The concept of organization

In recent years a good deal of the very best sociological work has been devoted to the study of organization. Although the term, organization, belongs to the category of expressions about which there is maintained an air of informed vagueness, certain special conventions exist that focus its use, with qualifications, on a delimited set of phenomena. In accordance with these conventions, the term applies correctly to stable associations of persons engaged in concerted activities directed to the attainment of specific objectives. It is thought to be a decisive characteristic of such organizations that they are deliberately instituted relative to these objectives. Because organizations, in this sense, are implementing and implemented programs of action that involve a substantial dose of comprehensive and rational planning, they are identified as instances of formal or rational organization in order to differentiate them from other forms.1 It has been one of the most abiding points of interest of modern organizational research to study how well the programmatically intended formal structures of organizations describe what is going on within them, and what unintended, unprogrammed, and thus informal structures tend to accompany them. How do sociologists go about distinguishing the facts of formal organization from the facts of informal organization? There seem to be two things that matter in the ways this distinction is drawn. There is, in the first place, a certain scholarly tradition in which the distinction is rooted. It dates back to Pareto’s definition of rationality, Tonnies’ typology, Cooley’s concept of primary-group, and – tracing through the seminal achievement of the Hawthorn studies – the tradition is very much alive today. Being steeped in this line of scholarship allows a sociologist to claim his colleagues’ consent to the decisions he makes. In this way the distinction is a fact of life in sociological inquiry, and perceiving it correctly is a trademark of