Reflections on a half-century of organizational sociology.

INTRODUCTION

I had the good fortune to grow up with the field of organizational sociology. When I was in graduate school during the 1950s, the field was just beginning to coalesce, and through the succeeding decades, I observed the broadening and deepening of theory and the widening flood of empirical studies. The overall history is, I believe, a positive one, beginning from a relatively barren landscape and developing into one of the most vigorous intellectual areas of the second half of the twentieth century. A challenge I confront throughout this essay is that the field of organizational sociology is hopelessly entangled with the larger area of organization studies. (For a recent history of this broader arena, see Augier et al. 2004). The influences go in both directions, and it is often not possible to distinguish developments in the more circumscribed area of organizational sociology from those in the wider field. Nevertheless, on this occasion and in this venue, I feel justified in emphasizing sociological contributions. In this chapter, I review some of the major developments and trends and then comment on current problems and future prospects.

CRAFTING A NEW FIELD OF STUDY

Field Foundations: Upon this Cleft Rock

Although it is possible to detect concepts and arguments relevant to the study of organizations throughout recorded history, the first systematic studies of organizational behavior occurred during the late decades of the nineteenth century. Spurred by changes in social structure associated with industrialization and bureaucratization, scholars from a number of disciplines began to pay closer attention to organizations and to their effects on social life. From the outset, however, the growing body of scholarship exhibited a polarity that has continued to the present.

The earliest approach, and one that is still active, featured an engineering orientation: How could work systems be designed to improve reliability and productivity? Engineers--most famously Taylor (1911)--proposed reforming work systems from the bottom up. They began with the standardization of nuts and bolts but gradually addressed the motions of workers, the sequencing of tasks, the packaging of tasks into jobs, and the arrangement of jobs into departments (Shenhav 1999). Industrial engineers and operations researchers continue to examine these issues. Managerial theorists, such as Fayol (1919/1949), proceeded from the top down, devising principles for subdividing and coordinating complex work systems. Much of this work was more prescriptive than empirical. Most early organization scholars passed over Weber's (1924/1968) magisterial history of the transformation of administrative systems to concentrate on his ideal-type models of rational-legal administrative systems that, taken out of context, served to reinforce the prevailing design-driven, formalized, prescriptive approach to organizations.

In reaction to these technocratic versions, social scientists entered the workplace during the 1930s and 1940s, talked to and observed participants, and began to challenge the conception of organization as dominated by rational, instrumental behavior. The research of social psychologists uncovered more complex individual motives, and studies by anthropologists and sociologists revealed unofficial, informal patterns of cooperation, shared norms, and conflicts between and among managers and workers (Roethlisberger & Dickson 1939, Arensberg 1951, Roy 1952, Dalton 1959).