ABSTRACT
Work organisations are crucial to the way modern industrialised societies are structured. Central to the history of modern societies was a trend whereby work tasks were increasingly carried out within bureaucratised corporations and formally structured enterprises that employed people to work under the instructions of organisational managers. The study of work organisations is to examine just one aspect of the wider social organisation of society. This chapter focuses on patterns of activity which have been deliberately set up at some historically distinguishable point in time to carry out certain tasks and which, to do this, make use of various administrative or bureaucratic techniques. The control and co-ordination of work tasks through a hierarchy of appropriately qualified office holders, whose authority derives from their expertise and who rationally devise a system of rules and procedures that are calculated to provide the most appropriate means of achieving specified ends.
