Continuity and change in theories of organizational action - 40th Anniversary Issue

Administrative Science Quarterly,  June, 1996  by James G. March

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The writing of history is a conceit of survivors. Since survival is temporary, history is ephemeral; but we exercise our fleeting right to authoritative voice. So, I will tell a story. It is not the only such story that could be told in the world of organization studies, but it happens to be one I know. It is embedded in the context of a particular time, the forty years since 1956, and of a particular set of experiences. It has a moral, not perhaps a very profound moral, but a comfortably uncomplicated one. And it is romantic enough for the present occasion.

A LITTLE CONTEXT: 1956-1996

The intellectual foundations for the systematic study of organizations are scattered over much of the early twentieth century, especially the years between the two world wars, but the period that began shortly after the end of the Second World War propelled the field into importance. The early part of that period was a time of growth and innocent excitement, when scholars built their pretenses from optimistic hopes for scholarship and found little time for angst. The Administrative Science Quarterly was a creation of those times. Its survival for forty years is testimony to an ability to sustain that innocence while paying the bills.

Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose

In an introduction to the Handbook of Organizations (March, 1965), I attempted a brief description of the state of studies of organizations at the start of the 1960s, for all practical purposes at the time the ASQ began. The introduction made three general points: First, the study of organizations honors prior research through appropriate citations, but there is no clearly defined family tree. Citations show rather little genealogical structure. There is only a modest sharing of "classics," the "classics" draw from a diffuse collection of general social science sources, and the multiple-generation citation lineage of current work is obscure. Second, although students of organizations have increasingly differentiated themselves into a distinct semidiscipline with its own professional associations, journals, academic departments, and traditions, the field remains one that depends heavily on more established disciplines for ideas, personnel, and legitimation. And third, the growth of the study of organizations has paralleled the growth of organizational and managerial techniques and has been entwined with the teaching of management in universities and consultancies, but a clear link between research and teaching is elusive. Many well-known organizational techniques have little or no research basis; many research findings have little or no impact on organizational techniques.

Although I think that each of these propositions would require some shading and qualification, the same conclusions could easily be repeated in 1996. In that sense at least, nothing has changed very dramatically in forty years. Yet to describe organization studies in terms of such stabilities would be quite misleading. The world of organization studies has been altered in ways that are striking. Many of these changes are either due directly to, or have been shaped significantly by, sheer growth in the size of the enterprise. Proliferation of people, papers, pulpits, and predictions has resulted in an intellectual world that is more luxurious, more crowded, more differentiated, and more competitive. Any one of several subfields can sustain academic programs, conferences, and reviews of current knowledge on scales that would not have been possible 40 years ago, even in the field as a whole.

Along the way, the content of the field has changed conspicuously: Any later handbook of organizational research would have to have a different table of contents.(1) Some of the chapters in the old handbook still are marvelous "reads" (e.g., Starbuck on organizational growth and development, Stinchcombe on social structure and organizations, Weick on laboratory experimentation), but most of them would require extensive reworking and additions to reflect changes in research findings, conceptions, and language.

Some topics that were included then would not warrant as much attention now, but the more conspicuous changes are in the number of substantial new domains that have pushed their way into our consciousness.(2) Since the early 1960s, the sociological, economic, and political science versions of institutional perspectives on organizations have been rediscovered and elaborated. Transaction cost economics has similarly become obviously significant. The links between hierarchical organizations and markets and between hierarchies and other forms of networks, as well as the role of such networks in understanding organized human behavior, have all become important. A variety of approaches that emphasize humanistic, interpretive, and ethnographic visions of organizational research have become common. Studies of organizational change and learning have been extended into studies of the evolution of populations of organizations, organizational forms, and organizational rules, and into the dynamics of ecologies of mutual learning. The simple observation that organizations involve conflicts of interest has become the basis for extensive applications of game theory and related concepts to questions of information exchange, bargaining, contracts, and problems of agency. Issues of gender, ethnicity, and culture have attracted students of organizations with a wide variety of methodological styles, as they have scholars throughout the social sciences.