Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

Organizations dominate our socioeconomic landscape. Their influence in our everyday lives has increased steadily over time, particularly in the most developed regions of the world during the twentieth century. Today, we are born, work, pray and die in organizations, and, along the way, many of us derive our identities from our associations with them. Organizations are the building blocks of our societies, and a basic vehicle for collective action. They produce the infrastructure of our societies and they will fundamentally shape our futures. Because they are such an integral part of modern societies, we readily turn to them, or construct them when a problem exceeds our own personal abilities or resources. The ubiquity of organizations prompted Nobel Laureate Herbert Simon (1991) to question the use of the term “market economy” to describe the structure of economic interactions, suggesting that “organizational economy” would be the more appropriate term. As Richard Scott (1992 , p. 3) points out, however, because organizations are so ubiquitous, they tend to “fade into the background, and we need to be reminded of their impact”. Still, most of us are of two minds about the organizations in our lives. While we wonder in amazement at their innovative achievements and bask in the recognition and status they confer on us, we damn them when they don't (or won't) work for us and worry ... log in or subscribe to read full text