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.

Hyper-Organization: Global Organizational Expansion

Politics & Social Sciences

Meyer, John W.

Bromley, Patricia

Sociology

Oxford University Press

Susan Aitken returns home looking forward to the Easter weekend to find her husband, Sir Gerald Aitken, with a bullet in his head. What appears to be a suicide is much more sinister. Four teenage friends, all now mature women, become reunited at his funeral. Thirty years have passed and none of them realise that their lives have been intertwined. The months following the funeral open up a catalogue of lies and as Susan struggles to cope with the consequences, police investigate further and find links to blackmail, homosexuality and child abuse amongst all of them. The family and trusted friends are in total disbelief, but one of them is Gerald's killer. How do these happenings, spanning over four decades, lead to a massive police cover-up and who is behind it all?

Four Decades of Lies, Deceit, Corruption and Murder

Literature & Fiction

Genre Fiction

Austin Macauley Publishing

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Books by Bromley, Patricia