Keep your eyes peeled in October 2019. Emerald Publishing is releasing my first non-fiction book, Values, Rationality, and Power: Developing Organizational Wisdom as part of its Critical Management Series. This book summarizes years of research in the Canadian healthcare system into how individuals manage the confluence of values, rationality, and power to drive wise organizational action.
It is not easy to spread innovation through a healthcare system. There will always be groups resistant to change, and it is often difficult to determine how individuals can exercise their values, rationality, and power to overcome this resistance.
Values, Rationality, and Power: Developing Organizational Wisdom demonstrates that organizations can act wisely despite these hurdles. Using a uniquely interdisciplinary approach that employs a critical realist framework and insights drawn from phonetic research, it performs an embedded single case study of one group’s attempt to develop and spread a medical innovation within a Canadian healthcare authority. In so doing, this book presents a framework to conceptualize and study wisdom, and it argues that values guide wise action, that knowledge is required but insufficient for wisdom, and finally that wisdom is action-oriented. Ultimately, all of this demonstrates the power that values possess to drive organizational behaviour.
For its unique insight into how values, rationality, and power interact in a real social setting, and for its explorations of how these interactions can drive and resolve conflict while creating positive change, Values, Rationality, and Power is essential reading for academics and students of management and organizations, and particularly for those wishing to understand a nascent discipline that fosters the development of organizational wisdom.
Order your copy (or recommend your local library pick it up) here.
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