Blackwell Reference Online

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When I walked into Steve Berkowitz's office, in the winter of 1965, and saw the thick red book on his desk, I thought, “Why does he need a Handbook of Organizations ? Is he thinking of becoming a Boy Scout leader or something?” I was in my first year of graduate school at the University of Michigan and Al Reiss had yet to implant in my mind the notion of organizations as units of analysis. Months passed before my curiosity got the better of me and I opened the book. The book's sections – foundations, methodologies, theoretical-substantive areas, and applications – struck me as arbitrary, and I ignored Stinchcombe's brilliantly prescient chapter for another year or so. So much for my abilities as a clairvoyant. In his introduction, Jim March (1965: ix) made an astonishing claim: “we wish to summarize and report the present state of knowledge about human organizations”. In 1247 pages! He noted the growing amount of multi-disciplinary work on organizations and the emerging boundaries of organizations as an area of study. Self-effacing as always, Jim (1965: xiv) admitted, “I do not know where the study of organizations is going. The vitality, represented by the contributors to this Handbook , and by contemporary organizations, suggests that it is going somewhere”. And indeed, it has. The first issue of Administrative Science Quarterly , founded by James Thompson, had appeared in ... log in or subscribe to read full text