S ince the Second World War, the field of organizations studies has grown substantially in the number of researchers, number of publications, and amount of research produced. It has moved from being a combination of established disciplines to becoming a quasi-discipline of its own, with its own journals and professional associations. It has established a standardized set of ancestors, a stylized history. It has solidified an academic home in business schools. This history has implications for understanding both the future of organizations research and the social dynamics of the development of scholarly communities. Despite this long heritage, the contemporary field of organization studies is primarily a creation of a shorter and more parochial history created in the last half of the twentieth century in Anglophone North America. 1 The focus on North American scholarship is not to overlook the substantial twentieth century contributions from other parts of the world. European scholars such as Tom Burns, Ronald Coase, Michel Crozier, David Hickson, Edith Penrose, Derek Pugh, Claude Riveline, George Stalker, and Joan Woodward were major figures in the middle of the century, as were scholars such as Nils Brunsson, Lex Donaldson, Giovanni Dosi, Alfred Kieser, Bruno Latour, Johan Olsen, Andrew Pettigrew, and Jean-Claude Theonig in the latter part. Scholarly fields often bury their early and geographically distant contributors through some combination of ignorance, localized ambitions for recognition, and convenient conceptions of progress; and the field of organization studies in North America clearly exhibits such myopia. However, there are special features of twentieth century history that shaped the development of the organizations research community after 1945 in such a way as to lead to a relatively autonomous genealogy.