W. Richard Scott, Institutions and Organizations: Ideas, Interests, and Identities

Abstract

The " unplugged " section seeks to experience new forms of book reviews. We regularly grant a wild card to a world-class scholar to review his/her own Classic. In " My own book review " , authors will tell us the story of "what I was trying to do" with sometimes some auto-ethnographic considerations. By recounting the building process of one seminal research with a contemporary lens, they may give some insights for the current craft of research and also share with us renunciations, doubts and joys in their intimate writing experience. ! What constitutes a self-review of the second edition of " The social psychology of organizing (hereafter spo2)? Since such a review is supposed to be " performative " and " auto-ethnographic " it won't necessarily look like a traditional book review consisting of " book, overview, bits of excerpt, some wrangling, some praise, followed by the larger pronouncement " (Birkerts, 2015). Bits of excerpt, however, set this commentary in motion. The very first sentence in the book reads, " This is a book about organizational appreciation. " Appreciation? The last 2 sentences in the book read, " Organizations keep people busy, occasionally entertain them, give them a variety of experiences, keep them off the streets, provide pretexts for storytelling, and allow socializing. They haven't anything else to give. " That's appreciation? What goes on in between that ties these two thoughts together? That middle can be described in terms of substance, historical embedding, intentions, form, tools deployed, wishes, and summation. ! The substance of this book was described in a disarming fashion by the social psychologist and editor, Charles Kiesler. In the first 1969 edition he described the book as a " fresh theoretical approach that provides us oldsters with new insights while maintaining the proper level of difficulty for an introductory text. " In the second edition he wrote that the book is " an intriguing introduction for the beginning student " . " Fresh " had morphed into " intriguing " but the beginning student was still baffled. ! The word " organizing " suggested that the book was more about processes than structures. Attempts were made to articulate organizational life as sequence, motion, implementation of recipes, chains of events, series of actions (Enactment, Selection, Retention), narrative-like constructions with a beginning + middle + end, accomplishing, and streaming. A generic pattern in all of this activity was modeled after Donald Campbell's summary of sociocultural evolution as variation and selective retention with variation and retention being opposed to one another. Modification of these basics included the replacement of variation with enactment, the shift of environmental impact from selection to enactment, the addition of feedback loops from retention to both enactment and selection, M@n@gement