ABSTRACT
The sociology of organisations is clear enough regarding the significance of organisations in contemporary society, something which is put forward as self-evident in view of their number and their range of social, economic, political and cultural roles. But, although we may feel that we are able to recognise an organisation when we see one, are we able so easily to define these phenomena in generic terms, in order to distinguish organisations from both individual actors and other types of social grouping? The sociology of the subject appears less helpful in this respect, giving rise to opposing theories on the question whether organisational action can be distinguished from individual action, and to varying definitions and typologies. However, one key consistent element in the sociological literature is a very broad distinction which is drawn – often in somewhat different terms – between, on the one hand, looser, more random social structures and, on the other hand, more purposeful collectivities which possess formal and enduring structures. The latter type of collectivity – in Weber’s language, the ‘corporate group’, or in the language of others, the ‘formal’ or ‘large-scale’ or ‘complex organisation’ – has a bounded, structured, and purposive character which serves well as the basis for the idea of an ‘organisation’. It is proposed here to base discussion on a threefold categorisation of collectivities in the social domain: aggregates, which have an essentially random and happenstance composition (e.g. a crowd or an audience); social groups, which have a shared but loose feeling of being bound together (e.g. an ethnic group, or social class); and organisations, as groupings which are co-ordinated and structured in the pursuit of particular objectives. It is the latter type which will be referred to as an ‘organisation’ for purposes of the present work. Historically and at the present time there are many different examples of such organisations, 29but it is argued that a typology of this collective form may usefully be based on two major divisions: organisations of governance and representation, and organisations of enterprise.
