Modern Organizations

Offering a critical overview of key issues in our understanding of organizations, this book explores current approaches to organization studies, and relates to the concepts of modernity and postmodernity to the realities of organizational structure and context. In surveying alternative perspectives on organizations in terms of ideal types, systems, contingencies, ecologies, cultures, markets and efficiency, Stewart Clegg demonstrates that no single approach is adequate to deal with the real-world variety of organizations that exist and work. Drawing upon unusual and revealing examples - the production of French bread, the Italian fashion industry and "post-Confucian" Asian enterprises - he argues that their success cannot be reduced to "culture", but must incorporate a fuller understanding of the ways in which organizations are constructed and reproduced. This analysis is carried through in a detailed discussion of the debate over why Japanese organizations are so successful.