Product Description: Performance measurement remains a vexing problem for business firms and other kinds of organizations. The "balanced scorecard", widely touted as a solution to problems of performance measurement and strategic planning, has no strong basis in theory...read more

Are social structures products of human action, expressions of individual or group power? Or are they essentially external constraints on human action, necessarily analyzed at a different level? How are themes of power and constraint to be joined in a common analytic approach? These have long been central questions for sociologists. since the collapse of functionalism as a unifying paradigm, however they have often appeared as the basis for sharp divisions between competing analytic paradigms. The divide between structuralism and rational-choice theory has been one of the most prominent such splits. Yet each approach has undergone a revival in past years. The editors of this book, in honour of Peter Blau, brought together a wide range of distinguished sociologists who have taken positions on different sides of this issue and brings them into focus as parts of a common discourse on the place of social structure and concepts of strategic action in sociological explanation.

Product Description: This book examines in detail the process of change in 240 city, county and state public bureaucracies responsible for local finance administration. Using the longitudinal method of analysis, the data show organizational structures to be much less stable than conventional stereotypes have suggested...read more

Product Description: In this volume, the authors closely examine performance and draw on both sociology and economics to explain why some organizations perform well and others perform badly. They first separate the concept of organizational performance from that of organizational persistence...read more

Book by Meyer, Marshall W.