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Library of Congress Cataloging‐in‐Publication Data
Names: Bolman, Lee G., author. | Deal, Terrence E., author. Title: Reframing organizations : artistry, choice, and leadership / Lee G. Bolman, Terrence E. Deal.
Description: Seventh Edition. | San Francisco : Jossey‐Bass, 2021. | Revised edition of the authors’ Reframing organizations, [2017] | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2021009919 (print) | LCCN 2021009920 (ebook) | ISBN 9781119855125 (paperback) | ISBN 9781119756859 (adobe pdf) | ISBN 9781119756842 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Management. | Organizational behavior. | Leadership. Classification: LCC HD31 .B6135 2021 (print) | LCC HD31 (ebook) | DDC 658.4/063—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021009919
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021009920
COVER DESIGN: PAUL MCCARTHY
COVER ART: GETTY IMAGES | IVAN KRYVOSHEI
PREFACE
This is the sixth release of a work that began in 1984 as Modern Approaches to Understanding and Managing Organizations and became Reframing Organizations in 1991. We're grateful to readers around the world who have told us that our books gave them ideas that make a difference—at work and elsewhere in their lives.
It is again time for an update, and we're gratified to be back by popular demand. Like everything else, organizations and their leadership challenges continue to evolve rapidly, and scholars are running hard to keep pace. This edition tries to capture the current frontiers of both knowledge and art.
The four‐frame model, with its view of organizations as factories, families, jungles, and temples, remains the book's conceptual heart. But we have incorporated new research and revised our case examples extensively to keep up with the latest developments. We have updated a feature we inaugurated in the third edition: “Greatest Hits in Organization Studies.” These features offer pithy summaries of key ideas from some of the most influential works in scholarly literature (as indicated by a citation analysis, described in the Appendix at the end of the book). As a counterpoint to the scholarly works, we have also added occasional summaries of management best sellers. Scholarly and professional literature often run on separate tracks, but the two streams together provide a fuller picture than either alone, and we have tried to capture the best of both in our work.
Life in organizations has produced many stories and examples, and there is new material throughout the book. At the same time, we worked zealously to minimize bloat by tracking down and expunging every redundant sentence, marginal concept, or extraneous example. We've also tried to keep it fun. Collective life is an endless source of vivid examples as entertaining as they are instructive, and we've sprinkled them throughout the text. We apologize to anyone who finds that an old favorite fell to the cutting‐room floor, but we hope readers will find the book an even clearer and more efficient read.
As always, our primary audience is managers and leaders. We have tried to answer the question, what do we know about organizations and leadership that is genuinely relevant and useful to practitioners as well as scholars? We have worked to present a large, complex body of theory, research, and practice as clearly and simply as possible. We tried to avoid watering it down or presenting simplistic views of how to solve managerial problems. This is not a self‐help book filled with ready‐made answers. Our goal is to offer not solutions but powerful and provocative ways of thinking about opportunities and pitfalls.
We continue to focus on both management and leadership. Leading and managing are different, but they're equally important. The difference is nicely summarized in an aphorism from Bennis and Nanus (2007): “Managers do things right. Leaders do the right thing.” If an organization is over‐managed but under‐led, it eventually loses any sense of spirit or purpose. A poorly managed organization with a strong, charismatic leader may soar briefly—only to crash shortly thereafter. Malpractice can be as damaging and unethical for managers and leaders as for physicians.
Myopic managers or overzealous leaders usually harm more than just themselves. The challenges of today's organizations require the objective perspective of managers as well as the brilliant flashes of vision that wise leadership provides. We need more people in managerial roles who can find simplicity and order amid organizational confusion and chaos. We need versatile and flexible leaders who are artists as well as analysts, who can reframe experience to discover new issues and possibilities. We need managers who love their work, their organizations, and the people whose lives they affect. We need leaders who appreciate management as a moral and ethical undertaking, and who combine hard‐headed realism with passionate commitment to larger values and purposes. We hope to encourage and nurture such qualities and possibilities.
As in the past, we have tried to produce a clear and readable synthesis and integration of the field's major theoretical traditions. We concentrate mainly on organization theory's implications for practice. We draw on examples from every sector and around the globe. Historically, organization studies have been divided into several intellectual camps, often isolated from one another. Works that seek to give a comprehensive overview of theory and research often drown in social science jargon and abstraction and have little to say to practitioners. Works that strive to provide specific answers and tactics often offer advice that applies only under certain conditions. We try to find a balance between misleading oversimplification and mind‐boggling complexity.
The bulk of work in organization studies has focused on the private or public or nonprofit sector, but not all three. We think this is a
