Etzioni is the author of over 30 books. About half are academic tomes, the most important of which is "The Active Society", and about half are written for the public, especially "The Spirit of Community". His early academic work focused on organizational theory, resulting in the often-cited "A Comparative Analysis of Complex Organizations", published in 1961. The theory advanced in this book is that variations in two key factors, present in all organizations, determine much about how they function. The two factors are the way the organization uses power to control its people (whether through incentives, sanctions, force, and/or appeals to values) and the ways people approach the organization (which can vary widely, from outright hostility to deep involvement). Thus, organizations that have antagonistic members, who are controlled with force, such as maximum-security prisons, are less likely to rehabilitate than organizations that employ less force and have less resentful members, such as minimum-security prisons. Organizations that pay their members produce work of higher quantity and quality when they also appeal to the values of their members and when their members approve of them than when their members are more ambivalent, which bodes better for professions than factories. The book's implicit normative message is that organizations that appeal to their members’ values are better than those that employ incentives and much better than those that rely on force.