Authors: Helmut K. Anheier
ISBN-13: 9780761910473, ISBN-10: 0761910476
Format: Hardcover
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date Published: January 1999
Edition: (Non-applicable)
Helmut Anheier (Ph.D., Yale University, 1986) is Director of the Center for Civil Society at UCLA's School of Public Affairs, where he is also a Professor of Social Welfare. From 1998 to 2002 he was the founding director of the Centre for Civil Society at the London School of Economics, and a member of LSE's Department of Social Policy, where he now holds the honorary title of Centennial Professor. Prior to this he was a Senior Research Associate and Project Co-director at the Johns Hopkins University Institute for Policy Studies and Associate Professor of Sociology at Rutgers University. Before embarking on an academic career, Dr. Anheier served as Social Affairs Officer with the United Nations. He has also held research appointments at Yale University, the University of Cologne, and the Science Center in Berlin. Dr. Anheier's research interests include civil society, nonprofit organization, philanthropic foundations, NGOs, globalization and civil society, comparative social and cultural policy, research methodology, social movements and networks.
'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.
Twenty-four essays written by authors from diverse scholarly backgrounds focus on four aspects of organizational failure--organizational, political, cognitive, and structural. They present failure as a relative concept in terms of the expectations and strategies of stakeholders putting a claim on the performance of the organization and the notion of success, and they challenge future research to combine economic and noneconomic measures of assessment. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.
Acknowledgments | ||
Pt. I | Introduction | |
1 | Organizational Failures, Breakdowns, and Bankruptcies: An Introduction | 3 |
Pt. II | Organizations and Failure | |
2 | Costly Information: Firm Transformation, Exit, or Persistent Failure | 17 |
3 | Decision Overreach as a Reason for Failure: How Organizations Can Overbalance | 35 |
4 | "Tales From the Grave": Organizations' Accounts of Their Own Demise | 51 |
5 | Organizational Coping, Failure, and Success: Academies of Sciences in Central and Eastern Europe | 71 |
Pt. III | The Political Economy of Failure and Bankruptcy | |
6 | Successful Failure: An Alternative View of Organizational Coping | 91 |
7 | Veiled Politics: Bankruptcy as a Structured Organizational Field | 105 |
8 | The Politics of Blame Avoidance: Defensive Tactics in a Dutch Crime-Fighting Fiasco | 123 |
9 | Creating the Agents of Corporate Rescue: Professionalization of Insolvency | 149 |
Pt. IV | The Cognitive Construction of Failure | |
10 | Prosaic Organizational Failure | 179 |
11 | Permanent Failure and the Failure of Organizational Performance | 197 |
Pt. V | Structural Failures | |
12 | Success and Failure in Institutional Development: A Network Approach | 215 |
13 | Stalemate: A Structural Analysis of Organizational Failure | 241 |
Pt. VI | Conclusion | |
14 | Studying Organizational Failures | 273 |
References | 291 | |
Index | 309 | |
About the Editor | 312 | |
About the Contributors | 313 |