A Functioning Society: Selections from Sixty-five Years of Writing on Community, Society and Polity

Peter Drucker is best known, especially in the United States, as a writer on management, but, in fact, management was neither his first nor has it been his foremost concern. Most of his books on management deal less with strategy and results than with the nature of the corporation as human effort and social institution. From the time of his intellectual apprenticeship to the present, Drucker’s primary subject has been community, in which the individual has status, and society in which the individual has function. The selections brought together in A Functioning Society are drawn both from his books and previously uncollected writings. Together, they reflect the full range of Drucker’s thought and constitute an ideal introduction to his work.