Why is Organization Theory so Ignorant? The Neglect of Total Institutions

Abstract

Organization theory has, on the whole, failed to adequately address the role that organizations have played in some of the crimes of humanity. The tools to do so have long been available to the discipline, in work by scholars such as Goffman on total institutions, Foucault on disciplinary mechanisms, and Bauman on the Holocaust. The article retrieves the work of these scholars to raise some important questions left begging by much contemporary scholarship.