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date: 03 April 2020

Abstract and Keywords

Organization theory is largely about management in many of its guises and how this intermediate group relates to both its hierarchical superiors and its subordinates. It involves the careful investigation and critique of knowledge about management that has been developed by a community of scholars, where management is seen as a middle-ranking social grouping within organizational contexts and it is only understood in terms of its relations to its superiors and subordinates. This article talks about the new epistemological and methodological orientations that are to be adopted. The question of what interrelationships within organization theory needs to be rephrased to include the encouragement of neo-disciplinarity, the involvement of the young in the dissemination and creation of newly published material, and closer connections of a non-exploitative kind with other social science disciplines.

Keywords: organization theory, management, hierarchical superiors, subordinates, social science disciplines

Gibson Burrell

Gibson Burrell is Professor at the University of Leicester, UK. He is about to finish his 40-year stint as a full-time paid academic with some reluctance. He looks back upon a time when research-led indolence marked British academic life—and was the better for it. He submitted his first academic article to a journal seven years into a Lectureship which is inconceivable today, even if more of us should remain silent for longer. And with that nostalgia possessed by the old, he says of his time that he wouldn’t change a thing. How smugly Panglossian is that?

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