Managing Creation: The Challenge of Building a New Organization.

Managing Creation describes, evaluates, and generalizes from an attempt to foster a high quality of work life (QWL) during the start-up of a medical-products laboratory. This book reports the second in a series of eight QWL projects being evaluated by the University of Michigan's Institute for Social Research. It contributes uniquely to the QWL literature. First, the project's consultants set out to involve inexperienced workers operating complex, prototypical technologies in a brand-new plant. This combination is unprecedented in the QWL movement. Second, the project's evaluators (the authors) designed their research carefully and conducted it independently. Both characteristics are unusual. Third, the book was published despite the failure of both the QWL project and its evaluation to achieve their objectives. Administrative science can benefit from such candid reports of negative results.