A Platform for Debating the Role of Organization in, for, and Throughout Society

Abstract

Writing this introductory essay for the journal on which we have worked for so many years entails some problems, not just emotionally (because we worked so hard on it), but more generally where this format is concerned. Of course, an introduction needs to set forth the tasks and relevant phenomena to be addressed in the journal. And we should be responsible for crafting it. Moreover, together with a group of diverse scholars, many of them strongly connected to the Research Committee 17 “Sociology of Organizations” of the International Sociological Association (ISA RC 17), we already defined a scope for the Journal of Organizational Sociology (JOSO). At the same time, we see a strong need to resist defining narrowly what a sociology of organization supposedly is, a question that immediately comes up when reading JOSO’s title. What we certainly can say is that, for us, organizational sociology entails taking organization seriously as a specific phenomenon or as a specific concept that is more than just a mere synonym for social order in general. Apart from that though, we will not provide a definition, because we want to embrace the different definitions that are out there and see such definitions rather as reflecting something that is in flux and continually recreated. Therefore, you, the (future) contributors to JOSO, are at the center of defining this sub-field of sociology in rather practical terms! In recent years, there has been much discussion about the state and identity of “organizational sociology”, involving ourselves, ISA RC 17, and many other colleagues (Besio, du Gay, and Serrano Velarde 2020; Godwyn 2022; Gorman 2014;