Abstract
Reading Discovering Organizations feels like watching the prequel to organisational life. It is a pithy ‘origins’ story, like the academic counterpart to Rise of the Planet of the Apes, The Joker or even Monsters University: familiar tropes, but taken back to their beginnings, told with more theory and fewer special effects. Burrow takes readers on a deep dive through history, exploring how many of the organisational forms and concepts we take for granted came into being. His focus on the human side of organising means the book is as much about people’s lived practices as it is about abstract structures. The result is a distinctive addition to the organisation studies bookshelf: historically grounded, accessible in style and peppered with case studies that bring the narrative to life.
The book is divided into two parts. Part I, ‘The Big Four’, introduces four organisational types – public, private, informal and an interesting inclusion to the text, criminal. Part II, ‘How Organizations Work’, presents a conceptual history (inspired by Koselleck and Presner (2002)) of bureaucracy, rationality, motivation, power and resistance. Across both parts, Burrow traces lineages that stretch beyond the usual Eurocentric canon: Mesopotamian storehouses, Qin China’s public bureaucracy and Mafia fraternities all find a place here, alongside the East India Company, capitalism and neoliberal higher education.
The Big Four
The first half of the book is where Burrow’s commitment to storytelling is clearest. Rather than beginning in Weberian bureaucracy or the industrial revolution, he opens chapter 2 with the very first public organisations in Tell Sabi Abyad, a Neolithic Syrian settlement with collective storage facilities. From there, the story moves to Qin China and early state forms of public administration. Importantly, these histories are not recounted as neutral facts; they are juxtaposed with conceptual discussions of neoliberalism, introducing the cornerstones of neoliberal thinking, what it offers, how it relates to public organisations, and importantly, encourages readers to think critically about these ideas. The chapter closes with an interesting case study based on Fleming’s (2021) ‘Dark Academia’ to explore the neoliberal influence and marketisation of Higher Education.
Chapter 3 focuses on private organisations and brings in the Roman origins of the corporation (Avi-Yonah, 2005), but also its afterlives: both its celebrated contributions to economic growth and its exploitative capacities (epitomised by the closing case study that explores the practices of the East India Company). Rather than treating corporations as natural or inevitable, Burrow uses Marxist critique to show how they embed asymmetries of power and wealth.
Chapter 4 diverts slightly from what we usually see in organisation studies texts by bringing in informal organisations: those ‘backstreet and basement’ networks that escape the gaze of formal structures. Here, Burrow follows work such as Biles (2009) to show how informal organisations sustain livelihoods but also distort markets, leaving governments and formal competitors scrambling to respond. In this chapter’s case study focus, he highlights how microfinance, hailed as an innovative tool to alleviate poverty, can in practice exacerbate precarity and exploitation, drawing on Banerjee and Jackson (2017). The result is a chapter that refuses to romanticise informality while recognising its central role in survival economies.
Finally, the section on criminal organisations insists that mafia, cartels and the Yakuza are not marginal anomalies but key players in the global economy. Their rituals, codes and violent solidarities are presented as organisational forms in their own right. Burrow (2025) acknowledges that while it is unlikely that students reading this book will be seeking out work in criminal organisations, it is still an important aspect of organisation studies due to the size, integration and impact of criminal organisations on our societies. The argument is clear: to understand ‘organization’ as a phenomenon, we must confront its illicit variants.
How Organisations Work
Part II shifts to the conceptual mechanics of organising: rules, bureaucracy, rationalisation, motivation, power and resistance. What distinguishes Burrow’s treatment is not the topics themselves (indeed, these are familiar staples of organisation studies) but his historical reframing. Bureaucracy, for example, is not introduced with Weber but with Middle Eastern record-keeping and Chinese administrative innovations. Motivation is not reduced to managerial ‘carrots and sticks’ but explored through a broader genealogy of how humans have been encouraged to work, from wages to wellness programmes.
Power and resistance are handled together, with attention to how control mechanisms engender counter-movements. This keeps the narrative from lapsing into managerialist platitudes. By historicising and complicating these concepts, Burrow offers both an accessible introduction and an invitation to think more critically about how organising has always been contested terrain.
Style and pedagogy
As an undergraduate, I was drawn to texts like Chris Grey’s A Very Short, Fairly Interesting and Reasonably Cheap Book About Studying Organizations (2021), precisely because they combined clarity with personality. Burrow aims for a similar register, and in his preface admits he wrote the book in deliberate opposition to ‘the incredibly dull alternatives’ available. He jokes that he has ‘literally had more fun reading the small print on [his] mortgage’ than most organisation studies textbooks. This refusal of textbook monotony is one of the book’s main strengths. The writing is lively, sometimes irreverent and always pitched to keep readers engaged.
The pedagogy is reinforced by carefully designed features. Each chapter concludes with case studies (ranging from neoliberal universities to the East India Company to the Yakuza) that serve as teaching tools. These are well chosen, theoretically informed and easily adaptable for classroom discussion. In addition, the suggested ‘what to watch, what to read’ tables at the end of each chapter are exemplary. They include not just books and articles but documentaries, podcasts and films, with estimates of the time commitment and notes on relevance. For students, this feels like an invitation into a wider cultural world of organisational thinking, legitimising the pleasure of bingeing a boxset ‘for work’. For educators, it is a ready-made set of teaching resources.
Critical reflections
Despite its many strengths, there are places where the book could go further. Most notably, while Burrow makes a serious effort to decentre Eurocentric histories (e.g. drawing on Chinese, Middle Eastern and postcolonial perspectives), the stories of women’s organising remain somewhat absent. Historically, women were excluded from many formal organisations, but this makes their informal and communitarian practices all the more significant. The book could have drawn on work like Jennifer Manning’s (2025) postcolonial feminist analysis of Maya women’s communitarian organising to broaden the narrative. Including such perspectives would have deepened Burrow’s project of unsettling the dominant canon.
Another minor concern is that while the historical storytelling is refreshing, there is a potential risk of oversimplification. Compressing complex lineages into brisk anecdotes necessarily leaves out nuance. For readers encountering these histories for the first time, that may not matter. For scholars, however, the danger is that the playfulness of style obscures the contested and messy nature of historical sources. This is not a fatal flaw. Burrow himself insists the book is an entry point, not an endpoint, but it does set limits to the depth of analysis.
Contribution
These critiques notwithstanding, Discovering Organizations is a significant and welcome addition to the literature. For students, it is accessible without being condescending; it signals the intellectual excitement of organisation studies rather than reducing it to bullet points. For educators, the case studies and resource lists are immediately usable. For scholars, the book offers fresh historical material and a reminder that our canonical concepts have longer, stranger genealogies than we often acknowledge.
Perhaps the best measure of its success is that it leaves the reader wanting more. That is exactly what we want from an introductory text: to whet appetites, to provoke curiosity, to encourage exploration beyond its own pages. In that sense, Burrow has succeeded in writing the ‘prequel’ that makes the main feature of organisational theory more compelling.
