Technology and Other Variables : Some Current Approaches in Organization Theory*

For many purposes industrial sociologists view organizations merely as convenient contexts for the examination of work-related behaviour. This is, of course, a valuable exercise and one which yields solutions to certain kinds of problems. For some purposes, however, it is more helpful to make the organization itself the focus of study, and this paper concerns work which is squarely within this second focus. It deals with the study of organizations as such and it is concerned with the problem of explaining why typical configurations of interactions are found in specifiable organizational types. In other words our central interest here relates to the explanation and prediction of organizational structure.