A definition of organizational form is proposed in terms of labor power, the object, means, and division of labor, and the control of labor at the organizational and institutional level. A number of typological approaches are then reviewed, focusing on the delineation of new organizational forms. The central hypothesis is that new organizational forms are emerging as a result of the transition from industrial to postindustrial capitalism. This hypothesis is elaborated by means of a number of historical and structural subhypotheses specifying the links between corporate dynamics and postbureaucratic organizational forms, the role of computer-integrated production in the internalization and replacement of external, bureaucratic rules by software, and the role of an ideology of responsiveness in service organizations and government agencies. Finally, six characteristics emphasizing the flexibility of postbureaucratic, technocratic organizational forms are examined: informalism, universalism, weak classification and framing of options, loose coupling, interdependence and networking, and the propagation of a corporate culture to counteract the centrifugal and deconstructive tendencies of structural flexibility. In contrast to the technical rationalization of work by computers, these elements of structural flexibility are seen as a form of social rationalization.

An alternative approach to organizational theory is outlined, based on Marxian categories and propositions. The concepts of “productive force” and “social relations of production” are specified in terms of various organizational phenomena such as organizing activity vs. organization; historical contradictions between organizational control structures and new forms of organizing work activity (e.g., occupational and professional status groups vs. administrative rationalization and bureaucratization; bureaucratic and technocratic administration vs. self‐organization of labor and workers' control); the contradictions between such organizational dimensions as labor‐power and its manifestations in terms of skills and knowledge, the object of labor (complexity of task structure), the means of labor (technology), the division of labor, the control of labor (cost‐accounting and hierarchical authority relations), and the organization of labor (e.g., either in terms of occupations and professions or unions, corporate management, state bureaucracies, or self‐organization and workers' control). Organizational contradictions between functional as well as historical phases of the work process are described for work organizations, in general, and for public service bureaucracies and courts of law, in particular. For example, administrative and technical innovations designed to increase productivity tend to come into contradiction with strategies of established authority structures (e.g., of the professional judicial elite) designed to expand domain, thus impeding or nullifying various organizational reform efforts. The paper concludes with a more general discussion of Marxian method.

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We focus on the social construction of innovativeness in the context of project teams and interfirm networks among new-media start-up firms in Silicon Alley, Manhattan. The analysis is based on a total of thirty-four interviews with firm executives and other informants. A brief discussion of the historical and structural context of the research project is followed by an exposition of the theoretical framework, that is, the theory of industrial districts and the hypothesized connection between innovativeness and interactivity. In each of the three subsequent sections of the paper, the empirical findings are presented and analyzed: the grounded conceptions of innovativeness, the two main variants of project organization (self-organized versus managerially coordinated project teams), and the varieties of interfirm networks such as transactional and mixed networks. Other networking practices documented are client relations and hiring. We consider the effect of state-level legal infrastructure and economic deregulation on the business culture of interfirm networking, information sharing, and innovativeness.