Unshackled Organization

by Jeffrey A. Goldstein

Publisher's MessageIn a time when managers are scrambling to find methods to maneuver through the madness of a completely unpredictable business environment, Jeffrey Goldstein's answers are... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 156327048X
• ISBN13: 9781563270482
• Release Date: May 1994
• Publisher: Productivity Press
• Length: 202 Pages
• Weight: 1.08 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 6.2" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

...Or, How to REALLY Bring About Organizational Change...

Jeff Goldstein's 1994 book "The Unshackled Organization," is considered one of the "must reads" by complexity folk who are in the organizational development business, and it is easy to see why. Little new has been said about the actual practice of facilitating organizational change and development since Kurt Lewin's work in the 1940's, save for perhaps Chris Argryis' and Peter Senge's works. Goldstein's prescriptions for facilitating change tap into the energy of the organizational system itself, and it's natural transformational qualities, leading to self-organization. Goldstein is a business professor at Adelphi University, and serves on the editorial boards of Emergence and Nonlinear Dynamics, Psychology, and Life Science. Goldstein has been at the forefront of applications of chaos and complexity in business and management for 15 years. He was one of the founding members of the Chaos Network, the first formal professional society to devote itself to these ends, and was one of first presidents of the academic group Society for Chaos Theory in Psychology and the Life Sciences. Goldstein's current work is focused on the history of the concept of emergence, and its implications.Goldstein states, "this book presents a practical approach to organizational change derived from state-of-the-art scientific research on how systems change". The book is "practical" in that while it does draw heavily from complexity theory, it does so in a user-friendly yet scientifically valid way. Each chapter introduces the theory behind the concept, and then discusses specific approaches and activities that the leader or facilitator could use to implement the concept; the chapter also has numerous short stories to make application of the concepts clear, and cartoons by Hannah Bonner that ground the concepts in everyday life. Goldstein's work theoretically draws most heavily from Prigogine's concepts of self-organization, and Maturana and Varela's concept of autopoiesis. He describes the characteristics of self-organization as "radical reorganization of the structure of a system; the spontaneous emergence of novel patterns and configurations; the amplification and incorporation of random events; the discovery of creative alternatives for functioning; and the arising of new coherence and coordination amongst the parts of the system". Self-organization is induced by pushing the system to a state far-from-equilibrium; at such a state, the system can be nudged into a different mode (attractor pattern) of behavior by small, random fluctuations from the environment. The environment does not change the system, and the system does not unilaterally change the environment; rather, the environment triggers internal mechanisms that are the source for transformation.Goldstein demonstrates how self-fulfilling prophecies are commonplace in today's organizations, and how such expectations act as equilibrium enhancers--barriers to change. Goldstein then makes explicit the