Kolb D. Hidden Conflict in Organizations...Disputes 1991

Textbook in PDF format

Kolb and Bartunek′s Hidden Conflict in Organizations picks up where earlier works left off. They provide some much-needed conceptual elaboration and empirical detail--elaboration and detail that earlier contextualist perspectives have not provided. Despite being an edited volume, this book is surprisingly well focused and delicious to consume. In directing our attention to the usual darkened and easily overlooked corners of organizational strife, this book provides a particularly compelling documentation of the social contextualist thesis. By documenting how minimal most organizational actors′ awareness of context is, coupled with active processes of denial, avoidance, and discounting, this book reminds us just how important it is to attend occasionally to the perceptual ground within which a figure is embedded. The book does a beautiful job at articulating the importance of social context." What a timely and much needed volume for the field of conflict research! We believe wholeheartedly in the book′s continuous theme about there being a ′hidden′ side to conflict--a side which we feel is hidden to scholars, not to disputants or even practitioners. The volume′s contributors clearly illustrate that unexplored gaps exist between the ′conflict′ studied by scholars and the multifaceted experience of those knee-deep in organizational conflict