Follow the Money: Inside the Black Box of the Corporation

In this paper, Whyte illustrates how the edifice of the corporation acts as a black box – a relatively enclosed system of social relationships – by ensuring that the internal and external workings of the organisation are generally obscured from view. Whyte proposes that it is the researcher’s task to open the black box in ways that enable us to “see” beyond the boundaries that very structure imposes on our knowledge and to establish ways to “follow the money.”