I became seriously interested in organizations and organizing on November 10, 1965. London is 300 miles from my home village and so I had taken the overnight bus to the metropolis. I had an interview booked for 11am at the London School of Economics, Department of Sociology, to see whether they would have me as an undergraduate student. I was 17 years old. After meeting my sister and her husband for breakfast, they put me on a ‘Tube’ to a station near the LSE. This was about 10am and the underground was relatively quiet after rush hour. The train came to a halt at its third stop and I was sitting with the arch of the tube wall on my left. The platform was on my right. I heard a choked word to my left. It was ‘Help’. There was one other person in my part of the Tube but he seemed oblivious to the cry. I heard it again, a little louder this time. Suddenly, between me and the tiled wall a head appeared, shouting for help. I remember it was a white woman but cannot recall age nor anything else of her appearance. I jumped up and went to the door of the carriage which was still open. A London Underground worker was about to signal the train off from the platform. I shouted out that ‘there’s someone trapped on the other side of the train’. So, the employee yelled out down the platform ‘Joe, cut the juice’. She then came into our carriage and saw the trapped person through the window. She said loudly and forcefully to me and the few other people in the carriage ‘Get off the train, get away from the platform, and leave the station’. She had spoken not one word of comfort to the trapped woman. She did not approach her, nor engage in eye contact, nor indicate help was close at hand. To this day I do not know the fate of the fallen woman, why she was on the wrong side of the platform, had she jumped or tripped, or how (indeed if) she was rescued. In confronting the callousness of the staff of the London Underground, I did as I was told and surfaced in a part of London I knew not.

At this point, shock had set in, yet my concern was to reach the LSE by 11am. I had absolutely no idea where I was in Central London nor where the School was. At this time, on British TV, the police were presented as caring local ‘bobbies’ who would always be there to assist members of the public. So, I approached an officer standing on a street corner by himself. I began ‘I’m looking for the London School of Economics’. Before I could explain what had happened, he said ‘Fuck off, sonny, I’m busy’. My first confrontation, therefore, with the Metropolitan Police was not a happy one and it did little to stem my rising sense of panic.

I eventually reached the LSE at about 11.10am and found the Sociology Department. I knocked on the door of the interviewing lecturer at 11.20. He looked decidedly discommoded and asked me to sit down so, without invitation to speak, I blurted out the events of the morning on my tube journey. I suggested (without evidence) that it might have been an attempted suicide. My regional accent was even stronger than usual as, somewhat relieved, I thought there would be some understanding of what was, for me, a significant metropolitan trauma. He barely looked at me and heard my blurted story without any apparent interest. He then asked, ‘why do you want to read sociology?’ He never went off script after that. There was no recognition of me being a human under stress – just a desire to run through the formal selection process in a mechanical way, sticking to the abbreviated timetable. Later that week, I was to discover that I would not be offered a place at the LSE.

So, on November 10, 1965, I interacted with members of three London based organizations; London Underground, the Metropolitan Police, and the London School of Economics and Political Science. On the bus journey home, my feeling was that these large organizations were unlike what I had imagined them to be. Prestigious, high profile, based in the capital, and very well resourced, they appeared – shockingly – not to be interested in the real lives of those they ‘served’. Indeed, by virtue of their unfeelingness, they did not seem to think that service was an issue for them at all. From that point on, I became interested to learn about these objects of power and why and how they operated as they did. These sorts of organizations were problematised for me from that day on. They became my theoretical object – the object of my interest – and not necessarily in any effort to support their everyday activities. There was no wish on my part to aid their work, for I saw them as politically motivated agents, exercising power over those people with whom they came into contact. I still do.

I took an undergraduate course in the late 1960s given by Nicos Mouzelis based on his book Organization and Bureaucracy. Here the existence of organization was taken for granted and Mouzelis was seeking to show the Weberian roots of Organization Theory coming into full flower. This made a lot of sense in explaining the then current landscape. Subsequently, my PhD was supervised by Tom Lupton who said one day in 1972 that I should recognize that ‘Industrial Sociology is dead. It is being replaced everywhere by organizational sociology. Industry is dying in Britain but management is everywhere’. This was a prescient prediction from someone who, as Dean of one of the UK’s two Business Schools at the time, should be well placed to know about Britain’s trajectory and that of his discipline. Some 50 years later, what do we face if we survey the field? Today, very troublingly, we have to ask the question ‘Has the concept of “organization” even got a future?’.

The collective future of the discipline appears to be under threat in the face of severe questioning of our work, sometimes even by those inside the tent (Williamson 1993; Swedberg 2003; Rowlinson 1996, 2004; Oswick et al. 2011; DiMaggio and Powell 2000). Organization Theory: A Research Overview has been written, in part, to provide a defence of the discipline and to show how its relevance is centrally important in the face of attacks upon it which are eating into its fabric. This fragmentation began in recent years and the pace of it is accelerating. Before long, the discipline of Organization Studies (OS) will be, at best, a mere adjunct to conventional management studies, taught sparingly on the fringes of programmes and courses, with a diminished sense of itself as a vibrant entity and of its putative role in academic life (Contu 2009). It will have been forced into the margins, as a twilight teaching subject, devoid of any gravitas. Organization Theory, however, should not be at the edge of business and management studies. It should be at its very heart, pumping discontent through the veins and arteries of the body of the discipline. But, as I have discovered, along with friends and close colleagues in Leicester University, this exhibition of discontent with one’s ‘betters’, any critique of their methods and ethics, any investigation of their lack of financial acumen, and all attempts to analyse their inadequacies are frowned upon by those in senior management who appear to know nothing of academic values, save for their own power to defend the indefensible and curtail academic freedom.

As we begin this book then, it felt necessary to point out to the reader that, whatever one thinks, the personal is the political (Marsden 2005). They are inextricably intertwined. I have happened to be associated during my career with permanent posts within three departments that previously might have laid claim to being centres of Organization Studies, or more narrowly with Organization Theory. These are Warwick Business School, Alliance Manchester Business School (which merged with UMIST some time ago), and the University of Leicester. Martin Parker has subjected two of these institutions to an organizational analysis (Parker 2014, 2021) of their own. Within these institutions, it was the ‘political’ rationale for contracting Organization Theory that held sway, for what people in the area did was to frighten senior management, sometimes even intentionally. Our internal critique of their style of managing, tinged with trade unionism, and the connections we made to other managerial approaches that were possible and preferable, appeared threatening. For those Deans and Heads of School seeking a legitimatory device to shift resources towards ‘strategy’, ‘organizational psychology’, ‘behavioural science’, and ‘service operations management’, all of which are a little devoid of institutional ‘edginess’, their time had come. Organization Theory, motivated by a critical edge, and analysis directed on occasion towards its place of employment (Fournier and Grey 2000), suggested that its purveyors were non-malleable and somewhat dangerous to the organizations that housed it. Opportunism, evidenced in business schools and universities intending to remove this sort of internal critique, has been very evident in recent years. Contextually, the ‘culture wars’ within the UK allow the critique of subjects based upon the arts, humanities, and social studies (not social sciences) to bloom. It is not a good time in the UK higher education sector to be STEMless and to have one’s legitimacy questioned (Contu 2009; Fleming 2021) by those with institutional power.

The institutional processes at work are not identical in those universities mentioned above (Townley 1997) but they function manifestly to encourage the diminution of the critical masses that have fostered the development of Organization Theory, both nationally and internationally. The working conditions of senior staff are worsened and the re-labelling of their expertise gets under way, so their voice is no longer attended to. Their role on committees is ended. Feeling powerless, or shown the door, they leave in droves. Young members of the profession are told there is no room for them on full-time staff and their progress through probation made impossible. They leave in droves. Established lecturers are not put forward for promotion by their deans and are told to their face that their value is limited. At all levels, academic staff seek (most often successfully) institutional exit (Fleming 2019, 2021). But, often, in their haste, they do not translocate to an alternative, large, growing centre of scholarship. They find places where Organization Theory is tolerated in small doses. Tolerated, not as large concentrations of questioning, motivated researchers in which politicized attitudes and values are seen as having a once respectable lineage, but as typically made up of troublemakers and ‘refusers’. Almost everywhere, the Business School seems to be out of love with Organization Studies – assuming, of course, that such a state ever existed.

But many in Organization Studies are out of love with the Business School (Taylor 2012; Fleming 2014, 2019). Most noticeable of those, perhaps, is Martin Parker who has spoken of ‘fucking management’ (2001) and of ‘shutting down the Business School’ (2018). These terms are not likely to endear anyone speaking on these issues, with such a vocabulary, to senior management both in Schools of Management and the offices of the Vice Chancellor, but they are indicative of mutual feelings of distaste and anxiety. So, Organization Theorists are unhappy with the organizations in which they live. But isn’t everyone? (Brignall 2021, p. 31).