ABSTRACT
For many decades, in Western management thought and practice, the concept of organisational boundaries seemed uncontroversial. Organisations were delimited and defi ned by their boundaries and the notion of ‘the boundary’ formed a fi rm basis on which organisational analysis could be conducted. This enabled the use of terms such as ‘internal’ versus ‘external’ events and entities, ‘the organisation’ versus its contextual ‘environment’, ‘internalised costs’ versus ‘externalities’, and so on. Such distinctions came to the fore in the 1960s, when general systems theory became associated with the metaphor of organisations as biological ‘open systems’ that interacted continuously with their environment (see Katz and Kahn 1966; Morgan and Sturdy 2000). And while the root metaphor of organisations (as machines, organisms, bundles of contracts, etc.) may vary, discussions of actual and possible organisational structure, culture, identity, the allocation of rights and obligations, and the development of mechanisms of coordination and delegation were made possible and indeed predicated on the sanctity of organisational space as identifi ed by organisational boundaries.
