The word “organization” appears to be an abstraction in its own right. If we use it in the sense of “the organization of festivities” then the word means the multitude of actions and efforts that are necessary to have the party be a success, before, during, and after the actual party. If we use it in the sens of “the organization has been in existence for 5 years” then we are referring to a group of people who have been something together in some context for the last five years. Or, are we in the first instance referring to something which is not part of the party, and in the second instance to a thing-like something which in some fashion can be identified as existing outside of ourselves and our own behaviour? 

Posing the question in this different manner defines the limits of organization as shorthand for a dynamic complex of people, interactions and behaviours on one side and organization as homogenous entity on the other; one that can grow or sell or produce, separate from the dynamics that to us seem necessary to make that possible. To people who reify the organization, it is a given, somewhere they go to and return from. In its non-reified form, the organization is a process that people participate in, where you accomplish something by your own behaviour, and from which you receive something in return as  a result of the many different types of behaviours of others. 

To people whom reify an organization, it is a thing that will exist  for the long term, offering its stable security through its structure, its buildings and its expreessions in the shape of its products. When non-reified, the organization seems more like a group of people having access to an assortment of means used by each for their own and each other’s ends, where daily changing interactions take place, where ambiguity becomes more visible and each day is just as different and unpredictable as all the others. People whom reify the organization refer to it as an immutable thing. In looking at it from the non-reified perspective it represents somewhere you work hard to achieve some stability among all that movement. To those whom reify, much behaviour is taboo, other behaviour required, and even more behaviour is absolutely essential in achieving one’s own ends. Someone who has not reified the organization will avoid certain behaviour out of empathy, but will be perfectly capable of transgressing against existing imperatives by way of an intervention. 

How people get lost in organizations, Martijn van Oorscheot & Michiel Hogerhuis, 2006, Eburon