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Organizations Working Together (SAGE Library of Social Research)
Organizations Working Together - SAGE Library of Social Research Author:Catherine Alter, Jerald Hage "This brilliant new book could easily be retitled `An epistemology of organisation theory and the networking of systems' . . . Without a doubt this is one of the better books in the field and must find a place in the library of every research scholar in the areas of management and organisations. For a library of Management Sciences such a book i... more »s almost mandatory." -Management and Labour Studies "Students of political economy, sociology, organizational theory, network relations, and institutional economics will find this book informative, engaging, and theoretically satisfying for several reasons. It is lucid, well organized, and makes excellent use of formal conceptual definitions and real-world examples to anchor and clarify its arguments. The theory development is extensive, logically compelling, and easily generalizable across private, public, and nonprofit sectors. The authors also retrieve valuable insights from early work on interorganizational relations in combination with more recent developments in rational choice, ecological, and interorganizational theories to explain why organizations work together. The authors provide an integrated, richly theoretical, and clearly-written account of the causes, conditions, and consequences of network formation. The timeliness of this book is unquestionable, given the increasing proliferation of strategic alliances, supplier partnerships, international joint ventures, nonprofit agency coordination, and a range of other network forms of organization nationally and globally." --Contemporary Sociology "As companies begin to replace competition with collaboration, negotiation and conflict management skills are becoming crucial at all levels of the corporate world. Organizations Working Together examines organizations in both the public and private sectors that are encouraging collaborative processes." --Negotiation Journal "The volume contains many references to the leading historical and current literature in the field. Many figures and tables. This volume is very interesting and particularly valuable to academicians and graduate students of organizational behavior." --Choice IBM and Apple. GM and Toyota. Ford and Nissan. Dow and Corning. The post-industrial world has made a casualty of many large centralized organizations and hierarchies whose main strategy was to eliminate competition by relying on corporate takeovers, price wars, and large advertising budgets. Instead, what has emerged are smaller, decentralized organizations that depend on cooperation and horizontal relationships to bring about strategic alliances, joint ventures, and systemic networks. Organizations Working Together provides a portrait of the various types of organizational collaborations currently taking place and the influence these efforts have in today's global marketplace. Alter and Hage focus on the workings of the most intensive of these cooperative ventures--systemic networks--and demonstrate their effectiveness with data from both the public and private sector. This in-depth study will be of interest to researchers, professors, students, and professionals in organizational studies, sociology, social work, and others concerned with organizations.« less