Resurrecting organization by going beyond organizations

Abstract

This essay is motivated by two related observations about the field of organization studies. First, organization studies researchers have traditionally been good at importing ideas from other areas of research but poor at exporting their own ideas to other fields. Second, even within the field of organization studies, interest in organizations has decreased over the past decades as organization scholars have turned away from organizations to address such other phenomena as institutions or networks. Both developments are undermining the significance of organization studies as a distinctive field of research, the insights of which are necessary for understanding modern society. In this essay, we elaborate on recent suggestions by distinctively European scholars for strengthening concern for the particularities of organization in social theorizing. The first suggestion is to move decisions back to the core of the field. The second suggestion is to extend the notion of organization beyond organizations. We illustrate these two moves with examples from the literature and discuss implications for the future of organization studies.