I have one thing left to do-----. Up to now, in a career that went back and forth between academia and executive experience I have written articles or chapters based on my research or experience in such divergent organizations as Ford Aircraft, IBM, Kaiser Cement, HSA, New York City Health and Hospitals Corp., the priests of the New York Archdiocese, Sanus (an entrepreneurial start-up of an HMO, and NYLCare, its large corporate successor). In each I attempted to do what I was challenged to do: from Blumer -- to thoroughly understand the continual emergent nature of their world as perceived by organizational participants; from Bendix -- to understand the structural, historical and ideological processes involved in these organizations; from Selznick -- the role of power, politics, and the "imbuement" of values involved in organizational units. Out of this came materials on pronoia, demotion, boundary roles, delegitimation of the non-profit sector, professionalization as a control device, the growth or cynical knowledge in the priesthood, rhetorical reticence in politics, the role of beliefs about market processes and organization structure, and power and conflict as inherent organizational processes. And then there was my plea in 1975 at an ASA session to stop ignoring the flow of money as a key to understanding organizational behavior. And now -- I will attempt to do just that in a comparative study of those above organizations in order to explicate relations between personal experiences and organizational processes in such issues as money flow, blame, centralization/decentralization, etc. Wish me luck.
