Logics Of Organization Theory

Building theories of organizations is challenging: theories are partial and "folk" categories are fuzzy. The commonly used tools--first-order logic and its foundational set theory--are ill-suited for handling these complications. Here, three leading authorities rethink organization theory. Logics of Organization Theory sets forth and applies a new language for theory building based on a nonmonotonic logic and fuzzy set theory. In doing so, not only does it mark a major advance in organizational theory, but it also draws lessons for theory building elsewhere in the social sciences. Organizational research typically analyzes organizations in categories such as "bank," "hospital," or "university." These categories have been treated as crisp analytical constructs designed by researchers. But sociologists increasingly view categories as constructed by audiences. This book builds on cognitive psychology and anthropology to develop an audience-based theory of organizational categories. It applies this framework and the new language of theory building to organizational ecology. It reconstructs and integrates four central theory fragments, and in so doing reveals unexpected connections and new insights.

Innovative and challenging. The Logic of Organizations explores organizational theory by focusing on the genesis of organizations and the conditions for their continued existence. Abrahamsson draws upon the classic theories of Marx, Weber, and Michels, as well as more contemporary developments in organizational theory, to present his unique theory - that organizations are deliberately designed social structures established by individuals, groups, or classes in order to implement specific goals. To effectively support his argument, the author concentrates on three critical areas of organizations: how to make organizations more efficient and more representative of the interests and objectives of their founders, and how to relieve the problems of bureaucracy, namely administrative groups working toward their own goals and objectives rather than those of the organization.

Logic and the Organization of Information closely examines the historical and contemporary methodologies used to catalogue information objects—books, ebooks, journals, articles, web pages, images, emails, podcasts and more—in the digital era. This book provides an in-depth technical background for digital librarianship, and covers a broad range of theoretical and practical topics including: classification theory, topic annotation, automatic clustering, generalized synonymy and concept indexing, distributed libraries, semantic web ontologies and Simple Knowledge Organization System (SKOS). It also analyzes the challenges facing today’s information architects, and outlines a series of techniques for overcoming them. Logic and the Organization of Information is intended for practitioners and professionals working at a design level as a reference book for digital librarianship. Advanced-level students, researchers and academics studying information science, library science, digital libraries and computer science will also find this book invaluable.

Institutional logics, the underlying governing principles of societal sectors, strongly influence organizational decision making. Any shift in institutional logics results in a similar shift in attention to alternative problems and solutions and in new determinants for executive decisions. Examining changes in institutional logics in higher-education publishing, this book links cultural analysis with organizational decision making to develop a theory of attention and explain how executives concentrate on certain market characteristics to the exclusion of others. Analyzing both qualitative and quantitative data from the 1950s to the 1990s, the author shows how higher education publishing moved from a culture of independent domestic publishers focused on creating markets for books based on personal, relational networks to a culture of international conglomerates that create markets from corporate hierarchies. This book offers broader lessons beyond publishing--its theory is applicable to explaining institutional changes in organizational leadership, strategy, and structure occurring in all professional services industries.

How do institutions influence and shape cognition and action in individuals and organizations, and how are they in turn shaped by them? Various social science disciplines have offered a range of theories and perspectives to provide answers to this question. Within organization studies in recent years, several scholars have developed the institutional logics perspective. An institutional logic is the set of material practices and symbolic systems including assumptions, values, and beliefs by which individuals and organizations provide meaning to their daily activity, organize time and space, and reproduce their lives and experiences. This approach affords significant insights, methodologies, and research tools, to analyze the multiple combinations of factors that may determine cognition, behaviour, and rationalities. In tracing the development of the institutional logics perspective from earlier institutional theory, the book analyzes seminal research, illustrating how and why influential works on institutional theory motivated a distinct new approach to scholarship on institutional logics. The book shows how the institutional logics perspective transforms institutional theory. It presents novel theory, further elaborates the institutional logics perspective, and forges new linkages to key literatures on practice, identity, and social and cognitive psychology. It develops the microfoundations of institutional logics and institutional entrepreneurship, proposing a set of mechanisms that go beyond meta-theory, integrating this work with macro theory on institutional logics into a cross-levels model of cultural heterogeneity. By incorporating current psychological understanding of human behaviour and linking it to sociological perspectives, it aims to provide an encompassing framework for institutional analysis, and to be an essential and accessible reference for scholars and advanced students of organizational behaviour, organization and management theory, business strategy, and cultural sociology.

This book contains Open Access chapters This volume integrates and redirects research on organizational hybridity, the mixing of logics, forms, and identities that do not conventionally go together. It sets a foundation for continued analytical rigor and real-world relevance.