ABSTRACT
This chapter develops two proposals for the future of organization studies aimed at increasing its significance and relevance for studies of social processes outside organizations. The first move involves a return to the classics by emphasizing the distinctiveness of organization as a particular type of social order. The second move involves the extension of our notion of organization beyond (formal) organizations, thereby allowing insights from organization research to be applied to phenomena studied in other fields and increasing the chance of a transfer of theories and concepts to other disciplines. The chapter elaborates on how the field of organization studies has increasingly lost sight of organization as its central object of research. It illustrates how organization studies can fruitfully be extended to other domains, such as markets, standards and families. A standard assumption that has remained in the field since classical times is that organization studies is about formal organizations.
