Blackwell Reference Online

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An interdisciplinary body of knowledge with close ties to sociology, psychology, political science, public administration, management and economics. It originated mainly in the United States, France and Germany following World War I, largely in response to the need for practical and professional, as well as scholarly, knowledge for managers and administrators in both the public and private sector. The American contribution focused on problems of industrial organization and the growth of the administrative state after 1932, the French on industrial organization as a key problem area of the social and economic division of labour, following on the work of Emile Durkheim. In contrast, the German contribution concerned itself with the phenomenon of bureaucracy as the organizational embodiment of what Max Weber called ‘legal-rational’ authority in both the state and the large enterprise. These three strands of research, scholarship and professional advice to managers and administrators began to come together in a relatively coherent form only after World War II, and achieved full recognition as a discrete field of research, teaching and training separate from management in the mid-1950s. Since 1970, organizational theory has split into a number of different areas of study, including O rganizational behaviour and interpretive and radical organization theories. While organizational behaviour ... log in or subscribe to read full text