It has been one of the most abiding points of interest of modern organizational research to
study how well the programmatically intended formal structures of organizations describe what is going on within them, and what unintended, unprogrammed, and thus informal structures tend to accompany them . How do sociologists go about distinguishing the facts of formal organization from the facts of informal organization? There seem to be two things that matter in the ways this distinction is drawn. There is, in the first place, a certain scholarly tradition in which the distinction is rooted. It dates back to Pareto’s definition of rationality, Tönnies’ typology, Cooley’s concept of primary-group, and – tracing through the seminal achievement of the Hawthorn studies – the tradition is very much alive today.