William Richard Scott

This is a great gateway to the research of institutionalization in organizations, and a very good text to tease out disparate conceptualizations of institutions and their role in organizational life, providing a unifying framework to tie it all together or, when a unification is impossible, to explain differences in perspectives.

A very useful summary of the field of organizational science. Its treatment of three different paradigms to understand organizations (as rational, natural, and open systems) is tremendously insightful.

The book's only problem: as it progresses, and in parallel to the evolution of the field it describes, it becomes more and more centered on administrative science.