front cover of Agency Merger and Bureaucratic Redesign
Agency Merger and Bureaucratic Redesign
Karen M. Hult
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1987

Since the expansion of public programs in the 1960s, charges of bureaucratic inefficiency, unresponsiveness, and “red tape” have been rampant. The response has often been extensive reorganization in an effort to change the source of control, carry out specific missions, and to achieve greater inter-agency cooperation. Karen M. Hult examines why these restructurings often fail, through three case studies: the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Design (HUD); the Minnesota Department of Energy, Planning, and Development; and the Minneapolis Community Development Agency. Hult's study assesses the usefulness of mergers and reorganizations as a policy tool, and offers a valuable contribution to the study of public management and organization design.

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The Challenge of Library Management
Leading with Emotional Engagement
Pixey Anne Mosley
American Library Association, 2011

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Changing Corporate America from Inside Out
Lesbian and Gay Workplace Rights
Nicole C. Raeburn
University of Minnesota Press, 2004

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Changing Forever
The Well-Kept Secrets of America's Leading Companies
Carl F. Frost
Michigan State University Press, 1996

Do Motorola, Herman Miller, and the Donelly corporations all share a secret of business? Without a doubt, it is the ability to continually change—their "only hope for survival and success"—change based on a participatory management style, often referred to as the Scanlon Plan—identity, participation, equity, and managerial competence—these corporations have succeeded where others have failed.  
      Changing Forever builds on the forty years of research, experience, and development that have gone into the Scanlon Plan. Documenting fully the principles and processes of the Scanlon Plan, Carl Frost gives the reader a clear view of how the plan works and how it can be adapted to suit the needs of businesses large and small. The conclusions of his research are not surprising: with implementation of the four basic principles of the Scanlon Plan comes an optimal synergistic relationship between all employees and management.

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Community Action and Organizational Change
Image, Narrative, Identity
Brenton D. Faber
Southern Illinois University Press, 2002

Brenton D. Faber’s spirited account of an academic consultant’s journey through banks, ghost towns, cemeteries, schools, and political campaigns explores the tenuous relationships between cultural narratives and organizational change.

Blending Faber’s firsthand experiences in the study and implementation of change with theoretical discussions of identity, agency, structure, and resistance within contexts of change, this innovative bookis among the first such communications studies to profile a scholar who is also a full participant in the projects. Drawing on theories of Michel Foucault, Anthony Giddens, and Pierre Bourdieu, Faber notes that change takes place in the realm of narrative, in the stories people tell.

Faber argues that an organization’s identity is created through internal stories. When the organization’s internal stories are consistent with its external stories, the organization’s identity is consistent and productive. When internal stories contradict the external stories, however, the organization’s identity becomes discordant. Change is the process of realigning an organization’s discordant narratives.

Faber discusses the case studies of a change management plan he wrote for a city-owned cemetery, a cultural change project he created for a downtown trade school, and a political campaign he assisted that focused on creating social change. He also includes detailed reflections on practical ways academics can become more involved in their communities as agents of progressive social change. Featuring six illustrations, Faber’s unique study demonstrates in both style and substance how stories work as agents of change.

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Deeply Responsible Business
A Global History of Values-Driven Leadership
Geoffrey Jones
Harvard University Press, 2023

Corporate social responsibility has entered the mainstream, but what does it take to run a successful purpose-driven business? A Harvard Business School professor examines leaders who put values alongside profits to showcase the challenges and upside of deeply responsible business.

For decades, CEOs have been told that their only responsibility is to the bottom line. But consensus is that companies—and their leaders—must engage with their social and environmental contexts. The man behind one of Harvard Business School's most popular courses, Geoffrey Jones distinguishes deep responsibility, which can deliver radical social and ecological responses, from corporate social responsibility, which is often little more than window dressing.

Deeply Responsible Business offers an invaluable historical perspective, going back to the Quaker capitalism of George Cadbury and the worker solidarity of Edward Filene. Through a series of in-depth profiles of business leaders and their companies, it carries us from India to Japan and from the turmoil of the nineteenth century to the latest developments in impact investing and the B-corps. Jones profiles business leaders from around the world who combined profits with social purpose to confront inequality, inner-city blight, and ecological degradation, while navigating restrictive laws and authoritarian regimes.

He found that these leaders were motivated by bedrock values and sometimes—but not always—driven by faith. They chose to operate in socially productive fields, interacted with humility with stakeholders, and felt a duty to support their communities. While far from perfect—some combined visionary practices with vital flaws—each one showed that profit and purpose could be reconciled. Many of their businesses were highly successful—though financial success was not their only metric of achievement.

As companies seek to coopt ethically sensitized consumers, Jones gives us a new perspective to tackle tough questions. Inspired by these passionate and pragmatic business leaders, he envisions a future in which companies and entrepreneurs can play a key role in healing our communities and protecting the natural world.

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Downsizing in America
Reality, Causes, and Consequences
William J. Baumol
Russell Sage Foundation, 2003
In the 1980s and early 1990s, a substantial number of U.S. companies announced major restructuring and downsizing. But we don't know exactly what changes in the U.S. and global economy triggered this phenomenon. Little research has been done on the underlying causes of downsizing. Did companies actually reduce the size of their workforces, or did they simply change the composition of their workforces by firing some kinds of workers and hiring others? Downsizing in America, one of the most comprehensive analyses of the subject to date, confronts all these questions, exploring three main issues: the extent to which firms actually downsized, the factors that triggered changes in firm size, and the consequences of downsizing. The authors show that much of the conventional wisdom regarding the spate of downsizing in the 1980s and 1990s is inaccurate. Nearly half of the large firms that announced major layoffs subsequently increased their workforce by more than 10 percent within two or three years. The only arena in which downsizing predominated appears to be the manufacturing sector-less than 20 percent of the U.S. workforce. Downsizing in America offers a range of compelling hypotheses to account for adoption of downsizing as an accepted business practice. In the short run, many companies experiencing difficulties due to decreased sales, cash flow problems, or declining securities prices reduced their workforces temporarily, expanding them again when business conditions improved. The most significant trigger leading to long-term downsizing was the rapid change in technology. Companies rid themselves of their least skilled workers and subsequently hired employees who were better prepared to work with new technology, which in some sectors reduced the size of firm at which production is most efficient. Baumol, Blinder, and Wolff also reveal what they call the dirty little secret of downsizing: it is profitable in part because it holds down wages. Downsizing in America shows that reducing employee rolls increased profits, since downsizing firms spent less money on wages relative to output, but it did not increase productivity. Nor did unions impede downsizing. The authors show that unionized industries were actually more likely to downsize in order to eliminate expensive union labor. In sum, downsizing transferred income from labor to capital-from workers to owners
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The End of Organized Capitalism
Scott Lash
University of Wisconsin Press, 1987

The End of Organized Capitalism argues that—despite Marx’s and Weber’s insistence that capitalist societies become increasingly more ordered—we now live in an era of “disorganized capitalism.” The book is devoted to a systematic examination of the shift to disorganized capitalism in five Western nations (Britain, the United States, France, West Germany, and Sweden). Through the analysis of space, class, and culture, Lash and Urry portray the restructuring of capitalist social relations that has resulted from this disorganization. They adduce evidence for the claims that in each of the nations there is a movement toward a deconcentration of capital within nation-states; toward the increased separation of banks, industry and the state; and toward the redistribution of productive relations and class-relevant residential patterns.
    The authors also show that national disparities in contemporary, disorganized capitalism can be understood through close examination of the extent to which, and mode in which, capitalism became historically organized in each of the five countries under consideration.
    The lucid arguments and judicious comparisons in this book will be of great interest to political scientists, sociologists, geographers, economists, and historians.

 

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An Evolutionary Theory of Economic Change
Richard R. Nelson and Sidney G. Winter
Harvard University Press, 1982

This book contains the most sustained and serious attack on mainstream, neoclassical economics in more than forty years. Richard R. Nelson and Sidney G. Winter focus their critique on the basic question of how firms and industries change overtime. They marshal significant objections to the fundamental neoclassical assumptions of profit maximization and market equilibrium, which they find ineffective in the analysis of technological innovation and the dynamics of competition among firms.

To replace these assumptions, they borrow from biology the concept of natural selection to construct a precise and detailed evolutionary theory of business behavior. They grant that films are motivated by profit and engage in search for ways of improving profits, but they do not consider them to be profit maximizing. Likewise, they emphasize the tendency for the more profitable firms to drive the less profitable ones out of business, but they do not focus their analysis on hypothetical states of industry equilibrium.

The results of their new paradigm and analytical framework are impressive. Not only have they been able to develop more coherent and powerful models of competitive firm dynamics under conditions of growth and technological change, but their approach is compatible with findings in psychology and other social sciences. Finally, their work has important implications for welfare economics and for government policy toward industry.

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Executive Defense
Shareholder Power and Corporate Reorganization
Michael Useem
Harvard University Press, 1993

A quiet revolution came to corporate America during the late 1980s and early 1990s. Large shareholders—pension funds, insurance companies, money manages, and commercial banks—exercised new-found muscle, pressuring senior managers to improve disappointing financial results by reshaping their organization. Michael Useem reveals how those investor pressures have transformed the inside structures of many corporations, better aligning them with shareholder interest.

Useem draws on numerous sources, including interviews with senior managers and intensive studies of seven large corporations representing a range of restructuring experiences and industries—including pharmaceuticals, transportation, chemicals, retailing, electronics, and financial services. He shows that organizational changes have affected many areas of corporate life: headquarters staffs have been reduced authority has filtered down to operating units, and compensation has become more closely tied to performance. Change also extends to corporate governance, where managers have fought back by seeking legal safeguards against takeovers and by staggering board terms. They’ve also put significant resources into building more effective relations with shareholders.

As Useem demonstrates, this revolution has reached beyond the corporation, influencing American politics and law. As increasing ownership concentration has caused companies to focus more attention on shareholders, corporate political agendas have shifted from fighting government regulation to resisting shareholder intrusion.

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Founders of the Future
The Science and Industry of Spanish Modernization
Óscar Iván Useche
Bucknell University Press, 2022
In this ambitious new interdisciplinary study, Useche proposes the metaphor of the social foundry to parse how industrialization informed and shaped cultural and national discourses in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Spain. Across a variety of texts, Spanish writers, scientists, educators, and politicians appropriated the new economies of industrial production—particularly its emphasis on the human capacity to transform reality through energy and work—to produce new conceptual frameworks that changed their vision of the future. These influences soon appeared in plans to enhance the nation’s productivity, justify systems of class stratification and labor exploitation, or suggest state organizational improvements. This fresh look at canonical writers such as Emilia Pardo Bazán, Concha Espina, Benito Pérez Galdós, Vicente Blasco Ibáñez, and José Echegaray as well as lesser known authors offers close readings of their work as it reflected the complexity of Spain’s process of modernization.


 
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The Greening of the U.S. Military
Environmental Policy, National Security, and Organizational Change
Robert F. Durant
Georgetown University Press, 2007

By the Cold War's end, U.S. military bases harbored nearly 20,000 toxic waste sites. All told, cleaning the approximately 27 million acres is projected to cost hundreds of billions of dollars. And yet while progress has been made, efforts to integrate environmental and national security concerns into the military's operations have proven a daunting and intrigue-filled task that has fallen short of professed goals in the post-Cold War era.

In The Greening of the U.S. Military, Robert F. Durant delves into this too-little understood world of defense environmental policy to uncover the epic and ongoing struggle to build an environmentally sensitive culture within the post-Cold War military. Through over 100 interviews and thousands of pages of documents, reports, and trade newsletter accounts, he offers a telling tale of political, bureaucratic, and intergovernmental combat over the pace, scope, and methods of applying environmental and natural resource laws while ensuring military readiness. He then discerns from these clashes over principle, competing values, and narrow self-interest a theoretical framework for studying and understanding organizational change in public organizations. From Dick Cheney's days as Defense Secretary under President George H. W. Bush to William Cohen's Clinton-era-tenure and on to Donald Rumsfeld's Pentagon, the battle over "greening" the military has been one with high-stakes consequences for both national defense and public health, safety, and the environment. Durant's polity-centered perspective and arguments will evoke needed scrutiny, debate, and dialogue over these issues in environmental, military, policymaking, and academic circles.

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Imitation and Innovation
The Transfer of Western Organizational Patterns to Meiji Japan
D. Eleanor Westney
Harvard University Press, 1987

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Implementing for Results
Your Strategic Plan in Action
Sandra Nelson
American Library Association, 2009

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Innovating with Integrity
How Local Heroes Are Transforming American Government
Sandford Borins
Georgetown University Press, 1998

Innovating with Integrity presents a comprehensive portrait of the local heroes—front-line public servants and middle managers—who are reinventing state and local government, and it offers practical recommendations for innovating successfully.

Based on a study of more than 200 successful government innovations, this book is the first large-scale, systematic analysis of innovation in American government. Sandford Borins identifies the components of integrity that he finds in successful innovators, including the intellectual discipline to plan rigorously and to establish measurable goals; the ability to collaborate with others and accommodate criticism; and a willingness to mobilize both the private sector and the community. In addition to analyzing the common traits driving new initiatives, Borins shows the distinctive differences among six areas of innovation: information technology, organizational redesign, environmental and energy management, policing and community development, social services, and education. This trenchant analysis of what initiatives actually work and why contributes to both the practice and theory of public management. Its practical advice will be especially valuable for front-line government workers, public managers, union leaders, agency heads, politicians, and all concerned with reforming government.

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Lean Library Management
Eleven Strategies for Reducing Costs and Improving Services
John J. Huber
American Library Association, 2011

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The Library Innovation Toolkit
Ideas, Strategies, and Programs
Anthony Molaro
American Library Association, 2015

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Library Next
Seven Action Steps for Reinvention
Catherine Murray-Rust
American Library Association, 2021

After a career of more than 40 years, Murray-Rust, former Dean of Libraries at Georgia Tech and a self-proclaimed library disrupter, sees our profession’s central challenge as simply this: how to turn the library outward in order to make a difference in the lives of individuals and the community. In this book she encourages readers to look an uncertain library future square in the eye. She shares stories from her transformational years at Georgia Tech Libraries which present both inspiration and practical advice on how to stand up for values while changing the ways we act upon them. Organized around seven action steps for change, this book offers takeaways and activities you can adapt to your work style and organizational culture. You will learn from such stories and lessons as

  • the three different kinds of information you need for measuring impact;
  • using new frameworks, outside fragmented, risk-adverse library structures, to get the work done;
  • the limitations of trying to manage your way through major cultural change;
  • embedding in the community to develop visions and strategies for improvement;
  • painful and challenging times that set Murray-Rust on a path of self-learning;
  • how an uncomfortable assignment led to a sought-after seat at the table for a university-wide capital construction project;
  • the bold promise that got the library onto the high-priority list for renovation;
  • visiting a Toyota plant to learn how to encourage employee engagement and creativity; and
  • learning to listen with the "turning outward" philosophy of Harwood Institute.
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Managing Creativity
The Innovative Research Library
Ronald Jantz
American Library Association, 2016

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The Managing Creativity
The Innovative Research Library
Ronald Jantz
Assoc of College & Research Libraries, 2016

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Navigating The Future With Sce Nario Planning
A Guidebook Fo
Joan Giesecke
Assoc of College & Research Libraries, 2015

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Navigating the Future with Scenario Planning
A Guidebook for Librarians
Joan Giesecke
Assoc of College & Research Libraries, 2015

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The New Competition
Institutions of Industrial Restructuring
Michael Best
Harvard University Press, 1990

Why is America losing its competitive edge in basic industries ranging from automobile manufacture to consumer electronics? The reason, Michael Best shows, is the rigid command and control structures that are typical of big business in America. America firms lack the organizational flexibility of the "new competition" practiced by companies in Italy, West Germany, and Japan. The secret to the success of these foreign firms is that they are organized from top to bottom to pursue continuous improvements in methods, products, and processes. They seek competitive advantage not through lowest-cost production but through superior product design. This requires an unusual degree of organizational flexibility, which in turn demands organizational commitments to problem solving, constant attention to detail, and an integration of thought and action in the work place.

The New Competition posits a strategic tension between market competition and cooperation in successful industrial societies. Instead of bargaining with suppliers and customers at arm's length, firms can forge consultative relations with them, facilitating the flow of valuable advice, suggestions, and information and crucially modifying a key processor design. Instead of engaging in price rivalry, companies can pursue product-related rivalries that increase their international competitiveness. Best envisions a new role for national industrial policy—one not of bailing out sick firms in dying industries but of shaping industrial sectors and markets. It would encourage firms to cooperate in terms of the form that competition takes, one that involves products instead of prices.

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New Routes to Library Success
100+ Ideas from Outside the Stacks
Elisabeth Doucett
American Library Association, 2015

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On the Job
Is Long-Term Employment a Thing of the Past?
David, editor Neumark
Russell Sage Foundation, 2000
In recent years, a flurry of reports on downsizing, outsourcing, and flexible staffing have created the impression that stable, long-term jobs are a thing of the past. According to conventional wisdom, workers can no longer count on building a career with a single employer, and job security is a rare prize. While there is no shortage of striking anecdotes to fuel these popular beliefs, reliable evidence is harder to come by. Researchers have yet to determine whether we are witnessing a sustained, economy-wide decline in the stability of American jobs, or merely a momentary rupture confined to a few industries and a few classes of workers. On the Job launches a concerted effort to reconcile the conflicting evidence about job stability and security. The book examines the labor force as a whole, not merely the ousted middle managers who have attracted the most publicity. It looks at the situation of women as well as men, young workers as well as old, and workers on part-time, non-standard, or temporary work schedules. The evidence suggests that long-serving managers and professionals suffered an unaccustomed loss of job security in the 1990s, but there is less evidence of change for younger, newer recruits. The authors bring our knowledge of the labor market up to date, connecting current conditions in the labor market with longer-term trends that have evolved over the past two decades. They find that  layoffs in the early 1990s disrupted the implicit contract between employers and staff, but it is too soon to declare a permanent revolution in the employment relationship. Having identified the trends, the authors seek to explain  them and to examine their possible consequences. If the bonds between employee and employer are weakening, who stands to benefit? Frequent job-switching can be a sign of success for a worker, if each job provides a stepping stone to something better, but research in this book shows that workers gained less from changing jobs in the 1980s and 1990s than in earlier decades. The authors also evaluate the third-party intermediaries, such as temporary help agencies, which profit from the new flexibility in the matching of workers and employers. Besides opening up new angles on the evidence, the authors mark out common ground and pin-point those areas where gaps in our knowledge remain and popular belief runs ahead of reliable evidence. On the Job provides an authoritative basis for spotting the trends and interpreting the fall-out as U.S. employers and employees rethink the terms of their relationship.
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Organizational Ecology
Michael T. Hannan and John Freeman
Harvard University Press, 1989
Michael T. Hannan and John Freeman examine the ecology of organizations by exploring the competition for resources and by trying to account for rates of entry and exit and for the diversity of organizational forms. They show that the destinies of organizations are determined more by impersonal forces than by the intervention of individuals.
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Organizational Learning at NASA
The Challenger and Columbia Accidents
Julianne G. Mahler. with Maureen Hogan Casamayou
Georgetown University Press, 2009

Just after 9:00 a.m. on February 1, 2003, the space shuttle Columbia broke apart and was lost over Texas. This tragic event led, as the Challenger accident had 17 years earlier, to an intensive government investigation of the technological and organizational causes of the accident. The investigation found chilling similarities between the two accidents, leading the Columbia Accident Investigation Board to conclude that NASA failed to learn from its earlier tragedy.

Despite the frequency with which organizations are encouraged to adopt learning practices, organizational learning—especially in public organizations—is not well understood and deserves to be studied in more detail. This book fills that gap with a thorough examination of NASA’s loss of the two shuttles. After offering an account of the processes that constitute organizational learning, Julianne G. Mahler focuses on what NASA did to address problems revealed by Challenger and its uneven efforts to institutionalize its own findings. She also suggests factors overlooked by both accident commissions and proposes broadly applicable hypotheses about learning in public organizations.

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Organizing for Equality
The Evolution of Women's and Racial-Ethnic Organizations in America, 1955-1985
Minkoff, Debra C
Rutgers University Press, 1995

Women and racial-ethnic minorities have had long histories of mobilizing for equality in U.S. society, but recent decades have witnessed an unprecedented expansion in the number and visibility of voluntary and activist organizations committed to challenging gender and racial-ethnic discrimination. What conditions have encouraged this growth? Going beyond more familiar accounts of social movement development, Debra Minkoff uses multivariate techniques to demonstrate that there is an ecology of organizational evolution that has shaped the formation and survival of national women's, African-American, Asian American, and Latino social and political organizations. Changes in the environment for action during the 1960s promoted the creation of a niche for women's and minority organizational activity, and this sector continued to expand even as the climate for social action became increasingly conservative during the 1970s and 1980s. Drawing on recent advances in both social movement and organizational theory and research, Minkoff offers an organizational analysis of the evolution of the women's and racial-ethnic social change sector since the mid-1950s. She provides an original synthesis of social movement and organizational theory, and unique analysis of the development of these women's and minority organizations from the civil rights era to the present.

 

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The Pandemic Workplace
How We Learned to Be Citizens in the Office
Ilana Gershon
University of Chicago Press, 2024
A provocative book arguing that the workplace is where we learn to live democratically.

In The Pandemic Workplace, anthropologist Ilana Gershon turns her attention to the US workplace and how it changed—and changed us—during the pandemic. She argues that the unprecedented organizational challenges of the pandemic forced us to radically reexamine our attitudes about work and to think more deeply about how values clash in the workplace. These changes also led us as workers to engage more with the contracts that bind us as we rethought when and how we allow others to tell us what to do.

Based on over two hundred interviews, Gershon’s book reveals how negotiating these tensions during the pandemic made the workplace into a laboratory for democratic living—the key place where Americans are learning how to develop effective political strategies and think about the common good. Exploring the explicit and unspoken ways we are governed (and govern others) at work, this accessible book shows how the workplace teaches us to be democratic citizens.
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The People's Lobby
Organizational Innovation and the Rise of Interest Group Politics in the United States, 1890-1925
Elisabeth S. Clemens
University of Chicago Press, 1997
In this pathbreaking work, Elisabeth S. Clemens recovers the social origins of interest group politics in the United States. Between 1890 and 1925, a system centered on elections and party organizations was partially transformed by increasingly prominent legislative and administrative policy-making as well as the insistent participation of non-partisan organizations.

Clemens sheds new light on how farmers, workers, and women invented strategies to circumvent the parties. Voters learned to monitor legislative processes, to hold their representatives accountable at the polls, and to institutionalize their ongoing participation in shaping policy. Closely analyzing the organizational politics in three states—California, Washington, and Wisconsin—she demonstrates how the political opportunity structure of federalism allowed regional innovations to exert leverage on national political institutions.

An authoritative statement on the changes in American politics during the Progressive Era, this book will interest political scientists, sociologists, and American historians.
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Planning Our Future Libraries
Blueprints for 2025
Kim Leeder
American Library Association, 2013

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Power after Carbon
Building a Clean, Resilient Grid
Peter Fox-Penner
Harvard University Press, 2020

As the electric power industry faces the challenges of climate change, technological disruption, new market imperatives, and changing policies, a renowned energy expert offers a roadmap to the future of this essential sector.

As the damaging and costly impacts of climate change increase, the rapid development of sustainable energy has taken on great urgency. The electricity industry has responded with necessary but wrenching shifts toward renewables, even as it faces unprecedented challenges and disruption brought on by new technologies, new competitors, and policy changes. The result is a collision course between a grid that must provide abundant, secure, flexible, and affordable power, and an industry facing enormous demands for power and rapid, systemic change.

The fashionable solution is to think small: smart buildings, small-scale renewables, and locally distributed green energy. But Peter Fox-Penner makes clear that these will not be enough to meet our increasing needs for electricity. He points instead to the indispensability of large power systems, battery storage, and scalable carbon-free power technologies, along with the grids and markets that will integrate them. The electric power industry and its regulators will have to provide all of these, even as they grapple with changing business models for local electric utilities, political instability, and technological change. Power after Carbon makes sense of all the moving parts, providing actionable recommendations for anyone involved with or relying on the electric power system.

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The Purpose-Based Library
Finding Your Path to Survival, Success, and Growth
John J. Huber
American Library Association, 2015

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Reflecting on the Future of Academic and Public Libraries
Peter Hernon
American Library Association, 2013

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Reinventing Texas Government
By Michael Lauderdale
University of Texas Press, 1999

The Survey of Organizational Excellence is revolutionizing the operation of Texas state agencies and other governmental and private organizations. Developed and refined over the last twenty years by a team of researchers led by Michael Lauderdale, the survey is a proven tool for improving the effectiveness of state government services through surveys of employee attitudes toward their organizations.

In this book, Lauderdale gives a history of the survey and its use under four governors, including George W. Bush. He explains what the survey is, how to use it, and how to apply its results to organizational change and improvement. Step-by-step instructions for planning, implementing, and evaluating the survey are enhanced with real-life case studies from the 140,000 surveys that have been distributed and used by more than 75 different organizations. Lauderdale also sets the survey in a broader perspective by identifying some of the forces currently impelling change in organizations throughout our society and exploring where this push for change is taking us.

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Resilient by Design
Creating Businesses That Adapt and Flourish in a Changing World
Joseph Fiksel
Island Press, 2015
As managers grapple with the challenges of climate change and volatility in a hyper-connected, global economy, they are paying increasing attention to their organization’s resilience—its capacity to survive, adapt, and flourish in the face of turbulent change. Sudden natural disasters and unforeseen supply chain disruptions are increasingly common in the new normal. Pursuing business as usual is no longer viable, and many companies are unaware of how fragile they really are. To cope with these challenges, management needs a new paradigm that takes an integrated view of the built environment, the ecosystems, and the social fabric in which their businesses operate.
Resilient by Design provides business executives with a comprehensive approach to achieving consistent success in a changing world. Rich with examples and case studies of organizations that are designing resilience into their business processes, it explains how to connect with important external systems—stakeholders, communities, infrastructure, supply chains, and natural resources—and create innovative, dynamic organizations that survive and prosper under any circumstances.
Resilient enterprises continue to grow and evolve in order to meet the needs and expectations of their shareholders and stakeholders. They adapt successfully to turbulence by anticipating disruptive changes, recognizing new business opportunities, building strong relationships, and designing resilient assets, products, and processes. Written by one of the leading experts in enterprise resilience and sustainability, Resilient by Design offers a confident path forward in a world that is increasingly less certain.
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Responding to Rapid Change in Libraries
A User Experience Approach
Lauren Stara and Callan Bignoli
American Library Association, 2020

In the face of rapid change and an ever-widening constellation of challenges, it’s crucial for library leaders to pull back to the question of “why?” Plotting a sustainable way forward depends upon recommitting ourselves to our underlying values, such as customer service and community-building, while fostering the improvements that change makes possible. With passion, patience, and fortitude, libraries can stride confidently into the future. In this book, noted speakers and consultants Bignoli and Stara speak directly to library directors, managers, administrators, and technology staff, offering concrete guidance on setting or resetting strategic priorities. Taking an interconnected and specific approach to planning for and strengthening the library environment as a whole, their book

  • discusses why libraries should embrace change as a fundamental part of library life; 
  • explores how to harness rapid change to provide more responsive, user-centered library service;
  • addresses the ways in which libraries straddle the physical and the digital, in areas such as service provision and collections, illuminating how they overlap and can be improved using similar philosophies;
  • presents both a comprehensive overview of library technologies as well as related team and change management advice, all grounded in user experience principles;
  • shows how the concepts of sustainability and flexibility apply to physical space planning and design, from furniture selection and arrangement to infrastructure; and
  • provides sound guidance on project management, problem solving, preparing for future challenges, personal reflection and self-care, and other leadership topics.
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Revising State Theory
Essays in Politics and Postindustrialism
Fred Block
Temple University Press, 1987
Socialist Review Book Award, Socialist Review, 1987 This volume makes available in one place a complete statement of Fred Block's perspective for students and participants in the ongoing debate on state theory. His substantial Introduction serves as an intellectual autobiography in which he assesses the field-including the theories of Domhoff, Poulantzas, and Skocpoland situates his own work within it. Block also discusses his relationship to different strands of Marxism. In his analysis of the relationship between business and the state, Block argues that while business interests have far more influence over state policy than other constituencies, state actors still have substantial autonomy in formulating policies. In particular, the business community's internal divisions and difficulties in assessing its own interests limit its capacity to control events. Block insists that when business influence is greatest, as during the Reagan years, state policies will be least successful in solving the society's problems. "What is at work here is a relatively simple sociological dynamic--that institutionalized relations of power tend to become visible only when they weaken. When these institutionalized relations are most effective, they tend to be invisible, precisely because the justifying ideologies so dominate people's commonsense understandings. The classic recent example is the existence of women's subordination. In the fifties, people would have responded to the claim that women were systematically discriminated against in American society with incredulity because they had so totally accepted an ideology that justified differential treatment of men and women as normal and natural. The full-blown analysis and critique of male domination emerges only in the seventies, when patriarchal arrangements are already weakening.... "In state theory, the development is analogous. In the fifties, pluralist arguments dominate because the exercise of power has been rendered invisible. The relation between business and the state works so well that it leaves few traces. Moreover, there is little real debate about how the society should be structured, so the extent to which everyone's basic assumptions fit with the interests of corporate capitalism is not at all obvious. Since nobody was even asking the big questions of who should make investment decisions and how should income and wealth be distributed, it was not apparent that the narrow limits of debate fit exactly with the interests of business.... However, the cumulative impact of Vietnam and racial conflict in the late sixties, the drama of Watergate, and the growing economic difficulties of advanced capitalist societies in the early seventies served to make the exercise of power in American society widely visible. The previous functional relation between the state and business had been disrupted and the efforts by each side to advocate its own interests became more apparent." --From the Introduction
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Revisiting Waldo's Administrative State
Constancy and Change in Public Administration
David H. Rosenbloom and Howard E. McCurdy, Editors
Georgetown University Press, 2006

The prevailing notion that the best government is achieved through principles of management and business practices is hardly new—it echoes the early twentieth-century "gospel of efficiency" challenged by Dwight Waldo in 1948 in his pathbreaking book, The Administrative State. Asking, "Efficiency for what?", Waldo warned that public administrative efficiency must be backed by a framework of consciously held democratic values.

Revisiting Waldo's Administrative State brings together a group of distinguished authors who critically explore public administration's big ideas and issues and question whether contemporary efforts to "reinvent government," promote privatization, and develop new public management approaches constitute a coherent political theory capable of meeting the complex challenges of governing in a democracy. Taking Waldo's book as a starting point, the authors revisit and update his key concepts and consider their applicability for today.

The book follows Waldo's conceptual structure, first probing the material and ideological background of modern public administration, problems of political philosophy, and finally particular challenges inherent in contemporary administrative reform. It concludes with a look ahead to "wicked" policy problems—such as terrorism, global warming, and ecological threats—whose scope is so global and complex that they will defy any existing administrative structures and values. Calling for a return to conscious consideration of democratic accountability, fairness, justice, and transparency in government, the book's conclusion assesses the future direction of public administrative thought.

This book can stand alone as a commentary on reconciling democratic values and governance today or as a companion when reading Waldo's classic volume.

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A Revolution in Military Adaptation
The US Army in the Iraq War
Chad C. Serena
Georgetown University Press, 2011

During the early years of the Iraq War, the US Army was unable to translate initial combat success into strategic and political victory. Iraq plunged into a complex insurgency, and defeating this insurgency required beating highly adaptive foes. A competition between the hierarchical and vertically integrated army and networked and horizontally integrated insurgents ensued. The latter could quickly adapt and conduct networked operations in a decentralized fashion; the former was predisposed to fighting via prescriptive plans under a centralized command and control.

To achieve success, the US Army went through a monumental process of organizational adaptation—a process driven by soldiers and leaders that spread throughout the institution and led to revolutionary changes in how the army supported and conducted its operations in Iraq. How the army adapted and the implications of this adaptation are the subject of this indispensable study. Intended for policymakers, defense and military professionals, military historians, and academics, this book offers a solid critique of the army’s current capacity to adapt to likely future adversary strategies and provides policy recommendations for retaining lessons learned in Iraq.

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Social Change in Contemporary China
C.K. Yang and the Concept of Institutional Diffusion
Wenfang Tang
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2006

Social Change in Contemporary China offers a wide-ranging examination of Chinese institutional change in areas of education, religion, health care, economics, labor, family, and local communities in the post-Mao era. Based on the pioneering work of sociologist C. K. Yang (1911–1999), and his institutional diffusion theory, the essays analyze and develop the theory as it applies to both public and private institutions.  The interrelationship of these institutions composes what Yang termed the Chinese “system,” and affects nearly every aspect of life. Yang examined the influence of external factors on each institution, such as the influence of Westernization and Communism on family, and the impact of industrialization on rural markets. He also analyzed the impact of public opinion and past culture on institutions, therein revealing the circular nature of diffusion. Perhaps most significant are Yang’s insights on the role of religion in Chinese society. Despite the common perception that China had no religion, he uncovers the influence of classical Confucianism as the basis for many ethical value systems, and follows its diffusion into state and kinship systems, as well as Taoism and Buddhism.

Writing in the early years of Communism, Yang had little hard data with which to test his theories. The contributors to this volume expand upon Yang’s groundbreaking approach and apply the model of diffusion to a rapidly evolving contemporary China, providing a window into an increasingly modern Chinese society and its institutions.

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Social Science Knowledge and Economic Development
An Institutional Design Perspective
Vernon W. Ruttan
University of Michigan Press, 2003
Ruttan advances a model of institutional change, which creates an environment where resource and cultural endowments and technical change can take place. The disequilibria resulting from such changes create opportunities for the design of more efficient institutional arrangements. The design perspective employed in the book stands in sharp contrast to organic or evolutionary perspectives.
With its emphasis on interdisciplinarity, Social Science Knowledge and Economics Developmentis important reading for social scientists, development economists, and in the development studies classroom.
Vernon W. Ruttan is Regents Professor Emeritus in the Department of Applied Economics at the University of Minnesota.
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Stealing the State
Control and Collapse in Soviet Institutions
Steven L. Solnick
Harvard University Press, 1998

What led to the breakdown of the Soviet Union? Steven Solnick argues, contrary to most current literature, that the Soviet system did not fall victim to stalemate at the top or to a revolution from below, but rather to opportunism from within. In three case studies--on the Communist Youth League, the system of job assignments for university graduates, and military conscription--Solnick makes use of rich archival sources and interviews to tell the story from a new perspective, and to employ and test Western theories of the firm in the Soviet environment. He finds that even before Gorbachev, mechanisms for controlling bureaucrats in Soviet organizations were weak, allowing these individuals great latitude in their actions. Once reforms began, they translated this latitude into open insubordination by seizing the very organizational assets they were supposed to be managing. Thus, the Soviet system, Solnick argues, suffered the organizational equivalent of a colossal bank run. When the servants of the state stopped obeying orders from above, the state's fate was sealed.

By incorporating economic theories of institutions into a political theory of Soviet breakdown and collapse, Stealing the State offers a powerful and dynamic account of the most important international political event of the later twentieth century.

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Tactical Urbanism for Librarians
Quick, Low-Cost Ways to Make Big Changes
Karen Munro
American Library Association, 2017

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Whistleblowing
Toward a New Theory
Kate Kenny
Harvard University Press, 2019

Society needs whistleblowers, yet to speak up and expose wrongdoing often results in professional and personal ruin. Kate Kenny draws on the stories of whistleblowers to explain why this is, and what must be done to protect those who have the courage to expose the truth.

Despite their substantial contribution to society, whistleblowers are considered martyrs more than heroes. When people expose serious wrongdoing in their organizations, they are often punished or ignored. Many end up isolated by colleagues, their professional careers destroyed. The financial industry, rife with scandals, is the focus of Kate Kenny’s penetrating global study. Introducing whistleblowers from the United States, the United Kingdom, Switzerland, and Ireland working at companies like Wachovia, Halifax Bank of Scotland, and Countrywide–Bank of America, Whistleblowing suggests practices that would make it less perilous to hold the powerful to account and would leave us all better off.

Kenny interviewed the men and women who reported unethical and illegal conduct at major corporations in the run up to the 2008 financial crisis. Many were compliance officers working in influential organizations that claimed to follow the rules. Using the concept of affective recognition to explain how the norms at work powerfully influence our understandings of right and wrong, she reframes whistleblowing as a collective phenomenon, not just a personal choice but a vital public service.

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The Whole School Library Handbook 2
Blanche Woolls
American Library Association, 2013


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