Managing the Work Situation: A Phenomenological Approach to Organization and Management in a Complex World of Work

Managing the Work Situation outlines a perspective on how organization and management in the contemporary world of work happens as active everyday accomplishments by workers and managers, facing and handling complex work situations with an excess of expectations. Based on philosophical and sociological phenomenology, notably Jean-Paul Sartre’s and Erving Goffman’s works, the book coins a situation-centric perspective on organization and management, and the concept of ‘situational sensemaking’, as the driving mechanism of organization as well as the focus of management – characterized as ‘situation management’. The book addresses an academic audience with interests in organization and management of work, both theoretically and practically. A prime audience will be (academic and executive) master students in organization and management.

Table of Contents:
Introduction 1. A Working Life with an Excess of Expectations Part 1: Situations 2. Situational Sensemaking 3. Agency in Context 4. The Context of (Work)Situations Part 2: Organization(s) 5. Organization as an Outcome of Situational Sensemaking 6. Organization(s) as Input to Situational Sensemaking Part 3: Management 7. (De)Coupling of Management and Managers 8. Managing the Organization of the New Town Hall 9. Situation Management Conclusion

About the Author :
Lars Klemsdal is Professor of Sociology at the Department of Sociology and Human Geography at the University of Oslo. His research interests include processes of organizing, management of organizational change and development, institutional change during public sector reforms, and sociological and organizational theory. He is particularly concerned with foundational issues concerning agency and theories of knowledge in organization and management contexts. He works mostly through microsociological, pragmatist, and phenomenological approaches.

Review :
"This is a wonderful book, in every sense. If you want to understand organizations not as entities but as accomplishments, I can think of no better book. Lars Klemsdal masterfully draws on organization and social theory, through a phenomenological lens, to demonstrate the processes through which we organize ourselves and produce what we come to label as organizations. Approached through the perspective of sensemaking, both organizations and their management acquire new meaning. One notices opportunities for action; situations are shown to be more malleable than they appear; meaning-full interactions become salient. Lars Klemsdal has given us delicious food for thought. Enjoy it." Haridimos Tsoukas, University of Cyprus, Cyprus; University of Warwick, UK "Sartre and Goffman, two ‘outsiders’, in many ways, to conventional studies of work and its organization, are combined in this important book by drawing on philosophical and sociological phenomenology to make profound theoretical sense of work situations, placing the human experience in all its modes of being at the centre of sociological analysis of organizations." Stewart Clegg, University of Sydney, Australia