Organizational Theory for Sociologists

Abstract

Organizational theory contains many insights that can further organizationalstudies in Sociology. The paper makes four points. First, organizationaltheory is relatively new and very interdisciplinary. Many disciplines havecontributed to its development and not just Sociology. It is very open to different perspectives.Second, initially the focus was on organizational structures and not labor relations. Other subfields in sociology, e.g., Marxist theory, focused on the latter. Organizational theory can be traced to Weber’s essays on bureaucracy, and it focused on different forms that organizations can take and under what conditions different forms are more or less effective. Third, organizational theory has not been kind to managers and administrators, portraying them as boundedly rational, conspiratorial, or self-serving. Unfortunately, this deflected attention from the problems that they confront and must solve on a day-to-day basis. Fourth, organizational theory focuses more on the context of strategic decision-making than on the choices that managers make. The structure within the organization as well as the environment external to the organizations limit what managers can do. Ecological and neo-institutional theories made the greatest contribution here but approached the study of organizational behavior from very different perspectives. The talk then described two new developments in the field, classification theory, which is an offshoot of ecological theory, and inhabited institutionalism, which is an offshoot of neo-institutional theory, to show that the field is still growing and developing new insights. The paper concludes by encouraging researchers to continue to search for new explanationsto organizational phenomena focusing on both inside and outside of the organization.（Joseph Galaskiewicz）