CRITICAL-RETROSPECTIVE ESSAY The Relevance of Organizational Sociology

Organizational sociology is, by most standards, a fundamental part of the discipline— after all, figuring out how to collectively organize ourselves is a core problem of any society—but many have wondered if it’s a subfield on the brink of irrelevance. Blog posts and a recent ASA session have been dedicated to this question: what is the future of organizational sociology? There are numerous institutional reasons that organizational sociology has moved toward the periphery of the discipline, including the lack of sociology jobs in the subfield and the fact that many organizational sociologists, this author included, are no longer housed in sociology departments but in business schools. But if we put aside the questions of where and how organizational sociologists are trained and get jobs, at the heart of the problem is whether organizational sociology has anything new to say to sociologists who do not study organizations. If organizational sociologists are becoming irrelevant, it is because we are increasingly disconnected from the conversations most central to sociology as a discipline. It was not always this way. Starting in the mid-1970s and then peaking in the early 1980s, organizational sociology went through a period of vibrancy and creativity that led to the generation of several theoretical perspectives and research programs that left an indelible imprint on the discipline. This work was motivated by attempts to better understand the rapidly emerging and increasingly complex organizational world— populated by complex bureaucracies in the public sector and sophisticated legal fictions that dominated the marketplace. Ecologists wanted to explain how such organizational diversity came to be, and institutional scholars wanted to understand why all of these different types of organizations looked so similar to one another in important ways. The lifeblood of organizational sociology was an examination of the historical trends in organizing and an attempt to develop a more ‘‘social’’ explanation for these trends. Organizations were (and are) building blocks in contemporary society, and it was hard to find any major social problem, whether it be race or gender discrimination, economic inequality, or colonialism/globalization, that did not implicate organizations in some way. Organizations were sources of domination and exploitation, as well as potential mechanisms for addressing social Manufacturing Morals: The Values of Silence in Business School Education, by Michel Anteby. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013. 231 pp. $19.00 paper. ISBN: 9780226323510.