Strategic Management and Organisational Dynamics: The Challenge of Complexity (to Ways of Thinking about Organisations)

This is a textbook of ways of thinking about organisations and their management, particularly strategic management. While most strategic management textbooks are concerned with presenting the key elements and prescriptions of strategic management to be found in the dominant discourse on the matter, this book is concerned with the implicit, taken-for-granted assumptions made in the ways of thinking expressed in that dominant discourse. The intention, then, is not to summarise what key strategic thinkers have written about generic strategies that managers should follow to secure competitive advantage and so produce superior organisational performance. Nor is the intention to convey received wisdom on how to design and implement conditions and processes conducive to effective organisational learning and knowledge management. The intention is, rather, to explore the ways of thinking reflected in the prescriptions for successful strategic content and process so as to highlight taken-for-granted assumptions. In order to do this, it is necessary to locate current thinking about strategy in the history of Western thought. The book raises and explores questions rather than presenting further explicit prescriptions. For example, why do we think that an organisation is a system, and what are the consequences of doing so? What view of human psychology is implicit in prescribing measures that managers should take to select the direction of an organisation’s movement into the future? In a world in which the dominant prescriptions for strategic management are quite clearly not delivering what they are supposed to, I believe it is far more useful to reflect on how we are thinking, so that we may understand more about what we are doing rather than simply continuing to mindlessly apply the conventional wisdom.