As its title implies, this book has two purposes. One is to explicate the
‘decoding organization’ at Bletchley Park, the place most famous for
the breaking of Enigma ciphers in conditions of complete secrecy
during the Second World War. The other is, in the process, to develop
a certain approach to the analysis of organizations; a way of making
sense of, or ‘decoding’, organization which points to a way of reviving
organization studies as currently commonly conducted. In this sense it
is a contribution to the social science of organizations and will primarily be of interest to academics working in that field. However, it should
also have a value to those working in the area of intelligence studies
and history, and an appeal to general readers with an interest in
Bletchley Park2
.
The overall intention is to provide an interpretative analysis
which draws on a broad range of concepts in organization studies
whilst engaging in considerable historical detail in order to illuminate
how ‘organization’ is achieved or accomplished over time. This is a
‘decoding’ of organization in that, like the codebreakers of Bletchley
Park, an interpretive analysis seeks an answer to the question ‘what
does this mean?’. It entails considerable complexity; a complexity
which is analytical, methodological and empirical. This lengthy opening chapter introduces this complexity by first introducing Bletchley
Park, then indicating the problems and possibilities of organization
studies. This is followed by a discussion of organization studies and
history, and what the linkage of the two has to offer. This serves as a
prelude to indicating the approach to historical analysis which I will
adopt and the methods and sources of that analysis. There follows a
brief overview of the organization of Bletchley Park and, finally, an
outline of the contents of the rest of the book.