′Indispensable and subversive′ - Simon Caulkin, The Observer

′A highly entertaining polemic.... This slim volume more than lives up to its title′ - Stefan Stern, Financial Times

Conceived by Chris Grey and written to get you thinking, the ′Very Short, Fairly Interesting and Reasonably Cheap’ series offers informal, conversational and critical overviews of popular areas of study.

Updated throughout with examples from the biggest global news events, including the Trump presidency, cost-cutting at Boeing, working conditions at Sports Direct and the fallout of the Covid-19 pandemic, the fifth edition explores contemporary developments in organizations.

This book is ideal for students of organizational studies, management professionals and anyone curious about the workings of organizations.

Chris Grey is Emeritus Professor of Organization Studies at the School of Business and Management at Royal Holloway, University of London, UK.

Indispensable and subversive.  -- Simon Caulkin
I wanted to write to you to tell you how much I appreciate your book - as evidenced by the coffee stains and frayed edges, it is a book I cannot live without and I will use it as I continue my education and into my career.  -- Wanda V. Mitchell
A highly entertaining polemic.... This slim volume more than lives up to its title.  -- Stefan Stern
Grey...has important things to say and he says them with rigour, warmth and a great deal of intelligence...He informs the analysis with humour and humility. It is the most valuable management book I have ever read.  -- Debora Campbell
Every page has something interesting to say, a great example, a sharp polemic, a superlative popularization, a thought-provoking eccentricity or a new take on something banal and tired.  -- Yiannis Gabriel
A highly readable, insightful and enjoyable up-to-the-minute text.  -- Marta Calas and Linda Smircich
Loved the book. I read it quickly. I will re-read it with a pencil in hand this time.  -- Patrick Nadeau
I′ve been waiting for someone to come along and write a book such as this one.  -- Janne Tienari
This is a racy read and rightly challenges the stuffy, often unreadable prose found in academic outlets.  -- Royston Greenwood
One of the most valuable and interesting books we have read during our MBA at Cardiff University...an inspiration to us.  -- Eleni Platitsa

Chris Grey is Emeritus Professor of Organization Studies at the School of Business and Management at Royal Holloway, University of London. Before that he held Professorships at the Universities of Warwick and Cambridge. He is also Visiting Research Fellow at Cambridge and has been Velux Foundation Visiting Professor at Copenhagen Business School, Denmark, Visiting Professor at the Université Paris-Dauphine, France and a Visiting Fellow at the Stockholm Centre for Organizational Research, Sweden. Between 2010 and 2012 he was a Leverhulme Major Research Fellow. For six years he was Editor-in-Chief of Management Learning and is currently an Associate Editor of Organization and a European Co-editor of the Journal of Management Inquiry. Apart from publishing numerous articles in academic journals, he co-edited Rethinking Management Education (Sage, 1996), Essential Readings in Management Learning (Sage, 2004) and Critical Management Studies: A Reader (Oxford University Press, 2005), co-authored Making Up Accountants (Gower Ashgate, 1998) and is the author of Decoding Organization. Bletchley Park, Codebreaking and Organization Studies (Cambridge University Press, 2012). He currently has an eclectic mix of research interests, including the organization of intelligence and security agen­cies, but his real passion is detective novels and he will one day write the definitive contribution to that genre. He was born in Croydon (Britain’s ‘New Manhattan’!) in 1964 and may very well be one of the leading organizational theorists that town has produced.