Organizing Organizations

Contemporary society is densely organized. There is an enormous number of organizations, some of them extremely rich and powerful. Furthermore, the powerful organizations tend to interact in organized ways. This book augments the many important Scandinavian contributions to our understanding of the organizational mosaic of society. It focuses on the interaction among organizations, how it is structured and how it is sustained or transformed. In different ways the 14 chapters demonstrate that the many complex forms of cooperation and competition among organizations cannot be captured solely by models such as hierarchies and markets. Likewise it is shown that organizational change cannot merely be understood as resulting from rational design or environmental dictates. This book is aimed at students of organizations as well as all others interested in how organizations shape our everyday life. Nils Brunsson is Professor of Management at the Stockholm School of Economics and Chairman of Stockholm Center for Organizational Research (SCORE). Johan P. Olsen is Director of the Norwegian Research Council's ARENA programme (Advanced Research on the Europeanisation of the NationState) and Adjunct Professor of Political Science at the University of Oslo.