Hyper-Organization: Global Organizational Expansion

✍ Scribed by Patricia Bromley, John W. Meyer

• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Year: 2016
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 248
• Edition: Illustrated
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

Hyper-Organization offers an institutional explanation for the expansion of formal organization in the contemporary era-in numbers, internal complexity, social domains, and national contexts. Much expansion is hard to justify in terms of technical production or political power, it lies in areas such as protecting the environment, promoting marginalized groups, or behaving with transparency.

The authors argue that expansion is supported by widespread cultural rationalization characterized by scientism, rights and empowerment discourses, and an explosion of education. These cultural changes are transmitted through legal, accounting, and professionalization principles, driving the creation of new organizations and the elaboration of existing ones. The resulting organizations are constructed to be proper social actors, as much as functionally effective entities. They are painted as autonomous and integrated but depend heavily on external definitions to sustain this depiction. So expansion creates organizations that are, whatever their actual effectiveness, structurally arational.

This book advances theories of social organization in three main ways. First, by giving an account of the expansive rise of 'organization' rooted in rapid worldwide cultural rationalization. Second, explaining the construction of contemporary organizations as purposive actors, rather than passive bureaucracies or loose associations. Third, showing how the expanded actorhood of the contemporary organization, and the associated interpenetration with the environment, dialectically generate structures far removed from instrumental rationality.

✦ Table of Contents

Cover
Hyper-Organization: Global Organizational Expansion
Copyright
PREFACE
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
TABLE OF CONTENTS
LIST OF FIGURES
LIST OF TABLES
LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS
1: Organization and hyper-organization
Arguments
Precursors to contemporary organization
BUREAUCRACY
ASSOCIATION
Organizational expansion
Existing theories
Institutional theory
Overview of the book
NOTES
Part 1: Organization: Worldwide Expansion and Cultural Roots
2: Worldwide expansion
International expansion
National growth
Intra-organizational elaboration
The special case of public and state organizations
Chapter summary
NOTES
3: Cultural foundations: science, empowerment, education
Cultural globalization following World War II
Expansion of science
Expansion of individual capacities, rights and responsibilities
Education as obligation and global right
An illustration: organizing childhood
Chapter summary
NOTES
4: Transmitting culture: law, accounting, professionalism
Expanding uncertainties
Rationalized rules: law and accounting
Professionalism
An illustration: the fair trade industry
Chapter summary
NOTES
Part 2: The Dimensions of Organizational Actorhood: Non-Rational Integration
5: Organizations as actors
Individuals as actors
Organizations as actors
Organizational actors as responsible citizens of global society
Dimensions of organizational actorhood
Chapter summary
NOTES
6: Dialectics: non-rational integration
Inconsistent or incomparable rationalities
Internalized interdependence
Resolutions
Alternative accounts of intra-organizational inconsistency
An illustration: presentation of self in annual reports
Chapter summary
NOTES
7: Conclusions
Overview
Normative issues
Professionals and management
Implications for world society
Reflections on future developments
NOTES
LIST OF SOURCES
INDEX