Customer Reviews

Images of Organization

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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.

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.

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 was the single best book of all the books I was required to read for my Masters in Public Administration, and it remains a valued reference in my rather large personal library.

Other books I recommend:
Normal Accidents: Living with High-Risk Technologies
Radical Man: The Process of Psycho-Social Development.
The Innovator's Dilemma: The Revolutionary Book that Will Change the Way You Do Business (Collins Business Essentials)
Group Genius: The Creative Power of Collaboration
Leadership and the New Science: Discovering Order in a Chaotic World
The Knowledge Executive
The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom
The New Craft of Intelligence: Personal, Public, & Political--Citizen's Action Handbook for Fighting Terrorism, Genocide, Disease, Toxic Bombs, & Corruption
End of Bureaucracy and the Rise of the Intelligent Organization

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.

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 was required reading for my undergraduate BSBA. I have read it 4 or 5 times since then. It does not read like a novel. Expect to read not more than 250 to 300 words per minute for comprehension. Even at that you'll still miss stuff. I read about a chapter a month just because you awareness of the environment increases with each read.

Pros:
Complete coverage of organizational structure.
Well written.
Theories.
Multiple points of view.
References actual research.
Metaphors for clarity and comparison.
Increased awareness of everything around you (Really? Yeah, really!).
You will understand why people do what they do in a business environment... (okay, ill tell you. it's in their own self interest! ALWAYS!)

Cons:
None (sort of)

Review:
Morgan provides a comprehensive conversation about nearly every aspect of an organization from the outside looking in. Much of the focus is on the management role. Also, each chapter has a metaphor for the main topic of the chapter. So if you don't have much work experience the metaphor provides clarity and alternative points of view.

Google chapter summaries and you wont even get 1% of the information. No sentence is wasted in this book.

I was required to purchase this book for an organizational behavior course I took. It's a lot to read, but it's fairly interesting to read about how organizations have evolved overtime. Reading or 'skimming' through the book helped me to understand the organization I work for.

Morgan's Images of Organization is a well written book. I purchased this book for a class in Adult Education, and it is remarkably interesting. The book is organized around eleven chapters and a postscript. The most interesting parts of the book are Chapters 2 through 7.

CH 2: Organizations as Machines
CH 3: Organizations as Organisms
CH 4: Organizations as Brains
CH 5: Organizations as Cultures
CH 6: Organizations as Political Systems
CH 7: Organizations as Psychic Prisons

These chapters represent the majority of the material relevant to organizational theory. Anyone who wants to learn more about organizational design should read this book

Ignore the bad reviews below. This is one of the best books ever written on
organizations. If you are a serious student of management, this book is an essential
text.