Bureaucracy, organizations and formalization of knowledge.

Summary The sociology of organizations was built around a founding opposition between formal or theoretical knowledge on the one hand and practical or informal knowledge on the other. This opposition underlined the gap between the overhanging vision of the leaders, equipped with scientific or legal knowledge, and the empirical knowledge of the executors. The transformations of organizations since the 1970s have led to the questioning of this founding opposition. Sociologists have studied how actors develop knowledge in practice that can then acquire formal properties. In doing so, the sociology of organizations has emphasized that the use of more formalized knowledge for control or coordination purposes can lead to bureaucratic processes.