Theoretical contrasts and international contexts Organizations and modernity An argument in several movements Organizations and postmodernity Methodological modernism and postmodernism: objects of analysis Postmodern futures Organizations and the modernization of the world Modernity and organization Max Weber and the analysis of organizations The iron cage of bureaucracy The variable tendencies of bureaucracy Loosening the iron cage Why and where did bureaucracy triumph? Organizations cinceptualized as systms Inside the iron cage, enmeshed by unavoidable contingencies Efficiency rules, ok? Contingencies, adaptation and efficiency Ecologies, institutions and power in the analysis of organizations Population ecology perspective The institutionalist perspective The power perspective The interpenetartion of power/institutions Comparing perspectives: an empirical test French bread, italian fashions and asian enterprise French bread Conceptions of action and economic embeddedness Italian fashion: the united colours of benetton Variations of organization form in east asian enterprises: the limits of under-socialized accounts of economic action The confuncian tradition applied to esat asian enterprises: the limits of over socialized conceptions of economic action Japanese organizations in historical perspective Organizational diversities and rationalities Back to basic: economic embeddedness, institutional frameworks and modes of rationality Ethnicity and family as resources for rationality in esat asia Institutional frameworks as resources for rationality in east asia Modernist and postmodernist organizations Bureaucracy and fordism: the modernist mix Postmodern organizations? Organizational imperatives Organization imperatives and organizational representations Postmodern skill and capital formation? Turning japanes?Debates on flexible manufacturing as the technical core of postmodern organization The practice of swedish social democracy: other postmodern possibilities?