The Discipline of Organizing: Core Concepts Edition, 3rd Edition

Preface to the Third Edition

Robert J. Glushko

The Third Editions

For a book to be republished in a third edition barely two years after its first is highly unusual, but we were compelled to update the book by the extremely positive reception it has received. In 2014 The Discipline of Organizing was named an “Information Science Book of the Year” by the Association of Information Science and Technology. As gratifying as this recognition is for all of us who have applied themselves to this work, it is even more gratifying that nearly 60 schools—three times as many as a year ago—are using it in a very diverse set of courses. Each new course ratifies the idea that multiple perspectives can reinforce a shared focus on organizing, while at the same time highlighting the concepts, technologies, and methods that distinguish those points of view.

Because the book structure mirrors this content structure with a transdisciplinary core supplemented with discipline-specific content, it is easy to add content when new courses or instructors identify a need for it. However, even when they were suggesting revisions or new content, many instructors expressed concern about the “syllabus backward compatibility” of a new edition. To help with this, we have made very few changes to the Table of Contents structure in the 3^rd edition. Instead, most of the new content appears at the end of sections to provide more depth and breadth to a topic, or else it appears in sidebars or endnotes, which can easily ...