[Ed note: This is the eighth of 14 posts in a virtual panel on The Future of Organizational Sociology.]
Following the panel on “The Future of Organizational Sociology” at the 2014 American Sociological Association meeting, there seems to be a worry that we’re a subfield that is out of touch with mainstream sociology. But for a field in trouble, organizational sociology does very well in our discipline’s most important journals. Looking at issues of the American Journal of Sociology and the American Sociological Review published in the last year (since June 2013) and based on my rough coding of abstracts, articles that are primarily about organizations, occupations, and work made up 29% of AJS articles and 32% of ASR articles. The articles cover a diversity of theoretical and empirical issues, from explaining businesses’ responses to economic recessions, the influence of category-spanning on hiring among freelance workers, to the effects of corporate downsizing on management diversity. If I had included all articles that use organizational theories, in some way, to explain a phenomenon, the percentages would be much higher. Based on these numbers, it’s hard to see how anyone could make the case that the future of organizational sociology is anything but bright.
So why is there such fear that organizational sociology’s future is in danger? Clearly, the existence of high quality research on organizations and work is not the problem; rather, I think the fear reflects changes in the constitution of the subfield itself. Our concerns stem mainly from the lack of organizational scholars in sociology departments and an increasing association of organizational sociology with business schools. Some people worry that organizational sociology is being diluted as a category of sociological research due its increasing presence in business schools. If organizational sociology is no longer taught in sociology departments or practiced by people who have PhDs in sociology, the subfield is going to become disassociated from the rest of sociology and lose its relevance.
Work in Progress 