Why do organizations exist? Why cannot the market - that is, free contracts between single buyers and sellers - solve all production and distribution problems? What are the causes behind the rise of industrial enterprises and other hierarchies?

In Why Organizations?, Bengt Abrahamsson raises these and other questions and discusses the conditions for the emergence of hierarchy, bureaucracy and democracy in organizations - and why organizations are needed at all. The framework for his discussion is rationalistic organization theory based on concepts such as rationality, interest, power, form and function, external forces and inner logic, organizational mandators and executives.