situated social action’ which are inXuenced not only by ‘explicitly organized and
formal disciplinary knowledges’ such as marketing, production, or HRM but also
by ‘practices embedded in the broad social fabric, such as gender, ethnic and other
culturally deWned social relations’ (Clegg and Hardy 1999 : 4 ). The fact, for example,
that HR managers occupy a diVerent class position from those occupied by many
of the workers with whom they deal inevitably inXuences manager–worker inter-
actions. And it has been observed that gender factors can signiWcantly color the
interactions between HR and other managers (Miller and Coghill 1964 ; Watson
1977 ; Gooch and Ledwith 1996 ).
6.3 The Emergence of
Organization Theory
.........................................................................................................................................................................................
Although bureaucracy has existed for a long time, the prevalence of bureaucratized
organizations across both public administrative and industrial spheres has been a
more recent phenomenon, coming about over the last two centuries of human
history. Over this period, various writers made contributions which might be seen
as attempts to theorize these organizational developments, most notably Adam
Smith ( 1776 ), Charles Babbage ( 1832 ), Andrew Ure ( 1835 ), Karl Marx ( 1867 ),
Frederick W. Taylor ( 1911 ), Max Weber ( 1922 ), Elton Mayo ( 1933 ), Chester Barnard
( 1938 ), and F. J Roethlisberger and W. J Dickson ( 1939 ). Although these writers
cannot all be directly identiWed with a growing social scientiWc way of thinking and
writing about organizations they are all people who have been taken up as sources
of ideas or as inspirations by social scientists over the last half-century or so—the
period in which the recognized academic subject of organization theory has existed
(sometimes as ‘organization studies,’ sometimes as ‘organization science’). But
there were other very signiWcant and previously neglected strands of organizational
thinking that went into the subject which emerged as organization theory in the
USA in the middle of the twentieth century. These were produced by the mechan-
ical engineers who moved beyond an interest in solving technological problems to
an interest in solving organizational dilemmas (Jacques 1996 ; Shenhav 1994 , 1995 ,
1999 ; Shenhav and Weitz 2000 ). AtWrst sight, we might not expect these engineers
to have a great deal of relevance to what we these days call HR issues. But as we shall
see later (pp. 113 – 14 ) this is anything but the case.
For present purposes, we simply need to note that engineers had a signiWcant
inXuence on the ‘new’ subject of organization theory. Their contributionsWt into
one of the two themes which Starbuck identiWes as ‘motivating’ the birth of
organization theory: the theme ofWnding ways in which ‘organizations can operate
110 tony watson