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Explorations in Organizations presents readers with contemporary issues in the study of organizations, and introduces the paths down which tomorrow's organizational scholarship might travel. A collection of recent papers by or co-authored by the eminent James G. March, the book consists of five sections: exploring theories of organizational action; novelty in organizational adaptation; institutions and the logic of appropriateness; the history of organization studies; and uses of literature in the study of organizations. Each section begins with a new essay by a scholar whose work has focused on the theme explored in that part of the book. These introductory essays not only introduce and tie together the papers that follow, but also serve to add additional voices to the volume in order to deepen the discussion within it

Scholarship is less an individual than a collective activity. The history of A Behavioral Theory of the Firm illustrates two key aspects of the collective nature of scholarship. The first aspect is the dependence of scholarship on the institutions of scholarship. For a period of about 10 years beginning around 1954, The Graduate School of Industrial Administration at the Carnegie Institute of Technology was an extraordinary incubator of ideas, the "Vienna Circle" of its time. The second aspect is the cooperative interdependence of communities of scholars. Ideas take form and reproduce through an intergenerational, international pyramid of promiscuous and acrobatic intellectual intercourse.

Predictions of the future of organizations are variations on a theme of fantasy: reliably incorrect and usefully seductive. To illustrate a few general points about the role of imagination in human existence, some predictions about the future of organizations are developed from an interpretation of the environments that will shape organizational survival. The predictions emphasize the adaptiveness of populations of rigid, disposable organizations as well as some of the problems of sustaining rigidity. Imaginations of the future are portrayed as instruments of the organizational obstinacy required by such an adaptive system. Mention is made of one or two of the consequences of robbing fantasy of its innocence in this way.