Abstract
Drawing on a major historical study of the organization of Bletchley Park, the site of British and Allied codebreaking during the Second World War, this article shows that it was characterized by ‘chaos’ in terms of a lack of clear formal structures. It is argued that the success of Bletchley Park can be explained in terms of various factors including shared social capital of some employees, organizational hybridity, centralization, knowledge-sharing and organizational porosity. These factors may be understood to be the reasons why Bletchley Park was successful despite its organizational chaos, but the paper seeks to advance the stronger claim that it was successful because of its organizational chaos.
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