An Actor's Approach to Management: Conceptual Framework and Company Practices - Softcover

Morten Jakobsen

Softcover

ISBN 10: 8757424691 ISBN 13: 9788757424690

Publisher: DJØF Publishing, 2011

Synopsis

For over fifty years management models have been dominated by a rather mechanical approach to the descriptions of human action, organizational activity and relationships. In this book, the contributors consider the actor based management perspective as a direct contrast to mechanical management. The book offers a clearer understanding of the processes of reality construction within contemporary organizations. It aims to help students and practitioners dealing with the complexity and non-linearity of business life to encourage them to be reflective in their tackling of everyday business situations. Essential for this purpose is to show students and practitioners how they can construct themselves as successful actors in interaction with others in a competitive business environment. An Actor s Approach to Management includes both a theoretical framework for understanding and analyzing actor based management, and details a number of case studies that are used to illustrate different aspects of actor based management. These case studies are from a variety of industries such as banking, electronics, retailing, automotive, pharmaceutical and aircraft manufacturing. An Actor s Approach to Management is a contribution to the development of methods and practices for handling organisational processes. It highlights how individuals posses some creativity and problem solving skills that can be used in a constructive way in their daily work-life and that organisations can become more competitive if management is capable of using these abilities fully. The challenge for management is to take care of employees' creativity, encouraging them to be innovative and taking on responsibility for organisational concerns in their work.

About this title

Product Description

This book is a contribution to the development of methods and practices for handling the complexity and non-linearity of organisational processes. The basic premises are that the individual person posses some creativity and problem solving skills that can be used in a constructive way in his/her daily work-life and that organisations can become more competitive if the management is capable of binding to these abilities. The challenge for management is to take care of employees' creativity, encouraging them to be innovative and taking on responsibility for organisational concerns in their work. The book provides a conceptual framework for understanding the complexity and challenges for management. A number of cases are presented in order to illustrate how managers can practice the actor based method. The actor based approach presented in the textbook contrasts more mainstream management approaches that tend to focus on rather mechanical management techniques constructing the employees as reactive.

Edition details

• Publisher: DJØF Publishing
• Publication date: 2011
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 8757424691
• ISBN 13: 9788757424690
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 176
• Editor: Morten Jakobsen, Inga-lill Johansson, Hanne Norreklit