Multi-Rational Management

More and more, organisations are confronted with an environment from which they receive contradictory demands and expectations. Big corporations have to conduct excellent, but also academically recognised research; hospitals are no longer merely run according to the successes aspired to by health professionals, but also on the basis of economic valuation standards; and administrations and public companies are caught between government regulations and the market, and family businesses between the family and competition. To satisfy these different demands at the same time and on a permanent basis constitutes the central challenge of multirational management.

The more diverse the constituents of an organisation's integration in its environment are, the more consistently it must reproduce the pluralism of this environment internally. It becomes a pluralist organisation with all the challenges, but also with the opportunities that its inside complexity entails. Multirational management addresses this situation and demonstrates how to deal constructively with the simultaneous effectiveness of multiple rationalities. What is required for this is executives' keen awareness of this diversity and a concerted development of the organisational competence of being able to make binding decisions in appreciative cooperation in spite of this diversity.

Multi-rational Management explains the concept of multirational management and illustrates it with many practical examples. It has primarily been written for 'reflective practitioners', i.e. those executives who continually think about their organisation and their own roles in that organisation. It provides students of organisation and management with a valuable foundation for learning to 'read' pluralist organisations.