Around 5,000 business and management titles are published every year, and increasingly, their preferred mode of presentation is centred on the creation and marketing of buzzwords and fads. This book argues that these management fads and buzzwords deflect critical inquiry and limit useful action because they present a 'ready made' view of the world, which rejects the benefits of theoretical analysis and reflection. Topics covered include: * the 'guru industry' * 'excellence' * business process re-engineering * empowerment * culture * knowledge work * globalization. 'Unpacking' the 'guru industry' and analyzing the fads and buzzwords, this book provides a 'critical-practical' analysis, designed to allow readers to locate, understand and critique management fashion.

Explores where new ideas come from, how to evaluate which ideas are worth pursuing, and how to customize ideas to suit and organization's unique needs.

Organizations change. They grow, they adapt, they evolve. The effects of organizational change are important, varied and complex and analyzing and understanding them is vital for students, academics and researchers in all business schools. The Routledge Companion to Organizational Change offers a comprehensive and authoritative overview of the field. The volume brings together the very best contributors not only from the field of organizational change, but also from adjacent fields, such as strategy and leadership. These contributors offer fresh and challenging insights to the mainstream themes of this discipline. Surveying the state of the discipline and introducing new, cutting-edge themes, this book is a valuable reference source for students and academics in this area.

Managing Change: A Critical Perspective explores how and why change occurs in organizations and how the change process can be managed effectively. Complete with an appendix featuring twenty popular change management techniques, it is an ideal core textbook for change modules on HR and business degree programmes at both undergraduate and postgraduate level. It offers a critical perspective, challenging the main assumptions and ensuring that the complexity of the subject is understood and appreciated. This fully updated 2nd edition of Managing Change: A Critical Perspective includes new chapters on perspectives, power and politics, ethics, agents and agency, HRM and evaluation. Its revised structure reflects strategic, group and individual change, and a revised final chapter evaluates the practice and theory of change management. Online supporting resources include annotated weblinks for students, an instructor’s manual complete with commentary on questions and cases in the book and lecture slides and additional case studies for tutors.

Innovations in management are becoming more numerous and diverse, and are appearing in organizations providing many different kinds of products and services. The purpose of this book is to examine whether some widely-promoted examples of these management innovations – ranging from techniques such as Kaizen to styles of leadership and the management of learning – can usefully be applied to organizations which provide healthcare, and applied in different kinds of health systems. Management Innovations for Healthcare Organizations is distinctive in selecting a wide and diverse range and selection of managerial innovations to examine. No less distinctively, it makes an adaptive, critical scrutiny of these innovations. Neither evangelist nor nihilist, the book instead considers how these innovations might be adapted for the specific task of providing healthcare. Where evidence on these points is available, the book outlines that too. Consequently the book takes an international approach, with contributions from Europe, the Middle East, Australia and North America. Each contributor is an expert in the management innovation which they present. This combination of features makes the book unique.

This book provides a rhetorical critique of the management guru and management fashion phenomenon, and stimulates a much-needed critical dialogue between practitioners and academics.

Management ideas, and their associated applications, have become a prevalent feature of our working lives. While their focus is familiar, such as efficiency, motivation, and improvement, they range from specific notions such as activity-based costing, to broad movements like corporate social responsibility. This Handbook brings together some of the latest research from leading international scholars on how management ideas are produced, promoted, and adapted, and their effects on business and working practices and society at large. Rather than focusing on specific management ideas, this volume explores their key socio-political contexts and channels of dissemination, and is organized around four core overlapping themes. The first section sets out the research field in general, in terms of both an overall system and of different perspectives and research methods. The second section explores the role of different actors and channels of diffusion, including the consumers and producers of management ideas and 'new' media, as well as traditional players in the management ideas field such as consultancies and business schools. The third section focuses on specific features or dynamics of the management ideas system, such as their adoption, evolution, institutionalisation, and resurgence, while in the final section, critical and new perspectives on management ideas are examined, highlighting specific socio-political contexts and the possibility of alternative ideas and forms of critique. With a broad range of perspectives represented, this Handbook provides a comprehensive, authoritative, and enduring resource for those studying management, innovation, and organizational change, as well as for those working in the management ideas industry.

Knowledge Management is here to stay. This book is a compilation of a number of important papers on this subject selected by two leaders in this field of study. A wide range of topic have been chosen which leads the reader through some of the most important considerations in the field today. The book argues that this thing called Knowledge Management has been around for at least 25 years. Yet despite being accused, at several times in that period, of being nothing more than a passing management fad or fashion, it has retained or rather sustained interest by both academics and practitioners. Publication levels in a variety of related journals remains high and organisations continue to implement strategies, processes and systems to create and share knowledge assets of importance to their business. One reason for this situation is the reality that Knowledge Management is, to a large degree, an amalgam of a number of different academic areas. A variety of academic disciplines (strategy, sociology, psychology, IT, library sciences and accounting, to mention only a few) have all made contributions. Practitioners recognize the key terms and have a loose understanding of the general subject matter, however formal education in the field is still limited and focused in a few areas. Indeed only a few KM departments exist across the world and most KM education seems to occur in the library science and IT faculties, and not in the business studies departments, where it truly belongs. This book is an important text for academics, researchers, students and practitioners.

Leadership, the practice of focusing and motivating a group or organization to achieve its aims, is a much discussed but often misunderstood concept. This comprehensive textbook introduces the subject for Masters level students. Readers are invited to make a series of metaphorical journeys of discovery, thematically organized around fundamental dilemmas within the field of leadership studies. Building on the success of previous editions, the text uses a simple map-based approach to consider dilemmas such as: Is a leader born or made? How are tensions between ethical dilemmas and economic self-interest resolved? How does a leader's desire for control balance with the need to empower members of the organization? This third edition contains a brand new chapter on leadership in sport, an enhanced chapter on creativity, and more international content. Also new to this edition is a companion website containing PowerPoint slides, revision quizzes and a tutor’s guide. This text will be essential reading for Masters and MBA students on leadership courses, and will also be illuminating for managers pursuing leadership development.