The Contribution of Organisation Theory

Abstract

The central concerns of organisation theorists have changed greatly over the past twenty years, as the emphasis has shifted from a concern with structures, to strategic and cultural questions. Until the late 1960s and early 1970s the main area of study was organisational structure and process, typically involving such issues as the relationship between size and bureaucracy, or between technology and control. In the 1970s Marxist and phenomenological influences led to a concern with issues of power, interests and values. In the work of Clegg and others, organisations came to be seen as instruments of domination and control, which reflected and recreated wider aspects of the social structure. In the 1980s the concern for cultural questions in the organisation became dominant, while losing the more radical edge that similar issues had raised in the 1970s, and post-modernists and post-Fordists replaced Marxists. To culture was added questioning of the strategies that organisations were adopting, as the pace of social and economic change became ever greater.