Decoding Organization: Bletchley Park, Codebreaking and Organization Studies

by Christopher Grey

How was Bletchley Park made as an organization? How was signals intelligence constructed as a field? What was Bletchley Park's culture and how was its work co-ordinated? Bletchley Park was not just the home of geniuses such as Alan Turing, it was also the workplace of thousands of other people, mostly women, and their organization was a key component in the cracking of Enigma. Challenging many popular perceptions, this book examines the hitherto unexamined complexities of how 10,000 people were brought together in complete secrecy during World War II to work on ciphers. Unlike most organizational studies, this book decodes, rather than encodes, the processes of organization and examines the structures, cultures and the work itself of Bletchley Park using archive and oral history sources.

Organization theorists, intelligence historians and general readers alike will find in this book a challenge to their preconceptions of both Bletchley Park and organizational analysis.

*The first social scientific account of Bletchley Park by one of the leading figures in organization studies
*Proposes a distinctive approach to organization studies that will appeal to those dissatisfied with current thinking
*Offers a detailed historical case study that challenges many popular preconceptions and myths

340 pages, Hardcover

First published February 24, 2012

About the author

Christopher Grey is Professor of Organization Studies at Royal Holloway, University of London and Visiting Professor at Université Paris-Dauphine. He was previously a Professor of Organizational Behaviour at the University of Warwick, and before that, a Professor of Organizational Theory at the University of Cambridge and Fellow of Wolfson College. He has published numerous academic articles on the sociology and history of management and organizations, on management education and learning, on critical management studies and on professional services organizations. He is the author of A Very Short, Fairly Interesting and Reasonably Cheap Book about Studying Organizations (2012) and Decoding Organization (2013).

This is the listing for the management author. For the novelist, see Christopher Peter Grey. For the photographer see Christopher Grey.