ABSTRACT
As an assessment of knowledge about business organizations, this chapter mainly treats studies in which the workings of such organizations have been the central focus of inquiry, rather than the studies covered by other chapters in this volume for which business has merely provided a setting for research. Despite the prominence of business organizations in modern society, relatively little is known about many aspects of their structure and activities. The pattern of what is and is not known reflects considerable unevenness in the attention paid to business by social scientists. Long the darling of economists, business organizations remain something between an enigma and an anathema to most historians, psychologists, sociologists, and political scientists. Even in economics, more attention has been given to describing the aggregated interactions of companies or to recommending strategies for businessmen to follow than to analyzing the internal development and operation of individual firms.
