ABSTRACT
Organizations are everywhere today. Input ‘organization’ as a subject or title search term in any Internet search engine or large public library and you will get hundreds of hits; add ‘organizational’ and you will get a few hundred more, from ‘organizational behaviour’ to ‘organizational structure’ via ‘organizational culture’ and ‘organizational learning’. But had you made the search 60 years ago, you would not have found anything like that, as Drucker (1995a, p. 76) reminds us, the word ‘organization’ did not come into common use in that sense until after the Second World War (though according to the Shorter Oxford Dictionary, it was used to mean ‘an organized body, system or society’ in 1873).
