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The Role of the Classics

Organizations have deep and pervasive effects on our lives at work and beyond. The previous century witnessed a massive transformation of advanced capitalist societies: whereas families and neighborhoods once constituted the basis of society, now large organizations play a pivotal role in every sphere (Perrow 1991). And the most recent decades have witnessed further, equally profound and disconcerting changes in this landscape. The aim of the present volume is to help scholars in organization studies better understand these changes. In particular, we highlight the enduring value of some of the older work in this field. The field of organization studies has become well established in both sociology departments and professional schools, most notably in business schools. However, in the course of this institutionalization, the field has progressively lost contact with its founding writers. To some, this represents a welcome sign of maturation: they might quote Alfred North Whitehead: 'A science which hesitates to forget its founders is lost' (Whitehead 1916 413). Whitehead, however, was writing about the natural sciences, and the premise of this volume is that the social sciences are in this specific respect quite different, because in our field founders continue to play a crucial role. We have thus reversed Whitehead's warning as the clarion call for this volume. Without minimizing the potential contribution of more recent scholarship nor the value of earlier scholarship that has been less celebrated, we believe that these classics present unusually rich resources for research today. Most notably, these writers all struggled to make sense of the momentous social changes of their times. In contrast, organization studies today focuses too little on the big issues of our own times and too much on the narrower concerns of academic peers. The classics, this volume argues, serve both as a source of specific insights and also as encouragement to lift and broaden our aspirations. Alongside some thematic chapters, this volume includes contributions on each of several classic authors. Each chapter addresses the author's ideas and his or her context, the impact of these ideas on the field of organization studies so far, and the potential future research these ideas might inspire. The goal is not reverential exegesis, but rather to examine how these classics can enrich and enliven organizational research—how they can help us make better sense of the social changes currently under way, and perhaps equip us to act more intelligently in our efforts …