ABSTRACT
The contrast between organizations as they appear in management textbooks, and organizations as we encounter them in real life, has frequently been remarked.2 In textbooks, the organization is often made to seem like a piece of well-greased machinery. Everybody who works in the organization knows what it is all about and is concerned principally with implementing its mission. People get satisfaction from their work. Anxiety is low and morale is on the up-and-up. People interact with each other in frictionless, mutually supportive teams. Any troublemakers are quickly ditched. If there are any managerial difficulties, they are essentially technical questions, whose resolution lies in applying the correct techniques of management that inevitably are those being recommended by that particular textbook.
