ABSTRACT
Every ten years for the last three decades there has been some landmark publishing of textbooks in the organizational field. At the end of the 1960s the first serious texts for the British market appeared. Nicos Mouzelis first published his Organization and Bureaucracy in 1967, and this was shortly followed by David Silverman’s more influential and significant book, The Theory o f Organizations in 1970. At the end of the 1970s, Burrell and Morgan published their saga Sociological Paradigms and Organiz ational Analysis (1979), which was closely followed on the book stalls by Clegg and Dunkerley’s equally long Organizations, Class and Control (1980). Ten years on again, in 1990, no less than three texts have appeared: Glenn Morgan’s Organizations in Society, Stuart Clegg’s Modern Organizations and Thompson and McHugh’s Work Organizations. It is not of course the case that there have been three decades of solid progress: initial forays into the field twenty years ago have not been consolidated and developed. The current burgeoning interest in organization (see also Hassard and Pym 1990, Reed and Hughes 1992, Hassard and Parker 1993, Brown 1993) reflects high levels of interest in the field combined with disagreement about the current state of knowledge. Pfeifer’s comment: ‘It is difficult to discern in what direction knowledge of organization is progressing - or indeed if it is progressing at all’ (Pfeffer 1982), is still widely felt to be apposite today. In the following chapter, the development of organization studies as an academic field will be discussed, and a way forward will be proposed.
