Summary: Effective managers are skilled in the art of 'reading' the situations that they must organize or manage. Professor Morgan's book is designed to develop the art of reading and understanding organizations. Firstly, he shows how many of our conventional ideas about organizations and management build upon a small number of images, especially mechanical or biological ones. Secondly, by exploring these and alternative images, he shows how to develop new ways of thinking about organizations. Thirdly, he demonstrates how this method of analysis can be used for the management and design of organizations. And fourthly, he explores the theoretical implications raised by this kind of analysis. Morgan works from the premise that our theories and explanations of organizational life are based on metaphors that lead us to see and understand organizations in distinctive, yet partial ways. He demonstrates how the use of different methaphors provides new ways to manage and design organizations. Overall, this work stands as a treatise on metaphorical thinking that contributes to both the theory and practice of organizational analysis. `The book is profoundly original and has the quality of a masterpiece. No one before him has so fully and convincingly demonstrated the advantages of taking a multiperspective approach to the study of organizations... In every decade since World War II three or four books have stood out as opening up new vistas in organizational behaviour... For the eighties, Images of Organization will... be such a book.' - "Eric Trist, Professor Emeritus, Wharton School and Fellow, International Academy of Management "
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`This is one of the most innovative and exciting organizational studies texts that I have read in a long time. Gareth Morgan offers us a repertoire of new ways for understanding complex organizations.' - "Andrew H Van de Ven, Professor of Human Systems Management, University of Minnesota"