orgtheory.net

The publishing industry is in sad shape, we are told. Some think that newspapers and books may soon become a thing of the past due to the onslaught of free information on the net. The current economy hasn’t helped any. As Andy noted on Scatterplot, university presses are cutting back on costs, inhibiting them from attending academic meetings this year. Still, despite all of this doom and gloom, I have hope. The editor of the University of Minnesota Press recently joked that “the crisis in scholarly communication is now in its fifth decade.” Academic publishing has never been the most profitable business, but it’s been sustainable. Why? Because academics like books. How else would we communicate our academic identities to visitors if not for books adorning our office shelves?

I personally love books. I don’t feel complete if I’m not in the process of reading a book. Journal articles are great, but books are more complete and richer. They give authors the ability to dig deeper into arguments and go off on interesting tangents. I learn a lot from those side trips. Books can also be more emotionally rewarding than articles, which in the end helps me remember the takeaway better. By the end of a book, you feel like you’ve been somewhere. I like academic books for the same reason I like novels. They get me inside the head of someone other than myself.

One unfortunate consequence of the b-school-ization of organizational theory is that we seem to have fewer books on the topic than we used to. The classic books in org. theory haven’t changed much over the years, although perhaps fewer students read them than was true 20 or 30 years ago. Selznick, Gouldner, and March and Simon still deserve reading today. But what about recent history? What’s been written in the last couple of decades that will stand the test of time? Here are a few of my favorite org. theory books written in that time period. As you’ll notice, most of them are not really organizational in the same sense that March and Simon would be, but they’re in the same ballpark and they definitely should be read by organizational scholars of all types.

• Elisabeth Clemens, The People’s Lobby – Started off a new variant of institutional theory focusing on the heterogeneity of organizational forms and practices; I have a thing for suffragists
• Wendy Espeland, The Struggle for Water – Commensuration and identity; why we all can’t just get along
• Diane Vaughan, The Challenger Launch Decision – A tour de force in archival research; organizational culture can kill
• Robert Jackall, Moral Mazes – Incredibly interesting stories about the inner lives of organizations at the executive level
• Michael Suk-Young Chwe, Rational Ritual – Probably not on most of your radar screens but it should be; game theory gets cultural
• Rakesh Khurana, Searching for a Corporate Savior – Why corporations overpay CEOs; all about the irrational pursuit of charisma
• Neil Fligstein, The Tranformation of Corporate Control – This one was on my prelim list and I can remember several pivotal a-ha moments I had while reading it; Chandler meets conflict theory

I left some obvious classics, like Structural Holes, off the list because the content was first written as articles and later compiled as books. Still great books. I also left off three books written by my co-bloggers because everyone knows I think they’re awesome. What’s on your list?