A systematic and chronological overview of contemporary literature on horizontal organization (HO) is given; organizations with less hierarchy, more autonomy for the participants and tools for shared decision-making power: commons, cooperatives, participation/co-production and self-managing teams and organizations. This literature shows an evolution from 1900 towards an increasingly broad cultural understanding of organizations within the organizational sciences: at first the focus was only on the needs of the organization, nowadays a paradigm prevails that increasingly incorporates the needs of the participants and environmental factors.