"The premise of this book is that our well-worn modes of collective action - from markets to hierarchies, from institutions to movements - provide a limited vocabulary to investigate, let alone invent new forms of open, networked and transsectoral collaboration. The promise of this book is to introduce a novel set of concepts including shared concerns, symbols, interface designs, participatory architectures, evaluative infrastructures, network strategy and leading as diplomacy. Together they represent figures of thought that combine goal-orientated, purposeful action with scale, openness and creativity. The practical implication is that this new vocabulary for distributed and collective action might help to address big challenges and crises of our times"--

"The premise of this book is that our well-worn modes of collective action - from markets to hierarchies, from institutions to movements - provide a limited vocabulary to investigate, let alone invent new forms of open, networked and transsectoral collaboration. The promise of this book is to introduce a novel set of concepts including shared concerns, symbols, interface designs, participatory architectures, evaluative infrastructures, network strategy and leading as diplomacy. Together they represent figures of thought that combine goal-orientated, purposeful action with scale, openness and creativity. The practical implication is that this new vocabulary for distributed and collective action might help to address big challenges and crises of our times"--

Lecturers - save time by clicking here to request an e-inspection copy of this textbook - no waiting for the post to arrive! Written by a team of leading academics, this groundbreaking new text is an invaluable guide to the core elements of strategy courses, that will challenge conventional thinking about the field. Key features: - Provides a coherent and engaging overview of the established 'classics' of strategy, while taking an innovative approach to contemporary issues such as power and politics, ethics, branding, globalisation, collaboration, and the global financial crisis. - A unique critical perspective that encourages you to reflect on the strategy process and strategic decision-making. - Packed with learning features, including a wealth of international case studies and accompanying discussion questions. - A website offering a full Instructors' Manual, video cases, podcasts and full-text journal articles. Visit the Companion Website at www.sagepub.co.uk/cleggstrategy Read the authors’ research paper ‘Re-Framing Strategy: Power, Politics and Accounting’ in which they make the case for a critically informed approach to studying strategy in the special issue of Accounting, Auditing & Accountability Journal (Vol 23, Issue 5) Praise for Strategy: Theory and Practice "Finally, something different in a strategy text! This new volume provides a broad view of strategy covering the conventional as well as less mainstream alternatives like the growing strategy-as-practice perspective. It also does a great job of providing balanced critiques of the existing orthodoxy and provides explicit connections to some of the more accessible academic articles providing more depth to the arguments presented. All in all, it is an excellent break from the unfortunate tendency to make strategy a narrow economic enterprise in a world that is far more complex and social than that. Strategy: Theory and Practice is a welcome addition to the available texts on strategy" - Nelson Phillips, Professor of Strategy and Organizational Behaviour Co-Editor, Journal of Management Inquiry "A super and overdue book. It embraces the central importance of organization theory and, especially, the play of power and politics both inside and outside the organization. This erudite, almost polemical book promises to redraw how we approach the study of strategy - and not before time!" - Royston Greenwood, Associate Dean, School of Business, University of Alberta "It explains where strategy originates from and how contemporary ideas and practices facilitate or constrain decision-making and action. In particular, this book illuminates the role of power and politics in strategy - an issue that has been overlooked in most textbooks in this area. Enjoyable and inspiring reading for students, researchers and practitioners" - Eero Vaara, Professor of Management and Organization Dean of Research Hanken School of Economics, Helsinki "The authors have managed to produce a unique and admirable combination of critical external engagement with 'strategy', understood as a complex object of organizational and political construction, and a useable insiders text book rich in illustrative cases. As such it is essential reading for academics, students and practitioners - all of whom will discover how theory and practice are more intertwined than they ever imagined" - Michael Power, Professor of Accounting, London School of Economics and Political Science

On how acts of 'languaging' and heterogeneous practices contribute to the rise of networks, and how these networks perform complex tasks shaping organisations.

Object-based Distributed Computing is being established as the most pertinent basis for the support of large, heterogeneous computing and telecommunications systems. The advent of Open Object-based Distributed Systems (OODS) brings new challenges and opportunities for the use and development of formal methods. Formal Methods for Open Object-based Distributed Systems presents the latest research in several related fields, and the exchange of ideas and experiences in a number of topics including: formal models for object-based distributed computing; semantics of object-based distributed systems and programming languages; formal techniques in object-based and object oriented specification, analysis and design; refinement and transformation of specifications; multiple viewpoint modeling and consistency between different models; formal techniques in distributed systems verification and testing; types, service types and subtyping; specification, verification and testing of quality of service constraints and formal methods and the object life cycle. It contains the selected proceedings of the International Workshop on Formal Methods for Open Object-based Distributed Systems, sponsored by the International Federation for Information Processing, and based in Paris, France, in March 1996.

ÔProfessional service firms are critical agents of contemporary economies and understanding them has become a central focus of recent scholarship. This very timely and well organized Handbook brings together several leading scholars who explore how we might think and theorize about professional service firms and their entrepreneurial behaviours. The Handbook will become a key source for the growing community of researchers in this area.Õ Ð Royston Greenwood, University of Alberta, Canada ÔFor too long, both researchers and practitioners have presumed that professional service firms follow the status quo when they should better understand how these professionals set the rules for globalization. This Handbook reminds us that professionals are as much the shock-troops of capitalism as the multinational corporations that they serve. As this Handbook shows, the leading firms successfully compete with each other by fostering entrepreneurship and innovation in order to service an institutional system that undergirds the international economy.Õ Ð Christopher McKenna, University of Oxford, UK Professional services are increasingly seen as an important foundation for future economic growth and prosperity. Yet research on innovative and entrepreneurial processes in professional services has been surprisingly scarce. This Handbook provides a collection of original contributions from leading scholars outlining the current stock of knowledge in the area as well as providing directions for further research. The expert contributors discuss entrepreneurship and innovation from a number of different perspectives, including the entrepreneurial professional team, the entrepreneurial firm and the institutional environment. The first part of the book looks at the challenges of entrepreneurship specific to the professional service firm while the second explores the creation and exploitation of entrepreneurial opportunities in the professional service team. Part III turns to the organization and Part IV to the management and growth of the entrepreneurial professional service firm. The final part discusses the interplay between professions, firms and the institutional environment. Researchers, scholars and PhD students in the areas of entrepreneurship and professional service firms along with advanced students of management will find this volume of great value.

′If strategy is the queen of business, then this book offers us the perfect introduction to her court! It is accessible, lively, and informative. The book repays the reader with wonderful account of how strategy works. It also lets the reader in on some of the darker secrets of strategy′ - André Spicer, Associate Professor of Organisation Studies, Warwick Business School Studying Strategy is a welcoming, lively and thought provoking account that helps students get to grips with strategy′s key issues and broad debates and introduce them to the latest ideas. Conceived by Chris Grey as an antidote to conventional textbooks, each book in the ‘Very Short, Fairly Interesting and Reasonably Cheap’ series takes a core area of the curriculum and turns it on its head by providing a critical and sophisticated overview of the key issues and debates in an informal, conversational and often humorous way. Suitable for students of strategy at Undergraduate, Masters and MBA level, professionals involved in strategic decision making and anyone interested in how strategy works.

This volume of Research in the Sociology of Organizations explores the institutional macrofoundations of action, providing an array of insights into the constitutive and contextualizing powers of institutions, and an agenda for further exploration of these themes.

The four-volume set LNCS 11244, 11245, 11246, and 11247 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 8th International Symposium on Leveraging Applications of Formal Methods, Verification and Validation, ISoLA 2018, held in Limassol, Cyprus, in October/November 2018. The papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected for inclusion in the proceedings. Each volume focusses on an individual topic with topical section headings within the volume: Part I, Modeling: Towards a unified view of modeling and programming; X-by-construction, STRESS 2018. Part II, Verification: A broader view on verification: from static to runtime and back; evaluating tools for software verification; statistical model checking; RERS 2018; doctoral symposium. Part III, Distributed Systems: rigorous engineering of collective adaptive systems; verification and validation of distributed systems; and cyber-physical systems engineering. Part IV, Industrial Practice: runtime verification from the theory to the industry practice; formal methods in industrial practice - bridging the gap; reliable smart contracts: state-of-the-art, applications, challenges and future directions; and industrial day.

Managing and organizing are now central phenomena in contemporary societies. It is essential they are studied from a variety of perspectives, and with equal attention paid to their past, their present, and their future. This book collects opinions of the trailblazing scholars concerning the most important research topics, essential for study in the next 15–20 years. The opinions concern both traditional functions, such as accounting and marketing, personnel management and strategy, technology and communication, but also new challenges, such as diversity, equality, waste and cultural encounters. The collection is intended to be inspiration for young scholars and an invitation to a dialogue with practitioners.