Decoding organization

About this book

"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"-- "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 Park "--