Disappearing ‘Formal Organization’: How Organization Theories Dissolved Their ‘Core Object’, and What Follows from This

Debates about the (‘higher’) purpose and usefulness of Organization Theory (OT) have periodically shadowed the field since its inception. In recent years, disquiet has mounted once again, not least concerning what has been variously described as the overly theoretical and often a-or anti-organizational state of OT, and its abstraction and lack of practical purchase in the light of pressing economic, social and political concerns that are often deemed profoundly organizational in nature.

At the same time as OT itself has been undergoing a process of intense self-examination and self-criticism, the world it ostensibly examines, describes, and seeks to intervene in – the world of actually existing organization and organizations – has itself been subject to considerable substantive and normative problematization. Aside the organizational scandals and breakdowns at the beginning of the present millennium, and, more recently those attaching to and indeed constitutive of the Global Financial Crisis (GFC), most of the pressing matters of concern dominating public debate in a range of areas both raise and involve at their core fundamental practical and normative matters of formal organization. And yet, it is precisely the idea of ‘formal organization’ that seems increasingly defunct both in the practical world of management and organization, where substantive developments are deemed to presage an epochal shift to an era of ‘organizing without organizations’, and the arrival of ‘a post-organizational society’, and concurrently in OT itself, where we witness the emergence of a wide variety of theoretical vocabularies often widely at variance one with another, and yet nonetheless united by a shared (negative) capability, that of ‘disappearing’ the field’s core object: formal organization . Consequently, while the term ‘organization’ continues to be used, it is stripped of any substantive meaning; . Increasingly, it would appear, formal organization is a problem, if not downright dysfunctional.