William H Whyte’s concept of organization man is now used in bowdlerised form, shorn of its polemical core. It was an appeal against the situation of people in the big organiations taking shape after World War Two, belonging to the organization rather than simply working for it, earning...

This article evaluates to what extent Resource Dependence Theory (RDT) is able to explain organizational processes and structures. The evaluation criteria are the empirical corroboration of the theory, its information content and generality, but also how realistic the assumptions of the RDT are....