Politics and the Theory of Organization

Abstract

In some fashion or another, political scientists spend much of their time trying to understand organizations. They study public bureaucracies. They study legislatures. They study executive leadership. They study the courts. They study parties and interest groups. And because theory is the path to understanding, a central part of their task is to develop theories of organization. A similar story could be told for the other social sciences. Organizations are relevant, often crucial, to the traditional concerns of sociologists, psychologists, and economists, among others, and they too have strong reasons to pursue theories of organization. The difference is that scholars in these other fields have actually followed through. There is a sociology of organization, a psychology of organization, and, although it took economists a long time to get their act together, a fastdeveloping economics of organization. What we commonly refer to as organization theory is a combination of these, and thus a highly eclectic and interdisciplinary body of work (Perrow, 1986). Political scientists have not really been part of this. To the extent that they have paid attention to the field of organization theory at all, they have almost always been borrowers rather than contributors, relying on the nonpolitical theories of sociologists, psychologists, and economists to help them understand political organization. On those rare occasions when they have been active contributors to the field, moreover, they have typically not been concerned with developing theories of political organization anyway. Instead, they have chosen to pursue generic theories of organization: theories that,