IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/h/pal/palchp/978-0-230-25093-2_4.html
   My bibliography  Save this book chapter

What is an Organization?

In: Business Ethics and Organizational Values

Author

Listed:
  • Ole Thyssen

    (Copenhagen Business School)

Abstract

The question ‘what is an organization’ often leads to a kind of embarrassment: everyone knows the answer, but it is difficult to find the right words to describe it. As a point of departure it might be agreed that an organization is a system. That just does not get us very far — a system of what? Hesitant suggestions might come up: a system of people or a system of things. Obviously, an organization needs to be populated, and even though virtual organizations exist without a tight connection to any place or objects, they still have to involve things: buildings, furniture, computers, telephones and fax machines. Even though the Internet is immaterial, it is inconceivable without material objects.

Suggested Citation

  • Ole Thyssen, 2009. "What is an Organization?," Palgrave Macmillan Books, in: Business Ethics and Organizational Values, chapter 4, pages 45-61, Palgrave Macmillan.
  • Handle: RePEc:pal:palchp:978-0-230-25093-2_4
    DOI: 10.1057/9780230250932_4
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:pal:palchp:978-0-230-25093-2_4. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.palgrave.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.