From King to Court Jester? Weber’s Fall from Grace in Organizational Theory

Abstract

While the work of Max Weber was an omnipresent guiding force in the early development of organizational theory, contemporary scholars have seemingly little connection to that heritage. In this paper, we probe the dynamics of Weberian organizational theory scholarship from mid-century to the present and examine how shifts in research orientation have facilitated Weber’s apparent fall from grace. We draw on a dataset of all articles published in the Administrative Science Quarterly from 1956 to 2002 to track shifts in Weber citation patterns and three streams of Weberian-inspired organizational research: intraorganizational, social organization and organization-environment relations. We show how the shift from the early bureaucracy and social organization studies of the 1950s and 1960s to the more instrumental, resource focus of the organization-environment tradition in the 1970s and 1980s went hand-in-hand with the marginalization of Weber in organizational theory. We also show that Weber has increasingly been cited in a ceremonious way over this time period. However, we also examine contemporary trends and identify opportunities for more direct engagement with Weber’s scholarly corpus in organizational theory.