Essentials of Contemporary Management

Essentials of Contemporary Management, Eighth Edition, provides the most current account of changes taking place in the world of management and management practices while making the text relevant and interesting to students.

Jennifer George is the Mary Gibbs Jones Professor of Management and Professor of Psychology in the Jesse H. Jones Graduate School of Business at Rice University. She received her BA in Psychology/Sociology from Wesleyan University, her MBA in Finance from New York University, and her PhD in Management and Organizational Behavior from New York University. Prior to joining the faculty at Rice University, she was a professor in the Department of Management at Texas A&M University. 

Professor George specializes in organizational behavior and is well known for her research on mood and emotion in the workplace, their determinants, and their effects on various individual and group-level work outcomes. She is the author of many articles in leading peer-reviewed journals such as the Academy of Management Journal, the Academy of Management Review, the Journal of Applied Psychology, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, and Psychological Bulletin. One of her papers won the Academy of Management’s Organizational Behavior Division Outstanding Competitive Paper Award, and another paper won the Human Relations Best Paper Award. She is, or has been, on the editorial review boards of the Journal of Applied Psychology, Academy of Management Journal, Academy of Management Review, Administrative Science Quarterly, Journal of Management, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, Organization Science, International Journal of Selection and Assessment, and Journal of Managerial Issues; was a consulting editor for the Journal of Organizational Behavior; was a member of the SIOP Organizational Frontiers Series editorial board; and was an associate editor of the Journal of Applied Psychology. 

She is a fellow in the Academy of Management, the American Psychological Association, the Association for Psychological Science, and the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology and a member of the Society for Organizational Behavior. She also has coauthored a textbook titled Understanding and Managing Organizational Behavior. 


Gareth Jones currently offers pro bono advice on solving management problems to nonprofit organizations in Houston, Texas. He received his BA in Economics Psychology and his PhD in Management from the University of Lancaster, UK. He was formerly Professor of Management in the Graduate School of Business at Texas A & M University and earlier held teaching and research appointments at Michigan State University, the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, and the University of Warwick, UK. 

He continues to pursue his research interests in strategic management and organizational theory and his well-known research that applies transaction cost analysis to explain many forms of strategic and organizational behavior. He also studies the complex and changing relationships between competitive advantage and information technology in the 2010s. 

He has published many articles in leading journals of the field and his research has appeared in the Academy of Management Review, the Journal of International Business Studies, and Human Relations. He published an article about the role of information technology in many aspects of organizational functioning in the Journal of Management. One of his articles won the Academy of Management Journal’s Best Paper Award, and he is one of the most cited authors in the Academy of Management Review. He is, or has served, on the editorial boards of the Academy of Management Review, the Journal of Management, and Management Inquiry. 

Gareth Jones has used his academic knowledge to craft leading textbooks in management and three other major areas in the management discipline: organizational behavior, organizational theory, and strategic management. His books are widely recognized for their innovative, contemporary content and for the clarity with which they communicate complex, real-world issues to students.