I do not review books but if I do it is because I have had my arm twisted, because I want to own the book, or because I think it will do me good to read it. In this case it was the last reason. I am delighted to say that I made a good choice. For scholars, and intending scholars, this book discusses all the major issues that face those with an academic interest in understanding what organizations are like, and what makes them the way they are. The standard of scholarship is uniformly high. The editors and their co-authors have written over half a million words which take about 40 hours to read quickly, maybe 20 hours to skip read, and a lifetime to come to grips with. As we will see, I am not sure how many readers will ever come to terms with the ideas and arguments oered.
For many readers of JOB it may come as a shock to ®nd that words such as correlation, regression, factor analysis, and graph do not appear in the index, though I did come across a couple of correlations. The editors explain why they chose the title, Handbook of Organization Studies rather than organization theory or organization science: to embrace the many and varied approaches to the study of organizations' (p. xxiii). One of the things you will not get from the book, however, is much of an idea of actual studies of organizations, or what dierent researchers do when they study them. There is a chapter on Data in organizations' which brie¯y describes the main quantitative and qualitative approaches, and some of the chapters contain very useful tables which classify and summarize empirical studies: e.g. the chapters on Organizational Ecology by Joel Baum and Feminist Approaches by Marta Calas and Linda Smircich. For the most part the authors take-for-granted a reasonable knowledge of studies of organizations and the major methodological and epistemological positions that have guided them. This is not a book for the beginner, the practising manager or even MBA students, though there are some chapters which would be of great value to such students. I found the chapter on Organizational Economics by Jay Barney and William Hesterly most instructive and very clearly expressed. The description of action research by Colin Eden and Chris Huxham will also help managers, consultants and researchers in understanding this way of changing organizations and learning from the process of doing it.
Almost all the other chapters refer to empirical work fairly brie¯y and use it to illustrate the writers' commentaries on the theoretical positions they adopt, or the concepts they are elucidating. These are highly conceptual chapters laced with criticism, argument and debate. They achieve what the editors set them to achieve . . . `engagement rather than estrangement; of opening up rather than closing down; of complexity rather than simplicity; we thought of continuing, challenging conversations between people' (p. xxii). Conversations are dynamic and usually not too well structured, whereas books are much more linear in design.
This book is organized into three sections. The ®rst contains eight chapters which are supposed to be about organizations as empirical objects. As I have already suggested there is not much about this really. The chapters cover organization theorizing, contingency theory, ecology, economics, industrial and organizational psychology, institutional theory, critical theory and postmodernism, and feminist approaches. Most of these chapters are concerned with the diculties of understanding organizations as empirical objects from within the particular paradigm or framework which is under