ABSTRACT
This book has a number of antecedents. Initially we began to write it shortly after completing our Critical Issues in Organizations (Clegg and Dunkerley, 1977). There are some continuities with our introductory remarks to this earlier collaboration. Particularly, we would draw the reader's attention to our suggestion at that time that the sociology of organizations should adopt a more historically informed perspective around the idea of ‘organizations as control’. It is this theme which we have developed in this volume. In addition, in the interim between Critical Issues and the present text, Stewart Clegg (1979a) wrote The Theory of Power and Organization in which some other of the ideas presented in this volume were first developed. In particular, we would draw the reader's attention to the argument in the latter study that the sociology of organizations lacked an adequate theoretical object for its analyses. In this volume we have proposed as such an object the concept of organization as control of the labour process. ‘The simple elements of the labour process are (1) purposeful activity, that is work itself, (2) the object on which that work is performed and (3) the instruments of that work’ (Marx, 1976, p. 284). This concept becomes increasingly central to our argument as the book unfolds.
