William H. Starbuck

This chapter argues that contemporary organization theory owes its existence to social and technological changes that occurred during the last half of the nineteenth century and first half of the twentieth century. These changes created both a basis for theorizing and an audience for theories about organizations. They stimulated an explosion in the numbers of large, formalized organizations, they made organizations relevant to many more people, and they made many more people interested in and capable of understanding theoretical propositions. This chapter reviews the developments that made organization theory possible and interesting.

The chapter follows a loosely chronological itinerary. It begins by taking note that theoretical writing about management began more than 4000 years ago, and that some organizations had the essential bureaucratic properties more than 3000 years ago. Next, the chapter surveys the educational, occupational, and technological changes that laid foundations for a new, organizational perspective. These changes escalated gradually through the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries, and then accelerated rapidly after 1850. Ensuing sections of the chapter examine changes in how people thought about organizations. The term "organization" evolved from a Roman medical term into a perceived property of societies, and then came to denote both a property of diverse social systems and medium-sized social systems that possess some degree of "organization". Organizational forms such as company and corporation emerged and gained status, not as mere labels for their collective members, but as legal persons distinct from their members.