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Power and Influence in Organizations.
Roderick M. Kramer and Margaret A. Neale, eds. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1998. 398 pp. $52.00, cloth; $24.95, paper.
This edited volume is the result of the Power and Influence in Organizations conference held at the Stanford University Graduate School of Business in May, 1996. The goal was to bring together leading scholars in organizations theory who were interested in exploring new perspectives on the role of power and influence in organizations. The resulting book is a collection of papers organized around that general theme. The ramifications of a conference origin are twofold. On the down side, the book is not a coherent statement of the field. The papers do not cite each other, build toward any statement of the field, or even work from common assumptions. It more than makes up for these problems, however, by providing a tour de force of great scholars and their current thinking on power and influence in organizations. It must have been a great conference.
Roughly a third of the book can loosely be described as being about power and politics in organizations. The opening chapter by Pfeffer and Cialdini explores illusions of influence among managers. This chapter is primarily a review of the factors that produce illusions of control, its dysfunctional effects, and ways of overcoming illusions of control. Valley and Thompson present an empirical chapter investigating management's ability to change the social structure of an organization by changing the formal structure. They find that systematic change in the organization requires formal power, the ability to convince people of the value of change, and knowledge of the current emergent or social structure of an organization. Bacharach and Lawler theorize about how enduring political alignments affect organizations. They are concerned about what processes promote political alignment and...