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Organizations as Action Generators
Abstract
Most of the time, organizations generate actions unreflectively and nonadaptively. To justify their actions, organizations create problems, successes, threats and opportunities. These are ideological molecules that mix values, goals, expectations, perceptions, theories, plans, and symbols. The molecules form while people are result watching, guided by the beliefs that they should judge results good or bad, look for the causes of results, and propose needs for action. Because organizations modify their behavior programs mainly in small increments that make sense to top managers, they change too little and inappropriately, and nearly all organizations disappear within a few years.
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Citations
Cited by
Organizational learning: The contributing processes and the literatures
Huber, G. P. (1991) · Organization Science · doi:10.1287/orsc.2.1.88 · Cited by 8,072
KEEPING AN EYE ON THE MIRROR: IMAGE AND IDENTITY IN ORGANIZATIONAL ADAPTATION.
Dutton, J. E., & Dukerich, J. M. (1991) · Academy of Management Journal · doi:10.2307/256405 · Cited by 2,931
Teece, D., Peteraf, M., & Leih, S. (2016) · California Management Review · doi:10.1525/cmr.2016.58.4.13 · Cited by 2,317
Using Paradox to Build Management and Organization Theories
Poole, M. S., & van de Ven, A. H. (1989) · The Academy of Management Review · doi:10.5465/amr.1989.4308389 · Cited by 1,905
DEVELOPING INNOVATION CAPABILITY IN ORGANISATIONS: A DYNAMIC CAPABILITIES APPROACH
LAWSON, B., & SAMSON, D. (2001) · International Journal of Innovation Management · doi:10.1142/s1363919601000427 · Cited by 1,581
Metadata
- Authors
- Starbuck, W. H.
- Venue
- American Sociological Review
- Publisher
- SAGE Publications
- Published
- 1983-02
- Volume
- 48
- Issue
- 1
- Pages
- 91
- ISSN
- 0003-1224 (ISSN-L)
- OpenAlex
- W3122267228
- Cited by
- 653
- References
- 0
- FWCI
- 25.35
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
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Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
