Values, Rationality, and Power: Developing Organizational Wisdom demonstrates that organizations can act wisely. A critical realist framework and phonetic research approach is used to perform an embedded single case study of a group's attempt to develop and spread a medical innovation within a Canadian healthcare authority.
The study's exploration of how to spread innovation through a healthcare system will help readers to gain insight into why groups resist change and how individuals can exercise their values, rationality, and power to overcome this resistance. Presenting a framework to conceptualize and study wisdom, the book identifies that values guide wise action, that knowledge is required but insufficient for wisdom, and finally that wisdom is action-oriented. The results of the case study demonstrate the power that values possess to drive organizational behaviour.
Offering a unique insight into how values, rationality, and power interact in a real social setting, the book explores how these interactions can both drive and resolve conflict, but also create positive change. Through this understanding, academic and students of management and organizations can create a discipline of scholarship and teaching that fosters the development of organizational wisdom.