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No issue divides social and organizational theorists more fundamentally today than the question of the status to be attributed to collective entities. On the one hand, it is argued that social collectivities from the small and simple (the social dyad) to the very large and very complex (a community or society) have no existence outside the ideas that people have about them; and that any collectivity is ultimately sustained by the conceptions that are used to describe collectivities. Thus King (1999: 277), asserts: "....the concept of structure becomes wholly superfluous to the description of social life, which can be adequately accounted for by reference only to individuals and their practices..." On the other hand, there is the view that collectivities are more than just the conceptions people have of them. Group tendencies and powers are very often conceived as identifiable phenomena that have considerable effects on behaviour. In this view, organizations are real external entities, which have demonstrable properties and real consequences.
This paper considers this to be a central issue for organizational theory, which is however, posed in a less acute from today because of the converging concerns of the concerns of many thinkers. For much of the time in the period following the Second World War the differences between positions in this area were seen to be so basic as to be irresolvable. Writers certainly differed fundamentally on the issue of whether organizations (and other collectivities) could be regarded as having objective existence and...