Customer Reviews

Experiential Exercises in Organization Theory

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

 

 

Unfortunately, I used this book in my Organization Theory course one term. I found the book inadequate in several respects: only a small minority of exercises were truly experiential, and several I couldn't bear to assign because they were simplistic, they generated student laughter, and they were probably not particularly valid with respect to the concepts they purported to teach. Many "exercises" were non interactive questionnaires that again had questionable validity and didn't yield particularly enlightening results. The exercise on "Name that Organizational Design" was too elementary; actually naming designs from "real" organization charts (not standard text examples) would be more challenging. Students couldn't grasp the exercise based on Perrow's technology classification at all and couldn't apply it to their own cases. The best of the bunch was the exercise on political negotiating involving "scarce resources." Even though the scarce resources were common office supplies, the students seemed to get the point. I continue to use this demonstration from time to time. My advice to the authors is to send this book out for review (if the publisher is interested in a second edition) and solicit recommendations for deletions/additions. There are many good "experiential" texts now in the OB area. These also would be worth looking at for ideas that might improve this text. The IM was also a bit sparse when it came to instructions and discussion ideas. These can all be problems common to a first edition; I'm left wondering why after several years, a revision was never commissioned.