Short answers, pulled from the story.
The word organization derives from the Greek organon, meaning tool or instrument, originally referring to a musical instrument before evolving to describe the structures that bind human societies together.
The Peter Principle was introduced in 1969 and suggests that in a hierarchy, every employee tends to rise to their level of incompetence, creating a system where the most capable individuals are often promoted until they can no longer perform their duties.
The matrix organization emerged in the early 1960s when United States aerospace industries introduced a structure that assigned every worker two bosses simultaneously to balance technical expertise with project completion.
The pharmaceutical company GlaxoSmithKline has been cited as an example of an organization attempting to function under ecological principles where employees are paid for what they actually do and must demonstrate a profit or face termination.
Condorcet's jury theorem suggests that if the average member votes better than a random roll of the dice, adding more members increases the likelihood of a correct decision, but if the average member is worse, adding more people only makes the decision worse.
Ronald Coase published his economic theory of organizations in 1937 and introduced the concept of transaction costs to explain why firms exist and how they reduce the friction of exchange.