Formal Organizations or Industrial Sociology: Towards a Social Action Analysis of Organizations

The emergence, in the past two decades, of a separate discipline of `Formal Organizations' has been associated with the general acceptance of a Durkheimian view of organizations as `natural systems' integrated by a value consensus and a de-emphasis on the processes through which they are related to the social structure. The similarities, in these respects, between Human Relations and Structural-Functionalism are suggested and an alternative Social Action model is outlined. It is suggested that this latter perspective on organizational behaviour fits most easily into the older discipline of `Industrial Sociology'.