Cover -- Strategic management and organisational dynamics -- Brief contents -- Contents -- List of boxes -- List of tables -- Preface -- Strategic management in perspective A step in the professionalisation of management -- Introduction -- The origins of modern concepts of strategic management: the new role of leader -- Ways of thinking: stable global structures and fluid local interactions -- Outline of the book -- Further reading -- Questions to aid further reflection -- Thinking about strategy and organisational change The implicit assumptions distinguishing one theory from another -- Introduction -- The phenomena of interest: dynamic human organisations -- Making sense of the phenomena: realism, relativism and idealism -- Four questions to ask in comparing theories of organisational strategy and change -- Further reading -- Questions to aid further reflection -- Part 1: Systemic ways of thinking about strategy and organisational dynamics -- The origins of systems thinking in the Age of Reason -- Introduction -- The Scientific Revolution and rational objectivity -- The eighteenth-century German philosopher Immanuel Kant: natural systems and autonomous individuals -- Systems thinking in the twentieth century: the notion of human systems -- Thinking about organisations and their management: science and systems thinking -- How systems thinking deals with the four questions -- Summary -- Further reading -- Questions to aid further reflection -- Thinking in terms of strategic choice Cybernetic systems, cognitivist and humanistic psychology -- Introduction -- Cybernetic systems: importing the engineer's idea of self-regulation and control into understanding human activity -- Formulating and implementing long-term strategic plans -- Cognitivist and humanistic psychology: the rational and the emotional individual -- Leadership and the role of groups.

Key debates -- How strategic choice theory deals with the four key questions -- Summary -- Further reading -- Questions to aid further reflection -- Thinking in terms of organisational learning and knowledge creation Systems dynamics, cognitivist, humanistic and constructivist psychology -- Introduction -- Systems dynamics: nonlinearity and positive feedback -- Personal mastery and mental models: cognitivist psychology -- Building a shared vision and team learning: humanistic psychology -- The impact of vested interests on organisational learning -- Knowledge management: cognitivist and constructivist psychology -- Key debates -- How learning organisation theory deals with the four key questions -- Summary -- Further reading -- Questions to aid further reflection -- Thinking in terms of organisational psychodynamics Open systems and psychoanalytic perspectives -- Introduction -- Open systems theory -- Psychoanalysis and unconscious processes -- Open systems and unconscious processes -- Leaders and groups -- How open systems/psychoanalytic perspectives deal with the four key questions -- Summary -- Further reading -- Questions to aid further reflection -- Thinking about strategy process from a systemic perspective Using a process to control a process -- Introduction -- Rational process and its critics: bounded rationality -- Rational process and its critics: trial-and-error action -- A contingency view of process -- Institutions, routines and cognitive frames -- Process and time -- Strategy process: a review -- The activity-based view -- The systemic way of thinking about process and practice -- Summary -- Further reading -- Questions to aid further reflection -- A review of systemic ways of thinking about strategy and organisational dynamics Key challenges for alternative ways of thinking -- Introduction.

The claim that there is a science of organisation and management -- The polarisation of intention and emergence -- The belief that organisations are systems in the world or in the mind -- Conflict and diversity -- Summary and key questions to be dealt with in Parts 2 and 3 of this book -- Further reading -- Questions to aid further reflection -- Extending and challenging the dominant discourse on organisations Thinking about participation and practice -- Introduction -- Second-order systems thinking -- Social constructionist approaches -- Communities of practice -- Unpredictability and strategy without design -- Critical management studies / labour process theory -- Summary -- Further reading -- Questions to aid further reflection -- Part 2: The challenge of complexity to ways of thinking -- The complexity sciences The sciences of uncertainty -- Introduction -- Mathematical chaos theory -- The theory of dissipative structures -- Complex adaptive systems -- Different interpretations of complexity -- Summary -- Further reading -- Questions to aid further reflection -- Systemic applications of complexity sciences to organisations Restating the dominant discourse -- Introduction -- Modelling industries as complex systems -- Understanding organisations as complex systems -- How systemic applications of complexity sciences deal with the four key questions -- Summary -- Further reading -- Questions to aid further reflection -- Part 3: Complex responsive processes as a way of thinking about strategy and organisational dynamics -- Responsive processes thinking The interplay of intentions -- Introduction -- Responsive processes thinking -- Chaos, complexity and analogy -- Time and responsive processes -- The differences between systemic process and responsive processes thinking -- Summary -- Further reading -- Questions to aid further reflection.

The emergence of organisational strategy in local communicative interaction Complex responsive processes of conversation -- Introduction -- Human communication and the conversation of gestures: the social act -- Ordinary conversation in organisations -- The dynamics of conversation -- Leaders and the activities of strategising -- Summary -- Further reading -- Questions to aid further reflection -- The link between the local communicative interaction of strategising and the population-wide patterns of strategy -- Introduction -- Human communication and the conversation of gestures: processes of generalising and particularising -- The relationship between local interaction and population-wide patterns -- The roles of the most powerful -- Summary -- Further reading -- Questions to aid further reflection -- The emergence of organisational strategy in local communicative interaction Complex responsive processes of ideology and power relating -- Introduction -- Cult values -- Desires, values and norms -- Ethics and leadership -- Power, ideology and the dynamics of inclusion-exclusion -- Complex responsive processes perspectives on decision-making -- Summary -- Further reading -- Questions to aid further reflection -- Different modes of articulating patterns of interaction emerging across organisations Strategy narratives and strategy models -- Introduction -- The emergence of themes in the narrative patterning of ordinary, everyday conversation -- Narrative patterning of experience and preoccupation in the game -- Reflecting on experience: the role of narrative and storytelling -- Reflecting on experience: the role of second-order abstracting -- Reasoning, measuring, forecasting and modelling in strategic management -- Summary -- Further reading -- Questions to aid further reflection.

Complex responsive processes of strategising Acting locally on the basis of global goals, visions, expectations and intentions for the 'whole' organisation over the 'long-term future' -- Introduction -- Strategic choice theory as second-order abstraction -- The learning organisation as second-order abstraction -- Institutions and legitimate structures of authority -- Strategy as identity narrative -- Summary -- Further reading -- Questions to aid further reflection -- Complex responsive processes Implications for thinking about organisational dynamics and strategy -- Introduction -- Key features of the complex responsive processes perspective -- How the theory of complex responsive processes answers the four key questions -- Refocusing attention: strategy and change -- Refocusing attention: control, performance and improvement -- Refocusing attention: research -- Rethinking the roles of leaders and managers -- Summary -- Further reading -- Questions to aid further reflection -- References -- Index.

Renowned for its unconventional thinking, Strategic Management and Organisational Dynamics continues to be a refreshing alternative for students and lecturers of strategic management specifically looking for {u0091}something different{u0092}. Stacey challenges the conceptual orthodoxy of planned strategy, focusing instead on the influence of more complex and unstable forces in the development of strategy.  This book explores and challenges ways of thinking about strategy and organisational dynamics and raises questions about systemic and responsive processes, utilising insights from the complexity sciences. The purpose of this book is to assist people to make sense of their own experience of life in organisations, to explore their own thinking and to pay attention to and so what they do. Ideal for advanced undergraduate and postgraduate study, this critically detailed account deals with up-to-the minute issues, raising the challenge of complexity within practice and theory.  As such it remains unique amongst strategic management text books.

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Electronic reproduction. Ann Arbor, Michigan : ProQuest Ebook Central, 2025. Available via World Wide Web. Access may be limited to ProQuest Ebook Central affiliated libraries.

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