Customer Reviews

Images of Organization

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Gareth Morgan's book provides an antidote to the finance, marketing and HR texts that are required reading for an MBA student. The clever use of metaphor allows the reader to absorb the huge anount of information contained within the book (check out the bibliography!) - you don't even realise how much you are learning until you start relating concepts to others around you. My fellow students, colleagues and even my parents had to listen ...

I found it a very easy to read book, if you are willing to put aside your existing ideas (psychic prison) about the way the organisation works(?) If you prefer big words, read Morgan and Burrell's Sociological Paradigms and Organisational Analysis - essential reading, but even more brilliant as a companion to Images.

Learn the stuff you are expected to know from your finance, marketing, statistics, strategy and HR texts, but understand the stuff that will change your world from Images of Organisation.

Since the start of the Industrial Revolution, thinkers have used evocative images in trying to explain just what a corporation is. Have they succeeded? Gareth Morgan presents a thoughtful, well-documented look at images that arise from our theories and metaphors about reality. He discusses how they shape the way we view the corporation as an entity and how we act. His analysis involves a mix of philosophy, history, sociology, anthropology, biology and organizational examples. He moves from industrial-age notions of the organization as a machine, to biological analogies about the organization as an organism. Other metaphors - the organization as a brain, as social reality, as the source of cultural difference and as an arena for power struggles - shape what occurs within corporations. While this book is not an easy read, it illuminates the dynamics of organizational life. We [...] recommend this book to executives, and to readers intrigued by serious societal expositions.

I am a graduate student in organizational development. Although this book has some good underlying concepts, I found most of the book hard to follow and not very engaging. It was often difficult to see how many of the concepts actually apply to organizations. There may be good ideas, but they often get lost in the rambling chapters.

This is a fantastic book for those people who are slowly losing their grip on reality. While some of the basic underlying concepts are good I don't find myself practically applying the concept of psychic prisons to my organisation, nor do I view my staff as ameobas that make up a large organism. I have to admit though that I know of others who found the paradyme of organisations as instruments of domination highly arousing.

Morgan decribes common assumptions about organizations - he helps to reveal the hidden assumptions behind the managers perceptions. What do we mean when we say that 'organizations are like animals'? It is pretty easy to start to think from a metaphor, and end up in literal believing in it (e.g. that 'organizations live and die', 'organizations have evolutions'). Such reifications are carefully described by Morgan - several most recurrent metaphors of organizations and popular organization theories basing on them are clearly described, and their pros and cons are pointed out. Having read 'Images of Organizations', it is much more difficult to adopt illusionate metaphors, and to get persuaded by a biased visioner.

This book is quite accessible to the reader. It's not dry like most textbooks, but talks about organizations in a straightforward manner. Morgan presents various ways of looking at organizations through the use of metaphors.

This is what made the book so good. Each chapter examines a different metaphor applied to organization. Metaphors such as "...as machines", and "...as brains" shed light on different aspects of organizations. What makes the book even better is that, in the summary of each chapter, Morgan also looks at the weaknesses of each metaphor, thus giving the reader a very thorough examination of the concept.

The reason I didn't give this book 4 stars was the fact that, later in the book, it got kind of hard to follow. By the time he got to "Organizations as Psychic Prisons", I was way out of my league. The chapters got convoluted and hard to understand. The chapter summaries ended up being half as long as the chapter itself. I just kind of gave up on some of them...they weren't helping me at all.

All in all, if you want to learn about how organizations work, this is a very good book, but be wary of the last third or so.

This is not a "three steps to understanding organizations" type book. The people posting negative reviews for this were looking for something simple and digestable - this book is not that. However, if you take the time, you will find it profoundly alters your thinking about understanding organizations.

This book provides solid theoretical models for understanding what is occuring in organizations. I read this book over 10 years ago and STILL find it the second best and most enlightening thing I have ever read on organizations. This has dramatically aided me in being a very successful business consultant.

The foundation of this book is the notion that you cannot understand complex organizations in any meaningful way through a single perspective. People in the organizations operate on many different perspectives. Each view of the world creates its own understanding of the organizational problems, solutions and daily pattern of interaction. This book provides you the tools for understanding organizations through a number of key perspectives or metaphors, and gives you indications on how to perform a multi-perspective systems analysis.

If you spend the time with this book, you will find yourself able to understand your surroundings FAR better than your peers.