Introduction: in search of alternative origins of organizing

How might we imagine the origins of organizing? We trust that most readers of this volume will agree that this is a thought provoking and challenging question. Are we to anchor the origins of organizing to specific historical events, to particular philosophical concepts or, rather, should we locate them firmly within familiar (and safe) disciplinary traditions? We take as our point of departure an admixture of all three in this introductory chapter, that is, historical, philosophical and disciplinary origins. From this perspective, perhaps the most dominant idea in the mainstream historiography of management and organization is that systemic organizing started to take hold in the Western hemisphere sometime in the mid-1800’s (Barley & Kunda, 1992; Reed, 2006: Starbuck, 2003). This was the time when the practice of industrial management began to enter the general consciousness of economic life of the time (Bendix, 1974; Guillen, 1994). Indeed, a related convention is to understand theoretical reflection on organizing as appearing in the aftermath of the industrial management approaches pioneered by, inter alia, F.W. Taylor, Henri Fayol and their disciples. Despite the accumulating body of research on the birth of organization theory (e.g. Adler, 2009), there have been astonishingly few contributions that challenge the established consensus of the social and philosophical ideas marking the origin of organizational studies. Typical assessments begin from Taylor, Fayol and Weber, continuing to the works of Mayo, Roethlisberger, Barnard and onwards to the first generation of self-conscious sociologists of organizations (Wren & Bedeian, 2009; Hatch& Cunliffe, 2006). Even when there were attempts to expand this predominantly Western narrative, one could argue that the investigations reoriented their attention only minimally in terms of the temporal (Jacques, 1996) or institutional (Drucker, Kanter & Graham, 1995) focus adopted