You are here

Sociology of Organizations
Share
Share

Sociology of Organizations
Structures and Relationships

Edited by:

Other Titles in:
Sociology of Organizations

August 2011 | 768 pages | SAGE Publications, Inc
A companion website is available for this text

The sociological study of organizations encompasses both planned and formal organizations as well as spontaneous and informal ones. Sociologists examine organizations with attention to structure and objectives, interactions among members and among organizations, the relationship between the organization and its environment and the social significance or social meaning of the organization. The ways of defining and examining organizations vary depending on the theoretical emphasis.

This book focuses on three things:

• providing a wide and historically accurate portrait of the diversity of sociological theories and their application to organizational studies

• updating selections that reflect a variety of ways that new technology affects methods of organizing and types of organizations

• including readings that examine a range of both formal and informal structures, and both deliberate and impromptu interactions.

Lively and provocative, this textbook is theoretically rigorous, disciplinarily informed and representative of heterogeneity within organizational studies.

 
Introduction
 
PART I. THE RELATIONAL ORGANIZATIONAL FORM
Mary Parker Follett
Business as an Integrative Unity
Tom Burns and G.M. Stalker
Mechanistic and Organic Systems of Management
William G. Ouchi
Markets, Bureaucracies and Clans
Walter Powell
Neither Market Nor Hierarchy: Network Forms of Organization
Carrie Leana and Harry Van Buren
Organizational Social Capital and Employment Practices
Carol Heimer
Doing Your Job and Helping Your Friends: Universalistic Norms About Obligations to Particular Others
Edward J. Lawler, Shane R. Thye and Jeongkoo Yoon
Social Exchange and Micro Social Order
 
Part II. THE BUREAUCRATIC ORGANIZATIONAL FORM
Mary Parker Follett
Bureaucracy
Mary Parker Follett
Coordination
Henry Landsberger
The Horizontal Dimension in Bureaucracy
Michael Piore
The Social Embeddedness of Labor Markets and Cognitive Processes
Charles Heckscher
Defining the Post-Bureaucratic Type
Paul Adler and Brian Borys
Two Types of Bureaucracy: Enabling and Coercive
Karen Ashcraft
Organized Dissonance: Feminist Bureaucracy as Hybrid Form
 
PART III. COORDINATION OF WORK
Mary Parker Follett
The Process of Control
James March and Herbert Simon
Organizations
Jay Galbraith
Organization Design: An Information Processing View
Linda Argote
Input Uncertainty and Organizational Coordination in Hospital Emergency Units
Karl Weick and Karlene Roberts
Collective Mind in Organizations: Heedful Interrelating on Flight Decks
Samer Faraj and Yin Xiao
Coordination in Fast Response Organizations
Jody Hoffer Gittell, Rob Seidner and Julian Wimbush
A Relational Model of How High-Performance Work Systems Work
 
PART IV. AUTONOMY AND CONTROL
Frederick Winslow Taylor
Fundamentals of Scientific Management
Mary Parker Follett
The Basis of Authority
Douglas McGregor
Theory Y: The Integration of Individual and Organizational Goals
Masahiko Aoki
Toward an Economic Model of the Japanese Firm
Rose Batt
Work Organization, Technology and Performance in Customer Service and Sales
Jean Lipman-Blumen
Connective Leadership: Female Leadership Styles in the 21st Century Workplace
Patrick Sweeney, Vaida Thompson and Hart Blanton
Trust and Influence in Combat: An Interdependence Model
 
PART V. ORGANIZATIONAL CULTURE
Edgar A. Schein
What is Culture?
Joanne Martin and Peter Frost
The Organizational Culture Wars: A Struggle for Intellectual Dominance
Mark Banks
Moral Economy and Cultural Work
Vicky M. Wilkins and Brian N. Williams
Representing Blue: Representative Bureaucracy and Racial Profiling in the Latino Community
Mary Godwyn
This Place Makes Me Proud to be a Woman’: Theoretical Explanation for Success in Entrepreneurship Education for Low-Income Women
Karl E. Weick and Kathleen M. Sutcliffe
Hospitals as Cultures of Entrapment: Re-Analysis of the Bristol Royal Infirmary
Christine H. Roch, David W. Pitts and Ignaciao Navarro
Representative Bureaucracy and Policy Tools: Ethnicity, Student Discipline and Representation in Public Schools
 
PART VI. ORGANIZATIONAL CONFLICT
Karl Marx
Capital: A Critique of Political Economy
Mary Parker Follett
Constructive Conflict
Louis Pondy
Organizational Conflict; Concepts and Models
W. Peter Archibald
Marx, Globalization and Alienation: Received and Underappreciated Wisdoms
Brenda Johnson
Racial Inequality in the Workplace: How Critical Management Studies Can Inform Current Approaches
John O. Ogbor
Mythicizing and Reification in Entrepreneurial Discourse: Ideology-Critique of Entrepreneurial Studies
 
PART VII. DIVERSITY WITHIN ORGANIZATIONS
Elin Kvande and Bente Rasmussen
Women’s Careers in Static and Dynamic Organizations
Mark Maier
We Have to Make a MANagement Decision: Challenger and the Dysfunctions of Corporate Masculinity
Kristen Schilt
Just One of the Guys: How TransMen Make Gender Visible at Work
Stella Nkomo
The Emperor has no Clothes: Rewriting ‘Race in Organizations
Anshuman Prasad
The Colonizing Consciousness and Representations of the Other: A Postcolonial Critique of the Discourse of Oil
Kirstin H. Griffin and Michelle R. Hebl
The Disclosure Dilemma for Gay Men and Lesbians: ‘Coming Out’ at Work
Dennis Gilbride, Robert Stensrud, David Vandergoot and Kristie Golden
Identification of Work Environments and Employers Open to Hiring and Accommodating People with Disabilities
 
PART VIII. ORGANIZATIONAL LEARNING AND CHANGE
Chris Argyris
Single-Loop and Double-Loop Models in Research on Organizational Decision-Making
Paul DiMaggio and Walter Powell
The Iron Cage Revisited: Institutional Isomorphism and Collective Rationality in Organization Fields
Barbara Levitt and James March
Organizational Learning
Amy Edmondson
The Local and Variegated Nature of Learning in Organizations: A Group-Level Perspective
Joyce K. Fletcher, Lotte Bailyn and Stacy Blake Beard
Practical Pushing: Creating Discursive Space in Organizational Narratives
Katherine Kellogg
Operating Room: Relational Spaces and Micro-institutional Changes in Surgery
 
PART IX. NEW TECHNOLOGY, SOCIAL MEDIA AND EMERGING COMMUNITIES
Sherry Turkle
Constructions and Reconstructions of Self in Virtual Reality: Playing in the MUDs
Jonathan Bach and David Stark
Link, Search, Interact: The Co-Evolution of NGOs and Interactive Technology
Joanna C. Dunlap and Patrick R. Lowenthal
Tweeting the Night Away: Using Twitter to Enhance Social Presence
Albert Jacob Meijer
E-mail in Government: Not Post-Bureaucratic but Late Bureaucratic Organizations
James Farrer and Jeff Gavin
On-line Dating in Japan: A Test of Social Information Processing Theory
Joe Phua
Online Organization of the LGBT Community in Singapore

"Sociology of Organizations: Structures and Relationships is a timely and unique book. It is timely given the growing interest in sociology in the field of management and organization studies -- sparked not only by the continued success of sociologically inspired schools of thought (e.g., contingency theory and new institutionalism) but also by the rapid growth of critical management studies. The book is unique in the way it builds its theoretical/historical account through a relational rather than a formal bureaucratic approach. To me this is, quite simply, cutting edge. The centering of Mary Parker Follett in the account is inspired. Overall the book challenges current wisdom about the history of management thought and its bureaucratic roots – and this is a good thing!"

Albert J. Mills
Saint Mary's University

"Sociology of Organizations is a far-reaching collection of classics and contemporary studies, insightfully organized around competing frameworks that spring to life in the capable hands of Professors Godwyn and Gittell. More comprehensive than the usual textbook, it not only builds on the past but also sheds light on some of the most pressing problems facing organizations today: new media, diversity and inclusion, and workforce engagement. This valuable book should reach a wide audience."

Rosabeth Moss Kanter
Harvard Business School professor and best-selling author of Men and Women of the Corporation, Confidence, and SuperCorp

"What a great collection! By adding Follett to the classics and including contemporary organizational issues like diversity and new technology, Godwyn and Gittell provide for students and professionals a nuanced and compelling insight into organizational life. In addition, their general and section introductions wonderfully interweave a substantive and theoretical web across all these topics. Sociology of Organizations is an important book that transcends simplistic understandings of bureaucracy and individualistic rational theories of action. Its emphasis on a relational perspective highlights the role of people and their interactions in understanding organizations. Altogether a significant new look at key issues in modern society."

 

Lotte Bailyn
Professor of Management, MIT Sloan School of Management, and author of Breaking the Mold: Redesigning Work for Productive and Satisfying Lives.

Sociology of Organizations: Structures and Relationships masterfully weaves together classic and current texts to bring to life the most pressing modern day issues that organizations face, from managing diversity within organizations to how the latest technologies, such as social media, are reshaping the boundaries of organizations. This extremely well thought out and unique book includes penetrating and immensely readable syntheses throughout, clarifying distinct theoretical lenses and creating a rich understanding of organizations. By bringing to the fore the relational organizational form, which traces back to Mary Parker Follett, this book provides a compelling counterpoint to purely bureaucratic analyses and thereby provides a way to understand the direction of the most innovative and cutting edge contemporary organizations. This highly engaging and original book is a must read for anyone interested in understanding modern organizations.”

Ofer Sharone
Assistant Professor of Management, MIT Sloan School of Management

"The Sociology of Organizations by Mary Godwyn and Jody Gittell is an absolute must read for social work educators and their students because their highly integrated and stimulating text is built on the writings and teachings of one of social work's most significant and original thinkers: Mary Parker Follett."

Richard Boettcher, PhD, Professor Emeritus
The Ohio State University

This text contains excellent readings and is very well organized. Better text for upper level undergrads, and not freshmen or sophomores.

Professor Sandra Nelson
Behavioral Social Sciences Div, Univ Of Houston-Clear Lake
April 15, 2014

I think this book is better for graduate students, but still I use some parts of it as additional readings.

Dr Erkan Erdemir
Management , Istanbul Sehir University
September 11, 2013

Good book to introduce and develop the theme.
Book serves as a basis, in conjunction with some specific texts.
It would be essential if the book was translated into Portuguese language.
Good for Erasmus students.
very good

Professor Antonio Abrantes
CENTRO DE ESTUDOS EM SOCIOLOGIA DA UNIVERSIDADE NOVA DE LISBOA, CESNOVA
August 28, 2013

Liked the content of the book but it did not fit my current goals for the upcoming class in the fall.

Dr Lawrence Audler
Business Administration , Our Lady of Holy Cross College
June 2, 2012

Great collection of relevant classic and current readings!

Professor Gary Mayfield
Sociology Social Work Dept, Mississippi College
October 19, 2011

For instructors

Select a Purchasing Option


Paperback
ISBN: 9781412991964
£152.00