Historical Analysis of Organization Theory

Conceptual Overview

Typically, researchers first started to interpret organizations using Weber's ideas, which they then revised as they attended to features of reality that were not captured in his model, producing an influential body of postwar work. Until the mid-1950s, the case study was the dominant method of research and Weber a central resource. These were based on substantive aspects of specific cases and thus their generalizability was low and hard to cumulate into a consistent body of interrelated theoretical knowledge.

In the 1950s, after the emergence of the journal Administrative Science Quarterly, the systems perspective came increasingly to dominate organization analysis. The perspective solved some problems inherent to the typological approaches. Systems approaches, modeled on the work of Talcott Parsons, promised a general approach to any organization conceived as a system of inputs, transformation processes, and outputs. General systems theory was scientifically influential, and organizations became a specialized domain of its analysis.

Emerging out of systems theory in the 1960s was the approach known as contingency theory. Organizations were still seen as systems, but organizations had to deal with contingencies that shaped their structure, such as their size, the key variable of the Aston School, led by Derek Pugh and David Hickson; technology, which was what Joan Woodward focused on; and environment, the variable that Tom Burns and George M. Stalker highlighted in 1962. Later, the idea of there being a national culture in which organizations were embedded was developed by Geert Hofstede in 1980 into a general theory of national culture as a contingency. While the earlier generation of researchers used case studies, contingency research was characterized by survey methods and larger samples, seeking to operationalize factors identified in the earlier literature, such as Weber's 15 dimensions of bureaucracy.

Population ecology was introduced by Michael T. Hannan and John Freeman in 1977, an approach that was influenced by general ecological theory, concentrating on populations of organizations and changes at the population level, typically dealing with big changes over large data sets, across significant periods of time, often using data sets that were not generated by the researchers themselves but that were already available or readily constructed. The approach was based more on the statistical testing of relations between constructs than upon intimate research knowledge. It was a sociological approach premised on biological models but one whose peak of influence seems to have passed.

From the 1970s onward, a number of new currents emerged. First, the influence of Harry Braverman's labor process approach, which he introduced in 1974, spawned a renewed fascination with case studies, such as the 1979 work of Michael Burawoy, and a series of multi-author monographs that represented the work of the labor process conference, held annually from 1983 onward, were produced. The labor process movement split into critical management studies (CMS) in the 1990s. It developed a broader, but usually oppositional and unconventional, perspective on organizations. Second, from the early 1980s onward, there was a renewed interest in Weberian theory, as a result of two related trends. One was the reemergence of institutional theory, after the seminal publication of Paul DiMaggio and Walter Powell's paper on the “iron cage”; the other was the popular success of George Ritzer's Weberian-inspired analysis of organizational rationalization as The McDonaldization of Society. There are some signs of synergies emerging between such approaches and CMS. More recently, since the 1990s, the influence of Foucauldian-inspired genealogical analysis has begun to make an impact on the field, perhaps best represented in the volume edited by Alan[Page 599] McKinley and Ken Starkey in 1997. Closely related, but hotly contested, are more postmodern approaches, debates about which were collected by Ed Locke in 2003.

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