David Knoke.

David Knoke. Boulder CO: Westview Pres 2001 474 pp $2800 paper.

According to the dust jacket, this main division was written for advanced undergraduate learners in sociology, public policy, and business management courses. It also targets graduate observers scholars, and researchers. In my view, undergraduates would have to be fair advanced to make full use of the work Graduate students will have an easier time of it. I believe, however, that the one and the other groups would get something on the outside of reading it.

sum of two units overarching themes are intended to integrate the part The first relates to the collective action of U organizational actors analyzed as a political economy, i.e., as the joint results of market and political processe taking place the two within and between organizations. The inferior relates to the application of network analysis to the dynamics of organizational change resulting from similar collective action. The dual themes of political economy and network analysis are intended to help us anticipate plausible directions for organization change in the novel century.

The volume moves from issues to theories and thence to the empirical application of theories, providing well-grounded examples in succession the way. Chapter 1 direct the eyes at the forces generating change in the U economy, the macro- and micro-environmental inclines of globalization within a market capitalistic framework, accelerating technological innovation, demography, perpetual corporate restructuring, changing work practices, and rising income inequality. Chapter 2 nears five organization theories that the author uses extensively from head to foot the book: organizational ecology, institutionalism, resource interdependence transaction cost economics, and organizational networks. The magnitude to which these five theories provide adequate explanatory coverage for the phenomena that the author wishes to address is clearly interpret to debate, as would be any alternative selection of theories. Chapter 3 provides a broad overview of U organizational populations, their demographic processe and their changing structural form. Chapters 4-6 contemplate at inter- and intraorganizational relations as they pass away in cycles around production patterns and workplace activities: interfirm collaborations similar as strategic alliances (chap. 4) the changing nature of the profession contract (chap. 5), and the nature of intraorganizational networks (chap. 6) Chapters 7-9 concentrate upon the political processes that take place within and between organizations.

point in disputes of corporate governance are discussed in chapter 7 the challenges pos to management's workplace prerogatives according to various employee movements are treated in chapter 8 and the participation of business and trade associations, labor unions, and other interest assemblages in U.S. policy making is described in chapter 9 Chapter 10 explores the impact of technological change, or organizational learning, and of novel organizational forms.

The author's expository strategy is clear. He uses the theories not awayed in chapter 2 as lense [i]or[/i] part of to the other which to examine the issues raised in chapter 1 and furnishs us the results in succeeding chapters. Since he tends to view these theories as complementary rather than as alternatives, we are not involved here in an exercise in theory choice. The strategy oftentimes works but comes at a price. The theories do not all operate at the same flush and do not offer the same intent The author's own application of the theories is generally plausible rather than compelling, leaving readers to be opposite to the problem of integrating them in particular cases. In the absence of an overarching framework to help them in this task, therefore, the author's target audiences might be derived away with a somewhat fragmented view of the field of organization studies. Those of a postmodern persuasion might argue that it's okay to instant a fragmented field in a fragmented way. Others might have feeling that we could do better.

I personally came away from the work feeling that the author might have been a bit more ambitious in his choice of theories. He claims that the theories fix uponed "are rooted in the field of organization studies, which had emerg by dint of the middle of the twentieth hundred as multidisciplinary, multitheoretical paradigms" (p 37) further since his theorizing is intended to act as a basis for looking ahead, we might reasonably ask whether we should really be looking at emerging twenty-first-century organizations in consequence of the conventional wisdom bequeathed to us by the agency of the twentieth. The theoretical lense that, in my view, proffer the most promise for examining organizations in the coming hundred namely, those dealing with complexity and evolution, are simply discussed--I believe, too briefly--in the last chapter of the volume and hence do not figure in the analyses that preced it. The message of this last chapter is that although tangle evolutionary processes make prediction difficult, "whatever of the present day political economy eventu ally escapes will most likely involve an evolutionary lubber towards a subsequent system that bears a able resemblance to its predecessor" (p 389) Quite. if it be not that bearing in mind that, genetically speaking, man and the apes are 98 percent identical, it has still prov hard to predict the emerging see the verb of the former from what single knew about the latter. The author, I therefore be impressed is not exactly sticking his neck not at home when it comes to telling us by what mode the theories he has drawn on the subject of are meant to help us in our predictions of what is coming down the road.