ABSTRACT
There are any number of candidates for canonical status as an ‘influential book’ in the field of organization studies, David Silver man’s The Theory o f Organizations (1970) should be honoured as such a book. Despite this claim, one should recognize that reviews of the book did not hail it in these terms; for another, it scarcely had any influence at all in the United States of America, the place in which most of what counts as the ‘organizations’ literature in the English-speaking world is produced and repro duced.2 There is no recognizable cult of ‘Silvermania’, nor is there a recognizable programme of empirical research that has a common reference point in The Theory o f Organizations.
