Organization Studies and Hospitality Management

Introduction

In simple terms, organization studies is the academic study of organizations using social scientific methods. But, as the editors of the Sage Handbook on Organization Studies argue, the study of organizations is no longer confined to a relatively restricted range of approaches and processes but ‘has opened up in ways that might once have seemed unimaginable’ (Clegg, Hardy and Nord, 1996: xxi). Even Morgan's (1986) influential book on the different metaphors that various writers use to understand organizational processes hardly encompasses the richness of the approaches now used. I am focusing here on a sub-set of broader organization studies: the attempt specifically to understand hospitality organizations. But hospitality organization studies does not have a simple relationship ...