ABSTRACT
Schools are an example of a formal organization, and in 1958, Parsons wrote, 'An immense amount of work will be required before we can have anything that deserves to be called a theory of formal organization'. A claim could be made that much of the work in the sociology of organization has been a debate with Weber and his theory of bureaucratization. Miller (1973) shows how the concept of school organization was related to another nineteenth-century invention, the factory. In the USA, Frank Spaulding, superintendent of schools in Newton, Massachusetts, used the principles of scientific management in the organization of schools. Perrow's own analysis of organizations is labelled socio-technical, that is, the distinguishing characteristic which differentiates between organizations is the work for which each organization was established. The earliest theoretical perspectives on organizations were those of scientific management. The most widely adopted, however, are various forms of systems theories.
