The Legalistic Organization

by Sim B. Sitkin (Editor)

In this volume, a multidisciplinary group of scholars investigate the changing attitudes towards management decisions in today′s workplace. Across a variety of areas traditionally reserved for managerial authority - employee hiring and firing, corporate takeovers and plant closings - managers face an increased likelihood of public and legal scrutiny of their decisions and decision-making processes. Formal procedures, decision-making criteria and the use of legal rhetoric within organizations are all addressed in the book.

400 pages, Hardcover

First published January 31, 1994

About the author

Sim Sitkin is Professor of Management, Staudenmeyer and founding Faculty Director of the Center on Leadership and Ethics at the Fuqua School of Business, Duke University. Previously at Duke, he served as Area Head for the Management and Organizations Department and Faculty Director of Fuqua’s Health Sect or Management Program.

Sim has also been Academ ic Director at Duke Corporate Education and on the faculty of the University of Texas at Austin. He is a Founding Partner of Delta Leadership, Inc. and holds an appointment as Professor of Organization Science at the Free University of Amsterdam, where he is a Fellow in the Centre of Comparative Social Studies. He was elected a Fellow of the Academy of Management in 2010.

Professor Sitkin’s research focuses on leadership and control systems and their influence on how organizations and their members become more or less capable of change and innovation. He is widely known for his research on the effect of formal and informal organizational control systems and leadership on risk taking, accountability, trust, learning, M&A processes, and innovation. His research has appeared in such publications as Organization Science, Academy of Management Review, Academy of Management Journal, Administrative Science Quarterly, and Harvard Business Review. His most recent book is Organizational Control (with Laura Cardinal and Katinka Bijlsma-Frankema), published in 2010 by Cambridge University Press.

He is the Deputy Editor of Behavioral Science and Policy, Consulting Editor of Science You Can Use, Advisory Board Member of the Journal of Trust Research, having previously served on the Board of Governors of the Academy of Management, as Senior Editor of Organization Science, and as Associate Editor of the Journal of Organizational Behavior. He has worked as a consultant and executive educator with many large and small corporations, non-profit and government organizations worldwide.

Professor Sitkin received his PhD in organizational behavior from Stanford Business School, EdM in educational administration from Harvard Graduate School of Education, and BA in psychology from Clark University.