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The complexity and dynamism of organizations make them difficult to understand and manage. This book presents the workings and designs of organizations and identifies the types of problems encountered by organizational workers. Allcorn provides an essential focus on dynamic workplace theory, questioning the current and future value of today's bureaucratic, hierarchic organizational structure. Allcorn advocates a shared theoretical perspective that is clear and comprehensive. His theory explains organizational life, encompassing four types of work experience: chaotic, bureaucratic, charismatic, and balanced. He proposes an organizational design that eschews positions of authority and power and eliminates severe, often hindering bureaucracy.
Clear and comprehensible without being simplistic, the book offers insights into how organizations actually function and proposes ways to intervene when organizations grow stale, become self-defeating in their missions, or develop into hostile environments for their employees. The insights and ideas presented here are of considerable and enduring importance to corporate trainers, consultants, group process experts, governmental agencies and entities, executives at all levels, academics, and students of organizational life and its various processes.
List of contents
Illustrations
Foreword by Michael Diamond
Preface
Introduction
Know Thy Workplace
Dynamic Workplace Theory
The Elemental Forces of Dynamic Workplace Theory
Transitional Organizational Space
Finding Stability in the Workplace
Managing and Consulting Using Dynamic Workplace Theory
The Search for the Organizational Solution to the Industrial Revolution
Ring Organization Design
An Analysis of Dynamic Workplace Theory and Ring Organization Design
In Conclusion
References
Index
About the author
Seth Allcorn is a retired, former health sciences center executive at the University of Missouri-Columbia, University of Rochester, Loyola University Chicago, Texas Tech Health Sciences Center, and former Vice President University of New England. He is an Associate of the Center for Psychosocial Organization Studies and the author or co-author of fifteen books, and over one hundred articles in scholarly and practitioner journals.
