This paper argues that books by Warner and Low and Selznick on the sociology of organizations have been misinterpreted and that a reassessment is overdue. This is undertaken via an analysis of both the original texts and the process of misinterpretation. One implication is that organizational sociology is, in part, a product of those bureaucratic and labelling processes that it affects to describe and that the agenda of issues with which it deals has been unduly delimited as a result.
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