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Cover -- Half Title -- Title -- Copyright -- Contents -- Acknowledgements -- Series Preface -- Introduction -- PART I CONTINGENCY THEORY -- 1 'Organization Design: An Information Processing View', Interfaces, 4, pp. 28-36. -- 2 'Organizational Structure, Environment and Performance: The Role of Strategic Choice', Sociology, 6, pp. 1-22. -- 3 'Alternative Forms of Fit in Contingency Theory', Administrative Science Quarterly 30, pp. 514-39. -- 4 'Organizational Structures in Japanese and U.S. Manufacturing', Administrative Science Quarterly, 31, pp. 338-64. -- PART II RESOURCE DEPENDENCE THEORY

The authors examine the contributions of ethnography to organizational sociology in five substantive areas: (1) the elaboration of informal relations, (2) organizations as systems of meaning, (3) organizations and their environments, (4) organizational change, and (5) ethics and normative behavior. They then discuss three claims that ethnographers typically make: that ethnography provides for depth, multiple perspectives, and process. These claims permit its unique contributions but also create trade-offs in terms of control, bias, and generalizability. The authors conclude by considering the implications that the resurgent interest in organizational ethnography holds for its systematic practice and the development of standards to evaluate its cross-disciplinary usage.

Status has become an increasingly influential concept in the fields of organizational and economic sociology during the past two decades. Research in this area has not only helped explain behavior within and between organizations, but has also contributed to our understanding of status processes more generally. In this review, we point to the contributions of this field in terms of the determinants of status, the effects of status, and the mechanisms by which these effects are produced. We next appraise the way in which a network approach has contributed to our formal understanding of status positions and status hierarchies. We then highlight recent studies that demonstrate the value of studying the structures of status hierarchies themselves rather than focusing solely on the actors within them. After suggesting potential directions for future research, we conclude by calling for renewed efforts to translate concepts and theories across levels of analysis and substantive commitment in order to build more general theories of status processes.

Current discussions surrounding organizational sociology theories indicate a state of stagnation. This paper aims to invigorate theoretical innovation by drawing on contemporary social theories, particularly employing a critical realist perspective. Focused on addressing the theoretical convergence between organizational and collective action sociologies, as identified by Friedberg, the paper reinterprets his concept of organized collective action through the critical realist collective subjectivities theory, as proposed by Vandenberghe. The objective is to generate an original Critical Realist Model for Organizational Sociology. This initiative stems from critical realism's critique of flat ontologies and epistemologies that tend to conflate different objects of reality. The proposed model takes the form of a trialectic generative sequence, highlighting driven objects configured in a specific ontological situation as the necessary, but not sufficient, condition for the emergence of organizations. This sequence includes (a) time-space co-presence and the embodiment process; (b) symbolic community sharing and the identification process; and (c) power dynamics and the processes of representation, delegation, and subordination. This model positions collective organized action as a fundamental intermediary concept for understanding organizations and collective action within a realistic social theory. It indirectly contributes to addressing the broader debate on agency and structure.

Academic disciplines are defined not primarily by their object but by their (theoretical and methodological) approach to that object, and by their claim to a monopoly over it. Even where that monopoly claim has been highly successful, it remains contestable. For example, economics, perhaps in this respect the most successful social science, finds its object – the economy – contested by political economists and economic sociologists. Whereas economics has successfully marginalized potential competitors, sociology has remained a broad church. Attempts to impose theoretical and methodological order on the discipline have met with resistance, and eventually failed. Moreover, sociology has never really reached consensus on what its object is; 'society', 'social facts', 'social action' were the classical options, with the list growing over time (social networks, rational action, actor networks, etc.). Thus, while we can speak of 'heterodox economics' there is insufficient orthodoxy to speak of 'heterodox sociology'. This has an obverse side. Precisely because of the weakness of its monopolistic claims, sociology has been very productive in spawning new disciplinary fields, which, rather than remaining within sociology's weak gravitational pull, successfully establish themselves as separate disciplines or 'studies'. Criminology, industrial relations, urban studies and organization studies are the most obvious examples. In light of this, this article addresses two questions: (1) What happens to these new fields when they break free of the parent discipline, and to the parent discipline when they do? (2) If one effect on the 'offspring' is a loss of disciplinary orientation (as the rationale for this special issue suggests) what, if anything, has contemporary sociology to offer OS as a potential source of reorientation?