1: Scope and Purpose

This book is about organisational behaviour in the public sector. It adopts an explicitly critical perspective. ‘Critical’ does not denote a narrow political or ideological point of view but is understood as a wider concern with criticality in relation to theory, politics and – especially – practice. The book offers an alternative approach to the orthodoxy of mainstream texts in organisational behaviour and public management. It provides instead a text which is theoretically sceptical of the dominant unitarist and functionalist orthodoxies of organisational behaviour – that is, of perspectives which assume consensus and stability in the organisation and where conflict is seen as dysfunctional and damaging – and which provides a lively and timely coverage of current debates, informed throughout by an enquiring perspective on the real daily issues faced by those who work in public sector organisations, including local government, the NHS, education and other areas of public service.