In this important theoretical and empirical statement John Law argues against the purity of post-enlightenment political and social theory, and offers an alternative post-modern sociology. Arguing in favor of a sociology of verbs, he suggests that power, organizations, mind-body dualisms, and macro-micro distinctions may all be understood as the local performance of recursive modes of social ordering. Drawing on a range of theoretical traditions including actor-network theory, verstehende sociology, and the writing of Michel Foucault, he explores the production of materials - including agents and architectures - and their importance for these modes of ordering. The book, which draws on organizational ethnography to develop its argument, is essential reading for all those interested in social theory, materialism, or the sociology of organizations at the end of the era of high modernity.

This book provides a re-evaluation of Weber's work on the current debates about the institutional and organizational dynamics of modernity, offering interpretations of his work which emphasize the reality of modernity as a dual process.

This book provides a reassessment of the significance of Max Weber's work for the current debates about the institutional and organizational dynamics of modernity. It re-evaluates Weber's sociology of bureaucracy and his general account of the trajectory of modernity with reference to the strategic social structures that dominated the emergence and development of modern society. Included here are detailed analyses of contemporary issues such as the collapse of communism, fordism, coporatism and traditionalism in both Western and Eastern societies. All of the contributors are scholars of international repute. They undertake analyses of Weber's texts and his broader intellectual inheritance to reassert the centrality of Weberian sociology for our understanding of the moral, political and organizational dilemmas of late modernity. These analyses challenge orthodox readings of Weber as the prophet of the iron cage. Instead they offer interpretations of his work which emphasize the reality of modernity as a dual process with the potential for both disarticulation of rational structures and deeper colonization of daily life. Not only is this book essential reading for Weber specialists but it also provides compelling analyses of modernity and the inherently contingent nature of global cultural and stuctural transformation. Martin Albrow, Roehampton Institute; Stewart Clegg, University of Western Sydney; David Chalcraft, Oxford Brookes University; John Eldridge, Glasgow University; Larry J

Identity and the Modern Organization presents a lively exchange of ideas among psychology and management scholars on the realities of modern organizational life and their effect on the identities that organizations and their members cultivate. This book bridges the domains of psychology and management to facilitate a multi-disciplinary, multi-level

This is a brief, authoritative and accessible introduction to the idea of modernity, written by a leading social theorist. Wagner shows that modernity was based on ideas of freedom, reason and progress, but he examines the extent to which these ideas have been, and can be, realized in the modern world.

This wide-ranging analysis both explores current approaches to organization studies and relates the concepts of modernity and postmodernity to the realities of organizational structure and context. In surveying alternative perspectives on organizations in terms of ideal types, systems, contingencies, ecologies, cultures, markets and efficiency, Clegg demonstrates that no single approach is adequate to deal with the real-world variety of organizations that exist. Drawing upon unusual and revealing examples - the production of French bread, Italian fashion and `post-Confucian' Asian enterprises - he argues that their success cannot be reduced to `culture' but must incorporate a fuller understanding of the ways in which organi