مقاله سال ۲۰۱۶

Organization studies is a large field of research involving thousands of scholars all over the world and taught at universities and at an ever-expanding number of business schools (Augier, March, & Sullivan, 2005). The field has a wide agenda e dealing with almost any type of event in formal organizations and other more general social phenomena such as institutional logics, institutional work, categorization, and networks. Organization studies has been open to import concepts and theories from other social sciences and even from natural science, including such disciplines as economics, psychology, science and technology studies, and biology. However, organization studies has been less successful in exporting its ideas to other fields of social science; interest in the issues addressed by organization studies is not great outside the field. Many scholars, like Bourdieu, Giddens, or Habermas, who presented general societal theories during the late 20th century seemed to need no concept or theory of organization and the concept is almost equally weak in economics. The common view among organizational scholars e that organizations matter and that modern society is filled with organizations, such that it can even be characterized as a “society of organizations” (Perrow, 1991) or an “organisational economy” (Simon, 1991) e has had little impact outside the field of organization studies.

In order to make organization a relevant category, one must demonstrate that the social order we find in organizations is not a mere reflection of a more general social order that can be adequately understood by concepts and theories describing society in general. An early example is Max Weber’s (1922) theory of bureaucracy, which described organization as a specific phenomenon requiring special concepts and a special theory. A generation later, March and Simon (1958) characterized organizations as a specific type of social order, distinct from other forms of order. Yet, whereas classic organization scholarship was concerned with the particularities of organizations, over the past few decades there has been a drift away from organizations to such other phenomena as institutions or networks.

In this paper, we develop two proposals for the future of organization studies aimed at increasing its significance and relevance for studies of social processes outside organizations. The first move involves a return to the classics by emphasizing the distinctiveness of organization as a particular type of social order. We argue that this requires a return of decisions to the core of the field. The second move involves the extension of our notion of organization beyond (formal) organizations, thereby allowing insights from organization research to be applied to phenomena studied in other fields and increasing the chance of a transfer of theories and concepts to other disciplines.