When Things Go Wrong: Organizational Failures and Breakdowns / Edition 1

by Helmut K Anheier

Overview

'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. ‘Failure' is presented as a relative concept where the expectations and strategies of stakeholders make claims on the performance of the organization and the notion

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780761910480
Publisher:	SAGE Publications
Publication date:	01/01/1999
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	328
Product dimensions:	6.52(w) x 9.14(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Helmut K. Anheier, Ph D, is President and Dean at the Hertie School of Governance, and holds a chair of sociology at Heidelberg University. He received his Ph D from Yale University in 1986, was a senior researcher at John Hopkins School of Public Policy, Professor of Public Policy and Social Welfare at UCLA's Luskin School of Public Affairs, and Centennial Professor at the London School of Economics. Professor Anheier founded and directed the Centre for Civil Society at LSE, the Center for Civil Society at UCLA, and the Center for Social Investment at Heidelberg. Before embarking on an academic career, he served as social affairs officer to the United Nations.

He is author of over 400 publications, and won various international prizes and recognitions for his scholarship. Amongst his recent book publications are Nonprofit Organizations - Theory, Management, Policy (London: Routledge, 2014), A Versatile American Institution: The Changing Ideals and Realities of Philanthropic Foundations with David Hammack (Washington, DC: Brookings, 2013) and The Global Studies Encyclopedia with Mark Juergensmeyer (5 vols, Sage, 2012). He is the principal academic lead of the Hertie School´s annual Governance Report (Oxford University Press, 2013-), and currently working on projects relating to indicator research, social innovation, and success and failure in philanthropy.

Table of Contents

PART ONE: INTRODUCTION
Organizational Failures, Breakdowns and Bankruptcies - Helmut K Anheier and Lynne Moulton
An Introduction
PART TWO: ORGANIZATIONS AND FAILURE
Costly Information - Lynne G Zucker and Michael R Darby
Firm Transformation, Exit, or Persistent Failure
Decision Overreach as a Reason for Failure - David Wilson, David J Hickson and Susan J Miller
How Organisations Can Overbalance
"Tales from the Grave" - Mark Hager et al
Organizations' Accounts of Their Own Demise
Organizational Coping, Failure, and Success - Renate Mayntz
Academies of Sciences in Central and Eastern Europe
PART THREE: THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF FAILURE AND BANKRUPTCY
Successful Failure - Wolfgang Seibel
An Alternative View of Organizational Coping
Veiled Politics - Kevin J Delaney
Bankruptcy as a Structured Organizational Field
The Politics of Blame Avoidance - Mark Bovens et al
Defensive Tactics in a Dutch Crime-Fighting Fiasco
Creating the Agents of Corporate Rescue - Terence C Halliday and Bruce G Carruthers
Professionalization of Insolvency
PART FOUR: THE COGNITIVE CONSTRUCTION OF FAILURE
Prosaic Organizational Failure - Lee Clarke and Charles Perrow
Permanent Failure and the Failure of Organizational Performance - Marshall W Meyer
PART FIVE: STRUCTURAL FAILURES
Success and Failure in Institutional Development - Frank P Romo and Helmut K Anheier
A Network Approach
Stalemate - Helmut K Anheier and Frank P Romo
A Structural Analysis of Organizational Failure
PART SIX: CONCLUSION
Studying Organizational Failures - Helmut K Anheier and Lynne Moulton

Editorial Reviews

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.

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