ABSTRACT
Throughout this volume we have alluded to the fact that organizations are not independent self-sufficient phenomena, in spite of the tendency of organization studies to treat the organization in this way. We have attempted to counter this tendency in a number of ways. The earliest analyses of organizations certainly had a macro-perspective in that writers such as Comte, Saint-Simon and Durkheim discussed the emergence of the new organizational arrangements in their contemporary society from the viewpoint of the wider societal changes taking place. This is equally true of Karl Marx, and possibly best seen in Max Weber's analysis of the Protestant ethic which took both a comparative and a historical perspective to demonstrate how the rise of capitalist organizations was tied up with the development of ideas seemingly quite ‘extra-organizational’.
