PublicOrgTheory is an attempt to bring theories of organization–especially those relating to public policy, administration, and presence–into the mainstream through examples and associative observations. The idea is to raise awareness of the influence organizations have on the lives of people in all facets of life, and to explore how all people might understand and influence organizations. This awareness is intended to do nothing less than to improve and extend the lives of constituents of these organizations. Particularly of interest are consequences of government and corporate decisions within and between organizational entities.
If one were to be slightly more precise, PublicOrgTheory trends more toward something like PublicOrgBehavior, but there are some reasons it isn’t named that:
- Restricting the blog to organizational behavior narrows the focus to one area of organizational studies.
- The blog is more concerned with the macro effects described by theories of organization.
- Topics touch on and draw from economics, sociology, psychology, political science, public administration, international development, and organization development.
Also, the name wouldn’t be quite as aesthetically pleasing. Broadening to organization studies enables us to think about current matters with organizational significance in the public sphere via a bricolage of extant and emerging theory.
Parts of this blog are intended to form a book and perhaps some articles examining topical issues with organizational implications and antecedents. Where these intentions are clear, those posts will be noted as such.
PublicOrgTheory 
Extremely well done. I’m very interested in the thesis and was alerted to it by Graham Stewart recently.
My input, insight and learning in this area is through trying to do a similar thing – removing the unintended consequences; the tyranny of paradigms that we default to ahead of actually thinking and planning in business.
We (senior teams in business, managers – leaders) have ceased to think in some cases. I have used visualisation, structure mechanisms and devious methods like conversation and discussion, reflection and objectivity to trick people into processing the data in different ways.
Keep up the great efforts and I will try and promote your energy in my blog and wiki…
John
Org theory requires a basic belief, a dogma such as Marxism for the Soveit system or the Christianity of the Catholic Church. Organization theory on its own does not yet, as far as I know, yet have a binding dogma. What do you suppose it to be?
That would depend on whom you ask. Sociology tries to have it one way, economics another, and psychology yet another. Add in management, which likes to borrow from all three, and you have a lack of coherence, something William Scott has opined.