Organizing Organizational Theory: Current Foundations, Future Directions
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This review synthesizes various organizational perspectives into seven clusters with the acronym SCRIPTS: structure, culture, relations, institutions, professions, transformation, and social conflict. These contemporary theories highlight how various organizational factors affect individual and organizational performance, change, innovation, wellbeing, and inequality. In organizational theory, structure focuses on formal elements like rules, roles, routines, and rewards while culture refers to informal elements like climate, identity, and sensemaking. Relations refer to effects of interpersonal and interorganizational networks while institutions refer to norms that influence isomorphism and dynamism. Professions feature psychological factors affecting performance and sociological factors shaping work and occupations. Transformation refers to episodic and continuous changes while social conflict foregrounds power, inequalities, and competition over resources. I map how these perspectives are connected with each other and also suggest future directions in the field by intersecting organizational theory with studies of new technologies, historic organizations, global interconnections, marginalized populations, political institutions, and larger societal consequences.