ABSTRACT
Our review of four approaches to the analysis of industrial organisations covers only a small proportion of the massive and continuously expanding literature on this subject. The frameworks which have been considered, however, provide some indication of the very different ways in which sociologists have tried to characterise organisations and explain the patterns of social relations and social action within them. Other writers have presented an even more highly differentiated picture. Morgan (1986), for example, organised his discussion around eight 'images of organization': as machines, as organisms, as brains, as cultures, as political regimes, as psychic prisons, as flux and transformation, and as instruments of domination. Each 'image' throws some light on the nature of organisations, but even this list does not exhaust the possibilities!
