This book offers an institutional explanation for the hyper-expansion of formal organization in the contemporary era—in numbers, internal complexity, social domains, and national contexts. Much expansion is hard to justify in terms of technical production or political power: it lies in areas such as protecting the environment, promoting marginalized groups, or behaving with transparency. It is supported by cultural rationalization—scientism, rights, and empowerment discourses—and an explosion of education. These cultural changes are transmitted through legal, accounting, and professionalizatio ... More

This book offers an institutional explanation for the hyper-expansion of formal organization in the contemporary era—in numbers, internal complexity, social domains, and national contexts. Much expansion is hard to justify in terms of technical production or political power: it lies in areas such as protecting the environment, promoting marginalized groups, or behaving with transparency. It is supported by cultural rationalization—scientism, rights, and empowerment discourses—and an explosion of education. These cultural changes are transmitted through legal, accounting, and professionalization principles, driving the creation of new organizations and the elaboration of existing ones. The resulting organizations are constructed to be proper social actors as much as functionally effective entities. They are painted as autonomous and integrated but depend heavily on external definitions to sustain this depiction. So expansion creates organizations that are, whatever their actual effectiveness, structurally arational. The book advances analyses of formal organization in three main ways, reflecting neo-institutional theory. First, it gives an account of the expansive rise of “organization” rooted in rapid worldwide cultural rationalization. Second, it explains the construction of contemporary organizations as purposive actors, rather than passive bureaucracies or loose associations. Third, it shows how the expanded actorhood of the contemporary organization, and the associated interpenetration with the environment, dialectically generates structures far removed from instrumental rationality.