1 This volume heralds a new era in the way that we look at organizations. Up to now organization was the province of social scientists, including management and business academics. Although a very substantial part of the functioning of any organization now depends on various areas of information systems engineering, computer science has not had a significant say on the phenomenon of organization. By giving a voice to the engineers and pointing the way toward more and better integration between organization design (OD) and organization engineering (OE), this book marks the shift from the old to the new era. The history of organization studies contains a great many references to engineering. In fact, some of the founding fathers were famous engineers, such as Taylor (1911) or Fayol (1949, originally published in 1916). Many of the practices that are still current in organizations came from various fields of engineering (Shenhav, 1995). The Taylorist tradition has been extended up to the present day through a series of process-oriented approaches, which is better known as the total quality movement led by figures such as Shewhart, Deming, and Juran. Active since the 1930s, total quality aimed at reducing costs to the provider and increasing the user’s satisfaction in the goods or services. More recently, the process approach took an important turn with the rallying cry from Hammer (1990) for obliteration rather than automa- tion. This was to be known as the business process reengineering (BPR) movement that revived the Taylorist notion that all processes that do not add value should be summarily scrapped. In spite of being relatively short-lived, the BPR opened up the way to the age of enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems. These are highly integrated software systems provided by companies such as SAP, Oracle, Introducing the Volume Rodrigo Magalhães This file is to be used only for a purpose specified by Palgrave Macmillan, such as checking proofs, preparing an index, reviewing, endorsing or planning coursework/other institutional needs. You may store and print the file and share it with others helping you with the specified purpose, but under no circumstances may the file be distributed or otherwise made accessible to any other third parties without the express prior permission of Palgrave Macmillan. Please contact rights@palgrave.com if you have any queries regarding use of the file. PROOF