 3 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