ABSTRACT

For over a century now, our societies have been the scenes of numerous economic, social, political and cultural transformations. These transformations, whose origins undoubtedly reach back even further (Braudel 1979), have led to the advent of what the American historian and sociologist I. Wallerstein has called historical capitalism (1985). Marked by the rise of rationalization (Weber 1971), by the accumulation of capital (Marx 1954), by the hegemony of economic categorizations (Polanyi 1983), by the rise of individualism (Dumont 1983), by the obsession with pro­ gress (Rostow 1968), by increasing urbanization (Castells 1975) and by the recent technological explosion (Ellul 1964, Landes 1975), this dynamic new social order has witnessed the birth and proliferation of a large number of organizations (Presthus 1978). Given that these formal organizations have proved to be one of the major contemporary sources of individual and collective anchoring and structure (Meyer and Rowan 1977, Zucker 1977), it is not surprising that they have become an object of study in themselves (Chanlat and Séguin 1987, Morgan 1986, Hassard and Pym 1990). This interest in organized entities has taken a number of directions, such as economics (Williamson 1985, Ouchi and Barnes 1986), sociology (Crozier and Friedberg 1977, Perrow 1979, Warriner 1984, Sainsaulieu 1987, Bailé 1989), psychology (Schein 1980), political science (Hardy 1987), administrative science (Koontz and O’Donnell 1955, Mintzberg 1973), and even anthropology (Whyte 1948, Warner and Low 1947) and psycho­ analysis (Jaques 1951, Amado 1980, Kets de Vries and Miller 1984, Zaleznik and Kets de Vries 1985). Within the administrative sciences as such (Audet and Malouin 1986), the study of human behaviour in organizations has given rise to a specific scientific

domain,1 that of ‘organizational behavior’ (Côté et al. 1986, Lorsch 1987, Cooper and Robertson 1987).