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Robert Cooper: Beyond Organization

Apart from one short book on work design, Robert Cooper has exclusively written articles and book chapters. This early book (Cooper, 1974) and other works from the early 1970s (eg, Cooper, 1972; 1973) were part of a programme at the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations, London, whose object was to translate some of the theoretical ideas from sociotechnical systems thinking into practical language. Although interesting in its own right, it is Cooper’s later work, roughly starting with his 1976 essay ‘The Open Field’, which is of greater interest for the study of organization, primarily because it raises profound theoretical questions concerning the ontological underpinnings of organization. In this chapter I am concerned with these later works, in which Cooper turns away from the core concerns of the Tavistock programme to address more general philosophical and sociological questions concerning the nature of organization. From the mid-1970s until 1995, when he went to Keele University, Cooper worked in the Department of Behaviour in Organizations at Lancaster University. The ‘Lancaster group’, which in the late 1970s and early 1980s included Gibson Burrell and Gareth Morgan among others, questioned the status quo of organization theory by investigating its roots in sociology and philosophy. One of the key publications of these years is Burrell and Morgan’s Sociological Paradigms and Organizational Analysis, first published in 1979 (see Hancock and Tyler, in this volume). Cooper and Burrell’s introduction of postmodernism and poststructuralism to the study of organizations in the late 1980s (Cooper and Burrell, 1988; Burrell, 1988; 1994; Cooper, 1987; 1989b) was also strongly connected to the research performed by the Lancaster group. At Keele University, Cooper became the director of the interdisciplinary Centre for Social Theory and Technology, which was one of the largest groups of poststructuralists in the United Kingdom at that time. In his years at Keele Cooper further developed poststructuralist-inspired ideas (eg, 1998a; 2001a), in collaboration with the sociologist John Law among others. At the time of writing, Cooper is a visiting professor at Keele University. It would, however, be a mistake to limit a discussion of Cooper’s work to these ‘contributions’ to organization theory, since his treatment of organization