SHIV SENA 23 The bulk of the data was collected in a field study in Bombay from 1972 to 1974, from personal interviews and observations. Two short visits were made in 1975 and 1976 to fill in a few gaps in the information gathered earlier. Some of the office-bearers mentioned in this paper have since been removed (notably Datta Pradhan) but the organizational structure has remained the same. Perspective An organization may be defined as ^a relatively permanent and relatively complex discernible interaction system. Organizations can be observed as a series of patterned interactions among actors."2 Here the emphasis is clearly not on the mere collection of actors but on the interaction among them. Other sociologists such as Parsons,3 Gooley,4 and Max Weber,6 particularly the last, have given competent definitions of organization. We have presented the definition of Hass and Draabek as it clearly emphasizes the interaction among actors which we consider to be very important. The Shiv Sena organization is, as we shall sec later, a formal one,6 in the sense there are regulations and formal communication and decision making systems, and the actors have different positions and ranks. As a matter of fact, decentralization and differentiation are the hallmarks of all formal and complex organizations as Etzioni,7 and Blau and Schoenherr8 have demonstrated. In this connection a word of caution needs to be introduced. Organizational theorists like the ones quoted above, tend to lean towards a static model, as Alien rightly pointed out,9 in the sense that to them the robustness of an organization seems to depend largely on factors internal to it. The discussion of conflict is also undertaken within the confines of the organizational structure. A great deal of emphasis is, for instance, put on the functions of goal attainment, commitment, leadership, structural differentiation and so on. Though these organizational theorists, including Gro-zier, do talk of the environmental influences as well, the environment enters as a passive subject, which has to be controlled, by degrees, by the organization, as it gets^more complex and diversified.10 Such an approach plays down the fact that the capacity to tackle the environmental milieu does not necessarily depend on the degree of complexity of an organization. An organization, we believe, is not sustained solely by its efficiency or by its complex and well demarcated institutional structure, as much as by its capacity to orient itself to the environment in keeping with its stated goals. It is true that for any large scale organization to