Essai: The Ghost in the Organism
探讨组织被比作有机体的隐喻历史，指出该隐喻并未摆脱机械论，反而强化了现代主义基础，并提出前现代和后现代两种替代思路。
The emergence of the idea that organizations are like organisms is generally seen as having saved organization studies (OS) from its mechanistic precepts. We argue that it has not. Rather, the mechanistic underpinnings of organization merely found a new medium of expression in the organism metaphor. This is largely due to the particular legacy that first informed so-called organic thinking about organizations in the 20th century. This essai investigates the history of the words organization and organism and asks how it became possible for one to be used as a metaphor for the other. Then it examines the way that the organism was brought into the fold of organization so as to reinforce the Modernist and mechanistic underpinnings of the field. We conclude that if the mechanistic ghost in the organism is to be exorcised, OS needs to recognize and rethink these underlying premises. Towards this end, we offer two alternative ways of thinking organization via the organism: one pre-Modern and one post-Modern.