To understand success, you must first understand failure. This understanding is especially critical since failure is a phenomenon that is much more common to everyday life, businesses, and government practice than standard theory would lead us to assume. Failure manifests itself in many ways, including breakdowns, bankruptcies, and other forms of organizational catastrophes and fiascoes. Thus, learning from failure will enable success. When Things Go Wrong brings together contributions from 24 leading scholars who examine the causes, patterns, process, and outcomes of such failures from economic, managerial, cognitive and political perspectives. This book presents failure as a relative concept in terms of the expectations and strategies of stakeholders putting a claim on the performance of the organization and the notion of success. It challenges future research in this field to combine both economic and non-economic performance measures to assess organizational tendencies toward success and failure and to differentiate between failure as process and failure as an outcome.

Table of Contents:
PART ONE: INTRODUCTION Organizational Failures, Breakdowns and Bankruptcies - Helmut K Anheier and Lynne Moulton An Introduction PART TWO: ORGANIZATIONS AND FAILURE Costly Information - Lynne G Zucker and Michael R Darby Firm Transformation, Exit, or Persistent Failure Decision Overreach as a Reason for Failure - David Wilson, David J Hickson and Susan J Miller How Organisations Can Overbalance "Tales from the Grave" - Mark Hager et al Organizations′ Accounts of Their Own Demise Organizational Coping, Failure, and Success - Renate Mayntz Academies of Sciences in Central and Eastern Europe PART THREE: THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF FAILURE AND BANKRUPTCY Successful Failure - Wolfgang Seibel An Alternative View of Organizational Coping Veiled Politics - Kevin J Delaney Bankruptcy as a Structured Organizational Field The Politics of Blame Avoidance - Mark Bovens et al Defensive Tactics in a Dutch Crime-Fighting Fiasco Creating the Agents of Corporate Rescue - Terence C Halliday and Bruce G Carruthers Professionalization of Insolvency PART FOUR: THE COGNITIVE CONSTRUCTION OF FAILURE Prosaic Organizational Failure - Lee Clarke and Charles Perrow Permanent Failure and the Failure of Organizational Performance - Marshall W Meyer PART FIVE: STRUCTURAL FAILURES Success and Failure in Institutional Development - Frank P Romo and Helmut K Anheier A Network Approach Stalemate - Helmut K Anheier and Frank P Romo A Structural Analysis of Organizational Failure PART SIX: CONCLUSION Studying Organizational Failures - Helmut K Anheier and Lynne Moulton