This captivating book delves into the complex realm of management and organizational dynamics, focusing on the significance of paradoxes. From the intricate interplay between social obligations and business missions to the tension between stability and change, this textbook unveils the essence of these enduring contradictions. As organizations evolve, paradoxes become defining features, and illustrative cases of this are included throughout the textbook. Organizational Paradoxes equips students of organization management, organization change and strategy with an understanding of paradoxes, their philosophical underpinnings and their management in practice. Medhanie Gaim (PhD) is Associate Professor of Management at Umeå School of Business, Economics, and Statistics, Sweden. Stewart Clegg is Professor at the University of Sydney in the School of Project Management and the John Grill Institute for Project Leadership and a Distinguished Emeritus Professor of the University of Technology Sydney. Miguel Pina e Cunha is the Fundação Amélia de Mello chair professor at Nova School of Business and Economics, Nova University Lisbon, Portugal.
Forecasts point out an exponential growth in the global population, which raises concerns over the ability of the current agri-food production systems to meet food demand in the long term. Such a prospect has led international organizations and the scientific community to raise awareness about, and call for, the need to identify additional sources of food to feed the world. From this perspective, insects qualify as a suitable and more environmentally friendly alternative to meat and other foods that are sourced from animal proteins. However, uptake of the production and commercialization of insects as food has been facing regulatory hurdles, consumer skepticism and rejection in many markets. This is particularly true in the context of western societies in which insects do not always constitute part of the local traditional diets. Production and Commercialization of Insects as Food and Feed: identification of the Main Constraints in the European Union analyses and discusses the regulatory state-of-the-art for the production and commercialization of insects as food and feed in the European Union. The EU has been taking concrete legislative steps with a view to opening up its market for insect foods, although some key regulatory constraints still exist today which ultimately prevent the industry sector from growing, consolidating and thriving. The main regulatory constraints in the EU for insects as food include the fragmentation of the EU market as a result of the adoption of different policy solutions by EU Member States for novel foods and the lengthy and complex authorization procedures. Also, ad hoc safety and quality requirements tailored to the needs and specificities of the insect food sector are currently missing. This work constitutes the first comprehensive overview of the evolution and current state-of-the-art of the regulatory framework for insect foods in the EU, based on a multidisciplinary approach that combines science, policy and law. It proposes a legislative roadmap which the EU should follow in order to make its regulatory framework fit for insect foods in the long term by providing a detailed comparison between the current EU legal framework and other regulatory systems of western countries with a view to singling out the markets which are better equipped to address the production and the commercialization of insect foods. The text provides an updated overview of the overall market and of European consumers’ perspectives on the use of insect foods. With the proper legislative steps and consolidation, the EU can be a global leader for insects as food and feed both as a market and as a standard-setting body.
This title addresses the theoretical background necessary to accomplish planning and management of groundwater systems, and presents up-to-date applications of the decision-aid techniques in this field.
Why do great companies and other organizations fail, sometimes abruptly? Why do admired leaders fall from their organizational pedestals? Why do young and promising managers derail? Why do organizations create and reinforce rules that manifestly damage both them and those that they employ, serve and sustain? Leadership is a much-discussed but ill-defined idea in business and management circles. Analysing and understanding the skills and behaviours exhibited in leadership practice reveal that leaders exhibit paradoxical activities that challenge our understanding of organizations. In this text, the authors identify leadership behaviours that compete towards business equilibrium: selfish versus selfless, distance versus proximity, consistency versus individuality, enforcing professional standards versus flexibility and control versus autonomy. These paradoxical dilemmas require a reflexive and analytical approach to a subject that is tricky to define. The book explores the paradoxes of power and leadership not as a panacea for solving organizational problems but as a lens through which leadership and power are seen as an exercise in dynamic balance. Read this book as an invitation to the paradoxes of power and leadership that frame organizational life today. Be prepared to find surprises – and some counterintuitive arguments. Providing a thought-provoking guide to the traits and skills that will help readers to understand and navigate paradoxical leadership behaviour, this reflexive book will be a useful reading for students and scholars of business, management and psychology globally.
Paradoxes, contrary propositions that are not contestable separately but that are inconsistent when conjoined, constitute a pervasive feature of contemporary organizational life. When contradictory elements are constituted as equally important in day-to-day work, organizational actors frequently experience acute tensions in engaging with these contradictions. This Element discusses the presence of paradoxes in the life of organizations, introduces the reader to the notion of paradox in theory and practice, and distinguishes paradox and adjacent conceptualizations such as trade-off, dilemma, dialectics, ambiguity, etc. This Element also covers what triggers paradoxes and how they come into being whereby the Element distinguishes latent and salient paradoxes and how salient paradoxes are managed. This Element discusses key methodological challenges and possibilities of studying, teaching, and applying paradoxes and concludes by considering some future research questions left unexplored in the field.
Confronted with rapid and unpredictable environments, contemporary organizations are becoming more aware of the benefits of improvisation. By improvising, organizations create the capacity to make sudden adaptive moves, thus adapting in real time to unexpected events. Organizational improvisation is thus a new and exciting area in terms of practice and research. Organizational improvisation has important implications for such subjects as product innovation, teamworking and organizational renewal, and this new book brings together some of the best and most thought-provoking papers published in recent years. Organizational improvisation is now emerging as one of the most important areas of organizational science, and this book provides a comprehensive collection suitable for students, researchers and practitioners alike. Frank J. Barrett Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, Monterey, USA, David T. Bastien Minneapolis, USA, Shona L.
In a globalized world, where multinational companies have extensive power over a huge number of other organizations and millions of people, building positive organizational performance requires global leaders with virtues. Organizations, especially multinational ones, may be crucial engines of social and economic progress; global leaders' virtues and character strengths may be strong drivers of such an endeavour. One cannot demand of them that they be morally pure or that they assume responsibility for solving the most pressing public problems in the world. However, this book argues that they may be part of the solution, help in making the world a better place, and contribute to the realistic desiderata of a values-based capitalism. Drawing on the Positive Organizational Scholarship movement, this book aims to provide a holistic approach to the virtues of leaders. It explores how virtues and character strengths may be put at the service of positive organizational performance, stressing that virtues represent the 'golden mean' between the extremes of excess and deficiency, and discussing the perverse consequences of 'excessive virtuousness'. The book shares theoretical, anecdotal, and empirical evidence on the convergence between good virtues and good results, aiming to disseminate the idea that managers can be competent and competitive, whilst doing 'good things right'.
Organizational compassion provides a multitude of benefits at individual, team and organizational levels. These encompass heightened positive affect, trust, engagement, loyalty, performance, resilience, and recovery. This important book provides an accessible yet scholarly overview of key academic findings and theories on organizational compassion. It equips readers with tools for reflection, awakening and practical application of compassion within the workplace across dyadic, team and organizational contexts. Historically, compassion work has been largely unacknowledged in official organizational discourse. Yet, wherever there are human beings, there will be suffering; where there is human suffering, one can often find human responses infused with kindness and compassion. This observation holds true across industries, professions, and communities. The book explores the complexities of organizational compassion, analyzing the factors that enhance organizational compassion capabilities, as well as those that make compassion falter and fail. The primary aim of this book is to foster the cultivation of organizational compassion by providing a provocative, stimulating and engaging foray into the academic study of organizational compassion for readers, ranging from undergraduate to postgraduate and executive students, as well as reflective practitioners. In a world marked by suffering and challenges, a research-based understanding and fostering of compassion at work, offers a path towards a better future.
With organizational environments becoming more unstable, uncertain and equivocal, the concept of resilience has become increasingly significant for management studies. Resilience connotes organizational, team and individual capacities to absorb external shocks and to learn from them, while simultaneously preparing for and responding to external jolts. This book pinpoints the essential aspects of managerial and organizational resilience and offers insights that stimulate critical thinking. As the concept of resilience is essentially made up of contrasting forces, the volume presents some innovative synthetic interpretation that allows a deeper comprehension of the phenomenon and provides managers and policy-makers with a solid basis for taking their decisions.
This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 License. It is free to read, download and share on Elgaronline.com. Presenting the emergence of new organizational designs in a novel way, this insightful book blends theory and practice to examine major trends and directions, the key ideas that underpin organizational design and how these ideas might be applied.
This insightful Elgar Introduction comprises the first effort to provide a succinct overview of the field of organizational paradox theory, exploring contradictions and tensions in organizational settings. By conceptually mapping the field, it offers guidance through the literature on paradox, making space for new interpretations and applications of the concept.
Positive Organizational Behaviour: A Reflective Approach introduces the most recent theoretical and empirical insights on positive organizational practices, addressing emerging topics such as resilience, job crafting, responsible leadership and mindfulness. Other books on positive approaches tend to gloss over the limitations of the positive agenda, but this textbook is unique in taking a reflective approach, focussing on the positive while also accommodating critical perspectives relating to power and control. Positive Organizational Behaviour provides an integrated conceptual framework, evidence-based findings and practical tools to gain an understanding of the potential of positive organizational practices. This innovative new textbook will provide advanced management and psychology students with a grounding in the area, and help them develop strategies for building effective and responsible organizations.
Much has been researched and written about the emergence of improvisation processes within organizational contexts. Although still scarce, research on organizational improvisation has evolved from a jazz and theater metaphor to empirical and conceptual organizational frameworks, creating a consolidated organizational theoretical body. This Elgar Introduction discusses major theoretical advances in organizational improvisation, which the authors view as the process of improvisation that occurs within an organizational context, whether at the individual, team, or organizational level. Grounded in rigorous academic work to date, this book speaks both to scholars interested in developing research on organizational improvisation and to managers who face rapid change with crucial consequences.
On the morning of the next day, February 1st, 1542, the eve of the day of the Purification of Our Lady, we pitched our camp, and as D. Christovão came with full knowledge of the approaches, as soon as we were in sight he allotted them to the Captains: to Francisco Velho and Manuel da Cunha, with their people and three pieces of artillery, the first approach, with the wall at the foot, the attack to be made at a given signal; to the second he appointed João da Fonseca and Francisco de Abreu, with three other pieces of artillery, and with the same instructions as to the signal; as the last approach was the strongest and most dangerous, he selected it for himself with the remaining people. There pikes, who were angry and discontented that they were excluded from remained on guard over the Queen sixty soldiers with matchlocks and the attack.
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