Understanding Organizational Culture

With his usual engaging and inimitable style, Mats Alvesson takes the reader on a riveting journey through the diverse ways in which culture itself can be understood and how these powerfully inform organizational life.

- Blake E. Ashforth, Arizona State University

′Understanding Organizational Culture comunicates complex ideas in a manner that will illuminate for those who are less familiar with the concepts discussed, as well as providing a depth and critique of interest to those familiar with the topics.

- Claire Valentin, The University of Edinburgh

Unlike prescriptive books about organizations, Understanding Organizational Culture challenges and provokes the reader to think critically. It provides an insight into organizational culture, aided by numerous empirical illustrations from ethnographic studies that develop and illustrate how cultural thinking can be used in managerial and non-managerial organizational theory and practice.

Mats Alvesson answers questions of definition, explores alternative perspectives and exands on substantive issues, before discussing key issues of research and developing his framework. Further more, the advances in the field of organizational culture are synthesized for the reader by drawing upon the range of relevant literature within organization studies.

Understanding Organizational Culture provides great breadth within a textbook approach - covering a wide spectrum of management and organization while at the same time developing a new theoretical approach to organizational culture. The new edition contains improved pedagogy and expanded coverage of topics such as identity and organizational change.

It is essential reading for students taking undergraduate and postgraduate modules in Organizational Behaviour and Organizational Theory on Management and Organization Studies programmes, including MBA.