Organizations: A Dialectical View

Abstract

Revision of a paper presented at the Sixty-eighth Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association, New York, N.Y., August, 1973. I gratefully acknowledge comments on earlier drafts of this paper by Howard Aldrich, Eliot Freidson, Peter M. Hall, Wolf Heydebrand, James Mulherin, Charles Perrow, Richard Riddle, Stephen Turner, Robert A. Day, Mayer Zald, and students in my bureaucracy and theory seminars at the U n iversity of Missouri-Columbia. In preparation of this draft I have particularly benefited from extensive conversations with Mark Wardell and Robert Hagan. None of these are to be blamed for flaws remaining in the argument, and some have disagreed substantially with my position.