The Discipline of Organizing: Professional Edition, 3rd Edition

Foreword to the First Edition

Jonathan Grudin

This wonderful book arrives at the right time. It is more than a textbook—it defines and creates the field for which it is a text. Befitting a book that lays out a discipline of organization that spans print and digital media, this volume is carefully organized, with a focus on future print and digital editions.

The Discipline of Organizing has a broad scope. Even more valuable is its depth, the result of years of examining and thinking through related concepts—often overlapping but not identical—from the fields of library science, information science, business, and computer science. The rare combination of breadth and depth empowers readers by providing a new perspective and framework for organizing subsequent experiences. The organization is comprehensive and systematic, but it is not simple. A lot of concepts must be assimilated. Yet thanks to the authors’ thoroughness, you can proceed confident that investing the time to master novel concepts will pay off, that a coherent structure is being assembled, without inconsistencies or confusions. Into this framework you can fit your own examples, alongside the many provided by the authors. You can identify extensions and form new associations, building on a strong foundation.

The authors ask us to step back and adopt a general, multidisciplinary perspective. This is unusual for a textbook. For good reason, the world is marked by increasing specialization, the division of labor on ...