When Things Go Wrong

Organizational Failures and Breakdowns

Helmut K. Anheier, Helmut K Anheier

• Publisher: SAGE Publications, Inc
• Year: 1999
• Print ISBN: 9780761910480, 9780761910473
• eBook ISBN: 9781452264653
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Etica aziendale
• Index: Business

To understand success, you must first understand failure. This understanding is especially critical since failure is a phenomenon that is much more common to everyday life, businesses, and government practice than standard theory would lead us to assume. Failure manifests itself in many ways, including breakdowns, bankruptcies, and other forms of organizational catastrophes and fiascoes. Thus, learning from failure will enable success. When Things Go Wrong brings together contributions from 24 leading scholars who examine the causes, patterns, process, and outcomes of such failures from economic, managerial, cognitive and political perspectives. This book presents failure as a relative concept in terms of the expectations and strategies of stakeholders putting a claim on the performance of the organization and the notion of success. It challenges future research in this field to combine both economic and non-economic performance measures to assess organizational tendencies toward success and failure and to differentiate between failure as process and failure as an outcome.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Part I - Introduction
• Chapter 1 - Organizational Failures,Breakdowns,and Bankrup An Introduction
• Part II - Organizations and Failure
• Chapter 2 - Costly Information:Firm Transformation,Exit, or Persistent Failure
• Chapter 3 - Decision Overreach as a Reason for Failure: How Organizations Can Overbalance
• Chapter 4 - "Tales From the Grave'': Organizations' 3 Accounts of Their Own Demise
• Chapter 5 - Organizational Coping,Failure,and Success: Academies of Sciences in Central and Eastern Europe
• Part III - The Political Economy of Failure and Bankruptcy
• Chapter 6 - Successful Failure:An Alternative View of Organizational Coping
• Chapter 7 - Veiled Politics:Bankruptcy as a Structured Organizational Field
• Chapter 8 - The Politics of Blame Avoidance: Defensive Tactics in a Dutch Crime -Fighting Fiasco
• Chapter 9 - Creating the Agents of Corporate Rescue: Professionalization of Insolvency
• Part VI - The Cognitive Construction of Failure
• Chapter 10 - Prosaic Organizational Failure
• Chapter 11 - Permanent Failure and the Failure of Organizational Performance
• Part V - Structural Failures
• Chapter 12 - Success and Failure in Institutional Development: A Network Approach
• Chapter 13 - Stalemate:A Structural Analysis of Organizational Failure
• Chapter 14 - Studying Organizational Failures
• References
• Index
• About the Editor
• About the Contributors