Hyper‎-Organization offers an institutional explanation for the expansion of formal organization in the contemporary era‎-in numbers‎,‎ internal complexity‎,‎ social domains‎,‎ and national contexts‎.‎ Much expansion is hard to justify in terms of technical production or political power‎,‎ it lies in areas such as protecting the environment‎,‎ promoting marginalized groups‎,‎ or behaving with transparency‎.‎ The authors argue that expansion is supported by widespread cultural rationalization characterized by scientism‎,‎ rights and empowerment discourses‎,‎ and an explosion of education‎.‎ These cultural changes are transmitted through legal‎,‎ accounting‎,‎ and professionalization principles‎,‎ driving the creation of new organizations and the elaboration of existing ones‎.‎ The resulting organizations are constructed to be proper social actors‎,‎ as much as functionally effective entities‎.‎ They are painted as autonomous and integrated but depend heavily on external definitions to sustain this depiction‎.‎ So expansion creates organizations that are‎,‎ whatever their actual effectiveness‎,‎ structurally arational‎.‎ This book advances theories of social organization in three main ways‎.‎ First‎,‎ by giving an account of the expansive rise of ‎'‎organization‎'‎ rooted in rapid worldwide cultural rationalization‎.‎ Second‎,‎ explaining the construction of contemporary organizations as purposive actors‎,‎ rather than passive bureaucracies or loose associations‎.‎ Third‎,‎ showing how the expanded actorhood of the contemporary organization‎,‎ and the associated interpenetration with the environment‎,‎ dialectically generate structures far removed from instrumental rationality‎.‎