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There is no doubt that this is an ambitious book. In the introduction, Professor Grey makes it clear that he has two concerns. The first is to analyse and explain the organization of Bletchley Park: the British Intelligence and cryptography centre popularly credited with bringing World War II to an early conclusion by decoding German communications. The second is to cure a rot that has set into the discipline of organization studies. Like a modern-day Marcello, Grey pronounces that �something has gone badly wrong with the field of organization studies� (p. 5), supporting this verdict with the obligatory string of reference to such luminaries as Starbuck, Weick, Greenwood, Czarniawska, Gabriel, Suddaby, Hinings, McKinlay and Hardy. This �something� is a loss of relevance. Setting himself against both the North American dominated, neo-positivist orthodoxy of the Academy of Management, and the more Eurocentric tradition of Critical Management Studies, Grey calls for an organization studies that de-familiarizes, but still speaks to, organizational experience, combining fine-grained empirical analysis with a theoretical eclecticism that resists dogmatism to embrace whatever is useful in explaining �organization�.
Anyone who has ever attended a meeting of the Academy of Management can surely attest to his observation that �much academic work in the field has become highly specialised, quantified and abstract, seeking to identity statistical relationships between different, artificially isolated variables� (p. 6). Participation in the Critical Management Studies conference, or even selected streams at EGOS, should substantiate his assertion that �some parts of the field � are concerned with extremely arcane debates in social theory, and scarcely refer to concrete human experience at all� (p. 6). The result of this two-pronged desertion of the real, Grey argues, means that organization studies succeeds in de-familiarizing lived organizational experience but at the expense of relevance and fidelity to the complex messiness �
