A situation of real failure

In times of an acute moral and material crisis such as the one we are witnessing today, it is a very sobering experience to come across work dating from years ago where the tendencies which eventually led to the present crisis had been clearly identified. One such sobering read is the autumn 2002 issue of Administrative Science Quarterly. A large section of that issue was dedicated to a discussion on the role of the organization in society, and the function of teaching and research in this. An article by Hinings and Greenwood (2002) first gives a historical overview of the times when there was no Organization Theory but a budding discipline called Sociology of Organizations. Soon, however, the sociological focus was lost, giving way to more pragmatic, managerial perspectives. The Sociology of Organizations, a discipline dedicated to the understanding of a system, moved towards what in a rather unfortunate choice of terminology is today frequently called ‘Management Science’, often dedicated to pragmatic questions of ‘usefulness’. The viability of this trend was questioned by the authors contributing to the issue: ‘In particular, the question of consequences, i.e., efficient and effective for whom?, is usually left unasked’ (Hinings and Greenwood 2002: 413).