Organizational Myopia
Problems of Rationality and Foresight in Organizations

The book examines the mechanisms that generate myopia in organizations and explores how organizations can foresee and contain unexpected events.

Maurizio Catino (Author)

9781107447219, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 30 October 2014

270 pages, 5 b/w illus. 12 tables
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.4 cm, 0.37 kg

'… Organizational Myopia is an overwhelming success, likely to be of significant interest to researchers, practitioners, students, and experts alike. Organizational researchers, to start, will benefit from the near-encyclopedic reproduction of decades' worth of research on individual-, social-, and organizational-level phenomena related to decision making, learning, and risk, most notably.' Edward Bishop Smith, American Journal of Sociology

Could the terrorist attacks on the Twin Towers have been avoided? What about the control failures in the recent global financial crisis? Behind these apparently very different events, it is possible to identify a common element of organizational myopia - a syndrome that severely limits the capacity of organizations to foresee the effects of their own decisions and to recognize signs of danger or opportunity. Organizational Myopia explores the barriers that impede organizations from identifying an effective response to the problems that they have to confront. Using real-world cases, the author investigates the mechanisms that generate myopia in organizations at the individual, organizational, and interorganizational level in contexts that are complex, uncertain, ambiguous, and changeable. This book will help readers understand how to limit the origins of myopia and therefore increase the capacity of organizations to anticipate and contain unexpected events.

Introduction
1. Cases of myopia
2. Uncertainty and predictability in organizations
3. The mechanisms of organizational myopia
4. Anticipating risk: the problem of learning
5. Implications for organizational design
Epilogue.

Subject Areas: Organizational theory & behaviour [KJU], Management decision making [KJMD]