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More than 30 years ago in this journal, Dwight Waldo (1961) first likened organization studies to the parable of the three blindfolded individuals placing their hands on different parts of an elephant, and coming up with rather different characterizations of the "organization." Some years later, Waldo (1978) revisited the "elephant," and although there was much that was new, field still seemed scattered somewhat randomly around the elephant, offering accounts that did not fit together well and that seemed to miss the elephant-as-a-whole. Even by this time, some writers were ascribing at least some of these problems to excessive rationalism and functionalism in the approach to the study of organizations; perhaps the earliest, noteworthy such critique was David Silverman's The Theory of Organizations (1970). New approaches were actively called for in subsequent years (Weick, 1979), and many were forthcoming (Morgan, 1986), including for example, the organizational culture perspective.(1) Now, as the century draws nearer to a close, capturing the elephant seems as elusive as ever.
Nearly all of us spend our working lives in organizations and have had some direct experiences with events and behaviors that seem to make no sense and that seem to come, quite literally, out of the blue. These experiences are particularly vivid when we are blindsided by them. For example, Roger Boisjoly, the engineer at Morton Thiokol most knowledgeable about the infamous "O-rings," thought he had a solid, rational care against launching the space shuttle Challenger in January 1986; indeed, during a teleconference on the eve of the launch, Boisjoly and the other nine engineers in Utah had made their case against launching and won . . . or so they thought.(2) Then, during a break in the conference call, the senior manager present said, in voice intended to be heard only by the other three managers sitting close by, "We have a management decision to make." Next, one of the four managers, who was also an engineer, was told to "take off your engineering hat, put on your management hat." Boisjoly was not naive; he saw what was coming. The Thiokol managers had caved in to NASA management's pressure to launch; they were about to reverse Thiokol's opposition to launch. One of the engineers walked with his charts in hand...