Organization: a large, fairly permanent social system designed to achieve limited objectives through the coordinated activities of members

"An organization is a system of roles graded by authority." Such characteristics appear most clearly in large organizations, which may be defined as those in which the sheer number of participants and the scale of operations prohibit face-to-face relationships among most of their members. Size by itself introduces a pathological element in organizations that eases the problem of analysis by dramatizing their other characteristics. Although hierarchy appears in both the small group and the army, its intensity and effects are more sharply evident in the larger system".