Studying Organization: Theory and Method (Handbook of Organization Studies, Vol 1)

STUDYING ORGANIZATION

EDITORIAL BOARD Howard E. Aldrich Department of Sociology. Unil'ersily of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Mats Alvesson Departmenl of Business Adminislration. Lund Universily

Koya Azumi Department of Social Sciences, Internalional Christian University

Per Olof Berg Management Research Institute, Copenhagen Business School

Gibson Burrell School of Industrial and Business Srudies, University of Warwick

Marta Calas School of Management, Universily of MassachusellS

Barbara Czarniawska School of Economics and Managemenl, Lund University

Peter Frost Faculty of Commerce and Business Adminislration, Unil'ersity of British Columbia

Jane Marceau Pro- Vice Chancellor Research, Unil'ersily of Western Sydney, Macarthur

Stella Nkomo Belk College of Business Administration, Unil'ersily of North Carolina at Charlolle

Andrew Pettigrew Centre for Corporate Strategy and Change. Wanrick Business School

Linda L. Putnam Department of Speech Communication, Texas A & lvl University

Karlene Roberts Walter A. Haas School of Business, University of California

Suzana Rodrigues Faculty of Management, Federal Universil), of Minais Geras

Linda Smircich School of Managemenl, Universily of MassachusellS

Barry Staw Walter A. Haas School of Business, Unil'ersily of California

Roberto Venosa GetiAlin Vargas Foundalion, Sl. Pauls Business College

Karl E. Weick FacullY of Managemel1l. Ullirersitr of Michigan

David Whetten Department of Business Adminislration, Unirersily of Illinois al Urbana-Champaign

STUDYING ORGANIZATION Theory & Method

Edited by STEWA RT R. C L E G G A N D C Y NTHI A HA R D Y

SAG E Publications London· Thousand Oaks· New Delhi

Preface, Introduction, Conclusion and Editorial Selection © Stewart R. Clegg and Cynthia Hardy 1 999 Chapter I © Michael Reed 1 996 Chapter 2 © Lex Donaldson 1 996 Chapter 3 © Joel A.C. Baum 1 996 Chapter 4 © Jay B. Barney and William Hesterly 1996 Chapter 5 © Walter R. Nord and Suzy Fox 1 996 Chapter 6 © Pamela S. Tolbert and Lynne G. Zucker 1996 Chapter 7 © Mats Alvesson and Stanley Deetz 1 996 Chapter 8 ':0 Marta B. Calis and Linda Smircich 1 996 Chapter 9 © Ralph Stablein 1 996 Chapter 10 © Colin Eden and Chris Huxham 1 996 Chapter II © Stephen Fineman 1 996 Chapter 1 2 © Pasquale Gagliardi 1 996 Chapter 1 3 © John Hassard 1 996 Chapter 14 ([:J Joanne Martin and Peter Frost 1 996 Chapter 1 5 © Cynthia Hardy and Stewart R. Clegg 1 996 Chapter 16 © Gibson Burrell 1 996 Chapter 1 7 © Richard Marsden and Barbara Townley 1 996 Chapters 1 - 1 7 originally published in Handbook of Organization Studies, 1 996 This edition first published 1 999 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, transmitted or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without permission in writing from the Publishers. SAGE Publications Ltd 6 Bonhill Street London EC2A 4PU SAGE Publications Inc 2455 Teller Road Thousand Oaks, California 9 1 320 SAGE Publications India Pvt Ltd 32, M-Block Market Greater Kailash - I New Delhi 1 10 048 British Library Cataloguing in Publication data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 0 761 9 6045 7 Library of Congress catalog record available

Typeset by Mayhew Typesetting. Rhayader. Powys Printed in Great Britain by Butler & Tanner Ltd. Frome and London

Stewart dedicates this book to Lynne who, as ever, was a great help in so many ways, but also to Jonathan and William as well as Bill and Joyce Cynthia dedicates this book to all the wonderful friends she leaves behind in Canada and all the friends - old and new - she joins in Australia

Contents

Contributors

IX

Preface

XVI

Introduction Stewart R. Clegg and Cynthia Hardy

Part One

Chapter 1

FRAMEWORKS FOR ANALYSIS

Organizational Theorizing: a Historically Contested Terrain

23

25

Michael Reed

Chapter 2

The Normal Science of Structural Contingency Theory

51

Lex Donaldson

Chapter 3

Organizational Ecology

71

Joel A. C. Baum

Chapter 4

Organizational Economics: Understanding the Relationship between Organizations and Economic ��y�

1M

Jay B. Barney and William Hesterly

Chapter 5

The Individual in Organizational Studies: the Great Disappearing Act?

142

Walter R. Nord and Suzy Fox

Chapter 6

The Institutionalization of Institutional Theory

169

Pamela S. Tolbert and Lynne G. Zucker

Chapter 7

Critical Theory and Postmodernism: Approaches to Organizational Studies Mats Alvesson and Stanley Deetz

185

V11I

Chapter 8

STUD YING ORGANIZA TION

From 'The Woman's' Point of View: Feminist Approaches to Organization Studies

212

Marta B. CaMs and Linda Smircich

Part Two

REFLECTIONS ON

RESEARCH, THEORY AND PRACTICE

Chapter 9

Data in Organization Studies

253 255

Ralph Stablein

Chapter 10

Action Research for the Study of Organizations

272

Colin Eden and Chris Huxham

Chapter 11

Emotion and Organizing

289

Stephen Fineman

Chapter 12

Exploring the Aesthetic Side of Organizational Life

311

Pasquale Gagliardi

Chapter l 3

Images of Time in Work and Organization

327

John Hassard

Chapter 14

The Organizational Culture War Games: a Struggle for Intellectual Dominance

345

Joanne Martin and Peter Frost

Chapter 15

Some Dare Call It Power

368

Cynthia Hardy and Stewart R. Clegg

Chapter 16

Normal Science, Paradigms, Metaphors, Discourses and Genealogies of Analysis

388

Gibson Burrell

Chapter 17

The Owl of Minerva: Reflections on Theory in Practice

405

Richard Marsden and Barbara Townley

Conclusion: Representations

422

Stewart R. Clegg and Cynthia Hardy

Index

452

Contributors

Mats Alvesson is a Professor at the Department of Business Administration at Lund University, Sweden. He is interested in critical theory, organizational culture and symbolism, gender and philosophy of science. Empirical work has mainly been conducted especially in professional service and knowledge­ intensive companies. He is a co-editor of the journal Organization. Recent books include Corporate Culture and Organizational Symbolism (1992, with P.O. Berg), Cultural Perspectives on Organizations (1993), Gender, Managers and Organizations (1994, with Yvonne Billing), Making Sense of Management: a Critical Introduction (1996, with Hugh Willmott) and Management of Knowledge-Intensive Companies (1995). Jay B. Barney is a Professor of Management and holder of the Bank One Chair for Excellence in Corporate Strategy at the Max M. Fisher College of Business, the Ohio State University. After completing his education, Professor Barney joined the faculty at the Anderson Graduate School of Management at UCLA. He moved to Texas A&M University in 1986, then joined the faculty at Ohio State in 1994. In his research, Professor Barney focuses on the relationship between idiosyncratic firm skills and capabilities and sustained competitive advantage. He has published over thirty journal articles. He has served on the editorial boards of several journals, and is currently senior editor at Organization Science. Professor Barney has published three books: Organizational Economics (with William G. Ouchi), Managing Organizations: Strategy, Structure, and Behavior (with Ricky Griffin) and Gaining and Sustaining Competitive Advantage. He won the College of Business Distinguished Research Award at Texas A&M in 1992, and presented the Holger Crafoord Memorial Lecture at the University of Lund, Sweden, in 1993. In addition, he has consulted with a wide variety of public and private organizations, focusing on implementing large-scale organizational change and strategic analysis. Joel A.C. Baum is Professor of Strategy and Organization at the Rotman

School of Management (with a cross-appointment to the Department of Sociology), University of Toronto. Studying economic phenomena from the point of view of a sociologist, Joel is concerned with how institutions, inter­ organizational relations and managers shape patterns of competition and cooperation among firms, organizational founding and failure, and industry evolution. His recent publications include a series of articles on antecedents to

x

STUD YING ORGA NIZA TION

and consequences of multimarket competition among commuter airlines, with Helaine J. Korn, appearing in the Academy of Management Journal and Strategic Management Journal, and another on interorganizational learning among hotels and hotel chains, with Paul Ingram, appearing in Administrative Science Quarterly, Management Science, and Strategic Management Journal. Joel has also recently edited two books, Disciplinary Roots of Strategic Management Research (Advances in Strategic Management, Vol. 15, JAI Press) and Variations in Organization Science: In Honor of Donald T. Campbell (Sage), co-edited with Bill McKelvey. He is currently involved in two major research projects: one examining the rise of chain nursing homes in Ontario and the other analysing the effects of strategic alliances and intellectual property development on competition and firm performance in the Canadian biotechnology industry. Joel is a member of the editorial board of Administrative Science Quarterly and editor-in-chief of Advances in Strategic Management (JAI Press). Gibson Burrell is Professor of Organizational Behaviour at Warwick Business

School and Chair of the Faculty of Social Studies, University of Warwick. He is editor of the journal Organization and has recently completed a book entitled Pandemonium which explores some undeveloped themes in organiza­ tion theory. Marta

B. Cahis is Associate Professor of Organization Studies and International Management at the School of Management of the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. She was born in Cuba and has lived and worked in various countries. Prior to her current position she was Professor and Associate and Acting Dean of the School of Business at the University of Puerto Rico-Mayaguez. The exile experience has facilitated for her a nomadic position from which to write and teach about the intersections between organization studies and postmodern, feminist and postcolonial theorizing. In their collaborative scholarly work Marta B. Calas and Linda Smircich apply perspectives from cultural studies and feminist theories to question current understandings of organizational topics such as leadership, business ethics, and globalization. They are the Americas' co-editors of the new journal Organization. Their articles and book chapters have appeared in several national and international publications. They are the editors of two recent volumes, Critical Perspectives on Organization and Management Theory and Post-Modern Management Theory. Stewart R. Clegg moved to Australia for a job in 1976 and has been there ever

since, apart from an interregnum in Scotland in the early 1990s. He has held a Chair in Sociology at the University of New England, 1985-9; a Chair in Organization Studies at the University of St Andrews, 1990-3; and the Foundation Chair of Management at the University of Western Sydney, Macarthur, 1993-6. Currently he is a Professor in the School of Management, University of Technology, Sydney. He was a founder of APROS (Asian and Pacific Researchers in Organization Studies) in the early 1980s, and has been the co-editor of The Australian and New Zealand Journal of SOCiology, as well as editor of a leading European journal, Organization Studies. He serves on

CONTRIB UTORS

xi

the editorial boards of many other leading journals. Amongst the many books that he has published are Modern Organizations: Organization Studies in the Postmodern

World (1990),

Capitalism

in

Contrasting

Cultures (1990),

Constituting Management (1996, with Gill Palmer), The Politics of Manage­ ment Knowledge (1996, with Gill Palmer), Global Management (1998, with Eduardo Ibarra and Luis Montano), Transformations of Corporate Culture (1998, with Toyohira Kono), and Changing Paradigms (1998, with Thomas Clarke). He has published widely in the journals. He researched the leadership and management needs of embryonic industries for the Taskforce on Leadership and Management in the Twenty First Century commissioned by the Federal Government of Australia, which reported in 1995. Stanley Deetz is a Professor of Communication at Rutgers University, New

Brunswick, New Jersey where he teaches courses in organizational theory, organizational communication and communication theory. He is author of Transforming Communication, Transforming Business: Building Responsive and Responsible Workplaces (1995), Democracy in an Age of Corporate Colonization: Developments in Communication and the Politics of Everyday Life (1992), and editor or author of eight other books. He has published numerous essays in scholarly journals and books regarding stakeholder representation, decision-making, culture, and communication in corporate organizations and has lectured widely in the US and Europe. In 1994 he was a Senior Fulbright Scholar in the Foretagsekonomiska Institutionen, Goteborgs Universitet, Sweden, lecturing and conducting research on man­ aging knowledge-intensive work. He has served as a consultant on culture, diversity, and participatory decision-making for several major corporations. He also served as President of the International Communication Association in 1996-7. Lex Donaldson is Professor of Organization Design at the Australian

Graduate School of Management in the University of New South Wales. His interest is theories of organization, especially of structure. Books include In Defence of Organization Theory: a Reply to the Critics (1985), American Anti­ Management Theories of Organization: a Critique of Paradigm Proliferation (1995) and For Positivist Organization Theory: Proving the Hard Core (1996). He has also published a book for managers (with Frederick G. Hilmer), Management Redeemed: Debunking the Fads that Undermine Corporate Per­ formance (1996). He has also edited a collection of key articles by classic

contributors in Contingency Theory (1995), and published widely in the journals. Colin Eden is Professor and Head of the Department of Management Science

at the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, Scotland. Following an early career as a construction engineer, he moved to the University of Bath where he developed the use of cognitive mapping as the basis of a group decision support system for organizational problem solving. Since moving to Strathclyde, Colin's work has focused on strategy development and imple­ mentation and he has worked extensively with teams of senior managers in public, private and community sector organizations. His research in group

XII

STUD YING ORGANIZA TION

decision support is widely known and accessed across the world. He is co­ author of Thinking in Organizations (1979) and Messing About in Problems (1983) and is co-editor of Tackling Strategic Problems (1990). Stephen Fineman is Professor of Organizational Behaviour at the School of

Management, University of Bath. His background is in occupational psy­ chology, but he has for many years been researching in social constructionist perspectives on issues of emotion in organization, stress, work meanings and unemployment. He is currently directing two major projects on the greening of management - how organizations are responding to pressures to be environmentally 'responsible'. His recent books include Emotion in Organiza­ tion (1993), Organizing and Organizations: an Introduction (1993) and Experi­ encing Organizations (1996). Suzy Fox holds a doctorate in industrial/organizational psychology from the

University of South Florida. Her research interests include emotions, affective and behavioural responses to organizational frustration, and employees' responses to new technology in the workplace. She holds the primary dependent variable of interest to be employee well-being. Currently she holds a Visiting Position at the University of South Florida. Peter Frost holds the Edgar F. Kaiser Chair in Organizational Behavior in the

Faculty of Commerce and Business Administration at the University of British Columbia. He was recently a senior editor for Organization Science. He has published individually and collaboratively a number of books and journal articles on the topics of organizational culture, innovation and politics and on the sociology of science. Recent works include Reframing Organiza­ tional Culture (with Larry Moore, Meryl Louis, Craig Lundberg and Joanne Martin), Doing Exemplary Research (with Ralph Stablein) and a second edition of Publishing in the Organizational Sciences (with Larry Cummings). He recently completed a monograph Rhythms of Academic Life Susan Taylor, and is exploring new ways to think about leadership III organizations. Pasquale Gagliardi is Director of ISTUD (Istituto Studi Direzionali, an

Italian management institute at Stresa, on Lake Maggiore) and Professor of Organization Theory at the Catholic University in Milan. His research focuses on the relationship between culture and organizational order. He has published books and articles on this topic in Italy. In English, he has edited Symbols and Artifacts: Views of the Corporate Landscape (1990) and co-edited Studies of Organizations in the European Tradition (1995). Professor Gagliardi is a consultant to many large Italian corporations. Cynthia Hardy is Professor in the Faculty of Management, Melbourne

University, Australia, having previously been Professor of Policy Studies at McGill University, Montreal. Her research interests have spanned organiza­ tional power and politics; managing strategic change; retrenchment and downsizing; strategy making in universities; and interorganizational collabor­ ation. She has published a number of books, including Managing Strategic

CONTRIBUTORS

xiii

Action: Mobilizing Change (1994), Strategies for Retrenchment and Turn­ around: the Politics of Survival (1990), Managing Strategy in Academic Insti­ tutions: Learning from Brazil (1990), and Managing Organizational Closure (1985). An edited volume on Power and Politics in Organizations was pub­ lished in 1995, and a book on retrenchment in Canadian universities in 1996. Dr Hardy has also published over forty articles in scholarly journals and books. John Hassard was Professor of Organizational Behaviour at the University of Keele, England, and in 1998 took up a professional appointment at UMIST, in the Manchester School of Management. Before joining Keele, he was Fellow in Organizational Behaviour at the London Business School. His recent books include Time, Work and Organization (1989), The Sociology of Time (1990), The Theory and Philosophy of Organizations (1990), Sociology and Organization Theory (1993), Postmodernism and Organizations (1993) and Towards a New Theory of Organizations (1994). Professor Hassard is currently researching organizational change in manufacturing companies in China and the Czech Republic, and compiling a historical analysis of cinema verite studies of work and occupations. William Hesterly is Associate Professor of Management in the David Eccles

School of Business at the University of Utah. His current research interests are emerging organizational forms, interfirm networks, and vertical integration. He has authored and co-authored various articles on organizational economics, most recently in the journals Organization Science and Academy of Management Review. Chris Huxham is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Management Science and Chair of MBA Programmes in the Graduate Business School at the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, Scotland. Developed from a background of research at the Universities of Sussex and Aston in the analysis of conflict and in group decision support, Chris has been researching interorganizational collaboration for the past six years. In this time she has worked in a variety of collaboration contexts in the public and community sectors. Particular focuses have been with groups concerned with collaboration for economic and social development and for anti-poverty initiatives. Richard Marsden is an Associate Professor of Industrial Relations in the Centre for Economics, Industrial Relations and Organization Studies (CEIROS) at Athabasca University, Canada's open and distance university, where he is Director of its national Industrial Relations program. He holds a PhD from the University of Warwick. His interests focus on the uses of social theory for understanding IR-HRM and the politics of work, and his work appears in Sociology, Journal of Historical Sociology, Organization Studies and the Electronic Journal of Radical Organization Theory. He is currently working on using critical realism to develop a chronological-bibliographic reading of Marx and on marrying this with the work of Foucault. Joanne Martin is the Fred H. Merrill Professor of Organizational Behavior at the Graduate School of Business and, by courtesy, in the Department of

xiv

STUD YING ORGANIZA TION

Sociology, Stanford University, California. She has been at Stanford since 1977. Her current research interests include organizational culture, with particular emphasis on subcultural identities and ambiguities, and gender and race in organizations, focusing on subtle barriers to acceptance and advancement. Her most recent books are Reframing Organizational Culture (1991, co-edited and co-written with Peter Frost, Larry Moore, Meryl Louis and Craig Lundberg) and Cultures in Organizations (1992). Walter R. Nord is currently Professor of Management at the University of

South Florida. Previously he was at Washington University-St Louis (196789). His current interests centre on developing a critical political economics perspective of organizations, organizational innovation, and organizational conflict. He has published widely in scholarly journals and edited/authored a number of books. His recent books include The Meanings of Occupational Work (with A. Brief ), Implementing Routine and Radical Innovations (with S. Tucker), Organizational Reality: Reports from the Firing Line (with P. Frost and V. Mitchell), and Resistance and Power in Organizations (with J. Jermier and D. Knights). He is currently co-editor of Employee Responsibilities and Rights Journal and a recent past book review editor for the Academy of Management Review. He has served as consultant on organizational develop­ ment and change for a variety of groups and organizations. Michael Reed is Professor of Organization Theory in the Department of

Behaviour in Organizations at Lancaster University, UK. His research interests include theoretical development in organization analysis, changes to the expert division of labour and their implications for organizational forms, and the emergence of 'disorganized organizations' in high/postmodernity. His previous publications include Redirections in Organizational Analysis (1985), The Sociology of Management (1989), The Sociology of Organizations (1992), Rethinking Organization (1992, co-edited with M. Hughes) and Organizing Modernity (1994, co-edited with L. Ray). He is currently working on a book provisionally entitled Beyond the Iron Cage? which will be published in 1997. He is the joint editor with Professor Gibson Burrell of the journal Organization. Linda Smircich is Professor of Organization Studies and was Acting Chair of

the Management Department at the School of Management of the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. Originally from Long Island, New York, she was always interested in anthropology, but instead of going off to some distant locale, she stayed in the Northeast and has ended up studying some interesting natives: organizations and their management. The collaborative work of Linda Smircich and Marta B. Calas is described in the biography of the latter. Ralph Stablein is currently employed in the Management Department at the

University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand. His teaching and research interests revolve around notions of knowledge: what gets labelled as knowl­ edge, how it is 'produced' and used, and so on. Pamela S. Tolbert is currently an Associate Professor and Chair of the

Department of Organizational Behavior in the School oflndustrial and Labor Relations at Cornell. She has taught graduate and undergraduate courses in

CONTRIB UTORS

xv

organization theory, occupations and professions, organizations and environ­ mental change, and stratification. Much of her research has focused on professionals in organizations, and includes studies of career choices among engineers and engineering students, systems of decision-making within corporate law firms, and determinants of compensation and promotion of university faculty members. She was awarded the American Sociological Association's prestigious EGOS award in 1987 for a research study of the development of administrative offices in public and private universities. Among her current research projects are a study of the effects of work at home on engineering employees' careers and work attachment, and an analysis of the processes of curriculum change in higher education institutions. Barbara Townley taught industrial relations and human resource management at the Universities of Lancaster and Warwick, in the UK, before moving to Canada, where she is Professor in the Department of Organizational Analysis at the University of Alberta. Her research interests include using Foucault to reconceptualize human resource management, a theme developed in her book Reframing Human Resource Management: Power, Ethics and the Subject at Work (1994). Lynne G. Zucker is Professor of Sociology (since 1989) and Director (since

1986) of the Organizational Research Program at the Institute for Social Science Research at UCLA. Concurrently she holds appointments as Research Associate with the National Bureau of Economic Research and as Consulting Sociologist with the American Institute of Physics, and is a member of the affiliated faculty of the UCLA School of Education. Zucker is the author of four books and monographs and numerous journal and other articles on organizational theory, analysis, and evaluation, institutional structure and process, trust production, civil service, government spending and services, unionization, science and its commercialization, and per­ manently failing organizations. She serves or has served as associate editor or editorial board member on several journals. She has also served on the NSF Young Presidential Scholar Award Panel and the NSF Sociology Panel and as Acting Director of the UCLA Institute for Social Science Research. Zucker has had a variety of university and other appointments since 1974, including Economist with the Statistics of Income Division of the US Internal Revenue Service (1989-94), and visiting appointments in the Department of Sociology of the University of Chicago (1982), the Program on Non-Profit Organiz­ ations of the Institute for Social and Policy Studies at Yale University (1986), and the PhD Program in Organizational Behavior at the Harvard Business School (1987).

Preface

This volume derives from the 1996 Handbook of Organization Studies. Originally, the Handbook was launched primarily for a research audience. Since its launch, the book's success has led to many requests for a paperback edition, particularly in a format that instructors and students might use. Recognition from the American Academy of Management which honoured the Handbook with its 1997 George R. Terry award for 'the most outstanding contributions to the advancement of management knowledge' has further increased interest in the Handbook. Accordingly, the editors and the publisher decided to launch a paperback version in 1999. We decided to split the Handbook into two volumes. We wanted to produce a paperback version that would be more practical for teaching purposes. On the other hand, we also wanted to preserve the original integrity and structure of the Handbook. Volume 1 consists of the original Parts One and Three. It focuses on theoretical issues and the link between theory and practice. Volume 2 consists of the original Part Two and focuses on substantive organizational issues. Of course, there is some overlap between these categories but, nonetheless, each volume stands as a coherent entity with appeal to particular audiences. The editors would like to thank Rosemary Nixon and the wonderful team at Sage, in both the UK and the US, who did so much to ensure the success of this project. We would also like to thank the contributors once again. We should point out that they did not have the opportunity to update their chapters owing to the pressures of the publication deadline. The desire to make the paperback version of the Handbook available as quickly as possible precluded revision. It was more important to make the existing material more readily available than to engage in the lengthy process of overhauling thirty, still very current, chapters. Stewart R. Clegg and Cynthia Hardy

orbidden.

Introduction S T E WAR T R. C L E G G A N D C Y N T H I A H AR D Y

In the introduction we set the scene for this book. We first provide an overview of how the theory and practice of organization studies have changed over the last thirty years. We then define what we take organization studies to be in the light of those changes. We revisit some key theoretical debates in more detail since many of the chapters refer to them. We also draw atten­ tion to some of the major changes that have marked organizational practices, to which, if it is to have any application, theory must refer. It is within this theoretical and practical context that the chapters were written and, by drawing out some important themes, we hope to orient readers, especially those who are new to organ­ ization studies. We then explain the substance of the volume: why it is organized the way it is and why it contains the chapters it does. Finally, we will turn our attention to the readers: who they are and how they might make sense of the project.

CHANGES

What is the world like today? How has it changed? What does it mean for the study of organizations? I f we cast our minds back to the mid 1 960s. I we remember that the Vietnam War was starting to heat up while the Cold War was still frigid; in Europe the Berlin Wall had only recently gone up, while in Asia and the Caribbean the dominoes were threatening to come down; in the USA, the civil rights movement was in full swing and the Berkeley Free Speech Movement was gaining momentum; in Asia, Mao's Cultural Revolution was imminent and India and Pakistan were at war; in Africa, Rhodesia's Unilateral Declaration of Independence broke colonial

ranks, while to the south, Nelson Mandela had just started a prison sentence that would last a quarter of a century. Most organizations were still premised on instruction and surveillance through personal, written or verbal, communica­ tion, and relied on professional discretion to monitor the less routinizable areas of organiza­ tion life. Hierarchies were the norm, personal computers had not been invented, and the only mode of instantaneous communication was the telephone. The new technologies that were to challenge radically accepted organization designs seemed unthinkable. Since that time, things have changed. Consider the implosion of communism, the explosion of neo-conservativism, the eradication of apartheid, the advance of feminism, the erosion of US commercial dominance and the volatile ebb and flow of East Asian economic power. Note the emergence of the virtual, the network, the global and the postmodern organization. There are, as we approach a new millennium, many new phenomena, new conditions, new entities, even new organizations, for organization theorists to explore. The last thirty years have not only changed the terrain, they have also produced new approaches and concepts. Three decades ago, an 'orthodox consensus' (Atkinson 1 97 1 ) seemed to be emerging in organization theory concerning the role of functionalism, by which we mean an approach premised on assumptions concerning the unitary and orderly nature of organizations. Functionalist research emphasizes consensus and coherence rather than conflict, dissensus and the operations of power. The key concept is that of the organization as a 'system' which is function­ ally effective if it achieves explicit goals formally defined through rational decision-making. Man-

2

STUD YING ORGANIZA TION

agement's task, according to this view, is to define and achieve these goals; the researcher's task is to collect objective data concerning the way in which the organization functions around goal orientation and maintenance. Typically, the research method follows the normal science model, in which the nature of organizational reality is represented and expressed through a formal research design; quantitative data facil­ itate validation, reliability, and replicability; a steady accumulation and building of empirically generated knowledge derives from a limited number of theoretical assumptions. Different theoretical approaches, such as population ecology, organizational economics, contingency theory, among others, have evolved under the dual umbrella of functionalism and normal science, both of which remain driving forces in organization studies today. Meanwhile, a plethora of alternative approaches emerged, which directly challenge the supremacy of func­ tionalism and normal science. Marsden and Townley (Chapter 1 7) call these approaches 'contra' science since they aim at critiquing and replacing the assumptions, approaches, and methods of normal science. One important trigger of these alternative approaches in the British context was the publication of David Silverman's ( 1 97 1 ) The Theory of Organizations, whose interpretative emphasis countered the functionalist view. It opened a Pandora's box, releasing actors as opposed to systems; social construction as opposed to social determinism; interpretative understanding as opposed to a logic of causal explanation; plural definitions of situations rather than the singular definition articulated around organizational goals. In the USA, Karl Weick's ( 1 969) book The Social Psychology of Organizing provided another impetus for alter­ native work by focusing attention on the pro­ cesses of organizing, rather than those entities called organizations, using similar phenomen­ ological resources to Silverman ( 1 97 1 ). The publication of Braverman's ( 1 974) study of 'the labour process' brought the concerns of Marxist thinking on to the organization studies agenda, reinforcing concerns with conflict, power and resistance (Clegg and Dunkerley 1 980; Littler 1 982; Burawoy 1 979; Knights and Willmott 1 990). The framework offered by Burrell and Morgan ( 1 979) in Sociological Paradigms and Organizational Analysis identified functionalist, interpretativist, radical humanist and radical structuralist paradigms. It provided a sense­ making device to account for and locate these new approaches, as well as carving out legitimate spaces in which they could flourish. Elsewhere, in the broader realms of social theory, a radical change in social and political

thought was taking place under the rubric of 'postmodernism' (Laclau 1 988). One of the first sightings of the 'post' phenomenon occurred when Leslie Fiedler (1 967) tied the term to a series of radical antitheses to 'modern' trends in aesthetics. Huyssen ( 1 984) later identified this sighting as the primogenesis of postmodernism. While resistant to definition (Jencks 1 989), post­ modernism has been identified as that which is marked by discontinuity, indeterminacy and immanence (Hassan 1 985). Building on the pioneering work of intellectuals like Lyotard ( 1 984), postmodern critiques coalesced around an antipathy to 'modernist' tendencies empha­ sizing grand narrative; the notion of totality; and essentialism. The object of early postmodernist critiques clearly was Marxism. Here was a master narrative par excellence, the sweep of class struggle delivering a teleological 'end of history' in communist society; few categories could be more 'totalizing' than the notion of the 'mode of production' which was the key to explaining all social change everywhere. At the core of this theoretical project was 'class struggle', the essential fulcrum on which social and economic development occurred; individuals were visible only in so far as they were bearers of identities that their class position either ascribed, in which case their consciousness was 'authentic', or denied, in the case of 'false' consciousness. Postmodern approaches challenge and invert each one of these assumptions: no grand narra­ tive marks the unfolding of human histories. They are histories, not history: one must attend to local, fragmented specificities, the narratives of everyday lives. Any pattern that is constituted can only be a series of assumptions framed in and by a historical context. The great totalities like 'the economy' are merely theoretical artifacts. The evolution of dominant discourses from Christian religions, to sciences of the social, to histories of their constitution (Foucault 1 972) shows only the contemporary vanity of human­ kind in placing the 'individual', a relatively recent and culturally specific category, at the centre of the social, psychological, economic, and moral universe. The subject, decentred, relative, is acknowledged not as a stable con­ stellation of essential characteristics, but as a socially constituted, socially recognized, cate­ gory of analysis. For example, no necessarily essential social attributes characterize 'men' or 'women' . Instead the subjectivity of those labelled as such is culturally and historically variable and specific. As the status of the subject is challenged so, too, is that of the researcher. No longer all­ knowing, all-seeing, objective or omnipotent, the researcher is forced to re-examine, in a reflexive

INTROD UCTION mode, his or her relation to the research process and the 'knowledge' it produces. No longer a disinterested observer, acutely aware of the social and historical positioning of all subjects and the particular intellectual frameworks through which they are rendered visible, the researcher can only produce knowledge already embedded in the power of those very frame­ works. No privileged position exists from which analysis might arbitrate (see Chapter 7 by Alvesson and Deetz). 2

WHAT ARE ORGANIZATION STUDIES?

These changes have major implications for our understanding of what organization studies constitute. Gone is the certainty, if it ever existed, about what organizations are; gone, too, is the certainty about how they should be studied, the place of the researcher, the role of methodology, the nature of theory. Defining organization studies today is by no means an easy task. Our approach is to conceptualize organization studies as a series of conversations, in particular those of organization studies researchers3 who help to constitute organiza­ tions through terms derived from paradigms, methods and assumptions, themselves derived from earlier conversations. But what are these conversations, what are they about and why do they exist? We believe they are evolving conversations, with emergent vocabularies and grammars, and with various degrees of discontinuity. Sometimes they are marked by voices from the centre of analysis and practice, sometimes they seem to come from left field, out of the blue. They reflect, reproduce and refute both the traditions of discourse that have shaped the study of organizations and the practices in which members of organizations engage. They relate to organizations as empirical objects, to organization as social process, and to the intersections and gaps between and within them. Let us explain by starting with a premise: organizations are empirical objects. By this we mean that we see something when we see an organization, but each of us may see something different. For instance, we can refer to the World Bank as an 'organization', one with specific resources and capacities; with rules that con­ stitute it; with a boundedness that defines it more or less loosely; with a history; with employees, clients, victims and other interested agents. These boundaries, these rules, this history, these agents must be enacted and interpreted, however, if they are to form a basis for action. For example, a rule has to be represented as

3

something enforceable and obligatory before it means anything, and it may mean nothing or it may mean many things, to members and their experience of everyday organizational life. As researchers, we participate in these enact­ ment and interpretation processes. We choose what empirical sense we wish to make of organizations by deciding how we wish to represent them in our work. Representation, by any device, always involves a choice concerning what aspects of the 'organization' we wish to represent and how we will represent it. For example, some see organizations as character­ ized by dimensions like formalization, standar­ dization and routinization; others as exhibiting variation, selection, retention and competition; or incurring transaction costs; or distinguished by institutionalized cultures, or whatever. We would say that to the extent that organizations achieve representation in particular terms, they always do so as an effect of theoretical privileges afforded by certain ways of seeing, certain terms of discourse, and their conversational enact­ ment. At the same time, these terms of rep­ resentation are already ways of not seeing, ways of not addressing other conversational enact­ ments, and hence, ways of not acknowledging other possible attributes of organizations. How aspects of organizations are represented, the means of representation, the features deemed salient, those features glossed and those features ignored, are not attributes of the organization. They are an effect of the reciprocal interaction of multiple conversations: those that are profes­ sionally organized, through journals, research agendas, citations and networks; those that take place in the empirical world of organizations. The dynamics of reciprocity in this mutual interaction can vary: some conversations of practice inform those of the profession; some professional talk dominates practice; some practical and professional conversations sustain each other; others talk past, miss and ignore each other. Consider, again, the example of the World Bank: it shows that there is no artificial separation between the conversations in, of and around organizations. It is not the case that one discourse belongs to science and another to everyday life, that one can inform or reform the other in some determinate way. The World Bank' implies conversations lodged within diverse discourses with different emphases about, among other things, the scientific efficacy and adequacy of various models of economic and social development. The strategies of science are integral to its strategies of organization but its strategies of organization are more than merely this one restricted conversation. There are also the conversations that constitute the

4

STUD YING ORGANIZA TION

work of the members of the organization, con­ versations which implicate formal disciplinary knowledges, such as 'marketing', 'research and development', and all those other terms that provide a lexicon of 'management'. Such con­ versations and their associated practices arrange the organizational arena as a contested terrain: one where scenes are configured, agencies enrolled, interests translated, and work accom­ plished, a space in which the empirical object is constituted. Such conversations, derived from the disciplines, as well as from more local knowledges and their reciprocal interaction, shape the object, the organization. So, whether located in the organization of an academic specialism such as ours, or applied in the constitution of actions that become the analytical subject of such specialisms, the insights of conversation, as a public phenom­ enon, something intersubjective and shared, involve organizing as a social process. By this we refer to the embeddedness of organizing within distinct local practices, of language, of culture, of ethnicity, of gender. There is always someone who speaks and engages in conversa­ tion in order for a conversation to occur. These individuals have identities that are implicated in what is said, or not said. Speech is never dis­ embodied: there is always a subject who speaks. even behind the most reifying organization theorist or desiccated bureaucrat. Organizations are thus sites of situated social action more or less open both to explicitly organized and formal disciplinary knowledges such as marketing, production, and so on, and also to conversational practices embedded in the broad social fabric, such as gender, ethnic and other culturally defined social relations, them­ selves potential subjects for formally organized disciplinary knowledges, such as anthropology. sociology, or, even, organization studies. Simi­ larly, this volume is a collection of voices involved in the analysis of organizations, as real objects, where the 'reality' of these objects is constituted through diverse conversations of the analysts and the analysands, where both prac­ tices are embedded socially in ways of being, ways of organizing. With this conceptualization of organization studies, one can strive for reflexivity, by which we allude to ways of seeing which act back on and reflect existing ways of seeing. For instance. feminism is both a social movement and an intellectually organized discourse with many conversations contained within it. The conversa­ tions inform each arena: sometimes they constitute aspects of the other arena. and they can be used to reveal lacunae in that 'other' arena represented. Many research possibilities reside in these reflexive relations. For example.

in studying organization concerned with equal employment opportunity, one might want to address its impact from within feminist dis­ course; or one might want to address the impact of equal employment opportunity legislation on the further bureaucratization of the human resource management function within a sample of organizations: or one might be interested in the politics of implementation. None is a more 'correct' analysis than any other: they are different possibilities. Like any good conversa­ tion, the dialectic is reflexive. interlocutive and oriented, not to ultimate agreement. but to the possibilities of understanding of, and action within. these contested terrains. Contestation occurs not only in the scenes of action in organizations as empirical objects, for example around gender relations. but also in the con­ flicting interpretations of these scenes afforded by different theoretical, as well as 'lay' or 'practical', conversations. Where desired, this contestation and associated reflexivity generate difference, although frequently, both theorists and practitioners have a practical interest in closure, not in the continual iteration of further choice. Practical foreclosure does not resolve reflexivity: it suspends it, until the next dissenting interpretation. Readers are interpreters: to read is an active, sense-making process. Through texts such as this the reader has an opportunity to rethink his or her own conversational practices as an organiza­ tion member. The dialectic moves to that between text and the reader: readers make (and change the) sense of words and make their own representations. a theme to which we return in the concluding chapter. Ultimately, the text is important for what the reader gives to it, not in how its various authors use it to reaffirm their own SUbjectivity. Through their particular read­ ing, readers will find ways to employ aspects that enable them to speak for themselves in terms of their choosing 4

PARADIGMS AND POLITICS

The idea that organization studies should comprise a parallel set of unrelated options, different menus, and disconnected conversa­ tions, became part of an extremely influential debate during the 1 980s, in which the publication of Sociological Paradigms and Organizational Analysis ( Burrell and Morgan 1 979) was a first step. At the time, the framework, which classi­ fied research on organizations according to functionalist, interpretative, radical humanist and radical structuralist paradigms, may have seemed just a relatively straightforward way to

INTROD UCTION catalogue a limited number of available options for the study of organizations. But Paradigms was not proposed merely as a theory of knowl­ edge: it was a means to carve out a protected niche where 'alternative' researchers could do their thing, protected from the criticisms of functionalists, free from what they saw as the necessity of having to try to explain their work to them. The key to this defensive strategy lay in the 'incommensurability' of the paradigms and the language differences that precluded communica­ tion among them. F or those who see in functionalist science an exercise in intellectual imperialism, dominating organization studies both epistemologically and politically, the paradigmatic understanding of organization theory offers a way of legitimating approaches whose probity would be denied by functionalism . . . What it [incommensurability] implies is that each para­ digm must, logically, develop separately, pursuing its own problematic and ignoring those of other paradigms as paradigmatically invalid and that different claims about organizations, in an ideal world, be resolved in the light of their implications for social praxis. (Jackson and Carter 1 99 1 : 1 1 0)

Paradigms thus issued a lanus-headed challenge to those interested in taking it up. On the one hand, could one bridge the language 'problem' to allow paradigms to communicate? On the other, should one bridge it or would that allow imperialists to invade and dominate the weaker territories? The result was a frenzy of discussion on the subject in a three-cornered debate. One group of supporters of alternative paradigms felt the relativism of incommensurability too hard to bear. Academics trained in rational debate and the search for truth sought solutions to the incommensurability 'problem' through the use of sophisticated philosophical and linguistic dis­ course (e.g. Reed 1 985; Hassard 1 988; 1 99 1 ; Gioia and Pitre 1 990; Parker and McHugh 1 99 1 ; Marsden 1 993; Willmott 1 993a; 1 993b). A second group, including its creators (Burrell and Morgan 1 979; also lackson and Carter 1 99 1 ; 1 993), main­ tained a hard line on any bridge between the paradigms, requiring quasi-religious Paulinian conversion as the only way to move between them. The third group in the paradigm wars were the defenders of the 'orthodox' faith of function­ alism and normal science (e.g. Donaldson 1985; Aldrich 1 988). Polemics flourished between defenders and detractors (e.g. Clegg 1 990; also see the debate in Organization Studies 1 988). Most of the discussion, both incisive and accusatory, occurred between members of the 'alternative' paradigms who share a discontent with the imperialistic tendencies of the dominant 'orthodoxy'. This debate kindled such a degree

5

of heat that the protagonists appear less like different voices in one broad community separated by minor spats about doctrine, such as Catholics and Protestants debating the rite of communion, and more like Catholics and Protestants during the Protestant Reformation when heretics, Catholic and Protestant alike, were tortured, killed and consumed by fire. Crusades, jihads and fatwahs are the very stuff of historical encounters between religions, where incommensurability flourishes as a matter of course. An extreme example, perhaps (at least in many societies), but observers might see parallels in organization studies because, as Burrell points out in this book (Chapter 1 6), the paradigm reformists missed the point. The issue is not one of epistemology, logic or linguistic theory, it is one of politics: those defending incommensur­ ability believe it to be the best way to protect alternative approaches from the continuing onslaught of mainstream approaches in their various and evolving forms; while many of those who attack it believe it to be counterproductive in such a defence. The main battles thus took place between the rebels. In contrast, the engagement of most members of the 'orthodox' faith in the paradigm wars was muted; most inhabitants of the functionalist paradigm simply continued with business as usual. Perhaps they did not consider that Paradigms signalled a state of crisis, as heralded by the rebels (for example, Hassard 1 988; Burrell, Chapter 1 6 in this book). Certainly, most of the United States journals ignored the upstart newcomers (Aldrich 1 988) although whether this was because they were upstarts, newcomers, or aliens is not clear. Most adher­ ents of the dominant paradigm saw little threat to their privileged position, quite possibly because the nature of the institutionalized prac­ tices of the academic and publishing arena in the US made inroads by 'alternative' researchers extremely difficult. The one defender of normal science who did enter the fray with gusto was Lex Donaldson ( 1 985; 1 988; 1 995). He certainly felt an attack had been mounted, which is, pre­ sumably, one of the reasons behind his engage­ ment with opponents he later claimed to have 'routed' ( 1 988: 28), although the contents of this volume would indicate suspicion regarding such a claim. Donaldson's position notwithstanding, most adherents of functionalist, normal science approaches pursued a strategy of isolationism, known in political economy as 'protectionism', as opposed to 'free trade'. At its extreme, how­ ever, it can lead to autarky: where trade occurs only between those within the common bound­ aries. Such overdeveloped protectionism rarely springs forth from some notion of 'pure'

6

STUD YING ORGA NIZA TION

commerce: usually there is a religious or some other ideological imperative about the profanity of exchange with the 'enemy' . Protectionism involves a political strategy of creating and policing borders; its claims to purity and morality are strengthened by something visibly 'danger­ ous' threatening those borders, as evidenced by Donaldson's ( 1 985; 1 995) strategies of defence. Pfeffer ( 1 993), for some pragmatic reasons, makes a similar plea for paradigm consensus 5 It represents an overt attempt to re-establish the old elite's dominance over organization science (while denying any such elite exists). Pfeffer acknowledges that what constitutes consensus in a scientific field is a political affair. My sense is that such consensus [was] developed by a group of individuals forming a dense network of connection and unified view, who then intentionally and systematically took over positions of power and imposed their views, at times gradually and at times surreptitiously. There seems to be nothing in the natural order of things that suggests that mathema­ tical rigor should be valued over empirical richness or realism. Rather, the criteria, the status hierarchy, and the enforcement of rules were and are very much political processes. ( 1 995: 6 1 8)

Nonetheless, in order to attain consensus, which he believes is necessary to protect organization studies from 'hostile takeover' ( 1 995: 6 1 8), Pfeffer advocates the establishment of a nexus of powerful gatekeepers (or perhaps 'bouncers' would be a better term) to screen out undesirable elements. Pfeffer requires blind faith and unquestioning adherence to a dogma decreed to be 'true' by the elites of organization studies. Even when surrounded by evidence that theory is incomplete, Pfeffer would have us ignore the evidence until it overwhelms us . . . Conformity to a central paradigm would require that we train ourselves and our students to ignore any work that strayed from the established [path] . . . Further, although Pfeffer's solution ( restricting the entry of ideas decreed to be 'different') doubtless would increase the comfort level of those who are already established, it will also increase the costs of entry for new scholars and restrict innovative results on the output side. (Cannella and Paetzold 1 994: 337-8)

Pfeffer argues that paradigm consensus facil­ itates communication which, in turn, furthers knowledge development. Such a position is ironic when you consider that he ignores most of the discussion of communication and lan­ guage in that 'other' paradigm debate to which he does not refer. Pfeffer ( 1 993) cites only Burrell and Morgan ( 1 979); Donaldson ( 1 985); Marsden ( 1 993); not Reed ( 1 985); Hassard ( 1 988; 1 99 1 ); Organization Studies ( 1 988); Clegg ( 1 990); Gioia

and Pitre ( 1 990): Jackson and Carter ( 1 99 1 ; 1 993); Parker and McHugh ( 1 9 9 1 ); o r Willmott ( 1 993a; 1 993b). Evidently, what we have here is 'protectionism' for those intellectually and powerfully entrenched, designed to preserve the intellectual capital that forms the basis of their power. No surprise: collusion between traders, even in ideas, is rarely advanced for the benefit of any but the colluders, as Adam Smith ( 1 904) was wont to observe. Protectionism is not atypical of the broader intellectual establishment in the US, where the rationalist, quantitative, normative approaches associated with functionism and normal science have gained their strongest foothold. For example, a comparison of the different citation patterns found in Organization Studies and Administrative Science Quarterly for a matched period of coterminous publication found that the only European amongst 103 sources that received three or more citations in A SQ was Max Weber, who has been dead for most of the twentieth century. The European-based journal Organiza­ tion Studies, on the other hand, was found to be far more catholic, with cites of scholars based both in North America and elsewhere (Usdiken and Pasadeos 1 995). Aldrich's ( 1 988) finding that critical theorists had made a minimal impact on leading North American journals might be interpreted as an unwillingness of parts of the United States intellectual 'establishment' in organization theory to welcome new, contra­ dictory and challenging ideas (Marsden 1 993), especially when written by overseas scholars. It appears, then, that the heartland's response to incursions from further afie ld, both geographi­ cally and intellectually, has, at least in the past, been to deny either the reality or, if necessary, the legitimacy of the intruders' aspirations. Protectionism is, however, a strategy of diminishing returns in these days of European, Pan-American and Asian free trade blocs. Today, while it cannot be said that normal science is an endangered species (or even a singular species), new ways of doing and thinking about research are emerging. For example, John Van Maanen's condemnation of the tyranny of the 'Pfeffer-digm' at the subsequent Academy of Management meeting is a case in point (also see Van Maanen 1 995). Van Maanen ( 1 979) edited a special issue of Administrative Science Quarterly on qualitative methodologies as early as 1 979. Karl Weick and Steve Barley have been editor of Administrative Science Quarterly, neither of whom can be called practitioners of 'orthodoxy'. Moreover, the pace to include work that falls outside narrower confines is increasing. Qualita­ tive articles appear in the quantitative sanctum of the Academy of Management Journal (e.g. Dutton and Dukerich 1 99 1 ; Elsbach and Sutton

INTROD UCTION 1 992); a special issue of which (vol. 36 no. 6, 1 993) included such exotica as hermeneutics (Phillips and Brown 1 993), symbolic interaction­ ism (Prasad 1 993) and textual deconstruction ism (Gephart 1 993). The winner of the Annual Conference of the Academy of Management's best paper award in 1 994 was an ethnometho­ dological piece with a distinctly critical edge (Barker 1 993). Administrative Science Quarterly in 1 998 published a special issue on critical theory, while the Academy of Management Review had one earlier (vol. 17 no. 3 , 1 992). Compare this with the picture represented by Aldrich's ( 1 988) analysis of citations. It would appear that there is no denying the alternative theorists; they are emerging as new tenants in the citadels of power. To understand the paradigm debate, we must see it as a jostling for academic space by indi­ viduals with very different values, assumptions and agendas in a metaphorical joust: there are winners and losers, broken lances and deflected blows, colours and favours, queens and kings, knights and squires, barons and retainers, grand speeches and empty gestures. Paradigm protec­ tionists advocate a deliberately political strategy to define organization studies by investing the old elite with the necessary power to screen out alternative approaches. Others, regardless of which side of the commensurability divide they happen to be on, try to carve out new space for these alternatives. We ally with the latter, since it informs our view of how organization studies are constituted, both empirically and normatively; we reflect thinking that emphasizes ambiguity, contradiction and difference rather than resolu­ tion, conformity and closure. Our methods thus hinge on a fundamental value of bringing in, not screening out, alternative views of organization. Such 'agnosticism' (Nord and Connell 1 993) challenges the possibility of ultimate knowledge in an area of study. Agnostics value conversa­ tion, discourse, and open, cooperative inquiry across boundaries. Starting from one's own stream of consciousness and recognizing that others start from theirs, one attends to the context in which one's own experience and that of others are embedded. What is crucial to the agnostic view is the 'sense of accurate reception' (Nord and Connell 1 993). We do not, therefore, wish to eradicate the practice of what passes for normal science or functionalism (even if it were possible), but we do believe that there are other significant approaches to the study of organiza­ tions to which we want to expose our readers. It is in the struggle between different approaches that we learn (see Zald 1 994), and from the diversity and ambiguity of meaning; not through the recitation of a presumed uniformity, consensus, and unity, given in a

7

way that requires unquestioning acceptance. Many of the more fascinating debates have arisen in the interpretation of writers who have been notoriously difficult to interpret: for example the radical and functional divergences of Weberian writings stem from the difficulties in translating, both literally and metaphorically, key concepts, as do discussions that follow from what Foucault may or may not have said. These are occasions for revision, not reason for exclusion. Fragmentation creates a space for weaker voices (Hardy 1994) marginalized by institutionalization, centralization and concen­ tration. Even the paradigm warriors risk simply multiplying one orthodoxy and one hierarchy by four. There will be room for more at the top, but there will also be more space to dominate. There lies only more orthodoxy, a changing of the guard perhaps, but the same old politics of glittering prizes and exclusion, as others who have clawed their way up to find Room at the Top (Braine 1 957) have already noted. We also question whether any favoured elite could make the correct choices in designating the areas to be researched and problems solved. Given that processes of choice inherently premise received assumptions, as well as what we know about resistance to change, elite mem­ bers of the community are as likely to send us down the 'wrong' path as anyone else. Witness the lack of success of management theorists in solving contemporary business problems (e.g. Eccles and Nohria 1 993). Researchers seeking professional legitimacy could quite easily be press-ganged into learning more and more about problems that are increasingly uninteresting or irrelevant; or investing more and more in solutions that do not work. In this way, even from a functionalist view, the management project would be doomed to failure because of an inability to function effectively from the point of view of the client. The positivist approach has not guaranteed success, even for the managers it purportedly serves, as Marsden and Townley point out in Chapter 1 7. The correctness of choice is something decided not by elite agendas (and more than one ancien regime has toppled as a result of such arrogance), but by the unfolding of both practical and political relevancies in changing contexts. In summary, we resist strongly the notion of unity and singular direction and stand firmly apart from any attempt to screen out difference for the sake of a prior unity. Let us make clear, though, that this book is, of course, a political statement. To pretend otherwise would be either naive or duplicitous. Where we differ from more protectionist approaches is in our aim to illuminate and elaborate (notwithstanding the inevitable limits to our vision).

8

STUD YING ORGANIZA TION

While celebrating diversity, we should point out the limits to struggle, such as that of the paradigm wars. No 'solution' will ever satisfac­ torily bridge the paradigms: as theories become ever more sophisticated in attempts to bridge the yawning chasm, the very basis of the theorizing becomes more vulnerable to criticism. For example, Kuhn, as Burrell points out in this book (Chapter 1 6), used the term 'paradigm' in at least twenty different ways: other writers debate whether critiques of Paradigms should draw on Kuhn at all, since the authors did not intend to use a Kuhnian version of 'paradigm' (e.g. Jackson and Carter 1 993 critiquing Will­ mott 1 993a). Still others level charges of mis­ representing or misunderstanding Kuhn (e.g. Cannella and Paetzold 1 994 with respect to Pfeffer 1 993) and point to differences between the earlier and later Kuhn (e.g. Hassard 1 988; Burrell, Chapter 16 in this book). Given that the emphasis on language games as barrier or bridge draws on Wittgenstein and Derrida, the possi­ bilities for reinterpretation are endless. These are theoretical resources conducive not to definitive resolution so much as to sophisticated debate, a 'speech conversation' (Habermas 1 979) whose ideal is not closure but an infinite horizon of possibilities. It is not to say that we will not learn from such erudite discussion but we are unlikely to find a 'solution' to the 'problem' of paradigm incom­ mensurability. Even if we did find a 'solution', there is no guarantee that it would be accepted, not if it let down the defences that some individuals believe necessary to protect 'alter­ native' work. So, for these reasons we do not believe that the paradigm debate can be resolved here, or anywhere else for that matter. The paradigm debate may, then, have run its course. Perhaps it is time to move on.

FROM BUREAUCRACY TO FLUIDITY: NEW ORGANIZATIONAL FORMS

Having considered some of the important changes in the world of academics, let us now turn to the world of organizations. Once upon a time, not so long ago chronologically, but at considerable intellectual distance, the theme of bureaucracy dominated organization studies. Weber ( 1 978) systematized the concept of bureaucracy as a form of organization char­ acterized by centralization, hierarchy, authority, discipline, rules, career, division of labour, tenure. It was the staple of the typological studies of the 1 950s (see Clegg and Dunkerley 1 980); it represented one of the most common archetypes of organization design (e.g. Chandler

1 962; Mintzberg 1 979); and it was the site of key case material for subsequent critiques (Silverman 1 97 1 ; Reed 1 985). While none would deny the continued relevance and existence of bureaucracies for organizational life, and some have questioned the pervasiveness of postmodernity (e.g. Latour 1 993), few would fail to acknowledge the emer­ gence of new forms of organization. On the outside, the boundaries that formerly circum­ scribed the organization are breaking down as individual entities merge and blur in 'chains', 'clusters', 'networks' and 'strategic alliances', questioning the relevance of an 'organizational' focus. On the inside, the boundaries that formerly delineated the bureaucracy are also breaking down as the empowered, flat, flexible post-Fordist organization changes or, to be more accurate, loses shape. For some writers at least, these new organizational forms are sufficiently different from the bureaucratic features of modern organization to suggest the appellation of 'postmodern' (e.g. Clegg 1 990). The newly found fluidity in the external appearance of organizations rests on the assumption that the interorganizational rela­ tions into which an organization enters may be a more important source of capacity and cap­ ability than internal features such as 'size' or 'technology' . As a result, collaboration between organizations has become increasingly interest­ ing to researchers. While not new (for example, Blackford and Kerr 1 994: 203 note that 3,000 collaborative associations had been formed by US businesses by 1 900), interorganizational collaboration has taken on growing significance as a potential way to solve both business (e.g. Astley 1 984: Bresser and Harl 1 986; Bresser 1 988; Carney 1 987) and social problems (e.g. Gray 1 989; Waddock 1 989). It takes a variety of forms: from 'collective' strategy (Bresser and Hart 1 986) based on the formation of coopera­ tive arrangements such as joint ventures (Harri­ gan 1 985) and alliances (Kanter 1 990); to network organizations (Powell 1 990; Alter and Hage 1 993); to modular corporations (Tully 1 993; Winkleman 1993), where all non-core activities, from the cafeteria to all information technology and computer operations, are sub­ contracted to outsiders; to the virtual corpora­ tion (Byrne 1 993) which exists only as a transient collection of 'superhighway' linkages between ephemeral entities that donate their core com­ petences to a temporary collaboration. One new form of interorganizational relations is linear chains that connect disparate organiza­ tions as, for example, where a lead firm imposes strict quality controls on subcontractors and sub­ subcontractors in the supply chains, as do many Japanese firms. Critical linkages can pressure

INTRODUCTION management to improve innovation, as in the construction of supply chains (McKinley Report 1 993: 42). Creative use and shaping of the market through production linkages might focus, for instance, on consultative buyer/vendor relations, interfirm associations and extrafirm agencies that facilitate continuous improvement in production (Best 1 990: 1 9-21 ). Value enhancement comes through a 'virtuous circle' of pressures in the chain, such as demands that suppliers meet quality standards. Governments may play a role in these relationships by institutionalizing 'best practices' and 'industry standards'. Clusters often occur in industrial districts, where many small and medium enterprises cooperate at local level, specializing in phases that are all part of the same production cycle (Bianchi 1 993; Pyke and Sengenberger 1 992). Well established within industrial and artisanal traditions, these districts have also developed as a consequence of local state interventions, such as industrial districts in northern Italy (Weiss 1 988) and Germany (Herrigel 1 993). They may also result from government decisions to site a key industry in a particular area to establish an 'incubator' to encourage localized high-technol­ ogy parks, where organizations with related technologies, competences, markets etc. are able to benefit from synergistic collaboration. Some­ times, incubators act as catalysts for small­ business generated developments in a tightly focused geographical area and have a valuable role to play in regional programmes; in other cases they facilitate the transfer of technology and ideas from large organizations such as universities, government research bodies and large corporations to the marketplace by aiding the development of new business ventures. Networks (e.g. Clegg 1 990; Powell 1 990; Alter and Hage 1 993; Nohria and Eccles 1 993) encompass a loosely coupled cellular structure of value-adding activities that constantly intro­ duce new material and elements. They can take many different forms ranging from the formal to the informal; they may exist simply to exchange information or may be involved in an array of joint activities; they may be explicitly mediated by network 'brokers' or emerge from the initiatives of the firms themselves. Networks appear to have a number of advantages as a form of organizing, including: risk spreading and resource sharing to avoid costly duplication of independent effort, enhanced flexibility com­ pared with other forms of integration, such as a take-over or merger, particularly where product life-cycles are short; increased access to know­ how and information through collaborative relations before the formal knowledge stage. Strategic alliances, as Barney and Hesterly note in Chapter 4, are increasingly becoming

9

mechanisms to enter new markets, domestic and global. Owing to the substantial financial resources needed to develop new technology, more organizations are entering strategic alli­ ances, often with competitors, while others are turning to their government to secure support. Strategic alliances often link multiple partners on an international basis. They offer more staid partners access to leading edge technical devel­ opments in new fie lds; while emerging organiza­ tions secure external assets crucial to bringing an innovation to a marketplace where 'size and financial muscle are critical for the long pull in an increasingly global economy' (Amara 1 990: 145). Other important benefits include shared risks, accelerated technical progress, established market linkages and resources for subsequent product development. Such is the pattern in biotechnology (see, for example, Barley et al. 1 993; Powell and Brantley 1 993). Start-ups like Celltech and Genentech pioneered the applica­ tion of novel recombinant-DNA technologies, while bringing such innovation to market was achieved through 'dynamic complementarity', the paIrIng of organizationally separate resources and skills. Through a variety of ways and in a number of guises, argue advocates, these new organiza­ tional forms offer opportunities for more radical innovation, allowing organizations to 'reinvent the future' (Hamel and Prahalad 1 994). [M]ore radical innovations require new organiza­ tional forms. It appears that new forms, initially, are better adapted to exploit new techno/market regimes, breaking out from existing regimes within which established corporations, for historical, cultural and institutional reasons, might be rather strongly bound. (Rothwell 1 992: 234)

By maintaining, modifying and transforming multifaceted interorganizational relationships, organizations can construct their own environ­ ments, their own markets (e.g. Daft and Weick 1 984) as they seek allies to which they can bond for periods of mutual benefit (Fairtlough 1 994). To be successful, however, new external relations require new internal ones. Consider a firm like Semco (Semler 1 989), where the whole 'architecture' of the firm and the knowledge embedded in it was reconfigured in radically different ways. N ew relationships between existing organizations provide the comparative advantage of a clean slate, which enable them to manage 'transilience' (Abernathy and Clark 1 985) or radical innovation more effectively. Established organizations, on the other hand, face far greater difficulty in overhauling what they do and how they do it (Cooper and Kleinschmidt 1 986; Anderson and Tushman 1 990) since radical innovation, by definition,

10

STUD YING ORGA NIZA TION

involves an overthrow of existing competencies. So, to offset the disadvantages of size even large, apparently bureaucratic, organizations are having to reconfigure their internal relationships. Companies must also have both the mind-set and the organizational structures (or, sometimes, the lack thereof) to actively encourage cross­ disciplinary teamwork, collaboration, and thus learning. And it is not only interdepartmental barriers which must be demolished; the firm's outer boundaries also need to be radically redefined so that suppliers, customers, and strategic alliance partners can become insiders and be tapped systematically for ideas and insight (Kiernan 1 993: 9). Consequently, the resulting 'postmodern' organization (Clegg 1 990) looks a lot different from the traditional bureaucracy. First, it is decentralized: Competitive pressures, total quality management, the trend towards knowledge work, and time based competition are all business forces that create a need for decision making and staff support to be closer to customers and products . . . Businesses have to move from single profit centres to multiple profit­ measurable units. In business units, general manage­ ment decisions have to move to teams with direct product, project, or customer contact. As decision power moves to teams, the teams need additional knowledge, information and rewards that are tied to the businesses they manage. Finally, in work units employee involvement must move decisions to work teams. In all cases, faster decision making, control of quality at the point of origin, and delivery of service at the point of customer contact require that decisions be moved to lower levels, which in turn leads to focus on new, more distributed organiza­ tions, and the decline of hierarchy. (Galbraith et al. 1 993: 285-6)

Second, such organizations are designed increas­ ingly on a 'distributed' model (named in an analogy with distributed computing). Essen­ tially, they consist of an internal network where activities which, in the old-style modern organizations, were centralized at corporate headquarters, are distributed around an internal network of divisions or units, linked through electronic forms of communication in a 'very communication-intensive organization . . . facili­ tated by modern information technology' ( 1 993: 290). To guard against fissiparous tendencies a mutuality of interests has to be designed into the network. Advocates urge that leadership in the new organizational forms be team based, which will require skills in team building, conflict resolution and problem solving. Moreover, information, traditionally available only at the highest levels, must now be made available

through decentralized circuits to lower-level employees ( 1 993: 297), relying on both 'hard' technological networks and 'soft', relational networking competence III and between organizations. A third change concerns the nature of hierarchy: not its elimination, but its significa­ tion as a social order of rank, status and privilege that serves as 'impediments and barriers' preventing 'the flow of information, co-operation, decision making, and learning' ( 1 993: 293). Instead, hierarchies become one means among many to coordinate and control actions across people, knowledge, time and space. The development of 'groupware' means that there now exist more immediate and interactive bases for coordination than simple hierarchy. Within hierarchical layers, pressures lead to increasing teamwork, premised less on jobs and job requirements and more on competencies. Such lateral organization depends on communication. These organizations are characterized by openness, trust, empowerment and commitment (Dodgson 1 993; Fairtlough 1 994). Once in motion, 'virtuous circles' have a mUltiplier effect: collaborative, open decision­ making eliminates the inefficiency of traditional hierarchical styles of secrecy, sycophancy and sabotage. Decisions are based upon expertise, openly elicited and listened to by the organiza­ tion. The result is a very different organization compared with the bureaucracy and even with the matrix organization (Galbraith 1 973) and adhocracy (Mintzberg 1 979). Such postmodern, networked forms are fast 'becoming an organization of choice for many companies', raising the question of whether 'large size is necessary or desirable' (Galbraith et al. 1 993: 290) now that networks generate a potency that stems from being big and small simultaneously. These changes pose a very different set of research questions to those that informed and stimulated past theoretical practices. The con­ ception of the contingent relation between the size of an organization and its structural characteristics ceases to hold if the organization is a multiheaded, networked hydra. Japanese organizations such as Mitsubishi, with their different conditions of existence for legal own­ ership, have, since their inception, provided a model for these hydras. In this sense they were never 'modern' in the way that the organizations of Anglo-American-based business systems were (Whitley 1 992). Ironically the latter, which provided the manna for ' universal' theories of organizations, have been revealed by both comparative analysis and changing organiza­ tional practice to be neither universal nor necessarily effective.

INTROD UCTION OVERVIEW

Both the theory and practice of organizations have changed substantiaUy in recent years. In both cases, the changes have led to increasing diversity and fluidity, and decreasing certainty and structure. As academics, we are less certain of what we do: there are more ways to do it; many of those new ways raise questions about how and, indeed, whether we should do it. In observing organizations, we are beset with a moving target: questions concerning what is the organization exist today in ways not envisaged thirty years ago. Such is the context in which the authors prepared their contributions for this book. In noting and responding to these changes, we made choices concerning both the subjects and the authors we wished to include in this project. This book, ultimately, is our view of the terrain. Think of our 'map' of the terrain as being based on a series of more or less detailed photographs of the landscape. Nooks and crannies wiU appear (or fail to appear) as one surveys from different perspectives. The contributions in this book expose different aspects of the terrain chosen for inclusion in this portfolio of possible maps. It goes without saying that different editors would have made (some) different choices: their maps would be based on different photographs and emphasize different aspects of the landscape. They might miss some of the interesting formations that we see; conversely, they might see potential buried in the land that we have not. The volume moves from the past to the present to the new questions that the fin de siecle poses for organizations and for us. Contingency theory is one of the most widely appropriated approaches in organization studies because of the analytical economy of a perspective that deals with a finite but flexible set of variables, such as environment, technology, and size, to account for variations in organizational design and effectiveness. While there are alternative claimants for the status of normal science, perhaps none is promoted so fiercely as con­ tingency theory. Contingency theory, at root, is an organic analogy: the organization develops depending on features of its organic form and the environment that sustains them. It is not the only major research programme to take the organic analogy seriously. Organizational (including population) ecology, for instance, has been a major research programme in the last decade and particularly influential in the United States. It seeks explicit inspiration by drawing on biological and ecological models to explain organizational founding and failing, and matters of organizational change.

11

If biological and ecological models have been imported into organization studies, other sources of inspiration derived from economics and psychology. Hence, it is appropriate that economic and psychological approaches are also considered as part of the general framework of organization studies. There is a long history to their importation into organization studies, such as the early studies of the researchers into the Hawthorne Electric Plant (Mayo 1 947; Roeth­ Iisberger and Dickson 1 939), who sought to meld both 'psychological' and 'economics' variables in their understanding of the behaviour first of individuals and then of groups in organizations. Psychological approaches focus on the centrality of the individual to the organization; organiza­ tional economics addresses why organizations exist, how they should be managed and why some organizations outperform others. From sociological traditions comes institu­ tional theory, which had been an organizing device for a considerable programme of work which can be traced as far back as Selznick's ( 1 957) classic case study of the TVA. Institu­ tional theory shows how symbolic properties of organizations help them to secure support from external interests. Interpretative approaches owe much to anthropological traditions, offering considerable potential to areas of empirical enquiry. Subjectivist and humanistic assump­ tions mark interpretative approaches as pre­ modern. Postmodernist approaches, which question the existence of grand theory, the centrality of the subject, and the ontological status of the social world, have a more recent pedigree, especiaUy in so far as organization studies are concerned. Critical theories, which seek to reveal structures and processes of power and domination hidden in the legitimate and taken-for-granted aspects of our social world, can be traced back to the influential work of the Frankfurt School. Together, critical and post­ modern approaches, which draw from themes that also concern the humanities, supply a creative tension that makes an important contribution to organization studies. One area in which critical and postmodern approaches have flourished is feminism, a particularly diverse research agenda with which organization studies engaged only slowly. Here, more than anywhere else, we have a good example of the way that knowledge and practice interact, as issues of feminism as articulated in the form of interdisciplinary concerns within a broad social movement have been brought on to the agenda of organizations and organization studies. While some of our contributors have reflected on the range of perspectives in organization studies, others reflect on research, theory and

12

STUD YING ORGA NIZA TlON

practice and the relationship between them. The connection of theory and practice invariably draws on particular conceptions of what is to count and not to count as data. It is through data that we mediate between the concerns of members of organizations and members of organization studies. All the central issues of reliability and validity presume this relationship: what is to count as what kind of data? From the practitioner's point of view, a great deal of research probably seems arcane and esoteric, but action research is one area which directly confronts the theory/practice relation­ ship. Any investigation of the relation of theory to practice should consider the protocols of 'action research'. Action research requires some emotional investment in the organization being studied: to want to make a difference to the way the organization operates. Yet, traditionally, the emotional attachments of the researcher and the emotional life of organizations have rarely been central topics of organization research. As part of our brief to open up issues made critical by their relative neglect we chose to focus on emo­ tions in organizations. We also consider aes­ thetics in a similar way. That organizations display aesthetics and that aesthetics enter into the very fabric of organizations are evident: in the very physical structure: spatial layout; architecture and design; dress codes that are encouraged or sanctioned; body styles that are promoted or relegated. In both subtle and overt ways organizations display a complex of aesthetic dimensions. Similarly, time is the essence of organization life. From scientific management to just-in-time, much of what organization achieves is accomplished through the increasing imposition of mechanical and abstract chronology on the rhythms of everyday life. Yet, typically, time has been taken for granted by the majority of organization theor­ ists. Culture has been a 'hot' topic in organization theory for a decade or so now. However, much of the interest has been prescriptive. The idea that a strong, unified culture is a 'good thing' has become widely accepted. However, when the 'culture wars' are unpacked, the certainties of this view dissolve: such treatments of this topic obscure more than they illuminate. The same might be said of power. Indeed, power is still widely regarded as something one does not talk about in polite company, like religion or sex. Perhaps it is the association with politics that generates this aura? Again, power is a topic whose relative neglect makes it critical, not only a negative but also a positive aspect of organization life. For many organization theorists the explosion of reflexive awareness about paradigms, meta-

phors, discourse and genealogies has been the most significant event of the last decade or so. Paradigms are implicit, tacit and unremarked; metaphors are used unselfconsciously as literal devices; discourse is a term that few would utter easily. Such genealogies of analysis would strike most practitioners as both irrelevant and bizarre, even though they have significant implications for practice. The final three contributions go to the heart of the theory/practice nexus. The authors argue that conceptions of organization theory clustered around various positivist and functionalist conceptions have not been particu­ larly successful in their application in practice. Perhaps ironically, a different way forward lies with some of these approaches that are still relatively unfamiliar to the practitioners who might benefit from, as well as contribute to, them.

Frameworks for Analysis

Michael Reed's chapter provides an overview that frames the volume. He rediscovers the analytical narratives and ethical discourses shaping the historical development of organiza­ tion theory. In so doing, Reed wishes to carve out a new road between 'intellectual surfing or free riding on the rising tide of relativism [and] retreating into the cave of orthodoxy'. As with many of the contributors, he locates theory building within its historical and social context, highlights the contradictory claims within different branches of organization studies, and shows how they provide the grammar, the symbolic and technical resources, as well as the texts and discourses, which shape the various academic debates. He traces organization theory from roots in Saint-Simon and Weber through branches that reach to the modern day. The view of organiza­ tions as rational instruments shaped the early days of the formal study of organizations. Subsequently, the rediscovery of community as the organic, humanistic side of organizations, Reed suggests, led to functionalist systems and contingency theories. A third narrative, one that emphasizes the market, characterizes organiza­ tional economics and population ecology. In the fourth narrative, Reed reveals the many faces of power concealed in its less visible mechanisms and devices. The melding of knowledge and power, in the fifth narrative, illuminates the institutional biases that characterize all narra­ tives and all theorizing. It highlights disciplinary power, embedded in micro-level routines and structures, and shows how the meanings which shape our identities, as observers of organiza­ tional life as much as participants in it, emanate

INTROD UCTION from these micro-systems o f power. The sixth narrative focuses on the societal, institutional structures that surround and penetrate organiza­ tions, as in institutional theory and globaliza­ tion, allowing us to reconnect the local and the global. Reed then discusses how these rival explanatory claims deal with, and lead to, contests between agency and structure, episte­ mological battles, and conflicting demands for local or global levels of analysis. Debate emerges at points of intersection between the narratives. But, as Burrell also elaborates in his chapter, while these narratives illuminate the intersection, they also cast into shadow other themes, such as gender, ethnicity, technoscience, and disparities in global develop­ ment. Reed discusses how we might bring some light to those areas. Finally, he offers his own contribution to the 'incommensurability thesis' which is one of the enduring debates that mark academic discourse. To emphasize the contested nature of the terrain surveyed by organization studies, the second chapter adopts a very different voice: when Lex Donaldson talks of structural contingency theory, he advocates paying more attention to 'normal science' . Eschewing the proliferation of paradigms, he argues that structural contingency theory provides a coher­ ent approach to the study of organizations, one in which the accumulation of empirical results offers the prospect of consensus around the ways in which organizations structure and adapt to their environments. Donaldson discusses the origins of structural contingency theory, show­ ing how different contingency variables have been studied, as well as introducing the model developed as a result of this work . The characteristics of the underlying research para­ digm which Donaldson associates with normal science in organization theory are those of sociological functionalism. Donaldson argues that the rigorous and disciplined application of one 'scientific' approach to research enables development. Accordingly, Donaldson calls for a more focused approach to organization theory, one that revolves around structural contingency theory. Not for him the pursuit of newer theories, whatever they may contribute, because they can never supplant core theory applied to the key theme of organizational structure. This concept of organization structure is conceived in terms of variation around classical themes whose dimensions are redolent of 'bureaucratic' refrains, according to the Aston researchers (also see Donaldson 1 995). In his chapter, Joel Baum covers organiza­ tional ecology, by broadening the population ecology perspective to encompass related approaches. He first clarifies what organizational

13

ecology is and is not, thus exposing some of the myths and misconceptions that have arisen. The focus is on recent work, especially with regard to organizational founding and failing, and to matters of organizational change. Like struc­ tural contingency theory, this approach to the study of organizations is one based on a normal science conception of the steady accumulation and building of empirically generated knowledge derived from a limited number of theoretical assumptions shared between a community of scholars. In a comprehensive review, Baum tracks recent results and thinking and notes the caveats and polemics characterizing this subject. Organizational ecology, as a recent develop­ ment, represents an example of the proliferation resisted by some theorists (e.g. Pfeffer 1 993; Donaldson 1 985; 1 995). While Baum clearly makes a case for a self-contained, growing field of inquiry or 'subdiscipline', as he calls it, he also communicates with other approaches, such as institutional theory, to show how one might complement the other. Organizational economics, according to Jay Barney and William Hesterly, addresses four key questions: why organizations exist; how the firm should be managed; why some organizations outperform others; how firms can cooperate. Transaction cost theory has examined the relative costs of markets and hierarchies of alternative forms of governance. Managerial fiat offers distinct possibilities to counteract bounded rationality and opportunism. In the case of high uncertainty and transaction specific investment the organization offers advantages over the market. Applications of these ideas are to be found in the work on vertical integration and the multidivisional form. Agency theory examines differences between the principal (often shareholders) and the agent (usually management) concerning how the organization should be managed. Conflicting interests between these two groups open up possibilities for opportunism, especially on the part of the agent who often has recourse to information and knowledge. Work has examined the delegation of authority, monitoring mechanisms, and bonding and incentives. Strategic management concerns why some organizations outperform others. Research has focused on the effects of industry structure (turning the original intent, which was to help government regulators increase competition within an industry, on its head by focusing on how firms can develop strategies to reduce competition and earn above normal profits) and the resources and capabil­ ities controlled by the firm. Finally, Barney and Hesterly examine cooperation between firms, including tacit collusion and strategic alliances. The latter are the more common and are

14

STUD YING ORGANIZA TION

becoming an increasingly important feature of many economies as new organizational forms evolve as effective means to enter new markets. Psychological approaches assume the central focus of Walter Nord and Suzy Fox's chapter. Noting that the study of psychological factors is, perhaps, more typical of organizational analysts in North America than elsewhere, they explore the work that has been carried out under the rubric of psychological approaches, tracing the origins in Taylorism and the human relations school, which took the individual as the unit of analysis, through to more recent variations in the form of human resource management, which emphasizes context. Despite the substantial interest in the essentialist characteristics and the traditional view of the human as a purpose­ ful being who attempts to know and cope with an external reality, Nord and Fox find clues in a deeper analysis of this literature which support a more 'postmodern' reading of the individual. An emphasis on the centrality of 'the' individual has been countered by research that has focused on contextual factors that determine, or at least influence and constrain, individual behaviour; while feminist work has forced a rethinking of the psychology of gender. Such work questions the privileged place of the individual who apparently, even in psychological or 'micro' approaches, seems to be the subject of a 'great disappearing act', to the lamentation of some researchers, and apparent glee of others. Nord and Fox argue, however, that the disappearing act is itself a trick: the individual has not disappeared but continues to be a prime issue for some; while for others, through consideration of the context, the individual has been transformed. In fact, the move to reflexivity in organization studies offers possibilities for individuals to (re)create themselves in a variety of ways. The authors trace the move towards context-based analyses in industrial organization psychology, organizational behaviour and some portions of mainstream psychological literatures. Institutional theory, reviewed by Pamela Tolbert and Lynne Zucker, is the theme of the next chapter. Ironically, they note the low degree of institutionalization of institutional theory as they describe the different techniques and approaches that characterize it. Contemporary institutional theory derives from an article by Meyer and Rowan ( 1 977) that highlighted the symbolic properties of organization structure. Institutional theory draws from functionalist approaches that study how symbolic properties produce support from external interests which, in turn, help to safeguard organizational survival. The issue of institutional processes (rather than the characteristics or features of institutionalization) has become an important

focus of research in this area, and a number of researchers have turned their attention to how organizational domains become institutiona­ lized. In addition, some researchers have examined the role of 'champions' in promoting and shaping processes of institutionalization. In this way, some institutionalists attribute more voluntarism and less determinism to these complex dynamics. Institutional theory is thus concerned with broadening its scope by tackling the issue of agency and the process of institu­ tionalization, as well as accumulating and consolidating research on institutionalization as a property of a social system. Mats Alvesson and Stanley Deetz take on a formidable body of work when they review both critical theory and postmodern approaches. They note their relatively recent adoption in organization studies. Using a model that classi­ fies different theoretical perspectives according to the degree to which they emphasize dissensus or consensus, and the degree to which they privilege the local and emergent or the elite and a priori, the authors locate postmodernist and critical approaches in the broader context of organization studies. Both differ from normative and interpretative studies in terms of their emphasis on dissensus rather than consensus; they differ from each other in terms of post­ modernism's local, and hence plural, focus against the elitist tendencies of critical theory. By breaking these dimensions into their con­ stituent characteristics Alvesson and Deetz provide a helpful device for readers trying to make sense of these broad and multifaceted perspectives, as well as detailing some of the tensions that both divide and integrate them. Through their reading of more 'traditional' work on organizations, these contributors show how critical and postmodern approaches offer alter­ native and distinctive contributions to organiza­ tion studies. Critical theory and postmodernism are both 'alike and different ' . Both draw attention to the social, historical and political construction of knowledge, people and social relations. Alvesson and Deetz point to a future path that organization studies might tread, where critical theory and postmodernism go side by side, if not hand in hand. Without postmodernism, they counsel, critical theory becomes elitist and unreflective; without critical theory, postmodernism becomes esoteric. Together, with a renewed emphasis on empirical work, both offer new insights for emancipating people working in organizations. Marta Calas and Linda Smircich provide a comprehensive review of a variety of feminist theories, showing how these approaches illumi­ nate how both organizational practice and organ­ izational theorization cloud our understanding of

INTROD UCTION 'gender'. Feminist theories are not new: the authors trace liberal feminism back to the 1 700s. But neither this lengthy tradition, nor the resurgence in interest in feminism since the 1 960s, has solved the 'problems' that women face as members of society and organizations. As the authors point out, there remains sufficient inequity to justify a continuation of study into the role that women play and the challenges they face. There is, however, more to feminist approaches than this; feminist theories encom­ pass more than women's 'problems'. Recent developments in feminist theorization help to surface the taken-for-granted assumptions that characterize organization theory and render gender and gendered identities invisible. Calas and Smircich present seven different perspectives. Starting with liberal and psycho­ analytic feminist theories, the authors argue convincingly that they are not enough. These approaches take the system of production for granted, make maleness the norm, and treat gender as a universal category. Marxist, radical and socialist feminist theory propose a more transformational overhaul of social institutions. Poststructuralist and postmodern approaches call into question not just 'society' but the very way we study it. They raise questions concerning essentialist notions of gender and offer insight into how gendered identities are crafted by individuals' experiences in organizational set­ tings. Finally, Calas and Smircich draw our attention to (post)colonial feminist theorizations that seek to give voice to those who fall outside the parameters set by the predominantly white, often elite members of the developed world who dominate the world of organizations and of organization theory. This perhaps is the way forward for organization studies, as our interest in globalization draws us deeper into cultures and countries not normally visited and, conse­ quently, closer to the people who populate them. Reflections on Research, Theory and Practice

Ralph Stablein examines different kinds of data in organization studies. He notes that while data are central to our professional activities, agree­ ment on what data are range from the dismissal of ethnographic data as stories, to the dispara­ ging of survey data as simplistic and distorted, to the rejection of experimental data as unrealistic. He argues that we need a common definition of acceptable data which transcends the strictures of the qualitative/quantitative divide and which still does justice to the diversity of data that researchers collect and analyse. Stablein argues that confusion between ontology and epistemol-

15

ogy has hindered our ability to theorize about data. Data represent the empirical world, the one that we invent, rather than discover, through our research. Collecting data is, then, an epistemo­ logical project to find ways to represent the object of research, not an ontological question concerning the metaphysical world. The empiri­ cal world that we try to represent through the collection of data is what we, as a human scholarly community, understand and commu­ nicate at a particular point in space and time. Having established data as central to episte­ mology, the key question becomes 'how do we (through data) know our world?' This process of representing the empirical world requires a two­ way correspondence between it and the symbolic system used to represent it, regardless of whether those symbols are numbers to plug into a statis­ tical package, words recorded from in-depth interviews, or pictures taken of artifacts scat­ tered across the corporate landscape. In this regard, the set of symbols chosen is less import­ ant than agreement about investigation of the organizational phenomena. The first corre­ spondence plots a particular part of the organization into a symbol system that reduces the complexity of the organizational phenomena under investigation. The researcher then uses the already understood, abstracted relationships between the symbols to learn about the organ­ izational phenomena. The second correspon­ dence thus requires, following such analysis, plotting back the rearranged symbols on to the original organization phenomena. From the quantitative side, it means that researchers must provide evidence of validity, that respondents replied to questions in the way that their data represent. From a qualitative perspective, it means that case studies written from ethno­ graphic data convey the same meaning to inter­ viewees. This model allows Stablein to compare many different kinds of data to evaluate whether or not they further the epistemological project regardless of the particular paradigm to which the research belongs. Action research, suggest Colin Eden and Chris Huxham, represents a major bridge between theory and practice. They trace the historical context of this approach to research and develop a series of qualities that characterize exemplary action research. Included is the purpose of organizational change as well as the goals of generalization, theory development and prag­ matic research. The authors also discuss the action research process and offer guidelines for designing and validating action research. Action research draws our attention to the role of the researcher, in a way not unlike the tenets more recently associated with postmodernism. It positions the researcher as investigator, subject

16

STUD YING ORGANIZA TlON

and consumer: the researcher is an active person with values, hopes, and goals, as one involved in the research. Although there is no myth of neutrality. the contributors warn against becom­ ing seduced, at least unthinkingly, by managerial agendas. Action research also emphasizes reflexivity, which here refers to 'some means of recording the reflection itself and the method for reflect­ ing'. At the same time, the authors differentiate action research from postmodernism by dismiss­ ing the idea that any form of writing is accept­ able. They maintain that the conventions discussed in the chapter are integral to what they constitute as action research. By respecting these conventions, action research can resist attempts by the academic 'marketplace' to co­ opt it, for example, by demands for business sponsorship or the mingling of consultancy and research. Stephen Fineman discusses emotion and organizing, pointing out that writers have been slow to incorporate emotions into their scholarly work. Fineman traces the historical work on emotion in psychology and organization studies (the latter usually using terms other than emo­ tion). The overwhelming perspective in organiza­ tion theory is that emotion is something to be 'managed' and suppressed. Some writers explore how emotions interfere with rationality. thus putting the organization on the couch, so to speak, to reveal and explain its shortcomings. Other writers have studied how emotional processes can serve rationality. A third approach explores how rational self-interest is thoroughly imbued with emotion. Fineman goes on to clarify the concept of emotion and explores what it feels like. He then turns to emotions and organizational order, arguing that, if organizations are socially con­ structed. emotions are central to their construc­ tion. He discusses some of the emotions that are expressed in organizational contexts; shows how corporations often prescribe emotion, such as the smile at Walt Disney Productions, the cheery 'hello' of the flight attendant. Such emotional labour is built into many professional jobs where people are paid to be 'serious', 'sympathetic', 'objective', or 'friendly' . It can wreak consider­ able psychological damage but, at the same time, should the mask crack. as between say a doctor and a patient. the professional relationship is damaged. Consequently, there are often emo­ tional 'zones', such as the galley in the aircraft. where protagonists are able to resist by expres­ sing forbidden emotions. Fineman concludes his chapter with a discussion of some of the directions that the relatively recent interest in emotion might take and some of the challenges it faces.

In many respects, the chapter by Pasquale Gagliardi is an interesting companion to that by Stephen Fineman. Both seek to bring the 'whole' person to the centre stage of organizational analysis. As Fineman brings emotion to the research agenda, so Gagliardi brings the aesthetic side to life. He argues eloquently how organizations cultivate all of our senses: we don't just 'see' or 'know' organizations, we feel and experience them. Gagliardi makes claims for very different types of knowledge than con­ ventionally considered: sensory knowledge (rather than intellectual knowledge); expressive forms of action; and forms of communication other than speech. He asks why we are reluctant to change our focus, and traces our silence on these matters back as far as Newton, who divided the stuff of the primary qualities of the physical world from the secondary qualities of the sensory, subjective world. Pasquale Gagliardi draws on disciplines 'far' from the realm of traditional organization studies. such as history and aesthetics. He draws our attention to corporate landscapes, and the artifacts that are part of them, to show how sensory perception is an integral part of our life in organizations and how it can help us to reformulate the relations between ideas, images, identity, meaning and sensation. Gagliardi offers us an alternative to the analysis, calculation and logic with which we are probably most familiar; an alternative that relies more on synthesis, the recognition of the global context, and the overall form. As Gagliardi points out, it is not completely describable but, nonetheless, such ideas are integral to many of the new directions undertaken in organization studies, such as emotion ( see the chapter by Fineman) or time (see the chapter by Hassard). There is, however, an inherent paradox in such an approach: 'can we study the products of the right side of the , brain with the left? Perhaps lessons present themselves from the study of art? Perhaps we must be more responsive to our own feelings if we are to comment on the feelings of others? John Hassard examines how organization studies portray time and temporality. Many of us take time (or the lack of it) for granted, but the examination of the images and metaphors of time that emerge from social philosophy remind us that time is an elusive phenomenon. Time not only appears as objective, measurable, divisible, it is also valuable. Time is money' The apparent scarcity of time enhances its perceived value. Such a temporal concept of value is the link between time, pay, and the early time and motion studies of scientific management. One legacy of the modern organization is the reification and commodification of time, whether in the form of flexi-time or other time-structur-

INTROD UCTION ing practices. Hassard argues that this linear­ quantitative view of time requires closer scrutiny and that working time is a far richer, more complex phenomenon than is often portrayed. He revisits some of the more nuanced approaches to time in the work of Durkheim ( 1 976), Sorokin and Merton ( 1 937), and Gur­ vitch ( 1 964) that provide a basis for cyclic­ qualitative studies of time. Classical studies of organization time exist: Hassard makes reference to studies such as Roy's ( 1 960) 'banana time', Ditton's ( 1 979) 'baking time', and Cavendish's ( 1 982) 'doing time' to probe more deeply into the complexity of tem­ poral structure and meaning. All these accounts draw our attention to the emptiness of time for employees and their attempts to fill this vacuum of boredom with something more meaningful. A discussion of Clarke's ( 1 978) work on temporal repertoire shows how time frames in two different industries relate to the structures and cultures of the firm. In the final part of his chapter, Hassard looks at how we learn the meaning of time and uses the time frame of a career as an example. He then examines the three main time problems that organizations must solve: the reduction of tem­ poral uncertainty; conflict over time; and scarce time. The chapter by Joanne Martin and Peter Frost is not simply a summary of the work carried out on culture. Rather than promote a develop­ mental argument showing how our understand­ ing of culture has 'progressed' over the years, building and improving on earlier work, these authors tell a different story. It revolves around struggles that occur under the auspices of theoretical development and empirical testing. Accordingly, this chapter provides an example of some of the dynamics of theory building described in the earlier chapter by Reed, as well as the later ones by Burrell and by Marsden and Townley. Martin and Frost argue that initial work on culture represented an opportunity to break with the constraints of dominant quantitative and positivistic approaches. 'Culture' allowed quali­ tative, ethnographic methodologies to acquire legitimacy. However, as the authors point out, these forays into new territory evoked new struggles: managerialist-oriented work was criti­ cized for selling out; some qualitative work was proclaimed insufficiently 'deep'; the hermeneutic tradition was called into question for its neglect of political issues; and quantitative researchers began to reassert their control of empirical research. These different approaches to the study of organizational culture contributed much, but there is no clear, linear pattern of progress. More recently, postmodernism advises not bothering to look for progress. Yet, ironically, postmo-

17

dernism offers a way forward, whether we call it progress or not. While many of its advocates are as unequivocal in their support as its detractors are in their scepticism, others adopt a middle road (cf. Parker 1 992). They sec, as do we, that those developments labelled as 'postmodern' inject fresh insight, new ideas, and some excitement into organization studies. Martin and Frost agree and offer creative (although, for the aficionados, possibly modernist) suggestions as to how scholars of organization studies might expropriate postmodernism. As the authors show, the study of organizational culture could be (and in some cases already is) greatly enriched by postmodern thinking. Cynthia Hardy and Stewart Clegg discuss the role of power in organizations. They contend that the plethora of conceptualizations of power has in many respects served to restrict our understanding. As Reed says in the opening chapter: power is the 'least understood concept in organization analysis'. Hardy and Clegg seek to clarify this confusion. Like other authors in the book, such as Burrell, and Marsden and Townley, they locate the classical heritage of power in the work of Marx and Weber, and note diverse readings of Weber proposed by different theories. In the context of functionalist organiza­ tion theory, power vested in hierarchy is considered ' legitimate', 'formal' and functional. It disappears from the gaze of researchers who are much more interested in the dysfunctional, 'informal' and 'illegitimate' power that operates outside the hierarchy. In contrast to these functionalist researchers, who saw hierarchical power as non-problematic and in no need of explanations, critical theorists labelled the same phenomenon 'domination'. Both approaches could refer to different readings of Weber. The cleavage between focusing on power as illegiti­ mate or legitimate continued as the former concentrated their study on strategies to defeat conflict, while the latter analysed strategies of domination. Researchers with the means to bridge the chasm seemed either to draw back at the precipice or find their voices too frail to be heard on the other side. More recently, the two-way split has become a three-way break as the work of Foucault challenged the foundations of both critical and functional approaches. The result, argue the authors, is a curiously inactive conceptualiza­ tion: we know more and more about the way power works on us but less and less about how we might make it work for us. Like Alvesson and Deetz, Hardy and Clegg see the way forward in a melding of critical and postmodernist thinking. Gibson Burrell was a partner in a project that marks many of the chapters in this book, as co­ author of SOciological Paradigms and Organiza-

18

STUD YING ORGANIZA TION

tional Analysis. He revisits his earlier work in his chapter. He opposes those authors for whom the 'fragmentation' of organization studies warrants replacement by a nostalgic unity and argues that fragmentation has always characterized organization studies, contrasting different read­ ings of Weber to illustrate the point. One reading of Weber, associated with Parsons and his colleagues in the United States, saw bureaucracy as an ideal, efficient form of organizing. It was this conceptualization, according to Burrell, that gave rise to the epistemological and methodolo­ gical basis of the normal science approach. However, a second reading of Weber offered a more radical interpretation and provided, from the outset, an 'alternative' view of organizations. Hence, there was always a politics implicitly at work in any reading of Weber (as, for instance, in the sociological tradition that saw Weber's work as a counterpoint to that of Marx, one to which much organization theory seemed blind). Burrell argues that the apparent consensus associated with the heyday of the Aston Studies, when the so-called dominant 'orthodoxy' pre­ vailed on both sides of the Atlantic, was unusual. At that time, transatlantic convergence existed around a belief in welfarism, Keynesian eco­ nomics, and defence spending spurred by the Cold War. They were the result of centrally planned, coordinated activities, which provided sustenance for normal science but which were unique to that particular historical period. Since then, things have changed. The nature of organizing moved from the bureaucratic to more exotic forms; the paradigm debate legiti­ mated alternative modes of inquiry; and the work of Foucault and other postmodernists started to influence organizational scholars. Fragmentation is back for all to see. Some contributors in this book try to build bridges over the troubled waters of fragmenta­ tion, while others, who once were warriors, seek always to be warriors. Unlikely bedfellows thus emerge. Donaldson and Burrell, for instance, are paradigm warriors both. Whereas Donaldson believes that virtue, identified with those 'truths' that he holds dear, will triumph, Burrell restates his support for paradigm incommensurability and for the continuance of the fragmentation with which it is associated. A debate charac­ terizes the political strategies of many 'margin­ alized' groups: should one communicate with adversaries and try to influence them, or is dialogue, as Burrell argues, simply a weapon of the powerful? If so, should one exclude others? If the latter, then warfare, incommensurability and fragmentation are virtues in their own right. Oddly, both paradigm warriors seem to follow the same combat strategy, even though the terms that they defined differ so markedly.

Richard Marsden and Barbara Townley mirror some of Michael Reed's concerns, bring­ ing the book to a full circle. �hey consider the link between theory and practice which, as they point out, is not as antithetical as might appear. Organization theory matters because it not only reflects organizational practice, but helps con­ stitute it. In addition, as for many of our other contributors, there exists an academic politics of theory as there is a politics of organizational practice. They show how theory, even the sometimes esoteric discourse of postmodernism, nonetheless has important implications for organizational practice. Marsden and Townley trace organizational theory back to Marx and Weber because their work is the 'stage upon which practitioners perform'. They show that both struggled with problems of modernity, such as the creation of the abstract citizen, which continue to occupy contemporary organization theorists. Like Bur­ rell they show how theorizing and abstraction serve to divide our world up into the seen and the unseen; also, like Burrell, they point to the particularity in Weber's work that helped produce not only the Aston Studies, but also other traditions of normal science in the United States. The authors argue that these traditions of normal science do not serve practitioners well: research methods, rather than the problems and needs of managers, much less workers, drive the research agenda. They then introduce contra organization science, drawing on Silverman's early work, through Lukes's radical view of power, to the work of Foucault. This work, according to Marsden and Townley, has some potential for practice, although its aversion to anything tainted by empiricism has steered it away from organizational settings and into the relative safety of theoretical discourse. The potential, for both theory and practice, resides in our ability to transcend the debate between normal and contra science and to engage with the duality and ambiguity of organization life. They point to the contradiction of modernity: how it enriches as well as impoverishes, empowers and represses, organizes and ato­ mizes, emphasizing the importance of under­ standing what it means to the person. As these authors conclude, the way forward is the ethical interrogation of experience in terms of what our practices mean to us and to others. Finally, the volume concludes with a chapter on representation in which we explore particular themes that emerged from the chapters and engaged us. We are particularly interested in the way organization studies represent the subject: as individual and organization. By exploring issues of representation, we believe we can draw some insights for research, theory and practice in

INTROD UCTION organization studies as we move into the next century.

NOTES We acknowledge the substantive comments that Walter Nord, Eduardo Ibarra-Colado, Peter Frost, John Gray and Sue Jones made on an earlier draft of this chapter. l Our comparison with the world thirty years ago is not coincidental: the Handbook of Organizations edited by James G. March was published in 1965. We do not consider the Handbook of Organization Studies, from which this volume derives, to be a successor, natural or otherwise, to March's book or other handbooks (e.g. Dunnette 1 976; Nystrom and Starbuck 1 980; Lorsch 1 987), but we have often been asked how our Handbook compares with March's book. In most respects, we can only say that it does not, precisely because of the changes we mention here. 2 It is useful to differentiate between postmodern­ ism as social theory, as described here, and the more empirically grounded hypothesis which argues that characteristics associated with the 'modern' era are being superseded by phenomena that are radically discontinuous and sufficiently distinct to be termed 'postmodern', thus constituting a new epoch of postmodernity (see Parker 1 992). Some writers also distinguish between poststructuralism and postmo­ dernism, seeing the former as particular approaches, within the broader arena of postmodernism, which focus on the link between language, subjectivity, social organization and power. Poststructuralism counters the idea that language reflects social reality, arguing that, by producing meaning, it creates social reality. Different languages and different discourses categorize the world and give it meaning. Thus language defines, constructs and contests social organization, power and our sense of selves, our subjectivity (see Richardson 1 994: 5 1 8). 3 To be more specific, we refer to a community of researchers whose engagement in and exposure to conversations revolves around the concerns of various journals and institutions. Among the journals are Administrative Science Quarterly, The Academy of Management Review, The A cademy of Management Journal, Organization Studies, Organization Science, The Journal of Management Studies and Organization. The institutions include the European Group for Organization Studies (EGOS), the Standing Con­ ference on Organization Symbolism (SCOS), Asia Pacific Researchers in Organization Studies (APROS), the Organization and Management Theory (OMT) group of the (American) Academy of Management, Research Committee 1 7, Sociology of Organizations, of the International Sociological Association (lSA), and the 'Organization and Occupations' Committee of the American Sociological Association. It is from the

19

debates, scholars and community that comprise this 'invisible college' that we have woven the threads that bind this volume. 4 We would like to thank Eduaro Ibarra-Colado for helping to clarify the ideas in this paragraph. 5 Pfeffer ( 1 995) appears to perceive a threat not from contra science but from rational choice theory, which we would classify as one among a number of normal sciences, while viewing Pfeffer as a practitioner of another. Interestingly, Donaldson ( 1 995), an advocate of yet another form of normal science, contingency theory, makes a similar attack on other normal science approaches, notably organizational economics; population ecology; resource dependency; institutional theory. It may be that adherents of the different 'orthodox' approaches are starting to engage more directly in a struggle amongst themselves, some­ what like the paradigm warriors. There is a difference, however, in that the original paradigm warriors entered combat around the question of communication between their paradigms; they never disputed that alternative paradigms should exist, only whether they could or should talk to each other. The signs from these more recent battles suggest that orthodox warriors want all alternatives, save their own, closed out, even variations on the theme of normal science if they do not correspond to the chosen path. If Donaldson and Pfeffer have their way, there won't be anything left to constitute 'orthodoxy'!

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INTROD UCTION Harrigan, K.R. ( 1 985) Strategies for Joint Ventures. Lexington, MA: Heath/Lexington Books. Hassan, I. ( 1 985) The culture of postmodernism', Theory, Culture and Society, 2(3): 1 1 9-32. Hassard, J. ( 1 988) 'Overcoming hermeticism in organization theory: an alternative to paradigm incommensurability', Human Relations, 4 1 (3): 24759. Hassard, J. ( 1 99 1 ) 'Multiple paradigms and organiza­ tional analysis: a case study', Organization Studies, 1 2(2): 275-99. Herrigel, G.B. ( 1 993) 'Power and the redefinition of industrial districts: the case of Baden-Wurttem­ berg', in G. Graber (ed.), The Embedded Firm: on the Socioeconomics of Industrial Networks. London: New York. pp. 227-5 1 . Huyssen, A . ( 1984) 'Mapping the postmodern', New German Critique, 33. Jackson, N. and Carter, P. ( 1 9 9 1 ) 'In defence of paradigm incommensurability', Organization Studies, 1 2( 1 ): 1 09-27. Jackson, N . and Carter, P. ( 1 993) ' ''Paradigm wars": a response to Hugh Willmott', Organization Studies, 14(5): 721 -5. Jencks, C. ( 1989) What is Post-Modernism? London: Academy. Kanter, R.M. ( 1 990) 'When giants learn co-operative strategies', Planning Review, 1 8( 1 ): 1 5-25. Kiernan, M.J. ( 1 993) 'The new strategic architecture: learning to compete in the twenty-first century', A cademy of Management Executive, 7( 1 ): 7-2 1 . Knights, D . and Willmott, H . ( 1 990) Labour Process Theory. London: Macmillan. Laclau, E. ( 1 988) 'Politics and the limits of modernity', in A. Ross (ed.), Universal A bandon: the Politics of Postmodernism. Minneapolis: University of Minne­ sota Press. pp. 63-82. Latour, B. ( 1 993) We Have Never Been Modern. Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf. Linstead, S. and Grafton-Small, R. ( 1 992) 'On reading organizational culture', Organization Studies, 1 3: 3 3 1 -55. Littler, C. ( 1 982) The Labour Process in Capitalist Societies. London: Tavistock. Lorsch, J.W. (ed.) ( 1987) Handbook of Organizational Behavior. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Lyotard, J. ( 1 984) The Postmodern Condition. Manchester: Manchester University Press. March, J.G. (ed.) ( 1 965) Handbook of Organizations. Chicago: Rand McNally. Marsden, R. ( 1 993) 'The politics of organizational analysis', Organization Studies, 1 4( 1 ): 92- 1 24. Mayo, E. ( 1 947) The Social Problems of an Industrial Civilization. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. McKinsey Report ( 1 993) Emerging Exporters: A us­ tralia 's High Value-Added Manufacturing Exporters. Final Report of the Study by McKinsey and Co. for the Australian Manufacturing Council, Melbourne. Meyer. J. and Rowan, B. ( 1 977) 'Institutionalized organizations: formal structure as myth and

21

ceremony', American Journal of Sociology, 83: 340-63. Mintzberg, H. ( 1 979) The Structuring of Organizations. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Nohria, N. and Eccles, R.G. (eds) ( 1 993) Network and Organizations: Structure, Form and A ction. Boston: Harvard Business School. Nord, W.R. and Connell, A.F. ( 1 993) 'From quick­ sand to crossroads: an agnostic perspective on conversation', Organization Science, 4(1 ): 1 08-20. Nystrom, P.c. and Starbuck, W.H. ( 1980) Handbook of Organizational Design. Oxford: Oxford Uni­ versity Press. Organization Studies ( 1 988) 'Offence and defence', Organization Studies, 9( 1 ): 1 -32. Parker, M. ( 1 992) 'Post-modern organizations or postmodern organization theory?', Organization Studies, 1 3( 1 ): 1 - 1 7. Parker, M. and McHugh, G. ( 1 99 1 ) 'Five texts in search of an author: a response to John Hassard's "MUltiple paradigms and organizational analysis"', Organization Studies, 1 2(3): 45 1 -6. Pfeffer, J. ( 1 993) 'Barriers to the advance of organiza­ tional science: paradigm development as a dependent variable', A cademy of Management Review, 1 8(4): 599-620. Pfeffer, J. ( 1 995) 'Mortality, reproducibility, and the persistence of styles of theory', Organization Science, 6(6): 681 -6. Phillips, N. and Brown, J. ( 1 993) 'Analyzing com­ munication in and around organizations: a critical hermeneutic approach', Academy of Management Journal, 36(6): 1 547-76. Powell, W.W. ( 1 990) 'Neither market nor hierarchy: network forms of organization', in B.M. Staw and L.L. Cummings (eds), Research in Organizational Behavior. Greenwich, CT: JAI Press. Powell, W.W. and Brantley, P. ( 1 993) 'Competitive cooperation in biotechnology: learning through networks?', in N. Nohria and R.G. Eccles (eds), Network and Organizations: Structure, Form and A ction. Boston: Harvard Business School. pp. 36694. Prasad, P. ( 1 993) 'Symbolic processes in the implementation of technological change: a symbolic interactionist study of work computerization', A cademy of Management Journal, 36(6): 1 400-29. Pyke, F. and Sengenberger, W. (eds) ( 1 992) Industrial Districts and Inter-Firm Co-operation in Italy. Geneva: International Institute of Labour Studies. Reed, M. ( 1 985) Redirections in Organi:ation Analysis. London: Tavistock. Richardson, L. ( 1 994) 'Writing: a method of inquiry', in N.K. Denzin and Y.S. Lincoln (eds), Handbook of Qualitative Research. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Roethlisberger, F.G. and Dickson, W.J. ( 1 939) Management and the Worker. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Rothwell, R. ( 1 992) 'Successful industrial innovation:

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Part One

FRAMEWORKS FOR ANALYSIS

1 Organizational Theorizing: a Historically Contested Terrain M I C HA E L R E E D

Organization studies has its proximate historical roots in the socio-political writings of nineteenth century thinkers, such as Saint-Simon, who attempted to anticipate and interpret the nascent structural and ideological transformations wrought by industrial capitalism (Wolin 1 96 1 ) . The economic, social and political changes that capitalist-led modernization brought in its wake created a world that was fundamentally different from the relatively small-scale and simple forms of production and administration which had dominated earlier phases of capitalist develop­ ment in the eighteenth and early nineteenth cen­ turies (Bendix 1 974). The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries witnessed the growing dominance of large-scale organizational units in economic, social and political life as the com­ plexity and intensity of collective activity moved beyond the administrative capacity of more personal and direct forms of coordination (Waldo 1 948). I ndeed, the rise of the 'adminis­ trative state' symbolized a new mode of govern­ ance in which rational, scientific organization transformed human nature: Organization as power over things - that was the lesson taught by Saint-Simon. The new order would be governed not by men but by 'scientific principles' based on the 'nature of things' and therefore absolutely independent of human will. In this way, organizational society promised the rule of scientific laws rather than men and the eventual disappearance of the political element entirely . . . [organization] is the 'grand device' for transforming human irration­ alities into rational behaviour. (Wolin 196 1 : 378-83)

Thus, the historical roots of organization studies are deeply embedded in a body of writing which

gathered momentum from the second half of the nineteenth century onwards and confidently anticipated the triumph of science over politics and the victory of rationally designed collective order and progress over human recalcitrance and irrationality (Reed 1 985). The growth of an 'organizational society' was synonymous with the inexorable advance of reason, liberation and justice and the eventual eradication of ignorance, coercion and poverty. Organizations were rationally designed to solve permanently the conflict between collective needs and individual wants that had bedevilled social progress since the days of Ancient Greece (Wolin 1 96 1 ). They guaranteed social order and personal freedom by fusing collective decision­ making and individual interest (Storing 1 962) through the scientific design, implementation and maintenance of administrative structures that subsumed sectional interests within institu­ tionalized collective goals. The perennial conflict between 'society' and 'individual' would be permanently overcome. Whereas Hegel had relied on the dialectic of history to eradicate social conflict (Plant 1 973), organization theor­ ists put their faith in modern organization as the universal solution to the problem of social order. [T]he organizationists looked upon society as an order of functions, a utilitarian construct of inte­ grated activity, a means for focusing human energies in combined effort. Where the symbol of community was fraternity, the symbol of organization was power . . . organization signifies a method of social control, a means for imparting order, structure and regularity to society. (Wolin 1 96 1 : 363-4)

26

STUD YING ORGANIZA TION

Viewed from the historical vantage point of the late twentieth century, however, the practice and study of organization look very different today. The earlier metanarratives of collective order and individual freedom through rational organization and material progress have frag­ mented and frayed into a cacophony of querulous 'voices' totally lacking in general moral force and analytical coherence (Reed 1 992). The once seemingly cast-iron guarantee of material and social progress through sustained technological advance, modern organization and scientific administration now looks increasingly threadbare. Both the technical effectiveness and moral virtue of 'formal' or 'complex' organiza­ tion are called into question by institutional and intellectual transformations which push inexor­ ably towards social fragmentation, political disintegration and ethical relativism. Who amongst us can afford to ignore Bauman's argument that 'the typically modern, techno­ logical-bureaucratic patterns of action and the mentality they institutionalize, generate, sustain and reproduce' ( 1 989: 75) were the socio­ psychological foundations of and organizational preconditions for the Holocaust? In short, contemporary students of organiza­ tion find themselves at a historical juncture and in a social context where all the old ideological 'certainties' and technical 'fixes' that once underpinned their 'discipline' are under attack and seemingly on the retreat in the current debate over the nature of organization and the intellectual means most appropriate to its understanding (Reed and Hughes 1 992). Underlying assumptions about the inherently rational and ethical quality of modern organization are challenged by alternative voices that radically undermine 'taken-for­ granted' objectivity and goodness (Cooper and Burrell 1 988). While key texts published in the 1 950s and early 1 960s bridled with self­ confidence concerning their 'discipline's' intel­ lectual identity and rationale (see Haire 1 960; Argyris 1 964; Blau and Scott 1 963), this self­ confidence simply drained away in the 1 980s and 1 990s, replaced by uncertain, complex and confused expectations concerning the nature and merits of organization studies. In Kuhnian terms, we seem to be in a phase of 'revolutionary' rather than 'normal' science (Kuhn 1 970). Normal science is dominated by puzzle-solving activity and incremental research programmes carried out with generally accepted and strongly institutionalized theoretical frameworks (Lakatos and Musgrave 1 970). Revolutionary science occurs when 'domain assumptions' about subject matter, interpreta­ tive frameworks and knowledge are exposed to continuous critique and re-evaluation (Gouldner

1 97 1 ). Research and analysis are shaped by the search for anomalies and contradictions within prevailing theoretical frameworks, generating an internal intellectual dynamic of theoretical struggle. It signifies a discipline racked by internal conflict and dissension over ideological and epistemological fundamentals whose various supporters occupy and represent different para­ digmatic 'worlds' between which communica­ tion, much less mediation, becomes impossible (Kuhn 1 970; Hassard 1 990). Fragmentation and discontinuity become the dominant features of a field's identity and rationale, rather than the relative stability and cohesion characteristic of 'normal science' (Willmott 1 993). One, very potent, response to the divisive impact of the break with the functionalist/ positivist orthodoxy is the retreat into a nostal­ gic yearning for past certainties and the communal comfort they once provided (Donald­ son 1 985). This 'conservative' reaction may also demand an enforced and tightly policed political consensus within the field to repair intellectual tissue scarred by decades of theoretical in­ figh ting and to re-establish the theoretical hegemony of a particular research paradigm (Pfeffer 1 993). Both 'nostalgic' and 'political' forms of conservatism aim to resist the centri­ petal trends set in motion by intellectual struggle and to return to ideological and theoretical orthodoxy. A robust combination of 'back to basics' and 'paradigm enforcement' can be a very attractive option for those unsettled by the intellectual fermentation taking place in organization studies. Rather than 'paradigm enforcement', others look towards 'paradigm proliferation' through the separate intellectual development and nur­ turing of distinctive approaches within different domains, uncontaminated by contact with competing, and often more entrenched, perspec­ tives (Morgan 1 986; Jackson and Carter 1 99 1 ) . This response t o social change and intellectual upheaval provides intellectual sustenance for a 'serious playfulness' in organization studies where postmodern irony and humility replace the sanctimonious platitudes typical of a rational modernism that is incapable of seeing that 'objective truth is not the only game in town' (Gergen 1 992). If neither conservatism nor relativism appeals, a third option is to retell organization theory's history in ways that rediscover the analytical narratives and ethical discourses that shaped its development and legitimated its character (Reed 1 992; Willmott 1 993). Such approaches question both a return to fundamentals and an unrestrained celebration of discontinuity and diversity: neither intellectual surfing or free riding on the rising tide of relativism, nor

ORGANIZA TIONAL THEORIZING retreating into the cave of orthodoxy, are attractive futures for the study of organization. The former promises unrestrained intellectual freedom, but at the price of isolationism and fragmentation. The latter falls back on a worn and outmoded consensus, sustained through continuous intellectual surveillance and control. This chapter adopts the third response. It attempts to reconstruct the history of organiza­ tion theory's intellectual development in a way that balances social context with theoretical ideas, and structural conditions with conceptual innovation. It offers the prospect of rediscover­ ing and renewing a sense of historical vision and contextual sensitivity which gives both 'society' and 'ideas' their just deserts. Neither the history of organization studies nor the way in which that history is told are neutral representations of past achievement. Indeed, any telling of history to support reconstructions of the present and visions of the future is a controversial and con­ tested interpretation that is always open to refutation. Thus, the purpose of this chapter is to map organizational theory as a historically contested terrain within which different lan­ guages, approaches and philosophies struggle for recognition and acceptance. The next section examines theory making and development in organization studies as an intellectual activity which is necessarily impli­ cated in the social and historical context in which it is made and remade. The chapter then examines six interpretative frameworks that have structured the field's development over the last century or so and the socio-historical contexts in which they attained a degree of, always contested, intellectual dominance. The penultimate section considers the most signifi­ cant exclusions or silences that are evident in these major narrative traditions. The chapter concludes with an evaluation of future intellec­ tual developments, set within the context provided by the narratives outlined earlier.

THEORIZING ORGANIZATION

This conception of organizational theorizing is based on Gouldner's view that both the process and the product of theorizing should be seen as a 'doing and a making by persons caught up in some specific historical era' ( 1 980: 9). The theor­ etically informed analysis of and debate about organizations and organizing are outcomes of a precarious combination of individual vision and technical production located within a dynamic socio-historical context. As such, theory making is always liable to subvert institutionalized con­ ventions that have petrified into unreflectively

27

accepted orthodoxies that can never be contained completely within established cognitive frames and conceptual parameters. However, the prob­ ability of specific theoretical initiatives metamor­ phosing into much more significant conceptual 'paradigm shifts' is largely dependent on their cumulative impact on the particular intellectual communities and traditions through which they are mediated and received (Willmott 1 993). Thus, while theory making is always potentially subversive of the intellectual status quo, its actual impact is always refracted through existing knowledge/power relationships and the 'contex­ tual receptiveness' of particular socio-historical conditions to specific intellectual developments (Toulmin 1 972). In short, theory making is a historically located intellectual practice directed at assem­ bling and mobilizing ideational, material and institutional resources to legitimate certain knowledge claims and the political projects which flow from them. The intellectual and social contexts in which theoretical debate is embedded have a crucial bearing on the form and content of particular conceptual innovations as they struggle to attain a degree of support within the wider community (Clegg 1 994; Thompson and McHugh 1 990). As Bendix maintains, 'A study of ideas as weapons in the management of organizations could afford a better understanding of the relations between ideas and actions' ( 1 974: xx). It does not mean, however, that no recog­ nized, collective basis exists on which contra­ dictory knowledge claims can be evaluated. At any point in time, organization studies is constituted through shared lines of debate and dialogue which establish intellectual constraints and opportunities within which new contribu­ tions are assessed. Negotiated rules and norms are generated through which collective judge­ ments concerning new and old work are made and a vocabulary and a grammar of organiza­ tional analysis emerge. This 'grounded ration­ ality' (Reed 1 993) may lack the universality associated, however mistakenly (Putnam 1 978), with the 'hard' sciences but it nonetheless establishes an identifiable framework of proce­ dures and practices 'that provide for their own relevant discourse about proof' (Thompson 1 978: 205-6). Thus, organization theory i s subject t o shared, although revisable, methodo­ logical procedures through which reasoned judgements of competing interpretative frames and explanatory theories are negotiated and debated. The interaction and contestation of rival intellectual traditions imply the existence of negotiated, historicized, and contextualized understandings that make rational argumenta­ tion possible (Reed 1 993).

STUD YING ORGANIZA TION

28 Table I

Analytical narratives in organization analysis

Meta-narrative interpretative framework

Major problematic

Illustrative/exemplary/ perspectives

Rationality

Order

Integration

Consensus

Market

Liberty

Power

Domination

Knowledge

Control

Justice

Participation

Classical OT, scientific management, decision theory, Taylor, Fayol, Simon Human relations, neo-HR, functionalism, contingency/ systems theory. corporate culture, Durkheim, Barnard. Mayo, Parsons Theory of firm. institutional economics, transaction costs. agency theory, resource dependency, population ecology, liberal OT Neo-radical Weberians, critical/structural Marxism, labour process, institutional theory, Weber, Marx Ethnomethod, organizational culture/symbol, poststructuralist, post-industrial, post-Fordist/ modern, Foucault, Garfinkel. actor-network theory Business ethics, morality and OB, industrial democracy. participation theory. critical theory. Habermas

The interpretative frameworks in Table I constitute the historically contested intellectual terrain on which organization analysis developed - a terrain which must be mapped and traversed in relation to the interplay between the pro­ cedural and contextual factors that shape the debates around and through which 'the field' emerged (Morgan and Stanley 1 993). These frameworks have shaped the development of organization studies for a century or more by providing a grammar through which coherently structured narratives can be built and commu­ nicated; symbolic and technical resources through which the nature of organization can be debated; and a communal store of texts and discourses which mediate these debates for both specialist and lay audiences. They develop in a dialectical relationship with historical and social processes as loosely structured and contested ways of conceptualizing and debating key features of organization. Each is defined in relation to the central problematic around which it developed and the socio-historical context in

Contextual transitions from nightwatchman state to industrial state

from entrepreneurial capitalism to welfare capitalism

from managerial capitalism to neo-liberal capitalism

from liberal collectivism to bargained corporatism

from industrialism/modernity to post-industrialism/postmodernity

from repressive to participatory democracy

which it was articulated. The discussion thus provides a grounded appreciation of the strategic analytical narratives through which the field of organization studies is constituted as a dynamic intellectual practice, permeated by theoretical controversies and ideological con­ flicts concerning the ways in which 'organiza­ tion' can and ought to be.

RA TIONALISM TRIUMPHANT

As Stretton argued, 'we take in rationality with our mother's milk' ( 1 969: 406). Yet this belief in the naturalness of calculated ratiocination has definite historical and ideological roots. Saint­ Simon ( 1 958) has a very strong claim to being the first 'theorist of organization' to the extent that he 'was probably the first to note the rise of modern organizational patterns, identify some of their distinctive features, and insist on their prime significance for the emerging society . . .

ORGANIZA TIONA L THEORIZING the ground rules of modern society had been deeply altered and the deliberately conceived and planned organization was to play a new role in the world' (Gouldner 1 959: 400- 1 ) . The belief that modern society is dominated by a 'logic of organization' recurs throughout the history of organization studies, promoting a principle of social organization in which rationally assigned technical function defines the socio-economic location, authority and behaviour of every indi­ vidual, group and class. According to Saint­ Simon, it provides a cast-iron defence against social conflict and political uncertainty in so far as it establishes a new structure of power based on technical expertise and its contribution to the smooth functioning of society, rather than on randomly allocated or 'anarchic' market advan­ tages or birth privileges. The organization as a rationally constructed artifice directed to the solution of collective problems of social order and administrative management is reflected in the writings of Taylor ( 1 9 1 2), Fayol ( 1 949), Urwick and Brech ( 1 947) and Brech ( 1 948). Such work advocates that the theory of organization 'has to do with the struc­ ture of co-ordination imposed upon the work division units of an enterprise . . . Work division is the foundation of organization; indeed, the reason for organization' (Gulick and Urwick 1937: 3). It legitimates the idea that society and its constituent organizational units will be managed through scientific laws of administra­ tion from which human emotions and values can be totally excluded (Waldo 1 948). Epistemolo­ gical principles and administrative techniques translate highly contestable, normative precepts into universal, objective, immutable, and hence unchallengeable, scientific laws. The 'rational individual is, and must be, an organized and institutionalized individual' (Simon 1 95 7 : 1 0 1 2). Human beings became 'raw material' trans­ formed by modern organizational technologies into well-ordered, productive members of society unlikely to interfere with the long-term plans of ruling classes and elites. Thus social, political and moral problems could be transformed into engineering tasks amenable to technical solu­ tions (Gouldner 1 97 1 ). Modern organizations heralded the triumph of rational knowledge and technique over seemingly intractable human emotion and prejudice. This model insinuated itself into the ideolo­ gical core and theoretical fabric of organization studies in such a pervasive and natural manner that its identity and influence were virtually impossible to ascertain, much less question. As Gouldner ( 1 959) argued, it prescribed a 'blue­ print' for an authority structure where indivi­ duals and groups were required to follow certain laws. Principles of efficient and effective

29

functioning were promulgated as an axiom to direct all forms of organizational practice and analysis. It provided a universal characteriza­ tion of the 'reality' of formal organization irrespective of time, place and situation. Once this blueprint was accepted, it legitimated a view of organizations as autonomous and independent social units, above and beyond the purview of moral evaluation and political debate (Gouldner 1 97 1 ). Although the 'age of organization' demanded a new professional hierarchy to meet the needs of a developing industrial society, superseding the claims of both moribund aristocracy and reac­ tionary entrepreneurs, this view was profoundly anti-democratic and anti-egalitarian. A techni­ cally and administratively determined conception of hierarchy, subordination and authority had no truck with rising socio-political agitation based on notions of universal suffrage in either work­ place or polity (Wolin 1 96 1 ; Mouzelis 1 967; Clegg and Dunkerley 1 980). Rational bureaucratic organization was socially and morally legitimated as an indispensable form of organized power, based on objective technical functions and necessary for the efficient and effective function­ ing of a social order founded on rational-legal authority (Frug 1 984; Presthus 1 975). These principles are deeply embedded in the epistemological and theoretical foundations of those analytical perspectives that constitute the conceptual core of organization studies. Taylor's 'scientific management' is directed towards a permanent monopolization of organizational knowledge through the rationalization of work performance and job design. As Merkle argues: 'Evolving beyond its technical and national origins, Taylorism became an important compo­ nent of the philosophical outlook of modern industrial civilization, defining virtue as effi­ ciency, establishing a new role for experts in production, and setting parameters for new patterns of social distribution' ( 1 980: 62). As both ideology and practice, Taylorism was extremely hostile towards entrepreneurial theor­ ies of organization which focused on the legimatory and technical needs of a small elite (Bendix 1 974; Rose 1 975; Clegg and Dunkerley 1 980). As Bendix stresses, 'the managerial ideol­ ogies of today are distinguished from the entrepreneurial ideologies of the past in that managerial ideologies are thought to aid employ­ ers or their agents in controlling and directing the activities of workers' ( 1 974: 9). Fayol's principles of organization, although modified by a perceptive awareness of the need for contextual adaptation and compromise, were driven by the need to construct an architecture of coordination and control to contain the inevi­ table disruption and conflict caused by 'infor-

30

STUD YING ORGANIZA TION

mal' behaviour. 'Classical' organization theory is founded on the underlying belief that organiza­ tion provides a principle of structural design and a practice of operational control which can be rationally determined and formalized in advance of actual performance. Indeed, it assumed that the latter automatically follows the design rationale and control instrumentation entailed in the organization's formal structure (Massie 1 965). While Simon's ( 1 945) concept of 'bounded rationality' and theory of 'administrative behav­ iour' flow from a stinging critique of the ex­ cessive rationalism and formalism of classical management and organization theory, his ideas are framed within an approach which sees rational choice between clearly delineated options as the basis of all social action (March 1 988). It reduces the vital 'interpretative work', done by individual and organizational actors, to a purely cognitive process dominated by standardized rules and operating programmes. Politics, culture, morality and history are sig­ nificant by their absence from this model of 'bounded rationality' . Treated as random, extraneous variables beyond the influence, much less control, of rational cognitive processes and organizational procedures, they become analytically marginalized, left outside the con­ ceptual parameters of Simon's preferred model. Rationalism exerted a profound influence over the historical and conceptual development of organization analysis. It established a cognitive frame and research agenda which could not be ignored, even by those who wished to take a radically different line (Perrow 1 986), and ideologically resonated with the development of political institutions and economic structures during the early and mid twentieth century, rendering the corporation and political state 'knowable'. It provided a representation of emerging organizational forms that legitimated their increasing power and influence as inevitable features of a long-term historical trajectory through discourses of rational technocratic administration and management (Ellul 1 964; Gouldner 1 976). It also ' lifted' the theory and practice of organizational management from an intuitive craft into a codified and analyzable body of knowledge that traded on the immensely powerful cultural capital and symbolism of 'science' . Considered in these terms, rationalism estab­ lished a conception of organization theory and analysis as an intellectual technology geared to the provision of a 'mechanism for rendering reality amenable to certain kinds of action . . . it involves inscribing reality into the calculations of government through a range of material and rather mundane techniques' (Rose and Miller

1 990: 7). The 'organization' becomes a tool or instrument for the authorization and realization of collective goals through the design and management of structures directed to the admin­ istration and manipulation of organizational behaviour. Organizational decision-making rests on a rational analysis of all the options available, based on certified expert knowledge and deliberately oriented to the established legal apparatus. This 'logic of organization' became the guarantor of material advance, social progress and political order in modern industrial societies as they converged around a pattern of institutional development and governance through which the 'invisible hand of the market' was gradually replaced by the 'visible hand of organization'. Despite the primary position of the rational framework in the development of organization theory, its ideological and intellectual domi­ nance was never complete. It is always open to challenge by alternative narratives. Challengers often shared its ideological and political 'pro­ ject', that of discovering a new source of authority and control within the processes and structures of modern organization, but used different discourses and practices to achieve it. In particular, many saw the rational frame­ work's inability to deal with the dynamism and instability of complex organizations as a major failure. This growing sense of its conceptual and practical limitations and the utopian nature of the political project which it supported provided organicist thought with a intellectual and institutional space where it could prosper in a field of study previously held in the sway of mechanistic forms of discourse.

THE REDISCOVERY OF COMMUNITY

The substantive issue which most perplexed critics, from the 1 930s and 1 940s onwards, was the failure of rationalistic organization theory to address the problem of social integration and the implications for the maintenance of social order in a more unstable and uncertain world. This approach remained blind to the criticism that authority is ineffective without 'spontaneous or willing co-operation' (Bendix 1 974). Critics, uneasy about the highly mechanistic and deter­ ministic character of rationalism, emphasized both a practical and a theoretical need for an alternative foundation of contemporary man­ agerial power and authority to that provided by formal organization design. Organicist thinking was also concerned with how modern organizations combine authority with a feeling of community among their members.

ORGANIZA TIONAL THEORIZING The mission of the organization is not only to supply goods and services, but fellowship as well. The confidence of the modern writer in the power of organization stems from a larger faith that the organization is man's rejoinder to his own mortality . . . In community and in organization modern man has fashioned substitute love-objects for the political. The quest for community has sought refuge from the notion of man as a political animal; the adoration of organization has been partially inspired by the hope of finding a new form of civility. (Wolin 1 96 1 : 368)

This issue is at the forefront of the emergence of a human relations perspective in organization analysis that sets itself apart, in terms of solu­ tions if not problems, from the rational model. The Management and the Worker monograph (Roethlisberger and Dickson 1 939) and the writings of Mayo ( 1 933; 1 945) thus accuse the rational tradition of ignoring the natural and evolutionary qualities of the new social forms which industrialization generated. The whole thrust of the human relations perspective is a view of social isolation and conflict as a symptom of social pathology and disease. The 'good' society and the effective organization are defined in relation to their capacity to facilitate and sustain the socio-psychological reality of sponta­ neous cooperation and social stability in the face of economic, political and technological changes that threaten the integration of the individual and group within the wider community. Over a number of years, this conception of organizations as the intermediate social units which integrate individuals into modern indus­ trial civilization, under the tutelage of a benevolent and socially skilled management, became institutionalized in such a way that it began to displace the predominant position held by exponents of the rational model (Child 1 969; Nichols 1 969; Bartell 1 976; Thompson and McHugh 1 990). It converged in more abstract and sociologically oriented theories of organiza­ tion which held an elective affinity with the naturalistic and evolutionary predilections of the human relations school (Parsons 1 956; Merton 1 949; Selznick 1 949; Blau 1 95 5) . Thus, the origins of organicist thought in organization studies lay in a belief that rationalism provided an extremely limited and often misleading vision of the 'realities' of organizational life (Gouldner 1 959; Mouzelis 1 967; Silverman 1 970). I t stressed mechanically imposed order and control instead of integration, interdependence and balance in organically developing social systems, each with a history and dynamic of its own. ' Interference' by external agents, such as the planned design of organizational structures, threatens the system's survival.

31

The organization as a social system facilitates the integration of individuals into the wider society and the adaptation of the latter to changing, and often highly volatile, socio­ technical conditions. This view is theoretically anticipated, in embryonic form, by Roethlisber­ ger and Dickson, who talk of the industrial organization as a functioning social system striving for equilibrium with a dynamic environ­ ment ( 1 939: 567). This conception draws on Pareto's ( 1 935) theory of equilibrating social systems in which disparities in the rates of socio­ technical change and the imbalances which they generate in social organisms are automatically counteracted by internal responses that, over time, re-establish system equilibrium. Organizational structures are viewed as sponta­ neously and homeostatically maintained. Changes in organizational patterns are considered as the result of cumulative, unplanned, adaptive responses to threats to the equilibrium of the system as a whole. Responses to problems are thought of as taking the form of crescively developed defence mechanisms and being importantly shaped by shared values which are deeply internalized in the members. The empirical focus is thus directed to the spontaneously emergent and normatively sanctioned structures in the organization. (Gouldner 1 959: 405-6)

In this way, emergent processes, rather than planned structures, ensure long-term system stability and survival. By the late 1 940s and early 1 950s, this con­ ception of organizations as social systems geared to the integrative and survival 'needs' of the larger societal orders of which they were con­ stituent elements established itself as the dominant theoretical framework within organization analysis. It converged with theor­ etical movements in 'general systems theory', as originally developed in biology and physics (von Bertalanffy 1 950; 1 956), which provided con­ siderable conceptual inspiration for the subse­ quent development of socio-technical systems theory (Miller and Rice 1 967) and 'soft system' methodologies (Checkland 1 994). It was, how­ ever, the structural-functionalist interpretation of the systems approach which assumed the intellectual 'pole position' within organization analysis and which was to dominate theoretical development and empirical research within the field between the 1 950s and 1 970s (Silverman 1 970; Clegg and Dunkerley 1 980; Reed 1 985). Structural functionalism and its progeny, systems theory, provided an 'internalist' focus on organizational design with an 'externalist' concern with environmental uncertainty (Thompson 1 967). The former highlighted the need for a minimum degree of stability and

32

STUD YING ORGANIZA TION

security in long-term system survival; the latter exposed the underlying indeterminacy of organizational action in the face of environ­ mental demands and threats beyond the organi­ zation's control. The key research issue which emerges from this synthesis of structural and environmental concerns is to establish those combinations of internal designs and external conditions which will facilitate long-term organizational stability and growth (Donaldson 1 985). Structural functionalism and systems theory also effectively 'depoliticized' the decision­ making processes through which the appropriate functional fit between organization and environ­ ment was achieved. Certain 'functional impera­ tives', such as the need for long-term system equilibrium for survival, were assumed to impose themselves on all organizational actors, determining the design outcomes which their decision-making produced (Child 1 972; 1 973; Crozier and Friedberg 1 980). This theoretical sleight of hand consigns political processes to the margins of organization analysis. In keeping with the wider ideological resonances of systems theory, it converts conflicts over valued means and ends into technical issues which can be 'solved' through effective system design and management. As Boguslaw ( 1 965) indicates this conversion relies on a theoretical fa�ade, not to say utopia, of value homogeneity in which the political realities of organizational change, and the strains and stresses they inevitably cause, are glossed as frictional elements in an otherwise perfectly functioning system. It also gels with the ideological and practical needs of a rising group of systems designers and managers who aspire to overall control within an increasingly differen­ tiated and complex society. Thus, the general enthusiasm with which systems theory was received by the organization studies community in the 1 950s and 1 960s reflected a wider renaissance of utopian thinking which presumed that the functional analysis of social systems would provide the intellectual foundations for a new science of society (Kumar 1 978). The process of socio-organizational differentiation, perhaps with a helping hand from expert social engineers, would solve the problem of social order through naturally evolving structures capable of handling endemic, escalating tensions between institutional demands and individual interests. The conceit that society itself would solve the problem of social order depended on a 'domain assumption' that 'the whole of human history has a unique form, pattern, logic or meaning underlying the multitude of seemingly haphazard and uncon­ nected events' (Sztompka 1 993: 1 07). Functional systems analysis provided the theoretical key to

unlock the mysteries of this socio-historical development. enabling social and organizational scientists to predict, explain and control both its internal dynamics and its institutional conse­ quences. While this view traded on a form of socio-organizational evolutionism and function­ alism which had its roots in the writings of Comte, Saint-Simon and Durkheim (Weinberg 1 969; Clegg and Dunkerley 1 980; Smart 1 992), it reached its apogee in the work of those social scientists who contributed to the development of the theory of industrial society in the 1 950s and 1 960s, and who displayed little, if any, of the historical circumspection and political sensitivity of their academic predecessors. Con seq uently, the functionalist/systems orthodoxy which came to dominate, or at least structure, the intellectual practice and develop­ ment of organization analysis between the 1 940s and 1 960s was merely one part of a much broader movement that resurrected the evolu­ tionary form of the nineteenth century (Kumar 1 978: 1 79-90). In organization theory, it reached its theoretical consummation in the development of 'contingency theory' between the late 1 960s and early 1 970s (Thompson 1 967; Lawrence and Lorsch 1 967; Woodward 1 970; Pugh and Hickson 1 976; Donaldson 1 985). This approach exhibited all the intellectual virtues and vices of the larger theoretical tradition on which it drew for ideological and methodological inspiration. It also reinforced a managerialist ethic which presumed to solve, through expert social engineering and flexible organizational design (Gellner 1 964; Giddens 1 984), the fundamental institutional and political problems of modern industrial societies ( Lipset 1 960; Bell 1 960; Galbraith 1 969). Yet, as the 1 960s progressed the virtues of organicist thought were eclipsed by a growing appreciation of its vices, especially as social, economic and political realities refused to con­ form to the explanatory theories promulgated by this narrative. In time, alternative interpretative frameworks, grounded in very different historical and intellectual traditions, would emerge to challenge functionalism. Before we can consider these perspectives, however, we need to take stock of market-based theories of organization.

ENTER THE MARKET

Market-based theories of organization seem a contradiction in terms: if markets operate in the way specified by neo-classical economic theory, as perfectly functioning 'clearing mechanisms' balancing price and cost, there is no conceptual role or technical need for 'organization'. As

ORGANIZA TIONAL THEORIZING Coase ( 1 937) realized in his classic paper, if markets are perfect, then firms (and organiza­ tions) should not develop in perfectly regulated market transactions based on voluntary exchange of information between equal eco­ nomic agents. Coase was, however, forced to recognize the reality of firms as collective economic agents, accounting for them as 'solutions' to market failure or breakdown. As mechanisms for 'internalizing' recurring eco­ nomic exchanges, firms reduce the cost of individual transactions through standardization and routinization and increase the efficiency of resource allocation within the market system as a whole by minimizing transaction costs between economic agents who are naturally distrustful and suspicious of their partners. Coase unintentionally borrows a great deal from the rational framework in assuming that behaviour is primarily motivated by the goal of minimizing market costs and maximizing market returns. Both rationalistic and economistic tradi­ tions in organization analysis rest on a concep­ tion of 'bounded rationality' to explain and predict individual and social action; both subscribe to theories that account for organiza­ tion in terms of efficiency and effectiveness; both pay intellectual homage to the organic frame­ work by emphasizing the 'natural' evolution of organizational forms that optimize returns within environments whose competitive pres­ sures restrict strategic options. Economic theor­ ies of organization also trade on elements of the organicist tradition in focusing on organizations as an evolutionary and semi-rational product of spontaneous and unintended consequences (Hayek 1 978). Organizations are an automatic response to (and a reasonable price to pay for) the need for formally free and equal economic agents to negotiate and monitor contracts in complex market transactions which cannot be accommodated in existing institutional arrange­ ments. Such economic theories of organization emerged in response to the inherent analytical and explanatory limitations of classical and neo­ classical theories of the firm (Cyert and March 1 963). They demand that a more serious consideration be accorded to resource allocation as a primary determinant of organizational behaviour and design (Williamson and Winter 1 99 1 ). This focus on the 'micro-economics of organization' (Donaldson 1 990; Williamson 1 990) and a theory of firm behaviour that is more sensitive to the institutional constraints within which economic transactions are con­ ducted encouraged the formulation of a research agenda emphasizing corporate governance struc­ tures and their link to organizational functions (Williamson 1 990). This framework also draws

33

intellectual inspiration from Barnard's concep­ tion of organization as cooperation 'which is conscious, deliberate and purposeful' ( 1 938: 4), and which can only be explained as the outcome of a complex interaction between formal and substantive rationality or technical requirements and moral order (Williamson 1 990). Barnard's original attempt to provide a conceptual synth­ esis of 'rational' and 'natural' systems concep­ tions of organization provides the foundations of market-based theories of organization which flourished in the 1 970s and 1 980s, such as transaction cost analysis (Williamson 1 975; Francis 1 983) and population ecology (Aldrich 1 979; 1 992; Hannan and Freeman 1 989). While there are significant theoretical differ­ ences between these approaches, particularly in relation to the form and degree of environmental determinism in which they engage (Morgan 1 990), both subscribe to a set of domain assump­ tions that unify internal administrative forms and external market conditions by means of an evolutionary logic which subordinates collective and individual action to efficiency and survival imperatives largely beyond human influence. Transaction cost theory concerns itself with the adaptive adjustments which organizations need to make in the face of pressures for maximizing efficiency in their internal and external transac­ tions. Population ecology highlights the role of competitive pressures in selecting certain organizational forms over others. Both perspec­ tives are based on a model of organization in which its design, functioning and development are treated as the direct outcomes of universal and immanent forces which cannot be influenced or changed through strategic action. What is conspicuous by its absence in the market framework is any sustained interest or concern with social power and human agency. Neither the markets/hierarchies approach or population ecology or, indeed, Donaldson's ( 1 990; 1 994) 'liberal theory of organization' take much interest in how organizational change is structured by power struggles between social actors and the forms of domination which they legitimate (Francis 1 983; Perrow 1 986; Thomp­ son and McHugh 1 990). These approaches treat 'organization' as constituting a unitary social and moral order in which individual and group interests and values are simply derived from overarching 'system interests and values' uncon­ taminated by sectional conflict and power struggles (Willman 1 983). Once this unitary conception is taken for granted as an 'accepted', 'natural', and virtually invisible feature of organization, power, conflict and domination can be safely ignored as being 'outside' the framework' s field of analytical vision and empirical concern.

STUD YING ORGANIZA TION

34

This unitary conception of organization is entirely in keeping with a wider ideological and political context dominated by neo-liberal theor­ ies of organizational and societal governance which raise 'impersonal market forces' to the analytical status of ontological universals deter­ mining the chances of individual and collective survival (Miller and Rose 1 990; Rose 1 992; Silver 1 987). From neo-liberal or Darwinian ideologies in the last century (Bendix 1 974) to more recent doctrines emphasizing the 'survival of the fittest', such ideologies advocate the progressive expan­ sion of the market, private enterprise and economic rationality at the expense of increas­ ingly residual and marginalized conceptions of community, public service and social concern. Through globalization, nations and enterprises engage in an expanding economic struggle which will be won by those organizations and economies that sing1e-mindedly adapt themselves to market demands (Du Gay and Salaman 1 992; Du Gay 1 994). In this respect, market-based theories of organization trade on cyclical move­ ments within the encompassing socio-economic, political and ideological context of which they are a part (Barley and Kunda 1 992). Never­ theless, they remain consistently silent on the power structures and struggles in and through which organizations respond to putatively 'objective' and 'neutral' economic pressures.

F ACES OF POWER

Power remains the most overused and least understood concept in organization analysis. It provides the ideological foundations and episte­ mological scaffolding for a theory of organiza­ tion that stands in sharp contrast to the analytical narratives and interpretative frame­ works previously discussed. It proffers a logic of organization and organizing analytically rooted in strategic conceptions of social power and human agency which are sensitive to the dialec­ tical interplay between structural constraint and social action as it shapes the institutional forms reproduced and transformed through social practice (Giddens 1985; 1 990; Layder 1 994). It rejects the environmental determinism inherent in market-based theorizations of organization with their unremitting emphasis on the efficiency and effectiveness imperatives that secure the long-term survival of certain organizational forms rather than others. It also calls into question the unitarist assumptions that underpin the rational, organic and market frameworks by conceptualizing the organization as an arena of conflicting interests and values constituted through power struggle.

The power framework in organization analy­ sis is grounded in Weber's sociology of domina­ tion and the analysis of bureaucracy and bureaucratization which flows from it (Weber 1 978; Ray and Reed 1 994). More recently, this Weberian tradition has been complemented by theorizations of power that draw their inspira­ tion from Machiavelli's interest in the micro­ politics of organizational power and its con­ temporary expression in the work of Foucault (Clegg 1 989; 1 994). Weberian-based analyses emphasized the relational character of power as a differentially distributed capacity or resource which, if deployed with the appropriate degree of strategic and tactical skill by social actors, produces and reproduces hierarchically struc­ tured relationships of autonomy and dependence (Clegg 1 989; Wrong 1 978). This tends to prioritize the institutional forms and mechan­ isms through which power is achieved, routi­ nized and struggled over. The 'emphasis is on wider constraints and the determinants of behaviour - principally the forms of power derived from structures of class and ownership, but also the impact of markets and occupations, and of increasing interest lately the normative structures of gender' (Fincham 1 992: 742). Thus, Weber's analysis of the dynamics and forms of bureaucratic power in modern society highlights the complex interaction between societal and organizational rationalization as it reproduces institutionalized structures controlled by 'experts' or 'specialists' (Silberman 1 993). This structural or institutional conception of organizational power has been complemented by a more concentrated focus on the micro­ political processes through which power is attained and mobilized in opposition or in parallel to established regimes and the domina­ tion structures through which they rule. This approach resonates very strongly with Fou­ cault's work on the mosaic of cross-cutting coalitions and alliances mobilizing particular disciplinary regimes (Lyon 1 994) which provides a 'bottom-up', rather than a 'top-down', perspective on the detailed organizational practices through which power 'over others' can be temporarily secured. This processual interpretation of the concept of organizational power tends to concentrate on the detailed tactical manoeuvrings which generate a shifting balance of advantage between contending socio­ political interests ( Fincham 1 992). But it is less convincing when attempting to explain the broadly based organizational mechanisms which become institutionalized as accepted structures and rhetorics legitimating more permanent and taken-for-granted 'imperatively coordinated associations'. Thus, the more recent research focus on the interactional processes or

ORGANIZA TIONAL THEORIZING 'micro-politics' through which power relation­ ships are temporarily sedimented into relatively more permanent and stable authority structures deflects attention away from the 'hierarchical mechanisms that sustain the reproduction of power' (Fincham 1 992: 742). This dialogue between Weberian/institutional and Machiavellian/processual conceptions of power led to a much more sophisticated under­ standing of the multi-faceted nature of power relations/processes and their implications for the structuring of organizational forms. Lukes's ( 1 974) analysis of the multiple 'faces of power' has become the major reference point for contemporary research on the dynamics and outcomes of organizational power. His differ­ entiation between three faces or dimensions of power, between the 'episodic', 'manipulative' and 'hegemonic' conceptions of power (Clegg 1 989), results in a considerable broadening of the research agenda for the study of organizational power and the theoretical frameworks through which it is approached. The 'episodic' conception of power concen­ trates on observable conflicts of interest between identifiable social actors with opposing objec­ tives in particular decision-making situations. The 'manipulative' view concentrates on the 'behind the scenes' activities through which already powerful groups manipulate the deci­ sion-making agenda to screen out issues which have the potential to disturb, if not threaten, their domination and control. The 'hegemonic' interpretation emphasizes the strategic role of existing ideological and social structures in constituting, and thus selectively limiting, the interests and values - and hence action available to social actors in any particular deci­ sion arena. As we move from the 'episodic' through the 'manipulative' to the 'hegemonic' conceptions of power there is a progressive analytica! and valuational movement from the role of human agency in constituting power relations to that of material and ideological mechanisms in determining the structures of domination and control through which the latter are institutionalized (Clegg 1 989: 86- 1 28). There is also an increasing explanatory emphasis on the macro-level structures and mechanisms that determine the organizational designs through which micro-political power struggles are mediated and a corresponding downgrading of the organizationally specific practices that produce and reproduce institutional forms. Researchers (e.g. Fincham 1 992; Clegg 1 994; Knights and Willmott 1 989) attempted to overcome this potential split between institu­ tional/structural and processual/agency concep­ tions by focusing on the general but 'localized' organizational practices through which patterns

35

of domination and control are sustained. They attempted to synthesize a Weberian-based concern with the institutional reproduction of domination structures and a Foucauldian inter­ est in the micro-practices generating changing forms of disciplinary power. The focal point, both analytically and empirically, is the 'expert' discourses through which particular patterns of organizational structuring and control are established in different societies or sectors (Abbott 1 988; Miller and O'Leary 1 989; Powell and DiMaggio 1 99 1 ; Larson 1 979; 1 990; Reed and Anthony 1 992). These discourses create specific types of disciplinary regimes at an organizational or sectoral level that mediate between strategic governmental policies formu­ lated by centralized agencies and their tactical implementation within localized domains (Miller and Rose 1 990; Johnson 1 993; also see some of the recent work on labour process theory, e.g. Burawoy 1 985; Thompson 1 989; Littler 1 990; and total quality management, e.g. Reed 1 995; Kirkpatrick and Martinez 1 995). This kind of research tries to account for the decay and breakdown of 'corporatist' structures within the political economies and organiza­ tional practices of advanced industrial societies by focusing on their internal contradictions and failure to respond to external ideological and political initiatives led by a resurgent neo-liberal right (Alford and Friedland 1 985; Cerny 1 990; Miller and Rose 1 990; Johnson 1 993). It also raises questions about the analytical coherence and explanatory range of a power framework with limited capacity to deal with the material, cultural and political complexities of organiza­ tional change.

KNOWLEDGE

IS

POWER

The knowledge-based framework is deeply sus­ picious of the institutional and structural bias characterizing the analytical frameworks pre­ viously reviewed. It rejects their various forms of theoretical and methodological determinism and the 'totalizing' logic of explanation on which they trade. Instead, this approach treats all forms of institutionalized or structured social action as the temporary patterning of a mosaic of tactical interactions and alliances which form relatively unstable and shifting networks of power always prone to internal decay and dissolution. It explains the development of modern 'systems' of organizational discipline and governmental control in terms of highly contingent and negotiated power mechanisms and relationships whose institutional roots lie in the capacity to exert effective management of

36

STUD YING ORGANIZA TION

'the means of production of new forms of power itself' (Cerny 1 990: 7). I n this context, the cultural and technical mechanisms through which particular fields of human behaviour, such as health, education, crime and business, are colonized as the preserves of certain specialist or expert groups emerge as the strategic focus of analysis. These mechanisms take on a far greater explanatory significance than sovereign political and eco­ nomic powers such as the 'state' or 'class'. Knowledge, and the power which it potentially confers, assume a central role by providing the key cognitive and representational resource for the application of a set of techniques from which disciplinary regimes, however temporary and unstable, can be constructed (Clegg 1 994). Highly specialized and seemingly esoteric knowl­ edge, which can potentially be accessed and controlled by any individual or group with the required training and skill (Blackler 1 993), provides the strategic resource from which the appropriation of time, space and consciousness can be realized. Thus the production, codifica­ tion, storage and usage of knowledge relevant to the regulation of social behaviour become strategic considerations in the mobilization and institutionalization of a form of organized power which facilitates 'control at a distance' (Cooper 1 992). Reworked within this problematic, 'organiza­ tion' becomes a portable carrier of the socio­ technical knowledge and skills through which particular patterns of social relationships emerge and reproduce themselves in specific material and social circumstances (Law 1 994a). It has neither inherent ontological status nor explana­ tory significance as a generalizable, monolithic structure or entity. Contingency, rather than universality, reigns, both in the localized and constrained knowledge which makes organiza­ tions possible, and in the power relationships they generate. The research focus lies in the 'interactional order' which produces 'organiza­ tion' and the locally embedded stocks of knowledge through which agents engage in the situational practices constitutive of the struc­ tures through which 'organization' is reproduced (Goffman 1 983; Layder 1 994). A number of specific theoretical approaches draw on this general orientation to develop a research agenda for organization analysis which takes the knowledge production processes through which 'organization' is reproduced as its strategic interest. Ethnomethodology (Boden 1 994), postmodernist approaches to organiza­ tion culture and symbolism (Cal
and poststructuralist theory (Kondo 1 990; Cooper 1 992; Gane and Johnson 1 993; Clegg 1 994; Perry 1 994) collectively contribute to a shift of focus in organization analysis away from macro-level formalization or institutionalization and towards micro-level social ordering or routinization. In their different ways, these approaches, many of which are represented in this book (see Chapters 8 by Cal
SCALES OF JUSTICE

The analytical retreat into the local aspects of organizational life takes the study of organiza­ tions a long way, theoretically and epistemo­ logically, from the normative themes and structural issues which shaped its historical development and intellectual rationale. At the very least, it radically redefines the 'intellectual

ORGANIZA TIONAL THEORIZING mission' away from ethical universals and conceptual abstractions towards cultural relativ­ ities and interpretative schema that are inher­ ently resistant to historical and theoretical generalization. Yet, the turn towards 'the local' in organization analysis and the disinclination to engage with wider ideological and structural issues have not gone unremarked. A number of commentators have attempted to redirect the study of organizations back towards institu­ tional forms and the analytical and normative questions they raise. One relatively obvious example of this devel­ opment is to be found in the 'new institution­ alism' (Powell and DiMaggio 1 99 1 ; Meyer and Scott 1 992; Whitley 1 992; Perry 1 992). Another can be seen in the resurgence of interest in the political economy of organization and its implications for the extension, in a complex range of institutional practices and forms, of bureaucratic surveillance and control in 'late modernity' (Alford and Friedland 1 985; Giddens 1 985; 1 990; Cerny 1 990; Wolin 1 988; Thompson 1 993; Silberman 1 993; Dandeker 1 990). Finally, debates about the immediate and longer-term prospects for organizational democracy and participation within the corporate governance structures which developed in political econo­ mies dominated by neo-Iiberal ideologies and policies during the 1 980s and 1 990s (Lammers and Szell 1 989; Morgan 1 990; Fulk and Steinfield 1 990; Hirst 1 993) have reawakened interest in the 'global' issues which organization analysis must address. Each of these bodies of literature raises fundamental questions about the types of corporate governance and control prevailing in contemporary organizations and their ground­ ing in moral and political judgements concerning justice and fairness, as measured against certain preferred interests and values. They also reassert the centrality of issues relating to the institutio­ nalized distribution of economic, political and cultural power in developed and developing societies that tend to be marginalized in postmodernist and poststructuralist discourses centred on local representational and interpre­ tative practices. These approaches revivify a conception of the organization as an institutio­ nalized structure of power and authority 'over and above' the localized micro-practices of organizational members. DiMaggio and Powell argue that 'new insti­ tutionalism' entails a 'rejection of rational-actor models, an interest in institutions as independent variables, a turn towards cognitive and cultural explanations, and an interest in properties of supraindividual units of analysis that cannot be reduced to aggregations or direct consequences of individuals' attributes or motives' ( 1 99 1 : 8).

37

They focus on organizational structures and practices found across different institutional sectors, the 'rationality myths' which legitimate and routinize prevailing arrangements, and 'the ways in which action is structured and order made possible by shared systems of rules that both constrain the inclination and capacity of actors to optimize as well as privilege some groups whose interests are secured by prevailing rewards and sanctions' ( 1 99 1 : I I ) . Their empha­ sis on practices which penetrate organizational structures and processes, such as the state, social class, professions and industry/sector recipes, reveals the strategic role played by power struggles between institutional actors over 'the formation and reformation of rule systems that guide political and economic action' ( 1 99 1 : 28). While recognizing that the generation and implementation of institutional forms and practices 'are rife with conflict, contradiction and ambiguity' ( 1 99 1 : 28), institutional theory takes its central concern to be the cultural and political processes through which actors and their interests/values are institutionally con­ structed and mobilized in support of certain 'organizing logics' rather than others. In this way, the macro-level contexts which shape organizational behaviour and design assume explanatory primacy, given that they are con­ stituted by and through 'supra-organizational patterns of activity through which human beings conduct their material life in time and space, and symbolic systems through which they categorize that activity and infuse it with meaning' (Fried­ land and Alford 1 99 1 : 232). As institutionalized forms of social practice, organizations are seen as 'structures in which powerful people are committed to some value or interest' and that 'power has a great deal to do with the historical preservation of patterns of values' (Stinchcombe 1 968: 1 07). Thus, the historical, structural and contextual positioning of collective actors' values and interests, rather than their local (re)production through microlevel practices, emerges as the analytical and explanatory priority for institutional theory. This focus on the historical development and structural contextualization of organizations characteristic of the 'new institutionalism' is reflected in recent work on the changing 'sur­ veillance and control' capacities of modern organizations which, as Giddens suggests, takes the theme of 'institutional reflexivity' as its strategic concern. This is institutionalization of an investigative and calcula­ tive attitude towards generalized conditions of system reproduction; it both stimulates and reflects a decline in traditional ways of doing things. It is also associated with the generation of power

38

STUD YING ORGANIZA TION

(understood as transformative capacity). The expansion of institutional reflexivity stands behind the proliferation of organizations in circumstances of modernity, including organizations of global scope. ( 1 993: 6)

The rise of modern organizational forms and practices is seen to be intimately tied to the growing sophistication, scope and variety of bureaucratic systems of surveillance and control that can be adapted to very different socio­ historical circumstances (Dandeker 1 990). The emergence and institutional sedimentation of the nation state and professional administrative structures play a crucial role in advancing the material and social conditions in which organizational surveillance and control can be extended (Cerny 1 990; Silberman 1 993). Rela­ tively new technological, cultural and political changes encouraged the creation and diffusion of more unobtrusive surveillance systems which are much less dependent on direct supervision and control (Zuboff 1 988; Lyon 1 994). The growing technical sophistication and social penetration of control systems also serve to reassert the continuing relevance of Weber's concern about the long-term prospects for meaningful individual involvement in a social and organizational order that seems increasingly close to, yet remote from, everyday lives (Ray and Reed 1 994). Organization analysis seems, then, to have come full circle, both ideologically and theor­ etically, in that the perceived threat to freedom and liberty presented by 'modern', bureaucratic organizational forms at the beginning of the twentieth century is echoed in debates over the prospects for meaningful participation and democracy in the sophisticated and unobtrusive 'surveillance and control regimes' emerging at the end of the century (Webster and Robins 1 993). In so far as the 'postmodern' organization becomes a highly dispersed, dynamic and decentred mechanism of socio-cultural control (Clegg 1 990) which is virtually impossible to detect, much less resist, questions relating to political responsibility and citizenship are as important now as they were a hundred years ago. As Wolin ( 1 96 1 : 434) so elegantly argued, organization and political theory 'must once again be viewed as that form of knowledge which deals with what is general and integrative to man [sic]; a life of common involvements'. This aspiration to retrieve an 'institutional vision' in organization analysis which speaks to the relationship between the citizen, organiza­ tion, community and state in modern societies (Etzioni 1 993; Arhne 1 994) is a potent theme. Research on organizational democracy and participation suggests that efforts to develop

more open, participative and egalitarian organizational designs have had an extremely difficult time over the last fifteen years or so (Lammers and Szell 1 989). Long-term prospects for democracy seem equally pessimistic in an increasingly globalized and fragmented world which destabilizes, if not destroys, established socio-political and cultural identities, corroding the cognitive security and ideological certainty they once bestowed (Cable 1 994). The combination of neo-libertarian policies and sophisticated surveillance has not succeeded, however, in eradicating a continuing challenge to unobtrusive and self-reinforcing forms of organizational discipline and control (Lyon 1 994). As Cerny argued in relation to institu­ tional changes at the turn of this century: Individuals and groups must define themselves strategically and manoeuvre tactically in the context of the logic of the state, whether conforming to legal rules, competing for resources distributed or regulated by the state, or attempting to resist or avoid the influence of control of other state and non­ state actors . . . the state itself is constituted by a range of middle-level and micro-level games, which are also characterized by contrasting logics, interstitial spaces, structural dynamics and ongoing tensions. ( 1 990: 35-6)

Within these overlapping, and often contra­ dictory, political games new organizing princi­ ples and practices are emerging which require a fundamental reconsideration of the rapidly changing relationshi p between the individual and the community in a socio-political context where the 'agenda for identity politics' has become much more diverse, unstable, fragmen­ ted and contested (Cable 1 994: 38-40). Lyon's ( 1 994) survey of the social movements, interest groups and political coalitions challenging centralized and undemocratic regimes of surveil­ lance and control indicates that there are options available other than 'postmodern paranoia' and the extreme political pessimism that it seems to encourage. Similarly, writers such as Hirst ( 1 993) and Arhne ( 1 994; 1 996) rediscovered civil society and the diverse range of 'associative' forms of social and economic governance that it continues to generate and support, even in the teeth of socio-technical pressures for enhanced centra­ lized power and control. Thus, this narrative demands that we recon­ nect, analytically and politically, the local with the global; organizationally situated practices and processes with institutional rationalities and structures; negotiated order with strategic power and control. In short, we must address the fact that:

ORGANIZA TIONAL THEORIZING We live in a massively but unevenly, unequally, interconnected and interdependent world, where 'organization' (and disorganization), and particular kinds of organizations, represent fundamental 'nodes', conceptually, practically, but where a dominant big business vision, for example, can only be blinkered and imperialistic, conceptually, practically. Seeking to understand and analyze such complex intersections and their ramifications must, it seems to me, represent a key component for the future development of the field if it is to meet the intellectual and practical challenges posed by such. (Jones 1 994: 208)

The analytical structured narrative of organiza­ tional justice and democracy seeks to reconnect the study of locally contextualized discourses and practices with institutionalized orders of power, authority and control which have a societal rationale and historical dynamic that cannot be understood, much less explained, through a limited focus on 'everyday' interaction and events (Layder 1 994). It forces us to re­ discover the vital link between the practical demands and intellectual needs of the study of organizations, the 'points of intersection' between the normative and the analytical, which must be reforged if the latter is to retain its relevance and vitality in a world where long­ established structures are under extreme pressure to change, indeed metamorphose, into very different institutional forms.

POINTS OF I NTERSECTION

A number of interconnected themes provide the 'analytical spine' around which the six narrative frames reviewed in this chapter can be inter­ preted as historically contested attempts to represent and control our understanding of such a strategic institutionalized social practice as 'organization'. As with the discourse of political theory, the discourse of organization theory must be considered as a contestable and contested network of concepts and theories which are engaged in a struggle to impose certain meanings rather than others on our shared understanding of organizational life in late modernity. To say that a particular network of concepts is contestable is to say that the standards and criteria of judgement it expresses are open to contestation. To say that such a network is essentially contestable is to contend that universal criteria of reason, as we now understand them, do not suffice to settle these contests definitely. The proponent of essentially contestable concepts charges those who construe the standards operative in their own way of life to be

39

fully expressive of God's will or reason or nature with transcendental provincialism; they treat the standards with which they are intimately familiar as universal criteria against which all other theories, practices and ideals are assessed. They use universalist rhetoric to protect provincial practices . . . The phrase 'essentially contestable concepts', properly interpreted, calls attention to the internal connection between conceptual debates and debates over the form of the good life, to the reasonable grounds we now have to believe that rational space for such contestation will persist into the future, to the values of keeping such contests alive even in settings where a determinate orientation to action is required, and to the incumbent task for those who accept the first three themes to expose conceptual closure where it has been imposed artificially. (Connolly 1 993: 225-3 1 )

Connolly develops this argument t o sustain a critique of the 'rational universalism' and 'radical relativism' which dominates political analysis in the arenas of Anglo-American analytic philosophy and continental deconstruc­ tionism ( 1 993: 2 1 3-47). He is particularly critical of the artificial and unwarranted 'conceptual closure' of Foucauldian accounts of knowledge! power discourses that construe social actors as artifacts, rather than agents, of power. Accord­ ing to this view, the 'thesis of essential contestation gives way to the practice of total deconstruction' ( 1 993: 233). He conceives of political theory as an essentially contested domain or space in which rival interpretations of political life can be analytically identified and rationally debated by responsible agents without recourse to the 'transcendental provincialism' characteristic of either epistemological univers­ alism or cultural relativism. Such a conception can be used to survey the underlying themes which emerge from the historical account of organization theory provided in this chapter. These themes can be summarized as follows: a theoretical debate concerning the rival explana­ tory claims of the concepts of 'agency' and 'structure' as they are deployed to account for key features of organization; an epistemological debate between 'constructivism' and 'positivism' and their implications for the nature and status of the knowledge which organization studies produces; an analytical debate between the relative priority to be attached to the 'local' as opposed to the 'global' level of analysis in organization studies; a normative debate between 'individualism' and 'collectivism' as competing ideological conceptions of the 'good life' in late modern societies. Each of the six narratives contributes to and participates within the contested intellectual spaces which these debates open up.

40

STUD YING ORGANIZA TION The Agency/Structure Debate

The Constructivist/Positivist Debate

Layder argues that the 'agency/structure' debate in social theory 'concentrates on the question of how creativity and constraint are related through social activity - how can we explain their co-existence?' ( 1 994: 4). Those who em­ phasize agency focus on an understanding of social and organizational order that stresses the social practices through which human beings create and reproduce institutions. Those located on the 'structure' side highlight the importance of the objectified external relations and patterns that determine and constrain social interaction within specific institutional forms. In relation to the narrative frames above, a theoretical fault line appears between a concept of organization that refers to determinate structures which condition individual and collective behaviour and a concept that is a theoretical shorthand for consciously fabricated interactional networks through which such structures are generated and reproduced as temporary and constantly shifting ordering mechanisms or devices. The rational, integra­ tionist and market narratives come down firmly in favour of the structural conception of organization; while researchers working within the power, knowledge and justice traditions support the agency conception of organization. Much effort has been expended in trying to overcome, or at least reconcile, this theoretical duality through approaches which emphasize the mutually constituted and constituting nature of agency and structure in the reproduction of organization (e.g. Giddens 1 984; 1 993; Boden 1 994); but the underlying conflict between competing explanatory logics remains a source of creative tension within organization studies. There is always the danger that agency­ oriented conceptions will detach the organiza­ tion from its surrounding societal context and be unable to deal with major shifts in dominant institutional forms. On the other hand, struc­ ture-oriented views tend towards a highly deterministic explanatory logic in which society crushes agency through monolithic force (Whit­ tington 1 994: 64). Whittington's conclusion is that organization analysis needs a 'theory of strategic choice adequate to the importance of managerial agency in our society' ( 1 994: 7 1 ). His rejection of the theoretical extremes of indivi­ dualistic reductionism and collectivist detennin­ ism is well taken. The need to develop explanatory theories in which 'agency derives from the simultaneously enabling and contra­ dictory nature of the structural principles by which people act' ( 1 994: 72) constitutes one of the central issues on the research agenda for organization analysis.

Epistemological concerns have played a strate­ gic role in the development of organization theory, especially during the last twenty-five years or so as positivist orthodoxy has given way to various schools of interpretative, realist and critical methodology (Hassard 1 990; Will­ mott 1 993; Donaldson 1 985; 1 994; Aldrich 1 992; Gergen 1 992). This debate relates to the representational forms through which the 'knowledge claims' made by organization theorists can be evaluated and legitimated. While the rational, integrationist and market narratives developed on the basis of a realist ontology and a positivist epistemology, the power, knowledge and justice traditions are more favourably disposed to a constructivist ontology and a conventionalist epistemology. The former treats 'organization' as an object or entity existing in its own right which can be explained in terms of the general principles or laws governing its operation. The latter promotes a conception of organization as a socially constructed and dependent artifact which can only be understood in terms of highly restricted and localized methodological conventions that are always open to revision and change. These radically opposed epistemologies legit­ imate very different procedures and protocols for assessing the 'knowledge claims' which organization researchers make. Positivistic epis­ temology severely restricts the range of 'knowl­ edge claims' allowable in organization studies to those who pass a rigorous 'trial by method' and the law-like generalizations that it sanctions. Constructivism takes a much more liberal, not to say relativistic, stance and falls back on the restricted communal norms and practices asso­ ciated with specific research communities as they develop over time (Reed 1 993). Various attempts to follow a middle course between these epis­ temological polarities have been made (Bernstein 1 983), but the contested terrain mapped out by constructivismlrelativism and positivism/objecti­ vism continues to haunt the study of organiza­ tions.

The Local/Global Debate

The agency/structure debate raises fundamental questions about the logics of explanation which organization analysts should follow and the constructivism/positivism debate highlights deep-seated controversy over the representa­ tional forms through which the knowledge should be developed, evaluated and legitimated. The localism/globalism debate that emerges

ORGANIZA TIONAL THEORIZING from the narratives focuses o n questions relating to the level of analysis at which organizational research and analysis should be pitched. As Layder ( 1 994) maintains, questions relating to levels of analysis crystallize around different models of social reality and the analytic proper­ ties of entities or objects located at different levels within those models. Thus, the 'micro! macro' debate relates to whether the emphasis should be on 'intimate and detailed aspects of face-to-face conduct [or) more impersonal and large-scale phenomena' ( 1 994: 6). Within organization studies, theoretical approaches developed under the auspices of the power, knowledge and justice frameworks tend to favour a focus on local!micro organizational processes and practices; while the rational, integrationist and market narratives take a more global/macro conception of the 'reality of organization' as their starting point. Ethno­ methodological poststructuralist and approaches take the local focus the furthest; while population ecology and institutionalism have a more well-developed global level of analysis. Approaches fixated with the local! micro level of analysis in organization studies run the risk of basing their research on 'fiat ontologies' which makes it very difficult, if not impossible, to go beyond everyday practices in which members are engaged (Layder 1 994: 2 1 829). As a result, their theoretical capability to perceive, much less explain, the intricate and complex intermeshing of local practices - in all their variability and contingency - and institu­ tionalized structures is severely compromised (Smith 1 988). The corresponding danger with 'stratified ontologies' is that they never see the dialectic between and mutual constituting of social structures and social practices. The prevailing tendency in organization analysis to shift the analytical focus so far towards the local/micro level risks losing sight of the wider structural constraints and resources which shape the process of organizational (re)production or 'ordering'. Some studies, however, manage to keep the highly intricate, but absolutely vital, intermeshing of the local and the global; agency and structure; construc­ tion and constraint; constantly in view. Indeed, by far the most significant recent research in the study of organizations is to be found in Zuboff's ( 1 988) work on information technology, Jack­ all's ( 1 988) analysis of the 'moral mazes' to be discovered in large American business corpora­ tions, and Kondo's ( 1 990) research on the 'crafting of selves' in Japanese work organiza­ tions. These studies rediscover and renew the mutual constituting of situated practices and institutional forms that lies at the core of any type of organization analysis which reaclws

41

beyond the boundaries of everyday understand­ ing to connect with the historical, social and organizational dynamics which structure a society's development.

The Individualism/Collectivism Debate

The final analytical vertebra making up the theoretical backbone of this brief history of organization studies is the ideological debate between individualistic and collectivist visions of organizational order. Individualistic theories of organization are grounded in an analytical and normative outlook which sees the former as an aggregated outcome of individual actions and reactions that are always potentially reducible to their component parts. Thus, market-based theories of organization, and the rich vein of decision-making theorizing that is woven around this individualistic perspective (Whittington 1 994), deny that collective concepts, such as 'organization', have any ontological or metho­ dological status beyond shorthand code for the behaviours of individual actors. The ideological justification for this ontological/methodological precept lies in the belief that forms of social organization that go beyond direct interpersonal association can only be justified in terms of their positive contribution to the protection of individual freedom and autonomy. Collectivism lies at the opposite end of the ideological/methodological spectrum in that it refuses to recognize individual actors as con­ stituent components of formal organization; they simply become ciphers for the cognitive, emotional and political programming provided by larger structures. If individualism offers a vision of organization as the unintended creation of individual actors following the dictates of their particular instrumental and political objec­ tives, then collectivism treats organization as an objective entity that imposes itself on actors with such force that they have little or no choice but to obey its commands (Whittington 1 994). The integrationist narrative relies on this view most strongly in so far as it identifies a logic of organizational functioning and development which goes on 'behind the backs' of individuals and narrowly constrains the decision-making options available to the latter virtually to the point of extinction. While it has become much less fashionable of late, such collectivism continues to offer a conception of organization and organization analysis that directly chal­ lenges the dominance of analytical perspectives which are grounded in an individualistlreduc­ tionist programme.

STUD YING ORGANIZA TION

42

POINTS OF EXCLUSION

Each of the four points of intersection that emerged out of the history narrated in this chapter structures the contested terrain on which organization theory has taken shape as an iden­ tifiable and viable intellectual endeavour. They establish a set of parameters within which a dialogue between competing and conflicting interpretations of organization has been engaged for the best part of a century, as social scientists attempt to account for the rise and significance of such a strategic social practice. However, the points of intersection between the narratives are also relevant for what they exclude, for the points of exclusion or 'silences' which they reveal. The analytical structured narratives which constitute the historically contested terrain of organization theory are stories that selectively filter and mediate an extremely diverse and complex socio-historical reality. They omit, or at the very least marginalize, aspects of organiza­ tional life which may seem of strategic sig­ nificance viewed from a different angle. The narration which they provide is far from inno­ cent; indeed, it is mired in assumptions about the reality of organization and the intellectual means most appropriate to its excavation that finds little favour in other quarters. Our awareness of and sensitivity to these omissions or 'absences' has grown in recent years, but they remain relatively underdeveloped and understated realities in the study of organiz­ ations, with which we are only now beginning to come to terms. Four themes are crucial elements of this 'latent agenda' in organization analysis: the issue of gender and its implications for the way in which we conceptualize, analyze and practise organization; the theme of ethnicity and race and its relevance for our understanding of organizational inequality; the subject of tech­ noscience and its potential to transform both organizational structures and the theoretical means through which they are intellectually interrogated; finally, the process of global devel­ opment and underdevelopment, and its impact on forms of world-wide institutional and organizational governance. Gender

The 'gender-blindness' of organization theory and analysis is well documented elsewhere and does not need to be rehearsed yet again (Hearn et al. 1 989; Calas and Smircich 1 992; Witz and Savage 1 992; Mills and Tancred 1 992; Ferguson 1 994; Martin 1 994; also see Chapter 8 by Calas and Smircich). The basic point here is that the fundamental categories, concepts and theories

on which organization analysis trades usually fail to provide any recognition of the fact that organizational structures and processes are permeated by gender-based power relations and practices. This leads to an extreme form of institutionalized intellectual and ideological myopia in which the vital contribution which organizational theories and practices make to the production and reproduction of 'gendered persons' (Mills and Tancred 1 992), as well as the structures of inequality and control through which their subordination is routinely secured (Witz and Savage 1 992), are excluded from the research agenda. Race and Ethnicity

While the feminist critique of the innate 'gender­ blindness' of organization theory has gathered pace and momentum over the last ten years or so, the issue of the racial and ethnic foundations of organizational power and control is only just beginning to emerge within the literature as an acceptable topic of investigation and debate (Nkomo 1 992; Reed 1 992; Ferguson 1 994; also see Chapter 5 by Nkomo and Cox in Volume 2 of this work). [Clolouring organizational studies requires thinking about what colour might mean, taking apart the complex grammar of race, which routinely mixes biological (e.g. 'black', 'white'), geographical (e.g. 'African American', 'Asian American') and histor­ ical (e.g. 'Native American', 'indigenous') signifiers to track racial identity. Race, like gender, offers itself as a kind of performance, a set of practices, languages and self-understandings so dense and freighted that history is able to masquerade as nature. (Ferguson 1 994: 93)

Ferguson concludes that 'colouring' organiza­ tion analysis would encourage us 'to think of race, not as a static property adhering to indi­ viduals, but as a set of practices and identities produced through complex interactions between geography, history and power' ( 1 994: 9 5) . In this way, both the 'gendering' and the 'colouring' of organization theory would make way for 'a much expanded definition of the constituency and objectives of organizational studies' ( 1 994: 97) and would force us to engage in a more searching, and hence dangerous, interrogation of our basic analytical categories and ideological commitments. Technoscience

The socio-technical processes and practices through which 'organizational ordering' takes

ORGANIZA TIONAL THEORIZING place is a perennial theme in organization studies and re-emerges as a strategic research interest in contemporary approaches which draw on knowl­ edge-based theories of organization such as actor-network theory (Law 1 99 1 ; 1 994a). How­ ever, the dynamic interplay between culture and technology attracts more attention from those researchers focusing on the development of new information technologies which seem to entail 'a fundamental transformation in the structure and meaning of modern society and culture' (Escobar 1 994: 2 1 1 ). Scarbrough and Corbett maintain that new information technologies are generating more complex and innovative 'circuits' of control, meaning and design in that the 'trans­ formational power of technological knowledge may escape the intentions of the powerful and undermine, and not simply reproduce, existing social and economic structures' ( 1 992: 23). There is much talk of a neo-Taylorite strategy of organizational control as the economic and political driving force behind contemporary technological change (Webster and Robins 1 993). Yet, a more nuanced reading would seem to suggest that the new sites of struggle and circuits of control opening up around advanced technologies make predictions about long-term trends in power structures more difficult. Escobar's ( 1 994) work on the emergence of a new 'cyberculture' in high/postmodern societies raises fundamental questions about the role of technology as both agent and product of social and cultural production. He argues that new developments in artificial intelligence and bio­ technology, which radically transform the rela­ tionship between machines, bodies and behaviour, destabilize the conventional division of labour between science, technology and society. Instead of the traditional categorical distinctions between 'nature' and 'society', 'a new order for the production of life, nature and the body through biologically-based technologi­ cal interventions' ( 1 994: 2 1 4) is taking shape. It radically reconfigures the organizational prac­ tices and discourses which revolve around technoscientific developments. Escobar further maintains that these developments will lead to 'profound changes in capital accumulation, social relations, and divisions of labour at many levels . . . The shift to new information technologies marked the appearance of more flexible, decentralized labour processes highly stratified by gender, ethnic, class and geographic factors' ( 1 994: 1 20). Considered in these terms, the concept of 'technoscience' begins to sensitize organizational researchers to the new organizational sites and institutional settings in which scientific and technological development combine to form novel forms of appropriation and mechanisms

43

of ruling. This is particularly the case in relation to Third World development where trans­ national corporations are engaged in biotechno­ logical research and development in plant genetics, industrial tissue culture and genetically manipulated micro-organisms which is likely to result in a 'biorevolution' driven by the imperatives of capital accumulation rather than indigenous growth. It is in these terms that the relative silence over the cultural and political implications of biotechnology dovetails with a consistent neglect of Third World interests and traditions in organization studies.

Global Development and Underdevelopment

Researchers such as Castells ( 1 989) and Smith ( 1 993) have begun to recognize the 'new dependencies' between 'technology rich' and 'technology poor' countries which result from First World domination of such innovations as computers, information and biological technol­ ogies, as well as their systematic coordination through the organizational mechanisms asso­ ciated with 'technoscience'. The cultural prac­ tices and political forms through which these new relationships of exploitation and depen­ dency are mediated are also beginning to attract the attention of organizational researchers (Escobar 1 994; Ramirez 1 994). Yet the whole area of Western dominated cultural, economic and political globalization, and its impact on the new organizational forms emerging in both First and Third World countries, remains a seriously underdeveloped theme in contemporary organization analysis (Cal
44

STUD YING ORGA NIZA TION

identity, rationale and purpose for three decades or more. This debate has released a veritable torrent of new approaches which speak to a much wider range of audiences and relate to a much broader set of issues than was ever the case when the technical needs and political interests of a relatively narrow policy-making elite dominated the scene. It has also raised some very basic questions about the most appropriate ways in which the study of organization can develop in the future.

N ARRA TING THEORETICAL FUTURES

Law has suggested that over the last two decades organization studies has gone through a 'bonfire of the certainties' in relation to its ontological foundations, theoretical commit­ ments, methodological conventions and ideolo­ gical predilections ( 1 994b: 248-9). Domain assumptions relating to the analytical dom­ inance of 'order' over 'disorder', ' structure' over 'process', 'internalities' over 'externalities'. 'boundaries' over 'ecologies' and 'rationality' over 'emotion' have been put to the flames in a coruscating critique of innate theoretical hubris and methodological pretentiousness. He out­ lines two possible responses to this situation: 'carry on regardless' or 'let a thousand flowers bloom'. The first option suggests a retreat back into, appropriately refurbished, intellectual fortifications that offer protection against the radically destabilizing effects of continuing critique and deconstruction. It supports a general regrouping around an accepted theor­ etical paradigm and core research programme that counteracts the fragmentary dynamic let loose by approaches that have broken with orthodoxy. The second calls for a further proliferation of 'more questions and uncertain­ ties and . . . more narratives that generate questions' ( I 994b: 249). It need not necessarily result in organization studies slipping into a vortex of anarchic and uncontrollable relati­ vism, Law argues, because it sensitizes us to the need to preserve and build on the intellectual pluralism that critique has made possible and to reveal 'the processes by which story-telling and ordering produce themselves' ( I 994b: 249). As has already been intimated in earlier sections of this chapter, the urge to retreat and regroup back into reheated intellectual ortho­ doxy is a powerful tendency within the field at the present time. In their different ways, Donaldson ( 1 985; 1 988; 1 989; 1 994) and Pfeffer ( 1 993) attempt to revive the narrative of organization studies as a scientific enterprise that speaks directly to the technical needs and political

interests of policy-making elites, an aspiration and leitmotiv which has dominated the field's development since the early decades of this century. Their call for paradigmatic consensus and discipline around a dominant theoretical and methodological orthodoxy to deliver, cumula­ tively, codified bodies of knowledge that are ' user-friendly' to policy-making elites resonates with the current desire to re-establish intellectual order and control in an increasingly fragmented and uncertain world. They are intellectual and ideological heirs to the technocratic scientism that pervades the rational, integrationist and market narrative traditions reviewed earlier. Their call for intellectual closure around a refurbished theoretical paradigm and ideological consensus over the restrictive technocratic needs that organization analysis should serve rests on the assumption that a return to orthodoxy is a viable political project. The alter ego of the 'return to orthodoxy' vision is the 'incommensurability thesis' into which new intellectual life has been pumped by the growing influence of poststructuralist and postmodernist approaches as represented in Foucauldian-inspired discourse theory and actor-network theory (Jackson and Carter 1 99 1 ; Willmott 1 993; 1 994; Alvesson and Will­ mott 1 992). Supporters of the 'incommensur­ ability thesis' luxuriate in epistemological, theoretical and cultural relativism. They reject the possibility of shared discourse between conflicting paradigmatic positions in favour of an unqualified relativism that completely politi­ cizes intellectual debate and adjudication between rival traditions. Relations of mutual exclusivity between paradigms offer polarized visions of organization and languages of organization analysis which cannot be recon­ ciled. Thus the rival narratives which constitute 'our' field are locked into a struggle for intellectual power with no hope of mediation. A transcendental Nietzschean 'will to power' and a geopolitical Darwinian 'survival of the fittest' impose intellectual and institutional parameters within which this struggle has to be fought. There is no question of sustaining a narrative through argument, logic and evidence; there is simply the power of a dominant paradigm and the disciplinary practices that it generates and legitimates. There is neither recognition of negotiated ground rules within which contestation can rationally proceed (Con­ nolly 1 993: 233-4), nor a shared interest in mediating mutual suspicion and rivalry. The conception of organization studies as a histori­ cally contested and contextually mediated terrain thus gives way to the practice of total deconstruction and the unqualified relativism on which it rests.

ORGANIZA TIONAL THEORIZING This 'Hobson's choice' between revamped orthodoxy and radical relativism is not the only option: greater sensitivity to the socio-historical context and political dynamics of theory devel­ opment need not degenerate into unreflective and total deconstruction as the only viable alternative to a resurgent orthodoxy. Willmott's ( 1 993) reworking of Kuhn's approach to the process of theoretical development within natural and social science offers a way out of the intellectual cul-de-sac in which both ortho­ doxy and relativism terminate. His focus on the communal processes and practices of critical reflection required to identify anomalies within existing theories offers a more attractive alter­ native to both the hubris of 'carry on regardless' and the despondency of 'anything goes'. Will­ mott ( 1 993) resists the dogma of paradigm incommensurability, while highlighting the cru­ cial role of institutionalized academic politics in determining access to the resources and infra­ structure (appointments, grants, journals, pub­ lishers etc.) that shape the conditions under which different paradigms of knowledge produc­ tion are legitimated. However, this sensitivity to the 'production practices' that facilitate the acceptance of certain theories of organization and marginalize or exclude others does not go far enough. Willmott's analysis reveals little awareness of the ways in which these production practices mesh with adj udicatory practices, built up over a protracted period of intellectual development, to form the negotiated rules through which competing approaches and tradi­ tions can be evaluated. We need to develop greater awareness of the subtle and intricate ways in which material conditions and intellec­ tual practices intermesh to generate and sustain the inherently dynamic narrative traditions and research programmes that constitute the field of organization studies over time. ' Institutional reflexivity' (Giddens 1 993; 1 994) is not only the defining feature of the phenomena to which organizational researchers attend; it is also a constitutive feature of the intellectual trade they practise. The study of organization is both progenitor of and heir to this institutiona­ lized reflexivity in that it necessarily depends on and systematically cultivates a critical and questioning attitude to its concerns, as mediated through a dynamic interaction within and between the narrative traditions that constitute its intellectual inheritance. Students of organiza­ tion cannot avoid this inheritance: it sets the background assumptions and moral context which informs the decisions that researchers make concerning ideology, epistemology and theory. These choices are made within an inheritance that is not simply 'handed down', but is constantly revisited, re-evaluated and

45

renewed as it passes through the critical debate and reflection which is the intellectual life-blood of organization studies. Reflexivity and criticality are institutionalized within the intellectual practices that constitute the study of organization. The specific criteria through which these 'generalized mandates' are defined and the particular socio-economic and political conditions under which they are acti­ vated vary across time and space. The material and symbolic power mobilized by different academic communities clearly affects the survi­ val of rival narrative traditions. Nevertheless, the indelible link between practical reasoning, within and between competing analytically structured narratives, and theory development in a dynamic socio-historical context, can be erased by neither conservative orthodoxy nor radical relativism. It is the confrontation between rival narrative traditions, particularly when their internal tensions and contradictions or anomalies are most clearly and cruelly exposed, that provides the essential intellectual dynamism through which the study of organiza­ tion rediscovers and renews itself. As Perry argues, 'we cannot escape from either history or the game of culture. All theorizing is therefore partial; all theorizing is selective' ( 1 992: 98). But this is not a rationalization for a forced para­ digmatic consensus or for unrestrained para­ digm proliferation. Instead, it calls for a more sensitive appreciation of the complex interaction between a changing set of institutional condi­ tions and intellectual forms as they combine to reproduce the reflexivity and criticality that is the hallmark of contemporary organization studies. The underlying thrust of the chapter is to suggest that organization theorists have devel­ oped, and will continue to develop, a network of critical debates within and between narrative traditions that will indelibly shape their field's evolution. Three debates seem particularly intense and potentially productive at the present time. The first is the perceived need to develop a 'theory of the subject' which does not degenerate into the simplicities of reductionism or the absurdities of determinism. The second is a general desire to construct a 'theory of organiza­ tion' that analytically and methodologically mediates between the restrictions of localism and the blandishments of globalism. The third is the imperative of nurturing a 'theory of (intellectual) development' that resists the con­ strictions of conservativism and the distortions of relativism. In so far as this chapter has made some contribution to advancing the cause of a more historically informed and intellectually coherent pursuit of these issues, it will have done its job.

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Choice in Orgalli:ations. Bergen: Universitetsforla­ get. Martin. J. ( 1 992) Cultures in Organizations: Three Perspectives. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Martin, J. ( 1 994) 'The organization of exclusion: insti­ tutionalization of sex inequality, gendered faculty jobs and gendered knowledge in organizational theory and research'. Organization, 1 (2): 40 1 - 3 1 . Massie, l . ( 1 965) 'Management theory', i n J .G. March (ed.). Handbook of Organi:ations. New York: Rand McNally. Mayo, E. ( 1 933) The Human Problems of an Industrial Civili:ation. London: Routledge. Mayo, E. ( 1 945) The Social Problems of an Industrial Civili:ation. London: Routledge. Merkle, J. ( 1 980) Management and Ideology. Berkeley: University of California Press. Merton. R. ( 1 949) Social Theory and Social Structure. New York: Collier Macmillan. Meyer, J.W. and Scott. W.R. (1 992) Organi:ational Environments: Ritual and Rationality. California: Sage. Miller, E.J. and Rice, A.K. ( 1 967) Systems of Organi:ations. London: Tavistock. Miller, P. and O'Leary, T. ( 1 989) 'Hierarchies and the American ideals, 1 900-1940', Academy of Manage­ ment Revielt·, 14(2): 250-65. Miller, P. and Rose. N. ( 1 990) 'Governing economic life', Economy and Society, 19: 1 -3 1 . Mills, A . and Tancred, P. ( 1 992) Gendering Organiza­ tional Analysis. California: Sage. Morgan. D. and Stanley, L. ( 1 993) Debates in Sociology. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Morgan, G. ( 1 986) Images of Organi:ation. California: Sage. Morgan, G. ( 1 990) Organi:ations in Society. London: Macmillan. Mouzelis, N. ( 1 967) Organi:ation and Bureaucracy. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Nichols, T. ( 1 969) Ownership, Control and Ideology. London: Allen and Unwin. Nkomo, S.M. ( 1 992) 'The emperor has no clothes: rewriting "Race in Organizations"', Academy of Management Review, 1 7: 487- 5 1 3 . Pareto, V . ( 1 935) The Mind and Society. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Parsons, T. ( 1956) 'Suggestions for a sociological approach to the theory of organization, I and II', Administratil'e Science Quarterly, 1 ( 1 /2): 63-85, 225-39. Perrow, C. ( 1 986) Complex Organizations: a Critical Essay. 3rd edn. New York: Random House. Perry, N. ( 1 992) 'Putting theory in its place: the social organization of organizational theorizing', in M. Reed and M. Hughes (eds), Rethinking Organization: Nell' Directions in Organi:ation Theory and Analysis. London: Sage. pp. 85- 1 0 I . Perry. N . ( 1 994) 'Travelling theory/nomadic theoriz­ ing', Organi:ation, 2( 1 ): 35-54.

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stribution forbidden.

2 The Normal Science of Structural Contingency Theory L EX D O N A L D S O N

Within organization studies, contingency theory has provided a coherent paradigm for the analysis of the structure of organizations. The paradigm has constituted a framework in which research progressed leading to the construction of a scientific body of knowledge. The task of this chapter is to outline the contingency theory of organizational structure and show how research within this paradigm has proceeded in a normal science mode. The recurrent set of relationships between organizational members can be considered to be the structure of the organization. This includes, but is not restricted to the authority relation­ ships, the reporting relationships as signified in the organization chart, the behaviours required by organizational rules, the patterns in decision­ making such as decentralization, patterns of communication and other behaviour patterns. It embraces both the officially prescribed formal organization and the de jacto, unofficial, informal organization (Pennings 1 992). There is no definition of organizational structure that tightly circumscribes its subject matter a priori; rather the research projects each look at various, different aspects of organizational structure without claiming their focus to be exhaustive. Contingency theory states that there is no single organizational structure that is highly effective for all organizations. It sees the structure that is optimal as varying according to certain factors such as organizational strategy or size. Thus the optimal structure is contingent upon these factors which are termed the contingency factors. For example, a small-sized organization, one that has few employees, is optimally structured by a centralized structure in

which decision-making authority is concentrated at the top of the hierarchy, whereas a large organization, one that has many employees, is optimally structured by a decentralized structure in which decision-making authority is dispersed down to lower levels of the hierarchy (Child 1 973; Pugh et al. 1 969). There are several con­ tingency factors: strategy, size, task uncertainty and technology. These are characteristics of the organization. However, these organizational characteristics in turn reflect the influence of the environment in which the organization is located. Thus, in order to be effective, the organization needs to fit its structure to the contingency factors of the organization and thus to the environment. Hence the organization is seen as adapting to its environment. Each of the different aspects of the organiza­ tional structure is contingent upon one or more of the contingency factors. Thus the task of contingency research is to identify the particular contingency factor or factors to which each particular aspect of organizational structure needs to fit. This involves the construction of theoretical models of fits between contingency and structural factors and their testing against empirical data. The empirical data usually consist of data comparing different organiza­ tions as to their contingencies and structures. The contingency theory of organizational struc­ ture will be termed here 'structural contingency theory' (Pfeffer 1 982). Kuhn ( 1 970) argues that scientific research proceeds within the framework of a paradigm, which specifies the core theoretical ideas, the assumptions, language, method and conven­ tions. The growth of a body of knowledge is

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marked by paradigm revolutions, when one paradigm is overthrown and replaced by another. Such discontinuous changes are radical and infrequent. Most of the time science proceeds in a normal science phase guided by the ruling paradigm. In such a phase research works on problems within the body of work, such as resolving anomalies, while leaving the paradigm itself unquestioned. The study of organizational structure wit­ nessed a paradigm change when the classical management school was overthrown by the new paradigm of contingency theory, as will be seen below. This inaugurated an era of normal science research within the contingency paradigm. However, other paradigms arose subsequently that sharply question the contingency paradigm (Scott 1 992). Thus the study of organizational structure is presently pluralistic with conflict between paradigms and normal science within the paradigms (Aldrich 1 992; Donaldson 1 985a, 1 995a; Pfeffer 1 993). Since other chapters in this Handbook deal with other paradigms we will here concentrate on the contingency paradigm. The normal science that has been pursued within the contingency paradigm is probably the largest single normal science research stream in the study of organizational structure to date. Thus in discussing the contingency paradigm there is a considerable volume of normal science research to report. Hence the concept of normal science in organizational studies is quite well illustrated by the work within the contingency theory of organizational structure (see also Donaldson 1 996).

ORIGINS OF STRUCTURAL CONTINGENCY THEORY

Up until about the late 1 9 50s academic writing about organizational structure was dominated by the classical management school. This held that there was a single organizational structure that was highly effective in organizations of all kinds. This structure was distinguished by a high degree of decision-making and planning at the top of the hierarchy so that the behaviour of lower hierarchical levels and of operations was specified in detail in advance by senior manage­ ment, through job definitions, work study and the like ( Brech 1957). The classical management school held sway for the first half of this century, but was challenged increasingly from the 1930s onwards by the human relations school. This approach focused on the individual employee as possessing psychological and social needs. An understand­ ing of these would allow an appreciation of how

work organization emerged from the interplay of group dynamics (Roethlisberger and Dickson 1 939). This would enable managers to adopt a more considerate approach that would elicit employee cooperation. The focus here was on the bottom-up processes of organizing and the benefits of participation in decision-making by employees from lower levels of the hierarchy (Likert 1 9 6 1 ) . There were attempts to bring together these two antithetical approaches of classical management and human relations by arguing that each approach had its place. Thus contingency theories developed in the 1 950s and 1 960s on topics such as small-group decision­ making and leadership (see Vroom and Yetton 1 973). Around the end of the 1 9 50s scholars began to apply this contingency idea to organizational structures. The key idea in the small group literature was that group problem-solving was accomplished effectively in a centralized structure when the task was relatively certain but required a less centralized and more richly joined structure where the task was uncertain in order to generate and communicate the larger amount of knowl­ edge and communications needed (Pennings 1 992: 276). Applied to whole organization structures this is equivalent to a hierarchy which centralizes expertise, communications and control for tasks low in uncertainty and a flexible, participatory team network for tasks which are high on uncertainty. A major way to have a low uncertainty task is to do the same thing repeatedly by avoiding innovation. Thus innovation becomes a major underlying con­ tingency factor of the task uncertainty con­ tingency. Increasing scale can lead to low task uncertainty, in that scale often involves repeti­ tion, such as mass production. Scale also leads to increasing numbers of employees which in turn leads to specialization. This narrows the scope of each job so that it becomes less varied and complex, which in turn lowers the uncertainty of the task. These low uncertainty, repetitive tasks are amenable to bureaucratic formalization such that they are pre-specified in job descriptions, standard operating procedures, rules and training. This bureaucratization further reduces the uncer­ tainty of those performing the tasks. Thus task uncertainty is the core contingency concept that has implications for second-order contingency concepts such as innovation and size. Much of the significance of task uncertainty resides in the insight that the more uncertain the task the more information that has to be processed and this in turn shapes the commu­ nications and control structures (Galbraith 1973). The more uncertain the task, the less the work activities can be scheduled in advance and

STR UCTURAL CONTINGENC Y THEOR Y the more the reliance on ad hoc arrangements. Moreover, organizations often have to deal with uncertainty by utilizing diverse bodies of expertise and this requires departure from deference to hierarchy as some of the expertise may be possessed by those at lower hierarchical levels. Some part of these experts may be professionals and this tends to amplify the shift away from hierarchical control of employees. The core assumption of structural contingency theory is that low uncertainty tasks are most effectively performed by centralized hierarchy since this is simple, quick and allows close coordination cheaply. As task uncertainty increases, through innovation or the like, then the hierarchy needs to loosen control somewhat and be overlain by participatory, communicative structures. This reduces structural simplicity and raises costs but is rewarded by the benefits from innovation. As size increases the compact, simple centralized structure is replaced by a bureaucracy featuring a tall hierarchy and ex­ tensive specialization. This bureaucracy allows decentralization because employees are increas­ ingly controlled through formalization (e.g. rules) and decentralization is increasingly required because the increase in scale, internal structural complexity and length of hierarchy makes centralization infeasible. Bureaucracy brings disbenefits through rigidity, dysfunctions and some loss of control, but these are more than out-weighed by the increase in predictability, lower average wages, reduction in managerial overhead and increasing computerization which bureaucratization also brings. As the organiza­ tion increases the range and complexity of its outputs, that is products or services, or increases its geographical extensiveness, such as through becoming a multinational, so it further increases its structural complexity and decentralization, through adoption of a divisional or matrix structure. This then is the framework that provides the underlying theoretical unity of the ideas compos­ ing structural contingency. Such a totalizing vision is possible in retrospect, but the theory was developed in more piecemeal fashion, through breakthroughs that identified a connec­ tion between a particular contingency factor or factors and a structural factor or factors. These theoretical insights were typically advanced in studies that offered empirical support through field studies of actual organizations. The seminal statement that pioneered the contingency approach to organizational struc­ ture was by Burns and Stalker ( 1 96 1). They distinguished between the mechanistic structure in which organizational roles were tightly defined by superiors who had the monopoly of organizational knowledge, and the organic

53

structure in which organizational roles were loosely defined and arrived at by mutual discussion between employees, with knowledge being dispersed among the employees who possessed varieties of expertise germane to the organizational mission. Burns and Stalker ( 1 96 1 ) argued that where a n organization faces a stable environment then the mechanistic structure is effective but where the organization faces a high level of technological and market change then the organic structure is required. The mechanistic structure becomes counter-produc­ tive where a high rate of innovation is needed; the resulting high uncertainty of the environment and of the tasks in the organization means that spontaneous cooperation within teams of experts, that is, the organic structure, is more effective. The Burns and Stalker ( 1 96 1 ) theory was advanced in a book that gave extensive illustrations from qualitative case studies of the electronics industry. This is probably the most widely received contribution in the structural contingency theory literature. It provided in one stroke a synthesis between classical management and human relations schools in the mechanistic and organic structures, respectively. It resolved the debate between them with the compromise that each was valid in its own place. It also gave primacy to task uncertainty, driven by innova­ tion, as the contingency factor. At about the same time as Burns and Stalker, Woodward ( 1 958; 1 965) conducted a compara­ tive survey study of one hundred manufacturing organizations. She examined their organiza­ tional structures and found them to be unrelated to the size of their organizations. Operations technology emerged as the key correlate of organizational structure (Woodward 1 965). Where production technology was primitive, with single articles or small batches being made, often mainly by hand and involving craft skills, for example, musical instruments, the organ­ ization was fairly informal and organic. Where production technology had advanced to large­ batch and mass production using more specia­ lized machinery, such as in automobile assembly, work organization was more formalized and mechanistic and more according to the prescrip­ tions of classical management. However, with further technological advance to more capital intensive and automated production so that product flowed continuously, such as oil in an oil refinery, the regimentation of mass production gave way to work teams run on organic and human relations lines. The progressively greater predictability of the technical system and the smoothness of production as technology advanced led first to more mechanistic and then to more organic structures.

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The Woodward ( 1 965) model was more complex than that of Burns and Stalker ( 1 96 1 ), being of three rather than two stages. However, it shared a similar conceptualization of structure, as mechanistic or organic, and had some similarity in contingency factor in that techno­ logically induced uncertainty was a common­ ality. Moreover, Woodward, like Burns and Stalker, held that the future belonged to the organic, human relations, style of management and that this would be forced upon management by technological change. The task of research and academic writing in this approach was to bring these models and findings to the attention of managers so that they could avoid the inefficiencies that both Woodward ( 1 965) and Burns and Stalker ( 1 96 1 ) depicted resulted from failure to adapt organizational structure to technological change rapidly enough. Unlike Burns and Stalker ( 1 96 1 ), Woodward ( 1 958; 1 965) used quantitative measures of organizational structure, such as the span of control of the first line supervisor, the number of levels of management in the hierarchy and the ratio of direct to indirect labour. Woodward ( 1 965) gives many quantitative results showing associations between operations technology and various aspects of organizational structure. There is also one table ( 1 965: 69, Table 4) which shows not only an association between technology and an aspect of organizational structure (average span of control of the first line supervisor), but also that organizations which conform to the association had high performance and organizations which deviated had lower performance. Woodward ( 1 965) argued that where the organizational structure fits the organizational technology this caused superior performance to those organizations whose organizational structure is in misfit to the technology. Burns and Stalker and Woodward worked in the UK. Pioneering contributions came also from the US. Lawrence and Lorsch ( 1 967) have been credited with initiating the term 'contin­ gency theory' to identify the then fledgling approach to which they made a major contribu­ tion. They theorized that the rate of environ­ mental change affected the differentiation and integration of the organization. Greater rates of environmental change require certain parts of the organization, such as the R&D department, to face high levels of uncertainty relative to other parts, such as the production department. This leads to large differences in structure and culture between departments, with R&D being more organic internally and production being more mechanistic. This greater differentiation makes coordination between these two departments, for instance to innovate a new product, more

problematic. The solution is higher levels of integration provided by more integrating per­ sonnel in project teams and the like, coupled with interpersonal processes that defuse conflict through taking a problem-solving approach. Lawrence and Lorsch ( 1 967) advanced their theory in a comparative study of different organizations in three industries: containers, processed foods and plastics. They demonstrated also that organizations whose structures fitted their environments had higher performance. Hage ( 1 965) advanced an axiomatic theory of organizations, similar to Burns and Stalker, in which centralized, formalized organizations produced high efficiency but low innovation rates while decentralized, less formalized organizations produced low efficiency but high innovation rates. Thus which structure was optimal depended upon whether efficiency or innovation was the organizational objective. Hage and Aiken ( 1 967; 1 969) demonstrated the validity of the theory in a study of health and welfare organizations. Perrow ( 1 967) argued that knowledge tech­ nology was a contingency of organizational structure. The more codified the knowledge used in the organization and the fewer the exceptions encountered in operations, the more the organization could be centralized in decision­ making. Thompson ( 1 967) advanced a book-length theory of organizations containing many theor­ etical ideas and propositions. He distinguished closed system organizations versus organizations which are open systems transacting with their environments. He argued that organizations attempt to insulate their core production technologies into a closed system to render them efficient through buffering the core from the environment. External perturbations are dealt with by forecasting, inventories and other mechanisms. Thompson ( 1 967) distinguished also three different technologies: long-linked, mediating and intensive. M oreover, he distin­ guished three different levels of interdependence between activities in the workflow - pooled, sequential and reciprocal - and identified the differing coordination mechanisms to handle each interdependency. He theorized that inter­ dependencies between activities in the organiza­ tional workflow had to be handled at different hierarchical levels, thus generating the design of the organization. Thompson ( 1 967) further argued that the environment directly shaped the organizational structure, with different parts of the organizational structure being specialized to conform to the requirements of different parts of the environment. Thompson theorized also about organizational politics, as had Burns and Stalker and Perrow. The main

STRUCTURAL CONTINGENCY THEOR Y focus of contingency theory, however, remained upon the way the organizational structure was shaped so as to meet the needs of the environ­ ment and the resulting tasks (see Donaldson 1 996). In the US, Blau ( 1 970) advanced a theory of structural differentiation. This asserted that as an organization grows in size (employees) so it structures itself more elaborately into increas­ ingly numerous sub-units, such as more divi­ sions, more sections per division, more levels in the hierarchy and so on. He also argued that organizational growth leads to greater econo­ mies of scale with the proportion of employees who are managers or support staff declining. Weber ( 1 968) argued that organizations were becoming increasingly bureaucratic structures, characterized by impersonal administration, fostered in part by their increasing size. In the UK, the Aston Group (named after their university) argued the need to improve the measurement of organizational structure (Pugh et al. 1 963). They developed a large number of quantitative measures of different aspects of organizational structure, with attention to reliability (Pugh et al. 1 968; Pugh and Hickson 1 976). The Aston Group surveyed organizations of diverse types, spanning manufacturing and service organizations and public and private sectors. They empirically distinguished two main dimensions of organizational structure: structur­ ing of activities (how far the organization adopts specialization by function, rules and documents) and concentration of authority (centralization of decision-making) (Pugh et al. 1 968). They examined a large number of contingency factors and used multiple regression to identify the distinct set of predictors of organizational struc­ ture. For structuring the main contingency was organizational size (number of employees): larger organizations are more structured (Pugh et al. 1 969). For centralization the main contin­ gencies were organizational size and whether or not the organization under study was a sub­ sidiary of a parent organization: decentralization is higher in larger organizations which are independent (Pugh et al. 1 969). A further structural contingency theory focuses on the implications of the contingency of corporate strategy for the organizational structure of business corporations. Chandler ( 1 962) showed historically that strategy leads to structure. Corporations need to maintain a fit between their strategy and their structure otherwise they suffer lower performance. Speci­ fically, a functional structure fits an undiversified strategy, but is a misfit for a diversified strategy where a multidivisional structure is required for effective management of the complexity of several distinct product markets (Chandler 1 962).

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Other researchers analysed the significance for its structure of an organization going from operating only domestically to being a multi­ national (Stopford and Wells 1 972; Egelhoff 1 988; Ghoshal and Nohria 1 989). This leads to adoption of structures such as area divisions and product-area matrices. Egelhoff ( 1 988), in particular, advances a formal contingency theory based on the underlying information­ processing requirements. Other contingency factors, such as environ­ mental hostility (Khandwalla 1 977) and product life-cycle (Donaldson 1 985b), have been identi­ fied, and their implications for organizational structure theorized. For a model prescribing the optimal organization design required by the combination of the strategy and innovation contingencies see Donaldson ( l 985a; 1 7 1 ) .

T H E STRUCTURAL CONTINGENCY THEORY MODEL

Increases in the innovation rate of a firm may reflect competition from other firms through new products, so the ultimate cause is the environ­ ment. For this reason the contingency approach is often termed 'the organization in its environ­ ment approach'. However, the environmental innovation leads the organization to raise its rate of intended innovation which is the immediate cause of the adoption of an organic structure. Thus the structure is caused directly by the internal factor and only indirectly by the en­ vironment. Both the internal and the environ­ mental factors are referred to as contingencies but a more parsimonious statement of structural contingency theory would need refer only to the internal factor. Therefore, many contingency factors of structure such as organizational size or technology are internal to the organization, though they reflect the environment such as population size or commercially available tech­ nologies. Thus while it is correct to include the environmental factors as contingencies shaping structure a sufficient explanation may be obtained by considering only the internal factors as contingencies. The import of the contingency theory may be summarized briefly in the following way. A small organization, one with few employees, is organized effectively in a simple structure ( Mintzberg 1 979) in which there are few levels in the hierarchy. Decision-making authority is concentrated in the top manager (who is often the owner in a small firm) who exercises power directly over the lower-level employees by directly instructing them. Thus there is little delegation of authority and there is also little specialization

56

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among the employees. As the organization grows in size, especially in the number of employees, the structure becomes more differentiated. Many more levels are added in the hierarchy, creating tiers of middle managers. Some of the decision­ making authority of the top managers is delegated down to them, commensurate with their greater knowledge of local, operational matters, such as direction oflower-Ievel personnel and some decisions on production. This delega­ tion is to a degree forced upon senior managers by the increasing burden of decisions that they are facing as organizational size and complexity increases. Again the growth of hierarchy and the geographic spread of personnel makes senior management remote from 'the firing line' and so it becomes infeasible for them to access all the required information. However, senior managers retain decision-making over strategy, policy and large decisions, induding capital allocation and budget amounts. Throughout the organization there is a greater division of labour as operations are broken down into their components and allocated to specific departments and work-groups. Admin­ istration is also increasingly broken into specializations each handled by distinct staff roles such as accounting, production planning, records, personnel and so on. Behaviour is increasingly regulated by written job descrip­ tions, plans, procedures and rules. These constitute an impersonal web regulating organizational members, so that control shifts from direct, personal supervision to impersonal devices. At the extreme in the large organization, its structure is a machine bureaucracy (Min­ tzberg 1 979). The increase in scale and specialization means that the work of any one individual becomes more routine and this facilitates its bureaucratic formalization, which in turn heightens the routineness and predict­ ability of the work. The greater formalization and predictability of employee behaviour encourages the senior levels to increase their delegation of authority down to lower levels as they can do so with more confidence that such discretion will be used as the senior levels intend, though such control is imperfect as bureaucratic dysfunctions arise (Gouldner 1 954; Merton 1 949). The greater specialization of personnel increase their competence, which again fosters delegation, though again with some hazards (Selznick 1 957). As organizations seek to innovate, in products or services or production processes, so this entails more uncertain tasks. These tasks cannot be formalized by the bureaucracy i.e. the tasks cannot be pre-specified in advance in a rule or procedure because this would require knowledge that the bureaucrats do not possess. Thus there

is recourse to trial and error learning often accompanied by employment of more educated and higher trained employees such as profes­ sionals. The organization has to allow them discretion and encourage them to use their initiative, with the actual division of labour involving team elements and emerging through discussion between employees rather than being imposed by hierarchical superiors. This means that the R&D departments are structured more organically than the typical production depart­ ment. While R&D design the new offering, the production operations department makes it and sales sells it. The dove-tailing of these require­ ments means that successful innovation needs coordination across these departments and this is achieved by cross-functional project teams or matrices or product divisions (depending upon the other contingencies such as the degree of strategic diversification, see Donaldson J 985b). As the firm diversifies from a single product or service to mUltiple products or services, so the original functional structure becomes over­ whelmed by the complexity of decision-making. A multidivisional structure allows this complex­ ity to be factored down so that each division makes the decisions for its own product-market. This improves the expertise and speed of the decision-making and relieves the top manage­ ment of overload, allowing them to concentrate on strategic decisions and more selective inter­ ventions in the divisions. The centre retains overall control through treating the divisions as profit centres and creating a corporate staff to monitor divisional performance and plan corpo­ rate strategy. Thus the organization, if large and diversified, becomes even more bureaucratic and more decentralized. This in brief is the contingency theory model of the way organizational structure changes as the contingencies change through growth.

THE STRUCTURAL CONTINGENCY RESEARCH PARADIGM

Almost all of this pioneering structural con­ tingency research was published between 1 960 and 1 970 and was the fruit of a burst of research conducted mainly in the 1 960s. Thus by 1 970 there was a well-established research paradigm. The theory is sociological functionalism (Burrell and Morgan 1 979). Just as biological functionalism explains the way the organs of the human body are structured so as to contribute to human well-being, so sociological functionalism explains social structures by their functions, that is their contributions to the well-being of society

STRUCTURAL CONTINGENC Y THEOR Y (Merton 1 949; 1 975; Parsons 1 9 5 1 ; 1 964). The organizational sociological branch of function­ alism posits that organizational structures are shaped so as to provide for effective functioning by the organization (Pennings 1 992). Structural functional organizational theory proceeds in the following way. Variations in organizational structures are identified. These are explained by each different organizational structure function­ ing effectively in its situation. The structure fits the contingency which in turn fits the environ­ ment. Fit is the underlying key. Organizations move into fit by adjusting their structure to their contingencies and this produces the observed association between contingency and structure. The emphasis on the adaptation by the organiza­ tion to its environment makes structural contingency theory part of adaptive functional­ Ism. The functionalist theoretical base has meant that the contingency paradigm can be pursued both by sociologists interested only in the explanation of organizational structure, for whom the functionality of a structure is purely a cause, and management theorists for whom the effectiveness outcomes of structures inform their prescriptive advice to managers. In the history of contingency theory both values have motivated researchers (Hickson, personal com­ munication). The method used in contingency research tended to follow that used by Woodward ( 1 965). A comparative study is made across a number of different organizations (or across different sub­ units within the same organization if they are the object of theoretical interest). Each contingency and structural factor is measured, either as a quantitative scale or as a series of ordered cate­ gories. Each organization is allotted a score on each contingency and structural factor. The cross-distribution of scores of the organizations on a pair of contingency and structural factors is then examined to see whether there is an association; this is done by cross-tabulation or correlation. The theory that associations between contingency and structure reflect an underlying fit is then tested. Organizations con­ forming to the association are contrasted with those that deviate. If the conforming organiza­ tions outperform the deviant organizations then this signifies that the association is a fit between contingency and structure. Thus in much research the empirical association is taken as approximating the fit (Child 1 975; Drazin and Van de Ven 1 985; Woodward 1 965); however in other research the fit model is derived from theory (Alexander and Randolph 1 985; Donald­ son 1 987). It is desirable to unite the empirically and theoretically derived fit models over the course of the research programme.

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As the research progressed it became more sophisticated in at least four senses. Firstly, increasing attention was paid to the operational definitions of concepts. For example, Woodward ( 1 965) measured organizational performance in a vague way. Later researchers were more precise and recorded their definitions more explicitly, for example Child ( 1 974). Secondly, there was increasing attention to reliability of measure­ ment. Woodward ( 1 965) did not report the reliability of her measurements and used approaches that yield low reliability, such as single item measures. Later researchers sought to boost reliability by using multiple item measures, for example the Aston Group (Pugh et al. 1 968). It is now commonplace among research reported in the better journals to report the reliabilities of variables. Thirdly, the theoretical models used to explain any particular aspect of organizational structure went from using one contingency factor, for example technology in Woodward ( 1 965), to using several, such as in Pugh et al. ( 1 969), that is from mono-causality to multi­ causality. Fourthly, the analysis of data uses more sophisticated statistics. Woodward ( 1 965) used only simple statistics whereas, by the late 1 960s, multivariate statistics and statistics that took account of sample size were being used (e.g. Pugh et al. 1 969). Pioneering structural contingency theory work often used surveys of organizations at one point in time, that is a cross-sectional method. From these data inferences were made that causation flowed in particular ways, that is from contingency to structure. This adaptive functionalist interpretation is a convention in structural contingency research. Nevertheless, the correlational method left room for other causal interpretations. For example, Aldrich ( 1 972) reanalysed the Aston data and argued the correlations were compatible with a model in which structure caused size - the opposite of the causal interpretation advanced by the Aston Group (Pugh et al. 1 969). These alternative interpretations constitute challenges to the paradigm. There has been some progress in resolving some of these questions of causality in favour of contingency determinism, as will be seen below. The theory and empirical evidence deployed in the structural contingency theory paradigm are positivist. The organization is seen as being forced to adjust its structure to material factors such as size and technology. Ideas and values do not figure prominently as causes. Moreover, little scope is seen for choice or human volition. There is little information in most contingency analyses about who exactly makes the structural decisions or what their motives are or how the structures are implemented (Pugh et al. 1 969;

58

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Blau and Schoenherr 1 9 7 1 ) . Thus the analysis is depersonalized and at the level of the organiza­ tion as a collective entity pursuing its objectives. There is thus the absence of an analysis at the level of the human actors (Pennings 1 992). Such an analysis would identify actors in the processes of redesigning organizations, their beliefs, ideals, values, interests, power and tactics. Much of the criticism from outside of the paradigm revolves around the perceived neglect of an action-level analysis in structural contingency theory research (Silverman 1 970). Indeed the validity of talking about 'the organization' rather than the individuals that compose the organization has been challenged sociologically and philoso­ phically (Silverman 1 970). However, Donaldson ( l 985a) has offered a defence of organizational­ level constructs, arguing that they are cogent and indispensable in organization theory. Key phenomena such as organizational centralization and organizational performance cannot even be discussed unless a collectivity-level analysis of the organization as a system is made (see also Donaldson 1 990). The adaptive functionalism, contingency-fit model and comparative method constitute the core of the paradigm of structural contingency theory. They provide a framework in which subsequent researchers work.

THE NORMAL SCIENCE PHASE: REPLICATION AND GENERALIZATION

By about 1 970 there was an established contingency theory paradigm and those coming afterward could orientate their efforts within this tradition and contribute to its evolving literature (for a collection see Donaldson 1 995b). The pioneering contingency studies had produced evidence of connections between contingencies and organizational structure, but these might be flukes or idiosyncrasies or reflect biases of their authors. Therefore there was a need for replication, that is for studies by other, independent researchers to see whether or not they found the same phenom­ ena. Replication studies are seldom on the same organizations, so the studies provide also a test of generalization, that is whether the original findings hold in studies of new organizations, in settings that differ in some way, such as type of organization or country, from the pioneering studies (Fletcher 1 970). For instance, during the 1 970s there arose an interest in whether different national cultures require different forms of organizational struc­ ture that render the general structural con­ tingency theories false (Hickson et al. 1 974;

Lammers and Hickson 1 979; Mansfield and Poole 1 98 1 ; McMillan et al. 1 973). This interest continues through to the 1 990s and has spawned a great deal of research in the intervening period (as examples, Conaty et al. 1 983; Hickson and McMillan 1 98 1 ; Routamaa 1 985). The initial orientation of most research­ ers is that they expect that they may find the contingency-structure relations of the pioneer­ ing studies but that such general assertions are to be treated cautiously until verified empiri­ cally in each particular, new setting. The studies of replication and generalization con­ stitutes much of the normal science research in the structural contingency literature. The Aston Group gave emphasis to replica­ tion (Child 1 972a; Hinings and Lee 1 9 7 1 ; Inkson et al. 1 970). The multiple dimensions of organizational structure found in the pioneering study were not found in some replication studies, some of which found a single main dimension (Child 1 972a; Grinyer and Yasai-Ardekani 1 980; 1 98 1 ; Hinings and Lee 1 97 1 ) . This is a major difference in the Aston Group literature and there have been attempts to resolve it, through examination of method issues, such as the measurement of the variable and whether the status of the organization (as between indepen­ dent or dependent) affects the results (Donald­ son et al. 1 975; Greenwood and Hinings 1 976; Mansfield 1 973; see also Reimann 1 973; Star­ buck 1 98 1 ). The different findings are seen as supporting different theoretical views and as refuting or confirming Weber ( 1 968). In contrast, the main contingency-structure findings of the original study have been supported: size is the major contingency of the bureaucratic structuring of the activities aspect of organizational structure. Replication studies bear this out (Pugh and Hinings 1 976). Further studies show that this finding generalizes across organizations of many types and nations in diverse locations. For example, Donaldson ( 1 986: 74) reviews thirty-five studies of the rela­ tion between the contingency of organizational size and the structural variable of degree of specialization by function; all the studies found a positive correlation. The studies include organizations from fifteen countries: Algeria, Canada, Egypt, Finland, France, Germany, India, Iran, Japan, Jordan, Poland, Singapore, Sweden, the UK and the USA (respectively, Zeffane 1 989; Hickson et al. 1 974; Badran and Hinings 1 9 8 1 ; Routamaa 1 985; Zeffane 1 989; Child and Kieser 1 979; Shenoy 1 98 1 ; Conaty et al. 1 983; Azumi and McMillan 1 98 1 ; Ayoubi 1 98 1 ; Kuc et al. 1 98 I ; Tai 1 987; Horvath et al. 1 98 1 ; Bryman et al. 1 983; Blau et al. 1 976). Thus the size-functional specialization relationships generalizes globally and is not confined to Anglo-

STR UCTURAL CONTINGENC Y THEOR Y Saxon nations such as the UK or the USA where these sorts of relationship were originally identified (for a review see Donaldson 1 996).

CAUSAL DYNAMICS

The discussion thus far has concentrated on the results mainly from cross-sectional studies that correlate contingency and structure at the same point in time. The contingency literature inter­ prets these associations according to its own theoretical paradigm of adaptive functionalism and contingency determinism. The question arises as to whether this interpretation is correct. Each of the major theories in structural con­ tingency theory focuses on only certain cou­ plings of contingency and structural factors (for example, size and bureaucracy or strategy and structure); indeed, critics object that there is no singular contingency theory, only a collection of contingency theories that constitute at best a contingency approach. However, it is possible to abstract from these disparate offerings one common, underlying theory. This may be termed the structural adaptation to regain fit (SARFIT) theory (Donaldson 1 987). This holds that there is fit between each contingency and one (or more) aspect of organizational structure such that fit positively affects performance and misfit negatively affects performance. An organization initially in fit changes its contin­ gency and thereby moves into misfit and suffers declining performance: this causes adoption of a new structure so that fit is regained and per­ formance restored. Hence the cycle of adapta­ tion is: fit, contingency change, misfit, structural adaptation, new fit. This causal model underlies many structural contingency theories (Burns and Stalker 1 96 1 ; Lawrence and Lorsch 1 967; Williamson 1 970; 1 9 7 1 ; Woodward 1 965). Commentators have argued against the SARFIT type of idea and have contested each component part. They reason that the correla­ tions between contingencies and structure signify causal processes different to those in the SARFIT model (Aldrich 1 972). The errors or uncertainties in theoretical interpretation are seen as made possible by limitations in the cross­ sectional method. The call is made by commen­ tators for structural contingency theory studies to move beyond cross-sectional or synchronic research designs into those that study organiza­ tional change through time, that is longitudinal or diachronic studies (Mansfield and Poole 1 9 8 1 ; Galunic and Eisenhardt 1 994). Thus part of normal science has been the move to make studies through time in order to reveal the actual causal paths.

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The topic area of strategy and structure has been studied in greater detail and so is a suitable one to examine for causality.

Dynamics of Strategy and Structure

The explanation of the correlations between strategy and structure is the functionalist theory that there is a fit between certain strategies and certain structures (Chandler 1 962). Research into performance has initially focused on whether divisional structures outperform func­ tional structures (for example, Armour and Teece 1 978). However, this is not the same as contingency theory, which holds that it is not the structure per se but rather whether or not it fits the strategy, that is salient for performance. This requires the operationalization of a model that specifies certain combinations of strategy and structure as fits and other combinations as misfits. Donaldson ( 1 987) advanced such a model drawing on the work of Chandler ( 1962) and others. Corporations in fit are shown to outperform those in misfit, providing empirical validation (Donaldson 1 987). M oreover, fit is at a period prior to performance, adding confidence that fit is a cause and performance an effect. Hamilton and Shergill ( 1 992; 1 993) have also empirically validated a very similar fit model by showing that it relates positively to performance. Organizations in fit for a number of years have superior growth in performance during those years to those in misfit over the same period. This means that being in fit leads to increasing performance and so fit should be seen as a cause and performance as a consequence. Hill et al. ( 1 992) have also shown that the fit of strategy and structure is positively related to perfor­ mance. Thus the proposition that the fit between strategy and structure affects performance receives support and some of this is from research in which the temporal dimension lends support to the causal inference that fit affects performance. The functionalist theory that corporations align their structure with their strategy because of the underlying fit is supported empirically. Some studies of organizational change have sought for a correlation between contingency change and structural change, during the same time period or the immediately following time period. Their results have been mixed and have tended to throw into doubt structural contin­ gency theory (Dewar and Hage 1 978; Dyas and Thanheiser 1 976; Inkson et al. 1 970; Meyer 1 979). While contingency theory states that contingency causes structure, this is the long-run effect which flows through intermediary stages

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such as misfit. Thus contingency change initially only leads to misfit which eventually leads to structural change and new fit. This more elongated and closely specified causal model better represents structural contingency theory. This should be the subject of empirical tests in studies of organizational change. Donaldson ( 1 987) combined data from studies of strategy and structure in five countries (France, Germany, Japan, the UK and the USA). First the data were analysed in the traditional way: an association was sought between change in the contingency of strategy and change in structure in the immediately following period. There was no positive strat­ egy-structure association ( 1 987: 1 3), thus repro­ ducing the null finding of previous studies of organizational change. Then the data were analysed by examining each of the separate stages of the SARFIT model and this was confirmed. Of the 87 corporations that moved from fit into misfit, 83 per cent did so by changing their level of the contingency of strategy, typically by diversifying ( 1 987: 1 4). Thus the cycle of structural adaptation is initiated by contingency change, as SARFIT holds. Turning to the second step in the SARFIT model, the data were analysed to see whether misfit led to structural change. Of those corporations in misfit 39 per cent subsequently changed their structure, whereas of those in fit only 9 per cent did so ( 1 987: 1 4) . This confirms that misfit causes structural change. Of the corporations that changed their structure, 72 per cent moved from misfit into fit and only 5 per cent moved from fit into misfit ( 1 987: 1 4). Thus the structural change was overwhelmingly adaptive, that is, adoption of the divisional structure to fit with the more diversified corporate strategy. Hence the misfit causes structural adaptation as SARFIT holds. Thus each separate stage of the SARFIT model was validated. When organizational change is examined by a model that more accurately captures the full processes involved in structural adaptation then structural contingency theory is confirmed. Where the simplistic model that contingency change leads to structural change is used to analyse data it leads to the erroneous conclusion that structural contingency theory is not supported. This is normal science at work: resolving findings contrary to theory by showing that the empirical testing procedure was erro­ neous, in this case by not examining a properly articulated model of the theory. Contingency theory holds that strategy leads to structure. However. Hall and Saias ( 1 980) argue that structure leads to strategy. Bourgeois ( 1 984) criticizes contingency research for failing

to consider reverse causation in which the presumed contingency factor actually results from the structure. The possibility arises, there­ fore, that the positive correlations between strategy and structure arise through structure causing strategy. However, Donaldson ( 1 982) examined this and found no effect of divisiona­ lization on subsequent diversification. The correlation between strategy and structure does not arise through structure causing strategy. This adds confidence that the causal dynamics are those identified in the SARFIT model.

STRA TEGIC CHOICE

Structural contingency theory is deterministic in that contingency causes structure (albeit with time lags) . The organization bows to the imperative of adopting a new structure that fits its new level of the contingency factor in order to avoid loss of performance from misfit. This determinism has been much criticized. Some authors reject such situational determinism, asserting instead that organizational managers have a free choice (Whittington 1 989) and some speak of 'free will' (Bourgeois 1 984). Child ( 1 972b) argues, more moderately, that the contingencies have some influence but that there is a substantial degree of choice, which he terms 'strategic choice' (see also Reed 1 985; Pennings 1 992). Child ( 1 972b) argues that choice for managers and other organizational controllers arises from several sources. He points out the decision­ making process that intervenes between con­ tingency and structure, so beginning to sketch an action-level analysis. Managers (and other organizational controllers) vary in their response to the contingency according to their percep­ tions. their implicit theories, preferences, values, interests and power (Child 1 972b). The pioneer­ ing structural contingency theorists make some mention of these factors but nevertheless assert the contingency imperative (Woodward 1 965). For Child ( l 972b) these action-level factors gain strength from the room for manoeuvre afforded by weaknesses in the systems impera­ tives. An organization in misfit may suffer performance loss, but this may be of small degree relative to other causes of performance. A corporation in a dominant market position, such as monopoly or oligopoly, or a corporation in a protected industry, has sufficient excess profit, or organizational slack, that it can absorb a decrement in performance, due to structural misfit. without the profit level becoming unsa­ tisfactory, that is. dropping below the satisficing level. Thus managers of such organizations may

STRUCTURAL CONTINGENCY THEOR Y retain a misfitting structure that they prefer for a long time. Again, Child ( I 972b) argues that when a misfit is no longer tolerable and fit must be restored this can be done by retaining the structure and altering the contingency to fit the structure. Thus there is no imperative to adapt structure to contingency for there is an alternative route to regain fit. In these ways the imperative to adopt a structure for a given contingency is softened considerably and a larger role for choice is seen. The strategic choice theory has been widely received and constitutes a considerable challenge to structural contingency theory. It thereby becomes a candidate for refutation in the normal science program of structural contingency theory. The argument of Child ( l 972b) that the systems imperatives are weaker than pioneering structural contingency theory supposed has been examined and is not as valid as generally presumed. Commentators point out that in the Aston research into bureaucratic structure, the contingency factors accounted for only about half the variance in structure, so that much variance may be due to strategic choice. However, the variance in structure explained by contingencies is understated due to measure­ ment error. Donaldson ( 1 986: 89) showed that the true correlation between size and functional specialization after correcting for measurement error is 0.82. This means that 67 per cent of variance in structural specialization is accounted for by size, which is well over half. Of the remaining 33 per cent of the variance in structure, some will be due to other contingency variables and some will be due to time-lags in adaptation of structure to size and the other contingencies. Thus the proportion of structural variance available to be explained by choice is under 30 per cent at best. And it may well be less than 30 per cent because of any other causes of structure that might exist. Research into strategy and structure shows that organizations in misfit may delay adoption of a new. fitting structure for lengthy periods, up to decades (Channon 1 973; Donaldson 1 987; Dyas and Thanheiser 1 976). Structural adapta­ tion empirically tends to occur when the organization in misfit has low performance (Donaldson 1 987). This is consistent with the strategic choice argument (Child 1 9 72b). How­ ever, the study that reveals this phenomenon (Donaldson 1 987; Rumelt 1 974) is of large Fortune 500 corporations, that is, the pillars of American capitalism. Many of the studies of structural adaptation to changing contingencies are of large corporations (Channon 1 973; Donaldson 1 987; Dyas and Thanheiser 1 976; Fligstein 1 985; Mahoney 1 992; Palmer et al. 1 987; 1 993; Pavan 1 976; Rumelt 1 974; Suzuki

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1 980). It is therefore false to see large corpora­ tions as seldom having to make structural adaptations. For example, Fligstein ( 1 985: 386, Table 2) shows that, among the largest 1 00 US corporations, 71 adopted the multidivisional structure, over the years 1 9 1 9 to 1 979. Even large, wealthy corporations can face perfor­ mance downturns that lower their performance below the satisficing level. This may arise in part through an economic recession, increased inter­ national competition, deregulation of industry and so on. Critics assert that, whereas contingency theory depicts the organization as having to respond to the environment, the organization may alter the environment to make it more munificent for the organization (Perrow 1 986; Pfeffer and Salancik 1 978). This makes it easier for the organization to be profitable and thus to avoid having to make structural alterations. Perrow ( 1 986) draws on the analysis of Hirsch ( 1 975) which shows that organizations enjoyed greater profitability in the pharmaceutical than the phonograph industry, because the greater government reg­ ulation of pharmaceuticals is a barrier to entry that reduces competition. Presumably such a benign environment would be attractive to many organizational managements, yet they have not all succeeded in bringing such a favourable alteration of the environment into place. This indicates the resilience of the environment and of powerful institutions such as the government. The degree of regulation of the US pharmaceu­ tical industry is atypical, reflecting public concern about drugs being more harmful than pop records. In fact, governmental policy in several countries (Australia, New Zealand, the UK and the US) is increasingly to deregulate industries in order to increase competition with the intent of curbing organizational slack and forcing organizational adaptations. Thus the idea that environmental re-engineering is a ready alternative to organizational adaptation is overstated and becoming less feasible with time. A misfitting structure is seen as tolerable, given a modicum of organizational slack, because the negative effects of misfit on performance are seen as minor, especially for a wealthy organization enjoying market dominance such as an oligopoly (Child 1 972b). However, a study by Hamilton and Shergill ( 1 992; 1 993) compared the perfor­ mance effect of structural misfit with that of industry concentration, an index of market domination or oligopoly. Industry concentration accounted for 28 per cent of profitability, and structural fit (to strategy) accounted for 16 per cent ( 1 993: 79). Thus the effect of organizational structural misfit is similar in magnitude to that of market domination. Structural misfit is not trivial in its performance effect relative to

62

STUD YING ORGANIZA TION

market domination. For most firms, the degree of organizational slack enjoyed through market domination would be almost exhausted by structural misfit so that performance would decline below the satisficing level, leading to structural adaptation. Strategic choice theory argues that an organization in misfit can regain fit by altering its contingency to fit its structure, thereby avoiding the necessity of changing a structure that the managers prefer. In fact, empirical research shows that 95 per cent of corporations that move from misfit to fit do so by changes involving structural adaptations (Donaldson 1 987). Corporations overwhelmingly attain fit by adapting structure to the contingency of strategy. Only 5 per cent of corporations move from misfit into fit by altering just their strategy contingency to attain fit with their existing structure. Corporations do not in reality use the contingency adjustment route to fit. The difference is so marked as to raise doubts that contingency adaptation is an alternative route. Where strategy change produces a new fit, such as by the corporation reducing its level of diversification and thereby moving from misfit into fit with its existing functional structure, this may be caused by very poor performance forcing the sell-off of non-core businesses rather than be motivated by the search for fit with a preferred structure. Instead of alternative routes to fit and choice, the research supports the view that corporations select a strategy and then tailor the structure to fit (Chandler 1 962; Christensen et al. 1 978). Thus the normal science programme of solving deficiencies identified in extant work in the paradigm of structural contingency theory has been able to answer to a substantial degree the criticisms advanced from the strategic choice camp. The systems imperatives are strong and constrain to a high degree the choice open to managers and others deciding upon organiza­ tional structures. Organizations, even large and wealthy ones, bow to the dictate of having to fit structure to contingency in order to avoid intolerable performance loss. If there is much choice it is mostly restricted to timing of struc­ tural changes (see also Donaldson 1 996). There have been some moves towards demonstrating the role of individuals in the shaping of organizational structure, through showing that characteristics of individuals add to the explanation of structure by the con­ tingencies. For instance, Miller and his col­ leagues show that structure is affected by the personality of the CEO (Miller et al. 1 988; Miller and Droge 1 986; Miller and Toulouse 1 986). However, the Miller et al. ( 1 988) study is of small organizations wherein the effect of the CEO is

probably greater than in larger organizations, where the CEO has less influence, sharing it with staff specialists, and decision-making is more bureaucratized (as the authors accept ( 1 988: 564» . Moreover, the effect of the size con­ tingency variable is restricted in a study just of small organizations. Thus the Miller et al. ( 1 988) study likely overstates the impact of CEO personality and understates the effect of the size contingency that would typically apply in organizations in general. Indeed Miller and Droge ( 1 986: 552) found no relationship between CEO personality and organizational structure in large firms. Similarly, Miller and Toulouse ( 1 986: 1 397) found more numerous effects of CEO personality on organizational structure in small than in large firms. Thus the effect of CEO personality on organizational structure that is present in small firms fails to generalize completely to larger firms. Thus the effects of CEO personality is mainly restricted to small firms rather than the large corporations where institutionalization of the organizational struc­ ture means that impersonal contingency factors hold sway. Fligstein ( 1 985) shows that the functional background of the CEO affects structure. However. the functional background of the CEO is itself affected by the structure and by the corporate strategy, that is by a contingency of structure (Fligstein 1 987). Thus it is not clear that CEO background is a cause of structure that itself is independent of structure and of the structural contingencies. Many of the individual­ level factors that Child ( l 972b) and others see as shaping structural decisions may themselves be affected by organizational structure, strategy, size, or other contingency. For instance, power to affect selection of structure is presumably itself affected by the existing organizational structure; similarly, the interest of a manager would be affected by their position in the structure (see also Donaldson 1 996). The main attempt by Child ( 1 973) to forge an actor-level theory of structure holds that bureau­ cratic formalization is affected by the degree of specialization and qualifications among the administrative staffs who are the architects of bureaucratization - specialization leads to formalization. Thus the theory is itself struc­ tural, explaining structure by structure. This adds to our knowledge yet is not a replacement of structural by an action-level analysis. The strategic choice theory has provided the stimulus for a closer examination of several issues in structural contingency theory. The results support structural theory in its original form with the determinism intact. Strategic choice theory often has a negative aspect in that it seeks to assert a role of

STRUCTURA L CONTINGENC Y THEOR Y managerial choice by showing that managers select structures that are less than optimal for the situation (Child 1 9 72b), thereby exercising a capriciousness for which they should be held morally culpable (see especially Whittington 1 989). Thus choice is manifested by selecting a structure different from that which the con­ tingencies determine to be most effective. However, a second, more positive, sense of choice is that managers select the structure which moves the organization into fit with the contingencies thereby increasing organizational effectiveness through bowing to the system imperatives. Thus they exercise choice and are the human actors making the system respond but the outcome is beneficial for the organization and in conformity with contingency theory. Support for this positive view of managerial choice is provided in research by Palmer et al. ( 1 993). They show that the adoption of the multidivisional structure in large US corpora­ tions was greater among corporations whose CEO had a graduate degree from an elite busi­ ness school. Palmer et al. ( 1 993) argue that such CEOs would have acquired the idea of the multidivisional structure through such educa­ tion. The adoption of the multidivisional structure by large US corporations was over­ whelmingly rational adaptation to changes in the strategy contingency. They adopted the multi­ divisional structure to bring themselves into fit between strategy and structure (Donaldson 1 987). Thus the effect of business education on divisionalization is encouraging evidence that the education of managers in the results of structural contingency research hastens their adoption of more effective organizational structures, as the pioneering researchers hoped (Woodward 1 965).

FIT AND PERFORMANCE

As has already been pointed out, contingency theory centrally holds that there is a fit between the organizational structure and the organiza­ tional contingency that affects organizational performance. There has been renewed interest in the conceptualization and operational measure­ ment of fit during the 1 980s and subsequently. This is quite marked among researchers in the US. Such developments include the critical work of Schoonhoven ( 1 98 1 ). Others have sought to investigate the empirical relationship between their operational definition of fit and organiza­ tional performance, assessed in various ways (Alexander and Randolph 1 985; Argote 1 982; Drazin and Van de Ven 1 985; Gresov 1 989; Gresov et al. 1 989; Van de Ven and Drazin 1 985).

63

Drazin and Van de Ven ( 1 985) have modelled fit as a line of iso-performance and have meas­ ured the degree of misfit between a contingency variable and several different structural variables of each organization. This brings out the desirability of considering fit not just between a contingency and a structural variable, but between a contingency variable and all of the structural variables for which it is a contingency. Such a multistructural concept of fit more fully reflects the underlying fit notion and so is to be welcomed. In turn, it opens the door to a more fully multivariate model in which all the contingency factors and all the structural variables for which they are contingencies are considered simultaneously for each organization (Randolph and Dess 1 984). This multidimen­ sional model of fit would more richly capture the idea of fit. It would be more complex, but not too complex, as each structural variable has in practice only a limited number of contingencies. Many structural variables have as their con­ tingencies only a limited set of contingency vari­ ables, mostly restricted to one or a few out of the variables of size, strategy, task uncertainty and public accountability. Clarifying the exact few contingencies that apply to each different aspect of structure and including them in multivariate models that exhaustively capture fit and then measuring this multivariate fit and its impact on performance is the next step in fit research. It constitutes an important agenda item for future contingency research.

THE CHALLENGE OF OTHER PARADIGMS

As part of the growing pluralism in the study of organizations, since about the mid 1 970s new paradigms have arisen in sociology and econom­ ics which offer explanations of organizational structure additional to those available i n structural contingency theory (Pennings 1 992; Davis and Powell 1 992). These include resource dependence (Pfeffer and Salancik 1 978), institu­ tional (Powell and DiMaggio 1 99 1 ), population­ ecology (Hannan and Freeman 1 989) and agency (Jensen and Meckling 1 976) theories and transaction cost economics (Williamson 1 985). Some of these theories are outlined in other chapters of this Handbook. Elsewhere a detailed discussion and critique is offered of each of these organization theories and arguments in favour of contingency theory are presented (Donaldson 1 995a). Our view is that while these newer organization theories have something to con­ tribute that supplements contingency theory it remains the core explanatory theory of organiza­ tional structure (see Donaldson 1 995a).

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STUD YING ORGANIZA TION REFLECTIONS ON THE STRUCTURAL CONTINGENCY THEORY PARADIGM

The normal science of structural contingency theory has been pursued by a number of scholars, as we have seen. However, it is not popular in all quarters and has probably declined in popularity since 1 970. There have arisen many new and different approaches, for example, institutional theory in the US (Meyer and Scott 1 983) and action theory in the UK (Silverman 1 970). The US has witnessed a particular profusion of new organizational theories (see Donaldson 1 995a). Much organiza­ tional structural research has been conducted under their ambit. It has been suggested that career incentives lie more in innovating a new paradigm than in persevering with an older paradigm (Aldrich 1 992; Mone and McKinley 1 993). Moreover, awareness of alternative views has combined with specific negative findings within the structural contingency research so that some researchers interpret their findings as challenges to the paradigm and advance funda­ mental changes. For example, Cullen et al. ( 1 986) restudied the Blau ( 1 970) theory and variables across time; they interpret their negative findings as meaning that Blau's theory needs to be seen only as a theory of static scale rather than the size change dynamics that Blau claimed. In such cases, the researchers are not treating negative findings as puzzles to be solved, as is the way in normal science mode. Thus the normal science of structural con­ tingency theory has been pursued only by some students of organization. Nevertheless their results have indicated that considerable progress has now been made in solving puzzles and advancing a strengthened structural contingency theory. Moreover, while structural contingency theory is but one of several theories in the research literature, the teaching literature is quite opposite. Books on organizational structure and design continue to rely greatly on structural contingency theory and findings (Bedeian and Zammuto 1 99 1 ; Child 1 984; Daft 1 986). Given the increasing theoretical pluralism of the field of organizational structure studies, many contemporary empirical researchers take the contingency-structure relationship as basic and then add on variables and interpretations from the newer structural paradigms, such as institutional theory, in eclectic fashion (for examples, Fligstein 1 985; Palmer et al. 1 993). In this way the contingency theory endures in the mainstream of research among researchers who maintain allegiances to more than one organiza­ tion theory. This eclecticism between theories marks the breakdown of each as a distinct

theoretical paradigm. Such eclecticism is to a degree resisted by the hard-core adherents of each of the organization theory paradigms (see Aldrich 1 992). However, the more typical contemporary researchers seek to accommodate these differing ideas within their research models (Fligstein 1 985; Palmer et al. 1 993). While there are difficulties in realizing integration between the diverse contemporary paradigms (see Donaldson 1 995a), the attempt to re-integrate the field is greatly to be commended. This eclectic use may be becoming the largest use of structural contingency theory. Since structural contingency theory began as a synthesis between the opposed ideas of the classical management and human relations schools, it is not inappropriate that it in turn should become synthesized with other organiza­ tion theories in a wider model. The issue then becomes whether structural contingency theory is to be a minor or major part of that new synthesis. Proponents of structural contingency theory will see it as providing the major com­ ponent of the new synthesis (Donaldson 1 995a). Proponents of the other organization theories will see structural contingency theory as provid­ ing only a minor part and their own preferred theory as providing the major component of the new synthesis. This may well be one of the main debates in the immediate future of organization studies.

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3 Organizational Ecology JOEL A.C. BAUM

WHAT ORGANIZATIONAL ECOLOGY I s AND ISN'T

Until the mid 1 970s, the prominent approach in organization and management theory empha­ sized adaptive change in organizations. In this view, as environments change, leaders or domi­ nant coalitions in organizations alter appropriate organizational features to realign their fit to en­ vironmental demands. Since then, an approach to studying organizational change that places more emphasis on environmental selection processes, introduced at about that time (Aldrich and Pfeffer 1 976; Aldrich 1 979; Hannan and Freeman 1 977; McKelvey 1 982), has become increasingly influential. The stream of research on ecological perspectives of organizational change has generated tremendous excitement, controversy, and debate in the community of organization and management theory scholars. Inspired by the question, 'Why are there so many kinds of organizations?' (Hannan and Freeman 1 977: 936), organizational ecologists seek to explain how social, economic, and political conditions affect the relative abundance and diversity of organizations and attempt to account for their changing composition over time. Although differences exist among individual investigators, ecological research typically begins with three observations: ( I ) diversity is a property of aggregates of organizations, (2) organizations often have difficulty devising and executing changes fast enough to meet the demands of uncertain, changing environments, and (3) the community of organizations is rarely stable organizations arise and disappear continually. Given these observations, organizational ecolo­ gists pursue explanations for organizational diversity at population and community levels of

organization, and focus on rates of organizational founding and failure and creation and death of organizational popUlations as key sources of increasing and decreasing diversity. Organizations, popUlations, and communities of organizations constitute the basic elements of an ecological analysis of organizations. A set of organizations engaged in similar activities and with similar patterns of resource utilization constitutes a population. Populations form as a result of processes that isolate or segregate one set of organizations from another, including technological incompatibilities and institutional actions such as government regulations. Popula­ tions themselves develop relationships with other populations engaged in other activities that bind them into organizational commullities. Organizational communities are functionally integrated systems of interacting populations; the outcomes for firms in any one population are fundamentally intertwined with those for firms in other populations in the same community.

Organizational Ecology and Environmental Determinism

Although organizational ecology is currently a prominent subfield of organization studies, many critics and skeptics remain. Why? The debate centers primarily on assumptions about the relative influences of organizational history, environment, and strategic choice on patterns of organizational change advanced by structural inertia theory (Hannan and Freeman 1 977; 1 984). Structural inertia theory asserts that existing organizations frequently have difficulty changing strategy and structure quickly enough to keep pace with the demands of uncertain, changing

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environments, and emphasizes that major organizational innovations often occur early in the life-histories of organizations and popu­ lations. Organizational change and variability are thus regarded to reflect primarily relatively inert (i.e. inflexible) organizations replacing each other. To organizational ecology's critics and skeptics this means environmental determinism and loss of human agency (Astley and Van de Ven 1 983; Perrow 1 986). Do ecological approaches imply that the actions of particular individuals do not matter for organizations? The answer is no, of course. One part of the confusion is that determinism is mistakenly contrasted with voluntarism rather than with probabilism (Hannan and Freeman 1 989; Singh and Lumsden 1 990). Leaving aside whether their actions are intelligent or foolish, carefully planned or seat-of-the-pants, indivi­ duals can clearly influence their organization's future - but under conditions of uncertainty there are severe constraints on the ability of individuals to conceive and implement correctly changes that improve organizational success and survival chances reliably in the face of competi­ tion. Thus, 'in a world of high uncertainty, adaptive efforts . . . turn out to be essentially random with respect to future value' (Hannan and Freeman 1 984: 1 50). A second part of the confusion has to do with the level of analysis. The actions of individuals matter more to their organization than they do to their organization's population as a whole: there are limits on the influence of individuals' actions for variability in organizational properties. The actions of parti­ cular individuals may thus not explain much of the diversity in organizational populations. Ecological Approaches to Organizational Change

Changes in organizational populations reflect the operation of four basic processes: variation, selection, retention, and competition (Aldrich 1 979; Campbell 1 965; McKelvey 1 982). Varia­ tions are human behaviors. Any kind of change. intentional or blind, is variation. Individuals produce variations in, for example, technical and management competencies, constantly in their efforts to adjust their organization's relation to the environment. Some variations prove more beneficial than others in acquiring resources in a competitive environment and are thus selected positively - not by the environment, but by managers inside organizations and by investors, customers, and government regulators in the external environment (Burgelman 1 99 1 : Burgel­ man and Mittman 1 994; McKelvey 1 994: Meyer 1 994; Miner 1 994).

When successful variations are known, or when environmental trends are identifiable, individuals can attempt to copy and implement these successful variations in their own organiza­ tion. or they can attempt to forecast, anticipate, plan, and implement policies in the context of the predictable trends (DiMaggio and Powell 1 983; McKelvey 1 994; Nelson and Winter 1 982). But when successful variations are unknown, because, for example, the behavior of consumers and competitors is unpredictable, the probability of choosing the correct variation and implement­ ing it is very low. Even when successful vari­ ations are identifiable, ambiguity in the causes of success may frustrate attempts at imitation. Under such conditions, variations can be viewed as experimental trials, some consciously planned and some accidental, some successful and some failures (McKelvey 1 994; Miner 1 994). Whether or not they are known, over time, successful variations are retained as surviving organizations come to be characterized by them. If the survival odds are low for organizations with a particular variant, it does not mean that these organizations are destined to fail . Rather, it means the capacity of individuals to change their organizations successfully is of great importance (Hannan and Freeman 1 989). Thus, ecological theory does not remove indi­ viduals from responsibility for control (influ­ ence, at least) over their organization's success and survival: individuals do matter. Ecological theory does, however, assume that individuals cannot always (or often) determine in advance which variations will succeed or change their organizations' strategies and structures quickly enough to keep pace with the demands of uncertain, changing environments. Conse­ quently, in contrast to adaptation approaches, which explain changes in organizational diver­ sity in terms of the cumulative strategic choices and changes to existing organizations, ecological approaches highlight the creation of new organizations and the demise of old ones.

This Chapter

My goal in this chapter is to assess and consolidate the current state-of-the-art in organizational ecology. To accomplish this I review major theoretical statements, empirical studies, and arguments that are now being made. Although I attempt to survey the domain of inquiry in organizational ecology comprehensively, because ecological research now constitutes a large body of work, and because other extensive reviews are available (Aldrich and Wiedenmayer 1 993; Car­ roll 1 984a; Wholey and Brittain 1 986; Singh and Lumsden 1 990), I focus on recent work. The

ORGANIZA TIONAL ECOLOG Y remainder of the chapter is organized in two main sections. I review theory and research on rates of organizational founding and failure in the first section and rates of organizational change in the second. In both sections, I emphasize contempor­ ary issues and debates, identify central questions that remain unanswered, and highlight new and emerging directions for future research that appear promising. ORGANIZATIONAL FOUNDING AND FAILURE

Ecological approaches to founding and failure constitute radical departures from traditional approaches, which focus on individual initiative, skills, and abilities. The traditional traits approach to founding assumes that there is something about an individual's background or personality that leads him or her to found an organization (Gartner 1 989). Similarly, tradi­ tional business policy research typically attri­ butes organizational failure to managerial inexperience, incompetence, or inadequate finan­ cing (Dun and Bradstreet 1 978). Ecological approaches to organizational founding and failure, by comparison, emphasize contextual or environmental causes - social, economic, and political - that produce variations in organiza­ tional founding and failure rates over time by influencing opportunity structures that confront potential organizational founders and resource constraints that face existing organizations (Aldrich and Wiedenmayer 1 993; Carroll 1 984a; Romanelli 1 99 1 ) . In broad terms, ecological theory and research on founding and failure focuses on three themes summarized in Table I : ( 1 ) demographic processes, (2) ecological pro­ cesses, and (3) environmental processes. DEMOGRAPHIC PROCESSES

Whereas founding processes are attributes of a population since no organization exists prior to founding, failure processes occur at organiza­ tional and population levels: existing organiza­ tions have histories and structures that influence their failure rates. Thus, studying organizational failure is complicated by the need to consider processes at both organizational and population levels. Demographic analysis examines the effects of organizational characteristics on failure rates in organizational populations. Age and Size Dependence

A central line of inquiry in ecological research has been the effect of organizational aging on failure.

73

The predominant view is the liability of newness (Stinchcombe 1 965: 1 48-9), the propensity of young organizations to have higher failure rates. Underlying this argument is the assumption that young organizations are more vulnerable because they have to learn new roles as social actors and create organizational roles and routines at a time when organizational resources are stretched to the limit. New organizations are also assumed to lack bases of influence and endorsement, stable relationships with important external constitu­ ents, and legitimacy. In a complementary view­ point, Hannan and Freeman ( 1 984) suggest that selection pressures favor organizations capable of demonstrating their reliability and account­ ability. Reliability and accountability require organizations to be highly reproducible. This reproducibility, and the structural inertia that it generates, increase as organizations age. Since selection processes favor highly reproducible structures, older organizations are less likely to fail than young organizations. Closely related to the liability of newness is the liability of smallness. Larger organizations are assumed to be less likely to fail for a variety of reasons. Since large size increases inertial tendencies in organizations, and since selection pressures favor structurally inert organizations for their reliability, large organizations are proposed to be less vulnerable to the risk of failure (Hannan and Freeman 1 984). The propensity of small organizations to fail is also argued to be the consequence of problems of raising capital, recruiting and training a work­ force, meeting higher interest rate payments, and handling the administrative costs of compliance with government regulations (Aldrich and Auster 1 986). Large size also tends to legitimate organizations, to the extent that large size is interpreted by stakeholders as an outcome of an organization's prior success and an indicator of future dependability. Since new organizations tend to be small, if, as the liability of smallness predicts, small organiza­ tions have higher failure rates, then liabilities of newness and smallness are confounded and must be separated empirically (Freeman et al. 1 983). Thus, what appears as negative age dependence may actually be a confounding of unmeasured size (Levinthal 1 99 1 a). Although numerous early ecological studies support the liability of newness hypothesis consistently (Carroll 1 983; Carroll and Delacroix 1 982; Freeman et al. 1 983), as Table 2 shows, recent studies find that, after controlling for contemporaneous organizational size, failure rates do not decline with age. Since much of the original support for the liability of newness comes from studies in which organiza­ tional size is not controlled, the early supportive findings may simply reflect specification bias. In

STUD YING ORGANIZA TION

74 Table I

Major ecological approaches to organizational founding and failure Key variables

Demographic processes Age dependence Organizational age

Key predictions

Key references

Liability of newness: organizational failure rates decline with age as roles and routines are mastered, and links with external constituents established

Freeman et al. 1 983

Liability of adolescence: Bruder! and Schussler 1 990; Fichman and Levinthal organizational failure rates rise with 1991 initial increases in age, reach a peak when initial buffering resource endowments are depleted, then decline with further increases in age Liability of obsolescence: organizations' failure rates increase with age as their original fit with the environment erodes

Baum 1 989a; Ingram 1 993; Ranger-Moore 1 99 1 ; Barron e t al. 1 994

Size dependence

Organizational size

Liability of smallness: organizational failure rates decline with size, which buffers organizations from threats to survival

Freeman et al. 1 983

Ecological processes Niche-width dynamics

Specialist strategy

Specialists exploit a narrow range of resources and are favored in fine­ grained and concentrated environments

Freeman and Hannan 1 983; 1 987; Carroll 1 985

Generalist strategy

Generalists tolerate widely varying environmental conditions and are favored in coarse-grained, high­ variability environments

PopUlation dynamics Prior foundings

Initial increases in prior foundings Carroll and Delacroix 1 982; signal opportunity, stimulating new Delacroix and Carroll 1 983; foundings, but further increases create Delacroix et al. 1 989 competition for resources, suppressing new foundings. Increases in prior foundings that signal organizational differentiation lower the failure rate

Prior failures

Initial increases in prior deaths free up resources, stimulating new foundings, but further increases signal a hostile environment suppressing new foundings. Resources freed up by prior deaths lower the failure rate

Density dependence

Population density (i.e. a number of organizations in a population)

Initial increases in density increase the Hannan and Freeman 1 987; institutional legitimacy of a 1 988; 1 989; Hannan and population, increasing foundings and Carroll 1 992 lowering failures, but further increases produce competition, suppressing foundings and increasing failures

Community in terdependence

Population density

Examines cross-population density Hannan and Freeman 1 987; effects. Competitive (mutualistic) 1 988; Barnett 1 990; Brittain populations suppress (stimulate) each 1 994 other's founding rates and raise (lower) each other's failure rates

ORGANIZA TIONAL ECOL O G Y Table I

75

(continued) Key variables

Environmental processes Institutional Political turmoil processes

Government regulation

Key predictions

Key references

Political turmoil affects patterns of Carroll and Delacroix 1 982; founding and failure by shifting social Delacroix and Carroll 1 983; alignments, disrupting established Carroll and Huo 1 986 relationships between organizations and resources, and freeing resources for use by new organizations Government policies affect patterns of Tucker et al. 1 990a; Baum founding and failure by, for example, and Oliver 1 992; Barnett and Carroll 1 993 enhancing legitimacy, stimulating demand, providing subsidies, and regulating competition

Institutional linkages Linkages to legitimated community Singh et al. 1 986b; Baum and Oliver 1991 and public institutions confer legitimacy and resources on organizations, lowering the failure rate Technological processes

Technology cycles

Technology cycles affect patterns of Tushman and Anderson founding and failure by, for example, 1 986; Anderson 1 988; changing the relative importance of Suarez and Utterback 1 992 various resources, creating opportunities to establish new competitive positions, and rendering competencies of existing organizations obsolete

contrast, studies in Table 2 strongly support the liability of smallness prediction that organiza­ tional failure rates decline with increased size. Bigger May Be Better But Is Older Wiser?

These findings have prompted two alternative theoretical perspectives on age dependence that question the basic liability of newness argument. I The liability of adolescence hypothesis (Bruder! and Schussler 1 990; Fichman and Levinthal 1 99 1 ) predicts an inverted U-shaped relationship between age and failure. This model begins with the observation that all new organizations start with an initial stock of assets, including goodwill, positive prior beliefs, psychological commitment, and investment of financial resources, that buffer new organizations from failure during an initial honeymoon period - even when ear!y outcomes are unfavorable. The larger the initial stock of assets, the longer the time period in which the organization is buffered. As the original stock of assets is depleted, organizations face a liability of adolescence; and those organizations fail that are unable to generate needed resource flows because, for example, they were unable to establish necessary roles and routines or develop stable relationships with important external constituents. However, after adolescence, the

future probability of failure declines since surviving organizations have been able to acquire sufficient ongoing resources. The liability of newness and adolescence arguments provide divergent accounts of age dependence for young organizations, but both agree that rates of failure decline monotonically for older organizations. Yet, processes under­ lying these models (e.g. learning and creating new roles and routines, establishing relationships with external constituents, and depleting initial endowments) occur early in organizational life. The liability of aging hypothesis predicts an increasing rate of failure for older organizations as a result of processes that occur later in organizational life (Barron et al. 1 994; Baum 1 989a; Ingram 1 99 3 ; Ranger-Moore 1 99 1 ). Thus, the liability of aging hypothesis comple­ ments and extends the liability of newness and adolescence hypotheses (Baum 1 989a). The liability of aging argument begins with another insight from Stinchcombe's ( 1 965: 1 53) essay: 'the organizational inventions that can be made at a time in history depend on the social technology available at that time.' Organizations reflect the environment at the time of their founding. As the environment into which an organization is founded changes, the fit between organizations and their environments erodes as

STUD YING ORGANIZA TION

76 Table 2

Age and size dependence studies, 1 989-1994

Population

Age l

US labor unions, 1 836- 1 985 2

Size

Size variable

References

+

Membership at founding

Hannan and Freeman 1 989; Carroll and Hannan 1 989a; 1 989b; Carroll and Wade 1 99 1 ; Hannan and Carroll 1 992

Storage capacity

Delacroix et al. 1 989; Delacroix and Swaminathan 1 99 1 Barnett 1 990; Barnett and Amburgey 1 990

na na na na na na na na na na

US brewers, 1 633- 1 988 Argentina newspapers, 1 800- 1 900 Ireland newspapers, 1 800 - 1 975 San Francisco newspapers, 1 800- 1 975 Little Rock newspapers, 1 8 1 5 - 1975 Springfield newspapers. 1 835- 1 975 Shreveport newspapers, 1 840- 1 975 Elmira newspapers, 1 8 1 5- 1 975 Lubbock newspapers. 1 890- 1 975 Lafayette newspapers, 1 835- 1 975 California wineries, 1 940-85

0

Iowa telephone companies, 1 900-29

0

0

Pennsylvania telephone companies, 1 879 - 1 934 West German business organizations, 1 980-9

+ +/-

0

Bavarian brewers, 1 900-8 1

0

Toronto day care centers, 1 97 1 -89 Toronto nursery schools, 1971 -87 US immigrant newspapers, 1 877- 1 9 1 4 African-American newspapers, 1 877- 1 9 1 4 NY State life insurance companies, 1 8 1 3- 1 935 Manhattan banks, 1 840-1976 Manhattan hotels, 1 898- 1 990 California S&Ls, 1 970-87 US mutual S&Ls, 1 960-87 US stock S&Ls, 1 960-87 US cement producers, 1 888- 1 982 US minicomputer manufacturers, 1 958-82 US group HMOs, 1 976-91 US independent practice Assn HMOs, 1 976- 9 1 Finnish newspapers, 1 77 1 - 1963 US brewers, 1 878- 1 988

+

US microcomputer manufacturers, 1 975-86 US integrated circuit manufacturers, 1 97 1 -8 1 Medical diagnostic imaging firms, 1 953-89 US trade associations, 1 90 1 -90 US credit unions, 1 980-893 US hotel chains, 1 896- 1 980 New York City credit unions. 1 9 1 4-90 I

Subscribers

Employees at founding Small firm dummy Licensed capacity Licensed capacity na na

+/0

0 +

0 T /-

+/0/+/-

0 0 0 na na

0

Assets Assets Number of rooms Assets Assets Assets

na + +

0 +/-

0/+

0

Swaminathan and Wiedenmayer 1991 Baum and Oliver 1 9 9 1 ; 1 992; Baum and Singh 1994b Olzak and West 1 99 1 Ranger-Moore 1991 Banaszak-Holl 1 992: 1 993 Baum and Mezias 1 992 Haveman 1 992; 1 993a Rao and Neilsen 1 992 Anderson and Tushman 1 992

Enrollment Enrollment

+

Bruderl and Schussler 1 990

Production in 1 878 and 1 879 Units sold Employees 0 Corporate sales Membership -/+/- Assets Number of hotels Log real total assets

Wholey et al. 1 992 Amburgey et al. 1 993 Carroll et al. 1 993 Ingram 1 993 Loree 1 993 Mitchell and Singh 1 993 Aldrich et al. 1 994 Amburgey et al. 1 994 Ingram 1 994 Barron et al. 1 994

X/ Y gives the signs of significant (p<0.05) linear and squared terms, respectively, when estimated. X gives the sign of the effect of initial increases in age, Y gives the sign of the effect for later increases. 2 See Hannan and Freeman ( 1 989: 257-9) for an interpretation of this positive size effect. 3 Amburgey et al. ( 1 994) test a cubic effect of size to examine the failure risk of mid-sized organizations.

ORGANIZA TIONAL ECOLOG Y incomplete information, bounded rationality, and inertial tendencies make it difficult, if not impossible, for individuals to keep their organizations aligned with environmental demands. Environmental change also creates opportunities for new organizations to enter and undermine the competitive positions of estab­ lished organizations. Ironically, attempts to realign the organization with its environment may carry additional hazards that result from constraints on the ability of individuals to conceive and implement changes successfully and the potential for major change attempts to lower organizational performance reliability and disrupt key external relationships (Hannan and Freeman 1 984). Thus, encountering a series of environmental changes that decrease the align­ ment of organizations and environments exposes aging organizations to an increased risk of failure. Research Findings and Future Directions

Two sample-selection bias problems may con­ tribute to the weak support for the liability of newness in Table 2. First, the new organizations studied may be old new organizations, that is, late in the process of emergence (Katz and Gartner 1 988). If researchers were able to obtain data earlier in the founding process (e.g. prior to formal incorporation), liability of newness findings might be much stronger. Second, left­ censored organizations, that is, those founded before the start of the observation period, are included in several analyses. Because they are already survivors, these organizations tend to be low-risk cases. Consequently, treating left­ censored organizations as standard subjects can lead to an underestimation of failure rates at shorter durations (Guo 1 993). While the liability of newness may commonly be underestimated, the liability of aging may commonly be overestimated. If age coincides with the amount of environmental change experienced by an organization, and if the risk of failure increases with cumulative environ­ mental change, then the probability of failure will increase, spuriously, with age if accumulated environmental change is uncontrolled (Carroll 1 983: 3 1 3) . Thus, in the same way that negative age dependence can result spuriously from un­ controlled size, positive age dependence (after controlling for size) may result spuriously from uncontrolled exposure to environmental change. Of course, this implies that after controlling for size and environmental change, no age depen­ dence should be found. The limited support for the liability of adolescence hypothesis may have a simpler explanation: tests of the liability of adolescence

77

hypothesis are infrequent. Notably, five of seven studies in Table 2 that permit nonmonotonic age dependence find a liability of adolescence. Research on age dependence must move beyond the use of age as a surrogate for all constructs underlying the various age dependence models and begin to test the models' assumptions directly. For example, the liability of newness hypothesis assumes that a lack of social approval, stability, and sufficient resources typifies recent entrants into a population and that these short­ comings increase their risk of failure, but organizational variation in these factors is rarely measured directly. Of course, if young organiza­ tions are capable of obtaining early legitimacy and access to resources through the formation of institutional attachments to community and public constituents, a liability of newness may not be observed (Baum and Oliver 1 99 1 ) . A further benefit of this approach is that liabilities of newness, adolescence, and obsolescence can be treated as complementary rather than as compet­ ing organizational processes. Thus, although we still know very little about how aging lowers organizational failure, or the conditions under which one, the other, or some combination of these models will predominate (the same is true for organizational size, of course), recent advances offer promise for future progress.

ECOLOGICAL PROCESSES Niche-Width Dynamics

In the initial statement of organizational ecology, Hannan and Freeman ( 1 977) use niche-width theory to formulate a model of the differential survival capabilities of specialist organizations, which possess few slack resources and concen­ trate on ways to exploit a narrow range of potential customers, and generalist organiza­ tions, which attempt to appeal to the average consumer who occupies the middle of the market and exhibit adaptive tolerance for more widely varying environmental conditions. Building on fitness-set theory (Levins 1 968), Hannan and Freeman focus on two aspects of environmental variation to explain the relative prevalence of specialists and generalists. The first, variability, refers to the variance in environmental fluctua­ tions about their mean over time. The second, grain, refers to the patchiness of these variations, with many, small periodic variations being fine­ grained and few large, periodic variations being coarse-grained. Table 3 summarizes the domi­ nant organizational forms predicted by niche­ width theory. The key prediction (for concave fitness sets, in which the average magnitude of environmental variation is large relative to

STUD YING ORGANIZA TION

78 Table 3

Niche-width theory predictions offavored forms Certain environment

Uncertain environment

Concave fitness set Convex fitness set

Fine-grained

Coarse-grained

Fine-grained

Coarse-grained

Specialist Generalist

Generalist Generalist

Specialist Specialist

Specialist Specialist

Source: adapted from Hannan and Freeman 1989: 3 1 1

organizational tolerances) is that in fine-grained environments specialists dominate generalists regardless of the level of environmental uncer­ tainty. This occurs because specialists ride out the environmental fluctuations, while generalists are unable to respond quickly enough to attain any degree of production efficiency (but see Herriott 1 987). Thus, under specific conditions of fine-grained environments, fitness-set theory challenges conventional organizational contin­ gency theory predictions that uncertain environ­ ments always favor generalist organizations because they spread out their risk (Lawrence and Lorsch 1 967; Pfeffer and Salancik 1 978; Thompson 1 967). Carroll ( 1 985) advances an alternative model of niche-width dynamics designed to explain the differential survival capabilities of specialists and generalists in environments characterized by economies of scale. In contrast to fitness-set theory, which predicts that for a given population one optimal strategy exists, Carroll proposes that competition among large, generalist organiza­ tions in a population to occupy the center of the market frees peripheral resources that are most likely to be used by small, specialist members of the population. Carroll refers to the process generating this outcome as resource partitioning. The resource-partitioning model implies that, in concentrated markets with a few large generalists, small specialists may be able to exploit more resources without engaging in direct competition with larger, generalist organizations. This yields the prediction that increasing market concentra­ tion increases the failure rate of large, generalist organizations and lowers the failure rate of small specialist organizations. Research Findings and Future Directions

Although the distinction between specialists and generalists is now used commonly in ecological research as a strategic distinction, recent studies of populations' niche dynamics do not make use of niche-width theory and frequently attend to spatial as well as temporal environmental varia­ tion (Baum and Mezias 1 992; Baum and Singh 1 994b; I 994c; Carroll and Wade 1 99 1 ; Haveman 1 994; Lomi 1 995). Tests of the specific predictions

of niche-width and resource-partitioning theories are limited. Studies of California restaurant failure (Freeman and Hannan 1 983; 1 987) and US semiconductor firm failure (Hannan and Freeman 1 989) do not support the basic hypoth­ esis that (for concave fitness sets) in fine-grained environments specialists dominate over general­ ists regardless of the level of environmental uncertainty, and thus fail to distinguish niche­ width theory from orthodox organizational contingency theory. Resource-partitioning theory is supported in studies of newspaper organization failure (Carroll 1 985; 1 987) as well as two more recent studies offounding and failure of American breweries (Carroll and Swami­ nathan 1 992) and founding of rural cooperative banks in Italy (Freeman and Lomi 1 994), which offer partial support. Studies that compare the predictions of these two models and studies that contrast ecological models with traditional con­ tingency predictions are needed. Current for­ mulations of niche-width theory, which focus exclusively on temporal environmental variation, also need to be linked to recent approaches that consider spatial environmental variation. Finally, the possibility of organizational polymorphism (e.g. unrelated diversification for temporal varia­ tion, related diversification for spatial variation), an alternative strategy to specialism and general­ ism, must also be incorporated within existing frameworks (Usher 1 994). Population Dynamics and Density Dependence

Recent research on founding and failure in organizational ecology has paid considerable attention to intra population processes of popula­ tion dynamics, the number of prior foundings and failures in a population, and population density, the number of organizations in a population. Previous patterns of organizational founding and failure in a population can influence current rates of founding (Delacroix and Carroll 1 983). Initially, prior foundings signal a fertile niche to potential entrepreneurs, encouraging foundings. But as foundings increase further, competition for resources increases, discouraging foundings.

ORGANIZA TIONAL ECOLOG Y Prior failures are predicted to have a similar curvilinear effect on foundings. At first, failures release resources that can be reassembled into new foundings. But further failures signal a hostile environment, discouraging foundings. Prior foundings and failures can also lower failure rates. The resources freed up by prior failures enhance the viability of established organizations, lowering the failure rate in the next period (Carroll and Delacroix 1 982). Waves of organizational founding, which reflect differ­ entiation that segments organizations' resource requirements, lower the failure rate by reducing direct competition for resources (Delacroix et al. 1 989). Density-dependent explanations for founding and failure are similar though not identical. Initial increases in population density can increase the institutional legitimacy of a population. The capacity of a population's members to acquire resources increases greatly when those control­ ling resources take the organizational form for granted. However, as a population continues to grow, the interdependence among a population's members becomes competitive. When there are few organizations in a population, competition with others for scarce common resources can be easily avoided. But, this becomes more difficult as the number of potential competitors grows. Combined, the mutualistic effects of initial increases in density and the competitive effects of further increases suggest curvilinear effects of population density on founding and failure rates (Hannan and Carroll 1 992; Hannan and Freeman 1 989). Hannan and Freeman ( 1 989), Hannan and Carroll ( 1 992), and others provide substantial empirical support for the curvilinear relation­ ships predicted by the density dependence model. By comparison, although often significant, popUlation dynamics findings are mixed (Aldrich and Wiedenmayer 1 993; Singh and Lumsden 1 990). Moreover, as illustrated in Table 4, when population dynamics and population density are modeled together, recent studies find population dynamics effects are generally weaker and less robust. Even Delacroix and Carroll's ( 1 983) original Argentina and Ireland newspaper popu­ lation findings do not hold up when density is introduced in a reanalysis of their data (Carroll and Hannan 1 989b). One possible explanation for the apparent dominance of density dependence processes over population dynamics processes is the more systematic character of density relative to the transitory nature of changes in density that result from ongoing foundings and failures. A related explanation is that the effects of foundings and failures are more transitory than the yearly data that are typically available are

79

able to detect (Aldrich and Wiedenmayer 1 993). A third explanation is the greater sensitivity of estimates for quadratic specifications of prior foundings and failures to outliers. These issues need to be researched more thoroughly before population dynamics effects are abandoned, which is clearly the trend in recent research.

Elaborations of the Density Dependence Model

Although support for density dependence theory is quite strong, it has not been without its critics. Density dependence theory has received some critical attention for its proposed integration of ecological and institutional perspectives (Baum and Powell 1 995; Delacroix and Rao 1 994; Zucker 1 989). Some authors have questioned the implicit assumption that each organization in a population influences and is influenced by competition equally (Baum and Mezias 1 992; Baum and Singh 1 994a; I 994b; Winter 1 990). In a methodological critique, Petersen and Koput ( 1 99 1 ) argue that the negative effect of initial increases in population density on the failure rate may result from unobserved heterogeneity in the population (but see Hannan et al. 1 99 1) . Singh ( 1 993) observes that some of the debate about density dependence stems from the model's main strength, its generality, which may have been achieved at the expense of precision of measure­ ment and realism of context. Singh concludes that 'we may do well to sacrifice some generality, provided it moves the research toward greater precision and realism' ( 1 993: 47 1 ). Density effects are clear empirically but the specific conditions that generate legitimacy and competi­ tion are more ambiguous - defined by outcomes rather than by substance. Thus, the precise interpretation of the extensive density depen­ dence findings need to be explored further. Several elaborations, respecifications, and new measures have been advanced recently to address questions raised by the initial density dependence formulation. Although Hannan and Carroll have questioned some of these developments (e.g. 1 992: 38-9, 7 1 -4), these new directions appear to hold real promise for improving precision and realism with respect to both legitimation and competition. These developments, summarized in Table 5, are reviewed below. A ccounting for Concentration

The growth trajectories of diverse organizational populations appear to follow a common path. The number of organizations grows slowly initially, then increases rapidly to a peak. Once this maximum is reached, there is a decline in the

80 Table 4

STUD YING ORGANIZA TION Population dynamics and density dependence studies, l 1 989-95

Population Founding sTudies US labour unions. 1 836- 1 985 US brewers, 1 633- 1 988 San Francisco newspapers. 1 800- 1 975 Argentina newspapers, 1 800-1 900 Ireland newspapers, 1 800- 1 975 Little Rock newspapers, 1 8 1 5- 1 975 Springfield newspapers, 1 835-1 975 Shreveport newspapers, 1 840- 1 975 Elmira newspapers, 1 8 1 5- 1 975 Lubbock newspapers, 1 890- 1 975 Lafayette newspapers, 1 83 5 - 1 975 Pennsylvania telephone cos, 1 879- 1 934 Metro Toronto day care centers, 1 97 1 -89 US State life insurance cos, 1 759- 1 937 Manhattan banks. 1 840- 1 976 Manhattan fax transmission cos, 1 965-92 Pre-dominant design cohort Post-dominant design cohort NY State life insurance cos, 1 842-1 904 German breweries, 1 86 1 - 1988 US trade associations, 1 90 1 -90 Belgian automobile industry British automobile industry French automobile industry Italian automobile industry German automobile industry Failure STudies US labor unions, 1 836- 1 985 US brewers, 1 633- 1 988 San Francisco newspapers, 1 800- 1 975 Argentina newspapers, 1 800- 1 900 Ireland newspapers, 1 800- 1 975 Little Rock newspapers, 1 8 1 5- 1 975 Springfield newspapers, 1 835- 1 975 Shreveport newspapers, 1 840- 1 975 Elmira newspapers, 1 8 1 5- 1 975 Lubbock newspapers, 1 890- 1 975 Lafayette newspapers, 1 83 5 - 1 975 California wineries, 1 940-85 US semiconductor firms Metro Toronto day care centers, 1 97 1 -89 Manhattan fax transmission cos, 1 965-92 Pre-dominant design cohort Post-dominant design cohort US trade associations, 1 90 1 -90 I

Prior Prior foundings failures

Population density

+1 + 1010 -1 +

+1+ /+1+1+1 -

+1-

010 01+ 010 +10 010 na + + +1+10

na 0 - 1+ 01010 01+ 01 + 010 010 0 0 0 na na

-1+ -1+

0 0

-10 010 +1+ 10 +/0 010 + 10

na 0/0 na na na na na

na

0

+

0/0 010 010 +1010 +10 +10 010 010

+ 1+10 010 010 -1 + +1+1+1 +1 -

+1-

-1 + 0

+ 1-

0 +

0

Hannan and Freeman 1 989; Carroll and Hannan 1 989a; 1 989b; Carroll and Swaminathan 1 99 1 ; Hannan and Carroll 1 992

+1 +1 -

+10/+ +1+1+1+1+1+1 +1 -

+10 +1010 010 010 010 0 0

References

-1+ - 1+ -1 + - 1+ -1 + 010 01+ 010 010 01010 010 -1+ -1 + +10 - 1+ -1+

Barnett and Amburgey 1 990 Baum and Oliver 1 992 Ranger-Moore et al. 1 99 1 Banaszak-Holl 1 992; 1 993 Baum et al. 1 993; 1 995

Budros 1993; 1 994 Carroll et al. 1 993 Aldrich et al. 1 994 Hannan et al. 1 995

Hannan and Freeman 1 989; Carroll and Hannan 1 989a; 1 989b; Carroll and Swaminathan 1 99 1 ; Hannan and Carroll 1 992

Delacroix et al. 1 989 Freeman 1 990 Baum and Oliver 1 992 Baum et al. 1993; 1 995

Aldrich et al. 1 994

Includes only analyses that estimate both population dynamics and density dependence effects. XI Y gives the signs of significant (p<0.05) linear and squared terms, respectively.

number of population members and increased concentration. In organizational ecology. the density dependence model is used to account for the shape of the growth trajectory to its peak (Hannan and Carroll 1 992). Since no organiza-

tion or small group of organizations is allowed to dominate (each organization in a population is assumed to contribute to and experience compe­ tition equally), the density dependence model predicts logistic growth in numbers to an

ORGANIZA TIONAL ECOLOG Y Table 5

81

Elaborations of the density dependence model, 1 989-95

Model

Key variables

Nature of elaboration

Density delay

Population density at founding

Adds an imprinting effect of density at Carroll and Hannan founding to the original formulation. 1 989a; Hannan and Helps explain the commonly observed Carroll 1 992 decline in population density in older populations

Mass dependence

Population mass (population density weighted by organizational size)

Respecifies competition effect of population density by allowing larger organizations to generate stronger competition. Helps explain the tendency toward concentration in organizational populations

Institutional embeddedness

Relational density Attempts to explain the legitimation of Baum and Oliver 1 992; (number of linkages an organizational form in terms of Hybels et al. 1 994 between a population and endorsements by powerful actors and the institutional organizations environment)

Non-density-based measures of legitimacy

Certification contests and media-based content measures

Early versus late low density

Population density population age

Level of analysis

City density, state density, regional density, national density ( population density at various levels of geographic aggregation)

Attempts to uncover the appropriate Carroll and Wade level of analysis to study density1 99 1 ; Swaminathan dependent processes by comparing and Wiedenmayer patterns of density dependency across 1 99 1 ; Hannan and multiple levels of analysis Carroll 1 992

Localized competition

Size similarity, price similarity, location similarity ( population density weighted by the size of differences in various organizational features)

Respecifies competition effect of population density by allowing more similar organizations to compete at a greater level of intensity

Hannan et al. 1 990; Baum and Mezias 1 992

Respecifies population density by disaggregating it into competitive and mutualistic components using information on the overlap and nonoverlap of resource requirement of population members

Baum and Singh 1 994b; 1 994c

x

Organizational niche Overlap density, nonoverlap overlap density (population density weighted by the degree of overlap and non-overlap in resource requirements between organizations)

Models legitimation effects with nondensity-based measures of institutionalization

References

Barnett and Amburgey 1 990

Rao 1 994; Hybels 1 994

Separates early legitimation from later Baum 1 995 market power and resource partitioning effects of low population density in populations that have evolved beyond their peak density

equilibrium level. But it does not account for the later decline in numbers and increase in concentration (Carroll and Hannan 1 989a; Hannan and Carroll 1 992). Two elaborations of the original formulation have been advanced to address this question. Density Delay In the density dependence model it is contemporaneous population density, density

at particular historical times, that is the focus. Carroll and Hannan ( l 989a) propose a refine­ ment of the model to include an additional, delayed effect of population density that helps explain the decline of populations from their peak density. They suggest that organizations' survival chances are sensitive to population density levels at the time of their founding. Specifically, organizations founded in high-

82

STUD YING ORGANIZA TION

density conditions are proposed to experience persistently higher failure rates. High density at founding creates a liability oj resource scarcity that prevent organizations from moving quickly from organizing to full-scale operation. High density also results in tight niche packing, forcing newly founded organizations, which cannot compete head-to-head with established organiza­ tions, to use inferior or marginal resources. These conditions imprint themselves on organizations, affecting their viability throughout their exis­ tence. Carroll and Hannan show that population density at the time of organizational founding is positively related to failure rates in six of the seven populations they analyze (Carroll and Hannan 1 989a; Hannan and Carroll 1 992). This means that organizations entering high-density populations have persistently elevated failure rates, contributing to an explanation for a decline in population density from its peak. However, several other studies failed to replicate this finding (Aldrich et al. 1 994; Wholey et al. 1 992). Moreover, density delay effects appear to produce an oscillating equilibrium, not a definite, singular downturn in popUlation density (Hannan and Carroll 1 992: 1 83). Dependence Various perspectives in organization and management theory suggest that larger organizations generate stronger competition than their smaller rivals as a result of their superior access to resources, greater market power, and economies of scale and scope. If large organizations generate stronger competi­ tion, then ecological models of population dynamics should reflect their greater significance. Barnett and Amburgey ( 1 990) advance an elaboration of the density dependence model that incorporates this possibility. They do this by modeling the effects of population mass, the sum of the sizes of all organizations in the population, or, in other words, popUlation density weighted by organizational size. If large organizations are stronger competitors, then, after controlling for population density, increases in population mass should have a competitive effect, slowing the founding rate and increasing the failure rate of smaller organizations. By permitting the competitive strengths of organizations to vary as a function of their size, the mass dependence model permits larger organizations in a population to dominate by generating stronger competition than smaller organizations, displacing their population's size in numbers and increasing concentration. Large organizations may therefore play a central role in organizational ecology not because they are affected individually by selection pressures, but because they have a disproportionate influence on population dynamics (Barnett and Amburgey

Mass

1 990). Unfortunately, mass dependence findings are mixed. Some studies find the predicted effects (Banaszak-Holl 1 992; 1 993; Baum and Mezias 1 992). Others find either no or mixed effects (Hannan and Carroll 1 992), or mutualistic effects (Barnett and Amburgey 1 990). Although nonsupportive findings appear to be attributable to data limitations (Hannan and Carroll 1 992: I 30� I ) or significant features of the study population (Barnett and Amburgey I 990: 98� 9), a more general explanation may be found in strategic groups theory (Caves and Porter 1 977), which suggests that industry-wide inferences of market power cannot be made when strategic groups characterize competition since mobility barriers differentially protect strategic groups. Density and Institutional Processes

Drawing on the neo-institutional literature (DiMaggio and Powell 1 983; Meyer and Rowan 1 977; Zucker 1 977), organizational ecologists draw a distinction between cognitive and socio­ political legitimacy (Aldrich and Fiol 1 994). From a cognitive perspective, an organizational form is legitimate 'when there is little question in the minds of actors that it serves as the natural way to effect some kind of collective action' (Hannan and Carroll 1 992: 34). The socio-political approach emphasizes how embeddedness in relational and normative contexts influences an organizational form's legitimacy by signalling its conformity to social and institutional expecta­ tions. Although institutionalists view these two facets of legitimation as complementary and fundamentally interrelated, density dependence theory emphasizes only cognitive legitimacy. Although cognitive legitimacy may be achieved without socio-political approval, socio-political legitimacy is a vital source of, or impediment to, cognitive legitimacy. Indeed, since contemporary organizational populations rarely operate in isolation from the state, the professions, and broader societal influences, socio-political legiti­ macy cannot be ignored (Baum and Oliver 1 992; Baum and Powell 1 995). Institutional Embeddedness and Socio-political

In her provocative commentary, Zucker ( 1 989) takes Hannan and his colleagues to task for invoking the concept of legitimation ex post Jacto to explain the effects of density on founding and failure rates, and suggests that density estimates are proxies for other effects (see also Miner 1 993; Petersen and Koput 1 99 1 ). She advocates the use of more direct measures of the underlying institutional processes. Her critique led to the density-as-process argument, in which legitimation is no longer a variable to be measured but a process that relates density to Legitimacy

ORGANIZA TIONAL ECOLOGY founding and failure. Hannan and Carroll claim that 'growth in density controls . . . [legitimation) processes - it does not reflect them' ( 1 992: 69). These competing proxy and process views suggest different effects of adding covariates (Hannan and Carroll 1 992). If density is an indirect indicator, measuring legitimation more directly would dampen first-order density effects or lead them to disappear altogether. But from the density-as-process view, inclusion of such covariates implies a sharpening and strengthen­ ing of density's legitimation effects. Baum and Oliver ( 1 992) address exactly this question. They argue that an important limita­ tion of the density dependence model is that it neglects the evolution of a population's inter­ dependencies with surrounding institutions. However, where relations with community and government are dense, these institutional actors may exert considerable influence over the conditions that regulate competition for scarce resources and legitimacy in the population. Baum and Oliver ( 1 992) propose an alternative hypothesis in which legitimation is explained in terms of the embeddedness of a population in its institutional environment. They model institu­ tional embeddedness with relational density, the number of relationships between the popula­ tion's members and community organizations and government agencies in its institutional environment. While initial estimates in a study of day care centers support the curvilinear density dependence predictions for both founding and failure, inclusion of relational density altered both relationships to be purely competitive. These results support Zucker's measurement critique. Hybels et al. ( 1 994) replicated these findings in a study of founding of American biotechnology firms in which vertical (input and output) strategic alliances are used to measure industry embeddedness in relational and institu­ tional contexts. These studies suggest that the density-as-proxy formulation of legitimacy was more accurate, and, in addition, that population density may be a proxy for sociopolitical as well as (or instead of) cognitive legitimacy (Baum and Powell 1 995). Future research incorporating both population and relational densities may provide further clarification of the role of institutional processes in population dynamics. Non-Density-Based

Measures of Legitimacy

Several other promising non-density-based alter­ natives to studying legitimation have recently been examined. In many industries, special purpose organizations institute certification contests to evaluate products or firms and rank-order participants according to their per­ formance on preset criteria. Certification con­ tests offer a common social test of products and

83

organizations that serve as a social diffusion mechanism. Rao ( 1 994) argues that cumulative victories in such certification contests enhance organizational reputations in the eyes of risk­ averse consumers and financiers, improving their access to resources and their survival chances. Moreover, Rao argues that by increasing opportunities for certification and diffusing knowledge about organizations and their pro­ ducts, these contests establish the identity and legitimacy of a product and its producers, lowering the risk of producer failure. His analysis of the early American automobile industry supports these ideas, demonstrating that winning heavily publicized road races improved the survival chances of individual automobile manufacturers and, in addition, that the cumulative prevalence of contests lowers the aggregate failure rate. In addition to certification contests, a wide range of accreditation, certifica­ tion, and credentialing activities signal reliabil­ ity, raising the sociopolitical legitimacy of organizational forms, as well as contributing to their cognitive legitimacy by spreading knowl­ edge about them (Baum and Powell, 1 995). Another basic source of information diffusion about the activities of an organizational form are the print media. Detailed archives of media coverage exist for many industries and content analyses of these public records offer a poten­ tially powerful technique for operationalizing legitimation. Measurement of this kind is used widely in social movement research (e.g., Olzak, 1 992; Tilly, 1 993). Content-based measures promise high comparability across settings covered by the business press as well as temporal comparability within a given context. Hybels ( 1 994) successfully employed media-based meas­ ures of legitimacy in an analysis of foundings of American biotechnology firms. Early Versus Late Low-Density Conditions Al­ though, as noted earlier, density dependence theory only predicts logistic growth of popula­ tions to their peak size, it is frequently tested in populations that have evolved well beyond their peak density. This complicates density-depen­ dent legitimacy interpretations. Although early low density has a specific meaning (i.e. legitima­ tion) in density dependence theory, late low density has no meaning at all (Baum 1 995). Notably, early and late low-density conditions seem likely to have analogous effects on vital rates that are not distinguished in the estimates: the few large organizations that dominate substantial segments of the market are unlikely to fail, and increasing concentration may free up resources creating opportunities for new entrants that do not require them to engage in direct competition with larger, well-established organ-

STUD YING ORGA NIZA TION

84

izations (Carroll 1 985). First-order density coefficients may thus mean late market power and resource partitioning, not early legitimation. Baum and Powell ( 1 995) found that support for density dependence is far stronger in studies that include late low-density conditions. Thus, the findings of numerous studies supporting density­ dependent legitimacy may be undermined by incorporating information on periods of popula­ tion decline, which density dependence theory is not designed to explain. Consequently, future studies that estimate separate early and late linear density effects are needed (Baum 1 995). Density and Competitive Processes

Density dependence theory assumes that the intensity of competition depends on the number of organizations in a population. Some research­ ers, however, question the assumption implicit in this approach that all members of a population are equivalent, with each member assumed to compete for the same scarce resources and to contribute to and experience competition equally (Winter 1 990: 286). Although research demon­ strates that this assumption may be a reasonable starting approximation, theory in organizational ecology suggests that the intensity of competition between organizations in a population is largely a function of their similarity in resource require­ ments: the more similar the resource require­ ments, the greater the potential for intense competition (McPherson 1 983; Hannan and Freeman 1 977; 1 989). If all organizations in a population are not equal competitors, population density may not provide the most precise measure of the competition faced by different organiza­ tions in a population. This suggests that density dependence theory can be enriched by incorpor­ ating population microstructures. Recently, sev­ eral ecological models have been examined that incorporate organizational differences explicitly to specify competitive processes within organiza­ tional populations more precisely. In its original formulation, density dependence theory implicitly assumes that geographically organizations compete with each other at an intensity equal to neighboring organizations. Researchers have begun to refine this assumption by disaggregating population density according to level of analysis (i.e. spatial aggregation) to explore the geographic bound­ aries on competitive (and institutional) pro­ cesses. For example, Hannan and Carroll ( 1 992), Carroll and Wade ( 1 99 1 ), and Swami nathan and Wiedenmayer ( 1 99 1 ) analyzed density depen­ dence in the founding rates of American and German brewers at city, state, region, and national levels of analysis. These studies estimate

Level of Analysis

the density dependence model separately for each level of analysis and then compare co­ efficients across levels. They reveal that local and diffuse competitive effects differ much more than comparable legitimation effects in the American and German brewing industries. Lomi ( 1 995) obtained parallel findings in an analysis of founding rates of Italian rural cooperative banks. Recently, Hannan et al. ( 1 995) estimated models of organizational founding in the Euro­ pean automobile industry in which density­ dependent legitimation and competition were operationalized at different levels of analysis. They found stronger country-level competition and stronger European-level legitimation. These and other recent studies (Amburgey et al. 1 993; Baum and Singh 1 994a; 1 994b; Rao and Neilsen 1 992) support Zucker's ( 1 989: 543) speculation that 'smaller geographical areas should theoretically involve more intense com­ petition since they are more tightly bounded resource areas.' At the same time, they also support the idea that institutional processes operate at a broader level (Hannan et al. 1 995), serving to contextualize ecological processes (Scott 1 992; Tucker et al. 1 992). Thus, com­ petitive processes may often be heterogeneous, operating most strongly in local environmental arenas, while institutional processes may often be homogeneous, revealing themselves most strongly at higher levels of spatial aggregation . More research is needed to support or refute this speculation. Hannan and Freeman ( 1 977: 945-6) propose that organizations of different sizes use different strategies and struc­ tures; and, as a result, that although organizations of different sizes are engaged in similar activities, large and small organizations depend on different mixes of resources. This implies that organiza­ tions compete most intensely with similarly sized organizations. For example, if large and small organizations depend on different resources (e.g. large hotels depend on conventions while small hotels depend on individual travelers), then patterns of resource use will be specialized to segments of the size distribution. Consequently, competition between large and small organiza­ tions will be less intense than competition among large or small organizations. Although size­ localized competition did not receive empirical attention until recently (Hannan et al. 1 990), studies of Manhattan banks (Banaszak-Holl 1 992), Manhattan hotels (Baum and Mezias 1 992), and US health maintenance organizations (Wholey et al. 1 992) now provide empirical evi­ dence of size-localized competition. These find­ ings demonstrate that the intensity of competition faced by organizations in a population depends Localized Competition

ORGA NIZA TIONAL ECOLOGY not only on the number of other organizations, but on their relative sizes as well. Baum and Mezias ( 1 992) generalize the size-localized model to other organizational dimensions, and show that in addition to similar-sized organizations, competition within a population can be more intense for organizations that are geographically proximate and charge similar prices. Future research on localized competition can offer direct insights into the dynamics of organizational diversity. Localized competition models imply a pattern of disruptive or segregating selection (Baum 1 990b; Amburgey et al. 1 994) in which competition between like entities for finite resources leads eventually to differentiation ( Durkheim 1 933; Hawley 1 950: 20 1 -3). This mode of selection tends to increase organizational differentiation by producing gaps rather than smooth, continuous variation in the distribution of the members of a population on some organizational dimension. Organizational Niche Overlap

Baum and Singh

( I 994b; 1 994c) test a resource overlap model in

which the potential for competition between any two organizations is directly proportional to the overlap of their targeted resource bases, or organizational niches. Potential competition for each organization is measured using overlap density, the aggregate overlap of an organiza­ tion's resource requirements with those of all others in the population (i.e. population density weighted by the overlap in resource require­ ments). Baum and Singh define a complementary variable, nonoverlap density, which aggregates the resource nonoverlaps with all others in the population. Together, overlap and nonoverlap densities disaggregate competitive and noncom­ petitive forces for each organization in a population. Entrepreneurs are predicted to be unlikely to target or to be capable of founding organizations in parts of the resource space where overlap density is high. Organizations operating in high overlap density conditions are also predicted to be less sustainable. Conversely. entrepreneurs are predicted to be likely to target and be capable of founding organizations in parts of the resource space where nonoverlap density is high because of the absence of direct competition for resources and the potential for complementary demand enhancement. For these reasons, high nonoverlap density is also expected to lower failure rates. Baum and Singh found support for these predictions in a population of day care centers in metropolitan Toronto for which resource requirements were defined in terms of the ages of the children they had the capacity to enroll. These studies indicate that organizations have different likelihoods of being established and endure different survival fates

85

after founding as a function of the locations they target in a multidimensional resource space. Generalization of this disaggregation of popUla­ tion density into overlap and nonoverlap densities may help clarify the role of population heterogeneity in interpretations of the nonmo­ notonic density dependence findings (Petersen and Koput 1 99 1 ; Hannan et al. 1 99 1 ).

Community Interdependence

Relations among organizational populations are central to ecological theories of organization. Populations develop relationships with other populations engaged in diverse activities that bind them into organizational communities (Astley 1 985; Fombrun 1 986; Hawley 1 950). Organizational communities are formed as competition leads to the creation of new popu­ lations that fulfill complementary roles in which they are dependent on, but noncompetitive with, established popUlations. In this way, competi­ tion leads to the emergence of a complex system of functionally differentiated populations linked by mutualistic interdependencies. The growth of internal complexity fosters community stability, slowing the formation of new populations. However, increasing internal complexity also sets the stage for community collapse. If complex systems experience disturbances (e.g. technolo­ gical innovation, regulatory change) beyond a certain threshold level, they may disintegrate as the result of a domino effect. When an evolving population interacts with other populations, the success and survival of its members depends on the nature and strength of its ecological interactions with organizations in other populations. Consequently, it is often difficult to understand the behavior of organiza­ tions in a single population in isolation because the fates of popUlations are commonly linked (Fombrun 1 988). Community ecology attends explicitly to the structure and evolution of these interactions among organizational populations and considers the system-level consequences of these interactions for the dynamics of co-acting sets of populations. Brittain and Wholey ( 1 988) identify the following possible types of interac­ tions between two populations, j and k, where the signs are for C1jk and Qkj, respectively: (-,-) full competition. (-,0) partial competition, (+,-) predatory competition, (0,0) neutrality. ( +,0) commensalism, and (+,+) symbiosis. Studying the effects of such interactions on the dynamics of organizational communities is now emerging as an important area of inquiry (Singh and Lumsden 1 990). Findings of some recent studies of community interaction are summarized in Table 6.

86

STUD YING ORGANIZA TION

Research Findings and Future Directions

Among the studies in Table 6, the applications of community interaction models to strategic groups appear particularly promising (Brittain 1 994; Carroll and Swaminathan 1 992). Although the strategic groups construct captures the idea that the force of competition on an organiza­ tion's performance depends on the location of its various rivals in the resource environment, empirical research examining the effects of strategic groups on competition is quite limited ( McGee and Thomas 1 986; Thomas and Venkatraman 1 988). Community interdepen­ dence models, which highlight interactions among multiple organizational (sub)popula­ tions, provide a way to analyze competition within and between the multiple strategic groups comprising an industry. An ecological approach to strategic groups informs research in strategic management by providing a model of the effects of organizational strategies and strategic group membership in dynamic popUlations. Although studies such as those in Table 6 provide empirical evidence of the existence, structure, and potential influence of organiza­ tional communities on population dynamics, they barely scratch the surface of the Pandora's box of community ecology (DiMaggio 1 994). To date, the organizational communities studied have been limited in their scale and scope to single social or economic sectors of organiza­ tional activity (but see Baum and Korn 1 994; Korn and Baum 1 994). Moreover, because few studies attempt to predict the form of specific interpopulation interactions, we know very little about when competition or mutualism will exist between organizations. Unfortunately, within organizational communities, popUlations affect each other's fates not only through direct rela­ tionships between them but also through indirect interactions and feedback flowing through the community (Baum and Singh 1 994d). Thus, community dynamics involve nonlinear feed­ back among interacting populations: such non­ Iinearities can complicate substantially attempts to derive community-level predictions (Carroll 1 98 1 : 587; Puccia and Levins 1 985: Chapter 3). For this reason, Baum and his colleagues (Baum and Korn 1 994; Baum and Singh 1 994d; Korn and Baum 1 994) have advocated use of an analytical technique called loop analysis (Puccia and Levins 1 985) for modeling complex com­ munity systems. Loop analysis permits deriva­ tion of community-level predictions that account for the effects of indirect interactions and feed­ back processes in the community system. M o re fundamentally, however, although Hannan and Freeman ( 1 977) called for research at the popUlation level as a first step toward the

study of community-level phenomena, research in organizational ecology remains focused primarily at the popUlation level. Thus, the original question of organizational ecology why are there so many kinds of organizations? has yet to be pursued seriously. If, however, the current diversity of organizations is to be con­ ceived as a reflection of the 'cumulative effect of a long history of variation and selection' (Hannan and Freeman 1 989: 20), then an explanation of how organizational populations form, become different, and remain different through time is required. Progress on this problem seems unlikely without attention to the development of a theory of organizational evolution (Baum and Singh 1 994a; but for different views see Carroll 1 984a; Hannan and Freeman 1 989). Organizational evolution involves complex interplays between ecological and historical processes. It begins with the differential proliferation of variations within popUlations, that leads ultimately to foundings, the product of entrepreneurial thought, that jump out of established populations to create new populations, and ends with the extinction of the last member of the popUlation that imitation creates around the founding organization ( Lumsden and Singh 1 990). Few researchers have addressed the emergence and disappear­ ance of organizational populations (for excep­ tions see Aldrich and Fiol 1 994; Astley 1 985; Lumsden and Singh 1 990; Romanelli 1 99 1 ) . Consequently, we still know very little about the structures of organizational inheritance and transmission. Yet, a theory of organizational evolution must consider historical processes of information conservation and transmission (i.e. genealogical processes) by which production and organizing routines, organizations, and popula­ tions are carried (i.e. replicated) through time (Baum 1 989b; McKelvey 1 982; Nelson and Winter 1 982). Studying these genealogical processes involves tracing out the evolutionary lines of descent of organizations from their ancestors for the purpose of discovering populations of organiza­ tions and explaining their origins. Whereas biological inheritance is primarily based on the propagation of genes, inheritance processes for social organizations appear very different and suggest evolutionary dynamics strikingly differ­ ent from those expected with purely genetic transmission. Baum and Singh ( I 994a) antici­ pate an approach to organizational genealogical processes that embodies a preponderance of Lamarckian inheritance mechanisms in the sense that production and organizing competence acquired through learning can be retransmitted. Although some work in evolutionary economics (Nelson and Winter 1 982; Winter 1 990),

ORGANIZA TIONAL ECOLOGY Table 6

87

Community interdependence studies, 1 989-95 References

Community

Community interactions

US craft and industrial labor unions, 1 8 36- 1 985

Partial competition ( ,0): increasing density of craft unions both Hannan and suppress founding and increase failure of industrial unions, but Freeman 1 989 industrial union density does not affect either craft union founding or failure

Worker, marketing and consumer cooperatives in Atlantic Canada, 1 900-87

Commensalism (+,0): increasing density of worker coops stimulates founding of marketing coops; increasing density of marketing coops stimulates founding of consumer coops; increasing density of consumer coops stimulates founding of worker coops

Staber 1 989

Early Pennsylvania telephone companies, 1 879-1934: magneto and common battery technologies; single­ and multi-exchange common battery companies

Partial competition ( ,0): increasing density of magneto companies increase failure of common battery companies but common battery company density does not affect magneto company failure

Barnett 1 990

Day care centers and nursery schools in Metropolitan Toronto, 1 97 1-87

Full competition ( - , -): increasing density of day care centers stimulates failure of nursery schools and increasing density of nursery schools stimulates failure of day care centers in return

-

-

Symbiosis (+, +): increasing density of single-exchange companies lowers failure of multi-exchange companies and increasing density of multi-exchange companies lowers failure of single-exchange companies in return

Commercial and savings banks Neutrality (0,0): densities of commercial and savings banks are in Manhattan, 1 792- 1 980 unrelated to each other's founding rates

Baum and Oliver 1 99 1 Ranger-Moore et al. 1991

Mutual and stock life Commensalism (+,0): increasing density of stock companies insurance companies in New stimulates founding of mutual companies, but mutual company York State, 1 760- 1 937 density does not affect stock company founding US brewing industry, 1 975-90: Commensalism (+,0): increasing density of brewpubs stimulates microbreweries, brewpubs, founding of microbreweries, but microbrewery density does not affect brewpub founding and mass producers )

Carroll and Swaminathan 1 992

Partial competition ( ,0): increasing density of mass producers stimulates failure of micro breweries, but microbrewery density does not affect mass producer failure -

US HMOs, 1 976-91 : group HMOs and independent practice associations

Neutrality (0,0): densities of group and IPA HMOs are unrelated Wholey et al. 1 992 to each other's failure rates

US electronics components producers, 1 947-8 1 : ,-specialists, K-specialists, '-generalists, K-generalists2

Full competition ( - ,- ) : founding, none; failure, ,-specialists and Brittain 1 994 '-generalists, K-specialists and K-generalists Partial competition ( -,0): founding, '-generalists and K-specialists; failure, '-generalists and K-generalists Predatory competition (+,-): founding, none; failure, ,-specialists and K-specialists Neutrality (0,0): founding, none; failure, r-generalists and K-generalists Commensalism (+,0): founding, ,-specialists and r-generalists, ,­ generalists and K-generalists; failure, ,-specialists and K-generalists Symbiosis (+,+): founding, ,-specialists and K-specialists, r-specialists and K-generalists, K-specialists and K-generalists; failure, none

Partial competition (- ,0): pre-dominant design fax transmission Manhattan fax transmission cos, 1 965-92: pre- and post­ firms suppress founding and increase failure of post-dominant design fax transmission firms dominant design cohorts ) All other possible interactions are neutral (0,0) 2 See Brittain ( 1994) for a more detailed discussion of these findings

Baum et al. 1 995

88

STUD YING ORGANIZA TION

organization theory (Van de Ven and Grazman 1 994; Zucker 1 977) and organizational learning (Levin thaI 1 99 1 b) is concerned with genealogical processes of organizations, the research agenda on organizational inheritance remains wide open.

ENVIRON MENT AL PROCESSES

In their review of organizational ecology, Singh and Lumsden ( 1 990: 1 82) identified the conver­ gence of ecological and institutional perspectives on organizations 'as an exciting research devel­ opment in organization theory'. Institutional and ecological theories have converged mainly around the question: how do institutional en­ vironmental variables (e.g. government policy, political conditions, and sanctioning relations) influence population dynamics? Since then, a second, equally exciting, convergence has emerged with technology cycle theory. Pursuing such convergence is central to advancing organizational ecology. Environmental pro­ cesses such as institutional change and techno­ logical evolution that shape appropriate organizational forms and condition historical­ structural relationships (e.g. the basis of compe­ tition among organizations) need to be inte­ grated fully into ecological theory and research. Recent developments in these areas of conver­ gence are reviewed below.

Institutional Processes

Organizational environments are more than simply 'sources for inputs, information, and knowhow for outputs' (Scott and Meyer 1 983: 1 58). Institutionalized rules and beliefs about organizations also figure prominently (DiMag­ gio and Powell 1 983; Meyer and Rowan 1 977). Institutional theory emphasizes that organiza­ tions must conform to these rules and require­ ments if they are to receive support and be perceived as legitimate. The role of such normative constraints has figured with increas­ ing prominence in recent ecological theory and research. Some view the relationship between ecological and institutional theory as comple­ mentary, and propose their synthesis into a single explanatory framework (Hannan and Carroll 1 992; Hannan and Freeman 1 989). Others conceive institutional theory as contex­ tual to ecological theory: the relationship between them is not only complementary, it is also hierarchical (Tucker et al. 1 992). From this point of view, the institutional environment constitutes the broader social context for eco-

logical processes: the institutional environment may prescribe the environmental selection criteria for judging whether an organization or entire population is worthy of continued survival (Barnett and Carroll 1 993; Baum and Oliver 1 99 1 ; 1 992; Fombrun 1 988). Ecological research on institutional processes typically compares founding and failure rates across organizational populations or across time as the institutional arena of a particular population changes in terms of its political turbulence, government regulations, or institutional embeddedness. Political Turbulence

Political turbulence affects organizational found­ ing and failure by disrupting social alignments and established relationships between organiza­ tions and resources, freeing resources for use by new organizations. Supporting this argument, Delacroix and Carroll ( 1 983) show that cycles of newspaper foundings in Argentina and Ireland reflect political turbulence in addition to popula­ tion dynamics. Years of political turbulence were marked by founding rate increases in both countries. Carroll and Huo ( 1 986) replicate this finding and also show that political turbulence increases newspaper failure rates in an analysis of newspaper foundings in the San Francisco Bay area. Amburgey and his colleagues also find evidence that political turbulence raises news­ paper failure rates in Finland (Amburgey et al. 1 988). Notably, newspapers founded during years of political turmoil are short lived compared to those formed during more stable years (Carroll and Delacroix 1 982). To explain this finding, Carroll and his colleagues argue that newspapers founded in politically turbulent years are opportunists that thrive on resources freed in periods of social disruption but then either become obsolete or are outcompeted when the environment restabilizes. In other words, news­ papers are part of the political environment. Do political processes affect other kinds of organiza­ tions? Carroll et al. ( 1 988) provide a theoretical argument that generalizes the predictions to other kinds of organizations but it remains untested. Government Regulation

From an ecological standpoint, government regulations are viewed as important constraints on organizing and resource acquisition that affect organizational diversity (Barnett and Carroll 1 993; Hannan and Freeman 1 977). By increasing (decreasing) the number and/or variety of constraints, regulation increases (decreases) environmental heterogeneity, expanding (con­ tracting) the number of potential niches and increasing (decreasing) overall organizational

ORGA NIZA TIONAL ECOLOG Y diversity possible in an organizational com­ munity. Although institutional theorists agree, the central issue from their perspective is the level of fragmentation in the structure of the regulatory institutional environment (Scott and Meyer 1 983). When influence in the regulatory environment is centralized, institutional demands are easily coordinated and imposed on organiza­ tions. In contrast, fragmented regulatory struc­ tures suffer from ambiguity and conflict, and coordinated action to influence organizations is difficult. Thus, consistent with ecological expec­ tations, the greater the fragmentation of regula­ tory structures in an organizational field (i.e. the greater the number of distinct institutional resources and constraints), the greater the diversity of organizations that can be sustained. Ecological research on regulatory effects focuses on how changes in government regula­ tion influence patterns of organizational found­ ing and failure. Some regulatory changes embody routine processes or events whose cumulative effects are substantial. For example, over time, through coercive, mimetic, and normative pro­ cesses, institutional expectations of government regulations become embedded in the practices and features of organizations (DiMaggio and Powell 1 983). These institutionalized features, which provide assurance that organizations can be trusted to function reliably, produce ecologi­ cal consequences by, for example, constraining the range of possible competitive behaviors (Freeman and Lomi 1 994). Others are more dramatic and disrupt established ties between organizations and resources, freeing resources for use by new organizations (Carroll et al. 1 988). Because regulatory contexts vary widely, ecological research often formulates hypotheses about regulatory effects for particular research settings. However, recent research identifies four basic ways in which government regulation influences founding and failure rates (see Table 7). Consistent with a view of ecological processes as nested hierarchically within institutional processes, this research shows how government regulation acts to constrain and enable organiza­ tional behavior as well as condition ecological relationships among organizations. The next logical step in this research area is to study how government regulation, and institutional processes more broadly, condition ecological processes directly by examining interactions between institutional and ecological variables (Baum and Oliver 1 99 1 ; Tucker et al. 1 990a; Singh et al. 1 99 1 ; Tucker et al. 1 988).

89

legitimacy, social support, and approval from actors in the surrounding institutional environ­ ment (DiMaggio and Powell 1 983; Meyer and Rowan 1 977). This external legitimation elevates the organization's status in the community, facilitates resource acquisition, deflects questions about an organization's rights and competence to provide specific products or services, and permits the organization to demonstrate its conformity to institutionalized norms and expec­ tations. Although research on institutional embeddedness of organizations is still limited, consistent with the prediction of institutional theory, the results of existing studies indicate that the development of ties to important state and community institutions, as well as other organizations operating in the same institutional field, plays a very significant role in increasing an organization's chances of survival. Singh et al. ( 1 986) found that listing of a voluntary social service agency in a community registry and possession of a charitable registra­ tion number decreased the liability of newness in a population of voluntary social service organiza­ tions. Miner et al. ( 1 990) found that Finnish newspapers affiliated with political parties had significantly lower failure rates than news­ paper organizations without such an affiliation. Baum and Oliver ( 1 99 1 ) found that day care centers and nursery schools with institutional linkages to community organizations (e.g. schools, community centers, and religious organizations) and a municipal government agency exhibited a survival advantage over those without these linkages and that this advantage also increased significantly with the intensity of competition. They also showed that young, small, and specialist child care organiza­ tions benefited from institutional linkages to a greater extent than older, larger, and generalist organizations. In a study of integrated circuit producers, Loree ( 1 993) found that failure rates fell initially after approval for military-grade manufacture but then increased over time as the linkage aged. Uzzi ( 1 993) also shows how firms' survival chances in the New York apparel industry increase with their levels of transactional and social interconnectedness. Overall, these studies suggest that linkages of organizations to a broader institutional context may alter basic causal relationships advanced in organizational ecology. This strongly suggests the need for additional research on institutional linkages.

Technological Processes Institutional Linkages

Institutional theorists propose that an organiza­ tion is more likely to survive if it obtains

Technological innovation has the potential to influence organizational populations profoundly because it can disrupt markets, change the

90 Table 7

STUD YING ORGANIZA TION Government regulation and population dynamics

Regulatory effect

Examples

References

Barriers to entry

The national labor union founding rate increased after the Wagner Act, which provided legal protection to unions and union organizing campaigns. but declined after the Taft-Hartley Act, which repealed some protections of the Wagner Act

Hannan and Freeman 1 989

The founding rate in the US airline industry increased for several years after deregulation made it easier for airlines to enter and exit markets

Kelly 1 988; Kelly and Amburgey 1 99 1

The introduction of the Ontario government's Restraint Program lowered the founding rate and increased the failure rate of voluntary social service organizations in Metropolitan Toronto

Singh et al. 1 99 1

Increases in the value of the Metropolitan Toronto Children's Services Division annual budget increased the founding rate and lowered the failure rate of day care centers in the city

Baum and Oliver 1 992

State regulations that require a deposit to be filed by health maintenance organizations (HMOs) with the state insurance commissioner increases failure rates of small HMOs, but lowers failure rates of large HMOs

Wholey et al. 1 992

States with more fragmented local government boundaries (i.e. larger numbers of constraints) exhibited more limited competition among telephone companies, increasing their numbers

Barnett and Carroll 1 993

Relaxing the National Credit Union Administration's policies eroded the boundaries between credit unions and banks (i.e. reduced the number of constraints), increasing competition between them

Amburgey et al. 1 994

Regulatory constraints imposed on Italian rural cooperative banks and core national banks resulted in resource partitioning that enabled rural cooperative banks to draw on the resource base freed at the periphery of the system without engaging in direct competition with the larger generalist core banks

Freeman and Lomi 1 994

The Canadian federal government's endorsement of the legitimacy of local community groups engaging in independent organizational activity to achieve collective ends through the Opportunities for Youth program increased the founding rate of voluntary social service organizations in Metropolitan Toronto

Tucker et al. 1 990a; Singh et al. 1991

Increasing involvement of the Metropolitan Toronto Children's Services Division in monitoring, certifying, authorizing, and endorsing the activities of day care centers in the city enhanced the credibility and legitimacy of the population. increasing foundings and lowering failures of day care centers

Baum and Oliver 1 99 1 ; 1 992

The Canadian federal government's Opportunities for Youth program altered the density dependence of specialist foundings among voluntary social service organizations in Metropolitan Toronto

Tucker et al. 1 990a; Singh et al. 1991

The Kingsbury Commitment, a regulation intended to constrain the competitive activity of a dominant firm, Bell, triggered a process of competitive release, altering the relationship between large and small telephone companies from symbiotic to competitive

Barnett and Carroll 1 993

Resources and constraints

Monitoring, certifying, authorizing and endorsing

Nature of competition

T h i s

S A G E

e b o o k

i s

c o p y r i g h t

a n d

i s

s u p p l i e d

b y

N e t L i b r a r y .

U n a u t h o r i

ORGANIZA TIONAL ECOLOG Y relative importance of various resources, chal­ lenge organizational learning capabilities, and alter the nature of competition (Cohen and Levinthal 1 990; Tushman and Anderson 1 986). Technological innovation creates opportunities to found new organizations as existing sources of competitive advantage decay and new opportu­ nities for establishing competitive positions emerge. It also creates uncertainties and risks for incumbents because its outcomes can be only imperfectly anticipated. On the one hand, the impact of an innovation may not be known until it is too late for incumbents using older technologies to compete successfully with new competitors. On the other hand, gambling too early on a given innovation may jeopardize an incumbent's survival chances if that technology turns out not to become dominant. Thus, the competitive structures of populations reflect their underlying technologies and technological innovation may profoundly influence the com­ petitive dynamics and evolution of populations over time (Barnett 1 990; Brittain and Freeman 1 9 80; Dosi 1 984; Utterback and Suarez 1 993). Technology Cycles and Population Dynamics

Supporting Schumpeter's ( 1 934; 1 950) charac­ terization of technological evolution as a process of creative destruction, research supports the idea that technologies evolve over time through cycles of long periods of incremental change, which enhance and institutionalize an existing technology, punctuated by technological discon­ tinuities in which new, radically superior technologies displace old, inferior ones, making possible order-of-magnitude or more improve­ ments in organizational performance (Dosi 1 984; Tushman and Anderson 1 986). Technolo­ gical discontinuities generate competition as technologically superior organizations displace outdated ones. The new technology can be either competence enhancing, which builds on know­ how embodied in the existing technology, or competence destroying, which renders the skills required to operate and manage the existing technology obsolete (Tushman and Anderson 1 986). This distinction helps specify whether incumbents or newcomers are likely to become technologically superior competitors as a result of technological change. Technological disconti­ nuities are followed by eras offerment in which competition for dominance among multiple variants of a new technology as well as the incumbent technology creates high uncertainty (Anderson and Tushman 1 990). Technological ferment ends with the emergence of a dominant design, a single architecture that establishes dominance in a product class (Abernathy 1 978). Once a dominant design emerges, technological

91

advance returns to incremental improvements and elaborations of the dominant technology. Although there is some debate about the uni­ versality of this technology cycle, it has proven illuminating in a wide variety of industries (Nelson 1 994). Research Findings and Future Directions

How do technology cycles influence patterns of organizational founding and failure? Available research findings relating technology cycles to organizational founding and failure appear largely supportive of the major predictions (see Table 8). Although this research provides promising initial links between technology cycles and population dynamics, it needs to be extended in at least three important ways. First, although theory suggests incumbent and new­ comer failure rates differ significantly, studies of the effects of technology cycles on organizational failure do not typically differentiate between cohorts of organizations founded before and after technological discontinuities or dominant designs (Baum et al. 1 993; 1 995; Suarez and Utterback 1 992). Second, and more fundamen­ tally, studies rarely incorporate organization­ specific measures of technology. Incorporating organization-specific information on technology extends existing research in at least three major ways. One, the patterns of interdependence among firms operating with different technolo­ gies during eras of ferment can be examined, permitting the creative destruction process to be modeled directly and in a fine-grained way (Barnett 1 990). Two, the performance implica­ tions of firm-specific innovation (e.g. adopting a new technology) and conditions influencing whether and when firm-specific innovation will be rewarded can be modeled directly (Barnett 1 990; M itchell 1 99 1 ). Three, patterns of inter­ dependence among organizations using pre- and post-discontinuity or pre- and post-dominant design technologies can be examined, permitting the competitive superiority of technologies to be modeled directly (Baum et al. 1 993; 1 995). Third, research typically examines how changes in technology influence ecological processes. How­ ever, more research is needed that examines how ecological dynamics influence technological change. Wade ( 1 993; 1 995) provides some im­ portant first steps in this direction. His analyses of technological change in the US microproces­ sor market show that new entrants are the source of most design introductions, that density­ dependent processes influence patterns of entry of design sponsors as well as the rate at which new designs gain organizational support, and that the emergence of a dominant design stimulates the entry of new design sponsors.

92 Table 8 Variable

STUD YING ORGA NIZA TION Technology cycles and populaTion dynamics Predictions

A competence-enhancing discontinuity Competence­ consolidates incumbents' competitive enhancing discontinuity positions by strengthening their competencies, increasing their competitive advantage over new organizations, discouraging potential entrants Incumbents' advantage erodes over time as inertia makes it difficult for them to take full advantage of the enhanced technology. This protects incumbents from moving too quickly to the new technology, but it also creates openings for new entrants to develop specialized assets, market knowledge, and reputation

Examples

References

Entry-to-exit ratios declined (i.e. foundings were suppressed) in the five years after competence-enhancing discontinuities in the US cement and airline industries I

Tushman and Anderson 1 986

The competence-enhancing shift from Baum et al. 1 993 analog to digital facsimile transmission technology lowered founding and failure rates of facsimile transmission service organizations initially, but both rates increased as the discontinuity receded into the past

Competence­ A competence-destroying discontinuity destroying undermines incumbents' competitive discontinuity positions by rendering their competencies obsolete, permitting organizations that exploit the new technology to enter and establish positions in previously impenetrable markets at the expense of incumbents burdened with the legacy of the older technology

Semiconductor manufacturers exit rates increased after the integrated circuits competence-destroying continuity

Freeman 1 990

Leading firms in the photolithographic alignment equipment industry were supplanted successively by new entrants exploiting new technologies

Henderson and Clark 1 990

Era of ferment Technological ferment produces a succession of technological regimes that create new markets and dramatic performance improvement. Organizations must choose a new technology or defend the existing regime - but which technological regime or technical variant within competing regimes will dominate is profoundly uncertain

Anderson Organizational failure rates increased during technological ferments in the US 1 988; cement, glass container, and Anderson and minicomputer industries Tushman 1 992

Dominant design

Organizations founded before dominant Suarez and designs in US automobile, transistor, Utterback electronic calculator. and TV industries 1 992 had lower age-specific failure rates after dominant designs then those founded afterward

A dominant design creates a competitive advantage for incumbents by allowing realization of production and other economies, produces a wave of failures among firms that have not mastered the dominant technology, creates barriers to entry for newcomers, leading to a sharp decline in the number of organizations, and industry restabilization

Waves of failures occurred in the period Anderson immediately after the emergence of 1 988 dominant designs in cement. glass container, and window glass industries, but failure rates declined over time as the industry restabilized The emergence of the DOS standard was Ingram followed by a wave of failures in the US 1 993 minicomputer industry but failure rates declined over time as the industry restabilized

I

Although Tushman and Anderson ( 1 986) interpret their original finding that entry-to-exit ratios declined in the five years after competence-destroying discontinuities in the US cement and microcomputer industries as contradictory to predictions, since entry and exit rates are hOlh expected to increase after a competence-destroying discontinuity, a comparison of pre- and post-discontinuity entry-to-exit ratios is a confounded test.

93

ORGANIZA TIONAL ECOL O G Y

( )

Core change attempt

Reproducible t---+--.! structure

(+)

Standardized routines

I

(+) H '--_ _ _

t-

---1

_ _ _

0rganizational age

,I

I

I

I

I

I

I

I

I

'------1 Organizational size

Figure 1

Structural inertia theory (adapted from Kelly and Amburgey 1 99 1 : 593) ORGANIZATIONAL CHANGE:

STRUCTURAL INERTIA THEORY

Although ecological researchers have assembled a wealth of studies concerning rates of organiza­ tional founding and failure, until recently, few systematic studies of rates of organizational change were available. This inattention may be traced at least in part to structural inertia theory (Hannan and Freeman 1 977; 1 984). Structural inertia theory depicts organizations as relatively inert entities for which adaptive response is not only difficult and infrequent, but hazardous as well . Consequently, change in individual organizations is viewed as contributing consid­ erably less to population-level change than demographic processes of organizational found­ ing and failure. Despite the centrality of this theoretical position to ecological approaches, until recently, its veridicality had been taken for granted. Organizational ecologists have now begun to examine the assumptions of structural inertia theory, the influence of organizational and environmental factors on rates of change in individual organizations, and the adaptiveness (i.e. survival consequences) of different kinds of organizational changes. Organization and management theory fre­ quently focuses on the relative advantages of

alternative configurations of organizational features. Consequently, a great deal of research on organizational change has concentrated on the content of changes: a change to a more advantageous configuration is considered adap­ tive, while a switch to a less advantageous configuration is considered detrimental (Ambur­ gey et al. 1 993). Complementing this focus, Hannan and Freeman's ( 1 984) structural inertia theory o ffers a model of the process of organizational change that considers both inter­ nal and external constraints on change. Struc­ tural inertia theory addresses two main questions: how changeable are organizations, and is change beneficial for organizations? Figure 1 presents an overview of structural inertia theory.

How Changeable Are Organizations?

Hannan and Freeman ( 1 977) pointed out that organizations face both internal and external constraints on their capacity for change and that given these constraints, selection processes are an appropriate explanation for change in organizational populations. Building on their earlier argument, Hannan and Freeman ( 1 984) adopt a somewhat different approach that takes seriously the potential for organizational change

94

STUD YING ORGANIZA TION

by viewing inertia as a consequence rather than antecedent of selection processes. They hypothe­ size that, although some kinds of organizational changes occur frequently in organizations and sometimes these can even be radical changes, the nature of selection processes is such that organiz­ ations with inert features are more likely to survive ( 1 984: 1 49). Structural inertia theory assumes that organizations experience pressures for reliable performance and accountability for their actions. It also assumes that both reliability and accountability require that organizational structures be highly reproducible (i.e. stable over time). Reproducibility of structure is accom­ plished by institutionalization of organizational purposes and standardization of organizational routines. Institutionalization and standardiza­ tion offer the advantage of reproducibility but they also produce strong inertial pressures against change ( 1 984: 1 54-5). The structure in structural inertia theory refers to some, but not all, of the features of organiz­ ations. Hannan and Freeman ( 1 984: 1 56) emphasize core features of organizational struc­ ture, which are related to 'the claims used to mobilize resources for beginning an organization and the strategies and structures used to main­ tain flows of scarce resources' . Core features include the organizational goals, forms of auth­ ority, core technology, and marketing strategy of organizations. Peripheral features protect an organization's core from uncertainty by buffer­ ing it and by broadening the organization's con­ nections to its environment. Peripheral features include numbers and sizes of subunits, number of hierarchical levels, spans of control, commu­ nication patterns, and buffering mechanisms. Hannan and Freeman ( 1 984: 1 56) propose that core features have higher levels of inertia than peripheral features. Hannan and Freeman ( 1 984) propose that in addition to varying by facet of organizational structure, inertial pressures vary with organiza­ tional age and size. Because older organizations have had time to formalize more thoroughly internal relationships, standardize routines, and institutionalize leadership and power distri­ butions, as well as develop rich networks of dependencies and commitments with other social actors, reproducibility of structure and inertia should increase with age. Thus, older organiza­ tions should be most limited in their ability to adapt to changing environmental demands. Consequently, the probability of attempting change in core features declines with age ( 1 984: 1 57). Organizational size is also associated with resistance to change. As organizations increase in size, they emphasize predictability, formalized roles, and control systems and their behavior

becomes predictable, rigid, and inflexible. More­ over, by buffering organizations from failure, large size may reduce the impetus for change (Levin thai 1 994). Consequently, the probability of attempting change in core features declines with size (Hannan and Freeman 1 984: 1 59).

Is Change Beneficial?

Perhaps the most striking aspect of structural inertia theory is the relationship hypothesized between change in core features and the liability of newness, the propensity of young organiza­ tions to have higher failure rates (Stinchcombe 1 965). Hannan and Freeman ( 1 984: 1 60) propose that attempting core change produces a renewed liability of newness by robbing an organization's history of survival value. Attempting change in core features lowers an organization's perfor­ mance reliability and accountability back to that of a new organization by destroying or rendering obsolete established routines and competencies and by disrupting relations with important environmental actors. It also undermines an organization's acquired legitimacy by modifying its visible mission. Since organizational stake­ holders favor organizations that exhibit reliable performance and accountability for their actions, Hannan and Freeman ( 1 984: 1 60) conclude that, frequently, attempts to change core features to promote survival - even those that might eventually reduce the risk of failure by better aligning the organization with its environment expose organizations to a short-run increased risk of failure. Thus, structural inertia theory predicts that organizations may often fail as a direct result of their attempts to survive. In addition to their effects on reproducibility and inertia, organizational age and size also both affect the likelihood of surviving the short-run shock of a core change attempt. Because their internal structures and routines are more institutionalized and their external linkages are better established, older organizations are especially likely to experience disruption as a result of core change ( 1 984: 1 57). In contrast, larger organizations, although less likely to attempt core changes in the first place, are less likely to die during a core change attempt ( 1 984: 1 59). Large size can buffer organizations from the disruptive effects of core change by, for example, helping to maintain both old and new ways of doing things during the transition period or to overcome short-term deprivations and competitive challenges that accompany the change attempt. If an organization manages to survive the short-run shock of a core change, Hannan and Freeman ( 1 984: 1 6 1 ) predict the risk of failure

ORGANIZA TIONAL ECOL O G Y will decline over time a s performance reliability is re-established, external relationships are restabilized, and organizational legitimacy is reaffirmed. However, the rate of decline in the failure rate after a core change is not specified by the structural inertia model. If the rate of decline in the death rate subsequent to the change continues at a rate identical to that before the change, the organization will face the short-term risk of change without any long-term benefit. If the rate of decline in the death rate following the change is slower than before, the organization will increase both its short-term and its long­ term risk of failure. If, however, the rate of decline is faster than the original rate of decline, the organization will benefit in the long run from taking on the short-term risks of change. Thus, although structural inertia theory views core change as disruptive in the short run, it may, ultimately, be adaptive if the organization manages to overcome the hazards associated with the initial disruption. Thus, structural inertia theory frames the question of whether organizational change occurs at the population level or at the level of individual organizations as an issue of the rate of change of organizations relative to the rate of change in the environment. Organizations may be unable to respond to environmental change either because they are unwilling or unable to change or because they fai l prior to the realization of their change efforts.

Tests of Structural Inertia Theory Age and Size Dependence in Rates of Change

Tests of age and size dependence in rates of organizational change are presented in Table 9. The findings are mixed and, overall, appear to offer little support for structural inertia theory's predictions. In their review of organizational ecology, Singh and Lumsden ( 1 990: 1 82) use the core-periphery distinction to interpret the mixed findings available to them. They speculate that rates of core feature change decrease with age, while rates of peripheral feature change increase with age. Unfortunately, this distinction does not help account for the mixed age (and size) dependence findings in Table 9. For example, diversification - the development of new pro­ ducts or services, often for new clients and frequently requiring implementation of new administrative, production, or distribution tech­ nologies (Haveman 1 993a) - is one core change that has been studied across multiple popula­ tions. Unfortunately, Table 9 reveals little evi­ dence that diversification is related negatively to either age or size.

95

Is structural inertia theory wrong? In contrast to structural inertia arguments, some theoretical views suggest that organizations become more fluid with age (Singh et al. 1 988). Although selection processes favor organizations that are fit with their environment, the match between organizations and their environments is constantly eroding as managerial bounded rationality, informational constraints, and inertial pressures prevent organizations from keeping pace with constantly changing environ­ ments. Thus, 'through a cumulative history of having been alive, the stresses and strains ofliving through multiple environmental changes cumu­ late in organizations, increasing the pressure on organizations to change' ( 1 988: 6). Some theoretical views also support the idea that larger organizations are more fluid. Internal complexity, differentiation, specialization, and decentralization, all features of large organiza­ tions, have each been associated with the adoption of innovations (Haveman 1 993a). The slack resources available to larger organizations may enable them to initiate change in response to environmental change (Cyert and March 1 963). Greater size relative to other actors also increases market power (Bain 1 956), lowering barriers to entry stemming from scale economies and reducing external political considerations (Pfeffer and Salancik 1 978). Age and size estimates in Table 9 support fluidity and inertia predictions with approxi­ mately equal frequency. However there are good reasons to doubt some of the fluidity findings. Most studies that find evidence of fluidity include left-censored organizations. Because left-cen­ sored organizations, founded before the observa­ tion period begins, are not observed when they are youngest and smallest, including these organizations can lead to an underestimation of rates of change at younger ages and smaller sizes. Moreover, if large organizations are buffered by their resources from the risks of change, support for the fluidity of size may reflect sample selection bias resulting from right censoring: small organizations are not observed changing because they fail prior to the realization of their efforts. Fluidity of Age and Size

Repetitive Momentum Although Hannan and Freeman ( 1 984) do not include prior changes in their theoretical model, Amburgey and his colleagues (Amburgey and Kelly 1 985; Ambur­ gey et al. 1 993; Amburgey and Miner 1 992; Kelly and Amburgey 1 99 1 ) suggest a complete under­ standing of organizational change requires consideration of an organization's history of changes. From an organizational learning per­ spective, making a change furnishes an organiza­ tion with the opportunity to routinize the change (Levitt and March 1 988; Nelson and Winter

STUD YING ORGANIZA TION

96 Table 9

Rate of organizational change studies

Population

Type of change

US business periodicals, 1 774- 1 865

Ownership Editor Name Layout Content

Voluntary social service organizations, 1 970-82

Name Sponsor Location Service area Goals Client groups Service conditions Chief executive Structure

Silicon Valley Change in initial strategy semiconductor producers2

No. of prior Age l Size changes

0

0 0 0 0 0

+

+

0

0 0 0 0 0 0

+

Time since last change

References Amburgey and Kelly 1 985

0

na na na na na na na na na na na na na na

Singh et al. 1 988; 1 99 1 : Tucker et al. 1 990b

+

0 +

+

0

na na na na na na na na na

+

na

na

na

Boeker 1 989

+ +

+ 0 0 +

+

US medical diagnostic imaging firms, 1 959-88

Entry to emerging subfield

na

0

na

na

Mitchell 1 989

Metro Toronto day care centers , 1 97 1 -87

Specialist to generalist Generalist to specialist

+ +/- 0

na na

na na

Baum 1 990a

US health maintenance organizations2

For-profit to nonprofit

+

0

na

na

Ginsberg and Buchholtz 1 990

US airlines, 1 962-85

Business-level specialism Business-level general ism Corporate-level specialism Corporate-level generalism

0

0 0 0

+ + + +

na na na na

Kelly and Amburgey 1 99 1 ; see also Kelly 1 988

Gasoline stations, 1 959-88

Domain enlargement Domain contraction Niche migration

0 na 0 na +/- na

na na na

0

Usher 1 99 1

California wineries, 1 946-84

Brand portfolio Product line Land ownership status

0

+

0

0

Product-extension mergers Conglomerate mergers Horizontal mergers Vertical integration Product market diversification Structural decentralization

na na na na na na

0 0 0 0

Fortune 500 companies, 1 949-77

Finnish newspapers, 1 77 1 - 1 963

Content Publication frequency

State bar associations, 1 9 1 8-50

Unification attempt

Private liberal arts colleges, 1 972-86

Change to coed Add graduate program Add business program Related acquisition Unrelated acquisition

Bank holding companies, 1 956-88

0

+ + +

+

+

+

+

na 0 0 na na na na 0

Delacroix and Swaminathan 1991 Amburgey and Miner 1 992; Amburgey and Dacin 1 994

0 na na

+ +

Amburgey et al. 1 993; Miner et al. 1 990

na

na

Halliday et al. 1 993

+

+

na na na

Zajac and Kraatz 1 993

0

na na na

0

na na

+ +

0

+

0

Ginsberg and Baum 1 994

97

ORGANIZA TIONAL ECOL O G Y Table 9

(continued) No. of prior Age l Size changes

Time since last change

Population

Type of change

California S&Ls, 1 977-87

Real estate (entry rates) Nonresidential mortgages Mortgage-backed securities Consumer lending Commercial lending Service companies

0 0 0 0 0

+ 0 0 0 0 0

na na na na na na

na na na na na na

Haveman 1 994; see also Haveman 1 992; 1993a; 1 993b

US trade associations, 1 900-80

Change in organizing domain or goals

0/0

0

na

na

Aldrich et al. 1 994

California airlines, 1 979-84

Route entry Route exit

+ +

na na

na na

Baum and Korn 1 996

Metro Toronto day care centers, 1 97 1 -89

Market entry Market exit

+ 0

0

0

+ 0

Baum and Singh 1 996

I 2

References

X/ Y gives the signs of significant (p<0.05) linear and square terms, respectively, when estimated. Observation period dates not given.

1 982). Each time an organization engages in a particular kind of change it increases its competency at that change. The more experi­ enced an organization becomes with a particular change, the more likely it is to repeat the change - because it knows how to make it. If a particular change becomes causally linked with success in the minds of organizational decision-makers irrespective of whether such a link in fact exists reinforcement effects will make repetition even more likely. Thus, once change is initiated, the change process itself may become routinized and subject to inertial forces. This creates repetitive momentum, that is, the tendency to maintain direction and emphasis of prior actions in current behavior (Miller and Friesen 1 980). Experience with change of a particular type is therefore predicted to increase the likelihood that the change will be repeated in the future. To reconcile the idea that organizational change is propelled by repetitive momentum with evidence that organizations move from periods of change to periods of inactivity, Amburgey et al. ( 1 993) propose that effects of prior change are dynamic. Since organizational search processes begin with the most recently utilized routines (Cyert and March 1 963), the likelihood of repeating particular changes should be highest immediately after their occurrence, but decline as time since the changes were last made increases. Combined, the main and dynamic effects of prior change imply that the likelihood of repeating a particular change jumps immediately after a change of that type, the size of the jump increasing after each additional change, but declines with increases in the time since that type of change last occurred.

Support for repetitive momentum in organiza­ tional change is strong: among the estimates in Table 9, rates of change increase with the number of prior changes of the same type in eighteen of twenty-four tests. Estimates for the dynamic effect, however, are more mixed. Notably, studies that control for one or both prior change effects account for most of the support for structural inertia theory: nine of twelve negative age coefficients and seven of ten negative size coefficients occur in these studies. Thus, support for the fluidity of age and size may reflect a specification bias: older and larger organizations may be more likely to change not because they are older and larger but because they have accumulated experience with change. Overall, these findings suggest strongly the need for a broader view of inertial forces in organiza­ tions - one that includes momentum in the change process as well as inertia. Although addressing left-censoring, right­ censoring, and specification bias issues can im­ prove our understanding of organization-level change processes incrementally, larger gains are possible if researchers begin to test the under­ lying arguments directly. Because age and size coefficients reveal little about the underlying organizational processes of interest, we still know very little about how age and size affect rates of change, or the conditions under which fluidity, inertia, and momentum will predomi­ nate. To learn what is really going on, studies using more direct measures of the underlying organizational processes are needed. Fluidity and inertia arguments are not necessarily com­ peting, they can be complementary - indeed, fluidity of aging arguments rely in part on inertia

98

STUD YING ORGA NIZA TION

to create a gap between organizations and environments - and the underlying relationships they predict can potentially exist simultaneously. Organizational Change and Failure

While ecological research indicates that inertia and momentum often constrain organizational change, this is, of course, not necessarily harmful: in addition to promoting performance reliability and accountability, in an uncertain environment inertia and momentum can keep organizations from responding too quickly and frequently to environmental changes. But whether or not inertia and momentum are harmful ultimately depends on the hazardous­ ness of organizational change. Table 1 0 presents findings of studies investi­ gating the survival consequences of organiza­ tional change. Organizations in the study populations do not necessarily fail as a result of their efforts to change - but they do not necessarily improve their organizational survival chances either. Do organizations operate in a world so uncertain that adaptive efforts turn out to be essentially random with respect to future value (Hannan and Freeman 1 984: I SO)? Unfor­ tunately, only six studies in Table 1 0 separate short-run and long-run effects of change, and only three of these also test for age and/or size variation in the disruptive effects of change. Any conclusions drawn at this point would thus be premature. It is notable, however, that support for structural inertia theory predictions is strong in the three most fully specified studies (Ambur­ gey et al. 1 993; Baum and Singh 1 996; Haveman 1 993c), for all but one of the changes examined (i.e. market entries by day care centers). Future Directions

In addition to the need for more research on the adaptiveness of organizational change that specifies structural inertia theory predictions fully, future research may also benefit by considering the following issues. Left-censored organ­ izations, founded before the start of the observation period, are not observed when they are youngest and smallest, and, according to structural inertia theory, when they are both most likely to change and most vulnerable to the hazards of change. Including these organizations in the analysis can lead to underestimation of the overall hazard of change as well as variation in the hazard for organizations of different ages and sizes. Moreover, if core organizational change is as perilous in the short term as structural inertia arguments assert, unless data are fine-grained, core changes may frequently not be observed

Left and Right Censoring

because organizations fail prior to the realization of their efforts. For example, if some core changes prove fatal within a year, these deadliest changes will not be detected in the yearly data typically available. This right-censoring problem lowers estimates of the hazardousness of change because the most hazardous changes are not identified in the analysis. Organizational Performance Although poor and superior performing organizations are likely to experience different risks of failure as well as rates and kinds of change (Hambrick and D'Aveni 1 988; Haveman 1 992; 1 993a; 1 993b; 1 994), ecological analyses of the effects of change on organizational failure do not typically include measures of ongoing organizational performance. This creates two problems. First, cause and effect logic is blurred because some changes or types of change are symptoms of organizational decline rather than causes of failure. Second, model estimates are prone to specification bias: if rates of organizational change and failure are both influenced by recent performance, a spurious link between change and failure will be observed if prior performance is not controlled. Although it is unlikely that organization-specific indicators of performance can be obtained for entire popula­ tions over time, one way to cope with this problem is to use organizational growth and decline as a proxy performance measure (Baum 1 990a; Baum and Singh 1 996; Haveman 1 993c; Scott 1 992: 342-62). Shields A closely related issue is that all organizations are assumed to be equally susceptible to the effects of change on failure. Hannan and Freeman ( 1 984) have identified age and size as factors that alter the exposure of organizations to the liabilities of change. However, to date, only three studies (see Table 1 0) have accounted for this variability (Amburgey et al. 1 993; Baum and Singh 1 996; Haveman 1 993c). Institutional linkages (i.e. ties to important state and community institutions) may also provide such a transformational shield by conferring extra resources and legitimacy on organizations (Miner et al. 1 990; Baum and Oliver 1 99 1 ). Like unmeasured performance, unmeasured variation in susceptibility to the risks of change can cause specification bias in model estimates. Transformational

The ecological emphasis on change processes has resulted in less attention being given by ecological researchers to change content. Although broad categories of change are differentiated according to their content (see Tables 9 and 1 0), all instances of a particular

Within-Type Variation

ORGANIZA TIONAL ECOLOG Y Table 1 0

99

Organizational change and failure studies

Population

Type of change

Prior Time since Change Change References change l last change x age x size

US newspapers, 1 800- 1 975

Editor

+

0

na

na

Carroll 1984b

US business periodicals, 1 774- 1 865

Ownership Editor Name Layout Content

+ 0 0 0 0

na na na na na

na na na na na

na na na na na

Amburgey and Kelly 1 985

Voluntary social service organizations, 1 970-82

Sponsor Location Service area Goals Client groups Chief executive Structure

+

0

na na na na na na na

na na na na na na na

Singh et al. 1 986

+ 0 +

na na na na na na na

US airlines, 1 962-85

Business-level specialism Business-level generalism Corporate-level specialism Corporate-level generalism Peripheral change

0 0 0 0 0

na na na na na

na na na na na

na na na na na

Kelly and Amburgey 1 99 1 ; see also Kelly 1 988

Gasoline stations, 1 959-88

Domain enlargement or contraction

0

+

na

na

Usher 1 99 1

California wineries, 1 946-84

Brand portfolio increase Brand portfolio decrease Prod uct line increase Product line decrease Land acquisition Land divestment

0 0

0 0 0 0 0 0

na na na na na na

na na na na na na

Delacroix and Swaminathan 1 99 1 ; see also Swaminathan and Delacroix 1 99 1

Content Frequency Layout Location Name

+ + 0 0 +

+ +

Amburgey et al. 1 990; 1 993

+

na na na na na

na na na na na na na na

na na na na na na na na

Haveman 1 992

0 0

na na

Haveman 1 993c

na

na

na

Mitchell and Singh 1 993

na

na

na

Finnish newspapers, 1 774-1963

California S&Ls, 1 977-87

0 0

Residential mortgages Real estate (+ invest) Nonresidential mortgages Mortgage-backed securities Cash and investment securities Consumer lending Commercial lending Service companies

0 0 0

Iowa telephone companies, 1 900- 1 7

Presidential succession Managerial succession

+ +

US medical diagnostic imaging firms, 1 954-89

Expand and survive in new subfield Expand and exit subfield

+

Metro Toronto day care centers, 1 9 7 1 -87

Market entry Market exit

0 +

I

X gives the signs of significant (p<0.05) coefficients.

0 0

+ +

na na na na na na na na

0

+ +

/ Baum and Singh 1 996

1 00

STUD YING ORGANIZA TION

category of change are typically considered equivalent. While this assumption may provide a reasonable starting approximation, for many kinds of change, there may be significant within­ type differences with substantial survival impli­ cations. One such difference is within-type variation in the effect of changes on the intensity of competition (Baum and Singh 1 996). For example, depending on how an organization's specific actions alter the size of its domain relative to the number of organizations competing over its domain, the organization's diversification activities can increase, decrease, or leave unchanged the intensity of competition the organization faces. Baum and Singh ( 1 996) show that the effects of market domain changes (both expansion and contraction) on the survival of day care centers depend on how the changes affect the intensity of competition: changes that lower the intensity of competition improve organizational survival chances, while those that increase the intensity of competition lower survival chances. Thus, incorporating within­ type variation in the effects of change may help account for some earlier mixed results in studies of the adaptive consequences of organizational change.

dows of opportunity to examine the links between adaptation and selection perspectives on organizational change more closely ( Levinthal 1 994; McKelvey 1 994). Too few analyses of organizational-level change exploit such natural experiments (for an exception, see Ginsberg and Buchholtz 1 990). As Hannan and Freeman ( 1 977: 930) point out, a full treatment of organization-environ­ ment relations must cover both adaptation and selection. NOlI" is the time to expand the boundaries of ecological and adaptationist per­ spectives to create a combined approach that sees processes of adaptation and selection as com­ plementary and interacting. Expanding the study of organizational change in this way will create a framework that takes seriously the occurrence of selection processes and combines it with the systematic study of organization-level changes that may, under certain conditions, be adaptive.

Reconciling Adaptation and Selection

ll"hat does organi::ational ecology contribute to progress in organi::ation studies? One way to

Although adaptationist and ecological views are frequently presented as mutually exclusive alternatives with very different implications for organization studies, these views are not funda­ mentally incompatible. While ecological theory emphasizes the predominance of selection over adaptation, the complementarity of adaptive and ecological effects is clearly reflected in the research reviewed here. Research in Tables 8 and 9 does not appear to support strong ecological arguments: organizations change frequently in response to environmental changes, and often without any harmful effects. Moreover, rates of change are often not constrained by age and size as predicted by structural inertia theory. At the same time, however, in contrast to a strong adaptation view, survival consequences of change appear more consistent with random groping than calculated strategic action (Baum and Singh 1 996; Delacroix and Swaminathan 1 99 1 ). Taken together, the findings suggest a complex relationship between adaptation and selection: because organizational change can affect organizational failure, the population­ level result of combined adaptation and selection is not the simple aggregate of each process separately. Studying the transformation of organizational populations during periods of rapid environmental change may provide win-

answer this question is to examine the problems organizational ecology solves ( Lauden 1 984; Tucker 1 994). According to Lauden ( 1 984: 1 5), scientific theories must solve two kinds of problems: ( I ) empirical problems, which are substantive questions about the objects (i.e. organizations) that constitute the domain of inquiry; and (2) conceptual problems, which include questions about internal logical consis­ tency and conceptual ambiguity of theories advanced to solve empirical problems, as well as the methodological soundness of tests of theoretical arguments. From this perspective, organizational ecology's contribution to pro­ gress can be defined in terms of its capacity to accumulate solved empirical problems while minimizing the scope of unsolved empirical problems and conceptual problems. As revealed in this review, the primary emphasis of organizational ecology is the development of theoretical explanations for specific empirical problems. Although organiza­ tional ecology has advanced knowledge about a wide range of empirical problems, few (if any) of these can be considered solved conclusively. Of course, other organization studies subdisciplines have not solved these problems either. From a conceptual standpoint, while examples of inter­ nal logical inconsistencies are uncommon in

PROGRESS, PROBLEMS, AND FUTURE D IRECTIONS

As this review shows, organizational ecology is a vital subdiscipline within organization studies, with research proliferating and increasing in methodological sophistication constantly. But

ORGANIZA TIONA L ECOL O G Y ecological theory (but see Young 1 988), instances of conceptual ambiguity abound. Questions are frequently raised about the meaning and defini­ tion of central concepts such as organization, population, founding, failure, and legitimacy (Astley 1 985; Carroll 1 984a; Rao 1 993; 1 994; McKelvey 1 982; Young 1 988). To be fair, these ambiguities are not unique to organizational ecology, but endemic to organization studies (Tucker 1 994). Another recurrent source of conceptual problems is the methodological soundness of tests of theoretical arguments. One area of frequent debate is the appropriate­ ness of inferring processes of legitimation from population density estimates instead of measur­ ing the underlying construct more directly (Baum and Powell 1 995; Delacroix and Rao 1 994; Hannan and Carroll 1 992; Zucker 1 989). In part, this problem stems from organizational ecology's use of large-scale, historical databases in which, by necessity, measures are frequently removed from concepts. Research on age dependence, and to a lesser degree size dependence, also suffer from this problem. Although unsolved empirical problems and conceptual problems are not uncommon in new and emerging areas of scientific inquiry, the longer these problems - especially conceptual problems - remain unresolved, the greater their importance becomes in debates about the veracity of the theory that generated it (Lauden 1 984: 64-6). What produces organizational ecology's problems? Although organizational ecologists would like their theories to maximize generality across organizational populations, realism of context, and precision in measurement of variables, in fact, no theory can be general, precise, and realistic all at the same time (McGrath 1 982; Puccia and Levins 1 985; Singh 1 993). Theories must therefore sacrifice on some dimensions to maximize others. For example, realistic theories may apply to only a limited domain, while general theories may be inaccu­ rate or misleading for specific applications. Organizational ecologists appear to favor a trade-off of precision and realism for generality. For example, precision and realism are clearly sacrificed for generality in density dependence theory and structural inertia theory. This is less true of niche-width theory and the resource­ partitioning model. On the one hand, this research strategy produces organizational ecology's main strength: the accumulation of a wealth of comparable empirical evidence from diverse organizational settings on a range of empirical problems unparalleled in organization studies. On the other hand, it also creates a major weakness: the large pool of coefficients for indirect measures, such as age, size, and population density, reveals

101

little about theoretical explanations designed to account for the empirical problems of interest. This creates conceptual problems by fostering skepticism regarding the veracity of inferred underlying processes because conforming find­ ings cannot be interpreted precisely, and creates unsolved empirical problems by making it difficult to account for nonconforming findings on theoretical grounds. Thus, the sacrifice of contextual realism and measurement precision for generality may under­ lie several key problems in organizational ecology. Consequently, by sacrificing some generality for more precision and realism, organizational ecologists may be able to begin resolving some of these problems. Research that adopts this problem-solving strategy has already contributed to the literature in at least three ways. First, elaborations of the density depen­ dence model (see Table 5) all help increase either measurement precision, for example, by measur­ ing underlying processes of competition and legitimation either differently or more directly (Baum and Oliver 1 992; Baum and Singh 1 994b; 1 994c), or contextual realism, for example, by incorporating population-specific features such as organizational size distributions or market niche structures into the model (Barnett and Amburgey 1 990; Baum and Mezias 1 992; Baum and Singh 1 994b; 1 994c). Second, ecological analyses that incorporate institutional and technological processes help improve contextual realism by linking ecological processes in organizational populations to historical pro­ cesses in the surrounding environment (Barnett 1 990; Barnett and Carroll 1 993; Tucker et al. 1 990a; Singh et al. 1 9 9 1 ) . Third, research emphasizing greater measurement precision sheds light on the underlying causes of age and size dependence in organizational failure rates (Singh et al. 1 986; Baum and Oliver 1 99 1 ). More robust organization-level measures are necessary to establish more firmly the micro-foundations of ecological theory. My view is that we now have more than enough indirect tests of the general theories and that problem solving and progress in organiza­ tional ecology can be enhanced by a move toward greater precision and realism in theory and research. This means getting closer to research problems. Proximity can add realism by revealing important aspects of the phenomena that distanced ecological researchers typically cannot detect. This also means focusing more on anomalies. Results that are inconsistent with each other or with theoretical explanations are common in organizational ecology. Understand­ ing these anomalies is crucial to specifying the conditions under which various predictions hold and increasing precision. It also means asking

STUD YING ORGANIZA TION

1 02

new kinds of research questions that develop links with other research streams in organization theory and tie together micro and macro processes. One such linkage on which work has already begun is specification of the impacts of ecological dynamics of organizations on jobs and people (Haveman and Cohen 1 994; Korn and Baum 1 994). Lastly, this means letting research problems drive the choice of research design and methodology rather than vice versa. For some specific questions, an organizational history will be more appropriate than an entire population's history. Organizational ecologists need to start designing studies and using methods that best enable research questions to be answered. In some cases, this may require the use of multiple methods - qu�litative as well as quantitative. Altering the ecological research orientation in these ways may help realize more of the great potential contribution of organizational ecology to theory and research in organization studies, as well as to practice in public policy, management, and entrepreneurship.

NOTES For helpful discussions, conversations, and comments, I would like to thank Howard Aldrich, Terry Amburgey, Jack Brittain, Charles Fombrun, Raghu Garud, Heather Haveman, Kathy Hick, Paul Ingram, Helaine Korn, Walter Nord, Jim Ranger-Moore, Woody Powell, Huggy Rao, Lori Rosenkopf, Kaye Schoon­ hoven, litendra Singh, Bill Starbuck, and Anand Swaminathan. This chapter was written, in part, while the author was Associate Professor of Management at the Stern School of Business, New York University. I I am grateful to lim Ranger-Moore for the use of the heading for this section, which is the title of his 1991 manuscript.

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transformation', Administrative Science Quarterly, 37: 48-75. Haveman, Heather A. ( l 993a) 'Organizational size and change: diversification in the savings and loan industry after deregulation', Administrative Science Quarterly, 38: 20-50. Haveman, Heather A. ( 1 993b) 'Follow the leader: mimetic isomorphism and entry into new markets', Administrative Science Quarterly, 38: 593-627. Haveman, Heather A. ( l 993c) 'Ghosts of managers past: managerial succession and organizational mortality', A cademy of Management Journal, 36: 864-8 1 . Haveman, Heather A. ( 1 994) 'The ecological dynamics of organizational change: density and mass depen­ dence in rates of entry into new markets', in J.A.C. Baum and J. V. Singh (eds), Evolutionary Dynamics of Organizations. New York: Oxford University Press. pp. 1 52-66. Haveman, Heather A. and Cohen, Lisa E. ( 1 994) 'The ecological dynamics of careers: the impact of organizational founding, dissolution, and merger on job mobility', American Journal of Sociology, 1 00: 1 04-52. Hawley, Amos H. ( 1 950) Human Ecology: A Theor), of Community Structure. New York: Ronald. Henderson, Rebecca M. and Clark, Kim B. ( 1 990) 'Architectural innovation: the reconfiguration of existing product technologies and failure of estab­ lished firms', Administrative Science Quarterly, 35: 9-30. Herriott, Scott R. ( 1 987) 'Fitness-set theory in the population ecology of organizations: comment on Freeman and Hannan', A merican Journal of Sociology, 92: 1 2 1 0- 14. Hybels, Ralph C. ( 1994) 'Legitimation, population density, and founding rates: the institutionalization of commercial biotechnology in the US, 1 97 1 -89'. Unpublished PhD dissertation, Cornell University. Hybels, Ralph C., Ryan, Alan R. and Barley, Stephen R. ( 1 994) 'Alliances, legitimation, and founding rates in the U.S. biotechnology field, 1 97 1 - 1 989'. Paper presented at the Academy of Management National Meetings, Dallas, TX. Ingram, Paul L. ( 1 993) 'Old, tired, and ready to die: the age dependence of organizational mortality recon­ sidered'. Paper presented at the Academy of Management Meetings, Atlanta, GA. Ingram, Paul L. ( 1 994) 'Endogenizing environmental change: the evolution of hotel chains, 1 896- 1 980'. Unpublished manuscript, Johnson Graduate School of Management, Cornell University. Katz, Jerome and Gartner, William B. ( 1988) 'Proper­ ties of emerging organizations', A cademy of Management Review, 1 3: 429-41 . Kelly, Dawn ( 1 988) 'Organizational transformation and failure in the US airline industry, 1 962- 1 985'. Unpublished PhD dissertation, Graduate School of Business, Northwestern University. Kelly, Dawn and Amburgey, Terry L. ( I 99 1 )

'Organizational inertia and momentum: a dynamic model of strategic change', A cademy of Management Journal, 34: 591-612. Korn, Helaine J. and Baum, Joel A.C. ( 1 994) 'Com­ munity ecology and employment dynamics: a study of large Canadian firms', Social Forces, 73: 1 -32. Lauden, Larry ( 1 984) Progress and its Problems. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Lawrence, Paul R. and Lorsch, Jay W. ( 1 967) Organizations and Environments: Managing Differ­ entiation and Integration. Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press. Levins, Richard ( 1 968) Evolution in Changing Environ­ ments. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Levinthal, Daniel A. ( l 99 1 a) 'Random walks and organizational mortality', A dministrative Science Quarterly, 36: 397-420. Levinthal, Daniel A. ( 1 991 b) 'Organizational adapta­ tion and environmental selection - interrelated processes of change', Organization Science, 2: 140-5. Levinthal, Daniel A. ( 1 994) 'Surviving Schumpeterian environments: an evolutionary perspective', in J.A.C. Baum and J.V. Singh (eds), Evolutionary Dynamics of Organizations. New York: Oxford University Press. pp. 1 67-78. Levitt, Barbara and March, James G. ( 1 988) 'Organiza­ tional learning', Annual Review of Sociology, 1 4: 3 19-40. Lomi, Alessandro ( 1 995) The ecology of organiza­ tional founding: location dependence and unobserved heterogeneity', Administrative Science Quarterly, 40: 1 1 1 -44. Loree, David W. ( 1 993) 'Organizational mortality: the price paid for institutional linkages in the semi­ conductor industry'. Paper presented at the Academy of Management Meetings, Atlanta, GA. Lumsden, Charles J. and Singh, Jitendra V. ( 1 990) The dynamics of organizational speciation', in J.V. Singh (ed.), Organizational Evolution: New Directions. Newbury Park, CA: Sage. pp. 1 45-63. McGee, John and Thomas, Howard ( 1 986) 'Strategic groups: theory, research, and taxonomy', Strategic Management Journal, 7: 1 4 1 -60. McGrath, Joseph E. ( 1 982) 'Dilemmatics: the study of research choices and dilemmas', in J.E. McGrath, J. Martin and R.A. Kulka (eds), Judgement Calls in Research. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage. pp. 69- 1 02. McKelvey, Bill ( 1 982) Organizational Systematics. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. McKelvey, Bill ( 1 994) 'Evolution and organizational science', in J.A.C. Baum and J.V. Singh (eds), Evolutionary Dynamics of Organizations. New York: Oxford University Press. pp. 3 1 4-26. McPherson, J. Miller ( 1 983) 'An ecology of affiliation', American Sociological Review, 48: 5 1 9-32. Meyer, John W. and Rowan, Brian ( 1 977) 'Institution­ alized organizations: forn1al structure as myth and ceremony', American Journal of Sociology, 83: 34063. Meyer, Marshall W. ( 1 994) 'Turning evolution inside

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is older wiser? Age dependence in organizational death rates'. Unpublished manuscript, Department of Sociology, University of Arizona. Ranger-Moore, James, Banaszak-Holl, Jane J. and Hannan, Michael T. ( 1 9 9 1 ) 'Density-dependent dynamics in regulated industries: founding rates of banks and life insurance companies', Administrative Science Quarterly, 36: 36-65. Rao, Hayagreeva ( 1 993) 'An ecology of emerging organizations: incorporation and operational startup in the American automobile industry, 1 893- 1 9 1 5'. Unpublished manuscript, Emory Busi­ ness School, Emory University. Rao, Hayagreeva ( 1 994) The social construction of reputation: certification contests, legitimation and the survival of organizations in the American automobile industry, 1 895- 1 9 1 2', Strategic Manage­ ment Journal, 1 5(S2): 29-44. Rao, Hayagreeva and Neilsen, Eric H. ( 1 992) 'An ecology of agency arrangements: mortality of savings and loan associations, 1 960- 1 987', Administrative Science Quarterly, 37: 448-70. Romanelli, Elaine ( 1 99 1 ) 'The evolution of new organizational forms', A nnual Review of Sociology, 1 7 : 79- 1 03. Schumpeter, Joseph A. ( 1934) The Theory of Economic Development. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Schumpeter, Joseph A. ( 1 950) Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, 3rd edn. New York: Harper and Row. Scott, W. Richard ( 1992) Organizations: Rational, Natural, and Open Systems, 3rd edn. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Scott, W. Richard and Meyer, John W. ( 1 983) 'The organization of societal sectors', in J.W. Meyer and W.R. Scott (eds), Organizational Environments: Ritual and Rationality. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage. pp. 1 - 1 6. Singh, Jitendra V. ( 1 993) 'Review essay: density dependence theory - current issues, future promise', American Journal of Sociology, 99: 464-73. Singh, Jitendra V. and Lumsden, Charles J. ( 1 990) 'Theory and research in organizational ecology', A nnual Review of Sociology, 16: 1 6 1-95. Palo Alto, CA: Annual Reviews. Singh, Jitendra V., House, Robert J. and Tucker, David J. ( 1 986) 'Organizational change and organizational mortality', Administrative Science Quarter/y, 3 1 : 587-6 1 1 . Singh, Jitendra V., Tucker, David J . and House, Robert J. ( 1 986) 'Organizational legitimacy and the liability of newness', Administrative Science Quarterly, 3 1 : 1 7 1 -93. Singh, Jitendra V., Tucker, David J. and Meinhard, Agnes G. ( 1 988) 'Are voluntary social service organizations structurally inert? Exploring an assumption in organizational ecology'. Paper presented at Academy of Management Meeting, Anaheim, CA.

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4 Organizational Economics: Understanding the Relationship between Organizations and Economic Analysis J A Y B. B A R N E Y A N D WI L L I A M H E S T E R L Y

The field of organizational economics can be defined in a variety of ways. Some have argued that organizational economics is distinguished from other types of organizational analysis by its reliance on equilibrium analysis, assumptions of profit maximizing managers, and the use of abstract assumptions and models. In fact, some organizational economists do engage in these kinds of analyses and build models of organiza­ tions using these kinds of tools. However, not all organizational economists apply all the tools, all the time. For example, both evolutionary economic theory (Nelson and Winter 1 982) and Austrian economics (Jacobson 1 992) are expli­ citly non-equilibrium in nature. Models of risk shifting (Arrow 1 985), decision-making (March and Simon 1 958), and transaction economics (Williamson 1 97 5 ) do not assume perfect rationality. Agency theory (Jensen and Meckling 1 976), and theories of tacit collusion (Tirole 1 989) and strategic alliances (Kogut 1 988) do not assume that all managers, all the time, adopt profit maximizing objectives in their decision­ making. Finally, a great deal of organizational economics is neither very mathematical nor highly technical - although questions of how abstract a model is are usually matters of taste. Indeed, organizational economics, as a way of thinking about organization analysis, seems to have only two things in common. The first is an abiding interest in organizations, or firms (as economists usually call organizations). Unlike most economists, who are interested in the struc­ ture, functioning, and implications of markets,

organizational economists are interested in the structure, functioning, and implications of firms. Second, most organizational economists have an unflagging interest in the relationship between competition and organizations. Even organiza­ tional economists that study organizations under conditions of monopoly (where, presumably, there is relatively little competition) tend to focus on competitive processes that increase competi­ tion for monopolists over time (see the discus­ sion of 'contestable market theory' below). For organizational economists, organizations exist in 'seething caldrons' of competition, where other firms, individuals, institutions, and governments are all seeking to obtain some part of the success that a particular firm may enjoy. It is interesting to note that other forms of organizational analysis share this interest in organizations and competition. For example, the population ecology model (Hannan and Free­ man 1 977), in organization theory, has a well developed notion of competition, although (some might argue) a somewhat underdeveloped appreciation for the complexity of modern firms. Resource dependence theory discusses organiza­ tional responses to more or less munificent environments (Pfeffer and Salancik 1 978). Even institutional theory (DiMaggio and Powell 1 983) discusses the importance of legitimacy for an organization's survival. The probability of organizational survival is also of major interest in organizational economics. Organizational economics is hardly divorced from this broader organizational literature.

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Incidentally, the focus on competitIOn in organizational economics does not preclude discussions of cooperation within and between firms. As will be discussed later, intra-firm cooperation is one of the core issues in agency theory, and inter-firm cooperation (in the form of tacit collusion or strategic alliances) is an important topic in organizational economics as well. However, the role of cooperation in the Organizational Economic models is generally to enable a firm to more effectively respond to its competitive threats (Kogut 1 988). This twin focus on organizations, their origins and consequences, and on competition has gener­ ated a very large and ever growing literature. This huge literature can be conveniently divided into four major streams, each stream focusing on a slightly different, though related, central research question. These four research streams and their associated research questions are: ( I ) transactions cost economics (why do organizations exist?), (2) agency theory (do those associated with a firm agree about how it should be managed?), (3) strategic management theory (why do some organizations outperform others?), and (4) cooperative organizational economics (how can organizations cooperate?). These four research streams, and their associated research questions, are discussed in subsequent sections of this chapter.

WHY Do ORGANIZATIONS EXIST?

This question is, in many ways, the most central to organizational economics, in particular, and to organizational analysis more generally. To many, the question, 'why do organizations exist?' may sound odd. After all, it is pretty obvious that organizations do exist. Why go to such great effort to explain the existence of such a common phenomenon? However, this question becomes important in the context of neo­ classical microeconomic theory. Classical and neo-classical theory, beginning with Adam Smith, point to the amazing ability of markets to coordinate economic production and exchange at very low cost and without government planning. Simply stated, Smith's fundamental proposition was that an economy could be coordinated by a decentralized system of prices (the 'invisible hand'). Indeed, much of economics since the publication of The Wealth of Nations has involved formalizing this proposi­ tion, identifying the necessary conditions for the effective use of the invisible hand, and designing changes in those settings where the conditions are lacking (Demsetz 1 990: 1 45). In most economics textbooks, this work is called the

theory of the firm - although the theory actually focuses exclusively on the structure and opera­ tion of markets and is unable to explain the existence of firms. Given that markets are so effective in coordinating economic exchanges, it has always been a bit of a mystery why not all exchanges are managed through markets, i.e. why economic exchanges would ever be man­ aged through firms (Coase 1 937). Remarkably, the answer to the question 'why do organizations exist?' was formulated by Ronald Coase while he was a twenty-one-year­ old student at the London School of Economics. It was Coase's great insight - published in his 1 93 7 article The nature of the firm' - that the reason organizations exist is that, sometimes, the cost of managing economic exchanges across markets is greater than the cost of managing economic exchanges within the boundaries of an organization. The cost of using the price system involves such activities as discovering what prices are, negotiating contracts, renegotiating contracts, inspections, and settling disputes. The most lasting contribution of Coase's ( 1 937) article was to place transaction costs at the center of analysis of the questions of why firms exist and to suggest that markets and organiza­ tions are alternatives for managing the same transactions. However, by Coase's ( 1 972: 63) own admission, The nature of the firm' was 'much cited and little used'. This early lack of influence stems largely from Coase's failure to operationalize his approach and his lack of precision about which transactions will be left to the market and which will be internalized within firms. Later theorists addressed these deficiencies by developing a more complete model of the costs of using a market to manage economic exchanges. This work has come to be known as transaction cost theory (TCT). The Alchian-Demsetz Approach

The first influential extension of Coase's reason­ ing emphasized measurement or metering pro­ blems as the reason firms exist (Alchian and Demsetz 1 972). Measurement problems occur as a result of team production. Team production typically involves gains from cooperation where complex production processes are involved. The members of the team can produce more working cooperatively with one another than separately. Thus, they have an incentive to cooperate. This incentive to cooperate, however, declines as the potential for shirking among team members increases. Shirking includes behaviors that range from outright cheating to merely giving less than one's best effort. While the interdependence between team members yields potentially greater

ORGANIZA TIONAL ECONOMICS production, it also makes it more difficult to assess the contribution of each individual member. With no mechanism to monitor or measure each team member's efforts, the team cannot reward members based on individual productivity. If team members know that their individual efforts are only imperfectly connected to their individual rewards, then they have an incentive to work less diligently. The team may seek another way to reward members for their efforts. One alternative is to split the income gener­ ated by the team equally among members. However, this equal sharing arrangement does not remove the incentive of team members to shirk. This incentive occurs because individuals know that the costs of any additional efforts on their part will be theirs alone, while the rewards that come from these efforts will be split among the team. Since each team member has this same incentive to shirk, team production will fall. Indeed, the possibility of shirking also may discourage high-output individuals from joining the team in the first place. When high-output individuals do join the team, they may become shirkers once they become members. The firm emerges to meet the need to monitor the efforts of those individuals that make up a team. Monitoring each individual reduces the likelihood of shirking. As individuals are assigned to monitoring roles, a hierarchy emerges. Shirking is not completely eliminated by the hierarchy, however. Because monitoring is costly, it is efficient to monitor only to the point where the marginal benefits from reduced shirking equal the marginal costs of monitoring. It is typically neither reasonable nor efficient to completely remove shirking, even when techni­ cally possible. Assigning someone the task of monitoring the performance of individuals on a team creates yet another problem. Specifically, who will monitor the monitor? As with other team members, the monitor has an incentive to shirk unless contrary incentives exist. A1chian and Demsetz's ( 1 972) solution to this problem is to have the monitor bear the cost of her shirking by giving this person the right to negotiate contracts with all team members, to monitor their productive efforts, and (most importantly) to claim any residual value created by a team, after team members receive their expected compensation. The moni­ tor then pays team members based on their individual productivity and keeps the remaining portion as income. This arrangement leaves the monitor with a strong incentive to monitor the efforts of each team member. The results are reduced incentives for shirking and increased team productivity that is shared between the team members and the monitor. In the modern

III

corporation, this ultimate 'monitor of monitors' is a firm's stockholders. Just as A1chian and Demsetz expect, stockholders have a claim on a firm's residual profits, i.e. profits that remain after all other legitimate claims on a firm have been satisfied.

Williamson's Formulation of Transaction Cost Theory

The A1chian-Demsetz approach to explaining the existence of organizations has several strengths. For example, it does explain the existence of managerial hierarchies and the ex­ istence of stockholders as a firm's residual claim­ ants. However, many organizational economists have found that A1chian and Demsetz's exclusive focus on team production obscures some important issues associated with understanding the nature of the firm. The most highly developed alternative to the Alchian and Demsetz approach can be found in the work of Oliver Williamson. Indeed, it can be said that Williamson's answers to why organizations exist are now considered to be the core of transaction cost economics. A basic assertion of Williamson's TCT is that markets and hierarchies are alternative instru­ ments for completing a set of transactions (Williamson 1975: 8). As instruments for com­ pleting a set of transactions, markets and hierarchies are often also called 'governance mechanisms'. In general, market forms of governance rely on prices, competition, and contracts to keep all parties to an exchange informed of their rights and responsibilities. Hierarchical forms of governance, on the other hand, bring parties to an exchange under the direct control of a third party (typically called 'the boss'). This authoritative third party then attempts to keep all parties to an exchange informed of their rights and responsibilities. Moreover, this third party has the right to directly resolve any conflicts that might emerge in an exchange. Williamson calls the exercise of this right 'managerial fiat'. Behavioral Assumptions

TCT rests on two essential assumptions about economic actors (be they individuals or firms) engaged in transactions: bounded rationality and opportunism. Bounded rationality means that those who engage in economic transactions are 'intendedly rational, but only limitedly so' (Simon 1 947: xxiv). Within economics, this assumption is an important departure from the traditional omniscient hyperrationality of homo economicus (Simon 1 947; Hesteriy and Zenger

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1 993). Without cognitive limits, all exchange could be conducted through planning (William­ son 1 985). People could write contracts of unlimited complexity that would specify all possible contingencies in an economic exchange (Williamson 1 975). However, given bounded rationality, complex contracting breaks down in the face of uncertainty. Economic actors simply cannot foresee all possible outcomes in an exchange relationship or formulate contractual or other responses to those (unforeseeable) eventualities. Opportunism is also a departure from the behavioral assumptions used in mainstream economics. I While traditional economics assumes simply that economic actors behave out of self-interest, TCT assumes the possibility of self-interest seeking with guile (Williamson 1 975: 26). For Williamson ( 1 985: 47), opportu­ nism includes lying, stealing, and cheating, but it more generally 'refers to the incomplete or distorted disclosure of information, especially to calculated efforts to mislead, distort, disguise, obfuscate, or otherwise confuse' partners in an exchange. TCT does not assume that all econ­ omic actors are always opportunistic. Rather, all it assumes is that some of these actors may behave opportunistically and that it is costly to distinguish those who are prone to opportunism from those who are not. The threat of oppor­ tunism is important because in a world without opportunism, all economic exchange could be done on the basis of promise. Parties in such a transaction would simply pledge at the outset to perform their part of an exchange fairly ( 1 985: 3 1 ) . Given, however, that some are prone to opportunism, people and firms must design safeguards so they will not be victimized by others. The Choice of Governance

The governance decision, as characterized In TCT, is straightforward. Economic actors will choose that form of governance (market or hierarchy) that reduces any potential exchange problems created by bounded rationality, on the one hand, and by the threat of opportunism, on the other, at the lowest cost. The governance of economic transactions is costly. However, as suggested by Adam Smith and many others, markets have lower fixed costs compared to hierarchical forms of governance. If a market form of governance enables parties to an exchange to reduce potential exchange problems created by bounded rationality and the tendency towards opportunism, then a market form of governance will be preferred over a hierarchical form of governance. However, if market govern­ ance does not solve these exchange problems.

then more costly forms of hierarchical govern­ ance may have to be employed. Put differently, if all economic actors had to worry about was minimizing the cost of governing their economic exchanges, then they would always choose market forms of govern­ ance. Market governance is the least costly way of managing economic exchanges ever devised by human beings. Alternatively, if all economic actors had to worry about was minimizing the effects of bounded rationality and opportunism on their exchanges, then they would always choose hierarchical forms of governance. In hierarchical governance, there is always a third party whose sole responsibility is to manage an exchange in ways that minimize problems created by bounded rationality and opportu­ nism. Of course, economic actors need to be concerned both about the problems created by bounded rationality and opportunism and about the cost of governing economic exchanges. When Will Bounded Rationality and Opportunism Create Exchange Problems?

Given this characterization of the governance decisions facing economic actors, it is important to understand the attributes of transactions that will make bounded rationality and opportunism problematic. While this aspect of TCT has evolved some over the years, two attributes of transactions are now widely seen as creating the most problems for economic actors in transac­ tions: uncertainty and transaction specific investment. Without uncertainty, bounded rationality is irrelevant. If parties to a transaction could anticipate precisely how this transaction will evolve over time, and how rights and responsi­ bilities in a transaction will evolve, then managing that transaction over time is very simple. All that has to be done is for parties to an exchange to write a contract that specifies all current and future states in an exchange, and the rights and responsibilities of all actors in those future states. Of course, under conditions of uncertainty, this is not possible. I n general, the greater the level of uncertainty in a transaction, the more difficult it will be to use contracts and other forms of market governance to manage that transaction, and the more likely that hierarchical forms of governance will be adopted. Under hierarchical governance, a third party can decide how unanticipated prob­ lems in a transaction can be resolved. Moreover, parties in a transaction need not anticipate what these problems might be (they cannot do so), nor do they need to anticipate what the third party will do in response to these problems (they cannot do so). Rather, all they need to do is

ORGA NIZA TIONAL ECONOMICS agree that, if such problems arise in the future, a third party will mediate and solve those problems. As important as uncertainty in a transaction is for exchange partners to choose hierarchical forms of governance, the level of transaction specific investment in a transaction is generally seen as being even more important. It is often the case that parties in a transaction will need to make investments in that transaction in order to facilitate its completion. These investments can take many forms. For example, it may be the case that parties to a transaction will need to modify some of their physical technology to expedite the exchange (e.g. a firm may have to change the height of its loading docks to accommodate another firm's trucks). In many transactions, parties may need to modify some of their operating policies and procedures to expedite the exchange (e.g. a firm may have to simplify its order entry procedures to ensure more timely delivery of critical supplies). In other transactions, individuals involved may learn the special language, the informal working style, and the business practices of transaction partners, all to facilitate a transaction. All these investments have value in the particular transaction where they were originally made. Some of these investments may have value in other transactions as well. For example, a sales person may need to learn a new word processing language in order to efficiently interact with a group of new customers who already use this language in their work. How­ ever, this word processing language may also be used by numerous other potential customers. Thus, the investment in this new language is valuable in the transaction between this sales person and her new set of customers, but it may also be valuable in possible transactions between this sales person and another set of potential customers. On the other hand, certain investments in a transaction are only valuable in that particular transaction and have little or no value in any other transaction. Such investments are trans­ action specific. Formally, transaction specific investments are investments that are much more valuable in a particular transaction compared to any other transaction. The greater the difference in value between this investment's first best use (in the current transaction) and the second best use (in some other transaction), the more specific the investment. The existence of transaction specific invest­ ments increases the threat of opportunism. For example, suppose that a firm A is a supplier to firm B. Also, suppose that firm A has totally revised its manufacturing, sales, and distribution processes to fit firm B's needs, that firm B's needs

1 13

are completely unique, and that firm A has not had to make any special investments in firm B. Also, suppose firm A has several alternative suppliers, besides firm B. In this situation, firm A has made significant transaction specific invest­ ments in its relationship with firm B. It may be the case that firm B decides to exploit firm A by, say, insisting on a lower price for firm A's supplies than what had been agreed to in the original supply contract. What can firm A do? If firm A refuses to give in to firm B's demand, it loses the economic value of its investment in A. As long as the price reductions demanded by firm B are not as costly as entirely abandoning its investment in firm B, firm A will acquiesce to firm B's demands. The specific investment made by firm A creates an opportunity for firm B to behave opportunistically. The greater the level of transaction specific investment in an exchange, the greater the threat of opportunism. The greater the threat of opportunism, the less likely that market govern­ ance will effectively reduce this threat and the more likely that hierarchical forms of govern­ ance will be chosen - despite their additional costs. In the simple example discussed above, hierarchical governance would imply that firm A and firm B would be brought together into a single corporation and that a corporate manager ('the boss') would mediate the relationship between what would then be division A and division B. With this mediator in place, division A could make the transaction specific invest­ ments it needs to facilitate its supply relationship with division B, relying on the mediator to make sure that division B did not take unfair advantage of these specific investments. In short, Williamson's answer to the question 'why do organizations exist?' is that hierarchy arises to resolve the problems of market governance with transaction specific investments under conditions of uncertainty. Once under common ownership, the two parties in the exchange have less incentive to seek advantage over each other. Disputes are less likely to occur because the hierarchy is able to establish joint goals which lead to convergent expectations between those in a transaction. Additionally, hierarchy facilitates the development of codes and language that are unique to a firm which allow for more accurate and efficient commu­ nication (Arrow 1 974; Williamson 1 975). While hierarchy provides a resolution to the problem of transaction specific investments under uncertainty, there are, however, limits to using hierarchy. Firms are prone to important incentive and bureaucratic disabilities that limit their size. The high-powered incentives of the market are not easily duplicated within firms, particularly large ones.

1 14

STUD YING ORGA NIZA TION

Applications of Transaction Cost Theory Vertical Integration

The most researched application of TCT, vertical integration, is the most direct examina­ tion of the question 'why do organizations exist')' (see 10skow 1 988; Mahoney 1 992 for reviews). TCT studies approach vertical integration differ­ ently than much of the previous work in economics (see Blair and Kaserman 1 983 for review). Instead of viewing vertical integration as an aggregate measure of value added for an entire firm, TCT scholars typically use the trans­ action as their level of analysis. This research, which examines what in mundane terms is labeled make or buy decisions, finds consistent support for the proposition that transaction specific investment increases the likelihood that a transaction will be internalized. This finding is repeated whether transaction specific investment is operationalized as capital intensity (MacDo­ nald 1985; MacMillan et at. 1 986; Caves and Bradburd 1 988), human asset specificity or firm specific skills (Armour and Teece 1 980; Ander­ son and Schmittlein 1 984; Anderson 1 985; 10hn and Weitz 1 988; Masten et al. 1 99 1 ), site specifi­ city (Stuckey 1 983; 10skow 1 985), or small numbers bargaining ( Levy 1 985; MacDonald 1 985; Caves and Bradburd 1988). Uncertainty has a less consistent effect on the decision to integrate (Walker and Weber 1 984; 1 987). The Multidivisional Form

Another important extension of TCT to internal organization focuses on the multidivisional (M­ form) firm, which Williamson ( 1 98 5 : 279) regards as the 'most significant organizational innovation of the twentieth century'. Chandler's ( 1 962) historical study of strategy and structure in large American firms documented the rise of the M-form. Superimposing transaction costs logic over Chandler's findings, Williamson sees bounded rationality and opportunism at the root of the M-form's broad diffusion among US firms. He argues that as functionally organized firms (U-forms) expand in size and diversity, it becomes increasingly difficult for the top managers to deal with the myriad of operating problems faced by the company. Moreover, combining greater diversity with the interdepen­ dence between functional units makes it difficult to assign responsibility for successes and failures for a product or line of business. Thus, the complexity of the enterprise overwhelms the information processing capacity - or. in TCT terms, the bounded rationality - of top man­ agers. Additionally, increased complexity makes it more difficult to tie the goals of functional units to the goals of the firm as a whole. This

inability to operationalize functional goals causes managers to pursue functional subgoals in sales, manufacturing, etc. often at the expense of firm performance - or in TCT terms, the problem of opportunism. The M-form resolves these difficulties by organizing firms into either product or geo­ graphic divisions where operational decisions and accountability for performance are placed on a division manager. A typical M-form structure is presented in Figure 1 . Ideally, this structure separates strategic and operational decisions. Strategic decisions are limited to senior managers in the corporate office. Opera­ tional decisions are delegated to senior managers within operating divisions. By limiting their responsibility to strategic decision-making, the M-form reduces the bounded rationality pro­ blem faced by top managers in the corporate office. Dividing the firm into quasi-autonomous divisions facilitates clearer performance goals at lower levels of the organization. Responsibility for the performance of a business line is fixed upon a single divisional manager. Ultimately, the M-form structure also allows the firm to function as a miniature capital market where the corporate office monitors division performance, assigns cash flows to their highest yield uses, and engages in diversification, acquisition, and divestiture activities (William­ son 1 9 70; 1 975; 1 985). From the TCT perspec­ tive, the M-form possesses important advantages over the external capital market: ( 1 ) it has access to more accurate information about divisions; (2) it can manipulate incentives and replace poorly performing managers more easily; and ( 3 ) it can exercise control over the strategies pursued by divisions. Empirical evidence tends to support William­ son's contention that the M-form outperforms the functional structure in large, diversified firms (see Hoskisson et at. 1 993 for review). In their seminal study of M-form adoption in the oil industry, Armour and Teece ( 1 978) found that early adopters enjoyed performance advantages over the rest of the industry. As expected, though, these performance advantages disap­ peared as other firms adopted the M-form structure. Several other studies offer at least some support for the M-form hypothesis (Harris 1 983; Grinyer et at. 1 980; Hill 1 985; Hoskisson and Galbraith 1 985; Hoskisson et at. 1 99 1 ; Ollinger 1 993; Steer and Cable 1 978; Teece 1 98 1 ; Thompson 1 98 1 ). A few studies of non-US firms found no evidence that firms with an M-form structure enjoyed superior performance (Cable and Dirrheimer 1983; Cable and Yasuki 1 98 5; Hill 1 988; Holl 1 983). Reliance upon archival data sources suggests, however, that many of these studies may not have accurately classified

ORGANIZA TIONAL ECONOMICS

1 15

Board of directors Corporate office: sets broad strategic direction Office of the president

Corporate staff: helps corporate office set broad strategic direction

Division general managers: operational decision-making

Figure I

{ {

I

I

I

H uman resources

Finance

Accounting

I

I

I

Division

Division

II

I

Division

III

Typical multidivisional (M-form) structure

M-form structures (Hill 1 988). Thus, some debate remains as to what can be learned from these empirical tests (Hoskisson et at. 1 993). Criticisms of the M-form tend to focus on its effectiveness as an internal capital market. The emergence of more powerful, concentrated, institutional investors in recent years has greatly reduced the advantages enjoyed by top managers over external investors. Arguably, the informa­ tional asymmetries between managers and out­ side investors has been reduced. Anecdotal accounts also suggest that external investors are much more effective at displacing top ex­ ecutives and even influencing strategy than in the past. Assuming these changes are true, the governance advantages of the M-form over the external capital market have eroded. Thus, according to this reasoning, the M-form hypothesis may have been true when it was formulated, but it is likely outdated (Bettis 1 99 1 : 3 1 5- 1 6; Bartlett and Ghoshal 1 993). This criticism, however, remains to be tested (Hos­ kisson et at. 1 993: 275). Other criticisms of the M-form are based on the notion that it does not adequately align the interests of top managers with those of share­ holders. In short, it assumes away the agency problem (Hoskisson and Turk 1 990 and the discussion below). While the M-form assumes strong incentives on the part of divisional managers to maximize performance, there is no explicit mechanism that motivates top managers to do the same for the firm. Thus, top managers

are able t o pursue inefficient diversification. The M-form, with its decomposed structure of quasi­ firms, only facilitates this excessive diversifica­ tion. Incentive problems at the divisional level are not completely eliminated either. With the M-form's emphasis on financial evaluation, division managers may choose to focus on risk averse, short-term profit maximization while sacrificing activities such as R&D investment that are critical to long-term success. Research supporting these criticisms is somewhat equivo­ cal, however, since it typically fails to disentangle the effects of strategy (diversification) from structure (the M-form) . Markets, Bureaucracies, and Clans

Ouchi ( 1 979; 1 980) extended the transactions cost framework to explain alternative ways of coordinating activities within firms. He argued that firms rely on three basic forms of control: markets, bureaucracies, and clans. Markets coordinate through prices, bureaucracies coor­ dinate through authority and rules, and clans combine authority with shared values and beliefs to effect cooperation. As with Williamson's general formulation of TCT, the efficiency of these mechanisms varies depending on the conditions of the exchange. In these conditions of exchange, however, Ouchi departs from Williamson by emphasizing goal incongruence and performance ambiguity as the crucial dimensions of exchanges. Transaction costs in

1 16

STUD YING ORGANIZA TION

Ouchi's ( 1 980: 1 30) framework arise from a demand for equity and include 'any activity which is engaged in to satisfy each party to an exchange that the value given and received is in accord with his or her expectations'. For Ouchi ( 1 980), markets are efficient when goal incongruence is high and performance ambiguity is low. Prices adequately convey the information necessary to coordinate activity and the parties need not share congruent goals. As performance becomes more ambiguous and the need for congruent goals increases, firms will find bureaucratic governance more efficient than market exchange. Bureaucracy uses authority and rules which allow the film to resolve per­ formance ambiguity problems through monitor­ ing employees and constrains goal incongruence through rules and other operating procedures (Ouchi 1 979). When performance ambiguity reaches very high levels, then neither the meas­ urement of market mechanisms nor bureaucratic monitoring can insure that employees' efforts will be directed towards the organization's goals. Under these circumstances, clan governance is most efficient. Clan governance requires inten­ sive people processing (Ouchi 1 979) or socializa­ tion (Ouchi 1 980) and long-term associations within the firm to serve as an effective means of control. These activities are more costly than market and bureaucratic control, however. Thus, an investment in clan control is not warranted when performance ambiguity is low or moderate. Ouchi's theory of markets, bureaucracies and particularly clans was influential in stimulating interest in the topic of organizational culture. The Multinational Enterprise

TCT perhaps found its earliest and most complete acceptance among international busi­ ness and economics scholars. The internalization school (Buckley and Casson 1 976; Rugman 1 98 1 ; Hennart 1 982) applied TCT to understanding where multinational enterprises (MNEs) would internalize transactions within the firm and where they would rely upon market exchange. The explanation for MNEs centered around market imperfections. Markets for different assets, particularly some types of knowledge (Buckley and Casson 1 976: 39), are subject to market imperfections. The main conclusion of this early work was that markets will tend to be more efficient when there are a large number of buyers and sellers. Transactions characterized by high uncertainty and complex, heterogeneous products between a small number of buyers and traders, on the other hand, favor internalization (Buckley and Casson 1 976: 1 67-8). Teece ( 1 986) extended Casson and Buckley's reasoning on the role of knowledge in determin-

ing firm boundaries. He argued that when knowledge is difficult to trade - either because doing so would give away that knowledge or because the necessary infrastructure of capabil­ ities, communication codes, or culture is absent - firms will internalize those transactions. Empirical evidence (see Teece 1 986 for review) supports the transaction cost theory of the MNE. Though fairly distinct literatures on vertical integration and MNEs have emerged, there is little in the TCT theory of the MNE that is distinctly international. The MNE from a TCT perspective is largely a special case of the vertical integration problem. In essence, this literature is a simple restatement of the question 'why do organizations exist�' to become 'why do MNEs exist�' H.vbrid Forms of Organi:ation

Early TCT focused on the polar opposites of markets and hierarchies for organizing economic activity. Alternatives to markets other than hierarchies were acknowledged, but how these intermediate forms are viewed has shifted over time. Initially. Williamson ( 1 975) saw them as unstable, then later acknowledged that they might occur as often as markets and hierarchies (Williamson 1 985). TCT labels these intermedi­ ate forms hybrids. Hybrids include governance structures that are neither hierarchy nor market. Research on hybrids has focused on long-term contracting (Joskow 1 985), joint ventures (Hen­ nart 1 99 1 ), and franchises (Brickley and Dark 1 987; Brickley et al. 1 99 1 ; Fladmoe-Lindquist and Jacque 1995). More recently, network organizations - production among a set of firms with continuing ties - have received much attention (Thorelli 1 986; Powell 1 987). Scholars have observed such networks in areas as diverse as the US film industry (Baker and Faulkner 1 99 1 ), publishing (Powell 1 987), construction (Eccles 1 98 1 ), Italian textiles (Mariotti and Cairnarca 1 986). the Japanese auto industry (Fruin 1 992; Nishiguchi 1 994) and Silicon Valley (Saxenian 1 994). The existence of hybrids extends Coase's original question: 'Why do hybrids exist?' The most general answer is that hybrids have stronger incentives and adaptive capabilities than hierarchies while offering more adminis­ trative control than markets (Williamson 1 99 1 a: 28 1 ) . Thus, for transactions that require a mix of incentives, adaptation, and control, hybrids are well-suited (Williamson 1 99 I a) . Debate remains, however, about whether hybrid governance structures are discrete mechanisms or consist of a continuum of forms ranging from pure market to pure hierarchy (Bradach and Eccles 1 989). On the one hand,

ORGANIZA TIONA L ECONOMICS Williamson ( l 99 1 c : 1 65, 1 76) argues that the 'impossibility of selective intervention' (i.e. the problem of infusing market attributes into hierarchies and hierarchical features into mar­ kets) precludes a continuum of governance forms. According to this logic, differences in contract law also drive governance towards discrete forms (Masten 1 988; Williamson 1 99 1 c). Conversely, others view hybrid governance structures as a continuum of plural forms that combine the features of hierarchy and market (Bradach and Eccles 1 989; Hennart 1 993). Other Applications of Transaction Cost Theory

TCT has been used to address a variety of other topics including: ( l ) the internal organization of Congress (Weingast and Marshall 1 988), (2) the organization of public administration (Moe 1 99 1 ), (3) the role of trust in economic exchanges (Williamson 1 993a), (4) the functions of corpo­ rate governance (Williamson 1 985), and (5) how firms are financed (Williamson 1 99 1 b). It seems likely that TCT will continue to be applied to a wide range of organizational phenomena.

Criticisms of Transaction Cost Theory

Transaction cost theory has attracted its share of critics (see, for example, Perrow 1 986; Putterman 1 984; Robins 1 987; Demsetz 1 988). Of the many criticisms directed at TCT, three are particularly central: ( 1 ) TCT focuses on cost minimization; (2) it understates the cost of organizing; (3) it neglects the role of social relationships in economic transactions. TCT focuses on cost minimization as the organizational imperative. Or, as Williamson ( 1 99 1 b: 76) argues, 'economizing is more fundamental than strategizing - or, put differ­ ently, economy is the best strategy.' Resource­ based theory (discussed below), particularly, takes exception to this emphasis. As we shall see, resource-based logic suggests that creating and exploiting transaction specific investments under conditions of uncertainty is essential if firms are to gain long-term success (Conner 1 99 1 ; Kogut and Zander 1 992). Avoiding opportunism and minimizing governance costs are a secondary consideration. Minimizing transaction costs is of relatively little benefit if a firm has no transaction specific assets (including knowledge) that are highly valued by the market. A second criticism of TCT is that it tends to understate the costs of organizing transactions within the firm (Jones and Hill 1 988). The use of authority is assumed to resolve internal disputes more efficiently than the market. Clearly, this is

1 17

not always the case. Lengthy and costly haggling may often be more severe within a firm than between firms, as Eccles's ( 1 985) study of transfer pricing shows. Indeed, internal organ­ ization is often susceptible to costly bargaining and influence behavior (Dow 1 985; Milgrom and Roberts 1 988). Even where authority may efficiently resolve some disputes, it also may be abused opportunistically (Dow 1 987). Another criticism of TCT is that it understates the role of social and cultural forces in economic activity (Granovetter 1 985). While TCT seeks to adopt realistic assumptions of human nature, it does take a decidedly calculative view (William­ son 1 993a) of humans that discounts the impact of social relationships and culture. Granovetter pointed out that contrary to this atomistic view of economic exchange, transactions are em­ bedded within networks of social relationships. These transactions are influenced by expecta­ tions that are formed by the history of the relationship. Abstract transaction dimensions such as asset specificity and uncertainty do not alone determine the governance arrangements that we observe. Close friends, for example, may trade co-specialized assets without hierarchy, a formal contract, or other tangible credible commitments because they trust one another. Though certainly underappreciated in earlier work, TCT scholars are focusing more attention to understanding social forces such as trust on economic exchange (Ring and Van de Ven 1 992; Williamson 1 993a). Despite these criticisms, TCT's answer to the fundamental question of why firms exist has been undeniably influ ential. Historically, eco­ nomic theory viewed the organization as irrelevant and unworthy of economic science (Stiglitz 1 99 1 : 1 5) while organization theory took the existence of organization for granted. TCT has provided an approach that provoked economists to look inside the black box of the firm at the same time that it opened up a new approach for organization theorists.

Do THOSE ASSOCIA TED WITH THE FIRM AGREE ABOUT How IT SHOULD BE MANAGED?

Given that traditional neo-classical economics did not look inside the firm, it is not surprising that it did not address the possibility of intra­ firm conflict over the way a firm should be managed. Neo-classical economics assumed a monolithic goal for the firm: profit maximiza­ tion. Firms that behaved contrary to this assumption were thought to have little chance of survival . Thus, there was little need to look

1 18

STUD YING ORGANIZA TION

inside the firm, since once one could explain why a firm was created, what happened inside a firm's boundaries did not really aid in scientific prediction (Stiglitz 1 99 1 ) . In neglecting conflict within organizations, economics ran parallel to early organization theory, which also long neglected the topic (Mintzberg 1 983; Perrow 1 986). Early Departures from the Neo-Classical Firm

The neglect of intra-firm conflict ended, to some extent, with the research of a mUltidisciplinary group of scholars at Carnegie-Mellon University (March and Simon 1 958; Cyert and March 1 963; Simon 1 964). Their work was an important departure for both economics and organization theory in looking more explicitly at conflicts over goals and means within organizations. Cyert and March's ( 1 963) book A Behavioral Theory of the Firm addressed most directly the problems with the neo-classical theory of the firm. They rejected basic components of the neo-classical firm such as profit maximization and perfect information. In place of a single actor focused exclusively on maximizing profits (in many ways, analogous to Alchian and Demsetz's monitors), Cyert and March saw goals within the firm emerging and changing over time as coalitions formed and shifted among organizational members. Ironi­ cally, this and related work (e.g. March and Simon 1 958; Simon 1 964), was much more influential in organization theory than in economics. This was ironic, since many of those associated with the Carnegie-Mellon research group were economists. A few econo­ mists focused on potentially conflicting goals within the firm and argued that managers may pursue objectives other than profit maximization (e.g. they may pursue growth (Marris 1 964): they may pursue discretion and perquisites (William­ son 1 964)). Nevertheless, the traditional view of the firm remained the mainstream perspective. Transactions cost theory is of surprisingly little help in analyzing conflicting goals of those associated with a firm. TCT explains why organizations exist; it fails to address how or if those affiliated with the firm agree on its goals. The implicit assumption in TCT is that agree­ ment on how the firm should be managed is non­ problematic. However, just because economic exchange partners find it in their mutual self­ interest to form an organization does not mean that differences in interests, tastes, and prefer­ ences cease. Indeed, Williamson seems to argue that the problems of opportunism and bounded rationality that so plague transactions across markets almost magically disappear when

transactions are internalized into an organiza­ tion (Grossman and Hart 1 986). This assertion seems unrealistic, at best, and is particularly ironic given Williamson's ( 1 964) early work that examined managers' propensity to pursue their own goals at the expense of corporate profits. This lack of appreciation for the variety and complexity within organizations highlights the acknowledged incompleteness of TCT (William­ son 1 985; 392, 402).

Agency Theory

A literature in organization economics, agency theory, seeks to understand the causes and consequences for organizations of these goal disagreements. It draws heavily from the property rights literature (Alchian and Demsetz 1 972) and to a lesser extent from transaction cost. Like TCT, agency theory assumes that humans are boundedly rational, self-interested and prone to opportunism (Eisenhardt 1 989). The theories are also similar in their emphasis on information asymmetry problems in contracting and on efficiency as the engine that drives the governance of economic transactions (Barney and Ouchi 1 986; Eisenhardt 1 989). Agency theory, however. differs from TCT in its emphasis on the risk attitudes of principals and agents (Eisenhardt 1 989: 64). As it originally developed, agency theory research focused on the relationship between managers and stockholders (Jensen and Meck­ ling 1 976). In this form, the theory has been used to analyze corporate governance, including issues such as the role of boards of directors and the role of top management compensation. More recently, agency theory has been applied to relationships between many stakeholders in a firm such as those between different managers within the same firm, between employees and customers (Grinblatt and Titman 1 987), and between employees and different groups of stockholders and debt holders (Copeland and Weston 1 983). All these conflicts have important effects on a variety of attributes of organiza­ tions, including corporate governance, compen­ sation. and organizational structure. Agency relationships occur whenever one partner in a transaction (the principal) delegates authority to another (the agent) and the welfare of the principal is affected by the choices of the agent (Arrow 1 985). An obvious example is the relationship between outside investors in a firm and its managers. The investors delegate management authority to managers who may or may not have any equity ownership in the firm. The delegation of decision-making author­ ity from principal to agent is problematic in that:

ORGANIZA TIONAL ECONOMICS ( I ) the interests of principal and agent will typically diverge; (2) the principal cannot perfectly and costlessly monitor the actions of the agent; and (3) the principal cannot perfectly and costlessly monitor and acquire the informa­ tion available to or possessed by the agent. Taken together, these conditions constitute the agency problem - the possibility of opportunis­ tic behavior on the agent's part that works against the welfare of the principal. Jensen and Meckling view the agency problem as central to both economics in general and to organization theory specifically: It is worthwhile to point out the generality of the agency problem. The problem of inducing an 'agent' to behave as if he were maximizing the 'principal's' welfare is quite general. It exists in all organizations and in all cooperative efforts - at every level of management in firms. . . . The development of theories to explain the form which agency costs take in each of these situations (where the contractual relations differ significantly), and how and why they are born will lead to a rich theory of organizations which is now lacking in economics and the social sciences generally. ( 1976: 309)

To protect the principal's interests, attempts must be made to reduce the possibility that agents will misbehave. In this attempt, costs are incurred. These costs are called agency costs. Total agency costs are the monitoring expendi­ tures by principals, the bonding expenditures by agents, and the residual loss of the principal. The residual loss acknowledges that in many situa­ tions it will simply be too costly for principals to completely monitor agents and too costly for agents to completely assure principals that interests do not diverge (Jensen and Meckling 1 976). Assuming that agency costs exist, it is clear that principals have a strong incentive to minimize these costs (i.e. to minimize the sum of monitoring, bonding, and residual agency costs). However, agents also have an incentive to minimize these costs. Where significant savings in agency costs are possible, these benefits may be shared between agents and principals. Thus, the principal and agent have common interests in defining a monitoring and incentive structure that produces outcomes as close as possible to what would be the case if information exchange was costless (Pratt and Zeckhauser 1 985). Arrow ( 1 985) notes two essential sources of agency problems: moral hazard, which he equates to hidden actions, and adverse selection, which he equates to hidden information. Moral hazard involves situations in which much of the agent's actions are either hidden from the principal or are costly to observe. Thus, it is either impossible or costly for the principal to

1 19

fully monitor the agent's actions. Stockholders or even directors, for example, might find it prohibitively costly to fully monitor the behavior of their top management team. Indeed, the employment relation in general is one in which effort and ability are difficult to observe. Agency problems may also involve adverse selection. In adverse selection, the agent pos­ sesses information that is, for the principal, unobservable or costly to obtain. Consequently, principals cannot fully ascertain whether or not their interests are best served by agents' decisions. For example, a lower-level manager may submit proposals to the CEO (in this instance, the principal) even though, based on information possessed by the manager and not the CEO, these proposals are unlikely to generate economic value. By doing so, the lower-level manager may be able to gain some private benefits (e.g. broader experience that may be useful in other firms). Obviously, the CEO is at an informational disadvantage. This disadvantage is only exacerbated as the number of agents with similar incentives and advantages multiplies. At the most general level, principals and agents resolve agency problems through monitoring and bonding. Monitoring involves observing the behavior andlor the performance of agents. Bonding refers to arrangements that penalize agents for acting in ways that violate the interests of principals or reward them for achieving principals' goals. The contracts between agents and principals specify the monitoring and bonding arrangements. Indeed, contracts are central in agency theory. Jensen and Meckling ( 1 976: 3 1 0) argue that most 'organizations are simply legal fictions which serve as a nexus for a set of contracting relationships among indivi­ duals'. Within this nexus, however, firms adopt rules about monitoring and bonding. Given this general description of agency problems and their costly solutions, three important questions come to mind. First, why do principals delegate authority to agents, when they know that such delegation of authority will inevitably lead to agency problems? Second, what specific monitoring mechanisms can prin­ cipals put in place to minimize these agency problems? Finally, what specific bonding mechanisms can agents use to reassure princi­ pals? Each of these questions is discussed in subsequent sections. Delegating Authority

Given agency costs, principals will not delegate authority to agents unless they find compelling reasons to do so. Sometimes, there are no com­ pelling reasons, and single economic actors

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S TUD YING ORGANIZA TION

engage in a full range of economic activities. For example, in proprietorships, small partnerships, and closed corporations that operate on a small scale, it may be possible for a single individual to engage in the full range of economic activities, from conceiving of a business opportunity to obtaining funding for that opportunity to making and implementing all business decisions in exploiting that opportunity. Moreover, given the small size and relative simplicity of these business operations, a single individual may be quite effective in accomplishing these numerous tasks. In such settings, there will be no delegation of authority to agents and thus no agency costs. However, the situation facing larger, more complex business enterprises is not so simple. In these settings, a single individual may be unable to engage in all these business activities in a timely and effective way. This inability does not reflect, necessarily, a lack of will to accomplish all these tasks. Rather, individual bounded ration­ ality and real constraints on time and energy may make it impossible to conduct business without significant delegation of authority. Such delega­ tion always implies agency costs. Fama and Jensen ( 1 983) observe that the process of making most business decisions can be divided into two large categories: ( I ) decision management (i.e. how a decision possibility is originally initiated, and how that decision is implemented) and (2) decision control (i.e. how a decision is ratified and how performance relative to a decision is monitored). As suggested above, it may not be necessary to assign decision management and decision control responsibil­ ities to different agents in relatively less complex business settings. However, in more complex settings, Fama and Jensen ( I 983a) argue that delegating decision management to one group and decision control to a second group may, on average, lead to higher-quality decisions. The management group's task is simplified, and they are able to focus on questions concerning the initiation and implementation of decisions. The control group's task is also simplified, and they are able to focus on questions concerning the ratification and monitoring of decisions. Put differently, in settings where the decision-making situation is likely to overwhelm the cognitive capacity of a single individual, assigning differ­ ent groups different parts of the decision-making process is likely to improve the quality of decisions. Of course, this delegation also implies the existence of agency costs. Monitoring

Given the existence of agency costs, principals will find it in their self-interest to try to monitor agents (Eisenhardt 1 985). One way that princi-

pals can try to monitor agents is by collecting relatively complete information about an agent's decisions and actions - an agent's behavior. From this behavioral information, principals can then form judgments about the underlying goals and objectives of agents. In particular, principals can attempt to judge how similar their agents' goals and objectives are to their own goals and objectives. Of course, monitoring agent behavior will rarely generate perfect information about an agent's decisions and actions, let alone about an agent's goals and objectives. This is especially unlikely if agents are engaging in relatively complex, highly unstructured tasks. For exam­ ple, suppose that it was possible for a principal to directly observe the behavior of a group of research scientists she hired to conduct research for new products. It may well be the case that this principal would observe her scientists spending at least part of their day sitting in comfortable chairs, staring out a window. What can the principal conclude from this behavior that the scientists are shirking? Perhaps. On the other hand, the scientists may also be thinking about some fundamental research problem, the solution to which will generate a string of very valuable products. Given this behavior, by itself, it is not possible to deduce the scientists' goals and objectives. This limitation of behavioral monitoring is not limited to just scientists. Manageriai behavior at the top levels of an organization, for example, is notoriously difficult to monitor and even more difficult to interpret. This does not mean that behavioral monitoring does not, or should not, take place at these high levels in an organization. Institutional investors monitor critical strategic decisions made by senior managers; boards of directors monitor major policy changes imple­ mented by senior management teams; and corporate management teams monitor the decisions and strategic plans of division general managers. However, these efforts at monitoring the behavior of agents can only imperfectly reduce agency costs. As an alternative (or supplement) to monitor­ ing agent behavior, principals can also monitor the consequences of (only partially observed) agent behavior. Thus, instead of monitoring actions and decisions, principals may elect to monitor the performance implications of those actions and decisions. In general, monitoring performance (or output) is more efficient when tasks are not highly programmable (Eisenhardt 1 985; Mahoney 1 992). Output measurement, however. is not without problems. It becomes more problematic where team production is involved (Alchian and Demsetz 1 972). Inter­ dependence between agents creates ambiguity

ORGANIZA TIONAL ECONOMICS about how much each agent contributed to the final output. Thus, measuring the output of different agents is imprecise at best. A large segment of the agency theory liter­ ature examines the abilities of owners (stock­ holders) to monitor shareholders (Hill and Snell 1 989). Since large shareholders have a greater incentive and more resources to monitor management behavior and performance, the information asymmetries between investors and firms' managers are reduced. Thus, with the increasing presence of institutional shareholders and large shareholders, we should see less evidence of certain types of agency problems. Firms with more concentrated ownership are less likely to engage in wealth-destroying activities such as inefficient diversification (Hill and Snell 1 989) but are more likely to undertake wealth­ enhancing actions such as restructuring (Bethel and Liebeskind 1 993). Another mechanism that agency theory pre­ scribes for monitoring managerial behavior and performance is the use of independent directors on corporate boards. The independent board members provide objectivity as the board ratifies and monitors the decisions of management. A number of studies have examined the occurrence of firm policies that are thought to have negative consequences for the shareholders of a firm, including such anti-takeover amend­ ments as greenmail and poison pills. These studies have yielded mixed support of agency theory (Kosnik 1 987; Weisbach 1 988; Mallette and Fowler 1 992). However, recent studies suggest that the adoption of these policies may, in fact, not always signal agency problems in a firm (Mahoney and Mahoney 1 993; Brickley et al. 1 994). Instead, this more recent work suggests that these policies, while they can often entrench managers to the detriment of shareholders, may also increase the bargaining power of the target firm in takeover contests. The existence of outside directors has been shown to be the primary determinant of whether these policies are used to hurt or help a firm's shareholders. Bonding and Incentives

The existence of agency costs suggests that principals have an incentive to monitor agents. However, agents also have an incentive to assure principals that they are behaving in ways consistent with the principals' interests. Recall that, in many situations, principals and agents both absorb some agency costs associated with the delegation of authority. In general, principals can use bonding mechanisms to reassure principals. Frequently, bonding mechanisms take the form of incentives that agents create for themselves - incentives that make it in their

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self-interest to behave in ways consistent with the interests of principals. Perhaps the most common form of incentive bonding focuses on the compensation package of agents. If agent compensation depends, to a significant extent, upon behaving and perform­ ing in ways consistent with a principal's interests, then - assuming that agents value financial rewards - they will behave in ways consistent with those interests. Put differently, the will­ ingness of an agent to accept this form of compensation can be understood as a bond, a bond that reassures principals that their interests will be considered when decisions are made. A large part of the agency theory literature examines the incentives firms use to induce agents to work in the best interests of principals. Ideally, principals would prefer an incentive scheme that fully penalizes agents for shirking and opportunism. This, however, is extremely difficult to achieve without exposing agents to risks they will find unacceptably high. Often these risks are tied to conditions beyond the agents' control. On the other hand, policies that allow agents to be compensated in ways that are independent of the principals' interests insure that an agent's earnings will not fluctuate with conditions outside of the agent's control, but provide weak inducements against opportunism. Thus, though principals prefer schemes that emphasize incentives, they must design compen­ sation systems in ways that sometimes compro­ mise between pure incentives and fixed compensation plans (Winship and Rosen 1 988). Research in agency theory has examined a variety of compensation plans, including bonuses and stock options for executives (Murphy 1 986), salary versus commissions (Eisenhardt 1 985; 1 988), the effect of incentive pay on turnover (Zenger 1 992), the impact of firm size on incentive intensity (Zenger 1 994), choices between piece rates and time rates ( Lazear 1 986), and promotion contests (McLaughlin 1 98 8 ) . Other studies examine managerial ownership in the firm. This research (see Eisenhardt 1 989, for review) indicates managers with a significant ownership interest in their firm are less likely to engage in con­ glomerate diversification (Amihud and Lev 1 98 1 ; Argawal and Mandelker 1 987), resist takeover bids (Walking and Long 1 984), and use golden parachutes to the benefit of share­ holders (Singh and Harianto 1 989). Rewards other than financial compensation also serve to link the welfare of principals and agents. Managers may receive promotions or other forms of recognition which may enhance their reputations and the probability of increased future income. Even if firms do not explicitly tie performance to rewards, market forces may

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STUD YING ORGANIZA TION

work to reduce agency problems (Fama 1 980). The managerial labor market, for instance, views the previous associations of managers with success and failure as information about their talents (Fama 1 980: 292). Managers in more successful firms may not receive any immediate gain in wages, but the success of their firm may increase their value in the managerial labor market. In contrast, the managers of failing firms may not see a reduction in wages, but will be disciplined as the managerial labor market attaches less value to their services.

The Role of Market Discipline

Market discipline plays an important role in determining the arrangements and outcomes predicted by agency theory. Such a focus presupposes that markets, particularly capital markets, are efficient. Indeed, agency theory adopts at least a semi-strong form assumption of capital market efficiency (Fama 1 970). Semi­ strong capital market efficiency maintains that the value of a firm's assets mirrors completely and immediately all public information concern­ ing the value of those assets (Barney and Ouchi 1 986). This differs from the strong-form assump­ tion which asserts that asset prices reflect all information regardless of whether it is public or private. It also varies from weak-form capital market efficiency which avers that asset prices reflect only the historically available information about the firm's assets. Perhaps the most obvious example of market discipline as it is used in agency theory is the market for corporate control. Generally, this market is assumed to be semi-strong efficient, i.e. the value of a firm in the market for corporate control reflects all publicly available information about the value of that firm. If the agents (managers) of a firm take actions that are viewed by the market as adversely affecting the value of the firm's assets, then the price of these assets (i.e. the stock price) will likely drop. Managers in other firms, believing that they can more profit­ ably manage the assets of the under-performing firm, may engage in a contest for control of the firm and a takeover battle may ensue. Barring outside interference, the troubled firm's manage­ ment will eventually lose control of the firm, and old high agency cost managers will be replaced by new low agency cost managers. In other instances, market discipline may take more subtle forms. Managerial labor markets, for example, will attach less value to the services of managers in less successful firms (Fama 1 980). Or, boards of directors may replace high agency cost managers with others hired from outside the firm (Faith et al. 1 984).

Empirical evidence on the wealth effects of takeovers is largely consistent with the market discipline argument in agency theory. The shareholders of takeover targets receive, on average, significant wealth gains (Jensen and Ruback 1 983; Ruback 1 988; Jarrell et al. 1 988). These wealth gains reflect, at least in part, reductions in agency costs thought likely to occur after an acquisition is completed. Paradoxically, the agency cost creating beha­ vior that is most often subject to market discipline is the indiscriminate acquiring of other firms. For example, many managers of large US firms initiated programs of conglom­ erate diversification in the 1 970s. These pro­ grams resulted directly in growth for the firm and perhaps indirectly in greater wealth and status for the managers who initiated them. The acquired units, though, typically did not perform as well under the control of a management team from an unrelated industry (Ravenscraft and Scherer 1 987). Consequently, the market for corporate control eventually recognized that these firms were not maximizing the value of their assets, and they were the object of unfriendly takeovers. Indeed, there is substantial empirical evidence which indicates that the takeover, merger, and acquisition activity that refocused large firms in the last fifteen years was a correction of this earlier 'empire building' (Bhagat et al. 1 990; Shleifer and Vishny 1 99 1 ; Hoskisson and Johnson 1 992). Although this is cited as an example of market discipline, the question has been raised as to why the market took so long to respond to this detrimental over­ diversification (Shliefer and Vishny 1 99 1 ; Bethel and Liebeskind 1 993). While economics was slow to recognize con­ flicts within the firm, and between the firm and its numerous stakeholders, the influence of agency theory in organization economics is difficult to overstate. It has spawned literally hundreds of empirical studies. While these studies examine a vast array of topics, the underlying question is the same: how do organizations deal with conflicting goals between those who delegate authority and those to whom authority has been delegated? The theory addresses this question in only a few fundamental propositions.

Criticisms of Agency Theory

Though the empirical evidence is on balance supportive of agency theory, important ques­ tions have been raised about this set of ideas. Foremost among these is that agency theory seems to adopt an unrealistic view of humans and organizations (Hirsch et al. 1 990). In agency theory, humans are primarily motivated by

ORGA NIZA TIONAL ECONOMICS financial gain. Much of the early research, particularly, ignored the other behavioral sciences. Studies combining agency theory with ideas from other disciplines such as institutional theory (Eisenhardt 1 988), equity theory (Zenger 1 992), and social influence (Wade et al. 1 990; Davis 1 99 1 ) have yielded additional insights and questions about the theory. Another criticism of agency theory is more philosophical. Perrow and others (Hirsch et al. 1 990) argue that agency theory has an inherent investor focus. This criticism is true of most research in the area, but may not be inherent in the theory. The framework of agency theory is, in itself, neutral. It could just as well be used to examine issues that focus on the concerns of agents (Hesterly et al. 1 990). This is essentially what Shleifer and Summers ( 1 988) have done in their review of much of the corporate control research. They argue that much of the gains to shareholders from merger and acquisition activity result from redistributing wealth from other stakeholders such as employees to owners.

WHY Do SOME ORGANIZATIONS OUTPERFORM OTHERS?

Taken together, transaction cost economics and agency theory constitute a powerful theory of the firm. Transaction cost economics explains the conditions under which economic exchanges can be most efficiently managed using hierarch­ ical forms of governance. If a firm is, in essence, a bundle of interrelated transactions managed through hierarchical forms of governance, then transactions cost economics is a theory of the firm. Agency theory extends this theory of the firm by enabling a researcher to examine, in more detail, linkages among these different transactions. It does this by focusing attention on the effects of compensation, corporate governance, capital structure, and other attri­ butes of firm governance on agency problems within the firm, and between a firm and its external stakeholders. While transaction cost economics and agency theory can be used to explain why firms exist, they cannot be used to explain why some firms might outperform others. These models both assume that firms are essentially homogeneous in their transaction and agency governance skills. Put differently, these models assume that two or more firms, facing similar kinds of economic exchanges, will develop similar governance solutions. When a group of competing firms all choose similar approaches to solving similar transactions cost and agency theory problems, these common approaches cannot be sources of

1 23

competitive advantage, or superior performance, for any one firm. To explain why some firms might outperform other firms, substantially greater levels of heterogeneity must be intro­ duced into the analysis. Of course, transaction cost economics and agency theory are not alone in being unable to explain why some firms are able to outperform others. Indeed, a major implication of neo­ classical microeconomic theory is that, barring artificial barriers to competition (e.g. govern­ ment regulations that limit competition), the performance of firms in an industry will converge to a common level. This level of firm performance is called 'normal economic perfor­ mance' (Tirole 1 989). Normal economic perfor­ mance is a level of performance just large enough to enable a firm to pay all of its suppliers, including suppliers of capital, labor and technol­ ogy, the return they expect. Firms that earn normal economic performance are able to survive, although they will not prosper. In neo­ classical theory, firms earning above normal economic performance must be protected by artificial barriers to competition. Any superior firm performance that is not attributable to such barriers is difficult to explain using neo-classical theory. None of this would be problematic if the performance of firms was not very heteroge­ neous. However, both casual observation and empirical research suggest that it is: some firms, in fact, do outperform others (Jacobson 1 988). For example, while most firms in the US airline industry have struggled to break even, South­ west Airlines has made substantial economic profits (Hallowell and Heskett 1 993). Some firms in the discount retail industry have been unable to survive. Others have just been able to survive, by earning normal economic profits. However, WalMart has been massively successful, gener­ ating over $3 billion in wealth for its founder, Sam Walton (Ghemawat 1 986). Also, while virtually every integrated steel company in the world has experienced losses in economic value over the last thirty years, Nucor Steel has seen its economic value consistently increase (Ghemawat and Stander 1 993). Transaction cost economics, agency theory, and neo-classical microeco­ nomics cannot explain this level of performance heterogeneity. Understanding why some firms outperform others is the primary research topic of strategic management (Rumelt et al. 1 99 1 ). As this field of inquiry has evolved, two basic explanations of the performance heterogeneity of firms have been proposed. The first builds on what has come to be known as the structure-conduct­ performance (SCP) paradigm in industrial organization economics, and focuses on the

1 24

S TUD YING ORGANIZA TION

structure of the industries within which a firm operates to explain heterogeneity in firm performance. The second builds on a variety of research traditions in economics and organiza­ tion theory. including Penrosian economics (Penrose 1 959). Austrian economics (Jacobson 1 992). and the evolutionary theory of the firm (Nelson and Winter 1 982), and focuses on attributes of firms to explain heterogeneity in performance. This second approach has come to be known as the resource-based view of the firm (Wernerfelt 1 984; Barney 1 99 1 ). These two approaches to explaining why some firms out­ perform others are reviewed below.

The SCP Paradigm and Firm Performance

Original work on the SCP paradigm can be traced to Mason ( 1 959) and Bain ( 1 956). The original purpose of this framework was to assist government regulators in identifying industries that were less than perfectly competitive, and thus where firms were earning greater than normal economic performance. Traditionally, it was thought that when firms in an industry were earning above normal economic performance, customers were paying too high prices for the goods and services they purchased, the level of innovation was below what it should have been, and the quality of goods or services was less than it should have been - in short, that social welfare was not being maximized (Bain 1 956). Once these non-competitive industries were discov­ ered, regulators could then implement a variety of remedies to increase the level of competition in them, and thereby increase social welfare. Industry Structure and Firm Performance

As suggested earlier, the primary explanation of heterogeneity in firm performance in the SCP paradigm is industry structure. The critical performance-enhancing attributes of industry structure, isolated by SCP theorists, are: ( I ) industry concentration, (2) level of product differentiation, and ( 3 ) barriers to entry. Industry concentration was thought to enhance performance in one of two ways. First, in highly concentrated industries, a relatively small number of firms could collude - either explicitly or tacitly - and reduce industry output below a competitive level, and thus prices above the competitive level (Tirole 1 989). As long as the cost of this collusion was less than the economic profits it created, firms that operated in highly concentrated and collusive industries would outperform firms that operated in less highly concentrated and thus not collusive industries.

The implicit assumption in these assertions is that the difficulty of implementing tacit collusion strategies increases as the number of firms in an industry increases (Scherer 1 980). This assump­ tion will be discussed in more detail in later sections of this chapter. Industry concentration can also lead to performance heterogeneity through the opera­ tion of economies of scale. Economies of scale exist when there is a close relationship between a firm's economic costs and its volume of production. In concentrated industries, where economies of scale are operating, only relatively few firms will be able to take full advantage of these economies. These few firms will, all things being equal, have lower economic costs than smaller firms in the industry, thus leading to performance heterogeneity (Scherer 1 980). Product differentiation can also enable some firms to gain above normal performance in an industry. As first discussed by Chamberlain ( 1 933) and Robinson ( 1 933), firms that imple­ ment product differentiation strategies are able to enhance the perceived value of the products or services they sell. I n effect, these firms become monopolists for those consumers who are attracted to a firm's differentiated products. Indeed, Chamberlain first described competition in industries with product differentiation as 'monopolistic competition'. Like all monopolists (Tirole 1 989), these firms are able to charge greater than the fully competitive price for their products or services. Assuming the cost of differentiating their products is less than the extra revenue created by charging greater than the competitive price, product differentiation can also be a source of above normal economic profits. By themselves. industry concentration and product differentiation should be sources of only the very briefest above normal economic profits. The SCP paradigm suggests that any profits earned by firms in an industry will instantly lead to entry, either by new firms coming into an industry or by firms already in that industry modifying their strategies to duplicate the strategies of profitable firms (Bain 1 956). Entry will continue until all profits in an industry are competed away. If entry into an industry, or entry into new industry segments, is costless, then there will be no performance heterogeneity in an industry. A particularly strong form of this entry argument has been developed by Baumol et al. ( 1 982), called 'contestable market theory'. These authors argue that actual entry is not required to ensure that firms do not make above normal profits. Indeed, all that is required to ensure that firms in an industry will not earn above normal profits is the lhreat of low-cost entry.

1 25

ORGANIZA TIONA L ECONOMICS Of course, if entry into an industry is not free, then profit reducing entry may not occur. In general, if the cost of entry is greater than or equal to the value that a firm will obtain from entry, entry will not occur. The value that a firm will obtain from entry depends on the structure within that industry, i.e. the higher the level of concentration and the greater the product differentiation, the greater the poten­ tial economic value of entry. On the other hand, the cost of entry depends on the existence of barriers to entry; the more significant the barriers to entry, the more costly (and thus the less likely) that entry will actually occur (Bain 1 956). Several barriers to entry have been identified by SCP researchers, including: ( I ) economies of scale, (2) product differentiation, ( 3 ) cost advantages independent of scale, (4) contrived deterrence, and (5) government imposed restric­ tions on entry (Porter 1 980). The way that each of these barriers to entry acts to deter entry is discussed, in detail, elsewhere (Bain 1 956; Barney 1 995). Strategic lvfanagement and the SCP Paradigm

Strategic management researchers have turned the original intent of the SCP paradigm upside­ down (Porter 1 98 1 ; Barney 1 986a). Where traditional SCP research was designed to help government regulators to increase competition in an industry, strategic management researchers have used SCP insights to suggest strategies firms can implement that have the effect of reducing competition in an industry, and thus enabling firms in an industry to earn above normal profits. While several people have contributed to the SCP-based strategic management research, no one has been more influential than Michael Porter. In a series of books (Porter 1 9 80; 1 985; 1 990) and articles (Porter 1 974; 1 979a; 1 979b), Porter and his colleagues have developed a powerful model firms can use to choose and implement strategies that will generate above normal economic performance. Among the frameworks and tools Porter has developed out of the SCP tradition are: ( 1 ) the five-forces model of environmental threats, (2) a model of generic industry structure and environmental opportu­ nities, and (3) the strategic groups concept. The five-forces model of environmental threats, as developed by Porter, is presented in Figure 2. Based on earlier SCP research, Porter isolated five sets of threats to the profits of a firm in an industry: the threat of rivalry, the threat of entry, the threat of substitutes, the threat of suppliers, and the threat of buyers. All these

Threat of rivalry

Threat of substitutes

Threat of suppliers

Level

of

Threat of new entry

Threat of buyers

Figure 2 The jive-forces model of environmental threats (Porter 1 980) threats act to either reduce a firm's revenues (rivalry, entry, substitutes, and buyers) or in­ crease a firm's economic costs (suppliers) until a firm earns only normal economic performance. Porter ( 1 980) describes, in detail, the attributes of industries that reduce the level of each of these threats. Most of these industry attributes are completely consistent with earlier SCP research, e.g. to reduce the threat of entry, firms should implement barriers to entry. They implement barriers to entry ( 1 ) by exploiting economies of scale, (2) by differentiating their products, (3) by exploiting cost advantages independent of scale, (4) by implementing contrived deterrence strate­ gies, or (5) by encouraging the government to impose barriers to entry. Porter's model of generic industry structures and opportunity identified five types of indus­ tries and the opportunities typically associated with them. These five industry types and associ­ ated opportunities are: ( I ) emerging industries (first mover advantages), (2) fragmented indus­ tries (consolidation), ( 3 ) mature industries (emphasis on service, process innovation), (4) declining industries (lead, niche, harvest, divest), and ( 5 ) global industries (multinational organization, global integrated organization). Detailed definitions of these industry types, of the opportunities associated with them and examples of each are presented in Table I . As suggested earlier, firm profits can motivate entry from at least two sources: from firms entering an industry from the outside, or from firms that are already in an industry entering into a new segment of that industry. This second form of entry led Porter, in cooperation with Richard Caves, to develop the concept of 'strategic groups' (Caves and Porter 1 977). A strategic group is a set of firms in an industry pursuing similar strategies. Strategic groups may, or may not, be protected from entry by firms already in an industry by what Caves and

STUD YING ORGANIZA TION

1 26 Table I

Industry structure and opportunities

Industry type

Definition

Opportunities

Examples of firms exploiting these opportunities

Emerging industries

Recent changes in demand or technology; new industry standard operating procedures have yet to develop

First mover advantages

Intel in microprocessors

Fragmented industries

Large numbers of firms of approximately equal size

Consolidation

McDonald's in fast food

Mature industries

Slow increases in demand, numerous repeat customers, limited product innovation

Emphasis on service and process innovation

GE in light bulbs

Declining industries

Consistent reduction in industry demand

Leadership Niche Harvest Divest

General Dynamics in defence

Global industries

Significant international sales

Multinational Global

Nestle; Ciba-Geigy

Porter call 'mobility barriers'. Mobility barriers are like barriers to entry, except they are applied to strategic groups of firms within an industry, not to an industry as a whole. Thus, entry into an industry is deterred by barriers to entry; entry into a strategic group is deterred by mobility barriers. This SCP-based approach to understanding heterogeneity in firm performance has numerous important research and managerial implications. A great deal of research has been conducted testing the SCP foundations of this model of firm performance (see Scherer 1 980 for an extensive review). Additional research has also been conducted examining the empirical implications of the strategic management versions of this SCP framework. Some of this work supports the theories and frameworks developed by Porter and his colleagues. For example, the five-forces model has been shown to be a reasonably accurate predictor of the overall competitiveness of an industry. On the other hand, some of the other parts of the Porter framework have not fared as well, empirically. For example, while extensive research has been conducted on the existence and performance implications of strategic groups in industries, some have argued that most of this work has been badly flawed, and that the essential elements of this concept remain untested (Barney and Hoskisson 1 989). Interest in strategic group research has waned significantly, although some impressively creative strategic group research continues (e.g. Reger and Huff 1 993).

Criticisms of the SCP Paradigm in Strategic Management

While research continues on the theory under­ lying SCP-based models of firm performance, at least two important questions have arisen concerning the managerial implications of these models. The first of these questions revolves around the appropriateness of the unit of analysis in these models - the industry or the strategic group. These models assert that the primary determinant of firm performance is the industry (or strategic group) within which a firm operates. However, research has shown that there is often more heterogeneity in the performance of firms within a single industry than there is hetero­ geneity in the performance of firms across industries (Rumelt 1 99 1 ) . Indeed, each of the examples of heterogeneous firm performance cited previously focused on performance hetero­ geneity of firms within an industry, i.e. Southwest Airlines in the airline industry, WalMart in the discount retail industry, and Nucor Steel in the steel industry. By adopting the industry (strategic group) as the unit of analysis, SCP-based models cannot explain intra-industry (intra-group) het­ erogeneity in performance. Put differently, SCP explanations of hetero­ geneous firm performance continue to assume that firms within an industry, or within a strategic group, are homogeneous. In this framework, only differences between industries! groups can explain differences in firm perfor­ mance. While there is more heterogeneity in

ORGA NIZA TIONAL ECONOMICS these SCP models than in transaction cost, agency theory, or neo-classical theory, many have argued that there still is not enough heterogeneity in these SCP models, i.e. that the appropriate unit of analysis for the study of heterogeneous firm performance is the firm (Barney and Hoskisson 1 989). The limitations of the industry/group focus are brought into relief by examining their managerial implications. SCP logic suggests that firms seeking to earn above normal econ­ omic performance should enter and operate only in 'attractive' industries. An attractive industry is one characterized by low levels of threat, and high levels of opportunity, as defined by Porter ( 1 980). However, the attrac­ tiveness of an industry cannot be evaluated independently of the unique skills and abilities that a firm brings to that industry (Barney 1 994). Thus, while the airline industry has been unattractive for many airlines, it has been quite attractive for Southwest Airlines; while the discount retail industry has been unattractive for many firms, it has been quite attractive for WalMart; while the steel industry has been unattractive for many firms, it has been quite attractive for Nucor Steel. While the level of threat and opportunity in an industry is obviously an important component of any model of firm performance, a more complete model of performance must necessarily also include some discussion of a firm's unique resources and capabilities. A second question about the managerial implications of SCP-based models of firm performance concerns the social welfare implica­ tions of these models. Recall that the original purpose of the SCP paradigm was to isolate industries that were not maximizing social welfare, and to correct this problem. Strategy researchers have turned this objective upside down, by trying to help firms discover settings that are less than fully competitive. By implica­ tion, this suggests that firms that implement SCP-based strategies will reduce competition below the socially optimal level. Many aca­ demics find research that may have the effect of reducing overall social welfare morally unaccep­ table. The Resource-Based View of the Firm and l<'irm Performance

Several authors have recognized the limitations of SCP-based models of firm performance and have developed a complementary approach. This approach builds on other traditions in economics, rather than on the SCP framework, including work by Edith Penrose ( 1 959), Joseph

1 27

Schumpeter ( 1 934), and Michael Ricardo (Scherer 1 980), among others, and is known as the resource-based view of the firm. Work on the resource-based view of the firm in strategic management began with the publication of three articles, one each by Richard Rumelt ( 1 984), Birger Wernerfelt ( 1 984), and Jay Barney ( l 986b). Other early resource-based work in strategic management includes Teece ( 1 982) and Prahalad and Bettis ( 1 986). The Unit of Analysis, and Basic Assumptions of Resource-Based Logic

Unlike SCP-based models of firm performance, the resource-based view of the firm adopts, as its primary unit of analysis, the resources and capabilities controlled by a firm. A firm's resources and capabilities include all those attributes of a firm that enable it to conceive of and implement strategies. A firm's resources and capabilities can conveniently be divided into four types: financial resources (e.g. equity capital, debt capital, retained earnings, etc.), physical resources (e.g. the machines, factories, and other tangibles used by a firm), human resources (e.g. the experience, intelligence, training, judgment, and wisdom of individuals associated with a firm), and organizational resources (e.g. the teamwork, trust, friendship, and reputation of groups of individuals associated with a firm) (Barney 1 99 1 ). The resource-based view of the firm builds on two basic assumptions about a firm's resources and capabilities: ( I ) that resources and capabil­ ities can vary significantly across firms (the assumption of firm heterogeneity), and (2) that these differences can be stable (the assumption of resource immobility). These assumptions differ significantly from neo-classical economic assumptions, where firms within an industry are assumed to be essentially identical, and where any differences that do emerge are quickly destroyed as firms without certain resources and capabilities move quickly to acquire or develop them (Scherer 1 980). These assumptions also differ significantly from the assumptions adopted in the SCP paradigm. In this paradigm, it is assumed that firm resources and capabilities may vary across industries (or strategic groups) and that these differences can only be sustained if important barriers to entry (or mobility barriers) are in place. In resource-based logic, not all firms are assumed to be heterogeneous with respect to their resources and capabilities, nor is it assumed that all these differences will be sustained over time. Rather, it is only assumed that resources and capabilities can be hetero­ geneously distributed over time, and that heterogeneity can last, not simply because of

1 28

STUD YlNG ORGANIZA TION

barriers to entry, but because of the essential attributes of some of a firm's resources and capabilities. Firms' Resources and Sustained Competitive Advantage

To turn these assumptions into testable proposi­ tions, Barney ( 1 99 1 ) has suggested that, in order for a firm's resources and capabilities to be sources of superior performance they must be ( 1 ) valuable (in the sense of enabling a firm to exploit its environmental opportunities andlor neutralize its threats), (2) rare among its current or potential competitors, (3) costly to imitate, and (4) without close strategic substitutes. One resource or capability is a strategic substitute of another resource or capability if they both address approximately the same environmental opportunities and threats in about the same way and at about the same cost. Imitability is an important component of the resource-based view of the firm. If other firms can acquire or develop the same, or substitute, resources as a firm that already possesses these resources, and can do so at approximately the same cost as the firm that already possesses them, then they cannot be a source of competitive advantage for any firm. Several researchers have suggested reasons why a firm's resources and capabilities may be costly to imitate (Dierickx and Cool 1 989; Peteraf 1 993). Barney ( 1 99 1 ) divides these sources of costly imitation into three categories: the role of history, the role of causal ambiguity, and the role of socially complex resources and capabil­ ities. Sometimes, firms are able to acquire certain resources or capabilities at low cost because of their unique path through history. Dierickx and Cool ( 1 989) suggest that these types of resources and capabilities have 'time compression diseco­ nomies'. Arthur et al. ( 1 987) suggest that these types of resources and capabilities accrue in a 'path dependent' way, i.e. their development depends upon a unique series of events in a firm's history. Of course, firms that have not passed through these same historical circumstances will face a significant cost disadvantage in developing or acquiring these resources, compared 10 firms that have passed through these circumstances. History is a linear process. Once it endows a few firms with special resources and capabilities, firms without these resources and capabilities face high cost imitation. Sometimes it is not clear exactly why a firm with superior performance enjoys that perfor­ mance advantage. This can happen whenever two or more competing hypotheses about the determinants of a firm's performance exist and

when these hypotheses cannot be tested. Both Lippman and Rumelt ( 1 982) and Reed and DeFillippi ( 1 990) emphasize the importance of this 'causal ambiguity' in increasing the cost of imitation. When competing firms cannot know, with certainty, what enables a particular firm to enjoy its superior performance, these firms cannot know, with certainty, which of that firm's resources and capabilities it should imitate. This uncertainty effectively increases the cost of imitation. Finally, sometimes the resources and capabil­ ities that enable a firm to gain superior performance are socially complex. Examples of these types of resources include a firm's culture, teamwork among its employees, its reputation with suppliers and customers, and so forth. In this context, there may be little or no uncertainty about why a firm is able to enjoy high levels of performance, and imitation can still not occur. While managers can describe these socially complex resources, their ability to manage and change them rapidly are limited (Barney 1 986c). The importance of these socially complex resources as potential sources of sustained competitive advantage has led several resource­ based theorists to call for increased cooperation between strategic management researchers, and those who study organizational behavior. In an important sense, the dependent variables of organizational behavior and organization theory are potentially important independent variables in resource-based models of firm performance. The empirical implications of the resource­ based view of the firm are beginning to be examined in the strategic management literature. Thus far, most results are consistent with resource-based expectations, although this empirical work is early in development. Thus, for example, Rumelt ( 1 99 1 ) found that the unique attributes of a firm are more important determinants of its performance than the industry within which it operates. In a similar way, Hansen and Wernerfelt ( 1 989) have shown that a firm's culture is a more important determinant of firm performance than the structure of the industry within which it operates. Managerial Implications

The managerial implications of the resource­ based view of the firm stand in marked contrast to more traditional SCP-based strategic manage­ ment models. In particular, where the SCP-based models would have managers choose to enter and conduct businesses in 'attractive' industries, resource-based logic suggests that firms should look inward, discover their own valuable, rare, and costly to imitate resources and capabilities,

ORGANIZA TIONAL ECONO MICS and then discover markets where those resources can be exploited. While a particular industry may be very unattractive based on SCP criteria, it may be very attractive to a firm with just the right set of valuable, rare, and costly to imitate resources and capabilities (Barney 1 99 1 ). The social welfare implications of resource­ based strategies are also very different from the social welfare implications of SCP-based strate­ gies. SCP-based strategies are designed to reduce competition below the competitive level and thus reduce the level of general social welfare in favor of a few firms earning above normal profits. Resource-based strategies suggest that firms should discover those business activities for which they are uniquely well suited. Exploiting a firm's special resources and capabilities can, in this sense, enhance social welfare. Put differ­ ently, superior firm performance in the SCP framework suggests that firms have effectively protected themselves from competition. Superior firm performance of firms in the resource-based framework suggests that firms have discovered those business activities that they can conduct more efficiently than any current or potentially competing firms.

How CAN FIRMS COOPERATE?

All the organizational economic models dis­ cussed so far assume that firms can be analyzed as if they were independent economic entities. The picture painted, in most of these models, is of individual firms making transactions-cost vertical integration and boundary choices, solving their important agency problems, and competing against other independent firms for competitive advantage. And, indeed, there are many times when this 'independent firm' approach to economic analysis is appropriate. However, over the last several years, scholars have come to recognize the importance of sets of cooperating firms as major players in competi­ tive settings (Tirole 1 989). Competition is still important in these settings. However, more and more frequently, competition seems to manifest itself between groups of cooperating firms rather than simply between firms. Organizational economic models of coopera­ tion between firms have a common form and structure (Barney 1 995). First, these models examine the economic incentives otherwise independent firms have to cooperate in some way. It can be shown that firms have such incentives in a wide variety of settings. Once these cooperative incentives are understood, these economic models of cooperation then examine the incentives that cooperating firms

1 29

have to 'cheat' on their cooperative agreements. It is, perhaps, ironic, but each of the economic­ ally valuable reasons that firms can find to cooperate generally imply economically valuable ways that firms can cheat on those cooperative agreements. Finally, these models focus on activities that firms can engage in to monitor potential cheating in their cooperative relation­ ships. If this monitoring is done well, then the incentives to cheat on cooperative agreements can be reduced, and cooperation can continue. This form of analysis has been applied to two major forms of cooperation in organizational economics: tacit collusion and strategic alliances.

Tacit Collusion as Cooperation

Traditional economics has long recognized the importance of cooperation among firms in an industry (Scherer 1 980). The most common way this cooperation has been analyzed is as collusion, either explicit or tacit. A set of firms is said to be colluding when they cooperate to reduce the total output of products or services in an industry below what would be the case if they were competing in that industry (Tirole 1 989). Of course, assuming that demand for an industry's products remains relatively stable, these reduc­ tions in supply will be reflected in increased prices. These increased prices can generate levels of performance much greater than what would be expected in a more competitive industry. Incentives fo Cooperate

Consider, for example, a hypothetical industry with six firms. Imagine, for simplicity, that these firms sell undifferentiated products, and that the cost of manufacturing these products is $3 per unit. Also, imagine that total demand for these products is fixed, equal to 1 0,000 units, but that these six firms have agreed to restrict output below this level. Again, for simplicity, suppose that each of these firms has agreed to restrict output to only 1 ,000 units. Since demand ( 1 0,000 units) is much greater than supply (6,000), there are a large number of customers chasing after a relatively small number of products, and prices will rise. In a fully competitive industry, these firms would only be able to charge about $3 per unit. However, in this collusive industry, they may be able to charge as much as $ \ 0 per unit. Where in the competitive case, these firms would all about 'break even', in the colluding case they could each earn substantial economic profits of $7,000 « $ \ 0 x 1 ,000) - ($3 x 1 ,000». That $7,000 economic profit is the economic incentive for these firms to cooperate in the form of collusion.

STUD YING ORGANIZA TION

1 30 Incentives to Cheat

011

Cooperative Agreements

However, whenever there is an incentive to cooperate, there is also an incentive to cheat on those cooperative agreements. This incentive can be seen by what happens to the profits of one of our hypothetical firms if it violates the agreement to sell 1 ,000 units at $ 1 0, and instead sells 3,000 units at $9. In this situation, the five firms that stick with the collusive agreement still earn their $7,000 profit. but the cheating firm earns a much larger profit of $ 1 8,000 « $9 x 3,000) - ($3 x 3,000» . The $ 1 1 ,000 difference between the $7,000 that is earned if collusion is maintained, and the $ 1 8,000 the one firm earns if it cheats on this collusive agreement, is the economic incen­ tive to cheat on collusion. Cheating on these collusive agreements usually spreads rapidly. Once other firms dis­ cover that a particular firm is cheating on a collusive agreement, they may begin cheating on this agreement, and collusive cooperation in this industry will cease (Scherer 1 980). This can be seen in the simple case depicted in Figure 3. In this case, there are just two firms in the industry (I and II), who have agreed to collude, restrict output, and set a price equal to P*. P* is greater than the price these firms could charge in a non­ collusive setting. Also, to simplify this example, assume that the products or services these two firms sell are undifferentiated, and that custo­ mers face no costs switching back and forth from firm I to firm II (this roughly approximates competition between, say, two gas stations across the street from each other). Now suppose firm I decides to cheat on this collusive agreement and charge a price P I < P*. As soon as this happens, all those customers who had been purchasing products from firm II will instantly switch to firm I for the lower price. Firm II will have to respond by lowering its price to Pz. Pz must be less than P I or customers would have no incentive to shift back from firm I to firm II. When firm II sets its price at Pz, all of firm I's customers will instantly switch to firm II, and firm I will have to readjust its price to P3· P3 must be less than Pz, and so forth. This competition will continue until the prices these firms charge exactly equal their economic costs, at which time any superior performance that could have been obtained from collusion will have been competed away. Much of what has come to be known as game theory is dedicated to understanding interactions like those depicted in Figure 3. This particular game was originally studied by Bertrand ( 1 883) and examines what happens when colluding firms cheat on their agreements by lowering their prices. It can be easily demonstrated that such

Figure 3

Cheating on collusive

agreements 'Bertrand cheating' will lead firms to earn rates of return equal to that of firms in perfectly competitive markets (Tirole 1 989). Another early, and very influential, game of this sort was studied by Cournot ( 1 897). Coumot ana­ lyzed what will happen to prices and perfor­ mance if firms cheat on their collusive agreements by increasing their output beyond agreed levels. Such 'Cournot cheating' will lead to performance somewhere between that which fully colluding firms could have earned and what firms in a perfectly competitive market will earn (Tirole 1 989). Hundreds of other game theoretic models examine different types of interactions between firms and the implications of such interactions on the performance of firms in an industry (Scherer 1 980; Tirole 1 989). The conclusion of many of these models is that the economic incentives to cheat on collusive arrangements, despite the increased competition such cheating almost always creates, is often larger than the economic incentives firms have to maintain their collusive arrangements. Of course, much of this problem with cheating on collusive arrangements could be resolved if managers in colluding firms could sit down together, face to face, and work out their problems. However, such direct, face to face negotiations about the level of output in an industry and prices is, in most developed economies, illegal. Such explicit collusion can lead to very real negative consequences for managers and firms, including large fines and time in prison. Most governments actively discourage explicit collusion because the lower levels of production and the higher prices it creates, while they may improve the profits of colluding firms, are generally very bad for consumers, and for society as a whole (Scherer 1 980). Indeed, as was suggested earlier, the effort to eliminate collusion was one of the primary policy objectives of the SCP framework. Given the risks associated with explicit collusion, firms seeking to engage in this form

ORGANIZA TIONAL ECONOMICS of cooperation must use, instead, tacit collusion. In tacit collusion, there again is an agreement to reduce output below, and prices above, the competitive level. However, these agreements are not directly negotiated. Rather, firms seeking to implement tacit collusion must interpret the intent of other firms to collude through the behaviors and signals these other firms send out (Spence 1 974). Such interpretation of intentions to collude can be difficult. For example, suppose a firm that has been able to reduce its economic costs does not pass these lower costs along to customers in the form of lower prices. Does this mean that this firm is interested in developing some collusive relationships, or does it mean that this firm believes that demand for its highly differentiated product is sufficient to increase sales without price reductions? One tactic suggested for sustaining tacit collu­ sion is to punish those that either raise their output level or reduce their prices. For example, Axelrod ( 1 984) suggests that tit-for-tat strategies where such non-cooperative behavior is imme­ diately punished through some sort of retaliation (in this case increased output and price reduc­ tions) by competitors will discourage such behavior in the future. The effectiveness of tit­ for-tat strategies in assuring collusion, however, depends upon the ability of those involved to perceive one another's moves with a high degree of certainty. As Axelrod ( 1 984) found in his simulations, cooperative outcomes are more difficult to sustain when there is uncertainty about the moves made by players in a game. Moreover, tit-for-tat can lead to an escalation in competition as has been the case in price wars among US airlines. Industry Structure and the Ability to Collude

The ability to interpret intentions to collude varies with several important attributes of industries and of the firms in those industries. For example, in general, tacit collusion is easier when there are relatively few firms in an industry (Scherer 1 980). In such industries, firms need only receive and interpret signals of intentions to collude from a small number of firms, rather than from a large number of firms. Also, tacit collusion is typically easier in industries where all firms have about the same economic costs and sell undifferentiated products. When firms have about the same economic costs, they have about the same optimal level of production (Scherer 1 980). If collusion reduces production below this optimal level, all these firms will absorb about the same extra production costs. They will also all earn about the same level of economic profits. In this setting, no one firm has a strong incentive to cheat on collusion, since no one firm is

131

obtaining a disproportionately smaller level of benefit from colluding. The lack of product differentiation helps maintain collusion by limiting the ways that firms can cheat on collusive arrangements. If firms can differentiate their products, they can increase demand for their own products in ways that are less obvious than by simply lowering their prices. However, if product differentiation is difficult to do, then any cheating on collusive agreements will be reflected in a firm's prices. Prices are relatively easy to monitor, and thus cheating on prices will typically lead to quick retaliation against the cheating firm. Quick retaliation, in turn, reduces the time period during which a cheating firm will be able to earn extra economic performance from cheating, and thus reduces the incentives to cheat (Scherer 1 980). Scherer ( 1 980) describes several other industry attributes that tend to enhance the ability of firms to interpret signals of intention to collude, and thus enhance the ability of tacit collusion to emerge and remain. However, none of these other industry attributes is more important than high barriers to entry. As suggested earlier, barriers to entry increase the cost of entry into an industry. Firms that are successfully implement­ ing tacit collusion will be earning substantial economic profits. Such profits, other things being equal, should motivate entry into an industry. New entrants, in turn, are less likely to be part of the collusive agreements in an industry and thus more likely to 'cheat' on these agreements. Such cheating will almost always have the effect of increasing competition in an industry and reducing the probability that tacit collusion agreements can be maintained. Thus, in order for colluding firms to continue in their colluding ways, they must be protected from new entry by substantial barriers to entry. These barriers to entry were discussed previously in the context of the SCP-based approach to under­ standing heterogeneity in firm performance. In general, those attributes of firms and industries that have an effect on the ability of firms to interpret signals of intentions to collude can be thought of as part of the monitoring process firms engage in to reduce the probability of cheating in this form of cooperation. As suggested earlier, while there are often substan­ tial incentives to cooperate, there are also substantial incentives to cheat on these coopera­ tive agreements. By monitoring the behavior of their partners in collusion, the probability of cheating can be reduced, and the extra economic performance promised by collusion can be realized. The easier it is to monitor a colluding firm's behavior, the less likely cheating will occur, and the more likely that collusion will continue.

1 32

STUD YING ORGA NIZA TION Strategic Alliances and Cooperation

Previous work suggests that tacit collusion, as a form of cooperation, is possible. However, given the difficulties associated with interpreting signals of intent to collude, most organizational economists expect this form of collusion to be relatively rare. Strategic alliances, as a form of cooperation, are, on the other hand, much more common than tacit collusion. Indeed, the number of international strategic alliances entered into by US firms has grown dramati­ cally over the last several years (Harrigan 1 986; Kogut 1 988). Firms like IBM, AT&T, and Corning have, literally, hundreds of strategic alliances (Kogut 1 988). One of Corning's alliances, with Dow Chemical (Dow Corning). is, itself, a Fortune 500 company. Thus, strategic alliances are a much more common, and economically important, form of cooperation than tacit collusion (Barney 1 995). Moreover. strategic alliances usually have none of the social welfare reducing side effects of collusion (Kogut 1 988). Types of A lliances

In general, there are two broad classes of strategic alliances: contractual alliances and joint ventures (Hennart 1 988). A contractual alliance is any form of cooperative relationship between two or more firms, the purpose of which is to develop, design, manufacture, market, or distribute products or services, and where a separate firm is not created to manage this relationship. Rather, this relationship is mana­ ged through some sort of contract. Notice that, unlike tacit collusion, the effect of contractual strategic alliances is to increase economic activity, not to reduce economic activity below the competitive level. Common examples of contractual strategic alliances include: long-term supply relationships, licensing arrangements. distribution agreements, and so forth. Joint ventures are also cooperative relation­ ships between two or more firms with the purpose of developing, designing, manufactur­ ing, marketing, or distributing products or services. However, unlike contractual alliances, joint ventures always involve the creation of a separate firm (the joint venture) to manage this relationship. Partners in this joint venture provide capital and other resources to this separate firm, which is typically managed by its own management team reporting to a board of directors consisting of representatives of the joint venture partners. Partners in this joint venture are compensated for their investment from the profits that are generated by this firm. Financial interests may be equally distributed

across joint venture partners, or some partners may have larger financial interest in a joint venture than other partners. For example, Dow and Corning each own 50 per cent of the Dow Corning joint venture; Corning owns oyer 60 per cent of its television glass joint venture with Asahi (Nanda and Bartlett 1 990). Incentives to Cooperate in A lliances

The primary economic incentive for engaging in strategic alliances is to exploit resource com­ plementarity (Kogut 1 988; Hennart 1 988). The resources controlled by two or more firms are complementary when their economic value combined is greater than their economic value separately. Obviously, when firms have comple­ mentary resources, an important economic synergy among these firms exists. A strategic alliance is one way that synergy can be realized. While economic complementarity is a general requirement for firms to pursue strategic alliances, this complementarity can come from numerous different sources. Some of the most important of these sources of complementarities between firms are listed in Table 2. For example, firms may engage in an alliance to realize economies of scale that cannot be realized by each firm on its own (Kogut 1 988). In the aluminum industry. the minimum efficient scale of bauxite mining is much greater than the maximum efficient scale of aluminum smelting. Individual smelting companies, on their own, could never operate an efficient bauxite mining operation. Any smelting operation large enough to absorb all the bauxite mined in an efficient mine would be terribly inefficient and lead to high smelting costs; a mine small enough to supply just an efficient smelting operation would also be terribly inefficient and lead to high mining costs. One solution to this problem would be for a single firm to operate an efficient (i.e. very large) mine and an efficient (i.e. relatively small) smelting operation, and then to sell excess bauxite on the open market. Unfortunately, bauxite is not a homogeneous ore, and refining bauxite purchased from a large Table 2 Motiratiolls /or entering strategic alliances :2

3

4 5 6 7

Exploit economies of scale Low-cost entry into new markets Low-cost entry into new industry segments and new industries Learning from competition Managing strategic uncertainty Managing costs and sharing risks To facilitate tacit collusion

ORGANIZA TIONA L ECONOMICS mine would require a smelting firm to make enormous transaction specific investments in that mine. Such investments put these firms at risk of opportunistic behavior (see the discussion of transaction cost economics earlier), and thus these refiners would prefer not to have to purchase an independent efficient mining firm's excess bauxite (Hennart 1 988). Thus, to simulta­ neously exploit the economies of scale associated with a large mining operation, while maintaining relatively small and efficient aluminum smelting operations, and not requiring smelting firms to make high levels of transaction specific invest­ ments across market exchanges, most bauxite mines are owned by joint ventures, where joint venture partners are smelting firms (Scherer 1 980). Another important economic motivation for entering into a strategic alliance is to reduce the cost of entry into a new market (Kogut 1 988). In a global economy, many firms are beginning to recognize the importance of selling their pro­ ducts and services in markets around the world. However, entry into these markets can be costly and difficult. New market entrants often have to build costly new distribution networks. More­ over, new market entrants often do not have the local expertise they need to respond to customer needs in these new markets. In this setting, cooperating with a firm in a local market can be a very effective way to enter that market. Instead of building a new distribution network, market entrants can exploit the already existing dis­ tribution networks of their partner in that new market. That partner is also more likely to have the local expertise that will be necessary to be successful in that new market. On the other hand, the local partner may gain access to valuable new products and technologies that it can distribute in its traditional market. For these reasons, low-cost entry into new markets is, perhaps, one of the most common motivations behind strategic alliances (Harrigan 1 986). Alliances can also facilitate low-cost entry into new industries, or new segments of an industry (Kogut 1 988). For example, Dow Chemical believed that it had some resources and capa­ bilities that might be valuable in the electronics industry. However, as a chemical firm, they had relatively little experience in this industry. Rather than trying to enter on their own, Dow formed a strategic alliance with Philips Electro­ nics. This alliance uses Dow's chemical expertise, and Philips' electronics expertise, to manu­ facture compact disks for sale in North America. It was almost certainly less costly for Dow to enter into this segment of the electronics industry with Philips as a partner than it would have been for Dow to enter into this industry by itself (Barney 1 995).

1 33

Alliances can also be used to learn from competitors (Kogut 1 988). Since the early 1 980s, General Motors has consistently lost market share in the US automobile industry. Much of this share loss can be traced to poor quality manufacturing, especially among GM's small car lines. GM has been trying to learn how to manufacture high-quality automobiles, espe­ cially high-quality small automobiles, while still making a profit. In 1 983, GM formed a strategic alliance with Toyota. Called NUMMI, this Fremont, California, assembly operation has given GM an opportunity to directly observe how Toyota builds high-quality small cars at a profit. G M has transferred much of the knowl­ edge they gained from N UMMI, and other of their strategic alliances, to its Saturn division - a division that has been very successful at manufacturing high-quality cars (although still not at a profit). Alliances can also be used by firms to manage strategic uncertainty (Kogut 1 99 1 ). Sometimes, a firm may have several strategic options, but be unable to choose which of those options promises the most economic success. For example, after the US federal government broke up AT&T, AT&T was not completely sure what its long-term strategy should be. To be sure, it had numerous options and substantial financial and other resources at its disposal, but the best path forward was not obvious. In this context, AT&T invested in a very large number (almost 400 at one time) of strategic alliances (Kogut 1 99 1 ). Each of these alliances gave AT&T some insight into the competitive and economic potential of a different business activity. In financial terms, these numerous alliances can be thought of as real options ( Kogut 1 99 1 ) . Once the actual economic potential of different strategies becomes clear (i.e. once uncertainty is reduced), a firm can either divest itself of an option (by backing out of the alliance) or exercise an option (by, say, purchasing its alliance partner, and thus entering into an industry). In this uncertain context, multiple alliances can be thought of as a way a firm keeps its 'options open'. Once AT&T decided that the telecommunications industry and the computer industry were likely to come together in an economically valuable way, AT&T exercised some of its earlier strategic alliance options by purchasing several computer firms, including NCR. Alliances can also be used by firms to reduce their costs and manage their risk (Barney 1 995). Some potentially valuable investments are so large, or so risky, that individual firms would literally 'bet the company' if they made these investments on their own. In this case, an alliance of some sort can help a firm reduce the costs it

1 34

STUD YING ORGANIZA TION

bears from an investment, thereby reducing the risks of this investment. This is one reason why most deep water drilling platforms (typically, very risky investments) are owned by alliances of oil and gas companies and not just a single firm (Scherer 1 980; Kogut 1 988). A final reason that firms may enter into strategic alliances is to facilitate the development of tacit (or even explicit) collusion (Kogut 1 988). Indeed, for many years, the development of tacit collusion was seen as one of the primary motivators of strategic alliances. After all, firms that are able to directly communicate through a strategic alliance may be able to transfer this relationship to other of their businesses, where collusion may be forthcoming. For this reason, the alliance between GM and Toyota was subjected to intense regulatory scrutiny, to ensure that GM and Toyota would not use this alliance to develop collusion in the automobile industry. While alliances may, in principle, help facilitate the development of tacit collusion, most organizational economists now believe that, given the enormous economic potential of alliances from other sources, the development of tacit collusion is a relatively unimportant motivation for the creation of most alliances (Kogut 1 988). In all of the above incentives to enter into strategic alliances, resource complementarity is the central motivation for firms entering into an alliance. However, the institutional context also affects the feasibility of alliances (Williamson 1 993b). It may either facilitate or inhibit the formation of alliances. In Italy, for example, one argument for the reliance on extensive networks of small firms in some industries is that labor laws provide an incentive for firms to stay small and rely on extensive cooperation. Another example of the impact of institutional conditions is Japanese subcontracting (Williamson 1 985; Fruin 1 992). Multiple factors - such as cross­ ownership, the legal system, and culture contribute to a greater willingness to enter into alliances than was historically the case in some countries. Cross-ownership patterns contribute to ease in entering into alliances. Firms often hold a mutual equity interest in one another which leads to a perception that they have a 'common destiny' (Williamson 1 98 5 : 1 2 1 ) . Culture may also contribute to alliance patterns. In Japan, greater importance is attached to maintaining harmony than in some other cultures. Such a focus on harmony likely engen­ ders less risk in entering into alliances with others who share that focus. Though institutional context clearly makes it either more or less difficult to successfully enter into alliances, organizational economics nevertheless views this as secondary to resource complementarity

in explaining strategic alliances. In all of the above examples, firms also have clear resource complementarity reasons for entering into alliances and, indeed, it is potential complemen­ tarities that discriminate between firms that are potential alliance partners and those that are not. Incentives to Cheat in A lliances

While there are significant economic incentives for firms to cooperate in strategic alliances, there are also significant economic incentives to cheat on those alliances once they are formed. Such cheating can take at least three forms: adverse selection cheating, moral hazard cheating, and hold-up cheating (Barney and Ouchi 1 986). Each of these types of cheating in alliances can be thought of as specific examples of opportunistic behavior - of the sort described in transaction cost economics and agency theory. Indeed, adverse selection and moral hazard have already been discussed as problems in agency relation­ ships; hold-up, as a function of transaction specific investments, has already been discussed as a problem in transaction cost economics. Adverse selection exists when an alliance partner misrepresents the resources and capabil­ ities they can bring to an alliance (Barney and Hansen 1 995). For example, suppose firm I needs political contacts in a particular country in order to facilitate entry into a new market. If firm II informs firm I that it possesses these contacts, when it really does not possess them, firm II has engaged in adverse selection. In this case, firm II will be able to appropriate whatever resources and capabilities firm I makes available to the alliance, without providing any of its own resources and capabilities to the alliance. Moral hazard exists when an alliance partner really does possess the resources and capabilities it says it possesses, but simply does not make them available to the alliance (Barney and Hansen 1 995). For example, suppose that firm I and firm II are cooperating in a joint research and development effort. Also, suppose that, as part of this agreement, both firms promise to assign only their best engineering talent to this alliance. Firm I may, in fact, fulfill its part of the agreement and send top-level engineering talent to the alliance. Firm II, on the other hand, may decide to keep its best engineering talent in the parent company, where it can be used in other development projects. Rather than sending the best engineering talent, firm II might send engineers who are just well-enough-trained to learn everything that firm I's engineers can teach them, but not sufficiently well-trained to actually contribute to the alliance. In this case, firm II has engaged in moral hazard. It has been able to gain significant value from the alliance (it has learned

1 35

ORGANIZA TIONAL ECONOMICS a great deal from firm I's engineers), and it has been able to do so at very low cost (it retained its best engineers to continue working on its own development projects). Hold-up exists when an alliance is character­ ized by high levels of transaction-specific invest­ ment, and where those that have made these investments are exploited by those who have not made them. In the discussion of transaction cost economics, it was suggested that high levels of transaction specific investment can subject a firm to significant threats of opportunistic behavior and may motivate vertical integration (William­ son 1 975). This argument holds in the case of alliances as well: alliances characterized by high levels of specific investment may not be stable, and may have to be replaced by vertically integrated exchanges (Kogut 1 988). Reducing the Threat of Cheating

Just as different industry and firm attributes can facilitate the monitoring of cheating by partners in collusive arrangements, firms in strategic alliances can engage in activities designed to reduce the probability of adverse selection, moral hazard, and hold-up. These monitoring devices fall into two broad categories: govern­ ance and trust. The role of governance in strategic alliances precisely parallels the role of governance in transaction cost economics. In general, the greater the value of cheating in a strategic alliance, the greater the threat of cheating. The greater the threat of cheating, the more elaborate the governance that will be required to manage an alliance. When the threat of cheating is small, simple market forms of governance (e.g. simple contracts) can reduce the threat of cheating and do so at low cost. As the threat of cheating increases, more elaborate - and costly - forms of governance will have to be implemented (e.g. contractual alliances). At even higher levels of threat, joint ventures may have to be used to manage a cooperative relationship. By creating a joint venture, parties in an alliance create a new firm to manage a relationship. Since compensa­ tion for investing in this firm depends entirely on its profits, parties in this form of alliance have incentives to not behave opportunistically when creating the joint venture. However, sometimes even joint ventures cannot efficiently reduce the threat of cheating in an exchange, and that exchange will have to be integrated into a single firm, to be managed through hierarchical forms of governance (Kogut 1 988; Hennart 1 988). In general, firms will prefer that form of governance that minimizes the probability of opportunism, but does so at the lowest governance cost possible (Williamson 1 975).

A second approach to managing cheating in alliances builds on the trust that can develop between parties to an alliance. Over a period of time, parties to an alliance may discover that they can all be trusted to not behave opportu­ nistically in this relationship. With this trust in place, normal governance mechanisms can be dismantled. In this sense, trust among alliance partners may be a low-cost substitute for costly governance (Barney and Hansen 1 995). However, not only can trust be a low-cost substitute for governance, but firms that trust each other may be able to explore exchange opportunities that are not available to firms that cannot trust each other. If, as transactions cost theorists suggest, governance is costly, there may well be potentially valuable economic exchanges whose value cannot be realized. This can happen in at least two ways. First, the potential gains from these exchanges may only be modest, but the threat of opportunism sufficient, such that the cost of governance is greater than the gains from trade. Second, the potential gains from these trades may be enormous. However, the threat of opportunism in these exchanges may be so large that no cost effective governance mech­ anism can be created. Even vertical integration may not be able to solve all the problems of opportunism that might plague these exchanges (Grossman and Hart 1 986). In the absence of efficient governance, the exchanges will not occur - despite their economic potential. However, if parties in an alliance trust each other, these firms will be able to explore these exchange opportunities, and, perhaps, realize their economic potential. Moreover, if relatively few sets of alliance partners trust one another in this manner, and if this trust is costly for other sets of firms to imitate, then the resource-based view of the firm suggests that firms that are able to trust each other may be able to gain sustained competitive advantages from their cooperative efforts.

CONCLUSION

Organization economics has been, and will continue to be, an important set of theoretical tools for the analysis of organizations and organizational phenomena. It addresses some of the most fundamental issues in all of organiza­ tional research, including the four questions around which this chapter is organized. Progress in answering these questions, both theoretically and empirically, has been impressive although, clearly, much work remains. Of course, organization economics is not alone in addressing these, and related, fundamental

STUD YING ORGA NIZA TlO.\'

1 36

questions of organizational analysis. Both organizational behavior and organization theory are also concerned with understanding why organizations exist, the implications of interest conflicts among those associated with an organization, why some organizations outper­ form others, and how organizations can coop­ erate with one another. Given this overlapping set of interests, one might expect that these three literatures should build on each other, should inform work done in these different research streams - in short, that a theoretical integration of organizational economics, organizational behavior, and organization theory should be emerging. Most observers would agree, however, that despite the potential for integration and cross­ fertilization, relatively little of this integrative work has occurred. At best, cross-disciplinary work of this sort takes the form of public debates about the assumptions of economics, the quality of behavioral research, and so forth (e.g. Hirsch et al. 1 990 versus Hesterly and Zenger 1 993; Donaldson 1 990 versus Barney 1 990; William­ son and Ouchi 1 9 8 1 a and 1 98 1 b versus Perrow 1 98 1 ). At worst, these sets of disciplines ignore each other. There is little doubt that both organizational economists, on the one hand, and organizational behavior and theory scholars, on the other, bear responsibility for the limited integration that has developed between these fields so far. More behaviorally oriented scholars have often adopted an overly simplistic view of organiza­ tional economics, asserting that organizational economists all assume perfect rationality (which they don't), perfect information (which they don't), and equilibrium (which they don't). Economically oriented scholars criticize the 'fuzzy' and 'ill-defined' assumptions of beha­ vioral research, despite applying many of those same assumptions (e.g. imperfect information, bounded rationality) in their own research. One can only hope that discourse among these organizational scholars will continue, and that the real opportunities for bringing behavioral research into organizational economics, and an economic orientation into organizational behav­ ior and organization theory, will be fully realized.

NOTE The assumption of opportunism may be new to economics, but as Douglas ( 1 990) notes, it is more familiar to organization theorists. Indeed. notions of opportunism are central to resource dependence theory in particular and to power theories in general.

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5 The Individual in Organizational Studies: the Great Disappearing A ct? WA LTE R R . N O R D A N D S U Z Y F O X

This chapter reviews major developments about psychological factors and processes in organiza­ tional studies. We suggest that a profound but until now under-recognized change has taken place in this component of organizational studies. This change concerns assumptions about the appropriate primary level of analysis from the individual (psychological) level to the meso level. Traditionally, the domain of psychology has been the individual and the quest to uncover the essential properties and universal features of the typical human being. Under this domain major areas of interest included: personality, motiva­ tion, attitudes and learning. Since to a con­ siderable extent, organization studies, especially its micro component, was founded on psychol­ ogy, these topics and the methodologies associ­ ated with them became central to organizational studies. While these topics continue to serve as headings for structuring knowledge in organiza­ tion studies, emphasis has shifted from viewing individuals independently of context to consid­ eration of the interplay between individuals and their contexts. Before going further, we emphasize that this conclusion was reached inductively through review of the recent literature on the micro side of organizational studies and psychology proper. We did not set out with a conscious purpose of documenting such a reorientation. Rather we set out to review the literature and more or less were bombarded by information that made this reorientation appear to be the major movement in the field. When we began, we expected that the chapter would provide a comprehensive summary of

what is known about the major characteristics of a typical human being - centering on the traditional dimensions of personality, motiva­ tion, attitudes and learning. In short, we were directed to what Simon ( 1 990) called a search for invariants. However, we soon realized that a search for invariants would not be a fruitful approach for making sense of the recent literature in the field, because the individual as viewed traditionally was disappearing in the field. Indeed it was this realization that we advance as the major contribution of this chapter about psychological factors in contem­ porary organization studies. The chapter consists of three major sections and a conclusion. The first section summarizes the evidence supporting the 'disappearance' of the individual and the parallel growth of attention to mutually determining processes. The second section considers possible objections to the thesis that the individual has disappeared and attempts to refute that thesis by advancing an opposite one - i.e. 'The individual is alive and well. ' The third section examines trends in psychology and the social sciences more gener­ ally that also suggest the individual's disappear­ ance.

THE INDIVIDUAL ' S DISAPPEARANCE IN I NDUSTRIAL AND ORGANIZATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY AND BEHAVIOR

Recent publications in organizational psychol­ ogy and behavior reveal that the individual has become less central in these fields. This section

THE INDI VID UAL starts with a historical review of the individual's position, beginning with the centrality of psychology in the development of organizational behavior and ending with the recent growth in attention to context. The centerpiece of this review is a longitudinal study of relevant chapters published during the two most recent decades in the Annual Review of Psychology (ARP). I This review indicates a clear decline in the centrality of the individual's role. Since the magnitude of this development surprised us, in the next subsection we summarize our search for confirmation of this finding by seeing if others have noticed the disappearance of the individual. Since this exploration supported our finding, we turn in the final subsection to describing the major view that appears to be emerging, a view that studies the individual and context as components of mutually determining processes.

From Individual to Context Psychological Basisfor OB and this Research

At least in America, the individual had long been central in the study of organizations, even though for some time organizational sociologists had advanced the idea that the 'subject is organizations' (Scott 1 992). This qualification aside, major streams of thought about organiza­ tions including both Taylorism and the human relations movement were founded on special views of and assumptions about human nature. Moreover, psychologists such as Hugo Munster­ berg played an important role in early efforts to help organizational leaders most effectively utilize the human beings they employed. Then, as the fields of personnel and management moved towards a more scientific foundation and American schools of business began to teach organization behavior instead of personnel or human relations, psychology was one of the first disciplines to be tapped. As the emerging field consciously drew on American psychology for personnel as well as ideas and categories, it unconsciously took American psychology's assumptions as organizational behaviorists employed concepts and categories (e.g. motiva­ tion, perception, cognition, emotions) borrowed from psychology to structure their knowledge. Indeed the early pioneers of OB such as Douglas McGregor and Chris Argyris built directly on assumptions borrowed from psychology. Consequently we initiated our study of the individual in organization studies in the psycho­ logically oriented literature. We began with mainstream publications: specifically, the pro­ gression of reviews in the Annual Review of Psychology (ARP), the Handbook of Industrial

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and Organizational Psychology, particularly Raymond Katzell's overview of the contribu­ tions in the second edition, and the special issue on organizational psychology of the American Psychologist edited by Offerman and Gowing ( 1 990). We expected that these major reviews would provide a good reading of what was playing in the major theaters - reviews of the shows 'On Broadway' so to speak. One trend is clear: from the late 1 970s to date, in OB and I/O psychology the individual had lost much of its traditional status - contextual dimensions had become much more salient. By context we mean attributes of the physical and social systems in which individuals exist. Those attributes may be analyzed at a number of levels including: physical stimuli that directly impact the individual, and social and political levels that affect the presence of the physical stimuli and the interpretation of them and the events they compose. For example, in introducing the special issue on organizational psychology in the American Psychologist, Offerman and Gowing ( 1990) noted the heightened importance of such dimensions as cohort size, sex, and age for dealing with the 'changing work force'. They wrote: 'The notion of America as a melting pot is giving way to a view of America as a rich assortment of different talents to be preserved rather than homogenized. The traditional organizational focus on conformity through assimilation needs to be replaced by a true understanding of integration' ( 1 990: 98). Although the large inflow of immigrants in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century meant that the American workforce had long been diverse, Offerman and Gowing's call revealed that these differences could no longer be swept under the rug of 'invariant' principles promised by academic psychology. Using Gestalt terms, in I/O psychology the variations introduced by context had increasingly become part of the figure and not merely the ground. Several signs of figure/ground reversal were evident in this issue. First, Offerman and Gowing's call for greater interdisciplinary train­ ing for I/O psychologists was particularly note­ worthy. Similarly, Schein observed: 'I do not see a unique role for the traditional industrial! organizational psychologist, but I see great potential for the psychologist to work as a team member with colleagues who are more ethnographically oriented' ( 1 990: 1 1 8). Further­ more, writing on work motivation, Katzell and Thompson pointed to the overly simplistic theories of work motivation that dominated the field and called for greater attention to approaches dealing with 'problems of matching motivational practices to the needs and values of diverse groups of employees' ( 1 990: 1 44).

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STUD YING ORGANIZA TION

Similarly, Morrison and Von Glinow ( 1 990) observed that psychologically driven inquiries have inappropriately emphasized person­ centered variables to explain women's low job status. Longitudinal study of the Annual Reviell· of Psychology (ARP) revealed even stronger evi­ dence for the displacement of the individual in the OB and 110 psychology literature. Individual in ARP: a Longitudinal View

Initially we studied A RP to obtain a broad picture of the field, not to examine a particular question such as what had happened to the individual. As we have noted, that question and our answer to it emerged inductively, as we progressed. Unfortunately using A RP for such a longitudinal study is complicated by the fact that the chapters dealing with topics in organiza­ tional studies have appeared under a variety of titles: industrial psychology, industrial and organizational psychology, human resources, organizational behavior, to name a few. Still, looking at these topics together reveals an amaz­ ingly clear trend of deemphasizing the individual and giving increasing emphasis to context. This trend is evidenced in the changing chapter titles and definitions of the subject matter. Beginning at the end, the major theme of Jackson and Schuler's ( 1 995) chapter entitled 'Understanding human resource management in the context of organizations and their environ­ ments' (italics added) was a call to recognize context. Jackson and Schuler conceptualized HRM as 'an umbrella term encompassing (a) specific human resources practices such as recruitment, selection, and appraisal; (b) formal human resource policies, which direct and partially constrain the development of specific practices; and (c) overarching human resource philosophies' ( 1 995: 238). In addressing these somewhat traditional concerns while guided by their belief that 'To understand HRM in context we must consider how these three components of HRM are affected by the internal and external environments of organizations' ( 1 995: 238) Jackson and Schuler proposed broadening the scope for HRM substantially. Viewed historically, Jackson and Schuler's call for context was part of a long chain in A RP that is most easily traced to Cummings's ( 1 982) chapter which explicitly tried to bring the macro side of the field into focus. However, the trend predated Cummings's chapter. Mitchell ( 1 979) had discussed a number of comments about the lack of context in the field. Even earlier, Meltzer ( 1 9 7 1 ) had noted a broadening trend in A RP's industrial psychology chapters during the 1 960s. Meltzer pointed to a growing interdisciplinary

emphasis, as indicated by a decrease in the percentage of references to the two most frequently cited journals Personnel Psychology and the Journal of Applied Psychology. During the 1 960s Quinn and Kahn ( 1 967) exemplified this trend, entitling their annual review chapter 'Organizational psychology'. Stating that this was not simply another name for industrial psychology, Quinn and Kahn stressed the importance of general systems theory and drew far more heavily than previous reviewers on the sociological literature. Still, industrial psychology as portrayed in ARP and elsewhere was quite narrow. Meltzer and Nord ( 1 973) observed that even Quinn and Kahn's more broadly based review and Vroom's ( 1 974) chapter entitled 'Industrial social psychology' in the second edition of Lindzey and Aronson's Handbook of Social Psychology had remarkably psychological orientations, at least by com­ parison to the interdisciplinary study of organizations reflected in March's ( 1 965) Hand­ book of Organi:ations. Still, a broadening trend in A RP had begun in the 1 9605. Soon after, in their chapter on personnel and human resources Heller and Clark ( 1 976) took an important next step. They proposed an open systems model and located the personnel func­ tion at the boundary between the organization and the external environment. Despite this move, they concluded that while The literature relevant to the personnel function reflects a diversity of approaches . . . the unit of study is character­ istically the individual' ( 1 976: 428, italics added). In the period following this chapter, the broadening trend was only gradual. In fact, Mitchell writing the first ARP chapter entitled 'Organizational behavior', even though agreeing with the field's critics that insufficient attention had been given to contextual matters and that 'our theories are often too narrow in focus' ( 1 979: 27 1 ), adopted a primarily psychological framework and featured major sections on personality and individual differences, j ob attitudes, motivation . After 1 979, however, emphasis on context progressed more rapidly. In order to capture the developments between 1 977 and 1 9 8 1 which had given organizational behavior a macro flavor, Cummings ( 1 982) needed to employ new concepts. He concluded by calling for even more attention to the context of individual behavior and the study of linking processes, i.e. 'the processes that link individual and social system levels of analysis' ( 1 982: 5 7 1 ) . Notably, in the following decade linking processes received so much attention that Mowday and Sutton ( 1 993) subtitled their A RP chapter on organizational behavior 'Linking individuals and groups to organizational con­ texts' (italics added).

THE INDI VID UAL However, between 1 982 and 1 993, the field seemed to need to digest the changes. Staw's ( 1 984) and Schneider's ( 1 985) A RP chapters reflected this digestion. Staw recognized that organization behavior was now both micro and macro; micro OB was broader than 110 psychology. However, micro and macro had not been interwoven. Staw wrote: 'most research is still distinctly psychological or sociological in its approach to variables and levels of analysis' ( 1 984: 628). Staw recognized the possible benefits of moving to the study of processes, but he explicitly focused on the micro or psychological side of things and called for reformulation of the field's dependent variables through recognition of the restricted set of assumptions on which existing research had been based. Staw urged the field to move beyond the traditional polarizing question of whether micro or macro factors explained the most variance in favor of finding how to bring the two sides of the field together. He suggested such approaches as dissecting sociological constructs so as to specify their intermediate mechanisms in psychological terms, and conducting research focused on truly interdisciplinary topics such as organization innovation. He concluded that multi-level research is 'where the future of the field lies' ( 1 984: 659). Schneider ( 1 985) too appeared to sense the need for the field to digest the new developments more completely. Since Schneider used historical works from the field as a framework for interpretation, his chapter provides an excep­ tionally helpful examination of organizational behavior's digestion of the smorgasbord before it in the early 1 980s. Beginning by noting the ongoing tensions over levels of analysis (e.g. whether the proper focus should be on indi­ viduals and groups or the organization) Schnei­ der attributed much of the problem to the lineage of 110 psychology on the one hand and of organization and management theory on the other. He suggested treating the reciprocity across the levels by recognizing that topics studied at one level of analysis are 'embedded in, and affected by, at least the next level of analysis' ( 1 985: 597). However, 'affected by' did not mean moderated by; rather different levels of analysis have direct or linear effects on behavior. For example, group effectiveness is a direct function of characteristics of the group and also the larger context of the group itself. Significantly, Schneider's conclusion stemmed from analysis of research on traditional OB topics: individual motivation, job attitudes, groups, leadership, climate and culture. Consider his discussion of motivation. Schneider observed that the early OB researchers on worker motivation assumed that universal theories of

1 45

motivation were possible, were very individually oriented and focused attention on individual differences. Ultimately, however, the researchers became disillusioned about universalistic moti­ vation theories. 'The universal motivation theor­ ies of Argyris and McGregor are not thought of as motivation theories any longer; now they are theories of organization design, perhaps included under Quality of Work Life (QWL) rubric' ( 1 985: 578). Schneider lamented: 'Without a macro-motivation construct, comparative organization behavior becomes person-less' (ita­ lics added): 'One could ask "What happened to motivation research?'" ( 1 985: 578). Even on the one traditional motivation topic where research had continued - equity theory - attention had shifted to reflect awareness of context, reflecting Cosier and Dalton's ( 1 98 3 ) observation of the failure of traditional equity research to take history into account. Such trends extended beyond motivation. So many diverse relationships were found in job satisfaction research that Schneider bypassed trying to integrate them into a framework about individual wants. Instead he called for the more general study of person-environment fit. Furthermore, studies of role stress had moved towards understanding the linkages between organizations and member reactions, and had been broadened to include life-job relationships. Parallel broadening had occurred in the study of commitment with the addition of organizational citizenship (behavior beyond conventional job descriptions) to the research agenda. Further, growing use of macro or organiza­ tional outcomes such as market and industry competitiveness as dependent variables had forced research on groups and leadership to attend to context. These shifts meant that less fine-grained micro data on individuals were required and new perspectives were needed. Schneider wrote: 'we change what we look at and how we look at it. We look at planets not atoms with a telescope' ( 1 985: 587). Schneider noticed parallel changes in the study of leadership: 'as with motivation. 1 983 was not a good year for more traditional topics of research: no papers appeared on behavior trait approaches' ( 1 985: 588). He also recalled Leavitt's ( 1 975) invitation to take groups not individuals as the assumed building blocks of organizations. Despite these changes, the individual still received some attention; in fact, Schneider reported that the trait approach remained strong in assessment center research. However, the outlook for the traditional quest for predicting leadership and managerial behavior across settings was bleak. Schneider advised thinking about leader attributes guided by interactional psychology in order to recognize

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STUD YING ORGANIZA TION

the role of personal dispositions while simulta­ neously expecting the same person will behave differently in different situations. In sum, without saying so explicitly Schneider seemed to sense that the individual was disappearing. Schneider attributed the changes to a historical fluke: early research on motivation and leadership that was focused on the enterprise, 'somehow yielded research at the individual level of analysis' ( 1 985: 590). While this was true, it was not the whole truth. We suggest that some of the developments Schneider reviewed represented fundamental discontinuities, as the field moved to a more collective level of analysis and away from emphasis on the individual that is embedded in the American value system. Pfeffer's ( 1 983) introduction of the demographic view with its provocative proposition that generational cohort differences were more important than other individual attributes was a big step away from tradition. Also, importantly in view of what the future would hold, Schneider noted the replacement of 'climate' by 'culture' in organiza­ tional research. This change was especially significant because it entailed greater emphasis on the study of meaning. While meaning is held by individuals, study of meaning directs atten­ tion to transmission, which is a property of systemic processes. In this vein, Schneider wrote: 'organizations are a viable behavioral unit of analysis' ( 1 985: 597). Consequently, conducting research 'on individuals as individuals as the unit of analysis is important and interesting but not when trying to understand and predict an organization's behavior' ( 1 985: 597). Thus, Schneider's chapter showed how the field was digesting the changes moving in a more macro direction. Two years later in the next ARP chapter entitled 'Organizational behavior' House and Singh ( 1 987) moved the individual further from the traditionally privileged position. Noting that previous ARP chapters had stressed the micro over the macro side, House and Singh empha­ sized cross-level effects, but warned that their emphasis was speculative and called for more research of this sort. They noted that while cross-level research was evident in the areas of management succession and decision-making, little such work had appeared in important segments of the power and leadership literatures. They called for more emphasis on historical and evolutionary study of organizational behavior, going beyond traditional efforts to establish empirical regularities. They held out special hope for study of macro-level processes of selection, imitation, learning and institutionali­ zation to help answer the why and how of these cross-level relationships. Taken as a whole. their

chapter was a call to use certain macro-level processes to explain micro-level events. If this course were followed, the individual would not have disappeared, but would seem to have become more of a dependent than an indepen­ dent variable. In the succeeding review ligen and Klein ( 1 988) dealt with the multi-level issue differently, seemingly giving more prominence to the individual, by drawing on the so-called2 'cogni­ tive revolution' to place the multiple levels of organizations in individuals' minds. They ad­ vanced the qualified suggestion that the essences of organizations may be seen as products of the thoughts and actions of their members. They seemed to return the individual to center stage by asserting: 'All cognitive views share the assump­ tion that people think and that their thoughts play a major role in human behavior' ( 1 988: 329). Building on this assumption, ligen and Klein synthesized a wide variety of social and organizational topics into cognitive schemata that individuals use to interpret stimuli in organizations. Despite their successful use of the cognitive perspective, ligen and Klein cautioned that the demonstrated strengths of the cognitive frame­ work lay only in a few areas of the field, particularly person perception and leadership, and that 'the "cognitive revolution" has influ­ enced very few topics in the field of OB and has often had a narrow impact within those that have been studied' ( 1 988: 345). Moreover, even where the cognitive influence had been felt, so far the research had been primarily demonstrative, showing that the cognitive variables made sense for interpreting events that occur in organization settings. They warned, unless work moves beyond this demonstrative stage, cognitive processes will become little more than another passing fad. Thus, the return of the individual to center stage appeared tenuous. Indeed, in the next OB chapter in A RP, O'Reilly ( 1 99 1 ) revealed that the comeback of the individual had failed. Among other things, most frequently cited journals had shifted from the almost total reliance on psychological publications noted by Meltzer ( 1 97 1 ) to the Administrative Science Quarterly and to journals published by the Academy of Management. O'Reilly observed an increased intersection of micro and macro interests, especially through the Academy of Management. Whereas in 1 979, 70 per cent of the studies published in the A cademy of Management Journal were on micro topics, by 1 989 the comparable figure was only 38 per cent. Although O'Reilly's chapter still focused on micro OB, it revealed that these changes had diminished the individual's starring role. Most notable were changes in research on

THE INDI VID UAL the topics that had guided Mitchell's ( 1 979) ARP chapter - job attitudes, motivation, and leader­ ship. O'Reilly reported that under the headings of goal setting and equity theory, intrinsic motivation continued to be heavily researched. For the most part goal setting research seemed to have followed its traditional course. However, equity research had broadened considerably to encompass procedural as well as distributive justice. Growing emphasis on how decisions about distribution were made represented a clear move towards context. At first glance, increased interest in intrinsic motivation based on Deci's ( 1 975) work seemed to indicate that the indi­ vidual was back. However, O'Reilly observed that much of this interest centered around Deci and Ryan's ( 1 987) extension of their theory to consideration of the context of the situation, namely the circumstances under which extrinsic rewards impair intrinsic motivation. A similarly mixed verdict about the indivi­ dual's role appeared with respect to work attitudes. Although Avery et al. ( 1 989) had indicated that genetic factors accounted for a considerable amount of the variance in job satisfaction and Staw et al. ( 1 986) had made a strong case for the view that job satisfaction was dispositional, others such as Gerhart ( 1 987) and Davis-Blake and Pfeffer ( 1 989) had challenged Staw's conclusion. Broadening was also evi­ denced with respect to job commitment, espe­ cially by expansion of application of the concept from commitment to just the work organization, to include commitment to unions and careers and to consideration of organizational contexts as antecedents of commitment. With respect to leadership, however, the individual was still the star although a slightly dimmer one. O'Reilly suggested that much of the leadership research represented useful refine­ ments to previously accepted theories; the broadening included topics such as charisma and transformational aspects of executive lea­ dership, and greater interest in organizational consequences of leaders. Still, the negative side of the debate about whether or not leadership was a useful construct had received strong impetus from Meindl and Ehrlich's ( 1 987) research supporting their earlier conclusion that the tendency of people to view leadership as a likely explanation for organizational performance stemmed from the existence of values and ideology that engendered a propen­ sity to romanticize leadership. Although O'Reilly suggested that leadership was a promising topic for the future, his overall conclusion about the individual's role was discouraging. Pointing to the growing recogni­ tion of the potential contribution of economic and sociological approaches to OB, O'Reilly

1 47

predicted some broadening due to changes in societal-level demographics. He concluded: Micro-OB is in a fallow period. Useful micro-OB work is being done, but more excitement and attention are currently being generated by macro­ OB. The areas of micro-OB that Mitchell considered dominant - job attitudes, motivation, leadership and individual differences - remain the most frequently researched areas, though today they may generate less intellectual excitement. ( 1 99 1 : 445)

In the following ARP chapter on OB, Mowday and Sutton ( 1 993) seemed to cement trends of the previous decade, through including the linking of individuals and organizations in their title. Their chapter provided a mixed picture concerning the position of the individual. After beginning by commenting on the micro­ macro bifurcation in the field, the review focused explicitly on the micro material, suggesting that the individual had the same central role as always. However, then they echoed Cappelli and Sherer's ( 1 99 1 ) concern that the field had sacrificed attention to context in order to stay in touch with its psychological roots. Then, they took four steps which showed how the field had moved away from the individual. First, they broke with the tradition of earlier review chapters which were organized around psychological variables of motivation, work attitudes, job design, turnover and absenteeism, and leadership. Second, they agreed with O'Reilly ( 1 99 1 ) that these topics had lost their intellectual excitement. Third, they devoted an entire section to the question 'How can we put organizations back into organizational beha­ vior?' ( 1 993: 220). And fourth, they substituted context for psychological variables as the fundamental organizing theme for their chapter. In essence the fourth step substituted con­ textual dimensions for individual attributes to explain behavior. This substitution facilitated interesting theoretical work on the role of context, featuring reciprocal influence and the view that appropriate theorizing about context must include the opposing possibilities that some contexts have little influence and sometimes individuals create contexts. In the latter instances the individual would of course have center stage. At the time we wrote this chapter, the latest available ARP chapter on OB was Wilpert's ( 1 995). He adopted a systemic or macro focus and, as the first European to write an OB chapter for ARP, emphasized non-US sources. The individual did not fare well here, as Wilpert focused on the growth of symbolic and social construction approaches and on the difficulties the field is apt to meet in overcoming its widely acknowledged lack of attention to context. He

1 48

STUD YING ORGA NIZA TION

suggested that previous inattention to context stemmed from ( I ) the conservative role of the dominant paradigm, (2) the consistency principle in science which pressures new theories to be consistent with accepted knowledge, and (3) a dominant focus on the individual as the unit of analysis in combination with the current cognitivist bias. Wilpert argued that these forces have helped make macro and micro theories incommensurate. He also provided clues about what the individual's future role might be. He advised establishing bridges between the macro and the micro and following Cappelli and Scherer's ( 1 99 1 ) mesoscopic-Ievel approach. He also observed that we need to clarify what 'context' means, noting that traditionally in OB context has been the environment that is outside the individual. In contrast, organizational context is the environment external to the organization including socioeconomic changes occurring in the world. Therefore, treatment of the external environment needs to incorporate variations across nation states. Wilpert suggested that much of the conflict between micro- and macro-level approaches stems from unnecessary battles over intellectual turf, observing that the growth in the role played by symbolism and social construction 'does not make extant traditions extinct' ( 1 995: 83). Moreover, 'The choice of a theoretical basis frequently is a function of the question to be answered' ( 1 995: 83) and we have existing studies that have combined the various orienta­ tions successfully. Although Wilpert did not point specifically to which existing studies he had in mind, it would seem that his prime examples would include the following: Weick and Roberts's ( 1 993) treatment of organizations as intersubjectively shared meanings through the idea of heedful interrelations that are con­ structed and reconstructed by individuals; Drazin and Sandelands's ( 1 992) concept of autogenesis describing the self-organizing capa­ cities of individuals interacting in social fields; Yammarino and Bass's ( 1 99 1 ) multiple-level perspective of leadership including the person, the situation and person-situation; and Ambur­ gey et al. 's ( 1 993) treatment of organizational learning that showed how an organization's history and its position in its life cycle affect environmental impacts and organizational learn­ ing. Clearly, the individual has an important role in all of these processes but is not the whole show. In other words, the individual may continue to be important but this importance will emerge as researchers look at other problems, rather than study the state of the individual per se. Thus while the individual will be part of a larger plot, the play will not be a biography.

Extrapolating the trend from the last quarter­ century of the A RP chapters, we can say that the individual will not totally disappear from the stage, but people who attend the play are more apt to pay attention to the stage setting and less likely than before to have come just to see the individual. Finally we return to Jackson and Schuler's ( 1 995) call to move the individual to a less visible position in HRM and to give greater attention to context. They wrote: Contributions will not come through research as usual. Several shifts in approach will be required: from treating organizational settings as sources of error variance to attending as closely to them as we have traditionally attended to individual character­ istics; from focusing on individuals to treating social systems as the target for study; from focusing on single practices or policies to adopting a holistic approach to conceptualizing HRM systems. . . . These shifts in perspective are fundamental in many respects. In other respects, however, they require little more than a change from defining the essential features of situations as jobs (as industrial-organiza­ tional psychology often does) to a recognition that jobs are merely the first level of context in a many­ level complex system of contexts. By extension, we would argue that future HRM research should elevate organization analysis (and perhaps extra­ organization analysis) to a status equal to that currently enjoyed by job analysis. ( 1 995: 256)

Jackson and Schuler took the idea of context very seriously and moved it to the second level noted by Wilpert, to include the external environment of the organization. Key elements of this context included laws and regulations, culture, politics, unions, labor markets and industry characteristics. Summary

In short, our study of the last two decades' overviews published in mainstream sources in American organizational psychology and beha­ vior revealed, unexpectedly, that the individual seemed to be either disappearing or changing substantially. Although the disappearance of the individual seemed pretty clear to us, we remained skeptical until we took a further look to see if others had recognized a similar trend. If the individual has been disappearing, surely missing person reports and perhaps reports of occasional 'sightings' would have been filed. We reasoned that the existence of such reports would provide evidence that others had noted the individual's disappearance, thereby lending support to our interpretations. Review of the literature indicated that indeed several missing person reports had been filed and several 'sightings' reported.

THE INDI VID UAL Missing Person Reports and Occasional Sightings

Benjamin Schneider's 1 985 presidential address to the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology (see Schneider 1 987) was clearly a missing person report filed in the hope that refocus on the individual would take place. Schneider, distressed by the individual's absence, chastised his psychological colleagues for being seduced into believing that situations determine behavior. While many of Schneider's central concerns could equally well have appeared in a debate among students of personality on the situationist position advanced by social learning theories, he directed his plea to students of organizations: 'organizations are the people in them . . . the people make the place' ( 1 98 7 : 450). He concluded: 'We are psychologists and behavioral scientists; let us seek explanation in people not in the results of their behavior' ( 1 987: 45 1 ). Other missing person reports had also been filed, although not all of them wanted the individual to return. Perhaps Salancik and Pfeffer ( 1 977) were the first to call attention to the individual's disappearance. They wrote: 'the field has very nearly eliminated individual-level variables from the study of job attitudes. The field is no longer interested in what the individual brings to the work setting in terms of behavioral tendencies, traits, and personality' ( 1 977: 57). Salancik and Pfeffer's sentiment, in contrast to Schneider's distress, could well be described as 'good riddance'. They took special issue with the concept of needs in previous job satisfaction studies, arguing that since people having similar or dissimilar needs when con­ fronting similar or dissimilar job characteristics can have either the same or different attitudinal reactions, the concepts of need and need satisfaction are based on an outdated view of the individual and should be abandoned: 'Need models assume that individuals react to external realities in the context of relatively unchanging needs. Need-satisfaction models do not allow for the possibility that instead of reacting to environments which include job characteristics, individuals enact environments . . . need-satis­ faction models imply that individuals are tightly linked to their environments' ( 1 977: 440). Based on the evidence they suggested that persons are not that tightly linked to an objective environ­ ment and critiqued the concept of needs because it is very difficult to distinguish between needs and cultural expectations. About a year later Salancik and Pfeffer ( 1 978) dealt with the individual's disappearance in a somewhat different way, indicating that they

1 49

intended not to dismiss the language of needs but rather to use it metaphorically, viewing a need as an attribution made by a person or an observer to explain a behavior that could not be explained readily by observed external demands. Believing this view provided a necessary corrective for the failure of many need-satisfaction models to adequately take the social context into account, they proposed a social information processing perspective, combining the social context of work and the presence of consequences from previous actions, as a more adequate approach. They argued that 'one can learn most about individual behavior' not by study of the individual but by 'studying the information and social environment within which the behavior occurs and to which it adapts' ( 1 978: 226). Although recognizing that the key issues they raised about the need models had not been proven empirically, they concluded that social information processing provided a better account. Similarly in a later paper Davis-Blake and Pfeffer ( 1 989) critiqued the dispositional approach. They began by defining the essence of the dispositional approach as follows: 'that individuals possess stable traits that significantly influence their affective and behavioral reactions to organization settings' ( 1 989: 386). Believing that some of the apparent lack of support for the dispositional view stemmed from research design, Davis-Blake and Pfeffer explicitly stopped short of asserting that there are no dispositional effects. However. they proposed ending the search for dispositional factors, observing that even if the dispositional research­ ers could solve the major problems currently plaguing their research, important costs entailed by the approach (e.g. expensive selection procedures and the ease with which managers can blame individuals for poor performance) would remain. More sympathetic missing person reports were also filed primarily by writers who were saddened by the individual's absence. For example, Katzell and Thompson, in assessing knowledge on work motivation, called on their colleagues to pay more attention to individual differences - 'habitual or even biological dispositions of the individual' ( 1 990: 1 5 1 ). Other evidence of the missing individual took the form of joyful 'sightings' . Sightings

The most notable joyful sighting was Staw et al.'s ( 1 986) report of their longitudinal research on the dispositional approach to job attitudes. Lamenting that the individual had nearly disappeared in the wake of the job enrichment and social information processing debate, Staw

1 50

STUD YING ORGANIZA TION

et al. took heart from finding that affective dispositions predicted job attitudes over people's lifetimes. Alderfer ( 1 977) reported another sighting, noting that the individual had never been away and that Salancik and Pfeffer's initial missing person report was a false alarm based on misinterpretation of need theory. Similarly, Staw ( 1 99 1 ) suggested humorously that the individual had been there all the time but had been 'dressing up like an organization', because so-called organizational actions could be explained by psychological theories. Efforts to make light of the individual's dis­ appearance aside, the seriousness of the concern about the individual's whereabouts was reflected in the fact that in July 1 989, Mitchell and James co-edited a special issue of The Academy of Management Review on situational versus dis­ positional factors, which helped to place reports of the individual's disappearance, and the sightings, in perspective. Mitchell and James ( l 989a) pointed out that the whole incident was another manifestation of a long line of debates (e.g. nature versus nurture) in social science and philosophy. Similarly Pervin ( 1 989) noted that in the history of psychology a number of perspec­ tives had exaggerated the role of the environ­ ment and others had exaggerated the importance of the individual. Other articles in the special issue added perspective by advancing an inter­ actionist framework. Pervin, for example, commented that most personality psychologists are interactionists: 'they emphasize both person and situation variables when defining behavior' ( 1 989: 352). However, he added that the current debate had reformulated the interactionist perspective productively by calling attention to the dynamic processes through which people influence situations while also being influenced by them. Two models reveal the nature of these processes: first, Cantor and Kihlstrom's ( 1 987) social intelligence model postulated that indivi­ duals have knowledge about social situations and that they use that knowledge to deal with specific tasks in life; and second, the goals model emphasizes that people are goal directed and that their behavior in situations depends on their goals and their perceptions of the operative reward structure. In short, people are active agents in formulating goals and plans and they are engaged in dynamic, interpretative processes, not static and descriptive ones. By linking individual attributes and interpre­ tative processes Pervin outlined a promising path. The individual is still around, but a person's static traits are not of central interest; more crucial are the person's goals and self­ perceived competencies that influence how hel she interprets particular situations. In Pervin's

words: 'it is desirable to focus on relationships between person characteristics and task demands or environmental characteristics, rather than traits desired across tasks or environments that are desirable for all people and for all circum­ stances' ( 1 989: 357). Also, it must be remem­ bered that people shape their environments by selecting them and then modifying them. Even Pfeffer, writing with Davis-Blake (Davis-Blake and Pfeffer 1 989), after seemingly filing yet another missing person report by entitling a paper appearing in the special issue 'Just a mirage: the search for dispositional effects', came to a similarly interactionist position. They were comfortable talking about individuals' dispositions as long as it is recognized that the dispositions are not static and that individuals adapt to different types of situation. They wrote: 'Empirical research . . . has revealed that, over time, individuals' dispositions are significantly affected by the organizations in which they participate' ( 1 989: 389). Mitchell and James ( 1 989b) concluded the special issue with a very instructive paper concerning the situational versus dispositional debate, which is especially helpful for revealing the individual's new role. They observed that the traditional research paradigm in interactional psychology had changed from being concerned with partitioning behavioral variance into static entities such as persons versus situations to a paradigm 'in which

reciprocally interacting person-environment rela­ tions are viewed as being simultaneously consis­ tent and variable (adaptable) ' ( 1 989b: 405, italics added). They called for research guided by the premise of dynamic reciprocal causality. In our view general systems theory had long been a potential framework for such work, but its contribution was limited by the mechanistic ways in which it was first employed with a focus on inputs and outputs rather than the mutually determining processes that it could have high­ lighted. Currently the field is moving to serious consideration of mutually determining pro­ cesses; Karl Weick's work appears to be at the forefront.

Towards a New Role for the Individual: Mutually Determining Processes

Help in thinking through the complexities of mutually determining processes is available in the social constructionist view advanced and developed by Karl Weick. Weick's ( 1 979) influential book The Social Psychology of Organizing (second edition) and his more recent work have helped the field to conceptua­ lize mutual causality across levels by providing

THE INDIVID UAL both a system for and the SpIrIt to focus on process. The individual is still important to Weick: his 1 979 book was clearly psychologically based. However, Weick's concern was the process of organizing, and he advanced a new fundamental unit for organizational analysis the double interact. Although the individual was still important, the individual's most salient features were not the traditional ones that helped the person to know his/her environment objec­ tively. Rather, a person acts and then responds to and attempts to make sense of what he/she has done. Through this process individuals are active in creating the environments to which they respond. Although not often explicitly labeled as such, Weick's work represented a major post­ modern move, leading the field away from the assumed concrete entities from the past, i.e., individuals and organizations. From this perspective traditional ways of thinking about individuals and about larger social systems unravel. Interestingly, in some of Weick's more recent work (Weick and Roberts 1 993) a concept previously used to account for individual behavior - the mind - was reformu­ lated as the 'collective mind' to describe complex coordinated behavior among individuals. This transplant of the individual's most celebrated property (the mind) to the collective is a dramatic shift. Historically social psychologists have been highly critical of the idea of a group mind. However, Weick and Roberts's use of the term was qualitatively different than before. They began with the realization that they needed to develop 'a [new] language of organizational mind that enables us [them] to describe collective mental processes' ( 1 993: 357). This language helps to locate the individual's new role, by permitting focus on both individuals and the collective simultaneously. As they put it: 'only individuals can contribute to a collective mind.' However, 'a collective mind is distinct from an individual mind because it inheres in the pattern of interrelated activities among many people' ( 1 993: 360). Weick and Roberts treated the concept of 'mind' as a disposition to act with heed. Heed captures a 'set of qualities of mind that elude the more stark vocabulary of cognition' ( 1 993: 3 6 1 ) . Space limitations prevent a more complete summary of Weick and Roberts's conceptualization except to add that it led them to see the collective mind ' ''located'' in the process of interrelating just as the individual mind for Ryle was "located" in . . . activities' ( 1 993: 365). The interrelations are constructed and reconstructed by individuals. Although Weick and Roberts did not focus on a changed role for the individual, their ideas can be usefully extended to this end. They observed: The mindset . . . implicit in the preceding

151

analysis has little room for heroic, autonomous individuals. A well developed organization mind . . . is thoroughly social' ( 1 993: 378). 3 The individual still has a role but he/she is part of a play - a play produced by individuals heedfully interacting with others. The play is the unit of interest. Importantly, in Weick's most recent book, the individual is arso thoroughly social: 'Identities are constituted out of the process of interaction' ( 1 995: 20). Weick put the gist of this point in easily remembered prose in the question: 'How can I know who I am until I see what they do?' ( 1 995: 23, italics added). Weick's view of the thoroughly social indivi­ dual seems to capture well what appears to be the emerging role of the person. The individual still plays an important role, but that role is defined by the context; the individual's essenti­ alist properties are of less interest than before. As we concluded our review of contemporary American industrial psychology and organiza­ tional behavior publications with Weick, we were taken by the parallels between the emerging contextual view and that of the French historian Michel Foucault, who seems to have become an intellectual hero of many European students of organizations. The European parallel is well illustrated in Clegg's ( 1 994) discussion of Foucault. Clegg's treatment of Foucault's concept of rule is especially pertinent. Clegg argued that Fou­ cault's use of rule helps to transcend 'the limits of individualist accounts of "interpretative understanding" as a type of privileged access to the subjectivity of the other' ( \ 994: 1 59). According to Clegg, Foucault's notion of the disciplinary gaze focuses attention on why historical subjectivities come into existence. From this vantage point, it is easier for the analyst to gain the benefits of Granovetter's ( 1 985) embeddedness perspective, thereby avoid­ ing the trappings of both understructuralized and overstructuralized accounts. Similarly, Townley observed the value of Foucault for human resources management: 'Traditional approaches in personnel have taken the individual as a self-evident phenomenon . . . possessing an essential personal identity' ( 1 994: I I ). In contrast, Townley observed, Foucault offers 'a relational and dynamic model of identity. This individual is continuously con­ stituted and constructed through social relation­ ships, discourses and practices' ( 1 994: I I ). 'A Foucauldian analysis of the individual subject does not therefore, assume an uncovering of a given essential identity of skills, abilities, and personality traits. Rather its focus is on the processes involved in rendering the individual knowable' ( 1 994: 1 2) . She also noted that

STUD YING ORGANIZA TION

1 52

Foucauldian analysis stresses organizing, not organization. Of the European writers we reviewed, we found the strongest attack on the individual's privileged position in Changing (he Subject by Henriques et aI., who called for rejecting 'psychology's individualistic concept of the subject' ( 1 984: I I ) and for showing 'how indi­ viduals are constituted through the social domain' ( 1 984: 1 7). They indicated that psychol­ ogy has been plagued by dualistic conceptions (e.g. biological versus social) that make it difficult to conceptualize the individual in a fully social way. They called for reconceptualiz­ ing terms such as biology and society to avoid the implicit dualism 'in favor of stressing the relational character of their mutual effects' ( 1 984: 2 1 ) . This view challenges some funda­ mental and long-standing thought patterns which are embedded in our modes of discourse. In short, there may be a basis for a rapprochement concerning the individual's role between American organizational and psychol­ ogy behavior and a growing trend in European organizational scholarship. Both seem to be adopting a nonessentialist view of the individual and emphasizing the reciprocal relationship between the individual and social processes.

behavior have long had a social component. In fact. the social component was recognized with the famous Hawthorne studies, if not before (see Mathewson 193 1 ) . Also behind much of F.W. Taylor's work was a desire to overcome the group phenomenon he called 'soldiering'. Thus, clearly for a long time, the social system had not been totally ignored. However, we would counter that developments in the last two decades represent a qualitative change in the relationship between the individual and the social component. Earlier treatments of the social system were troubled by its role, seeing it as something that corrupted the individual or as an expression of people's lower level, nonra­ tional instincts. Consequently, the individual was treated as signal and the social relationships were treated more as noise. Further, although we acknowledge that the spotting of a trend is a function of an often arbitrary starting point and that social relationships were recognized in organization studies long before Cummings's ( 1 982) A RP chapter, we would maintain, for the reasons just stated, that things are quite different now than in the 1 960s.

The Individual is Alive and Well in 1/0 Psychology and OB

SOME POSSIBLE OBJECTIONS ABOUT THE DISAPPEARANCE OF THE I NDIVID UAL

This section was motivated both by a desire to present a balanced picture and quite frankly by our own skepticism about what we presented in the first section. Here we consider two possible objections to the thesis, developed in the first section, that the individual is disappearing. Thoughtful readers might object that the trends we discovered are misrepresentations for at least three reasons. First, locating a trend depends on the point in time that one begins analysis. We began ours with the late 1 960s. One could argue that by the 1 960s, even traditional II o psychology was far from asocial. A second objection is almost the opposite of the first. It suggests that even today there continues to be a great deal of research featuring a relatively traditional view of the individual. A third objection is that we relied very heavily on one publication A RP in developing our thesis. We consider these in order. -

-

110 Psychology was not Asocial as Implied

With respect to the first criticism, we agree that both industrial psychology and organization

The second objection would imply that it is possible to write an extensive story under the heading ·the individual is alive and well and starring on many stages. ' Being American psychologists we were predisposed towards this possibility; we took it seriously and studied the psychological literature to see if a strong case could be made for the position that 'the individual is alive and well.' We found that the individual retains a strong, starring role in many legitimate theaters. Indeed we found quite a renaissance of interest in a number of personality, cognitive, and affective variables in describing the experience and behavior of individuals in organizations. How­ ever, even in these places, the individual doesn't have the same role as in the past. Personality

A resurgence of interest in personality was one of Katzell's ( 1 994) meta-trends in his I/O Handbook chapter. Among the hottest topics in I/O psychology are studies of the role of the big five personality factors ( see Digman 1 990) in accounting for and predicting organizational performance (Hogan 1 99 1 ); the role of a general intelligence factor or g; and other dispositional variables such as positive and negative affectivity

THE INDI VIDUAL (Brief et al. 1 988; Spector et al. 1 995), locus of control (Storms and Spector 1 987; Perlow and Latham 1 993) and impulsivity (Latham 1 995). Emotions in the workplace are of increasing interest. with increasing emphasis on the under­ lying cognitive structure I)f the experience of work-related affect (Warr 1 987; 1 994). H owever, even in this traditionally psychological area, as Fineman's chapter on emotion and organizing in this volume reveals (Chapter I I ), sociological perspectives have become increasingly impor­ tant. Most notably, the recent resurgence of interest in emotions has included the association between affective responses to work and behavioral outcomes that go beyond prescribed performance criteria: behavioral role choices along a pro-role, in-role, anti-role continuum. A similar broadening of focus is evident in research examining cognitive associates of behavioral role choices, including assessments of organizational fairness and justice and psychological contracts. In organizational psychology some consensus is emerging about the role of personality for understanding people's behavior in organizations. The consensus is that indivi­ duals can be characterized by a number of enduring dispositional qualities, and that these characterizations can provide useful infonnation for the theory and practice of employee development and organizational effectiveness (Hogan 1 99 1 ). One predominant theory, known as the five-factor theory of personality, has evolved oui of fifty years of research on the underlying structure of personality based on the trait vocabulary used to describe observed behavior. A large body of factor analytic studies of peer and self-ratings of trait vocabulary, replicated across many different languages and populations, have converged on five primary factors describing personality. These are neur­ oticism, extroversion, openness to experience (or culture), conscientiousness, and agreeableness. Hogan ( 1 99 1 ) described these factors as repre­ sentations of cognitive prototypes or schemata which people seem to use when observing others' behaviors. They are the basis of people's reputations, serving a social function as 'pre­ wired categories of social cognition used to sort the behavior of others and to give some predictability to social life' ( 1 99 1 : 879). Based on the preponderance of evidence which 'shows that individuals who are dependable, reliable, careful, thorough, able to plan, organized, hardworking, persistent, and achievement oriented tend to have higher job performance in most if not all occupations' ( 1 99 1 : 272), Mount et al. ( 1 994) observed that conscientious­ ness has emerged as the most important trait motivation variable in personnel psychology.

The Big Five

1 53

Moreover, their own research, which supported the position that ratings by observers (e.g. supervisors and coworkers) of these attributes add incrementally to the variance in perform­ ance explained by self-ratings, suggested that previous research that has relied almost exclu­ sively on one's self-reports to measure person­ ality may have understated the validity of personality as a predictor of job performance. Although factor analytic methodology, and its appropriateness for uncovering an underlying structure of personality, have received some criticism (see Block 1 995), most scholars in the area agree that the big five theory of personality provides a robust framework for understanding human nature and its relationship to task and interpersonal behaviors (Hogan 1 99 1 ; Mount et al. 1 994). H owever, the term 'personality' entails an inherent lack of clarity and is actually used in two very different ways. One meaning of per­ sonality is a person's social reputation as seen by others, which Hogan described as 'public, relatively objective, and describable in terms of a common vocabulary - that is in terms of trait words' ( 1 99 1 : 875). The personality as reputation is based on the observer's experience with the target person's past behavior, and as such may be usefully applied to projections of the person's future performance. A second meaning of personality refers to the internal structures and processes within a person, inaccessible to an observer. At best we may obtain indications of this personality construct by means of self­ report, projective techniques, and the like, although their reliability is questionable. The usefulness of self-reports of personality is limited by the confound of self-presentation with issues of self-knowledge and self-concept. Industrial psychologists have looked exten­ sively at the relevance of the five-factor model for prediction of job performance. As noted, conscientiousness consistently appears to be a valid predictor across occupational groups and job-related criteria. A second factor, extrover­ sion (describing sociability, talkativeness, asser­ tiveness, ambition, and activity), appears to be a valid predictor for jobs with a large interpersonal or social component. Significantly, Mount et al.'s ( 1 994) preference for supervisor, coworker and customer ratings over self-reports of personality traits in predicting job-related criteria, is consistent with Hogan's preference for the construct of personality as social reputation opposed to personality as reflection of internal structures and processes 4 Despite the various methodological and conceptual issues involved in the big five research, it is certainly one stage where the individual's star is still bright, but emphasis is given to the perceptions held by others.

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STUD rING ORGANIZA TION

(g) The individual con­ tinues to be the focus of attention in the growing body of research supporting the validity of a number of dispositional and general intelligence factors in prediction of job performance. This research continues to raise perplexing ethical questions, e.g. what do we do with this knowl­ edge? Do we accept disposition as a basis of employee selection and development, in the same way as we have traditionally used requisite job­ related KSAs (knowledge, skills, abilities)? At least in the US these ethical questions are linked to legal issues. Also, there is the question that in 'selecting out' candidates whose personalities do not conform with organizational performance requirements, might we be depriving organiza­ tions of important sources of creativity, renewal, and transformation? Above all, what are the human implications of 'discarding' a large portion of our potential workforce merely for possessing personality structures that do not conform with the immediate needs of the marketplace? General Intelligence

It is clear that in the area of per­ sonality, the individual is alive and well. However, even here, macro issues raised by ethical and legal concerns threaten to rob the person's centrality. However, there is a second area where the individual seems to be thriving. This is in the study of emotions and work. Summary

Emotions in the Workplace

Locke, in his review of a monumental body of literature, defined job satisfaction as 'a pleasur­ able emotional state resulting from the appraisal of one's job or job experiences' ( 1 976: 1 300). Recognizing that satisfaction is an emotional reaction, obviously emotions have been a central part of organizational studies for some time. However, contemporary interest in emotions in organizations expands traditional approaches to job satisfaction in two important respects. First, satisfaction has typically represented a very narrow component of the complex interplay of perceptions, appraisals, arousals, and responses experienced as emotions in the workplace. Second, while researchers have traditionally been concerned with satisfaction as an indepen­ dent variable affecting performance and pro­ ductivity (see Nord's 1 974 critique of the satisfaction literature), the health and well­ being of organization members as people are increasingly seen as important outcome variables in their own right (Katzell 1 994). Warr's ( 1 994) work on job­ related affective well-being exemplifies this new focus on the health and well-being of organiza-

Affective States

tion members. Warr defined five components of mental health in Western societies: affective well­ being, competence, aspiration, autonomy, and integrated functioning. In organizational research, affective well-being has traditionally been studied as a one-dimensional, undifferen­ tiated construct, ranging from feeling bad to feeling good. As a result, Fineman ( 1 993) observed, the typical presentations of job-related well-being have depicted an 'emotionally anor­ exic' individual in possession of a narrow range of pale human emotions - satisfactions and alienations. Organ and Near ( 1 985) suggested that this narrow focus may partially explain the persistent lack of empirical support for a satisfaction-performance relationship, in part because traditional measures of 'performance' may fail to tap into certain types of constructive (or destructive) work behaviors; Organ has developed this theme in his body of work on altruistic or pro-social organizational behavior. More to the point, however, is the extent to which measures of job satisfaction and other job attitudes have privileged the cognitive dimen­ sion. Thus the concept of 'satisfaction' maps to an appraisal or evaluation of composite external circumstances, rather than to the 'happiness' experienced. Organ and Near cited Campbell's ( 1 976) findings that while aggregated cognitive measures of 'satisfaction' are positively corre­ lated with affective measures of 'happiness' (r = 0.57), the two sets of measures showed different patterns of relationship with a number of ante­ cedent and consequent variables. For example, age has been found to be the most consistent positive correlate of job satisfaction; however age correlated negatively with measures of 'happiness' (Campbell 1 9 76): Warr ( 1 994) further pinpointed interest in emotions as 'context-specific' affective well­ being, providing a basis for investigating the relationships of a wide range of affective states to antecedent and consequent organizational events and behaviors. By examining this range of emotions specifically anchored in the job experience ('My job makes me feel' from furious to ecstatic: Van Katwyk et al. 1 995) we may better understand the relationships between affective and behavioral responses to work (e.g. the range of behavioral choices that influence an organization's functioning above and beyond perfunctory performance). Similarly, emotion plays a major role in research concerning frustration and stress at work. Organizational Frustration and Stress One model of the affective basis of organizational aggression (Spector 1 975; Spector 1 978; Storms and Spector 1 987; Chen and Spector 1 992), based on the classic (Dollard et al. 1 939)

I SS

THE INDI VID UAL frustration-aggression theory, views aggression as a consequence of frustration. Spector and colleagues examined the sequence in organiza­ tional work of situational constraints blocking individuals from achieving valued work goals, emotional reactions to frustration, and beha­ vioral reactions. Affective reactions included job dissatisfaction and feelings of stress, frustration, anxiety and anger (Chen and Spector 1 992). Organizational frustration affected job perfor­ mance, absenteeism, turnover, organizational aggression, and interpersonal aggression and included withdrawal of efforts to achieve organizational goals (e.g. turnover, absenteeism) and interpersonal hostility or aggression. These behaviors may interfere with the organization's task performance, climate, or effectiveness and consequently may be thought of as counter­ productive, anti-role, or anti-social behaviors. Clearly, the individual has a starring role in this work on emotions, much as before when satisfaction and attitudes were studied in the past. The slight changes are represented by the spotlight on the less rational features of the individual, e.g., moods, emotions and affect. Behavioral Role Continuum: Extra-Role Choices

Although research on role choices continues to focus on the individual, growing attention has been given to the possibility that the success of the postmodern, post-industrial organization may increasingly depend upon employees' behavioral role choices. Employees may choose roles that go beyond the performance require­ ments defined by the job role itself: pro-role (McLean Parks and Kidder 1 994); pro-social (Brief and Motowidlo 1 986); organizational citizenship behavior (Organ 1 990). Conversely they may choose roles that covertly or overtly harm the organization: anti-role (McLean Parks and Kidder 1 994); anti-social (Hogan and Hogan 1 989); counterproductive (Storms and Spector 1 987); deviant (Robinson and Bennett 1 975); maladaptive (Perlow and Latham 1993); and sabotage (Jermier 1988). The organizational consequences of employees' extra-role behavior may be amplified by combination with a heightened competitive environment and the growing importance of computer-intensive tech­ nologies. On the one hand, the enormous capital expenditures on technology require optimal utilization of technological investments. On the other hand, computer-intensive technologies make organizations more vulnerable to employee aggression in the form of computer sabotage. According to LaNuez and Jermier ( 1 994), in these newer organizations, changes in class relations make it more likely than before that higher-level employees, such as managers and technocrats, will be saboteurs.

Organizational

Citizenship

Behavior

(OCB)

Perhaps OCB has received more research attention than any other topic in the role choice area. OCB researchers stress that organization members may choose to perform only the behaviors required by their jobs (or by their psychological contracts as mutually under­ stood by employee and supervisor). Alterna­ tively, employees may choose to exceed the requirements of their job roles and make extra­ role contributions to benefit the organization. A widely studied formulation of this latter extra-role behavior is organizational citizenship behavior (OCB), defined as organizationally helpful, constructive gestures exhibited by organization members and valued or appreciated by managers, but neither directly related to individual productivity nor inhering in the enforceable or formal requirements of the individual's role. OCB includes such behaviors as: cooperation, supporting the supervisor, helping coworkers, enhancing the reputation of the work unit, suggesting improvements, train­ ing new people, punctuality and attendance beyond required levels, and abstaining from negative behaviors. Organ distinguished OCB from the broader notion of pro-social organizational behavior (PO B), which is behavior directed at improving the welfare of the person(s) to whom it is directed. Recent advances in OCB include Graham's ( 1 986) introduction of principled organization dissent to describe individuals' efforts in the workplace to change the organiza­ tion because of their conscientious objection to a policy or practice, and Van Dyne et al.'s ( 1 994) test of a reconceptualized notion of OCB derived from political philosophy, adding the idea of civic citizenship to the traditional elements of organizational citizenship, to conceptualize organizational citizenship as a global concept that includes all positive organizationally rele­ vant behaviors.

An­ other range on the behavior choice continuum is anti-role behavior. The growing concern with such aggressive or anti-social behaviors in both the scholarly and popular press stems from awareness that annual losses from employee theft in the United States are high (estimated at over $40 billion) and that homicide is the third leading cause of occupational death in the American workplace (McLean Parks and Kidder 1 994). Frameworks employed in the study of anti-social behavior include: the organizational frustration model discussed above, the psychological contract and organiza­ tional justice. Anti-Role or Counterproductive Behavior

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STUD YING ORGANIZA TION

The psychological con­ tract is the individual's belief in a reciprocal exchange agreement. and doesn't necessarily correspond to the agreement assumed by the employer or other organization members. Sub­ jectively it is characterized by perceptions, interpretations, and sense-making (Rousseau and McLean Parks 1 993). From the contractual perspective, employees and employers enter into an employment relationship with sets of expecta­ tions of reciprocal obligations that go beyond the formal, explicit agreements made in the hiring process (Rousseau and McLean Parks 1 993; Rousseau 1 989; Shore and Tetrick 1 994; McLean Parks and Kidder 1 994). According to Shore and Tetrick ( 1 994) the core of the typical psychological contract of the industrial age organization member was the belief that the organization will provide job security and promotional opportunities in return for hard work and loyalty. With the dissolution of the job boundary, the dismantling of the internal labor market, and the movement toward a contingent workforce, it is precisely this aspect of the psychological contract which is pro­ foundly challenged in the post-industrial work­ place. As organizations continue to downsize, the violation of the psychological contract becomes a central issue for the survivors. If organizations move toward a more explicitly short-term, contingent, virtual model, we may expect the psychological contract to move increasingly toward the transactional end of the continuum, reducing commitment and trust. moving away from the socio-emotional aspects to focus on the purely pecuniary benefits of the relationship (McLean Parks and Kidder 1 994). Thus the effects of violations on surviving 'core' members, as well as the creation of a new genre of psychological contract for the contingent labor force. will be a major issue in our study of organizations. Psychological Contract

Organizational Justice The notion of the psychological contract i s closely related to research on organizational justice (Brockner and Greenberg 1 989; Greenberg 1 990). Equity theory and social exchange theory were perhaps the most direct parents of current j ustice research. Following these theories we would expect the perception that the organization is 110/ behaving in the employee's interests (organiza­ tional injustice, violation of psychological con­ tract) to be associated with increased anti-role behavior. Such violations of the psychological contract can cause strong affective reactions (Rousseau 1 989) as well as reevaluation of the contract itself. The employee may reevaluat� the rela-

tional contract. with its emphasis on long-term, interpersonal relationships and organizational commitment, to a transactional contract, or may respond affectively and evaluatively by moving down the continuum from pro-role behavior to in-role behavior. This is consistent with both the organizational frustration-aggression model and the early work of Organ ( 1 988) linking the fairness component of job satisfaction to pro­ social behavior. Similarly, the employee's perceptions of procedural justice in the organization (the perceived fairness of processes and procedures used to make decisions, particularly interperso­ nal treatment) can be examined in relationship to contract evaluation, satisfaction, and ultimately behavioral response and role choice. These relationships are the core of much of the research on survivor syndrome after downsizing, the influence of fairness perceptions on survi­ vors' work behaviors and attitudes (Greenberg 1 990; Brockner and Greenberg 1 989). Due to their social psychological heritage, studies of contracts and justice have placed the individual at their cores. Consequently, the growth of current research about them supports the 'individual is alive and well' position. Motivation

Another area where the individual continues to star stems from the continuing interest I/O psychologists have in motivation (see Pinder 1 984 and Kanfer 1 990 for comprehensive reviews of this work). Despite the trend that Kanfer noted towards reconceptualizing needs as flexible personal goals that vary with cognitive constructions of the environment, the individual remains at center stage. Specifically, the individual continues to star in the monumental body of research on goal setting, pioneered by Locke (see Locke et al. 1 98 1 for an excellent overview). More recently, the individual was highlighted in Wood and Locke's ( 1 990) use of control theory to theorize about why goals work. Individual DijJerences

The tradition of individual differences is alive and well. As we observed earlier, quite recently Ackerman and Humphreys ( 1 990) placed indi­ vidual differences at the core of lIO psychology. They wrote: 'A major purpose of industrial psychology is to categorize individuals' ( 1 990: 224). The individual also is at the center of a slightly different approach to the study of individual differences, the biological approach centering on genetics. Avery and Bouchard ( 1 994) highlighted the present interactionist course of this

THE INDIVID UAL approach. While focusing on genetic influence, however, they did not take a polar position on the nature-nurture issue, concluding that both genetic and environmental influences were important. Leadership

There continues to be strong interest in leader­ ship, an area where we should expect the individual to do well. The persuasive argument of House ( 1 988) and the monumental research program of McClelland and associates (see McClelland and Boyatzis 1 982) have provided a much stronger case for the role of personality on leadership than one would have imagined possible following reaction to the publication by Stogdill ( 1 974) which was widely interpreted (misinterpreted according to some - see Lord et al. 1 986) as suggesting that personality char­ acteristics were not important for leadership. Of course interpreting the degree to which these developments have restored the individual requires keeping other simultaneous develop­ ments in mind. When this is done, and we tie all the strands together, the leadership area does not bode as well for the role of the individual as the previous paragraph might imply. We have already noted the work of Meindl and his colleagues (see Meindl et al. 1 985) on the romance of leadership that suggested the importance of leaders may be overstated in our contemporary thinking. Even in the currently popular study of transformational leadership, where the indivi­ dual appears to be prominent, there is a long­ standing debate over the competing person versus situation models of leadership, corre­ , sponding to the person view (,great men [sic] ) versus situation view ('great times') of history (Yammarino and Bass 1 99 1 ). Clearly transfor­ mational leadership theory, with its emphasis on the charismatic qualities and behaviors of leaders, would seem to come down on the side of the individual. Charisma, whether based on Weber's innate personal attributes or a more modern behavioral approach, is seen as the basis of the transformational leader's intense norma­ tive influence over others, the ability to manipulate symbolism, rewards, and visions in order to engage and energize followers in carrying out the leader's agenda (Bryman 1 992). However, this approach to transformational leadership, with its unidirectional focus on the agency of the individual leader, has come under increasing criticism as leadership scholars have reexamined the leader in the context of the group and the organization. Bryman, for instance, noted the depth of the schism between leadership research with its emphasis on rationality, and the

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postmodernist approach of much of the field of organization studies. He pointed to the need to address the reciprocal relationship between leaders and followers, the dependence of the charismatic leader on continual validation and maintenance by followers, the social formation of charisma itself, and the dangers inherent in charismatic leadership (arrogance, obsession, poor judgment, abuse of power, authoritarian­ ism, disempowerment of subordinates, absence of moral safeguards). These issues highlight the inextricability of social context from the issues of individual leadership. Interestingly, recent research by Gaines ( 1 993) on one well known charismatic leader indicated that Anita Rod­ dick's style is much better captured by the idea of servant leadership than the dominating hero/ heroine of the past. Another view on leadership that threatens the individual's position by looking to the group or organizational context rather than the persona of the leader as the source of 'leadership' is implicit leadership theory. Implicit leadership theory is related to Calder's ( 1 977) attribution theory of leadership, which focused interest on the interpersonal perceptions and inferences people use in attributing 'leadership' to another person rather than on some set of traits or behaviors embedded in an individual 'leader'. In this view actions taken to be evidence of leadership are behaviors typically expected to be performed by leaders as distinct from behaviors of most group members. Leadership is attributed when observations of the focal person's behaviors are matched against the observer's implicit theories of leadership (i.e. expectations of how leaders should act). Leader­ ship, then, is not a quality in the person of the leader, but rather a cognitive construction by 'followers' . To the extent that leader prototypes are developed by members in a group context, these collective cognitive processes represent a strongly social constructionist model of leader­ ship requiring consideration of several levels of analysis. Yammarino and Bass ( 1 99 1 ) offered an approach to researching leadership at multiple levels of analysis. Their research addressed the full range of combinations of person effects, situation effects, person-situation interactions and joint effects, from person, group, and collective levels of analysis. At each level, effects were viewed both from a wholistic perspective (a focus on differences between entities), and a parts perspective (a focus on differences within entities). A methodology was offered for testing empirically interrelationships at these multiple levels - the within and between analysis (WABA) of Dansereau et al. ( 1 984) . The WABA design represents a breakthrough in

STUD YING ORGANIZA TION

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empirical research, integrating levels of analysis in such research areas as leadership and teams, and as such is a valuable approach for under­ standing the individual in a rich social context. Thus, it appears that the individual is still a star on the leadership stage; however, the role has been transformed to give larger parts to other cast members. Summary

Clearly then, the individual has not disappeared. A good case can be made that there are areas where the individual seems to be starring, but even in many of these the individual's past glory has diminished and the new script focuses attention on context, the surroundings and the supporting cast. Still our skepticism about the individual's disappearance persuaded us to consider other possible objections.

Nonrepresentativeness of ARP

A third set of objections concerning the individual's disappearance in the OB and I/O fields might argue that our conclusions stemmed from sampling problems involving such a heavy reliance on the longitudinal study of one major publication, even one as prestigious as A RP. How representative of the field is ARP? To explore this concern, we studied other major publications in the field. Based on the results of this study (summarized below) we concluded that the individual's seeming disappearance was not limited to A RP. Recent major publications in OB and I/O psychology, most notably Dunnette and Hough's multivolume Handbook of Industrial and Organizational Psychology, and numerous chapters in the highly regarded annual series Research in Organizational Behavior, edited by Cummings and Staw, confirmed the results of our A RP study: the subject matter of the field had become wider and more concerned with context. Of course, the content of these volumes is not independent of A RP. In fact, many of the same authors published in both sets of sources; moreover, the raw materials for the annual review chapters are often these other publications and vice versa. Still, the common­ ality concerning the individual's disappearance was noteworthy. Of particular note was the emphasis in recent volumes of the Cummings and Staw series on the meso theme we had encountered in several of the more recent ARP chapters. An especially thoughtful and potentially fruitful answer to the calls to move beyond using the individual as the unit for analysis appeared in House et al.'s

( 1 995) treatment of the meso paradigm. This was a valuable addition to Rousseau and House's earlier outline of a meso framework for encom­ passing 'the effects of context on individual and group behavior' ( 1 994: 1 6). This proposal was more than simply a critique of micro-level analysis; a purely macro-level analysis was also rejected. In their more recent paper, House et al. ( 1 995) expressed concern that micro researchers apply general psychological theories to the study of behavior as though behavior is context-free. They added: 'Until general psychological theor­ ies are linked to organizational contextual variables they will remain inadequate to explain what goes on in organizations' ( 1 995: 77). The Cummings and Staw series also contained an important chapter by Cappelli and Sherer ( 1 99 1 ). As we noted earlier, in calling for mesoscopic-Ievel work Cappelli and Sherer wrote: research in OB has systematically abandoned con­ textual arguments in order to remain consistent with theoretical developments in the field of psychology. The abandonment of context comes despite substantial and wide-spread evidence of important relationships between contextual factors and the behavior of individual employees in organizations. The rise of cognitive approaches in OB research which systematically exclude considerations of the external environment leave the field with some interesting choices. If it continues on its current cognitive path, the field of OB is likely to miss the chance to establish any independent identity. What is unique about behavior in organizations is pre­ sumably that being in the organization - the context of the organization - somehow shapes behavior, and it is impossible to explore that uniqueness without an explicit consideration of context. ( 1 99 1 : 97)

Katzell ( 1 994) expressed similar notions in his monumental overview chapter on the field's meta-trends in the second edition of the Hand­

book ofIndustrial and Organizational Psychology, although he left more room in center stage for the individual. Katzell described a continuum of embeddedness, extending from the individual and dyad to social/economic environment and national levels of analysis. He suggested that at a theoretical level, cross-level formulation enables us to understand both the cognitive/social construction of organizational properties and the dynamic patterns of person-situation inter­ action in the construction of personality. At an applied level, cross-level formulation can help practitioners identify interventions at the appropriate leve1(s) of analysis. In sum, Katzell's meta-trends revealed a mixed picture of the individual's role. On the one hand, many of the meta-trends (e.g. the growing interest that organizational psychologists have shown in how

THE INDIVID UAL things change over time, i.e. history; in using complex and integrative systems theories, con­ cepts, and models; and in advancing the belief that the whole is more than the sum of its parts) are consistent with the decrease in the centrality of the individual. On the other hand, Katzell observed other meta-trends, such as the growth of the cognitive perspective and the 'revival of personality' ( 1 994: 3), that are inconsistent with that picture. Then too, study of many of the chapters in the Handbook suggested that the individual had not been displaced at all. For example, Hogan ( 1 99 1 ) criticized Mischel's ( 1 968) argument that had advanced the situationist perspective over the traditional role of personality in accounting for human behavior. Hogan observed: 'personality and personality assessment, despite occasional rumors to the contrary, are alive and well' ( 1 99 1 : 877). On the other hand, Dunnette ( 1 990), editor of the first edition of the Handbook and co-editor of the second, indicated that he sensed the field had moved towards context and away from the individual. He wrote: It is obvious from the 1 980 portrayal of the field that fairly heavy emphasis was placed on individual issues, though it is also apparent that group issues and organizational issues were emerging as critical areas of concern. In contrast, the picture portrayed in 1 990 is one of needing to face and solve challenges related not only to these concerns, but also to many others brought by radical changes in organizations, the nature of workforces. ( 1 990: 6)

Thus, it is clear that there are major areas of study where the individual is still starring. However, it is noteworthy that writers such as Hogan ( 1 99 1 ), who maintained that the indi­ vidual is alive and well, were writing, in part, in rebuttal to others who had suggested the individual's role was dwindling. This review of other prestigious publications suggested that the A RP chapters had represented things quite well and that although the individual had not disappeared entirely in organizational and industrial psychology, the individual's star had been falling; even those who would like to have ignored the fact were unable to do so. Despite the growing support about the individual's disappearance in lIO psychology and OB, we were still skeptical. What other evidence might help resolve our remaining doubts? Certainly if this were a major trend, given the ties between lIO psychology, OB and psychology in general we would find a similar trend in general psychology. Accordingly we explored that literature for traces of the indi­ vidual's disappearance. Our findings are sum­ marized in the next section.

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CHANGING ROLE OF THE INDIVIDUAL IN GENERAL PSYCHOLOGY

Since the micro side of organizational studies had long been influenced by assumptions about human nature made in psychology and the social sciences more generally, we looked to see if the emphasis on context was crowding out the individual elsewhere in the social sciences. Exploration of the general psychological and related literatures revealed that here too, the

traditional privileged position of the individual had waned and the role ofsocial contexts had gained in importance. We present the evidence supporting this assertion in the next section on assumptions about human beings in modern social science.

Assumptions about Human Beings in Modern Social Science

We reviewed discussions of assumptions about human beings in major psychological publica­ tions and then explored the biological literature briefly. The original psychological theorists on whom early organizational behaviorists had drawn heavily (e.g. Maslow 1 943 and White 1 959) made rather essentialist assumptions about individuals (e.g. attributing fixed patterns of needs). Interestingly, psychological essentialism has retreated in much of the recent psychological literature in favor of emphasis on how philoso­ phical and social factors, by affecting assump­ tions about human nature, influence what human nature is taken to be. For example, the esteemed psychologist Gordon W. Allport ( 1 985) described how characteristics attributed to human social nature, such as hedonism, egoism, and sympathy, were all consequences of a prevailing social ethos. He concluded: ' Like all behavioral science, social psychology rests ultimately upon broad metathe­ ories concerning the nature of man [sic] and the nature of society' ( 1 985: 42). In a similar vein, another renowned psychol­ ogist, Albert Bandura, observed: 'Conceptions of human nature . . . focus inquiry on selected processes and are, in turn, strengthened by findings of research paradigms embodying the particular point of view . . . . As psychological knowledge is put into practice, the conceptions on which social technologies rest have even greater implications . . . . In this way, theoretical conceptions of human nature can influence what people actually become' ( 1 986: 1 -2). Conclusions such as these by such great psychologists suggested a strong movement in mainstream psychology away from the assump­ tion of the essentialist individual.

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Significantly we found a similar trend in other human sciences. In sociobiology, for instance, we found a less strong essentialist view than we had expected. For example, the famous sociobiolo­ gist Edward O. Wilson, writing the foreword to David P. Barash's ( 1 977) Sociobiolog)! and Behavior, advanced a surprisingly nonessentialist position, commenting that while there is very strong evidence that a human biogram (i.e. a pattern of potentials built into the heredity of the species as a whole) exists for many traits, 'In other traits human beings are . . . much more variable . . . . Human behavior is dominated by culture in the sense that the greater part, perhaps all, of the variation between societies is based on differences in cultural experience' ( 1 977: xiv). He added: 'To understand that evolutionary history and the contemporary biogram that it produced is to understand in a deeper manner the construction of human nature. . . . An exciting collaboration between biologists and social scientists appears to have begun' ( 1 977: xv). Following Wilson's foreword, Barash ( 1 977) noted the potential for social psychology, sociology and anthropology to contribute to sociobiology. This potential stems from the view of human nature that Barash attributed to sociobiology - a view that human behavior is the product of adaptive predispositions, 'A flexible, modifiable and perhaps rather fragile set of inclinations' ( 1 977: 286). He added: 'Practitioners of sociobiology . . . do not necessarily advocate biological determinism of human behavior. The difference between deter­ minism and genetic influence is the difference between shooting a bullet at a target and throwing a paper airplane; the paper airplane is acutely sensitive to environmental influences such as wind, and its ultimate path is not entirely predictable by the thrower.' Humans may be animals but, Barash warned, it does not follow that we are 'nothing but animals' ( 1 977: 287). Further exploration led us to a feminist critique of sociobiology in Janet Sayers's ( 1 982) book entitled Biological Politics: Feminist and Anti-Feminist Perspectives, which provided a further challenge to biological essentialism. According to Sayers, feminists are divided on how biology shapes women's social status. On the one hand there is social constructionism which maintains that the influence of biology on women's status is indirect, being mediated by the way that their biology is interpreted and construed within a given society. In contrast, biological essentialism argues that biology does affect women directly through the endowment of a particular 'feminine' character. Sayers ad­ vanced a third position: 'biological essentialism wrongly overestimates the biological determi­ nants of women's social status at the expense of

neglecting its social and historical determinants' ( 1 982: 3). Sayers also criticized social construc­ tionism for underestimating the biological roots of women's social status, suggesting that such status has been 'determined directly by biologi­ cal as well as social and historical factors' ( 1 982: 3-4) . Later she noted that the 'natural' condition of humankind, such as that advanced by Hobbes and some sociobiologists. is not given by nature but depends on specific historical contingencies. Sayers's work moved us to further exploration of feminist writings in the psychological litera­ ture. Here too. there were strong challenges to traditional ways of thinking about the individual. Marecek, for example, called for rethinking the psychology of gender, particularly the vie\\! which 'holds that the categories of "man" and "women" are natural. self-evident, and unequivocal' ( 1 995: 1 62). Marecek argued for 'alternative meanings of gender [that) de-center the meaning that prevails in psychology, namely individual differ­ ence' and for shifting 'the focus of analysis away from matters internal to the individual to the interpersonal and institutional arenas' ( 1 995: 1 62). Such views do not deny 'biological differ­ ence, but they do deny that such differences have a single, fixed meaning and salience whether from one culture to another, one historical period to another, one social group to another, or even from time to time in an individual's experience' ( 1 995: 1 62). Marecek stressed the need to consider how social location, which is a function of such things as race, ethnicity and social class, mediates the significance of gender. Other recent social science literature revealed additional concerns about the individual's position. Edward E . Sampson ( 1 985; 1 988; 1 989) published a series of articles in the American Psychologist challenging traditional conceptions of the individual. Sampson distin­ guished selIcontained individualism character­ istic of traditional American psychology, which emphasizes both firmly drawn self-other bound­ aries and personal self-control, from ensembled individualism 'that emphasizes more fluidly drawn self-nonself boundaries and field control' ( 1 988: 1 6). Sampson concluded that even though all cultures must deal with the human being as an embodied entity, 'individualism is a sociohisto­ rical rather than a natural event' ( 1 988: 1 8). In a later article, Sampson ( 1 989) developed the historical origins of the self-contained indivi­ dual, locating them in the modern era beginning in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. He observed that under the historical conditions of the modern era, in which the individual became the central unit of society, studying the indi­ vidual was sensible. However, we are now experiencing a transformation in the central organizing principle of society away from the

THE INDI VID UAL individual toward a more globally conceptual­ ized entity. In this new world, individualism leaves center stage and 'understanding the individual qua individual is no longer relevant to understanding human life' ( 1 989: 9 1 6). Accordingly, Sampson ( 1 989) proposed a revised mission for psychology: 'A psychology for tomorrow is a psychology that begins actively to chart out a theory of the person that is no longer rooted in the liberal individualist assump­ tions, but is reframed in terms more suitable to resolving the issues of a global era.' A number of other psychologists have expressed similar thoughts. Many were evident in a debate centering around the charge that the emphasis on the individual in American psychology is a product of a set of culture bound premises. Betancourt and Lopez ( 1 993), for example, charged that for a long time psychologists had ignored culture. In response, Lee ( 1 994) suggested that the problem was even deeper and located it in the individual oriented ness or individuocentrism characteristic of mainstream American psychology. In a related response, Reid ( 1 994) suggested that Betancourt and Lopez had identified some important issues but misdiagnosed the cause. The problem was not that culture had been ignored but that in the mainstream research, culture 'has been assumed to be homogeneous' ( 1 994: 525), i.e. based on a standard set of values and expectations. Additional questioning of the concept of the essentialist individual that has dominated Amer­ ican psychology presumes that there are some misguided assumptions about the 'self' as traditionally conceived in American psychology. Baumeister's ( 1 987) historical account of 'How the self became a problem' was a noteworthy example. Baumeister argued that the interest in the self held by contemporary psychologists and laypersons, and the idea of self as something hidden, abstract and within the individual causing visible behavior, are very recent in history. He observed that this concept of self emerged gradually and in contrast with the earlier view of the self as 'equated with observable behavior and commitments' ( 1 987: 1 65). According to Baumeister, the modern view contrasts sharply with the medieval one which denied that the person existed apart from his or her position in society. Baumeister's work suggested that the idea of the self commonly accepted in modern psychology should be viewed as the product of a specific historical stream rather than as a generalized concept. Recently, there appears to have been some movement back towards the medieval view noted by Baumeister. Writing in the pages of the prestigious Psychological Review, Markus

161

and Kitayama provided an insightful reformula­ tion of the idea of self by contrasting the independent view of self. which construes the selr 'as an autonomous, independent person' ( 1 99 1 : 226), with the interdependent construal. Even though in the interdependent construal the 'selr also possesses and expresses a set or internal attributes, such as abilities, opinions, judgments, and personality characteristics', in this view 'these internal attributes are understood as situation specific, and thus sometimes elusive and unreliable. . . . The interdependent self cannot be properly characterized as a bounded whole, ror it changes structure with the nature of the particular social context. . . . What is focal and objective about an interdependent selr . . . is not the inner self. but the relationships of the person to other actors' ( 1 99 1 : 227). Just as Markus and Kitayama ( 1 99 1 ) distin­ guished between the independent and interper­ sonal views of the self, Hogan ( 1 99 1 ) described a similar shift in the construct of personality toward a more interpersonal, relational inter­ pretation. Hogan distinguished between two very different definitions of personality. First, he described an internal, boundaried concept that refers to 'the structures, dynamics, processes, and propensities inside a person that explain why he or she behaves in a characteristic way' ( 1 99 1 : 8 7 5 ) . Second, Hogan found more organizational relevance and scientific applic­ ability in a conceptualization of personality that refers to 'a person's social reputation and to the manner in which he or she is perceived by friends, family, co-workers, and supervisors' ( 1 99 1 : 875). Treatments of the experience of emotions provides another example of the trend toward a social, relational interpretation of a phenom­ enon traditionally viewed as the private posses­ sion of the individual. Gergen and Gergen ( 1 988) critiqued both the traditional biological view of emotions and the more recent cognitive view. In critiquing 'biological reductionism', they pointed to the dramatic differences in the vocabularies of emotion and patterns of emotional expression across cultures. They questioned 'cognitive reductionism' for privileging rational processing to the exclusion of values, preferences, feelings, caring. Gergen and Gergen developed a view of emotion as social performance. In this view, emotions as possessions of individuals make no sense if not understood in social context, i.e. 'related to preceding andlor anticipated events (essentially a narrative account)'. Emotional performances then are to be understood 'as con­ stituents of larger or more extended patterns or interaction' ( 1 988: 44). Once more we see the reinterpretation of the individual emerging to give greater emphasis to

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social, relational context. The movement toward this interpretation is becoming evident in studies of personality, emotions, leadership, mental processing, schemata, attitudes - many of the fundamental psychological constructs that have played central roles in the view of the individual in organization studies. Gergen and Gergen summarized this transformation: narratives of the self are not fundamentally possessions of the individual; rather they are products of social interchange - possessions of the socius the traditional concept of individual selves is fundamentally problematic. What have served as individual traits, mental processes, or personal characteristics can promisingly be viewed as constituents of relational forms. The form of these relationships is that of the narrative sequence. Thus, by the end of our story we shall find that the individual self has all but vanished into the world of relationship. ( 1 988: 1 8)

Yet another move in mainstream American psychology against the traditional view of the individual was advanced by Simon ( 1 990). Simon's work also appeared to be a fundamental critique of the form of psychological science, dominated by a search for invariants about human behavior that are similar to the laws of classical physics, such as those governing the speed of light. Simon argued that the quest for laws of these sorts in sciences such as biology and psychology is apt to be futile: any invariants that are to be found in these sciences are apt to be laws of qualitative structure, not quantitative ones. Simon's argument is intriguing. He asserted that biological knowledge is ex t remel y specific, resting on the diversity of millions of species of plants and animals, and most of its invariants apply only to single species. Simon argued that in biological (including human) realms, the process is one where systems change adaptively to their environments over time. Consequently, the nature of such systems at any given time is a function of past and/or present environments, making it difficult to identify true invariants of the systems them­ selves. Consequently, we are dealing with 'artificial' systems - i.e. systems that are only what they are because they have responded to the shaping forces of the environment, to which they must adapt in order to survive. Part of the problem may stem from the assumptions we have made about human beings. Simon argued that the failure of psychologists to recognize the fact 'that Homo sapiens shares important psycholo­ gical properties with nonbiological systems (e.g. computers) . . . perhaps stems from the reluc­ tance of human beings to view themselves as "mere machines'" ( \ 990: 4). He concluded that since many of the invariants we see in behavior

are social invariants, 'social variables must be introduced to set the boundaries of our general­ izations' ( 1 990: 1 6) . A most recent move away from the essentialist individual in the psychological literature was present in the cognitive-affective system theory of personality of M ischel and Shoda (\ 995). They attempted to reconcile the conflicting approaches of the invariant character of the individual with social information processing. They wrote: When personality is conceptualized as a stable system that mediates how the individual selects, construes, and processes social information and generates social behaviors, it becomes possible to account simultaneously for both the invariant qualities of the underlying personality and the predictable variability across situations in some of its characteristic behavioral expressions. ( 1995: 246)

In this view, the context becomes an integral part of the system of processes that comprise the individual's personality. Both cognitive and affective processes are set off in systematic and predictable ways by features of situations, based on an individual's prior history of experience. At the same time, the situation does not represent some objective, empirical reality 'out there'. The situation as perceived by and responded to by the individual is a function of her/his constructs and subjective maps, a selective process of encoding and activation. The active and goal­ directed processes by which the individual constructs the situations lend consistency to her/his pattern of responses. Mischel and Shoda observed that this theory 'accounts both for individual differences in overall average levels of behavior and for stable if. . . then . . . profiles of behavior variability across situations, as essen­ tial expressions of the same underlying person­ ality system' ( 1 995: 252). Mischel and Shoda's approach parallels Weick's view of the double interact as the fundamental unit for organizational analysis. Summary

The trend we found in organizational literature of giving greater emphasis to context and less to the essentialist individual is very similar to one occurring in psychology more generally. The individual has not disappeared in either place, but his/her starring role has been challenged. Challenges have come from quite diverse sources including: American social psychologists and social learning theorists, sociobiologists, feminist psychologists, leading mainstream American psychological journals, and an economics Nobel Laureate.

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THE INDIVID UAL Some Related Topics

Comparison of psychological research con­ ducted in America with that conducted in other cultures suggests that American psychologists may have mistaken properties of the self revealed in American research for universal attributes. The assumption that people are inherently self­ interested and nonaltruistic may be a prime example, stemming from a failure to recognize how strongly social norms can affect behavior. As Markus and Kitayama observed: 'The view that altruistic behaviors are only seemingly altruistic and that they are public actions without any subjective, private foundation can perhaps be traced to the insistence of Western psychologists on the internal attributes (feeling, thought, and traits) as universal referents for behavior' ( 1 99 1 : 248). They asserted that 'in some cultures, on certain occasions the indivi­ dual, in the sense of a set of significant inner attributes of the person, may cease to be the primary unit of consciousness. Instead the sense of belongingness to a social relation may be so strong that it makes better sense to think of the relationship as the functional unit of conscious reflection' ( 1 99 1 : 226); this represents additional support for our suspicion that the traditional view of the individual has been displaced and/or sharply transformed. A look at European developments in social psychology supported the suspicion that the privileging of the self-contained individual in psychology and organization studies was in part a function of the dominance of indigenous American psychology. The European movement toward a more social, relational conceptualiza­ tion of the self predated the trend we see today in American studies by about twenty years. Henri Tajfel described the 'social dimension of European social psychology' that has played an increasing role since the early 1 960s, with its 'constant stress on the social and interactive aspects of our subject' (Tajfel et al. 1 984: I ). The study of attitudes and opinions of individuals has begun to give way to research on social representations of social reality. It has become more and more clear that such representations are not just expressions of acquired behavioural dispositions, but are important reflections of the social reality in which we live and have a shared and collective nature. ( 1 984: 2)

A slightly broader search of European writers revealed even more provocative challenges to the individual's traditional position. The British scholar Anthony Giddens ( 1 992) observed that the move to reflexivity in modern social life has been associated with a growing tendency for individuals to create themselves. Specifically, via

diets, psychotherapy, self-help, and surgery, people can create themselves in ways that were hardly imagined in other eras. Giddens observed that 'responsibility for the development and appearance of the body' ( 1 992: 3 1 -2) has been placed squarely in the hands of its possessor. 5 Even more recently, the spirit of these critiques of self has appeared in the organizational literature. Hoskin ( 1 995), for instance, observed that the primacy given to the self in the modern world needs to be and can be explained historically. Conceptual Changes

Much has been happening regarding psycholo­ gical factors in organization studies. The field is bursting at the seams in several respects. First, changes (especially the move to incorporate context) in perspective about the traditional fundamental unit of analysis - the individual have been dramatic. At times, the traditional unit of analysis seems to have been disappearing, at least in the sense that the search for essential properties of individuals is no longer assumed without qualification to be worthwhile. Second and closely related, many of the headings borrowed from psychology (e.g. motivation and satisfaction), that traditionally had been used to structure the field, although not totally obsolete, have become less useful for capturing what is going on. Still, in many places the traditional psycho­ logical categories continue to be employed. However, even when they are used, they seem to need to be stretched considerably to cover a highly diverse set of inquiries. Major treatments of the topic of motivation illustrate this stretch­ ing. For example, in her outstanding chapter on motivation theory, Kanfer ( 1 990), after explicitly ignoring biological and psychophysiological theories of motivation, still had to cover an enormous range of material, including distinc­ tions between behavior and performance, as well as three sets of paradigms about motivation: need-motive-value, cognitive choice, and self­ regulation metacognition theories. Since each of these in turn spanned a broad array of research, her chapter dealt with research on justice, goal setting, intrinsic motivation and so on. And, as we have noted above, many of these same topics have themselves expanded to encompass the influence of context, and become less centered on the essentialist individual and more concerned with the study of complex processes. At the end of her review, Kanfer acknowledged that substantial changes in the field had occurred. She wrote: 'Motivational psychology is entering a new phase of growth. In this phase, persons are viewed not only as processors of information but as sources of influence on behavior' ( 1 990: 1 5 1 ).

stribution forbidden.

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STUD YING ORGA NIZA TlO/',

In a similar vein, at the end of his exceilent book on motivation, Pinder ( 1 984) advocated inclusion of the systematic study of contexts into the study of work motivation. Pinder recognized that the need to incorporate context had complicated the study of motivation - so much so, that we should change our theoretical aspirations to developing middle range rather than universalistic theories. At this point we will not evaluate this solution; we point to it only to show how even those committed to traditional psychological categories derived from essential­ ist individualism feel the categories need to be stretched and/or qualified. CONCLUSION

Our process of exploration led us through the following progression of linkages between psychology and organization studies:

2

3

4

5

6

Traditionally the domain of psychology has been the individual. Psychology has sought to uncover the essential properties and universal dimensions of the typical human being. Within this domain centered around the individual emerged major areas of inter­ est, such as personality, motivation, atti­ tudes, and learning. Organization studies, at least in America, were founded on psychology. Thus the early concerns of organization studies, and the methodologies to study them, fell comfortably within the general paradigm of psychology. Since the late 1 960s, organization studies have leaned increasingly toward sociology. literature, communications, and other dis­ ciplines consistent with a more macro conceptual orientation. As a result, there developed a major schism regarding the overall conceptual framework. questions asked and methodologies em­ ployed (that is a major paradigmatic dis­ continuity, in the Kuhnian sense) between II o psychologists and sociologically oriented scholars in organization studies. What we found, to our surprise. was that a substantial decentering of the individual has been taking place in many of the most mainstream areas of psychology, including 110 psychology. Even the most traditional strongholds of the individual in psychology, the self, identity, and personality. appear to be increasingly viewed as inseparable from their social contexts. As a result, we found psychologically based micro OB to be moving conceptually in a direction consistent with the broader field of organization studies. This is reflected in the call for a meso level of analysis.

There is a curious mixture of thought and action on the psychologicai side of organization studies. On the one hand, we see many leading scholars have moved from the study of the essentialist individual. On the other we see many working successfully within the bounds of traditional psychological categories. This mixture may be interpreted as a manifestation of the postmodern tide, washing unevenly over and eroding the categories of the modernist era. Given the politics of social science, the different parts of the mixture could coexist for some time and coexist productively, with quite different sets of assumptions being employed in different con­ texts - with the postmoderrt frame being most useful in settings (e.g. types of organizations) in which the modernist patterns have been severely disturbed. In any case. we conclude that with respect to psychological factors relating to organizational studies, the previous uniform assumptions of an essentialist individual have lost much of their privileged position. Moreover, the change is not confined to organizational studies; there appears to be a parallel growing discomfort with tradi­ tional assumptions about human beings in the social (and perhaps biological) sciences in general. In all these areas, when the individual appears he/she increasingly does so only in context. Still, we found considerable evidence that inquiry concerned with properties of the individual still exists. We suggest that in the future this research will be most valuable if it is reported in ways that permit readers to locate the research in the full context in which the data were collected.

NOTES We want to thank Ann Connell. Stewart Clegg and Paul Spector for their helpful and insightful comments on earlier versions of this chapter. I The A 1111ual Rel'iell' af Psychology is a series of reviews of topics in psychology. with the topics selected according to a master plan. The editors, editorial committee and authors are highly distinguished members of their respective psychological subfields. 2 We use 'so-called' to reflect the work of Friman et al. ( 1 993) which suggested that while cognitive psychology was in ascendancy, it constituted nothing like a Kuhnian revolution. 3 See Klimoski and Mohammed ( 1 994) for a review of the proliferation in 110 psychology of research in 'group-mind' constructs, such as shared mental models, common cause maps. collective cognitive mapping, shared frames. teamwork schemata, transactional memory. intersubjectivity, shared meaning, collective

THE INDI VID UAL interpretation, negotiated belief structure, collective mind, sociocognition, group affect, collective efficacy, group level integrative complexity, and group pro­ social behavior. 4 Paul Spector ( personal communication, 1 995) has pointed out that supervisor ratings of performance can be thought of as essentially the person's image or reputation with the supervisor. Thus it is hard to separate supervisor performance ratings from super­ visor ratings of the trait conscientiousness. 'Do I see employees as conscientious because they perform well, or do I think they perform well because they are conscientiousry' This is another example of how characteristics and behaviors traditionally viewed on an inherently individual level have come to acquire a social, relational meaning. 5 In the context of Giddens's thoughts, Haraway's seemingly science fiction idea of cyborgs - 'creatures simultaneously animal and machine' ( 1 99 1 : 149) seemed to be less extreme. Although Haraway noted that currently cyborgs are most common in science fiction, she did observe that modern medicine is also 'full of cyborgs, of couplings between organism and machine' ( 1 99 1 : 1 50). Although we are reluctant to go much further with Haraway's idea at this point, her observation that even today, some individuals are in part machines, would seem to represent another nail in the coffin of the essentialist individual.

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( 1 974) 'Leadership', in Marvin D . Handbook of/ndustrial and Organiza­ tional Psychology. Rand McNally. pp. 1 527- 5 \ . Warr. P . ( 1 987) Work, Unemployment, and Mental Heallh Oxford: Oxford University Press. Warr, P. ( 1 994) 'A conceptual framework for the study of work and mental health', Work and Stress, 8: 8497. Weick. K . E . ( 1 979) The Social Psychology of Organiz­ ing, 2nd edn. Reading, M A : Addison-Wesley. Weick. K . E . ( 1 995) Sensemaking in Organizations. Vroom, Victor H. Dunnett (ed. ),

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6 The Institutionalization of Institutional Theory PAM E LA S . TOLBERT AND LYNNE G . ZUCKER

Since the publication of Meyer and Rowan's ( 1 977) classic article, organizational analyses based on an institutional perspective have proliferated. Work sharing the banner of insti­ tutional theory has investigated a wide range of phenomena, from the spread of specific person­ nel policies (Tolbert and Zucker 1 983; Baron et al. 1 986; Edelman 1 992) to the fundamental redefinition of organizational missions and forms (DiMaggio 1 99 1 ; Fligstein 1 985) to the develop­ ment of domestic and international policies by government organizations (Strang 1 990; Zhou 1 993). Ironically, however, the institutional approach has yet to become institutionalized. There is very little consensus on the definition of key concepts, measures or methods within this theoretic tradition. Unlike population ecology and its standard measures of density, institu­ tional theory has developed no central set of standard variables, nor is it associated with a standard research methodology or even a set of methods. Studies have relied on a variety of techniques, including case analysis, cross-sec­ tional regression, longitudinal models of various types, and so forth (see also Davis and Powell 1 992; Scott and Meyer 1 994). Our review of the literature suggests one important source of such variation in approach: despite the sizeable body of work defined as part of this tradition, there has been surprisingly little attention given to conceptualizing and specifying the processes of institutionalization (though see DiMaggio 1 99 1 ; Strang and Meyer 1 993; and Rura and Miner 1 994 for recent progress in this direction). As noted in Zucker's ( 1 977) early research, which focused on consequences of varying levels of institutionalization, institutionalization is

both a process and a property variable. Perhaps because her work was cast in a small groups setting, however, a process-based approach to institutionalization has not been followed in most organizational analyses. Instead, institu­ tionalization is almost always treated as a qualitative state: structures are institutionalized, or they are not. Consequently, important quest­ ions of the determinants of variations in levels of institutionalization, and of how such variation might affect the degree of similarity among sets of organizations, have been largely neglected. In this chapter, we address these questions by offering a theoretical specification of institutio­ nalization processes. We begin by presenting a brief historical overview of sociological theoriz­ ing and research on organizations through the mid 1 970s. This overview is intended both to clarify the links between institutional theory and previous traditions of sociological work on organizational structure, and to provide some context for understanding the receptivity of organizational researchers in the late 1 970s to institutional theory as an explanatory frame­ work. The next section reviews the initial exposition of the theory in Meyer and Rowan's ( 1 977) seminal article, focusing on the way in which it challenged then-dominant theoretical and empirical traditions in organizational research. We point up an apparent logical ambiguity in this formulation, one which in­ volves the phenomenological status of structural arrangements that are the objects of institution­ alization processes. In the remainder of the chapter, we offer a general model of institution­ alization processes, as a means both of clarifying this ambiguity and of elaborating the logical and

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empirical implications of a phenomenologically based version of institutional theory, first developed by Zucker. Finally, on the basis of this analysis, we consider a range of issues that require further theoretical development and empirical study. Our primary aims in this effort are twofold: to clarify the independent theoretical contributions of institutional theory to analyses of organiza­ tions, and to develop this theoretical perspective further in order to enhance its use in empirical research. 1 There is also a more general, more ambitious objective here, and that is to build a bridge between two distinct models of social actor that underlie most organizational analyses, which we refer to as a rational actor model and an institutional model. The former is premised on the assumption that individuals are con­ stantly engaged in calculations of the costs and benefits of different action choices, and that behavior reflects such utility-maximizing calcu­ lations (Coleman 1 990; Hechter 1 990). In the latter model, by contrast, 'oversocialized' indi­ viduals are assumed to accept and follow social norms unquestioningly, without any real reflec­ tion or behavioral resistance based on their own particular, personal interests (see Wrong 1 96 1 ). We suggest that these two general models should be treated not as oppositional but rather as representing two ends of a continuum of decision-making processes and behaviors. Thus, a key problem for theory and research is to specify the conditions under which behavior is more likely to resemble one end of this continuum or the other. In short, what is needed are theories of when rationality is likely to be more or less bounded. A developed conception of institutionalization processes provides a useful point of departure for exploring this issue.

SOCIOLOGICAL ANALYSES OF ORGANIZATIONS: THE ORIGINS OF INSTITUTIONAL THEORY Functionalist Analyses of Organizations

The study of organizations has a relatively short history within sociology. Prior to the work of Robert Merton and his students in the late 1 940s, organizations were not typically acknowl­ edged as a distinctive social phenomenon, one worthy of study in its own right, by American sociologists. Although organizations had cer­ tainly been subjects of study by sociologists prior to the advent of functionalist analyses (see, for example, the work of American theorists associated with the Chicago S<.:hool: Park 1 922;

Thomas and Znaniecki 1 927), such studies typically treated organizations as aspects of general social problems, such as social inequal­ ity, intercommunity relations, social deviance, and so forth; the focus of analysis was not on organizations qua organizations. Despite the key role assigned to formal organizations by Weber's ( 1 946) and Michels's ( 1 962) analyses of indus­ trial orders, the notion that organizations represent independent social actors in modern societal processes was not widely recognized until after the pioneering work of Merton and colleagues (see Coleman 1 980; 1 990). As we shall explore later in our review, we conceive of both organizational and individual actors as potential creators of new institutional structure (Zucker 1 988). (See also DiMaggio's 1 988 discussion of 'institutional entrepreneurs'.) Merton's ( 1 948) initial interest in studying organizations appears to have been driven primarily by a concern with empirically testing and developing the general logic of functionalist social theory. Organizations, viewed as societies in microcosm, offered the opportunity to conduct the kind of comparative research required for empirical examination of function­ alist tenets (see Selznick 1 949; Gouldner 1 950; Blau 1 955). Thus, one of the major hallmarks of analyses of organizations produced by Merton and his students was a focus on the dynamics of social change, an issue functionalist theory had often been accused by its critics of neglecting (Turner 1 974). Concern with change was reflected in two main objectives that were characteristic of organizational studies in the functionalist tradi­ tion: examining the nature of covariation among different elements of structure, and assessing the dynamic balance between dysfunctional and beneficial outcomes of given structural arrange­ ments. These foci directly address two key assumptions embedded in functionalist theory about survival requirements of social collectiv­ ities. The first assumption is that the structural <.:amponents of a system must be integrated in order for the system to survive, since the components are interrelated parts of the whole. A corollary derived from this main assumption is that change in one structural component necessitates adaptive changes in other compo­ nents. Thus, given this general theoretical framework, empirical examination of the rela­ tionships among elements of organizational structure was a natural focus of study. The second assumption is that existing structures contribute to a social system's functioning, at least on the balance; otherwise, the system could not survive. An implication of this assumption, adduced by Merton ( 1 948),

INSTITUTIONAL THEOR Y is that change is likely to occur when the functional contributions of a given structural arrangement are exceeded by dysfunctions associated with that arrangement. This reason­ ing led to an explicit concern with identifying both the dysfunctional and functional conse­ quences of given structural arrangements. 2 Quantitative Analyses of Structural Covariation

Pursuit of the first problem, examination of interrelations among structural elements, laid the foundation for one general line of research that came to dominate and define sociological studies of organizations for the next two decades. This line of research increasingly came to be typified by quantitative analyses of covariance among the elements of formal organizational structure and by essentially economic explanations of such covariation. The rapid ascendance of this approach to organizational analysis most likely reflects its affinity with established traditions of organizational research in the field of manage­ ment science, well established in most business schools by the time sociologists turned their attention to the study of bureaucracy (Follett 1 942; Fayol 1 949; Gulick and Urwick 1 937; Woodward 1 965). Formal structure was assumed to reflect organizational decision-makers' rational efforts to maximize efficiency by securing coordination and control of work activities. Thus, the finding of a positive rela­ tionship between size and complexity was explained in terms of the needs and capacity of larger organizations for efficiency-enhancing specialization, the relation between complexity and size of the administrative component in terms of the increased needs for supervision to manage coordination problems accompanying specialization, and so forth. 3 Organizational research shifted focus in the late 1 960s to include consideration of the effects of environmental forces in determining struc­ ture, but the basic functionalist/economic expla­ natory framework was retained by most work (see for example, Thompson 1 967; Lawrence and Lorsch 1 967). Despite the dominance of this approach to analyzing and explaining formal organizational structure (or perhaps because of it), this paradigm came under increasing fire by the early 1 970s. In part, increasing skepticism reflected the general lack of cumulative empirical findings from work in this tradition (Meyer 1 979). The widespread revival and reassessment of the general applicability of arguments devel­ oped earlier by Barnard ( 1 938), Simon ( 1 947), and March and Simon ( 1 957), emphasizing inherent limits on organizational decision-

171

makers' ability to act with a high degree of rationality, may have also helped lay the groundwork for the acceptance of alternative paradigms (Weick 1 969). Reflecting the growing dissatisfaction with traditional explanations of formal structure, a new approach to organization-environment relations, labeled resource dependence (Pfeffer and Salancik 1 978), became increasingly promi­ nent during the 1 970s. This perspective focused attention on decision-makers' concerns for maintaining organizational autonomy and power over other organizations. By emphasizing the determining role of power considerations in explaining organizations' structure (see Thomp­ son and McEwen 1 958), it challenged dominant theoretical approaches that focused largely or exclusively on production efficiency concerns. However, like earlier work, a resource depen­ dence approach also was predicated implicitly on a rational actor model of decision-making in organizations, albeit one in which actors' behavior was based on calculation aimed at maximizing power and autonomy rather than pure efficiency. The operation of social influence processes, such as imitation or normatively based conformity, which might mitigate or limit autonomous decision-making, was largely ignored.

FORMAL STRUCTURE AS MYTH AND CEREMONY Symbolic Properties of Structure

The analysis laid out in the now-classic paper by Meyer and Rowan ( 1 977) thus offered a radical departure from conventional ways of thinking about formal structure and about the nature of organizational decision-making through which structure was produced. Their analysis was guided by a key insight, namely: formal struc­ tures have symbolic as well as action-generating properties. In other words, structures can become invested with socially shared meanings, and thus, in addition to their 'objective' func­ tions, can serve to communicate information about the organization to both internal and external audiences (Kamens 1 977). Explaining formal structure from this vantage point offered organizational researchers the opportunity to explore an array of new insights into the causes and consequences of structure. The notion that organizations have symbolic aspects was not entirely novel: a variety of authors had previously underscored key sym­ bolic functions served by mission statements, structural arrangements, and top-level members

STUD YING ORGANIZA TION

1 72

of organizations (Clark 1 956; Selznick 1 957; Zald and Denton 1 963) . In the functionalist tradition, such elements were argued to be criti­ cal to securing environmental support through demonstration of the consistency between core values of the organization and those in the larger society ( Parsons 1 956; 1 960). Meyer and Rowan's contribution to this earlier, related work lay in their systematic development of the implications of the use of formal structure for symbolic purposes, particularly in terms of highlighting limitations of more rationalistic explanations of structure.

structure in terms of general, abstract dimen­ sions, such as formalization, complexity, and centralization. A second major implication pointed up in Meyer and Rowan's analysis is that the social evaluation of organizations, and hence organiza­ tional survival, can rest on observation of formal structures (that may or may not actually function), rather than on observed outcomes related to actual task performance. Thus, organizational success depends on factors other than efficient coordination and control of production activities. Independent of their produc­ tive efficiency, organizations which exist in highly

Implications

elaborated institutional environments and succeed

Based on the notion that formal structure can signal organizations' commitment to rational, efficient standards of organizing, and thus pro­ vide general social 'accounts' (Scott and Lyman 1 968), Meyer and Rowan's analysis specified three major implications of this notion. The first is that the adoption of formal structure can occur regardless of the existence of specific, immediate problems of coordination and control of members' activities that an organization may face.

gain the legitimacy and resources needed to survive.

Organizations practices

are

driven

to

in becoming isomorphic with these environments

incorporate

and procedures defined

the

by prevailing

rationalized concepts o f organizational work and institutionalized i n society. Organizations that do so increase their legitimacy and their survival pro­ spects, i ndependent of the immediate efficacy of the acquired practices and procedures.

( 1 977: 340)

This argument challenged then-dominant causal models of structure in several respects. First, in terms of the determinants of structure, it directed attention to external influences not linked to actual production processes, such as the passage of legislation and the development of strong social norms within an organizational network. In so doing, the relative importance of internal organizational characteristics traditionally inves­ tigated as sources of formal structure, such as size and technology, was called into question. It also indirectly suggested alternative ways of interpreting such characteristics (e.g. as indica­ tors both of organizations' visibility to the general public and of network linkages). Moreover, in terms of consequences or outcomes, it led to a focus on the adoption of specific structural arrangements that had acquired social meanings, such as formal employment policies, accounting and budgeting practices, and offices and positions associated with employment equity. This indirectly chal­ lenged the utility of existing theoretical and empirical efforts to conceptualize and measure

( 1 977: 352)

This claim sharply contradicted underlying market-oriented, or at least performance­ oriented, assumptions about the functions of formal structure that dominated previous work: ( 1 ) that inefficient organizations - in production terms - would be selected out through a process of interorganizational competition; and (2) that correlations between measures of formal struc­ ture and such characteristics as size and tech­ nology thus resulted from the survival of organizations whose form matched the demands of their production environments. Although these assumptions underpinned the majority of quantitative analyses of determinants of struc­ ture, they were often made explicit only in studies directly examining organizational effec­ tiveness (Goodman and Pennings 1 977). The notion that organizations could survive despite very low objective performance implied the possibility of 'permanently failing' organizations (Meyer and Zucker 1 989), that is organizations that survive despite evident inefficiencies that logically should cause them to fail. Finally, the third major implication derived by Meyer and Rowan was that the relationship between actual, everyday activities and beha­ viors of organizational members and formal structures may be negligible. ( F )ormal coupled . .

organizations

are

often

loosely

structural elements are only loosely

linked to each other and to activities, rules are often violated, decisions are often unimplemented, or if implemented have uncertain consequences, technol­ ogies are of problematic efficiency, and evaluation and inspection systems are subverted or rendered so vague as to provide little coordination.

( 1 977: 342)

This implication also represented a direct challenge to traditional explanations of structure which, by treating formal structures as means for

INSTITUTIONAL THEOR Y coordinating and controlling activities, necess­ arily assumed a tight connection between structures and actual behaviors of organiza­ tional members.

AMBIGUITIES IN INSTITUTIONAL THEORY

In drawing this last implication, Meyer and Rowan decouple formal structure from action, implicitly defining institutional structures as those that are subject to decoupling. However, earlier in their argument they use the concept of institutional structures much as Berger and Luckmann ( 1 967) and as Zucker ( 1 977): a structure that has become institutionalized is one that has become taken for granted by members of a social group as efficacious and necessary; thus it serves as an important causal source of stable patterns of behavior. This creates an inherent ambiguity in their underlying phenomenological argument, because the definition of 'institutionalized' itself contradicts the claim that institutional structures are apt to be decoupled from behavior. To be institutional, structure must generate action. As Giddens ( 1 979) argues, structure that is not translated into action is in some fundamental sense not 'social' structure. Geertz sounds a similar note: 'We gain access to symbol systems only through the flow of behavior - or, more precisely, social action' ( 1 973: 1 7). The discussion of the decoupling of structure and action implies a Goffmanesque 'backstage/ frontstage' definition of institutionalized struc­ tures (Goffman 1 959), where the belief in the efficacy and need for such structures is subject to dispute but the structures are nonetheless viewed as serving a useful presentational purpose. This implies that such structures fundamentally lack normative and cognitive legitimacy (Della Fave 1 986; Walker et al. 1 986; Stryker 1 994; Aldrich and Fiol 1 994), and that they are not at any time real signals of underlying intention. Whether such structures are appropriately described as institutionalized, given standard defin itions of the term, is dubious.

Resource Dependence versus Institutional Processes

Moreover, the ambiguity that inheres in this view of structural change in organizations leads to a fundamental confounding of institutional and resource dependence theory (Zucker 1 99 1 : 1 04). Scott ( 1 987: 497) has argued that a shift in institutional theory towards explaining 'the sources or loci of "rationalized and impersonal

1 73

prescriptions'" and away from explaining the 'properties of generalized belief systems' has the advantage of enlarging the framework for explaining formal structures to include organiza­ tions' compliance with external actors' demands in order to obtain resources needed for survival. More recently, he elaborated: 'Much of the theoretical and empirical research on institutions correctly focuses on regulative agencies . . . which exercise legitimate powers to formulate and enforce rule systems . . . [which leads to an emphasis on] the flow of rewards and sanctions' ( 1 994: 98). In this formulation, however, there is a blurring of the boundary between resource dependence and institutional theory, thereby obscuring the unique theoretical contributions of the latter, in particular, to organizational analysis. Comparison of recent studies based on institutional theory with earlier studies cast within the framework of resource dependence serves to illustrate problems of distinguishing these theoretical perspectives. For example, using an institutional perspective to examine the effects of government laws and policies on employment structures, Sutton et al. argue: 'Faced with an apparently hostile legal environ­ ment, employers adopt due-process governance to cool out potentially litigious employees and demonstrate good-faith compliance with govern­ ment mandates' ( 1 994: 946). Likewise, Edelman suggests that organizations that construct formal structures as symbolic gestures of compliance with government policy 'are less likely to provoke protest by protected classes of employ­ ees within the firm or community members who seek jobs . . . are more likely to secure govern­ ment resources (contracts, grants, etc.), and . . . are less likely to trigger audits by regulatory agencies' ( 1 992: 1 542). Thus, the adoption of structure is treated as a strategic, but apparently largely superficial change; it is the organizational counterpart of the manipulative actions of narcissistic persons who consciously use 'false fronts' as a means of gaining their own ends with other persons. 4 Other studies described in Pfeffer and Salan­ cik's ( 1978) development of resource dependence theory reflect a very similar explanatory logic. For example, they report ( 1 978: 1 97-200) a case study by Pfeffer of an organization that intentionally created two separate structural units, one of which was non-profit, in order to conform to extant social definitions of appro­ priate form for educational organizations and to thereby secure necessary support from external constituents. Similarly, they describe ( I 978: 569) research conducted by Salancik which examined the relationship between indicators of firms' visibility and relative dependence on

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federal government contracts, and the presence of organizational arrangements showing com­ mitment to equal employment opportunity. The results indicated that greater dependence was associated with more intensive signaling of compliance with affirmative action law via creation of formal positions and written doc­ umentation of programs and policies. The overlap between these arguments and those from more recent work cast within the frame­ work of institutional theory is striking. The lack of theoretical distinctiveness in these studies results in part from the de-emphasis on a distinguishing feature of institutional theory, a focus on the role of cultural understandings as determinants of behavior (Strang 1 994) and on the normative bounds of rational decision­ making. By shifting toward an emphasis on changes in 'appearance' and downplaying the internal consequences of institutionalized struc­ ture, treating structure as merely symbol and signal, we end up with the implicit argument that a structure can maintain its symbolic value in the face of widespread knowledge that its effect on individuals' behavior is negligible. How such a contradiction in cultural understandings (i.e. that structures signify commitment to some action, and that structures may be unrelated to action) can endure poses an unanswered riddle in this approach. There is a related, general problem with work that emphasizes purely symbolic, resource­ securing functions of structure, one which lies in the implicit assumption that the costs of creating such structural elements are relatively low compared to the potential gains in increased resources from the environment. This assump­ tion presumably follows from the notion that changes in formal structures often do not alter action. Although there are often-cited theoretical claims, there is no supporting empirical evidence that social activity is as ubiquitous as air and just as costless (Granovetter 1 985). F rom the research to date, we do not know in fact whether structure is regularly decoupled from the internal functioning of the organization, nor do we know the cost of creating such structure compared to any increase in resource flows to the organiza­ tion (a review of the evidence can be found in Scott and Meyer 1 994). The recasting of institutional theory to be more derivative of a resource dependence approach probably reflects, in part, general discomfort with the lack of voluntarism implied by more phenomenologically oriented versions of institutional theory, or what Oliver calls an 'overly passive and conforming depiction of organizations' ( 1 99 \ : 1 46). It may also stem from the apparent bias toward stasis in a phenomen­ ological approach (DiMaggio 1 988): as currently

developed in organizational analyses, the focus of an institutional approach traditionally has been on the way in which actors follow extant institutional 'scripts', and questions of how these scripts are produced, maintained and changed have been largely neglected (Barley and Tolbert 1 988). It is these questions to which we turn next, using theoretical analyses by Berger and Luckmann ( 1 967) and Zucker ( 1 977) as our point of departure. In addressing these issues, we make the key assumption that creating new structure takes more resources than maintaining the old: alteration and creation of organizational struc­ tures do constitute costs for the organization. Social structure is not simply a by-product of human activity; rather, human agency is required to produce it (Zucker et al. 1 995; Zucker and Kreft 1 994). Thus, structures that are altered or created must be believed to have some positive value for the organization, or decision-makers typically would not allocate resources to altering or creating new formal structure. Organizational decision-makers, of course, may have more or less discretion: sometimes decision-making power is very broad, sometimes it is very circumscribed. The analysis developed here is most applicable to instances in which decision-makers have rela­ tively high levels of discretion concerning the adoption of structures. 5

PROCESSES OF INSTITUTIONALIZATION

Drawing on work identified with the philoso­ phical tradition of phenomenology, Berger and Luckmann ( 1 967) identified institutionalization as a core process in the creation and perpetua­ tion of enduring social groups. An institution, the outcome or end state of an institutionaliza­ tion process, was defined as 'a reciprocal typification of habitualized action by types of actors' ( 1 967: 54; following Schutz 1 962; 1 967). In this definition, habitualized action refers to behaviors that have been developed empirically and adopted by an actor or set of actors in order to solve recurring problems. Such behaviors are habitualized to the degree that they are evoked with minimal decision-making effort by actors in response to particular stimuli. Reciprocal typi­ fication, in their use, involves the development of shared definitions or meanings that are linked to these habitualized behaviors (see Schutz 1 962; 1 967). Since typifications entail classifications or categorizations of actors with whom the actions are associated, this concept implies that the meanings attributed to habitualized action have come to be generalized, that is, to be indepen­ dent of the specific individuals who carry out the

INSTITUTIONAL THEOR Y action. Zucker ( 1 977) referred to this process of generalizing the meaning of an action as 'objectification', and identified it as one of the key component processes of institutionalization. Earlier phenomenological analyses of institu­ tions, then, suggest at least two sequential processes involved in the initial formation of institutions and in their spread: habitualization, the development of patterned problem-solving behaviors and the association of such behaviors with particular stimuli; and objectification, the development of general, shared social meanings attached to these behaviors, a development that is necessary for the transplantation of actions to contexts beyond their point of origination. At a later point in their analysis, Berger and Luckmann ( 1 967) suggest an additional aspect of institutionalization, one also identified by Zucker and termed 'exteriority'. Exteriority refers to the degree to which typifications are 'experienced as possessing a reality of their own, a reality that confronts the individual as an external and coercive fact' ( 1 967: 58). It is related to the historical continuity of typifications (Zucker 1 977), and in particular, to the transmission of typifications to new members who, lacking knowledge of their origins, are apt to treat them as 'social givens' (Berger and Luckmann 1 967; Tolbert 1 988). We refer to the processes through which actions acquire the quality of exteriority as sedimentation. In an early experimental study, Zucker ( 1 977) demonstrated that as the degree of objectifica­ tion and exteriority of an action increased, so did the degree of institutionalization (indicated by individuals' conformity to others' behavior), and that when institutionalization is high, then transmission of the action, maintenance of that action over time, and resistance of that action to change are all also high. Nelson and Winter ( 1 982) find a similar process operating in the creation of task routines within organizations: more institutionalized routines are more readily transmitted to new employees. Thus, transmis­ sion is both causally and consequentially related to institutionalization. By enhancing the exter­ iority of a set of behaviors, transmission increases the degree to which those behaviors are institutionalized; institutionalization, in turn, affects the ease of subsequent transmission (Tolbert 1 988). This set of sequential processes - habitualiza­ tion, objectification and sedimentation - sug­ gests variability in levels of institutionalization, thus implying that some patterns of social behavior are more subject to critical evaluation, modification, and even elimination than others. In short, such patterned behaviors can vary in terms of the degree to which they are deeply embedded in a social system (more objective,

1 75

more exterior), and thus vary in terms of their stability and their power to determine behavior. Berger and Luckmann's analysis was focused on the occurrence of institutionalization pro­ cesses among individual actors, not organiza­ tional actors. Zucker's experimental research extended the analysis to organizations, but still at the micro-level. Organizational actors are distinguished by a number of properties hierarchical authority, potentially unlimited lifespan, unique legal responsibilities, and so forth (see Coleman 1 980) - likely to affect the way in which institutionalization processes are played out. These processes are often played out between organizations as well as within them. 6 Thus, we consider the extension of this analysis specifically to institutional flows between formal organizations. Figure I presents a summary of our analysis of the process of institutionaliza­ tion, and the causal forces that are key at 7 different points in the process.

Habitualization

In an organizational context, the process of habitualization involves the generation of new structural arrangements in response to a specific organizational problem or set of problems, and the formalization of such arrangements in the policies and procedures of a given organization, or a set of organizations that confront the same or similar problems. These processes result in structures that can be classified as being at the pre-institutionalization stage. There are voluminous literatures on organiza­ tional innovation and on organizational change that are relevant to understanding these pro­ cesses (e.g. Quinn and Cameron 1 988; Huber and Glick 1 993). What is key for the purposes of our analysis, however, is that in this stage the creation of new structures in organizations is largely an independent activity. Since organiza­ tional decision-makers may share a common core of knowledge and ideas that make an innovation feasible and attractive, the adoption of a given innovation may and often does occur in close association with adoption processes in other organizations (i.e. simultaneous inven­ tion). Organizations experiencing a problem may, as part of their search for solutions, also consider solutions developed by others (DiMag­ gio and Powell 1 983). Imitation may follow, but there is little sense of the necessity of this among organizational decision-makers, since there is no consensus on the general utility of the innova­ tion. Hence, adoption can be predicted largely by characteristics that make a change technically and economically viable for a given organization (Anderson and Tushman 1 990; Leblebici et al.

STUD YING ORGA NIZA TION

1 76 Legislation Technological

M a rket forces

change

, I n novation

, Habitualization

. . . . . . .�

Objectification

� Interorganization

.

. . . . . . . . . .� .

4

Theorizing

monitoring

.

.

Sedimentation

�

•

Positive

I nterest group

outcomes

advocacy

I nterest group resistance

Figure I

Component processes of institutionali:ation

1 99 1 ) and by internal political arrangements that make organizations more or less receptive to change processes (see March and Simon 1 957). 8 At the pre-institutionalization stage, then. there may be multiple adopters of a given structure, but these are likely to be compara­ tively few in number, limited to a circumscribed set of similar, possibly interconnected organiza­ tions facing similar circumstances, and to vary considerably in terms of the form of implemen­ tation. Such structures will not be the object of any sort of formal theorizing (Strang and Meyer 1 993). and knowledge of the structures among non-adopters - especially those that are not in direct, frequent interaction with adopters - will be extremely limited, in terms of both operations and purpose (Nelson and Winter 1 982). Examples of structures at this stage of insti­ tutionalization can be readily found by compar­ ing the organizational charts of any set of similar organizations. Such comparisons will almost certainly reveal an array of offices and policies that are idiosyncratic to one or a limited subset of the organizations - directors of electronic communications, departments of poultry science, marketing/manufacturing liaisons. etc. These sorts of structures tend to be relatively impermanent, sometimes enduring only for the length of the incumbent's tenure (see Miner 1 987; 1 99 1 ) .

Objectification

The movement toward a more permanent and widespread status rests heavily on the next process. objectification, which accompanies the diffusion of structure. Objectification involves the development of some degree of social con­ sensus among organizational decision-makers concerning the value of a structure, and the in­ creasing adoption by organizations on the basis of that consensus. Such consensus can emerge through two different though not necessarily unrelated mechanisms. On one hand. organizations may use evidence gathered directly from a variety of sources (the news media. first-hand observation, stock prices, and so on) to assess the risk parameters of adopting a new structure. To the extent that the results of structural change are expected to generalize. the apparent outcomes for prior organizations will be a significant determinant of the next adoption decision. Thus, objectifica­ tion of structure is partially a consequence of organizations' monitoring of competitors, and efforts to enhance relative competitiveness. Recycling 'old social inventions' is a low-cost strategy. involving investment of fewer 'social resources' than creating new organizational structure. By implication. diffusion of new structures to a given organization will have a lower hurdle

INSTITUTIONAL THEOR Y than will creation de n o vo of comparable structures in that same organization, because other organizations will have 'pre-tested' the structure, and decision-makers' perception of relative costs and benefits of adopting will be influenced by observations of other organiza­ tions' behavior. Thus, the more organizations that have adopted the structure, the more likely will decision-makers perceive the relative bal­ ance of costs and benefits to be favorable. Our arguments here are consistent with models of sequential decision-making recently developed by economists ( Banerjee 1 992; Bik­ chandani et al. 1 992; see also David 1 985). These models are premised on the assumptions that there is some degree of uncertainty in the outcomes of different choices, and that decision­ makers will use information gained from observing the choices of others, as well as their own subjective assessments, in determining the 'best' choice. Under these conditions, the more widespread a given choice becomes, the more likely are individuals to view it as an optimal choice, and the less influential will be decision­ makers' independent j udgments of the value of the choice (see also Tolbert 1 985; Abrahamson and Rosenkopf 1 993). 9 Objectification and diffusion of structure can also be spearheaded by what is sometimes referred to in the organizational change literature as a 'champion' - often, in this case, a set of individuals with a material stake in the promotion of the structure (DiMaggio 1 988). Thus, for example, advocates of government civil service rules were often drawn from elite families whose traditional access to local political office had been broken by the development of immigrant­ dominated machines (Tolbert and Zucker 1 983); the spread of formalized selection procedures and performance evaluation procedures in businesses during the period following World War II was influenced by the promotional efforts of members of the emerging occupation of personnel manage­ ment (Baron et al. 1 986); and the role currently played by consultants in the adoption of practices identified with total quality management is widely acknowledged (Reeves and Bednar 1 994; Sitkin et al. 1 994). DiMaggio ( 1 99 1 ), Rowan ( 1 982), Covaleski and Dirsmith ( 1 988), Chaves (forth­ coming) and Ritti and Silver ( 1 986) also offer examples of the role of interest groups in promoting structural changes in organizations. Champions are most likely to emerge when there is a large potential 'market' for the inno­ vation (e.g. when environmental changes have adversely affected the competitive positions of a number of established organizations). To be successful, champions must accomplish two major tasks of theorization (Strang and Meyer 1 993): creation of a definition of a generic

1 77

organizational problem, a definition that includes specification of the set or category of organizational actors characterized by the problem; and justification of a particular formal structural arrangement as a solution to the problem on logical or empirical grounds (see also Galaskiewicz 1 985). The first task involves generating public recognition of a consistent pattern of dissatisfaction or organizational fail­ ing that is characteristic of some array of organizations; the second task involves develop­ ing theories that provide a diagnosis of the sources of dissatisfaction or failings, theories that are compatible with a particular structure as a solution or treatment. By identifying the set of organizations that face a defined problem and providing a positive evaluation of a structure as an appropriate solution, theorizing invests the structure with both general cognitive and normative legitimacy. To be persuasive and effective, theorizing efforts must also provide evidence that the change is actually successful in at least some cases that can be examined by others considering the adoption of new structure. On the basis of such theorizing, and the accompanying evidence, champions encourage the diffusion of structures throughout a set of organizations that are not otherwise directly connected. Structures that have been subject to objecti­ fication and have become fairly widely diffused can be described as being at the stage of semi­ institutionalization. At this stage, adopters have typically become quite heterogeneous; conse­ quently, specific characteristics of organizations that were previously identified with adoption will have relatively limited predictive power (Tolbert and Zucker 1 983). The impetus for diffusion shifts from simple imitation to a more normative base, reflecting implicit or explicit theorization of structures. As theorization develops and becomes more explicit, variance in the form that the structures take in different organizations should decline. Examples of structures that could be classified as being at this stage include team-based production, quality circles, gain-sharing com­ pensation plans, internal consultants, sensitivity training programs for management, managers of work/family policy, and employee assistance programs, among others. While such structures generally have a longer rate of survival in organizations compared to those in the pre­ institutionalized stage, clearly not all persist indefinitely. In fact, the ultimate fate of most such structures often invests them with a fad or fashion-like quality (Abrahamson 1 99 1 ). This is because structures at the stage of semi-institu­ tionalization typically have a relatively short history. Thus, while they have acquired some

STUD YING ORGANIZA TION

1 78

degree of nonnative acceptance, adopters none­ theless are apt to remain cognizant of their relatively untested quality, and consciously to monitor the accumulation of evidence (from their own organization as well as others) on the effectiveness of the structures. It is not until a structure has reached the stage of full institutio­ nalization that actors' propensity to engage in independent evaluation of the structures sig­ nificantly declines.

Sedimentation

Full institutionalization involves sedimentation, a process that fundamentally rests on the historical continuity of structure, and especially on its survival across generations of organiza­ tional members. Sedimentation is characterized both by the virtually complete spread of struc­ tures across the group of actors theorized as appropriate adopters, and by the perpetuation of structures over a lengthy period of time. Thus, it implies both 'width' and 'depth' dimensions of structures (Eisenhardt 1 988). Identification of factors that affect the extent of diffusion and the long-term retention of a structure is thus key to understanding the process of sedimentation. One such factor that has been pointed up in a variety of studies is the existence of a set of actors who are somehow adversely affected by the structures and who are able to collectively mobilize against them. Covaleski and Dirsmith's ( 1 988) analysis of legislative resistance to a new budgeting arrangement in a university provides a within-organizational example of this sort of force. At an interorganizational level of analysis, Leblebici et al.'s ( 1 99 1 ) depiction of changes in the radio broadcast industry high­ lights the crucial role of small competitor organizations that, disadvantaged by established practices, actively promote alternative practices in the industry. Likewise, Rowan ( 1 982), analyz­ ing the spread of three different structures across school districts in California, underscored the role of conflicting interests in stemming institu­ tionalization processes. Even in the absence of direct opposition, sedimentation may be truncated gradually because of a lack of demonstrable results associ­ ated with a structure. A weak positive relation between a given structure and desired outcomes may be sufficient to affect the spread and maintenance of structures, particularly if advo­ cates continue to be actively involved in theorization and promotion. However, in many cases, the link between the structure and the intended outcomes is quite distant, and demon­ stration of impact exceedingly difficult. Given the development and promotion of alternative

structures purported to achieve the same ends, organizations are likely to abandon older arrangements in favor of newer, promising structures (Abrahamson 1 99 1 ; see analogous arguments by Abbott 1 988 concerning changes in occupational jurisdictions), at least if costs associated with the change are relatively low. Hence, full institutionalization of a structure is likely to depend on the conjoint effects of relatively low resistance by opposing groups, continued cultural support and promotion by advocacy groups, and positive correlation with desired outcomes. Resistance is likely to limit the spread of a structure among organizations identified by theorizing as relevant adopters, and continued promotion and/or demonstrable benefits are necessary to counteract entropic tendencies, and to thus ensure perpetuation of the structure over time (Zucker 1 988). Examples of structures that could be characterized as fully institutionalized in the US range from tenure policies among higher education organizations, to beverage service on airplane flights, to the use of memos as a fonn of interoffice communica­ tion (Yates and Orlikowski 1 992). The reversal of this process, or deinstitutional­ ization, is likely to require a major shift in the environment (e.g. long-lasting alterations in markets, radical change in technologies) which may then allow a set of social actors whose interests are in opposition to the structure to self­ consciously oppose it or to exploit its liabilities (see Rowan's 1 982 description of the decline of health officers in schools following the advent of various vaccines; see also Aldrich 1 979: 1 67; Davis et al. 1 994). Table I summarizes our arguments about the characteristics and consequences of the compo­ nent processes of institutionalization.

I MPLICA TlONS FOR RESEARCH

There are a number of implications of our analysis for empirical studies of organizations that draw upon institutional theory. Probably the most important implication, from our perspective, is the need to develop more direct measures and better documentation of claims of the institutionalization of structures, since out­ comes associated with a given structure are likely to depend on the stage or level of institution­ alization. Depending on the scope and fonn of data collection, different procedures could be used for this. For example, analyses examining the level of institutionalization of contemporary structures could use survey research in which respondents were asked directly about the degree to which

INSTITUTIONAL THEOR Y Table 1

1 79

Stages of institutionalization and comparative dimensions

Dimension

Pre-institutionalization stage

Semi-institutionalization stage

Full institutionalization stage

Processes Characteristics of adopters Impetus for diffusion Theorization activity Variance in implementation Structure failure rate

Habitualization Homogeneous Imitation None High High

Objectification Heterogeneous Imitative/normative High Moderate Moderate

Sedimentation Heterogeneous Normative Low Low Low

they perceived a given structure to be necessary for efficient organizational functioning (e.g. Rura and Miner 1 994), or use questionnaires that ask about attributes correlated with degree of institutionalization, such as the degree of subjective certainty about judgments made (Zucker 1 977). While the development of items used to create adequate measures would un­ doubtedly be a contentious task, this is hardly a problem peculiar to the construct of institution­ alization (we think of such standard concepts as productivity, effectiveness, uncertainty, for example). As with other difficult constructs, this problem could be grappled with in part through standard psychometric techniques. Historical research utilizing archival data, on the other hand, could deal with the problem through more careful attention to and docu­ mentation of historical context and cultural changes surrounding the purported institutional­ ization of structures (Zucker 1 988). Content analysis of written materials can, in some in­ stances, provide a useful indicator of the cultural status of structures (Tolbert and Zucker 1 983). Whatever methodology is used to collect data, however, plausible claims about the level of institutionalization of structures are likely to rest on a strategy involving triangulation of both sources and methods. In addition, our analysis suggests that identification of the determinants of changes in the level of institutionalization of structures represents an important and promising avenue for both theoretical and empirical work. Extant studies have already suggested a number of potential determinants of how taken for granted a specific structure becomes, and thus how insti­ tutionalized. For example, a number of studies have shown that when large and more centrally linked organizations are innovators and early adopters of a given structure, that structure is more likely to become fully institutionalized than other structures (DiMaggio and Powell 1 983; Fligstein 1 985; 1 990; Baron et al. 1 986; Davis 1 99 1 ; Palmer et al. 1 993). Further, work by Mezias ( 1 990) and his colleagues (Mezias and Scarselletta 1 994) suggests that the social status

of forces opposing the adoption of a structure may operate in the opposite direction: as the status of those opposed increases, the degree of institutionalization decreases. There are other factors that, intuitively, we would also expect to have an impact on insti­ tutionalization, including: the scope or range of organizations for which a given structure is theorized to be relevant (the broader the range of organizations, the more difficult it should be to provide convincing evidence of a structure's effectiveness, and hence the lower the level of institutionalization); the number of 'champions' or size of champion groups (the greater the number of champions, the less likely are entropic processes to become operative, and thus the higher the level of institutionalization); the degree to which adoption of a structure is linked to costly changes in adopting organizations (higher invest­ ment costs should also mitigate entropic tenden­ cies, thus resulting in a higher degree of institutionalization); the strength of the correla­ tion between adoption and desired outcomes (creating strong incentives to maintain the structure, thus resulting in a higher degree of institutionalization); and so forth. Studying the determinants of institutionaliza­ tion processes is likely to require comparative work on the development and spread of different structures. This might involve, for example, the construction and comparison of several natural histories of structures that have been recently made the object of theorizing - quality circles, employee assistance programs, telecommuting policies, and so forth. Comparative case studies of this sort could provide important insights into whether (or not) there are any similarities in the processes through which adoption and diffusion of different types of structures occur. Alternatively, useful insights could also be provided by comparisons of the diffusion and fate of a given structure across several industries or across several countries (see Strang and Tuma 1 993). Such research has the potential to address a number of puzzles about institutionalization processes that are suggested by various empirical observations. Why do some structures (e.g.

STUD YING ORGA NIZA TION

1 80

team-based production) leap industries and not others (e.g. tenure systemsF Are institutionaliza­ tion processes always Icss likely to affect structures in small organizations (Han 1 994) and, if so, why? Why are biotechnological inno­ vations located primarily in new small firms in the US, but primarily in large incumbent firms in Japan (Zucker and Darby 1 994)? A final major implication that we would draw from our analysis is the need to consider the contexts or conditions under which institutional, resource dependence and efficiency-oriented contingency theories are each more likely to provide useful insights for organizational scho­ lars. Unfortunately, different theories often lead to the same predicted organizational outcomes although the mechanisms that are postulated to produce the outcomes are quite different. Hence, it is often extremely difficult, if not impossible, to determine whether the factors highlighted by a given theoretical perspective are actually at work in determining organizational actions. Because of this, it may be useful to confine empirical 'tests' of institutional theory to studies that are set in contexts where there are no major actors that are attempting to compel organiza­ tions to adopt a given structure, either through law or through the withholding of critical resources. Or it may be useful to compare directly unconstrained adoption processes to those that have some coercive elements, as in our examina­ tion of the adoption ofcivil service reform in states where it was not required by law and in states where it was legally required (Tolbert and Zucker 1 983). Likewise, it may also be useful to focus empirical application of institutional theory on analyses where the material benefits associated with a structure are not readily calculable (which is the case for many administrative innovations, as well as some technical innovations) - i.e. where efficiency-oriented contingency ap­ proaches are less obviously relevant. Or, again, it may be useful to assess how social institutions are used to increase material benefits, as for example when scientific collaborators tend to be selected from the same organization, effectively using the organizational boundaries as informa­ tion envelopes to protect new discoveries from early exploitation by others (Zucker et al. 1 995).

CONCLUSIONS

By highlighting the role of normative influences in organizational decision-making processes, institutional theory offers an important and distinctive extension to our repertoire of per­ spectives and approaches to explaining organiza-

tional structure. While the notion that decision­ makers are characterized by bounded rationality has become a staple component of the catechism of organizational research, the implications of this are not explored in any depth in most con­ temporary theories. l o How rationality is bounded and under what conditions it will be more or less bounded are questions that have rarely been addressed. Institutional theory offers a framework that can be useful in addressing these questions, but its utility in this respect requires further development of the theory to clarify the conditions and processes that lead structures to become institutionalized. A clearer understanding of institutionalization as a pro­ cess would allow us to specify the impact of more social aspects of decision-making, such as the effects of social position of those providing information on choices made, and the conditions under which prediction of a particular choice is possible only if the social aspects are directly included in the analysis. Addressing this general issue of conditions of applicability requires consideration of a number of problems: how and when choices or alternative lines of action become socially defined; who acts to cause change and to diffuse that change to multiple organizations, and why; and what are the potential benefits of creating similar struc­ tures, or converging to the same structures, that lead to the institutional isomorphism we so often observe. For institutional theory to develop as a coherent paradigm and thus to make an enduring contribution to organizational analyses, such questions about institutionalization processes require both conceptual and empirical answers. In this analysis, we have outlined some initial answers to these problems, answers whose extension and modification must await further theoretical development and empirical test.

NOTES We would like to thank, without implication, Howard Aldrich, Michael Darby, Shin-Kap Han, John Meyer, Linda Pike and Peter Sherer for taking the time and effort to read and offer very useful comments on earlier drafts of this chapter. Lynne Zucker acknowledges support for this research by grants from the Sloan Foundation through the NBER Program on Industrial Technology, and from the University of California Systemwide Biotechnology Research Education Program. Opinions expressed here are those of the authors and not those of NBER. I Here we concentrate our analysis on institutiona­ lization processes at the interorganizational level. Similar processes are likely to operate at the intra­ organizational level as well, though the exact

181

INSTITUTIONAL THEOR Y mechanisms as well a s the consequences may differ. See Tolbert ( 1 988), Rura and Miner ( 1 994) and Barley and Tolbert ( 1 988) for discussions of the relation between intraorganizational and interorganizational processes. See Zucker ( 1 977) for a discussion and experimental test of intraorganizational processes and consequences. 2 The evolution of this line of research includes work focusing on the relation between formal structure and the 'informal organization' and particularly on power relations among organizational members (e.g. Blau 1 955; Zald and Berger 1 978; Perrow 1 984). Perhaps because such work was less compatible with extant management science literature, it did not achieve prominence as rapidly in the sociological literature on organizations as did work focusing on covariation among structural elements. 3 See, for example, Stinchcombe ( 1 959), Thompson ( 1 967), Pugh et al. ( 1969), Blau ( 1 970). Hall ( 1 987) provides a thorough review and summary of the findings of this literature. 4 Another individual-level analog is ingratiation, in which flattery and exaggerated compliance are used to meet personal needs by altering the response of someone with power or authority (Jones 1 964; Jones and Wortman 1 973). See also Elsbach and Sutton ( 1 992) for a discussion of impression management by organizations. 5 D'Aunno et al. ( 1 99 1 ) describe the way in which conflicting demands placed on community mental health organizations by different constituencies result in the adoption of incompatible and contradictory practices. We suggest that such contradictions in structure are most likely to occur when managers have little discretion over the adoption of structural changes. 6 We leave for later development change processes that operate inside a given organization. Inertia within organizations is often assumed to block internal change or at least to make it extremely difficult (Kanter 1 983; 1 989). Yet institutionalization processes are likely to be very important in internal organiza­ tional functioning (Zucker 1 977; Pfeffer 1 982). 7 As John Meyer pointed out to us, this model may be most applicable to societies that are characterized by relatively weak national states. 8 Leblebici et al. ( 1 99 1 ) point out that when the advantages of an innovation are unclear, it is often smaller, less competitively advantaged firms who are most likely to adopt first, because the relative risks of making an error by adopting are lower for such firms. 9 This process of theorization has already been explicitly developed and empirically tested on the individual level as diffuse status characteristics (key references include Berger et al. 1 972; Webster and Driskell 1 978; Zelditch et al. 1 980; Ridgeway and Berger 1 986). It is easier to see errors in the generalization process when personal attributes such as gender or ethnicity are analyzed. But we expect similar errors at the organizational level. l O A good example is provided by transactions costs theory (Williamson 1 975), which is explicitly premised

on the assumption of bounded rationality. However, work in this tradition appears to be predicated implicitly on the assumption that decision-makers are capable of carrying out extremely complex calculations required to estimate the relative transaction costs associated with different relational forms, and selecting an appropriate course of action based on those calculations (i.e. of relatively unbounded rationality).

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7 Critical Theory and Postmodernism: Approaches to Organizational Studies MATS ALVESSON AND STANLEY D EETZ

Anyone who has followed the writings in critical theory and postmodernism during the last decade or so understands the difficulties we face in trying to provide a short, understandable and useful overview of this work. The two labels refer to massive bodies of literature, most of which are difficult to read. Compared to most other research perspectives treated in this Hand­ book, most of the various critical theory and postmodernist positions are still relatively new to management studies. Texts in the field cross many traditional disciplinary divisions. Many researchers draw on both traditions; others argue for irreconcilable differences between them. The differences and conflicts both within and between these two general headings have filled many pages both within and outside of organization studies. It might well be argued that nothing at once fair, coherent and brief can be written on this topic. But striving to understand these literatures is important. The general projects of critical theory and postmodernism do not represent fad or simple fascination. Certainly some popular accounts on postmodernism invite such a critique, and we do not believe that this label is necessarily the best or will last. We believe that postmodernism - and critical theory for that matter - should be studied not because they are new and different, but because they provide unique and important ways to understand organizations and their manage­ ment. Initially we will consider the social and historical context giving rise to these approaches and why the themes they address are becoming increasingly important to organization studies. We will then demonstrate ways postmodern and critical theories of organizations are different

from other approaches to organization studies as well as different from (and within) each other. As the chapter develops, we will consider different ways of doing postmodern and critical work. I n addition t o reviewing and discussing existing work, we will sketch some fruitful lines of development between and within these two approaches. Despite their importance, in the treatment of neither critical theory nor post­ modernism will we cover gender issues in any specific or detailed way since this volume has a chapter devoted to feminist approaches (see Calis and Smircich in Chapter 8). Researchers in organization and management studies came to critical theory and postmodern writings relatively late, with critical theory emerging in the late 1 970s and early 1 980s (for example, Benson 1 977; Burrell and Morgan 1 979; Frost 1 980; Deetz and Kersten 1 983; Fischer and Sirianni 1 984) and the postmodern­ ism writings in the late 1 980s (for example, Smircich and Calis 1 987; Cooper and Burrell 1 988). This is no surprise given the 'modernist' assumptions embedded in organizations and the rather dogmatic and exclusionary character of dominant research traditions of either a posi­ tivist or a Marxist bent. Part of the reason both critical theory and postmodern writings have now found fertile ground in management studies is the decline and disillusionment of what is broadly referred to as modernist assumptions by both organizational theorists and practitioners. As will be developed, the attack on the modernist tradition is central to both critical and postmodern studies. The increased size of organizations, rapid implementation of communication/information

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technologies, globalization, changing nature of work, reduction of the working class, less salient class conflicts, professionalization of the work force, stagnant economies, widespread ecologi­ cal problems and turbulent markets are all part of the contemporary context demanding a research response. Some of these lines of development have weakened the soil for Marx­ ism and other critiques of domination but improved it for the alternative orientations discussed here. Many of these developments provided a growing crisis in the heart of the modernist discourse with its instrumental ration­ ality and connection to state democracies. Management in a modernist discourse works on the basis of control, the progressive rationalization and colonization of nature and people, whether workers, potential consumers, or society as a whole. But there are structural limits to control. The costs of integration and control systems often exceed the value added by management within the corporation. The shift from manufacturing to service industries as the most typical economic form in the Western world also has implications for control forms (Alvesson 1 987). As the cost of control grows and the means/end chains grow longer, strategy and instrumental reasoning are strained. Themes like corporate culture, identity, quality manage­ ment, service management and the renewed call for leadership, soul, and charisma during the late 1 980s and early 1 990s, illustrate this. Objects for management control are decreasingly labour power and behavior and increasingly the mind­ power and subjectivities of employees. These new social conditions provide a new urgency and new areas of application for postmodern and critical theory work in organization studies consider the amount of critical theory work on organizational culture (see Alvesson 1 993a and Willmott 1 993 for overviews) - but have little to do with their formation. These rather indicate the new social conditions to which critical theory and postmodern writing have provided innova­ tive and instructive analyses. While these new conditions have provided opportunity for organizational changes, we think little is gained by proclaiming a new postmodern period, or talking about postmo­ dern organizations (Alvesson 1 995). Empirical indications are highly selective and weak (Thompson 1 993). The portrayal of one's own time as unique and a time of great transition is an unfortunate tendency of many periods in Western thought (Foucault 1 983). Theoretically, this enterprise is equally unconvincing. The talk about postmodern organizations often means a relabeling of what is also called organic, adhocratic or post-Fordist organizations, with little or no conceptual gains and quite a lot of

confusion (Parker 1 993, Thompson 1 993). For example, Peters ( 1 987) or even Clegg ( 1 990) talk about significant changes in organizations that we think can be usefully explored using postmodern and critical theory discourses, but they do not. We are only interested in these theoretical approaches and what they offer to organization studies, not in claims of organiza­ tions as postmodern . What is then included under the umbrella concepts of critical theory and postmodernism? Sometimes critical theory is given a broad meaning and includes all works taking a basically critical or radical stance on contem­ porary society with an orientation towards investigating exploitation, repression, unfair­ ness, asymmetrical power relations (generated from class, gender, or position), distorted communication, and false consciousness. We, however, use the term here with a more restricted meaning, referring to organization studies drawing concepts primarily, though not exclu­ sively, from the Frankfurt School (Adorno, Horkheimer, Marcuse and Habermas). Much of the foundation for this work is summarized, though not without some conceptual confusions, in Burrell and Morgan's ( 1 979) radical human­ ism paradigm and in Morgan's ( 1 986) images of domination and neuroses. Postmodernism is in many ways much harder to delimit. In the social sciences, the term has been used to describe a social mood, a historical period filled with major social and organiza­ tional changes, and a set of philosophical approaches to organizational and other studies (Featherstone 1 988; Kellner 1 988; Parker 1 992; Hassard and Parker 1 993). We will focus on this last designation, emphasizing the more socially and politically relevant writings and the use of conceptions of fragmentation, textuality, and resistance in organization studies. These philo­ sophically based approaches to organization studies have emerged out of works of Derrida and Foucault in particular, and to a lesser degree Baudrillard, Deleuze and Guattari, and Laclau and Mouffe. Much more so than with critical theory this is a wide group of writers and positions with quite different research agendas. Still their work shares features and moves that can be highlighted in treating them together. 1 Their themes include focusing on the con­ structed nature of people and reality, emphasiz­ ing language as a system of distinctions which are central to the construction process, arguing against grand narratives and large-scale theor­ etical systems such as Marxism or functionalism, emphasizing the power/knowledge connection and the role of claims of expertise in systems of domination, emphasizing the fluid and hyperreal nature of the contemporary world and role of

CRITICAL THEOR Y AND POSTMODERNISM mass media and information technologies, and stressing narrative/fictionlrhetoric as central to the research process. We emphasize the critical edge of post­ modernism. We see it as part of a broader critical tradition which challenges the status quo and supports silenced or marginalized voices. This is a common emphasis, but by no means the only one. Many postmodernist ideas have been utilized for different political purposes. The critique of foundations and utopian ideals has been understood by some as leaving a distinctly apolitical, socially irrelevant, or even neo­ conservative stance (Habermas 1 983; Margolis 1 989; Sarup 1 988). The absence of a political stance grounded in a systematic philosophy has been a source of complaint, but this does not mean that a different, more 'local' and 'respon­ sive', political stance is absent (see Walzer 1 986). Sometimes people distinguish between 'reaction­ ary postmodernism' and a 'postmodernism of resistance' (Foster 1 983; Smircich and Calas 1 987). Like the majority of authors in social science and organization theory, we choose the latter route in our account. Most applications in social science have taken postmodern concep­ tions in a radical/critical direction - although an unconventional one.

THE DEVELOPMENT OF CRITICAL THEORY AND POSTMODERNISM

Every historical period has probably had its particular equivalences of traditionalists, mod­ ernists, critical theorists, and postmodernists those who lament the passing of a purer time, those instrumentally building a future, those concerned with disadvantaged segments and the direction of the future, and those seeing fragmentation and decay mixed with radical potential. In faster transitional periods as compared to relatively stable periods the mix of these figures is probably different. Remember­ ing this more situates the historical account of critical theory and postmodernism than denies it as being interesting. Here we wish first to situate them in the history of ideas. Let us be clear at the start: all such social histories are types of fiction. They often serve present social purposes more than record the past. They are reconstructions which give us a particular way to think about the present. The history is interesting because of its productive capacities. The developmental accounts of critical theory and postmodernism are no exceptions. 2 These accounts emphasizing unity and distinction, while purposive fictions, highlight central features of these bodies of work.

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Theoretical Sources of Inspiration and Distinction

Both critical theory and postmodern writers position their work in regards to four specific developments in Western thought. The way they respond to and partly use mixes of these developments accounts for many of the differ­ ences between and within postmodernism and critical theory. These are ( 1 ) the power/knowl­ edge relation arising with Nietzsche's perspectiv­ alism, (2) a nondualistic constructionist account of experience and language arising with phe­ nomenological hermeneutics and structural linguistics, (3) a historically based social conflict theory arising from Marx, and (4) a complex human subject arising from Freud. The first posed a challenge to any possible foundations for knowledge: all knowledge claims primarily reference social communities filled with specific power relations rather than an essential world or knowing subjects. The second situated all perspectives within specific social/historical/lin­ guistic contexts: the intersubjectivity preceding any subjectivity or objectivity is structured in specifiable ways. The third removed the inno­ cence of social/historical/linguistic perspectives by positioning them within materially produced social divisions and denied any smooth unitary historical development. And the fourth provided for a complex, conflict ridden, and often mistaken subject in place of a knowing, unitary, autonomous person , thereby challenging any claim to simple rationality and a clear and fixed identity. Together people, realities, and social relations become nonessential constructions, constructed under specific conditions of power and contestation, and filled with opacities, contradictions, and conflict suppression. These different concepts provide the historically spe­ cific tools for encountering the dominant discourses of the time. These shared intellectual heritages should not prevent us from emphasizing the differences in how critical theory and postmodernism draw upon them. Postmodernism typically, for exam­ ple, uses Freud much more unconventionally than critical theory, and merges psychoanalytic ideas with language philosophy in efforts to deconstruct and show the fragmentation of the subject. Important sources of inspiration that are clearly different from critical theory and post­ modernism include structuralist language theory (Saussure), which postmodernism draws heavily upon, and Weberian notions of the rationaliza­ tion process of modern society, which is central for critical theory. In addition, critical theory is inspired by German moral philosophy and its faith in autonomy and reason (Hegel, Kant).

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Embedded in these choices are long term OPPositIOns between French and German cul­ tural contexts. If it were not for this historical context some of the differences would not be as clear. For example, Horkheimer and Adorno's ( 1 979) cultural criticism of administratively induced control contingent upon the conception of progress in the Enlightenment can be read as sounding as close to Foucault as to Habermas's recent writings. But few would think of them in that way. It is interesting to note that Foucault, when towards the end of his life became acquainted with the Frankfurt School, expressed himself very positively, almost over generously, about it: if I had been familiar with the Frankfurt School . . I would not have said a number of stupid things that I did say and I would have avoided many of the detours which I made while trying to pursue my own humble path - when, meanwhile, avenues had been opened up by the Frankfurt School. ( 1 983: 200)

Critical Theory and Postmodernism Responses to Modernism

Since both postmodernism and critical theory writings are filled with attempts to distinguish themselves in comparison to the modernist project, a brief rendition of the latter may be helpful - though since it is familiar we will not be long. Kant described the Enlightenment as the escape from self-inflicted tutelage. In pre­ Enlightenment communities, personal identities, knowledge, social order, and dominant historical narratives were carried and legitimized by tradition, though individuals actively 'inflicted' the tradition upon themselves. The Enlight­ enment promised an autonomous subject pro­ gressively emancipated by knowledge acquired through scientific methods. It noted the rise of reason over authority and traditional values. Its science developed and in time proclaimed a transparent language (freed from the baggage of traditional ideology) and representational truth, a positivity and optimism in acquisition of cumulative understanding which would lead to the progressive enhancement of the quality of life. The Enlightenment enemy was darkness, tradition, ideology, irrationality, ignorance, and positional authority. Each of these themes of the Enlightenment are deeply embedded in moder­ nist management theory. In the organizational context, we use the term 'modernist' to draw attention to the instrumen­ talization of people and nature through the use of scientific-technical knowledge (modeled after positivism and other 'rational' ways of develop-

ing safe, robust knowledge) to accomplish predictable results measured by productivity and technical problem-solving leading to the 'good' economic and social life, primarily defined by accumulation of wealth by produc­ tion investors and consumption by consumers. Modernism initially represented emancipation over myth, authority, and traditional values through knowledge, reason, and opportunities based on heightened capacity. Early twentieth century organization studies were organized around development of modernist over tradi­ tional discourses. Taylor's and Weber's treat­ ment of rationalization and bureaucratization showed from the start the corporation as a site of the development of modernist logic and instru­ mental reasoning. The traditional was margin­ alized and placed off in the private realm. While writings in human relations, quality of work life, and later cultural studies would continue to claim a place for traditional values and norms with their particular logics, each would be 'strategized' and brought to aid further rationa­ lization of work for the sake of convenience, efficiency, and direction of the work effort. 'Performativity' would come to be valued over any earlier Enlightenment narrative of emanci­ pation or human values (Lyotard 1 984). In fact in the new age embellishment one could even be emancipated from the body's emotions and bring the body's spirit and faith under rational control. Foucault's ( 1 977; 1 980; 1 988) demon­ strations, and critical treatment, of the rise of self-surveillance and bio-power as control systems described the furthest development of self-rationalization in modernity. Critical theory and postmodernism open new discussions. In particular critical theory showed how modern­ ism itself was based on myths, had acquired an arbitrary authority, subordinated social life to technological rationality and protected a new dominant group's interests (Horkheimer and Adorno 1 979). The old conflict between a modern and a traditional discourse where the modern laid claim to all the positive terms is suddenly displaced by a new set of conflicts, those arising from the problems of modernity itself. Both critical theory and postmodernism see their work as responses to specific social conditions. Contemporary society as a result of science, industrialization, and communication/ information technologies has developed positive capacities but also dangerous forms of domina­ tion. Both critical theory and postmodernism describe Western development as one where a progressive, instrumental modernism gradually eclipsed traditional society with fairly clear payoffs but also great costs. They agree that something fundamental has gone awry and that

CRITICAL THEOR Y AND POSTMODERNISM more technicaL instrumental 'solutions' will not fix it. While their diagnoses are similar (to use a less than totally adequate medical metaphor), they differ in their pronouncement and response. Critical theorists see the modernists' project as sick and see hope for reconstruction in recovery of good parts and redirecting the future. Postmodernists pronounce its death and pro­ claim the absence of a thinkable future. 3 The critical theorists, especially Habermas ( 1 984; 1 987), focus on the incompletion of the positive potentialities of enlightenment. Differ­ ent forces have utilized their power and advan­ tages to force new forms of tutelage, often consentjitl in character. As we will discuss in regards to organizational studies, critical theor­ ists have focused on the skewing and closure of the historical discourse through reification, universalization of sectional interests, domina­ tion of instrumental reasoning, and hegemony. In different ways they hope to recover a rational process through understanding social/historical/ political constructionism, a broader conception of rationality, inclusion of more groups in social determination, and overcoming systematically distorted communication. Central to this is the critique of domination and the ways those sub­ jugated actively participate in their own sub­ jugation. The politically astute intellectual is given an active role in the production of an enlightened understanding. The hope is to provide forums so that different segments of the society and different human interests can be part of a better, more moral, historical dialogue, so that each may equally contribute to the choices in producing a future for all. The postmodernists also focus on the dark side of the Enlightenment, its destruction of the environment and native peoples, its exclusions, and the concealed effects of reason and progress, but postmodernists see the entire project as wrong. The problem is not who or what par­ ticipates in it. The project is inherently problem­ atic. They seek to find the 'nonenlightened' voices, the human possibilities that the Enlight­ enment itself suppresses. This discourse is filled with the pronouncement of the end of the historical discourse of progress and emancipa­ tion and its endless deferral of social promise, that more technology, more knowledge and increased rationality will somehow accomplish the promise. Man (the humanist subject as a coherent entity with natural rights and potential autonomy) is pronounced dead and in his place appears the decentred, fragmented, gendered, classed subject; the grand narratives of theory and history are replaced by disjoined and fragmented local narratives potentially articu­ lated and sutured; and metaphysics with its philosophies of presence and essence has lost

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terrain to the celebration of multiple perspectives and a carnival of positions and structurings. The future is endlessly deferred and without positive direction, but life can be made more interesting through deconstruction and the recovery of suppressed conflicts and marginalized groups. The intellectual has no privileged position or special knowledge, but can only act in situa­ tional, local ways like all others. Since there can be no theory of history or projection into the future, resistance and alternative readings rather than reform or revolution become the primary political posture.

OPENING THE TENSIONS AND PROVIDING TEMPORARY UNITIES

In this section we will show a way of thinking about research positions that makes critical theory and postmodernism similar in contrast to other approaches to organizations and different from each other. To do this we will use a grid similar to the popular one by Burrell and Morgan ( 1 979) but with changes that highlight similarities and differences more usefully (see Deetz 1 994a; in press a; for development).4 See Figure I . The consensus-dissensus dimension focuses on the relation of research practices to the dominant social discourses. Research perspec­ tives can be contrasted based on the extent to which they work within a dominant set of structurings of knowledge, social relations, and identities, called here a 'consensus' discourse, and the extent to which they work to disrupt these structurings, called here 'dissensus' dis­ course. This dimension is used to show a significant way that we can think about what makes postmodernism and critical theory differ­ ent from other current research programs. The second dimension focuses on the origin of concepts and problem statements as part of the constitutive process in research. Differences among research perspectives can be shown by contrasting 'local/emergent' conceptions with 'elite/a priori' ones. This dimension will be used to show one way to interestingly think about the difference between the postmodernism and critical theory discourses. The two dimensions together attempt to show what is negotiable and not in research practice, how research reports are organized, and the anticipated political outcome of the research activity (the direction in which it points, whether or not it has a practical effect). Unlike Burrell and Morgan we do not wish to suggest that the grid identifies paradigms but rather we propose that it shows particular discourses which develop

STUD YING ORGANIZA TION

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Relation to dominant social discourse

I

Dissensus

Origin of concepts and problems

Dia logic studies

Critical studies

Postmodern,

Late modern,

deconstructionist

reformist

___

Local / emerg ent

--+---- Elite/a priori

_ _ _ _

I n terpretative studies

Normative studies

Premodern, traditional

Modern, progressive

Consensus

Figure 1 Contrasting dimensions from the metatheory of representational practices (adapted from Deetz 1 994c) mobile but specifiable relations to each other and position particular types of conflicts and contra­ dictions internal to them. Each of these issues will be taken up briefly below. We recognize that in naming these positions and the bodies of work exemplifying them, some things are pulled together that are still different in many now hidden ways and bipolar contrasts are created that change a continuous world to a discontin­ uous one. We hope the reader will work with us to see the various conceptualizations as interest­ ing ways to call attention to similarities and differences that matter rather than as devices for division and classification. The differences between critical theory and postmodernism are often contested and many researchers draw on both traditions. Still it is useful to give some account of what makes these different traditions that do not easily collapse into each other.

The Consensus-Dissensus Dimension

Consensus or dissensus should be understood not primarily as agreement and disagreement but rather as presentation of unity or of difference, the continuation or disruption of a coherent dominant discourse, trust or doubt as basic anticipation. Key to this dimension is the argument from the dissensus end that people, orders, and objects are constructed in work, social interaction, and the process of research, and hence the perceived world is based on political processes of determination which often demonstrate domination and could/should be

contestable; while the consensus discourse provides the identities of people, social orders, and objects as natural, or if constructed, legitimate and given awaiting discovery by the researcher. When a construction view is advo­ cated by certain consensus researchers, it tends to emphasize the natural, organic and sponta­ neous nature of the constructions, rather than, as in the version of dissensus seekers, its arbitrary and political character. To save space, see Table I for conceptualization of this dimension. LocaUEmergent-ElitelA Priori Dimension

The local/emergent-elite/a priori dimension will be used here primarily to call attention to a central difference between postmodern and critical theory positions but it also contrasts normative and interpretative studies. Table 2 presents an array of these contrasts. On the elite side, the discourse produces the researcher as a stronger agent with privileged insights - at least having the ability to produce reliable knowledge - and makes clear the commitment to political agendas. The a priori set of conceptions demonstrates implicit or explicit alliances with different groups in society. For example, to the extent that normative researchers' concepts align with managerial conceptions and problem statements and are applied a priori in studies, the knowledge claims are intrinsically biased toward certain interests as they are applied within the site

CRITICAL THEOR Y AND POSTMODERNISM Table I

191

Characterizations of the consensus-dissensus dimension

Consensus

Dissensus

Trust Hegemonic order as natural state Naturalization of present Integration and harmony are possible Research focuses on representation

Suspicion Conflicts over order as natural state Present order is historicized and politicized Order indicates domination and suppressed conflicts Research focused on challenge and reconsideration (re-presentation) Lens (seeing/reading as) dominant metaphor Insight and praxis central concern Theory as opening Positional complementarity Science is political Life is struggle and creation Researcher named and positioned Historically/socially situated agent

Mirror (reflecting) dominant metaphor Validity central concern Theory as abstraction Unified science and triangulation Science is neutral Life is discovery Researcher anonymous and out of time and space Autonomous/free agent Source: adapted from Deetz in press a

Table 2

Characterizations of the locallemergent-elite/a priori dimension

Local/emergent

Elite/a priori

Comparative communities Multiple language games Particularistic Systematic philosophy as ethnocentric Atheoretical Situational or structural determinism Nonfoundational Local narratives Sensuality and meaning as central concerns Situated, practical knowledge Tends to be feminine in attitude Sees the strange Proceeds from the other Ontology of 'otherness' over method

Privileged community Fixed language game Universalistic Grounded in hoped-for systematic philosophy Theory driven Methodological determinism Foundational Grand narrative of progress and emancipation Rationality and truth as central concerns Generalizable, theoretical knowledge Tends to be masculine in attitude Sees the familiar Proceeds from the self Epistemological and procedural issues rule over substantive assumptions

Source: adapted from Deetz in press a

community. The knowledge claims become part of the same processes that are being studied, reproducing world views and personal identities, and fostering particular interests within the organization (see Knights 1 992). Feminists and those primarily concerned with class analysis, while usually in sympathy with most aspects of postmodernism, often turn to critical theory (or a similar position) to acquire a political agenda based on preconceptions of social divisions and forms of domination that are considered general (see Fraser and Nicholson 1 988; Flax 1 990). While such conceptions from critical theory are critical of elite groups in the move to create a more equitable society, they tend to privilege the conceptions of disadvantaged groups or intellec­ tual ideals, and hence produce their own, usually

temporary, elitism. The local/emergent concep­ tions see social groupings themselves as con­ structions, power and domination as dispersed, and the research agenda as itself dominating. Words like 'women', 'worker', 'poor', 'owners', and so forth are accepted not as representations of 'reality', but as power-laden distinctions. An ordinary conception of political action as end­ directed is thus difficult to sustain in either interpretative or postmodern (dialogic) work.

A Sketch of Alternative Research Approaches

The relation of postmodern and critical theory to each other and to normative and interpretative work can be shown by comparing the discourse

STUD YING ORGANIZA TION

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Prototypical discursive features

Table 3

Discourse Issue

Normative

Interpretative

Critical

Dialogic

Basic goal

Law-like relations among objects Nomothetic science Progressive emancipation Economic

Display unified culture Hermeneutics, ethnography Recovery of integrative values Social

Unmask domination

Reclaim conflict

Cultural criticism, ideology critique Reformation of social order Political

Deconstruction, geneology Claim a space for lost voices Mass

Marketplace

Community

Polity

Carnival

Inefficiency, disorder Fidelity, influence, information needs Scientific/technical, strategic Modern Control, expertise

Meaninglessness, illegitimacy Social acculturation, group affirmation Romantic, embracing Premodern Commitment, quality of work life Friendly Depersonalization

Domination, consent Misrecognition, systematic distortion Therapeutic, directive Late modern Participation, expanded knowledge Suspicious Authority

Marginalization, conflict suppression Discursive closure

Method Hope Metaphor of social relations Organization metaphor Problems addressed Concern with communication Narrative style Time identity Organizational benefits Mood Social fear

Optimistic Disorder

Ironic, ambivalent Post modern Diversity, creativity Playful Totalization, normalization

Source: adapted from Deetz in press a

they generate in regard to issues in organization studies, See Table 3, Since we will use these characterizations to build our discussion of studies in critical theory and postmodernism, we will not discuss them here,

CRITICAL THEORY AND ORGANIZA TIONAL RESEARCH

The central goal of critical theory in organiza­ tional studies has been to create societies and workplaces which are free from domination, where all members have an equal opportunity to contribute to the production of systems which meet human needs and lead to the progressive development of alL Studies have focused externally on the relation of organizations to the wider society by emphasizing the possible social effects of colonization of other institutions and the domination or destruction of the public sphere, and internally on the domination by instrumental reasoning, discursive closures, and consent processes within the workplace, As indicated, critical researchers tend to enter their studies with a full set of theoretical commitments which aid them analytically to ferret out situ­ ations of domination and distortion, Organiza­ tions are largely seen as political sites, and thus

general social theories and especially theories of decision-making in the public sphere are seen as appropriate (see Deetz 1 992; 1 995), Critical theorists sometimes have a clear political agenda focused on the interests of specific identifiable groups such as women, workers, or people of color, but usually address general issues of goals, values, forms of consciousness and communicative distortions within corporations, Increasingly important to critical studies is the enrichment of the knowledge base, improvement of decision process, and increases in 'learning' and adaptation, Their interest in ideologies considers the difficulties of disadvantaged groups in understanding their own political interest, but is more often addressed to limitations on people in general, challenging technocracy, consumerism, careerism, and exclu­ sive concern with economic growth, Most of the work has focused on ideology critique which shows how specific interests fail to be realized owing partly to the inability of people to understand or act on these interests, In the con­ text of management and organization studies, it should be emphasized that critical theory, compared to Marxism, is not anti-management per se, even though one tends to treat manage­ ment as institutionalized and ideologies and practices of management as expressions of contemporary forms of domination, Critical

CRI11CAL THEOR Y AND POSTMODERNISM theory can offer much to management and managers. Contributions include input to reflec­ tion on career choices, intellectual resources for counteracting totalitarian tendencies in manage­ rially controlled corporate socialization, and stimulation for incorporating a broader set of criteria and consideration in decision-making especially in cases where profit and growth do not clearly compete with other ends or where uncertainty exists regarding the profit outcomes of various alternative means and strategies (Alvesson and Willmott 1 996: Chapter 8; Deetz 1 995: Chapter 4). Two principal types of critical studies can be identified in organization studies: ideological critique and communicative action.

Ideology Critique

The earliest ideological critiques of the work­ place were offered by Marx. In his analysis of work processes he focused primarily on practices of economic exploitation through direct coercion and structural differences in work relations between the owners of capital and the owners of their own labor. However, Marx also describes the manner in which the exploitative relation is disguised and made to appear legitimate. This is the origin of ideology critique. Economic conditions and class structure still were central to the analysis whether this misrecognition of interests was a result of the domination of the ruling class's ideas (Marx 1 844) or of the dull compulsions of economic relations (Marx 1 867). The themes of domination and exploitation by owners and later by managers have been central to ideology critique of the workplace in this century by Marxist inspired organization theor­ ists (for example, Braverman 1 974; Clegg and Dunkerley 1 980; Edwards 1 979; Salam an 1 98 1 ) . Attention by analysts from the left focused on ideology since workers often seemed to fail to recognize this exploitation and their class-based revolutionary potential in the industrial coun­ tries. Gradually these later analyses became less concerned with coercion and class and economic explanations as their focus changed to why coercion was so rarely necessary and to systemic processes that produced active consent. Issues of 'workers' self-understanding of experience' become more central (for example, Gramsci 1929-35; Burawoy 1 979; Willmott 1 990). To an increasing degree, ideology critiques do not only or even strongly address class issues, but broaden the picture and study how cultural-ideological control operates in relationship to all employees, including levels of management (Hodge et al. 1 979; Czarniawska-loerges 1 988; Deetz and

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Mumby 1 990; Kunda 1 992). Ideology produced in the workplace would stand alongside that present in the media and the growth of the consumer culture and welfare state as accounting for workers' failure to act on their own interests. Ideology would also account for professionals' and managers' failure to achieve autonomy in relationship to needs and wants and the con­ formist pressure to standardize paths for satisfy­ ing these (conspicuous consumption, careerism, and self-commodification: see Heckscher 1 995). This would fill out the tradition of ideology critique. A considerable amount of critical work has addressed management and organization theory as expressions, as well as producers, of ideologies which legitimize and strengthen specific societal and organizational social rela­ tions and objectives (Burrell and Morgan 1 979; Alvesson 1 987; Alvesson and Willmott 1 996; Steffy and Grimes 1 992). Academics, particu­ larly those in management studies, are often viewed as ideologists. They serve dominant groups through socialization in business schools, support managers with ideas and vocabularies for cultural-ideological control at the workplace level, and provide the aura of science to support the introduction and use of managerial domina­ tion techniques. Four themes recur in the numerous and varied writings about organizations working from the perspective of ideology critique: ( I ) the natur­ alization of social order, or the way a socially/ historically constructed world would be treated as necessary, natural, rational and self-evident; (2) the universalization of managerial interests and suppression of conflicting interests; (3) the domination by instrumental, and eclipse of competitive, reasoning processes; and (4) hege­ mony, the way consent becomes orchestrated. Naturalization

In naturalization a social formation is abstracted from the historical conflictual site of its origin and treated as a concrete, relatively fixed, entity. As such the reification becomes the reality rather than life processes. Through obscuring the construction process, institutional arrangements are no longer seen as choices but as natural and self-evident. The illusion that organizations and their processes are 'natural' objects and func­ tional responses to 'needs' protects them from examination as produced under specific histor­ ical conditions (which are potentially passing) and out of specific power relations. In organiza­ tion studies, organismic and mechanistic meta­ phors dominate, thereby leading research away from considering the legitimacy of control and political relations in organizations (Morgan

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STUD YING ORGA NIZA TION

1 986). Examining the naturalization of the present and the reifications of social processes helps display the structural interrelation of insti­ tutional forces, the processes by which they are sustained and changed, and the processes by which their arbitrary nature is concealed and hence closed to discussion. Ideology critique reclaims organizations as social-historical con­ structions and investigates how they are formed, sustained, and transformed by processes both internal and external to them (see Lukacs 1 97 1 ; Benson 1 977; Giddens 1 979; Frost 1 980; 1 987; Thompson 1 984; Deetz 1 985; I 994d). The self­ evident nature of an organizational society, the hasic distinctions and division of labor between management and workers, men and women, and so forth are called into question by ideology critique which demonstrates the arbitrary nature of these phenomena and the power relations that result and sustain these forms for the sake of discovering the remaining places of possible choice. Universalization of Managerial Interests

Lukacs ( 1 9 7 1 ) among many others (see Giddens 1 979) has shown that particular sectional interests are often universalized and treated as if they were everyone's interests. In contempor­ ary corporate practices, managerial groups are privileged in decision-making and research. Management is ascribed a superior position in terms of defining the interests and interest realizations of the corporation and thereby of wide segments of the population. The interests of the corporation are frequently equated with specific managerial self-interests. For example, worker, supplier, or host community interests can be interpreted in terms of their effect on corporate - i.e. universalized managerial interests. As such they are exercised only occasionally and usually reactively and are often represented as simply economic commod­ ities or 'costs' - for example, the price the 'corporation' must pay for labor, supplies, or environmental clean-up (Deetz 1 995). Central to the universalization of managerial interest is the reduction of the multiple claims of ownership to financial ownership. The investments made by other stakeholders are minimized while capital investment is made central. Management by virtue of its fiduciary responsibility (limited to monetary investors) speaks for (and is often conceptually equated with) the corporation (Storey 1 983). In such a move, since the general well-being of each group is conceptually and materially tied to the financial well-being of the corporation as understood by management, self­ interest by nonmanagerial stakeholders is often ironically reinterpreted as accomplished by mini-

mizing the accomplishment of their own self­ interests. In ideological critique managerial advantages can be seen as produced historically and actively reproduced through ideological practices in society and in corporations them­ selves (see Tompkins and Cheney 1985; Knights and Willmott 1 985; Lazega 1 992; Deetz 1 992). Critical studies explore how interest articulation is distorted through the dominating role of money as a simple and powerful medium (Offe and Wiesen thaI 1 980) and confront productivity and consumption with suppressed values such as autonomy, creativity and pleasure as objectives for the organization of work ( Burrell and Morgan 1 979; Willmott and Knights 1 982; Alvesson 1 987). The Primacy of Instrumental Reasoning

Habermas ( 1 97 1 ; 1975; 1 984; 1 987) has traced the social/historical emergence of technical rationality over competing forms of reason. Habermas described technical reasoning as instrumental, tending to be governed by the theoretical and hypothetical, and focusing on control through the development of means-ends chains. The natural opposite to this Habermas conceptualizes as a practical interest. Practical reasoning focuses on the process of under­ standing and mutual determination of the ends to be sought rather than control and develop­ ment of means of goal accomplishment (Apel 1 979). As Habermas described the practical interest: 'a constitutive interest in the preserva­ tion and expansion of the intersubjectivity of possible action-oriented mutual understandings. The understanding of meaning is directed in its very structure toward the attainment of possible consensus among actors in the framework of a self-understanding derived from tradition' ( 1 97 1 : 3 1 0). I n a balanced system these two forms of reasoning become natural complements. But, in the contemporary social situation, the form and content of modern social science and the social constitution of expertise align with organiza­ tional structures to produce the domination of technical reasoning (see Stablein and Nord 1 985; Alvesson 1 987; Alvesson and Willmott 1 992; 1 996; Mumby 1 988; Fischer 1 990). To the extent that technical reasoning dominates, it lays claim to the entire concept of rationality and alternative forms of reason appear irrational. To a large extent studies of the 'human' side of organizations (climate, job enrichment, quality of work life, worker participation programs, and culture) have each been transformed from alternative ends into new means to be brought under technical control for extending the dominant group interests of the corporation (Alvesson 1 987). Sievers, for example, suggests

CRITICAL THEOR Y AND POSTMODERNISM that 'motivation only became an issue - for management and organization theorists as well as for the organization of work itself - when meaning either disappeared or was lost from work; that the loss of meaning is immediately connected with the way work has been, and still is organized in the majority of our Western enterprises' ( 1 986: 338). The productive tension between technical control and humanistic aspects becomes submerged to the efficient accomplishment of often unknown but surely 'rational' and 'legitimate' corporate goals. Hegemony

Although Gramsci's ( 1 929-35) analysis and development of the concept of 'hegemony' aimed at a general theory of society and social change with the workplace as one component, his conceptions have been widely used as a foundation for an examination of the workplace itself (for example, Burawoy 1 979; Clegg 1 989). Gramsci conceives of hegemony as a complex web of conceptual and material arrangements producing the very fabric of everyday life. Hegemony in the workplace is supported by economic arrangements enforced by contracts and reward systems, cultural arrangements enforced by advocacy of specific values and visions, and command arrangements enforced by rules and policies. These are situated within the larger society with its supporting economic arrangements, civil society (including education/ intellectuals/media), and governmental laws. The conception of hegemony suggests the presence of mUltiple dominant groups with different interests and the presence of power and activity even in dominated groups. The integration of these arrangements, however, favors dominant groups and the activity of both dominant and dominated groups is best characterized as a type of produced 'consent' . The hegemonic system works through pervading common sense and becoming part of the ordinary way of seeing the world, understanding one's self, and experiencing needs (see Angus 1 992). Such a situation always makes possible a gap between that inscribed by the dominant order and that which a dominated group would have preferred. As Lukes argued, 'Man's wants themselves may be a product of a system which works against their interests, and in such cases, relates the latter to what they would want and prefer, were they able to make the choice' ( 1 974: 34). A number of studies have investigated a variety of 'consent' processes (for example, Burawoy 1 979; Kunda 1 992; Vallas 1 993). Several studies have shown how employees 'strategize their own subordination', achieving marginal gains for themselves through subordi-

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nation but also perpetuating dominant systems which preclude their autonomy and ability to act on their own wider interests (see Burawoy 1 985; Deetz 1 995; in press b; Willmott 1 993). Organization studies in the 1 980s and 1 990s have exhibited a rather wide body of critical theory addressing corporate culture or proceed­ ing from cultural perspectives on organizations, where culture and cultural engineering are defined as pointing towards hegemony (for example, Alvesson 1 993a; Alvesson and Willmott 1 996; Deetz 1 985; Jermier 1 985; Knights and Willmott 1 987; Mumby 1 988; Rosen 1 985). Willmott, for example, has explored how 'corporate culture programmes are designed to deny or frustrate the development of conditions in which critical reflection is fostered. They commend the homo­ genization of norms and values within organiza­ tions . . . Cultural diversity is dissolved in the acid bath of the core corporate values' ( 1 993: 534). In practice, as Willmott and other critical theorists point out, management control strategies are seldom fully successful. Resistance and some level of cultural diversity normally prevail. The role of critical theory, but even more so postmodernism, can be seen as trying to preserve and reinforce this diversity. A Critique of Ideology Critique

Each of these four concerns raised in various ideological critiques has value. Yet, limitations of ideology critique have been demonstrated by many. Three criticisms appear most common. First, ideology critique often appears ad hoc and reactive. Most studies explain after the fact why something didn't happen rather than making predictive and testable statements about the future. Second, it appears elitist. Concepts like false needs and false consciousness which were central to early studies presume a basic weakness in insight and reasoning processes in the very same people it hopes to empower. The irony of an advocate of greater equality pronouncing what others should want or how they should perceive the world 'better' is not lost on either dominant or dominated groups. And, third, the accounts from early studies of ideology critique appear far too simplistic. According to Aber­ crombie et al.'s ( 1 980) critique of the 'dominant ideology thesis', the conception of the dominant group remains singular and intentional, as if an identifiable group worked out a system whereby domination through control of ideas could occur and its interest could be secured. A more sophisticated critique, coming from postmodernism, points out that the idea of the centred agent-subject is as central to ideology cntlque as it is to dominant groups and the systems that advantage them. The hope for a

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STUD YING ORGA NIZA TlO/\'

rational and reflective agent who is capable of acting autonomously and coherently may in itself be a worthy target of ideology critique. The modern corporation's legitimacy is based on both the assumption of the existence of such an individual and its ability to foster that indivi­ dual's development. Ideology critique does not, on the whole, question this basic notion of the individual, even though authors are quick to point to the discrepancy between actual produc­ tion of people and a potential development. Clearly the power of ideology critique can be maintained without falling to these criticisms and many critical theorists have accomplished this as they have pulled the concept of ideology away from traditional Marxism. They have responded to the critics by (a) advocating research that empirically investigates expressions of dominating systems of thought in particular communicative situations rather than explains outcomes (for example, Alvesson 1 996; Knights and Willmott 1 987; Rosen 1 985); (b) refraining from directive statements regarding what people should do (revolt, liberate) but emphasizing the problematization of dominating beliefs and values (Deetz 1 992); (c) recognizing pluralistic qualities, but still insisting that there are strong asymmetries between various interests and perspectives; and (d) treating ideologies as dominating without seeing them as a simple instrument or in the interest of an elite group, thus showing that elites may have internalized and may suffer from the effects of dominating sets of ideas (such as pollution or through work processes: Heckscher 1 995). Another response to the problems of ideology critique is the development of a communicative perspective within critical theory. It represents a development from a focus on socially repressive ideas and institutions to the explorations of the communicative processes through which ideas are produced, reproduced and critically exam­ ined, especially in decision-making contexts.

Communicative Action

Unlike earlier advocates of critical theory, Habermas's work since the late 1 970s has reduced the significance of traditional ideology critique and has concentrated instead on build­ ing a systematic philosophy in which theory and communicative action are of pivotal importance (Habermas 1984; 1 987). This project retains many of the features of ideology critique. including the ideal of sorting out constraining social ideas from those grounded in reason. but it envisages procedural ideas rather than substantive critique and thus becomes quite different from traditional ideology critique. It

also introduces an affirmative agenda, not based on a utopia. but still a hope of how we might reform institutions along the lines of morally driven discourse in situations approximating an ideal speech situation. Habermas separates two historical learning processes and forms of rationality, the techno­ logical-scientific-strategic, associated with the system world. and the communicative-political­ ethical, associated with the Iifeworld, and tries to contribute to the latter. He argues for the systematic improvement of the lifeworld through an expanded conception of rationality focusing on the creation and re-creation of patterns of meaning. The lifeworld can be regarded as fully rational - rather than instrumentalized or strategized - to the extent that it permits interactions that are guided by communicatively achieved understanding rather than by impera­ tives from the system world - such as those contingent upon the money code or formal power - or by the unreflective reproduction of traditional cultural values (Habermas 1 984). Communicatively achieved understanding is dependent on undistorted communication, the presence of free discussion based on goodwill, argumentation and dialogue. On the basis of undistorted. rational discussion he assumes that consensus can be reached regarding both present and desirable states. He maintains that in language itself and the way it is used there are certain conditions for achieving this ideal: the expectation and the wish to be understood and believed. and the hope that others will accept our arguments and other statements (see Thompson 1 984; Deetz 1 992: Chapters 6 and 7). Without such expectations and ambitions there is little point in either statements or discussions, Undistorted communication provides the basis for the 'highest' (or perhaps the widest, most reflective) form of rationality, namely commu­ nicative rationality. Here it is not power, status, prestige. ideology, manipulation, the rule of experts. fear. insecurity, misunderstanding or any other form of mischief that furnishes a base for the evolving ideas. Decision-making becomes based on the strength of the good, well-grounded argument provided in an open forum rather than authority. tradition. ideology, or exclusion of participants. This concept of communicative rationality carries with it connotations based ultimately on the central experience of the unconstrained. unifying. consensus­ bringing force of argumentative speech, in which different participants overcome their merely sub­ jective views and. owing to the mutuality of rationally motivated conviction, assure themselves of both the unity of the objective world and the intersubjectivity of their lifeworld. ( H abermas

1 984: 1 0 )

CRITICAL THEOR Y AND POSTMODERNISM Communicative rationality thus denotes a way of responding to (questioning, testing and, possibly, accepting) the validity of different claims. Communicative action thus allows for the exploration of every statement on a basis of the following (universal) validity criteria: com­ prehensibility, sincerity, truthfulness and legiti­ macy. Communicative action is therefore an important aspect of social interaction in society, in social institutions and in daily life. The ideal speech situation, which enables communicative rationality and is in turn pervaded by it, exists under the following conditions: 'the structure of communication itself produces no constraints if and only if, for all possible participants, there is a symmetrical distribution of chances to choose and to apply speech-acts' (Habermas, cited by Thompson and Held 1 982: 1 23). Of course, the ideal speech situation is not a quality of ordinary communication, but a counterfactual anticipa­ tion we make when we seek mutual under­ standing, trying to accomplish the form of argumentation we presuppose we are able to step into when we seek to step aside from the flow of everyday action and check a problematic claim. As we will suggest in looking at critical theory's contribution, such an ideal when used as an analytic frame in organization studies can provide much guidance to restructuring discus­ sions and decision-making in organizations (for example, Lyytinen and Hirschheim 1 988; Power and Laughlin 1 992). We will not here repeat the critique of Habermas's theory (see Thompson and Held 1 982; Fraser 1 987; Burrell 1 994), but just mention that it over stresses the possibility of rationality as well as value of consensus (Deetz 1 992) and puts too much weight on the clarity and rationality potential of language and human interaction. To some extent, it relies on a model of the individual as potentially autonomous and clarified, but this assumption plays a less central role compared to earlier critical theory, as the focus is not on consciousness, but on the structure of communicative interaction as the carrier of rationality. But still Habermas can be criticized for his 'benign and benevolent view of human kind' (Vattimo 1 992) which counts on knowledge and argumentation to change thought and action, a position about which postmodernists are highly skeptical. The Contribution of Critical Organization Studies

Critical studies in organization theory have utilized the ideas sketched above, developed these and illustrated their relevance for the understanding of modern organizations, in

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particular corporations. Alvesson and Willmott ( 1 996) have pointed at some metaphors for organizations and management from critical theory: organization as technocracy, mystifica­ tion, cultural doping and colonizing power. These draw attention to how management expertise leads to passivity on the part of other organizational participants, how ambiguity and contradictions are masked, how the engineering of values and definitions of reality tend to weaken low-level and other marginal groups in the negotiation of workplace reality and, respectively, how the codes of money and formal power exercise a close to hegemonic position over workplace experiences and articu­ lated values and priorities. As indicated above, two basic foci can here be pointed at: one content oriented, emphasizing sources of con­ straints; one process oriented, emphasizing variation in communicative action in organiza­ tions. Critical theory draws attention, for example, to the narrow thinking associated with the domination of instrumental reason and the money code. Potentially, when wisely applied, instrumental reason is a productive form of thinking and acting. However, in the absence of practical reason (aiming at politically and ethically informed judgment), its highly special­ ized, means-fixated and unreflective character makes it strongly inclined to also contribute to the objectification of people and nature and thus to various forms of destruction. Most salient are ( I ) constrained work conditions where intrinsic work qualities (creativity, variation, develop­ ment, meaningfulness) are ignored or subordi­ nated to instrumental values (Alvesson 1 987; Sievers 1 986); (2) the development and reinfor­ cement of asymmetrical social relations between experts (including management elites) and non­ experts (Alvesson and Willmott 1 996; Fischer 1 990; Hollway 1 984); (3) gender bias in terms of styles of reasoning, asymmetrical social relations and political priorities (Calas and Smircich 1 992a; 1 992b; Mumby and Putnam 1 992; Ferguson 1 984; Hearn and Parkin 1 987); (4) extensive control of employees' mindsets and a freezing of their social reality (Deetz and Kersten 1 983; Frost 1 987; Mumby 1 987); (5) far-reaching control of employees, consumers and the general political-ethical agenda in society, though mass media and lobbying advocating consumerism and the priority of the money code as a yardstick for values and individual and collective political decision-making (Alvesson and Willmott 1 996; Deetz 1 992); and (6) destruction of the natural environment through waste and pollution (Shrivastava 1 995; Stead and Stead 1 992). In the guise of technocracy, instrumental rationality has pretenses to neutrality and

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freedom from the value-laden realms of self­ interest and politics. It celebrates and 'hides' behind techniques and the false appearance of objectivity and impartiality of institutionalized sets of knowledge, bureaucracy and formal mandates. Not surprisingly, technocracy is promoted by each of the management 'special­ isms' as they claim a monopoly of expertise in their respective domains. Human resource specialists, for example, advance and defend their position by elaborating a battery of 'objective' techniques for managing the selection and promotion of employees (Hollway 1 984; Steffy and Grimes 1 992). Strategic management institutionalizes a particular way of exercising domination through legitimizing and privileging the 'management' of the organization-environ­ ment interface, producing some actors as 'strategists' and reducing others to troops whose role is to subordinate themselves and to implement corporate strategies ( Shrivastava 1 986; Alvesson and Willmott 1 995). The concept of technocracy draws attention to some of the darker and more disturbing aspects of so-called ' professional management ' . It points to a restricted understanding of human and organiza­ tional goals: those that are identified and validated by experts. By associating management with technocracy and its instrumentalization of reason, the domination of a narrow conception of reason is at once exposed and questioned. The domination of groups, ideas and institu­ tions producing and drawing upon the idea of technocracy leads to a technocratic conscious­ ness (Habermas 1 970; Alvesson 1987). Here basic conflicts between different ideals and principles are seen as dissolving as a consequence of the development of more and more rational methods. In work organizations, conflicts between practical reason (emphasizing the removal of repression) and instrumental reason (focused on the maximization of output) are portrayed as avoidable through the use of optimal management methods such as job en­ richment, QWL, TQM, corporate culture and so forth, which simultaneously produce human well-being and development as well as high quality and productivity. Basic political issues are then transformed into technical problem­ solving. Habermas's ideas may also be used in a pragmatic way, more suitable for social science and organization studies than the original philosophical-theoretical version. With the com­ municative turn in Habermas's work, there follow possibilities for a more applied and empirical development in the use of critical theory. This means, as Forester argued, 'putting ideal speech aside' and expanding the exploration of 'the actual social and political conditions of

"checking", of political voice, and thus too of possible autonomy' ( I 993: 3, italics added). Forester ( I 985; 1 989; 1 992; 1 993) has developed a 'critical pragmatism' based on an independent and creative reading of Habermas. Forester's work is particularly interesting as it combines theoretical sophistication with an empirical and applied orientation and can serve as an example here of what critical can look like in practice. To Forester, an empirically oriented critical theory should be ' ( 1 ) empirically sound and descrip­ tively meaningful; (2) interpretatively plausible and phenomenologically meaningful; and yet (3) critically pitched, ethically insightful, as well' ( 1 993: 2). In following this through, Forester ( 1 989) distinguishes between unavoidable and socially unnecessary disturbances, between socially ad hoc problems and more socially systematic, structure-related sources of distortions. Organ­ izations may be understood as structures of systematically (nonaccidentally and possibly avoidable) distorted communications or as social/communicative infrastructures mediating between structural relations and social actions in economic and working life contexts. Irrespective of the extent to which distortions can be avoided in practice, knowledge and insight of these distorted communications are certainly of value. From a communication perspective, organiza­ tions can be assessed and evaluated according to whether they approximate dogma (closed com­ munication) or dialogue (open communication) (see Deetz 1 992: Chapter 7). As Forester argued: When organizations or polities are structured so that their members have no protected recourse to checking the truth. legitimacy, sincerity, or clarity claims made on them by established structures of authority and production. we may find conditions of dogmatism rather than of social learning, tyranny rather than authority, manipUlation rather than cooperation, and distraction rather than sensitivity. In this way critical theory points to the importance of understanding practically and normatively how access to. and participation in, discourses, both theoretical and practical, are systematically struc­ tured. ( 1 983: 239-40)

Forester views the organizing of attention as a crucial feature of administrative and organiza­ tional processes of social reproduction. He draws upon Habermas's ( 1 984) model of reproduction, which includes ( I ) cultural repro­ duction of world views (ideas, knowledge, beliefs), (2) social integration, in which norms, obligations and patterns of social membership are reproduced, and (3) socialization, in which social identities, motives and expressions of the self are altered and developed. At stake in specific communicative/organizational acts (and

CRITICAL THEOR Y AND POSTMODERNISM struggles) are thus the reproduction/challenging! reformulation of beliefs, consent and identity. Crucial research as well as practical questions include 'what makes possible or impedes a worker's finding out information at the work­ place, challenging rules or norms, or expressing needs, feelings, his or her identity, way of being?' ( 1 993: 1 3 1 ). The problem here, Forester notes, is to link control structures to daily experience, voice and action. Such an account becomes a structural phenomenology: it is structural because it maps 'the systematic staging and framing of social action; it is phenomenology because it explores the concrete social interac­ tions ( promises, threats, agreements, deals, conflicts) that are so staged' ( 1 993: 1 40). Forester ( 1 992) illustrates his approach through a sensitive reading of a mundane, seemingly trivial empirical situation, a city staff planning meeting. He explores his data - twelve lines of transcript from the meeting - and shows how Habermas's pragmatic validity claims are productive in exploring how social and political relations are established, reordered, and reproduced as the staff talk and listen.

POSTMODERNISM AND ORGANIZATIONAL RESEARCH

Much has been made of the multiple uses of the term 'postmodern' and the different versions of it (Alvesson 1 995; Thompson 1 993). We will not here deny the variation within the stream. Nevertheless, in contexts such as the present one it can be helpful to produce common themes in which variations in key authors' agendas are downplayed and commonalities highlighted. In postmodernism as a philosophically based research perspective, which is our major concern in this chapter, the following, on the whole interrelated, set of ideas is often emphasized: (a) the centrality of discourse - textuality - where the constitutive powers of language are empha­ sized and 'natural' objects are viewed as discursively produced; (b) fragmented identities, emphasizing sUbjectivity as a process and the death of the individual, autonomous, meaning­ creating subject where the discursive production of the individual replaces the conventional 'essentialistic' understanding of people; (c) the critique of the philosophy of presence and representation where the indecidabilities of language take precedence over language as a mirror of reality and a means for the transport of meaning; (d) the loss of foundations and the power of grand narratives where an emphasis on multiple voices and local politics is favored over theoretical frameworks and large-scale political

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projects; (e) the power/knowledge connection where the impossibilities in separating power from knowledge are assumed and knowledge loses a sense of innocence and neutrality; (f) hyperreality - simulacra - replace the 'real world' where simulations take precedence in contemporary social order; and (g) research aims at resistance and indeterminacy where irony and play are preferred to rationality, predictability and order. Let us consider each briefly.

The Centrality of Discourse

Postmodernism grew out of French structuralism by taking seriously the linguistic turn in philosophy. In this sense postmodernists in the French tradition made a move on structuralist thought similar to the one Habermas made on ideological critique in the German tradition. As systematically distorted communication replaces false consciousness in critical theory, textual/ discursive fields replaced the structure of the unconscious in postmodern thought. Both used these to fight a two front war, the objectivists on the one hand with their science aimed at predicting!controlling nature and people, and humanists on the other privileging the indivi­ dual's reported experience and unique human rights, and advancing a naive version of human freedom. Focusing on language allowed a constructionism which denied the objectivist claim of certainty and objective truth and the humanists' reliance on essential claims which lead them to miss the social/linguistic politics of experience. As discussed later, the linguistic turn enabled a postmodern rejection of humanism through a critique of autonomy and unitary identities and a rejection of objectivism through a critique of the philosophy of presence and representation. To note the primacy of discourse is to suggest that each person is born into ongoing discourses that have a material and continuing presence. The experience of the world is structured through the ways discourses lead one to attend to the world and provide particular unities and divisions. As a person learns to speak these discourses, they more properly speak to him or her in that available discourses position the person in the world in a particular way prior to the individual having any sense of choice. As discourses structure the world they at the same time structure the person's subjectivity, provid­ ing him/her with a particular social identity and way of being in the world. The person, contra humanism, is always social first and only mis­ takenly claims the personal self as the origin of experience.

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There are two major versions of this theme. One emphasizes discourses in a special linguis­ tic sense, where language in use is intrinsically related to meaning and perception. All percep­ tion and meaning entails a 'seeing as' and this 'seeing as' is described as a fundamental 'signifying' or 'language' relation. The distinc­ tions historically carried in language enable a reproduction of specific 'seeing as' relations. Different discourses are always possible although they may be more or less powerful or marginal. As a linguistic phenomenon, discourse is weakly coupled to material practices in this version (Weedon 1 987). Another, Foucauldian version views discourses as systems of thought which are contingent upon as well as inform material practices which not only linguistically, but also practically through particular power techniques (clearly visible in prisons, psychiatric hospitals, schools, factories, and so forth), produce particular forms of subjectivity (Foucault 1 977; 1 980). In both versions, human subjectivity can be relatively open or closed. Discursive closure according to the first version is temporary, though often continually reproduced, while Foucault tends to emphasize a more systematic fixation of subjectivity as a result of the network of power relations in operation. Many organizational researchers have used this insight productively. Most, but not all, have followed Foucault in their development. For example, Knights and Morgan used Foucault's discursive practices to show the construction of person and world in the discourse of corporate strategy. They argue that 'strategic discourse engages individuals in practices through which they discover the very "truth" of what they are viz. "a strategic actor'" ( 1 99 1 : 260). They point at a number of power effects of corporate strategy discourse, including the sustaining and enhancement of the prerogatives of manage­ ment, the generation of a sense of personal security for managers, the expression of a gendered masculinity for (male) management, and the facilitation and legitimization of the exercise of power.

Fragmented Identities

The position on the 'person' follows directly from the conception of discourse. Postmodern­ ism rejects the notion of the autonomous, self­ determining individual with a secure unitary identity as the centre of the social universe. Even though many other traditions have done so also (for example, behaviourists, structuralists), post­ modernists have pushed this point strongly and in a sophisticated manner.

There are two versions of this critique of a secure unitary identity. The first suggests that the Western conception of man has always been a myth. It represents a rather ethnocentric idea. Freud's work on tensions and conflicts as central for the human psyche is used to show the growing awareness in Western thought of the fundamental inner fragmentation and inconsis­ tency, but postmodernists go further in their deconstruction of the Western self-image. The conception of a unitary self is considered a fiction used to suppress those conflicts and privilege masculinity, rationality, vision, and control. To the extent that dominant discourses spoke the person (and produced the person as the origin of thought), the person gained a secure identity but participated in the reproduction of domination, thus marginalizing the other parts of the self and other groups. The sense of autonomy served to cover this subservience and give conflict a negative connotation. The other version suggests that the view of the individual as coherent, integrated and (potent­ tially) autonomous has become false in the contemporary historical and cultural situation. If identity is a social production, identity will be relatively stable in homogeneous and stable societies with few dominant discourses. In contemporary, heterogeneous, global, telecon­ nected societies the available discourses expand greatly. They also change rapidly. The individual comes to be spoken by so many discourses that fragmentation is virtually inevitable (Gergen 1 99 1 ) . As society becomes more fragmented and hyperreal or virtual (discourse is disconnected from any world reference, images reference images) the identity-stabilizing forces are lost. 5 Such a position suggests the possibility of tremendous freedom and opportunity for mar­ ginalized groups and aspects of each person to enter the discourse, but also insecurities which lead to normalization strategies in which people 'voluntarily' cling themselves to consumer identities offered by commercial forces or organizational selves through the orchestration of corporate cultures (Deetz 1 995; Willmott 1 994). This loose self is also very susceptible to manipUlation and can be jerked about in the system, leading to ecstasy but domination without any dominant group as in Baudrillard's ( 1 983; 1 988) conception of simulation. These two versions - emphasizing human nature per se or only the contemporary, Western variant as discursively produced and fragmentary - are often a matter of emphasis (see Gergen 1 9 9 1 ; 1 992). This view of the human subject however creates difficulties in developing political action. Flax ( 1 990) for example shows the awkward position it leaves women in. If gender is treated

CRITICAL THEOR Y AND POSTMODERNISM as a social construction and dominant discourses have produced marginality and a sense of women being 'others' - taking all the negative terms in the linguistic system and discourse then ridding society of strong gender ascriptions, making gender irrelevant in many situations, is a good idea. One should simply stop talking about 'men' and 'women', and stop reproducing this pervasive and powerful distinction (except in specific situations where it makes practical sense, i.e. in relationship to childbirth and a few diseases). But to accomplish such a move in the contemporary situation requires women to organize and show that gender is an issue across nearly all social situations. And similarly with the issue of experience: if women' s experience arises out o f an essential difference (bodily and/or socially produced), it cannot be denied as important and needing to be taken into account, but to make the essentialist argument denies social constructionism and can easily be used in a society where men have resources to further stigmatize women. Theor­ etical tensions are not easily escaped (see Fraser and Nicholson 1 988). Ironically, however, this type of deep tension and inability to develop a single coherent position appears at the same time to weaken postmodern work and give it its reason for being. Such tensions have led some researchers to borrow from critical theory conceptions to add a clearer political program (see Martin 1 990) and others to focus on more local forms of resistance (see Smircich and Cahis 1 987). Important implications for organizational analyses follow from the destabilization of human actors and their organizing processes. Linstead suggests that 'organization then is continuously emergent, constituted and consti­ tuting, produced and consumed by subjects' and argues for investigations that move 'towards those processes which shape subjectiv­ ity rather than the process by which individual subjects act upon the word' ( 1 993: 60). Knights and Willmott ( 1 989) have provided such work, demonstrating the way being subjected leads to particular forms of subjugation. Pringle ( 1 988) has shown how the identity of a 'secretary' becomes constructed and reproduced. Deetz ( 1 994c; in press b; in press c) has shown how the nature of ' knowledge-intensive' work situates the production of specific work identities. In a similar way, Townley ( 1 993) applied Foucault's analysis to the discourse of human resource management. I n this work, Townley argued that the basic unit of analysis in understanding human resources management was 'the nature of exchange embodied in the employment relation'. Since this relation in itself is indeterminant, the exchange relation is

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organized through imposing order on the inherently undecidable. The construction of knowledge in human resource management 'operates through rules of classification, order­ ing, and distribution; definition of activities; fixing of scales; and rules of procedure, which lead to the emergence of a distinct HRM discourse' ( 1 993: 54 1 ) . This body of knowledge operates to objectify (determine) the person, thus both constraining and subordinating the person's fuller social and personal character.

The Critique of the Philosophy of Presence

Normative social science as well as most of us in everyday life treat the presence of objects as unproblematic and believe that the primary function of language is to re-present them. When asked what something is we try to define it and list its essential attributes. Postmodernists find such a position to be illusionary in the same way as the conception of identity. The stuff of the world only becomes an object in a specific relation to a being for whom it can be such an object. Linguistic and nonlinguistic practices thus are central to object production. Such a position has been familiar for some time in works as varied as Mead, Wittgenstein, and Heidegger, but continues to lead to misunder­ standings, the most common being the claim of relativism. The position is not, however, relativistic in any loose or subjective way. Those making the charge misunderstand the conception of objects or the strength of the conception of discourse. Most postmodernists are not concerned with the chance of being called relativistic, they are more concerned with the apparent stability of objects and the difficulty of unpacking the full range of activities that produce particular objects and sustain them. As mentioned in the section of fragmented identities, postmodernists differ in the extent to which they describe discourse in textual versus a more extended form. On the whole, however, they start with Saussure's demonstration that the point of view creates the object. He meant this to attend to the importance of the value-laden nature of the system of distinctions in language, but the linguistic and nonlinguistic practices quickly interrelate. Let us use a brief example. A 'worker' is an object (as well as a subject) in the world, but neither God nor nature made a 'worker'. Two things are required for a 'worker' to exist: a language and set of practices which makes possible unities and divisions among people, and something to which such unities and divisions can be applied. The questions 'What is a worker really?" 'What is the essence of a worker?', 'What makes one a worker?' are not

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answerable by looking at the something that can be described as a worker, but are products of the linguistic and nonlinguistic practices that make this something into an object. In this sense, a worker is not an isolated thing. To have a worker already implies a division of labor, the presence of management (,nonworkers'). The 'essence' of worker is not the properties the 'object' contains but sets of relational systems including the division of labor. The focus on the object and object properties is the mistake; the attention should be to the relational systems which are not simply in the world but are a human understanding of the world, are dis­ cursive or textual. The meaning of 'worker' is not evident and present (contained there) but deferred to the sets of oppositions and junctures, the relations that make it like and unlike other things. Since any something in the world may be constructed/expressed as many different objects, limited only by human creativity and readers of traces of past understandings, meaning can never be final but is always incomplete and indeterminate. The appearance of completeness and closure leads us to overlook both the politics in and of construction and the possibilities for understanding that are hidden behind the obvious. Language is thus central to the production of objects in that it provides the social/historical distinctions that provide unity and difference. Language cannot mirror the reality 'out there', or people's mental states (Shotter and Gergen 1 989; 1 994). Language is figural, metaphorical, full of contradictions and inconsistencies (Brown 1 990; Cooper and Burrell 1 988). Meaning is not universal and fixed, but precarious, fragmented and local (Linstead and Grafton-Small 1 992). Organizational researchers have used these conceptions to deconstruct objects of organizational life including the bounded concept of an organization itself. Perhaps among the most productive have been those studying accounting practices. The bottom line, profit and loss, expenses, and so forth have no reality without specific practices creating them (Hopwood 1 987; Power and Laughlin 1 992; Montagna 1 986). Others have looked at knowledge and information (Boland 1 987). And yet others have examined reporting practices (SIess 1 988) and categories of people (Epstein 1 988). Each of these shows the conditions necessary for objects to exist in organizational life. Any attempt at representation is thus always partial (one-sided and favoring a side). The making of distinction through language use is both a necessary condition of life with others, and yet inevitably limiting in that it hides important alternative distinctions (see Bourdieu 1 984; 1 99 1 ).

The Loss of Foundations and Master Narratives

The power of any position has been traditionally gathered from its grounding. This grounding could be to either a metaphysical foundation such as an external world in empiricism, mental structures in rationalism or human nature in humanism - or a narrative, a story of history, such as Marxism's class struggle, social Darwi­ nism's survival of the fittest, or market econo­ my's invisible hand. With such groundings, positions are made to seem secure and inevitable and not opportunistic or driven by advantage. Certainly much organizational theory has been based on such appeals as has critical theory in its morally guided communicative action. Again, as in the case of identity, postmodern­ ists take two different but not incompatible stances, one categorical (valid throughout history and social context) and one interested in recent historical trends (thus overlapping the philosophy/periodization distinctions). Follow­ ing the first position, foundations and legitimat­ ing narratives have always been a hoax. They have been used (usually unknowingly) to support a dominant view of the world and its order. Feminists, for example, have argued that the historical narrative has always been history. Empiricists' appeal to the nature of the external world covered the force of their own concepts (and those borrowed from elite groups), meth­ ods, instruments, activities, and reports in constructing that world. Following the second position, other post­ modernists note the growing social incredulity toward narratives and foundational moves. Lyotard ( 1 984) showed the decline of grand narratives of 'spirit' and 'emancipation'. The proliferation of options and the growing political cynicism (or astuteness) of the public lead to a suspicion of legitimating moves. This conception is not far from Habermas's idea of legitimation crises in late capitalistic society (Habermas 1 975). In Lyotard's sense perhaps all that is left is local narratives. Such a position has led to sensitive treatments of how stories in organiza­ tions connect to grand narratives and how different ones have a more local, situational character (see Martin 1 990; Deetz in press c). Others have used this opening to display the false certainty in the master narratives in management (Jehenson 1 984; I ngersoll and Adams 1 986; Carter and Jackson 1 987; Callis and Smircich 1 99 1 ) . Not a l l postmodernists see this a s necessarily positive. Certainly the decline of foundations and grand narratives takes away a primary prop of dominant groups' offer of security and certainty

CRITICAL THEOR Y AND POSTMODERNISM as a trade for subordination. But the replacement is not necessarily freedom and political possibi­ lity on the part of marginalized groups. Lyotard demonstrated the rise of 'performativity' where measures of means toward social ends become ends in themselves (see also Power 1 994). Access to computers and information - contingent less upon knowledge integrated in the person . (,scholarship') than upon financial resources has become a significant source of knowledge and power. Along with this comes new forms of control directed not by a vision of society and social good but simply by more production and consumption. Certainly the loss of grand integrative narratives has not been missed by management groups. One could perhaps say that corporate 'visions' and 'cultures' are strategic local narrative constructions to provide the integra­ tion and motivation in a pluralistic society formerly provided by wider social narratives. On the other hand one could say that these forms of management control represent large-scale sys­ tematic efforts which resemble grand narratives, though at a corporate level. Perhaps the development of management control can be seen as corporate grand narratives taking over some of the functions of political programs. The decline of vision, hope and community in politics has paved the way for management ideologies and practices that may fill parts of the vacuum (Deetz 1 992) . Postmodernists point to the precarious nature of this kind of project. Corporate cultures, for example, are seen as text and corporate members then become read­ ers who 'bring awareness of other texts, other cultural forms, other evocations and explosions of meaning to their reading of any text, and enter into the text, changing its nature and re­ producing it as they consume it' (Linstead and Grafton-Small 1 992: 344). The difficulty in postmodernism with this, as in the concept of fragmented identities, is how to generate a political stance in regard to these developments. If one rejects an essentialist foundation and believes that more than local resistance is needed, some kind of combination between postmodernism and critical theory may well provide the best remaining option. We will come back to this.

The Knowledge/Power Connection

Within postmodern writings power is treated far different from most writings on organizations. Foucault has been the most explicit (Foucault 1 977; 1 980; see Clegg 1 994). The power that is of interest is not that one possesses or acquires. Such appearances of power are the outcome of

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more fundamental power relations. Power resides in the discursive formation itself - the combination of a set of linguistic distinctions, ways of reasoning and material practices that together organize social institutions and produce particular forms of subjects. As mentioned before, language is here less strictly focused than in many other variants of postmodernism . Following the earlier example, the discourse that produces a 'manager' both empowers and disempowers the group of individuals formed as that object. It simultaneously provides a solidarity and interests and sets into play conflicts, material and symbolic resources, self­ understandings, and the same for others such as professionals and workers. Power thus resides in the demarcations and the systems of discourse that sustain them, including material arrange­ ments, for example, recruitment and selection procedures, office arrangements, reward and control structures, inclusion/exclusion in signifi­ cant meetings, and so forth. One of the most useful terms entering into organizational studies from this has been Foucault's ( 1 977) concept of discipline. The demarcations provide forms of normative behavior supported by claims of knowledge. Training, work routines, self-surveil­ lance, and experts comprise discipline in that they provide resources for normalization. Nor­ mative experts in particular and the knowledge they create provide a cover for the arbitrary and advantaging discursive practices and facilitate normalization (Hollway 1 984; 1 99 1 ). Townley's ( 1 993) work, already discussed, carefully showed how the development of the human resource expert and human resource knowledge was used as a way to 'determine' and subordinate employ­ ees. Such knowledge can also be utilized by employees to engage in self-surveillance and self­ correction of attitudes and behaviors toward norms and expectations established by others (Deetz 1 995: Chapter \0; in press b). Hyperreality

Postmodern writings vary in terms of how they handle the relation of language to the nonlinguistic realm of people and world. A strict linguistic focus and a strict critique of the philosophy of presence leave little interest in references to a pre-formed and relatively con­ stant extra-textual reality. Most postmodernists treat the external as a kind of excess or 'otherness' which serves as a resource for formations and also prevents language systems from becoming closed and purely imaginary. While the referent has no specific character it always exceeds the objects made of it, and thus reminds one of the limited nature of all

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systems of representation and their fundamental indeterminacy (Cooper 1 989). The presence of 'otherness' in the indeterminacy provides a moment to show the domination present in any system, to open it up, and to break the sealed self-referentiality of some textual systems. Many existing linguistic or representational systems are shown to be self-referential by postmodernists. Such systems are not anchored in a socially produced as objective world, nor do they respect the excess of an outside. They produce the very same world that they appear to accurately represent. For example, contempor­ ary media and information systems have the capacity to rapidly construct images which replace. more than represent, an outside world. Such systems can dominate the scene with an array of reproduced imaginary worlds. The referent disappears as anything more than another sign; thus signs only reference other signs; images are images of images. Such systems can become purely self-referential. or what Baudrillard calls simulations (see Deetz I 994b ). In such a world, in Baudrillard's analysis, signs are disconnected from opening a relation to the world and the 'model' response to a 'model' world replaces responsive action in an actual changing one. Signs reach the structural limit of representation by referencing only themselves with little relation to any exterior or interior. Baudrillard expresses this relation as follows: The form-sign [present in a monopolistic code] describes an entirely different organization: the signified and the referent are now abolished to the sole profit of the play of signifiers, of a generalized formalization in which the code no longer refers back to any subjective or objective 'reality', but to its own logic . . . The sign no longer designates anything at all. It approaches its true structural limit which is to refer back only to other signs. All reality then becomes the place of semi-urgical manipula­ tion, of a structural simulation. ( 1 975: 1 27-8)

The world as understood is not really a fiction in this situation since there is no 'real' outside which it portrays falsely or which can be used to correct it. It is properly imaginary; it has no opposite, no outside. Baudrillard used the example of the difference between feigning and simulating an illness to show the character of this postmodern representation: 'feigning or dissim­ ulation leaves the reality principle intact; the difference is always clear, it is only masked; whereas simulation threatens the difference between "true" and "false", between "real" and "imaginary". Since the simulator produces "true" symptoms, is he ill or not? He cannot be treated objectively either as ill, or not ill' ( 1 983: 5). These ideas have inspired some organization studies emphasizing the imaginary character of

modern organizations (Berg 1 989; Alvesson 1 990; Deetz I 994c; 1 995). As is common with postmodern ideas in organization theory, these studies do not follow the source of inspiration to its full (extreme) consequences.

Research as Resistance and Indeterminacy

The role of postmodern research is very different from more traditional roles assigned to social science. It primarily serves to attempt to open up the indeterminacy that modern social science, everyday conceptions, routines, and practices have closed off. The result is a kind of anti­ positive knowledge (Knights 1 992). The primary methods are deconstruction and resistance read­ ings and genealogy. These terms have been used in many different ways and in the short space here we can do little beyond a sketch. Decon­ struction works primarily to critique the philo­ sophy of presence by recalling the suppressed terms (the deferred term) which provides the system and thus which allows the positive terms to appear to stand for an existing object. When the suppressed term is given value both the dependency of the positive term on the negative is shown and a third term is recovered which shows a way of world making that is not dependent on the opposition of the first two (see Cooper 1 989; Martin 1 990; CaUls and Smircich 1 99 1 ; Mumby and Putnam 1 992). The resistance reading is less narrowly focused on terms. It both demonstrates the construction activity and provides indetermi­ nacy based in the excess of the outside. The positive and the polar construction are both displayed as acts of domination, subjectivity doing violence to the world and limiting itself in the process. In this move, conflicts that were suppressed by the positive are brought back to redecision and the conflictual field out of which objects are formed is recovered for creative redetermination - constant dedifferentiation and redifferentiation. Given the power of closure and the way it enters common sense and routines, especially in simulations, such rereadings require a particular form of rigor and imagination. The rereadings are formed out of a keen sense of irony, a serious playfulness, and often guided by the pleasure one has in being freed from the dull compUlsions of a world made too easy and too violent. A good example of such readings is Calas and Smircich's ( 1 988) account of a mainstream positivist journal article - where they start with the question 'Why should we believe in this author?' and then point at the rhetorical tricks involved in order to persuade the reader. Another interesting example is Sangren's ( 1 992) critical review of Clifford and Marcus's Writing Culture ( 1 986). Sangren, drawing upon Bourdieu ( 1 979),

CRITICAL THEOR Y AND POSTMODERNISM uses their points about the politics of representa­ tion - intended to indicate the problems of ethnographies in mirroring cultures and exem­ plified through important anthropological works - against themselves, showing how representa­ tions of Clifford, Marcus and co-authors of earlier work can be seen in terms of politics. Particular kinds of representations are used that create the impression that earlier works are flawed and that there is a large and open space for novel contributions (and the career options) of the new heterodoxy (Clifford, Marcus et al.) and their more informed view on the politics of representation. The point of social science is not to get it right but to challenge guiding assumptions, fixed meanings and relations, and to reopen the formative capacity of human beings in relation to others and the world, qualities that Gergen ( 1 978) and Astley ( 1 985) displayed as essential to any important theory. As Sangren ( 1 992) illustrates, the challenge of dogma, fixed ideas and reopenings easily implies new dogmas, fixations and closures. Postmodernism is in no way immune to such implications (Alvesson and Ski:ildberg 1 996). One outcome of the themes reviewed above in particular the critique of the philosophy of presence and the loss of master narratives, but also hyperreality and the focus on resistance - is a strong current interest in experimenting with different styles. This is prominent in anthropol­ ogy (Clifford and Marcus 1 986; Geertz 1 988; Marcus and Fisher 1 986; Rose 1 990) but also in organization theory (for example, Cahis and Smircich 1 99 1 ; Jeffcutt 1 993; Linstead and Grafton-Small 1 990). Typically, 'realist' ways of writing are superseded or complemented by other styles, for example, ironic, self-ironic or impressionistic ones. In an investigation of texts in organizational culture and symbolism, Jeff­ cutt shows how it is 'distinguished by heroic quests for closure; being dominated by authors adopting representational styles that privilege epic and romantic narratives over tragic and ironic forms. These representational strategies expose an overriding search for unity and harmony that suppresses division and conflict' ( 1 993: 32). Perhaps the inspiration to develop new ways of writing will turn out to be one of the most powerful and interesting contributions of postmodernism.

RELATING CRITICAL THEORY AND POSTMODERNISM

Critical theory and postmodernism, as has been shown, are both alike and different. Each has much to contribute to organizational studies,

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and we believe that they have a contribution to make together. Without considering postmodern themes, critical theory easily becomes unreflec­ tive in regard to cultural elitism and modern conditions of power; and without incorporating some measure of critical theory thought - or something similar that provides direction and social relevance - postmodernism simply becomes esoteric. Both draw attention to the social/historical/political construction of knowl­ edge, people, and social relations, including how each of these appears in contemporary organiza­ tions. And they share a view that domination is aided, and both people and organizations lose much, if we overlook these construction activ­ ities by treating the existing world as natural, rational and neutral. In critical theory's lan­ guage, the concern is reification; in postmodern­ ism, the philosophy of presence. Based on this naturalization and freezing of contemporary social reality, important conflicts - options for reconsiderations and questioning - are lost and different groups of people as well as vital values are marginalized and disadvantaged. Both see organizations and the social sciences that support them as relying increasingly on a form of instrumental reasoning privileging the means over ends and aiding dominant groups' ability to invisibly accomplish their ends. Habermas describes this in terms of 'instrumental technical reasoning', Lyotard in terms of 'performativity'. The differences are also important. Critical theory sees the response in terms of an expanded form of morally guided communicative reason­ ing leading to individual autonomy and better social choices. Through reflections on the ways ideology - taken for granted cultural ideas as well as specific messages engineered by powerful agencies - enters into person/world/knowledge construction and by providing more open forums of expression and a type of discourse aimed at mutual understanding, there is hope for the production of social consensus and social agreements that better fulfill human needs. The grand narrative of enlightenment might, accord­ ing to critical theory, yet be advanced. But postmodernism rejects such reflection and con­ sensus, suspecting the replacement of old illusions with new ones, and the creation of new elites and new forms of marginalizations. Critical theory replies: without reflection, con­ sensus and rationality, there is no politics, no agenda for a constructive alternative. Post­ modernism counters: politics are by necessity local and situational; responsiveness is more important than systematic planning. Critical theory responds: local politics is too weak to confront system-wide gender and class domina­ tions as well as global poverty and environ­ mental problems. Postmodernism maintains:

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orgamzmg against domination both props up and solidifies dominant groups; it creates its own forms of domination. The difference is in a sense the same as between a push and pull theory. Critical theory wants us to act and provides direction and orchestration; postmodernism believes that such a move will be limited by the force of our own subjective domination and encourages us to get out of the way and allow the world to pull us to feelings and thought heretofore unknown; but critical theory does not have enough faith to let go. And so on. But there are ways to think them both at once, though not necessarily through some new synthesis. We have a need for both conflict and consensus, for resistance and plans. The issue is not which but the balance, choosing the right moments (Deetz 1 992). To say that consensus implies domination means not that we should not make the best decisions we can together, but that we need to continue to look for domination and be ready to move on. To say that resistance lacks a clear politics does not mean that it is not doing something important and ultimately may be the only way we can see through dominations that we like or that benefit and limit us. One option is thus to work with unresolved tensions within a text where one follows different themes of postmodernism and critical theory without attempting synthesis, working with the tensions and contrastive images. Examples of this include work by Martin ( 1 990; 1 995), Knights and Willmott ( 1 989) and Deetz ( 1994c; in press b). Another version is to allow space for various discrete voices in texts through organizing these around conversations between various theor­ etical perspectives or interest groups (Alvesson and Willmott 1 996: Chapter 7) or to conduct multiple interpretations of the same phenomenon (Alvesson 1 996; Morgan 1 986), such as inter­ preting a phenomenon from both critical theory and postmodernist (and perhaps other) posi­ tions. Another way of combining insights from critical theory and postmodernism is to see both as metatheories useful as inspiration for reflex­ ivity rather than as theories directly relevant for guiding and interpreting studies of substantive matters (Alvesson and Sk61dberg 1 996). Still another option is to restrict the approach to the careful study of language use and communicative practices in 'real' social settings, which is done by discourse and conversation analysis (1. Parker 1 992; Potter and Wetherell 1 987) and constructi­ vists (Shotter and Gergen 1 994; Steier 1 99 1 ). Such studies can be used to sensitize us to the power effects of language and ground Haberma­ sian and postmodernist ideas in portions of organizational reality (Forester 1 992). Such a language focus avoids the philosophy of presence but maintains an empirical context.

Perhaps the greatest criticism of critical theory and even more so post modernism is the lack of clear empirical studies. Part of the criticism arises from a narrow view of the notion of 'empirical', but researchers can still be faulted for doing many conceptual essays without extended field experience and reports. Critical theory's and postmodernism's strong critique of empiricism, and their emphasis on data as constructions open to a multitude of interpretations, do not mean that reflective empirical work is not worth doing. Many texts have limited feelings for organiza­ tional contexts and the lives of real people. Much can be gained by allowing organizational participants to 'say something' that is not immediately domesticated by theories locating the material in an all too predictable 'bureau­ cracy', 'patriarchy', 'capitalism', 'managerialism' pejorative discourse, an all-embracing Foucaul­ dian power concept, or a pacification and fragmentation of subjects as mere appendices of discourses. An empirical turn may also reduce the tendency of negativity in much of critical theory and some postmodernism. Having said this, we must acknowledge that recently more empirical work has been done, particularly with a critical theory orientation (for example, Rosen 1 985; 1 988; Knights and Willmott 1 987; 1 992; Alvesson 1 996) but also using postmodern themes (Martin 1 990; 1 995; Deetz in press b; in press c). What is lacking, in particular, is serious efforts to ground ideas of local resistance in specific empirical contexts. There is a lot of talk of resistance in the postmodernist industry, but it is highly theoretical and generalized and remains quite esoteric. We need to go further than repeat programmatic slogans and use and refine the idea in close contact with the lives of subjects III organizational settings. We will for space reasons not indulge in further treatment of these responses to various critiques of traditional ways of doing research brought forward by postmodern authors in particular, but in many cases also by authors not waving the postmodern flag. Suffice to say that there are various paths that address the middle ground between more traditional realist and hermeneutic epistemologies - where there is space for empirical studies of organizational phenomena - on the one hand and a post­ modern philosophy threatening to turn all social science into a quite esoteric literary criticism on the other hand.

NOTES Quite often when people talk about postmodern­ ism and its shadow modernism, the former position is a

CRITICAL THEOR Y AND POSTMODERNISM kind of synthesis and social science adaptation of what has been expressed by the gurus referred to. This means that there is not necessarily a one-to-one relationship between what one can find clear support for in key texts of Derrida, Foucault, etc. and what is summarized as a postmodernist position. We will here follow this practice and hold back doubts regarding the reasons for summarizing partly quite different authors and intellectual themes (cf. Alvesson 1 995) - a move these people would probably have little sympathy for. 2 We should note before going on that one of the functions of histories is to produce a number of scholars/texts (a) as a school of thought, and (b) as new or different both for the professional advantages of its practitioners and as a way of demarking a community. It is interesting to note that this history production is important not for forerunners or gurus - who often resist labels such as postmodernism - but for followers and supporters. The political and identity-confirming advantages are clearest for these people. 3 As on many issues, there are variations here amongst postmodernists. Derrida does not directly address the issue. Foucault comes closest in supporting a critical theory view against social engineering as a solution, although he is not without ambiguity on this point. Lyotard appears to have mixed feelings about this matter. The majority of social science authors advocating postmodernism share the skepticism of critical theory on this point. 4 The discussion in this section is adapted from Deetz's (in press a) discussion of the problems of Burrell and Morgan's ( 1 979) paradigm divisions. Several revisions of Burrell and Morgan are crucial. The term 'normative' is used to describe most of the same research positions that Burrell and Morgan called 'functionalist'. This frees the description from a particular school of sociological thought and draws attention to both their search for the normal, the regularity, and the value­ laden nature of their use in 'normalizing' people, and the existing social conditions. 'Dialogic' draws attention to the relational aspect of , postmodernism' and avoids the periodicity issue. Note too that critical work is shown with more affinity to 'normative' work (rather than the total opposition in Burrell and Morgan's 'functionalist! radical-humanist' configuration) because of their directive qualities in contrast to the strong 'otherness' guidance in interpretative and dialogic work. The a priori/elite-Iocal/emergent dimension replaces the sub­ jective-objective dimension in Burrell and Morgan. The subject!object dualism on which their dimension was based is severely flawed. First it tends to reproduce the subject/object dualism that is present in the philosophies underlying 'normative' research but not the other positions. Second, it misplaces normative research, overlooking its subjectivity in domination of nature and in defining people's experience for them. And third, it fails to highlight the constructionist quality of all research programs. 5 This is then basically a sociological or period­ ization type of postmodern psychology, and is also to

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some extent used by authors who do not see themselves as postmodernist or talk about postmodernism, for example, Berger et al. ( 1 973) or Lasch ( 1 978; 1 984).

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systems as rational discourse: an application of Habermas's theory of communicative action', Scandinavian Journal of Management, 4: 1 9- 30. Marcus, G. and Fischer, M. ( 1 986) Anthropology as Cultural Critique. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Margolis, S. ( 1 989) 'Postscript on modernism and postmodernism: both', Theory, Culture & Society, 6: 5-30. Martin, J . ( 1 990) 'Deconstructing organizational taboos: the suppression of gender conflict in organizations', Organization Science, I I: 339-59. Martin, J. ( 1 995) 'The organization of exclusion: the institutionalization of sex inequality, gendered faculty jobs, and gendered knowledge in organiza­ tional theory and research', Organization, I : 40 1 - 3 1 . Marx, K. ( 1 844) Economic and Political Manuscripts of 1844, translated by M . Miligan. New York: International, 1 964. Marx, K. ( 1 867) Das Kapital, Bd I . Berlin: Dietz, 1 967. Montagna, P. ( 1 986) 'Accounting rationality and financial legitimation', Theory and Society, 1 5 : 1 03-38. Morgan, G. ( 1 986) Images of Organization. Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Mumby, D.K. ( 1 987) 'The political function of narrative in organizations', Communication Mono­ graphs, 54: 1 1 3-27. Mumby, D.K. ( 1 988) Communication and Power in Organizations: Discourse, Ideology, and Domination. Norwood, NJ: Ablex. Mumby, D.K. and Putnam, L. ( 1 992) 'The politics of emotion: a feminist reading of bounded rationality', A cademy of Management Review, 1 7: 465-86. Offe, C. and Wiesenthal, H. ( 1 980) 'Two logics of collective action: theoretical notes on social class and organizational form', in M. Zeitlin (ed.), Political Power and Social Theory, vol. I . Greenwich, CT: JAI Press. Parker, I. ( 1 992) Discourse Dynamics. London: Routledge. Parker, M. ( 1 992) 'Post-modern organizations or postmodern organization theory?', Organization Studies, 1 3 : 1 - 1 7 . Parker, M . ( 1 993) 'Life after Jean-Fran�ois', in J . Hassard and M. Parker (eds), Postmodernism and Organi::ations. London: Sage. Peters, T. ( 1 987) Thriving on Chaos. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Potter, J. and Wetherell, M. ( 1 987) Discourse and Social Psychology: Beyond A ltitudes and Behaviour. London: Sage. Power, M. ( 1 994) 'The audit society', in A. Hopwood and P. Miller (eds), Accounting as Social and Institutional Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge Uni­ versity Press. pp. 299- 3 1 6. Power, M. and Laughlin, R. ( 1 992) 'Critical theory and accounting', in M. Alvesson and H. Willmott (eds), Critical Management Studies. London: Sage. pp. 1 1 3-35.

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8

From ' The Woman 's ' Point of View: Feminist Approaches to Organization Studies MARTA B . CALAs AND LINDA SMIRCICH

During the last thirty years, the 'women's liberation' movement achieved profound social, political, and economic gains, improving the situation of many women. At the same time, feminist movements have contributed strongly to contemporary cultural analyses and, in univer­ sities all over the world, women's studies programs have helped foster energetic cross­ disciplinary scholarship and a plurality of feminist 'theories' aimed at rethinking the grounds of knowledge. Despite these gains. however, the sex segregation of occupations and organizations persists world-wide. as does pay inequity between women and men (Adler and Izraeli 1 988; Berthoin-Antal and Izraeli 1 993; Brown and Pechman 1 987; Davidson and Cooper 1 984; Game and Pringle 1 984; Kovalainen 1 993; R. Morgan 1 984; Reskin and Roos 1 990; Strober 1 984; Strober and Arnold 1 987; United Nations 1 995). The ' feminization of poverty' shows that lower income households are more likely to be headed by a female single parent, often out of work and on welfare (Pearce 1 978). Meanwhile, women professionals experience the 'tipping' phenomenon, where traditionally male high paying occupations lose earning power once women dominate them (Strober 1984) while 'unequal opportunities' for husbands of working women keep them at lower pay scales and slow their move up the career ladder compared to men whose wives do not work outside the home (Stroh and Brett 1 994). In transnational organizations in industrializing countries, women, who once occupied the lowest paying and more exploitative jobs, are now becoming unemployed as men.

earning the same low wages, take over these jobs (e.g. Fernandez-Kelly 1 994; Mies et al. 1 988). This and other evidence notwithstanding, some consider that feminism has gone too far toward benefiting women as charges of reverse discrimination and claims of sexual harassment of male workers give rise to what Faludi ( 1 99 I ) labels ' a backlash'. Others, however, complain that many feminisms have not gone far enough, because they are white, Western, and middle class. excluding many women (and men) in the world, their interests and their needs (e.g. Lugones and Spelman 1 983; Mohanty 1 9 9 1 b) . In our view the task o f feminism i s not finished. Feminist concerns continue to intersect with organizational issues. Equally important, as we will suggest. 'feminist' theories are not only about 'women's' issues: by using feminist theories as conceptual lenses, we believe a more inclusive organization studies can be created, one that brings in the concerns of others, not just women, who are directly affected by organizational processes and discourses. Thus, feminist theories articulate problems in both the theory and practice of organizations which otherwise might go unnoticed (see also, Billing and Alvesson 1 993; Cockburn 1 983; 1 985; 1 99 1 ; K. Ferguson 1 984; Ferree and Martin 1 995; Jacobson and Jacques 1 989a; Marshall 1 984; 1 995).

WHAT ARE FEMINIST THEORIES?

In this chapter, we will review liberal, radical, psychoanalytic, Marxist, socialist, poststructur-

FEMINIST A PPROA CHES alist, and Third World/(post)colonial feminist approaches, and discuss their contributions to organizational studies (see Table I ) . Despite their diversity, most feminist theories share some assumptions, notably the recognition of male dominance in social arrangements, and a desire for changes from this form of domination (e.g. Flax 1 987; 1 990; A. Ferguson 1 989). More generally, feminist theoretical perspectives are critical discourses in that feminist theory is a critique of the status quo, and therefore always political. Yet, the degree of critique and the nature of the politics vary, leading to agendas that range from 'reforming' organizations; to 'transforming' organizations and society; to transforming our prior understandings of what constitutes knowledge/theory/practice. Sex, Gender or Gender Relations?

For example, one key conceptual distinction among feminist theories is the way gender is understood. Earliest theories of liberal feminism were concerned with inequality between 'the sexes', i.e. between two categories of persons ('males' and 'females') denoted by biological characteristics. Later, theorizing made a distinc­ tion between biologically based 'sex' and socially constructed 'gender', a product of socialization and experience. Even here, though, feminist theorizing differs over what aspects of experience are most important in constituting gender and gender relations: for instance, socialization into sex/gender roles according to liberal feminism; or cultural practices that value men's experiences over women's according to radical feminism; or early developmental relations with parents according to psychoanalytic feminism? Further, socialist feminists consider gender(ing) a process embedded in power relations and particular historical material conditions, while the black 'womanist' perspective addresses the question of which 'women's experiences' are constitutive of 'gender'. Both poststructuralists and Third World/(post)colonial approaches problematize the whole notion of 'experience'. They critique investing 'sex' and 'gender' with a certain stability as analytical categories, noting that subjectivity is constructed linguistically, histori­ cally, and politically, and is therefore flexible and multiple. Thus gender is a term 'in the making' that both reflects and constitutes the variety of feminist theorizing (Scott 1 986). FEMINIST ApPROACHES AND ORGANIZATIONAL STUDIES

In this chapter we describe how various ap­ proaches in feminist thought intersect with

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theories of organization and organizational practices, and how each feminist theoretical strand highlights particular organizational issues while ignoring others. As we discuss these various approaches, the issues they address and the questions they raise shift, as does the vocabulary, from concerns about women (their access to organizations and their performance in organizations), to concerns about gender and organization (the notion of gendered organiza­ tional practices), to concerns about the very stability of such categories as 'gender', 'mascu­ linity', 'femininity', and 'organization'. Each school of thought gives alternative accounts for gender inequality, frames the 'problem' differ­ ently and proposes different courses of action as 'solutions' . Several key works shape our presentation of the history of feminist thought (Jaggar 1 983; Tuana and Tong 1 995; Tong 1 989) and the discussion of gender conceptions and research (Harding and Hintikka 1 983; Harding 1 986; 1 99 1 ; Lorber 1 994; Reinharz 1 992). Presenting each school of thought in sequence is somewhat misleading, however, for they developed and changed in response to one another: although they may look discrete and unified, their boundaries are blurry and blurring. Our goal is not to j udge which approach is 'best', but to recognize that each has an important contribu­ tion to make, even if together they enact a somewhat uneasy conversation. Further, we acknowledge that the need for brevity in writing a chapter means a less detailed and nuanced exposition. We do not claim to write as 'detached' observers: as authors we have our favored positions in between the 'post' discourses; as a Latina and a white US woman who write together and share their professional and personal lives, mostly within U S contemporary institutions but also in other places in the world, we recognize that our writings come from particularly (dis)located positions. This, how­ ever, can be an advantage: the charge of relativism often leveled toward 'post' positions allows us to consider seriously the assertions made by each and all feminist theoretical claims even if we are similarly skeptical about the finality of any solution.

LIBERAL FEMINIST THEORY

This perspective has its roots in the liberal political tradition developed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when feudalistic, church dominated rule was giving way to capitalistic, civil society, and when aspirations

Table I

A summary offeminist approaches Poststructuralist! Postmodern

Third World! (Post)Colonial

Emerged in the 1 970s as part of women's liberation movements' attempts to synthesize Marxist, psycho-analytic and radical feminisms.

Located in contemporary French poststructuralist critiques of 'knowledge' and 'identity'.

Emerging from intersections of gendered critiques of western feminisms and postcolonial critiques of Western epistemologies.

Human nature is created historically and culturally through dialectical interrelations among human biology, society and human labor.

Decentering of the rational, self-present subject of humanism. 'Subjectivity' and 'consciousness' are discursive effects.

Analyzed as a Western construct that emerged by making its 'other' invisible or 'almost' human. Also 'strategic essentialism' .

Gender is part of Gender is processual historical class and socially constituted through relations which constitute systems of several intersections oppression under of sex, race, ideology, and capitalism. experiences of oppression under patriarchy and capitalism (that are distinct systems).

Sex/Gender are discursive practices that constitute specific subjectivities through power and resistance in the materiality of human bodies.

Considers the constitution of complex subjectivities beyond Western conceptions of sex/gender focusing on gendered aspects of globalization processes.

School of thought

Liberal

Radical

Psychoanalytic

Marxist

Socialist

Intellectual roots

Evolved from 1 8th and 1 9th century political theory.

Generated in the contemporary women's liberation movements of the late 1 960s.

Evolved from Freudian and other psychoanalytic theories, in particular objectrelations theories.

Based on and a 'correction' of Marxist critique of capitalist society since the mid 1 9th century.

Conception of human nature

Individuals are autonomous beings capable of rationality (mind! body dualism and abstract individualism).

Human beings are fundamentally embodied sexed beings.

Human nature Human nature develops biologically reHects historical, and psychosexually . material conditions. The human essence is the ensemble of social relations.

Conception of sex/gender

Sex is part of essential biological endowment, a binary variable.

'Sex class' is the condition of women as an oppressed class.

Gender is socialized onto sexed human beings for appropriate behavior.

Gender is a social construction that ensures women's subordination to men.

Individuals become sexually-identified as part of their psychosexual development. Gender structures a social system of male domination which inHuences psychosexual development.

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Conception of 'the good society'

The 'good society' is a just society that allows individuals to exercise autonomy and to fulfill themselves through a system of individual rights.

The 'good society' is a gender/sex-free society (or maybe a matriarchy).

The 'good society' has no gender structuring because both parents share children's upbringing.

The 'good society' is a classless society that allows for the full development of human nature.

The 'good society' has eliminated all systems of private/ public oppression based on sex, gender, race, class, etc. and thus transformed social relations.

The 'good society' requires ongoing deconstruction and denaturalization of discourses and practices that constitute it.

The 'good society' is a Western ideology produced through colonial relationships that favor Westernization. Other social formations are possible.

Epistemological positions

Positivist, genderneutral objectivity.

Holistic femalecentered knowledge is possible outside of patriarchal structures.

Women's way of Feminism must take the standpoint of an knowledge is different from men's oppressed class because of different under capitalism for their knowledge psychosexual development. interests to represent those of the social totality.

Feminist standpoints represent a particular historical condition of oppression that is more adequate for understanding contemporary society.

' Epistemology' is problematized by the heterogeneity of subject positions and social identities - i.e. there is no 'subject of knowledge' to sustain it.

'Knowledge' is a system of power relations deployed by the 'West' on 'the rest'. Other's knowledges/subjectivities are possible.

Some favored methodologies

Positivist social science; laboratory experiments; correlational analyses; mostly quantitative.

Consciousnessraising groups and case studies.

Clinical case studies, Econometrics, Case studies, historical analyses of institutional focus on contextmacro-social data. ethnographies, specific social relations and ethnomethodology developmental focus on micro-social processes; life activities as they histories. connect to macrosocial processes.

Textual analyses, deconstruction, Foucauldian genealogies.

Textual analyses, postcolonial deconstructions/ reconstructions, testimonial writings, hybrid representations.

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STUD YING ORGANIZA TION

for equality, liberty and fraternity were supplant­ ing the monarchical order (Cockburn 1 99 1 ). A new vision of persons and society was emerging, based on two key assumptions about human nature: normative dualism (mind/body dualism) where rationality is conceived as mental capacity, separated from embodiment, and abstract indi­ vidualism, where human action is conceived of in abstraction from any social circumstances (Jaggar 1 983). Further, individuals were assumed to inhabit a world of scarcity, and to be motivated by the desire to secure as large an individual share as possible of the available resources. Thus, for liberal political theorists, a 'good' or 'just' society allowed individuals to exercise autonomy and to fulfill themselves through a system of individual rights. Where did women stand in this society? Women were unable to vote, own property in their own names, and, with the transition from a home-centered form of economic production to an industrial economy, increasingly economic­ ally dependent and isolated. Early liberal political theorists, Mary Wollstonecraft ( 1 792), John Stuart Mill ( 1 869), and Harriet Taylor Mill ( 1 8 5 1 ), said that women's true potential went unfulfilled because of their exclusion from the academy, the forum and the marketplace: they were 'non-persons' in the public world (Tong 1 989). Women needed the same access to opportunities in all spheres of life as men, but without radical transformation of the present social and political system. Thus the early liberal theorists were reformists rather than revolution­ aries: male was the paradigm of human nature; their concern was to demonstrate that women were as fully human as men (Jaggar 1 983). One hundred years later Betty Friedan ( 1 963) echoed W ollstonecraft and the Mills, as she questioned the idea that women could find satisfaction exclusively in the roles of wife and mother. In the \ 960s, the second wave women's movement was aiming for equal access and equal representation in public life for women; any stressing of sex differences or acknowledgement of differences was seen to be reactionary and harmful to the 'cause'. But by the 1 980s, Friedan ( 1 98 1 ), among others, began to question this reasoning, arguing it treated women as 'male clones', when 'there has to be a concept of equality that takes into account that women are the ones who have the babies' (Friedan, in Tong 1 989: 27). Thus liberal feminists made a transi­ tion from themes of equality in the 1 9 60s and 1 970s to themes of difference in the 1 980s and 1 990s, noting that sex, a matter of chromosomes and anatomy, has been conflated with gender, cultural constructs about what are appropriately 'masculine' or 'feminine' traits and behavior. They charged that women (and men) are

handicapped by inappropriate judgments about the appropriate behavior and work for persons of a particular sex. Therefore, an overriding goal has been sexual equity or 'gender justice'. For some liberal feminists, gender stereo­ typing must be eliminated if the goals of equality for both sexes are to be realized (e.g. Tong 1 989). Others propose the notion of the androgynous person as a solution to sex discrimination: since the cultural overlay of 'sex roles' or 'gender traits' is culturally reinforced, along with sanctions and norms concerning what is a 'real' man or woman, androgynous personalities could liberate men and women from their culturally constraining roles (Tong 1 989). Thus, the first view considers that women have been held back because of inappropriate sex stereotypes, ques­ tions the truth of such stereotypes, and asks for individual women to be judged on their merits. The second view considers there to be sufficient overlap between males and females, because structural conditions imprison both men and women, that the remedy is to erode the effects of gender. Regardless of view, liberal feminist research favors positivist epistemologies, which they assume are gender-neutral (Jaggar 1 983). Both views adhere to an ideal, ahistorical, universal humanity toward which both men and women should aspire (Parvikko 1 990). How close individuals approximate that ideal human­ ity determines their level of benefit and reward; yet, this research seldom acknowledges that the 'ideal humanity' and the 'ideal society' are modeled after Eurocentric, elite, masculinist ideals. Some black feminists are more critical, contending that liberal feminism, as manifested in the contemporary American women's move­ ment, represented only the interests of white, middle class, heterosexual women under the guise of representing all women. They point to the irony that both the first and second wave American women's liberation movements emerged out of the strength of race liberation movements: the anti-slavery and civil rights movements. At a minimum, they specify, it is impossible to address issues of 'gender justice' without taking race into account, for together they constitute particular forms of oppression and discrimination (e.g. Bambara 1 970; Dill 1 983; hooks 1 98 1 ; Giddings 1 984; Hull et a\. 1 982; Lewis 1 977; Joseph and Lewis 1 98 1 ). Liberal Feminist Theory and the Women-in-Management Literature

Organizational scholarship has been, primarily, literature written by men, for men and about men: how to gain the cooperation of men to

a

FEMINIST APPROA CHES achieve organizational ends through rationality: how to man/age . Despite the fact that women occupied organizational jobs from early indus­ trialization (as documented in Taylor 1 9 1 1 ), and women were organizational researchers soon after the turn of the century (e.g. Mary Parker Follett 1 9 5 1 ; Lillian Gilbreth 1 967), most writers addressed women in organizations as anomalies if in managerial positions (e.g. Alpern 1 993; Fortune August 1 93 5 ; September 1 935) or normalized them in subordinate roles (e.g. Barnard 1 938; Roethlisberger and Dickson 1 939). Most of the 'gendered' organizational litera­ ture since the 1 960s falls under the category of women-in-management, and is consistent with liberal political theory's assumptions about human nature: abstract individualism; mind/ body dualism; the separation of the private and the public spheres in social life; the right to ownership of private property; and a notion of rationality whereby self-interested individuals would see to it that scarce resources are distributed according to universal rules of fairness and moral judgment. For example, in 1 965, a Harvard Business Review article, based on a survey of business people, asked 'Are women executives people?' It concluded: When women act like people, ask no special privileges, and display no undue temperament, they are more likely to be treated like people. Conversely, when women are treated like people on a case-by-case basis rather than as a category, they are more likely to think of themselves as managers, not women, and to behave naturally in a work situation. (Bowman et al. 1 965: 1 74)

Male respondents 'overwhelmingly' agreed that 'only the exceptional, indeed the overqualified, woman can hope to succeed in management. They see little, if any, chance for the woman of only average ability' ( 1 965: 1 76, original emphasis). In general, not much has changed in this literature since the 1 960s. The majority of the women-in-management literature is still trying to demonstrate that women are people too. Con­ sistent with the tenets of liberal political theory, it conceives of organizations as made up of rational, autonomous actors, whose ultimate goal is to make organizations efficient, effective, and fair (see Table 2). Thus the pursuit of sexual equity (gender justice), rather than the elimina­ tion of sexual inequality, is a central theme. Thirty Years of Researching that Women are People Too

Below, we briefly discuss some representative themes in this literature, which is the most

217

extensive of the gendered organizational litera­ tures that we review (also see Adler and Izraeli 1 994; Fagenson 1 993; Gutek and Larwood 1 987; Moore 1 986; Pilotta 1 983; Powell 1 988; 1 993; Sekaran and Leong 1 99 1 ; Terborg 1 977). A substantial portion of this research has been devoted to documenting inequities in the work­ place in terms of segregated occupations, salary inequalities and short career ladders (Larwood and Gutek 1 984; Blau and Ferber 1 986; Freed­ man and Phillips 1 988). In general, research shows that attitudes, traditions, and cultural norms still represented barriers to women's access to higher status and higher paying posi­ tions in the workplace despite legal sanctions against sex discrimination (Nieva and Gutek 1 98 1 ; Larwood and Gutek 1 984). Given what is judged to be discriminatory patterns, researchers then try to determine factors that maintain such patterns. The literature addresses these problems in different ways. Early women-in-management research placed strong emphasis on psychological variables that accounted for discrimination. More recently, there has been an increasing interest in structural explanations as the empha­ sis shifted to sociological-based research. A third approach goes beyond legal remedies to address the intersections of the organization and the

broader social system. Psychological and Individual-Level Research

This stream of research is strongly influenced by experimental and behaviorist psychology; thus the topics and research approaches tend to follow that disciplinary line as part of organiza­ tional behavior and human resources scholar­ ship. 'Methods and theories applied previously to other topics have been transferred to this subject without modification or inspiration' (Brown 1 979: 267), while the topics of investiga­ tion remain almost identical to those in 'non­ gendered' organizational research (Calis and Jacques 1 988). Said differently, it is difficult to find any gender-specific theoretical development among these works. The questions that are asked, and the research approaches that are followed, mimic those developed and utilized in research that does not emphasize gender. An overriding concern in this literature is to determine if there are sex/gender differences within traditional organizational concepts such as leadership (e.g. Adams et al. 1 984; Butterfield and Powell 1 98 1 ; Chapman 1 975; Dobbins and Platz 1 986; Eagly et al. 1 992; Jago and Vroom 1 982; Schneier and Bartol 1 980); uses of power (e.g. Ayers-Nachamkin et al. 1 982; Mainiero 1 986; Wiley and Eskilson 1 982) ; job stress (e.g. Jick and Mitz 1 985; Nelson and Quick 1 985); job

STUD YING ORGANIZA TION

218 Table 2

Liberal feminism and women-in-management: a comparison

Liberal feminism

Represented in the women-in-management literature

Roots

Roots

Evolved from liberal political theory ( 18th, 1 9th centuries)

Evolved from the civil rights and second wave feminist movements of the 1 960s

Basic assumptions

Representative issues under these assumptions

Human nature Human nature • • Are women executives people? Conceives of persons as autonomous individuals, capable of rationality (mind/body dualism) • Individuals have desires/interests that can be fulfilled • The women-in-management literature's general apart from the interests/desires of others (abstract focus on 'women's issues', i.e. separate from 'men's issues' individualism) • • Sex is part of essential biological endowment Research conceives of 'sex' as a discrete demographic variable, 'women' as a homogeneous category • • Sex/gender roles are socialized on to the essential Research on 'gender roles' and 'sex-typed' person 'underneath' occupations Nature of organi:ations Nature of society • Individuals inhabit a world of scarcity; each tries to • Individuals aspire to occupy as high an (scarce) secure as large an individual share as possible of the organizational position as possible; women may have been limited in attaining these positions available resources • • The 'just society' is one that allows individuals to The 'just organization' is one that allows both men exercise autonomy and to fulfill themselves through and women to exercise their capabilities and fulfill a system of individual rights themselves through a merit system Causers) of oppression of women • Female subordination rooted in attitudes, customs, legal constraints that block women's entrance and/ or success in the public world

Cause ( s) of \Vomen's lack of organizational opportunities • Glass ceiling, 'second shift', missing 'opportunity structure', non-sex-blind performance appraisals, sexual harassment, lack of mentoring and networks

Goals/agenda for change • Gender justice/sexual equity

• • •

Goals/agenda for organizational change • Sexual equity as instrument of improved organizational performance; equal pay for equal work Treat men and women differently, but equally • Avoid sex discrimination litigation Humanistic personhood for all: full membership in • Cross-gendering jobs and occupations for full the human community attainment of human potential Free women (and men) from oppressive gender roles • Possibility of androgyny

Obstacles to achieving goals • Lack of access to good jobs, unequal and/or inequitable pay • Gender stereotypes

Obstacles to achieving goals • Same

Path to\Vard goal achievement/remedies sought • Even the playing field • Remove discriminatory laws

Path toward goal achievement/remedies sought • Equal access; sex-blind performance appraisals • Analyses of gender effects of organizational rules and regulations • Effects of affirmative action; work/family issues

• •

Reform oppressive structures; fight for affirmative action plans, equal pay, childcare Educationltraining to eliminate stereotypes

•

Stay within the system to make a fair society

•

• •

Same

Assertiveness training for women; diversity trainings; supervisory appraisal trainings 'Numbers' argument, i.e. increased number of women will even out the situation; dual-career families

FEMINIST A PPROA CHES satisfaction (e.g. Brockner and Adsit 1 986; Smith and Plant 1 982; Varca et al. 1 983; Waters and Waters 1 969; Weaver 1 978) and organizational commitment (e.g. Bruning and Snyder 1 983; Chusmir 1 982; Zammuto et al. 1 979). Further, in this research sex/gender-specific concepts such as sex stereotypes (e.g. Brenner 1 982; Cleveland and Landy 1 983; Gordon 1 974; ligen and Terborg 1 975; Osborn and Vicars 1 976) and androgyny (e.g. Bern 1 976; Powell and Butterfield 1 979; Sargent 1 98 1 ; Spence and Helmreich 1 98 1 ) seem to be of interest mostly for corrective purposes: the possibility of eliminating sex/gender differ­ ences from traditional organizational issues. There is also a considerable amount of work focusing on traditional human resource manage­ ment topics such as biases that could be attributed to sex/gender differences in recruit­ ment (Forsythe et al. 1 985; Powell 1 987; Sterrett 1 978); selection (Heilman and Martell 1 986; Mai­ Dalton and Sullivan 1 98 1 ; Rosen and Mericle 1 979); performance appraisal (Grams and Schwab 1 985; Hall and Hall 1 976; Heilman and Stopeck 1 985; Nieva and Gutek 1 980; Pulakos and Wexley 1 983; Rose 1 978); and pay (Cooper and Barrett 1 984; Martin and Peterson 1 987; Sigelman et al. 1 982). Sociological and Structural Research

Because of its more macro-structural focus, this literature can be considered organizational sociology or organization theory, but some research tries to integrate both structural and behavioral issues. The majority of this work appeared after the mid 1 980s, and much of it is inspired by Kanter ( 1 977) and Bartol ( 1 978). Central to these writings is a concern around the sex structuring of organizations and its con­ sequences for traditional organizational activ­ ities and expectations. Among representative topics are the glass ceiling (Morrison and Von Glinow 1 990; Morrison et al. 1 987); organiza­ tional demography (Bielby and Baron 1 987; Ely 1 995; Jacobs 1 992; Perry et al. 1 994; Pfeffer and Davis-Blake 1 987; Tsui et al. 1 992); and careers and social networks (Auster 1 989; Bowen and Hisrich 1 986; Hunt and Michael 1 983; Ibarra 1 992; Kram 1 985; Gallos 1 989; Ragins and Cotton 1 99 1 ; Smith 1 979; Tharenou et al. 1 994). The Organization and the Broader Social System

Within this strand is research that addresses topics of general social and legal concerns and their relationship to organizational issues. Among these are equal opportunity, affirmative action and discrimination (Barclay 1 982; Berg­ mann 1 995; Chacko 1 982; Gender, Work and

219

Story I: Ellen Randall as Liberal Feminist Ellen Randall is a very impressive figure. She has worked her way up the ranks to become president of a business unit with full bottom­ line responsibility, taken over in tough situations and worked things out, and added executive stripes to her sleeve. She is obviously the one in charge, but she is also warm and open. She makes you think that she's going places, that you'll be reading about her future promotions in the Wall Street Journal. She's going to the top, you think. But Ellen's future doesn't look so bright to her. When she looks ahead, she senses no realistic possibility for further advancement in her corporation. Instead, she senses a wall, a barrier between her - a woman - and a top job in her corporation. . . . Ellen sees a limit on how high she can go as an executive woman. Realistically, she said, she will probably have one or two more promotions in her company, but she will probably not reach the top executive level. . . . Why don't executive women move higher? What can be done about the barriers they believe are holding them back?

Source: Morrison et al. 1 987: 4-5

Organization July 1 995; Heilman and Herlihy 1 984; Taylor and ligen 1 98 1 ); sexual harassment (Gutek and Morasch 1 982; Konrad and Gutek 1 986; Paetzold and O'Leary-Kelly 1 994) and worklJamily issues (Barling and Rosenbaum 1 986; Beutell and Greenhaus 1 983; Jones and Causer 1 995; Norton 1 994; Parasuraman et al. 1 989). In general, women-in-management research documents the persistence of sex segregation in organizations as it tries to elucidate its causes through measurable constructs. Its epistemolo­ gical premises show a marked functionalist/ positivist orientation, favoring quantitative methodologies but sometimes also using quali­ tative research (e.g. Ely 1 995). In the majority of these studies, sex/gender is a variable, not an analytical framework (Balsamo 1 985; Smircich 1 985). Yet, despite the voluminous literature and apparent variety, most of this research fails to recognize liberal feminism's political implica­ tions. Attaining the liberal goals might imply very fundamental organizational changes, not small corrections in what is taken to be, ultimately, a rational and just system and a desired state of affairs (i.e. the organizational rationality, its goals and values). No surprise then that this literature has been cautious in

220

STUD YING ORGA NIZA TION

forwarding policy oriented remedies, often taking refuge in the scientistic dictum that 'more research is needed'. Among the excep­ tions, however, are writings that address inter­ sections of race and gender in organization. and which tend to be more critical of both traditional organizational goals and conditions, and tradi­ tional organizational research (Bell 1 990; Bell et al. 1 993; Betters-Reed and Moore 1 99 1 ; Cox and Blake 1 99 1 ; Cox and Nkomo 1 990; Jackson and Holvino 1 986; Pettigrew and Martin 1 987). Nonetheless, we can conceive almost all of women-in-management research as glass ceiling research, since assuring women fair access to managerial positions has been its overriding objective. The type of problems addressed by this research and the way in which they are conceptualized is summed up by the situation facing Ellen Randall in Story I (Morrison et al. 1 987). As we go on to discuss other feminist theories, Ellen Randall will become our guide: as her feminist 'consciousness' changes, so does the concept of the glass ceiling, its meaning, and its importance.

RADICAL FEMINIST THEOR Y

Radical feminism grew out of women's dis­ satisfaction with the sexism of the supposedly liberatory movements of new left politics, civil rights and opposition to the Vietnam War (Deckard 1 979). It takes the subordination of women as its fundamental problematic: gender is a system of male domination. a fundamental organizing principle of patriarchal society, which is at the root of all other systems of oppression (Jaggar 1 983). What are seen by liberal feminists as essentially personal and individual problems, such as failing to get a promotion, being sexually harassed, or being unable to achieve orgasm, are seen here more systemically, as the consequence of male gender privilege in a society where the male and the masculine define the norm (Jaggar 1 983). From its 1 960s roots, radical feminism devel­ oped into a wide ranging and fluid perspective, calling for the transformation not only of the legal and political structures of patriarchy, but of social and cultural institutions, such as the family, the church, the academy, and cyen language (Tong 1 989; Daly 1 978). Radical feminism's stance marked an epistemological position in which there is no distinction between 'political' and 'personal' realms: every area of life is the sphere of 'sexual politics' (Jaggar 1 983: 101) and worthy of political analysis. 'Consciousness raising' developed as a method located in practice, whereby women could

interrogate their experiences in light of systemic male domination. Research, from this perspec­ tive, is always 'interested'. It is a political activity which locates the origins of women's oppression in patriarchy, and which tries to find ways to overcome it. For example. Firestone ( 1 970) argued that while women's subordination rests in human biological reproductive processes, biological imperatives are overlaid by social institutions, particularly sexual and child-rearing practices, that reinforce male dominance. New and developing technologies make it possible to free women from their historical reproductive roles, permitting development of a society no longer dependent upon the sexual division of labor and its biological base. Some radical feminists proposed androgyny as an answer, suggesting that the dualism of masculinity/femininity could be eradicated (A. Ferguson 1 977). A biological male or female would be culturally 'androgy­ nous', both masculine and feminine. While liberal feminists pursued the androgynous ideal as a strategy for deficient women, radical feminists sought, instead, a new ideal of human nature: one that mixes historical notions of masculinity and femininity and challenges norms of heterosexuality (e.g. Daly 1 978; Rich 1 980; see also Jacobson and Jacques 1 989b). Other radical feminists rejected this image, however, arguing that although the intent may be to transcend gender, the notion of androgyny was more likely to perpetuate gender stereotypes. Radical feminism is 'radical' because it is 'women centered'. It envisions a new social order where women are not subordinated to men. For this purpose, it focuses on the intersections of sexuality and power relations. It proposes alternative, often separatist, social, political, economic and cultural arrangements that chal­ lenge the values of male dominated culture (Koedt et al. 1 973). Radical feminists have taken the traditional association of woman with nature (in contrast to man with culture) and found within it a source of strength and power. They emphasize the positive value of qualities identi­ fied with women: sensitivity, emotional expres­ siveness, nurturance. Because of their closer connection to nature. women have a different way of knowing the world: emotional, non­ verbal, spiritual; in contrast to patriarchal ways of knowing, relying on reason and logic (Jaggar 1 983). Radical feminism suggests that it is possible for women to regain a sense of wholeness and connectedness to the 'authentic feminine' outside of patriarchy through a female counter culture: a cultural feminism (Echols 1 983; Eisenstein 1 983). Generally then, radical feminists favor separatist politics at least until women and men become equals.

FEMINIST APPROA CHES By stressing all women's values, radical feminism has also provided a space for women of color as well as lesbians to articulate, not unproblematically, their differences, personal and political, from white heterosexual women (e.g. Frye 1 983; Lorde 1 983; Moraga and Anzaldua 1 983). Yet, the radical views of women of color tend to emphasize more fluid and flexible subjectivities than the strong essentialist positions of other radical perspec­ tives (e.g. Alcoff 1 988). Radical Feminist Theory and Alternative Organizations

Starting in the late I 960s, radical feminists discovered and put into practice organizational forms that were reflective of feminist values, such as equality, community, participation, and an integration of form and content (Brown 1 992; Ferree and Martin 1 995; Koen 1 984). In the early days of the women's liberation movement, this implied negation of leadership and negation of structure (Joreen 1 973). They were thus reactive in nature, seeking to reject elements associated with male forms of power. Radical feminism focused on creating a 'womanspace' through alternative institutions and organiza­ tions to fulfill women's needs: putting medical care back into women's own hands; giving women skills they traditionally lacked, such as auto mechanics and carpentry; creating battered women's shelters and rape crisis centers, as well as cultural organizations such as bookstores, art galleries, film and music festivals, to nurture women's cultural expression. Such space is needed to nurture, and revalue, what is devalued in 'malestream' culture. As Ellen Randall illustrates in Story 2, the glass ceiling exists only because so much value is put into climbing the corporate ladder, a competitive approach to jobs and occupations that emphasizes scarcity. Consciousness-raising groups, as forums for the collective analysis of women's oppression, were referred to as 'leaderless' and 'structure­ less'. For example, one group practice, 'the lot and disc system', attempted to institutionalize equality, participation, and skill development of the members (Koen 1 984). Specific roles for each meeting, e.g. chair, secretary, were determined by lot, while other roles such as treasurer might be determined by lot to serve one month. At meetings an equal number of discs was distri­ buted to all members and each time a member spoke, she had to turn in a disc. When her discs were spent, the member was expected to remain silent, letting others continue the discussion. This practice was intended to balance participa­ tion and prevent any individual from mono-

221

Story 2: Ellen Randall as Radical Feminist Ellen Randall is a very impressive figure. She has worked her way up the ranks to become president of a business unit with full bottom­ line responsibility, taken over in tough situ­ ations and worked things out, and added executive stripes to her sleeve. She is obviously the one in charge, but she is also warm and open. She makes you think that she's going places, that you'll be reading about her future promotions in the Wall Street Journal. She's going to the top, you think. But Ellen's future doesn't look so bright to her. Since she started participating in a women's consciousness­ raising group she has become more aware of her oppression. She notices now the foolish­ ness of her expectations. Not only is she not going to be promoted 'to the top', but she is actually contributing to the patriarchal existence of the organization. For there to be 'a top' there has to be 'a bottom', and this bottom seems to be overly populated by women. She recognizes that with her warm and open preferred mode of behavior she would feel more comfortable in a place with no hierarchy, surrounded by other women like herself. She decides to resign and start her own business with other 'sisters' from her con­ sciousness-raising group.

polizing discussions. While such organizational forms proved excellent for creating communities for learning, they were less effective at sustaining political action: as their energy dissipated and fragmented, groups began to dissolve. Conse­ quently, groups began to experiment with organizational forms that were egalitarian and non-oppressive, but that also acknowledged a role for forms of 'structure' and 'leadership' (Koen 1 984; Brown 1 992). From the 1 970s numerous case studies have detailed feminist organizational practices (e.g. Baker 1 982; Brown 1 992; Cholmeley 1 99 1 ; Epstein et al. 1 988; Farrell 1 994; Ferree and Martin 1 995; Hyde 1 989; Koen 1 984; Iannello 1 992; Leidner 1 99 1 a; Morgen 1 994; Reinelt 1 994; Riger 1 984; Rothschild 1 992 (her six-point model reprinted in Robbins 1 996: 568); Schwartz et al. 1 988; Sealander and Smith 1 986). Many of these organizations embrace the goals and values of radical feminism combined with attention to issues of hierarchy and organization structure similar to that found in theories of anarchy and in collectivist organizations (Iannello 1 992; Rothschild-Whitt 1 979). For example, Koen's ( 1 984) ethnographic research on three explicitly ' 'feminist' businesses suggests that finding an organizational structure that facilitates r ther

4

i

STUD YING ORGANIZA TION

222 Table 3

A comparison offour feminist organizational practices' Six characteristics of the feminine model of organization (Rothschild 1 992)

Feminist management (P.Y. Martin 1 993)

A distinction between critical and routine decisions: critical reserved for the many, routine delegated horizontally to the few

Value members as individual human beings

Asking the woman question

System of rotating leadership

Recognition of ability or expertise rather than rank or position

Non-opportunistic relationships are valued

Using feminist practical reasoning

Flexible interactive job designs

Empowerment as a basis of consensual process

Careers are defined in terms of service to others

Doing consciousness raising

Equitable system of income distribution

Clear goals arrived at through consensual process

Commitment to employee growth

Promoting community and cooperation

Creation of a caring community

Promoting democracy and participation

Power sharing

Promoting subordinate empowerment, power as obligation

Key features and design principles of feminist workplaces ( Koen 1 984)

Modified consensus organization (Iannello 1 992)

Participatory decision­ making

Interpersonal and political accountability

Promoting nurturing and caring Striving for transformational outcomes

than hinders member participation and empow­ erment is key to feminist practice. She identifies five organizational elements reflective of feminist values in organizing: a participatory decision­ making system, a system of rotating leadership, flexible and interactive job designs, an equitable distribution of income, and interpersonal and political accountability. Of these she believes that structure and processes for decision-making, rather than leadership, are central to an organization's adherence to feminist values. Table 3 compares Koen's model with those of Rothschild, Iannello, and P.Y. Martin.

Are Feminist Organizations Really Possible?

Studies of feminist organizations, however, have seldom appeared in the mainstream organization studies literature (K. Ferguson 1 994; Ferree and Martin 1 995). One reason, perhaps, is that many of these organizations have an explicit agenda to invert the values of capitalist masculinist organ­ ization (P.Y. Martin 1 990; 1 993; WooduI 1 978).

The nature of business will be changed by feminist operation of it. There should be structures for worker input, working toward meaningful worker control. Salaries should be set within a narrow range, with consideration of each woman's parti­ cular needs as well as her role in the company. Structures should be clear to all and determined on concrete bases. Decisionmaking methods should be set out, with the understanding that decisionmaking must presume responsibility. There must be a consciousness of accountability to the women's community. There must be a commitment to channel money back into the community or movement. Finally, there must be a commitment to radical change - to the goals of economic and political power for women. (Woodul 1 978: 1 97-8)

In attempting to invent feminist business and organizational practices, women confront the practical dilemma of trying to actualize equality in concrete activities. For instance, Cholmeley describes her feminist business in a capitalist world as a 'living case study of a major theoretical problem of the women's liberation movement' ( 1 99 1 : 228). How can equality be enacted in the

FEMINIST APPROA CHES face of differences of class, race, sexuality, edu­ cation, skills, dependants, financial resources? The identification of a shared set of core values informing organizing activity in the women's movement does not mean that their enactment is unproblematic or uncontentious (Brown 1 992). Further, feminist values in action challenge the impersonality of bureaucracies by blurring the distinction between the personal and the organizational. Many case studies report on situations that are emotionally charged. Strug­ gles are documented where 'the rhetoric of equality, the collective decisionmaking structure, and the explicit goals of women's and com­ munity empowerment' confront differences in work styles and class, race and ethnicity conflicts ( Morgen 1 994: 68 1 ) . Under the inspiration o f radical feminism, some scholars are revising not only organiza­ tional forms and practices, but forms and practices of organizational theorizing. They start from 'women-centered theorizing', theoriz­ ing from the lives and experiences of women, to create feminist revisions of basic organizational concepts such as work, career, and management (e.g. Freeman 1 990; Marshall 1 984; 1 989; 1 995; P.Y. Martin 1 993; Shrivastava 1 994; Tancred 1 995). So, while liberal women-in-management research is uncritical of organization in taking a 'how to succeed' perspective (e.g. Brenner 1 987; K. Ferguson 1 994), organization studies from a radical feminist perspective puts the perspectives and practices of women at the center of analyses. As observed by Ferguson, it privileges 'the world as seen from this set of vantage-points, thus problematizing the conventional equation of men with humanity' ( 1 994: 90). Yet, there is irony in 'using capitalist strategies as a road to liberation' (Woodul 1 978: 203).

PSYCHOANALYTIC FEMINIST THEORY

Consistent with its intellectual roots, psycho­ analytic feminist research favors clinical approaches that connect the mind-world of individuals with their developmental experi­ ences. While a variety of methods are used, all share an emphasis in understanding the whole person and her mode of relating to her world. Most psychoanalytic feminist theorizing origi­ nated with Freudian psychoanalysis but as critique and correction of its misogynist biases, or as a basis for a female-centered psycho­ analytic interpretation (Tong 1 989). Freud proposed that to develop as normal adults, children must pass through several stages of psychosexual development. Originally, chil­ dren, regardless of biological sex, are 'poly-

223

morphously perverse', deriving sexual pleasure from several forms of bodily stimulation. Children move out of this multiple and perverse sexuality toward normal heterosexual genital sexuality when they pass, successfully, through specific developmental stages. The most critical passage children must overcome resides in the resolution of the Oedipus complex, the mother as object of love and desire, which appears when they are about three or four years old. The fact that boys have penises and girls do not affects the ways they overcome this stage. For boys, the resolution of the Oedipus complex resides in their ability to transfer their love for mother into fear of father, which occurs when boys become aware that women do not have penises and assume that they have been castrated by the father. The fear of castration by the father makes them renounce their desire for the mother and submit to the father's authority, thus developing a strong superego and eventually becoming one of the fathers. Girls resolve their Oedipal drama differently. When girls realize they don't have a penis but boys do, they assume they have been castrated and start envying the superiority of the boy's (non-castrated) anatomy. Because of this, girls start rejecting their mothers and transfer their love to the (superior) father. Eventually the desire for the father's penis is transcended by their desire to have a baby, which becomes the most important penis substitute. According to Freud's theory, females have more difficulties than males in attaining the mature, balanced post-Oedipal stage and in developing a normal adult sexuality. His writings are explicit about different neuroses and limita­ tions in the psychosexual development of women, including references to their inferior ethical sense (Tong 1 989). Women never attain men's same strong superegos: they lack men's strong sense of justice, are less likely to obey authority, are more influenced by feelings rather than reason. Feminist writers criticize Freudian theory as an insensitive and inaccurate view of women's psychological make-up (e.g. Firestone 1 970; Millet 1 970; Friedan 1 963); or reject Freudian biological determinism and reinterpret psychoanalytic theory in terms of cultural influences which affect women's gender identity (e.g. Thompson 1 964; Horney 1 974). In general, psychoanalytic feminisms deny the biological determinism embedded in traditional psychoanalytic interpretations of gender and sexuality. Rather, they consider specific social arrangements (e.g. the patriarchal family) as leading to distinctions in male and female psychological development, which can be chan­ ged by changing the structural conditions that produce unequal gender development (Flax 1 990; Tong 1 989). In this regard, an influential

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strand of contemporary psychoanalytic femin­ ism, inspired by object-relations theory (e.g. Winnicott 1 975), focuses on the pre-Oedipal rather than the Oedipal stage, and the relations between mother and child. For example, Dinnerstein ( 1 977) argues that, as a result of their encounter with their mother as the basic source of both pain and pleasure, children learn to blame the woman/mother for all that goes wrong in life which, in turn, leads to a set of gender arrangements that produces the subordi­ nation of women to men. Chodorow ( 1 978) emphasizes the reproduction of mothering. Boys see their mothers as different from themselves, as 'other', and eventually, during the Oedipal stage, cease to identify with them. Girls, however, never really break the connection to their mothers, whom they see as an extension of self. While girls do distance themselves from their mothers during the Oedipal stage, mostly a test of the possibility of a separate identity symbo­ lized by the father, the separation is never complete. For this reason, women find their most solid emotional relations with other women, despite the fact that most girls develop into heterosexual women. Girls tend to have an overdeveloped capacity for relatedness in con­ trast to boys, but a balance is attained when girls and boys are brought up experiencing both their parents as loving and autonomous beings. Thus, changes in parenting arrangements are a way toward a less male dominated society. Other theorists consider psychosexual devel­ opment and the emergence of different notions of gendered self and identity not just as a problem to be resolved by socialization, but also as an epistemological problem regarding whose self-knowledge is valued and whose is devalued (e.g. Flax 1 983; Braidotti 1 989). Gilligan's ( 1 982) work challenges the masculinist epistemological bases of traditional psychological research as, for instance, in Freud's contention that women did not develop a strong sense of justice. In her studies of solutions to moral dilemmas, Gilligan argues that women and men have different concepts of justice and morality, both reason­ able and well developed. She describes 'male' morality as an ethics of justice, while 'female' morality supports an ethics of care. Psychoanalytic feminism has, then, demon­ strated the patriarchal orientation of most developmental personality theories, and the limitations (what has been valued/devalued) in what is considered a 'normal humanity'. Yet, even with these 'corrections', psychoanalytic feminism has been criticized by other feminists who hold, for example, that Chodorow's analysis represents the same white, middle class, heterosexual nuclear family in capitalist societies that was the center of Freud's psycho-

analysis (e.g. Brennan 1 989; Spelman 1 989). Although some see Chodorow's object-relations approach as a good starting point for articulat­ ing alternative identities that develop within differential conditions of race and class (e.g. Abel 1 990; Flax 1 990), critics note that other possible family arrangements, and the subjectiv­ ities that develop within them, have seldom been of interest in these theories. Psychoanalytic Feminist Theory and Women's Ways of Managing

Psychoanalytic feminism, as applied to organiza­ tion studies. considers the consequences of women's different psychosexual development for their roles in organization and management. Early 'applications' focused on feminine char­ acter traits to explain women's subordinate economic status (Blum and Smith 1 988). For instance, Horner ( \ 972) posited that women's 'fear of success' stemmed from a 'basic incon­ sistency' between femininity and achievement that derived from their sex-role socialization. Hennig and lardim's ( 1 977) research for The Managerial Woman examined how early socia­ lization experiences of males and females, and their differing resolutions of the Oedipal com­ plex, carried over into their managerial beha­ vior. Most women are socialized to be passive, to see themselves as victims rather than agents; they are ambivalent toward career, and lack the drive for mastery that men have. Successful women managers, it was argued, have atypical relationships with their fathers. Thus, most women fall short in the corporate culture, because the rules, norms, ethos of modern business reflect the male developmental experi­ ence (Blum and Smith 1 988: 53 1 ) . For women to succeed they must change themselves but, unlike the liberal feminist literature which emphasizes an ' instant remaking' of women such as 'dressing for success' or assertiveness training, this literature sees psychosexual development as both a personal and a societal issue, with cultural and historical roots. As Ellen Randall illustrates in Story 3, the persistence of the glass ceiling is traced back to historical and cultural forms of social relations; yet this approach still shares basic liberal assumptions about the 'goodness' of moving to the top. The Woman's Advantage?

More recent research has treated these women's differences, not as a problem, but as an ad­ vantage. The influence of feminist psychologists

FEMINIST APPROA CHES Story 3: Ellen Randall as Psychoanalytic Feminist Ellen Randall is a very impressive figure. She has worked her way up the ranks to become president of a business unit with full bottom­ line responsibility, taken over in tough situations and worked things out, and added executive stripes to her sleeve. She is obviously the one in charge, but she is also warm and open. She makes you think that she's going places, that you'll be reading about her future promotions in the Wall Street Journal. She's going to the top, you think. But Ellen's future doesn't look so bright to her. When she looks ahead, she senses no realistic possibility for further ad­ vancement in her corporation. Instead, she senses a wall, a barrier between her - a woman - and a top job in her corporation. . . . Ellen understands how her situation and that of those around her has been produced by childrearing practices, parenting patterns and childhood socialization in earlier dec­ ades. She. as well as her co-workers and superiors, are trapped into a mode of thinking and behaving that favors a 'male' mode of being in the world. She doesn't think that much will change for her: she is 'too warm and open' but she and her husband are making sure that their children grow up valuing and practicing both feminine and masculine forms of relating. As a dual-career family of the 1 990s they are also dual parent­ ing their children as a way to eventually break up patriarchal domination in organizations and society. Yet, in the back of her mind, Ellen still hopes that now that organizations are looking for alternative approaches to traditional management, she might be able to use her 'feminine values' as her trump card that will move her to the top.

225

the tide of alienation, apathy, cynicism, and low morale in organizations' (Grant 1 986: 62). Women's 'interactive leadership' was cited as 'the management style of choice for many organizations . . . as the work force increasingly demands participation and the economic envir­ onment increasingly requires rapid change' (Rosener 1 990: 1 25). Women's approach to organizational structuring, favoring images of circle and web over those of pyramid and chain, suited the demands of the information economy and the team approach (Helgesen 1 990). A feminine approach to conflict and interpersonal relations enabled women to accomplish pre­ viously male dominated jobs, such as prison guarding, in different and perhaps even better ways (Zimmer 1 987). Women became a non­ traditional but increasingly valuable and skillful resource for global competition (Jelinek and Adler 1 988; Peters 1 990; Rosener 1 995). Still, some question whether 'the focus on the female advantage actually "advantages" females' (Fletcher 1 994a: 74), or further entrenches gender stereotypes. In many cases the women's ways perspective has been positioned as an 'enlightened' correction to liberal-inspired research, but also criticized as one in service of the usual instrumental ends of organizations that objectify women (Callis et al. 1 990; Callis and Smircich 1 993; Fletcher 1 994a). Several feminist organizational scholars, nonetheless, find within this perspective a way to challenge the status quo by emphasizing the power of relational activities (Calvert and Ramsey 1 992; Fletcher 1 994a; 1 994b; Kolb 1 992; Kolb and Putnam (in press); Marshall 1 984; 1 995; Ramsey and Calvert 1 994). Such work resists incorporation by the main­ stream management discourse and, through women-centered approaches, seeks more funda­ mental organizational transformations.

MARXIST FEMINIST THEORY

and psychoanalysts, including Dinnerstein, Chorodow, Gilligan and others (e.g. Miller 1 976; Belenky et al. 1 986), as well as influences from radical/cultural feminisms, led to work that pointed out that women's different sex-role socialization and different character traits were not deficiencies to be overcome, but advantages for corporate effectiveness (Grant 1 986; Jelinek and Adler 1 988; Helgesen 1 990; Loden 1 985; Rosener 1 990; 1 995). Women's ways of knowing and leading were studied and advocated (e.g. S. Freeman 1 990; Haring-Hidore et al. 1 990; Valentine and McIntosh 1 990; Rosener 1 990; 1 995). Women's relational skills, capacity for empathy and interpersonal sensitivity became critical human resources skills that could 'stop

Marxist theory was a reaction to, and a critique of, capitalism and the liberal political theory that served to justify it. In contrast to liberal political theory which conceptualizes humans as univer­ sally autonomous and rational beings, according to Marxist views, human nature reflects histor­ ical material conditions. In Marx's famous phrase: 'It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness' (in Tong 1 989: 40). Thus, the organization of economic life conditions social, political and intellectual life; and, for that reason, the capitalist mode of production, a class struggle between labor and capital, moves to the center of analysis in this perspective.

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Consistent with their views on human nature, feminist perspectives inspired by Marxist think­ ing conceptualize gender and gender identity as structural, historical and material. From this perspective, 'gender' is similar to 'class', a social category, characterized by relations of domina­ tion and oppression, functioning as a determi­ nant of structural patterns in society. Masculinity and femininity are not understood as psycholo­ gical states, or as attributes of sex roles, amenable to 'role reversal' ; they are much deeper, because our fundamental identities are as sexed beings, as men or women (Game and Pringle 1 984: 1 6). Marxist feminist thought analyzes how identities are constructed through social practices such as work, observing that power and sexuality are interwoven in work relations. Marxist feminism is not only critical of liberal feminism for its erroneous conception of human nature and its inadequate understanding of the labor process; it is also critical of traditional Marxism for its blindness to patriarchy (Hart­ mann 1 976; Game and Pringle 1 984). Thus, Marxist feminism adds gender to the analytical concerns of the Marxist perspective, to 'correct for' its inattention to gender dynamics. Even though a hierarchy exists among men through a system of class, men as a group dominate and control women as a group, through a system of gender (Jaggar 1 983; Lorber 1 994). Marxist feminism is thus concerned with women's double oppression of both class and sex. From this perspective, liberal feminism is totally inadequate for explaining the situation of women in the economy. Its uncritical approach to women in organizations and overemphasis on women in management is ultimately inconsistent with women's interests. That is, to Marxist feminists the capitalist economy is not best described through such concepts as market forces, exchange patterns, supply and demand as liberal/classic economic theory posits; rather, capitalist economy should be analyzed by focus­ ing on relations of inequality and power. In this sense, then, work organizations are important sites for analyzing the ongoing reproduction of sex/gender inequality as they expose the intersec­ tions of patriarchy and capitalism. In summary, Marxist feminism analyzes the ongoing productive and reproductive gender dynamics of patriarchal, capitalist organization of economy and society, pointing out that gender inequality persists and will not change without major structural changes. Further, while seldom represented in organization studies, traditional Marxist feminist perspectives have given way to socialist feminist approaches, elaborated below, which are of special importance for organiza­ tional studies. Yet, some recent neo-Marxist works also promise significant analytical insights

in the area of workplace-household relations (e.g. Gibson 1 992; Fraad et al. 1 989).

SOCIALIST FEMINIST THEORY

Socialist feminism is a confluence of Marxist, radical and psychoanalytic feminism (e.g. Jaggar 1 983; A. Ferguson 1 989), which resulted from Marxist feminists' dissatisfaction with the gender-blind character of Marxist thought and the tendency of traditional Marxisms to dismiss women's oppression as not nearly as important as workers' oppression (Tong 1 989). Socialist feminists also critique radical and psychoanaly­ tic feminism because they both exhibit universa­ lizing tendencies, assuming (Western) patriarchal conditions as a normative phenom­ enon, with little regard for culture or historical circumstances. In particular, radical feminism is criticized as naive for pretending that there could be a separate 'women's culture' under patriarchy and capitalism. Socialist feminist theories thus claim to incorporate several positive insights of Marxist, psychoanalytic and radical feminist theories while overcoming most of their limita­ tions. In particular, this view theorizes gender dynamically, in both processual and material ways. Here gender means more than a socially constructed, binary identity: 'Gender is a constitutive element of social relationships based on perceived differences between the sexes, and gender is a primary way of signifying relationships of power' (Scott 1 986: 1 067). To

analyze

these

relationships,

socialist

feminists employ two main approaches: dual­ systems theory and unified-systems theory. Dual-systems theory considers capitalism and patriarchy as separate phenomena which inter­ sect and dialectically relate to each other. Here, capitalism is always a material, historically rooted mode of production, but patriarchy is considered as either a material or an ideological structure. For example, Mitchell ( 1 974) observes that a woman's status and function are jointly determined by her role in production, reproduc­ tion, the socialization of children and sexuality. Women's oppression will persist unless their psyches experience a revolution equivalent to the economic one that effects the transition from capitalism to socialism. In her view, capitalism is material but patriarchy is ideologically based and thus closer to the psychoanalytic view. Other dual-systems approaches, similar to radical feminism, consider patriarchy as a material structure. For instance, Hartmann ( 1 976; 1 98 1 a; 1 98 1 b) argues that Marxist feminism, by subsuming women's relation to men under workers' relation to capital, is

FEMINIST APPROA CHES slighting the real object of feminist analysis: male-female relations. A Marxist analysis of capitalism needs to be complemented with a feminist analysis of patriarchy: the different forms of men's interest in the domination of women. Thus the 'family wage' is negotiated by men to maintain wives' servitude and subordina­ tion at home; the 'dual income family' has not really changed the patriarchal situation: women in the workforce remain underpaid and over­ worked since they bear the major responsibilities for housework and family nurturance. From Hartmann's viewpoint, then, women have to fight against their material exploitation under patriarchy at the same time as they fight their material exploitation under capitalism. However, each of these wars has to be fought with different and very specific weapons, according to site of struggle: in the household or in the workplace. Dual-systems theories have not been without their critics (e.g. Ferguson and Folbre 1 98 1 ; Folbre 1 98 5 ; 1 987; Young 1 980) . Young's unified-systems approach considers materialist accounts of patriarchy as promoting a separate­ spheres model of family and economy which does not question when and how the public/private split came about and is maintained. She also argues that patriarchy as a psychological con­ struct could be falsely regarded as being less oppressive to women than capitalist economic oppression. Thus through the concept ofgendered division oflabor, Young highlights the individuals who do the producing in society and how they are differently exploited: for example, how women functioning as a secondary labor force became a fundamental characteristic of capitalism. In summary, socialist feminists have empha­ sized the analytical integration of social structure and human agency in explaining the persistence of gender segregation and gender oppression (e.g. Wharton 1 99 1 ). Further, through theor­ etical developments that address social location and relations, such as women's standpoints (Hartsock 1 983; Harding 1 986), they have been particularly concerned with epistemological issues: not only what is to be known, but how knowledge is constituted and for what purposes. For these reasons, socialist feminism has addressed intersections of gender, race, class, and sexuality more effectively than other feminist approaches already discussed (e.g. Collins 1 990; Anzaldua 1 990; Lugones and Spelman 1 983). Socialist Feminist Theory and the Gendering of Organizing

From the standpoint of socialist feminism an organization studies that focuses on 'the organization' as a unit of analysis is a mistake.

227

Story 4: Ellen Randall as Socialist Feminist Ellen Randall is a very impressive figure. She has worked her way up the ranks to become president of a business unit with full bottom­ line responsibility, taken over in tough situations and worked things out, and added executive stripes to her sleeve. She is obviously the one in charge, but she is also warm and open. She makes you think that she's going places, that you'll be reading about her future promotions in the Wall Street Journal. She's going to the top, you think. But Ellen's future doesn't look so bright to her. When she looks ahead, she senses no realistic possibility for further ad­ vancement in her corporation, but that is not the worst of it. In fact Ellen, a women's studies graduate from an elite liberal arts college, knows very well what her situation is all about. Her upper class location has contributed to her coming up the ranks, but patriarchy is still at work here. So, even though she is 'luckier' than her black secretary, who holds an MBA degree, and 'luckier' than her 'less connected' peers, she is still a woman under capitalism and under patriarchy. Every minute of her life she is involved in re-creating the structures that exploit her and most other women, even though to different degrees and apparently in different forms. She cannot stop thinking how she herself might contribute even more directly to this state of affairs by keeping the Nicaraguan maid who cooks and cleans her house, and takes care of her children, making it possible for her to have this job, working the long hours that she does. Her husband is also working hard to make it to the top, or maybe to make it at all now that his corpor­ ation is talking about downsizing. Ellen may be more secure in her job than he, since she is, after all, 'cheaper labor'.

The private sphere cannot be separated from the public one, since organizations, families and societies are mutually constituted through gender relations, as Ellen Randall's heightened socialist feminist consciousness reveals in Story 4. Historically, the transition from agrarian to industrial modes of production created the separation of workplace and home, and pro­ duced a gendered structure where women and men work at different jobs, in different industries and at different organization levels (Alpern 1 993; Crompton and Sanderson 1 990). The unequal, and persistent, sex-based patterns in employment, observable across multiple indus­ tries and situations, are referred to variously as

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the sexual division of labor, the sex structuring of organizations, and occupational sex segregation (Acker and Van Houten 1 974; Game and Pringle 1 984; Reskin and Roos 1 990: Strober 1 984). In general, research inspired by this approach favors case study methods that make visible the informal and invisible processes of segregation which remain inaccessible to those who favor survey research (e.g. Collinson et al. 1 990). Empirical work by sociologists, labor process theorists, ethnomethodologists and organiza­ tional culture researchers shows how gender assumptions are embedded in societal expecta­ tions and how they interact with organizational rules and practices. It reveals the micro­ processes and micro-practices that are 'under­ neath' and constitutive of macro-social struc­ tural arrangements (Acker 1 990; 1 994). As conceptualized by Acker, persistent struc­ turing along gender lines is reproduced in a number of ways. One is through ordinary, daily procedures and decisions that segregate, manage, control and construct hierarchies in which gender, class and race are involved (Acker 1 990). The 'vicious circles of job segregation' are played out in recruiting and promoting practices (Collinson et al. 1 990). When firms hire part­ time workers, they tend to be women, thereby increasing the proportion of women at the lowest levels of the organization (Cockburn 1 99 1 ). Gender structuring persists through wage setting practices and job evaluation schemes with embedded gender assumptions, resulting in the undervaluing of the interpersonal dimensions of work, such as nurturing, listening, empathizing. 'Caring work' is 'women's work' and caring work pays less (see Acker 1 989; Fletcher 1 994b). Gendering, and racializing, of organizations also occurs through symbols, images, ideologies that legitimate gender inequalities and differences (Acker 1 990; 1 994; Benschop and Doorewaard 1 995; Billing and Alvesson 1 993: Gherardi 1 994: 1 995; Mills 1 988; 1 995; Mills and Tancred 1 992). Images of the ideal organization member, the top manager, and the organizational hero tend to be those of forceful masculinity (e.g. Kanter 1 977; Aaltio- Marjosola 1 994; Stivers 1 993). Symbolic processes are also associated with work activities leading to gendered jobs. They constitute the gendered 'opportunity structures' through which sexed bodies get allocated, for example in academia (e.g. Morley 1 994; J . Martin 1 994) and insurance sales (Collinson and Knights 1 986; Leidner 1 991 b). Gender structuring is also sustained through social interactions that enact dominance and submission (Acker 1 990; 1 994; Cockburn 1 99 1 : Game and Pringle 1 984; Hall 1 993; Rantalaiho and Heiskanen forthcoming; P. Y. Martin 1 996; D. Smith 1 987; 1 990a; 1 990b; West and

Fenstermaker 1 995). Analysis of conversations shows how gender differences in interruptions, turn-taking, and setting the topic of discussion re-create gender inequality in the flow of ordinary talk (West and Zimmerman 1 987) and joking (Collinson 1 988), so that organiza­ tion itself is shown to be a gendered commu­ nication act (Buzzanell forthcoming; Mills and Chiaramonte 1 99 1 ). Through organizational conversations and interpersonal interactions, an individual's choices are limited (Nes and ladicola 1 989) and personality attributes are created and maintained ('too emotional', 'too sensitive', 'not sufficiently context independent for making the tough decisions') which can block human fulfillment. Identity-making pro­ cesses - for example, the choice of appropriate work, use of language, style of clothing, and the presentation of self as a gendered member of an organization - also contribute to structuring along gendered lines (Acker 1 990; 1 994; Benschop and Doorewaard 1 995; Hearn et al. 1 989; Hearn and Parkin 1 987; Rantalaiho and Heiskanen forthcoming; Reskin and Roos 1 990). For example, Sheppard ( 1 989) and Piller ( 1 996) analyze the 'body work' necessary for women managers. Leidner ( 1991 b) examines how gender segregated service jobs reinforce the conception of gender differences as natural, while Sahlin-Andersson's ( 1 994) study of nurses shows how 'female identity' is reflected in the interactions among nurses and between nurses and doctors. Recently, researchers' attention is being drawn to 'men' as a social category with examination of the intersections of masculi­ nities and management and organization (e.g. Collinson and Hearn 1 994: 1 996; Connell 1 995; Kerfoot and Knights 1 993; K vande and Rasmussen 1 994: and P. Y. Martin 1 996). In Acker's view: Individual men and particular groups of men do not always win in these processes. but masculinity always seems to symbolize self-respect for men at the bottom and power for men at the top, while confirming for both their gender's superiority. Theories that posit organization and bureaucracy as gender neutral cannot adequately account for this continual gendered structuring. We need different theoretical strategies that examine organizations as gendered processes in which sexuality also plays a part. ( 1 990: 145)

Finally, the persistent structuring of organiza­ tions along gender lines is supported and sustained by the gendered substructure of organizations, for example, the practices related to the 'extra-organizational reproduction of members' (Acker 1 994: 1 1 8). Women are the 'hidden providers' in the economy (Stoller 1 993:

FEMINIST APPROA CHES 1 53). The physical and social reproduction of employees happens outside the workplace and is done primarily by women, most of it as unpaid work (Acker 1 994; Folbre 1 994; Stoller 1 993; Stromquist 1 990). According to this view the sexual division of labour is a basic characteristic of capitalist society (Jaggar 1 983) which affects men as well as women. Thus, in many ways, 'doing organization' implies 'doing gender' (West and Zimmerman 1 987). Socialist feminist analyses promote 'a society in which maleness and femaleness are socially irrelevant, in which men and women, as we know them, will no longer exist' (Jaggar 1 983: 330). Yet, goals of gender equity and equality are too limited goals; they '[do] not challenge the concept of sex differences that leads to separate spheres in the family and marketplace division of labor, which in turn results in women's lesser access to control of valued resources and positions of power' (Lorber 1 986: 577).

WHAT CAN BE DONE? THEORIZING A DIFFERENT SOCIAL ORDER

The creation of socially interchangeable 'women' and 'men' requires transformational change in social systems: the restructuring of our most intimate relations, kinship, sexuality, parenting, friendship, as well as relations in the workplace (Lorber 1 986); the development of a gender­ neutral wage structure where all work would be equally valued, and all wage workers would receive equal compensation for their labor; the disappearance of sexual division of labor in the marketplace and the family; the equal compensa­ tion of all work, including dependant care (e.g. Folbre 1 994; Phillips and Taylor 1 980); the enactment of non-gendered taxation and legal policies, non-gendered families and non-gen­ dered sexuality (hooks 1 984; Lorber 1 986; 1 994; Paige and Paige 1 98 1 ). These solutions are much more 'radical' than those that attempt to place women and men workers on equal footing within an already organizationally established frame­ work of job categories and relations (Brenner 1 987; Feldberg 1 984; Lorber 1 986; Treiman and Hartmann 1 9 8 1 ) .

POSTSTRUCTURALIST / POST MODERN FEMINIST 'THEORIES'

There are at least three different feminist strands in this literature. First, ' French' feminism includes the contributions of women authors such as Helene Cixous and Catherine Clement

229

( 1 986), Luce Irigaray ( 1 985a; 1 985b) and Julia Kristeva ( \ 980), who have engaged directly with the works of well known (male) figures in French poststructuralism, such as Jacques Lacan ( 1 977) and Jacques Derrida ( 1 976), and also with traditional Freudian psychoanalysis (Jardine 1 985; Moi 1 985; Tong 1 989). The second strand, represented in Anglo-American theory, draws primarily from Michel Foucault's power/ knowledge arguments regarding intersections of the body, discourses, and practices (Diamond and Quinby 1 988; Sawicki 1 9 9 1 ; Weedon 1 987). Third, 'postmodern feminism' comprises a collection of eclectic approaches, drawing from diverse sources but sharing certain similar concerns, in particular, Lyotard's ( 1 984) post­ modern incredulity concerning metanarratives, a suspicion of the constitution of the 'feminine' within modernity, and the negative consequences of deconstructing this image for a 'politics of feminism' (e.g. AIcoff 1 988; Butler and Scott 1 992; K. Ferguson 1 993; Nicholson 1 990). Unlike liberal and Marxist theories, which provide positive groundings for feminism, post­ structuralist approaches question 'positive knowledge', as we know it, in a move toward periodizing the Enlightenment' s (i.e. modern) philosophical and scientific traditions such as the existence of transcendental reason, and the possibility of objective knowledge. These ap­ proaches constantly interrogate the ontological and epistemological claims of modern theories: their foundationalism, essentialism, and univers­ alism, including the claims of many feminist theories in so far as they articulate a 'privileged knowing subject' (e.g. women's experience; women's standpoint), an 'essential feminine', and a general representation of 'woman'. These approaches thus interrogate 'knowledge' and its constitution as such. Poststructuralist approaches draw from Fer­ dinand de Saussure's ( 1 966) structural linguis­ tics, where language is a system of differences rather than a representation of essences, to demonstrate the instability of language as a representational form. ) Language (broadly understood as a system of signification, beyond the ordinary written and spoken form) is not only malleable over time, but also ambiguous and excessive: any term is able to signify a multiplicity of things and ideas at any particular point in time. In so far as 'knowledge' depends on the possibility of representing a reality that exists outside its representation, outside of language, the correspondence between one and the other can be easily questioned. On the one hand, 'knowledge' is given to us only as a representation: for example, we learn as we read about something that is assumed to exist outside of the text we are reading, but we have

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immediate knowledge only about the textual representation. On the other hand, that which is represented in language has never been outside of language: it is through language that researchers constitute the subject of their investigations (what is to be researched, paid attention to, ignored) and their own subjectiv­ ities. That is, it is through language that we can 'tell' who we are. In this argument, 'knowledge' ends up being nothing but the difference from that which is 'not knowledge' - a representation that depends on an often devalued, invisible 'other' for legitimation. The focus on the relationship between language and knowledge is extended in various directions by different theorists. Derrida's deconstructions emphasize the multiplicity of 'the other' as a condition that always defers the meaning of the primary term (what is claimed as 'knowledge'). Traditional logocentric notions about 'knowledge', deconstructed by Derrida in their immediate textuality, are analyzed by Foucault through historical genealogies. Fou­ cault ( 1 977; 1 980) emphasizes the emerging power/knowledge relations constantly consti­ tuted in discourses and practices, through which we constitute our 'selves' and define our subjectivity. Thus, the human body becomes a locus that legitimates and normalizes certain discourses and practices as 'truth' and 'knowl­ edge'. Lacan's ( 1 9 77) arguments reinterpret Freudian theories about the Oedipal/pre-Oedipal stages in children's development by emphasizing the importance of children's entrance into the domain of language. He argues that splitting occurs as the child enters the symbolic (linguis­ tic) stage and loses the sense of wholeness and completion of the imaginary (pre-linguistic) stage. Thus, the self that is possible within the symbolic order is always a lacking, desiring self, wanting to be whole again. This brief excursion into some basic post­ structuralist ideas sets the stage for the arguments of different strands of poststructur­ alist feminist 'theories'. French feminists focus their arguments around the relationship between language and 'being woman' . They extend Derridian and Lacanian insights to consider the particular space that the linguistic figure of 'woman' occupies as that which is 'other' to the dominant (phallogocentric) language, system of rules, and concepts of knowledge in modernity. For these authors, tenuously inspired by Simone de Beauvoir ( 1 972), 'women's otherness' is a space to be both reclaimed and problematized. For example, Cixous and Ch�ment ( 1 986) articulate the possibility of ecriture feminine, as a space where 'the other' would represent herself. The marginality and elusiveness of this idea makes it both a positive representation and a

constant reminder for the 'masters' about the equally precarious position of their claims to 'knowledge'. Irigaray uses images about the heterogeneity and multiplicity of 'woman', the multiple points of sexual pleasure in women's bodies, to counter philosophical and psycho­ analytic arguments (e.g. Irigaray 1 985a; 1 985b). Kristeva ( 1 980) dislodges the relationship between feminine/masculine language and the sexed bodies of men and women. The human search for a return of the repressed feminine language in the symbolic order renders human subjectivity unstable and always in process, thus allowing for more fluid and flexible gender identities and subject positions. The influence of Michel Foucault has pro­ duced another line of poststructuralist feminism. While acknowledging the problems of adopting an uncritical stance toward his work (e.g. Sawicki 1 99 1 ), Foucault's influence is not surprising if one considers the more immediate political appeal of his arguments around power, and his departure from traditional theories of the subject that privilege dominant ( patriarchal) views about knowledge and knowing. Diamond and Quinby identify four intersections between Foucault and feminism: Both identify the body as the site of power, that is, as the locus of domination through which docility is accomplished and subjectivity constituted. Both point to the local and intimate operations of power, rather than focusing exclusively on the supreme power of the state. Both bring to the fore the crucial role of discourse in its capacity to produce and sustain hegemonic power and emphasize the challenges contained within marginalized and/or unrecognized discourses. And both criticize the ways in which Western humanism has privileged the experience of the Western masculine elite as it proclaims universals about truth, freedom, and human nature. ( 1 988: x)

In addition, these authors argue that feminist and Foucaldian analyses offer distinctive insights that the other has ignored or missed. However, several feminist theorists have expressed ambivalence toward postmodern/post­ structuralist approaches, considering, for exam­ ple, that it might be risky for women to abandon the Enlightenment projects concerning the 'good', the 'true', and the 'beautiful' since women never had the opportunity to offer their own understandings to these projects. Others claim that postmodern relativism denies core values that would otherwise legitimate theories of knowledge (e.g. Harding 1 990) and morality (e.g. Benhabib 1 984) based on women's stand­ points and needs. Some of these critiques also argue that feminist politics is not yet strong enough to be able to withstand a decentered

FEMINIST APPROA CHES politics which prevents groups speaking from a unified subject position (di Stefano 1 988); and that postmodernism's abandoning of universal categories would imply abandoning the category 'gender' in favor of endless difference attached to human bodies, rendering a coherent theory and politics impossible for those not privileged (e.g. Bordo 1 990). Advocates, on the other hand, assert that 'postmodern-feminist theory would replace uni­ tary notions of woman and feminine gender identity with plural and complexly constructed conceptions of social identity, treating gender as one relevant strand among others, attending also to class, race, ethnicity, age' (Fraser and Nicholson 1 98 8 : 393). By recognizing the heterogeneity within the apparently unitary category 'gender', political engagement is possi­ ble in so far as women are willing to make up 'a patchwork of overlapping alliances, not one circumscribable by an essential definition' ( 1 988: 394). Flax ( 1 987) also articulates a politics of heterogeneity, reminding us that partiality and difference are the reality of everyday social relations. Any view that posits the world to be otherwise, such as Enlightenment views, mysti­ fies and disempowers alternative political engagements. Feminist theories should then engage directly in demonstrating the unstable, complex, and ambiguous 'nature' of social reality (e.g. de Lauretis 1 984; 1 987). For example, Alcoff ( 1 988) proposes the notion of positiona1ity as a political argument for locating 'woman' as a relative identity, both flexible and agential, while K. Ferguson ( 1 993) considers the possibility of mobile subjectivities which, like Haraway ( 1 985: 73) offer 'affinity, not identity': 'Already aware of themselves as incorporating contestation, mobile subjectivities could be prepared to accept the partiality of any set of solutions to public problems and the necessity of continued political struggle' (K. Ferguson 1 993: 1 83). In general, then, postmodern feminist views emphasize the complexity of social relations, requiring more than 'gender' as a category for etTective critique. Feminist theories that insist on keeping 'gender' and 'women' as privileged universal and ahistorical analytical categories are rendered suspect, i.e., if they mean that otherwise feminism couldn't provide a coherent notion of social and political agency: To what extent do words like 'poststructuralism' and 'postmodernism' . . . become the site for all sorts of fears about the diffusion of power and the loss of cognitive 'mastery'? To what extent do the terms used to defend the universal subject encode fears about those cultural minorities excluded in and by the construction of that subject; to what extent is

23 1

the outcry against the 'postmodern' a defense of culturally privileged epistemic positions that leave unexamined the excluded domains of homosexu­ ality, race, and class? (Butler and Scott 1 992: xv)

Thus, postmodern/poststructuralist feminisms allow for more complex intersections of gender and other social categories that both deconstruct taken-for-granted analytical subject positions (e.g. women, and women's oppression as unitary categories) and open the space for different political engagements which recognize asym­ metrical power relations among those who purport to be 'the same'.

Poststructuralist/Postmodern Feminist 'Theories' and Postmodern Feminist Organizational Analysis

Encounters between poststructuralist feminist literature and organization studies, while grow­ ing, are still quite limited, particularly in the USA. Most of the impact comes through organization studies' traditional relationship with other social sciences. For example, Dorinne Kondo's ( 1 990) exemplar account draws on cultural anthropology. On telling the story of everyday life on the shop floor of a Japanese small, family-owned factory, this postmodern 'feminist' ethnography subverts many images about what it is to be a gendered self belonging to particular ethnic groups within particular life circumstances; as well as what counts as theory, and where the boundary is between the empirical and the theoretical. Kondo describes her project as making the following points: [F]irst, that any account, mine included, is partial and located, screened through the narrator's eye/I; second, to emphasize the processual and emergent nature of ethnographic inquiry and the embedded­ ness of what we call theory in that process; and third, to argue that the liveliness and complexity of everyday life cannot be encompassed by theoretical models which rely on organizational structures, 'typical' individuals. referential meanings, or invoca­ tions of collective nouns like 'the Japanese'. Rather, my strategy will be to emphasize, through shifting, multiple voices and the invocation of the 'I', the shifting, complex, individual identities of the people with whom I lived and worked, and the processes by which I became acquainted with them. ( 1 990: 8-9)

Another example of a feminist analysis inspired by poststructuralism is Rosemary Pringle's ( 1 988) study of secretaries as a social group and their discursive constructions in the day-to-day relationships of power. She explores the connection between domination, sexuality and pleasure, using a Foucaldian approach.

STUD YING ORGANIZA TION

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Other contributions by writers in organization studies who have taken up these themes include Callis's ( l 993a) deconstruction of charismatic leadership from 'the other' viewpoint; Callis and Smircich's ( 1 9 9 1 ) feminist deconstructions of traditional leadership writings as well as their feminist rewritings of organization studies ( 1 992), organizational globalization ( 1 993), and business ethics (forthcoming); Cullen's ( 1 994) re­ analysis of Maslow on self-actualization; Gray's ( 1 994) feminist analysis of her own work on collaboration; R. Jacques's ( 1 992) graftings of an 'ethics of care' around arguments of theory building; J. Martin's ( 1 990) deconstruction of organizational taboos that allows for the reappearance of submerged gender conflict; and Mumby and Putnam's ( 1 992) feminist analysis of 'bounded rationality' . Further, Holvino ( 1 994) and Nkomo ( 1 992) are exemplar works which question both the 'racializing' and 'gendering' of organizational discourse. How­ ever, there are no 'boundaries' around a single subdiscipline when considering postmodern organizational analysis. Representative research exists in accounting (e.g. Shearer and Arrington 1 993), marketing (e.g. Bristor and Fischer 1 993; Fischer and Bristor 1 994) and educational administration (Capper 1 992), among others. All these works not only focus on the construction and precarious nature of gender in organization, but also reveal the involvement of 'organization studies' in the constitution of gendered arrangements. Thus, Ellen Randall portrays in Story 5 how the glass ceiling might look from a feminist poststructuralist perspec­ tive. The separation between the organizational practices that create the glass ceiling and research practices that produce knowledge about it dissolves: both are intertwined as 'the politics of knowledge' and 'the politics of identity' constitute each other.

THIRD WORL D / (POST)COLONIAL

Story 5: Ellen Randall as Poststructuralist Feminist Ellen Randall is a very impressive figure. She has worked her way up the ranks to become president of a business unit with full bottom­ line responsibility, taken over in tough situations and worked things out, and added executive stripes to her sleeve. She is obviously the one in charge, but she is also warm and open. She makes you think that she's going places, that you'll be reading about her future promotions in the Wall Street Journal. She's going to the top, you think. But Ellen's future doesn't look so bright to her. When she looks ahead, she senses no realistic possibility for further advancement in her corporation; but that is not what worries her the most. Ellen is actually a doctoral student doing a postmo­ dern ethnography of 'The glass ceiling in US corporations'. She is concerned that after so many years in the field, she might be found out - now that she is almost at the end of her work. Her main dilemma at this point is how to represent the configuration of her identity as 'a woman encountering the glass ceiling'. She realizes that the discursive practices that give way to this contemporary organizational issue have a history: 'the glass ceiling' is the opposite of a discourse that assumes the possibility of an absence of barriers, a 'truth' that never was but that continues to be sustained by those who use liberal discourses to research 'the glass ceiling'. She observes her position as a node in a power/knowledge network, where her activities, normalized in apparent con­ formity to the corporate requirements, are also moments of resistance and transgression as she performs 'as a woman in the corpora­ tion'. She also knows that there is no way out. Once she leaves 'the corporation' she will constitute and will be constituted as an/other subject in power/knowledge networks within 'the ivory tower'.

THEORIZAnONS

During the past ten years or so, several critical strands have challenged Western feminist theo­ rizations of gender and gender relations for being based on images and social experiences of mostly privileged women (and men) in the 'First World'. While not monolithic, and in fact often contested, these arguments go beyond those already raised by black and other women who have questioned white, middle class, heterosex­ ist, representations of gender in liberal, radical, psychoanalytic, and even socialist feminist theories. Otherwise different Third World/ ( post)colonial analyses hold in common a

fundamental suspicion of 'gender' as a stable and sufficient analytical lens that can be applied unproblematically across cultures and histories. They have extended the insights of postmodern and poststructuralist theorizations to their logical consequences: if Western knowledge has been constituted in difference from 'others', by rendering them invisible, what would happen if those 'others' were to speak back? What if they were to show how they are constituted as others? What if these others were to reclaim their own specificities, away from the dualisms (e.g. male! female) embedded in Western discourses of knowledge?

FEMINIST APPROA CHES Chandra Mohanty ( 1 99 1 a) argues that 'third world women' have often been constituted as 'others' of 'first world women' by highlighting their underdevelopment, oppression, illiteracy, poverty, overpopulated conditions, etc. These representations reaffirm Western knowledges of 'indicators' such as life expectancy, sex ratio, nutrition, fertility, education and income-gen­ erating activities, which homogenize and freeze non-Western women, denying the fluid, histor­ ical and dynamic nature of their lives. They show 'third world peoples' (not just women) as backward, ignorant and passive recipients of Western 'knowledges', obliterating other repre­ sentations which articulate their agency, cap­ abilities, involvement in struggles, and strategies for survival. Mohanty calls for the rewriting of history based on the specific locations and histories of struggle of (post)colonial peoples to articulate 'other knowledges' which would illuminate ' ( 1 ) the idea of the simultaneity of oppressions as fundamental to the experience of social and political marginality and the ground­ ing of feminist politics in the histories of racism and imperialism; (2) the crucial role of a hegemonic state in circumscribing their/our daily lives and survival struggles; (3) the sig­ nificance of memory and writing in the creation of oppositional agency; (4) and the differences, conflicts and contradictions internal to third world women's organizations and communities' (Mohanty 1 99 1 b: 1 0) . (Post)colonial analyses thus g o beyond the deconstruction of Western texts. They show the production of knowledge at the (Western) center to be a form of self-fashioning, widely implicated in the constitution of the legitimation of imperialism and colonialism (e.g. Minh-ha 1 989; Prakash 1 995; Said 1 978; 1 989). These analyses often focus on the complex subjectiv­ ities produced by intersections of gender, race, class, ethnicity, etc. in the context of specific First WorldlThird World relationships. They theorize heterogeneous subject positions and relations different from the gendered and racialized images produced by Western categor­ izations (e.g. 'women', 'black'). The question remains, however, whose lan­ guage and theories are being used by the 'rest' to deconstruct the 'West'? Some argue that the theoretical tools used in ( post)colonial analyses are those of the oppressors; others try to demonstrate how the colonized always reap­ propriate the masters' tools (Lorde 1 983) and redeploy them toward their own interests. Thus the deconstructive move is perfectly consistent with historical practices: a way to re-create them in the present. There is, however, still the nagging problem of the representational identity of the colonized: who is this 'other' who

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deconstructs the West? A dilemma exists in how to portray ( post)colonial subjectivities without depicting them either as a romanticized 'native other' or only in their relationship with their oppressors. How can writers articulate a Third World/(post)colonial subject without reclaiming a pristine original space from which to represent her agency either historically or experientially? How can writers provide a space for representation outside the power engage­ ments with the colonizer? Parry ( 1 995) identifies two different ap­ proaches in (post)colonial deconstructions, one exemplified by Gayatri Spivak's work (e.g. 1 987; 1 988), and the other by Homi Bhabha's (e.g. 1 985; 1 990). Spivak's deconstructions are pro­ duced through a double move. First, she considers the silence and muteness of the colonized (subaltern), who by intersecting his own patriarchal tradition with the interests of the colonizer, colluded in his own subjectifica­ tion, and thus cannot speak as himself. The subaltern woman is even further silenced. Spivak's second move requires that the con­ temporary (post)colonial woman intellectual develop a specific strategy for reading the history of the colonized, plotting a story that gives the (female) subaltern a voice in history. It means a rereading of old colonial stories about, for example, Sati (widow sacrifice), disposing of the fixed (gender) categories on which they depended for their intelligibility by the West (also see Mani 1 989). Bhabha follows a different approach. In his readings of colonial stories, he reveals that the colonized had already interrogated the colonialist text in their own ways: the shifting and contradictory subject positions that the colonized show in these texts are indicative of the representational difficulties that they posed for the colonizer. 2 Concerns remain, however, about the political power of a discourse that relies on a decentered, unfixed, multiple, constituted-in-difference sub­ ject as a position for representing 'knowledge', when the 'politics of knowledge', as we know it, has relied on a universal, centered, essential subject for its legitimation. Is there a positive subjectivity from which the colonized could represent herself after the deconstructive ges­ ture? Several responses to these concerns have been offered. The notion of strategic essentialism (e.g. Spivak 1 988; Said 1 989) describes 'a strategic use of positivist essentialism in a scrupulously visible political interest' (Spivak 1 988: 1 3), and demonstrates the possibility for engaging in seemingly contradictory political struggles, while mobilizing support for and from groups that might otherwise appear to stand on different agendas. Yet, some (post)colonial theorists (e.g. Radhakrishnan 1 994) consider

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strategic essentialism as another instance of redeploying the 'master's tools' through a reversal of its metropolitan tactics. Another notion, hybridization (e.g. Bhabha 1 988; Garcia­ Canclini 1 990), can be read as both resisting the forces of assimilation into a dominant culture, and representing new forms that simultaneously integrate and disintegrate modernity and tradi­ tion. Escobar ( 1 995: 2 1 8) explores hybridization with particular reference to Latin America, in terms of 'continuous attempts at renovation, by a multiplicity of groups taking charge of the multitemporal heterogeneity peculiar to each sector and country'. Latin American testimonial writings offer another possibility for unique Third World representations of strong political force by portraying very different gender configurations through women 'from below' who speak up, initiate action, fight in all kinds of struggles, while resisting any easy classification within First World images of 'woman' or ' feminism' (e.g. Franco 1 992; Marin 1 99 1 ; Sternbach 1 99 1 ; Sommer 1 988; 1 995). These arguments are of pragmatic importance for the contemporary articulation of knowledges beyond those considered legitimate in conven­ tional disciplinary discourses. How to speak (knowledge) as 'other' is perhaps the central problematic in the current scramble for significa-

tion, for not all discourses enter the (post)colo­ nial signifying space on the same footing. Thus, Third-World/(post)colonial arguments offer a much needed discursive space for engaging with the 'new colonialisms' of globalization and the market. Third World/(Post)Colonial Theorizations and the Women-in-Development Literature

While Ellen Randall muses over her glass ceiling dilemma in Story 6, we must acknowledge that there is not much organizational literature to help her: she will be better off consulting her anthropologist friend. There is, however, con­ siderable potential in the women-in-development literature if it were to focus on the intersections of gender with contemporary organizational issues, especially those that pertain to globaliza­ tion and transnationalization (e.g. Acosta-Belen and Bose 1 990). Women-in-development research emerged in the early 1 970s through intersections of economic development, feminist theories, and cultural anthropology. It offers 'feminist corrections' to development studies and to economic moderni­ zation interventions, especially industrialization, in the Third World by First World development

Story 6: Ellen Randall as (Post) Colonial Feninist Ellen Randall is a very impressive figure. She has worked her way up the ranks to become president of a business unit with full bottom-line responsibility, taken over in tough situations and worked things out, and added executive stripes to her sleeve. She is obviously the one in charge, but she is also warm and open. She makes you think that she's going places, that you'll be reading about her future promotions in the Wall Street Journal. She's going to the top, you think. But Ellen's future doesn't look so bright to her. When she looks ahead, she senses no realistic possibility for further advancement in her corporation. Instead, she senses a wall, a barrier between her as a woman and a top job in her corporation . . . . A possible way to the top, she reasons, is to literally continue to go places; that is, to continue traveling on foreign assignments often. Or at least that's what she was thinking until her recent trip to Sri Lanka, to visit the newest company factory. There, while having lunch with several of the women workers, she realized how little she really understood how other women in the world dealt with their work situation, and how little information about this is available. These were, after all, poor factory workers doing unskilled work, so she should have known better. In fact, the reason that she went there was to assess whether the company was providing fair working conditions to these women, so that the company would avoid any scandal regarding Third World sweatshops. Now she is quite confused. These women have little respect for the company. They have created their own community-based groups that determine what and how they work and how they get paid. Their struggles and resistances are difficult to explain. It is not a unionized situation, but rather a sort of community action group, including men and women, of whom some work in the factory and some don't. And they seem to be quite powerful. Upon reflection, she senses that when she talked to the women about having some opportunities for advancement in the corporation, through some more education, they pretty much laughed at her. Somehow she feels that she might have it all wrong, and that her own notion and strategies for 'corporate advancement' are the wrong notion and the wrong strategies. Maybe this whole idea of combating 'the glass ceiling' is a way to become disempowered if she buys into it. Well, live and learn! She has to talk to her postcolonial feminist anthropologist friend, when she gets back home. Maybe Ellen Randall is a very oppressed figure!

FEMINIST APPROA CHES agencies. This literature focused initially on liberal feminists' concerns around women's access to development resources and technology (Warren and Bourque 1 987; 1 9 9 1 ) . Recently, these original theoretical frameworks have changed upon recognition that the configurations of 'women' they deployed had more to do with images and issues of First World women than with other women's interests in the context of development around the world (e.g. Mohanty 1 99 1 a) . One such change is the feminization-of­ technology approach based on radical feminism. Here the focus has been on instilling feminine values into development strategies that, accord­ ing to Western theorists, were the strength of traditional cultures and traditional women before they were tainted by modern Western values (e.g. Bergom-Larsson 1 982; Boulding 1 9 8 1 ) . But this approach articulates a universal 'natural woman(ness)' that exists mainly as a product of the Western (romantic) imagination ­ egalitarian, non-violent, and nurturing: This perspective dangerously romanticizes women's values, the family, the separation of 'domestic' and 'public' spheres, and the nature of Third World societies. One has only to look at the complex and various constructions of gender in contemporary societies, the negotiation of gender identities as they are realized in practice, and the interplay of family dynamics and legal systems to challenge these images of male and female. (Warren and Bourque 1 99 1 : 287)

A structural-dynamics approach to these issues is the global economy perspective, which produced a large amount of women-in-develop­ ment literature during the 1 980s (e.g. Beneria and Sen 1 986; Etienne and Leacock 1 980; Fernandez-Kelly 1 983; 1 987; 1 989; Nash 1 983; Nash and Safa 1 985). Closer to socialist feminist analytical critiques, this literature links capital­ ism, colonialism, and gender stratification, and produces more complex explanations of their intersections. It reveals not just the effects of modernization but the changes and diverse social configurations that modernization pro­ duces. For instance, Beneria and Roldan ( 1 987) analyzed decentralized production in households in Mexico City as an effect of multinational industrialization. They noticed how this new relationship between the private (household) and public (workplace) spheres was not a panacea for women as, perhaps, the feminiza­ tion-of-technology would have it. The work created in the households for women otherwise assumed to be 'unemployed' also produced a fragmented and cheaper labor force for the multinationals.

235

Other approaches, closer to postmodern theorizations, consider 'gender' not as a property but as a relationship which brings about redefinitions of subjectivities and subject positions over time, both as products and as producers of the social context (e.g. Mies 1 982). For instance, in a recent reanalysis of the maquiladora industry during the 1 980s, Fernandez-Kelly ( 1 994: 2 70) shows how changes in this industry (more men employed in maquiladoras now than in the past) are related to 'the atomization of the labor force on the basis of new gender definitions [which] has brought about the promise of personal and economic independence for women as well as greater equality between the sexes. But, as the example of workers in Mexico's maquiladora industry suggests, greater equality between men and women may be the result of deteriorating conditions for the former, not solely the effects of gains by the latter'. More post structuralist analyses have concen­ trated on how textualizations of women-in­ development 'discursively colonize the material and historical heterogeneities of the lives of women in the third world, thereby producing/re­ presenting a composite, singular, 'third world woman'- an image . . . which carries with it the authorizing signature of Western humanist discourse' (Mohanty 1 99 1 a: 53). Thus Third World women' are constituted in representations that are 'a way of knowing and a way of not knowing, a way of talking about women and a way of silencing women from speaking about the experiences of their own lives' (Mueller, quoted in Escobar 1 995: 1 80). Such deconstructions reveal the fictive character of development narratives that fashion andlor obliterate anI other world (see Mueller 1 987a; 1 987b; also Dorothy Smith 1 987; 1 990a; I 990b). Such work demonstrates that the first step toward ( post)colonia1 theorizations is a decon­ structive move that emphasizes the problems of Western representations. The next step belongs to ( post)colonial writings, which face the challenge of representing 'the other' through 'unknown' subjectivities. An important work in this case is Aihwa Ong's ( 1 987) ethnography of women workers in Japanese factories in Malay­ sia. Inspired by Michel Foucault's work on resistance, Ong focuses on the production of new subjectivities as peasant women become trans­ formed into 'docile bodies' who can adapt to factory life. She genealogizes the conditions that give way to these contemporary 'female factory workers', and notices how traditional social relations and the new disciplinary standards of the factory create a series of power relations which are not always on the side of the 'colonizer'. A form of resistance by women

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workers, for instance, was to become possessed by spirits and disrupt the work situation. This possession, based on local traditions, was one of many forms in which agency and representation intersected, fashioning very specific contempor­ ary gender configurations outside First World understandings. As already mentioned, other than women-in­ development literature there is little organiza­ tional literature located in the nexus between gender and ( post)colonial analyses (see also the NGO literature). Yet , more might appear in the near future as scholars from various parts of the world make their voices heard in Western publications in response to issues of globaliza­ tion and transnationalization. For instance, in a symposium on women and (post)coloniality at the US Academy of Management, Chio ( 1 993) fashioned a hybrid text to problematize the representation of women in international man­ agement scholarship in terms of how the researcher tries to represent 'the other'. In her heteroglossic writing, she portrays the refractive and multivocal subjectivities that appear as she tries to include herself in the very act of representation. At the same symposium, Hol­ vino ( 1 993) focused on the other side of the ( post)colonial dilemma: when the colonized is 'home'. Inspired by Zavella's ( 199 1 ) work, her deconstructive writings interrogated the dis­ course of organizational development with the voices of 'Chicana factory workers' in Califor­ nia. Also in that symposium, Calis ( I 993b) discussed the possibilities for organizational research offered by testimonial writings, warning about (mis)appropriations of these critical theorizations when 'translated' into ( First World) organizational scholarship. More recently, Mir et al. ( 1 99 5) have problematized the representational space avail­ able for Third World women's subjectivities when the forces of Westernization and transna­ tionalization coalesce with traditional patriar­ chal practices, such as female feticide and infanticide; while Calis ( 1 992) analyzed the rhetorical strategies used in organizational research when representing 'Hispanic woman', and the silences that such representations produced.

CONCLUSIONS: IT'S NOT ONLY ABOUT 'GENDER' ANYMORE

As the Third World/(post)colonial arguments make obvious, what we have written so far in this chapter comes from a very specific time period and place in the world. As such, we don't

believe anything we write today will 'withstand the test of time' or perhaps even endure until the next handbook of organization studies. After all, we don't believe in ahistorical, acultural, universals. But from where we do stand today we want to underscore that we consider feminist approaches to organization studies one of the few spaces left for reflecting upon and criticizing the excesses and violence of contemporary global capitalism, as it impacts many people all over the world. One only needs to read recent popular business publications (e.g. Business Week, 1 994, special issue on '2 1 st century capitalism'; Business Week 15 August 1 994, cover story on ' Inequality: how the gap between rich and poor hurts the economy'; Business Week 17 July 1 995, cover story on 'Wages stagnant while profits are soaring'; NewslVeek 1 995) to notice not only that social inequities are growing, but that they have become naturalized by a discourse that re­ emphasizes inequality as a normal condition for societies the world over. Under these tenets even gender-justice approaches in liberal feminism might seem radical. Our interest, therefore, is to maintain a location from which to denaturalize these conditions and to continue questioning the discrimination and oppression caused by con­ temporary forms of capitalisms, often widely implicated in organization studies. And so, as we attempt to produce in Table 4 an evaluative summary of the contributions of the various perspectives, we do so with a concern for their capacity to examine taken-for-granted organizational conditions which more and more see m to advantage the few at the expense of the many. As this summary shows, it's not only about 'gender' any more, as both women and men, from both First and Third Worlds, employed and unemployed, with and without families, struggle with inequality, injustice, inequity and intolerance. Finally, we are writing these last lines at the time of the UN World Conference on Women in Beijing, as they address many of the concerns already voiced in this chapter. From this location, then, it seems only fitting that we echo Betty Friedan's words on the occasion of the Conference: The problems in our fast-changing social world require a new paradigm of social policy, transcend­ ing all 'identity politics' . . . . Pursuing the separate interests of women isn't adequate and is even diversionary. Instead, there has to be some new vision of community. We need to reframe the concept of success. . . . 'Women's issues' are symptoms of problems that affect everyone . . . . Our job now is to move beyond polarization to a notion of community that can unite us as decent

FEMINIST APPROA CHES Table 4

237

Contributions to contemporary organization studies from feminist theories

Feminist approaches to organization studies

Contributions

Shortcomings

Liberal feminismlWIM

•

Provides evidence of inequities, particularly economic inequities, using a symbol (statistics) that carries strong social and academic credibility. Forms basis for other perspectives

•

Liberal thought accepts hierarchical division of labor and inequality as givens. Overriding aim is 'getting women to the top'

•

•

Counts what can be counted, e.g. distribution of bodies, incomes, positions

•

Needed to counter the claims that feminism has gone too far and to counter the thesis that 'more women will make it better', e.g. documents discrimination in pay and allocation of positions

Individualistic in orientation; sees the status of women as an issue of individual accomplishment; doesn't acknowledge power relations within capitalist economic and social systems

•

Presumes the existence of sex (and gender) as discrete and definable dichotomous variable with universal characteristics

•

Separatist strategy is utopian in so far as social reality does not foster the required conditions for ongoing 'womanspaces'

•

The radical/cultural politics it portrays might represent only white and middle class women's interests

•

Alternative organizations do not overcome the contradictions of being radical(izing) forms engaged in (more or less) capitalist practices

•

Essentializes 'gender' and 'woman', celebrating 'the feminine' over 'the masculine'. Reifies these characteristics and heightens their stereotypical aspects, obscuring many important differences arising from. for example, culture and history

•

The focus on psychosexual development reduces power dynamics to psychodynamics; it distracts from paying attention to material structural conditions that perpetuate gender inequality

•

The family relations it portrays might only apply to certain Western and privileged gender-race-class family relations

•

Its potential critical impact on the work/family organizational literature has been so far nil

•

In the organizational literature, the 'female advantage' approach reiterates,

Radical-cultural feminism/ alternative organizations

•

Portrays possibilities and visions of alternative worlds outside of patriarchy

•

Offers 'consciousness raising' as a unique form of organizational research and practice, developing political power for all participants

•

Psychoanalytic feminism/women's ways of managing

Documents alternative practices and alternative organizations; provides specific examples of successful nonburea ucratic organizations

•

Highlights the importance of psychosexual development in the formation of patriarchal social structures, including research structures

•

Fosters changes in gender relations and child-rearing practices as a step toward reducing gendered social inequality

•

In intersection with cultural feminism, documents the possibility of positive organizational practices (and organizational research) located in women's unique psychosexual orientations and experiences, particularly those associated with caring, nurturing and relating to others

cOnlinued overleaf

STUD YING ORGANIZA TlON

238 Table 4

(continued)

Feminist approaches to organization studies

Contributions

Shortcomings uncritically, conditions that seem to be the source of women's oppression; i t objectifies 'women's ways' into instrumental organizational benefits i.e. competitive advantage - depriving these approaches of their potential for changing organizational and social ethics and values

Socialist feminism! gendering of organizations and organizing

Poststructuralist feminism/postmodern feminist organizational analysis

•

Incorporates central insights from Marxist, radical and psychoanalytic feminism and alleviates some of their limitations

•

Focuses on gender relations and sexgender system (rather than sex or gender) as dynamic and processual power relations that produce/ reproduce gendered social inequality

•

Addresses the private/public divide as a false dichotomy historically produced by interactions of patriarchy and capitalism

•

Strong theoretical and epistemological concerns are articulated through analytical concepts such as standpoints, located in power relations. Analyses are expanded beyond gender relations to address other social formations emerging from intersections of - for example - gender, race, and class

•

The focus on the intersections of production/reproduction under patriarchy and capitalism has provided several important theoretical frames for organizational analysis. These are particularly helpful in documenting the perpetuation of oppression through conventional organizational practices and social interactions

•

Focuses on the discursive nature of 'social reality' and 'subjectivity', and its inessential nature. Emphasis on language as a system of differences permits questioning the limits imposed upon 'knowledge' by certain privileged discourses

•

Allows for articulating the 'politics of knowledge' as a form of power relations that attempts to naturalize a system of exclusion for certain subject positions (e.g. gendered)

•

Internal debates over the nature and origin of gender and social oppression (i.e. dual versus unified system) have often made theorists appear too focused on their ideological differences and academic arguments, to the detriment of the practical application of their theories, e.g. the importance of different analytical insights in uncovering causes of oppression

•

Its proposed remedies to social inequalities may appear naive and utopic, unless they are accompanied by major - and unlikely at this point in time - revolutionary social changes

•

In organization studies, these theories have not crossed over well from their sociological and European locations into the USA mainstream organizational gender literature. The incisive, complex and critical analyses do not mesh at all with the latter's liberal, positivist, behaviorist, and instrumental orientations

•

The focus on language and discourse has often been criticized as untenable for feminist politics. The deconstructive emphasis questions the possibility of a positive ground for knowledge and a knowing subject

•

Pluralistic politics are not always considered strong enough for eliminating systems of exclusion and oppression historically and culturally located in patriarchal and capitalist arrangements

FEMINIST APPROA CHES Table 4

239

( continued)

Feminist approaches to organization studies

Third W orld/ (post)colonial feminismIWID

Contributions

Shortcomings

•

Offers a more pluralistic view of political engagements, where 'gender' becomes only one argument among others. Provides more complex views of social location and structures of oppression

•

•

Deconstructive and genealogical analyses provide an important strategy for demonstrating the limits of organizational discourse and the often gendered structures of those limits

Critiques of deconstruction and other post structuralist analyses include the charges that they are elitist, inaccessible and full of jargon, making it difficult to utilize by most analysts, despite the democratizing impetus that is among the aims of these analyses

•

Problematizes the concept of 'gender' as constituted in the West and opens the possibility of other gendered configurations and more complex relations between women and men, in the context of multiple oppressions produced by global capitalism

•

In some cases it is subject to the same critiques of elitism and lack of accessibility leveled at poststructuralist approaches

•

Traditional West/rest 'politics of knowledge' might be played out in the context of 'Western feminism', i.e. rendering 'the other' voiceless and invisible

•

Its 'beyond gender' arguments need to be carefully positioned within critiques of neo-colonialisms and global exploitation, otherwise they might lead to cooptation and trivialization of gendered issues and concerns

•

In organizational studies it seems to be particularly troublesome even for those who acknowledge their sympathies for postmodern feminism. There are concerns about accepting the existence of 'other know ledges' outside the bounds of 'Western(ized) knowledge'

•

Extends the critique of Western knowledge beyond deconstruction by articulating other possible conceptualizations and subjectivities. Produces positive images of Third World subjects' capable of agency and representation. Strongly located in specific cultures and histories, and gender/race/class/ethnicity intersections

•

Demonstrates the possibilities of political action and political pluralism . within the micro-political confines of everyday (organizational) life

•

Illustrates additional approaches for organizing residing outside Western views of 'organization'. These approaches are often exemplified in new social movements and new manifestations of popular culture emerging in several (post)colonial countries

people. Are women strong enough to join and even lead men in finding that new vision? (Friedan 1 995: 3 1 -2)

To which we respond: only if we are strong enough to challenge conventional notions of organization, their ethics and values; that is, if we are strong enough to challenge and change the dominant and colonizing organizational discourse, over and over again. That is the aim of this chapter.

NOTES We are grateful to Jill Woodilla and Deborah Litvin for their assistance with research for this chapter. We also want to thank Deb Meyerson, Patricia Y. Martin, and Joyce Rothschild for sharing research materials with us. Many of the ideas we develop here had their beginnings in the course of our collaborations with Sarah Williams Jacobson and Roy Jacques. Finally, we

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acknowledge the extreme patience and helpfulness of the Handbook editors. in particular Cynthia Hardy and Sage's Sue Jones. 1 A core insight in Saussurean linguistics is the contingent relationship between signifier and signified. That is, from this perspective the sign that we use to signify anything is only meaningful because we are able to differentiate it from another sign rather than because it names any essential object or concept. Once this is accepted, the priority of language over thought is established, for language is thus constitutive of the things we can think/know rather than representative of that which we know. 2 Tom Stoppard's contemporary play, Indian Ink, provides a wonderful portrayal of the problems that representing the colonized causes/caused to the colonizer.

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Frye, Marilyn ( 1 983) The Politics of Reality. Freedom, CA: Crossing Press. Gallos, J.V. ( 1989) 'Exploring women's development: implications for career theory, practice and research', in M.B. Arthur, D.T. Hall and B.S. Lawrence (eds), Handbook of Career Theory. Boston: Cambridge University Press. pp. 1 1 0-32. Game, Ann and Pringle, Rosemary ( 1 984) Gender at Work. London: Pluto. Garcia-Canclini, Nestor ( 1 990) Culturas Hibridas: Estradegias para Entrar y Salir de las Modernidad. Mexico: Grijalbo. Gender, Work and Organization (July 1 995) 'Special Issue: The Economics of Equal Opportunities', 2(3): 99- 1 56. Gherardi, Silvia ( 1 994) 'The gender we think, the gender we do in our everyday organizational lives', Human Relations, 47(6): 591-610. Gherardi, Silvia ( 1 995) Gender. Symbolism and Organizational Culture, London: Sage. Gibson, Katherine ( 1 992) 'Hewers of cake and drawers of tea: women, industrial restructuring, and class processes on the coalfields of Central Queensland', Rethinking Marxism, Winter, 5(4): 29-56. Giddings, Paula ( 1 984) When and Where I Enter: the Impact ofBlack Women on Race and Sex in America. New York: Bantam. Gilbreth, Lillian ( 1 96711 926) Wha t 's Ahead for Management? New York: Kraus Reprint of New York: American. Gilligan, Carol ( 1 982) In a Different Voice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Gordon, Francine E. ( 1 974) 'Self-image and stereotypes of femininity - their relation to women's role conflicts and coping', Journal of Applied Psychology, 59(2): 24 1 -3. Grams, R. and Schwab, D.P. ( 1 985) 'An investigation of systematic gender-related error in job evaluation', A cademy of Management Journal, 28(2). Grant, Jan ( 1 986) 'Women as managers: what they can offer to organizations', Organizational Dynamics, 56-63. Gray, Barbara ( 1 994) 'A feminist critique of Collabor­ ating', Journal of Management Inquiry, 3(3): 286-93. Gutek, B.A. and Larwood, L. (eds) ( 1 987) Women 's Career Development. Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Gutek, B.A. and Morasch, B. ( 1 982) 'Sex-ratios. sex role spillover, and sexual harassment of women at work', Journal of Social Issues, 38: 55-74. Hall, Elaine J. ( 1 993) 'Smiling, deferring, and flirting: doing gender by giving "good service"', Work and Occupations, 20(4): 452-7 1 . Hall, Francine S, and Hall, Douglas T. ( 1976) 'Effects of job incumbent's race and sex on evaluations of managerial performance', A cademy of Management Journal, 1 9(3): 476-8 1 . Haraway, Donna ( 1 985) ' A manifesto for cyborgs: science, technology, and socialist feminism in the 1 980s', Socialist Review, 80: 65- 1 07 ,

FEMINIST A PPROA CHES Harding, Sandra ( 1 986) The Science Question in Feminism. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Harding, Sandra ( 1 990) 'Feminism, science, and the anti-Enlightenment critiques', in L.J. Nicholson (ed.), Feminism/Postmodernism. London: Routledge. pp. 83- 1 06. Harding, Sandra ( 1 99 1 ) Whose Science? Whose Knowl­ edge? Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Harding, S. and Hintikka, M. (eds) ( 1 983) Discovering Reality: Feminist Perspectives on Epistemology, Metaphysics, Methodology, and Philosophy of Science. Dordrecht, Holland: D. Reidel. Haring-Hidore, M., Freeman, S.c. Phelps, S., Spann, N. and Wooten, R. ( 1 990) 'Women administrators' ways of knowing', Education and Urban Society, 22(2): 1 70-8 1 . Hartmann, Heidi ( 1 976) 'Capitalism, patriarchy, and job segregation by sex', Signs, 1 (3), part 2: 773-6. Hartmann, Heidi ( 1 98 1 a) 'The family as the locus of gender, class, and political struggle: the example of housework', Signs, 6(3): 366-94. Hartmann, Heidi ( 1 98 1 b) 'The unhappy marriage of Marxism and feminism: towards a more progressive union', in Lydia Sargent (ed .), Women and Revolution. Boston: South End Press. pp. 1 -4 1 . Hartsock, Nancy ( 1 983) 'The feminist standpoint: developing the ground for a specifically feminist historical materialism', in Sandra Harding and Merrill B. Hintikka (eds), Discovering Reality. Dordrecht: D. Reidel. pp. 283- 3 1 0. Hearn, J. and Parkin, P.W. ( 1 987) 'Sex' at ' Work '. New York: St. Martin's Press. Hearn, J . , Sheppard, D., Tancred-Sheriff, P. and Burrell, G. (eds) ( 1 989) The Sexuality of Organi2a­ tion. London: Sage. Heilman, Madeline E. and Herlihy, Joyce Mardenfeld ( 1 984) 'Affirmative action, negative reaction? Some moderating conditions', Organizational Behavior and Human Performance, 33(2): 204- 1 3 . Heilman, Madeline E. and Martell, R . F . ( 1 986) 'Exposure to successful women: antidote to sex discrimination in applicant screening decisions', Organi::ational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 37: 376-90. Heilman, Madeline E. and Stopeck, M.H. ( 1985) 'Being attractive, advantage or disadvantage? Performance based evaluations and recommended personnel actions as a function of appearance, sex, and job type', Organizational Behavior and Decision Pro­ cesses, 35: 202- 1 5 . Helgesen, Sally ( 1 990) The Female A dvantage: Women 's Ways of Leadership. New York: Doubleday. Hennig, M. and Jardim, A. ( 1 977) The Managerial Woman. New York: Pocket Books. Holvino, Evangelina ( 1 993) 'The Chicana worker meets OD: a deconstructive reading of Productive Work­ places'. Paper presented at the National Meeting of the Academy of Management, Atlanta, August. Holvino, Evangelina ( 1 994) 'Women of color m organizations: revising our models of gender at

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work', in Elsie Y. Cross, Judith H. Katz, Frederick A. Miller and Edith W. Seashore (eds), The Promise of Diversity. New York: Irwin. pp. 52-9. hooks, b. ( 1 98 1 ) A in 't I a Woman. Boston: South End Press. hooks, B. ( 1 984) Feminist Theory: from Margin to Center. Boston: South End Press. Horner, Matina ( 1 972) 'Toward an understanding of achievement-related conflicts in women', Journal of Social Issues, 28(2): 1 57-76. Horney, Karen ( 1974) Feminine Psychology. New York: W.W. Norton. Hull, Gloria T., Scott, Patricia Dell and Smith, Barbara (eds) ( 1 982) Bur Some of Us Are Brave. Old Westbury, NY: Feminist Press. i Iunt, David Marshall and Michael, Carol ( 1 983) 'Mentorship: a career training and development tool', A cademy of Management Review, 8(3): 475-85. Hyde, Cheryl ( 1 989) 'A feminist model for macro­ practice: promises and problems', Administration in Social Work, 1 3(3/4): 145-8 1 . Iannello, Kathleen ( 1 992) Decisions without Hierarchy: Feminist Interventions in Organization Theory and Practice. London: Routledge. Ibarra, Herminia ( 1 992) 'Homophily and differential returns: sex differences in network structure and access in an advertising firm', Administrative Science Quarterly, 37: 422-47. ligen, Daniel R. and Terborg, James R. ( 1 975) 'Sex discrimination and sex-role stereotypes - are they synonymous - no', Organizational Behavior and Human Performance, 1 4( 1 ) : 1 54-7. Irigaray, Luce ( 1 985a) Speculum of the Other Woman ( 1 974), translated by Gillian C. Gill. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Irigaray, Luce ( 1 985b) This Sex Which Is Not One ( 1 985), translated by Catherine Porter. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Jackson, B . W . and Holvino, Evangelina ( 1 986) 'Working with multicultural organizations: match­ ing theory and practice', in Proceedings of the OD Network Conference. New York: OD Network. pp. 84-96. Jacobs, Jerry A. ( 1 992) 'Women's entry into manage­ ment: trends in earnings, authority, and values among salaried managers', A dministrative Science Quarterly, 37: 282-30 1 . Jacobson, Sarah Williams and Jacques, Roy ( l989a) 'Feminism(s) and organization studies: possible contributions to theory from women's experiences'. Unpublished manuscript, University of Massachu­ setts, Amherst. Jacobson, Sarah Williams and Jacques, Roy ( 1 989b) ' Beyond androgyny: future direction for gender research' . Paper presented at the National Meeting of the Academy of Management, Washington, DC, August. Jacques, Roy ( 1 992) 'Critique and theory building: producing knowledge "from the kitchen'' ', A cademy of Management Review, 1 7(3): 582-606.

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Jaggar, Allison M. ( \ 983) Feminist Politics and Human Nature. Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Allanheld. Jago, Arthur G. and Vroom, Victor H. ( \ 982) 'Sex differences in the incidence and evaluation of participative leader behavior', Journal of Applied Psychology, 67(6): 776-83. Jardine, A.A. ( 1 985) Gynesis. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Jelinek, Mariann and Adler, Nancy J. ( 1 988) 'Women: world class managers for global competition', Academy of Management Executive, 2( 1 ): 1 1 - 1 9. Jick, Todd D. and Mitz, Linda F. ( 1 985) 'Sex differences in work stress', Academy of Management Review, 1 0(3): 408-20. Jones, Carol and Causer, Gordon ( 1 995) ' ''Men don't have families": equality and motherhood in technical employment', Gender, Work and Organization, 2(2): 5 1 -62. Joreen ( 1 973) 'The tyranny of structurelessness', in A. Koedt, E. Levine and A. Rapone (eds), Radical Feminism. New York: Quadrangle Books. pp. 28599. Joseph, Gloria and Lewis, Jill ( 1 98 1 ) Common Differences: Conflicts in Black and White Feminisl Perspeclives. New York: Anchor. Kanter, Rosabeth Moss ( 1 977) Men and Women of ille Corporalion. New York: Basic Books. Kerfoot, Deborah and Knights, David ( 1 993) 'Manage­ ment, masculinity and manipulation: from paternalism to corporate strategy in financial services in Britain', Journal of Managemenl Siudies, 30(4): 659-77. Klein, Melanie ( 1 965) Contributions 10 Psycho Analysis: 1 921-1945. London: Hogarth Press. Koedt, A., Levine, E. and Rapone, A. (eds) ( 1 973) Radical Feminism. New York: Quadrangle Books. Koen, Susan ( 1 984) Feminist Workplaces: A llernalive Models for the Organization of Work. PhD dissertation, Union for Experimenting Colleges, University of Michigan Dissertation Information Service. Kolb, Deborah M. ( 1 992) 'Women's work: peace­ making behind the scenes', in D.M. Kolb and J. Bartunek (eds), Hidden Conflict in Organi=ations. Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Kolb, D.M. and L.L. Putnam (in press) 'Through the looking glass: negotiation theory refracted through the lens of gender', in S. Geason (ed.), Frontiers in Dispute Resolution in Labor Relations and Human Resources. East Lansing, M I : Michigan State University Press. Kondo, Dorinne K. ( \990) Crafting Selves. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Konrad, Alison M. and Gutek, Barbara A. ( 1 986) 'Impact of work experiences on attitudes toward sexual harassment', A dministrative Science Quar­ terly, 3 \ (3): 422-38. Kovalainen, Anne ( 1 993) 'At the margins of the economy: women's self employment in Finland 1 960- 1 990'. Publications of the Turku School of

Economics and Business Administration, Turku, Finland. Kram, K.E. ( 1 985) Mentoring at Work. Glenview, IL: Scott, Foresman. Kristeva, Julia ( 1 980) Desire in Language ( 1 977). New York: Columbia University Press. Kvande, Elin and Rasmussen, Bente ( 1 994) 'Men in male-dominated organizations and their encounter with women intruders', Scandinavian Journal of Management, 1 0(2): 1 63-74. Lacan, Jacques ( 1 977) Ecrits. New York: W.W. Norton & Co. Larwood, L. and Gutek, B. ( 1984) 'Women at work in the USA', in MJ. Davidson and c.L. Cooper (eds), Working Women: An Internalional Survey. Chiche­ ster: Wiley. pp. 237-67. Leidner. Robin ( l 99 I a) 'Stretching the boundaries of liberalism: democratic innovation in a feminist organization', Signs, 1 6(2): 263-89. Leidner, Robin ( l 99 I b) 'Serving hamburgers and selling insurance: gender, work, and identity in interactive service jobs', Gender and Society, 5(2): 1 54-77. Lewis, Diane ( 1 977) 'A response to inequality: black women, racism, sexism', Signs, 3: 339-6 1 . Loden, Marilyn ( 1 985) Feminine Leadership, or How to Succeed in Business without Being one of the Boys. New York: Times Books. Lorber, Judith ( 1 986) 'Dismantling Noah's Ark', Sex Roles, 14( 1 1 / 1 2) : 567-80. Lorber, Judith ( 1 994) Paradoxes of Gender. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Lorde, Audre ( 1 983) 'The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house', in Cherrie Moraga and Gloria Anzaldua (eds), This Bridge Called My Back. New York: Kitchen Table Press. pp. 98- 1 0 1 . Lugones, Maria C . and Spelman, Elizabeth V . ( 1 983) 'Have we got a theory for you! Feminist theory, cultural imperialism and the demand for "the woman's voice"', Women's Siudies International Forum, 6(6): 573-8 1 . Lyotard, J.F. ( 1 984) The Postmodern Condition: a Report on Knowledge. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Mai-Dalton, Renate R. and Sullivan, Jeremiah J. ( 1 98 1 ) 'The effects of manager's sex o n the assignment to a challenging or a dull task and reasons for the choice', Academy of Management Journal, 24(3): 603 - 1 2. Mainiero, Lisa A. ( 1 986) 'Coping with powerlessness: the relationship of gender and job dependency to empowerment-strategy usage', Administrative Science Quarterly, 3 1 (4): 633-53. Mani, Lata ( 1 989) 'Multiple mediations: feminist scholarship in the age of multinational reception', Inscriplions, 5: 1 -24. Marin, L. ( 1 99 1 ) 'Speaking out together: testimonials of Latin American women', Latin American Perspec­ tives, 1 8(3): 5 1 -68. Marshall, Judi ( 1 984) Women Managers: Travelers in a Male World. London: Wiley.

FEMINIST APPROA CHES Marshall, Judi ( 1 989) 'Revisioning career concepts: a feminist invitation', in M.B. Arthur, D.T. Hall and B.S. Lawrence (eds), Handbook of Career Theory. Boston: Cambridge University Press. pp. 275-9 1 . Marshall, Judi ( 1 995) Women Managers Moving On. London: Routledge. Martin, J .E. and Peterson, M.M. ( 1 987) 'Two-tier wage structures: implications for equity theory', Academy of Management Journal, 30(2). Martin, Joanne ( 1 990) 'Deconstructing organizational taboos: the suppression of gender conflict in organizations', Organization Science, 1 (4): 339-59. Martin, Joanne ( 1 994) 'The organization of exclusion: institutionalization of sex inequality, gendered faculty jobs and gendered knowledge in organiza­ tional theory research', Organization, 1 (2): 401 -3 1 . Martin, Patricia Yancey ( 1990) ' Rethinking feminist organization', Gender and Society, 4(2): 1 82-206. Martin, Patricia Yancey ( 1 993) ' Feminism and manage­ ment', in Ellen Fagenson (ed.), Women in Management: Trends, Perspectives and Challenges. Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Martin, Patricia Yancey ( 1 996) 'Men, masculinities and managements: gendering and evaluating dynamics', in David Collinson and Jeff Hearn (eds), Men as Managers, Managers as Men. London: Sage. Mies, Maria ( 1 982) The Lace Makers of Narsapur: Indian Housewives Produce for the World Market. London: Zed Books. Mies, Maria, Bennholdt-Thomsen, Vernika and von Werlhof, Claudia ( 1 988) Women: The Last Colony. London: Zed. Mill, Harriet Taylor ( 1 85 1 ) 'Enfranchisement of women', in John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor Mill, Essays on Sex Equality, edited by Alice S. Rossi. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1 970. pp. 89- 1 22. Mill, John Stuart ( 1 869) 'The subjection of women', in John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor Mill, Essays on Sex Equality, edited by Alice S. Rossi. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1 970. pp. 1 23-242. Miller, Jean Baker ( 1976) Toward a New Psychology of Women. Boston: Beacon. Millet, Kate ( 1 970) Sexual Politics. Garden City, NY: Doubleday. Mills, Albert J. ( 1 988) 'Organization, gender and culture', Organization Studies, 9: 35 1 -69. Mills, Albert J. ( 1 995) 'Managing subjectivity, silencing diversity: organizational imagery in the airline industry: the case of British Airways', Organization, 2(2): 243-69. Mills, Albert. J. and Chiaramonte, S. ( 1 9 9 1 ) 'Organiza­ tion as gendered communication act', Canadian Journal of Communication, 1 6 : 3 8 1 -98. Mills, Albert J. and Tancred, Peta (eds) ( 1 992) Gendering Organizational Analysis. Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Minh-ha, Trinh T. ( 1989) Woman, Native, Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. .

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Mir, Raza, Cahis, Marta and Smircich, Linda ( 1 995) 'Global technoscapes and unborn voices: challenges to theorizing global cooperation'. Paper presented at the Conference on organizational dimensions of global change, Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio. Mitchell, Juliet ( 1 974) P,ychoanalysis and Feminism. New York: Vintage. Mohanty, CT. ( l 99 I a) 'Under western eyes: feminist scholarship and colonial discourses', in CT. Mohanty, A. Russo and L. Torres (eds), Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. pp. 5 1 -80. Mohanty, CT. ( 1991 b) 'Introduction. Cartographies of struggle: Third World women and the politics of feminism', in CT. Mohanty, A. Russo and L. Torres (eds), Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. pp. 1 -47. Mohanty, CT., Russo, A. and Torres, L. (eds) ( 1 99 1 ) Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Moi, Toril ( 1985) Sexual/Textual Politics. London: Methuen. Moore, Lynda ( 1 986) Not as Far as You Think. Lexington, MA: Lexington Books. Moraga, Cherrie and Anzaldua, Gloria ( 1 983) This Bridge Called My Back. New York: Kitchen Table Press. Morgan, Robin ( 1 984) Sisterhood is Global: the International Women's 1110vement Anthology. Garden City, NY: Anchor Books. Morgen, Sandra ( 1 994) 'Personalizing personnel decisions in feminist organizational theory and practice', Human Relations, 47(6): 665-83. Morley, Louise ( 1 994) 'Glass ceiling or iron cage: women in UK academia', Gender, Work and Organization, 1 (4): 1 94-204. Morrison, Ann M., White, Randall P. and Van Velsor, Ellen ( 1 987) Breaking the Glass Ceiling. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley. Morrison, Ann M. and Von Glinow, Mary Ann ( 1 990) 'Women and minorities in management', American Psychologist, 45(2): 200. Mueller, Adele ( l 987a) 'Peasants and professionals: the social organization of women in development knowledge'. PhD dissertation, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto. Mueller, Adele ( l987b) 'Power and naming in the development institution: the "discovery" of "women in Peru"'. Paper presented at the Fourteenth Annual Third World Conference, Chicago. Mumby, D . K. and Putnam, L.L. ( 1992) The politics of emotion: a feminist reading of bounded rationality', Academy of Management Review, 1 7 : 465-86. Nash, June ( 1 983) 'The impact of the changing international division of labor on different sectors of the labor force', in June N ash and Maria Patricia Fernandez-Kelly (eds), Women, Men, and the

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International Division of Labor. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Nash, June and Safa, Helen (eds) ( 1 985) Women and Change in Latin America. South Hadley, MA: Bergin and Garvey. Nelson, Debra L. and Quick, James C. ( 1 985) 'Pro­ fessional women: are distress and disease inevitable?', Academy of Management Review, 10(2): 206- 1 8. Nes, Janet A. and Iadicola, Peter ( 1989) 'Toward a definition of feminist social work: a comparison of liberal, radical, and socialist models', Social Work, January: 12-2 l . Newsweek ( 1 995) 'The rise of the overdass', 3 1 July: 3346. Nicholson, L.J. (ed.) ( 1 990) Feminism/Postmodernism. New York: Routledge. Nieva, Veronica F. and Gutek, Barbara A. ( 1 980) 'Sex effects on evaluation', Academy of Managemenl Review, 5(2): 267-76. Nieva, Veronica F. and Gutek, Barbara A. ( 1 9 8 1 ) Women and Work: a Psychological Perspective. New York: Praeger. Nkomo, Stella ( 1 992) 'The emperor has no clothes: rewriting "race in organizations"', Academy of Management Review, 1 7(3): 1 3 3-50. Norton, Sue M. ( 1 994) 'Pregnancy, the family, and work: an historical review and update of legal regulations and organizational policies and practices in the United States', Gender, Work and Organiza­ tion, 1 (4): 2 1 7-26. Ong, Aihwa ( 1 987) Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline: Factory Women in Malaysia. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Osborn, Richard N. and Vicars, William M. ( 1976) 'Sex stereotypes - an artifact in leader behavior and subordinate satisfaction analysis', A cademy of Managemenl Journal, 19(3): 439-49. Paetzold, R . L . and O'Leary-Kelly, A . M . ( 1 994) 'Hostile environment sexual harassment in the United States: post-Merilor developments and implications', Gender, Work and Organization. I : 50-7. Paige, K.E. and Paige. J.M. ( 1 98 1 ) The Politics of Reproductive Ritual. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Parasuraman, Saroj, Greenhaus, Jeffrey, Rabinowitz, Samual, Bedeian, Arthur G. and Mossholder, Kevin ( 1 989) 'Work and family variables as mediators of the relationship between wives' employment and husbands' well-being', Academy of Management Journal, 32(1). Parry, Benita ( 1 995) 'Problems in current theories of colonial discourse', in Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin (eds), The Post-Colonial Studies Reader. London: Routledge. pp. 36-44. Parvikko, Tuija ( 1 990) 'Conceptions of gender equality: similarity and difference', in Marja Keranen (ed.), Finnish ' Undemocracy': Essays on Gender alld Politics. Jyvaskyla: Finnish Political Science Asso­ ciation, Gummerus Printing. pp. 89- 1 1 1 .

Pearce, D . ( 1 978) 'The feminization of poverty: women, work, and welfare', Urban and Social Change Review, 1 1 ( \/2): 28-36. Perry, Elissa L., Davis-Blake, Alison and Kulik, Carol T. ( 1 994) 'Explaining gender-based selection deci­ sions: a synthesis of contextual and cognitive approaches' , Academy of l'vfanagement Review, 1 9(4): 786-820. Peters, Tom ( 1 990) 'The best new managers will listen, motivate, support: isn't that just like a woman?', Working Woman, September: 2 1 6- 1 7. Pettigrew, Thomas F. and Martin, Joanne ( 1 987) 'Shaping the organizational context for black American inclusion', Journal of Social Issues. 43( 1 ) : 4 1 -78. Pfeffer, Jeffrey, and Davis-Blake, Alison ( 1 987) 'The effect of the proportion of women on salaries: the case of college administrators', A dministrative Science Quarterly, 32(1): 1 -24. Phillips, A. and Taylor, B. ( 1 980) 'Sex and skill: notes towards a feminist economics'. Feminist Review, 6: 79-88. Piller, Patricia ( 1 996) 'Women's bodies at work: the development of a typology of the female body in the workplace from a transnational (Canada and New Zealand) study of women's experiences'. Unpub­ lished doctoral dissertation, The Fielding Institute, Santa Barbara, CA. Pilotta, Joseph (ed.) ( 1 983) Women in Organizations. Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press. Powell, Gary N. ( 1 987) 'The effects of sex and gender on recruitment', A cademy of Management Review. 1 2(4): 73 1 -43. Powell, Gary N. ( 1 988) Women and Men in Manage­ menlo Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Powell, Gary N. ( 1 993) Women and Men in Manage­ menl, 2nd edn. Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Powell, Gary N. and Butterfield, D. Anthony ( 1 979) 'The "good manager": masculine or androgynous?', Academy of Managemenl Journal, 22(2): 395-403. Prakash, Gyan ( 1 995) After Colonialism: Imperial Histories and Postcolonial Displacements. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Pringle, Rosemary ( 1 988) Secretaries Talk. London: Verso. Pu1akos, E.D. and Wexley, K.N. ( 1983) 'The relation­ ship among perceptual similarity. sex, and performance ratings in manager-subordinate dyads'. Academy of Managemenl Journal, 26( 1 ). Radhakrishnan, R. ( 1 994) 'Postmodernism and the rest of the world', Organization, 1 (2): 305-40. Ragins, B.R. and Cotton, 1. ( 1 99 1 ) 'Easier said than done: gender differences in perceived barriers to gaining a mentor', Academy of Management Journal, 34: 939-5 l . Ramsey, V. Jean and Calvert, Linda McGee ( 1 994) 'A feminist critique of organizational humanism', Journal of Applied Behavioral Science, 30( 1 ): 83-97.

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FEMINIST APPROA CHES Rantalaiho, Liisa and Heiskanen, Tuula (eds) (forth­ coming) Gendered Practices in Working Life. Macmillan: London. Reinelt, Claire ( 1 994) 'Fostering empowerment, build­ ing community: the challenge for state-funded feminist organizations', Human Relations, 47(6): 685-705. Reinharz, Shulamit ( 1 992) Feminist Methods in Social Research. New York: Oxford University Press. Reskin, Barbara F. and Roos, Patricia A. ( 1 990) Job Queues, Gender Queues. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Rich, Adrienne ( 1 980) 'Compulsory heterosexuality and lesbian existence', Signs, 5(4): 63 1 - 90. Riger, Stephanie ( 1 984) 'Vehicles for empowerment: the case of feminist movement organizations', Preven­ tion in Human Services, 3(2--3): 99- 1 1 7. Robbins, Stephen P. ( 1 996) Organizational Behavior. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Roethlisberger, F.J. and Dickson, W. ( 1 939) Manage­ ment and the Worker. Belknap Press. Rose, Gerald L. ( 1 978) 'Sex effects on effort attributions in managerial performance evaluation', Organizational Behavior and Human Performance, 2 1 (3): 367-78. Rosen, Benson and Mericle, Mary F. ( 1 979) 'Influence of strong versus weak fair employment policies and applicant's sex on selection decisions and salary recommendations in a management simulation', Journal of Applied Psychology, 64(4): 435-9. Rosener, Judy B. ( 1 990) 'Ways women lead', Harvard Business Review, November-December: 1 1 9-25. Rosener, Judy B. ( 1 995) America's Competitive Secret: Utilizing Women as a Management Strategy. New York: Oxford University Press. Rothschild, Joyce ( 1 992) 'Principles of feminist trade union organizations'. Paper presented at the Work­ shop on Feminist Organizations, Washington, DC. Rothschild-Whitt, Joyce ( 1 979) 'The collectivist organization: an alternative to rational-bureaucratic models', American Sociological Review, 44(August): 509-27. Sahlin-Andersson, Kerstin ( 1 994) 'Group identities as the building blocks of organizations: a story about nurses' daily work', Scandinavian Journal of Manage­ melli, 1 0(2): 1 3 1 -46. Said, Edward ( 1 978) Orielltalism. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Said, Edward ( 1 989) ' Representing the colonized: anthropology's interlocutors', Critical Inquiry, 1 5: 205-25. Sargent, A. ( 1 98 1 ) The Androgynous Manager. New York: AMACOM. Sawicki, lana ( 199 1 ) Disciplining Foucault. London: Routledge. Schneier, Craig and Bartol. Kathryn M. ( 1980) 'Sex effects in emergent leadership', Journal of Applied Psychology, 65(3): 34 1 - 5.

Schwartz, A.Y., Gottesman, E.W. and Perlmutter, F.D. ( 1988) 'Blackwell: a case study in feminist adminis­ tration', Administration in Social Work, 1 2(2): 5- 1 5. Scott, 1.W. ( 1 986) 'Gender: a useful category of historical analysis', American Historical Review, 9 1 : 1 053-75. Sealander, J. and Smith, D. ( 1 986) 'The rise and fall of feminist organizations in the 1 970s Dayton as a case-study', Feminist Studies, 1 2(2): 320-41 . Sekaran, U . and Leong, F . (eds) ( 1991 ) Womanpower: Managing in Times of Demographic Turbulence. Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Shearer, Teri L. and Arrington, C. Edward ( 1 993) 'Accounting in other wor(l)ds: a feminism without reserve', A ccounting, Organizations and Society, 1 8(2/3): 253-72. Sheppard, Deborah L. ( 1 989) 'Organizations, power and sexuality: the image and self-image of women managers', in Jeff Hearn, Deborah L. Sheppard, Peta Tancred-Sheriff and Gibson Burrell (eds), The Sexuality of Organizt1tion. Newbury Park, CA: Sage. pp. 1 39-57. Shrivastava, Paul ( 1 994) 'Rereading Bhopal.·Anatomy of a Crisis through a feminist lens', Journal of Management Inquiry, 3(3): 278-85. Sigelman, Lee, Milward, H . Brinton and Shepard, Jon M. ( 1 982) 'The salary differential between male and female administrators: equal pay for equal work?', A cademy of Management Journal, 25(3): 664-7 1 . Smircich, Linda ( 1 985) 'Toward a woman centered organization theory'. Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Academy of Management, San Diego, CA, August. Smith, Catherine Begnoche ( 1 979) ' Influence of internal opportunity structure and sex of worker on turnover patterns', Administrative Science Quarterly, 24(3): 362-8 1 . Smith, Dianne B. and Plant, Walter T. ( 1 982) 'Sex differences in the job satisfaction of university professors', Journal oj Applied Psychology, 67(2): 249-5 1 . Smith, Dorothy ( 1 987) The Everyday World as Problematic: a Feminist Sociology. Toronto: Uni­ versity of Toronto Press. Smith, Dorothy ( l 990a) Texts, Facts, and Femininity: Exploring the Relations of Ruling. London: Routle­ dge and Kegan Paul. Smith, Dorothy ( l 990b) The Conceptual Practices ol Power. Boston: Northeastern University Press. Sommer, Doris ( ]995) 'Taking a life: hot pursuit and cold rewards in a Mexican testimonial novel', Signs, 20(4): 9 1 3-40. Sommer, Doris ( 1 988) 'Not just a personal story: women's testimonials and the plural self', in B. Brodzki and C. Schenck (eds), Life/Lines: Theorizing Women's A uto-Biography. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. pp. 1 07-30. Spelman, Elizabeth V. ( 1 989) Inessential Woman: Problems of Exclusion in Feminist Thought. Boston: Beacon Press. -

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Spence, J.T. and Helmreich, R.L. ( 1 98 1 ) 'Androgyny versus gender schema: a comment on Bern's gender schema theory', Psychological Review, 88(4): 365-8. Spivak, G.C. ( 1 987) In Other Worlds. New York: Methuen. Spivak, G.c. ( 1 988) 'Can the subaltern speak?', in C. Nelson and 1. Grossberg (eds), Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. Chicago: University of lllinois Press. pp. 27 1 -3 1 3. Sternbach, N.S. ( 1991 ) 'Re-membering the dead: Latin­ American women's "testimonial" discourse', Latin American Perspectives, 1 8(3): 9 1 - 1 02. Sterrett, John H . ( 1978) 'The job interview: body language and perceptions of potential effectiveness', lournal of Applied Psychology, 63(3): 388-90. Stivers, Camilla ( 1 993) Gender Images in Public A dministration. Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Stoller, Eleanor Palo ( 1 993) 'Gender and the organiza­ tion of lay health care: a socialist-feminist perspective', lournal of Aging Studies, 7(2): 1 5 1 -70. Strober, Myra ( 1984) 'Toward a general theory of occupational sex segregation: the case of public school teaching', in Barbara F. Reskin (ed.), Sex Segregation in the Workplace. Washington, DC: National Academy Press. pp. 144-56. Strober, Myra and Arnold, Carolyn 1. ( 1 987) 'The dynamics of occupational segregation among bank tellers', in Clair Brown and Joseph A. Pechman (eds), Gender in the Workplace. Washington, DC: Brook­ ings Institution. pp. 1 07-57. Stroh, Linda K. and Brett, Jeanne M. ( 1994) 'Dual­ earner dads versus traditional dads: can we account for differences in salary progressionry' Paper pre­ sented at the National Meeting of the Academy of Management, August. Stromquist, Nelly P. ( 1 990) 'Gender inequality in education: accounting for women's subordination', British lournal of Sociology of Education, 1 1 (2): 1 3753. Tancred, Peta ( 1 995) 'Women's work: a challenge to the sociology of work', Gender, Work and Organi:alion, 2 ( 1 ): 1 1 -20. Taylor, F.W. (1 91 1 ) The Principles of Scientific Management. New York: Norton. Taylor, M. Susan and Ilgen, Daniel R. ( 19 8 1 ) 'Sex discrimination against women in initial placement decisions: a laboratory investigation', A cademy of Management lournal, 24(4): 859-65. Terborg, J . R . ( 1 977) 'Women in management: a research review', lournal of Applied Psychology, 62: 647-64. Tharenou, Phyllis, Latimer, Shane and Conroy, Denise ( 1 994) 'How do you make it to the top: an examination of influences on women's and men's managerial advancement', Academy of Management lournal, 37(4): 899-93 1 . Thompson, Clara ( 1 964) Interpersonal Psychoanalysis. the Selected Papers of Clara Thompson, edited by M .P. Green. New York: Basic Books.

Tong, Rosemarie ( 1 989) Feminist Theory: a Com­ prehensive Introduction. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Treiman, Donald J. and Hartmann, Heidi (eds) ( 1 9 8 1 ) Women, Work. and Wages: Equal Pay for lobs of Equal Value. Washington, DC: National Academy Press Tsui, Anne S., Egan, Terri D. and O'Reilly, Charles A. III ( 1 992) 'Being different: relational demography and organizational attachment', A dministrative Science Quarterly, 37: 549-79. Tuana, Nancy and Tong. Rosemarie (eds) ( 1 995) Feminism and Philosophy. Boulder, CO: Westview. United Nations ( 1 995) Human Development Report. Geneva: United Nations. Valentine, Patricia and McIntosh, Gordon ( 1 990) 'Food for thought: realities of a women-dominated organization', Alberta lournal of Educational Research, XXXVI(4): 353-69. Varca, Philip E., Shaffer, Garnett Stokes and McCauley, Cynthia D. ( 1 983) 'Sex differences in job satisfaction revisited' , Academy of Management loumal, 26(2): 348-53. Warren, Kay B. and Bourque, Susan C. ( 1 987) 'Gatekeepers and resources: gender and change in Latin American countries'. Report for the Gender, Technology, and International Development Project, co-sponsored by the Rockefeller Founda­ tion and the International Development Research Center. Warren, Kay B. and Bourque, Susan C. ( 1 99 1 ) 'Women, technology, and development ideologies: analyzing feminist voices', in Micaela di Leonardo (ed.), Gender at the Crossroads of Knowledge: Feminist Anthropology in the Postmodern Era. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. pp. 278-3 1 1 . Waters, L.K. and Waters, Carrie Wherry ( 1969) 'Correlates ofjob satisfaction and job dissatisfaction among female clerical workers', lournal of Applied Psychology, 53(5): 388-9 1 . Weaver, Charles N . ( 1 978) 'Sex differences i n the determinants of job satisfication', A cademy of Management loumal, 2 1 (2): 265-74. Weedon, Chris ( 1 987) Feminist Practice and Post­ structuralist Theory. Cambridge: Basil Blackwell. West, Candace and Fenstermaker, Sarah ( 1 995) 'Doing difference', Gender and Society, 9: 8-37. West, Candace and Zimmerman, Don H. ( 1987) 'Doing gender', Gender and Society, 1 (2): 1 25-5 1 . Wharton, Amy S . ( 1 99 1 ) 'Structure and agency in socialist-feminist theory', Gender and Society, 5(3): 373-89. Wiley, Mary Glenn and Eskilson. Arlene ( 1 982) 'Interaction of sex and power base on perceptions of managerial effectiveness', Academy of Manage­ ment lournal, 25(3): 67 1 - 7. Winnicott, D.W. ( 1 975) Through Paediatrics to Psycho­ analysis. New York: Basic Books.

FEMINIST APPROA CHES Wollstonecraft, M. ( 1 792) A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, edited by Carol Poston. New York: W.W. Norton, 1 975. Woodul, Jennifer ( 1 978) 'What's this about feminist businesses?', in Alison Jagger and Paula S. Rothenberg (eds), Feminist Frameworks. New York: McGraw-HilI. pp. 1 96-204. Young, Iris ( 1980) 'Socialist feminism and the limits of dual systems theory', Socialist Review, 1 0(2-3). Zammuto, Raymond F . , London, Manuel and

25 1

Rowland, Kendrith M. ( 1 979) 'Effects of sex on commitment and conflict resolution', Journal of Applied Psychology, 64(2): 227-3 1 . Zavella, Patricia ( 199 1 ) 'Mujeres i n factories: race and class perspectives on women, work, and family', in Micaela di Leonardo (ed.), Gender at the Crossroads ofKnowledge. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. pp. 3 1 2-36. Zimmer, Lynn ( 1 987) 'How women reshape the prison guard role', Gender and Society, 1 (4): 4 1 5-3 1 .

Part Two

REFLECTIONS ON R E S E A R C H , T H E O RY AND PRAC TI C E

9

Data in Organization Studies RALPH STABLEIN

Organization studies (OS) is about understand­ ing the social world we organization students inhabit. It is not a closed system of study like logic or mathematics. OS is necessarily an empirical study, exploring attitudes, behaviours, experiences, artefacts, symbols, documents, texts, feelings, beliefs, meanings, measures, facts and figures. Even the armchair/conceptual theorists must muse on empirical data. But what is to count as data of organizational life? There is no clear consensus on an answer among the community (or is it communities?) of scholars who study organizations. Some organizational students (OSers) run well-con­ trolled experiments to produce data which others claim 'have little or nothing to say about the realities oforganizational behavior' (Lawler 1 985: 4). Some spend months 'in the field' reporting their data as ethnographic tales that others dismiss as mere anecdotes (Martin 1 990). Some ask hundreds and thousands of people to answer carefully chosen questions producing data which others disparage as simplistic, distorted reflec­ tions of the respondents' organizational reality, unrelated to their organizational behaviour. Can we reconcile these paradigm-laden posi­ tions and arrive at an acceptable definition of data for OS? The advantages of a common position are clear. If the field can establish a common paradigm, resources will flow more freely, and research will accumulate more 'successfully' (Pffefer 1 993). We could all use the money! However, will the accumulation of knowledge reflect the variety and complexity of organizational reality? Many argue that accu­ mulation is an illusion (see Cane1la and Paetzold 1 994 and Jaros 1 994 for specific responses to Pfeffer). These critics rely on contemporary philosophy of science (Kuhn 1 970) and the

sociology of scientific knowledge (Ashmore 1 989) to support their position. The arguments applied to OS are well developed (Burrell and Morgan 1 979; Morgan 1 983; Hartman 1 988). A more recent challenge comes from post­ modern and poststructural theorizing in the humanities (Zald 1 994). Cooper (Cooper and Burrell 1 988; Cooper 1 989) and Burrell ( 1 988) have written extensively on the implications of postmodernism for organizational studies. Hassard and Parker ( 1 993) provide a sampler of views on the utility and significance of post­ modernism for organization studies. Postmodern theorizing challenges the very notion of a common ground. In particular, postmodernists warn against any totalizing narrative (e.g. Jeffcut 1 994a), i .e. an attempt to provide an all­ encompassing explanation. They would argue that any attempt to develop a universal definition of data for OS is doomed. Yet, my strategy in this review will be to offer such a definition of data in organization studies. However, I make no claim to absolute truth in doing so. Instead, I offer this grand narrative, bracketed as a heuristic for OS. I believe we can self-consciously use modernist writing techni­ ques to forge temporary consensus, to create the shared tacit knowledge and assumptions required to do OS. Thus I do not write in opposition to the postmodern. As Deetz has noted in discussing competing research pro­ grams, they can be seen not as 'alternative routes to truth, but as specific discourses which, if freed from their claims of universality and/or com­ pleteness, could provide important moments in a larger dialogue about organizational life' ( 1 995: 5). Though I cannot promise the beauty of Kubla Khan, I join Coleridge in asking you, the reader, for the suspension of your disbelief.

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THE UNIVERSAL NARRATIVE

When one abstracts highly enough, the differ­ ences between entrenched research practices blur, revealing the contours of the research landscape. From this height, we can describe the universal characteristics of all OS research. Three features stand out: researcher purpose, audience, and data. Purpose

Organizational research is a purposeful human activity. These purposes can be described broadly by Habermas's ( 1 9 7 1 ) typology of human interests. OSers may work for a technical interest in control and prediction, for a practical interest in achieving mutual action-oriented understanding or for an emancipatory interest in extending human autonomy and responsi­ bility (Stablein and Nord 1 985; Rao and Passmore 1 989). More local descriptions of purpose might be 'resolving a debate in the literature', 'being concerned for the welfare of the group', 'solving a morale problem' , 'devel­ oping an understanding of . . .', 'legitimating resistance in a workplace'. The purpose of a research project or program is often called the research question . This expression is too suggestive of traditional hypothesis testing to cover the varieties of contemporary organization studies. Note that purpose is research-specific. More basic human motivations such as 'to get tenure' or 'to help humankind' must be funnelled through a particular research endeavour. Each research project or research stream has a purpose or purposes. Like all people, OSers are complex. They are limitedly rational, and more than rational. Their purposes may be multiple, changing, emergent, even conflicting. Their purposes may be con­ scious or not. But all OS is 'on purpose'. Audience

The second feature of all OS is audience. Organization studies, like all knowledge produc­ tion, is a social business (Frost and Stablein 1 992: 253). Though we may toil individually, we always work on common problems. Kuhn ( 1 970) described most natural science as 'puzzle­ solving' with paradigm-defined problems and boundaries. The description holds for OS. The very structure of OS journal articles, opening with introduction and literature review, illus­ trates the social nature of our activity. The ritualistic, even cynical, nature of these 'paeans'

in no way reduces their function of linking individual projects to a larger community of understanding. Even paradigm-making research defines itself in relation to existing puzzles and solutions (Gersick 1 992). Of course, an individual may have a personal understanding of organization that he or she does not or cannot share. While it remains an idiosyncratic insight, OS is not enriched or changed. Our studies are incomplete until we communicate our results to others who study organization. Usually this communication is written: work­ ing paper, journal article, consulting report, book chapter. The postmodernists emphasize the role of the audience. They remind us that these papers are not just written, they are read as well (Cooper 1 989; Smircich 1 992). The failure of authors to acknowledge diverse audiences and the expectation of readers that all reports are written for them has created unnecessary and unresolvable debates, such as that over the relevance of OS (Cartner and Stablein 1 994). When we acknowledge the audience, it is no surprise that the elegant technical jargon intended for other initiates of the researcher cult is nearly indecipherable for the novice student or stressed-out employee. Four key audiences can be identified for OS. Smallest in number, but most important to the organizational scholar, is the audience of his or her peers, other organizational researchers. If we limit our count to active researchers, i.e. those who publish in English language researcher­ oriented journals, the total would not exceed a few thousand world-wide. Academic book authors and contributors would add a few more. The audience for a particular manuscript in a sub-field is a good deal smaller. If we limit the circle of active researchers to those whose work is cited, the estimate of their numbers falls to the hundreds. The majority of publishing organizational scholars received their PhDs from, and are employed in, a relatively small number of 'elite' North American universities. Those who primarily teach organizational studies comprise the next largest group, number­ ing in the tens of thousands. Most have earned research degrees. They read the research literature. It is the teachers who pay the bills for research publications by maintaining profes­ sional association memberships and seeing that their libraries order the books and journals. In the USA, some of these teachers will be employed in tertiary institutions with an explicit teaching mission . Many in the USA and elsewhere work in institutions which espouse research values. However, the empirical reality is that many employed in these institutions will publish infrequently over their career.

DA TA IN ORGA NIZA TION STUDIES For students, we write textbooks, in which we try to provide uncomplicated summaries of research. Most texts also include attempts to create proxy organizational experiences. We may even try to make OS 'interesting'. Participants in organizations, in their millions, include almost everyone in the world, but organizational researchers show interest in reaching but a few. As critical scholars are fond of reminding us (Alvesson and Willmott 1 992), managers benefit most from the vast bulk of participant-oriented writing efforts. Their dollars for practice-oriented journals, executive educa­ tion and consultancy provide welcome additions to the researcher's personal bank balance and the university's drooping bottom line.

Data

The third universal feature of organization studies, data, links the researcher's purpose and the audience. More specifically, all organization students select and interpret data for their audience in the attempt to achieve their purposes. I choose the phrase 'interpret data' quite carefully over alternatives such as 'present data' or 'summarize data'. These phrases suggest a mechanical process of recording and playing back, i.e. that the data speak for themselves. This does not do justice to the effort and creativity required of researchers in data collection, analysis and reporting ( Frost and Stablein 1 992; Hackman 1 992; Meyer et al. 1 992) . This language also hides the researcher in a haze of 'objectivity' that is unwarranted in reports of quantitative (Gephart 1 988) or qualitative studies (Van Maanen 1 988). In another modernist move, I will draw a boundary around my aims for this text. I will attempt to focus my attention on the data of OS, i.e. data collection as opposed to data analysis. I leave discussion of the various data analytic techniques to others (see e.g. Bryman 1 989; Pedhazur and Schmelkin 1 99 1 ; Miles and Huberman 1 994).

So, WHAT ARE DATA? All data are representations. Respondents' questionnaire answers, experimental subjects' behaviours, employee records, financial records, boardroom conversations, production records, shopfloor humour, corporate balance sheets, informants' expressions, participant or non­ participant observations and emotional reac­ tions, annual reports, acetycoline blood levels and pulse rates, photos, videos, corporate

257

architecture and the products of earlier research may all be used by organization students to represent aspects of organizational reality. However, not all representations are data. For example, one might estimate the morale of assembly line workers by speaking to the firm's public relations officer. The polished response is a representation, but it is unlikely to be data, that is, it will do little to inform our under­ standing of shopfloor attitudes. A t the extreme, one could use a random number generator to represent respondents' ages. Not very smart, not data, but it is a representation. We need to identify what kinds of representations are to count as data. As representations, data imply things that are represented, and a process of representing. Both characteristics must be examined to separate data from other sorts of representations.

The 'Thing' Represented

Traditionally, scientists understood the empiri­ cal world, the thing measured, as the 'real thing', 'out there' waiting to be discovered (Lakatos 1 965). That view of science has been thoroughly revised. Philosophers of science have under­ mined the logical foundations of deduction, induction and falsification (see Chalmers 1 982 for an accessible account). Historians of science (e.g. Kuhn 1 970) and sociologists of scientific knowledge (see Ashmore 1 989 for a review) have studied historical and contemporary scientific practice. They have discovered that the tradi­ tional account bears little resemblance to the practices of working scientists. Mitroff and Kilmann ( 1 978), Burrell and Morgan ( 1 979), Astley ( 1 985), Hartman ( 1 988), and others have applied and extended these views to OS. Today most scholars would conclude that we invent rather than discover the empirical world. Any appeal to scientific evidence regarding the 'true' nature of the world is suspect and subject to rcvision as science evolves and changes (Kuhn 1 970; Tibbetts 1 990). The 'thing' that our data represent is not a concrete object or experience. Instead it is a human conception, constituted by the sensemaking of scientists. The impact of this conclusion for OS is sometimes misunderstood. Some would conclude that 'anything goes', that each individual scientist is free to proceed as they prefer. However, it is strikingly clear that this is not the case. Science is never an isolated individual activity. I t is a social practice. In the words of Vidich and Lyman: Although it is true that at some level all research is a uniquely individual enterprise - not part of a sacrosanct body of accumulating knowledge - it is

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also true that it is always guided by values that are not unique to the investigator: we are all creatures of our own social and cultural pasts. However, in order to be meaningful to others, the uniqueness of our own research experience gains significance when it is related to the theories of our predecessors and the research of our contemporaries. ( 1 994: 42)

For a study to be personally meaningful (Sande­ lands 1 993), an organizational scholar may hold a realist metaphysical belief, e.g. how can I accept that there is no underlying structure to the world? Doing organization studies does not require revision of such a belief. Similarly, the ontological commitment of an individual post­ modernist to language as the only reality is acceptable, but irrelevant to organization stu­ dies. The empirical world that we represent is what we, as a human scholarly community, under­ stand it to be. It amounts to the ideas and conceptions we use to understand: the constructs and relations of our theories. The 'we' is im­ portant. Individuals may claim anything they like about organizations but a claim does not become organizational reality until it is socially accepted. Dissertation advisers, editors, review­ ers, readers and conference participants must 'see' the reality, too. As a social practice, OS is not only an intel­ lectual enterprise. It is an economic, political and moral enterprise as well. As the title of this Handbook suggests, there is no one study of organization. There is not a single community of organizational scholars. This opens the possibility of multiple organiza­ tional realities. Some aspects of organizational reality are universally perceived by organization studiers, e.g. workers and managers. Other aspects are contested, e.g. whether the organiza­ tion is a reification or a legitimate social actor ( Hartman 1 988). Still other organizational phenomena are perceived by some groups of organization students but not others, e.g. class (Burrell and Morgan 1 979). Discussions of this issue in OS are often framed as discussions of paradigm incommen­ surability. Groups holding diverse paradigms 'see' different worlds and set different questions. My position is in line with Weaver and Gioia ( 1 994), Martin ( 1 990), Hassard ( 1 990) and others who argue that complete incommensur­ ability is rare, if not impossible. Studying differ­ ent organizational realities will yield different questions and answers which are more, or less, insightful for the various paradigms represented with OS. (See the dialogue between Stewart Clegg and John Jermier for a thoughtful dis­ cussion of the relationship between empirical research and theory: Jermier 1 994. )

The relationship between critical organiza­ tional researchers and managerialist researchers provides an example. The critical research com­ munity sees organizational reality as a structure of exploitation and power. One aspect of modern organizational society is self-exploitation (Gramsci 1 97 1 ). The notion of false conscious­ ness is sometimes employed to help explain this self-exploitation. Many researchers find this concept absurd. yet they can accept some of the data produced by critical researchers as relevant to constructs they employ, such as socialization and organizational culture, even while they differ on its interpretation. In summary, if data are representations, they must represent empirical things. The 'things' are our ideas about empirical 'reality'. Organiza­ tional students attempt to represent aspects of empirical, organizational reality. Different groups of scholars will have different ideas about different empirical realities. Thus, each will try to represent a different organizational reality. Successful data require that other scholars understand the reality a researcher's data are trying to represent. The starting point of any data-producing effort must be participation in a shared understanding of the empirical organizational phenomena to be represented.

The Process of Representing

Representing a shared organizational reality requires systematic activity undertaken by the researcher. Often, this activity goes unnoticed, or unreported, in OS. I t is part of the background, taken-for-granted assumptions that lie behind our organizational explorations. A successful representation process provides data that organizational scholars can interpret and ana­ lyse in ways that increase their shared under­ standing of an empirical reality. Such data are characterized by a two-way correspondence between the data and the organizational reality the data represent. The term comes from a well-established tradition in mathematical psychology that approaches the measurement of psychological attitudes as a representational problem (Coombs et al. 1 970). I will develop their ideas in defining data for organization studies. Remembering that the empirical world is a shared system of concepts, representation is achieved when one maps the 'thing' that we have conceptualized into a symbol system, what Dawes ( 1 972) would call a 'one-way correspondence' between the empirical world and the symbolic system. But for the representations to produce data, there is a stronger requirement, a two-way correspon­ dence. The mapping must be into a symbolic

DA TA IN ORGANIZA TION STUDIES system which allows one to map back from the symbolic system to the original empirical system of interest. An example should help make sense of this rather awkward criterion. I use a ruler to independently measure the height of lena in one room, then Sal in another room. I am using the ruler to map a one-way correspondence between an empirical quality (our concept of height) and a symbolic system (the real numbers - a ratio scale). Relying solely on the relations of this symbolic system, I am able to determine that lena is taller than Sal. If this conclusion holds when I bring lena and Sal together and see them standing side-by-side, then two-way correspondence has been achieved. I have used properties of the symbolic system to make true inferences about the empirical world. In this example, the real number system property of magnitude or order allows me to determine who is taller without reference to the empirical world. Six is bigger than five, therefore lena is taller than Sal. If I apply my ruler to lots of people, I might use additional properties of the real number system (addition and division to calculate a t-test) to confirm that, for example, basketball players are generally taller than football players. In both cases, the mapping from the empirical world, via symbolic manip­ ulation, mapped back on to the empirical world, providing insight. The data are successful in representing an empirical world in a way that produces shared understandings. By way of counterexample, a Maori activist in New Zealand recently adopted the name 'Te Ureturoa' which means 'mighty warrior'. A newspaper ( The Press 6 November 1 994) reported his name to mean 'the long penis'. This embarrassing mistake occurred when a newspaper reporter used a Maori-English dictionary (the 'ruler' which the journalist used to map the world of Maori words into the symbol system of the English language) to map a one-way correspondence between the activist's name and an English language representation. The reporter presumed that the literal transla­ tion would provide English speaking readers with data on the reality of Maoridom. But the one-way representation did not provide data about the Maori world. Two-way correspon­ dence, i.e. a meaningful understanding of the activist's name, is not achieved. The literal translation, in this case, is not data. As is often the case, literal translation was not an effective representational strategy. A more sophisticated strategy, taking into account context and utilizing back-translation, would be required to produce successful data. The representational measurement theorists are especially interested in representing psycho­ logical attributes using the properties of various

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formal number systems to produce measuring scales (e.g. nominal, ordinal, interval and ratio). They warn us that just because one assigns numerals to an empirical phenomenon (one-way correspondence), it does not follow that these numerals are from the real number system. The manner of assigning the numerals must reflect the relations of the empirical world and match the real number system relations (i.e. equal intervals relative to an absolute zero). As para­ metric statistics are derived from the properties of the real number system, representational measurement theorists are wary of the extensive use of statistics in empirical research. (For reviews of the issues and subsequent controver­ sies, see Michell 1 986.) If one measures several persons' preferences for participation in two groups on a Likert scale where 1 equals strong agreement to the state­ ment, 'I like to work in a participative group', one-way correspondence is achieved. But the numerals I , 2, 3, 4 and 5 represent real numbers only if the psychological distances represented by these reports are equal relative to an absolute zero point of no preference for participation. Can one calculate a I-test using real number properties to determine if the two groups are equivalent in their preferences? Lord ( 1 953) suggests that the numbers don't know where they come from. Indeed the computer will churn out a t-ratio. However, as MacRae ( 1 988) and others have correctly observed, the researcher does know where the numbers come from! Therefore representational measurement the­ orists insist on a representation theorem. For a particular measuring strategy, the representa­ tional theorem is an explicit statement of the assumptions required to justify the claim that data, i.e. two-way correspondence, have been produced. In the case of measurement of preferences on a ratio scale, the representational theorem is that transitivity (i.e. if a is preferred to b, and b is preferred to c, then a is preferred to c) applies to the preferences (Coombs et al. 1 970: 1 3) . Because of their exclusive interest in numerical symbol systems, the representation theorem consists of a mathematical proof. This requirement limits the representational theorist to a small number of alternative symbol systems. Even within the scope of numerical systems, only a few types are considered, usually counting, ratio, interval, ordinal, or nominal. OS scholars tend to be less orthodox. In the participation item above, most OSers would agree that the measuring strategy fails to map into a ratio or even an interval scale. In terms of an ordinal scale, the representational measurement theorist would argue that any monotonic transformation (i.e. order preserving) of the respondents' answers would yield the same information

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about the respondents' attitudes. However, I suspect most OSers would be very surprised if people gave the same responses when the alternatives offered were I , 2, 3, 4, and 500. Thus most psychologically oriented scholars implicitly consider Likert scale responses to roughly map the empirical world of respondent opinion onto a mixed ordinal/interval numerical system which can be manipulated statistically to produce roughly valid inferences about the respondents' psychological states. The representational assumptions for Likert­ style research might include: •

•

•

•

Respondents are willing to respond truth­ fully, e.g. no socially desirable responding (Zerbe and Paulus 1 987). If this assumption is untenable, then we might consider unobtrusive, non-reactive measures (Webb et a\. 1 966). Respondents understand the item as the researchers intended it to be understood, including such issues as respondent literacy, shared dialect, and framing (Clark and Schrober 1 992). Respondents can make the judgement the item requires, e.g. memory retrieval and information processing capacities are ade­ quate (Ericsson and Simon 1 980: Arkes and Hammond 1 986). Respondents can report the judgement, e.g. translate it into the metric of the response format.

However, in OS, we are not limited to numerical symbol systems. Much of our data utilize natural language or various technical languages as the symbol systems which represent the empirical world. Then, we manipulate these symbols to make inferences about the organizational world. John Van Maanen's ( 1 979) elegant title to his preface of the landmark A dministrative Science Quarterly special issue on qualitative methodol­ ogy expresses my sentiment: 'The map is not the territory'. The tape recordings and field notes of the fieldworker are not the culture of the group. They are the symbols which are analysed to present, we hope, an insightful description of the culture. For a non-quantitative example of representa­ tional assumptions consider Spradley ( I 979a), which provides an introduction to semantic ethnography. The researcher and the researched speak different languages or dialects. As an ethnographer, I must map the meaning of the native speaker into my language, such that a two-way correspondence is achieved. The inferred meanings must allow me to use the phrase correctly in new situations and settings to establish that two-way correspondence has been achieved. If I am able to operate successfully in

novel situations then true measurement or understanding has occurred. A researcher who can demonstrate this level of cultural under­ standing will be taken seriously by other ethnosemanticists. Data in OS should be representations which maintain a two-way correspondence between the empirical world and the symbol system. The rule for evaluating the criterion is the adequacy of the representational process. The representational process is essentially a theory of data produc­ tion. Like all theories, measurement theories cannot be proven correct. However, if we make our representational process explicit, we can examine the representational assumptions and actively consider evidence relevant to them. Consider again the introductory example of the ruler and height. As an everyday practice, we measure away with no concern for the validity of the ruler. But, if we consciously attend to the rationale . for ruler use, we can develop demon­ strations that are socially accepted evidence in favour of this representational process. The same is true for representational processes in OS. We can, for example, develop scales to detect socially desirable responding or compare the reports of various informants to increase our confidence that we have achieved two-way correspondence.

A Definition of Data

OS are representations u'hich maintain a !H'o-Imy corre:,pondence betH'een an empirical reality and a symbol sys tem .

Data in

An empirical reality is the set of ideas consti­ tuted. developed and sustained by a subcom­ munity of organizational scholars. Data are produced by a representing process that is documented by the representational assump­ tions. Data are then manipulated within the symbol system. yielding results which increase our understanding of an organizational reality. Applying an explicit and defensible represen­ tational process to a well-known portion of empirical reality yields good organizational data. Poor data result from an inadequate representa­ tional process and/or an inadequate under­ standing of the organizational phenomenon represented. If the phenomenon is understood and the representational strategy is flawed, the data are usually found wanting, the article rejected (Schwab 1 98 5 ) . If the underlying empirical phenomenon is not well understood, messier data are acceptable. As our under­ standing increases, we generally insist on better data.

DA TA IN ORGA NIZA TION STUDIES KINDS OF DATA

We have arrived at a general definition of data in organizational studies. Now it is time to return from the heights of generalization to the diversity of data produced in organizational researches. The heart of the postmodern and poststructural challenge is the challenge to one answer, one empirical reality, one representational strategy. At the local sites of organizational studies, differ­ ences in culture, moral ethic, intellectual history, academic discipline, etc. have yielded different subcommunities of organizational scholars who produce different sorts of data. Thus, for example. we observe differences between North American and European scholarship, between organizational psychology, organizational sociology, organizational economics, and organizational anthropology, between manage­ rial studies, critical studies, and feminist studies. Different kinds of data result from the intersection of the nature of the empirical reality each subcommunity is attempting to understand, and the representational processes each uses to represent aspects of that organizational world. Each combination is institutionalized as the research practice that each subcommunity develops, teaches and enforces. It would be neat if these various data could be logically connected in a two-dimensional space of shared organizational reality and representational prac­ tice. Alas, my perception of the organizational studies landscape is not so simple. In descending from the conceptual heights of a data defin ition to represent the data-using reality of OS, I do not find consistent groupings. Rather than attempt to force the variety of organizational data into a clean typology, I will try to do justice to the diversity of OS research. In most instances, I adopt conventional terms: survey data, experi­ mental data, case data, secondary data. One conventional category of organizational data, interviewing, receives no mention because interviewing does not constitute data in the framework proposed here. The term is used so loosely that the only commonality across uses is simply talking. The term is too broad. It does not stand as a symbol system oriented to the representation of an organizational reality. To become a distinct sort of data it requires an adjective, such as in ethnographic interviewing (Spradley 1 979a) or behaviour description interviewing (Janz et al. 1 986). Abandoning the Quantitative/Qualitative Divide

I do not use the distinction between quantitative and qualitative data in categorizing OS data,

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despite the fact that this is the most frequently used typology. Instead, I attempt to reposition this key distinction in the organizational sciences. The quantitative/qualitative distinction is a binary opposition that hides a more complex, non-dichotomous, and non-hierarchi­ cal distinction. The popular quant/qual distinction is rooted in the separation of numerical representations from non-numerical representations. As we have seen above, numerical representations are not members of a single class. The Arabic numerals 1 , 2, 3, etc. may represent counting, positions on the real number line, equally spaced intervals, ordered magnitudes on an ordinal scale, labels in a nominal classification system, or some hybrid of these systems. In many cases these numerals represent non-numbers, e.g. the sentence: ' I agree strongly with the statement.' Thus, I find the distinction hazy and not very informative on the numerical side of the divide. The quant/qual distinction condemns 'every­ thing else' to the non-numerical. subordinate side of the divide. The 'everything else' includes a diverse set of target organizational realities and representational practices (Van Maanen et al. 1 982: 1 5). Thus, attempts to define 'qualitative' data are hopeless. Instead, I develop the notion of ethno-data. Ethno-data are the extraction, from the qualitative morass, of those data which researchers claim represent the native experi­ ence. Ethno-data emerge from a variety of rep­ resentational strategies, but are united in their commitment to representing the empirical reality as it is experienced by the organizational participants. In the following sections, I will briefly char­ acterize the natures of the empirical realities and the types of representational processes utilized in the production of various kinds of organiza­ tional data. Together these provide an overview of data used in contemporary organization studies.

Survey Data

The paper-and-pencil questionnaire is probably the most frequently used method of data production in organization studies. Podsakoff and Dalton ( 1 987) have provided one estimate of usage. They surveyed the 193 empirical research articles published in the 1 985 volumes of

Academy of Management Journal, Administrative Science Quarterly, Journal of Applied Psy­ chology, Journal of Management and Organiza­ tional Behaviour and Human Decision Processes. The authors of over a third (36 per cent) of the articles primarily employed the questionnaire.

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The organizational reality of the questionnaire user is a nomological net of causal relationships between constructs. The nomological relations hypothesized by the researcher constitute middle range theories intended to explain a portion of organizational reality (Pinder and Moore 1 980), e.g. employee turnover. The terminology of middle range theory is Merton's ( 1 962). He developed the term to contrast his 'modest' approach with that of comprehensive (i.e. 'grand') social theories such as those of Parsons and Marxist scholars. Middle range theory is an analytic approach to understanding organiza­ tion. The researcher simplifies the complexity of organizational life by specifying a subset of relations that can be extracted and explored with relative independence from the rest. The basic organizational phenomenon is the construct. For organization studies, an annual chapter by Donald Schwab ( 1 980) has emerged as a foundational statement for this approach to data. Schwab defines the construct as 'a conceptual variable', i.e. an 'entity capable of assuming two or more values which is of a mental nature' ( 1 980: 5). Thus a construct is an idea, a researcher's idea, related to other ideas in a theory of organizational behaviour, belief, etc. As the construct only exists in the head of the individual researcher and the collective head of the community as revealed by the 'literature', only indirect assessment of organizational reality is possible. To study organizational life, the construct must be represented by a concrete operation. The first step in the representational process for survey data is careful definition of the con­ struct, its psychometric properties, and the relationship between the construct and other constructs in the researcher's theory. Next, questions which are intended to represent (measure) the construct are developed. Indivi­ dual respondents are asked to answer the questions. These answers are data. The method for demonstrating the two-way correspondence of the data is called construct validation. The construct validity of the data is defined as ' the correspondence between a construct and the operational procedure to measure or manipulate that construct' (Schwab 1 980: 6). The correspondence can never be directly demonstrated. However, several proce­ dures can provide falsifying or confirming evidence regarding the degree of construct validity of a data-producing operation. Description of the representational process is the most important way to demonstrate the correspondence of construct and measure. The ability to do so relies on clear definition of the construct. Ironson et al. ( 1 989) provide an example in the measurement of job satisfaction.

They carefully distinguish between the constructs of overall (general) job satisfaction, job facet satisfactions (e.g. with pay, co-workers, etc.) and facet composites (e.g. averaging pay and co­ worker satisfaction). Only in the light of these distinctions does the fancy number crunching that follows make sense as evidence of validity. Having achieved clear definition of the construct, current practice requires developing multiple questions to represent all but the most straightforward of constructs (e.g. self-reported sex, age, etc.). This representational strategy allows estimation of internal consistency relia­ bility, i.e. the degree to which the multiple items which are intended to measure the same construct actually are interrelated. Other types of reliability may also be estimated, in particular, reliability over time (stability or test-retest reliability). Again, note the importance of defining the construct when conducting reliability analyses. Some constructs, such as personality states, are expected to be stable over time. Thus, high test­ retest reliability estimates for the measure would provide evidence of construct validity. Other constructs, e.g. mood, are not expected to be stable: thus high reliability could provide evidence of construct invalidity. It is a truism among questionnaire data users that appropriate demonstration of reliability is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for judging the data to be construct valid. Reliability evidence establishes that respondents view the multiple items (a scale) in a common way, but it does not establish that the respondents view the items in the way that the researcher intended. The appropriate evidence would show that the scale is related to other scales which are construct valid measures of the same construct (convergent validity) and relate less strongly to construct valid measures of related, but not identical, constructs (differential or discriminant validity). For example, a questionnaire measure of global work satisfaction should relate more closely to other general work satisfaction scales than to measures of specific facets of job satisfaction (Ironson et al . 1 989). Schwab ( 1 980) is especially keen to encourage the demonstration of differential construct validity. Research practice does not always live up to prescription. Relying, again, on the Podsakoff and Dalton ( 1 987) survey, about two-thirds of published articles reported reliability evidence. A paltry 4.48 per cent of authors provided validity evidence. The failure to provide validity data is extremely important if one accepts the definition of data proposed here. The failure to provide validity evidence is a failure to document two­ way correspondence. The representational assumptions underlying survey data require

DA TA IN ORGANIZA TION STUDIES construct validation evidence. Substantive find­ ings from surveys assume that the inferences are from construct valid measures. Schwab argues that our failure to provide for adequate construct validation of our measures means that 'our knowledge of substantive relationships is not as great as is often believed, and (more speculatively) not as great as would be true if the idea of construct validity received greater attention' ( 1 980: 4). Should researchers choose to demonstrate reliability and validity, a variety of methods are available. Primarily, correlation and factor analytic techniques are used. Increasingly, the measurement model is estimated by treating the latent variables calculated by LISREL as estimates of the constructs. This approach is becoming available to a wider set of researchers as recent releases of the program are increasingly user-friendly. Sometimes experimental data are produced to support the construct validity of a measure. For example, Breaugh and Becker ( 1 987) report three studies as part of a larger research program to provide construct validity evidence for the three facets of the work autonomy scale (Breaugh 1 985). One of these studies is an experiment in which the authors created high and low autonomy working conditions for experimental subjects. The subjects were then asked to complete the questionnaire. The answers varied from high to low, as predicted. The authors interpret these data as evidence of construct validity. This tradition of data production is associated with researchers in the areas of industrial! organizational (lIO) psychology and organiza­ tion behaviour (OB). It has its roots in psychological testing (Cronbach and Meehl 1 955). 110 psychologists and mainstream OB researchers will find the language of this section familiar. Other OSers who use questionnaires may find the language alien but the essential view of organizational reality and the survey repre­ sentational process should still hold. For example, Schwab ( 1 980) points out the similarity of his construct validation position and Blalock's ( 1 968) discussions of questionnaires in socio­ logical research.

Experimental Data

In an earlier handbook review, Weick ( 1 965) observed that the experiment was an infrequent, but useful, way to generate organizational data. Today, experimental data are a frequent base for organizational studies. One indicator, the Pod­ sakoff and Dalton ( 1 987) data, is a bit ambiguous, but it would appear that about 30

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per cent of the articles reviewed used experi­ mental procedures in either the laboratory or the field. The empirical reality of the organizational experimentalist is essentially the same as that of the survey user. Both test middle range theories which posit causal relations among constructs. They differ on one important point. The experimentalists are far less optimistic about the ability to isolate the set of causal relations of interest from the rest of organizational reality. Experimentalists are convinced that the world is a densely interrelated net of constructs with subtle, complex and powerful effects on each other. They have shown that seemingly minor factors can destroy the two-way correspondence of a representational process (Rosenthal and Rosnow 1 969). For example, if the experimenter is aware of the hypotheses under study, his or her expectations can influence the responses of experimental subjects. Two-way correspondence for experimental data is achieved by demonstrating internal validity. To do so, the experimental representa­ tional strategy follows the traditional natural scientific method (Boring 1 969). A hypothesized cause (independent variable) is varied by the experimenter. The effect or dependent variable is observed. If the dependent variable varies more than could be expected by chance alone, a causal relation is inferred. Because the world is causally dense, other possible causes (alternative expla­ nations) of any effect must be discounted to produce experimental data. This sort of experi­ mental design is said to possess internal validity. It yields 'interpretable' data. There are three strategies for eliminating alternative explanations (Caporaso 1 973). First, the experimenter can control other possible causes, seeing to it that they do not vary. Second, potential causes that cannot be held stable may be measured and accounted for in the statistical analysis of the effect. Third, protection against the effects of causes that can be neither controlled nor measured is gained through random assignment of subjects to the different states of the hypothesized cause. This strategy is the least desirable because it increases the total variation of the dependent variable, making it harder to detect the covariation of the hypothe­ sized cause and effect. However, randomization has the strength of protecting against unantici­ pated causes. Taken together, these strategies can produce an experimental situation which generates two-way correspondence. When there is adequate control for the effects of alternative explanations, experimental data can be informa­ tive. The organizational experimentalists appear to rely on the behaviourist tradition in psychology

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for their version of this model of data produc­ tion. Individual subjects (rats, people) are placed in simplified environments to control other causes. The researcher manipulates an aspect of the environment, the hypothesized cause (rein­ forcement schedule, pay plan), called the stimulus, operation, manipulation, condition or treatment. The effect, the subjects' 'behaviour' (bar pressing, widgets produced), is recorded. This is called the response. The cognitive revolution in psychology has left the behaviourists behind (Bruner 1 990), but their influence on representational strategy remains (see Landy 1 986 for a discussion of this point with respect to testing). For example, the behaviourist assumptions are betrayed in the experimentalist's treatment of behavioural versus verbal data. Behavioural data are counted and treated as unproblematic. Verbal data are treated with suspicion (Nisbet and Wilson 1 977) and require elaborate defences (Ericsson and Simon 1 980). In contrast, other subcommunities within OS, e.g. ethnographers, tend to privilege the verbal and worry about the meaning of the behavioural. Field experiments play an important role in organization studies. Just how important is an issue of perennial debate (Bryman 1 989; Locke 1 986). The foundational guidance for organiza­ tional field experimentation is provided by Campbell and Stanley ( 1 966) in their discussions of how to design experiments that produce valid data. The Cook and Campbell ( 1 979) update expands their discussion of threats to validity. Limiting the threats to validity increases the likelihood that the experiment will produce good data, i.e. that two-way correspondence is achieved. Where the surveyor measures constructs, the experimentalist manipulates constructs. Where the surveyor emphasizes the measurement of each construct, the experimentalist is more concerned about representing the relationships between constructs.

Ethno-data

Many terms could be used to describe this sort of data. Evered and Louis ( 1 98 1 ) describe ethno­ research as 'inquiry from the inside' as opposed to 'from the outside'. Their catalogue of synonyms includes: antipositivistic, phenomenologicaL ethnomethodological, experiential, existentiaL ideographic, participative, anthropological, qua­ litative, dialectic, pragmatic, subjective, intensive, soft, and high context. Morey and Luthans ( 1 984) draw on the emic-etic distinction from anthro­ pology for a label. Burrell and Morgan ( 1 979) popularized the term 'interpretative'.

The defining characteristic of this sort of organizational data is the nature of the empirical reality that the researcher is attempting to rep­ resent. Ethno-researchers are intent on discover­ ing and communicating an organizational reality as it is experienced by the inhabitants of that reality. The 'ethno-' prefix has come to be associated specifically with this view. The phrase 'ethno-data' is intended to be broad enough to encompass a variety of research practices and traditions that aim to produce data that represent insiders' lived experiences. The organizational reality studied by the ethno-researcher is different from that of the experimenter or survey researcher. In contrast to their researcher-designed organizational reality of constructs to be measured or manipulated, the ethno-researcher's organizational world is full of constructs to be discovered. The participants of this world make their own meanings and weave their own patterns. The ethno-researcher is a visitor, a voyeur, a stranger on a journey of discovery. The quality of ethno-data, i.e. the degree to which two-way correspondence has been achieved, is equivalent to the fidelity with which representation matches the native viewpoint. There is strong agreement on the organizational reality to be represented, but much less consensus on the representational strategies which yield two-way correspondence. Some ethno-research­ ers discuss this in terms of reliability and validity, as defined above (Becker 1 970). Kunkel and McGrath ( 1 972) argue that there is a necessary trade-off between the two. Others explicitly deny the applicability of these criteria. As substitutes, Lincoln and Guba ( 1 985) propose the criteria of credibility, transferability, dependability and confirmability. Golden-Biddle and Locke ( 1 993) identify authenticity, plausibility and criticality in their analysis of three exemplary ethno­ research reports. The Denzin and Lincoln ( 1 994) handbook devotes several chapters to the discussion of criteria (Guba and Lincoln 1 994; Altheide and Johnson 1 994; Denzin 1 994). Achieving two-way correspondence for the ethno-researcher usually involves 'firsthand involvement in the social world' (Filstead 1 970: title) as a participant observer. Participant observers listen, learn, take notes, converse, interview, ask questions, test preliminary under­ standings, watch, read, count, and anything else that seems to 'help' them understand the meanings of the world they are exploring. Participant observation is best characterized as immersion in the field setting. Participant observation is a multi-method representational enterprise. Participant observation in organiza­ tions almost always includes: casual and systematic interviewing, casual and systematic

DA TA IN ORGANIZA TION STUDIES observation, and collection of substantial docu­ mentary materials. There has been an emphasis on learning how to do 'fieldwork' (a synonym for participant observation) by actually going out and doing it. The 'do-it-yourself' tradition is giving way to more regularized specifications of representa­ tional practice. Methodological appendices (Whyte 1 955; Mills 1 959) and collections of war stories (Hammond 1 964) are being replaced or complemented by textbooks. Some ethno­ data representational processes are very sys­ tematic, for example ethnosemantics. Spradley's ( l 979a; 1 979b) manuals lay out step-by-step protocols for ethnosemantic investigations. Note that ethno-data need not be produced by participant observation techniques. Gersick ( 1 988) provides an example of non-participant observation of work groups. In other cases, the ethno-researcher may interpret artefacts from the field. For example, Barley et al . ( 1 988) develop a sophisticated content analysis techni­ que to represent the insider's understanding of organizational culture. They argue that the symbolic and conceptual view of organizational culture held by academic and practitioner subcultures can be derived from analyses of the pragmatics of written communications in each subculture's journals. The paper provides an excellent exposition of their theoretical rationale, and of the representational process they designed. The recently published Handbook of Qualitative Research describes a variety of rep­ resentational processes, many of which could be used to produce ethno-data for organization studies (Denzin and Lincoln 1 994). Ethno-data were brought into the conscious­ ness of OS in a big way by the explosion of organizational culture research in the early 1 980s (e.g. Pondy et al. 1 983; documented by Barley et al. 1 988) and the discussion of alternative paradigms (Van Maanen 1 979; Burrell and Morgan 1 979; Morgan 1 983; Lincoln and Guba 1 985). Corners of OS have been long aware of this sort of data, e.g. occupations' and professions' folks could not avoid the Chicago School sociology of the 1 920s onward (e.g. Becker et al. 1 96 1 ; Roy 1 952). Conferences and subsequent publications have served to support the use of ethno-data in the study of organizations. Key conferences have included those held in Illinois (Pondy et al. 1 983); Vancouver (Frost et al. 1 985), and a series of small conferences on interpretative ap­ proaches held at Alta. Of particular note is the biennial meeting sponsored by the mainly European Standing Conference on Organiza­ tional Symbolism (SCOS). European OS has shown a greater affinity for ethno-data. Until recently, research using ethno-data has had

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limited access to the mainstream journals of OS, with the exception of special issues (Adminis­ trative Science Quarterly, Van Maanen 1 979; Journal of Management, Frost 1 98 1 ; Adminis­ trative Science Quarterly, Jelinek et al. 1 983). In their survey of 1 98 5 journals, Podsakoff and Dalton ( 1 987) classified only two studies that may have been based on ethno-data. In part, this may be due to the tradition of reporting in books. The amount of data produced, the 'wordiness' of the symbolic system and the sub­ sequent analyses often require more pages than the journals allow. Another explanation offered is the failure of positivitically oriented editorial boards to recognize ethno-data as anything more than anecdote (Morgan 1 985).

Case Data

In the early days of OS, case studies were an important type of data. Daft ( 1 980) documents the dominance of case reports in the Adminis­ trative Science Quarterly in 1 959. The founda­ tional works in organizational sociology are cases (Blau 1 955; Gouldner 1 954a; 1 954b). Cases undergirded the theory and practice of the Tavistock Institute (e.g. Trist and Bamforth 1 9 5 1 ; Rice 1 958). By the late 1 960s there is evidence of a decline in the reliance on cases in Administrative Science Quarterly (Daft 1 980) and in sociology (Hamel 1 993). However, there is evidence of increased interest in case studies in the 1 980s and 1 990s in the US and Europe (Hamel 1 993; Ragin and Becker 1 992; Bartunek et al. 1 993). The 'case study method' is a well-used term that has many meanings. Ragin ( 1 992) discusses these at length. Gummesson ( 1 99 1 ) offers an interesting discussion of case varieties from a Scandinavian point of view. For organization studies, I argue there are three main types of case data. The various types of cases share the focus on one, complex organizational unit . The various types of cases share a common rep­ resentational process of multi-method immer­ sion. However, they differ in important aspects of the organizational reality that is studied. The three types of case studies are: ethno-cases, usually known as ethnographies; 'theory-gener­ ating' cases; and 'exemplar' cases. The ethno-case or ethnography produces ethno-data. It is oriented to representing the native participants' reality, as described in the previous section. The classic cases in this tradition include Whyte's ( 1 955) Street Corner Society, Dalton's ( 1 959) Men Who Manage, and Becker et al.'s ( 1 961 ) Boys in White. The tradi­ tion continues with recent organizational ethno­ graphies such as Kunda's ( 1 992) Engineering

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Culture, Collinson's ( 1 992) Managing the Shop­ floor and Jackall's ( 1 988) Moral Mazes. The second sort of case data is oriented to generalizable theoretical propositions. Thus the organizational reality of this sort of case writer is the world of researcher-defined constructs. Unlike the world of the questionnaire researcher, the organizational world is a complex and tangled world where cutting the Gordian knot is not as simple as asking the right questions. Experimentation is not an available strategy because the case researcher's issues are more sociological and there are insufficient indepen­ dent units for a field experiment. Case research in this tradition generally involves the same multi­ ple method immersion of the ethno-researcher, but researcher views are the starting point. The classic cases of industrial sociology fit this mould. For example, in Patterns of Industry Bureau­ cracy, Gouldner ( 1 954a) attempts to discover and describe the ways Weber's ideal bureaucracy is found in an American factory and mine. In The Dynamics of Bureaucracy, Blau ( 1 955) tackles a similar project in two government agencies. Kanter's ( 1 977) case study of Men and Women of the Corporation is frequently cited as a masterpiece of this genre of case research . In her methodological appendix, she clearly states: 'This study represents primarily a search for explanation and theory rather than just a report of an empirical research' ( 1 977: 2 9 1 ). In justi­ fying the representational strategy of case immersion, she quotes another pioneer of organizational studies: Crozier, who framed the methodological problems inherent in studies of large-scale organizations well: 'Comprehensive studies of human relations prob­ lems at the management level are usually hampered by two sets of difficulties. First, the complexity of the role structure in modern organisations causes much ambiguity and overlapping, making it impossible to match really comparable cascs and to use rigorous methods meaningfully. Second, the general emphasis on status and promotions gives a crucial importance to the human relations game, thus preventing the researcher from obtaining reliable data on the central problem of power relationships' (Crozier, 1 964, p. 1 1 2). Thus, a combination of methods such as used in the classical sociological field studies emerges as the most valid and reliable way to develop under­ standing of such a complex social reality as the corporation. ( 1 977: 297)

The exemplar case is the third sort of case data. It is amongst the most influential data in OS. Exemplary case data are influential because they are often presented to organizational partici­ pants and students in OS classrooms. Often, such presentations are oriented to action. The

audience comprises powerful organizational participants who can follow the template provided by an exemplar to intervene in their own organizations. For students, these vivid cases provide ersatz organizational experiences against which they test other data and ideas. The organizational reality of the exemplar­ based researcher consists of nearly universal problems, processes or solutions relevant to most organizations. The lessons drawn from studying individual leaders, events or organiza­ tions are taken to be informative for most organizational behaviour. Sometimes, this understanding of organizational reality is expli­ citly acknowledged (Frost and Stablein 1 992; Schon 1 987). Often, it is implicit. The representational strategy for the exemp­ lary case varies on an important dimension from that of other cases. For the types of data that we have discussed, the representational strategies are sensitive to issues of bias, authenticity, and validity using a variety of techniques such as reliability, experimental control, triangulation, multiple informants, etc. The researcher, as data generator, has taken a critical stance in their work. The exemplary case researcher tends to be less concerned about this aspect of the repre­ sentational process. Sometimes, the reporter is a key organizational participant and clear parti­ san, e.g. the CEO of Johnsonville Sausage. Sometimes, the researcher is ideologically com­ mitted, e.g. Walton ( 1 977) at Topeka Pet Food, or may be acting as a paid consultant. Exemplary case data make a bigger break with the traditional views of 'scientific' that linger in OS approaches. Thus, other OS researchers have tended to ignore or attack exemplary case data. I argue that this reflects an outdated view of science. The impetus of the approach suggested in this chapter is to be more open-minded in considering OS data. In identifying the organiza­ tional reality and representational strategy of the exemplary case researcher, other researchers can more carefully develop their views regarding a particular exemplar. Yes, the lack of criticality may be taken as a disadvantage for OS purposes and audiences. However, there may be offsetting advantages, beginning with the availability of the data. The access and resources of top consultants and powerful organizational participants are beyond the reach of most OS researchers. The particular bias of exemplary data is not a priori worse than the bias of a critical or cynical view.

Secondary Data

Data interpreted by an organizational scholar that were originally collected for another

DA TA IN ORGANIZA TION STUDIES purpose are called secondary data. Secondary data could be employment records, annual reports, government censuses, production fig­ ures, regulatory reports, meeting minutes, etc. Secondary data could have been collected for another research project, but, usually, have been collected for non-research purposes, such as regulatory compliance or management control. It is difficult to meet the criteria of good data using secondary data. The secondary data user has the task of demonstrating that the data represent the organizational reality of interest in the second research project. This reality may be the same as that of the original data collector, or it may not be. The researcher cannot assume that the original collector was trying to represent the same organizational reality. The burden of proof is on the secondary data user to demonstrate that the data work for the new use. Stewart and Kamins ( 1 993) provide many colourful examples of the misuse of secondary data and an introduction to their proper use. Difficulty is often encountered when organiza­ tional researchers use performance data in studies of employee behaviour. Sometimes ex­ plicitly, sometimes implicitly, organizational indices collected for technical or management reasons are used as measures of employee­ controlled outcomes. When these numbers, which may be excellent data for production planning, are used in models of employee behaviour, two-way correspondence can break down. Sutton and Rafaeli ( 1 988; 1 992) discovered the problem in their attempt to use a convenience store's sales figures to represent the effectiveness of employee friendliness. When they found a negative relationship between friendliness and sales, they did not advise store owners to hire gruff sales clerks. Instead they accepted that two-way correspondence had broken down. The data did not inform them about organizational reality. Next, they gener­ ated ethno-data in a variety of field settings. With a richer understanding of organizational reality in this particular retail setting, they realized that sales represented how busy a store was, i.e. store pace. Sales did not represent the original dependent variable (clerk performance) that the authors thought clerk friendliness would influence. A slow pace, reflected in low sales, provides both the opportunity and the motivation for otherwise bored sales clerks to be friendly. The secondary data user cannot design a representational process that will yield the desired two-way correspondence. Nor can the researcher assume that the original data collector did. Thus, the researcher must demonstrate that

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the existing data do represent the empirical reality of interest.

Text as Data

The texts authored by organizational scholars are the data for postmodernist scholars. Postmodern organizational scholars are not interested in the organizational reality that the authors try to expose, understand, predict, etc. They deny the existence of any organizational reality other than the text itself. The original writer presents the text as a report of his or her interpretation of the data, yielding greater understanding of organizational reality. In contrast, the postmodernist treats the text as the empirical reality to be studied. As presented by the original author the text constitutes a reality. For the postmodern researcher the text is data which represent and constitute multiple realities. However, the representational process of deconstruction is required to reveal these realities. The deconstructive process involves overturning and displacing the intended mean­ ings of the text (Linstead 1 993; Cooper 1 990). It is not simply a dialectical process of antithesis and synthesis. Deconstruction has been associated with revealing patriarchal, capitalist and racial oppression but, much to the dismay of some feminists, critical theorists, and colonial theorists, it does not privilege the cause of the previously oppressed or hidden. Nor does it deny the validity of the intended meanings of the powerful. It does not simply reverse the ordering or priority of meaning. A good deconstruction represents and constitutes multiple realities without freezing the potential meanings of the text. Two-way correspondence for textual data means unsettling, discomfort­ ing and disturbing our taken-for-granted knowledge of reality. Therefore, not every text provides data for the deconstructionist. Texts which are considered significant and influential in forming our knowl­ edge of organization are the appropriate raw data. It is 'foundational' texts that constitute our well-accepted, comfortable empirical reality. Thus, Kilduff ( 1 993) chose March and Simon's Organizations, and Callis and Smircich ( 1 9 9 1 ) chose M intzberg's oeuvre, a s organizational texts to deconstruct. A related interest of the postmodernist is in the ways that authors construct texts which readers accept as authentic and credible accounts. For example, Jeffcut ( l 994b) treats organizational ethnographies as data. In his analysis, he identifies the epic structure of the ethnographic account as crucial to the effective­ ness of ethnographic accounts. In this sense,

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postmodern analyses are meta-analyses: analyses of the products of other organizational scholars.

D ISCUSSION AND FUTURE DIRECTIONS

In my attempt to survey the breadth and depth of OS data, much has been lost. I have violated the integrity of the organizational research I describe. I have torn data from their analyses. I have largely ignored the content that the symbols have represented and the insight that subsequent analyses have generated. Fortu­ nately, other chapters in this volume do sum­ marize and review the substantive gains of various data users in their endeavours to under­ stand organization. What do I offer in defence of this exercise? First, I present a definition of data in OS that takes account of contemporary views on the nature of organizational studies as a human enterprise. A subcommunity of organizational studies shares a view of an empirical, organiza­ tional reality. Members of that community attempt to represent that empirical reality in ways that allow the development of that view and the generation of deeper understanding. Two-way correspondence between the reality and the symbol system used to represent it will yield success in the attempt. By thinking about data in this way, we can be clearer about what we are doing. This will benefit the development of research within subcommunities, and com­ munication across subcommunity boundaries. Second, I present a survey of the kinds of data in use in OS. The definition offers a different perspective on what we do, and invites different sorts of comparisons. It is not a comprehensive, a complete, or a final survey. I hope the definition offered here invites new categories and comparisons. My closing hope is that this chapter ( I ) contributes to the understanding and development of our research practices and thus to our insights, and (2) reduces the forces of fragmentation, while denying the need for unification in OS.

NOTE I thank Stewart Clegg, Cynthia Hardy, and the reviewers for their feedback on this chapter.

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10 Action Research jar the Study of Organizations COLIN EDEN AN D CHRIS HUXHAM

In common with other forms of qualitative research (Miles and Huberman 1 984; Strauss and Corbin 1 990; Gummesson 199 1 ; Denzin and Lincoln 1 994), action research has become increasingly prominent among researchers involved in the study of organizations as an espoused paradigm used to justify the validity of a range of research outputs. The term is sometimes used rather loosely to cover a variety of approaches. In this chapter we shall use the term to embody research which, broadly, results from an involvement by the researcher with members of an organization over a matter which is of genuine concern to them and in which there is an intent by the organization members to take action based on the intervention. Interventions of this kind will necessarily be 'one-offs', so action research has frequently been criticized for its lack of repeatability, and, hence, lack of rigour. These criticisms are countered by the argument that the involvement with practi­ tioners over things which actually matter to them provides a richness of insight which could not be gained in other ways (Rowan and Reason 1 9 8 1 ; Whyte 1 99 1 ) . This i s a valid and important argument to which we shall return. However, in this chapter a major concern is to identify the range of approaches over which the argument may apply. For example, we would not consider any organizational intervention project to be necessarily action research, unless it satisfies characteristics which make it rigorous research. Similarly, we would not consider any piece of research within an organization to be necessarily action research, unless it satisfies characteristics which make it action oriented. Aguinis ( 1 993) argues that action research has

much in common with traditional scientific method. Our own view, however, is that good action research will be good science though not in a way which depends necessarily upon meeting all the tenets of traditional scientific method. But this requires a clear understanding of what is needed to achieve 'good quality research' in this type of setting. Criticism of action research as poor social science is often made without understanding the (albeit often unrealized) potential for rigour. Nevertheless, the label 'action research' is unfortunately often used as an excuse for sloppy research. The main thrust of this chapter is thus an exploration of the nature and boundaries of good action research in the context of the study of ol ganizations. We are not attempting to argue, in general, for action research as against other types of research. We do not intend to formulate a definition of action research because we do not believe this would be helpful or productive. To do so is likely to narrow its application as well as encourage wasteful defin itional debate. We believe that action research is better captured through an interlocking set of characteristics than a definition. Inevitably many of the characteristics of good action research apply to any good research, but we see those identified in this chapter as particularly pertinent for those undertaking action research. In relation to action research these characteristics are often ignored, because they are either seen as not relevant or taken to be not attainable. We indicated, in the first paragraph of the chapter, our starting point for an exploration of the nature and boundaries of action research, where we asserted that:

A CTION RESEAR CH A ction research involves the researcher in working with members of an organization over a matter which is of genuine concern to them and in which there is an intent by the organization members to take action based on the intervention. The underlying argument of the chapter will be that while the above attributes are clearly important to action research, they do not alone give sufficient guidance about its nature. The chapter will thus both narrow down this initial description and elaborate on the detail of it. We shall begin this process by setting action research in context, both in relation to its history and in relation to similar approaches. Our exploration will continue with the development of characteristics which are required if action research is to satisfy the criterion of being both action oriented and research oriented. The characteristics, when taken together, will act as a summary of the important aspects of action research, and of the features which distinguish it both from pure consultancy-type interven­ tions and from other forms of research for the study of organizations. The chapter concludes firstly with a discussion of some of the issues concerned with the reporting of action research, and finally with some commentary about the real world context of organizational action researchers.

A CONTEXTUAL PERSPECTIVE

Our concern in this chapter is with that particular form of action research which is

relevant in the context of the study of organiza­ tions. In order to clarify how this relates to other forms of research, we shall review briefly a number of others which are closely related. Firstly, however, we will present a brief review of the history of these kinds of approaches. Historical Context

The notion of action research is often considered to have been first identified by Lewin in the 1 940s (Lewin 1 946; 1 947), although it is worth noting that Ketterer et al. ( 1 980) mention Collier's ( 1 945) research on 'American Indians' as an early example of action research. Lewin argued that research for social practice needs to take an integrated approach across social science disciplines and should be concerned with 'two rather different types of questions, namely the study of general laws . . . and the diagnosis of a specific situation' ( 1 946: 36). His approach was to design hypothesis testing experiments into workshops which he had been asked to run for

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delegates who were concerned, for example, to design ways of tackling race relations issues. He emphasized that the research data (in his case, concerned with understanding the kinds of change the workshops had produced) would be complex and difficult to keep hold of. The need to design methods for recording ill-structured data was therefore seen as important, as was a focus on the relationship between perception and action - an interpretativist approach to research. Lewin's ( 1 943) work on encouraging the use of meat entrails in everyday cooking is one of the first applications of social science knowledge which was to be labelled 'action research' . In some ways, this was more akin to the traditional controlled experimentation of the physical sciences (Clark 1 972), but it did have the explicit aim of changing behaviour and recording the outcomes of the attempts to do so. The crucial difference between this work and others' was the recognition that the researcher was visible and was expected to have an impact on the ex­ periment. Lewin's work produced a great deal of mistrust about the research conclusions because of the difficulties in measuring outcomes and controlling contextual variables. The emphasis on hypothesis testing is still prevalent among some groups of action researchers (see, for example, the special issue of the Journal of Applied Behavioural Science: Alderfer 1 993). However, as the approach has gained credence, the early notions have been used, extended or re-created by others. This process has led to a variety of action-oriented methods being developed. Soon after the pioneering work in the US, the Tavistock Institute in the UK began a pro­ gramme of research in the coal mining industry which gradually led to an exposition of the relationship between investigatory research and its implications for action (Trist and Bamforth 1 95 1) . This work was to lead to the development of the socio-technical systems approach to thinking about organizational interventions (Emery and Trist 1 963). The work was strongly aimed at conducting research and undertaking associated theory development alongside attempting to make significant changes in organizations. Socio-technical thinking was to dominate action research across the globe, and the work of the Tavistock Institute continued to act as a reference point for others wishing to undertake action research (see Clark 1 975). Collaboration between UK and Norwegian researchers led to Scandinavia enjoying a long association with the development of action research (Emery and Thorsrud 1 969; Thorsrud 1 970; and recently Elden 1 979; Elden and Levin 1 99 1 ) . Notably, significant institutional support was provided for extensive work in Sweden on

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the democratization of the workplace. All of this early work focused upon understanding organ­ izations and organizational change. Alternative Interpretations and Related Concepts

In recent times it has become more difficult to identify the main thrust of action research; the literature has become confused in a variety of. ways. On the one hand, there have been a number of different interpretations of the term action research, while on the other, an assort­ ment of different (but similar) terms has sprung up. Action learning, action science, participatory action research, and action inquiry have each become important labels applied to research which aims to build 'theories within the practice context itself, and test them there through intervention experiments' (Argyris and Schon 1 99 1 : 86). A further confusion arises from the range of other qualitative research approaches which have many characteristics in common with action research. Collaborative and partici­ patory research are possibly the most closely related (Rowan 1 98 1 ; Torbert 1 98 1 ) with many authors, in contrast to ourselves, arguing that action research is necessarily of this type (Peters and Robinson 1 984). Having considered, in the previous section, the historical context, we will now review briefly a number of examples of these closely related, contemporary alternative inter­ pretations and related concepts. In the last fifteen years or so, a network of scholars has developed whose main concern is with the use of some of the principles of action research as a method for developing effective professional practice. The focus of this form of action research is the individual practitioner rather than the organization. Individuals thus undertake research on their own personal practice, in their own practical context, and seek to use the research for their own personal benefit. This kind of action research is thus a form of self-development. This use of action research has sometimes arisen in the context of education research. Indeed the work of Corey ( 1 953) on improving school practices is one early example of action research. It is used by those who are concerned with 'how to live one's values more fully in the workplace in a way which protects integrity, freedom, justice and democracy, [and) how to find new qualitative research forms of account­ ing for oneself within particular social contexts, [and) how to account for the processes of personal understanding' (this was the explicit aim of the 3rd World Congress on Action Learning, Action Research and Process Manage-

ment, 1 994). Thus, for example, 'academics research their own practice as teachers, man­ agers and researchers . . . action research is a systematic form of enquiry undertaken by practitioners into their attempts to improve the quality of their own practice' (Whitehead 1 994: 1 38, our emphasis). This focus on the researcher as investigator, subject, and consumer can be seen as an extension of the work of Argyris and Schon ( 1 974) related to 'double-loop' and 'deutero' learning and its role in developing a 'reflective practitioner' (Argyris and Schon 1 978; Argyris 1 982). Similarly, Torbert ( 1 976; 1 99 1 ), building on what Argyris and Schon prefer to call 'action science', talks of 'action inquiry' as conscious­ ness in the midst of action. The term 'action learning' is perhaps the most common currency presently used to describe this kind of approach (Revans 1 977; 1 978; 1 982). In a similar fashion, at the organizational rather than the individual level, some action researchers use the term 'action research' and 'organization development' as if they were synonymous and seem to imply that action research is solely about creating organizational change (Alderfer 1 993). Another extension of action research is an approach called 'participatory action research'. The key distinguishing feature of this approach is the combination of (i) the central principle of 'participatory' or 'collaborative' research, the notion that some members of the organization being studied should actively participate in the research process rather than just be subjects, with (ii) the central principle of action research, that there should be an intent to take action (Whyte 1 99 1 ). This suggests a two-way relation­ ship; the researcher becomes involved in and contributes to the practitioner's world, and the practitioner becomes involved in and contributes directly to the form of the research output. In itself this is simply a refinement of the kind of action research with which we are concerned. However, participatory action research devel­ oped largely within the context of social research concerned with ideological issues such as worker participation in decision-making. Thus, as with the educationalists' version of action research above, participatory action research is often driven by concerns for the emancipation and empowering of groups and individuals. In this case, 'the values researchers hold and the ideo­ logical perspectives that guide them exert a powerful influence on choices they make in the course of inquiry' (Brown and Tandon 1 983: 281). In practice this has often meant being interested in helping underprivileged groups and being concerned with the kind of social change which seriously questions the dominant values within society. This contrasts starkly with most

A CTION RESEARCH action research aimed at the study of organiza­ tion and organizations - the concern of this chapter - where it is likely that the researcher accepts the dominant managerial ideology. While the focus on the underprivileged thus dominates some participatory action research­ ers, others are driven by a different form of ideology. For this group, 'one important difference between classical action research and participatory action research is that in addition to solving practical problems and contributing to general theory, contemporary forms of action research also aim at making change and learning a self-generating and self-maintaining process in the systems in which action researchers work' (Elden and Chisholm 1 993a: 1 25). Participatory action research is thus often inspired by considerations that are not necessary - or even appropriate - for the study of organizations. Interesting and contemporary explorations of a number of these are contained in Fals-Borda and Rahman ( 1 99 1 ) and the special issue of Human Relations in February 1 993 (Elden and Chisholm 1 993b) on the subject. The Congruence of Action-Oriented Approaches

Throughout the history of these action-oriented approaches to research and learning, whichever tradition has been followed, there has been a consistent defensiveness on the part of research­ ers attached to it. In 1 972 Clark argued that the distinctive features tend to be neglected and slighted, albeit unintentionally, and that much academic commentary is little more than negative criticism. However in the late 1 970s and early 1 980s a number of attempts were made to argue positively not just that action research was valid, but that in a number of respects it was better than the alternatives. Notably a book by Reason and Rowan ( 1 9 8 1 ) sought to bring together writers from all of the traditions mentioned above and argue for the legitimacy of a 'new paradigm' of research based upon cooperative and collaborative research. In the US a paper by Susman and Evered ( 1 978) had sought to legitimize action research within the context of a system of research accreditation in North American academia which has been - some would argue still is driven by positivism. In North America and Europe all of these 'action' -oriented approaches to research are still finding difficulty in accept­ ance on the grounds that they are not science. Argyris and Schon argue that there is 'a funda­ mental choice that hinges on a dilemma of rigour or relevance' ( 1 99 1 : 85), as if the researcher chooses between scientific or action research. In

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this chapter it is argued that good action research must, and can, meet both of these requirements. In defence of its scientific merits it is, perhaps, significant that it is now commonplace for those engrossed in all the related endeavours of action learning, action science, action research and participatory action research to be concerned, at least, with the validity of research data (Aguinis 1 993). Thus there is a concern to collect more subtle and significant data than those which are easily accessed through traditional research methods. For example, in action science Argyris and Schon argue for placing emphasis on the 'spontaneous, tacit theories-in-use . . . especially whenever feelings of embarrassment or threat come into play' ( 1 99 1 : 86). They argue that without an awareness of the impact of these dimensions it is not possible to be certain of the status of data. Most action researchers now pay a great deal of attention to the intricacies of research data and argue that traditional positivist research methods trivialize data collection. Although the above discussion has sought to distinguish action research aimed at the study of organiza­ tions from the other approaches, the latter do offer important comment on data collection which is highly relevant to action research as we define it. They also similarly have much of relevance to say about issues such as analysis or synthesis of data and about the presentation of results. Since many of these issues are of concern to all action-oriented researchers, this chapter will draw selectively from all of the traditions when to do so is consistent with its outlook.

ACTION RESEARCH CHARACTERIZED

The purpose of the last section was to begin to build up a picture of the kind of action research with which we are concerned, by placing it in the context of its historical development and of other contemporarily related approaches. With that as background, we now continue to enhance the picture by exploring its important character­ istics in much greater depth. We have divided our discussion of the char­ acteristics of action research for the study of organizations into three groups. In this pre­ liminary section we will discuss just one characteristic: the key feature which distin­ guishes action research from other forms of management research. The following sections focus firstly on action research outcomes and secondly on action research processes. The broad issues that we regard as particularly important are: the action focus of action research; general­ ity; theory development; the type of theory

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development appropriate for action research; the pragmatic focus of action research; designing action research; and the validity of action research. We are seeking to identify a set of character­ istics which can inform practically the research process. Ultimately we shall commend the final list of fifteen characteristics as a check-list to guide thinking about the design and validity of action research. However, we wish to make clear that the discussion leading to the derivation of each characteristic is crucial to a proper under­ standing of its use in this way.

The Action Focus of Action Research

Our first characteristic is almost, but not, definitional: Action research demands an integral involve­ ment by the researcher in an intent to change the organization. This intent may not succeed - no change may take place as a result of the intervention - and the change may not be as intended. This is saying that action research must be concerned with intervening in action; it is not enough for the researcher simply to study the action of others. While the latter can be a valid alternative form of management research it is not action research. Action research thus carries a particular set of concerns along with it which the remaining characteristics seek to encapsu­ late.

THE CHARACTERISTICS OF ACTION RESEARCH OUTCOMES Generality

In common with Lewin, many authors on action research stress the importance of the work being useful to the client. For example, Reason ( 1 988) quotes Torbert as arguing that action research must be 'useful to the practitioner at the moment of action rather than a reflective science about action' (our emphasis), and Elden and Levin ( 1 99 1 ) argue that action research should be a way of empowering participants. Although these two outcomes are related - because empowering demands use at the moment of action empowering goes significantly further by demanding a change in the power relationships within the organization. Other authors stress that the development of 'local theory' - theory which applies in the specific context of the

research - is a central feature of the approach (Elden 1 979). While these comments support the role of action research for enhancing action (character­ istic I ) they tend to ignore the role of research for a wider audience. They also ignore the role of reflection to the practitioner as a part of changing their future behaviour (as with action learning). For the practitioner there will be benefits that go beyond the moment of action towards some generality which is related to their expectation of implications for future situations. This circumstance provides the opportunity for collaborative or participatory research. For other practitioners, and researchers, the general­ ity will go even beyond this by having something to say about other contexts than that within which this specific practitioner operates. Many critics of action research reasonably take from the above authors the view that results can only be bounded tightly by context. We, however, see action research as an approach which can build and extend theory of more general use than implied above. We are not, of course, arguing for a level of generality which is devoid of context. Rather, we are arguing that the general theory derived from action research must be applicable significantly beyond the specific situation. Following from this, our second characteristic is that: 2

Action research must have some implications beyond those requiredfor action or generation of knowledge in the domain of the project. It must be possible to envisage talking about the theories developed in relation to other situations. Thus it must be clear that the results could inform other contexts, at least in the sense of suggesting areas for considera­ tion.

This means that the outcomes must be capable of being couched in other than situation-specific terms. Thus, 'the name you choose [for a category] . . . must be a more abstract concept than the one it denotes' (Strauss and Corbin 1 990). It is important to be careful, of course, to avoid the danger that the abstractness is mean­ ingless, generates more unnecessary jargon and obfuscates the power of the research. The ability of the researcher to characterize or conceptualize the particular experience in ways which make the research meaningful to others is crucial. This usually means that the reported research must be translated so that different circumstances can be envisaged by others. It is this that may promote interest from other practitioners in how to understand situations they expect to find themselves in, and from researchers by informing their own theory development.

A CTION RESEAR CH Theory Development

It is the careful characterization and conceptua­ lization of experiences which amount to the theory which is carefully drawn out of action research. This leads to our third characteristic, that: 3

As well as being usable in everyday life, action research demands valuing theory, with theory elaboration and development as an explicit concern of the research process.

This may appear to suggest a dichotomy between research aims and intervention aims (Friedlander and Brown 1 974). There is, how­ ever, no reason why the two need to be seen as mutually exclusive. It is possible to fulfil the requirements of the client and at the same time consider the more theoretical implications, though it should be recognized that addressing these dual aims often means that more effort has to be put into achieving research results than would be the case with more conventional research paradigms. Research output can often be the direct converse of what is required for a client, where situation-specific terminology may be the key to gaining ownership of the results. The research output will also tend to be different from the immediate concerns of professional interventionists (that is, consul­ tants) even though the latter may have an interest in generally transferable aspects of their interventions in order to enhance their profes­ sional adequacy. Our fourth characteristic, below, relies on exploring this point further. Professional interventionists are sometimes engaged by immediate and incremental develop­ ment of practice: 'how will I do better, work more effectively and efficiently, on my next project?' Among other things, they will be inter­ ested in a transfer of tools, techniques, models and methods from one specific situation to another. This does demand the need to general­ ize from the specific, but this is most likely to be an incremental transfer from one specific context to another specific context. By contrast, obser­ vations about the specific situation will, for the researcher, raise broader questions that are of interest to a wider community who will work in a wider variety of contexts. Researchers qua interventionists, as distinct from interventionists qua researchers, address themselves to a different primary audience. The 'interventionist as researcher' seeks to uncover general principles with implications for practice which can be shared between practitioners. The 'researcher as interventionist' seeks to talk to other researchers, and so, in addition, to other interventionists. Notably both reflect a practical orientation and both are focusing on the

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generality of the ideas expressed (that is, they are extending them beyond the setting in which they were designed) but they are meeting different needs and (in the first instance) satisfying different audiences. There is a distinc­ tion here between concern with direct practice and the concern of action research to develop

theory to inform a more reliable and robust development of practice. Lewin's much quoted 'there's nothing so practical as a good theory' should perhaps become the action researcher's motto. Despite this we emphasize the importance of the development of tools, techniques, models, or methods as possible expressions of the outcome of action research. These can be an excellent outcome of action research, providing they embody a clear expression of theory. Unfortu­ nately, often the embodiment is implicit, if it exists at all. Action research demands that the research output explain the link between the specific experience of the intervention and the design of the tool or method; it is this

explanation which is a part of theory generation. Thus: 4

If the generality drawn out of the action research is to be expressed through the design of tools, techniques, models and method then this, alone, is not enough. The basis for their design must be explicit and shown to be related to the theories which inform the design and which, in turn, are supported or developed through action research.

The Type of Theory Development Appropriate for Action Research

What kind of theory then is an appropriate output of action research? The notion of drawing out theory is important for action research and suggests an approach to theory development which recognizes that while the researcher always brings a pre-understanding (Gummesson 1991) a starting theoretical position - to the situation, it is important to defer serious reflec­ tion on the role of this until the later stages of the project. This contrasts with other research approaches which are committed to setting out in advance the biases of the researcher. In action research the researcher needs to be committed to opening up the frame within which the research situation and the data related to it are explored. To do so requires the researcher to have a commitment to the temporary suppres­ sion of pre-understanding. This decreases the likelihood of the researcher's theoretical stance closing off new and alternative ways of under­ standing the data and so extending theory. In -

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to try out complex theoretical frameworks that cannot be pulled apart for controlled evaluation of individual theories. This is important in organization studies research where it is often the systemic nature of a uniquely interlocking set of theories from many disciplines that makes the body of theory powerful and useful. Action research is, at its best, therefore, importantly concerned with such systemic relationships, rather than with single theories: the aim is to understand conceptual and theoretical frameworks where each theory must be understood in the context of other related theories. Intervention settings can also provide rich data about what people do and say - and what theories are used and usable - when faced with a genuine need to take action. These settings are thus likely to provide both new and often unexpected insights. They are settings that are much more amenable to theory generation and development than theory testing. It would be unusual for action research to deliver fundamentally new theories. Rather, the research insights are likely to link with, and so elaborate, the work of others. The areas in which action researchers choose to work will often be influenced by their interest in the kinds of theory that already exist (or do not exist) in the area. So each intervention provides an opportunity to revisit theory and develop it further (Diesing 1 972). The overall process of theory develop­ ment is a continuous cyclic process in which the combination of the developing theory from the research and implicit pre-understanding informs action, and reflection upon the action informs the theory development. There will be a close interconnection between what may emerge from the data (and indeed what data are used) and what will emerge from the implicit, and explicit, use of theory for driving the intervention (Figure 1 ).

addition, suppression of pre-understanding encourages generation of a holistic and complex body of theory, concepts, and experience. By contrast, being explicit about pre-understanding tends to result in a neatly bounded and 'chunked' list of biases which inevitably, even if unintentionally, take on the form of separable propositions. Thus, for action research it is important to move towards reflecting upon the role of pre­ understanding only as theories begin to emerge, rather than in advance of the research. This is a matter of emphasis and timing, not a question about whether the researcher's own theoretical stance is influential and needs to be made explicit. This is influential and it must be made explicit, but its influence will be less constraining if made explicit later rather than earlier. It is important to note that this is neither the position taken by Glaser ( 1 992), who argues for the complete suppression of pre-understanding, nor, at the other extreme, the emphasis within the collection of papers in the Journal of Applied Behavioural Science (Alderfer 1 993) which seem to assume a hypothesis testing approach for action research. By its very nature, action research does not lend itself to repeatable experimentation; each intervention will be different from the last. Over time, it is possible to try out theories over and over again, but each context will be slightly different, so each time it will be necessary to adjust the interpretation of the theory to the circumstances. Action research is therefore not a good vehicle for rigorous and detailed theory testing (at least in the traditional sense where explicit awareness of a theoretical pre-under­ standing is crucial). On the other hand, interventions in organiza­ tions provide ideal opportunities for experimen­ tation in the sense that they provide opportunities I m p l ication of

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A CTION RESEARCH Thus: 5

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Action research will be concerned with a system of emergent theory, in which the theory develops from a synthesis of that which emerges from the data and that which emerges from the use in practice of the body of theory which informed the intervention and research intent. Theory building, as a result of action research, will be incremental, moving through a cycle of developing theory to action to reflection to developing theory, from the particular to the general in small steps.

This contrasts with Lewin's argument for hypotheses to be empirically testable. The very richness of the insights which action research should produce and the relative complexity of the theoretical frameworks suggest that it will usually be diffic ult - even logically impossible to design experimental situations in which we could be clear about confirmation or disconfir­ mation (Sandford 1 98 1 ; Eden 1 994). The value of action research can therefore be seen to be in developing and elaborating theory from practice. As an aside, developing 'grounded theory' (Glaser and Strauss 1 967; Strauss and Corbin 1 990; Glaser 1 992) is a well recognized example, but only one of many, of emergent theory building. The Pragmatic Focus of Action Research

Most of the often referred to writers on action research, including Lewin, demand that it be pragmatic. This is not a criterion which distinguishes action research from consultancy, but one which justifies the use and value of action research rather than other forms of research. If the practicality criterion is taken seriously, this might be interpreted as suggesting that prescriptive theory is more appropriate than descriptive theory. This is a false dichotomy. Descriptive theory can, and does, seriously influence the actions of the consumer of the research because it does (not necessarily inten­ tionally) highlight the important factors the consumer should be concerned about. For example descriptive insights about why things go wrong are suggestive of actions that might be taken to avoid problems in similar situations. By implication, descriptive theory also draws atten­ tion away from those aspects of the situation that are not included in the description. It is thus, by implication, prescribing one way of accounting for a situation rather than another (Allison 1 97 1 ). But if descriptive theory is to be the output of action research it is important that

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its practical implications be recognized even if these are presented implicitly. This means that the researcher must recognize that the language, metaphors, and value orientation used to present the theory will seriously influence the under­ standing of the theory in relation to the future thinking and actions of the consumer of the research. Thus our seventh characteristic is that: 7

What is important for action research is not a (false) dichotomy between prescription and description, but a recognition that descrip­ tion will be prescription, even if implicitly so. Thus presenters of action research should be clear about what they expect the consumer to take from it and present it with a form and style appropriate to this aim.

THE CHARACTERISTICS OF ACTION RESEARCH PROCESSES Designing Action Research

In order to be effective in the sort of action research we are concerned with, it is clearly important to be credible as an interventionist. A researcher thus needs to pay a great deal of attention to developing a competent intervention style and process. However, while consultancy skills are an important part of the action research toolkit, they do not, in themselves, justify the activity as research. Much more fundamental is the need to be aware of what must

be included in the process of consulting to achiel'e the research aims. This, of course, implies being aware of the research aims themselves. This is not intended to imply that the researcher should have a precise idea - or pre­ understanding - of the nature of the research outcome of any intervention at the start; rather, the researcher should have a strategic intent for the research project. Indeed, since action research will almost always be inductive theory-building research, the really valuable insights are often those that emerge from the consultancy process in ways that cannot be foreseen. Whilst it is legitimate for an action researcher to enter a consultancy interaction with no expectation about what the specific research output will be, it is crucial that an appropriate degree of reflection by the researcher is built into the process. This process must include some means of recording both the reflection itself and the method for reflecting. Action research therefore demands a high degree of self-awareness in knitting together the role of the consultant with that of researcher. In

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I m p l ication of

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Application of

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i ntervention

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Figure 2

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The latter stages of an action research project

addition, researchers must recognize that they not only have the roles of researcher and inter­ ventionist, but - because of their role as interventionists - are also a part of the situation which is being researched. It is also important to consider the role that the client or other participants play in the generation of theory. There are many different levels at which they may be involved, ranging from 'pure subjects' whose aim is to get the benefits of the intervention but have no involvement with the research, to 'full collabor­ ating partners' in the research (Rowan 1 98 1 ) . Exactly how the roles o f the action researcher and the practitioners are played out at any level of involvement can vary, but they need to be thought about and understood. Designed into any action research programme should thus be a consciousness of the roles to be played by the researcher and the participants and a process of reflection and data collection which is an activity separate from - though often connected to - the intervention itself (Figure I ). At the least, this demands that extensive amounts of time away from the intervention setting and the 'hands-on' problems be devoted to reflecting about process and data in relation to research issues. The exact nature of the reflection is relatively immaterial, though we may debate the validity of any particular one; what is crucial is that the process exists explicitly. Glaser and Strauss ( 1 967) suggest an appropriate approach to this process of meth­ odical reflection, and Richardson ( 1 994: 526) builds on this approach by suggesting that the time away from the intervention setting is used to record observation notes, methodological notes, theoretical notes, and personal notes which are a journal recording of feelings about the research.

Thus our eighth characteristic is that: 8

For high quality action research a high degree of systematic method and orderliness is required in reflecting about, and holding on to, the research data and the emergent theoretical outcomes of each episode or cycle of involvement in the organization.

Furthermore, and our ninth characteristic: 9

For action research, the processes of explora­ tion of the data - rather than collection of the data - in the detecting of emergent theories and development of existing theories must either be replicable or, at least, capable of being explained to others.

Thus the outcome of data exploration cannot be defended by the role of intuitive understanding alone: any intuition must be informed by a method of exploration. In essence this means that compared to 'everyman' as researcher, profes­ sional researchers need to be professional. Towards the closing stages of a project, the design of action research must also acknowledge an important extension of the cycle depicted in Figure I . This is concerned with the process of explication about pre-understanding and the role of writing about research outcomes in a formal manner for theory development (see Figure 2). Writing about research outcomes is a 'way of "knowing" - a method of discovery and analysis' (Richardson 1 994: 5 1 6). It is a formal process of integrating the records of methodical reflection, prior theory development and the explication of pre-understanding. At this stage the use of pre-understanding is more formal than the reciprocal influence between - the deliber­ ately suppressed - implicit pre-understanding and theory exploration and development which has been occurring throughout the project

A CTION RESEAR CH (Figure 1). This wntmg process continues to inform theory exploration and implicit pre­ understanding. Also, in this way, action researchers use this cycle to acknowledge to themselves and the consumers of the research that the research process and outcomes were influenced by the researcher's particular pre­ understanding. 10

The full process o f action research involves a series of interconnected cycles, where writing about research outcomes at the latter stages of an action research project is an important aspect of theory exploration and development, combining the processes of explicating pre-understanding and meth­ odical reflection to explore and develop theory formally.

The Validity of Action Research

We have argued above that action research as intervention does not lend itself to repeatable experimentation; indeed its distinctive role is played when such experiments are inappropriate. The results of action research lie open to criticism if their validity is judged solely by the traditional criteria of positivist social science. Under these circumstances, we would agree with Susman and Evered ( 1 978) that it is likely to fail. Action researchers therefore need to be keenly aware of the key issues in the validity of action research and that a designed action research process must address these. In this section, we consider what we see as the most important of these.

The Validity of Action Research: Adhering to Action Research as a Coherent Paradigm

First and foremost, we consider: 11

Adhering to characteristics 1 to l O is a necessary but not sufficient condition for the validity of action research.

Without attention to each of these character­ istics, an intervention cannot be considered as research at all. These characteristics may thus be thought of as concerned with the internal validity of the research as action research. By contrast, the remaining topics that we discuss are concerned with external validity. That is, they are concerned with the degree to which the results may both be justified as representative of the situation in which they were generated and have claims to generality.

28 1

The Validity of Action Research: Theory in Use

Our second point then stresses the need to be aware that much of action research's validity comes from the theory developed not simply being 'grounded in the data' in Glaser and Struass's ( 1 967) sense, but being grounded in action (cf. characteristic 1 ) . One of the most persuasive reasons for using action research is that when subjects do not have to commit to real action and to creating a future which they will inhabit, any data gained from them are inherently unreliable (Eden 1 994). This i s because it is impossible to test whether what people say they would do is what they actually do if it 'came to the crunch'. The role of the past, of history, and of the significance of established patterns of social relationships in determining organizational behaviour cannot be overestimated (Vickers 1 983). Reliable data, and hence theories, about both past and future aspects that influence the way in which people change a situation are much more likely to emerge from a research process which is geared to action than from more traditional approaches. This is because it is possible to track what participants actually say and do in circumstances that really matter to them, as compared with what they might say hypothetically, or do in controlled circumstances (as for example in the use of students as research subjects acting as if participants in an organiza­ tion). Using Argyris and Schon's ( 1 974) terms, an action research setting increases the chances of getting at participants' 'theory in use' rather than their 'espoused theory'. It is in this way that action research can be regarded as action science. The change process provides a forum in which the articulation of complex or normally hidden factors is likely to emerge as well as an incentive to participants for spending time in articulating. However, in the action research setting there will be forces pushing against, as well as in favour of, the articulation of theories in use. Most obviously, it is important to recognize that the intervention will result in organizational change and will challenge the status quo. Inevitably some people will anticipate being disadvantaged by the proposed changes and it is unlikely that the interventionist will gain full trust from all parties (Argyris and Schon 1 99 1 ).

The politics of organizational change are thus a force acting against getting fully reliable data from all concerned. Yet there are other arguments, not directly linked to the reliability issue, in favour of the action orientation. One important one is the notion that the best way of learning about an

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organization is by attempting to change it. The very process of change is likely to reveal factors which would not have been unearthed in a stable environment. The process of change forces a

dialectic - a contrast - which helps articulation. For example, Fineman's ( \983) research on un­ employed executives probably provided more useful data about the nature of employment than it did about unemployment. It was the dialectical experience of unemployment which enabled an understanding and so articulation about the role employment played in the lives of the research subjects. In summary, we are arguing that while there may be some forces acting against easily getting reliable data through action research, the method

is likely to produce insights which cannot be gleaned in any other way. This means - as with any kind of research - that it is important to consider explicitly where the kinds of weaknesses and strengths discussed above are likely to occur in any particular research situation. But it also means that: 12

It is difficult to justify the use of action research when the same aims can be satisfied using approaches (such as controlled experimentation or surveys) that can demonstrate the link between data and outcomes more transparently. Thus in action research, the reflection and data collection process - and hence the emergent theories - are most valuably focused on the aspects that cannot be captured by other approaches.

This, in turn, suggests that having knowledge about, and skills to apply, the method and analysis procedures for collecting and exploring rich data are essential. A detailed introduction to methods for the analysis of rich data is beyond the scope of this chapter, and has, in any case, been covered in a much more appropriate level of detail by others. The kinds of approaches suggested by Miles and Huberman ( 1 984), Strauss and Corbin ( 1 990), Glaser ( 1 992) and Cassell and Symon ( 1 994) fulfil most of the requirements for a systematic and methodical exploration of data. In addition a form of 'cognitive mapping' along with associated com­ puter software (Graphics COPE) provides an extremely powerful method for 'playing' with the structure, as well as content, of qualitative research data (Cropper et al. 1 990; Eden et al. 1 992). The added advantage of using computer software of this sort is that it can provide a continuous record of the process of play and exploration and so of the emerging theory development. None of these methods are easy to use; they all require a great deal of skill both in applying the

analysis to the data and, more significantly, in moving from analysis of the data themselves to the more valuable insights and conceptualization that result from discussion of and reflection on the data. The analysis of action research data thus requires craft skills, which takes time for an individual researcher to develop, as well as knowledge about specific methods of data analysis. The Validity of Action Research: Triangulation

In the course of the preceding discussion, we have highlighted some concerns about getting at particular 'truths' of situations, rather than 'the truth'. Argyris et al. ( 1 985) also emphasize the difficulty of ensuring that the theories identified by the research process are thoroughly devel­ oped or the only theories that could have been developed. Our third topic therefore focuses on

triangulation. Triangulation of research data refers to the method of checking their validity by approach­ ing the research question from as many different angles as possible and employing redundancy in data collection (Denzin 1 989). The principle is that if different research approaches lead to the same conclusions our faith in the validity of those conclusions is increased. The analogy with the triangulation process surveyors use to check a sequence of measurements from one point to another is clear. Triangulation is always import­ ant in understanding uncertainty in interpreta­ tion or measurement. In part, this is an argument for a multi­ method approach to research. Denzin ( I 978a; 1 978b) provides a comprehensive argument for the use of multiple studies where each study acts as a cross-check on others, and so the process of developing reliable conclusions is enhanced. Denzin also argues for triangulation to be applied in five aspects of the research: method­ ology, data, investigator, theoretical, and multi­ ple triangulation. Triangulation to check the validity of data is as important in action research as in other forms of research. However, action research provides also a uniquely different interpretation of the concept of triangulation. Exceptionally, action research provides an opportunity to seek out triangulation between (i) the observation of events and social processes, (ii) the accounts each participant offers, and (iii) the changes in these accounts and interpretation of events as time passes (Harre and Secord 1 976). From these three perspectives the data are not expected to triangulate (agree). Indeed we may be more surprised if they do agree than if they do not,

A CTION RESEARCH given the deliberate attempts at discovering multiple views. This procedure 'underlines the possibilities of multiple, competing perspectives on how organizations are and might be' (Jones 1 987: 45). Importantly a lack of triangulation acts as an effective dialectic for the generation of new concepts. The focus is therefore on what could be rather than what is (Elden and Chisholm 1 993a). Thus triangulation has a different significance for action research compared with using triangulation only as a cross-checking method. Similarly, action research provides the opportu­ nity for cyclical data collection through exploit­ ing more continuous and varied opportunities than is occasioned by more controlled research. The chaos and the changing pace and focus of action research are used as a virtue. Thus: 13

In action research, the opportunities for triangulation that do not offer themselves with other methods should be exploited fully and reported. They should be used as a dialectical device which powerfully facil­ itates the incremental development of theory.

The Validity of Action Research: the Role of History and Context

The previous two topics have been largely about external validity in the specific project context. The fourth topic focuses on the problems of generalizing beyond that. It concerns the need to understand and project the role of history and context in deriving research outcomes (Pettigrew 1 985; 1 990). Given that action research generally deals with a one-off case study, and hence incurs all the issues inherent in case study research (Yin 1 984): 14

The history and context for the intervention must be taken as critical to the interpretation of the likely range of validity and applic­ ability of the results of action research.

Identification of the crucial variables that determine the particularity of the context is non­ trivial and it is likely that individuals with different experiences and aims would focus in different areas. Discovering history and its relevance is, in any case, more problematic than Pettigrew implies. History, and context, are differently defined by different actors in the situation and by different observers: historians have always recognized the contribution of bias, selectivity and interpretation. Nevertheless, even given these difficulties, a concern to understand

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the role of context, and the different interpret­ ations of it, is a most important requirement of action research. Indeed working with the selective nature ofdifferent accounts of how a history of the organization, of the individuals and their rela­ tionships with one another, and of the wider context within which the research took place, is as important as paying attention to their role.

EXPOSING ACTION RESEARCH

So far we have addressed issues in doing action research. Disseminating to the world beyond where the research was undertaken, however, raises a number of additional issues. For example the seventh characteristic raises an issue about the style of presentation (recognizing the prescriptive aspects of action research). Also the fourteenth characteristic suggests that it is important to consider the possible interpretation of results in the light of history and context. Each of these has specific implications for the style of dissemination of action research. In this section we shall discuss some of the difficulties inherent in writing about action research. Our final characteristic is: 15

Action research requires that the theory development which is of general value is disseminated in such a way as to be of interest to an audience wider than those integrally involved with the action and/or with the research.

The demands we have set out, in the first fourteen characteristics, mean that it is unlikely that action research can be written about fully in anything shorter than a book-type format. Relative to 'straightforward' positivist research there will always be more to say about: the incremental nature of the theory development; research method in overall terms as well as the detail of data exploration method; history and context; and implications of theory for practice. This is more material than can be contained easily within the confines of a chapter. A chapter always leaves many important questions about the status of the research unanswered. In writing this chapter we have been particularly interested in the difficulty we have had in finding written exemplars of action research which have been explicitly acknowl­ edged by the author to be action research. Most action research sees the light of day through a variety of indirect methods. Clearly some explanation for this phenomenon can be derived from the circumstances discussed in the above paragraph. There is also some resistance from academic journals to publishing action research.

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However we do find many written examples of the outcome of action research. In these instances, we believe - because we have had the opportunity to discuss, in depth, the research process with the authors - that the action research satisfies the majority of our first fourteen characteristics. These examples have in a sense cheated the action research paradigm by disseminating research outcomes in a way which hides the method in a variety of forms of presentation. Thus one example is the promulgation of action research through the discussion of a methodology for organizational intervention. Here the theoretical framework is explicated as the raison d'etre for the design of a method. technique, or tool for intervention. In most examples of this way of exposing the outcomes of action research, the authors make no explicit mention of action research as the research paradigm for theory exploration, but exemplify the relationship between theory and practice through technique and tool (our fourth char­ acteristic). It is clear that their technique and tool have been developed in parallel with theory development through its application in long sequences of action settings which have been fully researched following an action research procedure. In the US, Nutt and Backoff ( 1 992) and Bryson ( 1 988) build theory and practice from undeclared action research. In the UK, Checkland (Checkland 1 98 1 ; Checkland and Scholes 1 99 1 ) and Eden (Eden et al. 1 983; Eden 1 993) follow the 'cycle of developing theory to action to reflection to developing theory, from the particular to the general in small steps' (our sixth characteristic). A second example is where researchers use action research to provide a rich source of examples and stories to illustrate theory. For example, Mangham ( 1 979; 1 986) has used many projects where he was involved as an organiza­ tion development consultant as the action research basis for his development and elabora­ tion of 'symbolic interactionism' into a coherent dramaturgical theory. The theory has been more persuasive and more practical because of the rich examples within the text. But nowhere is there acknowledgement of the role action research, conducted in a manner which would meet most of the standards established here, played in the written outcome. A further example for indirectly reporting the outcomes of action research is through the use of 'faction' (fiction which is a version of fact). An interesting example of this type of approach is the book called The Carpetmakers by Jones and Lakin ( 1 978). Here one of the authors was an interventionist and the other author was one of the managers in the client organization - that

made carpets! The book is written and presented as if it were a novel, and the content makes no reference to the roles played by the authors. And yet the authors conducted a form of action research which enabled them to develop a theory of the 'four orders of administration' which is exposed in the middle section of the book. We have no indication of the nature of the method and nature of the research; indeed we are never sure that the story is of a real case, even though it is clear that the theory derives from the story. The use of journalism and 'faction' to report research is not necessarily misplaced: it provides an entertaining and engaging way of learning about research outcomes. However once again the use of action research is not made explicit. Is it easier to promulgate research outcomes without reference to the messiness of the empirical research which provided the richness of experience and meaning to the theory presented? As Richardson notes, 'how we are expected to write affects what we can write about . . . inductively accomplished research is to be reported deductively . . . the conventions [of the journals] hold tremendous material and sym­ bolic power over social scientists . . . using them increases the probability of one's work being accepted into "core" social science journals, but it is not primafacie evidence of greater - or lesser - truth value or significance than social science writing using other conventions' ( 1 994: 520). We do not agree with Richardson and others who subscribe to a postmodernist view of writing, that any form of writing about research is satisfactory. The conventions are of some significance, but they do seem to be forcing many action researchers to hide behind the conventions in a manner which does not give due credit to the research process.

COMMENT

The standards we have set for action research to be considered as research (pulled together in Table I ) are undoubtedly hard to achieve. Understanding the methodological issues involved in action research in practice is difficult and must be expected to take time and experi­ ence: action research is an imprecise, uncertain, and sometimes unstable activity compared to many other approaches to research. Enacting the standards in practice demands holistic attention to all the issues. Given the complexity and pressure of the real world action research setting, this provides a major challenge. Indeed, it is probably not an achievable challenge, though this should neither deter researchers from trying to achieve the standards nor, worse

A CTION RESEA RCH Table I

2

3 4

5

6 7

8

9

10

II

12

13

14 IS

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The fifteen characteristics of action research

Action research demands an integral involvement by the researcher in an intent to change the organization. This intent may not succeed - no change may take place as a result of the intervention - and the change may not be as intended. Action research must have some implications beyond those requiredfor action or generation of knowledge in the domain of the project. It must be possible to envisage talking about the theories developed in relation to other situations. Thus it must be clear that the results could inform other contexts, at least in the sense of suggesting areas for consideration. As well as being usable in everyday life, action research demands valuing theory, with theory elaboration and development as an explicit concern of the research process. If the generality drawn out of the action research is to be expressed through the design of tools, techniques, models and method then this, alone, is not enough. The basis for their design must be explicit and shown to be related to the theories which inform the design and which, in turn, are supported or developed through action research. Action research will be concerned with a system of emergent theory, in which the theory develops from a synthesis of that which emerges from the data and that which emerges from the use in practice of the body of theory which informed the intervention and research intent. Theory building, as a result of action research, will be incremental, moving through a cycle of developing theory to action to reflection to developing theory, from the particular to the general in small steps. What is important for action research is not a (false) dichotomy between prescription and description, but a recognition that description will be prescription, even if implicitly so. Thus presenters of action research should be clear about what they expect the consumer to take from it and present it with a form and style appropriate to this aim. For high quality action research a high degree of systematic method and orderliness is required in reflecting about, and holding on to, the research data and the emergent theoretical outcomes of each episode or cycle of involvement in the organization. For action research, the processes of exploration of the data - rather than collection of the data - in the detecting of emergent theories and development of existing theories must either be replicable or, at least, capable of being explained to others. The full process of action research involves a series of interconnected cycles, where writing about research outcomes at the latter stages of an action research project is an important aspect of theory exploration and development, combining the processes of explicating pre-understanding and methodical reflection to explore and develop theory formally. Adhering to characteristics I to l O is a necessary but not sufficient condition for the validity of action research. It is difficult to justify the use of action research when the same aims can be satisfied using approaches (such as controlled experimentation or surveys) that can demonstrate the link between data and outcomes more transparently. Thus in action research, the reflection and data collection process - and hence the emergent theories - are most valuably focused on the aspects that cannot be captured by other approaches. In action research, the opportunities for triangulation that do not offer themselves with other methods should be exploited fully and reported. They should be used as a dialectical device which powerfully facilitates the incremental development of theory. The history and context for the intervention must be taken as critical to the interpretation of the likely range of validity and applicability of the results of action research. Action research requires that the theory development which is of general value is disseminated in such a way as to be of interest to an audience wider than those integrally involved with the action and/or with the research.

perhaps, from using action research at all. For ourselves we are not convinced that our own research has fully satisfied the standards we have set. However what is important is having a sense of the standards that make for good action research and evaluating the research in relation to them. Action research is also challenging for two further reasons: (i) the uncertainty and lack of control creates anxiety for anyone other than confident and experienced researchers; and (ii) doing action in action research demands

experience and understanding of methods for consultancy and intervention. This second chal­ lenge suggests the need to face up to conceptual issues about the nature of problems in organiza­ tions and the concomitant demands for change, the nature of a client-centred activity, the issues involved in building and sustaining a consul­ tant-client relationship, and so the nature of power and politics in the context of intervention. We have set out a framework for undertaking research through fifteen characteristics. Each of these represents, in effect, a test against which

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action research may be judged. We have argued that each of them is an important aspect of good action research, and to that extent we suggest that the complete list (shown in Table I ) can be used as a 'check-list'. Because action research is difficult to undertake and to publish we believe that it is even more important than in other types of research for researchers to have a set of standards that can be used to guide and inform the process of undertaking the research. The standards we have sought to establish in this chapter are not the only set that could be applied to action research; others might argue for an alternative check-list. Nevertheless, the fifteen characteristics serve a dialectical purpose for researchers. Individuals can then add further standards of their own as they attempt to evaluate their own action research against those established in this chapter. We suspect that the current environment for research in business schools throughout the world is putting extraordinary demands on the delivery of research output. These demands can easily lead to a gradual reduction in standards. Alongside the increased competition for research funds and research publications is the demand made of business school academics to undertake consultancy and demonstrate the relevance of their research and teaching to practising managers. It is possible that consultancy and action research get confused at the expense of research standards. Many business school academics value their consultancy both as a way of informing and legitimizing their teaching and as a source of extra cash. There is thus a danger that consultancy done for these reasons, rather than as part of a deliberate design for research, may become their major source of research output. While consultancy settings may be a valuable source of 'real' data, unless these are entered with a more sophisticated view of action research there is a danger that sloppy research will result. As we suggested earlier, the 'action research' label is often used as a way of excusing sloppy research. Not all academics are necessarily driven by the consultancy motivation however. Many are involved in projects with outside organizations set up and funded by the organizations as research projects, but aiming to address specifi­ cally a problem or issue which is of concern to the organization. Under these circumstances it is questionable how many 'researchers' stop to ask whether the project has wider research implica­ tions and how the project should be tackled in order to ensure that these are addressed. There is a great deal of pressure towards this behaviour. Firstly, in an era where research grants count so vitally on both the individual

and the institutional curricula vitae, it may not pay researchers to turn down opportunities of this kind. Secondly, the sponsoring organization cannot necessarily be expected to be concerned with general research and would often be concerned, quite naturally, with ensuring that it gets value for money for the specific project. Thirdly, in some management disciplines the preponderance of what are seen (rightly or wrongly) as over-theoretical (and hence non­ practical) papers has led to a call - perhaps sparked by practitioners rather than academics for publication of more case studies describing specific problem solving situations. Fourthly, in some disciplines there is a great deal of pressure on researchers to be directly involved in 'real world' situations in order to demonstrate the applicability of what they say. Finally, while methodological issues may be central concerns to those in the management disciplines most closely allied to mainstream social science, it seems reasonable to suppose that there are areas of management research where researchers are hardly aware of the existence of a methodolo­ gical debate, let alone of the issues in it or of ways of addressing them in practice. A further source of confusion may stem from outside the academic community: that is, from professional consultants and practising man­ agers themselves. Though many of these just 'get on with the job', a small number take time to reflect upon and publish what they are doing. That these are often valuable contributions to the field of management is not in question. But given the everyday concerns of consultants and managers, it would be unreasonable to expect them to be motivated by the criteria which must be applied to jUdging high quality research outcomes. As Lake ( 1 968), quoted in Clark ( 1 972: 1 45), argued after reviewing papers published by the Journal of Applied Behavioural Sciences, 'it would seem that those most central to, and actively engaged in, the process of planned organizational change are not careful analytical researchers. ' This chapter i s a 1 990s attempt t o reinforce the value of action research as a legitimate and rigorous research method, and to suggest standards which will encourage 'careful analy­ tical researchers' who are also concerned with intervention and action.

REFERENCES Aguinis, H. ( 1 993) 'Action research and scientific method: presumed discrepancies and actual simila­ rities', Journal of Applied Behavioural Science, 29: 4 1 6- 3 1 .

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Lewin, K. ( 1 946) 'Action research and minority problems'. lournal of Social Issues, 2: 34-46. Lewin, K. ( 1947) 'Frontiers in group dynamics: channel of group life: social planning and action research', Human Relations, 1: 143-53. Mangham, I . L. ( 1979) The Politics of Organizational Change. London: Associated Business Press. Mangham, I .L. ( 1986) Power and Performance in Organizations. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Miles, M.B. and Huberman, A.M. ( 1 984) Qualitative Data Analysis: a Sourcebook of New Methods. London: Sage. Nutt, P. and Backoff. R. ( 1 992) Strategic Management of Public and Third Sector Organizations. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Peters, M. and Robinson, V. ( 1984) 'The origins and status of action research', The lournal of Applied Behavioural Science, 20: 1 1 3-24. Pettigrew, A.M. ( 1 985) The A wakening Giant. Oxford: Blackwell. Pettigrew, A.M. ( 1990) 'Longitudinal field research on change theory and practice', Organisation Science, I : 267-92. Reason, P. (ed.) ( 1 988) Human Inquiry in Action. London: Sage. Reason, P. and Rowan, J. (eds) ( 198 1 ) Human Inquiry: a Sourcebook ofNew Paradigm Research. Chichester: Wiley. Revans, R.W. ( 1977) 'Action learning and the nature of knOWledge/learning', Education and Training, 1 9 : 3 1 8-20. Revans, R.W. ( 1 978) 'Action learning and the nature of knowledgellearning', Education and Training, 20: 8II.

Revans, R.W. ( 1 982) The Origins and Growth of A ction Learning. Bickley, Kent: Chartwell-Bratt. Richardson, L. ( 1 994) 'Writing: a method of inquiry' , in N.K. Denzin and Y.S. Lincoln (eds), Handbook of Qualitative Research. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Rowan, J. ( 1 98 1 ) 'A dialectical paradigm for research', in P. Reason and J. Rowan (eds), Human Inquiry: a Sourcehook of New Paradigm Research. Chichester: Wiley. pp. 93- 1 1 2 .

Rowan, J. and Reason, P . ( 1 98 1 ) 'On making sense', in P. Reason and 1. Rowan (eds), Human Inquiry: a Sourcebook of New Paradigm Research. Chichester: Wiley. pp. 1 1 3-40. Sandford, N. ( 198 1 ) 'A model for action research', in P. Reason and J. Rowan (eds), Human Inquiry: a Sourcehook of New Paradigm Research. Chichester: Wiley. pp. 1 73-82. Strauss, A. and Corbin, J. ( 1 990) Basics of Qualitative Research. London: Sage. Susman, G.!. and Evered, R.D. ( 1 978) 'An assessment of the scientific merits of action research', A dminis­ trative Science Quarterly, 23: 582-603. Thorsrud, E. ( 1 970) 'A strategy for research and social change in industry: a report on the industrial democracy project in Norway', Social Science Information, October: 65-90. Torbert, W.R. ( 1 976) Crealing a Community of Inquiry: Conjfict, Collaboration, Transformation. New York: Wiley. Torbert, W.R. ( 1 98 1 ) 'Why educational research has been so uneducational: the case for a new model of social science based on collaborative inquiry', in P. Reason and J. Rowan (eds), Human Inquiry: a Sourcehook of Nell' Paradigm Research. Chichester: Wiley. pp. 1 4 1 -5 1 Torbert, W . R . ( 1 99 1 ) The Power of Balance: Transforming Self, Societ)" And Scientific Inquiry. Newbury Park. CA: Sage. Trist, E. and Bamforth, K.W. ( 1 95 1 ) 'Some social and psychological consequences of the longwall method of coal getting', Human Relations. 4: 3-38. Vickers, G. ( 1 983) The Art of ludgement. London: Harper and Row. Whitehead, J. ( 1 994) 'How do I improve the quality of my management" , Managemenl Learning, 25: 1 3753. Whyte, W. (ed.) ( 1 99 1 ) Participatory Action Research. London: Sage. Yin. R. ( 1 984) Case Study Research: Design and Melhods. New York: Sage.

11 Emotion and Organizing STEPHEN FINEMAN

Writers on organizations have been slow to incorporate emotions into their thinking. A scan of the indexes of mainstream textbooks on organizational behaviour and organizational theory reveals few, if any, entries under 'emo­ tions' or 'feelings'. This itself is a clue to the historical status of emotion, and the framing of organizational studies. But the frame is now shifting to include emotion, offering exciting possibilities for interdisciplinary convergence and the theoretical and empirical insights that this brings. We can draw profitably from sociology, psychology, history, anthropology and philosophy. The resonance of 'emotion' and 'feelings' in working is not hard to grasp. Literary accounts about work by writers such as Terkel ( 1 975) and Wallraff ( 1 985) are engaging for the precise sense of passion, distress, joy, or drudgery that they convey. For those who spend much of their time in organizations, emotion talk is often taken for granted: the gripes, the anger, the anxiety, the frustrations; the glee, the joys, the tedium; the embarrassments and the despair. These are part of the social creation and personal expression of work and organizational life. Specific work activities - making decisions, persuading, negotiating, counselling, selling, meeting, interpreting data, hiring, firing, fight­ ing, resisting, surviving - are more than a set of robotic responses. They are felt, and shaped by feelings. This chapter initially presents a historical context to the framing of emotion in organiza­ tions - where the main influences have been and how they have shaped our current conceptuali­ zations. Ideas from academic psychology - both behavioural and clinical - are germane here; however, particular emphasis will be placed on

the recent growth of sociologically inspired studies. With this backcloth in mind, specific areas are discussed where an emotion perspective illuminates current issues in organizational studies. These include the concept of the rational organizational actor, order and control in organizations, organizational culture, stress, and the 'marketing' of emotional performance. Finally, directions for the further study of organizational emotion are elaborated.

FINDING A PLACE FOR EMOTION

Academic psychology has been the traditional guardian of emotions. We can trace the first psychological theory of emotions in William James's paper, 'What is emotion'? published in 1 884. James emphasized the importance of perception of an event, object or circumstance as a precursor to emotion. This process, he contended, activated changes to internal bodily activities. The feelings of these reactions are the emotional experience. James's formulation turned common sense on its head: we do not smile because we are happy, we are happy because we smile. Since James's time the psychological concep­ tualization of emotion has developed in many different directions. Some still broadly favour a James-type rationale (e.g. Zajonc et al. 1 989). Others emphasize the motivational properties of emotion (Leeper 1 965), emotion as a specific personality trait (Spielberger 1 966), or emotion as a sign of inadequate personal adaptation (Plutchik 1 970). Furthermore, some theorists look to cognitive processes as sufficient explana­ tions of things 'emotional'. while others focus on

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the experiential or the unconscious (Strongman 1 978). Emotion as an individual or group construct has infiltrated the study of organizations in various ways, although it has only recently been taken as an important organizational topic in its own right (see Fineman 1 993a). It is camou­ flaged somewhat by different terminologies such as 'sentiment', 'mood', 'affect', 'valence' or 'morale'. For example, the social scientists studying Western Electric Company's Hawthorne plant in the 1 930s spoke of workers' 'sentiments': the values residing in interhuman relations of the different groups within the organization. . . . Examples of what is meant here are the arguments employees give which center around the 'right to work', 'seniority', 'fairness', 'the living wage'. This logic, as its name implies, is deeply rooted in senti­ ment and feeling. (Roethlisberger and Dickson 1 939: 564)

The effects of negative emotions on work behav­ iour were particularly stressed at this time (see review by Pekrun and Frese 1 992). Only a few writers offered a different emotional tone - such as Munsterberg ( 1 9 1 2) on joy at work and Hersey ( 1 9 5 1 ) on zest. During the 1 940s and 1 950s the concept of morale began to be used by occupational and industrial psychologists, espe­ cially in military contexts. Morale has distinct emotional overtones: the feelings of attachment or belonging that a person has to a work group and his or her sense of commitment to the group task and spirit (Guba 1 958). In t he 1 9505, p sych o an a l yt i c al l y inspired organizational researchers-cum-consultants were beginning to plough their own furrow from London's Tavistock Institute of Human Relations (Jaques 1 95 1 ; Miller 1 993). This work presented, and continues to present, a dramatic contrast to the consciously driven actor influ­ enced by here-and-now emotions. Again, nega­ tive feelings predominate: organizational psychoanalysis posits a shifting sea of uncon­ scious desires and anxieties which are expressed in the organization's processes of leadership, structuring and group functioning. From the 1 950s into the 1 970s attention switched to the study of job attitudes. Attitudes are commonly presented as having an 'affective' component - a feeling, preference, or mood about a person, idea, event or object (Warr 1 97 1 ; Fishbein and Ajzen 1 975). Vroom ( 1 964) and others have argued that such a predisposition, or valence, is a crucial feature of human motiva­ tion. One particular attitude - job satisfaction absorbed much attention. Job satisfaction is a 'pleasurable or positive emotional state resulting from the appraisal of one's job or job

experiences' (Locke 1 976: 1 300). Original job satisfaction research used questionnaires or interviews to measure overall reactions, such as how people felt about their job as a whole, using seven-point scales such as 'I love it' to 'I hate it' (Hoppock 1 935). Later work tended to focus satisfaction on segments of the job, such as the physical working conditions, rewards, co-work­ ers or job content (Brayfield and Rothe 1 95 1 ; Smith et al. 1 969). Job satisfaction, a fairly gross emotion concept, still occupies researchers. Recent work continues examining ways different work factors (e.g. goals, fringe benefits, work challenge) influence satisfaction and how work satisfaction levels may relate to performance on the job and satisfaction in the rest of life (Landy 1 985; laffaldano and Muchinsky 1 985; Judge and Watanabe 1 993; O'Reilly 1 99 1 ). Since the 1 970s the study of human behaviour has taken a strong swing to the cognitive. The positive, free-will aspects of human behaviour are emphasized, with cognition, the act of know­ ing, as the main unit of analysis. The focus on 'information', 'expectancies', 'demands', 'incen­ tives', 'problem-solving', 'decision-making' and 'thinking' has tended to obscure emotion and feelings. In recent years cognitive theorists have tried to incorporate emotion into their models, most conservatively through the notion of 'hot' cognitions, or by adding the influence of specific emotions (such as fear, anxiety or anger) to models of the decision-making process (Dona­ hue and Ramesh 1 992). More radical perspec­ tives reconceptualize cognition as inseparable from emotion (Stein and Trabasso 1 992; Bloom and Beckwith 1 989; Howard 1 993; Ortony et al. 1 988). The work of Park et al. ( 1 986) is note­ worthy in this respect. They explore the interplay of affect and cognition on performance appraisal in organizational settings, arguing that informa­ tion-processing models ignore the influence of the mood of the rater (which can influence attention and recall) and specific feelings triggered by the ratee's appearance, such as dress, hairstyle, race, gender. For these authors affect and cognition interact in managerial action and judgement. An additional facet of post 1 970s psychologi­ cal research has been greater attention to positive emotions. So Abramis ( 1 987) speaks of fun at work, while Frese ( 1 990) explores the mechanisms of pride. Isen and Baron ( 1 99 1 ) and Argyle and Martin ( 1 99 1 ) make a strong plea for organizations to engineer a specific sense of job enjoyment and happiness (which they distinguish from job satisfaction) by improving physical working conditions, remodelling organizational culture and enhancing communication. Mild shifts in positive affect or mood can, they contend, improve task perception and decision-

EMOTION AND ORGANIZING making, face-to-face bargaining (Carnevale and Isen 1 986), conflict resolution (Baron 1 993), performance appraisal (Brief and Motowidlo 1 986), absenteeism and labour turnover (George 1 990; 1 99 1 ). The benefits of the 'feel good' factor are echoed by Harrison ( 1 987) and Peters and Austin ( 1 985), who say that love, empathy, verve, zest and enthusiasm are the sine qua non of managerial success and organizational 'excel­ lence'.

THE IDEOLOGICAL CONTEXTS OF EMOTION THEOR Y

The psychologizing of emotion, in its various guises, needs to be seen in its ideological con­ texts. The acceptability of emotion in the work setting is tied to the way work and labour are construed. For example, deeply rooted in Western (especially male) cultural beliefs about the expression of emotion is the belief that organizational order and manager/worker effi­ ciency are matters of rational, that is non­ emotional, activity (Lakoff and Johnson 1 980; Putnam and Mumby 1 993). Cool, clear strategic thinking is not to be sullied by messy feelings. Efficient thought and behaviour tame emotion. Accordingly, good organizations are places where feelings are managed, designed out, or removed. Or, put another way, behaviour control and cognitive processes should be the central substance of organizational theory. Such a perspective fits comfortably with the machine-like organization where uniformity of behaviour is regarded as crucial to the profitable production of goods and services; a manifesta­ tion, of sorts, of Max Weber's early thinking on the 'ideal' bureaucracy, unsullied by 'love, hatred and all purely personal, irrational and emotional elements' (Gerth and Mills 1 958: 2 1 6). Indeed, the tight control of work processes and emotions was manifest in the missions of turn­ of-the-century management consultants and engineer/entrepreneurs (Kakar 1 970; Jardin 1 970; Morgan 1 986). Human 'factors' were to serve, lubricate and extend the machineries of the factory, and no more. When open feelings threatened to disrupt the managerially desired flow of work, management would respond with even tighter controls - or bewilderment. For example, Frederick Winslow Taylor and Elton Mayo, influential in the design of industrial organizations in the 1 920s and 1 930s, were appalled at the strong hostility they witnessed amongst rank-and-fi1e workers. And they were singularly unsuccessful in their initial attempts at curbing it (Stearns 1 989). The continuing industrial disputes of the late twentieth century

29 1

reveal that strong worker feelings - anger, disaffection, humiliation - can still breach organizational controls, although they are now channelled through more elaborate social con­ duits and transformations. Stearns ( 1 993) points out that the Victorian emotional culture saw intense feeling as a source of danger. The early male, middle class captains of industry, and the equally middle class, male organizational experts who shadowed them, were in part enacting their own social/emotional biographies. For example, we learn that Freder­ ick Winslow Taylor, architect of the minutely regulated factory of the 1 930s, had a youth preoccupied with order, control and parsimony, rooted clearly in the puritanical strictures of his family. This extended to fastidious analyses of his sporting activities, country walks, sleeping position, and even the organization of his dancing (e.g. Kakar 1 970; Morgan 1 986). It is perhaps no accident that his influential 'scientific management' is emotionally inert. Likewise, Henry Ford's highly conservative upbringing, again reflecting the era, probably assisted him viewing his extraordinary production line with quiet pride - rather than a likely source of harsh alienation for those who had to work on it (Jardin 1 970; Zaleznik and Kets de Vries 1 975). In the 1 960s and 1 970s organization theory, reflecting a new liberalism in the West, took a significant step towards the democratization of work (Likert 1 96 1 ; Argyris 1 964). Interest turned to the 'psychological needs' of employees, from security to self-actualization (Maslow 1 943; Herzberg 1 966). The benefits, or otherwise, of employee participation in decision-making were a key topic in organizational and social psychology, and 'quality of working life' became an international movement in social science (Warr and Wall 1 975; Lawler 1 976). This set the agenda for current principles of human resource management, where human beings and their SUbjectivity are placed more firmly at the centre of the organizational stage. Yet, on close examination, it is clear that the people depicted are rather like the splintered characters in a computer game. As I have concluded elsewhere, the people presented are emotionally anorexic. They have 'dissatisfactions' and 'satisfactions', they may be 'alienated' or 'stressed', they will have 'prefer­ ences', 'attitudes' and 'interests'. Often these are noted as variable for managerial control. (Fineman 1 993a: 9)

I will briefly elaborate two key strands of this viewpoint: job satisfaction and stress. Intuitively, job satisfaction connotes emotional processes or 'being' feelings such as of joy, enthusiasm, pleasure, pride, happiness, delight and fulfil­ ment. But these have not been the focus of job

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satisfaction researchers. In the main, as already discussed, they have defined job satisfaction as a global outcome attitude towards work, or a job facet, measured on investigator-prescribed scales. Despite the voluminous material on job satisfaction, which proceeds like a juggernaut through job attitude research, it offers a poor insight into the essential emotionalities of work­ ing (Sandelands 1 988; Pekrun and Frese 1 992; Fineman 1 994). Stress can be criticized on similar grounds. It is a diffuse, non-specific, global negative state (Pekrun and Frese 1 992; Selye 1 956; 1 976). In the 1 960s and 1 970s stress formulation was rooted firmly within the stimulus-response tradition of psychology. The individual's level of stress could, was the contention, be measured in relation to specific, predefined, life events or 'stressors' (Dohrenwend and Dohrenwend 1 974; Rabkin and Struening 1 976), where stress indices included self-reports of behaviour, anxiety and physical health. Since that period social psycho­ logical renditions of stress are quarrelled over, but the models presented have very similar elements: objective stressor, self-reported stress, physical symptoms, individual/social moderators (e.g. Cooper 1 99 1 ). It is clear that many emotions do characterize the experience of stress, such as anger, anxiety, sadness, despair, depression and disappoint­ ment. Stressed people undoubtedly feel their distress or illness. Significantly. some writers (e.g. Lazarus 1 993) are now arguing for a rapprochement between theories of emotion and those of stress. Lazarus's central point is that the stress responses should be seen in terms of a number of different emotional states, each of which is related to particular ways that individuals appraise and cope with their circum­ stances. Such an approach asserts a separation between appraisal, the cognitive act, and emotion - a point to which we shall return.

EMOTIONALITY: ISSUES OF DEFINITION AND FORM

The backcloth to emotion so far presented covers various uses and variations of the concept in work and organizational life. How can emo­ tion best be conceptualized and refined for ' understanding organizational processes? The field is confusing, and different terms are used interchangeably. However, there are some important distinctions that can be made (see Oakley 1 993; Hochschild 1 983; Frijda et al. 1 99 1 ; Ratner 1 989). The first relates to feelings. A feeling is essentially the subjective experience which is at the heart of most definitions of

emotion. To feel means we are aware 'in' ourselves of some bodily state, perturbation, or more diffuse psychological change. Some feel­ ings can be in part determined by early life experiences and expectations - sources of which we may be unaware. Next, emotions are the personal displays of affected, or 'moved', 'agitated' states - such as of joy, love. fear, anger, sadness, shame, embar­ rassment. They acquire their meaning, their social currency, from the cultural setting national, local and organizational (Ratner 1 989; Lutz and White 1 986; Fineman 1 993a). While we may be physiologically 'wired' in ways that permit emotional (and feeling) processes, the arousal requires the use of culturally shared communicative signs - body movements, facial expressions. cognitive labels, language nuances to achieve its understanding, social significance and meaning (Ekman 1 985; Sugrue 1 982). Emotion episodes and private feeling do not always correspond. One can 'be' angry without feeling angry. Indeed, an actor's anger outburst might feel to him/her as fairly neutral, pleasur­ able or even exciting. Given the performance element of emotions, they can be seen to fulfil a strategic purpose in interpersonal relations: a display of anger to bring out a change; a look of despair to attract attention. This requires some level of dramatic skill (Harre 1 986; Gallois 1 993; Hopfl and Linstead 1 993; Ekman 1 984; Mang­ ham and Overington 1 987). Emotions are also situational, where particu­ lar displays of emotion are attached to specific social encounters: there may be an appropriate emotion to show when 'caught by a police officer for speeding', or when 'at a party'. The emotion norms may be even more prototypical and role­ bound, such as for 'mother', 'father', 'boss', 'subordinate', 'man' or 'woman' (Zurcher 1 982; Kemper 1 98 1 ; Geertz 1 973: Shott 1 979; Hearn 1 993; Parkin 1 993; Hochschild 1 975; 1 990). Implicit and explicit emotion rules are moulded and transmitted in our ethnic groups, families, religions and workplaces, bolstered by the extensive influence of the media (Denzin 1 990; Fineman 1 993a). The messages often have a double imperative of the sort: 'these are the emotions you ought to be showing; these are the feelings you should be feeling.' Emotion 'work' is entailed in ensuring that private feelings are suppressed or re-presented to achieve the socially acceptable emotional face. Emotional 'labour' is the buying of an employee's emotional demea­ nour; the individual is being paid to 'look nice', smile, be caring, be polite (Hochschild 1 975; 1 990; 1 993; Wharton 1 993). Feelings and emotions are processes which are the quintessence of humanness, social function­ ing and social order. Feelings connect us with

EMOTION AND ORGA NIZING our realities; they provide an experiential, personal readout on how we are doing, where we 'are', what we want, what we might do next. In this sense most feelings are mobile; we interact with them, work them over. We have feelings about our feelings, guided by existing social scripts or stocks of knowledge, e.g. 'how should I really feel in these circumstances?', 'need I feel so upset by this?' (Rosenberg 1 990; Fischer and Frijda 1 992). We may sometimes 'fall victim' to our feelings, especially when they are of the consuming, passionate sort such as hate or love. Or we may get stuck in feeling traps, a recursiveness such as being anxious about being anxious (Scheff 1 990). Feelings are Janus faced, both a necessary part of personal perception and something of which to be wary (Franks and Gecas 1 992).

Feelings of Work

Do we know what doing work feels like? As earlier suggested, the research in this area has a distal quality, remote from the self-referentiality of feelings that essentially constitute the doing of work, management, or organizing. Some writers argue that there are certain sorts of feelings that are flow-related experiences, absorbing the self and free from self-judgements of the sort: 'can I do this job?', 'how well am I doing?' (Czikszent­ mihalyi 1 977; Frese et al. 1 99 1 ) . The activity is the work and the work is the activity; people are 'lost' in their work. The feelings are of me, but not about me. Feelings of work are a form of acquaintance knowledge not typically found in social science. It refers to the sense of goodness, tedium, irritation, gloom, excitement, fear or surge that working evokes, and the kind of adaptations and shifts that people make as a result of such feelings. There is a serenade of motions that can be intrinsically pleasurable to people in aesthetic occupations, such as dancing, designing, decorating, painting and pottery (Sandelands and Buckner 1 989; Frese 1 990). Surgeons, computer programmers, mathemati­ cians are reputed to report similar feelings of deep involvement. A conundrum in specifying and accounting for work feelings is whether we can 'know' them somehow free from the implicit values of culture or linguistic form. This is both a methodological and a philosophical puzzle. The very reporting of one's feelings in words, or other symbols, offers a translation of the 'raw' experience. And talk about feelings mirrors the value and language system to which the individual belongs. The Chinese, for example, will talk far less than Americans about emotions, focusing more on the body (Lutz and White 1 986). But a question

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remains as to whether experiencing the experi­ ence in the first place requires some learned symbolic form, some language in the head, to make even the most inchoate sensation worthy of personal attention (Bedford 1 986; Oakley 1 993).

THE M YTH OF THE RATIONAL ORGANIZATION ACTOR?

Rational assumptions on human conduct con­ tinue to shape a whole range of organizational! management issues, from advice books on decision-making (Leigh 1 993; Magee 1 99 1 ) and optimum incentive and reward systems (Fried­ man 1 990) to the 'best' leadership styles (Rabey 1 994). Rationality is thought of as the unique property of human beings to be able to make decisions which will maximize their gains in relation to specific goals. They will do this by careful search and assessment of information, and then adopt an optimum means to achieve their goals. Rationality is essentially a thinking, cognitive, process of cool calculation. Impulsive, emotional, desiring qualities are antithetical to rationality and cognition, a duality rooted deeply in traditional Western philosophy and science (Franks and Gecas 1 992; Putnam and Mumby 1 993). But as our discussion so far implies, emotionality has been gaining pace, and place, in organizational analysis. So can we still talk meaningfully of the rational organizational actor? The emotion challenge to rationality comes in three fairly distinct forms: (i) that emotions will interfere with rationality; (ii) that emotional processes can serve rationality; and more radically, (iii) that emotions and cognitions are inextricably entwined, that rationality is a myth. An articulation of these three positions reveals both the breadth of the controversy on where emotions should be best positioned in organiza­ tional studies, and the kind of understandings that different perspectives provide.

Emotions Interfere with Rationality

A number of writers have pointed out that people at work can fail to think 'straight' when feeling threatened (Argyris 1 990). They may be trapped in escalating commitment to the wrong course of action, pouring more and more resources into defending a lost cause, such as the US involvement in the Vietnam War (Schwenk 1 986; Staw 1 98 1 ). Such 'irrational' responses may be explained by people's needs to justify their previous decisions and to appear

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consistent in their behaviour (Staw and Ross 1 987). Essentially these are psychologically defensive reactions, a phenomenon of special interest to clinical organizational analysts, especially followers of traditional Freudian personality theory (Diamond 1 993; de Board 1 978; Miller 1 993; Kets de Vries 199 1a; Schwartz 1 990). Their argument runs as follows. Organizational actors fail to act rationally because what they see is not necessarily a veridical reading of what is 'there'. It is distorted by the actors' imported needs and desires, especially unconscious fears. Anxiety, envy, shame and guilt can shape organizational interactions and structures in ways of which participants are unaware. Such emotionalized thinking twists reality, confuses the appraisal of options, and undermines organizational effec­ tiveness and health. Because of this, negative feelings are suspect and to be handled with care. Eliot Jaques, a psychoanalytic writer on organ­ izations, counsels chief executives to express feelings only 'within the specified limits', and preferably 'outside the company' ( 1 989: 4 1 ) . The feelings should be 'treated' along the lines that a psychoanalyst would treat an individual patient. People in work organizations place each other in roles and relationships which correspond exactly to the unconscious positioning of 'objects' in adult psychoanalysis (Hinshelwood 1 987). The organization is placed on the couch, so to speak (Diamond and Allcorn 1 985; Hirschhorn 1 988). Kets de Vries ( 1 99 1 b) speaks of decoding the emotional components of the 'organizational text' through a historical analysis of aspirations, fears, and goals. Special attention is paid to interpretation of transference - where attitudes developed early in life are repeated in the present. So, for example, a person may react to an autocratic boss with the negative feelings previously experienced for an autocratic parent or teacher. The feelings for these past characters are 'transferred' to the boss, and acted out accordingly (Baum 1 99 1 ) . Evidence o f the operation o f unconscious emotional processes is taken from a broad range of organizational behaviours - individual and group. While such behaviours have an internal rationality, in the sense that they serve actors' anxieties and fears, they can obstruct the organizational rationality of optimizing task behaviour and achieving organizational goals. Kets de Vries and Miller ( 1 984; 1 987) and Lapierre ( 1 99 1 ) explore leadership. They suggest that there are unconscious fantasies underlying the actions of many organizational leaders such as an ever-lurking threat, the need to be in control, and the need to be centre-stage. The centre-stageness can be supported by followers' needs and anxieties. A leader's vision of the

problems with the organization awakens an awareness in the follower of his or her personal needs or problems. As the connection between the two tightens, the leader's presence, influence and opinions are progressively accepted without question. In this manner the follower's anxieties can be transferred to the leader (Kets de Vries 1 990; Bryman 1 992). Such is the relational basis of charismatic leadership, which flourishes in stressful times (House 1 977). Executives will wish to gratify these 'neurotic' desires through their management styles. Kets de Vries and Miller ( 1 984; 1 99 1 ) muster case studies which purport to show that top executives' fears and fantasies are reflected in the emotional tone and behaviour of the whole organization. Para­ noid, depressive, or schizoid executives create respectively suspicious, pessimistic or bewildered employees. This rationale is most persuasive when applied to small, centrally controlled organizations with a dominant chief executive (Miller and Toulouse 1 986). It should be borne in mind that cause-effect links in such analyses (as indeed in many psychodynamic interpreta­ tions) are open to question. The executives' anxiety could be a response to their work groups' inability to cope. Similarly with authoritarians. Leaders with 'authoritarian' personalities, according to Freudian conceptualization (Adorno et al. 1 950), are the products of status-anxious parents who enforce harsh dis­ ciplinarian rules on their offspring, creating fear of failure, hostility and anxiety. When repressed from consciousness these feelings re-emerge as strongly conservative, aggressive behaviours. Industrial and military leaders marked with authoritarianism are noted for their irrational behaviour - blindness to warning signals, inability to admit their own mistakes, and stifling work style (Dixon 1 976; Hosking and Morley 1 99 1 ; lackall 1 988). Psychodynamics, Politics and Work Group Emo tions

Political behaviour in organizations is the strategic mobilization of self-interest - a com­ plex web of individual interpretations and agendas (Lawler and Bacharach 1 983; Pfeffer 1 978). Politics may seem anything but rational in terms of the manifest goals and purposes of an organization. People will 'buy' friends, divide enemies, nurture protective coalitions, diminish another's success (Zaleznik 1 970; Eagle and Newton 1 98 1 ). A realist interpretation of such behaviours is that they represent what organiza­ tions essentially are about, an inevitable feature of organizing. A psychoanalytic perspective is different. Politics stem from individuals' uncon­ scious fears concerning their identity, security

EMOTION A ND ORGANIZING and self-worth. They generally sap the organi­ zation's productive energy by consolidating irrationality, but they are not immutable. Politics, as expressed in the irrationalities of work group behaviour, have been put under the psychoanalytic microscope. Working in groups can pose a basic threat to personal identity as well as being a source of identity (Winnicott 1 965; Rycroft 1 968). It can raise feelings of vulnerability, embarrassment, and fear corre­ sponding to the tensions and dramas of early family life (Weinberg and Mauksch 1 99 1 ). Wilfred Bion ( 1 959) has identified three distinct emotional, unspoken, 'basic assumptions' of in­ group activity: dependency, pairing, fightlflight. Group processes are constantly changing the dominance of one emotional state over another as feelings of security, insecurity and threats to identity ebb and flow. The emotional agendas can, at the least, deflect the group from its task; at worst they can swamp the group. Bion seeks to improve the work effectiveness and rationality of the group by assisting it to increase its psychoanalytic insight - a mark of the 'sophisti­ cated' group. Diamond and Allcorn ( 1 987) take a similar tack, aiming to create an 'intentional work group' which has skills of 'double-loop learning' - the ability to re-examine the assumptions by which it operates (after Argyris 1 990). Under shared threat, such as retrenchment, management cutbacks, or leadership changes, the group as a whole may react in unison with regressive, child-like behaviours: for example, by refusing to cooperate with management, becom­ ing aggressive, or being excessively dependent on a hero figure as a potential 'saviour' (Diamond and Allcorn 1 987). Such reactions feel safe because that is exactly the kind of protection they once afforded in early life. But, in psycho­ analytic terms, excessive reliance on these defences insulates the group from the colder realities that it will need to face up to if it is to preserve its functional integrity, if not very survival, in the organization. Social Defences as Institutionalized Irrationality

Irrationality can become institutionalized in organizations. Unconsciously motivated feelings and primitive anxieties are collectively trans­ ferred and dramatized as systems of 'social defences' in the design and operation of work routines and structures (Hinshelwood 1 987; Jaques 1 9 5 1 ) . Menzies-Lythe's ( 1 988; 1 99 1 ) work in a London teaching hospital offers a powerful illustration of social defences in oper­ ation. Menzies-Lythe approached the alarming waste of good students in the hospital as if they

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were presenting symptoms. Following Melanie Klein's ( 1 959) thoughts on ego defences, she observed that work routines protected the student nurses from the anxiety of the work itself: Their work involves carrying out tasks which, by ordinary standards, are distasteful, disgusting and frightening. Intimate physical contact with patients arouses strong libidinal and erotic wishes and impulses which may be difficult to control. The work situation arouses very strong and mixed feelings in the nurse: pity, compassion and love; guilt and anxiety; hatred and resentment of patients who arouse these strong feelings; envy of the care given to the patient. (Menzies-Lythe 1 988: 46)

The way work was organized ensured non­ feeling, numbed, mechanical caring - minimal emotional contact with the patients. Procedures included keeping the nurse and patient apart as far as possible through rotas and specific tasks on a large number of patients; the depersonali­ zation of patients, who were known by their bed number or disease type; a rhetoric of coping and detachment, e.g. 'a good nurse doesn't get too involved and doesn't mind moving'; checks and counterchecks to dissipate the burden of anxiety about a final decision on a patient; and rituals such as precise task lists, regularly repeated, which induced thoughtlessness and helped nurses avoid anxiety. Nurses would regularly wake patients to give them drugs, even when it was better for patient care to let them sleep. Such defences helped evade anxiety - but it froze coping. And it was for this reason that some nurses left. They found the routines too restrictive, denying them the close patient contact that they desired for their professional development and personal satisfaction. Social defences have been demonstrated by a number of psychodynamic organizational researchers. Jaques's ( 1 95 1 ) early study of factory communication showed how sub-groups interacted, but did not communicate. Suspicion, hostility and guilt prevailed across management and workers, splits based on primitive defences. In screening people from anxiety, social defences can interfere with activities or precau­ tions which avert accidents or disasters. Indeed, they can increase the very probability of an accident happening. To act safely requires a sense of vulnerability to injury. If this vulner­ ability is projected elsewhere - 'the system will handle it', 'it's a foolproof machine', 'it's the safety officer's job' - the precautionary anxiety can no longer play its self-alerting role (Hirsch­ horn and Young 1 99 1 ). This is one explanation why eminently rational security notices of the sort 'what to do in case of an emergency' often have such little impact. The fatal explosion of

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the American space shuttle Challenger in 1 986 has been interpreted along these lines by Schwartz ( 1 988) and Hirschhorn ( 1 988). Far from being a bit of technological misfortune. the failure can be attributed to NASA officials mythologizing the glory and invulnerability of the machine they had created. This made psychodynamic sense given the overwhelming technical complexities and political pressures of a launch at that time, but the wishful thinking obscured warning signs that the shuttle's booster seals might fail. The psychoanalytic writers cited in this section offer a picture of an objective, rational organiza­ tional world that is obfuscated by the unwitting defensive reactions of anxious, emotional actors. Uprooting the 'demon of irrationality' (Gay 1 988: xvii) is the interventionist's task. Examples of 'healthy', rational, organizations are hard to spot in this literature, which tends to focus on the diseased 'patient'. And indeed, there are some despairing critics within the genre who point to (a) a failure of their professional community to free organizations from social defence routines, and (b) the inadequacy of traditional, clinical, psychoanalysis when applied to organizational outcomes and results. Psychoanalysis claims to transform and heal through its process; organizational performance indicators are at best a very rough guide to psychological health. The couch is, perhaps, a little at sea (Gould 1 99 1 ; Menzies-Lythe 1 99 1 ).

and Hirshleifer ( 1 993) suggest that negative emotions, such as anger, serve to ensure the credibility of threats, while love and affection ensure the credibility of promises to cooperate. Emotions block actions that are irrational in a narrow time frame, but are rational when more distant consequences are considered. Emotions allow us to act in ways compatible with our long­ term interests. Artificial intelligence experiments show that emotion is necessary for task-oriented cognition - to make judgements about what is relevant or irrelevant for problem solution (Dennett 1 978; de Sousa 1 987). It allows us to decide what is worth thinking about, and what is relevant and irrelevant once we start thinking. Franks and Gecas relate the following tale to make the point: when a computerized robot was put into a wagon with a bomb and told to figure out what to do before the bomb exploded at a prescribed time, it sat paralyzed from the preliminary stage of figuring out whether the distance between the wagon and China and the price of tea in New York were relevant to the problem. ( 1 992: 1 0)

Or, as Minsky ( 1 986) suggests, the question is not whether intelligent machines can have any emotions, but whether machines can be intelli­ gent without emotions. Emotions and Rationality Entwine

Emotions Serve Rationality

People at work do not always follow rationally 'optimal' processes or paths in their own decisions, or conform to managerially defined rationalities. Relevant information can be missed in making decisions. Hunches, acts of faith, gut feelings, idiosyncratic preferences unlock a problem or change the course of events. A rational actor has to contend with the information to hand. And because there are simply too many possible alternatives for a person to evaluate, rationality must be 'sub­ jective' and 'bounded' (Simon 1 957). We thus move to a model of sufficing rationality. The actor has to make do and, in making do, emotions will show the way. The actor is not the victim of his or her feelings. On the contrary, without emotions even an approximation to rationality could not be achieved. Emotions and feelings are, according to this perspective, necessary appendages to reason (Mumby and Putnam 1 992). Cognitions will follow their own paths, but emotions stop them getting lost. Particular emotions can serve rationality in particular ways. So Frank ( 1 993)

The central tenet of this position is that rational self-interest is thoroughly imbued with emotion. The two cannot be separated and the weighing of means and ends is overwhelmingly emotional. Many rational organizational strategies are pursued on highly emotional grounds, and much of what we describe as rational is in fact emotional (Kemper 1 993; de Sousa 1 987). We have feelings about what we want, and what we want is infused with feelings; and that is intrinsic, not residual, to individual, interpersonal and group functioning (Smith and Berg 1 987a; 1 987b). In further advancing this argument, some writers insist that emotion cannot exist outside the thought/symbolic processes of language, so the cognitive/affective distinction cannot be sustained (e.g. Harre 1 986; Gallois 1 993; Sarbin 1 986; Abu-Lughod and Lutz 1 990). Once the emotion/cognition duality is broken down in this manner, the rational actor cannot exist. The setting of goals, the selection and use of information, and the benefits gained, involve myriad emotionalized/feeling adjustments, 'read­ ings' and personal judgement calls. The whole process may be driven by some overriding emo­ tion: anger with a competitor pushes a retalia-

EMOTION AND ORGANIZING tory executive to considerably over-stretch his department, regardless of consequences; fear of upsetting a powerful supplies director leads a manager to reject a considerably cheaper outside rate for some components. In sum, the combined assault on rationality from the three perspectives leaves us with a compelling case that emotions matter a great deal in organizational behaviour, and that rationality is, at the least, a problematic concept. As researchers of emotion have tended to Balkanize into disciplinary pockets, cross-ferti­ lization of perspectives has been very slight (Kemper 1 990). So we find that the recent surge in sociological interest in emotions, which underpins the 'entwinement' hypothesis on rationality, rarely asks the historical questions that the psychoanalysts raise. The latter may be criticized for promulgating a psychology about 'windowless encapsulated individuals' (Elias 1 978), but the former rarely acknowledge that individuals carry a personal past which can exert its own special emphasis on the social meaning­ making process. Separating the dancer from the dance may well be extremely short-sighted (Sarbin 1 986; Franks and Gecas 1 992); separat­ ing the dancer from past dances could be a sin of equivalent order.

EMOTIONS AND ORGANIZATIONAL ORDER

The way social order is maintained in organiza­ tions has been characterized as a feat of social construction. Actors interpret their situations and seek to 'make sense' through negotiating meanings, some temporary, some less so, with their fellow workers (Berger and Luckmann 1 966; Weick 1 979). This is regarded as a cognitive process, conducted by thinking, mean­ ing-seeking souls who invent and invoke social rules to help them on their way. Weick ( 1 993) recently refines these cognitive dynamics to focus on the 'commitments' between actors which bind particular interpretations and organizational policies. But Weick does not reveal what makes a commitment a commitment, or where the different strengths of commitment come from or feel like - such as being driven by fear, or by loyalty, pride or affection. Different commit­ ments reflect different emotional contracts with others and with self - and this determines the commitments' potency. Cognitive processes alone are an insufficient explanation of organiza­ tional order (Pfeffer 1 982). Certain emotions are central to the nature of organizational order and control, providing the springs to self-regulation that social enterprises require to function. The ability to feel shame,

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embarrassment or guilt is pivotal in this respect. As Wentworth and Ryan note, such emotions 'put the sensed imperative into social duties, the ought into morality, the feeling into respect, the sting into conscience, the deference necessary for social hierarchies' ( 1 992: 38). And, arguably, displaying such emotions without feeling them is one route to moral bankruptcy and organiza­ tional decay (Scheff 1 988; 1 990; Shott 1 979; Oakley 1 993). These emotions are nurtured in the processes of socialization in a nation's culture, and fine-tuned in specific work organiza­ tions. They are, broadly speaking, emotions which concern how we think others are seeing us, and how our performances are judged. Cooley ( 1 922) spoke appealingly of the 'looking glass self', suggesting that people routinely monitor their presentation of self: positive feelings lead to pride, negative feelings lead to embarrassment. While embarrassment may be intrinsic to certain social orders, so too is the taboo on its outward expression - especially in Western societies where it is seen to reflect social incompetence (Goffman 1 967; Harrington 1 992). Anticipation of embarrassment can, therefore, ensure that behaviour in organizations holds to certain normative codes such as deference patterns to superiors, views not to express in particular settings, confidences not to break, dress codes, modes of speech, ways to deal with 'outsiders' or customers. Furthermore, when embarrassment is felt people will attempt to repress or deny the feeling to prevent it leaking into emotional display. This can grow to monomaniac proportions in some institutions, such as the British government system. Deep within unwritten rules of British party politics is the expectation that a party, especially the ruling one, should avoid public embarrassment at all costs (Flam 1 990). Consequently an elaborate public relations machinery and language are used to filter, smooth over, or redefine potential or actual embarrassing moments. In the com­ mercial world it not uncommon for companies to relish a competitor's discomfort as it struggles to disguise an embarrassing revelation on 'unorthodox conduct' . The social codes o f shame and guilt are more deeply rooted than embarrassment. They are tied intimately to moral conduct. If people are unable to anticipate shame or guilt before they act in par'ticular ways, then moral codes are rendered invalid (Callahan 1 988). The field of 'business ethics' (e.g. Walton 1 988) rests on the assump­ tion that moral behaviour is important, but problematic, for the organizational actor. Busi­ ness ethics research focuses on an important feature of organizational behaviour, but atten­ tion to the emotional underpinnings is minimal, leaving the field in an affective vacuum.

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Typically, the literature portrays ethical issues as practical decision problems with a 'bite' because of the harm that can accrue to innocent others. Decisions may involve lying, deceit, fraud, evasion or negligence - disapproved of in many cultures. But ethical monitoring and control go beyond just the pragmatics of harm. They reach into the emotional springs that get people thinking 'harmfully' in the first place. There is evidence that corporations develop values that, in effect, determine their own moralities. Corporate ideology replaces wider moral codes, and it is held in place by fear of unemployment, demotion, non-promotion, humiliation, and/or appeals to loyalty or achievement (Flam 1 993; Smith 1 990; Jackall 1 98 8 ) . As Kunda ( 1 992) notes of a high technology company, its employees lack the foundations of a moral framework that enables them to evaluate corporate activities. The social consequences of the company's technology are glossed over by words like 'innovation', 'pro­ ductivity', and 'profit', 'with their connotations of inevitability and rightness'. Similarly, Jackall reports a manager's pithy assertion on his own organization: What is right in the corporation is not what's right in a man's home or in his church. What is right in the corporation is what the guy above wants from you. That's what morality is in the corporation. ( 1 988: 1 09)

Shame is still a possible feeling in this form of corporate morality, but shame linked to the organization's own 'moral', committed, com­ munity - in isolation, or opposition, to the broader community in which it exists (Schwartz 1 990). It is an organizational representation of Stanley Milgram's ( 1 974) experimental demon­ stration of the extraordinary power of locally contrived rules and regulations to subvert people's normal moral standards. Many of Milgram's subjects felt more anxious about resisting the experimenter's authoritative exhor­ tations to injure a fellow human being (and they believed they actually did) than about not following their own feelings of repulsion at this act. In this manner organizational actors can be relatively impervious to wider social censure: on, say, marketing health damaging products to a country which has weak public health controls; exploiting a poorly organized workforce; or creating significant environmental damage. The shameful employee is the one who breaks the organization's normative codes, as is evidenced in the decisive way that whistleblowers are sidelined and ejected from the corporation (Miceli and Near 1 99 1 ; Jackall 1 988).

EMOTIONALIZING ORGANIZATIONAL CULTURE

Organizational culture is a major carrier of social order. Organizational cultures and sub­ cultures bond people emotionally, while also defining the nature, form and legitimacy of their emotionality. And cultures are susceptible to manipulation (Collins 1 990; Pfeffer 1 982; Fine­ man 1 993a; Aldrich 1 992). Skilled emotion managers, often charismatic chief executives or consultants, have mobilized employee feelings by exhortation. So consultant Tom Peters urges managers to 'be enthralled by the product', and 'to laugh, cry and smile' to be effective ( 1 989: 39-4 1 ). In a high technology company, top managers speak of 'trying to make it fun to work here, make it challenging and exciting, make you feel you can make important contributions' (Kunda 1 992: 65). The evocation of feelings of loyalty, 'family', and shared fate can stir primitive bonding when the drama is well scripted and the props appropriate - as was the performance of Jan Carlzon, president of Sweden's domestic airline. He stood on a tall ladder in a huge aircraft hanger, surrounded by his assembled workforce, ingenuously placing the organization's fate in their 'valued' hands (Carlzon 1 987). Other companies, known for their 'strong' cultures, inspire new recruits and reinvigorate old ones through a careful social programme to keep alive the managerial vision of collective feelings and purpose. Many such events blur the division between work and non­ work (Van Maanen 1 986; Van Maanen and Kunda 1 989; Peven 1 968). A marketing director of a direct-sales perfumery describes her reac­ tions to such indoctrination: They ended the presentation with the words, 'Tomorrow will be the same as today unless you do something about it now! Can you afford not to?' It was that that ensnared me into the positive thinker's nirvana. For a nominal fee I was soon on the road to building my dream and, whether I had a dream or not. I was soon to acquire one. . . . Parisienne provided me with an ideal opportunity to build my own business with no financial risk (and) to feel valued, recognized and rewarded. Once caught on the roundabout, many people become so involved that their whole life revolves around their team. Their friends are the people they recruit. Their social life revolves around company meetings. These are always fun events - bright lights, loud music, razzamataz. For many people whose work life is routine, perhaps mundane, working in such an atmosphere of glitz becomes addictive. (Hopfl and Linstead 1 993: 82-3)

EMOTION AND ORGANIZING The emotional medicine can be potent. Seiden­ berg ( \ 975) reports how IBM employees have shown more pride at seeing the company flag on the corporate offices than seeing their national flag. With such strong programming there is little room for doubters or the disaffected. If they cannot sincerely fall into line they must feign enthusiasm, or leave.

Culturalizing Stress

The managerial prerogative over emotionality can also extend to determining the organiza­ tional place for negative feelings, especially those associated with stress. Stress has not normally been addressed as an organizational cultural phenomenon, although its psychological pro­ cesses have been well documented (e.g. Selye 1 956; Cooper 1 99 1 ; Cooper and Payne 1 978; Cox et al. 1 98 1 ). Stress has become extraordinarily diffused and popularized over the last decade or so. The discourse on 'stress the disease' and its 'control' has been co-opted by managers, along with a range of health-care professionals (Giddens 1 99 1 ; Murphy 1 984; Newton 1 989). I t would be rare indeed to find a student of management who has not been exposed to a textbook rendition on the personal and organizational dangers of excessive stress, despite the evidence that suggests some stress ( ,eustress') can have positive, energizing qualities (Selye 1 956). Indeed, stress has acquired something of the status of a cultural symbol in organizations, representing the plight of indivi­ duals who are at once damaged by the work/ organization and responsible for their own predicament (Barley and Knight 1 992; Abbott 1 990; Newton et al. 1 995). This point is nicely captured by Allinson et a\" s view of why stress counselling is needed in the workplace: Many employees are grimly beginning to acknowl­ edge the fact that the stability (in the sense of freedom from constant change) is a thing of the past, but this in itself is not helping them to cope any better. ( 1 989: 385-6)

Company-based stress management pro­ grammes are fast expanding (Murphy 1 987; 1 988). The initial seduction lies in their compat­ ibility with a 'caring' management style, where feelings are the concern of 'enlightened employ­ ers'. The presenting rhetoric is of the sort: 'We all get stress feelings from time to time, which can be an unhappy state of affairs. It is understandable, and help is at hand to assist you coping. ' Most companies emphasize the liability of stress: a highly stressed, or burned out, worker is unreliable, one of the 'walking wounded' (Kunda 1 992). In this way, stress is a dangerous

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personal weakness. Supervisors are trained to spot the symptoms in their staff and to intervene. Managerial self-interest is not far from the surface in such interventions. Matteson and Ivancevich proclaim that the issue of labour costs is a 'compelling' reason for stress manage­ ment courses, 'viewed from virtually any perspective' ( 1 982: 770). A reduction of labour costs, turnover, sickness, and absence, and an increase in productivity, are the promises (Barley and Knight 1 992; Allinson et al . 1 989). Individualizing stress in this manner circumvents a company's responsibility for dealing more structurally with stress. It is the individual's coping that has to improve. But the partiality of this position can be contested, reinforcing the view that stress can be cultural1y embedded and politically driven. For example, Neale et al. ( 1 982) compared management and union per­ spectives on stress, noting union rejection of the view that workers needed to learn to change their perceptions of job pressures to reduce stress (an axiom of cognitive appraisal theories of stress). On the contrary, argued the union, more relaxed styles would follow if demands and deadlines, job-loss threats and speed-ups were diminished to a more acceptable level. Stress rhetorics can become a vocabulary for organizing, penetrating a major part of the cultural space of an organization or occupation. In the semi-professions, such as nursing and social work, it can build solidarity. Barley and Knight ( 1 992) suggest that an 'interpretive contagion' occurs in these settings. The occupa­ tional social network sanctions stress talk because it represents a shared feeling about over-demanding work and excessive pressures. Consequently, the support community does not ameliorate stress as advocated in traditional stress research. It heightens it, at least presenta­ tionally. Sometimes contagion will be indirect, but signalling a tacit acceptability of stress. For example, in a study of a social work agency Fineman ( 1 985) observed that workers would rarely admit their stresses to one another, and hardly ever to their supervisors - whom they believed would disapprove of such 'weakness' and use it against them. But non-verbal, public, expressions of stress were rampant: harassed looks, sighs, tense movements, shouting and smoking. 'Going sick' was prevalent and hardly ever questioned by management. Privately, staff acknowledged that more often than not, such sickness meant stress.

R IGIDIFYING EMOTIONAL ENACTMENTS

Corporately prescribed emotions can be fine­ tuned. The checkout clerk at a supermarket is

stribution forbidden.

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instructed that 'a friendly smile is a must', or is rewarded with a gift ranging from $25 to a new car if 'caught' being friendly to mystery shoppers (Czepiel et al. 1 985; Rafaeli and Sutton 1 987; 1 989). McDonald's 'Hamburger University' instructs its managers to ensure that 'all­ American' traits are displayed by its counter staff: 'sincerity, enthusiasm, confidence and a sense of humor' (Boas and Chain 1 976). And Walt Disney World advises its new employees about the way they must appear: First we practice a friendly smile at all times with our guests and among ourselves. Second, we use friendly courteous phrases. 'May I help you' . . . 'Thank you' . . . 'Have a nice day' . . . 'Enjoy the rest of your stay', and many others are all part of our working vocabulary. (Walt Disney Productions 1 982: 6)

Interactive style is stripped of its usual improvi­ zation. Affective demeanour, precise words, and sometimes physical posture, are scripted for short bursts of friendliness or courtesy. Some parts of the insurance sales business have developed such programming with awesome precision so that 'positive mental attitude' (PMA) can be exuded by its sales agents (Leidner 1 99 1 ). 'Negative thinking' is wiped out with scripts for all occa­ sions; radiated enthusiasm and an ever-present smile is de rigueur. Leidner describes an insurance company where it is reputed that even llon­ English-speaking agents in the USA can perform the scripts. They learn them phonetically. Emotion is taken as a resource that a company needs to get the job done, what Mills ( 1 956) calls the 'personality market'. There have been behaviouristic studies which relate emotional demeanour to work performance, such as in nurses (Ostner and Beck-Gernsheim 1 979), cock­ tail waitresses who get better tips (Tidd and Lockard 1 978), conmen (Sutherland 1 937) and poker players (Hayano 1 982). Women who have recently become prostitutes are preferred by clients for their emotional openness; long-term prostitutes display emotions more superfic ially (Girtler 1 985). Recent work by Rafaeli and Sutton ( 1 987; 1 989) and Rafaeli ( 1 989) continues this tradition, examining the emotions workers convey in order to satisfy role and performance expectation. In a study of supermarket cashiers the researchers measured eye contact, smiling, thanking, pleasantness and attending as 'ex­ pressed positive emotions' and discovered, per­ haps unsurprisingly, that the busier the cashier, the fewer the positive emotions. They also found that sex of supermarket clerks, their form of dress and the presence of other clerks or customers, influenced the display of positive emotion. The segmentation of emotional display, as exemplified in these studies, is aimed at manage-

rial and productivity concerns. The inquiries fail to engage significantly with private feelings or the sociallnegotiative subtleties of workplace emotion. Hochschild's ( 1 983) seminal depth study of flight attendants was rather different in orientation. She identified 'feeling rules' in an American airline's recruitment and training systems. Flight attendants' grooming and perso­ nal attitudes had to be in accord with such rules. Encounters with customers had to be met with warmth and smiles. And the smiles were to be 'inside-out' ones - really felt and meant. The turmoil of passenger service, the time pressures, the spillages, the provocative customers, the angry customers, the sexualized remarks, all had to be received with understanding and a smile. For some this was hard work, emotional labour. They strove through 'deep acting' to take the company's message to heart and to 'really feel' what they were presenting. They became emotionally encapsulated in their job role, and some reported confusion about their self-image and sexuality. Others took the job to be all about acting, or face work (Goffman 1 959); they resisted the corporation's attempts at deeper programming. So the smile, the laughter, the sympathy, would be switched on and off as and when necessary. The act, though, could break down under pressure when feelings of anger, irritation or rebellion could surface. A key incident illustrates: young businessman said to a flight attendant, 'Why aren't you smiling?' She put her tray back on the food cart and said, 'I'll tell you what. You smile first, then I'll smile.' The businessman smiled at her. 'Good: she replied. ' Now freeze and hold that for fifteen hours'. (Hochschild 1 983: 1 27) A

The act can go stale, a sentiment amplified by another flight attendant in a British study: You try saying 'hello' to 300 people and sound as though you mean it towards the end. Most of us make a game of it. Someone - probably a manager - said This business is all about interpersonal transactions.' He was wrong. It's all about bullshit. If life is a cabaret, this is a bloody circus. (Hopfl 1 99 1 : 5-6)

Hochschild's research points up the psychologi­ cal damage of a high degree of emotional labour - when feeling rules, coupled with hierarchical surveillance, become oppressive. Because of this, the very existence of emotional labour has been regarded as pernicious, and some argue for a radical reformulation of organizing where implicit feeling rules prevail, based on mutual relatedness (Mumby and Putnam 1 992). While this may be a laudable goal, the stereotyping of emotional labour tends to overstate its negativ­ ity. The 'play' or 'drama' between server and

EMOTION AND ORGANIZING served can be mutually rewarding, echoing views of Homans ( 1 958) and Thibaut and Kelly ( 1 959). Rather like a tease, or game, both parties are trying to look 'convincing' while neither fully believes in the emotions presented. The fun is in pulling off a good performance - in the aircraft, shop, restaurant, theme park, or wherever (Fineman 1 993a). Indeed, Wouters's ( 1 989) work with flight attendants presents a decidedly less bleak picture than Hochschild's. And Leidner's ( 1 99 1 ) insurance agents were not at all fazed about their emotional programming: sales commission was all. There has been considerable interest in refining and developing the emotional labour concept. Hochschild herself expands it to include the 'knowing about, and assessing as well as managing emotions, other people's as well as one's own' (Hochschild 1 993: x). So a manager's emotional labour will involve assessing others' feelings in everyday supervision, as well as in more exceptional times - like disputes and emergencies. It will also involve regulating own feelings and those of others, such as in counselling and 'motivating'. Emotional labour tends to be most onerous in jobs with low autonomy, and in some boundary-spanning roles where people represent their companies to outsiders (Wharton 1 993). Most studies of emotional labour take a tightly contained view of organizational actors; they are disconnected from other life roles and from their historical and psychodynamic context (Wharton and Erickson 1 993; James 1 989; 1 993). The virtue of a wider analysis is revealed in studies on the legacy effects of periods of unemployment. Both family and prior employ­ ment experiences help explain why some people struggle with their feelings of commitment to a new job or employer. They act out a positive and harmonious role at work to 'look right' to management in order to protect their job and family security. Privately they feel especially nervous and insecure about committing them­ selves - because of being let down by a previous employer (Constantas 1 994; Fineman 1 987). One of Constantas's re-employed unskilled workers expressed his new difficulty in 'play acting' : It's not only that you've got t o crawl [to manage­ mentj, but you can never express yourself negatively, having to pretend and look as though you're working hard. ( 1 994: 23 1 )

The more a person wants t o wrap his o r her identity in the job, the more he or she will embrace any 'necessary' emotional labour - a fair exchange for what the organization has to offer (Ashford and Humphrey 1 993; Kunda 1 992). Emotional labour is built into many professional jobs, where the doctor, nurse,

30 1

lawyer, banker and so forth is, in effect, paid to be 'serious', 'concerned', 'sympathetic', 'objective' or 'detached'. Such presented images become part of the professional mystique with which clients collude (Hosking and Fineman 1 990). If the mask cracks the professional relationship is threatened - such as the doctor who gets very upset in front of a patient; the nurse who shouts at a nervous patient; the lawyer who over-identifies with a client; or the banker who seems too frivolous. Emotional labour for these people can be a burdensome and lonely affair, self-monitored until something goes drastically wrong. Emotional labourers can be part of a network, or hierarchy, which determines who conveys what emotional messages to whom. For exam­ ple, the bad news on a failed promotion or redundancy is sidelined by a supervisor to a personnel officer. James ( 1 993) aptly shows more subtle divisions of emotional labour, formal and informal, in the way a diagnosis of cancer is disclosed to a patient and her relatives. Although the broad context and hierarchical tone are set by the consultant surgeon in charge of the case, disclosure in fact is an unfolding product of emotion work between the patient, relatives, nurses and junior doctors. In ad hoc and opportunistic fashion they negotiate boundaries of acceptability, emotional tolerance and infor­ mation. Gender is also a factor in emotional labour. Gender and emotion discourses are often closely interrelated (Chodorow 1 979; Hearn and Parkin 1 987; Lutz 1 990). In the patriarchy of many work organizations, men, by virtue of positional status and power, are more able to impose their understanding and valuation of emotionality on other men and women, to the extent that emotional labour has been accused of being the product of a quiet male conspiracy about the role of emotion in organizational affairs (Mumby and Putnam 1 992; Putnam and Mumby 1 993). A similar reasoning can apply to categorizations of 'women's work' and 'men's work', which usually contain assumptions about the emotional performance or stability of the sexes.

EMOTIONALIZED ZONES

Some writers have argued the benefits of aggregating an organization's feeling states and emotion norms for broad predictions of different organizational behaviours (Staw and Sutton 1 993; Isen and Baron 1 99 1 ) . However, this can run the risk of over-homogenizing important differences. One can envisage a cultural map of

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an organization which charts the various settings and locations, or zones, which have come to 'permit' different types of emotional expression. These are not randomly distributed but exist in relation to each other, sometimes counterbalan­ cing, sometimes complementing. Each relies on socially constructed, culturally transmitted implicit feeling rules, and together they generate a series of sub-cultural swirls of emotional meaning and conduct (Martin 1 992; Aldrich 1 992). If we return to the cabin of an aircraft, the galley is a place where it is possible for flight attendants to drop their public mask, if they wish. In low voice, by facial expression, they can reveal to each other some of their feelings about their service encounters, the management, or whatever (Hochschild 1 983). These sorts of compensatory, even cathartic, acts are permis­ sible in the school staff room, behind the kitchen door of a restaurant, in a closed police car, in a doctor's rest room, and so forth (Goffman 1 956; 1 959; Gabriel 1 988; Hearn 1 993). Such settings offer workers an amnesty from their normal emotional labours, a chance to enjoy self­ expression through a different set of emotional codes. So academics round a lunch table vent their despair about the students they have just 'suffered'. 'Safe' settings such as these provide fertile territory for power-coded humour and stories, a symbolic attack on those (especially bosses) whose normal status protects them from open criticism; this is what Clark ( 1 990) describes as a renegotiation of social place. Some emotionalized zones may be more temporarily defined, but just as significant in the patchwork of emotional cultures. Corridors, company car parks, lobby areas and washrooms are places where confidences are exchanged, formal stances dropped, 'real feelings' expressed, persuasion exercised, and old camaraderies reinforced. Turner ( 1 969) speaks of 'liminal episodes' between formally structured events, when language and behaviour become more playful and fraternal. An organizational exam­ ple would be the quick, informal debriefings and interpretation checking that take place during breaks in, and between, meetings. In Kunda's ethnography of an engineering company, such periods were used to voice the unofficial line on top management - that 'bullshit that comes from above' ( 1 992: 1 58).

ISSUES AND DIRECTIONS FOR ORGANIZATIONAL EMOTION

A major challenge to our understanding of emo­ tion in organizations is to soften the disciplinary

lines. Encouragingly, we are now hearing voices raised in that direction from within the separate disciplines (e.g. Oatley 1 992; Kemper 1 990). However, the translation of such an ethos into organizational studies is only just beginning. If we are to see more theoretical convergence, this present review suggests some propositions to consider: •

•

•

Organizational actors will carry with them an emotional history, which includes both conscious and unconscious traces of pre­ vious emotion work. The emotionalities of organizing and culture will both reflect and be influenced by these, and they may be better construed as important 'givens' rather than aberrations or oddities. The social context not only defines the meaning and place of emotions, but also defines its legitimacy. This will reflect the social times as well as the specific organiza­ tion. Emotion can become highly politicized in this process, as is the case of stress, and the value placed on work as a source of 'well­ being' or 'happiness'. In-context research means that emotions should not be divorced from the actor/task activity, or from other social roles and related experiences. Tasks' and 'emotion' take on their meaning and affective sig­ nificance within the actor's phenomenologi­ cal and 'doing' universe.

We can, as I have indicated elsewhere (Fineman 1 993b), focus this type of thinking in a number of ways, as exemplified in the following sections. What Are the Emotionalities of Working and Organizing?

Currently we have surprisingly little insight into real-time feelings and emotions as they unfold, interact, form and reform. We might expect a blend of flow-type experiences, private feelings and emotional performances as organizational life proceeds. Such basic, and engaging, descrip­ tive data are missing in the haste to predefine and isolate specific emotions in advance of a study. While the driving feelings (fear, anger, passion, worry, shame) no doubt saturate some work experiences and performances, more often we pass through a range of mundane feelings which set the trajectories and character of a working day. And these feelings will become redefined and reformed as some of them are told and retold in the various social groupings of work (Rime et al. 1 99 1 ). We need a social science of the prosaic, the fleeting, as well as of the loud emotions. Methodologies of subjectivity and observation

EMOTION AND ORGANIZING are required, such as introspections, 'live' diaries, deep ethnography, participant observation and possibly less conventional media (Ellis and Bochner 1 992; Ronai 1 992). The foundational role of such research cannot be over-emphasized. We should not atomize and quantify emotions before we know what we have to atomize and quantify.

Feelings and Action Lines

Within the above picture, there will be doing along with the feeling. Perhaps this means doing x instead of y, staying longer than intended with a particular colleague, missing a meeting, going home early, returning often to the coffee machine. Tightly defined studies could track particular prototypical organizational decisions, or deci­ sion arenas - such as in personnel selection, budget allocation, the purchase of new equip­ ment, layoffs, environmental protection. Such studies could be revealing at a number of levels. They could trace the political effect of emotions as different emotional performances, such as anger, hurt and pride, are used strategically to influence outcomes. Some channels of possible actions will be closed off to avoid embarrass­ ment, or for fear of exposure; others will be opened to retain feelings of solidarity and warmth. This would be an excellent test-bed for those interested in the way 'rationality' in organizations operates, and how more subtle emotional agendas ( personal fears and threats, desire for recognition, envy) are employed, or woven into, decisional processes. Ethical questions can arise with certain deci­ sions, such as on layoffs, promotions and environmental protection. What is the emotional substructure of the organizational values that shape these considerations? What social defence mechanisms operate? Does a stirring of guilt or shame ever happen, and if so (or if not) what difference does it make to the outcomes? At present, mainstream research into business ethics is almost an emotion-free zone. Yet, as Solomon observes, 'without such emotions there can be no ethics, no business ethics, whatever the rules, policies, the corporate codes and fine speeches from company headquarters' ( 1 99 1 : 1 97).

Emotionalized Zones

With a more sociological eye we can explore the ways organizations divide in emotional archi­ tecture and emotion work. How do office spaces (open plan, cellular, closed doors, open doors) come to feel safe or risky for different types of

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emotional presentation or the sharing of intimacies? How do meeting places and struc­ tures of all sorts come to be socially defined as 'right' or 'wrong' for certain forms of emotion­ ality? · Are they linked to the organization's power and status differentials? Is their degree of perceived privateness or publicness important (Parkin 1 993)? Is there, as I have suggested earlier, a necessary complementarity in these processes? And if there is, are people generally unhappier working in organizations where emotionalized zones are restricted or restrictive? In such circumstances people have nowhere to 'go' to test out, work on, redefine or refine their feelings. They have to rely heavily on themselves and their feelings of work, and/or on others outside of the organization. In this sense, the doing of emotion work and the social regulation of feeling are both intrapsychic and socially located phenomena.

Managerial Control of Emotions

In the last decade or so we have witnessed an acceleration in the institutionalization of man­ agerial control over emotional display. What was once intuitive 'good sense' to the effective shopkeeper or door-to-door salesman is now a commodity which is subjected to the full rigours of corporate training and control. Deliberate hierarchical control of emotions - where posi­ tive, 'smiling', ones are inculcated and negative 'stress' ones are pathologized - presents a com­ pelling picture of a late twentieth century form of Taylorism. Most social psychological studies of emotion operate with the material 'as given', regardless. So, if smiling and niceness can be elevated and more sincere, to link better with managerial and market purpose, so be it (e.g. Staw and Sutton 1 993; Baron 1 993). By way of contrast, some writers regard this response as both collusive and regressive (Hochschild 1 983; Kemper 1 990; Flam 1 993). Enhancing service efficiency or corporate loyalty by selecting and training people for the 'right' feelings and emotional gloss is akin to emotional eugenics. Human beings are diminished - and often exploited because many have little choice but to comply. Perhaps justifiably, this scenario has become something of a bogy in the sociology of emotions because of its manipulative aura and the distress it can cause. But, as signalled in this review, there is a less seedy side to such endeavours, and also a more pluralisticlnegotia­ tive one - as emotional regulation moves between actors of different status and power. Such processes merit further investigation. Nevertheless, there is evidence that 'have a nice day', or the McDonaldization of industry, is

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gaining an ever-tightening grip, especially on the increasing world market in casual labour (Ritzer 1 993). There has been little constructively critical response to this from the organizational sciences, with the exception of a few writers who urge employees to resist emotional enculturation and to encourage employers to think more in terms of the advantages of employee self-formation and owned feelings (Willmott 1 993; Putnam and Mumby 1 993). As students and researchers of emotion we can, perhaps, prod, educate, and shout more in unison if managerial control of emotions is edging towards a new authoritarian­ ism. It also requires disengagement from activities which tacitly support or collude with the worst elements of such ventures. But most importantly, we need to offer imaginative organizational designs which place emotionality, in both its manageable and unmanageable forms, nearer the centre of the organizational stage.

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12 Exploring the Aesthetic Side of Organizational Life PASQUALE GAGLIARDI

THE TANGIBLE ORGANIZA nON I was brought up not just by my mother but also by the colours registered by my eyes, by the noises that prompted reactions of alertness or of calm, by the smell of fragrance and danger, by the habit of distinguishing good and bad more through sampling than through opinions, through the variants of touch born out of wishes or prompted by desires. I (Crovi 1 993: I )

Students o f organizations usually conceive, describe and interpret them as (utilitarian) forms of social aggregation. We have always been accustomed to associating the idea of organization with the image of people who make decisions, act and interact, each performing different tasks, more or less specialized and more or less linked, between them and with a collective task or purpose. If you ask a manager to describe the company for which he or she works he or she will probably draw you an organization chart, that is, nothing other than a graphic and sum­ mary representation of a set of socio-professional roles and of relations between these roles. At one time I used to view organizations in a similar corporate way. My perspective changed as a result of some field work during which I asked a workman assigned to an old lathe to describe his company to me. In reply he said: For me, this company is that damned gate I come through every morning, running if I'm late, my grey locker in the changing-room, this acrid smell of iron filings and grease - can't you smell it yourself? - the smooth surface of the pieces I've milled - I instinctively rub my fingers over them before

putting them aside - and . . . yes! that bit of glass up there, in front, where sometimes - there you are - I spot a passing cloud.

Maybe my respondent had a poetic soul and felt things that the majority of corporate actors do not feel, though I don't believe that is so. I think he was merely more aware than most that our experience of the real is first and foremost sen­ sory experience of a physical reality, while he was less concerned to supply an intellectualized version of his firm. For him it was obviously above all a place, a physical and tangible reality. He had grasped the elementary truth that the physical setting is not a naked container for organizational action (Strati 1 990), but a context that selectively solicits - and hence, so to speak, 'cultivates' - all our senses. This context refines some of our perceptive capacities ( perhaps at the expense of others), enabling us to grasp minimal gradations in the intensity of a stimulus, and accustoms us to certain sensations till we become 'fond' of them, even if those same sensations may well be unpleasant in other contexts and for other people. The physical setting can be natural (as the rectangle of sky of my informant) but in contemporary organizations - generally recep­ tive towards any technical expedient that may improve efficiency - it is in large measure strewn with artifacts. An artifact may be defined as '(a) a product of human action which exists independently of its creator, (b) intentional, it aims, that is, at solving a problem or satisfying a need, (c) perceived by the senses, in that it is endowed with its own corporality or physicality' (Gagliardi 1 990a: 3).

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The study of corporate artifacts and space has emerged in recent years as one of the more interesting new currents in the general approach whereby organizations are studied as cultures 2 Seemingly, the object of this type of study is what in the tradition of anthropological research is defined as the material culture of a social group. In that tradition, though, material culture has been generally considered an element (al­ though secondary and accessory) of the cultural system, and the objects in which the material culture is expressed have often been considered worthy only of scrupulous classification. Even the study of the artistic production of traditional societies, which - as Forge ( 1 973) observes - was an object of particular interest on the part of pioneers of anthropology such as Haddon and Boas. has vanished from the agenda of anthro­ pologists with the spread and development of field-work techniques. The choice of certain researchers of organiza­ tional culture to devote themselves to the study of artifacts springs not from the desire to become specialists in a secondary or superficial 'aspect' or 'element' of the cultural system - however fascinating it may be - but from the awareness that the study of artifacts and of physical reality enables one to approach a basic human experience: aesthetic experience. The term 'aesthetic' (from the Greek aistha­ nomai 'perceive, feel with the senses') is used here in the general sense, to refer to all types of sense experience and not simply to experience of what is socially described as 'beautiful' or defined as 'art'. In the general sense I employ it, aesthetic experience includes: a form of knowledge: sensory knowledge 3

2

3

(different from intellectual knowledge). often unconscious or tacit and ineffable. i.e. not translatable into speech a form of action: expressive, disinterested action shaped by impulse and by a mode of feeling rather than by the object (the opposite of impressive action aimed at practical ends) (Witkin 1 974) a form of communication (different from speech) which can take place to the extent that expressive actions - or the artifacts which these produce - become the object of sensory knowledge and hence a way of passing on and sharing particular ways of feeling or ineffable knowledge.

When I call the aesthetic experience 'basic', I intend the adjective also in the literal sense of the term, to indicate, that is, that the aesthetic experience is the basis of other experiences and forms of cognition which constitute the usual object of organizational studies and that it therefore implies that aesthetic experiences have

a profound influence on the life and performance of the organization. Despite the basic grounds that aesthetic experience provides for the sense of organization life it is an aspect generally ignored in organizational literature. The few isolated exceptions (Jones et al. 1 988; Ramirez 1 99 1 ; Sandelands and Buchner 1 989; Strati 1 990; 1 992) constitute early - sometimes timid attempts at exploring an issue that awaits and deserves in-depth investigation. Considering the novelty of the theme and the fact that knowledge that is still to be produced cannot be systematized, the main aim of this chapter is to be mould-breaking, future-oriented and agenda-setting. In order to break the mould we have to analyse and transcend the inveterate reluctance of social scientists - and of organiza­ tion people in particular, be they practitioners or scholars - to deal with things and with aesthetics. Here one needs a critical analysis of some of the implicit assumptions dominant in the world of social and organizational research. Having done this I shall lay the basis for a consistent conceptual framework. Having pro­ vided an appropriate language, the discussion of aesthetic experience in organizations need not rely on antiquated interpretative categories. Categories such as 'motivator factors' or 'intrin­ sic satisfaction' rightly have been challenged for their contemporary lack of depth by writers such as Sandelands and Buchner ( 1 989) as shallow, inconsequential and trite in revealing the depth of sensations and feelings in the workplace. Aesthetics, conceived as a single discipline in the terms of philosophy, does not prove ade­ quate for the task proposed. One must, as ever in interesting organization studies, be catholic in one's use of sources. Points of view and analytic categories drawn from such diverse disciplines as the theory of knowledge, cultural anthropology, the psychology of perception, neuro-psychology, the sociology of art. the history of art. and others, turn out to be necessary. A glance at the references to this chapter will give the reader some idea of the wide range of disciplines invoked in the efforts so far made to grasp the hidden regularities of phenomena that remain. in many ways, ungraspable.

THE REASONS FOR NEGLECT : DOMINANT VIEWS OF SOCIAL AND ORGANIZATIONAL KNOWLEDGE

Every culture habituates those who share in it. Habituation takes the form of fundamental polarities that express oppositions or comple­ mentarities between extremes that shape the perception. analysis and structure of experience.

EXPLORING THE AESTHETIC SIDE A series of paired terms, close and partly over­ lapping, well rooted in modern Western culture, are of particular importance for my proposed analysis: art/science, intuitive knowledge/logico­ scientific knowledge, play (or leisure)/work, beauty/utility, expressivity/instrumentality, con­ templation/activity. These distinctions do not reflect - as many believe - an order inherent in reality. On the contrary, such distinctions are culturally determined and derive from visions and conceptions inspired by the utilitarian rationalism which became rooted and wide­ spread in the West from the second half of the eighteenth century. These conceptions are, at the same time, cause and effect, reflection and j ustification of the industrial revolution. More generally they are grounded in that profound cultural transformation which we usually iden­ tify with the advent of 'modernity' and which Max Weber defined as the disenchantment of the world. The scientific revolution and the perfecting of the cognitive framework of the natural sciences achieved by Newton divided the study of the primary qualities of the physical world objective, universal and subject to the language of mathematics - from its secondary qualities, which are the object of subjective experiences, sensory and inexact. 'Special aesthetics', mean­ ing the study of beauty, arise at the moment when the beautiful is definitively split off and distinguished from the useful and practical, when the moment of activity, connected with the exercise of the cognitive faculties of the intellect and its productions (science and technology), is conceptually and socially split off from the moment of contemplation and of the imagination linked to the fruition of the beautiful and of art (Carmagnola 1 994). These oppositions/divisions did not exist - or did not have the same force and the same consequence - before the eight­ eenth century: in the Renaissance (as in the Graeco-Hellenistic civilization which inspired humanism) art and technique, functionality and beauty were hardly separable, either concep­ tually or in the organization of social life, and Hamilton ( 1 942) suggests that the extraordinary level reached by those civilizations was the outcome of this integration. With the advent of modernity the aforemen­ tioned distinctions hardened. New hierarchies took unequivocal shape among the values referred to by such polarities. Work and pro­ duction became more important than leisure and play,4 activity than contemplation, utility than beauty. Above all - for what interests us here logico-scientific (objective) knowledge estab­ lished itself definitively as a superior form of knowledge over aesthetico-intuitive (subjective) knowledge. The aesthetic was demoted to the

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'secondary sphere of consumption, of spare time, , of the useless 5 (Carmagnola 1 994: 1 29). In the old scholastic treatises logic was con­ sidered the art of demonstration, while elo­ quence (or rhetoric) was held to be the art of persuasion. In the first the capacity to convince the hearer depends on objective features of the discourse, in the second on subjective qualities of the speaker and on his style, that is to say, on the formal properties - i.e. sensorially and emotion­ ally perceptible - of his speech, which in their turn appeal to subjective characteristics and perceptual attitudes in the hearer. Rhetoric was often represented in the treatises by the image of an open hand and logic by that of a fist (Howell, cited in Mamiani 1 992). This symbolization gave clear expression to the idea that the progress of knowledge is the fruit of an oscillation between two diverse forms of knowledge and wmmu­ nication of equal worth and dignity. But, starting with Newton, the sage became more and more identified with the scientist whose reports had to be the outcome of cold observa­ tion, stripped of any stylistic stratagem and divested of the charm of imagination. Modernity has thus inherited from the eighteenth-century scientific revolution a closed fist - or at least the idea of the superiority of the closed fist over the open hand - and hence a conception of science , 'clenched in its processes of demonstration 6 (Mamiani 1 992: 225). This conception is still dominant in the social sciences also, despite the fact that efforts - among which those of Polanyi ( 1 966) and of Brown ( 1 977) are outstanding - to establish an aesthetic view of social knowledge, combining the rigorous outlook of scientific realism with the creative potentiality of Roman­ tic idealism, have found more than a handful of enthusiastic supporters. The problem is that, apart from affirmations of principle, not much has been done to work out the methodological implications of these attempts at synthesis. If formal organizations are the social artifacts which best embody the rationalistic and utilitar­ ian ideal of modernity, it should not surprise us that those who deal with organizations - be they practitioners or academics - are irresistibly attracted to the pragmatic, serious, rationalist half of the paired terms mentioned above. How­ ever open-minded organizational scholars may be, the fact remains that the knowledge that they produce is aimed at practitioners. Their epistemology, implicit or explicit, will thereby tend to reflect the world view and theory of knowledge of those in whose eyes they strive to be credible: it is a question, so to speak, of cognitive and cultural attunement (Barley et al. 1 988). This explains, in my view, why even among students of organizational cultures, interest in the study of artifacts and of the

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aesthetic dimension is comparatively limited, despite the fact that the founding principles of this line of study included from the start the legitimacy of a form of understanding of corporate life different from and alternative to that of rational cognition, one which Ebers ( 1 985) specifically defined as 'the poetic mode'. When one moves from the forms of knowledge to the objects of social knowledge (that is to say, if we pass from the question of epistemology to the question of ontology), we come up against the idiosyncratic tendency of social scientists, and organizational ones in particular, to shuttle between people - as subjects of relationships and their mental products, between the 'thinker' and the 'thought', excluding from their visual field and interests material things (the 'product' , s o t o speak) (Ammassari 1 985). Here, too, we can see, on the one hand, the influence of Descartes's idea of the self as the subject of thought capable of self-consciousness, and on the other the influence of the rooted distinction between mind and body, with the evident assumption of the superiority of the former over the latter. However, as Latour ( l 992a) has brilliantly observed, material things are the missing masses who knock insistently at the doors of sociology. To neglect to analyse them and observe only human action is like limiting one's gaze to half of the court during a tennis match: the observed movements seem to have no meaning. For Latour ( 1 992a; 1 992b), in fact, the development of technology in modern society makes it possible to delegate a growing number of action programmes to non-human subjects, to things which while being often stationary and lacking any trace of 'machinery' - as for example an indicator board - are machines in the more general sense of the term. They, in fact, incorporate activity that could be - or that was previously - performed by human beings, they condition human beings, they interact with them and are conditioned by them, in a chain of delegations and transfers - or translations, as Latour calls them - which have conscious human beings at one extreme, efficient and tenacious machines at the other, and the power of symbols and signals halfway between. From a different standpoint, but one close to that of Latour, we can also say that ideas and things, thought and action, spirit and matter do not belong to separate and non-communicating worlds. On the contrary, things can represent the materialization of ideas (Czarniawska-Joerges and Joerges 1 995) and thus can generate in their turn ideas that tend to materialize themselves, in a process that only when it is captured in its entirety makes possible an understanding of the nature and the forms of social and organizational change.

THE RELEV ANCE OF AR TIF ACTS FOR THE STUDY OF ORGANIZA TIONAL CULTURES

The need for the study of artifacts is particularly striking for those embarking on the exploration of organizations as cultures - that is to say, as symbolic systems of meaning - for at least two reasons. In the first place, we can reasonably con­ jecture, as I have elsewhere claimed (Gagliardi 1 990a), that artifacts do not constitute secondary and superficial manifestations of deeper cultural phenomena (Schein 1 984), but are themselves so to speak - primary cultural phenomena which influence corporate life from two distinct points of view: (a) artifacts make materially possible, help, hinder, or even prescribe organizational action; (b) more generally, artifacts influence our perception of reality, to the point of subtly shaping beliefs, norms and cultural values. In the second place, if one is concerned with organizational symbolism, one must not forget that symbols are concretions of sense, and things constitute their more usual and natural abode. To the extent to which, as I said at the beginning, material reality is the vehicle through which ineffable or tacit knowledge - which generally escapes the control of the mind - is commu­ nicated, the study of things enables us to aim directly at the heart of a culture, or at what the subjects do not wish - and above all cannot communicate, at least in words. Various authors (Meyerson 1 99 1 ; Van Maanen 1 979; Whyte 1 9 6 1 ) have stated that the things most interesting to know about people are those which they take for granted or find difficulty in expressing and discussing openly: that about which the actors lie, or do not manage to be sincere even when they want, is in fact very often what is most central to them and can thus explain important aspects of their behaviour and social relations. So, corporate artifacts can function as 'clues' to ways of seeing and 'feeling' very distant from the rationalizations offered by the actors, sometimes entirely in good faith, when faced with a questionnaire or an interviewer, or during participant observation itself. In other words, artifacts make it possible to rescue the sense beyond the action (Monaci 1 99 1 ) . Without wanting t o resuscitate Dilthey and German historicism - and the stress on 'under­ standing' ( I'erstehen) rather than on 'explana­ tion' (erklaren) - but taking over Weber's filtered version, one may say that as social scientists we are interested in grasping the uniformities in action and in the reasons behind it, taking as our starting-point the socially elaborated meanings of the actors. Up to now the study of action - that is to say of -

EXPLORING THE AESTHETIC SIDE manifest behaviour - and of conscious inten­ tions has been the principal mode of access to systems of meaning. This emphasis on behaviour has been j udged a form of short-sightedness in the social sciences (Laughlin and Stephens 1 980), and for some time now the necessity has been stressed of providing a more rigorous reformula­ tion of the whole problem of meaning, with the hope that new ways of exploring it will emerge (F oster 1 980). The study of artifacts can constitute an answer to this need. It is therefore time to turn our attention to things and to the experience that the actors have of them in society and in organizations. This experience can be analysed on two differ­ ent levels, as subjective experience and as social fact. In the first case the aim is to explore the psychological dynamics entailed by our relation­ ship with things; in the second case it is a matter of reconstructing the meaning and the impact of artifacts and of physical reality on the life of an organization and, in general, of a social group.

THE MEANING OF THINGS The things of the world have the function of stabilizing human life, and their objectivity lies in the fact that . . . men, their ever-changing nature notwithstanding, can retrieve their sameness, that is, their identity, by being related to the same chair and the same table. (Arendt 1 958: 1 37)

The most careful study of transactions between people and things is that by Csikszentmihalyi and Rochberg-Halton ( 1 98 1 ) , which puts together a series of reflections deriving from psychological theories with empirical data gathered during some ethnographic research conducted in the tradition of the Chicago School of urban sociology. Two observations - central to the authors' argument - deserve to be looked at here since they provide a convincing psycho­ logical reason for some of the regularities observable in organizational life and can serve as important elements in the conceptual frame­ work that I am trying to construct. The first observation concerns the relationship between things and the development of the self, the second the interactive nature of our relationships with objects. If it is easy to concede that the things we create, which we use and with which we surround ourselves 'reflect' our personality, it is more difficult to acknowledge - Csikszentmihalyi and Rochberg-Halton observe - that often they are part of or an extension of the self, not in a metaphorical or mystical sense but in a factual and concrete sense. Depth psychology has from time past shown the importance of the 'object'

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and of 'objectual' investment in the construction of personal identity, referring generally, how­ ever, to relationships with other people and not to relationships with inanimate objects. But people invest psychic energy both in other people and in ideas or things. Things - as compared to people and ideas - have the singular property of restituting to the self a feedback that is steadily and immediately perceptible to the senses. Even the feedback from our investment in ideas or people comes to us unquestionably through material signs and things: if, for example, we seek confirmation of our identity as thinkers through the working out of ideas, it is only the written page in front of us - it is only the materialized idea - which reassures us about our capacity to pursue such aims. Only the sight, the feel, the smell of printing ink from the newly published book unequivocally tell us that we are capable of exercising those particular forms of control of external reality with which our identity as writers is bound up. Things thus incorporate our intentions of control, and the self develops out of feedback to acts of control. In things reside the traces and memories of our past, the witness to our present experiences, our desires and our dreams for the future. Things tell us constantly who we are, what it is that differentiates us from others and what it is that we have in common with others. And in many cases it is difficult to trace out the boundary between our bodily identity and external physical reality: a judge is not a judge, does not feel himself such and is not perceived as such without his robes; a woman feels herself beautiful because she has an elegant dress; and for all of us the possibility of driving nonchalantly down a narrow street depends on the fact that we have learned to 'feel' the car as an extension of our bodily schema. Inanimate objects that on first view seem often to be only the outcome of our projects or the ground of our dominion, have in reality an 'active' role which has been brought out by various writers and analysed from various points of view. Scarry states that 'the object is only a fulcrum or lever across which the force of creation moves back onto the human site and remakes the makers' ( 1 985: 307). It has been said that artifacts are pathways of action (Gagliardi 1 990a) in the sense that they structure sensory experience and enlarge or narrow the range of behaviour that is materially possible. But they can even embody - as Latour ( l 992a) has shown in his analysis of, for example, the impact of an automated door-closer on human behaviour - a programme of action which prescribes a specific piece of behaviour. Finally, given that in all objects, even the most practical, it is difficult to separate function from symbolic meaning, the

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'power' of the object derives from its capacity as a symbol - of awakening sensations, feelings and reasons for acting. The stimulating and creative role of an inanimate symbol shows itself in a special way when it stands not for something else that exists, but for something else that might exist, in which case it is not a symbol 0/ reality but a symbol /or reality. This meaning of things, Csikszentmihalyi and Rochberg-Halton note, is not exclusively the outcome of a projection of categories of thought by the knowing subject. In other words the meaning of things does not depend only on the structure of the mind: it is equally determined by the intrinsic and sensible properties that things have (which make them fitted to convey specific meanings) and by the experience which the circumstances foster of them, even beyond (in the case of artifacts) the intentions of their creator. The interactive nature of our relationship with things has also been described by Witkin ( 1 974) - with particular regard to artistic creation - as a reverberative process, a continual shuttling between the impulse which shapes the expressive action and the material means through which the impulse expresses itself, till one becomes the echo of the other. Alluding to the same dynamics, Fabbri ( 1 992: 38) has even spoken of a 'malignity' in objects, which constitute in their irreducible materiality and otherness 'a radical challenge to subjectivity which wearies itself, fades in the attempt to interpret their dumb­ ness' .7

THE CORPORATE LANDSCAPE Men must feed themselves, wrest from nature the conditions for their survival; and can do so only by taking account of the environment that charac­ terizes their habitat. History shows us, however, that their productive practices are not necessarily in functional accord with this environment, but are equally determined by rites, symbols, ideas - in brief, by a worldview. A pure productive practice does not exist; every productive practice is im­ mediately a symbolic practice of appropriation of the world; every productive practice is a way of responding, fitted to a determined environment, to the basic biological requirement, but in so far as that is already culturally formulated. And the signature through which an environment testifies to this cultural requirement of sun-ivai is called landscape 8 (Duby 1 986: 29)

Material reality, which performs such an im­ portant role in the construction and develop­ ment of the individual self, is equally decisive, perhaps more so, for the collective identity of an organization. If, in fact, the existence of a

consciousness of self which does not seek confirmation in the external world is theor­ etically admissible - in extreme and pathological forms of solipsism - the existence of a social self which is not publicly objectivized in forms which survive the coming and going of individual people and generations, and which embody a sharable vision of reality, is conceptually unthinkable (Arendt 1 958). In an organization, ends are pursued, energies invested and ideas made concrete in machines, products and places. All this is done through productive practices which - as Duby says in the passage just cited - are never pure productive practices but are always also symbolic practices, combinations of expressive disinterested (aes­ thetic) actions and of impressive actions aimed at practical results. Actions, like thoughts and speeches, are contingent signs, destined to vanish if they are not reified. Only things last. A brilliant idea left out of the minutes of a meeting can be irretrievably lost . And students of strategic management learned long ago to identify the real strategy of an organization by the choices irreversibly incorporated in its concrete investments or disinvestments, in the renovated building, in the plant that is set up or dismantled. In order to think and act, especially when they must reciprocally coordinate, organizational actors need an intelligible world. Things are the visible counterparts of this intelligibility, they indicate rational categories and hierarchies of values, and in this sense they collectively constitute an important system of communica­ tion, alternative to language, as we shall see more clearly below. Above all, things make it possible to pin down meanings, and contain their fluctuations. As Douglas and Isherwood ( 1 979) have observed, verbal rituals, spoken and not recorded, vanish into the air, and hardly contribute to the demarcation of the field of interpretation. For this reason rituals make use of things, and the more costly the ritual accoutrements the stronger and more striking is the intention to fix the meaning for the future. The instantaneous perception of things is linked with our idea of space. Just as new things are being incessantly created, others are multi­ plying and spreading, while still others are discarded. They reveal patterns of invention, repetition, and selection, cycles of stability and change, chaos and order: from things emerge the form which the collective identity has taken on over time (Kubler 1 962). The physical setting of an organization (with its formal qualities, i.e. sensorially perceptible qualities) is thus the most faithful portrayal of its cultural identity, and artifacts - to the extent that they adumbrate a view of the world (and of the self in the world), in

EXPLORING THE AESTHETIC SIDE the dual sense of how one believes it is and of how one would like it to be - constitute a vital force for the evolution of the organization as culture. The worldview that the physical setting offers daily and uninterruptedly to the unconscious perception of members constitutes at the same time indelible testimony about the past and a guide for the future. Thus it contains an implicit promise of immortality for the collective self, a public declaration that the organization will survive as a super-individual and impersonal reality (Sievers 1 990). The concern of French presidents to link the construction of grandiose monuments to their time in office unequivocally expresses their desire to contribute and define the form over time of 'Frenchness'. On a smaller scale, the president of an industrial association whose mandate was only three years - told me that all his predecessors (and he himself was following their example) had been concerned to leave behind some indelible trace of their brief occupation of the post by physically changing the shape of the presidential floor: thus waiting rooms, meeting rooms and offices changed form and aspect, shrinking and growing alternately, every time offering subtly different conceptions of a microcosm of roles and relations. In light of the considerations set out so far, we can state that the supreme manifestation of a culture is the landscape, that is to say, a natural reality which has inscribed within itself a cultural code. This code is in the first place an aesthetic code. The argument for this latter affirmation requires some reflection on the relations existing between ideas/concepts and imageslforms, iden­ tity and style, systems of meanings and systems of sensations. To translate an idea into an image (or vice versa) entails passing from the conceptual abstract order to the formal concrete order, expressing, that is, a logical relationship between representations of the mind in terms of relations between formal elements perceptible to the senses. In a visual image these relations are spatial and chromatic, in an auditory perception they are temporal relations between sonic stimuli of different pitch and intensity, and so on. Every cultural system seems to have structural corre­ spondences between its ontological or deontolo­ gical codes and its aesthetic codes, that is to say, between systems of beliefs and of values on the one hand, and specific patterns of relation/ combination between formal elements on the other. Hauser ( 1 952), for example, studied the connection between the geometric style, the stability of institutions and the autocracy of forms of government in the culture of neolithic peasantry, while Vernant ( 1 969) studied the relationship between the structuring of space and

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political organization in ancient Greece, and Panofsky ( 1 974) studied the relationship between Gothic architecture and scholastic philosophy. Coming to artistic movements closer to our time, considerable interest has been shown in the relation between Italian Futurism and fascism (De Maria 1 973). Croce ( 1 924), for example, claims that the conceptual source of fascism is to be found in Futurism and its trumpeted values of determination, aggres­ sivity, thirst for the new, the rejection of tradition, the exaltation of force, youth and modernity. Like Croce, the leaders of the move­ ment themselves (Marinetti 1 924) stressed the links between Futurist ideology - the Futurist notion of the function of art in society - and fascist ideology, especially in its original revolu­ tionary elements. But it is also possible to set out detailed structural correspondences between these ideologies and the Futurist aesthetic codes. For example, the exaltation of dynamism finds its correspondence in the paradoxical efforts of Boccioni ( 1 9 1 2) to represent movement in sculpture despite the fixity of the material. Again, the idea that Futurist art (and fascism) had to destroy society and re-create it on new foundations has its counterpart in the tendency of the Futurist painters to burst the boundaries of their traditional space through the materiality of their pigments, the stridency of their colours, and the striving to make the canvas three­ dimensional (Fael 1 993). In the same way, translating a particular conception of ourselves into concrete behaviour entails passing from an abstract definition of our identity to the adoption of a style, a word which we usually associate with an aesthetic - in the broad sense - experience. This problem is well known to those who are concerned with corporate identity, and who seek to translate particular conceptions of the collective self into subtle formal variants of elements - graphic, spatial, chromatic - that are sensorially percep­ tible. There is a widely held opinion, even among anthropologists and historians of art (Firth 1 973), that artifacts are the illustration of a pre­ existing worldview, and that therefore the translations of which I have been speaking are always one-directional: from abstract thought to concrete manufactured object. But it is difficult to say whether it is ideas which produce forms or forms which generate ideas. I have from the start expressed my leaning towards considering aesthetic experience basic, if for no other reason than that it takes place before (and often without) the intellect's conferring of unity on the data of sensory experience through concepts (Gagliardi 1990a). Artifacts - according to Goldwater's ( 1 973) thesis as taken over by Geertz ( 1 983) -

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convey their own messages, often untranslatable into ideas, at least to the same extent as they demonstrate existing conceptions. In this sense, the relation between systems of meanings and systems of sensations is probably circular in nature. Students of organizational cultures who have a cognitivist bias (that is, students who are primarily interested in mental representations of cultures) often use the expression 'vision of reality' metaphorically to indicate a 'conception' of reality. I am suggesting that we use the expression literally, to look at the corporate landscape as a materialization of a world view, and strive to interpret the aesthetic code written into the landscape as a privileged pathway to the quiddity of a culture. A land becomes landscape - it is aestheticized, so to speak - in two different ways, working that is in situ (in the physical place) and also in visu (into the eye) (Roger 1 99 1 ). The first way consists of writing the aesthetic code directly onto the physicality of the place, populating it with artifacts; the second consists in educating the eye, in furnishing it with schemata of perception and taste, models of vision, 'lenses' through which to look at reality. The two modalities described are equally important in the processes of socialization. The first - the writing of the aesthetic code into the physicality of place - is easily observed by those who do not belong to the culture in question, even if it is not always easy to interpret. Every landscape has a scenographic element, meaning that it is 'constructed to be seen' . This setting displays and hides, provides backgrounds and close-ups, sequences and articulations. Often the setting constitutes a real visual metaphor (just as a caricature does): it prompts one to interpret a factory as a cathedral, a pathway as a labyrinth, a ministry as a monastery (Larsen and Schultz 1 990). The second mode of aestheticization of a physical place - the writing of the aesthetic code into the eye - is very much more difficult to grasp: it is a matter, in fact, of managing to see things materially 'through the eyes' of the natives. The importance of the education of the eye in a culture has been stressed by Worth (Worth and Adair 1 972; Worth 1 98 1 ), who speaks of the anthropology of visual commu­ nications and distinguishes it from visual anthropology, indicating by the former the study of a way of seeing and hence a way of photographing, filming, portraying, putting on show - as a culturally determined phenomenon, and by the latter the ethnographer's use of film or photographs to record cultural phenomena in images which replace or fill out the written report (Dabbs 1 982; Van Maanen 1 982). For -

Worth, a way of seeing is a way of choosing and combining in images aspects and fragments of the real, expressing in this way one's conception of the world and of one's role in the world. In contrast to Arnheim's ( 1 969) objectivist stand­ point, Worth denies that the natural world presents an intrinsic order to the eye: it is the eye which projects onto the world an image of order. Visual communication thus presupposes the sharing of conventions between those who transmit and those who receive a message, a shared education of the eye: looking from close to and not from a distance, looking at the details and not the whole. the form more than the colour, and so on. Even a setting which selects and combines elements for the specific purpose of exhibiting them can hence be looked at from many points of view, and it is this which often makes interpretation difficult for the outsider. The idea that the particular conception of the order which is in force in a culture is the reflection of sense experiences that are either inevitable or possible in that culture (and, conversely, the idea that every landscape is the materialization of a particular conception of the order of things) seems well worth exploring in the world of organizations, which base their social legitimacy on their instrumentality as regards specific ends and which should conse­ quently tend to be ordered on the basis of criteria of instrumental rationality. How do pragmatic exigencies and the aesthetic code combine to determine the organizational order? How does the aesthetic code of an organization arise and change? What relationship is there between the aesthetic code and the idealized image of the collective identity? What relationship is there between the structure of the physical setting - the form of the corporate landscape - and the cor­ porate structure - the form of the social organ­ ization? Can the form of the social organization reflect a conscious ideal of beauty (Ramirez 1 99 1 )? These questions indicate fascinating areas for research to which it would be worthwhile devoting far greater resources and energies than those that have so far been invested.

AESTHETIC EXPERIENCES AND ORGANIZA TIONAL CONTROL Beauty is a ray of light that from the first good derives and into appearances then divides . . . Into the senses it comes and then the wits, and shows in one forms scattered and split apart: it feeds and does not sate, and creates from part to part desire for itself and hope of bliss. 9 Galeazzo di Tarsia, Canzoniere

tion forbidden.

EXPLORING THE AESTHETIC SIDE As tangible reality the organization offers itself not only to the eye but to all the possible forms of sensory knowledge, even if not all the senses or not all to the same extent - are solicited by the diverse artifacts which populate the different organizations. It is also true that - in the human species - not all the senses are equally developed or have the same completeness, the same perceptive potential, as sight. Nevertheless, the dynamics described with reference to vision are very likely common to all the forms of sense experience: every organizational culture educates the sense of taste, of smell, of touch, of hearing, as well as of sight. The wealth of associative and reactive capacities that people accumulate through living in a specific physical-cultural setting forms a set of patterns of classification, interpret­ ation and reaction to perceptual stimuli that I propose to call 'sensory maps' (Gagliardi 1 990a), distinguishing them from 'cognitive maps' (Weick 1 979). Cognitive maps can be conscious or unconscious but are 'knowable'; sensory maps are learned instinctively through intuitive and imitative processes over which the mind exercises no control, and integrated automatically into life daily. A corporate culture, then, is recognizable not only by the specificity of its beliefs - the 'logos' that pertains to cognitive experience - and of its values - the 'ethos' that pertains to moral experience - but also by the specificity of its 'pathos' -- the particular way of perceiving and 'feeling' reality - that belongs to aesthetic experience. A concept analogous to that of 'pathos' was formulated by Kubler ( 1 962), in his claim that cultural artifacts are bearers of a central pattern of sensibility. Works of art, as things made to be contemplated and admired, reveal this pattern in a special way since action is guided in them only by the expressive impulse, by the way of 'feeling', and therefore need take no account of practical exigencies, as happens instead with other cultural artifacts. In organizations whose purpose is profit the central pattern of sensibility is difficult to recognize precisely because expressive disinter­ ested action - and the disinterested enjoyment of it, in its ongoing process or in its outcome - has no legitimate place in them: anything gratuitous can't help but be considered waste or play in a social group which demands to be judged on its efficiency and which strives to appear efficient, if not to be so. It is the reverse in not-for-profit (e.g. voluntary) organizations in which, without renouncing instrumental rationality, the 'disin­ terested' action of members, central to the definition of the collective identity, is set higher on the scale of values: it is more likely that expressivity is permitted or fostered, and the

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pattern of sensibility is more immediately and easily recognizable. But in the majority of economically oriented organizations the pattern of sensibility lodges in the folds of impressive actions, corrects the formal scansion of objects and space dictated by practical purposes. Some­ times it stands out clearly - like a lapse in the collective unconscious - in a detail or an object, apparently insignificant and useless, but which instead synthesizes the aesthetic code of a culture, the distinctive 'way of feeling' of its members. At the opposite extreme, in organizations in which the specific result of the coordinated action of the members is an artistic product, the socialization of a new member is essentially and expressly education to the group pattern of sensibility. The expression of the pattern is not only legitimate but indispensable for organiza­ tional action, and communication between the members comes about almost exclusively on the aesthetic level. The most obvious example of such a situation is that of a chamber orchestra which - like the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra plays without a conductor. Our admiration and astonishment in cases of the kind express our recognition of the power and mystery of ineffable communication. Yet, at levels certainly less refined and where the outcome is less startling, one may presume that there can be no organization which does not make recourse to it, given that the aesthetic is a fundamental component of every human experience: the more the pathos is distinctive and idiosyncratic, the more it constitutes a special bond between members and can turn into an extraordinary resource for coordination. These latter observations introduce a topic I have already alluded to here and there in the preceding pages - in particular when discussing the relationships between systems of meanings and systems of sensations - but one which merits systematic treatment of its own: the essential characteristics of sensory knowledge and aes­ thetic communication that differentiate them from intellectual knowledge and communication through the language of words. Various com­ monplaces and assumptions - related to the dominant views of knowledge discussed in the second section - here invite critical scrutiny. In the first place, as Langer (\ 967; 1 969) has cogently demonstrated, words constitute merely one of the systems that we employ in symboliz­ ing, a system which owes its supremacy to the natural availability of words, to their cheapness and their readiness to be combined. But it is untrue that the language of words is the expression of knowledge and that other systems of symbolization are mere expression of emo­ tions and of feelings: there is an infinity of things

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that we know and that we cannot say in words. and in the very moment that the mind confers unity on experience through concepts formulable in words, it reduces it irremediably. The language of words, in its literal and merely denotative function, is the most excellent of tools for exact reasoning. but its weakness lies in discursiveness. in the linear order of words, strung one after the other like beads on a rosary. By contrast, aesthetic communication - based on purely sensory contact with the forms - makes use of a system of symbolization that Langer calls presentational: the object is presented directly and holistically, in such a way that its elements which do not have a fixed and independent meaning like words in a dictionary - are grasped in a single act of perception and understood simultaneously by virtue of their reciprocal relations and of their relation with the global structure of the object. J 0 Discursive language is the vehicle of a knowl­ edge by description: it permits us to say one thing at a time. Presentational language is the vehicle of a knowledge by acquaintance: it permits us to say more - even contradictory - things simultaneously and without the filter of abstrac­ tion. But precisely in this intimacy without mediations, so to speak. lies the richness and ambiguity of aesthetic communication, its capacity to break the schemata and penetrate ineffable reality, its surprising, stunning, moving character, its being - as Bruner ( 1 962: 108) says - 'a play of impulses at the fringe of awareness'. In this sense, aesthetic knowledge is an intuitive knowledge of the possible, rather and more than of the true, and aesthetic communication is not so much the account of that which has happened as the prompting of that which might happen or might be (Bottiroli 1 993). The cognitive potential of the aesthetic ex­ perience - bound up with its character of ambiguity, globality, unresolved tension - has been explored by Rochberg-Halton ( 1 979a; 1 979b). The approach of this author is based on Dewey's ( 1 9 34) distinction between 'recogni­ tion' - the interpretation of the object based on pre-existent schemes and stereotypes - and 'per­ ception' - the capacity to embrace the object while letting its qualities modify previously formed mental schemes and habits. Perception thus understood is constitutive of aesthetic experience, and the source of psychological development and learning. The conclusion, seemingly paradoxical, is that: 'Aesthetic experi­ ences, which are often considered subjective and hence inessential by social scientists, thus actually may be one of the essential ways we learn to become objective, in the sense of coming to recognize the pervasive qualities of the en­ vironment in their own terms' (Csikszentmihalyi

and Rochberg-Halton 1 98 1 : 1 78). The idea of the 'superiority' of aesthetic knowledge is implicit in the approach of Dewey and Roch­ berg-Halton. as it is, for that matter, in the vision of a neo-positivist philosopher such as Polanyi ( 1 966), for whom to know intellectually is to discover what one already knew unconsciously and tacitly at the subliminal level of perception of the body. I said at the start that I would be using the term 'aesthetic experience' to include every type of sense experience and not only experiences that are socially defined as 'beautiful' or as 'art'. But it is clear that not every form of sense experience presents the above-mentioned features with the same intensity. The pleasure linked to perceptual surprise, the emotion, the learning, depend on at least three factors. The first is the capacity of the object perceived - be it a work of nature or a work of art - to surprise by the novelty of its form. The second is the specific 'pathos' - or pattern of sensibility - that the subject has learned by living in a particular physical-cultural setting and which he/she shares with the other members of that culture: in relation to features of this pattern an event or an object may leave us indifferent or it may reawaken our senses, it may cause pleasure or disgust, it may attract or repulse us. The third is the subjective and contingent willingness to embrace the quality of the object: a natural spectacle already seen more than once will move and surprise us as if we were seeing it for the first time only when we find the time to contemplate it and are willing to perceive it in a new way. From what I have said it follows that the feeling for beauty is a cultural product like artifacts - and that any event or object has the potential to provide intense aesthetic emo­ tion. In short, one may agree with Vickers ( 1 982) that we have two different modes of knowledge open to us, both of which we use in our efforts to understand the world in which we live. One mode relies largely on analysis, calculation, and logic, entails abstraction and the manipulation of elements - without concern for the form in which they are combined - and is completely describable. The other mode relies more on synthesis and recognition of the global context, entails recognition or creation of the form without concern for the elements which consti­ tute it - and is not completely describable. As we know, logico-rational knowledge and aesthetico­ intuitive knowledge are both aspects of the neo­ cortical development that distinguishes the human species from other mammals and appear to be linked with the specialization of the hemispheres of the brain. The right hemi­ sphere appears to synthesize the perceptual input into holistic images (visual, olfactory. tactile,

EXPLORING THE AESTHETIC SIDE auditory) maintaining the interrelations between the elements in perception, while the left hemi­ sphere codifies verbal information, processing it serially through hierarchical categories (Dimond and Beaumont 1 974). I have referred already to the importance of aesthetic experiences in relation to certain major organizational issues: in particular, I pointed to the role of artifacts in the formation of a concrete collective identity and in fostering the identification of members. We have also seen how the concept of corporate pathos enables us to considerably expand both our notion of communication media and our understanding of the mechanisms of coordination among inter­ dependent activities. The argument just put forward on the differential features of sensory knowledge vis-a-vis intellectual knowledge in my view enables us to see in a new light another crucial organizational question, that of control. Organization theory has for some time been stressing the influence of informative premises logical and ideological - in determining the nature of decisions, and hence of organizational action. If the force of sensory knowledge and communication is in part due to the fact that it escapes the control of the mind, the importance taken on by the characteristics of the context and of perceptual premises in determining the effective course of events in corporate life becomes evident. For this reason I proposed (Gagliardi 1 990a) adding to the three levels of control identified by Perrow ( 1 972) - ( I ) direct orders, (2) programmes and procedures, (3) influence of the ideological premises of the action - a fourth level corresponding to the possibility of influencing the sensory premises of choices and behaviour. I shall look briefly at some studies that validate this suggestion and, at the same time, exemplify lines of research that could fruitfully be taken further. Sassoon ( 1 990) has analysed the links existing between colour codes and the formation of ideological thought, showing how shades of colour can express with extraordinary immedi­ ateness and efficacy variations in ideological vectors and in the social meaning of artifacts. It will be interesting to investigate empirically how these semantic correspondences - which seem at least in part to be cross-cultural in so far as they are bound up with universal bio-psychological experiences - translate themselves into the specific cultural codes of a society, and what use individual organizations make of these codes (to what extent they embrace them, invert them or adapt them) in relation to their own 'character' and to their own distinctive ideology (Selznick 1 957). In a study of a telecommunications company (Gagliardi 1 99 1 ) the presence of a 'decomposi-

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tional-sequential' archetype was identified that perhaps constituted an analogical extension of the procedure used in telegraphic transmission, the original concern of the company. This archetype was primarily recognizable in the structuring of space: the building, laid out only horizontally, had been expanded with successive additions of parts which tended to be single elements themselves, without the pre-existing or the whole ever being questioned. This formal pattern led one to interpret - or expressed the tendency to interpret - the interdependence between the parts exclusively in terms of a unilateral sequentiality, and influenced the division of tasks, the structure of internal communications, the articulation of plans and projects: tasks were extremely fragmented, communications flowed exclusively one way, plans for action tended to be broken down into successive phases minutely specified without any appeal to forms of parallel planning and mechanisms of mutual adjustment. The most obvious use of this archetype was the way in which a global plan for corporate restructuring was conducted: the areas into which the company was divided were restructured aile after another, and no move was made to pass to the subsequent one until the previous one had been defined in detail. In another case (Gagliardi 1 989) it was possible to interpret the failure of an expensive and massive programme aimed at sensitizing the staff of a bank - the purpose was to instil the value of 'service to the customer' - through an analysis of the perceptual conditioning exerted daily on employees by physical objects and structures: the thickness of the walls, the monumental character of the entrance extremely lofty, but largely blocked by a steel grille - the luxurious carpets and tapestry in the management offices, and so on. Each of these elements - and all as a set - solicited feelings of solidity, comfort, safety on the one hand, and feelings of independence and superiority over the world outside on the other, rendering in fact barely credible the ambition to invert the image of dominance that the artifacts embodied. This example, like the previous, suggests a need to re­ examine the way in which corporate planning and planned corporate change have so far been conceptualized, concentrating more attention on the interplay of physical, symbolic and social structures (Gagliardi 1 992). As final examples, mcntion must be made of a study by Witkin ( 1 990) and an essay of Rosen et al. ( 1 990). Witkin explored in particularly careful fashion the subtle relationship between the stylistic qualities of artifacts and the sensuous experience of members of an organization, showing how the design of artifacts can be an

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instrument of control in bureaucratic organiza­ tions. Through an analysis of the formal characteristics of a corporate micro-setting the boardroom of a large company - he shows how a physical place can foster certain sensa­ tions and hinder others, induce a two-dimen­ sional rather than three-dimensional vision of reality, even deliberately suppress 'sensuous values that are centred in the being of the individual as a living subject' ( 1 990: 334). Rosen et al. instead analysed from the macro point of view the dialectical relation between the organization of labour and the structuring of space on the one hand, and the way in which bureaucratic ideology concretely shapes social life on the other. Both these studies prompt further exploration (from a critical and emanci­ patory standpoint) of the way in which the corporate stage is conceived, constructed, and invested with meaning.

EXPLORING THE CORPORATE PATHOS ' . . . the resources of science are far from being exhausted. 1 think that an evening in that study would help me much . ' ' A n evening alone!' 'I propose to go up there presently . . 1 shall seat in that room and see if its atmosphere brings me inspiration. 1 am a believer in the genius loci. You smile, friend Watson. Well, we shall see.' Conan Doyle, The Valley of Fear .

The reader who has followed to this point, jf hel she has become persuaded of the importance of aesthetic knowledge, action and communication in organizational life, will be asking now how it is possible to investigate this particular form of human and social experience. One of the first questions helshe will probably come up with is whether this new object can be known using the logico-analytical methods traditionally used in the practice of organizational studies or whether the choice of aesthetic experience as object necessarily implies the recourse by the enquirer to aesthetico-intuitive forms of understanding (Strati 1 992). One might ask, in other words: can we study the products of the right cerebral hemisphere with the left hemisphere, or is only the right hemisphere capable of really knowing what it itself produces? Put in these terms, the dilemma is not easily solved. If everything I have said about the incommensurability of the two realms, about the richness of the aesthetic experience and about its ineffability, is plausible, the deployment of analytical methods and of discursive language will be intrinsically reductive, and we will not

even be certain that our speeches even partially reflect tacit knowledge. Whether we ask corpor­ ate actors to tell us of their aesthetic experiences, or whether it is we ourselves as researchers who interpret them, we will always be dealing with 'espoused' theories which may not in any way coincide with the secret regularities of expressive action. If, on the other hand, we strive to 'feel' as the natives feel, we shall have understood more but we will be unable to transfer to others this 'knowledge by acquaintance' without ourselves employing forms of aesthetic communication. But perhaps this is to ask too much of intel­ lectuals by profession: it is probable that those who have artistic gifts and vocation do not take up organizational studies. At all the interna­ tional conferences organized over the last fifteen years on organizational culture, the call for papers has prompted out-of-the-way, unortho­ dox, creative forms of communication, but with some rare, often disconcerting, exceptions these have never gone beyond the use of slides that more often contained words than images. The dilemma that I have posed is as old as the criticism of art: either one describes the work of art. pointing to its analytically observable formal canons - rhythm, sequences, proportions, corre­ spondences - which usually in no way help 'to feel' the work, or one deploys an evocative, allusive, poetic language intended to transfer to the listener the aesthetic emotion experienced by the critic. It is this that leads many people to claim that the great critics are great artists in their turn. This view is very close to that of those who maintain that linguistic invention and aesthetico-literary qualities go a long way to explain the success of scientific theories, at least in the human and social sciences (Geertz 1 988). But our problem is how to realistically develop in researchers the ability and the bent which will enable them to investigate aesthetic experiences through modalities appropriate to their nature without having to renounce the transference, and hence the accumulation, of their acquired knowledge, and without requiring them to have innate and marked artistic gifts. As Bateson and Mead stated in their introduction to Balinese Character: A Photo­ graphic Analysis (the most comprehensive and ambitious visual ethnography ever carried out), our effort should be 'to translate aspects of culture never successfully recorded by the scientist, although often caught by the artist, into some form of communication sufficiently clear and sufficiently unequivocal to satisfy the requirements of scientific enquiry' ( 1 942: xi). The work of Bateson and Mead is an interesting example of how pictures can be used to illustrate patterns of culture analytically described in the text: the authors used the pictures as records

EXPLORING THE AESTHETIC SIDE about culture rather than records of culture, as research tools rather than research material (Worth 1 98 1 ). However, their more or less implicit assumption that the camera can tell us the 'aesthetic truth' about the social system studied is seriously undermined by the post­ modernist critique of traditional 'realist' ethno­ graphy and documentary photography: pictures are created social artifacts, to be interpreted by learning the system of conventions used by their makers to imply meanings; as such, they tell us more about the picture-makers than about what is pictured (Harper 1 994). In my view, even in exploring the pathos of an organization it is not a matter of the sole and unconditional employment of a particular form of knowledge and communication. As the scholastic philosophers claimed, knowledge progresses through a systematic shuttling between intuition and rationalization, tacit and conscious knowledge, hand open and hand closed, alternately, with the regularity of breath­ ing. It is a matter, therefore, of employing one or the other form of knowledge and of com­ munication, one or the other cerebral hemi­ sphere, according to the relevance that each may assume in the diverse phases of the research process, and according to the heuristic value of one method vis-a-vis the other (that is, according to how much we win or lose in terms of under­ standing). There is no doubt that the sole way of coming to grips with the pathos of an organization without the filter of the actors' rationalizations, and without the ethnocentric danger of attribut­ ing to the organization studied the pattern of sensibility we have assimilated in our own culture (lwanska 1 97 1 ), is that of sharing in the aesthetic experiences of the natives by immersing ourselves in their perceptual context and allow­ ing ourselves to be imbued by sense experience (Gagliardi 1 990a). If we split the process where­ by a phenomenon is studied into three main phases - observation, interpretation, report - it is essential in the first phase to abandon oneself to what Kant calls 'passive intuition', and it is not difficult to do so. It is done spontaneously and effortlessly by those who - venturing into a physical and symbolic terrain - are prepared to stay, as the newcomers. If we are interested in exploring the pathos of an organization, we must thus initially act 'as if we are there to stay'. As I have more than once remarked, artifacts con­ stitute the main empirical correlate of pathos. It is to them we shall mostly devote our attention, and faced with any object - even those which appear to have an exclusively practical function - we shall ask not what purpose they serve but what sensations they rouse in us, and record these sensations in the roughest and most

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immediate possible form in a new column of the field notes that we are inured to keeping as ethnographers. The idea of Worth and Adair ( 1 972) of asking natives to film for us, thus concretely showing their 'way of seeing' the world, or Meyer's ( 1 99 1 ) notion o f asking informants t o answer questions with images, figure, diagrams and other visual displays, suggest that there are alternative ways of getting at ineffable knowledge. These propo­ sals, of great interest in my opinion, aim at enriching our field of observation by adding to artifacts already existing artifacts produced on the spot at the request of the ethnographer. If on the one hand what is produced is certainly influenced by the informant's relationship with the researcher and from his/her eventual desire to lie about himself/herself and the organization to which he/she belongs, on the other hand the possibility of observing the expressive action as it takes place can offer new and diverse opportu­ nities for intuition. Whether it is a matter of existing artifacts or ones produced on the spot, it is important to resist the structuralist temptation to interpret them as if they had an intrinsic semiotic status, as if they were a system of signs interpretable on the basis of a self-evident grammar accessible to all (Hodder 1 994). Just as for verbal language a more complex linguistic model is required to explain poetry, so visual language requires a model more complex than one that can account for an unequivocal system of signs (Forge 1 973). Objects, let us remember, are mainly vectors of symbols: they can say many, even contradictory, things, simultaneously, and their meaning oscil­ lates in an ambiguous range, an interweaving of the intentions that motivated their production and the conditions of their reception, i.e. the sensory and emotive experiences that the arti­ facts awaken in a specific spatial and temporal context (Semprini 1 992). It is a question, true enough, of grasping a code, a syntactic principle, a pattern: but, whatever one wants to call it, it is irremediably local. Gaining an awareness of the local pattern of sensibility is the most difficult part of the task, not least because it must be done in good time. We must in fact manage to 'give a name' to our sensations before we become too inured to the aesthetic climate of the setting and while we are still capable of appreciating the specificity of the stimuli to which we are exposed. There is, in other words, a magical moment, short-lived I believe, in which one can hope to lead out the 'play of impulses at the fringe of awareness' of which Bruner ( 1 962: 1 08) speaks beyond that fringe, translating one's sensations into thoughts without too much betraying them. In the interpretative phase it is then essential to solicit

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and keep in tension both forms of knowledge. achieving that balancing of emotion and reflec­ tion, empathy and analytic detachment that is perhaps in general - even when the focus of research is not the pathos of the organization the essence of ethnographic work. As Whyte has said of his Cornerville study. The parts of the study that interest me most depended upon an intimate familiarity with people and situations . . . . This familiarity gave rise to the basic ideas in this book. I did not develop these ideas by any strictly logical processes. They dawned on me out of what I was seeing, hearing, doing - and feeling. They grew out of an effort to organize a confusing welter of experience. . . I had to balance familiarity with detachment, or else no insights would have come. There were fallow periods when I seemed to be just marking time. Whenever life flowed so smoothly that I was taking it for granted. I had to try to get outside of my participating self and struggle again to explain the things that seemed obvious. ( 1 955: 357)

How may it be possible to develop this ability in the researcher? In the first place, we must admit that to some extent it requires a capacity for self­ reflection that cannot be acquired if one does not have a minimum of talent and natural bent. For the rest, the best training is to 'try one's hand' under the guidance of able people. There are no recipes or handbooks, and the only really useful literature in my opinion are autobiographical reports on ethnographic research such as the splendid appendix to Street Corner Society from which the quotation above is taken. Finally, the drafting of the report will rigorously follow logico-analytical methods, but it will be useful if at least in part - and without any pretence to the production of literary artifacts aimed at communicating only or mainly on the aesthetic plane - a little 'elo­ quence' goes along with the 'logic' and visual reporting with the verbal reporting: we shall be more certain of not having lost too much along the road, the long journey whereby knowledge is generated and passed on. And perhaps we shall learn, little by little, to share a richer. more unitary and decidedly more attractive concep­ tion of organizational knowledge.

NOTES I The translation is my own. 2 The Standing Conference on Organizational Symbolism - an independent work group within the European Group for Organizational Studies ( EGOS) devoted its Third International Conference ( M ilan 1 987) to 'The Symbolics of Corporate Artifacts'. A

selection of those papers which concentrated on all the elements that go to make up the physical setting of corporate life - buildings. objects. images, forms - has been published in an edited book (Gagliardi 1 990b). 3 In Baumgarten's definition. aesthetics are the scientia cognitionis sensitil'ae (the science of sensory cognition). 4 Huizinga ( 1 964) has claimed that the eighteenth century is that which took itself and the whole of creation most seriously. 5 My translation. 6 My translation. 7 My translation. 8 My translation. 9 Translated by Michael Sullivan. 10 Langer's distinction between discursive and presentational language corresponds to that of Goodman ( 1 976) between articulated language - in which the characters, as the letters of the alphabet, are separate and differentiated without ambiguity. with a univocal correspondence between syntactic and semantic unity -- and the dense/exemplificatory language - in which the inverse procedure to notation is followed. i .e. one goes not from the label to the object but from the object to the label.

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Geertz, C ( 1 983) Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology. New York: Basic Books. Geertz, C ( 1988) Works and Lives: Ihe Anthropologist as AlIlhor. Cambridge: Polity Press. Goldwater, R. ( 1 973) 'Art history and anthropology: some comparisons of methodology', in A. Forge (ed.), Primitive Art and Society. London and New York: Oxford University Press. pp. 1 - 10. Goodman, N. ( 1 976) Languages ofArt: an Approach to a Theory of Symbols. Cambridge: Hackett. Hamilton, E. ( 1 942) The Greek Way. New York: Norton. Harper, D. ( 1 994) 'On the authority of the image. Visual methods at the crossroads', in N.K. Denzin and Y.S. Lincoln (eds), Handbook of Qualitative Research. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. pp. 403- 1 2 . Hauser, A . ( 1 952) Th e Social History ofA rt. New York. Hodder, I. ( 1 994) 'The interpretation of documents and material culture', in N.K. Denzin and Y.S. Lincoln (eds), Handhook of Qualitative Research. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. pp. 393-402. Huizinga, 1. ( 1 964) Homo ludens. Milano: II Saggiatore. Iwanska, A. ( 1 97 1 ) 'Without art', British Journal of Aesthetics, 1 1 (4): 402- 1 1 . Jones, M.O., Moore, M.D. and Snyder, R.C (eds) ( 1 988) Inside Organi::ations: Understanding the Human Dimension. Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Kubler, G. ( 1 962) The Shape of Time. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Langer, S.K. ( 1 967) Mind: an Essay on Human Feeling. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Langer, S.K. ( 1 969) Philosophy in a New Key: a Study in the Symbolism of Reason, Rile, and Art. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Larsen, 1. and Schultz, M. ( 1 990) 'Artifacts in a bureaucratic monastery', in P. Gagliardi (ed.), Symbols and Artifacts: Views of the Corporate Landscape. Berlin and New York: de Gruyter. pp. 28 1 -302. Latour, B. ( 1 992a) 'Where are the missing masses? Sociology of a few mundane artifacts', in W. Bijker and J. Law (eds). Shaping Technology-Building Society: Studies in Sociotechnical Change. Cam­ bridge, MA: MIT Press. pp. 225-59. Latour, B. (I 992b) 'Technology is society made durable', in J. Law (ed.), A Sociology of Monsters: Essays on Power, Technology and Dominalion. London: Routledge. pp. 1 03-3 1 . Laughlin, CD. and Stephens, CD. ( 1 980) ' Symbolism, canalization, and structure', in M.L. Foster and S.H. Brandes (eds), Symbol as Sense: Nelt· Approaches to the Analysis of Meaning. New York: Academic Press. pp. 323-63. Mamiani, M. ( 1 992) 'La retorica della certezza: il metodo scientifico di Newton e l'interpretazione dell'Apocalisse', in M. Pera and W.R. Shea (eds), Carte della persuasione scientifica. Milano: Guerini e Associati. pp. 207-26. Marinetti, F.T. ( 1 924) FUlurismo e fascismo. Foligno: Campitelli.

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semiotici della relazione oggettuale', in A. Borsari (ed.), L 'esperien:a delle cose. Genova: Marietti. pp. 61 -79. Sievers, B. ( 1 990) 'The diabolization of death: some thoughts on the obsolescence of mortality in organization theory and practice', in J. Hassard and D. Pym (eds), The Theor) , and Philosophy of Organi:ations.· Critical Issues and New Perspectives. London: Routledge. Strati, A. ( 1 990) 'Aesthetics and organizational skill', in B. A. Turner (ed.), Organi:ational Symbolism. Berlin: de Gruyter. pp. 207-22. Strati. A. ( 1 992) 'Aesthetic understanding of organiza­ tional life', Academy of Management Revie\<', 1 7(3): 568-8 1 . Van Maanen, J. ( 1 979) 'The fact of fiction in organizational ethnography', A dministrative Science Quarterly, 24: 539-50. Van Maanen, J. ( 1 982) 'Fieldwork on the beat', in J. Van Maanen, 1.M. Dabbs and R.R. Faulkner (eds), Varieties of Qualitative Research. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage. Vernant, J.P. ( 1 969) My the et pensee chez les Grecs. Paris: Maspero. Vickers, G. ( 1 982) 'Razionalita e intuizione', in J. Wechsler (ed.). L 'estetica nella scienza. Roma: Editori Riuniti. pp. 1 73-99. Weick, K. ( 1 979) 'Cognitive processes in organiza­ tions', in L.L. Cummings and B.M. Staw (eds), Research in Organi:ational Behavior, vol. 1 . Green­ wich, CT: JAI Press. pp. 41 -74. Whyte, W.F. ( 1 955) Street Corner Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Whyte, W.F. ( 1 96 1 ) Men at Work. Homewood, IL: Dorsey Press. Witkin, R.W. ( 1 974) The Intelligence of Feeling. London: Heinemann. Witkin. R.W. ( 1 990) 'The aesthetic imperative of a rational-technical machinery: a study in organiza­ tional control through the design of artifacts', in P. Gagliardi (ed.), Symbols and Artifacts: Views of the Corporate Landscape. Berlin and New York: de Gruyter. pp. 325-38. Worth, S. ( 1 98 1 ) Studying Visual Communication. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Worth, S. and Adair, J. ( 1 972) Through Navajo Eyes: an Exploration in Film Communication and Anthropol­ ogy. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.

13 Images of Time in Work and Organization J O HN H A S SARD

This chapter examines how time and tempor­ ality have been portrayed in studies of work and organization. The chapter is developed in three sections. In the first, we outline some of the key images of time to emerge from social philosophy and social theory. This short section draws contrasts between images which emanate from two key time metaphors, the line and the cycle. In the second section, we examine the main images of time to emerge from the history of industrial capitalism. While initially the focus is upon those linear time images which stem from the progressive intensification and commodifica­ tion of the labour process, subsequently this section is qualified by time images which reflect the circularity of cultural reproduction in the workplace. In this analysis, an examination of the homogeneous time-reckoning systems of Taylorism is complemented by examples of heterogeneous time-reckoning from ethno­ graphic studies of work and occupations. Finally, in the third section, we address structural issues of time and organization. We argue that the structure of social time, and ultimately of organizations, is based on three temporal factors: synchronization, sequencing, and rate of activity. Following a discussion of the notion of career as a normative 'time chart' for organization members, the chapter assesses the three main time problems that organizations must solve: the reduction of temporal uncer­ tainty; inter-unit conflicts of interest over temporal matters; and the inevitable scarcity of time. The chapter shows how, in a very real sense, organizations owe their existence to the need for collectivities to solve these problems.

I MAGES OF TIME

To develop a sociologically informed analysis of time, we will first construct a conceptual frame­ work. To achieve this, we draw upon some of the main images of time in social philosophy and upon two of the main time metaphors in social theory. These concerns are then brought together in the main body of the chapter, which analyses how these various temporal images are employed in studies of work and organization. Social Philosophy

In philosophy, there is a long and sophisticated tradition of temporal analysis. The concept of time has, as Jaques ( 1 982: xi) notes, been of central concern to philosophers for over 2,000 years. Debate is found at a number of abstract levels, ranging from ontological concerns with time and existence to epistemological concerns with time and understanding. It is a tradition which has yielded a wealth of abstract, complex, yet unresolved questions (see Gale \ 968). Although a detailed analysis of such questions is beyond our scope, we can note some of the main issues which confront the philosopher of time. To achieve this, we turn to the excellent introduction to temporal philosophy presented by Heath ( 1 956). Heath introduces the philosophy of time by asking three questions central to discussions in the field. First, at the level of ontology, he asks whether we should regard time as an objective 'fact' located 'out there' in the external world, or as a subjective 'essence' which is constructed via

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a 'network of meanings'; that is, should we think of time as real and concrete or as essential and abstract? Second, he asks whether we should think of time as homogeneous (where time units are equivalent) or as heterogeneous (where time units are experienced differentially); is time atomistic and divisible or continuous and infinite? And third, he asks whether time can be measured, and if so, whether we can have more than one valid time; should time be regarded as a 'unitary quantitative commodity' or as a 'manifold qualitative experience'? It can be argued that the ways in which we answer these questions will determine how we conceptualize time in relation to the analysis of work and organization. Heath's antinomies represent basic constructs for interpreting the nature of time in formal institutions. Moreover, they provide a set of tools for dissecting socio­ logical concepts relating to temporal issues of organization, and lay analytical foundations for associated research perspectives.

Metaphor

Sociologists have argued that metaphor is another powerful tool for social analysis ( M anning 1 979; Pinder and Moore 1 979; Tinker 1 986). In particular, it has become popular to use metaphors, or other related tropes, when illustrating the imagery of socio­ logical concepts (see Lakoff and Johnson 1 980). Morgan ( 1 986), for example, has shown the power of metaphor for interpreting work organizations as 'systems', 'machines', 'dramas', 'organisms', and even 'psychic prisons'. Although the literature on the philosophy of time is replete with metaphoric images (see Gale 1 968), thus far only a few generic metaphors have evolved to conceptualize what is, like organization, an abstract and elusive notion (see Jacques 1 982). Of those that have evolved, the most sociologically illuminating have been the 'cycle' and the 'line'. Cyclic Time

For the metaphor of cycle, one of the most sophisticated analyses has been that provided by Eliade ( 1 959). Eliade describes how the cycle was the basic time metaphor of what he calls 'archaic man' (or 'pre-Christian man'). He suggests that for archaic man events unfolded in an ever recurring rhythm; his sense of time was developed out of his struggle with the seasons; his time horizon was defined by the 'myth of the eternal return'. In contrast, Eliade argues that when 'Christian man' abandoned this bounded world for a direct, linear progression to

redemption and salvation, for the first time he found himself exposed to the dangers inherent in the historical process. Since then humankind has tried to master history and to bring it to a conclusion; as, for example, Marx and Hegel sought to do. In the modern world, we seek refuge in various forms of faith in order to rationalize a historical process that seems to have neither beginning nor end (Eliade 1 959; see also Park 1 980; Fabian 1 98 3) . Lillear Time

A complementary analysis is developed by de Grazia ( 1 972) in his assessment of the linear time metaphor. De Grazia suggests similarly that, whereas primitive concepts of time are domi­ nated by the metaphor of the cycle, for modern societies Christian beliefs give the image of time as a straight line - as a testing pathway from sin on earth, through redemption, to eternal sal­ vation in heaven. He argues that in the evolution of modern culture the idea of irreversibility has replaced that of eternal return. The distinguish­ ing feature of ultimate progression has led the way to a new linear concept of time, and with it a sense af firm beginning. For example, in book II of his Confessions, Augustine broke the circle of Roman time. In contrast to Herodotus and his notion of the cycle of human events, Augustine dispelled 'false circles' and instead purported the straight line of human history. Although anna Domini chronology became widespread only during the eighteenth century, history began to be dated from the birth of Jesus Christ.

TiME, INDUSTRIALISM AND THE WORKPLACE

For us, the linear metaphor is important because of its link with a further concept, time as a commodity of the industrial process. This link is central to the development of what we shall term the linear-quantitative tradition of temporal imagery in industrial sociology.

The Linear-Quantitative Tradition

During the rise of industrial capitalism this sense of unilinearity was to find time equated with value (E.P. Thompson 1 967; Nyland 1 986; Thrift 1 990). Time, like the individual, became a commodity of the production process, for in the crucial equation linking acceleration and accumulation, a human value could be placed upon time. Surplus value could be accrued through extracting more time from labourers

IMA GES OF T1ME than was required to produce goods having the value of their wages (Marx 1 976). The emphasis was upon formality and scarcity. The images came from Newton and Descartes: time was real, uniform and all-embracing; it was a mathema­ tical phenomenon; it could be plotted as an abscissa. In this tradition, modern industrial cultures adopt predominantly linear time perspectives. Here, the past is unrepeatable, the present is transient, and the future is infinite and exploi­ table. Time is homogeneous: it is objective, measurable, and infinitely divisible; it is related to change in the sense of motion and develop­ ment; it is quantitative. Whereas in modern theology linear time has as its conclusion the promise of eternity, in the mundane, secular activities of industrialism temporal units are seen as finite. Time is a resource that has the potential to be consumed by a plethora of activities. In advanced societies time scarcity makes events become more concentrated and segregated, with special 'times' being given over for various forms of activities. Time is experienced not only as a sequence but also as a boundary condition. As the functionalist sociologist Wilbert Moore stated, time becomes 'a way of locating human behaviour, a mode of fixing the action that is particularly appropriate to circumstances' ( l 963a: 7). By uniting the ideas of linearity and value we begin to see time as a limited good: its scarcity enhances its worth. LakofT and Johnson ( 1 980) crystallize this idea by citing three further metaphors to illustrate the dominant conception of linear time: time is money; time is a limited resource; time is a valuable commodity. Graham ( 1 98 1 ), likewise, suggests that time and money are increasingly exchangeable commodities: time is one means by which money can be appro­ priated, in the same way as money can be used to buy time; money increases in value over time, while time can be invested now to yield money later. This quantitative, commodified image of time thus emerges as primarily a by-product of industrialism. Mumford ( 1 934: 1 4) for instance has emphasized how 'the clock, not the steam engine [was] the key machine of the industrial age'. He argues that rapid developments in synchronization were responsible for organiza­ tions of the industrial revolution being able to display such high levels of functional specializa­ tion. Large production-based firms required considerable segmentation of both parts and processes in time and space. Such specialization set requirements for extensive time/space coor­ dination at both intra- and inter-organizational levels. As high levels of coordination needed high levels of planning, so sophisticated tem-

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poral schedules were necessary to provide a satisfactory degree of predictability. The basis of fine prediction became that of sophisticated measurement., with efficient organization becom­ ing synonymous with detailed temporal assess­ ments of productivity. As the machine became the focal point of work, so time schedules became the central feature of planning. During industrialism the clock was the instrument of coordination and control. The time period replaced the task as the focal unit of production (Mumford 1 934; see also Landes 1 983). In another landmark study, E.P. Thompson ( 1 967) argues that industrialism sees a crucial change in the employment relation, as it is now time rather than skill or effort that becomes of paramount concern. In large-scale manufactur­ ing, the worker becomes subject to extremely elaborate and detailed forms of time discipline (E.P. Thompson 1 967; see also McKendrick 1 962). Whereas prior to industrialism 'nearly all craftsmen were self employed, working in their own homes with their tools, to their own hours' (Wright 1 968: 1 6), with the factory system came temporal rigidification. Before the industrial revolution the prime characteristic of work was its irregularity. Periods of intense working were followed by periods of relative inactivity. There was the tradition of 'St Monday', with Mondays often being taken as a casual day like Saturday and Sunday; most of the work was done in the middle of the week (Reid 1 976). Similarly, the length of the working day was irregular and determined largely by the time of the year. E.P. Thompson's quote from Hardy complements his analysis well: 'Tess . . . started her way up the dark and crooked lane or street not made for hasty progress; a street laid out before inches of land had value, and when one-handed clocks sufficiently subdivided the day' ( 1 967: 56). The linear-quantitative tradition thus empha­ sizes how, in contrast to the task-oriented experience of most historical and developing economies, under industrial capitalism not only have the great majority of workers become subject to rigidly determined time schedules, but they have also become remunerated in terms of temporal units: that is, paid by the hour, day, week, month, or year. The omnipresence of the factory clock brought with it the idea that one is exchanging time rather than skill: selling labour­ time rather than labour. Under industrial capitalism, workers are forced to sell their time by the hour (see Gioscia 1 972). Out of this form of analysis industrial sociology came to view modern conceptions of time as hegemonic structures whose essences are precision, control, and discipline. In industrial societies, the clock becomes the dominant machine of productive organization; it provides

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the signal for labour to commence or halt activity. Workers must consult the time-clock before they begin working. Although life in modern societies is structured around times allocated for many different activities, it is always production that takes preference: 'Man is synchronised to work, rather than technology being synchronised to man' (de Grazia 1 972: 439). Time is given first to production; other times must be fitted around the margins of the production process. Ideal productive organiza­ tions are those having temporal assets which are highly precise in their structuring and distribu­ tion. As technological determinism dominates modern perceptions of time, so correct arithme­ tical equations are seen as the solutions to time problems: there are finite limits and optimal solutions to temporal structuring. The basic rule is that a modern productive society is effective only if its members follow a highly patterned series of temporal conventions; each society's productive day must be launched precisely on time. In this process, clock-time holds advan­ tages for capital as it is both visible and standardized. It has two strengths in particular: it provides a common organizing framework to synchronize activities, and it commodifies labour as a factor of production (Clark 1 982; Hassard 1 990). It is indeed from this scenario that, for indus­ trial sociology, Frederick W. Taylor was to emerge as the heir to Adam Smith's pin factory, and thus to become the high priest of rational time use. It is in the manuals of industrial engineers following Taylor ( 1 9 1 1 ) that were found the logical conclusions to the ideas of Smith, Ricardo and Babbage. Scientific manage­ ment, and the time and motion techniques that were its legacy, established by direct admin­ istrative authority what the machine accom­ plished indirectly, namely fine control of human actions. In Taylorism we reach the highpoint in separating labour from the varied rhythms experienced in craft or agricultural work: clock rhythms replace fluctuating rhythms; machine­ pacing replaces self-pacing; labour serves tech­ nology. Thus, for modern industrial societies, the linear conception of time became 'commodified' due to a major change in economic development; that is, when time was discovered as a factor in production. Time was a value that could be translated into economic terms: 'it became the medium in which human activities, especially economic activities, could be stepped up to a previously unimagined rate of growth' (Now­ otny 1 976: 330). Time was a major symbol for the production of economic wealth. No longer was it merely given, and reproducible through cultural notions of the 'eternal return', but it

represented instead an economic object whose production is symbolized. Under industrial capitalism, timekeepers were the new regulators and controllers of work; they quantified and transformed activity into monetary value. When time became a valuable commodity its users were obliged to display good stewardship; time was scarce and must be used rationally (see Julkunnen 1 977; Thrift 1 990).

The Neglect of Qualitative Time-Reckoning

The linear-quantitative thesis is powerful because it describes how, under industrial capitalism, time became an object for consumption. Time becomes reified and given commodity status so that relative surplus value can be extracted from the labour process. The emphasis is upon time as a boundary condition of the employment relation. Time is an objective parameter rather than an experiential state (Fabian 1 983). However, the standard linear-quantitative thesis is one needing qualification. When taken up by industrial sociologists, especially those concerned with labour process analysis, it is often used to overstate the quantitative ration­ ality of production practices and understate the qualitative construction of temporal meanings (Starkey 1 988). There is a tendency, for example, to gloss over the fact that the industrial world is not simply composed of machine-paced work systems, but includes a wealth of work processes based on self-paced production. Although temporal flexibility has recently been associated with new structural forms of employ­ ment (see Atkinson 1 984; Pollert 1 988), in the more subtle sense of social construction, it has long remained widespread in boundary spanning organizational functions, such as sales, market­ ing, R&D, and corporate planning. Moreover, while professional roles retain flexible, event­ based task trajectories, also many non-profes­ sional occupations operate within irregular, if not totally self-determined, temporal patterns. As Moore ( l 963b: 29ff) pointed out some years ago, examples here include the emergency services, police, and maintenance crews. Further, event-based temporal trajectories have long been commonplace within Britain's large service economy, while new forms of employment systems have violated the tradition of selling labour-time in the homogeneous sense of eight hours a day, five days a week, fifty weeks a year. An example of this increasing heterogeneity in work-time arrangements is the 'no-hours' con­ tract in retailing, where an employee can (in theory) decline to accept the work schedules offered by management.

IMA GES OF TIME We can begin t o question, therefore, whether the linear-quantitative thesis should be applied so readily as the basis for explaining the nature of time at work. Whereas writers sympathetic to Braverman's ( 1 974) structuralist thesis suggest that progressive temporal commodification accompanies increased deskilling, other writers note that employers' time-structuring practices are far more complex and less deterministic than mainstream labour process theory implies (see Clark 1 982; Clark et al. 1 984; Starkey 1 988; Hassard 1 990). Clark ( 1 982: 1 8), for instance, suggests that 'the claim that commodified time has to be transposed into a highly fractionated division of labour through Taylorian recipes is naive.' Drawing upon socio-technical theory, he offers examples of 'rational' task designs that are not anticipated by the Marxian theory of the 'porous day' (see also Clark et al. 1 984). For example, in socio-technical systems a major key to improv­ ing productivity, and also the quality of working life, is to permit temporal autonomy. Here, much time-structuring is taken away from the 'planners' and handed over to the 'executors', that is, to the semi-autonomous work group or work cell. Indeed many of the scenarios that emerge from an unrestrained linear-quantitative thesis require scrutiny. The standard image is of homogeneous activities being measured in microseconds in order to form some optimal, aggregate, standardized production output. However, production line ethnographies (e.g. by Roy 1 960; Cavendish 1 982; Kamata 1 982) have documented how this image ignores the power of work groups, on even the most externally determined task processes, to con­ struct their own time-reckoning systems. Whilst in comparison to other forms of organization the temporal inventories of manufacturing are exact, they remain of bounded rationality when we consider contingencies such as effort, technical failure, market demand and withdrawals of labour. For contemporary market-based organiza­ tions, time inventories are by no means so finite and determined as the so-called 'rational' models would portray. Stability and the deploy­ ment of long-term time horizons are luxuries rarely available within the conditions of chaos and turbulence which characterize the 'post­ modern' organizational world (see Clegg 1 990; Hassard 1 993). Despite the emergence of technologies designed to ensure temporal stabi­ lity (e.g. robotics, flexible manufacturing sys­ tems, computer integrated manufacturing), most industrial time-structuring sees production pro­ cesses subject to the fallible judgements of planners and supervisors. In everyday practice,

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time systems are rarely a set of optimal solutions to mechanical problems: temporal strategies are factors which seldom equate with ideal calcula­ tions. Bounded rationality still characterizes decision-making linked to production manage­ ment. Firms which have sought to eliminate temporal porosity, through attempting to realize computer integrated manufacturing, have often reverted to less technologically sophisticated operating systems (e.g. cellular manufacturing) when faced with the difficulties experienced in achieving database integrity for their own operations and adequate electronic data inter­ change with suppliers and customers.

Towards Cyclic-Qualitative Time Analysis

It can be argued, therefore, that working time is a much richer phenomenon than is portrayed in mainstream industrial sociology. Dominant perspectives such as functionalism and structur­ alism mostly fail to capture the complexity of industrial temporality. Such paradigms concen­ trate either on delineating ideal-types of tem­ poral structuring, or on suggesting that working time reflects the social relations of capitalist production. However, in contrast to the wealth of socio­ logical studies which reflect elements of the linear-quantitative tradition (see Table I ), studies of temporal experience are few. The qualitative dimension of working time is under­ stated, and research evidence is found only in occasional pieces of ethnography. To conduct research into working time, it can be argued that we need qualitative as well as quantitative approaches: we need methods which access inter-subjective features as well as structural ones; methods which describe subjective as well as objective features of time-structuring. In developing such a qualitative approach we are not, however, as ill-equipped as we might think. The identification of qualitative tools has been a major theme in both the French and the American traditions in the sociology of time (see Table I

Two paradigms for working

time

Linear-quantitative paradigm emphasizes:

Cyclic-qualitative paradigm emphasizes:

Realism Determinism Linearity Homogeneity Nomothesis Quantity

Nominalism Voluntarism Circularity Heterogeneity Ideography Quality

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Hassard 1 990). In the French tradition, the writings of Hubert ( 1 905), Hubert and Mauss ( 1 909), Mauss ( 1 966), and Durkheim ( 1 976) all emphasize the 'rhythmical' nature of social life through developing a notion of 'qualitative' time; that is, an appreciation of time far removed from writers who present it as simply measurable duration. Hubert ( 1 905), for exam­ ple, defined time as a symbolic structure rep­ resenting the organization of society through its temporal rhythms, this being a theme also developed by Durkheim who analysed the social nature of time (Isambert 1 979). Durkheim focused on time as a collective phenomenon, as a product of collective consciousness (see Pronovost 1 986). For Durkheim, all members of a society share a common temporal con­ sciousness; time is a social category of thought, a product of society. In Durkheim we find a macro-level exposition of the concept of social rhythm. Collective time is the sum of temporal procedures which interlock to form the cultural rhythm of a given society. Durkheim argues that: The rhythm of collective life dominates and encompasses the varied rhythms of all the elementary lives from which it results; conse­ quently, the time that is expressed dominates and encompasses all particular durations' ( 1 976: 69). For Durkheim, time is derived from social life and becomes the subject of collective representations. It is fragmented into a plethora of temporal activities which are reconstituted into an overall cultural rhythm that gives it meaning (see Pronovost 1 986). In the American tradition, Sorokin and Merton ( 1 937) also highlight this qualitative nature of social time. In so doing, they draw not only on Durkheim, but also, and significantly, on the works of early cultural anthropologists, such as Codrington ( 1 89 1 ), Hodson ( 1 908). Nilsonn ( 1 920), Best ( 1 922) and Kroeber ( 1 923). This synthesis allows Sorokin and Merton to identify qualitative themes at both micro and macro levels. Whilst, at the micro level, they emphasize the discontinuity, relativity and specificity of time - 'social time is qualitatively differentiated' - they also suggest, like Dur­ kheim, that: 'units of time are often fixed by the rhythm of collective life' ( 1 937: 6 1 5). Indeed, they take this position a step further. Whereas Evans-Pritchard ( 1 940) in his studies of the Nuer illustrated how certain activities give significance to social time, Sorokin and Merton adopt a position more characteristic of the sociology of knowledge. They argue that mean­ ing comes to associate an event with its temporal setting, and that the recognition of specific periods is dependent on the degree of signifi­ cance attributed to them. Drawing on Gurdon's ( 1 9 1 4) anthropology, they argue that 'systems of

time reckoning reflect the social activities of the group' ( 1 937: 620). They show that the concept of qualitative time is important not only for primitive societies, but also for modern indus­ trial states. They suggest that: 'Social time is qualitative and not purely quantitative. . . . These qualities derive from the beliefs and customs common to the group . . . . They serve to reveal the rhythms, pulsations, and beats of the societies in which they are found' ( 1 937:

623). Finally, perhaps the most ambitious attempt to outline the qualitative nature of social time has been made by Gurvitch ( 1 964). In a sophisticated, if at times rather opaque, thesis, Gurvitch offers a typology of eight 'times' to illustrate the temporal complexity of modern, class-bound society (i.e. enduring, deceptive, erratic, cyclical, retarded, alternating, pushing forward, explosive). He illustrates how cultures are characterized by a melange of conflicting times, and how social groups are constantly competing over a choice of 'appropriate' times. Like earlier writers, Gurvitch distinguishes between the micro-social times characteristic of groups and communities, and the macro-social times characteristic of, for example, systems and institutions. He makes constant reference to a plurality of social times, and notes how in different social classes we find differences of time scales and levels. He suggests that through analysing time at the societal level we can reveal a double time scale operating - with on the one hand the 'hierarchically ordered and unified' time of social structure, and on the other the 'more flexible time of the society itself' ( 1 964:

391 ).

This literature suggests, then, that modern societies - as well as primitive ones - hold pluralities of qualitative time-reckoning systems, and that these are based on combinations of duration, sequence and meaning. Unlike with homogeneous time-reckoning, there is no uni­ formity of pace and no quantitative divisibility or cumulation of units. The emphasis is on cultural experience and sense-making, on creat­ ing temporal meanings rather than responding to temporal structures. The goal is to explain the cyclical and qualitative nature of social time.

Cyclic-Qualitative Studies in the Workplace

Having introduced elements of a cyclic-qualita­ tive paradigm for work-time thought, we will now overlay this with evidence from a cyclic­ qualitative paradigm for work-time research. In this section, the tone of the analysis changes, from theoretical discussion to empirical descrip­ tion, as we present field studies which develop

IMA GES OF TIME this approach, research which reflects cyclic and qualitative elements of time at work (see Table I ). Although the paradigm is at present a nascent one, and as such there are relatively few fieldwork studies to consult, we can nevertheless trace four clear examples. We review Roy's ( 1 960) account of time-structuring amongst factory workers, Ditton's ( 1 979) analysis of the time strategies of bakers, Cavendish's ( 1 982) portrayal of time battles on the assembly line, and Clark's ( 1 978; 1 982) attempts to link temporal experience with organization structure. Although these studies represent essentially isolated and unconscious attempts at paradigm building, they are important in that they move toward a nominalist ontology, produce explana­ tions from ideographic data, and illustrate how time-structuring can be voluntarist as well as determinist. Above all, they describe how our everyday understanding of work is based on the experience and construction of recurrent 'event­ times' (Clark 1 982). As such, these cases offer examples on which to build an ethnographic, cyclic-qualitative paradigm for work-time research. Roy: Banana Time

Of the above accounts, Roy's is probably the best known. In what has become a classic paper in industrial sociology, he outlines how workers who are subject to monotonous tasks make their experiences bearable by putting meaning into their (largely meaningless) days. In Roy's machine shop, the work was both long (twelve­ hour day, six-day week) and tedious (simple machine operation). He describes how he nearly quit the work immediately when first confronted with the combination of the 'extra-long work­ day, the infinitesimal cerebral excitement, and the extreme limitation of physical movement' ( 1 960: 207). It was only on discovering the 'game of work' which existed within the shop that the job became bearable. The group in which he worked had established its own event-based, time-reckoning system for structuring the day, although it was one which took some time to understand. As the working day stretched out infinitely, the group punctuated it with several 'times', each of which was the signal for a particular form of social interaction. The regularity of ' peach time', 'banana time', 'window time', 'pick up time', 'fish time' and 'coke time', together with the specific themes (variations on 'kidding' themes and 'serious' themes) which accompanied each time, meant that instead of the day being endless duree it was transformed into a series of regular social activities. In place of one long time horizon,

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the day contained several short horizons. Roy explains that after his initial discouragement with the meagreness of the situation, he gradually began to appreciate how interaction was there, in constant flow. It captured attention and held interest to make the long day pass. The twelve hours of 'click, - move die, - click, - move die' became as easy to endure as eight hours of varied activity in the oil fields or eight hours of playing the piece work game in a machine shop. The 'beast of boredom' was gentled to the harmlessness of a kitten. ( 1 960: 2 1 5) Ditton: Baking Time

Ditton's ( 1 979) analysis of the time perceptions of bakery workers is in the same tradition. Like Roy, he describes the social construction of time, and how workers develop 'consummatory acts to manage the monotony of time . . . breaking endless time down into digestible fragments to make it psychologically manageable' ( 1 979: 1 60). He illustrates how time is both handled differently and experienced differently according to the type of work being done. For example, in the bakery there were two main production lines - the 'big (loaf) plant' and the 'small (roll) plant' - each with a range of tasks. Whereas in the big plant the work was physically more difficult (,hot, hard and heavy'), it was preferred because the number and speed of events made the day pass quickly. In contrast, life on the small plant was made bearable only because slower produc­ tion meant there were more opportunities to 'manipulate' time. In the bakery study, not only do we see (as in Roy's study) the use of event-based time­ reckoning to give meaning to the day, but further how such time-reckoning is strategic. Ditton shows not only how management and workforce possess different time strategies but, furthermore, how these are linked, directly, to their differing time orientations. Ditton distin­ guishes between the linear time orientation of management and the cyclic time orientation of workers. Management is consumed by the linearity of clock-time: with the calculation and division of duration, and with the unending rhythm of the machinery. Workers, on the other hand, use their knowledge of event cycles in order to control time. The bakers possessed a whole repertoire of 'unofficial instrumental acts' for exercising control over the pace of the line. Ditton's work is aimed, specifically, at showing how these acts were appropriated in five main ways, that is, as strategies for 'making time', 'taking time twice', 'arresting time', 'negotiating time', and 'avoiding time'. In the bakery, individual work roles were evaluated according

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to their potential for manipulating time to a worker's advantage. Cavendish: Doing Time

Cavendish ( 1 982) is another to show the strategic importance of time in the workplace. In her account of women assembly workers 'doing time', she portrays time as fundamental to a global struggle between capital and labour. As time was what the assemblers were paid for, sharp distinctions were made between 'our time and their time'. Time obedience was the crucial discipline that management had to enforce, with skirmishes over clocking-off being more than just symbolic: they were real attempts by them to encroach on our time and, by us, to resist such encroachments . . . UMEC counted the minutes between 4 . 1 0 and 4. 1 5 i n lost UMO's. and every day the last few minutes before lunch and before the end of the afternoon were tense - each side tried to see what it could get away with. ( 1 982: 1 1 7)

Like Roy and Ditton, Cavendish outlines how working time is not only an objective boundary condition, but also a subjective state; time was experienced differently according to the social situations the work group faced. Indeed working on the line 'changed the way you experienced time altogether . . . the minutes and hours went very slowly but the days passed very quickly once they were over, and the weeks rushed by' ( 1 982: 1 1 7) . There was a general consensus amongst the women as to the speed at which time was passing: 'Everyone agreed whether the morning was fast or slow, and whether the afternoon was faster or slower than the morning' ( 1 982: 1 1 2). Similar to Roy's machine operatives, the women at UMEC developed time 'rituals', which served both to 'make the day go faster and divide up the week . . . all the days were the same, but we made them significant by their small dramas' ( 1 982: 1 1 5). However, while Cavendish, like Roy. shows how such events gave work days a sense of temporal structure, she delves deeper into the phenomenology of the situation and makes us aware of the personal time strategies within the network of meaning. In the interstices between rituals/events, or simply during periods when time seemed unusually burdensome, the women would devise personal strategies for 'getting through' the day. Cavendish explains how: Sometimes 7 .30 to 9 . 1 0 seemed like several days itself, and I would redivide it up by starting on my sandwiches at 8 am. I would look at the clock when we'd already been working for ages. and find it was still only 8.05, or, on very bad days 7.50 . . . . Then I redivided the time into half hours, and ten-minute

periods to get through, and worked out how many UMO's I ' d have done in ten minutes. twenty minutes and half an hour. ( 1 982: 1 1 3)

Group members would adopt different strategies for getting through these periods: 'Arlene was deep in memories, and Alice sang hymns to herself. Grace always found something to laugh about, and Daphne watched everything that went on' ( 1 982: 1 1 5). In general, older workers were better at 'handling' time. In particular. the older women were adept at 'going inside', or deciding to cut off from chatting in order to pass the time by day-dreaming. In Cavendish's account organizational time was also reckoned differently according to the day of the working week. She notes how Monday was a good day time-wise, because it was the first day of the week and everyone was fresh ('it seemed a long time since Friday'), and because the group could catch up on the weekend's news. Tuesday, however, was a 'very bad day' because it wasn't special in any sense. On Wednesday the supervisor came around with the bonus points which would form part of the basis for Thursday's pay. This made Wednesday bearable; first, because the bonus points gave the group a vehicle for ritual discussion, and second because, as the points were related to the pay packet, it gave the impression that it was 'almost Thursday', and thus near to the end of the week: 'By Wednesday lunchtime, people would say half the week was over and we could see our way to Friday afternoon. ' Although Thursday was pay day, it could be experienced as a long day. This was mainly because the pay slips arrived in the first half of the morning. However, the pay slips often served as a vehicle to give the group 'a few minutes interest', especially if one of the packets had been calculated incorrectly. Friday, although being the last day of the week, was also a slow day as there were few external incidents to supplement the group's own daily rituals. Apart from the horizon of subsidized fish and chips at lunchtime, the day was a long haul to finishing at 4. 1 0. At the end of the afternoon the women always tried to spin out the last break by an extra five minutes, so there was only half an hour or so to finishing time. Clark: the Temporal Repertoire

Finally, some of the most innovative of case work in this area has been by Clark ( 1 978; 1 982), who in studies of two contrasting industries sugar beet processing and hosiery manufacture illustrates how temporal differentiation repre­ sents a crucial link between a firm's culture and its structure. One of the few writers to make this link, Clark argues that in depicting organizations in a static mode sociologists have failed to

IMA GES OF TIME consider how structures 'vary rhythmically' ( 1 978: 406). Following Kuznets ( 1 933), Sorokin ( 1 943) and Etzioni ( 1 96 1 ) , he suggests that all large firms experience periodic differences in the intensity of production or service, and that these changes bring differences to the organization's character and culture. In sugar beet production, Clark notes how the time frame 'contains two sharply contrasting sets of recurring activities' ( 1 978: 1 2). He notes the marked differences in activities and attitudes between the period of sugar beet processing (' 1 00-20 days after 26 September') and the rest of the year (,when the factory is dismantled and rebuilt by the labour force') ( 1 978: 1 2). Clark highlights the cultural rhythms that ebb and flow during these two periods: he illustrates the excitement at the commencement of the 'cam­ paign' (,26 September onwards'); how 'start-up' is full of anticipation; and how processing seems to change the relationships between the men and their families. Clark also notes, however, that as the campaign 'matures' the workforce becomes somewhat alienated from the work, the corollary being open expressions of control by manage­ ment. Indeed, by January the workforce comes to welcome the second major transitional period, when, after the processing is completed, the men are dispersed to relatively self-regulating groups with distinct tasks. In seeking a concept with which to analyse this 'structural and cultural flexibility' Clark ( 1 982) draws upon the anthropology of Gearing ( 1 958) and the notion of the 'structural pose'. The structural pose is a concept which denotes: the set of rules for categorizing a recurring situation; the type of social actors required for the situation; and the forms of action that should be employed. Gearing located four main struc­ tural poses in the organization of the Cherokee Indian village of the eighteenth century. He gave the example of the cue of the red flag which, although ostensibly representing the signal for conducting warfare against another village, also acted as the signal for organizing the village on a clan basis under the council of elders, and for allocating specific roles among the village com­ munity. He insists, however, that the concept does not simply imply a set of organizing procedures, for the same pose can be evoked for situations which, although of a qualitatively different nature, are deemed to require similar structural responses (for example, playing ball against another village). For organizations, Clark uses the concept to denote how similar sequences fit several occasions. Structural poses are the tacit rules of conduct shared by those familiar with rela­ tionships between the organization's structure and culture; they are keys to anticipation and

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inter-subjectivity, and are founded on experi­ ence; they are blueprints which suggest the actions to take in response to certain sets of circumstances. This is well demonstrated in Clark's second study, concerning a marketing group within a large hosiery firm, and how it drew on its structural poses to account for, and react to, a major seasonal shift in fashion and demand. The case involved a comparison between two of the firm's marketing departments and how each handled this major shift. The two groups were from different divisions and located in different parts of the country. With regard to personnel, while one division (Acorn) was composed mainly of experienced staff, the other (Harp) comprised marketing managers new to the industry. Clark shows how, of these groups, only the Acorn team were able to anticipate and handle the change satisfactorily. They were able to respond to the situation by 'activat[ingJ a structural arrange­ ment by which employees in various parts of the firm were redesignated as members of an innovation group' ( 1 982: 3 1 ). In contrast, the Harp team, who in the short four-year history of the site had only experienced seasons of expanded production, interpreted the poor sales figures as being merely the result of a bad season: It was some time before they realized that a major shift in style was unfolding. When they did realize, they had neither the credibility nor the capability to achieve the appropriate collateral structure for innovation. It was not in the structural repertoire of Harp Mill. ( 1 982: 3 1 )

Clark argues that organizations possess whole repertoires of structural poses based on the premise of temporal recursiveness. In developing such repertoires, employees are able to account for the recurrent, but varying, rhythms of the organization, and thus for its heterogeneous time-reckoning system. Clark's marketing study, in particular, illustrates the links between temporal experience, structural differentiation and strategic time-reckoning. It indicates how organizations, over time, develop mechanisms for activating new structures from their reper­ toires in order to deal with anticipated events in the environment. Instead of the case turning on the linear, clock-time metaphor, it highlights the importance of cyclic, event-based trajectories.

ORGANIZATIONS, CAREERS AND TEMPORAL STRUCTURING

Having examined images of time in work and industrialism, we now consider temporal aspects

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of organization. We describe how individuals learn time discipline through membership of formal organizations such as the family and the school, institutions which prepare them for the organization demanding the greatest time dis­ cipline of all, the workplace. We also note how on gaining entry into a workplace, individuals embark upon a 'career', a process which sees them constantly evaluated in time-related terms. The focus shifts, subsequently, to the study of 'organizations in themselves'. The ontological emphasis changes as organizations are portrayed as systems which have time problems of their own. We look specifically at the temporal resources of work organizations, and assess the difficulties such institutions face in controlling temporal assets. In so doing, we draw upon the works of Moore ( I 963b), Lauer ( 1 980), and McGrath and Rotchford ( 1 983) to describe the measures organizations take for resolving pro­ blems of scheduling, allocation and synchroniza­ tion.

Coming to Terms with Organization

Time is an inherent quality of human life. The sheer nature of existence prompts awareness of temporal differences between, for example, hunger and satisfaction, comfort and pain. and waking and dreaming. We first place structure on existence by assimilating times which have a natural and physiological basis. Despite the potency of such natural times, we must remember that many of our physiological times become linked. inextricably. to social times. As an infant is unable to sustain life unaided, its physical well-being becomes depen­ dent not only on its capacity to demand, but also on the willingness of those responsible for it to meet such demands. Given the nature of this relationship, the infant has no other choice than to allow the timing of demands to be regulated by social convention. Gradually needs become influenced by social constraints which dictate the 'correct' times for feeding, drinking, sleeping etc. As the process of physical development is joined by social development, so the infant begins to appreciate time as a vehicle which brings it within the orbit of human organization. So that individuals may function adequately in society, they must, therefore, come to terms with the temporality which underlies social organization. Although physiological time needs persist throughout life, and while there are limits to the social ingenuity which can be placed upon their structuring, nevertheless social convention comes in time to regulate their satisfaction. The dominance of the physiological as the basis for action is seen to moderate and

then to decline as the individual matures. Physiological demand gives way to social performance: biological decree succumbs to social negotiation. While our sense of tempor­ ality is founded on the biology of the human organism. it becomes refined and ordered by participation in society and culture. In matura­ tion, individuals learn to organize temporal experience in accordance with particular social and cultural processes. For the infant, the temporal parameters of its actions become modified from their basis in physiological need to a new locus in the normative structures of an organization, the family. The development of social relations with parents and siblings signals that experience has become increasingly controlled, and that the infant has grasped a sense of organization. The acceptance of normative constraints sees phy­ siological needs - for multiple feeds, or for sleeping during the middle of the day - deferred in favour of alternative possibilities, such as play. Through time, the infant becomes aware of how its actions are organized into formal patterns by agents in its environment. This familiarization with the temporal struc­ tures of the family in turn prepares the child for a further, more formal, encounter with organiza­ tion, the school. It is at school that the child experiences a more rigid temporal discipline, from the fixed lengths of daily and weekly attendance, to the formal separation of activities. The school day is segmented into precise temporal units, with each unit devoted to a specific topic or task. The child learns that school has a primary claim on time. Children learn that the school's organization of time must be accepted as legitimate, even when the school extends its temporal influence beyond its physical boundaries, as for example in the assignment of homework. Above all. the formal time-structuring of the school prepares the individual for the institution demanding the greatest time discipline of all, the work organization. Joining a formal work organization represents the final stage in conditioning the individual to an 'organized' time consciousness. While earlier we noted how in most primitive and developing economies work systems either are, or have been, primarily task-oriented, in modern economies they are time-oriented. In the factory or office employees are held to minimum temporal standards: their work day is characterized by known temporal parameters and constraints. Through the com­ bination of minute specialization and fine measurement. employees become subject not merely to temporal cycles based on the week, day or hour. but to ones defined by minutes or even seconds.

IMA GES OF TIME Externality and Specialization

Our analysis begins to suggest that while indi­ viduals experience time as natural and inherent, and while subjective awareness of time becomes expressed in the construction of inter-subjective temporal meanings, neverthe­ less, in modern society pressures for synchro­ nization force time sense to become objectified and constrained. In order to be organized, individuals must subscribe to times which are rational but external. As societies have become increasingly com­ plex, work organizations become primary claimants of social time. In modern societies the formal, external organization has replaced the family as the main locus of time-structuring. As the family has lost many of its functions to outside agencies, it has likewise relinquished claims on its members' time. Familial functions have been surrendered in line with greater specialization around distinct foreign agencies. Social functions have become the province of organizations such as the state, the factory, the shop and the school. Notable here has been the externalization of child education, and the removal from the home of the main forms of economic production. Despite a qualified return to homeworking, the only significant productive functions which remain in the home are those of cooking. cleaning, child care, laundry and shopping. In the wake of this specialization, family members devote their time, typically, to perform­ ing one particular role within a single place of work. Modern employment practice has demanded that we acquire expertise in one specific field. It demands that we develop skills relevant to a particular 'career'. As individuals have since long exchanged 'organic utility' for 'mechanistic specialization' (Laslett 1 965), so their worth has become checked against a linear, external and generic social instrument, the career 'ladder'. Increasingly, success or failure is judged on one criterion, the timing of personal accomplishments.

The Career

The career has become the dominant model for contemporary employment. As a concept it has become engrained into everyday common sense and culture. When Western adults meet for the first time. the question they ask - 'What do you do?' - begs an answer that is singular, functional and career-oriented; it begs an answer that is status-loaded and linear; an answer that can be indexed directly to the wider social structure.

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The notion of career is thus central to an assessment of the social position: it is the definer par excellence of the individual's progress in organized society; it is the central element in the list of social times which regulate biographies and determine personal worth. Society deter­ mines a normative time chart for its members, and it is according to this chart that we construct appropriate timetables and schedules for living. So important are these timetables that indivi­ duals construct their biographies no longer simply by passing through states determined by nature, but more importantly by reference to the sophisticated, normative structures of social life. An individual's biography is evaluated according to the rate and sequence with which he or she passes through what Glaser and Strauss ( 1 965) term 'status passages': that is, through stages which relate the various positions and identities available in society. The career thus charts how an individual has passed through a socially recognized and mean­ ingful sequence of related events. As Hughes ( 1 97 1 : 1 37) puts it, the career is 'the moving perspective in which the person sees his life as a whole and interprets the meaning of his various attributes, actions, and the things which happen to him'. Through time, individuals develop a perspective in which their careers are endowed with particular meanings and values. As the person passes from one stage to another, this perspective serves as a basis for assessment. Careers give the individual an acute sense of social time, and we think of ourselves in terms of a career path which includes the states of past, present and future. As we move from status to status, from organization to organization, we become sensitive to our relative position on the ladder of social biography. We ask: are we living too rapidly or not rapidly enough? Is the pace of our biography concordant with the ideal? The career timetable is socially sanctioned and based on a normative assessment of achievement; it prescribes the normal time for a person to pass from position to position. Individuals who are seen to progress at a rate faster or slower than normal risk being identified as age deviates. Anyone who departs from age-related normalcy is likely to be attributed with extraordinary skills, qualities or characteristics. In modern societies, then, the relationship between age and career has become highly structured and formalized. Many organizations, starting with the school, provide detailed inventories which compare age with skill in order to arrive at selection. In large work organizations careers become interpreted in terms of age-grade relationships. Qualifications notwithstanding, an individual may simply be deemed too young or too old for higher office.

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Organizations and Temporal Structuring

We now turn to the time problems faced by organizations as entities in themselves. Given the dominant conception of time in Western culture as scarce, valuable, homogeneous, linear and divisible, and given the dominant characteristics of work organizations as functional, specialized, formalized and rational, organizations are con­ fronted with three key time problems: the reduc­ tion of temporal uncertainty, the resolution of conflicts over temporal activities, and the allo­ cation of scarce temporal resources (McGrath and Rotchford 1 983). In attempting to solve these problems, three temporal needs emerge: the need for time schedules (for reliable predictions of the points in time at which specific actions will occur), the need for synchronization (for tem­ poral coordination among functionally segmen­ ted parts and activities), and the need for time allocations (for distributing time so that activities will consume it in the most efficient and rational way) (Moore 1 963b). In this section, we analyse the relationships between these various problems and needs.

Simple Pooled

Sequential

_-,-�R eciprocal Complex

Figure I

Types of task interdependence in organization design

Uncertainty and Control

For a structural analysis of temporal uncer­ tainty, J.D. Thompson's ( 1 967) classic text on organizational design, Organizations in Action, represents a valuable first model (see Clark 1 982; McGrath and Rotchford 1 983). In this work, Thompson contrasts problems of temporal structuring with those of organizational struc­ turing. In focusing upon the changing nature of organizational environments, he brings out the difficulties encountered when organizations seek to establish stable and efficient time structures. Thompson illustrates not only problems which stem from temporal uncertainty, but also those which arise when we apply generic solutions such as scheduling, synchronization and alloca­ tion. A main theme of Thompson's analysis is that organizations have a technical core that requires protection against uncertainty. To operate successfully, an organization must comprehend, and as far as possible control, the numerous environmental forces which impinge on its activities. Whereas this may seem a straightfor­ ward task for organizations operating in stable environments, Thompson notes that for those operating in dynamic ones there is a need to protect the technical core through: 'buffering to absorb the uncertainty', 'smoothing and levelling to reduce the amount of uncertainty', and 'anticipating and adapting the environmental uncertainty so that it can be treated as a constant constraint within the organization functions'. It

is these strategies which make the interaction of organization and environment more predictable, because they reduce the uncertainty over the availability and timing of resources. In particu­ lar, it is these processes which illustrate the importance of efficient scheduling; for they suggest ways of resolving temporal uncertainty by increasing the predictability of when some event will occur and/or when some product will be available. In developing this argument, Thompson out­ lines three types of intra-organizational inter­ dependence, each of which, he suggests, requires a different type of coordination (see Figure I ) . First, he talks o f 'pooled interdependence', where all organization units contribute to and are supported by the organization as a whole, and where coordination is achieved by employing standardized units and regulations. Second, he discusses 'sequential interdependence', where the outputs of one unit form inputs to another, and where coordination is achieved tht:ough plan­ ning. And third, he talks of 'reciprocal inter­ dependence', where the outputs of one unit are inputs to all other units, and where coordination is achieved through ongoing mutual adjustment among units. His argument is that for organ­ izations to operate efficiently these interdepen­ dencies must be coordinated rationally. Organizations must group units by type of interdependence into layers and departments. The purpose of such grouping is to minimize the

IMA GES OF TIME costs associated with communication and deci­ sion/effort times. Groupings must be made first on the basis of reciprocally interdependent units, because they involve the greatest communication and decision/effort time. The second most time­ costly to coordinate are sequentially interdepen­ dent units, so they have the next priority in hierarchical and departmental grouping. And, finally, as the pooled interdependent units are the least time-costly to coordinate, they are grouped only after the reciprocal and sequentially inter­ dependent positions have been arranged. Thompson suggests, therefore, that the major imperative in organizational structuring is the desire to minimize communication and decision/ effort times. He argues that coordination through the standardized rules of pooled inter­ dependence requires 'less frequent decisions and a smaller volume of communication during a specific period of operations than does planning, and planning calls for less decision and commu­ nication than does mutual adjustment' ( 1 967: 56). Through this analysis, we see that a major reason why decision and communication activ­ ities incur costs is that they consume time: they use up scarce temporal resources. Conflict o ver Activities

For our second problem - conflict over activities - we consider how functionally segmented actions can be coordinated through specializa­ tion and interpersonal norms. In dealing with the coordination of segmented activities, we are concerned with questions of synchronization rather than with scheduling. We are concerned with: (a) the temporal patterning of an actor's multiple actions, (b) the temporal patterning of the actor's actions in relation to those of other actors, and (c) the temporal patterning of an actor's actions in relation to other objects or events (e.g. the timing of a machine, the activities of another unit). Such patterning is a problem in that it points to a need to operate within an elaborate set of procedures and norms. As Weber ( 1 947) described, the logic of organization is such that the larger and more complex an organization becomes, the greater functional specialization it will display. As functional specialization requires the synchroni­ zation of various parts and activities, the greater the need for temporal coordination of the various activities among the various parts. However, while the logic of specialization demands that each individual performs one function efficiently, this is at the cost of performing a number of functions overall. As activities become increas­ ingly specialized, and in turn as their location in a temporal pattern becomes increasingly fixed, the

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greater the pressure to apply principles of formalization, or even to automate the whole activity. The irony here is that while the need for increased synchronization is a direct consequence of functional specialization, what is needed to accomplish this, the coordination of workers on individual tasks, violates one of the premises on which functional specialization is based, the interchangeability of parts. Nevertheless, not all of an organization's activities are reducible to such tight specifica­ tions, nor is all temporal organizing so mechan­ ical. There indeed remain many organizational activities which require the synchronizing of individuals - as subjective actors - as well as of processes. While these activities require temporal coordination, this is achieved not so much by mechanistic specialization, but by the organic process of developing implicit working norms. Norms develop during interaction in order to synchronize the activities of participants. As failure to synchronize activities can be a major cost to both productive efficiency and group satisfaction, time norms emerge in order to reduce such costs. As we move from dyadic interaction to the activities of larger groups, synchronization of norms becomes all the more important, because the temporal and spatial needs of such large, complex systems become more demanding. As norms take on an increasingly critical role, there is pressure to make them explicit. Eventually implicit regulatory norms become translated into explicit rules, regulations and standard operating procedures, with these for­ malized sets of expectations being associated with specific 'positions' or 'roles' in the organiza­ tional network. In the process of organizational growth, the norms by which actors regulate their actions become mere subsets of the role expectations extant in the formal organizational structure. No longer are behaviours indexed to particular individuals, groups and situations; instead they are objectified on to particular functions. It is the role which acts, not the actor. Positions which are formalized in the shape of recognized organizational procedures allow for expertise only within an established framework of regulations. Normative procedures become control devices which operate in the service of smooth temporal coordination; they effect explicit synchronization between the various activities of the organization's members (see Clark 1 982: 22). Scarcity

For the third problem, 'scarcity', we are con­ cerned with matching productive activities to limited time allocations; that is, with 'the

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efficient assignment of temporal resources to tasks, hence the assignment of priorities or values to the tasks and assignment of responsi­ bility for those tasks to staff' (McGrath and Rotchford 1 983: 85). Our goals here are twofold: at the macro level, to balance temporal resources between units; and at the micro level, to obtain optimal matches between an employee's avail­ able time and the number of actions to be performed. While in the next section we discuss scarcity issues at the macro level, we are concerned here with problems arising at the micro level. In particular we note how the matching of time and activities forms the basis for an employee's rolel load problems, a form of stress which results from a perceived scarcity of time relative to the requirements of tasks to be performed. Role overload is an almost inevitable consequence of the interaction between Western time culture and modern forms of organization. This reflects the interaction of functional specialization, temporal and spatial segregation, synchronization, and fine time measurement. In modern societies, adults are likely to divide their time between many spatially, functionally and temporally segregated organizations, in relation, for exam­ ple, to work, the family, recreation and religion. These sophisticated time allocations, and the temporal precision that comes with them, can become double-edged. While on the one hand this makes synchronization within narrow time tolerances more feasible, on the other the ability to account for increasingly precise time alloca­ tions gives individuals scope to pack activities more tightly into their roles. This can have the effect of increasing: the perceived scarcity of time in each role, the precision required for synchro­ nizing between roles, and the strains on the boundaries between roles.

Solving Time Problems in Organizations

We finally describe some of the tactics which organizations use to cope with time scarcity. In particular we examine three ways of coping with tight temporal constraints: by adjusting the specific time locations of activities, by redis­ tributing peak-time loads over other phases of time cycles, and by trying to recover time that would otherwise be lost (see McGrath and Rotchford 1 983). Altering Time Locations

For the first of the tactics, adjusting the specific time locations of activities, we refer to instances in which organizations need ways of freeing activities from their fixed locations in 'real' time.

For example, the most pressing time problem for employees is the pressure to do two or more things simultaneously; or, in other words, the pressure imposed by multiple, conflicting demands either within one role or across two or more roles. The only solution to this problem is through time relocation: through having one or more of these events extracted from its location and rescheduled. While some events are relatively amenable to temporal relocations, and can easily be extracted from context - processes which can be easily separated from related processes - others cannot be so readily extracted, and depend instead on being enacted at a specific place and time. While such temporal conflicts are not easily remedied, and while such problems must generally be solved by assigning priorities, nevertheless, tech­ nological developments have provided partial solutions. Video-taping, for example, has meant that we can record certain activities in real time and then react to them when convenient. This enables rescheduling, whereas previously the only viable solution would have been through prioritizing. A related problem concerns the need for parts of activities to be accomplished in a fixed, tem­ porally coordinated sequence. As work activities tend to be structured linearly, so that the sequence covers a substantial period of real time, this can be problematic in two ways: (a) because the total time required may not allow the task sequence to be accomplished quickly enough, or (b) because the individual may not be able to commit sufficient time, at a given time, to the whole process. For these situations, methods are required for uncoupling the sequence linkages between substages of the task, so that constituent subtasks can be accomplished in temporal isolation. For the first problem, large tasks are often subdivided into substages which are then executed in temporal parallel. Although this does not save time, in the sense of the hours used, it serves to get the whole task completed sooner in real time, even though a price may be paid in terms of the detailed coordination of the separately executed parts. Similarly, for the latter problem, a large task may be divided into several small segments that can be accomplished over a wide stretch of real time. For example, when prioritizing tasks, organizations often arrange for certain jobs to be accomplished only when no urgent work is at hand, such as maintenance, safety and renovation. Distributing Time Loads

For the second coping strategy, redistributing peak-time loads, we are concerned with the

IMA GES OF TIME reallocation of activities in order to make better use of the system capacity as a whole. In other words, we wish to operate more effectively by either increasing capacity during periods of low load or increasing capability during periods of high load. In practice, the former often involves experi­ ments in 'inverse pricing', or attempts to encourage demand during unfashionable or low-load periods. Common methods for accom­ plishing this are, for example, offering 'off-peak' rates for electricity, telephones, transport and advertising; 'off-season' rates for holidays and flights; and 'end-of-season' prices for clothes and sporting equipment. During periods of high demand, organizations simply provide more capability, notably by getting more staff-hours devoted to peak-load activities. As markets have become more volatile, organizations have also started to balance loads by distinguishing between core and peripheral workforces, again so as to buffer against uncertainty. In order to balance staff demands with market demands, organizations have recruited a greater percentage of employees on short, fixed-term contracts, which offer little protection under employment law. Similarly, because firms wish to keep labour costs to a minimum, recent decades have seen a growth in agencies supplying temporary, predominantly female, labour for generic tasks at short notice, a practice commonly referred to as 'temping'.

Reclaiming Time

The techniques above reflect strategies for avoiding time waste in work systems. However, despite our desire to eliminate temporal waste, the very logic of modern organization functional specialization and temporal segrega­ tion - means that certain pieces of time are inevitably lost. As specialization and segregation encourage planning in ever more precise temporal divisions, so the very fact of slicing work into smaller intervals means that slivers of time are lost in the process. Other arenas of 'wasted' time are those of travelling and waiting. While in one sense these sections of time are 'filled', in that they are dedicated to specific purposes, to most of us they represent intervals which are empty. As such, they are time spaces open to development. Many commuters for instance use up travelling time by writing reports, dictating letters, or simply reading work-related literature. For others, travelling to work now represents an opportu­ nity to conduct business with the office or with customers direct, through the use of car or other portable phones.

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Finally, and related to the above, is the double use of time that is filled not with waiting, but with activity. Time can sometimes be 'saved' by the purposeful combining of activities which, while different in nature, are oriented towards the same functional end. Examples of these are the working lunch and the executive golf game. The aim of both is to enhance business dealings by making the interaction between the parties less formal.

CONCLUSIONS

In the early sections of the chapter, we outlined how industrial sociologists have portrayed the dominant image of time as objective, measur­ able, highly valued and scarce. The emphasis is upon rationality and homogeneity, and the view that time is quantifiable and evenly distributed. We accept that employment defines the pivotal time around which all other social times are structured. As economic performance is assessed by the number of hours it takes to produce certain goods, time is given a commodity image. A corollary of this is the portrayal of work organizations as marvels of synchronicity; contemporary production systems, with their fine arithmetic assembly operations, are held to be the most rational of technologies: they, more than anything, epitomize quantitative time­ reckoning. However, in concentrating upon quantitative time, industrial sociologists have overlooked the importance of qualitative time. Stress has been placed on time-structuring rather than experi­ ence. The focus has been upon how time is formally patterned in task systems rather than the way it is 'interpreted' in task execution. In concentrating upon temporal structuring, and thus in treating time as a hard, objective, and homogeneous facility, we have neglected how it is experienced as a soft, subjective and hetero­ geneous abstraction. Indeed, from the complex relationships linking production systems, labour and the environment, there emerge whole ranges of time patterns and rhythms. New employees learn these rhythms gradually, through experiencing how the character of work changes according to the particular time period being endured. While most work roles are structured according to a formal inventory of activities, new recruits discover the meaning of work by reference to an informal typology of events. Tasks are cate­ gorized not only in relation to explicit work schedules, but also according to the group's own personal and social constructs. As we noted in Ditton's study, time is one of the

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major criteria here. The experience of work is inextricably linked to the way time is socially constructed. Thus, we have argued that industrial sociology needs research which accesses not only the concrete facts of time-structuring, but also the subjective essences of temporal meanings. While the discipline's conceptions of time are based, predominantly, on metaphors of linearity, rationality and quantification, we have illu­ strated how these images are overstated; they proffer a truncated awareness of time by ignoring the subjective and irrational features of time at work. By turning to the French and American traditions in the sociology of time, we have suggested that at the interface of sociology, philosophy, and anthropology lies a position more sensitive to temporal heterogeneity - a position capable of illuminating the cyclical and qualitative features of working time. In the third section of the chapter, we have analysed the complex relationship between time and organization. As we enter the world of affairs, we find that a major function of socializ­ ation is the structuring of our time sense within formal institutions. Notable here is the process whereby school and workplace teach us rigid time disciplines; they segment activities into precise temporal units, and condition us to an 'organized' time consciousness. This condition­ ing sees us subscribe to times which are external and specialized, times which are technocratic. In the West, the external and highly specialized organization has become not only the main regulator of social time, but also its primary claimant. In organized society, we structure our actions according to what we feel are 'proper' social times. We base our temporal understanding on practices we learn from the environment. In dealing with sophisticated social structures, we develop ways of expressing our needs for coordinated acts. To reproduce order, we create common definitions and assumptions in regard to the location of events in time. In particular, we form common understandings of synchronization, sequence and rate. Given the increasing scope of human communication and thus the problem of dealing with a plurality of times - we seek means by which diverse groups can adjust their actions to meet the challenges of mutual dependence: we require general temporal agreements so that we can relate processes in ways which avoid activities becoming conflictual. This is especially neces­ sary in situations where actions must be regulated in order to give scope for each to fulfil its potential. Temporal structuring is thus at the heart of organization. When organizations are designed

or changed, temporal factors are of primary concern. As the logic of organization is such that with increased size comes greater speciali­ zation, time emerges as a central feature of structuring. Time is basic to resolving problems of environmental uncertainty, conflicts over activities, and the allocation of scarce resources. Synchronization, sequence and rate are critical factors when we seek predictions of when specific actions will occur relative to others; when we attempt to coordinate functionally segmented parts and activities; and when we want to distribute time so that activities consume it in the most efficient manner. In competitive markets, organizations are driven to find new ways of reducing communication and decision/effort times. They seek new tech­ niques for reducing levels of conflict between activities, and in particular for effecting super­ ior coordination, through meshing sophisticated specialization with appropriate cultural/norma­ tive values.

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Landes, D.S. ( 1 983) Revolution in Time: Clocks and the Making of the Modern World. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Laslett, P. ( 1 965) The World We Have Lost. London: Methuen. Lauer, R.H. ( 1 980) Temporal Man. New York: Praeger. McGrath, J.E. and Rotchford, N.L. ( 1 983) 'Time and behaviour in organizations', Research in Organiza­ tional Behaviour, 5: 57- 1 0 1 . McKendrick, N . ( 1962) 'Josiah Wedgwood and the factory discipline', The Historical Journal, 4: 30-5. Manning, P. ( 1 979) ' Metaphors of the field', Adminis­ trative Science Quarterly, 24: 660-7 1 . Marx, K . ( 1976) Capital ( 1 867), vol. I . Harmonds­ worth: Penguin. Mauss, M. ( 1 966) Sociologie et anthropologie. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Moore, W.E. ( l 963a) Man. Time and Society. New York: Wiley. Moore, W.E. ( l963b) 'The temporal structure of organizations', in E.A. Tiryakian (ed.), Sociological Theory, Values and Sociocultural Change. New York: Free Press. Morgan, G. ( 1 986) Images of Organization. New York: Sage. Mumford, L. ( 1934) Technics and Civilisation. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World. Nilsonn, P. ( 1 920) Primitive Time Reckoning. London: Oxford University Press. Nowotny, H. ( 1976) 'Time structuring and time measurement', in J.T. Fraser and N. Lawrence (eds), The Study of Time, vol. 2. New York: Springer. Nyland, C. ( 1986) 'Capitalism and the history of work­ time thought', British Journal of Sociology, 37: 5 1 334. Reprinted as Chapter 8 in J. Hassard (ed.), The Sociology of Time. London: Macmillan, 1 990. Park, D. ( 1980) The Image of Eternity: Roots of Time in the Physical World. Amherst, MA: University of Massachussetts Press. Pinder, C. and Moore, L. ( 1 979) 'The resurrection of taxonomy to aid the development of middle range theories of organization behaviour', Administrative Science Quarterly, 24: 99- 1 1 8. Pollert, A. ( 1 988) 'The flexible finn: fixation or fact?', Work, Employment and Society, 2: 28 1 - 3 1 6. Pronovost, G. ( 1 986) 'Time in a sociological and historical perspective', International Social Science Journal, 1 07: 5 - 1 8 . Reid, D.A. ( 1976) 'The decline of Saint Monday', Past and Present, 7 1 : 76- 1 0 1 . Roy, D.F. ( 1 960) 'Banana time: job satisfaction and informal interaction', Human Organi::ation, 1 8: 1 5668. Reprinted as Chapter 9 in J. Hassard (ed.), The Sociology of Time. London: Macmillan, 1990. Sorokin, P.A. ( 1 943) Sociocultural Causality. Space and Time. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Sorokin, P.A. and Merton, R.K. ( 1 937) 'Social time: a methodological and functional analysis'. American Journal of Sociology, 42: 6 1 5-29. Starkey, K.P. ( 1 988) 'Time and the labour process: a

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14 The Organizational Culture War Games: a Struggle for Intellectual Dominance JOANNE MARTIN AND PETER FROST

The childhood war game of King of the Mountain is preferably played on a sandy beach so no one will get hurt. One king's temporary triumph at the top of a sand pile is rapidly superseded by the reign of another would-be monarch (boy or girl), until the succession of short-lived victories and the plethora of defeats leaves the pile flattened. Sometimes the tide washes away the traces of the struggle and sometimes children (usually a fresh army) rebuild the pile and start the game anew. Other children refrain from playing King of the Mountain, preferring to build their own castles in the sand.

Organizational culture researchers, like other organizational behavior scholars, generally (but not always) use conventional structures for reviewing literature. Intellectual differences of opinion are usually handled with the indirection and tact that sometimes can help scholars to co­ exist in a close-knit field and continue to have cordial intellectual exchanges. The most fre­ quently used strategy is silence, whereby a paper or book focuses predominantly on one point of view, simply by not citing competing perspec­ tives or by relegating them to the margins (for example, in a parenthetical aside, a separate chapter in a book, or a footnote). This popular strategy permits the full exploration and delineation of the favoured point of view, while not creating a need to criticize, or even draw attention to other perspectives. A variant on this silence/marginalization approach is the review which cites a wider range of perspectives, but focuses primarily on the perspective the author personally prefers (and of course, no public record is left of these more conflictful encoun­ ters). Whether silence, marginalization, or tact-

ful understatement is used, these commonly utilized strategies mask intellectual disagree­ ments, so one is forced to attend to silences and 'read between the lines' of what is published in order to decipher what fundamental issues are causing discord. The culture literature is unusual, however, in that these norms of silencing, marginalizing, and minimizing intellectual disagreements have sometimes been broken, usefully, in a number of publications which argue openly for one point of view in preference to other, extensively described alternatives. Reviews of the cultural literature which fit this description include, for example, Alvesson and Berg ( 1 992), Calis and Smircich ( 1 987), Czarniawska-loerges ( 1 992), Frost et al. ( 1 9 9 1 ), leffcutt (forthcoming), Kunda ( 1 99 I ) , Linstead and Grafton-Small ( 1 992), Martin ( 1 992), Schultz ( 1 994), Smircich and Calis (1 987), Stablein and Nord ( i 985), Sypher et al. ( 1 985), Turner ( 1 986), and Willmott ( 1 993). Fundamental disagreements about epis­ temology, methodology, political ideology, and theory, which might have been handled only in ' subterranean' outlets such as blind reviews, have been openly argued in the cultural literature. We therefore have a textual record of overt conflict that can be quite informative and enlightening. Such critiques can challenge taken-for-granted certainties and inspire new ideas. The seriousness of these intellectual differ­ ences makes it difficult to review the results of research in this area, for there is chaos rather than order, conflict rather than consensus, and little sense of a cumulative building of what would be generally recognized as advances in

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knowledge. These problems are compounded because so many cultural researchers, for good reasons, prefer qualitative methodology, devel­ oping context-specific descriptions of cultures rather than collecting the quantitative data that lend themselves more obviously to systematic meta-analyses and the development of empiri­ cally based theoretical generalizations. For all these reasons, cultural research epitomizes the lack of paradigm consensus in our field, an attribute that some worry about because it may inhibit the cumulation of knowledge, harm the reputation of our field, or draw attention to textual analysis rather than the material condi­ tions of work (e.g. Donaldson 1 989; Pfeffer 1 993; Reed 1 990). Other organizational scholars welcome paradigm proliferation, so evident in the cultural arena, as a spur to creativity and the proliferation of previously silenced viewpoints (e.g. Burrell and Morgan 1 979; Van Maanen \ 995). Whether one welcomes or avoids overt con­ flicts about fundamental issues, it is clear that any review of organizational culture research must respond to the existence of these disagreements. Rather than telling a conventional, chronological tale of linear progress toward greater knowledge, we have decided to experiment with one of several possible alternative structures for this review, portraying research in this domain as a struggle for intellectual dominance among the proponents of various theories, methodological preferences, epistemologies, and political orientations (e.g. Burrell and Morgan 1 979; Kuhn 1970). We use a metaphor to structure our description of this struggle for dominance: the organizational culture 'war games' or, more specifically, a game of 'king of the mountain'. This chapter reviews organizational culture research as if this field began, without history, in approximately 1 970. We cite some intellectual predecessors of particular points of view, but less as contributors of the history of an idea and more as totems invoked to legitimate certain points of view, drawing attention to the exclusion of other viewpoints with equally venerable intellectual lineage. We chose to constrain the historical depth of this review because of space limitations and because excellent treatments of the history of the organizational culture 'chaos' - a phrase variously attributed to Turner ( 1 990) and Cai
contributions to the literature, as when advo­ cates of one point of view cite only work in their own tradition, while ignoring or marginalizing competing perspectives. (Although even isola­ tionist strategies can be construed as a play in the game for intellectual dominance.) Coalitions in king of the mountain games usually evolve spontaneously, without much conscious coordi­ nation; the goal is to depose the current king and when that is accomplished, the coalition often dissolves, only to reconstitute itself in a some­ what different form when a new king takes over. 'Attacks' often take the form of a solo climbing to the top of the sand pile, rather than someone deliberately and aggressively pulling rivals down. Finally, it is important to say that we, as authors of this review, do not see ourselves as innocent, distant, or dispassionate adult observers, watch­ ing children play. We have, for better or worse, been fully involved players in the game, some­ times consciously, sometimes not. Although we believe using the war games metaphor is a useful way to describe the struggle for intellectual dominance within organizational culture studies, it is undeniable that this meta­ phor, like any other metaphor, brings some issues into focus while obscuring others particularly those which are congruent with a linear, positivistic view of hypothesis-testing theory development (see Pinder and Bourgeois 1 982). The war games metaphor can unfortu­ nately de-emphasize isolationist intellectual strategies, leave an impression of intentional coordination when coincidence or independent simultaneity would be more accurate descrip­ tions, and describe as an aggressive 'attack' what was intended to be a non-aggressive, almost isolationist description of an intellectual posi­ tion. In short, the war games metaphor reads aggressive competition in, when none may be intended. However (in accord with, for example, Morgan 1 983a) we believe that any less obviously metaphorical framework would also, inevitably, draw attention to some aspects of an intellectual domain, rather than others, and distort, to some extent, what is included in an account to improve its narrative flow and support its point of view. We will endeavor to minimize these problems as we write around the war games metaphor, but we, like others who eschew an explicitly metaphorical structure, cannot avoid them completely. Moving from the structure of this review to its tone, we sought a tone that is relaxed, playful in the postmodern tradition, and sometimes ironic. However, such a tone should not be interpreted as a sign of disrespect for the work we are describing. We hope that this metaphor and tone will permit us to generate some new insights about the cultural research that has and has not

ORGANIZA TIONAL CULTURE WAR GA MES been done. Furthermore, we would welcome a lessening of the deleterious effects of a struggle for dominance. It is our hope that looking at organizational culture research as a struggle for dominance will illuminate what is worthwhile and insightful about all the competing points of view, not in a Panglossian desire for harmony and resolution, but in a clear-eyed call for the worth of trying to understand the importance of the differences that cause these conflicts to recur. The less time we spend fighting for dominance and the more time we spend trying to understand reasons for differences, the deeper our under­ standings may become. This story of the culture wars takes place in a broader societal context. We begin the telling of this story in the 1 970s and 1 980s - decades when increasing attention was paid to sources of cultural difference, for example among ethnic groups, races, genders, and regions. For exam­ ple, in Europe, in the wake of the European Common Market, moves to reduce the salience of national boundaries brought regional and ethnic differences to the fore. In the US, Canada, and Australia, some minorities (such as African­ Americans, French-speaking Canadians, and various indigenous peoples) challenged claims of nationally shared values (see, for example, Schlesinger's ( 1 992) The Disuniting of America). In some US universities, the phrase 'culture wars' refers to debates about multi-culturalism on campus and in the curriculum; the 'great books' tradition of education was criticized for being centered on the writings of a few dead white Western men, a charge that was hotly resisted in the name of quality (e.g. Bloom 1 987). After these debates, it was no longer sufficient to simply add a slogan 'we value diversity' to a list of values presumably shared by all. Valuing diversity was now defined to entail learning about difference, understanding it deeply, and facilitating its flourishing, without the traditional (at least in the US) pressures towards assimila­ tion to a more dominant view.

THE REVOLUTIONARY VANGUARD

There are many ways to tell the history of the renaissance of interest in culture in the late 1 970s, but most organizational accounts cite the successes of Japanese management and the perceived failures of traditional organizational analysis as catalysts for awakening managerial interest in corporate culture (e.g. Turner 1 990: 85-6). For example: The dearth of practical additions to old ways of thought was painfully apparent. It was never so clear as in 1 980, when US managers, beset by

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obvious problems of stagnation, leaped to adopt Japanese management practices, ignoring the cultural difference, so much wider than even the vast expanse of the Pacific would suggest . . . The theorists from academe, we found, were wrestling with the same concerns. Our timing was good. The state of theory is in refreshing disarray. (Peters and Waterman 1 982: 4-5)

Many members of the revolutionary vanguard of cultural researchers were highly critical of mainstream organizational research, which, at that time, emphasized quantitative, normal science in both the US (where it has long been the tradition) and the UK (where the Aston Studies were gaining momentum). They declared this approach to be arid and fruitless because it was overly reliant on a rational model of human behavior, a structural approach to questions of corporate strategy, and a love of numerical analysis. Business education based on such research, they argued, created a generation of managers who knew more about managing spreadsheets than people: A buried weakness in the analytic approach to business decision making is that people analyze what can be most readily analyzed, spend more time on it, and more or less ignore the rest. As Harvard's John Steinbruner [ 1 974] observes, 'if quantitative precision is demanded, it is gained, in the current state of things, only by so reducing the scope of what is analyzed that most of the important problems remain external to the analysis.' ( 1 982: 44)

Members of the revolutionary vanguard, whether or not they advocated the use of qualitative methods, shared a conviction that a cultural framework would permit them to broaden the kinds of organizational phenomena they studied. For example: My interest in culture stemmed from a feeling of excitement: that through the cultural lens we could bring to the top of the agenda, in a constructive way, the emotional side of organizational life. I felt that our approaches to organizations were quite antiseptic and lifeless in many ways. Also I saw that we could begin to look at the texture of organizational life, again in ways that had been brushed aside/dismissed/discounted in the main­ stream of research. It was now potentially ok to do qualitative research, to be playful and experimental, to collect, study, and learn from the stories, events, dramas, and tedium in organizations. It was a liberation from seemingly purely technical, engi­ neered approaches to studying organizations. I experienced a sense of the fun and the theoretical potential of looking at organizations that way . . . We took risks and invented things that we would not likely have thought about in the previous era. (Frost 1 995)

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At these first stages of the cultural revolution, hope was in the air, new insights seemed likely, and the possibility of an organizational theory that was at once more broad and more useful was a heady tonic for many.

V ALUE ENGINEERING AND THE INTEGRATION PERSPECTIVE

At this point, the game of king of the mountain had not yet begun. It was as if children drifted to the beach and began to play in the sand, at first without much interaction or coordination. Although publication dates can be misleading, and (as will be the case throughout this chapter) it is difficult to choose which of many exemplars to cite, many of the first widely influential culture publications were managerially oriented and written for a popular audience. Critics later labeled this cultural approach 'value engineer­ ing', l because these authors had the temerity to argue that effective cultural leaders could create 'strong' cultures, built around their own values. Perhaps the most popular was Peters and Waterman's ( 1 982) In Search of Excellence:

Lessons from America's Best-Run Companies. This anecdote-filled, lively book began with many of the same premises outlined and quoted above. The key to corporate financial success, according to Peters and Waterman. was a strongly unified culture. Top managers could build such a culture by articulating a set of values and then reinforcing those values, again and again, with formal policies, informal norms, stories, rituals, and jargon. In time, and with consistency, those values would become shared with enthusiasm - by all employees. This would set up a domino effect: higher commitment, greater productivity, and ultimately, more profits. These seductive promises, complete with advice about how to create a 'strong' (meaning unitary) culture, were popularized in other books written primarily for executive and MBA audiences (e.g. Deal and Kennedy 1 982; Ouchi 1 98 1 ; Pascale and Athos 1 98 1 ; see Fitzgerald 1 988 for a rebuttal to some of these claims). Not surprisingly, culture quickly became the hottest product on the consulting market. The value engineers touched a responsive chord in many managerially oriented academic researchers who shared the perception that organizational research had become dead­ ended, boring, and/or too distant from the practical concerns of business. A flurry of culture research appeared (e.g. Enz 1 988; Ott 1 989: Ouchi and Jaeger 1 978: Pennings and Gresov 1 986; Pfeffer 1 98 1 ; Pondy et al. 1983: Sathe 1 985: Sergio vanni and Corbally 1 984). These studies

define culture as an internally consistent package of cultural manifestations that generates organization-wide consensus, usually around some set of shared values. In these cultural portraits all is clear; culture is 'an area of mean­ ing carved out of a vast mass of meaninglessness, a small clearing of lucidity in a formless, dark, always ominous jungle' ( Berger 1 967: 23; quoted in Wuthnow et al. 1 984: 26). Within the domain that is considered the culture, there is virtually no ambiguity (e.g. Schein 1 99 1 ). Subcultures are noted only as a secondary consideration (if at all). Very little deep, collective conflict is acknowledged. Studies which share these char­ acteristics (consistency, organization-wide con­ sensus, and clarity) have been termed 'integration' research (Martin 1 992). Many, but not all, integration studies have value engineer­ ing overtones. claiming that culture can be managed or that 'strong' cultures can lead to improved financial performance. Reviews which include a description of some of the historical roots of the integration literature are Ott ( 1 989), Ouchi and Wilkins ( 1 985), Schultz ( 1 994), and Trice and Beyer ( 1 993). The integration perspective conceptualizes cultural change as an organization-wide cultural transformation, whereby an old unity is replaced - hopefully - by a new one; in the interim, conflict and ambiguity may occur, but these are interpreted as evidence of the deterioration of culture before a new unity is established (e.g. Clark 1 972; Greenwood and Hinings 1 988; Jonsson and Lundin 1977; Selznick 1 957). For example, Schein ( 1 985) describes several organizational leaders who articulate their personal values and apparently generate harmo­ nious and universal commitment to those values, reaping benefits of high morale and smoothly coordinated task performance. When dissent appears or ambiguities emerge, these anomalies are explained as evidence of individual deviance, insufficiently homogeneous employee selection procedures. poor socialization of new employ­ ees, a weak culture, a temporary period of confusion during a time of cultural realignment, or - in the case of ambiguity - as a domain of organizational life that is not part of its culture (Schein 1 99 1 ) . The bottom line is that homo­ geneity, harmony, and a unified culture are achievable. Other good examples of integration studies include Barley's ( 1 983) study of how funeral directors manipulated a variety of physical artifacts (e.g. changing the sheets on a death bed, washing and putting make-up on a corpse, closing the corpse's eyes) to create the illusion that death is life-like. Pettigrew ( 1 979) described how headmasters used rituals. stories, and jargon to generate commitment to their schools.

ORGANIZA TIONA L CULTURE WAR GA MES McDonald ( 1 99 1 ) described how uniforms, slogans, posters, a charismatic leader, well­ defined rituals, and a strong work ethic com­ bined to create a sense of excitement and a commitment to excellence among volunteers and employees of a temporary organization, the Los Angeles Olympic Organizing Committee. 2 These are generalist cultural studies, that is, in addition to formal practices, rules and structures they describe and interpret informal practices (such as norms about appropriate behavior or proper decision-making procedures), as well as organ­ izational stories, rituals, specialized jargon, and physical artifacts, such as decor, dress norms, machinery, architecture. In contrast to 'general­ ist' cultural studies, 'specialist' cultural studies focus on only a single cultural manifestation. Examples of specialist integration studies include Dandridge ( 1 986) on ceremonies, Martin et al. (1 983) on organizational stories, and Trice and Beyer ( 1 984) on rituals. Specialist research done within the integration perspective assumes that the manifestations of a culture are consistent with each other, and thus sometimes, without adequate evidence, asserts that a single manifes­ tation represents the culture as a whole (e.g. Martin et al. 1 983).

ASSEMBLING THE TROOPS: THE D IFFERENTIA TION PERSPECTIVE

Roughly at the same time as the flood of inte­ gration research began to appear, another group of scholars, mostly working independently, were drawn to some but not all the ideas expressed by the revolutionary vanguard. They too thought that mainstream organizational theory and research needed revitalization. They too thought that a renaissance of interest in organizational culture would bring an interdisciplinary creativ­ ity into the field, expanding the types of issues being studied and the kinds of methods considered valid. Some of the members of this second group of cultural scholars had done work considered by many to be marginal to the managerial, quantitative emphases common to much main­ stream organizational theory and research. Like many of the advocates of the integration viewpoint, some of this second group of scholars were qualitative researchers, who were excited because now ('at last' in the US) ethnographic research would have a home in organizational studies and qualitative case studies would be appreciated for their richly detailed, context­ specific insights, rather than being dismissed as 'a nice story about an N of one'. Some scholars in this second group were also hopeful that

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cultural work would generate alternatives to the managerial orientation that had been dominant for so long; now the opinions and interests of lower-level employees would be more fully represented. These and other deviants, dissi­ dents, and disenchanted organizational scholars seeking a fresh perspective were attracted to cultural studies. Because culture itself was so vaguely defined, because it lacked a clear and commonly accepted theoretical framework, and because so many of these scholars prided themselves individually on their iconoclastic openness to new ideas, this 'rag-tag' collection of marginals soon generated an impressive body of work that shared some common character­ istics, labeled here and elsewhere (e.g. Martin and Meyerson 1 988) as the differentiation perspective. Differentiation studies developed commonal­ ities without much intentional coordination (although meetings, such as the 1 984 Vancouver Conference on Organizational Culture and the annual gatherings of the Standing Conference on Organizational Symbolism, did provide some opportunities for contact and interchange among a wide range of cultural researchers). These commonalities emerged from a disparate set of intellectual traditions and, as outlined in the next section of this chapter, this de facto alliance was shaky, soon to be threatened by dissension. In the terms of the king of the mountain game, it was as if children playing independently on the beach began to notice each other, eventually moving together to play in a parallel fashion: an unstable coalition at best. Differentiation studies, like integration stu­ dies, stress the ideational aspects of culture, such as values, cognitions (meanings), symbolism (including aesthetics), and/or emotions - topics which were being neglected in mainstream organizational research. Rather than defining culture in purely ideational terms, however, differentiation studies preferred a less ethereal, more material approach that included within the definition of culture practical/structural consid­ erations such as pay, task responsibilities, hierarchical reporting relationships, formal poli­ cies and procedures - in short, any organiza­ tional practice formal enough to be written down. Most differentiation studies seem to assume that a good study of a culture should be generalist rather than specialist, that is, it should include a wide range of cultural manifestations. Such generalist breadth was not enough; a good cultural study also had to have depth, to 'penetrate the front' presented to strangers (e.g. Gregory 1 983), and to observe conflicts, the unresolved, the shameful, what causes ambiva­ lence - the chinks in the armor through which deeper, more complex considerations become

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visible. This emphasis on depth of understanding produced cultural accounts that were sensitive to inconsistencies between stated attitudes and actual behavior, between formal practices and informal norms, between one story and another, and - most important - between the interpreta­ tions of one person and another (e.g. Van Maanen and Barley 1 984; Van Maanen and Kunda 1 989). Differences in perception and opinion were associated with status, tasks, jobs, seniority, sex, occupation, race, and ethnicity often coalescing into overlapping, nested sub­ cultures (e.g. Louis 1 985). Although Rosen ( 1 99 1 ) rightly observes that true ethnographies of organizational cultures are rare, the best differentiation ethnographies are highly com­ plex, full of nuance, open to conflict, pervaded by inconsistencies and ambivalences: a complex richness that indeed fulfilled many of the hopes of the cultural vanguard (e.g. Jaques 1 95 1 ; Kunda 1 99 1 ; Rosen 1 985; Van Maanen 1 99 1 ; Young 1 989). These studies are bold, empirically well-supported challenges to the integration assumption that organizational culture can be a unitary monolith composed of clear values and interpretations perceived, enacted, and shared by all employees, in an organization-wide consen­ sus. In addition, differentiation research showed that the subcultures within an organization can reflect, and be partially determined by, cultural groupings in the larger society. For example, functional subcultures within a firm can reflect occupational subcultures that cross firm bound­ aries, as when accountants appear to be the 'same everywhere' (e.g. Gregory 1 983). From this perspective, cultural change is localized within one or more subcultures, alterations tend to be incremental, and innovations are triggered primarily by pressures from an organization's environment (e.g. Meyerson and Martin 1 987). That environment is likely to be segmented, so different subcultures within the same organiza­ tion experience different kinds and rates of change. Thus, from a differentiation viewpoint, an organizational culture is not unitary; it is a nexus where environmental influences intersect, creating a nested, overlapping set of subcultures within a permeable organizational boundary (Martin 1 992: 1 1 1 - 14). Examples show the texture of this kind of cultural work. Christensen and Kreiner ( 1 984) drew on several case studies to distinguish differ­ ent aspects of cultures in organizations: the firm's external 'aura' (what economists refer to as its reputation in the market); its 'corporate culture' (the values and goals espoused by its top management - not necessarily accepted or even noticed by lower-level employees); and 'cultures in work' (reflecting the everyday working lives of

groups of employees who share tasks). Rosen

( 1 985) focused on the discordance between the espoused values of an advertising agency's top management and the reactions of various sub­ cultures of employees, as they attended an annual company breakfast ritual. Van Maanen ( 1 99 1 ) studied subcultures at Disneyland, as operators of various rides and concessions stands arranged themselves in a status hierarchy, harassed obnoxious customers, and ignored their super­ visors. Bartunek and Moch ( 1 99 1 ) described the non-too-enthusiastic reactions of various sub­ cultures (in-house consulting staff, management of local plants, line employees, and machinists) to a management-initiated 'quality of working life' intervention. Young ( 1 989) observed women working on an assembly line, describing their fission into two subcultures reflecting differences in age, marital status, and task assignments. A few researchers have delineated the difficulties women and minorities have in 'fitting into' corporate cultures dominated by white men (e.g. Bell 1 990; Cox 1 993; Kanter 1 977; Mills 1 992). Other studies consistent with a differentia­ tion approach, broadly defined, include Brunsson ( 1 985), Riley ( 1 983), and Van Maanen ( 1 986). These studies have in common a willingness to acknowledge inconsistencies (i.e. attitudes versus behavior, formal policies versus actual practices, etc). They see consensus as occurring only within subcultural boundaries. They acknowledge con­ flicts of interest, for example, between top man­ agement and other employees or within a top management group. These studies describe whatever inconsistencies and subcultural differ­ ences they find in clear terms: there is little ambiguity here, except in the interstices between subcultures. Thus, inconsistency, subcultural consensus, and subcultural clarity are the hall­ mark characteristics of differentiation research (Martin 1 992).

DISSENSION IN THE RANKS OF THE DIFFERENTIA TION PERSPECTIVE

Although differentiation studies share the common characteristics described above, these commonalities mask important distinctions (for an extended discussion of this issue, see Alvesson 1 993; Alvesson and Berg 1 992) 3 For example, there is an important distinction between pluralism (the delineation of differences within a whole) and the awareness of power and con­ flicts of interest that come with a more critical perspective (i.e. Knights and Willmott 1 987; Lucas 1 987; Mumby 1 988; Reed 1 985; Riley 1 983). There is a fundamental difference between the 'describe reality' tone of a historical-

ORGANIZA TIONAL CUL TURE WAR GAMES hermeneutic orientation (e.g. Agar 1 986; Gar­ finkel 1 967; Goffman 1 967; Spradley 1 979) and the challenge to the status quo represented by critical theories, for example what Habermas ( 1 975) terms an emancipatory point of view (for a more extensive discussion of critical theory and related issues, see Chapter 7 by Alvesson and Deetz in this volume). In Burrell and Morgan's ( 1 979) terminology, some of these issues stem from differences between the interpretative and the radical humanist paradigms. Putnam et aI.'s ( 1 993) debate between ethnography and critical theory outlines some of these differences in orientation, and Stablein and Nord's ( 1 985) review classifies organizational culture research according to the extent to which it represents an emancipatory point of view. Clues to where differentiation stud� stand on these issues can most easily be found in their theoretical introductions, rather than in the content of their descriptions of particular sub­ cultures. Studies that stem from a more critical, rather than interpretative or pluralistic, tradition tend to cite some common intellectual predeces­ sors to legitimate their theoretical orientation and anti-management tone. These include organizational scholars open to the insights of Marxist/critical theory (e.g. Burawoy 1 979; Burrell and Morgan 1 979; Deetz 1 992; Perrow 1 979; Reed 1 98 5) , occupational research in the tradition of the Chicago School of sociology (e.g. Becker et aI. 1 96 1 ; Hughes 1 958; Manning 1 977), and some early qualitative studies of organiza­ tions that included a focus on lower-level employees (e.g. Crozier 1 964; Jaques 1 9 5 1 ). These intellectual predecessors share a con­ cern with the everyday working lives of people of relatively low status, a focus which is congruent with a relatively leftist political ideology that challenges the top management's views and de­ lineates the negative consequences of the status quo on those who are relatively disadvantaged. In this context, it is surprising to note that few differentiation studies, even those written from a critical theory viewpoint, go beyond the delinea­ tion of subcultural differences to examine processes of organizational change that might, for example in a grass roots collective action, benefit those who are at the bottom of an organizational hierarchy. Although several lit­ eratures are relevant to these questions of change (for example, research on social movements, unions, and sabotage), these issues have received relatively little attention to date from cultural researchers. Thus, the differentiation perspective includes at least two subdivisions that have developed in distinctive ways from differing intellectual traditions. One documents pluralism within a culture, usually utilizing ethnographic methods

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and a hermeneutic epistemology, offering a single, presumably 'accurate' interpretation of what was observed without fundamentally chal­ lenging a managerial perspective (i.e. Barley et aI. 1 988; Louis 1 985; Martin and Siehl 1 983). The other adds a critical, anti-management reading of the data (empirical examples include Rosen 1 985; Van Maanen 1 99 1 ; Young 1 989). In some critical studies, sometimes even the pluralist sensitivity to difference that is the foundation of all differentiation research is underemphasized, while critique of the hege­ mony of management takes precedence. Thus, these differences in intellectual orientation within the differentiation classification can sometimes blur the boundaries of the category. Some differentiation scholars, particularly those working from a critical theory perspective, have been concerned about delineating these differ­ ences within their ranks (see Alvesson and Berg 1 992 and Alvesson 1 993, for example), while others have directed their attention to criticizing integration research . Now the battle lines had been drawn and the attack was about to begin.

LET THE GAME BEGIN: THE ATTACK OF THE DIFFERENTIATION ADVOCATES

Literally hundreds of integration studies were published in the 1 980s. In the vast majority of these publications, consultants and academics had adopted the language of cultural studies and transformed it into a barely recognizable variant (some would say, travesty). Suddenly 'strong' unitary cultures had become the latest 'new' answer to managers' desires for greater control over their employees and greater profitability for their firms (Barley et aI. 1 988). Differentiation scholarship, of both pluralistic and critical varieties, had been outflanked by a value engineering perspective; the integration view had become king of the mountain. Advocates of the differentiation viewpoint were, needless to say, not pleased by these developments and they regrouped and then counter-attacked on several different fronts. Some noted that in spite of efforts to dis­ tinguish practitioner-oriented integrationist writings from academic integrationist studies, the boundaries between these two categories were permeable (for example, many academics consulted and many consultants had fine academic credentials); more importantly, they shared a managerial emphasis (Barley et aI. 1 988; Jeffcutt forthcoming) and came to similar conclusions: organizational cultures were sup­ posedly characterized by consistency, organiza­ tion-wide consensus, and clarity. Some noted

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such commonalities with contempt, as evidence that these integration studies had 'sold out' to the managerial perspective that dominated mainstream organizational research (see also Van Maanen and Kunda 1 989: 92): The companies studied are the cream of America's corporate crop, and range from IBM to McDo­ nald's hamburgers. The dedication and quasi­ religious commitment which the new manager seeks to instill into his employees sometimes sits a little oddly with the nature of the company goal: it may be inspiring to hear of sales staff risking their life in a snow storm to ensure that the company goal of regular delivery of supplies is maintained, but when the reader learns that the product is a high­ salt, high-calorie junk food, doubts about whether some of this shining dedication is perhaps misplaced begin to arise. (Turner 1 986: 1 08)

Cahis and Smircich ( 1 987), noting the over­ whelming numbers of integration studies being published, declared that the cultural revolution was in danger of becoming 'dominant, but dead'. As Calas and Smircich had hoped, this fear was premature. Many of those who were not willing to give up the fight to dethrone the integration view utilized a methodological critique, a move that ultimately had the effect of partially cross­ cutting the integration/differentiation battle lines and bringing different issues to the front.

THE M ETHODOLOGY BATTLE

The methodology battle was particularly fierce because underlying these method preferences were firmly held epistemological beliefs (e.g. Burrell and Morgan 1 979). Although some skirmishes in this battle took place out in the open, most were more like guerrilla warfare, taking place in a series of out-of-sight maneu­ vers; the methods battle affected an editor's choice of journal reviewers for a culture article, a 'blind' reviewer's verdict about the merits of a particular manuscript, and even the content of letters from external reviewers in tenure cases. Of course, such out-of-sight maneuvers left few published traces that can be quoted here, without breaking norms of confidentiality and blind review. Nevertheless, we personally can testify that these non-public fights were, and are, fiercely contested. The stakes were high, at least in academic terms. Viewing culture from the differentiation perspective and studying it using qualitative methods can be a risky career strategy, particularly in the US where the field is dominated by managerial interests, integra­ tionist theoretical preconceptions. and quantita­ tive methods.

Some qualitative researchers were disap­ pointed by this reaction. They responded by citing texts justifying their methods choices and outlining the fundamentals of good qualitative research methodology ( some helpful texts include Agar 1 986; Blau 1 965; Glaser and Strauss 1 967; Schein 1 987; Van Maanen et al. 1 982). Even among advocates of qualitative methods for studying culture there were strident disagreements, most of which surfaced in less public places, like journal reviews. The purist ethnographers criticized short-term and/or inter­ view-based qualitative studies as being 'smash and grab' ethnographies.4 If a researcher was to truly 'penetrate the front' of cultural members, he or she had to, they argued, adopt 'true' ethnographic methods. This meant spending months or even years as a participant-observer in order to see things from an insider's 'emic' perspective (e.g. Gregory 1 983). Anything less was worthy of being classified, at best, as exploratory pilot testing, anecdotal examples to illustrate ideas based on more solid evidence - in short, probably not worth mentioning, in print (see Sutton 1 994 for a frank discussion of these issues). Other cultural researchers, perhaps in response to criticisms of qualitative methods, developed quantitative measures of cultural phenomena, drawing primarily on techniques used in organizational climate research (Schnei­ der 1 990). Quantitative culture studies are generally 'specialist' in that they focus on only one kind of cultural manifestation - usually a measure of agreement with a series of espoused (rather than enacted) values o r a self-report of behavioral norms (e.g. 'People in my work group are generally more cooperative than competi­ tive'), measured using seven-point scales or more innovative techniques, such as adjective sorting tasks (e.g. O'Reilly et al. 1 99 1 ). There are several problems with these quanti­ tative approaches. Specialist studies should not (although integration studies often do) assume or assert that the one kind of manifestation is consistent with or representative of the culture as a whole (see Martin et al. 1 983 as an illustration of this problem). Additionally, respondents may not be aware that their espoused values are not being consistently enacted (e.g. Argyris and Schon 1 978). They may fear that researchers' promises of anonymity will not be kept, en­ dangering their jobs, and so may give misleading answers that are reflective of top management's expressed preferences, rather than actual beha­ vior, thus creating an illusion of organizational consensus. To manage the impression given to researchers, respondents may give answers that seem socially desirable or that reflect their current levels of job satisfaction (high or low).

ORGANIZA TIONAL CULTURE WAR GAMES Furthermore, this kind of quantitative measure may give a misleading representation of a culture because the researcher has generated the alter­ natives that the respondents are evaluating. Most importantly, such quantitative studies are likely to provide empirical support for integra­ tionist assumptions. if responses that do not reflect organization-wide consensus are excluded from discussion and analysis - as not part of the 'culture'. Significantly, other questionnaire­ based specialist studies have used broader, random samples of respondents, across status levels, and have found evidence of subcultural differentiation ( pockets of ignorance of and resistance to managerial values), rather than organization-wide consensus (Kilmann 1 985; Rousseau 1 990). Some integration studies, which use specialist quantitative (questionnaire) measures of culture, have claimed to have found evidence of a link to financial performance (Denison 1 990; Gordon 1 985; Ouchi and Johnson 1 978). Other specialist quantitative studies (for example, a content analysis of espoused managerial values in annual reports has been used as a measure of 'culture') conclude that valid empirical confirmation of a link to financial performance has not yet been found and is unlikely to be found, given the many non-cultural determinants of financial performance and the difficulty of developing adequately generalist measures of the cultures of large numbers of firms (see Siehl and Martin 1 990 for a review of the research on this issue). Advocates of ethnographic methods, from both the integration and differentiation perspec­ tives, have been particularly critical of specialist studies which by definition lack the richly detailed, context-specific understandings that emerge from generalist ethnographic cultural portraits (e.g. Schein 1 987; Smircich 1 983; Smircich and Morgan 1 982; Van Maanen et al. 1 982). especially those with a longitudinal focus (e.g. Pettigrew 1 985a; 1 985b). Ethnographers also have disapproved of an exclusive focus on espoused values or self-reported behavioral norms. Because such a superficial focus cannot 'penetrate the front' of people's desires to present themselves in a favourable light, it is far inferior to the depth made accessible by long-term participant-observation. In organizational con­ texts, behavior is often constrained by managerial preferences or career ambitions and cannot be assumed to reflect an employee's true attitudes. Many ethnographers had thought that the cultural movement would provide respect, parti­ cularly in the US where qualitative methods had been so disparaged. Many of these qualitative researchers were disappointed that this domain of organizational research, like all the others, was in danger of being taken over by the number

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crunchers, a reaction that was expressed, in public forums, by the usual strategies of silence and marginalization: in more private arenas, such as 'blind reviews', the negative reaction was more pronounced and many researchers felt it was difficult to get their work recognized due to methods preferences of reviewers and editors (see, for example, Rousseau 1 994). The result was a strident debate over the merits of qualitative and quantitative methods for studying culture (for a particularly clear discus­ sion of the underlying issues, although not within the context of this particular body of literature, see Blau 1 965; Daft 1 980; Light 1 979). with some researchers advocating matching particular con­ ventional methods with particular conceptual problems (e.g. McGrath 1 982; Rousseau 1 990), while others preferred an uneasy, but possibly innovative hybrid mix of the two approaches (e.g. Martin 1 990a). For example, one such hybrid qualitative-quantitative approach to studying culture involved a two-step procedure (Martin et al. 1 985). An open-ended. structured interview protocol was used to collect qualitative. context­ specific event histories, generated by employees themselves, using such questions as: 'Describe the ten incidents that made your company what it is today. Give details. For each event, tell us what meanings this event holds for you personally and for the company as a whole.' These open-ended responses were then quantitatively content­ analyzed, to measure subcultural or organiza­ tion-wide agreement about what happened, to delineate which employees' actions were con­ sidered important, and which interpretations of the meanings of these events were shared. Such hybrid methods represent an uneasy compromise between quite different epistemologies. The qualitative/quantitative debates among cultural researchers continue (see the edited volumes by Schneider 1 990, and Hassard and Pym 1 990, for some recent salvos in this battle). Given the deep differences that underlie these disputes. agree­ ment is unlikely. Taken as a whole, qualitative cultural studies do not provide consistent, convincing support for the premises of either the integration or the differentiation perspectives. For those who thought quantitative research could resolve the conflict between these two viewpoints, the contradictory empirical record caused confusion: how could conscientious culture researchers come to such different conclusions? Was it the case simply that integration research generally focused on organizations where organization­ wide consensus existed, while differentiation research picked organizations where subcultures prevailed? This was unlikely, given that integra­ tion studies dismissed evidence of non-unitary cultures as examples of weak or failed integration

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(e.g. Schein 1 99 1 ) , while differentiation research often failed to look for or report organization­ wide agreement. At this point, the conflict escalated, as advocates of each viewpoint accused each other of theoretical and methodological tautology, whether or not they used quantitative methods. Integration studies were accused (for examples from the literature, see Martin 1 992: 65-7) of engaging in a kind of tautology because they defined culture as consistent and clear, then included in their cultural portraits only those manifestations which seemed to have consistent and clear interpretations. They defined culture (or a 'strong' culture) as organization-wide agreement with values espoused by top manage­ ment, but their sampling procedures were seldom either random or stratified to include all levels of the hierarchy. Instead, integration studies tended to study those cultural members who were particularly articulate informants, or those who were most likely to have views similar to top managers (i.e. high-ranking and upwardly mobile managers, professionals such as accoun­ tants or engineers, or loyal lower-ranking members selected by management). Unfortu­ nately, integration studies seldom hesitated to generalize from such limited subject samples to the culture of the whole organization. Even studies which refrained from these non­ standard sampling procedures found organiza­ tion-wide consensus by excluding from their cultural portraits (as 'not part of the culture' or 'evidence of a weak culture') all aspects of the culture that generated conflicting or ambiguous interpretations (see Schein 1 99 1 for a cogent defense of this position). Not surprisingly, the portraits of culture that emerged from these research designs were entirely consistent with integrationist theoretical preconceptions: each 'strong' culture was a monolith where every manifestation reinforced the values of top management, employees complied with manage­ rial directives, and preferences were assumed to share these values, and there was, apparently, only one interpretation ofthe meaning ofevents shared by all. These studies were designed so integration research would find what it was looking for. Advocates of the integration point of view did not take all this criticism without fighting back. They accused differentiation research of also being tautological (for examples, see Martin 1 992: 1 06-8). Differentiation studies, these critics argued, defined cultural manifestations as inconsistent, and then included in their cultural portraits those manifestations that fit these definitions. Differentiation studies were accused of seeking subcultural differentiation, by using focused, non-random samples of lower­ level employees and ignoring (or not searching

for) evidence of values shared on an organiza­ tion-wide basis. Integration critics claimed that, if differentiation studies had only had sufficiently astute clinical and ethnographic skills, they would have understood that, at a deep enough level, fundamental assumptions (for example, about the nature of time) are shared by all or most members of an organization (e.g. Schein 1 985; 1 994). Of course, when such widely shared, deep assumptions are found, they may in fact be part of a society's culture, and not appropriately studied at the organizational level of analysis (Martin 1 992: 53-6). And so it goes on: the openly combative exchanges in public, as well as the more private and less visible forms of battle, continue. This academic battle about methodology and theory shows some considerable indifference to the fates of actual people in real organizations (see Donaldson 1 989: 250 for an articulate version of this criticism); even differentiation research, ostensibly so concerned about the fate of the disadvantaged and oppressed, contributes little so far to understanding how to make people's organizational lives better. Outside academia, in corporations the stakes are high. Managers do not generally care about the hair splitting disputes of academics, but they do care, deeply, about the considerable expense and unwanted consequences of ill-thought-out cul­ tural change interventions. Many executives, consultants, and lower-level employees dismiss culture as 'yesterday's fad', and predictably have turned elsewhere to find another 'quick fix' for corporate ills. The theoretical and methodological disputes described above have caused chaos in the field of cultural studies. In the struggle to be king of the mountain, skirmishes are constant among proponents of various epistemologies, meth­ odologies, intellectual heritages, publication norms, and even different career paths (e.g. US versus European). Everyone is out to prove what they already believe in. It is not clear what has been learned, who is more correct, or even what methods could convincingly resolve these differ­ ences of opinion. In fact, for reasons explained in the next two sections of this review, such disputes may not be resolvable. In the short term, however, the confusion caused by the methods battle created an opening for other parties to enter the battlefield.

A NEW CONTENDER: THE FRAGMENT ATION PERSPECTIVE

These new parties to the conflict each tried to redraw the battle lines so that their point of view

ORGANIZA TIONAL CULTURE WAR GAMES would emerge triumphant - the king o f the mountain. The first of these new contenders has been termed the fragmentation perspective (Martin 1 992), as it is positioned as the third logical possibility on the dimensions that are the focus of the integration versus differentiation struggle. According to the advocates of the fragmentation view, the relationships among the manifestations of a culture are neither clearly consistent nor clearly inconsistent; instead, the relationships are complex, containing elements of contradiction and confusion. Similarly, con­ sensus is not organization-wide nor is it specific to a given subculture. Instead, consensus is transient and issue-specific, producing short­ lived affinities among individuals that are quickly replaced by a different pattern of affinities, as a different issue draws the attention of cultural members (e.g. Kreiner and Schultz 1 993). In such an ephemeral environment, culture is no longer a clearing in a jungle of meaninglessness. Now, culture is the jungle itself. According to the fragmentation point of view, the essence of any culture is ambiguity, which pervades all (e.g. Feldman 1 99 1 ; Meyerson 1 99 1 ). Clarity, then, is a dogma of mean­ ingfulness and order propagated by management to create an illusion of clarity where there is none (e.g. Levitt and Nass 1 989). Lack of consistency, lack of consensus, and ambiguity are the hallmarks of a fragmentation view of culture. In a fragmentation account, power is diffused broadly at all levels of the hierarchy and throughout the organization's environment. Change is a constant flux, rather than an intermittent interruption in an otherwise stable state. Because change is largely triggered by the environment or other forces beyond an individual's control, fragmentation studies of change offer few guidelines for those who would normatively control the change process. For example, Feldman ( 1 989) studied policy analysts in a large government bureaucracy. They spent their days writing policy reports that might never be read and, in any case, were unlikely to influence the formation of a policy. In such a context, ambiguities became a protective cloud that prevented a clear analysis of the meaning(lessness) of the analysts' work. In Meyerson's ( 1 99 1 ) studies of social workers, ambiguity pervaded an occupation whose practi­ tioners had to operate in a world where the objectives of social work were unclear, the means to those goals were not specified, and sometimes it wasn't even clear when an intervention had been successful or even what success in this context might have meant. Meyerson concluded that to study the culture of this occupation while excluding ambiguity from the realm of what is defined as cultural - would have been

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dramatically incomplete, even misleading. Weick ( 1 99 1 ) offered a fragmentation view of a foggy airport in Tenerife, as pilots, controllers, and cockpit crews struggled to make themselves understood across barriers of status, language, and task assignment. In this context, pervasive ambiguity was not benign: hundreds of lives were lost as two jumbo jets collided in the fog.

AN ATTEMPT TO REDRA W THE BATTLE LINES: A META-THEORETICAL MOVE

What had been a war among two perspectives was now a war among many: among the inte­ gration, differentiation, and fragmentation views; between the qualitative and quantitative advocates; and between the critical theorists and their more interpretative colleagues. The game of king of the mountain was now being played in earnest; all of these contenders were competing for supremacy, although each was arguing for the use of different playing rules. Rather than going for a minor victory (a fourth perspective), the next obvious move in the king of the mountain game was to create a meta-theory that would encompass all three perspectives. Martin ( 1 992) outlined the problems of methodological tautology discussed above and argued that such tautologies were also evident in fragmentation research. Fragmentation studies focused on contexts (airports literally in the fog) and occupations (policy analyst, social worker) that were particularly ambiguous and then wrote cultural portraits emphasizing those ambiguities. Both fragmentation and differentiation studies tended to focus on a wide range of cultural manifestations, making it less likely that all manifestations would have consistent interpreta­ tions. Thus, integration, differentiation, and fragmentation researchers defined culture in a particular way and then designed studies which made it more likely they would find what they were looking for. This problem of tautology explained, to a large extent, why three traditions of research on ostensibly the same topic could produce such conflicting empirical records. (Indeed, some have argued that similar tautolo­ gical problems characterize all of organizational research; see Morgan 1 983b). However, the fact remains that evidence con­ gruent with each perspective had been found. Martin ( 1 992) argues that it is not only that advocates of the various perspectives have sought and found cultural contexts that fit their preconceptions; in addition, any organiza­ tional culture contains elements congruent with all three perspectives. If any organization is studied in enough depth, some issues, values,

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and objectives will be seen to generate organiza­ tion-wide consensus, consistency, and clarity (an integration view). At the same time, other aspects of an organization's culture will coalesce into subcultures that hold conflicting opinions about what is important, what should happen, and why (a differentiation view). Finally, some problems and issues will be ambiguous, in a state of constant flux, generating multiple, plausible interpretations (a fragmentation view). A wide range of organizational contexts have been examined using the three-perspective frame­ work, including studies of a temporary educa­ tional organization for unemployed women in England, a newly privatized bank in Turkey, truants from an urban high school in the US, and Peace Corps/Africa volunteers (8aburoglu and Gocer 1 99 1 ; Enomoto 1 993; Jeffcutt forth­ coming; Meyerson and Martin 1 987). Implicit in the three-perspective framework is the assump­ tion that these social scientific viewpoints are subjectively imposed on the process of collecting and interpreting cultural data. Often one perspective, labeled the 'home' viewpoint. is easy for cultural members and researchers to acknowledge, while the other two perspectives can be more difficult to access. It is therefore a misunderstanding to conclude that a particular organization has a culture that is best character­ ized by one of the three perspectives. Rather, any culture at any point in time will have some aspects congruent with all three perspectives (e.g. Frost et at. 1 99 1 ; Martin 1 992; Meyerson and Martin 1 987). The three-perspective framework is a meta­ theory, which claims to encompass and thereby surpass prior, more narrow theories by moving to a higher level of abstraction, claiming that. when a cultural context is viewed from all three perspectives, a deeper understanding will emerge. Presumably, because the three-perspec­ tive theory is more inclusive and thereby possibly more insightful, it supposedly deserves to dominate other approaches to understanding cultures in organizations. This is a classic attempt to redraw the lines of battle and so become 'king of the mountain', and as such, it arouses considerable antagonism. Obviously, this approach does have limita­ tions. To paraphrase and quote arguments made elsewhere (Martin 1 992: 1 92), this tripartite classification scheme is based on a series of undeconstructed dichotomies that position the perspectives in opposition to one another. It ignores aspects of theories and studies that straddle boundaries among the perspectives (see, especially, rich ethnographies such as Kunda 1 99 1 and Pettigrew 1 985b), omits unclassifiable research or relegates it to marginalized places in the text, and reserves treatment of issues that

transcend these categories for separate parts of the text ( for example, see the discussion above of the differences between the critical theory and interpretative traditions or the qualitative versus quantitative methods debates). Most impor­ tantly, by using these tripartite categories to classify studies, the perspectives are reified and individual studies are pigeonholed, thereby diminishing the uniqueness of their contribu­ tions. Such a use of categories is common social scientific practice, and not unique to this particular attempt to build a meta-theory, but it does have harmful effects on the ways knowledge gets created and scholarly work is and is not evaluated (e.g. Gagliardi 1 990; Turner 1 989). And these criticisms are mild compared to the postmodern critiques of meta-theories out­ lined in the next section of this review. To summarize the results of the last few battles described above: in spite of (or perhaps because of) the confusion caused by these disputes, the last decade of cultural research has produced a variety of insightful, innovative studies that might not have been completed within the narrower orthodoxies of theory and method that have constrained other kinds of organiza­ tional inquiry. Cultural studies have brought epistemological and methodological variety to the field, introduced ideas from other disciplines, and (speaking now of qualitative generalist work) offered richly detailed, context-specific descriptions of organizational life. Now, how­ ever, cultural research faces a new and formid­ able challenge: post modernists have entered the culture wars. The postmodernists' bid to be king of the mountain has a very different tone than the modernist traditions of cultural research described so far. If the postmodernists are successful, cultural researchers will admit that it is impossible, ever, to know, or represent, the truth about a culture.

THE END OF THEORY: A POSTMODERN ROUT OF ALL ARMIES FROM THE FIELD OF BATTLE?

It is beyond the mandate of this chapter to discuss postmodernism at length (readers should consult Chapter 7 by Alvesson and Deetz) but, nonetheless, we are able to discuss its implica­ tions for and contributions to the work on organizational culture. Postmodernism is the most profound, potentially disruptive, and possibly insightful development in cultural studies to date (e.g. Calas and Smircich 1 987; Czarniawska-Joerges 1 992; leffcutt forthcom­ ing; Linstead and Grafton-Small 1 99 1 ). There is not just one postmodernism: it is a discourse,

ORGA NIZA TIONAL CUL TURE WAR GA MES rather than a unified theory, in part because it has attracted such a diverse group of advocates, including architects, philosophers, and literary critics. Some postmodernists have been accused of fascism, while others are leftist refugees from the political activism of the 1 960s. In all these varieties, postmodernism challenges ideas which are the foundation of modern science: ration­ ality, order, clarity, realism, truth, and intellec­ tual progress (e.g. Baudrillard 1 983; Derrida 1 976; Foucault 1 976; Grafton-Small and Lin­ stead 1 987; Lyotard 1 984). When contrasted to postmodern ideas, modernist cultural scholar­ ship is seen to share some preconceptions. For example, modern cultural studies (even those written from differentiation and fragmentation perspectives) attempt to provide coherent accounts - to order the disorder that is organizational life. Carrying this emphasis on order one step further, integration studies offer a portrait of unity, harmony, and in many instances, the promise of cultural control. In contrast, postmodern accounts draw atten­ tion to disorder and offer a multiplicity of contradictory interpretations, making integra­ tion studies particularly suspect from a post­ modern viewpoint. The relationship between the signifier and the signified, between an image and the original experience it was once produced to represent, is from a postmodern viewpoint attenuated, complex, and in part arbitrary (Alves son and Berg 1 992: 220). This arbitrari­ ness should not be confused with the more tepid, manageable ambiguities, irrationalities, and randomness that are the focus of fragmentation research. The key difference is that while ambiguity implies a surplus of meaning attached to a particular object. i.e., a somewhat unclear, fuzzy, vague, obscure or enigmatic relation, arbitrariness implies a capricious or willful relationship that cannot be determined by any rule or principle. While an ambiguous relation­ ship means that there is a way of understanding and capturing this relationship and of understanding the inherent way in which the signifier represents the signified, an arbitrary relationship makes no such assumptions. (Alvesson and Berg 1 992: 220)

Modern cultural scholarship, particularly that which uses ethnographic methods, attempts to cut through superficial cultural manifestations and interpretations to uncover a deeper reality, revealing knowledge that is closer to the truth. Modern scholarship is careful to draw distinc­ tions among the objective truth about reality, the subjectivity of a researcher-author, and a text. These distinctions, however, are not inviolable. For example, modernist studies sometimes explore the flaws of an imperfect relationship

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between reality and data (which presumably can be improved by more rigorous ethnographic or quantitative methods). Modern scholars also sometimes acknowledge a flawed relationship between presumably objective data and their imperfect representation in a text (which presumably can be improved by clearer, more 'transparent' writing). More rarely, a modernist author may engage in self-reflexivity concerning the effects of his or her individualized sub­ jectivity on a text (e.g. Kunda 1 99 I ; Van Maanen 1 988). Such introspection is usually confined to the margins of a text (an introduc­ tion, and anecdote, or an appendix). Such marginalization enables the modern author, in the main body of the text, to maintain the impersonal, supposedly objective style and language that sustain scientific credibility by making the individualized subjectivity of the author invisible (e.g. Clifford and Marcus 1 986; Geertz 1 988). In contrast, from a postmodern point of view, reality is a serious of fictions and illusions (Alvesson and Berg 1 992; Arac 1 986; Clifford and Marcus 1 986; Geertz 1 988). A text is not a closed system; it reflects the subjective views of its author, those who read it, and those whose views are quoted, included, suppressed, or excluded (e.g. Hassard and Parker 1 993; Linstead and Grafton-Small 1 992). This focus on representational issues, such as the ways impersonal language reinforces the authority of an author, undermines any claim that a text can represent the objective truth about a reality that is 'out there' - separable from the text (e.g. Cooper and Burrell 1 988; leffcutt 1 995; Smircich 1 995). Truth therefore becomes 'a matter of credibility rather than an objective condition' (Alvesson and Berg 1 992: 223; Van Maanen 1 988). This focus on textual analysis (rather than collective change efforts or data collection) is justified from a postmodern point of view because there is nothing outside or beyond the text (e.g. Moi 1 985; Weedon 1 987). Whereas modern scholars argue about what the truth is or what methods or modes of engagement would bring research closer to truth, postmodernists use analytic techniques such as deconstruction to reveal strategies used to represent truth claims in a text, for example, how: an author establishes his or her credibility; particular data are selected and interpreted (to the exclusion of other, equally valid data and interpretations); uncertainties are hidden; oppos­ ing meanings are suppressed or omitted; and unintended and suppressed viewpoints emerge in the margins of a text (such as footnotes, asides, metaphors, etc.). (For introductions to and examples of deconstruction, see Cal
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Ferguson 1 993; Flax 1 990; Martin 1 990b; Weedon 1 987.) Reading in these ways, between the lines of a text, silences become eloquent and the false certainties inherent in language (such as the clarities of a dichotomy) are exposed. Postmodernist cultural scholars use textual analysis to interrogate, disrupt, and overturn claims to truth or theoretical superiority (e.g. Gagliardi 1 99 1 ; leffcutt 1 995). Their goal is not to establish a better theory of culture (this would perpetuate the struggle for intellectual domi­ nance of the field, as described for example by Kuhn 1 970), but rather to challenge the foundations of modern cultural scholarship (Alvesson and Berg 1 992; Smircich and Cahis 1 987). For example: Not surprisingly, postmodern theorizing is ada­ mantly disdainful of meta-theories, labeling them 'narratives of transcendence' because each claims to be better than its predecessors - more abstract and yet also closer to 'the' empirical 'truth.' Lyotard, for example, views meta-theories as totalitarian attempts, by those who are or wish to become dominant, to provide all-encompassing world views that silence diversity of opinion. Post modern scholars argue that attempts to create meta-theories are misguided and futile; fragmentation and multi­ plicity will flourish, in spite of attempts to make particular meta-theories dominant. (Martin 1992: 1 93)

For this reason, postmodern analyses often take the form of critiques or parodies (e.g. Calas and Smircich 1 988; Willmott 1 993) carnivalesque writing that steadfastly maintains a marginalized position. Such writing attempts to 'overturn a disciplinary and prejudicial order through the articulation of ambiguity and contradiction from the margin' but does not seek 'to co­ ordinate this difference into a fresh hierarchy through the articulation of a superior vision of progress' (Jeffcutt forthcoming a: 1 8 - 1 9). Given the postmodern disdain for attempts to legitimize claims of theoretical supremacy, a postmodern history of cultural research would not be a linear tale of progress, with new insights learned and old errors abandoned. Postmodern­ ism, if taken seriously, makes the structure and form of a traditional handbook or review chapter an impossibility. Instead, postmodern­ ism, in accord with Kuhn's ( 1 970) views of paradigm revolutions, views the history of research on a topic as a struggle for intellectual dominance. Each new development, whether theoretical or methodological, is seen as an attempt to declare superiority over prior efforts. This handbook chapter has been structured around some of these ideas, using the metaphor of culture wars and a war game (king of the mountain) to describe developments in this field -

as struggles for intellectual dominance, rather than linear advancements in the progression toward greater knowledge. The various moves in the culture wars, outlined in the first sections of this chapter, are described as if these modernist culture scholars were saying 'My approach is deeper, more complex, or more inclusive than yours' (ethnography, a longitudinal approach, or the three-perspective framework); or 'My approach is more responsive to the needs of business than yours' (the integration frame­ work); or 'Look what you have been ignoring' (the fragmentation perspective). Such claims of superiority have in common the implication that each view is, somehow, closer to the truth about a culture. All are attempts to impose order and meaning. A postmodern critique would deconstruct these attempts to establish dominance in a hierarchical order. For example, such a critique would show how all these modern studies refrain from fully exploring the inherent and inescap­ able limitations of textual representation. Rather than perpetuating the king of the mountain game, where each new theory or meta-theory attempts to dominate other current contenders, post modernism apparently abandons claims of linear progress and superior insight. Postmo­ dernism is an attempt to rout all contenders from the field of battle and change the terms of engagement in the culture wars: no longer are we discussing ways to 'penetrate the front' of cultural members and get closer to some truth; now truth is impossible to represent.

A VICTORY FOR POSTMODERNISM OR MORE OF THE SAME?

Many academics have dismissed postmodernism on grounds that it is esoteric, reactionary, apolitical, too relativistic, or nihilistic (e.g. Okin 1 994; Reed 1 990). This reaction has been particularly strong among some empirical, relatively positivistic culture researchers, perhaps because postmodernism represents a deep chal­ lenge to basic tenets of the scientific method: rationality, order, truth, and progress. Modernist cultural scholars, rather than seeing only the threat that the burgeoning postmodern literature represents, could try to learn from and use some aspects of postmodern thinking (see, for exam­ ple, Clegg 1 990; Hassard and Parker 1 993; and Chapter 7 on postmodernism in this volume). For example, postmodernism offers a way of escaping the cycles of disillusionment that trouble relationships between cultural scholars and practitioners, whereby each attempt at theoretical innovation is oversimplified and

ORGANIZA TIONAL CUL TURE WAR GAMES transformed into yet another managerial pana­ cea - an easy answer to managers' endless desire to use 'quick fix' remedies to attain greater productivity or profitability. Such easy answers are doomed, ultimately, to fall short of their advance press and be labeled a failure, only to start the cycle again (e.g. Calils and Smircich 1 990). Indeed, some have said that organiza­ tional culture represents just such a failed managerial fad. Could deconstruction make this cycle visible and be a tool to prevent its recurrence? In addition, cultural researchers have invested a considerable amount of time and effort trying to combat the unitary assumptions of the integration perspective (i.e. Gregory 1 983; Lucas 1 987; Martin and Siehl 1 983; Turner 1 986; Van Maanen and Kunda 1 989; Young 1 989). Every careful ethnography or quantitative study that tries to challenge integrationist assumptions is countered quickly by yet another assertion that any culture can be a haven of homogeneity and harmony - a place where management's values are shared by all, and an employee's major task is simply to find a culture where he or she will 'fit in'. Could this cycle be short-circuited by postmodernism, so that researchers could devote their time and energy to deeper and more important cultural questions? A postmodern approach could most certainly offer insight into the representational strategies that make cultural accounts more like fiction than, supposedly, like science (e.g. Callis 1 987; Jermier 1 992; Van Maanen 1 988). Our cultural texts could become more self-reflexive and we could seek, as anthropologists are now doing, new, polyphonic ways of writing about culture that allow multiple voices to be heard and de­ constructed, without transforming the researcher into a transcriber who has given informants total control of and responsibility for the text (Clifford and Marcus 1 986). As Alvesson and Berg ( 1 992) observe, such 'benefits' would not represent a major change in modern cultural research strategies and they would not fully acknowledge the depth of the challenge to the scientific method that would follow from a full acceptance of postmodern ideas. Common criticisms of postmodernism (e.g. nihilistic, relativist, apoliticaL esoteric, etc.) could be redefined as problems in postmodern­ ism that cultural scholars might be able to help solve. Not only might this reorientation repre­ sent a contribution to problems that many postmodernists have been struggling with; it might also open the minds of modern cultural and more broadly organizational - scholars to the value of postmodern insights. F or example, some scholars are seeking clear ways of explaining postmodern ideas to a

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broader range of organizational researchers (at the risk of being accused of oversimplification and other intellectual crimes and misdemeanors) (e.g. Boje and Dennehy 1 993; Clegg 1 990; Cooper and Burrell 1 988; Hassard and Parker 1 993). Some are trying to align postmodern insights with activist social change agendas, focusing on small wins and the likelihood of ambiguous and random outcomes as more attainable, less romanticized views of what kinds of organizational change are possible in contemporary circumstances (e.g. Arac 1 986; Bergquist 1 993; Letiche 1 99 1 ; Simons and Billig 1 994). Still others (e.g. Ferguson 1 993; Flax 1 990; Okin 1 994) are struggling with ways to reconcile the indeterminism of postmodernism with ideological certainties (for example, from moral philosophy and feminism) in order to avoid problems of ethical relativism. The insights from all these lines of inquiry could enrich cultural studies in helpful ways.

SOME LESSONS OF WAR

One striking aspect of the culture literature, at this point in its development, is that none of the cultural approaches outlined in this chapter have gone very far in helping improve the lives of people who work in organizations. Integration studies have perhaps gone the farthest, although this research seems aimed primarily at aiding managers without acknowledging conflicts of interest with other constituencies, such as lower­ level employees. Some differentiation research, several ethnographies, and studies in the critical theory tradition have effectively chronicled the views and material conditions of work of non­ management employees, but these studies say Jess about how to fix the problems they describe so eloquently. The fragmentation perspective and symbolic approaches also offer description and analysis, but relatively few tools for action. Postmodern organizational scholars have not, so far, taken as their mission helping employees take action, although such work is starting to emerge (e.g. Letiche 1 99 1 ). Of course, not all cultural researchers have, as part of their agendas, the goal of helping others to improve their working lives. For those that do, we can draw on this analysis of the culture wars to see what might be learned and applied. If managers, employee representatives, and other stakeholders in and around organizations paid attention to the culture literature and studied the debates as we have represented them here, they might at first blush throw up their hands and dismiss culture as a fad or as unimportant. Alternatively, they might fixate on

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one or the other theoretical viewpoint, borrow­ ing only a subset of the available ideas about culture. We would predict, in the latter case, that most managers would want to create and control a unified and strong culture that would maximize productivity and performance, trying to manage cultural change in a controlled and predictable manner. If unreflective, they would draw primarily from the integration perspective, given its prevalence in publications written for executives and MBAs. Rather than relying on the integration literature, some employees might find differentiation research, with its emphasis on intergroup conflict, to be more attuned to their goals (for example, achieving job security, fair wages, equity, resistance to change). They might also be interested in differentiation ideas about cultural control, particularly when there is a perceived need for a unified resistance (e.g. to a management initiative) or a need to understand what management is thinking as it pushes its agenda. Other stakeholders, such as customers, legislators, shareholders, and environmentalists, may view an organizational arena as being fragmented and conflict-ridden, rather than highly integrated. Alternatively, those 'outsiders' with a skeptical eye may view cultures as purely symbolic representations used by managers and employees to influence outcomes in self-serving ways. This last view may be closer to a post­ modern perspective on culture than any of the others. The aspirations of these various stakeholders differ, as group members struggle to accomplish outcomes they believe serve their interests. This is neither good nor bad. If we take the position that understanding culture is important, and that having such understandings available to all stakeholders is a basis for more informed and just efforts to make organizations more profit­ able and humane, then sharing the intellectual 'spoils' of the culture wars with everyone may be a useful undertaking. We think that trying to make sense of the ideas, insights, prescriptions, and the like that are currently reported in the various literatures might improve the chances of reflective, informed, and creative approaches to working and living with culture. Some examples are as follows: First, practitioners tend to oversimplify the meaning of organizational culture as they borrow, adapt, or are fed the latest theory of organizational culture. This produces a high probability of a failed adaptation of culture to organizational issues, especially those related to improving productivity and performance. This, in turn, leads to disillusionment and dismissal of the cultural approach as a fad. Analysis of common oversimplifications of cultural theories and representative failed attempts at cultural

change (e.g. Bartunek and Moch 1 99 1 ) can be particularly useful in this regard. Second, no one theory or collection of theories about culture can conclusively claim superiority over others. One is better off adopting a multi­ perspective framework that assumes that, in any organizational setting, there will be some values, interpretations, and practices that generate organization-wide consensus, some that cause conflict, and some that are not clear. At any point in time, a subset of these will be easily visible (a 'home' perspective of a researcher or an employee), while other perspectives will be harder to see. To the extent that it is possible to work with culture to attain collectively desired ends, actions and processes will have to take into account these different, co-existing cultural possibilities. Accepting this proposition means that culture 'users' will have to understand and accept that there is no 'happy acculturated forever after' ending to change attempts. In all likelihood, there is no 'forever after' in the script. At best, there may be some combination of agreement, dispute, and confusion that can be stitched together by human agency, as managers and others move the action along, accomplish some objective, and then regroup around sub­ sequent problems, issues, and opportunities. Third, in attempting to manage change, it may be useful to try to accomplish collective objectives in a way that incorporates the post­ modernist treatment of 'reality' as a series of fictions and illusions. In particular, if one under­ stands that the culture theorist (or consultant) who promotes a perspective on organizational culture is providing a fictional account of the phenomenon (and plays a part in the story as well), then one is empowered to treat the 'story' with caution - preferably to rewrite, or better yet co-write, the script for the setting he or she is in. The application of theories of culture to organizational issues then becomes a joint venture between the theorist and those who work with the story or stories. This approach is likely to incorporate more improvisation and reflexivity than is usually the case when cultural theories are applied to managing organizational issues. Fourth, at the same time, some stories about culture are more compelling than others and some are more influential than others (particul­ larly if they are rooted in the values of those with power). Consequently, a useful additional source of value to a cultural theory . - as story/rep­ resentation - can be its deconstruction. While the tools of deconstruction may be outside the grasp of the typical organizational practitioner, they need not necessarily remain so. This may be a challenge that postmodernists can take on in the interests of helping improve the human

ORGANIZA TIONAL CULTURE WAR GAMES condition i n the work place (see Boje and Dennehy 1 993; Clegg 1 990). Application of deconstructive techniques might be used to help reconstruct a theory, strategy, action plan, or story in ways that would be more useful to a wider array of interested stakeholders. Fifth, if truth is a matter of credibility rather than an objective condition (e.g. Alvesson and Berg 1 992: 223), then management of change by practitioners (not necessarily only managers) becomes a matter of developing credible scripts and framing issues to bridge different under­ standings, rather than imposing or inserting a new set of values in a situation. There is likely to be much more emphasis on dialogue, process, co-creation, and finding ways to build credibility for such activities and outcomes than is typically prescribed by most cultural theories. Sixth, wars don't typically end: they are settled for a time and then they flare up in new forms, perhaps with new armies, new 'would-be kings'. Other wars start up in different situations. We expect this to continue in the culture arena. What this might mean for change agents is a willingness to remain alert to the existence and nature of the wars, to learn from the 'dispatches' from the front lines, and to factor these messages into their plans and strategies for change. One cannot assume a 'settled once and for all' script, any more than a 'forever after' one. Finally, the intentions and actions of members of groups sometimes identified as having strong cultures (e.g. 'the managers', 'the workers') might be better understood, and their cultural roles in organizations more effectively identified, if we treated them as less homogeneous, more multi-dimensional in their intentions, and more tentative and experimental in their actions. If, as we suspect, the organizations that people nego­ tiate have, simultaneously, elements of inte­ gration, conflict, power, uncertainty, and 'truth construction', then there is exciting and challen­ ging work to be done. Cultural researchers need to figure out what this means for their defini­ tions, theories, investigations, and practices.

AND So IT GOES

We have no illusions about the creation of a unifying theory. If players in the cultural war games, now struggling for a place at the top of the sand mountain, have the courage and curiosity to talk with the 'enemies' and to suspend disbelief about who and what is 'right', we think that the resulting rapprochement might forge some creative new alliances to take the field of organizational culture into some fruitful areas of inquiry.

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We were originally drawn to culture as an emancipating way of approaching organiza­ tional phenomena, and as a metaphor for revitalizing organizational theory. Culture seemed to allow us to move away from the con­ stricting aspects - the 'boxes' - of our theories, methods, and usual ways of doing things at a time when this change seemed to be needed, helpful, empowering, and energizing. We suspect many others felt the same way. It was astonish­ ing to us, however, to see how quickly this apparently open conceptual terrain became cluttered - in part, by ourselves - with maps, boxes, categorizations and so forth. Many of these quickly became reified and served as ammunition in the emerging cultural wars. ('In search of excellence' rapidly became 'the ingredients of excellence'. Other formulations suffered similar fates.) During these war years, many of the most playful, inquiring, irreverent and inventing voices left the cultural field or played less frequently on it. Culture became a part of the hegemony within organizational theory and practice, even turning up on the tables of contents of handbooks. This Quixotic victory had the paradoxical effect of 'deadening' culture's effect on open inquiry, a point made most eloquently by Smircich and Calas as long ago as 1 987. Perhaps this is the fate of all innovative endeavours. They either die out or, if success strikes, they become coopted and routinized so they can be used in organizations (Daft and Bradshaw 1 980; Frost and Egri 1 99 1 ). Such developments are not all negative since we must have ways to preserve creative and useful ideas and practices. Our point is that these preserved insights become 'truth ammunition' in the struggle for dominance. In contrast, we need some mechanisms to foster 'free-range' thinking that has the capacity to learn from and about the wars, but also can be used to negotiate peace depicting alternative worlds where wars are not the only or the preferred way to study culture. We believe that efforts are needed to balance or even unbalance the culture wars mentality, counteracting the tendency for theories and methods to become constraining boxes that impede 'free-range' inquiry. Several things have to happen, in our opinion, if we are to have such alternatives to war. First, we need to identify and nurture exemplars of 'unboxed' thinking who can and do write about organizational life without succumbing to the war games mentality. We suspect that such individuals come to their subject with the same degree of passion for understanding that characterizes the best of the warriors in the game. Some of our 'unboxed' exemplars develop

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their ideas in ways that inform, without creating reifiable categories. Their work moves others to develop their own insights without seeming to engender imitation or a need for strict adherence to any particular formulation of 'truth'. Such works often are characterized by the ambiguity of their concepts, forcing readers and the authors themselves back on their assumptions; what emerges is playful, provocative, and, at best, upending. For us, such 'unboxed' exemplars include James March, Barry Turner, and Karl Weick. Other exemplary authors seem to join the war games but not take sides. Somehow they remain 'unhooked' from the struggle for dominance, delivering their broadsides without aiming to throw their support behind any of the factions. They speak with eloquence and fire, from the margins, serving to draw the battle lines outward, creating an opportunity for a reex­ amination of the premise for the war in the first place. We suspect that these exemplars may play in other games, but they do not seem interested in becoming monarchs. From our point of view, Gideon Kunda, Linda Smircich, Marta Cahis, Walter Nord, Steve Linstead, Antonio Strati, Sylvia Gherardi, Robert Grafton-Small, and John Van Maanen are exemplars of this manner of engagement - although they and others may not see them this way. We also need champions for peace who will articulate and set the stage for alternatives to the dominance game. The innovation literature is replete with evidence of the importance of individuals willing and able to champion new ideas, protect the innovators, and find ways to ensure that new ideas get implemented (Chakra­ barti 1 974; Frost and Egri 1 99 1 ; Howell and Higgins 1 990). This is a role open to all, but perhaps it will be most tempting to those who are new to the game, not yet having invested them­ selves in winning and losing battles, and as yet less tainted by the field's usual ways of doing scholarly business. Other champions of peace may be insiders looking out - battle-hardened veterans who have come, the hard way, to see the futility of war. Such champions of peace, working on the fringes of the battlefield, may share some of the characteristics of the tempered radical (Meyerson and Scully 1 995): that is, they may have values different from those in the mainstream of the organizational scene, but may wish to contribute to the well-being of the whole while finding a way to stay true to their personal vision and values. Perhaps, increasingly, more of us will become champions of peace. We also believe there is a need for appreciative approaches to cultural work that feature critique that is fair and tough minded, rather than biased and destructive (e.g. Cooperrider 1 986; Gergen

1 990; Harman 1 990; Mirvis 1 990; Vickers 1 968). Such critique would seek to inform, to build and improve, even to help dismantle when this seems appropriate. Such critique would seek to advance a field, rather than a particular point of view, focusing on ideas and issues rather than individuals. The goal would be to preserve rather than attack the dignity of individual researchers, so time, effort, and emotion would not have to be spent repairing and defending damaged egos and positions. The challenge is to create institutionalized practices which would, system­ atically and continuously, develop and sustain such an appreciative orientation to discourse; the keys lie in the arenas of manuscript review, doctoral training, conference settings, and the like. Appreciative critique is a tough skill to learn and tougher still to teach and model, as evidenced, for example, in our struggle to chronicle the culture wars while retaining an appreciative tone and some fidelity to our own convictions. This review is, partially, a plea for more imaginative and courageous attempts to turn the culture field away from warlike endeavors. We do not believe that wars will vanish from the intellectual landscape and we know that not all changes flowing from wars are negative. They sometimes clear the air and fresh ideas emerge. We do think, however, that competition for dominance is costly in terms of lost ideas and silenced or disillusioned people. The 'king of the mountain' approach - whether the conflict is overt or advocates of opposing views ignore each other - is not the only way to structure cultural inquiry and it may not be the best. Undoubtedly, some readers will say: There's a war (game) to be played; let's get on with it!' Others will say: '1 choose not to play and will pursue my own path.' We say: 'Let's find a way or ways to focus as much energy as we can to keep the study of culture free of destructive conflict, so we can collectively imbue it with characteristics that will invite us all to do our best work, to share that work with excitement and passion, and to keep the search for understanding and application rich and open.'

NOTES We wish to express our thanks to Cynthia Hardy for her thoughtful, insight-giving advice and guidance. Her patience with us was limitless. Our thanks go too to our reviewers who provided feedback that helped us immeasurably. We were the beneficiaries of the kind of constructive, appreciative critique from all three colleagues that we advocate in this chapter as the norm for discourse in a war-free environment. And we are

ORGA NIZA TIONAL CULTURE WAR GA MES also grateful for the assistance of Karen Harlos and Vivien Clark. I We do not know the origins of this term, but it was first drawn to our attention as the title of the annual meeting theme of the Standing Conference on Organizational Symbolism, held in Montreal, Canada, in 1 986. 2 Although the scope of this review does not include studies of national cultures performed by organiza­ tional scholars, it is worth noting that these studies tend to use an integration framework to describe national cultures in unitary terms. For example, Lincoln and Kallberg ( 1 985) implicitly adopt an integration perspective for the study of international cultures, describing US and 1apanese cultures as internally homogeneous, characterized by consistency, consensus, and clarity. 3 In this section particularly, we are grateful for the suggestions of an anonymous reviewer, although errors and omissions remain our own responsibility. 4 This felicitous phrase was, we believe, coined by Robert Sutton.

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radicalism and the politics of ambivalence and change', Organi::ational Science, 6: 585-600. Mills, A. ( 1992) 'Organization, gender, and culture', in A. Mills and P. Tancred (eds), Gendering Organi::a­ tional Analysis. Newbury Park, CA: Sage. pp. 93I l l. Mirvis, P. ( 1 990) 'Merging of heart and mind in crisis management', in S. Srivastava, D. Cooperrider and Associates (eds), Appreciative Management and Leadership. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. pp. 55-90 Moi, T. ( 1 985) Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory. New York: Methuen. Morgan, G. ( l 983a) 'More on metaphor: why we cannot control tropes in administrative science', Administrative Science Quarterly, 28: 60 1 -7. Morgan, G. (ed.) ( l 983b) Beyond Method: Strategies for Social Research. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage. Mumby, D. ( 1 988) Communication and Polt'er in Organizations: Discourse, Ideology and Dominatioll. Norwood, NJ: Ablex. Okin, S. ( 1994) 'Gender and relativism'. Unpublished manuscript, Stanford University. O'Reilly, C, Chatman, J. and Caldwell, D. ( 1 99 1 ) 'People and organizational culture: a Q-sort approach to assessing person-organization fit', A cademy of Management Journal, 34: 487-5 1 6. Ott, J. ( 1 989) The Organizational Culture Perspective. Pacific Grove, CA: Brooks & Cole. Ouchi, W. ( 1 98 1 ) Theory Z: How American Business Can Meet the Japanese Challenge. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley. Ouchi, W. and Jaeger, A. ( 1978) 'Type Z organization: stability in the midst of mobility', Academy of Management RevielV, 3: 305 - 1 4. Ouchi, W. and Johnson, J. ( 1 978) 'Types of organiza­ tional control and their re la t i on shi p to emotional well-being', Administrative Science Quarterly, 23: 293-3 1 7. Ouchi, W. and Wilkins, A. ( 1 985) 'Organizational culture', Annual RevielV of Sociology, I I : 457-83. Pascale, R. and Athos, A. ( 1 98 1 ) The Art of Japanese Management: Applications for American Executives. New York: Simon and Schuster. Pennings, J. and Gresov, C ( 1 986) 'Technoeconomic and structural correlates of organizational culture: an integrative framework', Organization Studies, 7: 3 1 7-34. Perrow, C ( 1 979) Complex Organizations: A Critical Essay. Glenview, IL: Scott, Foresman & Co. Peters, T. and Waterman, R. ( 1 982) In Search of Excellence: Lessons from America's Best-Run Companies. New York: Harper & Row. Pettigrew, A. ( 1 979) 'On studying organizational cultures', A dministrative Science Quarterly, 24: 570-8 1 . Pettigrew, A . ( l 985a) 'Examining change in the long­ term context of culture and politics', in J. Pennings and Associates (eds), Organizational Strategy and Change. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. pp. 269- 3 1 8 .

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15 Some Dare Call It Power C Y N T H I A HARDY AN D STEWART R . CLEGG

Historically, the precursors of modern 'organiza­ tion' consisted of the medieval guild structure - a simple tripartite structure ( Offe 1 976). One entered the organization at the base as an appren­ tice. Having served one's time as an apprentice. during which the rudiments of the knowledge base appropriate to the guild were learned and practised, one became a journeyman. A journey­ man plied his trade peripatetically. honing his skill and knowledge with new masters as he travelled, and, if fortunate, slowly acquiring some capital. ' With capital and the right connections, established during the apprentice­ ship and the journey, journeymen might one day become masters in their own right. The master oversaw everything: if not masters of the universe, they would at least profess monopoly mastery over a licensed sphere of skills in a particular locale, and thus enjoy a parochial mastery. Of course, conditions would vary from workshop to workshop: some masters would be excellent guides to the apprentice, passing on skill, knowledge and learning generally. Others might be petty tyrants, incapable of creating learning other than through fear. Within the general form, different personalities. to use a contemporary concept, would infuse the relation­ ship with a different ethos. Guild structures were task-continuous status structures, in which obedience to a wide range of technical rules was required from all individuals (Offe 1 976). Superordinates differed from sub­ ordinates 'merely in terms of greater mastery of the rules and greater ability. knowledge and experience in production' ( 1 976: 25). Here. power clearly derived from ownership and control of the means of production. supported by the power of surveillance. Important too was knowledge, with power also deriving from

knowledge of the means of production - from 'mastery'. Modern organizations did not so much evolve from guild structures as pass them by. They grew not out of the absolutist soil of mercantile feudalism, with its monopolies in trade and industry, so much as in its interstices, where, frequently, the displaced and dispos­ sessed carved out artisanal and industrial niches for themselves (Hall 1 986). As organizations grew larger. skills became increasingly fragmen­ ted and specialized, and positions became more functionally differentiated. Strategies were developed to steer a common path for the organization by centralizing power and envel­ oping the potentially troublesome and plural sources of identity that had arisen with the division of labour. Modern organizations were thus designed to function as if they were a unitary organism. It is because they are composed of a multitude of unique components that this design is promoted against, or in spite of. their non-unitary form. These are 'task-discontinuous status struc­ tures' (Offe 1 976). Unlike the guilds. the status structure and the functional structure are no longer mapped precisely on to each other in a universal sphere of organization knowledge. Tasks are fragmented. skills are diverse, and knowledge is differentially codified, held and valued. Typically. according to labour process theorists (e.g. Braverman 1 974), knowledge is divided between that which is more valued, which is generally more esoteric, abstract and related to mental rather than manual labour, and that which is less valued, more mundane and related to manual labour. Implicit in these distinctions is the notion of contemporary organization. Some jobs have been designated

SOME DARE CALL IT PO WER as supervisory, while other posts exist to execute orders derived from superordinates. Hence power is structured into organization design. In such a design, the issue of 'organization obedience' is central to the discussion of power (e.g. Mintzberg 1983; Hamilton and Biggart 1 985; also see Etzioni 1 96 1 ; Weber 1 978; Assad 1 987; Kieser 1 987). Power has typically been seen as the ability to get others to do what you want them to, if necessary against their will (Weber 1 978), or to get them to do something they otherwise would not (Dahl 1 957). This seemingly simple definition, which presents the negative rather than the positive aspects of power, has been challenged, amended, critiqued, extended, and rebuffed over the years but, nonetheless, remains the starting point for a remarkably diverse body of literature. But that is where the synergy and convergence end. There are, in fact, a multitude of different voices that speak to power. The result has been a variety of contradictory conceptualizations. The confusion has been exacerbated because the two loudest voices to emerge - the functionalist and the critical (to use simple categorizations) rarely communicate with each other. The former has adopted a managerialist orientation whose underlying assumptions are rarely articulated, much less critiqued. The result has been an apparently pragmatic concept, easy to use but also easy to abuse. The latter has confronted issues of domination and exploitation head on but appears increasingly to be less relevant to those seeking to achieve collective action. The aim of this chapter is to explore these different voices increasingly heard in the literature on power and to forge a reconceptua­ lization of power as the medium necessary for responsible, collective action. The first section explores the historical development of these two voices. It discusses the broader heritage of Marx and Weber concerning power, followed by the early management work on power. The second section shows how subsequent developments built on the respective approaches, in many respects drawing them further apart. An analysis of more recent work shows how the different voices have continued to grow apart.

THE FOUNDING VOICES

This section examines some of the key work that provided the foundations for the current work on power and politics in organizations. Broadly speaking. the impetus came from two, quite different directions. The older tradition stems from the work of Marx and Weber. Obviously, with such a parentage, this body of work has

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focused on the existence of conflicting interests and has examined power as domination. As a result, it has addressed how power becomes embedded in organizational structures in a way that serves certain, but not all, interest groups. The second tradition developed more centrally within the field of organization studies itself. I n contrast t o the work o n power and interests, this body of work has taken for granted the way in which power is distributed in formal organiza­ tional structure and, instead, examined how groups acquire and wield power not granted to them under official arrangements.

Power and Interests in Organizations

One approach to the way in which power is structured into organization design has derived from work on class structures (see Clegg and Dunkerley 1 980: 463-82 for a discussion of the key literature). In as much as conceptions of interests depict the arena of organizational life in terms of the leitmotif of 'class' and its social relations, they will be attuned to the general conditions of economic domination and sub­ ordination in organizations, as theorists of the left from Marx onwards have defined them (see, for instance, Carchedi 1 987: 1 00 for an identi­ fication of these conditions). Marx ( 1 976) argued that class interests are structurally predetermined, irrespective of other bases of identity. They follow from the relations concerning the ownership and control of the means of production. While relations concerning production, property, ownership and control have inscribed the key social relations of capitalist modernity (Clegg and Dunkerley 1 980; Clegg et al. 1 986), few scholars accept this deterministic view today. 2 The first writer to render Marx's view more complex was Weber, who considered relations in production as well as relations of production. Weber acknowledged that power was derived from owning and controlling the means of production, but he argued that it was not reducible exclusively to the dichotomous cate­ gories of ownership and non-ownership of the means of production, as proposed by Marx. From Weber's perspective, power also derived from the knowledge of operations as much as from ownership. Organizations could be differ­ entiated in terms of people's ability to control the methods of production, as influenced by technical relations of production, and embedded in diverse occupational identities from which grew the subjective life-world of the organiza­ tion. In this way, Weber emphasized the forms of identification and representation of which organizational members actually made use,

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rather than simply assumed that their view of the world was merely a 'false' consciousness. Weber's insights indicated that all organiza­ tional members had some creativity, discretion and agency to use power (although some more than others). In the view of Marx and much subsequent theory, there is little room for discretion and its opportunities for strategic agency. Economic conditions regulate the con­ text in which labour is sold and capital raised and, at the outset, two classes are defined: those who possess capital and those who do not. The latter own only their own creative, differentially trained and disciplined capacities that they are obliged to sell on the labour market. But. once sold to bureaucratic organizations (Clegg 1 990), labour has the opportunity to use those capacities creatively in 'certain social relation­ ships or carry out forms of social action within the order governing the organization' (Weber 1 978: 2 1 7). So, by factoring in the differential possibilities for creativity, it becomes clear that organizational members have some control over their disposition to exercise power, both to challenge and to reproduce the formal organiza­ tion structure in which differential powers are vested, legitimated and reproduced. Thus organizational 'structures of dominancy' do not depend solely on economic power for their foundation and maintenance ( 1 978: 942). In this way, labour power represents a capacity embodied in a person who retains discretion over the application of that capacity. From the employer's point of view, the employee represents a capacity to labour which must be realized: these are the conditions of effective management. Standing in the way of realization is the embodiment of potential power in the capacities of the people hired, who may be more or less willing to work as subjects ruled by managerial discretion and control. Always, because of embodiment, the people hired as labour will retain ultimate discretion over themselves, what they do, and how they do it. Consequently, a potential source of resistance resides in this inescapable and irreducible embodiment of labour power. The gap between the capacity to labour and its effective realization implies power and the organization of control. The depiction of this gap is the mainstay of some Marxian traditions of analysis, particularly of alienation (Schacht 1 97 1 ; Geyer and Schweitzer 1 98 1 ; Mezaros 1 970; Gamble and Walton 1 972). Management is forever seeking new strategies and tactics through which to deflect discretion. The most effective and economical are thought to be those that substitute self-discipline for the discipline of an external manager. Less effective but historically more prolific, however, have been the attempts of

organizations to close the discretionary gap through the use of rule systems, the mainstay of Weberian analyses of organizations as bureau­ cracies. Such rule systems seek to regulate meaning to control relations in organizations through the structure of formal organization design. Thus, a hierarchy is prescribed within which legitimate power is circumscribed. In summary, this founding research focused on the way in which power derived from owning and controlling the means of production, a power that was reinforced by organizational rules and structures. Weber's work provided for more room for strategic manoeuvre than Marx­ ian views. As a result, workers had options and possibilities to challenge the power that con­ trolled them. However, as we shall see, these options proved to be far from easy to exercise due to more sophisticated strategies on the part of dominant groups.

Power and Hierarchy in Organizations

As the section above demonstrates, power in organizations necessarily concerns the hierarch­ ical structure of offices and their relation to each other. Particularly (but not exclusively) the field of management has tended to label such power as 'legitimate' power. 3 One consequence of the widespread, if implicit, acceptance of the hier­ archical nature of power has been that social scientists have rarely felt it necessary to explain why it is that power should be hierarchical. In other words, in this stream of research, the power embedded in the hierarchy has been viewed as 'normal' and 'inevitable' following from the formal design of the organization. As such, it has been largely excluded from analyses which have, instead, focused on 'illegitimate' power, i.e. power exercised outside formal hierarchical structures and the channels that they sanction. One of the earliest management studies of such power was that of Thompson ( 1 956), who researched two USAF bomber wings. The work of the USAF personnel was characterized by highly developed technical requirements in the operational sphere, for both aircrew and ground crew. While the aircrew possessed greater formal authority than the ground crew, the latter were in a highly central position within the workflow of the USAF base relative to the more autonomo�s aircrew. The aircrew depended upon the ground crew for their survival and safety, which conferred a degree of power on the latter not derived from the formal design of the base relations. Thompson attributed the power of the ground crew to their technical competency vis-a­ vis the flight security of the planes and the

SOME DARE CALL IT PO WER strategic position it accorded them because of the centrality of concerns for the aircrew's safety. Other writers confirmed Thompson's ( 1 956) view that it was the technical design of tasks and their interdependencies that best explained the operational distribution of power, rather than the formal prescriptions of the organization design. Dubin ( 1 957: 62), for example, noted how some tasks will be more essential to the functional interdependence of a system than will others, and the way in which some of these may be the exclusive function of a specific party. Mechanic ( 1 962) built on this argument, extend­ ing it to all organizations, saying that such technical knowledge generally might be a base for organization power. In this way, researchers began to differentiate between formally pre­ scribed power and 'actual' power, which was also regarded as illegitimate. research workers have seldom regarded actual power . . . [but] have stressed the rational aspects of organization to the neglect of unauthorized or illegitimate power. (Thompson 1 956: 290)

Other researchers were to echo this distinction as they followed in Thompson's footsteps. Bennis et al. ( 1 958: 1 44) made a distinction between 'formal' and 'informal' organization. In the formal organization there resides 'authority', a potential to influence based on position; while in the informal organization there exists power, 'the actual ability of influence based on a number of factors including, of course, organizational position'. Another important study was carried out by Crozier ( 1 964), which focused on maintenance workers in a French state-owned tobacco monopoly. Their job was to fix machine break­ downs referred to them by production workers. The production workers, at the technical core of the organization, were highly central to the workflow-centred bureaucracy that character­ ized the organization. The maintenance workers were marginal, at least in the formal representa­ tion of the organization design. In practice, however, the story was very different. The production workers were paid on a piece­ rate system in a bureaucracy designed on scientific management principles. Most workers were effectively 'deskilled'. The bureaucracy was a highly formal, highly prescribed organization: there was very little that was not planned and regulated, except for the propensity of the machines to break down, and thus diminish the bonus that the production workers could earn. Hence, to maintain their earnings the production workers needed the machines to function, which made them extraordinarily dependent on the maintenance workers. Without their expertise, breakdowns could not be rectified or bonus rates

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protected. Consequently, the maintenance work­ ers had a high degree of power over the other workers in the bureaucracy because they con­ trolled the remaining source of uncertainty. Management and the production workers were aware of this and had attempted to remedy the situation through preventive main­ tenance. But manuals disappeared and sabotage sometimes occurred. The maintenance workers were indefatigable in defence of their relative autonomy, privilege and power. Through a skilled capacity, the result of their technical knowledge, they could render the uncertain certain. The price of restoring normalcy was a degree of autonomy and relative power, enjoyed and defended by the maintenance workers, well in excess of that formally designed for them. Crozier's ( 1 964) study was a landmark. He had taken an under-explicated concept - power - and had attached it to the central concept of the emergent theory of the firm - uncertainty. A central feature of organizations as conceptua­ lized in the 'behavioural theory of the firm' (Cyert and March 1 963) was that they attempted to behave as if they were systems. Yet, they did so in an uncertain environment. The ability to control that uncertainty thus represented a potential source of power. After Crozier ( 1 964) the field developed rapidly. A theory emerged, called the 'strategic contingencies theory of intra-organizational power' (Hickson et al. 1 97 1 ), which built on these ideas. At the core was the idea that power was related to uncertainty, or at least to its control. More formal survey methods were used, instead of grounded research, in which a series of hypothetical scenarios were presented for eva­ luation by departmental managers. In this way, those functionally specific personnel were identi­ fied who used esoteric technical knowledge to control uncertainty and thus increase their power relative to the formally designed hier­ archy. The change in methodology helped produce a formal functionalist model. The organization was conceptualized as comprising four func­ tional sub-systems or sub-units. The sub-units were interdependent, but some were more or less dependent, and produced more or less uncer­ tainty for others. What connected them in the model was the major task element of the organization, which was conceptualized as 'coping with uncertainty'. The theory ascribed the balance of power between the sub-units to imbalances in how these interdependent sub­ units coped with this uncertainty. Thus the system of sub-units was opened up to environ­ mental inputs, which were the initial source of uncertainty. Sub-units were characterized as more or less specialized and differentiated by

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the functional division of labour, and were related by an essential need to reduce uncertainty and achieve organizational goals: 'to use differential power to function within the system rather than to destroy it' ( 1 97 1 : 2 1 7) . According t o this model, power i s defined in terms of 'strategic contingency'. Strategically contingent sub-units are the most powerful, because they are the least dependent on other sub-units and can cope with the greatest systemic uncertainty, given that the sub-unit is central to the organization system and not easily substitu­ table. The theory assumes that the sub-units are unitary and cohesive in nature whereas, in fact, they are more likely to be hierarchical, with a more or less problematic culture of consent and dissent. To be unitary, some internal mechanisms of power must exist to allow such a representa­ tion to flourish, silence conflicting voices, and over-rule different conceptions of interests, attachments, strategies and meanings. The theory assumes that management definitions prevail but research suggests this is not always the case (Collinson 1 994). Nor can we assume that management itself will necessarily be a unitary or cohesive category. For it to speak with one voice usually means that other voices have been marginalized or silenced. In other words, the strategic contingencies theory provides very little about these aspects of power because it does not challenge existing patterns of legitimacy. Similar to the strategic contingencies view of power, in terms of theoretical approach, is the resource dependency view. It derives from the social psychological literature that Emerson ( 1 962) developed and which was implicit in Mechanic's ( 1 962) study of the power of lower­ level participants. Examples include French and Raven ( 1 968), Pettigrew ( 1 973), Pfeffer and Salancik ( 1 974) and Salancik and Pfeffer ( 1 974). Information (Pettigrew 1 973), uncertainty (Cro­ zier 1 964), expertise, credibility, stature and prestige (Pettigrew 1 973), access to and contacts with higher echelon members and the control of money, rewards and sanctions (French and Raven 1 968; Benfari et al. 1 986) have all been identified as bases of power. All resource lists are infinite, however, since different phenomena become resources in different contexts. Without a total theory of contexts, which is impossible, one can never achieve closure on what the bases of power are. They might be anything, under the appropriate circumstances. Possessing scarce resources is not enough in itself, however, to confer power. Actors have to be aware of their contextual pertinence and control and use them accordingly (Pettigrew 1 973). This process of mobilizing power is known as politics (Pettigrew 1 973; Hickson et al. 1 986), a term whose negative connotations

have helped to reinforce the mainstream view that power used outside formal authoritative arrangements was illegitimate and dysfunctional. It was the dichotomous nature of power and authority that created the theoretical space for the contingency and dependency approaches. The concept of power was thus reserved primarily for exercises of discretion by organiza­ tion members which were not sanctioned by their position in the formal structure. Such exercises are premised on an illegitimate or informal use of resources; while the legitimate system of authority, on the other hand, is taken for granted and rendered non-problematic.

Two Voices Compared

The comparison of this early work on power reveals two diverging streams of research. The former, developed from and sustained by the work of Marx and Weber, adopted a critical look at the processes whereby power was legitimated in the form of organizational structures. For these researchers, power was domination, and actions taken to challenge it constituted resis­ tance to domination (see Barbalet 1 987). The mainstream management work saw power quite differently: existing organizational arrangements were structures not of domination but of formal, legitimate, functional authority. Power was, effectively, resistance but of an illegitimate, dysfunctional kind. In other words, in studying 'power', the founding voices speak to different phenomena, and from quite different value positions. The MarxistlWeberian tradition equa­ ted power with the structures by which certain interests were dominated; while the management theorists defined power as those actions that fell outside the legitimated structures, and which threatened organizational goals.

V ARIA nONS ON Two THEMES

Subsequent work was designed to enhance and extend these foundational ideas. In so doing, it served to widen the gulf that had already grown between the two voices that had appeared. These voices were directed principally at their own constituencies, not at bridging the gulf through dialogue across the divide.

Strategies of Domination: Manufacturing Consent

The various constituent parts of the critical litera­ ture began to probe the means of domination in

SOME DARE CALL IT PO WER more detail. The heritage left by Weber provided a theoretical basis for reflecting on resistance by subordinate groups. But, why was there so little resistance and why did these groups so often consent to their own subj ugation? Equally puzzling was the prevalence of passivity, which was so much more marked than revolutionary fervour. Marx had predicted that the individual acts of resistance to their exploitation would meld into a revolutionary challenge to existing power structures by the proletariat who peopled the base of most large, complex organizations. Yet, clearly, such dreams of a proletarian class con­ sciousness had failed to materialize. One writer who addressed this issue, through a somewhat circuitous route, was Steven Lukes ( 1 974). He traced the developments in the study of power made in the political sciences. Early studies had typically focused exclusively on the decision-making process (e.g. Dahl 1 957; 1 96 1 ; Polsby 1 963; Wolfinger 1 9 7 1 ) . Researchers analyzed key decisions that seemed likely to illustrate the power relations prevailing in a par­ ticular community. The object was to determine who made these decisions. If the same groups were responsible for most decisions, as some researchers had suggested, the community could be said to be ruled by an elite. The researchers found, in contrast, that different groups pre­ vailed in decision-making. Such a community was termed pluralist and it was hypothesized that America as a whole could be considered a pluralist society. Some writers began to question the pluralist assumption that decision-making processes were accessible, and non-participation reflected satis­ faction. Doubt about the 'permeability' of the US political system was prompted by the civil rights movement and the backlash to the Vietnam War (Parry and Morriss 1 975). The pluralists were criticized for their failure to recognize that interests and grievances might remain inarticulate, unarticulated, and outside the decision-making arena. Consequently, con­ flict might well exist even if it was not directly observable (e.g. Gaventa 1 980; Saunders 1 980). The focus on formal decision-making was also criticized because of its assumption that access to it was equally available to all organizational members. Researchers started to examine how full and equal participation was constrained. Schattsch­ neider argued non-participation might be due to: the suppression of options and alternatives that reflect the needs of the non participants. It is not necessarily true that people with the greatest needs participate in politics most actively - whoever decides what the game is about also decides who gets in the game. ( 1 960: 1 05)

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Building on this insight, Bachrach and Baratz ( 1 962; 1 963; 1 970) developed the concept of a second face of power - a process whereby issues could be excluded from decision-making, con­ fining the agenda to 'safe' questions. A variety of barriers are available to the more powerful groups to prevent subordinates from fully participating in the decision-making process through the invocation of procedures and political routines. The use of these mechanisms has been termed non-decision-making, because it allows the more powerful actors to determine outcomes from behind the scenes. This work highlights the fact that power is not exercised solely in the taking of key decisions, and that visible decision-makers are not necessarily the most powerful. Lukes ( 1 974) argued that Bachrach and Baratz's model did not go far enough because it continued to assume that some form of conflict was necessary to stimulate the use of non­ decision-making power. Their focus was very much upon 'issues' about which 'decisions' were made, albeit 'non-decisions' (Ranson et al. 1 980: 8). Lukes maintained, however, that power could be used to prevent conflict by shaping [people's) perceptions, cognitions, and preferences in such a way that they accept their role in the existing order of things, either because they can see or imagine no alternative to it, or because they view it as natural and unchangeable, or because they value it as divinely ordained and beneficial. ( 1 974: 24)

The study of power could not, according to Lukes, be confined to observable conflict, the outcomes of decisions, or even suppressed issues. It must also consider the question of political quiescence: why grievances do not exist; why demands are not made; and why conflict does not arise, since such inaction may also be the result of power. We may, then, be 'duped, hoodwinked, coerced, cajoled or manipulated into political inactivity' (Saunders 1 980: 22). It was this use of power that helped sustain the dominance of elite groups and reduced the ability of subordinate interests to employ the dis­ cretionary power they possessed: Power is most effective and insidious in its consequences when issues do not arise at all, when actors remain unaware of their sectional claims, that is, power is most effective when it is unnecessary. (Ranson et al. 1 980: 8)

In this third dimension, Lukes focused attention on the societal and class mechanisms which perpetuated the status quo. These relate to Gramsci's concept of ideological hegemony (Clegg 1 989a) - where 'a structure of power relations is fully legitimized by an integrated system of cultural and normative assumptions'

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(Hyman and Brough 1 975: 1 99). According to this view, the ability to define reality is used by dominant classes to support and justify their material domination, thus preventing challenges to their position. Another stream of research on this issue came from labour process theorists (e.g. Braverman 1 974; Burawoy 1 979; Edwards 1 979), who examined the day-to-day minutiae of power and resistance, built around the 'games' that characterize the rhythms of organizational life (Burawoy 1 979). Studies (e.g. Edwards 1 979) also considered the historical patterns that structure the overall context of power, from simple, direct control premised on surveillance; through technical control based on the dom­ inance of the employee by the machine, and particularly the assembly line; to fully fledged bureaucratic control - Weber's rule by rules. This tradition focuses on the dialectics of power and resistance in relation to phenomena such as gender, technology, ethnicity, managerial work and other aspects of the structuration of work and its organizational context (Knights and Willmott 1 985; 1 989; Knights and Morgan 1 99 1 ; Knights and Murray 1 992; Kerfoot and Knights 1 993). More recently, the notion of 'organizational outflanking' (Mann 1 986: 7) has been used to provide another answer to the question of why the dominated so frequently consent to their subordination. Rather than seeing this phenom­ enon as either denial on the part of the oppressed or outwitting on the part of the elite, this view focuses on the relative collective powers of the participants. Organizational outflanking can be thought of in at least two related ways. One of these concerns the absence of knowledgeable resources on the part of the outflanked. The other concerns precisely what it is that the organizationally outflanked may know only too well. First, let us consider the absence of knowl­ edge: ignorance. Frequently those who are relatively powerless remain so because they are ignorant of the ways of power: ignorant, that is, of matters of strategy such as assessing the resources of the antagonist, of routine proce­ dures, rules, agenda setting, access, informal conduits as well as formal protocols, the style and substance of power. It is not that they do not know the rules of the game so much as that they might not even recognize the game, let alone know its rules. Ignorance also often extends to a lack of knowledge of other powerless agencies with whom one might construct an alliance. Here resistance remains an isolated occurrence. easily surmounted and overcome. As long as resistance remains uncoordinated it can easily be dealt with by defeat, exile or incorporation, even

though the antagonists might easily outweigh the protagonists if they could only connect. One step further from isolation is division. Time and space may be ordered and arranged to minimize interaction or even render one group of subordinates invisible to another (Barnes 1 988: 1 0 1 ). Complex divisions of labour may achieve this as may the extreme experience of competi­ tion. Examples of the latter might be the arrangement of concerted action within an organization in such a way that it is experienced in individual rather than collective terms, through competitive individual bonus systems of payment or through other mechanisms for constructing an egocentric environment. Secondly, organizational outflanking on the basis of knowledge operates in so far as individuals, who may know what is to be done, also know that the costs of doing so outweigh the chances of success or the benefits of succeeding. The necessity of dull compulsion in order to earn one's living, the nature of busy work, arduous exertion and ceaseless activity as routinely deadening, compulsory and invariable: such techniques of power may easily discipline the blithest of theoretically free spirits when the conditions of that freedom become evident. In this way, outflanking works against certain groups either because they do not know enough to resist - or because they know rather too much concerning the futility of such action.

Strategies of Management: Defeating Conflict

The mainstream management literature took a different approach: instead of concerning itself with the use of power to prevent conflict, it focused almost exclusively on the use of power to defeat conflict. In fact definitions explicitly linked power to situations of conflict that arise when groups and individuals seek to preserve their vested interests (e.g. Pettigrew 1 973; 1 985; MacMillan 1 978; Pfeffer 1 98 1 a; 1 992; Nar­ ayaran and Fahey 1 982; Gray and Ariss 1 985; Schwenk 1 989). From the definition of power, it is clear that political activity is activity which is undertaken to overcome some resistance or opposition. Without opposition or contest within the organization, there is neither the need nor the expectation that one would observe political activity. (Pfeffer 1 98 1 a: 7)

These definitions evoke the idea of a 'fair fight' where one group (usually senior management) is forced to use power to overcome the opposition of another ( perhaps intransigent unions or dissident employees). Such a view is reinforced

SOME DARE CALL IT PO WER by the definition of politics in terms of illegiti­ macy. A common definition of politics in the management literature is the unsanctioned or illegitimate use of power to achieve unsanctioned or illegitimate ends (e.g. Mintzberg 1 983; 1 984; also see Mayes and Allen 1 977; Gandz and Murray 1 980; Enz 1 988). It clearly implies that this use of power is dysfunctional and aimed at thwarting initiatives intended to benefit the organization for the sake of self-interest. Distilled to its essence. therefore, politics refers to individual or group behaviour that is informal, ostensibly parochial, typically divisive, and above all, in the technical sense, illegitimate - sanctioned neither by formal authority, accepted ideology, nor certified expertise (though it may exploit any one of those). (Mintzberg 1 983: 1 72, emphasis removed)

These definitions ignore the question: in whose eyes is power deemed illegitimate, unsanctioned, or dysfunctional? Legitimacy is usually defined in terms of the 'organization', when writers really mean the organizational elites, i.e. senior management. Thus managerial interests are equated with organizational needs, and the possibility that managers, like any other group, might seek to serve their own vested interests is largely ignored (e.g. Watson 1 982). Existing organizational structures and systems are not neutral or apolitical but structurally sedimented phenomena. There is a history of struggles already embedded in the organization. The organization is a collective life-world in which traces of the past are vested, recur, shift and take on new meanings. In Weber's terms organizations already incorporate a 'structure of dominancy' in their functioning. Authority, structure, ideology, culture, and expertise are invariably saturated and imbued with power but the mainstream tradition has taken the struc­ tures of power vested in formal organization design very much for granted. The focus is on the exercise of power within a given structure of dominancy. Such an approach focuses only on surface politics and misrepresents the balance of power. It attributes far too much power to subordinate groups who are chastised for using it; while the hidden ways in which senior managers use power behind the scenes to further their position by shaping legitimacy, values, technology and information are conveniently excluded from analysis. This narrow definition (see Frost 1 987) obscures the true workings of power and de politicizes organizational life (Clegg 1 989a). It paints an ideologically con­ servative picture that implicitly advocates the status quo and hides the processes whereby organizational elites maintain their dominance (Alvesson 1 984). Mechanisms of domination such as leadership, culture and structure are

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usually treated in this mainstream literature as neutral, inevitable, or objective and, hence, unproblematic (Clegg 1 989a; 1 989b; also see Ranson et al. 1 980; Deetz 1 985; Knights and Willmott 1 992; Willmott 1 993). Thus the functionalist perspective has equa­ ted power with illegitimate, dysfunctional, self­ interested behaviour. These definitions have raised an interesting question concerning what happens when there is no conflict: does power simply cease to exist or does it turn into something else? If so, what does it become? Clearly, according to this work, only 'bad guys' use power; the 'good guys' use something else, although the literature is not clear on exactly what. This issue becomes even more proble­ matic when the broader management literature is factored into the equation. Much of this work does not focus on power per se and, so, does not bother to define it. Nevertheless, power is an integral part of the discussion. For example, work on leadership advocates the use of charisma by managers. Writers assume (usually implicitly) that managers will auto­ matically use it responsibly to achieve organiza­ tional objectives, even though much of what we know about charismatic power comes from studying such leaders as Hitler, Mussolini, and Pol Pot! So, adding up the streams of functional, managerial work the assumption is that managers use power (or something like it) responsibly in pursuit of organizational goals, while everyone else uses it irresponsibly to resist those objectives. Potential abuses of power by dominant groups are downplayed, while those who challenge managerial prerogatives are automatically discredited by the label 'political'. In this way, ethical issues associated with the use of power are shielded from view, rendering this approach ill-equipped to deal with matters of abuse and exploitation. In summary, work carried out in the 1 970s sought to refine the bases laid down by the founding figures. In each case, however, they built on each body of work separately; little was done in the way of bridging. This is partly due to the apparent reluctance of many management researchers to refer to the broader body of social sciences of which they are a part, and the seemiri.g indifference of sociologists and political scientists to the study of organizational, rather than societal or class, processes.

A BRIDGE Too FAR?

A few studies did offer the prospect of bridging the two worlds. However, as the following discussion demonstrates, their ideas were not

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readily adopted by the larger body of function­ alist literature, which remained committed to existing conceptualizations. At the same time, developments in the critical field were devoted explicitly to rejecting functionalism, not accom­ modating it. As will be discussed, these devel­ opments were also to challenge many of the modernist assumptions embedded in the critical literature. Managing Meaning: the Creation of Legitimacy

One issue that did, finally, attract attention within the management literature was power as legitimation (Astley and Sachdeva 1 984). Political scientists had long recognized the advantages of creating legitimacy for existing institutions, thereby avoiding the necessity of using more coercive, visible forms of power (Lipset 1 959; Schaar 1 969; Roelofs 1 976; Roths­ child 1 979). Legitimacy can also be created for individual actions, thus reducing the chances of opposition to them. Edelman ( 1 964; 1 97 1 ; 1 977) pointed out that power is mobilized not only to achieve physical outcomes, but also to give those outcomes meanings - to legitimize and justify them. Political actors use language, symbols, and ideologies to placate or arouse the pUblic. Political analysis must then proceed on two levels simultaneously. It must examine how political actions get some groups the tangible things they want from government and at the same time it must explore what these same actions mean to the mass public and how it is placated or aroused by them. In Himmelstrand's terms, political actions are both instrumental and expressive. (Edelman 1 964: 12)

In this way, in the manner described by Lukes's

( 1 974) third dimension of power, the process of legitimation prevents opposition from arising. The advantages of creating legitimacy had not gone completely unnoticed, even in organization studies. Stable organizing power requires legitimation. To be sure, men can be made to work and to obey com­ mands through coercion, but the coercive use of power engenders resistance and sometimes active opposition. Power conflicts in and between societies are characterized by resistance and opposition, and while the latter occur in organizations, effective operations necessitate that they be kept at a minimum there and, especially, that members do not exhibit resistance in discharging their daily duties but perform them and comply with directives willingly. (Blau 1 964: 1 99-200)

The functionally oriented management literature had, however, largely ignored this issue.

One writer who attempted to draw legitima­ tion processes into the management fold was Pettigrew ( J 977). His work on the management of meaning explicitly addressed how legitimacy was created. Politics concerns the creation of legitimacy for certain ideas, values and demands - not just action performed as a result of previously acquired legitimacy. The management of meaning refers to a process of symbol construction and value use designed both to create legitimacy for one's own demands and to 'de-legitimize' the demands of others. ( 1 977: 85)

He acknowledged that political actors define success not always in terms of winning in the face of confrontation (where there must always be a risk of losing), but sometimes in terms of their ability to section off spheres of influence where their domination is perceived as legitimate and thus unchallenged (Ranson et al. 1 980; Frost 1 988). In this way, power is mobilized to influence behaviour indirectly by giving out­ comes and decisions certain meanings, by legitimizing and justifying them. Pfeffer ( 1 981 a; 1 98 1 b) considered a similar use of power when he distinguished sentiment (attitudinal) from substantive (behavioural) out­ comes of power. The latter depend largely on resource dependency considerations, while the former refer to the way people feel about the out­ comes and are mainly influenced by the symbolic aspects of power, such as the use of political language, symbols and rituals. Pfeffer ( J 98 1 a) argued there is only a weak relationship between symbolic power and substantive outcomes: that symbolic power is only used post hoc to legitimize outcomes already achieved by resource depen­ dencies. In this way, Pfeffer stops short of acknowledging that power can be used to prevent conflict and opposition. In fact, there is an inconsistency in Pfeffer's arguments: if symbolic power is effective enough to 'quiet' opposition ex post, why not use it ex ante to prevent opposition from arising in the first place? The only factor preventing Pfeffer from reaching this conclusion is his refusal to acknowledge the existence of power in situations other than those character­ ized by conflict and opposition ( 1 98 1 a: 7). The work of these writers and others (e.g. Clegg 1 975; Gaventa 1 980; Ranson et al. 1 980: Hardy 1 985) offered an opportunity to merge the management 'school' with the more critical work on domination. The bridge was never made, however, for a number of reasons. First, the idea of using power to manage meaning and create legitimacy was never taken up to any great extent by North American and other mainstream, functionalist writers, who contin­ ued to focus on dependency and define power in

SOME DARE CALL IT PO WER terms of conflict and illegitimacy (e.g. Mayes and Allen 1 977; MacMillan 1 978; Gandz and Murray 1 980; Narayaran and Fahey 1 982; Mintzberg 1 983; Gray and Ariss 1 985; Pettigrew 1 985; Enz 1 988; Schwenk 1 989; Pfeffer 1 992). Pfeffer's ( l 98 I a) prevarication is, in fact, indicative of the entire fie ld. The idea of managers using power in this way threatens to open up a can of worms for a perspective grounded in managerialism. Rather than delve into the power hidden in and mobilized through apparently neutral structures, cultures, and technologies, the vast majority of researchers preferred to continue to view these constructs as apolitical management tools. For example, most mainstream writers on organizational culture have gone to considerable lengths to avoid any association with power and politics (see Smircich 1 983; Izraeli and lick 1 986; Mumby 1 988). Cultural change is presented in neutral terms that suggest that it is to everyone's advantage (see Willmott 1 993). Weiss and Miller ( 987) explore this issue in an interesting expose of how widely cited articles have 'doctored' the defini­ tions of ideology to avoid any political connota­ tions. (Also see Beyer et al. 1 988 and Weiss and Miller 1 988 for the resulting debate on the matter.) A second barrier to bridge building was the fact that a new stream of work was rapidly moving to challenge sovereign views of power and, in so doing, questioned not only the functional perspective, but also the modernist assumptions that underlay much of the critical theory, as the following sections discuss.

Power and Discipline

The rule systems that made up Weber's bureau­ cracy have, more recently, been reinterpreted under the auspices of 'disciplinary practices' derived from Foucault ( 1 977). 4 Writers influ­ enced by this tradition refer to 'micro-techniques' of power. Unlike rule systems, these techniques are not ordinarily thought of in terms of the causal concept of power (the notion of someone getting someone else to do something that they would not otherwise do). Rather than being causally observable social episodes, they repre­ sent ways in which both individual and collec­ tively organized bodies become socially inscribed and normalized through the routine aspects of organizations. In this way, power is embedded in the fibre and fabric of everyday life. At the core are practices of 'surveillance', which may be more or less mediated by instrumentation. Historically, the tendency is for a greater instrumentation as surveillance moves from a literal supervisory gaze to more complex forms of observation, reckoning

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and comparison. Surveillance, whether personal, technical, bureaucratic or legal, ranges through forms of supervision, routinization, formaliza­ tion, mechanization, legislation and design that seek to effect increasing control of employee behaviour, dispositions and embodiment. Sur­ veillance is not only accomplished through direct control. It may happen as a result of cultural practices of moral endorsement, enablement and suasion, or as a result of more formalized tech­ nical knowledge, such as the computer monitor­ ing of keyboard output or low-cost drug-testing systems. The effectiveness of disciplinary power in the nineteenth century was linked to the emergence of new techniques of discipline appropriate for more impersonal, large-scale settings in which the Gemeinschaft conditions whereby each person knew their place no longer prevailed (see Bauman 1 982; Foucault 1 977). Previous localized, moral regulation, premised on the transparency of the person to the gaze of the community, was no longer viable. So, new forms of state institution emerged in which new forms of control were adopted, and later copied by the factory masters. No grand plan caused these institutions to adopt similar forms of disciplin­ ary technique. The process is perhaps best seen in terms of the pressures of institutional innovation (Meyer and Rowan 1 977; DiMaggio and Powell 1 983). People copied what was already available; hence they created their own world in isomorphic likeness of key features they already knew. Machiavelli once observed that 'Men nearly always follow the tracks made by others and proceed in their affairs by imitation, even though they cannot entirely keep to the tracks of others or emulate the prowess of their models' ( 1 96 1 : 49). This view captures much of the sense of contemporary institutional theory, an organiza­ tion theory with clear parallels to Foucault's ( 1 977) work (see Scott 1 987). Disciplinary techniques had been readily available in the monastic milieu of religious vocation, the military, institutional forms of schooling, poor houses, etc. Their effectiveness had been estab­ lished during the past two centuries. Practices of institutional isomorphism thus tended to repro­ duce similar relations of meaning and member­ ship as the basis for social integration in other organizations. Because certain forms of techni­ que were already available and known they had a certain legitimacy which enabled them to be more widely dispersed than they might otherwise have been (e.g. Meyer and Rowan 1 977). Such forms of control, whether direct and personal or more mediated and instrumented, changed commonly held notions of private individual space. In the medieval monastery

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there was very little. As industrialization devel­ oped from 'putting out' to the 'factory system' the definition of this space was transformed in secular organization life as well. At a more general level, one may be dealing with the development of disciplines of knowledge shaped almost wholly by the 'disciplinary gaze' of surveillance, as Foucault ( 1 977) suggests was the case of much nineteenth century social science, particularly branches of social welfare, statistics and administration. Organizationally, the twen­ tieth century development of the personnel function under the 'human relations' guidance of Mayo ( 1 975) may be seen to have had a similar tutelary role (see Clegg 1 979; Ray 1 986). Individual or collective bodies may be discrimi­ nated and categorized through diverse tactics of ratiocination. Mechanisms are often local, diverse and uncoordinated. They form no grand strategy. Yet, abstract properties of people, goods and services can be produced that are measurable, gradeab1e, assessable in an overall anonymous strategy of discipline. In this way, then, sovereign notions of power (which underlay both modernist and functional­ ist approaches) were challenged. Power was no longer a convenient, manipulable, deterministic resource. Instead, all actors operated within an existing structure of dominancy - a prevailing web of power relations - from which the pros­ pects of escape were limited for dominant and subordinate groups alike. Previously, power had been characterized in a number of ways but each required one to 'take sides'. For the functional­ ists, their side was that of the managers: resistance to their power was illegitimate. For the critical theorists, resistance was a good thing: it was an opportunity for creative human agency, particularly that associated with sub­ jugated identities such as workers, women, ethnic minorities, to reassert itself against domination. An implicit morality was in play in both perspectives, and each was an affront to the other. Foucault's views and those directly influenced by him were different. Power does not involve taking sides, identifying who has more or less of it, as much as seeking to describe its strategic role - how it is used to translate people into characters who articulate an organizational morality play. Much of this work adopts a principled indifference to the sentiments attached to those parts; instead the thrust is strategic, descriptive and empirical.

Power and Gender in Organizations

Work on gender helped support the view that power in the organization should be represented as a total, rather than partial, picture. Early

contributions on the role of women in organiza­ tions were Kanter's ( 1 975; 1 977) and Janet Wolff's ( 1 977) articles. Kanter's case studies were probably the first ever to take gender seriously, in terms of the numbers, power and opportunities open to men and women in the corporation. Both as members of the organiza­ tion and in the supporting roles that women play outside organizations as 'company wives', women were systematically subjected to power that was frequently implicit, tacit and uncon­ scious. Wolff's ( 1 977) article was concerned less with the tacit . hegemony within organizations and more with the ways in which women's positions in organizations were inseparable from their broader social role. This perspective was to be developed later in the work of Gutek and Cohen ( 1 982) . who coined the idea of 'sex role spillover', the carrying over of societally defined gender-based roles into the workplace, whereby the sex roles associated with the demographically dominant gender become incorporated into the work roles. The armed forces and nursing are probably the best examples of polar opposites in this respect. By the 1 970s, scholars were increasingly aware of the gender blindness not only of organizations but also of organization studies (see Mills and Tancred 1 992 for a brief overview). Major works were reassessed in terms of how their contribu­ tion to the literature was often premised on unspoken assumptions about gender or unob­ served and unremarked sampling decisions or anomalies in gender terms (Acker and Van Houton 1 974). For example, Crozier's ( 1 964) maintenance workers were all men while the production workers were all women. As Hearn and Parkin ( 1 983) were to demonstrate, this blindness was symptomatic of the field as a whole, not any specific paradigm within it. A peculiar irony attaches to this, as Pringle ( 1 989) was to develop. Gender and sexuality are extremely pervasive aspects of organizational life. In major occupational areas, such as secret­ aries and receptionists for example, organiza­ tional identity is defined through gender and the projection of forms of emotionality, and indeed sexuality, implicated in it. The mediation of, and resistance to, the routine rule enactments of organizations are inextricably tied in with gender since not only is behaviour defined as organiza­ tionally appropriate or inappropriate, but its appropriateness is characterized in gendered terms. Neatness, smartness, demureness take on gendered dimensions (Mills 1 988; 1 989; Mills and M urgatroyd 1 9 9 1 ) . Rather than challenging these taken-for-granted assumptions, the gender bias inherent in the study of organizations has helped to preserve the status quo. How else could the vantage point and privileges of white,

SOME DARE CALL IT PO WER usually Anglo-Saxon, normally American, males have been taken for granted for so long (Cahis and Smircich 1 992)? Functionality attaches to dominant ideolo­ gies: presumably that is why they dominate (Abercrombie et al. 1 980). Repression is not necessarily an objective or a prerequisite, but often is simply a by-product of an ideology that maximizes the organization's ability to act. Masculinist ideology has long been dominant in the majority of organizations. Certain male identities constituted in socially and economic­ ally privileged contexts routinely will be more strategically contingent for organizational deci­ sion-making, and for access to and success in hierarchically arranged careers (Heath 1 9 8 1 ) . But, organizations d o not produce actions that are masculinist, so much as masculinism pro­ duces organizations that take masculinist action. Often they do this without anyone even being explicitly aware of it. In such a case the decisions that characterize organizational action will be a result, not a cause, of ideology. Organizations may be the arenas in which gender politics play out, and, as such, suitable places for treatment through anti-discriminatory policies. But, such 'solutions' may address only the symptoms and not the causes of deep seated gender politics. Attacking their organizational expression may suppress these symptoms but it is unlikely to cure the body politic, behind which there is a history of living, being and (dis)empowering in a gendered world that is tacit, taken for granted and constitutive of the very sense of that everyday life-world.

Power and Identity in Organizations

People's identities are not only tied up in their gender or sexuality, any more than in the type of labour power that they sell to an organization. People in organizations are signifiers of meaning. As such they are subjects of regimes of both specific organizational signification and disci­ pline, usually simultaneously. Identities pre­ mised on the salience of extra-organizational issues such as ethnicity, gender, class, age and other phenomena provide a means of resistance to organizational significations and discipline by forming limits on the discretion of organiza­ tional action. Who may do what, how, where, when and in which ways are customarily and, sometimes, legally specific identities, which are prescribed or proscribed for certain forms of practice. Embodied identities will only be salient in as much as they are socially recognized and organizationally consequent. 5 Accordingly organizations are structures of patriarchal domination, ethnic domination and

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so on. Clearly such matters are contingent: most organizations may be structures of class, gender, or ethnic dominancy but not all necessarily are. Too much hinges on other aspects of organiza­ tion identity left unconsidered. In specific organizational contexts, for example, the general conditions of economic or class domination may not necessarily be the focus of resistance or struggle. More specific loci of domination may be organizationally salient; after all, divisions of labour are embodied, gendered, departmenta­ lized, hierarchized, spatially separated and so on. As a result, organizations are locales in which negotiation, contestation and struggle between organizationally divided and linked agencies are routine occurrences. Divisions of labour are both the object and the outcome of struggle. All divisions of labour within any employing organization are necessarily constituted within the context of various contracts and conditions of employment. Hence the employment relation­ ship of economic domination and subordination is the underlying sediment over which other organization practices are stratified and overlaid, often in quite complex ways. This complexity of organizational locales renders them subject to multivalent powers rather than monadic sites of total control: contested terrains rather than total institutions. It is in these struggles that power and resistance are played out in dramatic scenes that those approaches influenced by Foucault ( 1 977) seem best able to appreciate, because they are not predisposed to know in advance who the victorious and vanquished dramatis personae should be. Rather, the emphasis is on the play of meaning, signification and action through which all organization actors seek to script, direct and position all others. In this way, the fragility of unified interest 'groups' is emphasized and the simplistic nature of pluralistic (much less dualistic) approaches to power relations is countered. Power and Resistance

Any superordinate member of a complex organ-. ization is only one relay in a complex flow of authority up, down and across organization hierarchies. Ideally, according to functionalist views, such relays should be without resistance; there should be no 'problem' of obedience. Rarely, if ever, is this the case as organization researchers have long known (Coch and French 1 948). Consequently, obedience cannot be guar­ anteed, despite the search for a secular equiva­ lent to divinely inspired obeisance because of the complexity and contingency of human agency. Instead, resistance is pervasive as organizational actors use their discretion. It is the ability to

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exercise discretion, to have chosen this rather than that course of action, which characterizes power, both on the part of power holders, those who are its subjects, and on the part of those who are its objects. Important implications flow from the relation­ ship between power, resistance and discretion. Power will always be inscribed within contextual 'rules of the game' which both enable and constrain action (Clegg 1 975). Action can only ever be designated as such-and-such an action by reference to the rules which identify it. Those rules can never be free of surplus or ambiguous meaning: they can never provide for their own interpretation. Issues of interpretation are always implicated in the processes whereby agencies make reference to and signify rules (Wittgenstein 1 968; Garfinkel 1 967; Clegg 1 975; Barnes 1 986). 'Ruling' is thus an activity: it is accomplished by some agency as a constitutive sense-making process whereby attempts are made to fix meaning. Both rules and games necessarily tend to be the subject of contested interpretation and, although some players may have the advantage of also being the referee, there is always discretion and therein lies the possibility of resistance. Here we confront the central paradox of power: the power of an agency is increased in principle by that agency delegating authority; the delegation of authority can only proceed by rules; rules necessarily entail discretion; and discretion potentially empowers delegates. From this arises the tacit and taken-for-granted basis of organizationally negotiated order, and on occasion its fragility and instability, as has been so well observed by Strauss ( 1 978). Matters must be rendered routine and predictable if negotia­ tion is to remain an unusual and out of the ordinary state of affairs. Thus freedom of discretion requires disciplining if it is to be a reliable relay. Whether this is achieved through what Foucault referred to as 'disciplinary' or some other mode of practice is unimportant. In any event, discipline occurs not so much by prohibition and intervention into states of affairs, but through the knowledgeable construc­ tion of these states of affairs which enables subordinates to minimize the sanctions directed at them by superordinates. [Actors] must recognize that the output of appro­ priate action which they produce is what minimizes the input of coercion and sanctioning which they receive. (Barnes 1 988: 1 03)

In this way, power is implicated in authority and constituted by rules; rules embody discretion and provide opportunities for resistance; and, so, their interpretation must be disciplined, if new powers are not to be produced and existing

powers transformed. In fact, given the inherent indexicality of rule use, things will never be wholly stable, even though they may appear so historically (Laclau and Mouffe 1 985). Resis­ tance to discipline is thus irremediable because of the power/rule constitution as a nexus of meaning and interpretation which, because of indexicality, is always open to being refixed. So, although the term 'organization' implies stabilization of control - of corporate and differential member­ ship categories across space and across time this control is never total. Indeed, it is often the contradictions in the evolution of regimes of control that explain their development (Clegg and Dunkerley 1 980). Resistance and power thus comprise a system of power relations in which the possibilities of, and tensions between, both domination and liberation inevitably exist (Sawicki 1 99 1 : 98). Politics is a struggle both to achieve and to escape from power (Wrong 1 979; Hindess 1 982: Barbalet 1 985; Clegg 1 994a). The definitional distinction between power and resistance signifies 'qualitatively different con­ tributions to the outcome of power relations made by those who exercise power over others, on the one hand, and those subject to that power, on the other' (Barbalet 1 98 5 : 545). In other words, according to this view, power is substan­ tively different from resistance. This view involves a reconceptualization from the duality of power (domination) or resistance (liberation) that had existed in sociological literature (e.g. Giddens 1 979; 1 982). It challenges the views of sovereign power which, at their furthest reach, embraced the fiction of supreme ' super-agency' while denying authentic sover­ eignty to others: an overarching A imposing its will on the many Bs. Concepts of the ruling class, ruling state and ruling culture or ideology overwhelmed the consciousness of subjects, thereby creating false consciousness (and explaining the absence of Marx's revolutionary predictions). In this way, writers like Lukes ( 1 974) accepted the problematic of 'hegemony' (Gramsci 1 9 7 1 ) or 'dominant ideology' (Aber­ crombie et al. 1 980) and presumed to know, unproblematically, what the interests of the oppressed really were. The practical implications of these analyses were clear: good theory would replace bad theory; good theory would enable the realization of real interests. Foucault ( 1 980) sounded the death-knell of sovereign power with his distrust of the very notion of ideology. Criticisms concerning the empirical problems in measuring real interests (e.g. Benton 1 98 1 ) were replaced by a more fundamental challenge. Foucault regarded ideol­ ogy as a term of 'falsehood' whose relational opposition to a 'true' concept of 'science' can never be too far away. By demonstrating that the

SOME DARE CALL IT PO WER 'truths' and 'falsehoods' o f particular discourses have been constituted historically, he showed that no assumption of reality can exist as anything more than its representation in language. Language cannot mask anything, it simply represents possibilities. Claims to know the real interests of any group, other than through the techniques of representation used to assert them, cannot survive this reconceptualiza­ tion of power.

PowerlKnowledge and Emancipation

The recognition that resistance was implicated by power has not led to an acknowledgement of enhanced prospects for emancipation. The space and ambiguity in which resistance is fostered do not lead to a transformation of prevailing power relations; they only reinforce those power relations. This is the sobering implication of the Foucauldian-influenced tradition. The death of the sovereign subject was accompanied by the killing of originating sources of action: none were to inhabit the poststructural world. The pervasiveness of power relations makes them difficult to resist. Prevailing discourses are experienced as fact, which makes alternatives difficult to conceive of, let alone enact. I ndeed, resistance often serves only to reinforce the existing systems of power (Clegg 1 979; Knights and Willmott 1 989; Knights and Morgan 1 99 1 ). In addition, the production of identity confers a positive experience on individuals which leads to the reproduction of the power relations, not their transformation (Knights and Willmott 1 989; Knights and Morgan 1 99 1 ). Finally, while all actors are, to some extent, captured in the prevailing web of power relations (Deetz 1 992a; 1 992b), those advantaged by it are, usually, in the best position to develop strategies (such as outflanking, managing meaning, manipulating culture, choosing technology, etc.) that will protect their position. Another blow to emancipation came from Foucault's attack on modernist assumptions that with knowledge comes 'truth', i.e. a situation free from power. Instead, argued Foucault, with knowledge only comes more power. Truth isn't outside power, or lacking in power: contrary to a myth whose history and functions would repay further study, truth isn't the reward of free spirits, the child of protracted solitude, nor the privilege of those who have succeeded in liberating themselves. Truth is a thing of this world: it is produced only by virtue of multiple forms of constraint. And it induces regular effects of power. Each society has its regime of truth, its 'general' politics of truth: that is, the type of discourse which

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it accepts and makes function as true; the mechanisms and instances which enable one to distinguish true and false statements, the means by which each is sanctioned; and the techniques and procedures accorded value in the acquisition of truth; the status of those who are charged with saying what counts as true. ( 1 980: 1 3 1 )

I n other words, salvation does not lie i n under­ standing. The modernist idea that demystifying processes and structures of domination would help the subjugated to escape from them was shaken to its roots. Despite the protestations of those who contend that Foucault's work is compatible with the idea of resistance (e.g. Smart 1 985; 1 986; 1 990; Sawicki 1 99 1 ; Alvesson and Will­ mott 1 992), opponents argue, with equal fervour, that his work is antithetical to notions of liberation and emancipation (e.g. Hoy 1 986; Said 1 986; Walzer 1 986; White 1 986; Ashley 1 990). These writers argue that the Foucauldian attack on agency removes the possibility of using power for particular objectives, especially the possibility of the powerless achieving empower­ ment. Whatever the result of this debate, one outcome is sure: opposing camps have engaged in a highly theoretical, intellectual struggle concerning matters of ontology and epistemol­ ogy (Clegg 1 989a; Nord and Doherty 1 994). The debate is polarized around two apparently conflicting epistemological positions: modernism with its belief in the essential capacity of humanity to perfect itself through the power of rational thought and postmodernism with its critical questioning, and often outright rejection, of the ethnocentric rationalism championed by modern­ ism. (Cooper and Burrell 1 988: 2)

What is ignored in this absorbing - but somewhat esoteric - discourse are the practical matters of overcoming barriers to collective action and devising concrete strategies of resistance (Nord and Doherty 1 994). Thus those with the greatest case for emancipation have been largely ignored. The functionalist literature does not consider them to have a cause: the power embedded in organiza­ tional structures and processes is not power, much less domination. Those who dare to challenge it are irresponsible and irrational, if not downright subversive. The critical literature that derived its focus from its concern with underprivileged groups (e.g. Freire 1 992) has, with the loss of faith in Marxist formulae, distanced itself from its former constituents. Once the struggles of resistance occupied a central place; now they revolve around sterile debates conducted in obfuscatory language 6

382

STUD YING ORGANIZA TION FROM CACOPHONY TO CHORUS?

Researchers have long noted the confusion that exists concerning the definition of power. It is no wonder when we consider the many different voices that have spoken on power. Depending on who is studying it, what they are studying, and why they are studying it, these voices are often looking at different phenomena or, at the very least, looking at the same phenomenon through very different lenses. Power has been both the independent variable causing outcomes such as domination, and the dependent variable, in this case the outcome of dependency. Power has been viewed as functional in the hands of managers who use it in the pursuit of collective, organiza­ tional goals, and dysfunctional in the hands of those who challenge those goals and seek to promote self-interest. Power has been viewed as the means by which legitimacy is created and as the incarnation of illegitimate action. Power has been equated with the formal organizational arrangements in which legitimacy is embedded, and as the informal actions that influence organizational outcomes. It has been seen as conditional on conflict and as a means to preempt conflict. It has been defined as a resource that is consciously and deliberately mobilized in the pursuit of self-interest - a resource that has failed to be used by those (such as women and workers) whose self-interest has been ascribed to them - and as a system of relations that knows no interest, but from which some groups inadvertently benefit. It has been seen as an intentional act to which causality can be clearly attributed, and as an unintentional, unpredictable game of chance. The study of power has meant a behavioural focus for some researchers, and attitudinal or hegemonic factors for others. Power has been berated for being repressive, and lauded for being productive. Small wonder, then, that there is little agreement! This range of conceptualizations has, in general, coalesced around two very different streams of research, each of which has little to say to the other and each of which defends its own borders, thereby influencing the process of social inquiry. In the functionalist approach, power is a political 'disorganizing' tool used by opponents of managers. Sometimes, power is used by managers but only to repel these illegitimate attacks. This body of work adopts an unquestion­ ing managerial perspective, and assumes that power is a malleable, useful resource, which is 'good' when used by managers and 'bad' when used against them. The alternative, critical approach has viewed power as a means of domination and resistance to it as an emancipa­ tory tool. Starting out with a modernist perspec­ tive, it has recently been struggling to incorporate

postmodernist ideas. Ironically, the power/ knowledge concept of Foucault has robbed this body of work of much of its emancipatory power, and many writers (e.g. Alvesson and Willmott 1 992; Knights and Vurdubakis 1 994) seem to be struggling to give the postmodern adaptation back its modernist edge. The majority of the work is, however, highly theoretical, often ignoring the practicalities of developing strategies for resis­ tance and liberation. Perhaps it is time for both functionalists and critical theorists to pause. Maybe the practical, ethically situated and socially contexted uses of power need thinking through? The quotidian round of organization life has its own drama, its own theatricality, its own epistemologies, ontol­ ogies and methods, as Calion and Latour ( 1 98 1 ) have demonstrated. I t is not only through the moral play of functional legitimacy and illegiti­ macy versus critical opprobium and approval that power is analyzed. The time is ripe to treat all forms of power play, including its theorizing, as moves in games that enrol, translate and treat others in various ways, in various situated moralities, according to various codes of honour and dishonour which constitute, maintain, repro­ duce and resist various forms and practices of power under their rubric. There is no reason to think that all games will necessarily share one set of rules, or be capable of being generated from the same deep and underlying rule set. Power requires understanding in its diversity even as it resists explanation in terms of a singular theory. A theory of power does not, and cannot, exist other than as an act of power in itself - in attempting to rule out other understandings of phenomena in favour of a universalistic explana­ tion, as Hobbes recognized almost at the outset. Such a power theory of power is unreflexive: it cannot account for itself, and any theory of power that cannot account for its own power cannot account for very much at all. This is the hermeneutic circle within which post-Foucaul­ dian approaches to power leave us. The door marked 'general theory of power', whether fashioned critically or conventionally, seems to lead us back into a reduced version of the circle with a perspective that renders many organiza­ tional phenomena invisible or unimportant, particularly the concerns of the people whose lives frame the circle. One way out of this impasse is to explore the circle more completely and to investigate the relations and meanings that constitute it, by listening more carefully to the voices that normally populate it (e.g. Forester 1 989) and unmasking the researcher who enters it. This approach advocates more empirical study of local struggles, focusing not on a monolithic conception of power, but on the strategic concerns raised by Machiavelli ( 1 96 1 ) or the

SOME DARE CALL IT PO WER war of manoeuvre highlighted by Gramsci ( 1 97 1 ). We can learn much about power by ?ehberately selecting ' transparent' examples that IllumInate the processes we wish to explore (EI�enhardt 1 989). In this way, we can expose the vanety .of marginalized voices by, for example, examInIng how different women in different c�ltural and social situations are affected by different aspects and manifestations of gender discrimination (see Sawicki 1 99 1 ; Kerfoot and Knights 1 993). We can deconstruct prevalent disciplinary practices as in accounting (e.g. Knights and Collinson 1 987). We can reveal how organizational practices contribute to the subjectivity and sUbjugation of employees (e.g. Knights and Willmott 1 992); or contrast the characteristics of a Foucauldian web of power with existing conceptualizations of sovereign power, as in the case of fragmented refugee systems �Hardy 1 994). We can amplify pre­ . vIOusly silent vOices or herald voices of resis­ tance. In so doing, we may privilege certain discourses (resulting in a temporary elitism: see Chapter 7 by Alvesson and Deetz in this volume) but, nonetheless, a space is claimed for voices that might otherwise be lost. By listening to the stories that people tell, we learn about how certain voices come to be silenced and how resistant subjects are constituted (Clegg I 994b). We must also acknowledge the researcher's arrival within the circle, not as a neutral ob­ server, but as an implicated participant. This requires a greater awareness of who the researcher is and where he or she comes from. Researchers must make clear how they access and interpret 'subjectivities' and outline metho­ dological protocols (Collinson 1 994; Clegg 1 994a). w.e must expose both our analytic . InterpretatIOns and our theoretical assumptions to the same kind of analysis. In this way we are in a position to identify the 'danger' of particular practices whether in the situation under study or m the very act of studying itself. For Foucault, freedom lay in bringing to light the anonymous . hlstoncal processes through which any and all subjectivity is constructed, in questioning and reevaluating our inherited identities and values and in challenging received interpretations o them (Sawicki 1 99 1 ) . By exposing ourselves and our work to this kind of genealogical analysis (e.g. Knights and Morgan 1 99 1 ), we become more aware of how we are also prisoners in a web of power that we have helped to create.

f

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versity of Western Sydney, Macarthur and McGill University for their support and Walt for the title. I In the early days of the guild structure the use of the masculine gender would have been less acceptable, but, as Rowbotham ( 1 975: I ) notes, 'Separate organisations developed to protect the masters, and the terms of entry became formalised. It was consequently more difficult for journeymen's wives to be formally involved in the workshops, or for the master's wife to supervise the apprentices, and less customary for widows to take over from their husbands.' Thus, the emergence of power in pre­ modern organizations had a gender bias built into its historical development; women were progressively screened out from the emergent organization form. 2 Marxist models have been premised on a series of capitalist/worker polarities, e.g. exploitation versus non-exploitation; productive versus non-productive; wage-earners versus revenue receivers (Carchedi 1 977). Class was assumed to be the most salient base for identity. Recent empirical research in this tradition suggests that associational aspects of society, such as personal support for sports clubs, are more important (Baxter et al. 1991). Consequently, the empirical grounds for attaching credence to Marxist analyses of organization power as principally class power seem poorly grounded. Instead, the means of production are considered to be only one part of the picture: interests are variable, and dependent on organizational mechanisms of representation and outflanking (Mann 1 986). 3 As interpreted from the Weberian concept of Herrschaft by Parsons (Henderson and Parsons 1 947). 4 The concept is derived from Foucault but is implicit in Weber ( 1 978) and labour process theory (see Littler and Salaman 1 982). 5 Forms of embodiment such as age, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, religiosity and handicap are particularly recognizable as bases which serve to locate practices for stratifying organization members: this is evidenced by their being the precise target of various anti-discrimination laws. 6 Obviously, researchers do directly consider subjects of oppression and their work has produced claims, for example, that womanhood and ethnicity are new universal subjects of oppression. Such studies do, however, run into the 'old' problem of imputation of interests to subjects whose empirical behaviour confounds the interest assumption. In this direction lie new quagmires of morality, signposted as 'political correctness'.

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stribution forbidden.

16 Normal Science, Paradigms, Metaphors, Discourses and Genealogies of Analysis GIBSON BURRELL

LIFE IN THE I 960s

In the 1 960s the field of organizational analysis was deceptively simple. The figure of Max Weber bestrode the terrain like a colossus and it was within his shadow that almost all the work was carried out. The simplicities of the period were widespread and involved assumptions about the centrality of modernity, the institutional super­ iority of bureaucratic structures and the need ror measurement of Weber's ideal type construct. The rise of contingency theory had done nothing to question these assumptions, for theory was still to be tested by collecting data. usually of a quantitative kind, utilizing standard positivistic methods in the search for managerially relevant conclusions. The writers on organizations of this period, in which the growth of the welfare and warfare state had created something of a movement towards corporatism, saw their role as being that of scientization of the field and adding administrative science to the list of manage­ rially relevant fields like operational science and economics. Their subject matter - the organiza­ tion - was gaining an importance from major societal changes to do with bureaucratization. And Weber, whose writings promised a protected future to his professional audience, was a graven image before which these analysts bowed. Sociologists, of course, had long recognized that the complexities of Weber's thought could not be reduced to such simplicities. His style was one in which he was always careful to show how provisional, partial and tentative his thoughts were. His concept or l'erstehen also

raised uncomrortable issues, for it pointed to the tradition or German Idealism or and for which the Anglophone organization theorists had little sympathy or understanding. So even as organizational analysis rormed around a hagiographic image or Weber, it ignored those parts or his recund writing which the Parsonians wished consciously or uncon­ sciously to suppress. There is little space here to evaluate the importance or the Pareto Circle at Harvard University but their impact upon organization theory can be easily underestimated. This group met as a dining club in the early 1 930s and included the names or many eminent personages who collectively called themselves by the name or Vilfredo Pareto, the 'Marx of the bourgeoisie'. Parsons. Merton. Mayo, Homans, Roethlisber­ ger and Chester Barnard all belonged to this inner circle of major figures in organization theory. In seeking to reject the influence or Marx they turned to other European social theorists. Whilst Pareto served this purpose in the early 1 930s, it was Weber who came to the rescue in the post World War II period (Ray and Reed 1 994). This is not to say that Parsons was not an extremely able social theorist, or that he was ignorant or the German Idealist tradition, or that he wilfully misrepresented Weber's ideas any more than most. It is more to say that in seeking to rorm an administrative science, unity, homogeneity and coherence were emphasized at the expense or fracture, fissure and difference. In the Parsonians' discussion of the work of Max Weber, his original philosophical and political tensions are almost totally ignored. Moreover,

PARA DIGMS, METAPHORS, DISCO URSES, GENEALOGIES their analysis of organizations could be held up as in no need of Marx or leftist ideas. Weber, or more accurately right Weberianism, provided the perfect defence of bureaucratic rule and the importance of the administrative function (Mouzelis 1 975). Meanwhile, the relevance of left Weberianism was ignored along with the concept of verstehen. Thus, almost from the outset, a unified organization theory began to dissolve in front of our eyes. No sooner had a modified Weber been presented as the patron saint of organizational analysis than the vandals began to daub the holy figure with the graffiti of political and methodological disaffection. Administrative science then is no stranger to fractured lines of analysis. The Weber who was politically of the left and intellectually idealist had been ignored in much of the classic work. As soon as this Weber had been resurrected, the project of organization theory, almost at its moment of conception, became fought over. Organization theory, from that day on, was 'contested terrain' . Such a view of organizational analysis suggests that contestation over political, episte­ mological and methodological grounds was present even in the heyday of the Aston Studies, the launch of Administrative Science Quarterly (ASQ) and the rise of contingency theory. Whilst the leading figures did not shout out their concerns about its coherence - indeed one might argue that 'leading' figures only become so because they never voice any doubt in public about the integral nature of their project - such coherence had to be asserted rather than demonstrated to audiences which were not yet aware. Bruno Latour ( 1 982) has shown us that for a field of science to be successful, an actor network tends to be developed, and whether the area does or does not develop to full fruition in practice depends upon hard work and political nous amongst its leading lights. Thus one can forgive the first organization theorists some of their myopia for it served a highly important political purpose. However, the notion of a golden age is always suspect, for when we look back we can see not only a much smaller field but one in which the powerful agreed to ignore fundamental problems in addressing fundamental issues. The power the group gained came more from a widespread external recognition of its 'explanandum' rather than its 'explanans'. In other words, lots of influential people thought administration was an important phenomenon to be explained (the explanandum) irrespective of the explanatory framework being used which was both positivis­ tic and structural (its explanans). So long as the problematic nature of the phenomenon was being addressed, therefore, it was almost im-

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material how any putative solutions were reached. Thus the real difficulty for organiza­ tional analysis was, and still is, how to convince the influential that we are addressing a vitally important explanandum - from their point of view. If we see ourselves as 'servants of power' (Baritz 1 962) then having the ear of the powerful is a crucial issue on which our political and economic fortunes hang. What explanans we possess is, by and large, of interest only to ourselves. Yet this present piece is not about the expla­ nandum of our discipline; rather it concerns itself with our explanans at the most basic levels. Here, paradigms, frameworks, cognitive maps, theoria etc. are the words (and sometimes even concepts) that we use to describe how we approach and confront our subject matter. But if we look at organization theory in the last few years of the century we see that it shows more of a fractured visage than it did thirty years ago. What we faced in the 1 960s was an agreement of sorts that the focus of our attention had to be the large bureaucratic organization within a modern society. With agreement on the explanandum, difficulties over what was the explanans retreated. We lived in a golden age because the object of our desires was fixed. This golden age of modernism gradually has given way to a situation in which it is not agreement and identity that are celebrated but difference and heteroglossia (Cooper and Burrell 1 988). In the mainstream areas of organization theory today it would be foolish to maintain that postmodernism has been embraced with any affection, but a gradual awareness of the avant­ garde relevance of the work of Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, for example, has slowly dawned. This chapter will attempt to show the undermining effect upon our explanandum of which postmodernism is capable - as long as we note here that, such is the centrality of dispute and of speaking with many voices to 'post­ modernism', neither Foucault nor Derrida would accept that label as a classifier for their own work. Moreover in the struggle between those twin Greek gods, Apollo and Dionysius, whilst Apollo had dominated the 1 960s and 1 970s, Dionysius has made something of a comeback in the last fifteen years. And with this Bacchic rise, phallocentric as it is, it becomes possible to speak of desire and the body rather than thought and the mind. How then to describe the fractured present? In the spirit of the authors about to be discussed, let us search for another deep-seated myth regard­ ing human knowledge and, on finding it, use it metaphorically to understand our discipline. The myth that usefully springs to mind here is found not in Greek mythology but in the Bible. Like all

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myths its significance is capable of multi-layered analysis, but one effort which the reader might find helpful is to be found in George Steiner's

After Babel: Aspects of Language and Trans­ lation ( 1 975).

THE TOWER OF BABEL

In Genesis, the story is told that God became unhappy with humanity in the shape of the builders of the temple at Babel (Babylon). Their temple is so high and their aims so transparent as to rival God in his power that God decides to spread them to the four corners of the Earth in a diaspora which leaves builder unable to speak unto builder. The diaspora of the builders is motivated by God's desire to ensure their deliberate division into many warring encamp­ ments. The speaking of many languages comes only after the abandonment of the work on the same edifice. What is important is the shared project, not the shared language. The babel of voices comes from the cessation of the shared task and not vice versa. What organization studies lack today is a shared language and a shared project. How then does this fit in with the much used notion of 'the project of modernity' and the role of organiza­ tion studies within it? The answer of course is that modernity in its late or postmodern phases questions bureaucratic organization and its legitimacy almost as much as it was interrogated in those far-off premodern times before indus­ trialization. With the explanandum of our activities in retreat, is it any wonder that our explanans, too, suffers from a lack of con­ fidence? Pfeffer ( 1 993) in a recent piece of provocation has argued that organization theory needs to be much more disciplined, centralized and con­ trolled by a small elite grouping if it is to have any future at all in the groves of academe. Although he does not use the metaphor of Babel there is a clear idea of a disparate, fragmented field ripe for hostile take-over from those without, who are better organized and centrally commanded. Thus this particular chapter will consider three elements within the structure of the field. The first is the nature of the fragmentation of our discipline into schools of thought and a corresponding lack of a uni­ versally recognized elite in control; the second is the resultant lack of shared explanans; and the third is the cause of both - the shifting nature of the administrative enterprise itself. Of course these are interconnected but let us concentrate upon one at a time.

The Diaspora of the Builders

The builders of organization theory do not live in a single city. The discipline is global in its sites of production. For example, the transatlantic nature of much of organization theory has long been recognized. The importation into the USA of Weber's intellectual remains is but one form of traffic. The reverse importation back into Europe of organizational principles developed on the railways of the eastern seaboard itself merely reflected the importation of French ideas on discipline and linearity into West Point Academy somewhat earlier (Hoskin and MacVe 1 986). Yet in each import and export, small changes are necessarily made to customize the intellectual product for particular markets. Something is added. Something else is removed. Thus the European concerns with property, with serfdom, with the absence of land for the masses, with aristocracy and monarchy, with the sheer weight of tradition, are not as vibrant and alive in the USA from the outset. What is seen in the arena of administration when we look carefully is the confrontation of the New World by the Old. How can they possibly have the same views about how to administer the people within their domain? Hence, just as Weber is partially lost in both translation and transatlantic passage, the builders of organization theory rely upon and use different assumptions about the nature of the social and psychological world - depending upon which side of the North Atlantic they happen to be standing at the relevant moment. However, lest the accusation of hemispher­ icentrism be levelled against this chapter, allow me to quickly point out that much current work of interest is being carried out in the southern hemisphere and around a larger ocean than the Atlantic. It was on one night in May 1 985 that air traffic above the Pacific became denser than that over the Atlantic for the first time, and this shift in global trade is also quite recognizable in intellectual exchanges. The Atlantic no longer represents the undisputed geopolitical centre of organization theory as it once did. Now the existence of this North Atlantic Theory of Organization ( NATO) does not mean that the original builders ever shared a complete identity of approach. What they did share however was a post-war consensus in which welfarism brought in by post-war governments was fused with Keynesian economics, a distrust of the USSR and Euro-communism, types of organizational restructuring brought about by US consultancy firms, huge defence spending and supposed attempts to keep unemployment down. All of these features relied upon large centrally planned and coordinated activities in which American ideas, just like the American

PARADIGMS, METAPHORS, DISCO URSES, GENEALOGIES military, predominated. For, a s h a s been recently pointed out, the D-Day landings represented the first successful invasion of European soil since the East had succumbed to one of the pashas in the late fourteenth century. Five hundred years of European predominance had given way to an invasion of capital, ideas and military hardware from the West. Organiza­ tion theory, delicately placed in the framework of a German sociologist as it was, nevertheless was an American re-import. Organization theory was and to some extent still is built around this inter-continental inter­ mingling. And like all products of interchange it invites attempts to understand the way in which it operates. Key to the issue is the centrality of science in . our ways of looking at administration and organizational behaviour. Science begins by placing the perpetually dynamic into a field of stasis. Ceteris paribus clauses, the experiment and the laboratory are all ways of stabilizing the real world's perpetual flow. There is the terrible example of a 4,900-year-old bristlecone pine tree in Wyoming being cut down by an impatient researcher because his tree corer would not work. The oldest living thing on the planet was killed in order to find out how old it was (Zwicky 1 992). The creation of stasis, the better to hold the scientific victim steady so that it might be anatomically examined, is a long one. We must look, perhaps, at the range of conceptualizations within organization theory as ways of enforcing anatomizing stasis upon the dynamics of organizational life. They are notions of and for stasis through which the mobile, the dynamic, the restless are forced to offer themselves up unto the gaze of the observer. Concepts are the ultimate form of the panopticon (Foucault 1 977). By classifying and marking their victims, concepts perform an imprisoning act of con­ siderable sophistication. But much more than incarceration takes place. Once immobilized, the body of thought becomes subject to inscription. Concepts inscribe their marks upon the body of the literature and, in the process of marking with cuts and incisions, they leave a trail of lesions behind which all can follow. The deeper cuts are those which make the biggest impression upon those that read off the significance of the author's (re)marks for themselves. But these impressive cuts ultimately spell death and immobility. At the very least the subject is wounded by the deepest and most incisive inscriptions. Paradigms, metaphors, discourses and genea­ logies are all incised lesions on the body of organizational life. Analysis of almost any kind requires the death or at least the mutilation of that which is analysed. To identify anything as

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an explanandum is to offer it up for execution. To alight upon anything as an explanans is to provide at the very least a fearsome weapon of mutilation. Thus words, especially in the form of conceptualizations, serve to imprison, immobi­ lize, and injure that which they seek to address. No Agreement over the Explanans

Just as the builders came to 'fall out' over the terms and methods to be used in the construction of the tower, so too in organization theory is there very little agreement over the types of conceptualizations to be used, never mind the actual conceptualization itself. The moments of force for dissolution, of course, are there in the area right from the start. As has been argued, it would be foolish to imagine the existence of some coherent structure which came to the point of incipient collapse. All that happened in the late 1 960s was that the reality of fragmentation became clearer when it became glaringly obvious that one particular group of contingency theorists had, hitherto, shouted down the other voices on the far side of the structure. The idea that one voice could drown out the rest is an attractive one to the pulmonarily gifted but it is a dream which can never be realized fully. There will, thank goodness, always be the voices of dissent and the clamour of alternatives vying for aural space. What we had in the 1 960s was merely the period of hushed opposition before the volume of babble rose. Different explana­ tions of differently conceived problems quickly came to prominence as the numbers of academics employed in the arena of organization theory increased. The demographic changes in the academic population are significant but should not be seen as the cause o f fragmentation. They merely made it more visible. The Shifting Nature of the Enterprise

In the same way as the demographics of the academic population affected the nature of the fragmentary dynamics within organization theory, so too did the changes occurring within the population of organizations in which our interest had centred. Privatization, franchising, the break-up of the large corporations into quasi-independent entities, the attacks upon bureaucracy, the attacks upon the middle manager and so on, all meant that the expla­ nandum itself was changing. The mode of organization was altering to the extent that markets and networks were starting to take the place of those bureaucracies of which Weber had been a major theorist. Whilst very few thought,

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or more accurately think, that bureaucracy is 'dead', clearly it is in retreat to some extent across the developed world. Thus, it is possible to say that the diaspora of theoreticians has been matched by the diaspora of the isomorphic organizational form. There is no easy silhouet­ ting here, for there is no close identity between those, for example, who study the voluntary sector and those who use a particular managerial stance. The lines of fissure do not match up. The fragmentation is much worse than that.

THE PROCRUSTEAN BED OF THEORY

Given all these lines of fissure and the desperate need, under modernity, for academics to claim an understanding of the world, it is little wonder that the theoreticians have attempted to 'fix' the organizational world and, by reducing its dynamics to a static classificatory system, imprison it. We must now, at last, turn to the ways in which the stabilizers have attempted to offer momentary glimpses of a world in flux. In this they have forced organizational analysis on to a procrustean bed on which it groans and squirms because it is not the right size to fit the cramping framework into which it is being pressed. Yet the forcing goes on. Each of the terms to be addressed below forces the subject into an understandable and simplifying frame­ work. This, after all, is what science does. But we must realize that what every concept does is to exclude as well as include, to ignore as well as concentrate upon, to consign to obscurity as well as bring into the limelight. Concepts stretch the point. And nowhere more than in the concept of 'paradigm' .

THE ORIGINS OF PARADIGM THINKING

At the beginning of this century, German science and philosophy were seen as being in a state of chaos. The external view which emphasized the power of these thought systems was not shared by the likes of Carnap, Neurath and the Viennese positivists or by the Be.t:lin School of logical empiricists. They all sought to overcome the well accepted situation of heterogeneity and fragmentation by offering a vision of a common language for science which would lead eventually to a unified science. Their unified science, to the outsider's eye, looks uncommonly like mathe­ matics but for them this way lay progress. Neurath and Carnap proposed a central work which would achieve such a goal. The Founda­

tions of the Unity of Science: Toward an International Encyclopaedia of Unified Science

was begun in 1 938 and by 1 962 included in its programme a key text for those interested in the notion of paradigms. This was Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions ( 1 962). The appearance of this particular book in this particular project is heavily ironic perhaps, because Kuhn's book is seen by many as offering a defence of non-unified science. However, for reasons that we will examine shortly, it is not all that clear that Kuhn is totally committed to the beneficial impact of a lack of unity in science. As Gioia and Pitre ( 1 993) show, Carnap, a great unificationist, welcomed the appearance of the book in the series he was editing. Gioia and Pitre ( 1 993) suggest that The irony of including Kuhn's putatively radical work in the Neurath et al. series may be only apparent. Although Kuhn's work typically is cited as a milestone in the downfall of logical empiricism, its actual opposition to post World War 11 empiricism is - arguably - overstated.

Nevertheless, what Kuhn achieved in The Struc­ ture of Scientific Revolutions did not sit well with the then contemporary views on scientific progress and how this was to be explained. In developing the concept of 'normal science' , Kuhn argued that the evidence o n progress i n the physical sciences, particularly in the grand works of synthesis by Newton and then Einstein, did not fit with the inductivist or falsificationist views of science. Science does not proceed by the facts revealing themselves to clever thinkers or by scientists attempting to falsify their own hypotheses in every experiment. Kuhn sees science as developing through political tensions being resolved in the scientific community in a cycle which begins with the challenge of youth, then resistance from the powerful, the death of the powerful, their replacement by the ageing young who then come to dominate, and finally the challenge yet again of new youth. Hence the life cycles of individuals and the path of scientific progress are heavily intertwined. It requires the death of the old for the new to come to fruition. Thus there is a cyclical relation between normal science and revolutionary science with one giving way to the other, repetitively. Science, then, is not a linear pathway of falsifiable hypotheses. Rather, for Kuhn, it is a series of discontinuous periods of 'normal science' and revolutionary change. Established ways of seeing the world are replaced, through­ out history, by tremendous upheavals in thought. These changes are so expansive that the old ways of thinking are totally incompatible with the new. To embrace the new is to under­ take a conversion experience. By no means are all scientists in the field willing to contemplate this move from a comfortable stability. The new

PARADIGMS, METAPHORS, DISCO URSES. GENEAL OGIES view of the world - an Einsteinian one rather than a Newtonian one, for example - creates a new structure, a new set of community agendas, a revolutionary new set of social arrangements, a new paradigm which revolutionizes our under­ standing. The full enormity of this revolution in thinking can only be seen if the scientist undergoes a 'Gestalt switch'. 'Paradigm', as used in Kuhn ( 1 962) , is a word which excited many in the philosophy of science but fascinated others from elsewhere. Master­ man ( 1 970), in a widely quoted article, shows that Kuhn uses the term in over twenty different ways in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. However in the second edition, written in 1 970, Kuhn maintained - in a much watered-down version of the radicalism of the first - that he preferred the term 'disciplinary matrix' to 'paradigm'. For in the intervening period Kuhn's work had enjoyed the time honoured fate of all important work. It was subjected to detailed and critical analysis. A conference organized by Imre Lakatos, the leading sophis­ ticated falsificationist of the period, attacked the Kuhnian position with gusto and, unsurpris­ ingly, found it had weaknesses. In the face of this, by the end of the 1 960s Kuhn had retreated to a less radical position. Since 1 970, this retreat has continued and reached the stage where he could say in 1 982 that 'paradigms' did not preclude full communication across the revolu­ tionary divide, and by 1 990 he argued that understanding across barriers could not be ruled out (Gioia and Pitre 1 993). Howard Sankey ( 1 993) has engaged in a full discussion of Kuhn's changing position on paradigms and persuasively argues for the view that Kuhn's work may be divided into three phases. These are 'the early position', 'the transitional phase' and 'the later position'. He argues, in a section worth quoting at length, that Kuhn's treatment of incommensurability divides into early and late positions, separated by a transitional stage. Originally Kuhn's notion of incommensurability involved semantical, observa­ tional and methodological differences between global theories or paradigms. His initial discussion suggested that proponents of incommensurable theories are unable to communicate and that there is no recourse to neutral experience or objective standards to adjudicate between theories. In sub­ sequent efforts to clarify his position he restricted incommensurability to semantic differences and assimilated it to Quinean indeterminacy of transla­ tion. During this intermediate stage Kuhn's treatment of the issues tended to be incomplete, often resulting in cursory discussion. However, in recent years he has begun to develop his position in more refined form. His present view is that there is

393

translation failure between a localized cluster of indefined terms within the language of theories. ( 1 993: 760)

Arguably, the problem of the incommensur­ ability of paradigms remains at the very core of the continuing issue of the relevance, existence, or future of organizational paradigms. If one paradigm could be easily translated into another then the question becomes one of how and when the total dominance of the numerically stronger encampment will take place. If the approaches of the smaller, less politically strong, groups can be so easily incorporated into the language of the dominant orthodoxy then their language, their culture, their very existence are unlikely to be secure. This notion of survival then, and the metaphors of death and destruction attendant upon it. are quite crucial. For those who argue for the existence of paradigm incommensurabil­ ity, there is a real tendency to think that any course of action predicated upon a belief in translation rules will result, sooner or later, in the take-over - the over-running - of their position by hostile forces. The functionalist orthodoxy, irrespective of its advantages in numbers, resources and institutional position, is very good at translating concerns, ideas and approaches originating from 'outside' into its own terms. Think of the way in which 'alienation' becomes transmogrified as a con­ cept. The words remain the same. The content, ideology and political significance are stripped out, however, leaving behind the word but not its signification.

ORGANIZATIONAL PARADIGMS

On both sides of the Atlantic, the notion of 'paradigms' in organizational analysis has received much attention in the last fifteen years. It is not clear, as we have already noted, in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions ( 1 962; 1 970) what is meant precisely by a 'paradigm', for Kuhn uses the term in at least twenty different ways in his analysis of the breakdown of Newtonian physics. However, the term revolves around the idea of 'classic laws' and 'modes of community, life'. This is to say that the paradigm marks out, in an agreed and deep­ seated sense, a way of seeing the world and how it should be studied, and that this view is shared by a group of scientists who live in a community marked by a common conceptual language, who seek to build upon a shared conceptual edifice and who are possessed of a very defensive political posture to outsiders. Social scientists alighted on the Kuhnian approach with great enthusiasm in the late

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1 960s and early 1 970s and began to see their own disciplines in this 'paradigmatic' way (Friedrichs 1 970; Ritzer 1 97 5) . This fitted in well with the notion of a crisis in post-war social science and the possibility of a new, indeed revolutionary, science overthrowing the old ideas developed by the ageing yet still powerful figures who dominated their fields. Kuhnianism, in many of its forms, appealed to the young. The ways in which 'paradigm' as a term came into organizational analysis were various, but the book published in 1 979 by Burrell and Morgan articulated the procrustean approach to stabilizing the field in a somewhat extreme form. And it is probable that its extremism in fixing and stabilizing the subject matter of organization theory explains some of its impact. They identified four 'paradigms' which were necessa­ rily formed by the adoption of a position with regard to two key conceptual dimensions. Given that sociology and organization theory are uncontentiously parts of social science, they argued, any statement that is made in these areas of a theoretical nature has to make assumptions about both the nature of society and the nature of science. If it does not do this, either uncon­ sciously or consciously, then it is not making a social scientific statement. Burrell and Morgan attempted to identify the nature of these assumptions on two axes which when placed at right angles create four 'mutually exclusive' paradigms. This mapping, for such it is, is presented as Figures 1 and 2. As soon as the book appeared, it was subjected to a sustained critique, much of it focusing on the impossibility of forcing both social theory and organization theory into four static categories. Whilst the term 'procrustean bed' was not widely utilized in the critique, many commentators objected to the forced over­ simplifications of the schema. Clegg ( 1 982), for example, said that this fixing of complexity by using a 2 x 2 matrix was typical of functional approaches to the subject matter and, whilst the book claimed to be able to identify and encourage alternatives to functionalism, it had fallen into the self-same trap of conservatism. Much attention was paid to the concept of paradigm itself and the ways in which it diverged from the 'view' (sic) that Kuhn had of the term. The component dimensions of the subjective­ objective dichotomy, as outlined in Figure 2, were also attacked as was the supposed misuse of the term 'ontology'. What critics found most disturbing, however, was the notion of paradigm incommensurability to which Burrell and Morgan had clung so tenaciously. Here the idea that paradigm could not speak unto paradigm was taken so far as to suggest that the concepts and terms and methods of one

paradigm were not translatable into those used by another paradigm. The absence of translation rules was presumed by Burrell and Morgan to lead to the mutual exclusivity of paradigms. They argued that since the meta-theoretical assumptions of the paradigms differed there could be no translation rules which would be totally effective. The commentators, however, argued in favour of the possibility of some translation being available and in this assertion, as we have seen, there is certainly some support from Kuhn himself in his later publications. What Burrell and Morgan's book may have succeeded in doing was to highlight the break­ down of the field of organization theory into warring encampments and to demonstrate that functionalist approaches, whilst popular, politi­ cally superior and common, were by no means the only possible avenues open to organizational analysis. The text articulated and legitimated to some extent the voices of those who did not share the functionalist orientation. Notice here that the argument within Sociological Paradigms and Organizational Analysis is not that function­ alism is representative of a normal science in our discipline and that it will be replaced eventually and inevitably by another single approach after a period of revolution (it la Kuhn). Rather it is argued that the normal state of organizational science is pluralistic. This does not mean that organizational analysis is 'immature' or is awaiting its normal science phase with bated breath. It is simply that a plurality of legitimate and competing perspectives is to be expected in all sciences but especially in the social ones. Despite the criticisms levelled against Burrell and Morgan and despite some pressure from the publishers, the authors did not produce a second edition. They had seen the way in which writers modify their work in response to criticism and the tendency for this type of modification to resemble a watering down of radical arguments. They eschewed the opportunity to respond to the critics for this simple if dubious reason of maintaining 'purity'. The present author dares to believe that the book stands as a piece written at a time when functionalism was in decline but the legitimacy of alternative perspectives was still in doubt. It provided the means for some organization analysts to embrace other frames of reference and not worry too much about the orthodoxy. However, the legitimacy of the other paradigms today is by no means assured. If one looks at radical structuralism, for example, then its vitality and some might even say its viability have certainly been thrown into doubt since the late 1 980s. On the other hand, the functionalist orthodoxy - which is not the same thing at all as normal science - remains very well entrenched.

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As we have already seen, the dimension which really irritates the functionalists in the area most especially, but also tends to concern all those who believe in the values of debate, argument and compromise, is the notion of incommensur­ ability. For it hits at the very core of the widely held belief in rational academic debate and discourse. What the proponents of the thesis of paradigm commensurability fail to understand is that one of the few lessons of history, in things epistemological, is that despite the best endea­ vours of many able minds the dream of translation remains just that. One does not have to fully embrace the work, for example, of Hofstede ( 1 99 1 ) to believe that culture affects perspectives on organizations, but it is clear to some nevertheless that culture does have con­ sequepces, not only making language often difficult to learn but implying that its nuances are rarely if ever to be understood by a non­ native. Wittgenstein said much the same in the famous aphorism 'meaning is use'. Here in that most eloquent yet enigmatic phrase is the assertion that if you don't use a language on a regular basis then you cannot fully understand how it is used by natives. The problem of the incommensurability of paradigms remains at the very centre of the issue of organizational paradigms. There is one group - the 'paradigm warriors' is the name by which they are sometimes called - who continue to advocate the notion of incommensurability (e.g. Jackson and Carter 1 993). For them, the separation of the approaches taken within the paradigm from those without is of crucial importance because what this isolationism (Reed 1 985) does is to ensure for the internal membership, in the short term at least, the survival of that approach and, more importantly perhaps, of the ideological standpoint from which it is made. The belief in incommensur-

ability then has its origins in politics as well as in epistemology. The attacks upon 'paradigm warriors' which depend for their force on issues based upon logic, linguistic theory and discourse analysis (e.g. Willmott 1 993) fail to recognize this. These criticisms also fail to appreciate that not only is discourse about power but con­ comitantly power without discourse is much weaker. Dialogue is a weapon of the powerful. Much of what one reads today about normal science and paradigms is concerned with some Habermasian injunction to engage in speech and to talk through one's problems. Much of what one reads is predicated upon the university culture of debate, argumentation and dialogue. The presentation of ideas is often seen as separate from the intellectual force of one's argument (which partly explains the inability of many scholars to lecture effectively) yet it is very obvious that the latter is heavily dependent upon convincing the audience of the utility of the thought contained in the presentation. It is almost impossible to escape from these conven­ tions, for as I sit here writing this paragraph I am concerned to convince you, the reader, that what I am saying is worth listening to. Universities rely upon the goodwill of those who try to speak (or more often write) to others in convincing terms. Thus the threat to this universal notion of truth was and is too much for some to bear. A hostile response to the concept of paradigm closure in organization theory has come from Lex Donaldson ( 1 985), whose aptly named text In Defence of Organization Theory attempts inter alia to refute the arguments contained in

Sociological Paradigms and Organizational Ana­ lysis (Burrell and Morgan 1 979). Donaldson

argues that structural functionalism has never been in a state of crisis and in fact has been very well able to deal with new theoretical and

PARADIGMS, META PHORS, DISCO URSES, GENEALOGIES practical issues when they arise. He maintains that core functionalist concepts are very sound both conceptually and philosophically. He argues for a revamped contingency theory which would carry the field any day in the face of the insubstantial work carried out by the critics of functionalism. The editors of the journal Organization Studies devoted a whole issue to the Donaldson piece in 1 988 and invited a number of scholars to talk about 'offence or defence' (cf. Hassard 1 993: 7 1) . Donaldson's triumphalism at this time was not easy to understand because for many the debate high­ lighted the existence of paradigms and their potency in explaining different philosophical positions. To Donaldson it showed the opposite. But perhaps this difference is in the nature of paradigm thinking itself! At about the same time, Reed ( 1 98 5) also discussed these issues, but by no means from the same position as Donaldson. Nor however should it be assumed that he came close to accepting the arguments for paradigm closure. His book Redirections in Organizational Analysis ends with a discussion of what these redirections for the discipline might actually look like. Four possibilities were outlined: integrationism, iso­ lationism, imperialism and pluralism. The first refers to the hope for eclectic reconciliation; the second to the strategy of paradigm separatism; the third to the success of one theoretical position over another; and the fourth to that which Reed personally advocates, which involves the rejection of any one overarching approach and the promulgation of the notion of 'let a thousand flowers bloom'. I n a similar vein, Hassard ( 1 993: 74-5) argues more recently that we now face a crisis. The crisis is deepened by the fact that the notion of paradigm heterodoxy is often joined by one of paradigm closure. Writers who specify a range of paradigm candidates often add that these various communities are incommensurable with one another. Professional practice in different traditions is based on philosophies which are antithetical; scientists from different paradigms do not debate, they talk through one another. This is a problem in that paradigm incommensurability seems to infer [sic] an extreme form of sociological relativism. If scientists cannot debate how can progress be signalled?

If this has any validity to it as an assertion then we must, perforce, concern ourselves with the recent attempts to engage in the widest debates possible concerning scientific progress. In other words, the widespread retreat from incommen­ surability needs to be chronicled in some depth. And here the work of Gareth Morgan is central both for his contribution to the discipline and for

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the symbolic nature of his work. For we see in his progress the European/North-American tension clearly expressed.

METAPHORS

The notion of metaphor has been around as an analytical device for centuries and is clearly sig­ nalled by Vico, for example, to be of consider­ able importance. Within social science as a whole, a number of writers sought, in the post­ war period, to elevate the notion to a high place in the lexicon of devices for understanding that are open to us. However, in organization theory the metaphor approach came to be used primarily because of Morgan's ( 1 988) book

Images of Organization. Gareth Morgan has attempted to move organization theory in the direction of more pluralist perspectives and since arriving in North America has gone on to do much to extend the range of approaches more or less acceptable within orthodox organization theory. His doc­ torate, completed at the University of Lancaster, identified the importance of metaphor as a way of seeing the world within each of the four paradigms identified in Burrell and Morgan ( 1 979). On his move to North America there was a concomitant and very marked shift in his intellectual position. Metaphor become the vehicle through which paradigms become actua­ lized in the minds of the theorist and Morgan sought to identify the dominant ones active within each paradigm. Thus we are presented with a variety of metaphors which inform the analysis of organizations in the 1 980s. Morgan's thesis contained a quarter of a million words and within it he pointed out that metaphors are but one of the tropes or figures of speech which we need to recognize. The saliency of synecdoche, metonymy and irony is intriguingly mentioned but the follow-up book to Images of Organiza­ tion on each of these has yet to appear. The book which did appear was a beautifully crafted piece which 'attempts to develop the more practical implications of the basic ideas' ( 1 988: 345). It thus shortens considerably the arguments within the thesis; indeed, many of the major conceptual items are to be found in the footnotes rather than in the body of the text. It might be argued that the impact of this book was greater than that of Sociological Paradigms and Organiza­ tional Analysis (SPOA), for not only was it written in a non-technical way but it opened up the 'paradigm' concept by quite clearly turning its back on incommensurability. Morgan articulates, in the final sections of the text, an integrating metaphor of binocular vision

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whereby, it is argued, two metaphors taken together can provide a better picture of the reality under investigation than a single meta­ phor. In the same way as two eyes are superior to one, then two metaphors are better than a single one. But how metaphors can be processed by the equivalent of the visual regions of the brain is left unexplored. The assumption is made - rather than defended - that metaphors are not incompatible. On the contrary they can suppo­ sedly be synthesized into a superior binocular vision. The other implicit metaphor which underpins the book is typical of the mid 1 980s. It is that of the supermarket of ideas. It is clear that incom­ mensurability is no longer central to Morgan's ideas because within organization studies, metaphors can be picked off the supermarket shelf at will. Of course they bring with them all kinds of assumptions but these are merely part of the product. Had Burrell and Morgan used the same metaphor in 1 979 then the equivalent position within SPOA would have been that whole sections of the hypermarket were out of bounds to shoppers by dint of the shoppers' refusal to enter areas where there was nothing of interest to them. The meat, baby food, pet food and alcohol sections would all have been ignored by paradigm equivalents of vegetarians, the childless and so on. But when writing by himself for an American audience, M organ told readers of Images of Organization that, if they so wished, nothing was out of bounds and they could roam at will in the market for and of ideas. They were welcomed as consumers. Whilst incommensur­ ability within SPOA had meant that the message there and at that time was entirely different, for functionalists were told that they could not get their acquisitive hands on genuine 'green' products in that textual hypermarket, in Images of Organization the store was thrown open to them to plunder and pillage as they saw fit. They were licensed by the book to roam in stereo­ typical North American tourist fashion. Once again, the search for a good deal suppressed any concerns that translation from domestic to overseas languages would not be possible. Nothing could be kept from 'the tourist gaze' (Urry 1 990). This opening up of ideas, the powerful and persuasive way in which the book was written, and the distancing within the book from the segregating limitations of SPOA , had a tremen­ dous impact. Of course, critics pointed out that metaphors are also static concepts and that the development of new ones (stolen often from the natural sciences which in turn take their ideas from classical literature, e.g. chaos) does little to escape from the presupposition that they are ways of organizing, capturing and fixing

thought. There is clear evidence, too, of the importance of Stephen Pepper's ( 1 948) work on world hypotheses for Morgan at this stage, for Pepper's influence is much more obvious than that of Thomas Kuhn. Of course, we should not underestimate the sophistication of the 'way in which the ideas are expressed in the text, for Morgan demonstrates his erudition in the literature very clearly. Many courses were and still are taught using this framework, and the wealth of examples contained within it and their intrinsic interest for our discipline make Images of Organization a very important book for the 1 980s. Just as Morgan hoped, its influence in teaching has been considerable, for the text and the notion of metaphors generally has become a key organizing principle for many courses.

MEANWHILE, BACK IN EUROPE

The development of Morgan's position was carefully watched by his ex-colleagues in Lan­ caster where there was a ready willingness to attribute his obvious intellectual movement to cultural and institutional pressures. Talk at this time, in the very early 1 980s, was of the im­ pending and longed-for demise of the Thatcher government and, less certainly, of the work of the French philosopher Michel Foucault. We had been introduced to his ideas, originally in the form of the book Discipline and Punish ( 1 977), by Bob Cooper. My personal reaction to reading that text was akin to confronting a major Gestalt shift in which the patterning of the world became seen through new and improved lenses. For Morgan the future was binoculars: in Lancaster it was panopticons, something made apparent in 1 984, when a piece written on Foucault's contribution to organizational ana­ lysis was submitted to A SQ. I treasure its referees' comments to this day, for all three questioned the relevance of 'an unknown French philosopher' and asked 'what could an American audience learn' from such thought. My under­ standing of the importance of the North Atlantic Ocean as a divide as well as a communication route was firmly fixed at this moment. Yet it is perhaps a relevant question which the next section will attempt to answer.

FOUCAUL T'S PENDULUM

Although this raises important issues about the relevance of authors in comprehending their own work, it is arguable that the corpus of Foucault's work can only be fully understood in terms of the personal and intellectual context in which he

PARADIGMS, METAPHORS, DISCO URSES, GENEALOGIES found himself. The centrality of the human body to his writings and the notion of pleasure - and of pain - appear to place him at some distance from the study of organizations. In Discipline and Punish, however, he specifically addresses the issue of contingency and organizational goals when he claims that all organizations resemble prisons. Thus the themes of the body, power and pleasure in organized and well disciplined contexts are ones which illuminate the study of organizations with an intensity of perspicacity. He had much distaste for classifi­ catory schemata and attempted to avoid being labelled himself. Yet, of course, he is vulnerable to such devices. Foucault, it is authoritatively said, was one of the first French citizens to die of AIDS. His untimely death in 1 984 did nothing to stem the burgeoning interest in his articulation of his intellectual approaches. Note that the plural term has to be used here, for it is clear that Foucault's hatred of being labelled, boxed in and categorized affected his own body and his own body of work. He sought to evade fixed terms as best he could and changed his own intellectual position constantly. His movement from what are called the 'archaeological' to the 'genealogi­ cal' orientations will be discussed a little later, but it must be recognized that we, ourselves, are fixing in time and space, within a relatively crude classification, ideas from an intellectual of con­ siderable stature that are essentially dynamic. This makes his work uncannily difficult for Anglophone audiences to fully appreciate, for it transgresses many of our assumptions. Yet his work is directly relevant to organization studies for he concentrates, in his later work particu­ larly, on issues in which our discipline is traditionally interested. At first sight, however, such are the difficulties in comprehending his ideas that their relevance for all of social science and not just organization theory needs careful articulation. To do so requires more space than is available here, so the reader is referred to Dreyfus and Rabinow's ( 1 982) lucid text on Foucault's work. Certain key points, never­ theless, need some attention here.

Archaeology and Discourse

Whilst the metaphor of the careful uncovering of history and historical artefacts has influenced many social scientists with the appeal of its sedimentary imagery, Foucault does not, in his early work, adopt a crude structuralism in his discussion of archaeology. For him, discourse analysis is that method which 'the archaeologist' performs upon the past, seeing within history the precise codes of knowledge which have lain there

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awaiting our discovery. Any archaeologists of knowledge must distantiate themselves from the past and seek to be objective, but they realize very quickly and very clearly that our present period itself contains discourses. Our codes of understanding today are therefore discourses too, subject to the same rules of articulation as those located in the past. Our contemporary discourses are subject to the same inflexibilities and problems as any theories emanating from the Middle Ages. Discourse is put as far away from its social setting as possible in this early work of Foucault and, acting as the archae­ ologist, he attempts to discover the rules which govern its own self-regulation. To do this, he enlisted the help of a rather short-lived notion that of the 'episteme'. The episteme unites the set of discursive practices which exist at any one time so that in any given epoch one will find that a particular episteme predominates. Modernity then becomes characterized by the episteme, put crudely and genderly, in which Man invents himself. This episteme required a catastrophic upheaval, an 'archaeological mutation', which signalled that the Classical Age had come to an end before it could struggle into existence itself. Since it first struggled for life it has succeeded in coming to dominate the epoch. In his book The Archaeology of Knowledge ( 1 972), Foucault takes his method to new-found depths of analysis. In the text he is interested in 'serious speech acts', mindful that the context in which this sort of discursive practice takes place is crucial for understanding profound differences in meaning. Ludwig Wittgenstein had obviously noted this tendency too and this interpretation had an important effect upon Thomas Kuhn. But Foucault is relatively silent on the whole issue of paradigms as ' language games' . Dreyfus and Rabinow ( 1 982: 60) conclude that this silence is because he misunderstood the notion and its Kuhnian intent. The silence may also have been a result of his unwillingness to con­ front ideas from outside a particular realm of his own discourse. He was to say later in life that he had not read Habermas's work on discourse when this, too, would seem to have been a useful exercise. Certainly, he was not ignorant of the existence of such literature. But what of the relevance of the archaeologi­ cal method to organization studies? Before we attempt to show this, perhaps it would be helpful to also consider Foucault's work on genealogy.

Genealogy

Once he had dispensed with the archaeological method, Foucault turned to genealogy. Dreyfus

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400

and Rabinow ( 1 982: 1 06) ask, rhetorically, 'what is genealogy?' The answer, they say, is genealogy opposes itself to traditional historical method: its aim is to 'record the singularity of events outside of any monotonous finality' . . . . For the genealogist there are no fixed essences, no under­ lying laws, no metaphysical finalities. Genealogy seeks out discontinuities where others have found continuous development. It finds recurrences and play where others found progress and seriousness. It records the past of mankind to unmask the solemn hymns of progress. Genealogy avoids the search for depth. Instead it seeks the surfaces of events. small details, minor shifts and subtle contours.

Thus the search for the modernist goals of hidden meaning, for truth, for the meanings of the unconscious rests on a failure to recognize that these are shams. Foucault says that we should shun these sorts of activities for there are no essences which we can uncover. Thus, Plato is the archenemy to the genealogist, whereas, of course, Nietzsche is the central, heroic figure. The foundations of morality are to be found not in ideal truth but in pudenda origo with their lowly origins. History is about lies not truth. It is about a struggle for domination acted out in a play of wills. But there is no one who is responsible for the emergence of any event; for the genealogist there is no individual or any collectivity who can move history. For we all live in the interstice created by this play of dominations. And all that we see is all that there is. This is important for it firmly suggests that the relativism of human conceptualizations of truth, beauty and virtue needs to be recognized. These are ever changing notions and are not located in something essential. Even the human body is not to be understood as something with an essence which has stood the test of time over millennia. Just the opposite. It is a notion which has undergone many changes. And the human body was to be one of Foucault's major concerns. In Discipline and Punish ( 1 977), Foucault reversed the priority of archaeology to genealogy by privileging the latter. The genealogist is por­ trayed as a diagnostician who concentrates on the relationship between power, knowledge and the body. At this point, Foucault turns organization theory around by focusing on the body as the locale where minute social practices meet the large scale organization of power. The organization of the body and its pleasure become a prime area for theoretical and practical debate. Whilst not taking Merleau-Ponty's notion of Ie corps propre the lived body as opposed to the physical body - to heart, Foucault does explore the way in which -

the body is also directly involved in a political field. . . . Power relations have an immediate hold upon it; they invest it. mark it, train it, torture it, force it to carry out tasks, to perform ceremonies, to emit signs. ( 1 977: 25)

This wonderful passage prefigures his interest in the political technology of the body which, it is claimed, has the greatest significance for Western society (Shilling 1 993: 75-82). But we should not assume that this analysis suggests that it is the state which is the key to understanding power­ knowledge and the body. In fact, Foucault does not believe that the state plays a major role in this at all. Rather it is in institutions, like prisons, asylums, schools, factories and bar­ racks, that one finds the loci of power. The metaphor of the prison is central here for all these types of institutions are claimed to be imprisoning, and in a famous section of Discipline and Punish Foucault articulates the importance of Bentham's Panopticon as mark­ ing the search for the 'ultimate managerial tool'. Here the bodies of inmates are subject to the disciplinary technologies of close surveillance, the gaze and the process of 'normalization'. What Foucault does is to open up the analysis of organizations to new notions in which the body plays a central role as a target for a plethora of disciplinary technologies located within organizational forms which all bear an uncanny resemblance to prisons. Power comes from the knowledge of the body which develops in the minds and comes into the hands of 'the judges of normality'. These are organizationally based professionals who are key parts of the 'somatic society' (Turner 1 992: 1 2) .

Foucault and Organizational Analysis

Whilst the concern for metaphors drove the teaching of courses in many programmes, the Foucaldian legacy - for by 1 984, after his death, this is all we had - drove considerable amounts of research (for example, Hollway 1 9 9 1 ; Townley 1 994; Rose 1 990). Of course, it would be foolish to say that many academics embraced this particular French philosopher with any relish, for his work, as we have said, is difficult to pin down and is theoretically challenging. Yet within organization studies, attempts have been made to elevate surveillance to a primary focus of attention and, almost weekly. new analyses of panopticism appear which show the relevance of Foucault to the mid 1 990s through his concen­ tration on power-knowledge. Yet archaeological and genealogical methods are not in much favour in many areas of the discipline. Warner's ( 1 994)

PARADIGMS, METAPHORS, DISCO URSES, GENEALOGIES Table 1

401

Two analytical approaches found in Foucault's writings

The same

and

The different

The archaeological method Uncover those rules which regulate and govern social practices, and which are unknown to the actors involved

The genealogical method Record the singularity of surface events, looking at the meaning of small details, minor shifts and subtle contours

It is possible to achieve some partial distancing from these institutional bonds by a bracketing of 'accepted truth'

There are no fixed essences or underlying laws. There is discontinuity and arbitrariness. Since the world is as it appears, one seeks out the 'superficial secrets'

Act as an 'excavator', revealing depth and interiority

Act as a recorder of accidents, chance and lies. Oppose the search for depth and interiority

recent review of organizational behaviour pays no attention to his work whatsoever. Table 1 attempts to place these two very different approaches developed by Foucault alongside each other. What this oversimplifica­ tion does is to show that the genealogical approach is much more in tune with postmo­ dernism whereas, perhaps, the archaeological method stands much more in tune with modern­ ism. Foucault turned his back on discourse analysis, saying that: 'I confused it too much with systematicity, the theoretical form, or something like a paradigm'. Genealogy stands much more happily with postmodernism, we might therefore argue. For us to label his later work as 'postmodern' would be fair perhaps but we must note that he explicitly rejected this epithet, preferring instead to claim that any classification scheme, any labelling device was itself part of a field of power-knowledge in which the speaker as well as the one spoken about became subject to disciplining. This is why he is difficult to classify as a thinker because almost any work that he did was self-consciously opposed to the piece which preceded it. Move­ ment allowed the evasion of capture, The whole issue of the links between post­ modernism and organizational analysis will be picked up in a later section, but first we must, albeit all too briefly, consider the work of Jacques Derrida whose contribution to social science in this period was also of considerable import. Derrida is only one of a number of French writers in the last fifteen years who have attempted to shift social theory away from the certainties of the 1 960s. The reasons for this concentration in France of intellectuals sympa­ thetic to the embraces of postmodernism cannot be addressed here, but the Anglophone derision for 'Parisian fashions' is very indicative of a hostility to theorizing and a concern to protect naive empiricism from the depredations of the slavering theoretician. Derrida is chosen here

merely to symbolize this type of work. He is a cipher for a movement which we watch from afar. For him, social life is made up of texts which are constantly read in very different ways so that our understandings are continually being broken down and reassembled. Just as Foucault seeks to avoid imprisonment for his ideas, Derrida argues that at least a double reading of any text is possible. Fixity is no longer tenable. Derrida's notion of deconstructionism has proved to be a powerful stimulus to p05tmodern forms of thought. It asserts a rather different way of thinking about and 'reading' texts. Whilst under modernism it was believed that the medium and the message were tightly inter­ connected, Derrida sees these as 'continually breaking apart and reattaching in new combina­ tions'. Texts are the way in which writers and readers come to understand the world and each new level of understanding produces new texts which are added to the textual weave. Inter­ textual weaving comes to have a life of its own for we write things of which we know naught and our words cannot convey what we mean. Language works through us, not the other way round. So, for the deconstructionist, one text dissolves into another, one text is located within another, one text is built upon another. Thus the objective of deconstructionism is to break the power of the author to claim the primacy of a particular narrative or to impose meanings upon the reader. All fixed systems of representation become seen as merely illusory and as capable of at least a double reading (Cooper 1 989: 492-5 0 1 ) . The key form o f discourse in postmodernism is the collage or montage. The inherent hetero­ geneity of this form of cultural work means that both producers and consumers of the artefact participate in its meaning generation. This is profoundly democratic, based as it is upon popular conceptualizations of the product within the audience, but of course the very incoherence of many conceptualizations does allow for mass-

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market manipulation. The montage is vulnerable to recombinatory meanings which are never fixed and never stable but often they may well be exploitative and imprisoning.

POSTMODERNISM AND ORGANIZA TIONAL ANAL YSIS

Those certainties of the post World War II world which supposedly confronted the organization theorists of the 1 960s relied for much of their solid existence upon a belief in the pillars of modern­ ism. Science and technology were seen as deter­ minate of a future which, since it grew directly from what was in front of our eyes, was knowable for those observers located in the present. Time was linear and tomorrow was likely to be better than today. Bureaucracy, rationality and effec­ tiveness were unquestioned as the elements upon which organizations relied for their legitimacy. Contingencies were merely those elements which interfered with the operation of well tried and tested principles of organization design and functioning. Contingency 'theory', a misnomer perhaps, articulated in good practical and relevant terms the questions of 'how' to organize. At this time, although the evidence was clearer then than it is today, few saw the defining organizational form of the whole twentieth century to be the death camps of Auschwitz. Modernism is about the death camps in a fairly uncontentious way even though its apologists seek to distance the likes of Auschwitz from the achievements of the modernist society, based as it is supposedly upon critical enquiry and the pursuit of truth. Ritzer's ( 1 993) book The McDonaldization of Society shows how the high achievements of modernity such as the Big Mac are still heavily redolent of the mechanized death of large numbers of creatures; in this case, cattle. But we also know that French soldiers in World War I went to almost certain death at the front, baaing like sheep; we know that the trains into Auschwitz were made up of cattle trucks; and we know that the efficiencies of the Ford motor plants relied heavily upon lessons learnt and technology drawn from the abattoirs of Chicago. The attainments of the organized world of modernism are, in fact, built upon the flesh and bones of the dead and the methods of their speedy and cheap execution. This may offend those who wish to speak only of the achievements of modern society. Yet if we forget that alongside this fashionable and sanitized view lies a much darker picture - a vision of death, pain and torture - then we lose some of the sense of emnity to modernism that the postmodernists have sought to engender.

Now this is not to say that Foucault or Derrida have written at length on the limitations of modernism, but there is clear implication in their epistemologies that the old certainties have gone. 'All that is solid melts into air' may well be a refrain with which they would have an affinity. The fin de siecle has brought with it the usual concerns for the century whose end we are witnessing.

FIN DE SIECLE POSTMODERNISM AND THE FUTURE

The end of each century brings with it two zeros on the number of the year. Only this century brings in a new millennium with the requisite three zeros. The cabbalistic significance of this is clear to almost all of us, for a new millennium will surely bring new modes of thinking. Each end of a century allows us to look back at the accomplishments and failings of the previous one hundred years. Every fin de siecle brings with it disappointment and relief for the passing of that era. If we look to the last years of the nineteenth century we see that modernism and the modern world were just appearing (Mestrovic 1 993). The large organizations of the robber barons were gaining a foothold and there was talk in New York, Paris, London and St Petersburg of a moral crisis in which the old values were being challenged by the breakdown in the normative structure of the society. This breakdown was linked in the minds of most commentators to the vast economic restructuring which was taking place in many parts of the globe. Today, globalization is talked about and even analysed but there is also a cabbalistic sense (a la Nostrodamus) of the breakdown of the old order. The nation-state, the bureaucratic organization, the scientific method, the natural world are all concepts which are under threat after a century of superiority. 'Superiority' of course does not mean that these notions have not always been contested. It is more important for us to recognize that it is the fact that they are questioned widely by the powerful (rather than by groups of intellectuals) which makes for the significance of the questioning of these core values. But the powerful do seek narratives which the populace will buy into, in ways which explain their own subordinate role and that of their 'superiors'. The dominant ideology is meant for general consumption (Abercrombie et al. 1 983). So the concepts which have been elaborated in this piece do not fit in well with the needs of the dominant ideology. Paradigms rather than a paradigm, metaphors rather than a complete narrative, discourse rather than a shared lan-

PARADIGMS, METAPHORS, DISCO URSES, GENEALOGIES guage, genealogy rather than the historical method, deconstruction rather than the author­ ity of an author, all that is solid melts into air rather than one-minute management. All of these suggest that we should be uncertain. All of these suggest that knowledge is politicized. All of these suggest that our understandings are limited by our conceptualizations and meta­ theory. If the 1 960s concerned theorizing and its practical utility then we might understand why so few courses in management education today manage to escape from the literature of this golden age of certainty. The literature of this period - the so-called classics - is precisely classical because that age in which it flowered has gone. Today we are much more circumspect about what, if anything, we know. Then, in principle all was knowable. 'Would that it were again' is the heartfelt plea of many a con­ temporary organization theorist. However, the fin de siecle has created new uncertainties for us. Beware of chaos theory and catastrophe theory for they tell us that it is possible to understand major changes by using mathematics, so they are by no means sympto­ matic of the forces for uncertainty. In fact these theories, despite their titles, are the last vestiges of modernity. That chaotic and catastrophic changes are in principle understandable would have been the everyday view of the heroic figures in 1 960s organization theory. No, the uncertain­ ties in our theories are to do with the failure of science to sell its narrative of being a form of knowledge superior to all others in delivering the goods. As a cargo cult of the twentieth century it was remarkably successful but new narratives and new epistemologies now seem more neces­ sary than ever. For science seems to have run out of steam. What do we put in its place? Poetry, literature, art? Can these deliver the goods? Well, of course, whatever these forms of knowledge produce, it is unlikely to look the same as the performativity conscious (Lyotard 1 983) artefacts of the twentieth century. In the classic tension between the Geisteswissenschaften and the Naturwis­ senschaften, surely it is not simply a matter of one achieving re-ascendancy over the other? Of course it is not that simple. But in that antinomy there is an exceptionally good place to attempt to build organization theory for the new millen­ nium. It is deep within premodernity, where we will also find a good time at which to begin an innovative approach to the future of our discipline. For example, if we were to look to the body and the way in which it has been conceptualised since medieval times we would see the 'anato­ mizing urge' being developed. The body, seen as

403

being made up of organs, becomes the dominant metaphor for arranging how those tasks of administration might be carried out - that is to say, organized. Thus we are reliant upon the wounding imperative of the surgeon's knife for the incisiveness of our thought. We anatomize constantly and ask our students in their apprenticeship to do the same to case studies, situations and texts. The cutting edge is the place to be. Whilst one can only point to the sig­ nificance of the anatomical urge, if one was to spend some time looking at Foucault, Derrida and some other social theorists one would find that they are highly resistant to the notion of incision and surgical separation. What remains for organization theory is the task of theorizing the body in such a way as to allow anatomiza­ tion and yet encourage the understanding of visceral morphological flows. Organization theory in the next century may weB attempt to 'shape shift' itself through understanding the premodern concept of the body before it became subject to organizing anatomy, through articu­ lating a way forward from the simple dichoto­ mies of the discipline which rely upon the oblique slash (f) to separate the indivisible, and through embracing the fluidity, flows and liquidity of the human body as being relevant to how we organize. In doing so, much that is new to us can be learned from Foucault and from Derrida. Unifying the body and difference may well be one way forward which reunites us in a common cause. This may not be the building of the Tower but it might be a premodern start for these postmodern times.

REFERENCES Abercrombie, N., Hill, S. and Turner, B.S. ( 1983) The Dominant Ideology Thesis. London: Routledge. Burrell, G. and Morgan, G. ( 1 979) Sociological Paradigms and Organizational A nalysis. London: Heinemann. Clegg, S. ( 1 982) 'Review of Burrell and Morgan ( 1 979)" Organization Studies, 3(4). Cooper, R. ( 1 989) 'Modernism, postmodernism and organizational analysis: the contribution of Jacques Derrida', Organization Studies, 1 0(4): 479-602. Cooper, R. and Burrell, G. ( 1 988) ' Modernism, postmodernism and organizational analysis: an introduction', Organization Studies, 1 0(4): 479-502. Donaldson, 1. ( 1 985) In Defence of Organization Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dreyfus, Hubert and Rabinow, P. ( 1 982) Michel Foucault: beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics. Brighton: Harvester. Foucault, M. ( 1 972) The Archaeology of Knowledge. London: Tavistock.

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Foucault, M . ( 1 977) Discipline and Punish. Harmonds­ worth: Penguin. Friedrichs, R. ( 1 970) A Sociology of Sociology. Free Press. Gioia, D. and Pitre, E. ( 1 993) 'Paradigms lost', Organization Studies. Hassard, J. ( 1 993) Sociology and Organization Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hofstede, G. ( 1 99 1 ) Cultures and Organizations. Maidenhead: McGraw-Hill. Hollway, W. ( 1 99 1 ) Work Psychology and Organiza­ tional Behaviour. London: Sage. Hoskin, K. and MaeVe, R. ( 1 986) 'Accounting and the examination', Accounting, Organizations and Society, 1 05-36. Jackson, N. and Carter, P. ( 1 993) 'Paradigm wars': a response to Hugh Willmott', Organizational Studies, 14(5): 727-30. Kuhn, T.S. ( 1962) The Structure of Scientific Revolu­ tions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Kuhn, T.S. ( 1 970) The Structure of Scientific Revolu­ tions, 2nd edn. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Latour, B. ( 1 982) Science in A ction. Milton Keynes: Open University Press. Lyotard, J . P. ( 1 983) The Postmodern Condition. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Masterman, H. ( 1970) 'The nature of a paradigm', in 1 . Lakatos and A. Musgrave (eds), Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. 59-89. Mestrovic, S. ( 1 993) The Coming Fin de Siecle. London: Routledge. Morgan, G. ( 1 988) Images of Organization. London: Sage.

Mouzelis, N. ( 1 975) Organisation and Bureaucracy, 2nd edn. London: Routledge. Pfeffer, J. ( 1 993) 'Barriers to the advance of organiza­ tional science: paradigm development as a dependent variable', Academy of Management Review, 1 8(4): 599-620. Ray, L. and Reed, M. (eds) ( 1 994) Organizing Modernity. London: Routledge. Reed, M . ( 1 985) Redirections in Organizational Analysis. London: Tavistock. Ritzer, G. ( 1 975) Sociology: a Multiple Paradigm Science. Allyn & Bacon. Ritzer, G. ( 1 993) The McDonaldization of Society. Newbury Park: Pine Forge. Rose, N. ( 1 990) Governing the Soul: the Shaping of the Private Self. London: Routledge. Sankey, H. ( 1 993) 'Kuhn's changing concept of incommensurability', British Journal of the Philo­ sophy of Science, 44: 759-74. Shilling, C. ( 1 993) The Body and Social Theory. London: Sage. Steiner, G. ( 1 975) After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation. Townley, B. ( 1 994) Reframing Human Resource Management. London: Sage. Turner, B. ( 1 992) Regulating Bodies. London: Routledge. Urry, 1. ( 1 990) The Tourist Gaze. Cambridge: Polity Press. Warner, M. ( 1 994) 'Organizational behaviour revis­ ited', Human Relations, 47(10): 1 1 5 1 -66. Willmott, H. ( 1 993) 'Paradigm gridlock: a reply', Organization Studies, 14(5): 727-30. Zwicky, 1. ( 1 992) Lyric Philosophy. Toronto: Uni­ versity of Toronto Press.

17 The Owl of Minerva: Reflections on Theory in Practice RICHARD MARSDEN AND BARBARA TOWNLEY

The relationship between 'theory' and 'practice' is perhaps the most central issue of the whole Handbook. It raises many questions: 'Why do we have an area of work devoted to organization studies?', 'What is it for?', 'What does it do?', 'Whom does it address?', and 'How does it relate to what people ordinarily do at work in organiz­ ations?' These are difficult questions, especially since the Handbook aims to address a diverse, global aUdience, and it is as well that they are left until the end of this book. Let us begin with the common-sense under­ standing of theory and practice. Although it has long been surpassed by developments in the philosophy of social science, most lay people (and not a few organizational analysts) subscribe to this view and, for this reason alone, it must be taken seriously. According to this view, 'theory' refers to the world of thought and reflection, while 'practice' refers to the world of action, of doing things. Theory and practice are construed as distinct. The second is typically considered more real and is usually the arbiter of the first: 'That may be OK in theory, but how would it work in practice?' Theory is construed pejora­ tively as impractical, unrealistic or 'academic'. Practice is construed as the antithesis of theory, as atheoretical. Practitioners often pride them­ selves on their immunity from theory and some academics pride themselves on their distance from the practical world. This philosophically naive view has long been demolished, of course, by philosophers of social science, who have demonstrated conclusively that the most innocent observation of what is 'out there' is conceptually mediated by the ideas in our head (Keat and Urry 1 97 5 ; Sayer 1 992).

Everyone, not just academics, theorizes about the causes and consequences of the social world and acts on this basis. Most practices operatio­ nalize some theory, however implicit, vague and contradictory it may be. Indeed, 'practice' is a theoretical construct and theorizing itself is a practice. But if the common-sense understanding of theory and practice is wrong, the nature of the alternative is much less certain. In this case, what is the relationship between the theorizing of academics and the practice of those constituting organizations? Before exploring this question, we must make some preliminary points. Clearly, there is a variety of organizational practices. While the management of work is normally the focus of organization theory, this has recently been broadened to include the practices that constitute and organize sexuality (Burrell 1 984; Hearn and Parkin 1 987; Hearn et al. 1 989), gender (Mills and Tancred-Sheriff 1 992), emotion (Rafaeli and Sutton 1 989; Mumby and Putnam 1 992; Fineman 1 993), pleasure (Burrell 1 992), war and famine (Jones 1 994), and time and space ( Harvey 1 989). Evidently, there is considerable disagreement over what 'organization' is and how it can and should be studied and acted upon. Although we tend to speak of the generic 'organization theory', just as there is no one organizational practice so there is an assortment of theories that draw attention to some things and shadow others. 'The zoological garden of organizational theorists is crowded with a bewildering variety of specimens,' says Perrow ( 1 980: 259), 'we are not even looking at the same beast.' Organization is a crystal viewed through a kaleidoscope of theories.

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Just as there is a variety of practices and theories, so there is a variety of conceptions of practice and theory. Organization studies parti­ cipates in the debate over what exists 'out there' ( practice or ontology) and how it can be known (theory or epistemology) and the nature of their interrelationship (Keat and Urry 1 975). Are organizations objective, tangible, empirical things or are they more elusive, intersubjective constructs? Similarly, is theory a framework for organizing observation, a synonym for hypoth­ esis or explanation, or is it a conceptualized real object (Sayer 1 992)? For these reasons, 'organization', 'theory', and 'practice' are among the most contested concepts in the human and social sciences. So what? Who cares? Why does it matter? Organization theory matters because it not only reflects the practice of organization, in ways we shall explain, but also helps constitute that practice. One of the ways it does this is by favouring the practices of some groups over others. Organization theory is essentially a theory of, and mostly for, management; it has much less to say of and for those who are managed. The conflict over theories of organiza­ tion matters, then, because it is a contest over the future shaping of organizations and the tangible lives of those who comprise them. This politics of organizations is reflected in the academic politics of theory. As Wolin puts it: 'Theories are not like explorations where a flag is planted for the first time. They are, in the revealing language frequently employed, "attacks" upon another theory. They contest ground that is already held and so they must not only establish their own legitimacy but delegitimate the prevailing theory and its practitioners' ( 1 9 8 1 : 402). Within organization studies, the most notable legitima­ tion struggle is between advocates and oppo­ nents of a positivist organization theory, between 'normal' and 'contra' organization science (Donaldson 1 985; 1 988; Hinings 1 988; Clegg 1 988; Marsden 1 993a). Superimposed on the normal versus contra organization science debate is a pervasive belief that modes of organizing and modes of knowing are fundamentally changing. The object before us (,organization') may be a moving target and our analytical tools of understanding ('theory') may need reformulating. This is the modernism versus postmodernism controversy. This is no academic debate. The belief that the past is no longer an adequate guide to the future is the central message of some influential prescriptions for today's managers: Peters's Liberation Man­ agement ( 1 992), Senge's The Fifth Discipline ( 1 990), Hammer and Champy's Reengineering the Corporation ( 1 993) and Osborne and Gaebler's Reinventing Government ( 1 993).

Hammer and Champy tell us: 'Adam Smith's world and its ways of doing business are yesterday's paradigm' ( 1 993: 1 7 , 47). Tradition, apparently, counts for nothing. Osborne and Gaebler lament: 'we're struggling to figure out a new way . . . so far there is no theory guiding it. People don't have a real clear idea of why past practices aren't working or what a new model might be. So they can't learn from success or failure; there's no theoretical framework people can use to integrate their experiences' ( 1 993: 32 1 ) . These books reflect a belief that there is a fundamental transformation going on in organizational practices and the way in which they are managed, and urge managers to break with the past. We must begin again, afresh, anew. What does this tell us of the relationship between organization theory and practice? Do these books he'rald the dissolution of the modern organizational form, Weber's bureaucratic organization, and the creation of the postmo­ dern organization? If the owl of Minerva flies only at dusk, perhaps the apparent twilight of modernity can illuminate our understanding of the past and, on this basis, we can better assess the claim that it is no longer an accurate guide to the future. To this end, we begin by reevaluating the work of two of modernity's most powerful analysts, Marx and Weber, for organization studies has developed within and against their legacy. This develop­ ment has been shaped by disagreements over the question: can organizations be studied in the same way as nature (Donaldson 1 985)? For this reason, we build on this account of Marx and Weber by describing the development of first normal and then contra organization science and consider their practical implications. We con­ clude that rather than choose between normal and contra organization science, it is more productive to investigate the nature of the object over which they disagree.

BACK TO THE FUTURE : M ARX, WEBER AND ORGANIZATION

The normal science of organization needs little introduction. It builds on the belief that organizations are hard, empirical things capable of being studied using scientific techniques (Donaldson 1 985). Normal science typically presents a teleological history of its own conceptual formation and leaves the impression that things could not possibly be other than they are (Kuhn 1 970). The origins of organization studies are normally traced to Weber, who is construed as an advocate of the modern bureaucratic corporation as a model of capitalist

THEOR Y IN PRA CTICE efficiency. He is equally well known as a critic of Marx. Weber's work was coopted, within American sociology, in the Cold War against the Soviet Union and it became taken for granted, since so few read their work, that Weber and Marx are antithetical and that Marx has little to say on 'organization': 'Marx not only left no theory of organization, he left little room for one to develop' (Clegg and Higgins 1 987: 209). The collapse of the Soviet Union, and its satellite states, seemed to reinforce the popular belief that 'Marxism is Wrong, and Thankfully, Dead' (Buss 1 993) and to legitimate the evangelical fervour with which the market is celebrated during the current intensification of the globa­ lization of capital (Peck and Richardson 1 99 1) . There i s n o alternative, i t would seem. Practi­ cally and theoretically it is important to scrutinize this prevailing view. To explore an alternative practical future, we want to sketch an alternative conceptual past by dragging organization studies out of the shadow of 'Weber versus Marx'. This is a good time to rethink this textbook cliche. The revolts in Europe during 1 989 were a practical critique both of regimes constructed in Marx's name and of Weber's thoughts on the indestructibility of bureaucratic power. Marx and Weber are theorists of modernity par excellence. The twilight of modernity can help us better under­ stand their work and this is a basis on which to develop an understanding of postmodernity. Understanding of Marx and Weber is constantly revised and there is now a basis for reexamining their relationship (L6with 1 993; Sayer 1 99 1 ) . As Sayer puts it, what they agree upon is more important than what divides them and 'provides a basis, perhaps, for going beyond both' ( 1 99 1 : 3). Together, Marx and Weber have much to teach us about organization, capitalism and modernity.

Marx: the Problem of Modernity

The hallmark of modernity is the creation of 'man', '1', the abstract citizen. Since modernity preoccupies many organization theorists today (Clegg 1 990; Hassard and Parker 1 993), it is worth recalling that this is the problem with which Marx began 1 50 years ago in his critique of the first philosopher of modernity, Hegel (Marx 1 843). He construes this problem as the dissolution of feudalism's fixed, personal rela­ tions of dependency into the abstract, atomized monads of civil society: they crowd by one another as though they had nothing in common, nothing to do with one another. and their only agreement is the tacit one,

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that each keeps to his own side of the pavement, so as not to delay the opposing streams of the crowd, while it occurs to no man to honour another with so much as a glance. The brutal indifference, the unfeeling isolation of each in his private interest becomes the more repellant and offensive, the more these individuals are crowded together, within a limited space. And, however much one may be aware that this isolation of the individual, this narrow self-seeking is the fundamental principle of our society everywhere, it is nowhere so shamelessly barefaced, so self-conscious as just here in the crowding of the great city. This dissolution of mankind into monads of which each one has a separate principle and a separate purpose, the world of atoms, is here carried out to its utmost extreme. (Engels 1 969: 58, our emphasis)

These words by Engels, describing life on the streets of London, were written as Marx scrutinized Hegel's concept of the state - the source, incidentally, of the concept of bureau­ cracy (Albrow 1 992). They describe Marx's initial explicandum: the 'narrow self-seeking' of the alienated monad of modernity. The dis­ organization of life on the streets in 'civil society' is the problem Marx set out to explain, not the organization of life in the factory. This atom or monad is no fiction or philosophical nicety, but a palpable reality on the streets - then and now. We can extend Engels's description to include the atomized users of the information super­ highway, the narcissistic individuals described by Lasch ( 1 979) and Callinicos's 'sinister, centre­ less, chaos', a 'violent, illiterate mass loboto­ mized by television, all coherent understanding lost as, their attention span dwindling, they hop from channel to channel' ( 1 989: 1 44). Given the contemporary salience of this problem of modernity and the belief that Marx has little to contribute to our understanding, it is worth reflecting on Marx's attempted explanation and its relevance to understanding 'organization'. Marx reasons thus: modern 'Man' is produced by the dissolution of feudalism and the develop­ ment of new forms of organizing production. The further back in history we delve, the more we find that the individual is dependent on others, a member of a greater whole. Para­ doxically, the 'isolated' individual's semblance of independence is a product of modern, developed social relations. The human being is 'an animal which can individuate itself only in the midst of society' ( 1 858: 84). We must, therefore, explain the 'alien powers' controlling this apparently free and independent monad, i.e. show how it is 'already determined by society' ( 1 858: 248, Marx's emphasis). Marx seeks an explanation of these 'alien powers' in the 'anatomy' of civil society ( 1 859: 20), by which he means 'the

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material foundation, the skeletal structure as it were, of its organization' ( 1 858: 1 1 0). Marx construes civil society as the surface of an object, a product of a process taking place beneath it, which he explains in terms of the 'moving unity' and 'inner necessity' of the elements comprising 'the inner organization of the capitalist mode of production' ( 1 864: 8 3 1 ) . The name of this 'inner structure' and 'complicated social process' ( 1 864: 830) - which 'actually conceals the inner connection behind the utter indifference, isola­ tion, and alienation' of the problematic 'abstract private person' - is capital. The primum mobile of capitalist production is the creation of a surplus by organizing labour into a productive power or 'force'. This is 'the absolute motive and content' of the capitalist's activity ( 1 866: 990). For Marx, the organization of labour into a productive power and the dissolution of feudalism's fixed, personal rela­ tions of dependency into the abstract, atomized monads of 'civil society' are sides of the same process. Capitalism and modernity are internally related, facets of the same nexus of production relations. The same process that organizes people into a productive power within the factory creates the atomized monads of moder­ nity on the streets. Whatever explains how labour is organized into a productive power, objectifies or 'subsumes' it as the ' force' of capital, will also explain how people are rendered the 'abstract' monads of civil society. The problem with Marx's model of capital is that while he establishes the necessity for the organization of labour into a productive power for capital, he does not explain how this organization is achieved. Put simply: he explains the 'why' (the motive) of organization, but not the 'how' (the means).

Weber: without Regard for Persons

Weber and Marx agree that society is dominated by capitalism and that its distinctiveness lies in the organization of production, and they are both interested in the contrast between earlier personalized and modern impersonal modes of domination. The concept linking them is Weber's ' rationalization': the calculation between end, means and the results of social action through the application of impersonal rules. Capitalism, says Weber, has produced 'a rational organization of labour, which nowhere previously existed' (cited in Sayer 1 99 1 : 93). Rationalization works by eliminating from business those human, emotional elements that escape calculation:

Precision. speed. unambiguity, knowledge ofthe files, continuity. discretion. unity, strict subordination, reduction of friction and of material and personal costs - these are raised to the optimum point in the strictly bureaucratic administration. . . . Bureau­ cratization offers above all the optimum possibility for carrying through the principle of specializing administrative functions according to purely objec­ tive considerations . . . . The 'objective' discharge of business primarily means a discharge of business according to calculable rules and 'without regard/or persons'. (cited in Bauman 1 989: 1 4, our emphasis)

Bureaucratic administration is rational not only because of its impersonal formalism and its machine-like efficiency but also, and most fundamentally, because it is based on knowledge and technical expertise. Rationalization is a process of domination based on seemingly apolitical techniques. The rationalization of economic activity is part of a broader process of rationalization, which affects the state, church, army and university, subsumed by Weber under the concept of bureaucratization. Rationalization, then, is a multiplicity of distinct, but interrelated, processes with different historical sources, developing at different rates and furthering different interests. Rationalization, rather than capitalism per se, is the root of the modern world. Capitalism did not create rationalization, rather rationalization facilitated the development of capitalism. 'Capit­ alism is but one theatre among others in which the drama of rationality is played out' (Sayer 1 99 1 : 1 34). It is for this reason that Weber is circumspect in prescribing remedies for capita­ lism's problems. Since Weber is often portrayed as an enthusiastic exponent of rationalization, it is worth stressing that he finds administration 'without regard for persons' deeply morally and politically problematic. Rationalization enhances efficiency, but it also dehumanizes. and the tension between formal and substantive ration­ ality is an important cause of social problems. Far from opposing Marx's analysis, Weber complements, broadens and extends it. Rationa­ lization is the mode of organization Marx does not explain, the mode of acting of capital, the mode of calculating of the monad of modernity, Homo economicus. Weber theorizes about the essential conditions of rational calculation: the nexus linking wage labour, private property, technology, law, the market and the state.

The Creation of Organization

The work of Marx and Weber is the stage upon which practitioners perform. The practical stimulus to the study of organization came

THEOR Y IN PRA CTICE from men, such as Ure, Gilbreth, Taylor, Ford, Fayol, Barnard and Urwick, who wanted to recruit social science to the task of efficiently organizing labour into a productive power for capital. They set the prevailing conception of practice for organization studies: management. The imperative for the study of 'organization' came from the marginalist 'revolution' against Marx and the resultant neo-classical economics. ! Whereas, for Marx, the abstract individual of modernity is the phenomenon to be explained, neo-classical economics accepts it as given. It abstracts individuals from their social context to form Homo economicus and abstracts material things from the social relations that produced them to form the 'economy' . It then develops an a priori model of rational economic action between these abstractions. This double abstrac­ tion expels from economic analysis 'power' and 'social relations', the nature of the employment relationship and the organization of work. Economics delegates these problems to comple­ mentary, but subordinate, disciplines that devel­ oped within the theoretical space of economists' implicit social ontology. Organization studies is one such discipline. This theoretical imperative combined with the influence of practical theor­ ists, such as Barnard ( 1 938), to define the object of knowledge of organization studies as control and coordination within the corporation. The privately owned, rationalized corporation is the organizational nucleus of modernity/capitalism and the implicit model for organization studies (Gortner et al. 1 987; Leblebici and Salancik 1 989; Sandelands and Srivatsan 1 993). Just as economics abstracts from social relations of production to form 'the firm', so organization theory abstracts from them to form its analogue, 'the organization', the apparently concrete and self-evident object of normal organization science. 'The organization' is an abstraction from the individuals, and the social relations among them, who constitute this modern form of social life. In the abstraction of 'organization' from 'society' the corporation's connections with the social relations that constitute this form of private property are conceptually severed. The conceptual exclusion of society from organization is the basis for the internal/external metaphor usually applied to the organization/society relationship: a physical metaphor suggestive of walls and fences quite unsuited to social realities, but apt for the boundary of private property. This conceptual severing militates against recognition of the causal connections between the behaviour of people within organizations and this broader social relationship structuring their interactions, between life in the factory and life in the home and on the streets.

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NORMAL ORGANIZATION SCIENCE Organization Theory: the First Generation

The initial practical imperative to organization theory, then, was a desire to develop knowledge of and for management so as to help organize labour into a productive power or force for capital. The abstraction of corporations from the relations of exclusion that constitute this form of private property retained the structure of property rights, underwriting management's right to direct production and appropriate its product. This structure of rights is theorized in economics as capitalist rationality, and propa­ gated in an ideology that construes management as allocating resources on the basis of an im­ partial interpretation of market signals. This abstracted structure is 'formal' organization: it is what is supposed to happen, because economic theory tells us it will and management ideology tells us it should. The underside of property rights and managerial authority, workers' indir­ ect or negative control - basically their power to say 'no!' - is what actually happens and is labelled 'informal' (Clegg and Dunkerley 1 980). Organization was initially defined as a formal system oriented towards the achievement of a goal. The presumption was that theorists of organization can advise managers on how to efficiently realize organizational goals. The practical problem posed by the discovery of behaviour inconsistent with this formal structure of rights, the informal systems of 'human relations' codified in the work of Mayo and colleagues at the Harvard Business School (Roethlisberger and Dickson 1 949), is how to motivate individual workers by addressing their psychological needs. Despite their differences, however, theorists of both formal and informal organization share an interest in diagnosing the causes of inefficiency within organizations and in prescribing how they can be made more efficient by ascertaining the conditions under which the attainment of goals is promoted or hindered (Etzioni 1 959: 43). The sociological framework within which organization studies developed during the twentieth century was provided by Parsons's translation and interpretation of Weber. Weber's model of bureaucracy, in particular, has been the point of departure for most theoretical and empirical work on organizations. According to Parsons's interpretation, encouraged by the nuances of his translation of the German original and influenced by Malinowski, under whom he studied at the London School of Economics during the 1 930s, Weber's concerns were leadership rather than domination, coordi­ nation not conflict and control (Weiss \ 983).

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Through the influence of Parsons, and his students, a belief developed that Weber's writing on bureaucracy is a description of and prescrip­ tion for an efficient modern organization. ' Bureaucracy is seen as an epitome of rationality and of efficient implementation of goals and provision of services' (Eisenstadt 1 959: 303). In this fashion, the ideal type of bureaucracy became 'ideally rational' and 'perfectly efficient'. The belief spread that formal bureaucracy is the most efficacious means of organizational goal attainment. Once organizational goals are known, criteria for the assessment of organiza­ tional effectiveness can be derived. Given the notorious difficulty of reading Weber, this Parsonian interpretation prevailed. Merton, a student of Parsons at Harvard during the 1 930s, and his students, Blau, Gouldner, Selznick and Sills, produ\.:ed the seminal early works on the sociology of organizations.

those used in the natural sciences have long been the norm in organizational behaviour and organization theory . . . . The authors of main­ stream texts in organization behaviour and organization theory accept the natural science model of good research' ( 1 980: 483). The parameters of legitimate enquiry in the field were defined by the intersection between a particular understanding of Weber and a particular understanding of science. 'One might describe organization theory as that discipline which moves between the discussion of what Max Weber's writings can be made to mean and the exploration of what computers can be made to say' (Perry 1 992: 85). These two influences are synthesized in the Aston Studies, perhaps the most thorough and comprehensive example of this mode of research.

The Aston Studies The Scientification of Organization Theory

The tacit assumption of this theory of and for management was that knowledge can best serve managers if it is true. During the late 1 950s and 1 960s, science became the adjudicator of the truth of knowledge and positivism became the adjudicator of science. The more scientific is knowledge, the truer it must be, and the more true, the more practically useful it must be. 'Good theory is practical precisely because it advances knowledge in a scientific discipline, guides research towards crucial questions, and enlightens the profession of management' (Van de Ven 1 989: 486). For this reason, the scien­ tification overtook the first wave of organization studies. This intended science of organization is described in the first ( 1 956) issue of Adminis­ trative Science Quarterly. This envisaged the development of an applied administrative science that would serve managers, much as the physical sciences serve engineers, and as the biological sciences serve physicians. Henceforth, organization studies was shaped as an applied science. Its particular positivist understanding of the practice of science became the organizing principle of research into organization. Mainstream texts embodied this vision. The diffuse amalgam of applied psychology, sociol­ ogy and human relations geared towards problem solving, characteristic of the first generation of organization theorists, was trans­ formed into a preoccupation with scientific method, i.e., 'careful sampling, precise measure­ ment, and sophisticated design and analysis in the test of hypotheses derived from tentative general laws' (Behling 1 980: 483). By 1 980, it could be said that 'research methods similar to

The basis of the Aston approach is set out in Pugh et al.'s ( 1 963) 'A conceptual scheme for organizational analysis': 'the main problem for the researcher has been how to use Weberian concepts in analysis with data on a real functioning organization' ( 1 963: 294). The key tasks Pugh et al. set themselves have done much to shape subsequent organization theory: (a) to 'isolate the conceptually distinct elements that go into Weber's formulation of bureaucracy', (b) to translate 'the insights of Weber into a set of empirically testable hypotheses' ( 1 963: 298), and (c) to postulate 'a conceptual framework for analyzing the structure and functioning of organizations, which will serve as a predictive instrument' ( 1 963: 3 1 5) . The study examined the interdependence of three conceptually distinct levels of analysis of behaviour in organizations: individual personality and behaviour; group composition and interaction; organizational structure and functioning ( 1 963: 292). The Aston approach translated theoretical concepts into measurable independent and dependent variables. 'Structure' was construed as a set of variables capable of empirical veri­ fication, which were then related to contextual variables such as size, ownership and control, charter and technology. The contextual variables were taken to be independent variables for the study of organizational structure and function­ ing (the dependent variables). The relationships between independent and dependent variables were examined using multivariate regression analysis. The discovery: the operation of an organization (its 'behaviour') is contingent on a wide range of variables. Bureaucracy is not a unitary concept. There is no one best way to organize. 'Organizational effectiveness is con-

THEOR Y IN PRA CTICE tingent on a "match" between internal structure and characteristics of the organization's task and environment' (Cheng and McKinley 1 983: 87). Contingency theory 'emphasizes the multivariate nature of organizations and attempts to under­ stand how organizations operate under varying conditions and in specific circumstances' (Kast and Rosenzweig, cited in Shepard and Hough­ land 1 978: 4 1 3 - 14). Research into the con­ tingencies between organizational structure and its environment is intended to produce a coherent model for guiding decision-making by managers. But let us note: 'The project deals with what is officially expected should be done, and what is in practice allowed to be done; it does not include what is actually done, that is, what "really" happens in the sense of behavior beyond that instituted in organizational forms' (Pugh et al. 1 968: 69). We might want to ask, what is practical or scientific about ' knowledge of things which do not actually happen' (Clegg and Dunkerley 1 980: 226)?

Theories of Organization

Having abstracted individuals and organizations from the social relations that constitute them, normal organization science must then go about reestablishing the connections it has methodolo­ gically severed: between the individual and the organization, and between the organization and its environment. Individual and Organization

Much organization theory focuses on the individual and considers the tension between the formal and the informal aspects of organiza­ tion, between what is supposed to happen and what actually happens. This is the task of expectancy theory, goal setting, needs theory and job design, political theories of organiza­ tions, and leadership theory. The problem is how to integrate individuals into the authority structure of the organization: in particular, how can they be motivated? From a focus on the individual, theory broadened to include organizational constraints on individuals, i.e. on social relations within organizations. This is the task of exchange-based and informational influence, social learning theory, role theory, retrospective rationality. This theoretical focus on the individual is the counterpart of the methodological individualism of neo-classical economics and Weberian sociology. It also complements the individualism at the heart of American culture which is evident today in the vogue of 'unlimited power' and the 'science' of

41 1

personal achievement (Robbins 1 986): 'Yes, you can do, have, achieve, and create anything you want out of life.' Organization and Environment

The issue here is how organizations adapt to their external 'environments', 'the organization's source of inputs and sink of outputs' (Pennings 1 975: 393). The external environment is nor­ mally the market. Theories of the organization­ environment relationship aim to advise man­ agers of how to interpret market signals and translate them into efficient modes of organiza­ tion. This is the task of the market failures approach, structural contingency theory, popu­ lation ecology, resource dependency and organization economics. Population ecology, for example, focuses on how environments 'select' the most robust organization by examin­ ing populations of organizations and their wider 'ecology'. 'It is competitive pressure which drives the ecological theoretical system as surely as it does the more obviously economically indebted contributions to organization analysis' (Clegg

1 990: 77).

The Nature of Theorizing and the Divorce of Theory from Practice

Although theories of organization differ over the variables they consider and over their hypo­ theses about the nature of functional relation­ ships between them, they share an underlying belief in the nature of organizations and how they can be known. Organizations are taken to be empirical, concrete things. Concepts are abstracted from these observables and operatio­ nalized through the construction of scales, indices and factors. Statistical inferences are made upon differences between variables. As Burrell and Morgan ( 1 979: 1 63) note, 'there is scarcely an organizational variable which has not been measured in some form or even correlated with itself in the objectivist search for "significant" relationships which eventually will prove to be "determinate".' General laws are inferred from the statistical manipulation of differences between factors. These inferences and laws are developed into an ordering theoretical framework. This positivist concept -of science, institutio­ nalized through the Aston School, severs the connection between organization theory and practice by emphasizing testing at the expense of the creation of theory (Weick 1 989). Positivism has little to say about theory creation or dis­ covery because it assumes discovery and proof are sides of the same process and because it

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assumes that the only logical reason for proposing a hypothesis is that certain considera­ tions lead one to think it is true (Hanson 1 958). But these assumptions are wrong. Typically, a hypothesis is proven long after its creation, by different people. Positivist accounts of scientific method begin with the hypothesis as given; they say nothing about the process of discovery in science. The emphasis on hypothesis testing impedes understanding of the creation of theory and severs the link between real problems and their putative explanations. Normal organization science does not exam­ ine the relationship between problems and explanations but examines that between inde­ pendent and dependent variables. Research methods, rather than the problems and needs of managers, workers and policy makers, drive research (Boyacigiller and Adler 1 99 1 : 270). The original problems that stimulated the creation of organization studies fade into the past and problems are now derived from review essays and statistical models. Organizational scientists are so caught up in the science of hypothesis testing that often the practical utility of this 'theorizing' is lost from sight. A striking number of books and articles deal solely with 'theory' . This divorce between organizational theory and practice is institutionalized in the division of labour between the two journals of the Academy of M anagement: A cademy of Management Journal ( practice) and Academy of Management Review (theory). Normal Science's Implicit Concept of Practice

Although normal organization science is replete with references to organizational 'members', it has never given equal weight to workers and managers. It is very much a theory of, and for, management. Indeed, 'organization' and 'man­ agement' have evolved in tandem. An important practical dimension of this body of theory is its implicit understanding of managers, workers and the employment relationship between them. Much of organization studies assumes that management is the agency of organization. It is 'the organ of society specifically charged with making resources productive, that is, with the responsibility for organized economic advance, [this] reflects the base spirit of the modern age' (Drucker 1 954, cited in Scott 1 979: 23). Managers are guardians of rationality, inter­ preting market signals for the good of all. 'Management is . . . the enterprise that makes resources productive, and thereby, it acts as an agency of human betterment' ( 1 979: 23). Senior executives exercise their 'strategic choice' over

how the organization is to be managed. Organization theories concur on the nature of practice; they differ only on the advice they would provide to managers. Managers are leaders with a high degree of discretion and influence over the organizations within which they work. These leaders can implement new ideas and discoveries uncovered by organization theory and research' (Cheng and McKinley 1 983: 85). Managers have discretion because their authority makes employees malle­ able. The employee is an instrument of manage­ ment and can be programmed to obey its instructions (Kilduff 1 993: 2 1 ). Business is driven by management decisions. The more correct the decisions, the more successful the corporation and the economy. These decisions can be improved by manage­ ment education and training. The more systema­ tic, analytical, logical and informed the decision, the better it will be and the greater the economic success. Scientific knowledge of organization and management can be translated into informa­ tion and techniques that are relevant to the practitioner. For example, if managers know the contingent relationships between their organiza­ tion's structure and environment they will be in a better position to manage. ' If greater efficiency is desired, the theory suggests increasing the formalization of rules; if greater job satisfaction is desired, the theory suggests decreasing the stratification of rewards' (Hage 1 965: 3 1 9). Finally, normal organization science is imprinted with an American orientation (Boya­ cigiller and Adler 1 99 1 : 265). Most management schools and academic management journals are American and the majority of management academics are American trained ( 1 99 1 : 267). Normal science assumes that the post-war economic success of the United States has been caused, in large part, by its conception of man­ agement and business and that the experiences of the post-war United States are applicable globally. 'Cultural values of the United States underlie and have fundamentally framed man­ agement research, thus imbuing organizational science with implicit, and yet inappropriate, universalism' ( 1 99 1 : 262). For example, normal organization science assumes that property and management rights are beyond dispute and that individuals are largely free of external, structural constraints. The atomization of civil society, which Marx first identified as a problem, is celebrated as a virtue in the name of freedom of the individual. The authority of science con­ firmed the validity of America's concept of management and ownership and imbued organization science with a false universality. Indeed the US conception of management and organization is ascendant; it is active in the

THEOR Y IN PRA CTICE creation o f business schools i n Britain and i n the former Soviet bloc. The globalization of capital goes hand in hand with the globalization of North American organization theory and prac­ tice.

413

A systematic critique of normal organization science developed during the 1 970s, spurred on by developments in epistemology and ontology which undermined the prevailing positivist conception of the practice of science which is active in the study of organization (Burrell and Morgan 1 979). Over the past twenty years, this critique stimulated an assortment of theories of organizations which oppose normal organiza­ tion science. They share an attempt to restore what rationalization has attempted to remove practically and what normal science attempts to obscure theoretically: those human characteris­ tics of organization which escape calculation human affectivity. In this section, we describe the line of argument traced by these contra organization theories and reflect on their practical significance.

constructed out of 'meanings which define social reality' ( 1 970: 1 27). Organizations must be explained by grasping the meanings which cause people to act, and this requires an entirely different set of techniques to those practised by positivist organization researchers. The action frame of reference proved influen­ tial in the following ways. First, by stressing the socially constructed nature of organizations, Silverman deconstructed the unitary 'organiza­ tional goals' of normal organization science to reveal the possibility of a plurality of competing goals of rival groups within organizations. Second, it shifted attention from what people are supposed to do and what they say they do to what they actually do. This method for gener­ ating theory provided a welcome alternative to the emphasis on theory testing of positivist organization theory and stimulated ideographic research of organizations, which attempt 'to make explicit the implicit structure and meaning of human experience' (Sanders 1 982: 3 5 3 ; Morgan and Smircich 1 980). Finally, the action frame of reference countered the managerialism of formal organization theory by aligning itself with social change, for, if organizations are creations rather than natural given entities, they can be changed by social intervention.

The Interpretative Paradigm

The Critique of Empiricism and

CONTRA ORGANIZATION SCIENCE

Silverman's ( 1 968; 1 970) early work proved pivotal in the development of contra organiza­ tion science because it articulated a dissatisfac­ tion many were feeling about much organization theory and offered the basis of an alternative (Clegg 1 975: viii). Drawing on Weber's concept of social action, the phenomenology of Goffman, Schutz and Berger and Luckman, the ethno­ methodology of Cicourel, and the empirical work of Gouldner, Silverman argued against the managerialism, functionalism and 'abstracted empiricism' of normal organization science. Formal theorists, he argued, reify management objectives as the goals of the 'organization'. This error of reification creates a distinction between formal and informal organization, or between what management says should happen and the contra goals of their subordinates, which normal organization science understands as a distinction between rationality and non-rationality. Silverman's alternative, the 'action frame of reference', is less a theory and more 'a method of analyzing social relations within organizations' ( 1 970: 1 47) or, as he later acknowledges, a set of questions that might guide empirical research (Silverman 1 99 1 ) . This alternative is based on the belief that organizations are distinct from natural phenomena because they are socially

the Radical Concept of Power

The rediscovery of the construction of social reality complemented the critique of empiricist epistemology, which reconstituted the social sciences in Britain during the 1 970s, and the ensuing understanding that what we see is mediated by the conceptual framework of the observer. These two influences combined to make organizations less tangible and organiza­ tion theory more uncertain. The critique of empiricism affected organization theory by changing the understanding of 'power'. It widened the scope of enquiry to latent, un­ observable conflict and to the role of ideology in shaping perceptions and preferences contrary to the real interests of those who hold them, and stimulated work on the 'radical' concept of power: 'A exercises power over B when A affects B in a manner contrary to B's interests' (Lukes 1 974: 34). The radical concept of power, in terms of objective interests and subjective misconcep­ tions, owes much to base/superstructure inter­ pretations of Marx. Objective interests are located in the economic base; subjective percep­ tion of these interests is obscured by an ideological superstructure. For this reason, the radical cOJ.lcept of power and the concept of ideology are mutually supportive. The then

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influential Marxian analysis of their conflicting real interests pointed to an imperative, at the point of production, for capital to control labour and for labour to resist that control. The radical concept of power was work.ed through organizational analysis, principally by Clegg and his various collaborators (Clegg 1 975; Clegg and Dunkerley 1 977; 1 980). This radica­ lization of organization theory coincided with the discovery of the 'labour process' in Braver­ man ( 1 974). Radical organization theory became subsumed under the vogue of labour process analysis; workplace relations and labour process became synonymous; and such was the strength of association between 'control' and 'labour process' that 'control of the labour process' was construed as the modus operandi of the work­ place for a generation of radical scholars and formed the theoretical object of radical organiza­ tion theory (Clegg and Dunkerley 1 980: I ) . And this despite the word 'control' scarcely appearing in Braverman ( 1 974). Nevertheless, 'control' reconceptualized organizational analysis, indus­ trial relations and labour history, even touching accounting and management studies, blurring their disciplinary boundaries and creating a common theoretical object. This, essentially Marxian, analysis drove contra theoretical and empirical studies of organization during the

1 980s. The organon of control broadened under­ standing of organizational practice, beyond the customary focus on management, to include the interests and practices of workers. It argued that to understand what happens within organiza­ tions we must situate them in their political and economic context and it thereby challenged the cordon sanitaire erected by positivism around organizations and organization theory. 'Control' added impetus to the developing split between organization theory and the sociology (or political economy) of organizations. Given the connection between the radical concept of power and the concept of ideology, normal organiza­ tion science was construed as ideological and politically conservative because it hinders recog­ nition of the nature of power. Its emphasis on real interests encourages explanation of organ­ izations in terms of the motives of the people who constitute them. Finally, it changed under­ standing of the role of the academic from neutral observer to partisan. One must choose whose interests to serve, the controllers or the controlled. 'Control' was but the beginning of a broader attempt by critics of normal organization science to explain what positivism attempts to mask and to restore what rationalization attempts to eliminate: human affectivity. The concern with control and resistance extended to other

previously neglected aspects of organization, such as pleasure (Burrell 1 992), sexuality (Hearn and Parkin 1 987; Hearn et al. 1 989), gender (Mills 1 988; Mills and Tancred-Sheriff 1 992), emotion (Fineman 1 993) and feelings (Albrow 1 992). The intended practice of this diverse body of theory is social change via the rehumanization and repoliticization of modern organizational forms of life. This approach entails quite differ­ ent criteria for assessing the performance of organizations. As Frost ( 1 980: 50 I ) argues: 'people operating in organizational arenas may be damaged, compromised, and even destroyed by what they experience in those arenas . . . [and) organizations often do not serve the individuals and groups that administrators claim are the primary recipients of organizational energy and resources. ' Organizational forms should be reconstructed to enhance creativity and fulfil­ ment. Conceiving organizations in terms of control remains the core of contra organization studies, but it has been clear for some time that this approach has run out of steam (Knights and Willmott 1 990). Its potential for further devel­ opment is restricted by the limitations of its basis in traditional Marxism, the radical concept of power and the critique of empiricist epistemol­ ogy. In the following sections, we explain how attempts to transcend these limitations have considerably broadened the scope of contra organization science.

From Traditional Marxism to Foucault

The radical formulation of power, in terms of control versus resistance, is regularly con­ founded by empirical evidence, which consis­ tently shows that managers are seldom interested in control per se and that workers are often complicit in the practices that radical analysis suggests they should be resisting (Burawoy 1 979; Cressey and MacInnes 1 980; Storey 1 983; 1 985; Edwards 1 986). The radical concept of power certainly improves upon the earlier concepts, but criticisms of 'control' suggest that a residuum needs explaining: the coexistence, within produc­ tion, of creation and alienation, empowerment and repression, cooperation and resistance. 'Calm surfaces with barely a political ripple disturbing them, just as much as scenes of heroic struggle to the political death, are something to be explained, not something to be taken for granted' (Clegg 1 989: I l l ). Power is not either resistance or consensus, but both. The problem of 'control' is firmly rooted in the problem of traditional Marxism. It is partly for this reason that Marxists have struggled for years to develop an alternative to the basel

THEOR Y IN PRA CTICE superstructure metaphor and its 'erroneous, simplistic, and unexplored assumptions not only about the nature of the state and the workplace but also about the relationship between the two' (Burawoy 1 984: 27). This theoretical problem is compounded by the seeming lack of a viable practical alternative to the organization of work criticized by Marxists, and by the revolts against Soviet state bureau­ cracies during 1 989 (Remnick 1 994; Yakovlev

1 993). Within this context, Foucault's implicit critique of traditional Marxism and of the practices of the Soviet bloc has proven attractive to some organizational analysts (Burrell 1 988; Townley 1 994). The first thing to note is that Foucault's work developed in reaction to traditional Marxism's implicit, radical concept of power and its corollaries, real interests and ideology, base and superstructure. Foucault does not deny the reality of control and subordina­ tion: he claims only that power is more complex than prohibition and that an understanding of power cannot be deduced from an imputed motive. The failure to analyze how power is exercised, 'concretely and in detail', in favour of deducing its existence from a motive, is a criticism Foucault levels at 'traditional' Marxists who, he says, worry more about the definition of class than the nature of the struggle: 'orthodox Marxists could ignore organizational questions as they waited for capitalism to collapse' (Clegg and Higgins 1 987: 203). Foucault's concern is less with the why, more with the how of power. He shows how the exercise of power simulta­ neously generates forms of knowledge: 'knowl­ edge follows the advances of power, discovering new objects of knowledge over all the surface on which power is exercised' ( 1 977: 204). Organiza­ tions are both architectures of power and apparatuses of knowledge; discipline is both a system of correction and a system of knowledge. Disciplines are organizing devices central to the operation of power. Through the organization of time, space and movement, disciplines operate simultaneously on the popUlation and the individual, enabling both to be directed (Fou­ cault 1 980). Their effect is simultaneously to totalize and to individualize. They are 'tiny, everyday, physical mechanisms', methods of controlling the operation of the body that work through exploring, breaking down and rearrang­ ing its operation ( 1 977: 1 37-8). As Foucault points out, the body has been a neglected dimen­ sion of work on power. Marxists, in particular, have a 'terrible tendency to occlude the question of the body, in favour of consciousness and ideology' ( 1 980: 59). Foucault's conception of power has several implications. By showing how mechanisms of

415

disciplinary power are simultaneously instru­ ments for the formation and accumulation of knowledge, Foucault dissolves the traditional, positivist distinction between power and knowl­ edge (or practice and theory). We should, says Foucault, 'abandon a whole tradition that allows us to imagine that knowledge can exist only where the power relations are suspended and that knowledge can develop only outside its injunctions, its demands and interests' ( 1 977: 27). Power and knowledge, conceived by positivism as independent, are internally related sides of the same social relation, and known by the conceptual shorthand, 'power-knowledge'. Just as for Marx capital alienates while it produces, for Foucault power constrains while it creates and enables. Foucault's approach is, then, an implicit critique of conceptions of power solely in terms of negation and repression of the actions of others A getting B to do something he or she would not or should not do, in other words, 'control'. Marxist and liberal conceptions share an economism, says Foucault. Liberals regard power as a property of rights which are bestowed by a protective state and which one can possess like a commodity. Marxists simply replace the benign with the malign state, j uridic with economic subjects. As for Marx ( 1 867: 990), power for Foucault is a machinery in which everyone is caught, 'those who exercise power just as much as those over whom it is exercised'. This underlying realist ontology redirects attention towards the every­ day, the normal: 'Rather than A getting B to do something B would not otherwise do, social relations of power typically involve both A and B doing what they ordinarily do' (Isaac 1 987: _.

96). Like Marx, Foucault is concerned not with what people imagine or conceive, but with what they actually do. Foucault's empirical enquiries revealed to him that power relations 'go right down into the depths of society . . . they are not localized in the relationship between the state and its citizens or on the frontier between classes' ( 1 977: 27). Thus he urges us to study power at 'the point where power reaches into the very grain of individuals, touches their bodies and inserts itself into their actions and attitudes, their discourses, learning processes and everyday lives' ( 1 980: 39). We should adopt an 'ascending' analysis, starting with the infinitesimal mechan­ isms of power and showing how they have been incorporated and colonized by more general state mechanisms and cloaked in its theory of power and system of rights. Thus we should study techniques rather than institutions; prac­ tices rather than intentions; webs of power rather than classes or groups; knowledge rather than ideology; in short, the way power is exercised,

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concretely and in detail, a relatively neglected area in studies of production relations (Townley 1 994). From the Critique of Empiricism to the Relativism of Postmodernism

The viability of the 'control' approach to the study of organization is also limited by the apparent difficulty in finding a suitable alter­ native to the empiricism and positivism which it so severely criticized. Recognition of the im­ possibility of theory-neutral observation under­ mined confidence in empirical work, lest it be tainted with 'empiricism', and encouraged a retreat into the relative safety of 'theory'. A mistaken belief that observation is conceptually determined led to a rejection of the possibility of any sort of science of organizations. These two influences facilitated the development of a diverse amalgam of ideas known as postmodern­ ism, during the 1 980s, which questioned the validity of modern science and the notion of objective knowledge or truth (Cooper and Burrell 1 988; Clegg 1 990; Power 1 990; Gergen 1 992; Parker 1 992). The debate on postmodernism has two interrelated arguments. According to the first, we are experiencing a fundamental change in the way society, particularly our experience of space and time, is organized. According to the second, we are experiencing a fundamental change in how we know things. These two arguments are usually distinguished by reference to the former as postmodernity and the latter as postmodern­ ism. Postmodernity, or the search for the postmodern organization, analyzes the changes occurring in organizational forms and focuses 'on what agents actually do in accomplishing the constitutive work involved in organizations' (Clegg 1 990: 1 3). Stressed, in particular, is the move away from the dominant organizational form described by Weber. The latter's ideal typical model of a hierarchical, bureaucratic organizational form was based on a division of labour from which was derived several char­ acteristics which typified modern organizations. Briefly, division of labour underscores task discontinuity, specialization and functional separation, with the result that organizational forms are characterized by stratification, hier­ archization and coordination through an imper­ sonalized formalization of rules. Emphasis is placed on standardization and coordination is centralized. Contractual arrangements and cre­ dentials negotiate social and personal relations. Organized for mass markets, these ways of organizing no longer appear relevant for today's market conditions. Postmodernity rejects these

central tenets of organizing and is identified in many cases by their polar opposites. Hence, rather than differentiation based on strict divisions of labour, observers identify a blurring of boundaries, de-differentiation (Clegg 1 990). The postmodern organization is characterized by flexibility. It purports to empower employees. Supervision stresses the importance of trust and the internalized recognition of and adherence to the organization's missions and goals. The debates between modernism and post­ modernism reflect broader epistemological dif­ ferences, though these too are reflected and incorporated into debates on the postmodern organizational form. In essence, modernism is identified with the Enlightenment project, that is, progress through the application of reason, and social development by advances in science and technology. Emphasis is placed on the impor­ tance of government, administration and plan­ ning, on the ordering of social relations (Cooper and Burrell 1 988). The dominant metaphor is of society as a machine. Indeed, 'organization' is very much a modernist metaphor. What is 'out there' is susceptible to enquiry and the formula­ tion of scientific laws. Language is a mechanism or tool that gives access to the outside world and is reflective of external order. Once acquired, knowledge gives greater agency to individuals who are then able to impose greater order or control on that which they survey. Postmoder­ nists reject these assumptions. They deny grand narratives. They reject the view that language is unconditionally tied to its external referent. For postmodernists, meaning is not a relationship between word and object, but is derived from a system of language. This renders the meaning of words unstable and indeterminate and funda­ mentally affects understanding of how we know things. What has all this got to do with organization analysis? The understanding of meaning as relational has undermined the dichotomous thinking or dualisms that inform normal organizational science, for example, inside/out­ side, organization/environment. The rejection of universal truths has emphasized the importance of local and specific knowledge and increased sensitivity to difference and incommensurability. Postmodernism emphasizes difference, ambiva­ lence, internal contradictions and mutual depen­ dence. For postmodernists, the world is not a stage, but a text to be read and interpreted. Understanding organizations is a process of textual interpretation, not knowledge building. Multiple and conflicting readings may be held simultaneously. The counterpart of the belief that there is no one best way of knowing things is a rejection of the belief that there is a one best way of doing things. Whilst postmodernism has

THEOR Y IN PRA CTICE stimulated cntlque, it is criticized for its relativism, nihilism and conservatism. It seems to deny the belief in the progress of reason, in the capacity of humanity to perfect itself through the power of rational thought. It offers no firm foundation for political action. 'The Enlight­ enment is dead, Marxism is dead, the working class movement is dead . . . and the author does not feel very well either' (Neil Smith, in Harvey 1 989: 325).

NORMAL AND CONTRA ORGANIZATION SCIENCE: ASSESSMENT AND AL TERNA TIVE

In assessing the relative merits of normal and contra organizational science, 'we must be aware of the near certainty that "the" field looks different to the beholder depending not only on his/her own personal predilections, but also on his/her country' (Lammers 1 990: 1 87). Organiza­ tion studies continues to be dominated by the hegemony of a positivist orthodoxy, based in the United States. European, largely British, critics have made little impact in North America, where 'organization theory . . . is positivistic and geared to a general organization design frame­ work' (Hinings 1 988: 6). Contra organization science is not a powerful force because critics of the science of organization have failed to develop a viable alternative to the positivism they have so severely criticized. They seem to have retreated into theory and adopted a hopeless relativism of incommensurable paradigms. 'If paradigms are characterized as incommensurable or metaphors as infinitely exchangeable. then a relativistic discipline is defined in which there are no secure grounds for selecting, using or valuing one approach over another' (Brown 1 992: 76; Jackson and Carter 1 99 1 ). If there is no right or wrong, just different points of view, contra organization science undermines its own founda­ tions as a political force. As each criticism is voiced and a neglected area of study is identified, they are incorporated into the orthodoxy as one more phenomenon to be explained, one more variable to be measured. As Clegg puts it, 'Anything could be a contingency, such that as new objections - "culture", "power" - are raised to existing contingency frameworks, they can be incorporated within them by contingency entre­ preneurs' ( 1 988: I I ). This allows criticisms to be 'dealt with as conceptual and theoretical addi­ tions to existing frameworks . . . for the most part . . . critiques are taken to mean adjustments to existing positions' (Hinings 1 988: 6). Rather than choose between normal and contra organization science, which is something

417

of a futile and sterile debate (Donaldson 1 985; Organization Studies Symposium 1 988), it is more productive to think of them as document­ ing the two faces of modernity: efficiency and dehumanization. Let us explain by indicating some connections between the work of Marx, Weber and Foucault. Although it is fashionable to disregard Marx, Harvey makes a compelling case that what we currently recognize as postmodernity is the disruptive effect on political-economic practices and organizational forms caused by a 'general speed-up in the turnover times of capital' ( 1 989: 285) and its consequent time-space compres­ sion. The effects of capital, in the modern world, are surely beyond doubt, but the mechanisms by which capital acts remain elusive. Capital is best understood as the social DNA of the cells that constitute society. It is both a social structure (relations of production) and a complicated social process (mode of production), depending on whether it is regarded statically or dynami­ cally (Marsden 1 993b). These organizational cells are not a microcosm of the social body; they constitute the social body, just as actual cells constitute actual bodies. It might be objected that this analogy with DNA leads to an unduly deterministic concept of capital. But this would be to misunderstand both DNA and capital. DNA is not the inert, predictably stable molecule it is often taken to be. It is a metabolic molecule, an integral part of the cell and responsive to what happens around it (Rennie 1 993). Capital is analogous to DNA because it is the primary, self-replicating genetic material from which action is produced and is present in nearly all social organisms. 2 As to how capital works, we think this question can best be answered by exploring the connections between Weber and Foucault and their respective models of rationalization and disciplinary power (O'Neill 1 987; Gordon 1 987; Clegg 1 994). Just as, for Marx, capital alienates while it produces, organizes life within the workplace and atomizes life in civil society, so, for Foucault, power simultaneously empowers and represses, and, for Weber, rationalization simultaneously increases efficiency and dehumanizes. It is a question not of either/or, but of understanding the dialectic between these two faces of modernity/capitalism. We think this is the most pressing problem facing organization studies. The most salutary demonstration of the reality of the dialectic between efficiency and dehuma­ nization is not the modern corporation, beloved of organization theorists, but Bauman's ( 1 989) remarkable account of the logic of events developing in Germany - ironically, as Parsons was translating and interpreting Weber - which culminated in the Holocaust. The Holocaust is

STUD YING ORGANIZA TION

418

normally regarded as a grotesque aberration rom the progress of modernity, explicable only m terms of the evil actions of abnormal people. Bauman's thesis is that, to the contrary, it was conducted, in the main, by normal people using the following principles of organizing. First, transform human subjects into objects ?f power and knowledge by transcribing them mto a set of quantitative measures. This de­ humanizes them, cancels their moral demands and allows them to be treated with ethical indifference. Second, elevate formal above substantive rationality and apply to these objects routine bureaucratic procedures: means-ends calculus budget balancing and universal rule application In this way, modern, bureaucratically organized power is able t� 'induce actions functionally mdlspensable to Its purposes while jarringly at odds with the vital interests of the actors' ( 1 989: 1 22). Third, allow rationalization to create social distance between causes and effects, intentions and consequences, perpetrators and victims. There is an inverse ratio between readiness to cruelty and proximity to its victims: 'the more rational is the organization of action, the easier it is to cause suffering - and remain at peace with oneself' ( 1 989: 1 55). Fourth, at each stage, place the ruled in a position of choice, however invidious, and allow them to participate in the decisions that adversely affect them. In this fashion, the rationality of their choice becomes a weapon of the rulers . The victims of the Holocaust deployed their rationality to the end: to kill fewer is less odious than to kill more, sacrifice some in order to save many ( 1 989: 140). If these principles seem familiar it is because they lie behind the knowledges and techniques . found m modern workplaces and taught in today's business schools. The Holocaust illumi­ nates the rationality of all modern modes of organizing, however benign or innocuous they may seem: 'Most bureaucrats composed memor­ anda, drew up blueprints, talked on the tele­ phone, and participated in conferences. They could destroy a whole people by sitting at their desk' (Hilberg, cited in Bauman 1 989: 24). As social relations are rationalized and technically perfect�d, 'so is th� capacity and the efficiency of the SOCial productIOn of inhumanity' ( 1 989: 1 54). The Holocaust was rule 'without regard for persons' in extremis. �he unfolding of this logic of power depends on Its context: the exercise of the capacity to act is � ways negotiated and is contingent on . political skIll, the motives of people and the circumstances of its deployment. But lest we think we are immune to this moral blindness:

�

:

�

it is helpful to think of the workers of an annament plant who rejoice in the 'stay of execution' of their factory thanks to big new orders, while at the same time honestly bewailing the massacres visited upon each other by Ethiopians and Eritreans; or to think how it is possible that the 'fall in commodity prices' may be universally welcomed as good news while 'starvation of African children' is equally univer­ sally, and sincerely, lamented. ( 1 989: 24)

The owl of Minerva', we are told, 'spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk' (Hegel 1 967: 1 3). Perhaps only in the twilight of modernity can we fully comprehend its nature. If the practices that made the Holocaust possible are not pathological, but normal, what does this tell us about modernity? We contend that modernity is lanus-faced: it enriches and im­ poverishes, empowers and represses, organizes life within the workplace and atomizes life in civil society on the streets and in homes enhances efficiency and dehumanizes. Thi dialectic points to the tension between formal and substantive rationality, between means to an end and ends and values in themselves, a tension evident within social conflicts and present within each of us. 'Reason' alone cannot be the arbiter of organizational practice. The belief that the messiness of the human world is but a temporary and repairable state, sooner or later to be replaced by the orderly and systematic rule of reason' is an illusion (Bauman 1 993: 32). When we rule without regard for persons, anything becomes morally permissible. The locus of the theory-practice relationship must be an ethical interrogation of experience, how one conducts oneself, one's daily practices vis-a-vis others. If ethics is at the heart of all organizational practices, then the role of social science is muted. It may allow us to understand and explain . actIOn, but It cannot tell us what to do. Endemic conflicts over ends or values cannot be resolved through the acquisition of more knowledge. We ne�� to recognize and debate issues of respon­ Slblllty, chOice and values, upon which organiz­ . mg IS based, and ask the central question: 'What shall we do and how shall we live?' (Weber, . quotmg Tolstoy, cited in Sayer 1 9 9 1 : 1 50).

�

NOTES I The following paragraphs draw on Marsden ( l993a). 2 The analogy between capital and DNA is not as fanciful as it might at first seem. The discovery of the structure of the DNA molecule by Crick and Watson verified Darwin's theory of natural selection. Darwin's theory of natural selection and Marx's theory of capital

THEOR Y IN PRA CTICE are parallel: 'Just as Darwin discovered the law of evolution in organic nature, so Marx discovered the law of evolution in human history' (from Engels's address at Marx's funeral, cited in Colp 1 982: 470). Marx 'read, and then reread, Darwin's The Origin of Species in the early 1 860s, looking for some natural-scientific basis for his own political and social conceptions' ( 1 982: 461 ) . There can b e n o doubt that Marx viewed 'the development of the economic formation of society . . . as a process of natural history' ( 1 867: 92). He studied the cell form of society, 'very simple and slight in content', but more difficult to study than the 'complete body' or 'organism' ( 1 867: 90).

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THEOR Y IN PRA CTICE Perrow, C ( 1 980) 'Zoo story, or life in the organiza­ tional sandpit', in G. Salaman and K. Thompson (eds), COnTrol and Ideology in Organizations. Cam­ bridge, MA: MIT Press. pp. 259-77. Perry, N. ( 1 992) 'Putting theory in its place: the social organization of organizational theorizing', in M. Reed and M. Hughes (eds), Rethinking Organization: New Directions in Organization Theory and Analysis. London: Sage. pp. 8 5- 1 0 1 . Peters, T . ( 1 992) Liberation ManagemenT: Necessary Disorganization for the Nanosecond Nineties. New York: Fawcett Columbine. Power, M. ( 1 990) ' Modernism, postmodernism and organization', in J. Hassard and D. Pym (eds), The Theory and Philosophy of Organizations: Critical Issues and New Perspectives. London: Routledge. pp. 1 09-24. Pugh, D.S., Hickson, DJ., Hinings, CR., Macdonald, K.M., Turner, C and Lupton, T. ( 1 963) 'A conceptual scheme for organizational analysis', Administrative Science Quarterly, 8: 289-3 1 5. Pugh, D.S., Hickson, D J . , Hinings, C R . and Turner, C ( 1 968) 'Dimensions of organization structure', Administrative Science Quarterly, 1 3: 65- 105. Rafaeli, A. and Sutton, R. ( 1 989) 'The expression of emotion in organizational life', Research in Organizational Behavior, I I : 1 -42. Remnick, D. ( 1 994) Lenin's Tomb: the LaS( Days of the Soviet Empire. New York: Vintage. Rennie, J. ( 1 993) 'DNA's new twists', Scientific A merican, March: 1 22-32. Robbins, A. ( 1 986) Unlimited Power. New York: Fawcett Columbine. Roethlisberger, FJ. and Dickson, WJ. ( 1 949) Manage­ ment and Morale. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Sandelands, L.E. and Srivatsan, V. ( 1 993) The problem of experience in the study of organizations', Organization Studies, 1 4( 1 ): 1 -22. Sanders, P. ( 1 982) 'Phenomenology: a new way of viewing organizational research', A cademy of ManagemenT Review, 7(3): 353-60. Sayer, A. ( 1 992) Method in Social Science. London: Routledge.

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Sayer, D. ( 1 9 9 1 ) Capitalism and Modernity: A n Excursus o n Marx and Weber. London and New York: Routledge. Scott, W . G. ( 1979) 'Organicism: the moral anesthetic of management', Academy of Management Review, 4( 1 ): 2 1 -8. Senge, P.M. ( 1 990) The Fifth Discipline: the Art and Practice of the Learning Organization. New York and London: Doubleday. Shepard, J.M. and Houghland, James G. Jr ( 1 978) 'Contingency theory: "complex man" or "complex organization"', A cademy of ManagemenT Review, 4 1 3-27. Silverman, D. ( 1 968) ' Formal organizations or industrial sociology: towards a social action analysis of organizations', Sociology, 2(2): 221-38. Silverman, D. ( 1 970) The Theory of Organizations: a Sociological Framework. London: Heinemann. Silverman, D. ( 1 99 1 ) 'On throwing away ladders: re­ writing the theory of organisations. Towards a new theory of organizations'. Paper presented at the Towards a New Theory of Organization Conference, University of Keele. Storey, J. ( 1983) Managerial Prerogative and the Question of Control. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Storey, J. ( 1985) 'The means of management control', Sociology, 1 9(2): 1 93-2 1 1 . Townley, B . ( 1 994) Reframing Human Resource Management: Power, Ethics and the Subject at Work. London: Sage. Van de Ven, A.H. ( 1 989) 'Nothing is quite so practical as a good theory', Academy of Management Review, 1 4(4): 486-9. Weick, K.E. ( 1 989) 'Theory construction as disciplined imagination', Academy of Management Review, 1 4(4): 5 1 6-3 1 . Weiss, R.M. ( 1 983) 'Weber on bureaucracy: manage­ ment consultant or political theorist?', Academy of Management Review, 8(2): 242-8. Wolin, S.S. ( 1 98 1 ) 'Max Weber: legitimation, method, and the politics of theory', Political Theory, 9(3): 40 1 -24. Yakovlev, A. ( 1 993) The Fate of Marxism in Russia. New Haven and London: Yale University Press.

Conclusion: Representations STEWART R . CLEGG AND CYNTHIA HARDY

As Stablein (Chapter 9) reminds us, it was John Van Maanen ( 1 979) who stressed that the map is not the territory. As Magritte implied in much of his art (see, for instance, La Representation, 1 937), there remains a fundamental difference between the means of representation and the represented image. A painter 'maps' onto a canvas, quite self­ consciously painting a lifelike representation of a familiar object, such as a pipe. Yet, of course, the object represented in the painting is not 'the pipe': it always remains a representation of a pipe. A painter paints a painting of a map, perfect in every detail. It is not 'the map': it always remains a representation of a map that is itself a representation of something else: not just any terrain, any territory, but the landscape outside. Looking through the gallery window, we compare the painting to the landscape. We notice that it resembles neither the painting of the map, nor the map itself. As we step through the gallery door, the landscape is even less like the two-dimensional picture as we hear the traffic and smell the fresh breeze coming off the harbour, mingled with the scent of the bush, eucalyptus and wattle, as well as the Gitanes and perfume of the nearby French tourists. How beautiful this scene, how quintessentially Australian, we say to each other. 'C'est un cliche,' we hear. One of us understands: 'Pardon?' 'Cet endroit, ce panorama nous rappelle des films de Godard, de Truffaut. C'est elegant, c' est chic. II y a un milieu etranger ici, une ambiance fran<;aise transposee dans un autre hemisphere comme une scene cadree par Sydney Harbour.' A conversation begins: someone translates; old Warner Brothers movies are mentioned; 'des hommages' of Godard and Truffaut are discussed; we argue movies; we speak 'franglais'; we move to a cafe and compare it,

contrast it, to Le Cafe de Paris, Le Cafe de Flore, 'non, aucune ressemblance'. Thus this mixture of French, English, Canadian, Australian translates, interprets, converses, learns and fills the spaces that the map 'represents'. So, when we map we miss. We miss the gap between representation and image represented. We miss the contrivance of the representational practices that produce the effect of representa­ tion. We miss the point if we think that what we see is what we see. What we see is a represen­ tation of a phenomenon, with technical, aes­ thetic, experiential presence and absence. What we miss is what we don't see. We don't see the history that produces this structuring of space and time, this representational mismatch of spaces, environments, activities, sounds, sym­ bols, scents and sights. But, to draw on the other metaphor framing this book, conversations help us understand what we don't see. Conversations help us see the figures in the landscape, moving through it, retreating to its margins, filling it with their voices, their anxieties, their emotions, their feelings, their beauty and the ghosts that haunt them: their ancestors, both literal and real. Organization theory is no exception. It, like any other representational practice, is nothing less, nothing more, nothing other than its prac­ tices of representation. No objective grounds exist from which to criticize any one genre of representation from another. In the art of life (as well as the life of art) we can relate to any rep­ resentation, even if only in recoil. Any repre­ sentation can be related to other, earlier, later, alternative representations, especially when ostensibly the same thing. Voice: [entering from off-stage) The same thing? What do you mean? Is it like music? I know that

CONCL USION: REPRESENTA TIONS you like music because I hear music playing in the background. Something about 'snowdrops on kittens' isn't it, by John Coltrane? Isn't this the same as 'My Favourite Things' sung by Julie Andrews in The Sound of Music? Author 1 : I guess that you're talking to me since I'm the jazz buff. Well, I think that I'd have to say, not really. Don't you think there is a difference between this version by Coltrane and the song by Julie Andrews? Voice: Yes, but doesn't the difference between these two versions of 'My Favourite Things' make one more real, less fake and more true to the original? Isn't there a genuine article, that all other representations should seek to emulate? Author 1: No. 'My Favourite Things' ceases to exist as anything other than its representations once it is represented. Voice: This is all very well. I know we started talking about music, or at least I did, but where does that get us? Author 2: That's right. What are we talking about music for? It's just some background, music while we work. So, let's get back to the real work. In any case, organization studies are closer to science than art, aren't they? A uthor 1 : It depends. It depends on precisely what sense of 'science', what sense of 'art', what sense of being 'closer'. what sense of 'getting some­ where', and, most importantly, the translation between them . . . Author 2 : No, this isn't a book about music, it's a book about organization studies. So, let's get back to the chapter. Forget your jazz obsessions.

REPRESENTING THE SUBJECT(S) IN ORGANIZAnON STUDIES

The precarious 'position' of the subject is a major concern of research in organization studies. Obviously, postmodern approaches have drawn attention to the risks associated with placing the 'individual' at the centre of our intellectual universe. The postmodern subject is not a stable constellation of essential characteristics, but a socially constituted, socially recognized, category of analysis. As the status of the research subject is challenged so, too, is that of the researcher. No longer all-knowing, all-seeing, objective or omnipotent, the researcher must re-examine his or her role in the research process and the pro­ duction of 'knowledge'. But it is not only postmodern work that is critically re-examining the subject. More mainstream approaches are also questioning who the 'subject' is, what con­ stitutes an 'organization', and what role the 'researcher' plays, as the chapters in this book

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clearly demonstrate. For example, concerns with 'agency' occupy institutional theorists, psycho­ logical approaches, and leadership theorists; managers of 'diversity' debate the social con­ struction of gender, ethnicity and race; global and ecological approaches draw our attention to subjects far removed from our normal span and scope of attention. Contingency theorists, organ­ izational economists and strategists alike note the problematic conceptualization of 'the' organ­ ization as it dissipates into cyberspace, permeates its own boundaries, and is razed, inverted and collapsed into flat, empowered hierarchy­ less structures. Other theorists struggle with the role of 'science': what is the best way to study organizational phenomena; what constitute data and how we can analyze them? Thus the subject, in its varying and precarious forms, preoccupies, in different ways, the diverse areas and scholars of organization studies. In this chapter, we develop three particular themes concerning the subject. First, we discuss how the enterprising subject is represented in organization studies. By this, we refer to the new organization forms described in the introduction. We argue that they raise important questions that are only partially addressed in organization studies. We offer some of our ideas for a new research agenda to take us into the next century. Next, we take a closer look at the individual subject as represented in organization studies. We argue that all the different approaches to research that exist in organization studies run the risk of losing sight of the people who constitute that research; even those researchers who focus on one group of subjects often lose sight of others. Consequently academics from neither normal nor contra science have served this con­ stituency terribly well and we show how future research might look to a resuscitated subject. Finally, we look back on how we represent ourselves, in our research, our theorizing, our writing. We challenge the separateness of the identities that we have constructed for ourselves, particularly those that separate 'theory' from 'practice'. The nature of all identity is contingent upon discursive practices: theorists theorize according to the conditions of particular discur­ sive processes; they specify the theory/practice relation also within the conditions of particular discursive practices. While the paradigm debate has drawn attention to the discursive basis of theory and theorizing, rather less attention has been focused on the relationship between theory and practice. Consequently, we lack a reflexive account of this most vital relationship in organ­ ization theory. We believe that it is the inter­ section of the different identities that make up organization studies which offers great potential in this regard. It is here that new conversations

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can arise and new conversationalists can emerge - although not just any old conversation will do.

THE ENTERPRISING SUBJECT

Organizations, despite the assumptions of overly structuralist frameworks, are not essences that exist outside of the configuration of changing times and spaces. We can afford to ignore neither the emergence of new organizational forms, nor the broader changes in which they are embedded such as those noted in this book by Reed. These changes generate a series of new research questions to which research in organiza­ tion studies must respond if it is to link to and inform practice. Some of the answers or, at least, the beginnings of answers are to be found in the chapters of this volume. However, it is also clear that considerable gaps remain. In this section, we offer our ideas, by no means an exhaustive list, about some of the directions that future research might take. They include a greater understand­ ing of: collaboration and trust in interorganiza­ tiona I relations; the problematic nature of change in interorganizational networks; the limits to power in interorganizational networks; the new skills needed in the enterprising organization; the changing nature of resistance; the question of whether it is still 'a man's world' and the impact feminist theory has had on organization research and practice; the body as subject; and the impact that organizational changes have had on the body.

Collaboration and Trust in Interorganizational Relations

Obviously, in the light of new arrangements emerging between organizations, more work adopting an interorganizational level of analysis would seem helpful. Researchers can no longer afford to concentrate exclusively on individual organizations: what goes on outside the organ­ ization obviously influences what goes on inside, as the boundaries that define 'the' organization become both more permeable and more ques­ tionable, and the organization is defined only empirically rather than ontologically a priori. Obviously, approaches such as population ecology, organizational economics and institu­ tional theory already adopt an interorganiza­ tional level of analysis that allows them to address some of these questions. Nonetheless, important issues still remain to be explored which, as we will discuss here, would benefit from different research approaches.

For example, many new organizational forms depend upon collaboration with other organiza­ tions rather than competition between them. Collaboration often depends upon trusting relationships between partners. Organizational economics has directly considered the issue of trust, as Barney and Hesterly illustrate in Chapter 4, noting that trust serves to reduce uncertainty and the likelihood of cheating in ways that contracts cannot. Such work draws on definitions of trust that revolve around pre­ dictable behaviour: trust is linked to an assessment by an actor that another actor will act in a certain way (e.g. Luhmann 1 979; Barber 1 983; Lewis and Weigert 1 98 5 ; Gambetta 1 988). According to this view, we make predictions (or have expectations) concerning the behaviour of others. If we are confident that our predictions will come to pass, we trust these others. Trust thus reduces complexity by ensuring that the social system is based on mutual expectations about actors' future behaviour, encouraging social actors to select specific options of social action and reaction. The basic function of coordinating social interaction is achieved, and cooperation, rather than opportunistic behav­ iour, is the result (see Lane and Bachmann 1 995). Such approaches have a number of limita­ tions, however. In general, they pay little atten­ tion to how trust is created (Perrow 1 993; Hardy and Phillips 1 995a and b). Typically, trust has been conceptualized retrospectively, often by writers (e.g. Ring and Van de Ven 1 992) drawing on the work of Granovetter ( 1 985) who focus on the social relations within which business trans­ actions are embedded. In other words, trust exists as a result of frequent interactions and previous trusting relationships (e.g. Dasgupta 1 988). Reliance on trust by organizations can thus be expected to emerge between business partners only when they have successfully com­ pleted transactions in the past and they perceive one another as complying with norms of equity (Ring and Van de Ven 1 992: 489). But the tautology of this statement begs the question: how do partners achieve a trusting relationship

in the first place� Writers have tended to assume that partners collaborate voluntarily, and share common goals and equal power. Such conditions may char­ acterize some collaborative ventures but cer­ tainly not all (e.g. Westley and Vredenburg 1 99 1 ) . Many collaborative initiatives bring together stakeholders with different goals, values and ideologies (Blumer 1 97 1 ; Rainey 1 983; Laumann and Knoke 1 987; Waddock 1 989; Pasquero 1 99 1 ). In such a situation, creating trust is a problematic process and a broader research agenda is necessary to flesh out

CONCL USION: REPRESENTA TIONS the dynamics of building trust. For example, more work on the institutional aspects of trust (e.g. Zucker 1 986) may help to reveal the ways in which trust and trustworthiness are signalled in different settings. This approach to trust illumi­ nates the importance of shared meanings that are necessary if partners are to signal trust and trustworthiness to each other. Accordingly, a sociological approach (rather than one associated with transaction cost economics or game theory) might conceptualize trust as a communicative, sense-making process, highlighting interpretative, communicative, sense-making activities (Berger and Luckmann 1 967; Schutz 1 970; Geertz 1 973) which then translate into action (e.g. Collins 1 98 1) . Such work might also be enriched by insights from narrative theory and discourse analysis, as well as ethnomethodological studies. In this way, we stand to learn more about the theoretical and practical issues involved in collaboration between parties with more or less different aims, languages, cultures, power; more about what works, and what does not, in setting up collaborative relationships (e.g. Huxham 1 995). There is also room for more critical analyses of collaboration since existing work has been noticeably mute on questions relating to power (Fox 1 974; Knights et al. 1 993). All too often, collaboration is assumed to be beneficial for participants as well as other stakeholders (e.g. Gray 1 989: Alter 1 990, Knoke 1 990; Nathan and Mitroff 1 99 1 ; Alter and Hage 1 993). Joint ventures (Harrigan 1 985) and alliances (Kanter 1 990) are advanced on the grounds that they reduce uncertainty, acquire resources, and solve problems (e.g. Emery and Trist 1 965; Astley 1 984). Research on network organizations (e.g. Powell 1 990; Alter and Hage 1 993) argues that they provide goods and services in ways more effective than either markets or hierarchies. Other research on interorganizational relations also promotes cooperation under the rubric of conformity (Oliver 1 99 1 ), integration (Knoke 1 990), and coordination (Rogers and Whetten 1 98 1 ). But in adopting these structural-function­ alist perspectives, such work on collaboration has ignored the role that power and interests play in collaborative relationships. [Studies] have tended to be 'heavy' on notions of negotiations and trust between members of the network and exceptionally 'light' on domination and power relations . . . networks continue to be portrayed as interdependent relationships based on reciprocity and mutual trust where self interest is sacrificed for the communal good. (Knights et al. 1 993: 979)

Domination lurks in collaborative relationships as much as in competitive ones, and we cannot

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afford to ignore the less savoury aspects of these new organizational forms. We cannot ignore that power can be hidden behind the fa9ade of 'trust' and the rhetoric of 'collaboration', and used to promote vested interests through the manipulation of and capitulation by weaker partners (Hardy and Phillips 1 995a). Power is, in fact, a 'functional equivalent' of trust in ensuring predictability in coordination (Luhmann 1 979; Lane and Bachmann 1 995). 'We've got to trust them' means in fact: 'We don't trust them but feel constrained to submit to their discretion.' This simply describes, of course, a power relationship. (Fox 1 974: 95)

Many of the complexities of interorganizational interactions are resolved, not by trust, but 'by implicit or explicit power relations among firms' (Granovetter 1 985: 502). But predictability and interorganizational coordination based on power are unlikely to lead to the synergy and creativity associated with more trusting forms of collaboration (Fox 1 974; see Hardy and Phillips 1 995a; 1 995b). Trust means taking risks, being vulnerable in order to achieve something that cannot be achieved otherwise. In this way, partners are able to 'see different aspects of a problem [and] can constructively explore their differences and search for solutions that go beyond their own limited vision of what is possible' (Gray 1 989: 5). [Trusting] participants share certain ends of values; bear each other a diffuse sense of long-term obligations; offer each other spontaneous support without narrowly calculating the cost or anticipating any equivalent short-term reciprocation; commu­ nicate freely and honestly; are ready to repose their fortunes in each other's hands; and give each other the benefit of any doubt that may arise with respect to goodwill and motivation. (Fox 1 974: 368)

Power, on the other hand, operates through submission, socialization and indoctrination (Fox 1 974). It may lead to cooperation and, certainly, may be convenient from the dominant partner's point of view (Warren et al. 1 974; Rose and Black 1 985; Hasenfeld and Chesler 1 989). But such 'spurious' trust (Fox 1 974) is unlikely to produce the synergistic creativity that more reciprocal collaboration is hoped to promote. There is, then, a substantive difference between cooperation achieved through power differentials that render some partners unable to engage in opportunistic behaviour, and a willingness to voluntarily sacrifice the benefits of opportunistic behaviour in order to cooperate with a trusted partner. Moreover, building trust does not and, in fact, should not preclude conflict since it is through conflict that things get changed. Otherwise, 'when the power position of

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one firm is obviously dominant, the other is apt to capitulate early so as to cut its losses. Such capitulation may not involve explicit confronta­ tion if there is a clear understanding of what the other side requires' (Granovetter 1 985: 502; also see Thorelli 1 986). More critical studies of col­ laboration would, then, help to counteract the structuralist and functionalist approaches found in organizational economics, strategic manage­ ment and institutional theory and provide more insight into these complex processes.

Change in Interorganizational Networks

Another potential agenda item for future research emerges from an important gap in the work of institutional theorists: how do institu­ tional fields change and what role do inter­ organizational relationships, specifically forms of collaboration, play in that process? An insti­ tutional field is defined as 'those organizations that, in the aggregate, constitute a recognized area of institutional life' (DiMaggio and Powell 1 983: 1 48). It encompasses a set of social orders or patterns where departures from the pattern are counteracted in a regulated fashion, by repetitively activated, socially constructed con­ trols, by some set of rewards and sanctions (Jepperson 1 99 1 : 1 45). Structures become insti­ tutionalized when they 'owe their survival to relatively self-activating processes' ( 1 99 1 : 1 45). Thus institutional theory, as Tolbert and Zucker point out in Chapter 6, emphasizes conformity rather than adaptation and downplays agency and interest (Oliver 1 99 1 ). Accordingly, it is weak on explaining change, especially changes that are not embraced by dominant organiza­ tions, changes that are sharply contested, and changes that delegitimate the institutional order of the field (DiMaggio 1 988: 1 2). Some theorists have proposed a role for institutional 'entrepreneurs' (DiMaggio 1988), people who possess sufficient resources to take advantage of the contradictions that aid dein­ stitutionalization (Oliver 1 992) and that might arise from political, functional, or social pressures. Entrepreneurs need not be private individuals. For instance, in some European countries, like Norway and Denmark, the state has played an important role in creating institutional isomorphism around the network form; but how important is the state as an institutional entrepreneur in other contexts, and how does this importance vary by country (e.g. see Weiss 1 988)? But, in explaining deinstitutionalization, insti­ tutional theorists often present causes in the form of deterministic, reified environmental or technological forces: the trigger of change is not

problematized. It is as if the hand of god (or, failing god, technology) magically reaches down. But both god and technology (Barley 1 986) have to be socially and collectively recognized in the first place. Interorganizational networks, fields and domains are not objective structures but processes of social construction (Warren 1 967; Warren et al. 1 974; Altheide 1 988; McGuire 1 988) whereby social order is negotiated (Strauss et al. 1 963; Gray 1 989; Nathan and Mitroff

1 99 1 ). [Interorganizational domains] are cognitive as well as organizational structures . . . one can only too easily fall into the trap of thinking of them as objectively given, quasi-permanent fixtures in the social fabric rather than ways we have chosen to construe various facets of it. (Trist 1983: 273)

As a result, when theorists do consider agency, they present a picture in which change can be championed only by actors with power, such as institutional entrepreneurs who may only rarely define their interests in terms of the transforma­ tion rather than the reproduction of the status quo. Writers argue, somewhat plaintively, that the powerless must acquire power to influence the domain (e.g. Gricar and Brown 1 98 1 ), at the same time as pointing out that powerful groups are usually reluctant to give power away. If this is the case, how can relatively powerless groups ever acquire power and influence the domain in the face of the defensive manoeuvres of more powerful adversaries? What strategies of power and resistance are most likely to succeed in particular contexts (Clegg 1 995)? Consequently, considerable scope exists to apply critical, cultural, textual, and ethnometho­ dological approaches to the field of interorgani­ zational relations (e.g. Knights et al. 1 993; Clegg and Palmer 1 996) to reveal 'power operating in structures of thinking and behaviour that previously seemed devoid of power relations' (White 1 986: 42 1 ) . In this way, work that draws more attention to how the relations of power and domination pervade new organizational forms might intersect with more 'mainstream' work which has, perhaps too readily, but not always inappropriately, attributed both benefit and benevolence to collaboration. The Limits to Power

Lest we get carried away with the 'power of power', it is important to remember that many of the relations in which 'new' organizations engage are not contained within their grasp as legally fictive individuals. Organizations do more than negotiate contracts of employment with indivi­ duals; they engage in subcontracting, build

CONCL USION: REPRESENTA TIONS alliances, formalize linkages, or informalize them, with other organizations. As networks expand and markets intrude more into organiza­ tions, hierarchies recede in importance, and control takes on a very different form. Accord­ ingly, as Hardy and Clegg point out in Chapter I S, existing models of power need modification: both 'mainstream' and 'critical' approaches are inadequate to deal with the complexity of power in these interorganizational relations. Both models emphasize a sovereign view where one agent exercises power over another: the former through the possession of critical resources; the latter through domination and hegemony. Neither is appropriate to situations where individual actors are unable to exert systematic control, such as in complex interorganizational networks (Hardy 1 995). New organizational 'realities' thus make for a complex challenge: old certainties concerning power require radical overhaul. If research is to inform practice, actors need to know more about the dynamics of the complex networks through which power flows instead of preoccupying themselves with the possession of information, expertise, rewards and punishments, and other 'critical' resources. Foucauldian insights seem particularly relevant. Power is no longer ade­ quately considered as a manipulable, determi­ nistic resource but must be viewed as a web of relations in which all actors operate and from which the prospects of escape are limited for dominant and subordinate groups alike. Com­ prehending how new identities are created by interorganizational networks helps to pinpoint tensions that might undermine those relation­ ships (Knights et al. 1 993). Yet, as these power networks constrain, they also enable: the frag­ mentation of power structures offers space for colonization even by the weaker players (Hardy 1 994). There is scope, then, for change, based on a productive, facilitative side of power. Viewing power as a solely negative phenomenon, as critical theorists tend to do, does not do justice to the obvious collaborative efforts that have made breakthroughs and achieved objectives that no individual organization could have achieved alone.

New Forms of Resistance

In the past, while formal structures of imperative command, crystallized as bureaucracy, could aspire to control all that was within the reach of the organization, that control could never be total. The many 'vicious circles' of attempts at control by management led to increased employee resistance, as recorded from Gouldner ( 1 954) onwards (see Clegg and Dunkerley 1 980).

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New organizational forms and the radical changes in information technology that under­ pin them give cause for both hope and concern. As Reed points out in Chapter 1 , as new forms of control open up, so too do new opportunities for resistance. There is much talk of a neo-Taylorite strategy of organizational control as the economic and political driving force behind contemporary technological change . . . Yet, a more nuanced reading would seem to suggest that the new sites of struggle and circuits of power opening up around advanced technologies make predictions about long-term trends in power structures more difficult.

When the most important relations that the organization enters into are outside its grasp as a legally fictive individual, control is particularly incomplete, and efforts to achieve it particularly inappropriate. As networks expand as markets intrude into organizations, intraorganizational hierarchies, and control premised on them, recede in importance. As organizations seek value through the strength of their ties to other organizations, attempts at imperative manage­ rial control become intrusive and inappropriate. Control through networks, particularly where there is considerable complexity and a short span of product life-cycles, means that emergent 'windows of opportunity' require rapid and widespread sharing of knowledge rather than its concealment from competitors. Much as in the external arena, the internal organizational experience of changed conditions is neither good nor bad; neither dominating nor empowering; neither constraining nor enabling. Or perhaps, to be more accurate, it is all of these. For example, the move towards 'employee empowerment' places considerable emphasis on unobtrusive controls. Selection, socialization and socializing become means whereby indivi­ duals are 'conditioned' to accept organizational goals (Stewart 1 989; Barker 1 993; Parker 1 993). Peer pressure is substituted for managerial directives and teams are used to reinforce managerial control through the language of the team effort (Parker and Slaughter 1 988; Deetz 1 992; Barker 1 993; Parker 1 993). Dissenters, if they are not fired, may be marginalized as uncooperative, or in need of additional educa­ tion or training (O'Connor 1 993). A critical approach renders these political dynamics more visible (see Leiba and Hardy 1 994). [T]he assembly line and traditional scientific management methods have actually found a new life in the team concept idea . . . in which a kind of worker empowerment takes place, but only insofar as it conforms to an even more carefully regimented shop floor regime. Indeed, rather than taking a step

rbidden.

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forward toward a new era of industrial democracy, the new participatory management schemes con­ stitute an intensification, not an abandonment, of the essence of classical Taylorism. (Parker 1 993: 250)

However, to dismiss employees involved in these initiatives as simple-minded victims does them a disservice. The changed organizational environ­ ment also offers an improvement in the quality of working life for some, if not all, employees. Instead of dismissing empowerment, critical researchers might consider how to make organ­ izations more empowering, for example, by examining how the wealth created through empowerment should be distributed; how sup­ port can be provided for those employees, previously successful in hierarchical organiza­ tions, who find it difficult to adjust; how empowerment affects lower-level managers who stand to lose power; how employees can be protected from the use of empowerment as an excuse for layoffs. 'Mainstream' work, on the other hand, might take a closer look at some of its assumptions and learn about some of the drawbacks of being a player enmeshed in an interorganizational network or immersed in an empowerment, team building programme (see Leiba and Hardy 1 994). Again, considerable potential is to be found in the intersection of approaches.

Is It Still a Man's, Man's, Man's World?

The bureaucratic game was clear: play the rules, deny any identity that defined itself against the rules. Try to keep that identity, and be labelled a 'maverick'. Who has not learned these painful lessons one way or another, at school, at work, in the army, the church, or the university? Modern organizations, modern management, modern life were built on these disciplines. And these disciplines were not disinterested in a gender sense. When Weber ( 1 947) wrote on the nature of 'vocation', which he saw as an essential ethical commitment of and for modernity, he wrote of the need to do one's duty, to act 'manfully'. Evidently, for Weber, it was a man's world. Is this still the case? The postmodern organization, that which is consciously designed to be more flexible, flat and creative than the military models of modern management, centres attention on the growing importance of highly skilled, highly motivated, knowledge-based workers. Almost every author­ ity mentions this as the critical ingredient for future business success. Reich ( 1 992) identifies the rise of what he calls the 'symbolic analyst'. Drucker insists: The social centre of gravity has

shifted to the knowledge worker. All developed countries are becoming . . . knowledge societies' ( 1 990: 1 67). That such pieties might seem a revelation, as Drucker intends, is an ironical indictment of the era of modernist management that Taylor ( 1 9 1 1 ) formally inaugurated with his

Scientific Management. Scientific management, it will be recalled, sought to structure and restrict the distribution of knowledge in organizations, redesigning it as a hierarchical rather than convivial tool. The wish was always stronger than the reality. Of necessity, it has always been the case that developed societies were 'knowledge societies'. No complex organization can last long that does not have recourse to, in some ways, the tacit knowledge of its workforce, even where jobs within it had been formally 'deskilled'. Drucker notes that in contemporary organizations the tendency will be not to deskill but to consciously enhance 'skill formation'. This context means a very different experience for organizational members which must be matched by very different approaches to research. Perhaps one area where the differences loom large concerns the role of women in the organization. The ranks of management in many countries, but certainly not all, are becoming staffed with more women than in the past; also the substantive content of manage­ ment activity is taking a less 'masculine' form than in older, military-derived models. That these were not the exclusive preserve of men is evident. Consider traditionally 'feminine' occu­ pations such as nursing, where, although the employees were principally women, the organizational model derived from the male world of the military, with its bureaucratized ranks, uniforms, distinctions and command structure (Clegg and Chua 1 990). The masculi­ nist model was capable of imposition irrespective of the gendered ranks. Older models of management derived from the military, through public sector bureaucracies (Weber 1 978) and engineering practice (Taylor 1 9 1 1 ) . In these organizations, serried ranks loomed large in the male imagination as mem­ bers strove to advance through them. The organization's wishes were their imperatives; its commands the inscriptions that shaped their working lives, even as they resisted them. Hier­ archy was huge, pervasive, formidable, forebod­ ing; sometimes it was uniformed and titled. Even when not militaristically attired it denoted endless divisions in the ranks of humanity: different organization entry points, different car parks, different cafeterias, different washrooms, bathrooms or toilets, different modes of address, different obsequies and indignations, different ranks and stations in life. Hierarchy humiliated

CONCL USION: REPRESENTA TIONS some as it elevated others. It rewarded those who scrambled for its ladders while punishing those who found themselves with snakes. Hierarchy hurt like hell for those at the receiving end of it and made life sweet for those who succoured its desire for order, obedience, discipline. It was, in James Brown's immortal words, 'a man's world'. The male members at the base of the bureaucratic pyramid felt the weight of the hierarchy every day, pressing down on them. Quite definite and different functions attached to women, those of comfort, emotional support and femininity. This is a man's world, this is a man's world, but it wouldn't be nothing. nothing, without a woman or a girl You see, man makes the cars, that take us over the road, man made the train, to carry the heavy load man made the electric light, to take us out of the dark man made the boat for the water, like Noah made the Ark This is a man's, man's, man's world, but it wouldn't be nothing, nothing. without a woman or a girl Man thinks about a little bitty baby girls and a baby boys, man makes them happy, 'cos man makes them toys And after man makes everything. everything he can You know that man makes money, to buy some other man This is a man's world, but it wouldn't be nothing, nothing, not one little thing, without a woman or a girl (from James Brown, 'It's a Man's, Man's, Man's World', Intersong Ltd 1 966)

While organization studies has certainly moved towards a greater appreciation of issues such as gender, race, ethnicity and culture, as Calas and Smircich make clear in Chapter 8, many of the changes to ' feminize' management involved not a transformation of organizational practices but rather a reform. Calas and Smircich remind us how the way in which we conduct our research, and the theory on which we draw, not only targets particular solutions but also defines the 'problem' in particular ways. Consequently, more critical work promises a substantial revision to the research agenda in such areas as gender, culture, feeling and emo­ tion in organizations, as the chapters by Nord and Fox, Martin and Frost, Calas and Smircich, Fineman, Gagliardi, and Hassard suggest in their various ways. First, it offers a way to

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document the experience of recently emerging voices, such as those gendered, coloured, emotional, aesthetic subjects in both organiza­ tions and organization studies. Second, by adopting a broader, more sensitive appreciation of the people who make up the organizations we study, we may derive greater insight into the new management practices required as global, inter­ organizational networks span not only different organizations but also different cultures and countries; where organizations incorporate not just a man's world, but worlds of different gen­ ders, ethnicities and cultures. Issues of gender, race, ethnicity, emotion, aesthetics and culture become far more apparent when those within organizations must nurture, group, collaborate, and engage in different ways of being, thinking, feeling and doing. Finally, we must also remember that many of the practitioners raised in a (white, authoritarian, logical, rational) man's world will find these new practices difficult. Critical research provides the opportu­ nity to address the needs, and the emotions, of those struggling to maintain their own identities in the face of demands from 'new' organizational members, 'new' management styles, and 'new' strategic mandates.

The Subject and the Body

All social change leaves its imprint on the human body. The agricultural revolution of the late eighteenth century saw an improvement in yield, the productivity of the land, technology and distribution, all of which led to a healthier and more robust population, one that the industrial revolution bent into new shapes and new rhythms with new technologies. From the outset, observers of organizations were aware of these transformations. Marx ( 1 975) spends much of Capital discussing the effects of capitalist industrialization on the bodies and subjectivity of the new class of English wage workers. Gramsci ( 1 9 7 1 ) discusses the effects of what he refers to as 'Fordism' and 'American­ ism' on the psycho-physiological constitution of workers, as does Weber ( 1 978) in his reflections on the impact of Taylorism. But by the same token, one feature of bureaucracy that Weber did not stress in his ideal type was the impact of bureaucracy on the bodies and subjectivities of those that comprised it. Strange that this should be so: given that the Prussian army, with its regimented units and its goose-stepping soldiers, with their erect carriage and precise drill, polished brass and ordered uniforms, was above all else a machine for making many subjectivities and many bodies into the embodi­ ment of one will, one Germany.

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Although these goose-stepping soldiers belong to another era, it is one so constitutive of modernity that, even today, we hardly sense its strangeness, except perhaps to remark on the military bearing of a person, or the discipline of a parade ground (except when consciously mocked and ironicized, as in Monty Python's ' Ministry for Silly Walks'). Ranks of soldiers and other occupations honed on the military model (police force/service, nurses, firecrews, flight attendants, boy scouts, girl guides, security guards, gym instructors, strict tempo bands and orchestras, for instance) hardly affront our notions of 'naturalness' even today (Dandekker 1 990). But, while the organizational body may still display some elements of these past models in the use of titles, ranks, uniforms, dress codes, bearing and demeanour, and other elements of embodied organizational life, the postmodern organizational world increasingly witnesses these signs of the body disappearing into cyberspace. Bodies used to be embedded in specific organizational contexts. One worked here, in this organization; shopped there, in this store; travelled this physical and familiar route; saw these pedestrians (and street children and homeless people, depending where one drives) every day. No more. One writer of these pages types in a hotel room in Berlin, on a portable computer, in spaces between presentations at a conference on 'Culture and Identity: City, Nation and World'. Soon the text will hurtle through cyberspace to the desktop of his co­ author, who will read, write, add, subtract, and transmit the revisions back to her colleague, by now back in his office on a third continent. We live in cyberspace but our bodies remain grounded. The 'encompassing world of compu­ ter technology . . . supports an admixture of codes of observing, commentating, imagining and fictionalizing to construct and support the immediate space in which human relations occur' (Rojek 1 995: 147). The technologies of the self are massively elaborated. Once, action at a distance was possible only through literacy and adequate postal delivery systems; then the telephone extended the range and shortened the time of communication, although still at some cost. The fax reduced the cost greatly; while the internet, e-mail and the worldwide web have heightened immediacy and established disembedded communication as an organizational norm. Routinely, organization members deal with others who are invisible, unknown in any direct sense, unmediated in presence, and who exist only as signs. In cyberspace, global integration and immediacy become possible through an encrypted, coded and encoded form of discourse between multiple persons, adopting multiple identities, plural

statuses. In cyberspace no paramount determi­ nation exists of identities and statuses. This is its defining, postmodern characteristic ( 1 995: 1 49). In addition, as Rojek ( 1 995: 1 53) argues, nations have become more tightly coupled and interdependent because of the globalization of the economy (see Parker 1 996). Recession or crisis in one economy affects other economies. Economic risks can no longer be insulated nationally. The tightly coupled integration of culture, nature and technology also has global, and not merely national, implications. The diminution of Brazilian rainforest, the cata­ strophe at Chernobyl, the Exxon Valdez oilspill in Alaska, are all testament to the impact of contemporary cultures of technology on the natural environment. Perrow ( 1 984) argues that some technologies are inherently risky, because they cannot be designed as a part of loosely coupled systems in which disaster in one subsystem does not immediately lead to systemic catastrophe. Hence, some writers believe we live increasingly in high risk societies, where risk is now 'uncontainable, unlimited and uncompen­ satable' and where 'Life has become more dependent upon contingencies which no one can control' (Rojek 1 995: 1 52, 1 53; Perrow 1 984). Accordingly, we are advised not to con­ tinue to behave as if we can control contingen­ cies that, patently, we cannot (Perrow 1 984). Other writers, like Bauman ( 1 992), show the changing nature of contingencies over time. In the past, tradition stabilized conditions of contingency: place, family, and religion were the personal correlates of organizational con­ tingencies for the individual, determining the individual's life-chances; blind forces work through subjects, individuals in the one case, organizations in the other, who are oblivious to their fate. Then modernity changed individuals, suggests Bauman: the life course was no longer a matter of destiny. Rather it became a question of contingent power relations: hence, Marx and Engels ( 1 965) were able to compose a 'Mani­ festo' that believed that individual destinies were shaped by class relations and that fate could be overthrown by a class reflexively aware of its own formation and demographic density in a society. Well, today there are hardly any Marxists left. History, not being subject to the grand narratives imagined for it, dealt the Marxist project a death-blow from which it would never recover. Today, the contingencies are no longer structured. Instead, postmodern theorists stress not the collective, but the plastic, free-floating and highly individually contingent structure of identities in societies. Order is precarious. Risk is pervasive. Individual security is not achieved by modern organization but threatened by it.

CONCL USION: REPRESENTA TIONS It is organizations that pollute the planet, cause economic disasters through contingent calculations, and inadvertently infect the security of our bodies with toxic wastes and contami­ nated blood supplies. In a postmodern world, one that recognizes the illusion in the power of class consciousness or the global rationality of organizations, there is scope for reflexive emancipation. One can become free to doubt, to disbelieve, to be sceptical of claims to over­ arching rationality. The partiality and value­ embeddedness of all claims to 'rationality' become more evident in both everyday and theoretical life. These are our conditions of existence now. Whereas we used to live 'in' the here and now, today we live in the heres, the nows, the pasts, and the futures, virtually and simultaneously. Imagine Disneyland, if you will. Dressed in character as Huckleberry Finn, a nineteenth­ century voice narrates a history in which you, and the other tourists on the boat, are asked to participate. The props to the performance are modern, involving electrically engineered simu­ lacra of alligators and other creatures. Back on land, with different visual effects, you step into the imagined future of EPCOT (one from which, when one checks the sponsors, all risk has been evacuated), a reality in which you are asked to suspend disbelief. Out of the compound and back in the hotel fantasy suite of your choice, you plug into a 'star wars' video game set in a different future from the one you have just 'witnessed'. Later you settle down to watch the video movie Blade Runner, and begin to doubt the more palatable futures of which you were earlier a part, which were imagined for you. The dark side of Disneyland is only an unscripted moment away, an ironic subterfuge to another scripted text, an alternative narrative to the sense made for you in one here and now. Start making sense. Stop being here where you are told you are.

The post-chip generation is the first to be able to 'be' any time, any place, to connect anywhere that is wired. Being there and being here are now coterminous as one sits in front of one's terminal and engages in immediate and virtually instan­ taneous communication. This person works in Chicago but the transmission of her decisions to 'buy' or 'sell' affects the lives of people in a peasant community in Mexico who have never imagined her, while she, who perhaps could imagine them, chooses not to. Simultaneity brings disparate elements of the world into immediate, but mediated and unknown, inter­ connection, achieved by organizational and technological mastery of the universe, and expressed in signs that communicate, inform

43 1

and connect virtually anywhere with anywhere else. Yet, in globalized terms, knowledge is not power. The world that watches CNN knows of the latest famine or war but knowing it cannot prevent it. And as the post-chip generation colonizes time and space, generation X lives in a more narrow, delimited, confining present with little to do, nowhere new to go, and little sense of nihilistic outrage left to flaunt. Nor are the bodies of the post-chip generation immune to this 'brave new world'. Sitting at the terminal, year in, year out, one ages, one's sight suffers, repetitive strain impairs one's move­ ment, the back gives up, the paunch grows. Contact lenses can fix the eyesight; the paunch that comes from physical passivity can be Iiposuctioned away; as we age, the bald scalp may be bewigged with a hairpiece 'undetectable in normal everyday use, so smart in winter or summer', or hair can be transplanted; breasts can be augmented, penises can be extended, and when the ageing process can no longer be resisted, our organs can be 'donated' to improve, sustain, save the lives of others. The body is no longer a reliable ground of identity. Think of Michael Jackson, whom cosmetic surgery has made a virtual person, for as long as he exists. His continuing claim to fame, not­ withstanding his 'desacralization' through accu­ sations of child molestation (Rojek 1 995), is of considerable organizational consequence for his recording company, Sony, which owns and produces those aspects of his image that are organizationally manufactured for goal-oriented purposes. Even those aspects of that image not manufactured by Sony, such as the allegations of child molestation, have been appropriated by other organizational interests, such as the sleazy mass circulation tabloids. His identities are an effect of diverse organizational practices. They cease to exist in any 'authentic' sense. Dead stars are safer: the costs are sunk, they cannot sue or misbehave, and 'necro-fever' can be manufactured, reproduced and repackaged without risk. Thus Elvis lives! And performs in a cabaret or bar near you, suggests Rojek ( 1 995: 1 60-4). Certainly that is true in Las Vegas. One can hardly move without bumping into Elvis: singing; car-washing; marrying; tour-guiding: Elvis everywhere and nowhere. The dead star is the perfect sign of postmodern corporeality: always absent, never attainable, a contrived image from some choice moment of youth and beauty, frozen for all time, never there, always here. Forever young. Forever dead. Forever. In the postmodern cybernetic world, you are who you want to be, what you want to be, and your interlocutors have to take your word for it. The body disappears in cyberspace so that one knows the other only through their signs. Trust

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or cheat? Does it matter if you meet only in cyberspace? In this world of representations, the self-evident boundedness of 'nature' from 'society' dissolves. We can no longer believe the claims to a big truth. Truth has its histories, truth is contingent, truth is in our imagination. The subject seems to disappear, rather like the Cheshire Cat, with just its traces remaining. In the past, much of organization life and interorganization life was premised on face-to­ face interaction between peers and between immediate subordinates and superiors (although face-to-face communication between members of vastly different strata was rare, at least in large complex organizations). Now these rela­ tionships can flourish in the absence of any interpersonal basis, as linkages form through cyberspace. Where once trust could be estab­ lished through intimacy, where surveillance was immediate, does the disappearing body now elude managerial control? Great hopes are expressed daily in the business press for the post-internet organizational world. But, in these pages are warning signs. How will the informal organization, so vital to formal organization, be shaped in a virtual world? Which communicative competencies can flourish in cyberspace and which cannot? What are the implications of the absence of subtle, tacit and embodied clues to meaning and context that are present in more face-to-face communication? Are there contexts where mediated communica­ tion can still be followed up with more direct access? New competencies will be required to navigate this cyberspace, both within and across organizations, that presently we know little about. The disappearance of the body from an immediate, physical workspace shared with others has been interpreted in different ways. Some suggest that as cyberspace grows, control shrinks; other suggest that cyberspace offers the potential for more sophisticated controls. On the one hand, we have the collapse of Baring Brothers, which has been attributed to risky and insufficiently scrutinized trading in cyber­ space on far-flung options markets. Information flowed back and forth between the head office in London and the trading desk in Singapore, but managers apparently failed to register the implicit clues embedded in this disembodied, electronic language. On the other hand, we hear stories of managers who, having e-mailed employees at 9.05, await the return messages to see who is at their desk. This 'brave new world' reawakens memories of the factory 'time-clock', showing a potential for Foucauldian disciplinary controls exerted through pervasive electronic media. Yet, where there is control, there is resistance, as hackers hack into computers and

code crackers crack sophisticated passwords. The struggle simply moves to a new arena, takes on a new dimension as 'displaced' employees lose the luxury of even cleaning out their offices; today, it may be done for them, in case they sabotage complex computer systems. Or the scope of e-mail communication is narrowed down as it is 'hijacked' by employees to express their concerns and complaints to an organiza­ tion-wide audience (e.g. Romm and Pliskin 1 995). Thus, the emergence and expansion of cyberspace carry no clear meaning, bring about no clear outcome: how it is used, abused, not used, depends upon the social context in which it is embedded.

THE RESUSCITATED SUBJECT

The body of the individual subject might dis­ appear from sight into cyberspace, or fluctuate and oscillate under the 'pornographic' gaze of the organization (Hopfl and Sinclair 1 995), but who the individual is, and what the individual might be, cannot be 'bleached' away. Those signs of identity, frequently washed away by organiza­ tion studies, require a renewed theoretical gaze. In this section, we focus on the human, rather than the organizational, subject, as we consider the individual. groups of individuals, individuals in various forms of relationships, who comprise and surround the organizations that we study. In the past, research, based on both normal and contra traditions, has often lost sight of this subject, as we will show here by exploring two paradoxes. To examine the normal science tradition, we use the example of the Aston Studies to illuminate the paradox of translation. We argue that only by silencing the individual subject, in this case managers, were the Aston Studies able to achieve the successful series of translations which helped constitute this body of work as 'science'. But, ironically, this resounding silence also prevented the final translation: that of theory into practice. To investigate the contra tradition, we draw on the modernist/postmoder­ nist debate to explore the paradox of meaning, in which we illuminate the incongruous tendencies of postmodern work to marginalize and draw attention away from the subject at the very moment it tries to acknowledge it. While we argue that all genres of research risk condemning the individual subject to the margins, we do not suggest that all research actually succumbs to this tendency. As many of the chapters in this book show, we can envision possible futures where the individual subject might be resusci­ tated in various ways.

CONCL USION: REPRESENTA TIONS The Paradox of Translation

While resisting generalization, the chapters in this book indicate that the development of organization studies has differed somewhat between North America and Europe (see Burrell in Chapter 1 6 and Marsden and Townley in Chapter 1 7) . In North America, Parsons's interpretation of Weber resulted in a view of bureaucracy as the ideal type of modern organization (see Weiss 1 983). Notable studies, such as those of Merton ( 1 957) and Gouldner ( 1 954), developed this theme. Coupled with Taylorist traditions and Fordist practices, a functional approach to 'management' theory flourished. In Europe, on the other hand, a traditional interest in class structure created a space for a more radical interpretation of Weber: one that focused on the domination of structures, rules, and procedures in modern life, and also drew from Marx (see Braverman 1 974; Clegg 1 975; Burawoy 1 979; Clegg and Dunkerley 1 980; Clegg 1 990; Thompson and McHugh 1 990). 1 There is thus an irony in that one of Europe's main contributions to organization theory in the 1 960s was the Aston School, considered by Marsden and Townley to be the archetypal example of normal science and functionalism. Although geographically located in the UK, intellectually the Aston School could have been anywhere. The members of the school make much of the camaraderie forged in a basement in Birmingham (Pugh and Hickson 1 976) but, when one inspects their work for signs of regional imprinting, none are visible. As a con­ ception it was immaculately clean of any signs of its own place of genesis. Consequently bearing the sign of nowhere it was rapidly to travel almost everywhere, as the word spread through the prestigious pages of the Administrative Science Quarterly, and became the keystone, the very centre, of claims to the existence of an orthodox consensus in organization studies. 2 The Aston Studies were successful precisely because of their lack of distinguishing features. Their portability, their universal appeal, facili­ tated the translation process that ensured their widespread acceptance.3 According to students of scientific practice (e.g. Calion 1 986; Latour 1 987; 1 993) what makes a science is less the moral basis of its practices and more the quality of its translations. Those of the Aston Group were exemplary. The Aston Studies constructed a set of concerns from texts ranging from the classics of Weber and Taylor to those of their contemporaries, which were then translated into the concerns of managers in local enterprises in the British West Midlands. Reiterative transla­ tions proceeded apace in the basement 'labora­ tory', where the already translated concerns of

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such matters as 'spans of control' were translated once more, with great ingenuity, into dimensions of standardization, routinization and the like. Researchers then translated these dimensions into simple instructions that collectively formed their questionnaire, the results of which were translated by factor analysis into universal attributes of all organizations everywhere. The research process translated whatever subject iv­ ities were found in the field into an instrumenta­ lized intersubjectivity: a research design capable of representing any organization as if it were a variation on any other organization. Such was the audacity of the research process. Unlike the artful construction of a laboratory setting, where the scientists can reconstruct the experiment, note any changes, and map any theoretical contingencies, the Aston researchers were forced to deal with a 'living' organization, whose members had an agency quite unlike that of microbes and chemicals trapped in a test tube (although Call on 1 986 warns us about making a false dichotomy between natural and social entities). These managers and employees could change the substance of the environment that the researchers had taken so much trouble to trans­ late; they could encroach on the translation pro­ cess.4 The Aston translation process arrested this agency and prevented managerial discretion from contaminating the results: only the researchers knew which organizations were in the study, and they preserved them in the analytical formalde­ hyde of 'formalization', 'standardization', 'cen­ tralization', 'routinization' and 'configuration'. Aston froze one image of these organizations in a timeless and motionless frame (Starbuck 1 98 1 ). Outside this frame, however, had the camera continued rolling, it would have been shooting 'truth twenty-four times a second' (Godard

1 963).5 By such strategies, then, the Aston Studies silenced the managers of the organizations they studied, denying any agency or intent they had. The process of consultation with the managers reminds us of a similar consultation conducted by Dom Casmurro: I got hold of old books, dead books, books dead and buried, opened them and compared them, seeking out the text and the meaning in order to discover the common origin of the pagan oracle and the biblical message. I even had recourse to the maggots in the books to ask what there was in the text they had eaten. 'My dear sir,' replied a long, fat maggot, 'we know absolutely nothing about the texts we eat. We do not choose what we eat, neither do we like or detest what we eat. We just eat.' I could get nothing more from him. And all the others, as if by mutual consent, repeated the same

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The Paradox of Meaning

Postmodernist writers have not been the only ones to struggle with the loss of meaning. For example, Gouldner's critique of technology revealed the loss of meaning that modernity had wrought through its institutionalization. At the centre of Gouldner's intellectual universe was an ontology of modernism (Lee 1 994: 7), one which signalled a subjective idealism that privileged those who critiqued technology, a project central to Gouldner's ( 1 976) later thought. In this respect, Gouldner was unequi­ vocally modern and his reaction typical of prevailing radical North American disillusion­ ment (Lee 1 994: 9). European modernist thought signalled similar disenchantment. For example, the Habermasian tradition made similar assump­ tions about reflexivity (Steffy and Grimes 1 986). Such approaches seek not so much to transcend modernism as to elevate it to a 'critical' or 'high' modernism (Jencks 1 989), using the idea of pure communicative competence to forge a new world free of unwarranted domination and distortion: the Enlightenment echoes of Kantian reason resound with clarity. In the postmodern tradition, however, the loss of meaning was a very different matter. Whereas radical modernists tried to salvage meaning through such means as Gouldner's critique of technology, writers in French semiology, such as Lefebvre ( 1 9 7 1 ), announced the death of mean­ ing through the domination of the symbol by the sign. Here was a postsubjectivist world that followed the uncoupling of the signifiers and the signified. In this world, meaning, no longer fixed, floats free: the self as subject no longer controls its own fate, while the sign as object controls everyone. The 'freedom' of the speaking subject is illusory. The Durkheimian 'social facticity' of language is reasserted as the subject is recon­ ceived as spoken rather than speaking. It is language that speaks: subjects are simply its conduits, its mediated bearers' ?

Normal science, of which Aston is a particularly illuminating example, is not the only branch of organizational studies that silences the subject. By drawing on the modernist/postmodernist debate, a debate that engages many of our authors (e.g. Alvesson and Deetz, Reed, Mars­ den and Townley, Burrell, Hardy and Clegg), we can explore another paradox, that of meaning. Postmodernism announced the death of meaning by showing the meaning of 'non-meaning', as Eduardo Ibarra-Colado reminded us when commenting on an earlier version of this text. In this section we discuss the implications of this paradox for the subject, showing that postmo­ dernist approaches have, by informing our understanding of the subject, often silenced the very voices they sought to amplify.

Postmodernist writers in organization studies responded to the challenges presented by the loss of meaning and the decentring of the subject8 by focusing on reflexivity. Marcus ( 1 994: 569) identifies different forms of reflexivity. Of particular interest here is reflexivity that takes the form of 'self-critique and personal quest, playing on the subjective, the experiential, and the idea of empathy' ( 1 994: 569); reflexivity that emphasizes the intertextual, diverse field of representations involved in any project and the fact that we operate in a complex matrix of already existing alternative representations; reflexivity that reminds us of the positioning of the gendered, coloured, classed subject. Such reflexivity is intended to address both 'crises' brought by postmodern thinking: a legitimation crisis, which cast doubt on assumptions that

story. Perhaps this discreet silence concerning the eaten texts was just another way of devouring again what had already been eaten. (de Assis 1 992: 40)

By marginalizing the agency of their managers, however, the Aston researchers were never able to complete fully their translation. Translation into practice, as far as we are aware, never occurred and the Aston Studies have never been a blueprint for organization design. So, the Aston Studies, and other work in their mould, failed to translate research into practice, despite their supposed managerialist orientation. This positivist concept of science, institutionalized through the Aston School, severs the connection between organization theory and practice by emphasizing testing at the expense of the creation of theory (Weick 1 989). Positivism has little to say about theory creation or discovery because it assumes discovery and proof are sides of the same process and because it assumes that the only logical reason for proposing a hypothesis is that certain considerations lead one to think it is true. (Marsden and Townley in Chapter 17)

The success of the translation process was also its weakness. What it could not do was arrest the gnawing of other 'maggots' not enrolled in its programme, both organizational participants and academic observers, who presumed to interpret, not just to be translated, who wished to create new translations, to challenge existing translations. In retrospect, the Aston project failed because it could not resolve the contra­ dictions of translation contained within it and, particularly, the contradictions posed by man­ agerial agency. It ignores the subject,6 as does much research of the functionalist, positivist genre.

CONCL USION: REPRESENTA TIONS 'qualified, competent observers can with objec­ tivity, clarity, and precision report on their own observations of the social world, including the observations of others' (Denzin and Lincoln I 994a: 1 1 ) ; and a representation crisis, which challenged the 'belief in a real subject, or real individual, who is present in the world and able, in some form, to report on his or her experiences'

( 1 994a: 1 2).

Such reflexivity which, as we stated in our introduction, aims to find 'ways of seeing which act back on and reflect existing ways of seeing' , has been pursued in organization studies i n a variety of ways. One approach, for example, has been through the link between theory and practice. Hassard ( 1 993: 1 9) argues that 'the essence of theory is not its database but its intelligibility.' But the question inevitable arises: intelligible for whom? Hassard does not answer this question directly, but he does argue that the successful communication of a theory's intellig­ ibility lies in its usefulness. In this way, continues Hassard, theory and practice become insepar­ able and, as academics, we should continuously absorb 'other cultural intelligibilities into our own' ( 1 993: 1 9) to promote and enhance this interaction, and avoid the problem of privileging one discourse over another. [This tenet is) central to anyone who aspires to write from within a distinctively postmodern paradigm. The notion of an expert writing from within an institution in social scientific language is one that cannot be sustained if post modernism is accepted. (Parker 1 992: 1 2)

In this way, postmodernism supposedly achieves reflexivity through the critical examination of the assumptions that underlie 'the nature of the relation between author, text and reader'

( 1 992: 1 2) The reader might include subjects who experience the phenomena under investigation, generating input to the research process; or subjects who act on the analysis and theories provided by the researcher, consuming the output of the research process; or subjects who act on the analysis and theories provided by the researcher, consuming the output of the research process. Yet terms like 'author', 'text' and 'reader' focus our attention on what an academic (the author) writes, in academic journals and books (the text), which are usually read by other academics (the reader) rather than by either practitioners or those purportedly 'studied'. The linguistics reveal an elitist approach which is not uncharacteristic of the practice of postmodern research: readers might recall the use of deconstructionism as a technique in the hands of elitist, indeed fascist, thinkers such as Heidegger. That such elitism is still evident,

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even though the impulses to serve a particular ideology have vanished, should not surprise us. Many postmodernist writers tend, then, to render their work intelligible primarily for other researchers and academics, rather than other subjects, such as those 'studied'. Postmodernist researchers often distance themselves from those who experience and consume the phenomena around which they construct their academic endeavours. One reason for this distance is, as Marsden and Townley (Chapter 1 7) point out, the fact that not much empirical research is being done. Ironically, the fragility and vulnerability of the 'researcher as subject' highlighted by this type of perspective dissuades scholars from taking on that role. It appears easier to avoid research altogether if it involves messing with the subjectivities of others who are non-academics. Recognition of the impossibility of theory-neutral observation undermined confidence in empirical work, lest it be tainted with 'empiricism', and encouraged a retreat into the relative safety of 'theory'. (Marsden and Townley in Chapter 1 7)

Instead of conducting empirical work, scholars are urged to spend their time with other scholars. For example, Burrell ( 1 954) asks us to be less like social science researchers (carrying out empirical work) and more like philosophers. To do so, we should interact more with 'professional' philo­ sophers, despite what Burrell sees as the likely painful consequences. To confront a professional philosopher is to con­ front one's own ignorance. Nevertheless, the embarrassment must be endured . . . As social scientists, we need to be more like philosophers; as people locked into empiricism we should be more excited by the transcendental; as pursuers of practice we should be more utopian in what we advocate. ( 1 994: 1 5)

In this way, the written text creates knowledge, at its best informed by 'professional' philoso­ phers (who, presumably, are better at philoso­ phizing than the amateurs in organizational studies), while other subjects remain unnamed and nameless. In this regard, as Parker notes, reflexivity appears to be the area where post­ modernist literature has been least successful. If the real world does not exist in anything other than discourse, then is the act of writing one interpretation of a discourse a worthwhile pursuit? The problems of (fictional) individuals in (mythical) organizations are safely placed behind philosophical double-glazing and their cries are treated as interesting examples of discourse. ( 1 992: I I )

The conservative role of modern universities, not only those steeped in 'tradition' as Bourdieu and Passeron ( 1 977) note, also makes itself evident in

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the postmodern 'caste of intellectuals' (Derrida 1 978; Cooper 1 989). Caste work consists of taboos as to who can do what, where, when, with what, and to whom. At the pinnacle stand the scholars, producers of articulate texts published as scholarly words, read and reviewed by pro­ fessedly articulate colleagues creating a self­ contained and hermetically sealed community. The pollution of everyday life is kept at textual length; opportunities for listening and learning from those who experience and consume the process that empirical research creates are kept away. This elite cult of postmodernism preserves its own caste by excluding, and thus minimizing, the reflexivity of others: it requires a truncated reflexivity, one that involves the death of sub­ jectivity other than that of the privileged author. Maintaining consistency between 'doing' research and the tenets of postmodern theory is particularly difficult because of the significant relationship between author and text; yet the ethos of postmodernism means that it is par­ ticularly important to do so. Little wonder, then, that many researchers avoid this dilemma by eschewing field work altogether. By subscribing to a reflexivity that is the preserve of a largely formalist, formulaic and limited theoretical conversation, these high caste scholars not only free themselves from the chore of rendering their theories intelligible to individuals who might find it difficult to decipher the words of a postmodern text, let alone derive any meaning from it; they also absolve themselves of the responsibility for doing so. Critical forms of modernism also distance themselves from the subject. We would argue that both critical modernist and postmodernist writers find their espoused philosophies breaking down when confronted by actual subjects in the flesh rather than merely those in the text. For example, in contrasting Paulo Freire's philoso­ phy and teaching method, Taylor ( 1 993) found the latter undermined the former by being antidialogic and manipulative, partly as a result of the practical and logistical difficulties involved in translating a thought into action in a way consistent with the underpinning philosophy. It is, it appears, one thing to write a coherent philosophical position, it is another to act on its terms. Neither critical theory nor postmodernism has, then, bridged theory and practice with any degree of confidence. In fact, both approaches have denied the very thing they most revere. The postmodern tradition simultaneously reclaims and marginalizes the subject. The identity of those subjects, so carefully constructed through postmodern analysis and insight, is then stripped away, as writers seek the safety of philosophical theorizing. The voices of the unnamed subjects,

who experience and consume the research process, still to the sounds of silence. Similarly the emancipatory ideals of critical theory fade ( see Alvesson and Willmott 1 992a; 1 992b; Martin and Frost in Chapter 14 in this volume). The practicalities of resistance and emancipation are often ignored by both post­ modernists and critical theorists and, when these matters are discussed, it is often in such generalized, theoretical, esoteric terminology that it offers little help to many of those who might benefit from it (see Chapters 7 by Alvesson and Deetz and 1 5 by Hardy and Clegg; also Clegg 1 989; Parker 1 992; Nord and Doherty 1 994). In this regard, postmodernism and critical theory are not unlike the positivism they seek to resist. All marginalize and silence the people of whom they talk: the one by reducing them to meaningless statistics in which they cannot see themselves, the other by excluding them through esoteric jargon in which they cannot speak themselves.

Subject Silence

Pity the poor subject: neglected for so long in organization studies, particularly where issues of gender, culture and ethnicity were involved; homogenized by functionalist assumptions in the mainstream of analysis; and pronounced dead on arrival in positions as diverse as Aston (Pugh and Hickson 1 976) and 'structural Marxism' (Althusser 1 972). In organization studies, we have seen how postmodern, critical and normal science have the potential to neglect the subject. In fact, research by its very nature tends to privilege the researcher at the expense of the subject (although some theories privilege more than others) . Academics are schooled in 'articulating' (or not) their thoughts and fears, and in presenting their views thoughtfully, rationally, and logi­ cally. Articulation soon overwhelms the 'excla­ mation' that communicates the experience of what the subject believes, sees, feels and senses. Exclamation is translated and channelled into requisite, articulate categories provided by the well-trained researcher. Yet, as Fugelsang ( 1 973) also points out, exclamation is 'genuine' because it refers to sensations, feelings, experiences unfiltered through the control mechanism of 'second thoughts'; while articulation is often concealing and influenced by systematized thinking (see Taylor 1 993). Most research agendas, both normal and contra, call for ever more careful and sophisti­ cated articulation, reducing further the limited legitimacy attached to exclamation. Therein lies

CONCL USION: REPRESENTA TIONS the dilemma. As Burrell (Chapter 1 6) points out, analysis 'requires the death or at least the mutilation of that which is analysed'. As researchers 'develop' their understanding, they seem to become further removed from the subjects, less able to engage in conversation with them. Normal scientists issue edicts and predictions about appropriate behaviour, as measured by highly sophisticated, quantitative analyses and experimental paraphernalia, from the safety of their laboratories. Subjects to them are like rats in a maze (or maggots in a book). The theor­ eticians who populate much of the critical theory and postmodernist genre engage with the subject mainly in terms of their own subjectivity, preferring the haven of the library in which to engage in endless debate about the meaning (for themselves) of what they do. Those of the postmodern persuasion rarely give advice any more; critical theorists do, but only to those they deem to be oppressed. Advice is the raison d'etre of the practitioner-oriented proselytizers, who preach at their subjects from the pulpit of com­ merce. They tell them how to be bigger, better, brighter than the rest, but remain oblivious to the costs of their recommendations to indivi­ duals both inside and outside the organization. Everyone ignores someone. The philosophers ignore everyone; the functionalists ignore work­ ers; critical theorists ignore managers (even oppressed managers because, in the view of many of these theorists, there is no such thing). Even ethnographers distance themselves, return­ ing from elsewhere as 'lionized' field workers with 'stories about strange people' (Denzin and Lincoln I 994a: 7) or 'cultural romantics' who (mis)represent deviants as heroes (I 994a: 9). Those who do not distance themselves may get so close to the subject as to 'go native' and become one of them. Part of them, unable to see past them, these researchers ignore the power structures that created not only the subject but also themselves, researcher-as-subject (see Chapter 7 by Alvesson and Deetz; see also Denzin and Lincoln I 994a). Even when, for example in qualitative research (Denzin and Lincoln I 994a), attempts have been made to let the subject speak, we talk about or for them, 'taking over their voice' (Denzin 1 994: 503). The perspective of the articulate, scientifically trained, insightful researcher is privileged (Jeff­ cutt 1 994; Marcus 1 994). I am waiting for them to stop talking about the 'Other', to stop even describing how important it is to be able to speak about difference. It is not just important what we speak about. but how and why we speak. Often this speech about the 'Other' is also a mask, an oppressive talk hiding gaps, absences, that space where our words would be if we were

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speaking, if there were silences, if we were there. This 'we' is that 'us' who inhabit the marginal space that is not a site of domination but a place of resistance. Enter that space. Often this speech about the 'Other' annihilates, erases: 'no need to hear your voice when I can talk about you better than you can speak about yourself. No need to hear your voice. Only tell me about your pain. I want to know your story. And then I will tell it back to you in a new way. Tell it back to you in such a way that it has become mine, my own. Rewriting you. I write myself anew. I am still author, authority. I am still the colonizer, the speaking subject, and you are now at the centre of my talk. Stop. ' (hooks 1 989: 1 5 1 -2; quoted in Fine 1 994: 70)

This is especially true, as Calas and Smircich point out in Chapter 8 (also see Slater 1 992), of those subjects associated with the 'developing' world. Even with the best of post-colonial intentions, this project is fraught with difficulty because we lack the tools to carry it out. Research so far has tended either to romanticize these subjects or to focus on the relationship between them and their oppressors. While such work may provide new insight there is an obvious risk of contamination. The challenge is to find an original space untouched by the power of the colonizers: no mean achievement. Another question that Calas and Smircich ask is: who deconstructs the West? While deconstruction is itself a Western practice, a 'return match' would at least offer some interesting insights. For example, because of globalization, we can only explain postmodernity in 'advanced' socie­ ties by understanding 'other' societies. Globalism itself involves two dynamic movements that are always in tension: the modernist advance of information technology and communications facilitates a process of world integration domi­ nated by economic and political fluxes; while the re-emergence of localism and nationalism, and a return of cultural and religious essentialism, focus attention on so-called 'traditional' socie­ ties. In the latter societies, a 'modernist' fa<;ade, articulated and constituted by a political and economic elite, often hides an unmodern interior. While a powerful minority displays the trappings of modernity, the majority inhabits a space somewhere between the traditions of premoder­ nity and the chaos of postmodernity, the latter often imposed by modernist institutions such as the World Bank, the UN, and the IMF. In this sense, such societies are postmodern because they have never been modern; while the post­ modernity of 'advanced' societies is really a peculiarly modern condition. We might also benefit from imagining the transition from premodernity, through modernity, to postmo­ dernity not simply as an economic or a

STUD YING ORGANIZA TION

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technological process, but as a personal experi­ ence, as an individual connects with both organization and society. 'Civilization' processes are a complex web of structural constraint and subjective constitution. Our analyses have tended to bear witness to the organizational attributes of these dynamics, such as new organizational forms and technological developments, and we have much to learn about the role of subjective experience. 9 Thus, many different types of researchers and theorizers privilege certain information, either through not listening in the first place (by not engaging in 'empirical' work or by engaging in unfettered empiricism); or by discounting and discouraging the genuine in favour of the manufactured, exclamation instead of articula­ tion, the emic over the etic (Taylor 1 993; Denzin 1 994). Ironically, by problematizing the researcher, we have drawn all the attention to her; as she engages increasingly in forms of experimental writing to achieve reflexivity - such as fiction, narratives of the self, performance science, polyvocal texts, responsive readings, aphorisms, comedy and satire, visual presenta­ tions, mixed genres (Richardson 1 994) - the creative and literary skills to entertain become paramount. The living, breathing, thinking, acting subject defers to the playwright, the novelist and perhaps, if we come full circle, the puppeteer.

SUbject Speak

By exposing the privilege that the articulate voices of academia currently have, we hope to reclaim some privilege for those willing to exclaim their experiences. In this way, not only might these voices secure an opportunity to speak; we might also listen. In other words, con­ versations between researcher and researched might emerge. As we mentioned earlier, while all forms of research run the risk of forgetting the subject, all have the potential for recall. Accordingly some writers have listened by focusing all their attention on the subject, the person, in all of the gendered, culturated and identity-laden senses in which subjectivity might manifest itself. No longer embedded in any sense of the authenticity, integrity and individuality of a heroic and world-ordering subject, this subject is merely a sign. Feminist scholars, in particular, have adopted this view to explore the signs of increasingly fragmented times, and the increas­ ingly insecure and fragmented subjectivities that these times constitute and frame. Consider Calas and Smircich (Chapter 8), who explore a variety of different ways in which the

female subject has achieved a voice in organiza­ tion studies and beyond; Nkomo and Cox ( 1 996), who put the spotlight on the whole range of ethnic diversity; Egri and Pinfield ( 1 996), who acknowledge the costs borne by inhabitants of less developed countries by our consumerism and materialism, while noting that individuals from radically different spiritual traditions know a lot more about caring for our natural environment than we do. Other chapters have put the subject back in the frame in a different way by taking pictures that would not normally be taken, to reveal different facets of our identity. Not for Fineman, Gagliardi, and Hassard the mugshot of rational 'man'; instead, by highlighting the way in which people feel about organizations, what they sense of the cor­ porate landscape, how they deal with moments of boredom, they achieve a three-dimensional picture. The subject may not speak loudly from a paper on population ecology, contingency theory or organizational economics but, even here, there is scope for researchers to reconnect with the people they study. Certainly the concerns of contingency theory, organizational ecology, and organizational economics are not so far removed from the real world: what manager or employee is unaffected by organizational effectiveness and performance, by organizational founding and failure, by change and inertia, by transaction costs? Consider Donaldson's ( 1 995) arguments against branches of normal science that he believes to be 'anti-management'; the observa­ tion by Tolbert and Zucker (Chapter 6) that institutional theory has increased its interest in the role of the institutional entrepreneur; Barney and Hesterly's perceptions (Chapter 4) concern­ ing how the firm can be managed, why some organizations outperform others, and how firms can cooperate. There are many ways, then, to reconnect with the inhabitants of the organiza­ tions we study (and without whom many of us would be unemployed) . While all types of research run the risk of losing the subject, they also have the potential to relocate the subject, as Nord and Fox (Chapter 5) have found in their work. Some approaches that connect with the subject do so from a managerial perspective. Other writers, notably those from critical and post­ modern traditions, tend to eschew such manage­ rialist stances, ignoring managers as a legitimate constituency (Alvesson and Willmott 1 992b; Nord and Jermier 1 992). For example, in this book, Hassard (Chapter 1 3) discusses time as boredom experienced by workers; but one could just as easily discuss the oppressive effects of time experienced as pressure and stress, from the perspective of managers, perhaps by revisiting

CONCL USION: REPRESENTA TIONS the work of Mintzberg ( 1 973) or Stewart ( 1 967). Managers as subjects seem to disappear under the gaze of the critical and the postmodern, or appear only as the 'bad' guys. Resistance to manager as subject undoubtedly occurs, at least partly, through the fear of managerialist hijacking and a wish to avoid the unthinking managerialism of some texts. There are good reasons for such resistance, as Martin and Frost argue in Chapter 1 4. Culture was a theme quickly taken up by managerialist researchers, and turned into a more effective managerial tool - even, some would say, instru­ ment of oppression (Hollway 1 99 1 ; Willmott 1 993). There is always the risk that, as the field gets richer and more 'sophisticated', and we bring in more and more aspects of situated humanity, we also increase the possibilities and probability of manipulation. Foucault's link between power and knowledge is apposite: generating more knowledge can create more opportunities for manipulation. Knowledge is not the antidote of power. Another good reason to resist unthinking managerialism is, ironically, its lack of success in helping managers. Thus in simplifying the concept of culture, an ineffective, faddish recipe has been concocted. There are as many categories of subject as there are stakeholders in organizations and organization theories and, to resuscitate the subjects, we need to be willing to follow them into the circle of research that we construct. This means a number of things. First, we need an enhanced awareness of the relationship of the researchers to those subjects under investigation, something which is not to be dismissed as a postmodern whim. 'Normal' scientists may strive for objectivity, but discussion within any scientific community acknowledges how under­ lying assumptions and positions affect research results (Tenbrunsel et al. 1 996). Managerially oriented work that does not question its motives and assumptions is severely hamstrung (see Whipp 1 996). Second, we need to listen to what all subjects have to say in both conceiving and executing research (Forrester 1 989). Letting people in organizations speak for themselves by conducting ethnographic studies is a vital means of moderating 'totalizing' accounts of management and organization. (Alvesson and Willmott 1 992a: 4 54)

However, we need to do more than just listen since listening alone simply reinforces that status and power of the intellectual (even if he or she is willing to leave the safety of the library or laboratory and venture into the world outside). Consequently, we need to engage in conversa­ tions between researcher and researched in which both parties may learn and from which explicitly

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political and coercive elements have been purged (e.g. Bowen and Power 1 993; Forrester 1 989). Drawing on narrative theory, we can see that the aim of such conversations is to open up multiple narratives with multiple meanings; resist con­ ventional narratives; not marginalize those narratives that do not conform to the accepted protocols (Cobb 1 993). Such conversations are not necessarily comfortable: they destabilize; they offer ambiguity and ambivalence, not coherence and closure. And they certainly make research a lot tougher to carry out. To be responsive to new narratives is important in research because narratives pro­ duce identities: as stories are elaborated, persons are co-opted into identities they did not author and cannot transform. So narratives are political in that they establish positions from which persons must speak and from which conse­ quences in the material world flow. Narratives are never totally coherent: there is always also some degree of 'autopoietic organization' (self­ regulation) that stabilizes, at least momentarily, the interpretation of the narrative. The structure of that narrative delimits the possible range of interpretations which in turn increases its coherence. This is problematic because it limits actions and privileges certain definitions of the problem (Cobb 1 993). But, if narratives can be opened, people are less likely to be pressganged into forced roles or confined in straitjacket identities. If culture is produced by all organiza­ tional members, and leadership is constituted by followers as much as leaders, then surely research is produced and consumed by all subjects in its circle. Let us remember that, despite all the strictures that postmodern analysis places on autonomous actors, subjects are not passive receptacles, sites of nothing more than history writ subjectively. As de Certeau ( 1 984: 32) has pointed out, consumption is as much a feature of (post)­ modern life as production. If those who read an academic text help to constitute it, those who experience everyday life help to constitute both it and their role in it. De Certeau draws on examples as diverse as TV audiences which, treated as inert statistical data, have to be transformed into a 'lexicon of user practices' because researchers are forced to ask 'what do consumers make of the images that pass before their eyes?'; as well as native Indians in South America, who neither rejected nor accepted the dominant order that Spanish law imposed on them, but made it 'function in another register' through procedures of consumption that allowed them to maintain their difference 'in the very space that the occupier was organizing'. To see the subject as historically constituted is still to see the subject, and to acknowledge the

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limits of its being also acknowledges the possibilities of its emancipation (Laclau 1 988). What we have rejected is the idea that humanist values have the metaphysical status of an essence and that they are, therefore, prior to any concrete history and society. However, this is not to deny their validity; it only means that their validity is constructed by means of particular discursive and augmentative practices . . . It is within this discursive plurality that 'humanist values' are constructed and expanded. And we know well that they are always threatened: racism, sexism, class discrimination, always limit the emergence and full validity of humanism. To deny to the 'human' the status of essence is to draw attention to the historical conditions that have led to its emergence and to make possible, therefore, a wider degree of realism in the fight for the full realization of those values. (Laclau and Mouffe 1 987: 1 02)

As Nord and Fox point out in Chapter 5, the individual has not disappeared. By examining how the subject is constituted by events and processes beyond any immediate or complete control, the distance between researcher and subject is decreased, not increased. To understand how he or she is con­ stituted and created in this world of uncertainties is not to claim victim status, however, but to show the possibilities for action. To combine listening with learning transforms reflexivity from elite privilege to a property of a system (see Lash and Urry 1 994). Created and re­ created in these flows are spaces and signs, significations and semiotics, symbols and selves. Postmodernism in this empirical mode involves analysis of different forms and trajectories of different types of mobile subjects and objects through circuits of power framed by meaning, space and time. Some subjects are more reflexive than others because of specific configurations of space and time which flow through them, but they are not confined to supposedly specialized, articulate researchers. This is not to romanticize the subject, or to yearn nostalgically for the return of mind over matter. As Denzin and Lincoln ( I 994a: I I) point out in the introduction to their handbook, organization studies must adapt to the chal­ lenges posed by the representation crisis: the concepts of the aloof researcher and the knowing subject must be abandoned. This does not preclude action- and activist-oriented research, or social criticism and critique. It means 'read­ ing' theory; searching for local rather than grand narratives; engaging in struggle rather than revolution; listening and learning; understanding style and rhetoric; attending to language and meaning; being aware of our temporal, spatial,

emotional involvement III the research enter­ prise, and starting up conversations. Future research might, then, select more diverse subjects from which to learn, such as managers and workers, men and women, black and white, Asian and Caucasian, the developed and the developing world. Through exploring diverse subjectivities, we are more likely to avoid stereo­ typical categorizations, and to meld theory and practice from both (different) managerial and emancipatory positions (Alvesson and Willmott 1 992b). It is through listening and learning, through the fusion of insight gained from experience with insight offered by theory, that one is likely to achieve reflexivity. Theorizing helps us see beyond experience to the webs of power and language that entrap and produce 'experience'. It prevents submergence (Freire 1 992) in the dark prisons where experience often resides. However, as academics we must also directly confront the subjects for whom we purport to speak. It is in this nexus of theory and experience that reflexivity is most potent. Bringing such agency back into focus does matter to organization studies. As Peter Frost suggested to us, when reading an earlier draft of these conclusions, organization theorists have been only too adept at developing and teaching theories and creating intellectual movements that scoffed at, dismissed or eliminated agency. We all know these approaches: contingency perspectives, where it is only 'size that matters'; population ecology perspectives, where only niches matter and not the people who may help fill them; postmodernism, where only the discourses speak and the agency of those spoken through is given the status of little more than a ventriloquist's dummy. I f we believe that nothing can be done, that we don't make a difference, we put the chains on ourselves and leave the controllers, the oppressors, whomso­ ever, to eliminate whatever agency they desire. Isn't this, after all, the intellectual position that is most conducive to tyranny? Hence, to resist tyranny let us resuscitate the subject, breathe life back into those stilled lips, disturb the somnolent and death-like state, shatter metaphorical bottles of analytic formaldehyde.

THE SUBJECT: MAKING SENSE OF ORGANIZA nON STUDIES

In the first section, we examined the organization of the enterprising subject, pointing out that it was often far ahead of the attempts of organiza­ tion studies to represent it. In the second section, we described how the individual subject, who is

CONCL USION: REPRESENTA TIONS often unrepresented or misrepresented in organization studies, fades away. In this section, we explore a third subject: organization studies themselves, how we represent ourselves and whether we can reflexively account for that representation. In this way, we contemplate our identities as researchers or organizations. As we have already suggested, reflexivity comes from conversations that take place at the intersections: between researcher and researched; between different theories; between theorizing and practice. In particular, we wish to draw attention to the relationship between theory and practice. Theory, practice and the relationship between them are contingent upon discursive practices: theorists not only theorize, they also specify the relationship between theory and practice within the conditions of particular discursive practices. No calibration of this rela­ tionship can stand outside of those discourses that constitute or oppose particular representa­ tions. Thus our identity as organization studies researchers depends partly on our understanding of the relation of theory and practice; and any reflexive understanding of our identity hinges on our understanding of the limits to this relation­ ship. While the debates between the paradigms and between modernism and post modernism highlight the need for more reflexive forms of theorizing, they have not devoted similar atten­ tion to the vital relationship between theory and practice. Some writers have simply opted out from conversations between research and practice. Write what you will and damn the consequences: it matters not whether practitioners understand or even read it. Those that opt out of prac­ titioner discourse may well have interesting things to say, but, by definition, rarely will they concern the relationship of theory to practice: the relationship of a theory to other theories perhaps, but not necessarily to practice other than that of other theorists. The relevancies of these researchers are rarely attuned to the relevancies of practitioners, in part because the latter change more rapidly as a result of situational, competitive pressures, whereas the former are concerned with maintaining existing investments in intellectual capital. So, having built up an expertise in a particular area, academics have a real interest in saving it from extinction, even if their focus sometimes runs counter to or lags behind what is happening in the organizational marketplace external to their knowledge interests. Thus does the organiza­ tional world change irrespective of what we think we know of it. Other writers do focus on the link between theory and practice, making prescriptions to denote what organizational practice should be.

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But they tend, knowingly or unknowingly, to rely on privileged analysis, unreflective of the power implications that this involves. For example, prescriptions often conjure up a medical model by referring to the state of the organization's health and providing prognoses for survival or morbidity. These functionalist approaches tend to founder on the organicism imported with this model: there is no a priori organic entity, whose health corresponds to that of the body in medical discourse, outside the representational aspirations of those theorists and consultants seeking to prescribe. So, while the liver and the arteries cannot debate the appropriate prescription for their health, the constituent parts of organizations usually do and rarely agree. As a result, any representation tends to take sides, even as it comforts itself with the illusion that it does not. Some representations tend to listen to the best resourced voices, the dominant coalitions (Cyert and March 1 963) that purport to speak for the organization. This leads to unreflective recom­ mendations. As Lukes remarked in another context, 'talk of interests provides a licence for the making of normative judgements of a moral and political character' ( 1 974: 34). Critical or radical perspectives take a different but equally privileged stance when they base their judge­ ments, not on what privileged members of the organization say they want, but on what the researcher thinks underprivileged members ought to want (see the discussion on 'real' interests in e.g. Lukes 1 974; Benton 1 9 8 1 ; Knights and Willmott 1 982; Clegg 1 989). Hence prescriptive theorists presume to know the interests of either a reification, the organiza­ tion as a unitary phenomenon, or a particular group of individuals within it. What they cannot easily do is to articulate prescription within the context of a contested conception of what, and whose, these interests really are, other than through protocols that are empirically fashion­ able, by chasing after the chimera of the current vogue. How does one avoid becoming subordi­ nated to such power, either established or resistant, in such a situation? The answer is that one cannot. But one can cast a more reflec­ tive eye over the relationship between theory and practice. For example, from what place of privilege can theory speak if not one rooted in the views existing within the organization? If prescriptive theorizing is rooted in the organiza­ tion, whose image of the organization prevails? Should theory seek, through its prescriptions, to create an illusion of order or represent actual dissonance and dissent? Should it identify with those interests that are currently organization­ ally dominant or with some emergent or dominated interest?

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We do not believe that there are easy answers to these questions but we do believe that they should be asked. In this way, we find that we need neither fear, nor hide behind, infinite relativism. Or, to be more accurate, relativism is not the issue. We may no longer have the means to judge one theory, one representation against another in any absolute terms, but, there again, it was ever an illusion to think otherwise (commensurability arguments not withstanding). What we can do, and do indeed do, is promote representations that have a greater reflexive awareness of what they map and what they miss. In this section we explore how greater reflexivity might be achieved. We first contrast two broad approaches, or identities, in organiza­ tion studies: those that emphasize organization and structure; and those that emphasize people and culture. We then show how identity is consolidated through distance and difference, not just between different theoretical identities but also between identities that revolve around theory or practice. Instead of separation, we argue for conversation, especially at the inter­ section of the practical and theoretical. The approaches covered in this volume, if they stand alone, risk becoming too encoded in their own constitution and, therefore, unreflexive. I n establishing their own identity, they must also be open to other identities, theories and practices.

Identities in Organization Studies

The chapters, despite their differences, agree on two key issues. First, organizations exist as empirical objects, even though there may be little agreement as to which features are most salient to their interpretation and explanation. Second, at the centre of organizations, and also sur­ rounding them, are the people who comprise them, found them, work in them, benefit from them, are disadvantaged by them. Starting from these simple data - 'organizations' and 'people' - two vantage points, two identities, present themselves. Some chapters stress organization structure and downplay the agency of the people: for example, contingency theory, population ecol­ ogy, economic approaches, and much of institu­ tional theory. Structure refers to organization patterning, based on some transcendent organiz­ ing principle, like natural selection, goodness of fit or efficiency. There may be disagreements on how to prioritize the conceptualization of structure but not on the prioritization per se. Other chapters emphasize people and their cultures, the centrality of actors and action to organizational life. One thinks of the chapters on

critical theory, postmodernism, power, emotion, aesthetics. For some researchers, cultures bind people together, unifying them in common frames of meaning and practice; for others, cul­ tures demarcate and define differences between people. These more or less structuralist or culturalist perspectives represent broad identities within organization studies, built around the dialectics of inclusion and exclusion; relevance and irrelevance; legitimacy and illegitimacy. They are rooted in discourses that address the analytical constitution of what is taken to be the 'real' world of organizations since we cannot presume any ontology of organization, as Stablein reminds us in Chapter 9. Thus different identities lead to different conclusions. For structuralists, the organizational world is char­ acterized principally by economic configuration and issues, by integration, convergence and divergence. For culturalists, organizational rea­ lities exhibit primarily the interlinkage of differ­ ent cultural dimensions that do not necessarily stop at the organization boundary: they may come into the organization from elsewhere; once there they may travel, nomadically anywhere. Theorists of each persuasion will look for, and find, quite different relevancies. Structuralists stress key elements that function independently and have a variable effect on other, dependent phenomena: the relation of size to bureaucracy, for instance, or the relation of transaction costs to the form that carries the exchange. Cultural­ ists attend to issues of social construction, meaning and its security or fragility. The constructions of these identities comprise three crucial moments: differentiation; the settlement of self-reference or self-image; the recognition of others (Therborn 1 995: 229). Differentiation takes place through the social construction of a boundary, for instance when contingency theorists demarcate themselves from population ecologists. Drawing boundaries facilitates the creation of a self-image and, in turn, makes it easier to recognize others, outsiders, aliens, enemies. The more clearly the opponents in the struggle can be seen, the more different that they appear, the earlier and the stronger a separate identity emerges. Threats to identity tend to lead to a reinforcement and narrowing of boundaries, heightening separation and difference. In situations of unusual uncertainty or adversity, entrepreneurs of mistrust, of more narrow bound­ aries of identity, should, ceteris paribus, be expected to be more successful than proponents of trust and open boundaries. ( 1 995: 229-30)

Thus paradigm warriors have sought to strengthen barricades and fortify positions,

CONCL USJON: REPRESENTA TJONS making it difficult to argue, reflexively, that the barricades are neither exhaustive of the possible options nor capable of resolving issues within the entrenched positions. In such conditions of adversity and uncertainty, there have been entre­ preneurs of mistrust aplenty, who have differ­ entiated identities very effectively: radical structuralists and radical humanists, functional­ ists and interpretativists, critical and institu­ tional theorists, contingency entrepreneurs and population ecologists. Differentiation achieved; self-image established; others recognized, repelled, rejected. We dispute neither the existence of these identities, nor the importance of self-image in carving out space for different forms of research and theory. Our objective is to challenge their separateness. We advocate the recognition of others in ways that promote the possibility of conversation. Consequently, neither structuralist nor culturalist approaches are adequate, because, as must be evident now, neither accounts for the other, and each only focuses on some aspects of the phenomenal world that the other does not focus on at all. Both structure and culture are active, not inert: there is both structuration and enculturation at work in the phenomenal world. Both shape organizational action as a species of social action and are, in tum, shaped by it. Similarly, the organizational world as we 'know' it is an effect of the knowl­ edge interests, protocols, and practices of researchers, students, and consultants - as well as those of the people who constitute the phenomenal aspects of the organizational reality under study. Fundamentalists on one side would argue for the determination of lay knowledge by expert knowledge; while those on another would say lay concerns are paramount. Rather than saying that our knowledge of organizations is either wholly 'real' (an effect only of the knowl­ edge interests, protocols, and practices of organization members and stakeholders) or wholly 'unreal' (an effect only of the knowledge interests, protocols, and practices of the mem­ bers of organization studies communities), we prefer to see the two positions as standing in relation to, and marked by conversations between, each other.

Conversations

As we said at the outset of this volume, our aim is to capture and stimulate conversations. How aspects of organizations are represented, the means of representation, the features deemed salient, those features glossed and those features ignored, are not attributes of the organization. They

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are an effect of the reciprocal interaction of multiple conversations: those that are professionally orga­ nized, through journals, research agendas, citations and networks; those that take place in the empirical world of organizations. The dynamics of reciprocity in this mutual interaction can vary: some conversa­ tions of practice inform those of the profession; some professional talk dominates practice; some practical and professional conversations sustain each other; others talk past, miss and ignore each other.

The terms through which organizations achieve representation are always an effect of theoretical privilege afforded certain ways of seeing, certain terms of discourse, and their conversational enactment. The work of this book is to construct a space in which conversation between theor­ etically self-privileging discourses becomes an option that researchers can pursue reflexively, where theoretical identities can be affirmed and differences can be negotiated, not just differ­ entiation from other theoretical positions but also within conditions of self-identification. Conversation, whether located in the organ­ ization of an academic specialism, or applied in the actions that constitute the analytical subject of such specialisms, is a public phenomenon. Conversation is intersubjective, shared and embedded within distinct local practices. By definition, no theoretical work ever floats free, hovering high above the plains of mundane knowledge, soaring over the peaks and gullies of societal interests. There are no ways in which theory can sever itself from the conditions of its own existence. While some forms of theory may claim autonomy, it is important to see the dangers therein. For example, much of the work from a feminist perspective resists autonomy and disinterestedness precisely because such disin­ terest led to the neglect of the feminine part of the world: a disinterested, autonomous discourse of organization theory unreflexively reproduced largely non-gendered or masculinist views of and practices in the organizational world. Viewed from the position of the neglected interests, disinterest looks a lot like the particularism of those represented and the slighting of those not. Thus a general and guiding theoretical point emerges. Those theoretical positions able to account, reflexively, for their own theorizing, as well as whatever it is that they theorize about, will be clearest about their own identity, and the extent to which it is partial or formed in dialogue with other positions. The recognition of the 'other' is crucial: self-regarding behaviour in the absence of recognition of and by others is of no value in itself. On these criteria, it is not the alleged 'disinterestedness' of a position that makes it worthwhile, but the degree of reflexivity

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that it exhibits in relation to the conditions of its own existence. Severing the conversational ele­ ments that nurtured the theory in the first place and which link it to practice makes it harder to attain this reflexivity. Thus we argue for the grounding of theoretical claims in local and specific circumstances, rather than their radical and rapid translation out of them. In an organ­ izational world that is part of the social, that is inscribed with the materiality of words and the indeterminacy of meaning, such conversational stretch is essential. Otherwise the paradigm closes, conversational practice becomes mono­ logue, and reflexivity declines accordingly. Theoretical positions can be judged according to three sets of criteria. The first set of criteria of differentiation relates to the ways in which theories separate themselves from the practices , of 'individual(s)' in the 'organization(s) that sustain them. The reference here is to the individual in both the 'concrete' organization and the theoretical organization of knowledge. How does the epistemology of a theoretical position translate to the practical knowledge of those researching and those being researched? Are these know ledges mediated? If so, on whose terms? The second set of criteria refers to the supply and demand of reference images, the ways in which theory knows itself to be the type of theory that it is, and is not. How does the theory reflexively recognize itself, achieve its epistemological self-recognition? How narrow or broad is its discourse? The third set of criteria refers to the extent of pluralist positive and negative recognition: not only the patterns of self-citation within discursive communities (e.g. population ecology citing population ecology) but also recognition, both negative and positive, from theoretical 'others'. In our opinion, forms of theoretical representation that cannot meet these criteria should be viewed with suspicion: they are unreflexive about their existence, a lack of reflexivity that augurs ill for their relation to knowledges in and of the organizational world. We have elaborated a means for discrimina­ tion, using ideas about the relative autonomy and reflexivity of theories. But that is not all. We can also exercise discretion and j udgement concerning individual representations. There is an aesthetic dimension to all human activity, theorizing included. Aesthetics refers to the investigation and appreciation of beauty, espe­ cially, but not exclusively, in the arts. It refers to the beauty of scientific prose as much as to literary endeavour. If the text does not please it will not be pleasurable: why should one endure experiences that lack aesthetic style if, elsewhere, one can find more aesthetic wit, elegance and refinement, or whatever aesthetic calculus one chooses? In this way, argue writers like Zald

( 1 994), organizational studies can be reconfi­ gured at the intersection of both science and humanities. Humanistic disciplines render behaviour in specific time and societal contexts - not time as a generalized measurement of distance between events, but particular time sequences in which specific events are embedded. Secondly, humanistic disciplines are concerned with substantive meaning - how particular objects and symbols relate to each other; the roots and background by which symbols, high and low, have achieved their meaning and transformation. Third, humanistic disciplines have been concerned with the coherence and transforma­ tion of high culture, of the symbols and meaning systems of intellectuals and artists and how if at all these systems relate to other societal institutions. Finally. the humanities have been interested not only in the substantive meaning of symbolic forms, but their presentational form: rhetorical and narrative devices and artistic styles have been of interest, as well as their impact upon social institutions and social change. ( 1 994: 5 1 8)

Part of the postmodern ethic concerns the aestheticization of everyday life, where every­ thing is explained in terms of 'culture' and 'style wars' (Rojek 1 995: 1 65). The modernist differ­ entiation of the world into high and low culture, separating ethics, politics and economics into unrelated spheres, is past, a spent force. With postmodernization, signs signify everywhere. No space remains innocent of meaning, of style, of ambiguity, of irony. In matters of style, appearance and reference are everything. Scratch the surface and one should find nothing deeper. The surface is already complex enough. Aesthetics is no mere privileged realm of heightened senses. We live in it and are affronted by its absence every day. Beautiful, playful, deconstructive and ironic images pervade all of everyday life: the billboards on the freeway, the narrative codes of current soaps, even popular television programmes such as The Simpsons', all display signs of reflexive, ironic postmoder­ nity. It saturates our senses from the media that extend and reflect our immediate sociability, just as it covers our disinclination to face the unaesthetics of everyday life: the despair, misery and ugliness of poverty, risk, hunger and disease. We can, then, develop competencies for aesthetic judgement. In the world of the humanities, the artists, the musicians, the actors, directors, writers, audience, spectators, and patrons, are hardly devoid of appreciation and criticism. One song may capture a mood better than another; a play may fail to make the social commentary it intended; one book may read more fluidly, more persuasively, more cleverly than another: a photograph may see something a

CONCL USION: REPRESENTA TIONS painting does not. Thus aesthetics raises moral and ethical questions. Bauman ( 1 992) suggests that in an economy of signs, a world where the materiality of things pales before their significa­ tion, people are less actors working out well­ rehearsed scripts, and more morally competent subjects. Such moral competence extends to aesthetics; 'the propensity of actors to believe that something is right and good is intimately connected with judgements of beauty' (Rojek 1 995: 1 69). And what is considered beautiful is a matter of knowledge which, we know, can never be innocent of power (Foucault 1 977). Nor are aesthetic judgements separate from the organizational practices that surround and support them. We can all make a sensible assess­ ment of both Julie Andrews and John Coltrane in their different renditions of 'My Favourite Things'. Our agency is no less touched by the improvisational beauty of John Coltrane's 'My Favourite Things' than it is unmoved by the banality of Julie Andrews's rendition. Yet, the expression of this agency is not merely a matter of style, of taste, of aesthetics, as we have been at pains to document in this conclusion. It is constructed organizationally through the impact of organizational developments: without the invention of the long-playing record, if one had not heard Coltrane in performance, his impro­ visation would be nothing other than a memory trace. The technology would not exist to capture it. Today, in the age of the microchip, both Coltrane and Andrews are accessible on compact or laser disks, on personal stereos that we carry to and from work, use while working, listen to while working out. To bring agency back in, in our postmodern times, does not necessarily lead to a fixed embodied human or organizational subject, to a definite sense of the person, the organization in the sight of organization studies. The develop­ ments that make the headlines in the daily papers or on the television news; the developments that fill the spaces created by the convergence of media and communications industries; the developments that mark our international, multicultural, global village, reveal both the possibilities of and limits to agency. The information superhighway; the internet; biotech­ nology; new forms of organizations and of employment; deregulation; the dissolution and creation of trading blocs; the breakup of states; conditions like AIDs; genocide and ethnic cleansing; worldwide displacements of refugees; these are signs of a more ambiguous, less certain world, a world of mobile bodies, fluid subjects and emergent identities. The subject is there, the subjects are there: sometimes difficult to see; sometimes fractured into mUltiple places and times; sometimes strong enough to struggle;

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sometimes helpless; sometimes aware, sometimes not; sometimes aesthetically pleasing, sometimes deliberately disturbing. All subjects construct their subjectivity; yet no subject is omnipotent since no subject can ever determine the reception of their subjectivity. The subject is product of neither an empiricist canvas, recorded as seen, nor a theoretician's palette, mixed and used at will. Subjects organize themselves and seek to organize the judgements of others. The signs of the subject jostle for our attention - an attention that is socially organized through hierarchies of judgement. So, while the subject is ever present, the signs of the subject are ever changing because of diverse representations, both lay and professional. The subject as a simple sign is unlikely to reappear, as professional discourse becomes more reflexive and as the world becomes more complex, as we have sketched in this chapter. So, the subject is always there. But where? In what style of being 'there'? The subject is never 'there', capturable by some fixed and simple grid, any more than the grid of the city map captures the complexities and possibilities of the land­ scape outside the gallery window. Step outside and the signs multiply, and become more complex. There is always more than one means of capture and more than one sense of the captive. 'A picture held us captive. And we could not get outside it, for it lay in our language and language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably . . . Language is like a labyrinth of paths. You approach from one and know your way about; you approach the same place from another side and no longer know your way about' (Wittgen­ stein 1 972: 1 1 6, 203).

AND IN THE END . . .

Wittgenstein said that 'understanding a sentence is much more akin to understanding a theme in music than one may think' ( 1 972: 527). And so we shall return to music, once more, to compose a conclusion. Abbey Road defined one version of 'the end' and, playing with its sense, we can say: 'and in the end, the sense you take is equal to the sense you make'. Voice: [interrupting the narrative] Do you mean that we have no way of determining truth or falsity in organization studies, other than through what people do, their forms of life? A uthors: No, come to think of it, maybe issues of truth and falsehood are never absolute. Truth is not a thing but a process for producing something that passes as the truth. It has its politics, its aesthetics, its practices of representation and translation, just like any other discourse. The

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truths of organization studies do not stand apart, like a touchline referee, from the game in which there are many players, not all of them academics. Voice: So there is nothing to get hung about, no point being hung up on 'normal science' or 'critical theory', on 'modern' or 'postmodern' perspectives? Authors: They are that, just perspectives, we see different things with them, different facets of that which is represented. They are voices in a conversation but they are not the conversation. Energy and vitality derive from the difference rather than the similarity, the contrasts and the contradictions rather than the agreement. We can use that energy to learn more about what we do, who we are, what we can achieve, and where we have failed. Voice: The book functions as a whole then, not in its parts, but in the tensions and contradictions between them, in the creative space between sharp edges and those moments of ambiguity, uncer­ tainty and anomie to which their interrelation gives rise? Authors: Yes, that's it! Voice: That raises some interesting questions. Perhaps you should address them; maybe in another book? A uthors: No way! Voice: Why do you say this? [Pause. Reflection. Silence for 20 seconds.) Authors: [haltingly) Look, the point is, there is a moment when, how should we say, 'whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent', right? Stop making sense? Voice: What do you mean? Authors: Leave it to the readers.

NOTES We acknowledge the substantive suggestions made by Walter Nord, Peter Frost, John Gray, Eduardo Ibarra­ Colado and Sue Jones on an earlier draft of this chapter. 1 Braverman was an American; Burawoy, although a US resident, was originally a Manchester anthro­ pologist. 2 Some writers, like Gibson Burrell in Chapter 16 in this book, argue that the unity of the Aston era was illusory since very different approaches to research existed elsewhere in Britain as well as further afield (also see Zald 1 994). While Burrell does not shy away from such contradiction others yearn for more unity, seeing the current fragmentation as atypical and, in many cases, to be resisted (e.g. Donaldson 1 985; 1 995; Reed 1 985). Whatever the interpretation, some things seem clear. In North America, by and large, func­ tionalism ruled the field, earning itself the appellation of 'dominant orthodoxy' (at least in the eyes of the

unorthodox); while in Europe, the functionalism characterized by the Aston School was challenged by the rise of other schools of thought, methods of inquiry, and styles of research (see Hofstede 1 995). It was in this context that, in 1 979, Burrell and Morgan wrote Sociological Paradigms and Organizational Analysis, which mapped out four approaches to organization theory depending on underlying assump­ tions concerning the nature of our world and the nature of knowledge (see the introduction and Burrell's chapter for more details). 3 One might be tempted to attribute Aston's success to its adherence to Popperian principles (e.g. Donaldson 1 985), but Popper's philosophy of science stems from his interpretation of the history of scientific progress, not from the empirical study of what scientists actually do. We are sceptical of using a non-empirical basis for a defence of empiricism (Law 1 986) and suggest that empirical observation is a more appropriate defence of orthodoxy than historical speCUlation. Contemporary studies that have empiri­ cally examined what scientists do when they do science (e.g. Latour 1 987) find that they do something quite different to Popper's recommendations and, as this discussion demonstrates, Aston is no exception. 4 Consider the problems caused to Calion's ( 1 986) scientists when their anonymous subjects exercised discretion in a scientifically inconvenient way. 5 What the Aston researchers forgot, paradoxically, is that by preserving anonymity, the organizational members preserved untrammelled agency as far as their particular organization was concerned. In other words, once the researchers had left, the managers and employees were free to choose this technology, that design, change this, institutionalize that, without anyone ever knowing. 6 The Aston methodology not only silenced organizational members, but also tried to muzzle other researchers. The success of its translation provided a one-dimensional discourse within which debate could take place, but always in the terms set by that discourse. In science, when narratives become too one-dimensional, science ceases to be interesting. Nothing much is left to be said; the field setting is a secret; only the processes of its translation are open to inspection; only its initial translators are able to revisit the field to reaffirm their translation, thus always being capable of delivering variation on the same meaning. The field can be approached only as it is already translated, already mediated, already arrested. What dull science! 7 These themes of French structuralism and poststructuralism are debated widely in most fields of the humanities and social sciences (Lane 1 9 7 1 ; Weedon 1 987) but have remained marginal in organizational studies (but see Clegg 1 989 for a case where they have not). Here, the notions of 'structure' and structuralism' have had far more circumscribed meanings, as in the contribution of Blau and Schoenherr ( 1 97 1 ) or Pugh and Hickson ( 1976): while the debate centres resolutely

CONCL USION: REPRESENTA TIONS on organizational structure, it does so in decidedly 'objectivist' terms. 8 Even writers from functionalist, normal science traditions have wrestled with the disappearance of the subject. Their response, however, has been one of nostalgia: the search for subject-centred reason in an embrace of the certainty of 'organization', ifnot of self. Enlightenment according to such approaches rarely concerned the individual and the personal: it encompassed only the technical. The embrace of method dissolved all traces of its ontogenesis, including the irony and parentheses embedded in Weber's original conception of modern organization. The tragic self locked in the 'iron cage' of bureaucracy, a little cog striving to be a bigger cog, disappeared. Instead, a contingent version of the 'iron cage' has been reconstructed: the machinery remains the same, but with a few more gears added: now it is geared up to cope with the environment, with technology, with size. With all its optional features, the basic Model T survives well into the latter half of the twentieth century, although it no longer has a driver, despite attempts to reinstate choice (e.g. Child 1 972). As ever more dedicated engineers toil to achieve its perfection (e.g. Donaldson 1 985), they empty the organization and, with no driver, no self, no meaning, the refinement of engineering excellence becomes its own form of subjectivity. As the organization, as subject-object, becomes an increasingly empty symbol, social engineering takes a firmer hold. From the time when the Hawthorne Studies challenged time and motion (see Reed in Chapter 1 ) still more gears have been added to rebuild meaning, passion, commitment, indeed vocation, through empowerment, participation, charisma, chaos, quality, excellence and the like. Ironically, this new organization science is a perfect example of those 'sensualists without spirit' that Weber ( 1 947) warned against. The technicians are out of the cage; their subjectivity designs its representations, becoming embodied in pure objectivism. 9 We are grateful to Eduardo Ibarra-Colado for his contribution to these arguments.

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Index

Aaltio-Marjosola, I . , 228

Allport, G.W., 1 59

Abbott, A . , 35, 1 78, 299

Alpern, S , 2 1 7. 227

Atkinson, M . , 1

Abel, E., 224

Alter, C, 8. 9. 425

attitudes, 290

Atkinson, J., 330

Abercrombie, N., 195, 379, 402

Altheide, D . L . , 264, 426

audience, 256- 7

Abernathy, W., 9, 9 1

Althusser, L., 436

Auster. E.R., 73, 2 1 9

Abrahamson, E . , 1 77, 1 78

Alvesson, M . , 44, 1 86, 193-9, 204-6,

Abramis, D.l., 290 abstract events, 1 1 7

Austrian economics. 109, 1 24

375, 38 1 -2, 436. 438-40

authority, 29, 37, 1 1 1 , 1 1 7, 1 1 9-20,

abstract individualism, 2 1 6, 2 1 7

Amara, R .. 9

Abu-Lughod, L., 296

Amburgey. T.L.. 76. 82, 84-5, 88, 93, 95.

accountability, 73, 94, 1 14 Acker,

1.,

228-9

Austin, N . , 291

2 1 2, 228. 257, 345-6, 350, 357-9, 3 6 1 .

3 7 1 -2, 375, 380. 409

97-8, 1 0 1 . 148 Amihud,

Y,

Avery, R.D., 147, 1 56 Axelrod, R., 1 3 1 Ayers-Nachamkin, B., 2 1 7

121

Ackerman, P., 1 56

Ammassari. P . . 3 14

Ayoubi, Z.M . . 58

Acosta-Belen, E . , 234

Anderson. E.. 1 14

Azumi, K., 58

action, 4 1 3; learning, 274; lines, 303; oriented approaches, 275 action research, 1 2, 1 5- 1 6, 272-86, 440

Annual Revie\\' 1 58-9

activities: conflict over, 339; rate of,

of Psychology,

Baburoglu, 143-8,

Anthony. P., 35

l.,

3 1 8, 323

0.,

356

Bacharach, S.B., 294 Bachmann, R . , 424, 425 Bachrach, P., 373

anthropology, I I . 205. 23 1 , 3 1 2 , 3 1 7, 332,

327 actor-network theory, 36, 43, 44 Adair,

Anderson. P., 9. 9 1 -2, 1 7 5 Angus, I . , 195

Backoff, R.H., 284 Badran, M . , 58

335, 342

Bain, J.S., 95, 1 24-5

anti-role behaviour, 1 55

Adams, G., 202

Anzaldua, G . 2 2 1 , 227

Baker, AJ., 221

Adams, l., 2 1 7

Apel, K.O., 194

Baker, W.E., 1 1 6

adaptive functionalism, 57-8 Adler, N., 2 1 2, 2 1 7, 225, 4 1 2

Apollo, 389 Arac, J . . 357. 359

'baking time' (Ditton), 1 7 . 333-4 Balsamo, A., 2 1 9

administrative science, 388-9, 4 1 0 Adorno, T.w., 1 86, 1 88, 294 Adsit, L., 2 1 9 adverse selection, 1 1 9, 1 34, 1 3 5

.

archaeology. discourse and,

399. 401

Arendt, H . , 3 1 5. 3 1 6 Argawal, A . , 1 2 1

'banana time' (Roy), 17, 333 Banaszak-Holl, J., 82, 84 Bandura. A., 1 59

aesthetics, 1 2, 1 6, 3 1 1 -24, 444-5

Argote, L . . 63 Argyle, M., 290

affect, 1 54, 290, 292

Argyris, C, 26. 143. 1 45. 274-5. 2 8 1 -2,

Agar, M . , 3 5 1 , 352 age dependence, 73-7, 95-8 agency, 380- 1 , 423, 426, 433-4, 440, 445; costs, 1 1 9-22; structure

Bambara, T.C, 2 1 6 Bamforth, K.W., 265, 273

29 1 , 293, 295. 352

Banerjee. A .. 1 77 Barash, D.P., 1 60

Arhne, G., 38 Ariss, S.S . 374, 377

Baratz. M.S .. 373 Barbalet, 1 . M . , 372. 380

Arkes, H . R . , 260

Barber, B., 424

.

debate, 39, 40; theory, 1 3 , 109,

Armour. H . O . 59. 1 1 4

Barclay, L . , 2 1 9

1 1 0, 1 1 8-23

Arnheim. R .. 3 1 8

Barker, J .R., 7 , 427

.

Aguinis, H . , 272, 275

Arnold, C L . . 2 1 2

Aiken, M . , 54

Arrington. C E . . 232

Ajzen,

Arrow,

I.,

290

Albrow, M . , 407, 4 1 4

K,

,/

109. 1 1 3. 1 1 8. 1 1 9

Arthur, W .. 1 28

Barley, S., 6, 9, 34, 1 74, 265, 299, 3 1 3, 348, 350- 1 , 426 Barling,

1.,

219

Barnard, C, 3 3 , 1 7 1 , 2 1 7 , 388, 409

Alchian, A . A . , 1 I 0- 1 I , 1 I 8, 1 20

articulation, 436-7. 438

Barnes, B., 374, 380

Alcoff, L . , 2 2 1 , 229, 2 3 1

artifacts, 1 6, 3 1 1 - 1 5, 3 1 7-23

Barnett, W., 82, 88, 9 1 , 1 0 1

Alderfer, C P . , 1 50, 273, 274, 278

Ashford, B . E . 301

Barney, J.B., 1 1 8, 1 22. 124-9, 1 32-6

Aldrich, H.E., 5-7, 33, 40, 52, 57, 59, 64,

Ashley, D., 381

Baron, J., 1 69, 1 77, 1 79, 2 1 9

7 1 -3, 79, 82, 86, 1 73, 1 78, 298, 302 Alexander, l.W., 57, 63

Ashmore, M., 255. 257

Baron. R.A., 290, 2 9 1 , 3 0 1 , 303

Assad, T., 369

Barrell, G.V., 2 1 9

Alford, R . , 35, 37

asset specificity. 1 1 4, 1 1 7

Barron, D.N., 7 5

alienation, 370, 393, 4 1 5

Astley, G., 205

Bartell, T . . 3 1

Allcorn, S . , 294, 295

Astley, W.G., 8. 72, 85-6. 1 0 1 . 257, 376,

Bartlett. CA., 1 1 5, 1 32 Bartol. K . M . , 2 1 7 , 2 1 9

Allen, R.W., 375, 377 alliances, 8, 9- 10, 109, 1 1 0, 1 32-5 Allinson, P . , 299 Allison, G.T., 279

425 Aston Studies, 1 3, 1 8 , 55. 57-8. 6 1 . 347, 389, 4 1 0- 1 1 , 432-4. 436 Athos, A., 348

Bartunek, 1 . M . , 265, 350, 360 Bass, B . M ., 148. 1 57 Ba teson, G . , 322

453

INDEX Baudrillard, J., 1 86, 200, 204, 357

Boas, M . , 300

Baum, H.S., 294 Baum, J.A.c., 75, 77-9, 82-6, 88-9, 9 1 ,

Boccioni, U., 3 1 7

98. 1 00-2 Bauman, Z., 26. 377, 408, 4 1 7- 1 8, 430,

Boden, D., 36, 40 body, 400, 403, 429-32

445

Bochner, A.P., 303

Burrell, G., 2, 4-5, 6, 26, 56, 1 85-6, 189, 1 93-4, 1 97, 202, 255, 257-8, 264-5, 346, 3 5 1 -2, 357, 359, 38 1 , 389, 394, 396-8, 405, 4 1 1 , 4 1 3- 1 6, 435 Buss, T.F., 407

Boguslaw, R., 32

Butler, J . , 229, 23 1

Baumeister, R.R., 1 6 1

Boje, D . M . , 359, 3 6 1

Butterfield, D.A., 2 1 7 , 2 1 9

Baumol, WJ., 124

Boland, R . , 202 bonding, 1 1 9, 1 2 1 -2

Buzzanell, P . M . , 228 Byrne, J.A., 8

Beaumont, J.G., 321 Beck-Gernsheim, E . , 300

Bordo, S., 2 3 1

Becker, H.S., 263, 264-5, 341

Boring, E.G., 263

Cable, J., 1 1 4

Beckwith, R., 290

Bose, C.E., 234

Cable, V., 38

O.c.,

Bedeian, A.G., 64

Bottiroli, G., 320

Cairnarca,

Bedford, E., 293

Bouchard, TJ., 1 56

Calas, M . , 36, 4 1 , 43, 1 85, 1 8 7 , 197,

Bednar, D., 1 77

Boulding, E., 235

behavioural theory of firm, 3 7 1

bounded rationality, 1 3, 30, 33, 77, 95,

Behling,

0.,

410

Belenky, M . F. , 225

1 70, 1 80, 232, 296, 3 3 1 ; economic analysis, 1 1 1 - 1 4 , 1 1 8 , 120

1 16

201-2, 204-5, 2 1 7, 225, 232, 236, 267, 345-6, 352, 356-9, 3 6 1 -2, 379 Calder, B.J., 1 57 Callahan, E., 297

Bell, D., 32

Bourdieu, P . , 202, 204, 435

Callinicos, A., 407

Bell, E., 220, 350

Bourgeois, L.J., 60

Calion, M . , 382, 433

Bern, S.L., 2 1 9

Bourgeois, V.W., 346

Calvert, L . M . , 225

Bendix, R . , 25, 27, 29, 30, 34

Bourque, S.c., 235

Cameron, K., 1 7 5

Beneria, L., 235

Bowen, D.D., 2 1 9

Campbell, A . , 1 54

Benfari, R.C., 372

Bowen, M . G . , 439

Campbell, D.T., 72, 264

Benhabib, S., 230

Bowman, G.W., 2 1 7

Cannella, A.A., 6, 8, 255

Bennett, R J . , 1 5 5

Boyacigiller, N . , 4 1 2

Cantor, N . , 1 50 capital, 40, 368, 408-9, 4 1 2, 4 1 4, 4 1 7;

Bennis, W . G . , 3 7 1

Boyatzis, R.E., 1 57

Benschop, Y .. 228

Bradach, J.L., 1 1 6- 1 7

Benson, J.K., 1 85, 194

Bradburd, R . M . , 1 14

Bentham,

Bradshaw, P., 3 6 1

1., 400

markets, 1 14, 1 1 5, 122 capitalism, 25, 36, 222, 225-7, 235, 327-3 1 , 369, 406-8, 429 Caporaso, J.E., 263

Benton, T., 380, 441

Braidotti, R., 224

Berg, D.N., 296 Berg, P.O., 204, 345-6, 350- 1 , 357-9,

Brantley, P., 9

Cappelli, P., 147-8, 1 58

Braverman, H . , 2, 193, 33 1 , 368, 374,

Capper, C.A., 232

361

4 1 4, 433

Carchedi, G., 369

Berger, P., 1 73-5, 297, 348 , 425

Brayfield, A.H., 290

Bergmann, B . R . , 2 1 9

Breaugh, J.A., 263

Car!zon, J . , 298

Bergom-Larsson, M . , 235

Brech, E., 29, 52

Carmagnola, F., 3 1 3

Bergquist, W., 359

Brennan, T., 224

Carrfap, R . , 392

Bernstein, B., 40

Brenner, J., 223, 229

Carnevale, P.J.D., 291

Bertalanffy, L. von, 3 1

Carney, M.G., 8

Berthoin-Antal, A., 2 1 2

Brenner, O.c., 2 1 9 Bresser, R.K., 8

Bertrand, J . , 1 30

Brett, J.M., 2 1 2

Carter, P . , 5 , 6 , 8 , 26, 44, 202, 396, 4 1 7

careers, 327, 335-41

Carroll, G.R., 72-3, 77-84, 86, 88-9, 1 0 1

Best, E . , 332

Brickley, J.A., 1 1 6, 1 2 1

Cartner, M . , 256

Best, M . , 9

Brief, A.P., 1 53, 1 55, 291

case data, 265-6 Casmurro, D., 433

Betancourt, H . , 1 6 1 -2

Bristor, J.M., 232

Bethel, J.E., 1 2 1 , 122

Brittain, J.W., 72, 85-7, 91

Cassell, c . , 282

Betters-Reed, B., 220

Brockner, J., 1 56, 2 1 9

Casson, M., 1 1 6

Bettis, R.A., 1 1 5, 127

Brough, I . , 374

caste work, 436

Beutell, NJ., 219

Brown, C., 2 1 2, 4 1 7

Castells, M., 43

Beyer, J . M . , 348, 349, 377 Bhabha, H . , 233-4

Brown, D . , 274, 277 Brown, H., 2 2 1 , 223 Brown, J., 7

catastrophe theory, 403

Brown, L.D., 426 Brown, L.K., 2 1 7

Cavendish, R . , 1 7, 3 3 1 , 333, 334 Caves, R.E., 82, 1 14, 1 2 5 centralization, 433 CEO (role/personality), 62-3, 1 1 9

Billing, Y.D., 2 1 2, 228

Brown, R.H., 202, 3 1 3 Bruder!, J . , 75 Bruner, J., 264, 320, 323 Bruning, N.S., 2 1 9

Bion, W.R., 295 biological determinism, 160- 1 , 223 biotechnology, 9, 43, 180, 445

Brunsson, N., 350 Bryman, A., 58, 1 57, 257, 264, 294 Bryson, J . , 284

Chacko, T.I., 2 1 9 Chain, S . , 300

Black, B.L., 425

Buchholtz, A., 100

chains, 8, 9 - 1 0

Blackford, M.G., 8

Buchner, G.c., 3 1 2

Chakrabarti, A., 362

Blackler, F., 36

Buckley, PJ., 1 1 6

Chalmers, A.F., 257

Blair, R.D., 1 1 4

Buckner, G.c., 293

Chamberlain, E.H., 124

Blake, S . , 220

Burawoy, M . , 2, 35, 193, 1 95, 3 5 1 , 374,

Bhagat, S., 1 22 Bianchi, P., 9 Bielby, W.T., 2 1 9 Biggart, N.W., 369 Bikchandani, S . , 1 77 Billig, M . , 359

Blalock, H . M . , 263 Blau, F., 2 1 7 Blau, P . , 26, 3 1 , 55, 58, 64, 1 70, 265-6, 352, 353, 376 Block, J., 1 5 3 Bloom, A . , 347

4 1 4 - 1 5 , 433 bureaucracy, 8 - 1 0, 1 7 1 , 291 , 3 7 1 , 429; contingency theory, 53-4, 55; transaction cost theory, 1 1 5- 1 6;

causal dynamics, 59-60 Causer, G., 2 1 9

ceremony (formal structure), 1 7 1 -3 Cerny, P., 35-6, 37, 38 ceteris paribus clauses, 391

champions, 14, 177, 1 79 Champy,

1.,

406

Chandler, A., 8, 55, 59, 62, 1 14 change, 1 -3, 1 3, 72; structural inertia, 93- 1 00

Weberian model, 8, 1 8, 34, 370, 377,

Channon, D.F., 6 1

388-9, 406- 10, 433

chaos theory, 346, 403

Bloom, L., 290

bureaucratization, 34, 1 88, 388, 408

Chapman, J . B . , 2 1 7

Blum, L., 224

Burgelman, R.A., 72

charismatic leaders, 294, 349, 375

Blumer, H., 424

Burns, T., 53-4, 59

Chaves, M., 1 77

454

STUD YING ORGANIZA TION

cheating, 1 29-3 1 , 1 34-5

Connell, R.W., 228

culturalizing stress, 299

Checkland, P., 3 1 , 284

culture, 1 2 , 1 7, 1 34, 1 95; war games, 1 7 ,

Cheney, G., 194 Cheng, J.L.C, 4 1 1 , 4 1 2

Conner, K.R., 1 1 7 Connolly, W., 39, 44 consensus, I , 6, 1 89-9 1 , 197, 205-6, 350-4, 356

Chesler, M.A., 425

consent, 192-3, 1 95, 372-4

Chiaramonte, S., 228

Constantas, A., 301

Chicago School, 1 70, 265, 3 1 5, 3 5 1

Chen, P.Y., 1 54-5

345-62 Cummings, L.L., 144, 1 52, 1 58 cyberculture/cyberspace, 43, 423, 430, 43 1 -2

construct validation, 262-3

cyclic time, 328, 3 3 1 -5 Cyert, R . , 33, 95, 97, 1 1 8, 3 7 1 , 441

Child, J., 3 1 , 32, 5 1 , 5 7 , 5 8 , 60-4

constructivism, 39, 40

Czarniawska-Joerges, B., 1 93, 3 1 4, 345,

Chio,

consumerism/consumption, 1 6, 438

V.,

236

356-7

Chisholm, R.F., 275, 283

contestable market theory, 1 09, 1 24-5

Czepiel, J.A., 300

Chodorow, N., 224-5, 301

context, 143-8, 273-5, 283 contingency theory, 2, I I , 1 2, 32, 78, 1 80,

Dabbs, J . M . , 3 1 8

Cholmeley, J., 2 2 1 , 222 Christensen, C , 62 Christensen, S . , 350 Chua, W.F., 428 Chusmir, L.H., 2 1 9 civil society, 3 8 , 1 9 5 , 407-8, 4 1 2 , 4 1 7, 4 1 8

3 7 1 -2, 423, 438; normal science, 5 1 -64, 388-9, 39 1 , 397, 402; structural, 1 3 , 5 1 -64, 4 1 1 contra organization science, 2 , 1 8 , 406, 4 1 3- 1 8, 423, 432, 436

Daft, R . , 9 , 64, 265, 353, 361 Dahl, R., 369, 373 Dalton, D.R., 145, 261 -3, 265 Daly, M., 220 Dandekker, C , 37, 38, 430

T,

Cixous, H . , 229, 230

contractual alliances, 1 1 9, 1 32, 1 3 5

Dandridge,

clans (transaction cost theory), 1 1 5- 1 6

control, 186, 369, 4 14, 4 1 6 ; discipline

Darnsereau, F., 1 57

349

Clark, A.W., 144

and, 203, 377-8; of emotions, 303-4;

Darby, M . R . , 1 80

Clark, B., 1 72, 348

resistance, 427; and surveillance, 38,

Dark, F., 1 16

Clark, C, 302

368, 374, 377-8; uncertainty and,

Dasgupta, P., 424

Clark, H . H . , 260

338-9

Clark, K., 9 Clark, P.A., 1 7, 273, 275, 286, 324-5, 330- 1 , 333, 338-9 class, 2, 1 93, 202, 225, 369-70, 373-4, 379, 430-1

data, 1 2 , 1 5, 255-68

conversation, 3-4, 8, 208; representations, 422, 439, 441 , 443-5 Cook, T.D., 264 Cool, K., 1 28

D'Aveni, R.A., 98 David, P., 1 77 Davidson, M.J., 2 1 2 Davis, G.F., 63, 1 23, 1 69, 1 78-9

Cooley, C H . , 297

Davis-Blake, A., 147, 149-50, 2 1 9

classical management, 52, 53, 1 10

Coombs, C H . , 258, 259

Dawes, R . M . , 258

Clegg, S . R . , 2, 5, 6, 8, 9 - 1 0, 27, 29, 3 1 -2,

Cooper, CL., 2 1 2, 292, 299

Deal, T., 348

34-6, 38, 1 5 1 , 1 86, 193, 195, 203, 258,

Cooper, E.A., 2 1 9

de Assis, M., 434

33 1 , 358-9, 3 6 1 , 369-70, 373, 375-6,

Cooper, R . , 9 , 26, 36, 1 85, 202, 204,

378, 380- 1 , 383, 394, 406-7, 409, 4 1 1 ,

255-6, 357, 359, 3 8 1 , 389, 398, 40 1 ,

de Beauvoir, S., 230 de Board, R., 294

4 1 3 - 1 7, 426, 428, 433, 436, 441 Clement, C, 229, 230

cooperation, 1 1 0, 1 29-35

Deci, E.L., 147 decision-making, 1 0 , 32, 36, 4 1 , 5 1 , 54-5,

416, 436

de Certeau, M . , 439

Cleveland, J.N., 2 1 9

Cooperrider, D., 362

Clifford, J . , 204-5, 357, 359

coordination, 4 1 6

clusters, 8, 9

Copeland, D.G., 1 1 8

coalitions, 346

Corbally, J . , 348

Deckard, B.S., 220

Coase, R . , 33, 1 10, 1 1 6

Corbett, M J . , 43

deconstructionism, 39, 204, 267, 356,

Cobb, S., 439

Corbin, J., 272, 276, 279, 282

Coch, L., 379

Corey, S., 274

Cockburn, C, 2 1 2 , 2 1 6, 228

corporate culture, 1 95, 200, 203, 3 1 9,

Codrington, R.H., 332 coercion, 1 93 cognitive approach, 30; emotion, 289- 9 1 , 296, 297

347, 350 corporate governance, 37, 1 1 7, 1 1 8

cognitive legitimacy, 83, 1 7 3 cognitive mapping, 282, 3 19, 389

corporate landscape, 3 1 6 - 1 8 corporate pathos, 3 1 9-24 passim

109, 1 1 8 -20, 1 70- 1 , 1 74, 1 76-7, 194, 196, 290, 373

360- 1 , 401 , 437 Deetz, S., 1 85, 1 85, 1 89-98, 200-4, 206, 255, 3 5 1 , 375, 38 1 , 427 DeFillippi, R., 1 28 de Grazia, S., 328, 330 dehumanization, 4 1 7 deinstitutionalization, 1 78, 426

Cohen, W . M . , 9 1 , 102

corporatism, 35, 388 Cosier, R.A , 145 cost, 1 1 7, 1 28, 1 33-4; see also transaction cost theory Cotton, J . , 2 1 9

Coleman, J., 1 70, 1 7 5

Cournot, A . , 1 30

demographic process, 73-7

collaboration, 274-5, 424-6

Demsetz, H . , 1 1 0- 1 1 , 1 1 7, 1 1 8, 1 20 Denison, D., 353

Collier, J., 273

Covaleski, M . , 1 77, 1 78 Cox, T Jr., 220, 299, 350, 438

creative destruction, 9 1

Dennehy, R., 359, 3 6 1

Collins, P.H., 227

Cressey, P . , 4 1 4

Dennett, D . C , 296

Collins, R . , 298, 425

critical analysis, 197-9

density delay, 8 1 -2

Collinson, D., 228, 266, 372, 383

critical theory, 6, 3 5 1 , 378, 382, 436-7,

density dependence, 74, 78-85

cognitive revolution, 146, 264 Cohen, A., 378

collectivism, 39, 4 1 , 1 5 1 , 332

.

Delacroix, J . , 73, 78-9, 88, 100-1

de Lauretis, T, 231 Della Fave, L., 173

de Maria, L., 3 1 7 democratization process, 291

collusion, 109- 10, 1 24, 129-32, 1 34

442; development of, 1 87-9;

Denton, P., 1 72

commitment, 297

postmodernism and, I I , 14, 1 85-206

Denzin, N.K., 264-5, 272, 282, 292, 435,

communication, 10, 430, 432; aesthetics, 3 12, 3 1 8-22

Croce, B . , 3 1 7

437-8, 440

Crompton, R . , 227

dependency, 1 28, 372, 382

communicative action, 1 96-7

Cronbach, J .L., 263

depth psychology, 3 1 5

community, 30-2, 74, 85-8

Cropper, S., 282

Derrida, J., 8 , 1 86, 229-30, 357, 389,

compensation, 1 2 1

cross-ownership, 1 34

competition, 84-5, 109, 1 24, 374

Crovi, R . , 3 1 1

Descartes, R., 3 14, 329

competitive advantage, 1 23, 1 28, 1 35

Crozier, M . , 32, 266, 36 1 . 3 7 1 -2, 378

descriptive approach, 279

competitive processes, 84-5

Csikszentmihalyi, M., 293, 3 1 5- 1 6, 320

deskilling, 3 3 1 , 3 7 1 , 428

Comte, A . , 32

Cullen, D., 232

de Sousa, R., 296

Conaty, J . , 58

Cullen, J.B., 64 cultural: difference, 349-52; revolution,

Dewar, R., 59

configuration, 433

40 1 -3, 436

Dess, G.G., 63

conflict, 339, 374-5, 382

347-8; systems, 3 1 2, 3 1 7;

Dewey, J., 320

Connell, A.F., 7

understanding, 1 74; values, 196, 4 1 2

dialogue, 396

455

INDEX Diamond, I . , 229, 230

Echols, A., 220

ethnography, 205, 23 1 , 302-3, 322-4,

Diamond, M.A., 294, 295 Dickson, W.J., I I , 3 1 , 52, 2 1 7, 290, 409

ecology:organizational, 7 1 - 1 02; population, 2, I I , 1 2, 14, 33, 4 1 , 7 1 ,

ethnomethodology, 7, 36, 4 1 , 4 1 3 , 425

economic analysis, 1 3- 14, 109-36

Evans-Pritchard, E.E., 332

Dierickx, I . , 1 28 Diesing, P., 278

109, 4 1 1 , 438, 440; processes, 74, 77-88

33 1 , 349-5 1 , 353-4, 356, 359, 437 Etienne, M., 235 Etzioni, A., 38, 335, 369, 409

difference, 403

economic rationality, 408

Evered, R., 264, 275, 2 8 1

differentiation perspective, 349-55, 359-60, 442-4

economies of scale, 55, 82, 124, 1 3 3 economy, globalization of, 4 1 3

Digman, J . M . , 1 52

ecriture feminine, 230

evolutionary theory, 109, 124 excellence, 29 1 , 361 exclamation, 436-7, 438

Dill, B.T., 2 1 6

Edelman, L., 169, 1 73

exemplar cases, 266

DiMaggio, P.J., 35, 37, 63, 72, 82, 86, 88-9, 109, 1 69-70, 174-5, 1 77, 1 79,

Edelman, M . , 376

experience, 1 87, 2 1 3, 440

377, 426

Eden, c., 279, 2 8 1 -2, 284

experimental data, 263-4

Edwards, P.K., 4 1 4

experts, 34, 36, 198, 2 9 1

Dimond, S.K., 3 2 1

Edwards, R., 193, 374

explanandum, 389, 390, 39 1

Dinnerstein, D., 224-5

efficiency, 1 7 1 , 1 80, 4 1 7

explanans, 389, 390, 3 9 1

Dionysius, 389

Egelhoff, W.G., 5 5 Egri, c.P., 3 6 1 , 362, 438

exploitation, 1 9 3 , 369, 3 7 3

Dirrheimer, M.J., 1 14 Dirsmith, M . , 177, 1 7 8

Ehrlich, S.B., 147

externality, 337

discipline, 35, 1 22, 203, 377-8, 380,

Einstein, A., 392

399-400

Eisenhardt, K.M., 59, 1 1 8, 1 20- 1 , 1 23,

discourse, 3-4, 1 2, 1 8, 44, 199 -200; of analysis, 388-403

1 78, 383

exteriority, 1 7 5

Fabbri, P., 3 1 6 Fabian,

1.,

328, 330

Eisenstadt, S.N., 4 1 0

factory system, 329, 378

discursive language, 320, 322

Eisenstein, H . , 220

Fael, A., 3 1 7

dispositional approach, 149-50, 1 54

Ekman, P., 292

Fagenson, E., 2 1 7

dissensus, 1 89, 190-1

Elden, M., 273, 275-6, 283

Fahey, L., 374, 377

di Stefano, c., 231

Eliade, M . , 328

Fairtlough, G., 9, 10

distributed model, 1 0

Elias, N . , 297

Faith, R.L., 1 22

distribution networks, 1 3 3

elitism, 1 89-9 1 , 196, 436, 440

Fals-Borda,

Ditton, J., 1 7 , 333-4, 341

Ellis, c., 303

false consciousness, 2, 1 86, 1 95, 199, 258,

diversity, 8, 347, 423

Ellul, J., 30

division of labour, 43, 56, 1 94, 202,

Elsbach, K.D., 7

Faludi, S., 2 1 2

368, 372, 374; gendered, 220, 227-9,

Ely, R.J., 2 1 9

Fama, E.F., 1 20, 122

379

emancipation, 38 1 , 382, 436

Farrell, A.E., 2 2 1

Dixon, N.F., 294

embarrassment (role), 297

fascism, Futurist art and, 3 1 7

Dobbins, G.H., 2 1 7

emergent theory, 189-9 1 , 279, 28 1

Faulkner, R.R., 1 1 6

Dodgson, M . , 1 0

Emerson, R . M . , 372

fax, 430 Fayol, H., 29, 1 7 1

Doherty, E.M., 38 1 , 436

Emery, F., 273, 425

Dohrenwend, B.P. and B.S., 292

emotion: organizing and, 1 2, 16,

'doing time' (Cavendish), 1 7, 334

289-304; workplace, 1 54-6

0.,

275

370, 380

Featherstone, M., 186 feedback, 3 1 5 feelings, 289-94, 296-7, 300-3, 3 1 9 ; see

Dollard, J., 1 54

emotional labour, 292, 300-1

domination, 186, 1 93, 195, 198, 200,

empirical reality, 259- 6 1 , 263, 267

also emotion

204-6, 220, 369, 375-6, 379, 400,

empiricism, 202, 206, 401 , 4 1 3- 14,

Feldberg, R., 229

425, 427; strategies, 372-4, 379-82

4 1 6- 1 7 , 435, 438 employment relation (time), 328-30

Donahue, W.A., 290

empowerment, 276, 427-8

Donaldson, L . , 5-6, 1 3, 26, 32-3, 40, 44, 52, 55-64, 1 36, 346, 354, 396-7, 406,

enactments, emotional, 299-300

4 1 7, 438 Doorewaard, H., 228 Dosi, G., 91 double-loop learning, 274, 295 Douglas, M., 3 1 6 Dow, G.K., 1 1 7

Engels, F., 407, 430

Feldman, M . , 355 feminist theory, 1 60, 1 9 1 , 202, 438; and organization studies, 1 1 , 1 4- 1 5, 2 1 2-39, 424, 443 Fenstermaker, S., 228

Enlightenment, 1 88-9, 229-3 1 , 4 1 6, 4 1 7,

Ferber, M.A., 2 1 7

434 Enomoto, E., 356 enterprising subject, 424-32 entrepreneurs, institutional, 426, 438

Ferguson, A., 220, 226-7, 229

environment, 54, 1 7 1 , 4 1 1 ; organizational ecology, 7 1 - 102

Ferguson, K., 42, 197, 2 1 2 - 1 3 , 222-3, 23 1 , 358-9 Fernandez-Kelly, M.P., 2 1 2, 235 Ferree, M.M., 2 1 2, 2 2 1 , 222 feudalism, 368, 407, 408 Fichman, Mark, 75 Fiedler, L., 2

Drazin, R., 57, 63, 148 Dreyfus, H. 399 Droge, c., 62 Drucker, P., 4 1 2, 428

environmental determinism, 33, 7 1 -2 environmental threat, 1 25, 1 28 Enz, c., 348, 375, 377

Filstead, W.J., 264

dual-systems theory, 226-7

episteme, 399

Dubin, R., 3 7 1 Duby, G . 3 1 6

epistemology, 29, 34, 39-40, 3 1 3- 1 4, 327, 345, 3 5 1 , 353, 3 8 1 -2, 396, 406,

Fincham, R., 34-5 Fine, M., 437 Fineman, S., 1 54, 282, 290-2, 298-9,

.

4 1 3 , 444

D u Gay, P., 34

301-2, 405, 4 1 4 Fiol, M . , 8 2 , 8 6 , 1 73

Dukerich, J.M., 7

Epstein, c., 202

Dunkerley, D . , 2, 8, 29, 3 1 -2, 193, 369,

Epstein, S., 2 2 1

Firestone, S., 220, 223

equity theory, 1 23, 1 4 5 , 1 56

firm, 109, 1 14, 1 1 7-23, 37 1 ; performance,

380, 409, 4 1 1 , 414, 427, 433

123-9

Dunnette, M.D., 1 58 , 1 59

Erickson, RJ., 301

Durkheim, E., 1 7 , 32, 85, 332

Ericsson, K.A., 260, 264

Firth, R., 3 1 7

Dutton, J.E., 7

erkldren, 3 1 4

Fischer, A.H., 293

Dyas, G.P., 59, 6 1

Escobar, A., 4 3 , 234, 235

Fischer, E., 232

Eskilson, A., 2 1 7

Fischer, F., 1 85, 1 94, 197

essentialism, 2, 14, 1 59-62, 199, 233-4,

Fischer, M., 205

e-mail, 430, 432 Eagle, J., 294

437

Fishbein, M., 290 fit/fitness, 63, 77-8

Eagly, A.H., 2 1 7 Ebers, M . , 3 1 4

ethics, 224, 297-8, 303, 375, 4 1 8 ethnicity, 42

Fitzgerald, T., 348

Eccles, R . , 7 , 9, 1 16- 1 7

ethno-data, 26 1 , 264-5, 267

five-factor theory ( personality), 1 52-3

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STUD YING ORGANIZA TION

456 five-forces model, 1 25, 126 Fladmoe-Lindquist, K., 1 1 6

Gagliardi, P., 3 1 1 , 3 1 4 - 1 5 , 3 1 7, 3 1 9, 32 1 ,

Gordon, G., 353 Gortner, H . F . , 409

323, 356, 358

Gould, L.J., 296 Gouldner, A., 26-7, 29- 3 1 , 56, 1 70,

Flam, H . , 297, 298, 303

Gaines, 1., 1 57

Flax, J . , 1 9 1 , 200, 2 1 3, 223-4, 23 1 , 358-9 Fletcher, C , 58

Galaskiewisz. J . , 1 77 Galbraith, CS., 1 1 4

Fletcher, J.K., 225, 228

Galbraith. 1.K., 32

governance (role), 1 35

flexible specialization, 36 Fligstein. N., 6 1 -2, 64, 1 69, 1 79

Galbraith. J . R . , 10, 52 Gale, R., 327. 328

governance decision. 1 1 1 - 1 3, 1 1 6- 1 7, 123, 1 35

fluidity, 8 - 1 0

Gallois, C, 292, 296

government regulation, 88-9, 90

Folbre, A. . 227, 229

Gallos, 1.Y., 2 1 9

Gowing, M.K., 143

Follett, M.P., 1 72. 2 1 7

Galunic, R . , 59

Grafton-Small, R., 202, 203, 205, 345,

Fombrun, C J . . 85, 88

Gambetta, D., 424

Ford, H . , 2 9 1

Gamble, A , 370

Graham,

Fordism, 429, 433

Game, A., 2 1 2, 226, 228

Graham, R.J., 329

265-6, 427, 433-4

356-7, 362

1.W., I SS

Forester, J., 198-9, 206, 382

game theory. 1 30, 425

Grams, R., 2 1 9

Forge, A., 3 1 2, 323

Gandz, 1., 375, 377

Gramsci, A., 193, 195, 258, 373, 380, 383,

formal structure, 1 7 1-3, 1 74

Gane, M., 36

Forrester, J . , 439

Garcia-Canclini, N., 234

Forsythe, S., 2 1 9

Garfinkel, H .. 3 5 1 , 380

Foster, H . , 1 87

Gartner,

Foster, M.L., 3 1 5

Gaventa. J., 373

Grant, J., 225

Foucault, M . , 2 , 7, 1 7- 1 8, 34, 1 5 1 , 1 86,

Gay, P., 296

Gray, B., 8, 232, 374, 377, 425-6

1 88. 200- 1 , 203, 229..30, 235, 357,

Gearing, E., 335

Grazman, D.N., 88

377-83. 389, 3 9 1 , 398-403, 4 1 4- 1 7,

Gecas, Y., 293, 296-7

Greenberg, J., 1 56

439. 445

Geertz, C, 1 73, 205, 292, 3 1 7, 322. 357,

Greenhaus, J., 2 1 9

429

W. B . ,

73, 77

Gregory, K.L., 349, 350, 352, 359

Gellner, E., 32

Fox, A . , 425 Fraad, D., 226 fragmentation perpective, 26, 27, 391-2;

205, 255-7, 440 Granovetter, M., 1 1 7, 1 5 1 , 174, 424-6

Greenwood, R . , 58, 348

425

Fowler, K., 1 2 1

grand narrative, 2, 1 86, 1 88, 199, 202-3,

Gemeillschafr,

Gresov, C, 63, 348

377

gender, 14, 1 5, 42, 3 0 1 , 378-9; division of

Gricar, B.G., 426

labour, 220, 227-8, 229; relations,

Grimes, A., 1 93, 1 98, 434

fragmented identities, 200- 1

200- 1 , 2 1 3 ; stereotypes, 2 1 6, 2 1 9-20,

Grinblatt, M . , 1 1 8

Francis. A., 33

225

Grinyer. P.H., 58, 1 1 4

organizational culture, 354-5. 359

Franco. J., 234

genealogies. 1 2, 1 8 , 86, 388-403

Grossman, S., 1 1 8. 1 3 5

Frank, R.H., 296

general systems theory. 3 1 , 1 50

grounded theory, 279, 2 8 1 ,

Frankfurt School,

I I,

1 86, 1 8 8

Franks, D . O . , 293, 296-7 Fraser, N . , 1 9 1 , 1 97. 201 , 2 3 1 free will, 6 0

generalismlgenerality, 77-8, 276

Guba, E.G., 264, 265, 290

generalization (contingency theory),

guild structures, 368

58-9

Gulick,

L.,

29, 1 7 1

George, 1 . M . , 29 1

Gummesson, E . , 265, 272, 277

Freedman, S.M., 2 1 7

Gephart, R.P., 7, 257

Guo, Guang, 77

Freeman. J . . 3 3 , 63, 7 1 -3, 76-9, 84, 86,

Gergen, K., 26, 40, 1 6 1 -2, 200. 202,

Gurdon, P.T.R., 332

88-9, 9 1 , 93-5, 98, 100, 109

Gurvitch, G., 1 7 , 332

205- 6, 362, 4 1 6

Freeman, S.J.M . , 223, 225

Gergen, M . M . . 1 6 1 -2

Freiere, P., 38 1 , 436, 440

Gerhart, B . , 147

French, J.R.P., 372, 379

German idealism, 388

Habermas, J., 8, 1 86-9, 194, 196-9, 202,

Frese, M . , 290, 292, 293

Gersick, CJ.G., 256, 265 Gerth. H H .. 291 Gesrair, 143, 393. 398

205-6, 256. 3 5 1 , 399 habitualization, 174-6, 3 1 2- 1 3 Hackman, R.l., 257

Freud, S., 1 87, 200, 223-4 Friedan, B., 2 1 6, 223, 236, 239 Friedberg, M . , 32 Friedland, R., 35. 37 Friedlander, F., 277 Friedman, B., 293 Friedrichs, R., 394 Friesen, P.H.. 97 Frijda, N . , 292, 293 Frost, P.J., 1 85, 1 94, 1 97, 256-7, 265-6, 345, 347, 356. 3 6 1 -2, 375-6, 4 1 4 Frug, G . E . , 2 9 Fruin,

W

.

M , 1 1 6, 1 34 .

Gutek, B A., 2 1 7, 2 1 9, 378 .

Geyer, R.F., 370 Ghemawat. P., 1 23

Hage, J., 8, 9, 54, 59, 4 1 2, 425 Haire, M., 26

Gherardi, S., 228, 362 Ghoshal, S .. 55. l I 5 Gibson, K. . 226

Hall, 0.1., 60 Hall, D.T., 2 I 9

Giddens, A., 32, 34, 3 7 - 8 . 40, 45, 1 63, 1 73, 194, 2 1 6 , 299, 380

Hall, E.J., 228 Hall, F.S., 2 1 9 Hall, J . A

.•

368

Gilbreth, L . . 2 1 7

Hallowell, R., 1 23

Gilligan, C , 224-5 Ginsberg, A., 100

Hambrick, D.C, 98 Hamel, G., 9

Gioia, D.A . . 5. 6, 258, 392-3

Hamel, J., 265

frustration-aggression theory, 1 54-5

Gioscia, Y., 329

Hamilton, E., 3 1 3

Frye, M . . 221

Girtler, R., 300

Hamilton, G.G., 369

Fugelsang, A., 436

Glaser, B.G., 278-82, 337. 352

Hamilton, R.T., 59, 6 1

Fulk, 1., 37

Glick,

Hammer, M . , 406

functional specialization, 55-6, 58-9,

global: development. 39-4 1 , 43-4;

329, 336, 339-41 functionalism, 26, 186, 3 3 1 , 37 1 , 382-3, 4 1 3 , 433, 436; adative, 57-8; normal science, 1 -2, 5, 6, 7, 57-8, 393-4, 396;

W ..

175

economy, 9: local debate. 39 .. 4 1 . 45 globalization, 9, 1 3 , 1 5. 234, 236, 402, 4 1 2- 1 3, 430

Hammond, K.R., 260, 265 Han, S.K., 1 80 Hannan, M . , 33, 63, 7 1 -3, 76-86, 89, 93-5. 98, 1 00- 1 , 1 09

Gocer. A., 356

Hansen, G.5., 1 28, 1 34-5

organizational analysis, 1 70- 1 , 44 1 ;

Godard,

Hanson. N.R., 4 1 2

pradigms and, 4-8, 1 2, 392-7; power

Goffman, E., 36. 1 73, 297, 300, 302

Haraway, 0 . , 23 1

relations, 375-6, 378-9; structural,

Goffman, I . . 3 5 1

Harding, S., 2 1 3 , 227, 230

3 1 -2, 396-7, 425 Futurism, 3 1 7

l-L.,

433

Golden-Biddle. 0 . 264 .

Hardy, C, 7, 376, 383, 424-5, 427-8

Goldwater. R . , 3 1 7

Harianto, F., 1 2 1

Goodman, P . , 1 72

Haring-Hidore, M . 225

Gabriel, Y., 302

Gordon, C, 4 1 7

Harl, J.E., 8

Gaebler, T.. 406

Gordon, F . E . , 2 1 9

Harman,

.

W.,

362

INDEX

457

Harper, D., 323

Hogan, R.T., 1 52-3, 1 55, 1 59, 1 6 1

industrialism, time images and, 328-35

Harre, R., 282, 292, 296 Harrigan, K.R., 8, 1 32, 1 33, 425

hold-up cheating, 134, 1 3 5

industry structure, 124-6, 1 3 1

Holl, P . , 1 14

information, 77, 120, 290; asymmetry,

Harrington, e.L., 297 Harris, B.e., 1 14

Hollway,

Holocaust, 26, 4 1 7 - 1 8

Harrison, R., 291

Holvino, E . , 220, 2 3 2 , 236

W.,

197-8, 203, 400, 439

Hart, 0., 1 1 8, 1 35 Hartman, E., 255, 257, 258 Hartmann, H., 226-7, 229

Homans, G.e., 30 1, 388 hooks, b., 2 1 6, 229, 437

Hartsock, N., 227

Hoppock, R., 290

Harvey, B., 405, 4 1 7

Hopwood, A., 202

Hasenfeld, Y., 425 Hassan, I., 2

Horkheimer, M . , 186, 188 Horner, M . , 224

Hassard, J., 5-6, 8, 26, 40, 186, 255, 258,

Horney, K., 223

330-2, 353, 357-9, 397, 407, 435

1 1 5, 1 1 8 - 1 9, 1 2 1 information technology, 10, 4 1 -3, 187, 188, 427 Ingersoll, V., 202 Ingram, P.L., 75 Inkson, J.H.K., 58, 59 innovation, 89, 9 1 , 176; organizing for,

Hopft, H., 292, 298, 300, 432

9-10, 427-8 institutional embeddedness, 82-3, 89 institutional processes, 75, 82-4, 88-9, 169, 173-4

Horvath, D., 58

institutional theory, 1 23; ambiguities in,

Hauser, A . , 3 1 7

Hoskin, K., 163, 390

1 73-4; institutionalization, 7,

Haveman, H.A., 7 8 , 9 5 , 98, 102

Hosking, D.M., 294, 301

14, 36, 169-80

Hawley, A.H., 85

Hoskisson, R.E., 1 14- 1 5, 122, 126-7

Hawthorn studies,

II,

1 52, 290

Hayano, D.M., 300

I I,

1 3,

institutionalization, 93, 295-6; of

II,

Houghland, J.G., 4 1 1

institutional theory, 7,

House, R.J., 146, 1 57, 1 58, 294

169-80; processes, 1 74-8

13, 14, 36,

Hayek, F., 33

Howard, N . , 290

instrumental rationality, 197-8, 3 1 8

Hearn, J., 4 1 , 197, 228, 292, 301 -2, 378,

Howell, J., 362

instrumental reasoning, 186, 189, 192,

Hoy, D.e., 3 8 1

405, 4 1 4 Heath, A., 379

194-5, 197-8, 205 integration studies, 4 1 , 348-9, 3 5 1 -4,

Huber, G . , 1 7 5

Heath, L.R., 327-8

Huberman, AM., 257, 272, 2 8 2

Hechter, M., 170

Hubert, H . , 3 3 2

interests, 369-70, 441

Heckscher, e., 193, 196 Hegel, F., 25, 187, 328, 407, 4 1 8

Huff, A., 126

internalization school, 1 1 6

Hughes, E., 351

International Monetary Fund, 437

hegemony, 193, 195, 373, 380, 427

Hughes, E.e., 337

internet, 430, 445 interorganizational relations, 8-10,

Heidegger, M., 201

Hughes, M., 26

Heilman, M.E., 2 1 9

Hull, G.T., 2 1 6

Heiskanen, T . , 228

human relations school, 14, 3 1 , 52-4,

Held, D., 197

424-7

human resource management, 4, 144, 148, 1 5 1 , 2 0 1 , 219, 291

Heller, F.A., 144 Helmreich, R.L., 2 1 9

humanism, 199, 202, 351, 440,

Hennart, J.F., 1 1 6, 1 1 7 , 132-3, 1 35

Humphrey, R.H., 301

inverse pricing, 341 investment, 1 1 3, 1 33-5

143, 188, 378, 409

Helgesen, S., 225

359-60, 377, 397

444

invisible hand, 30, 1 1 0, 202 Irigaray, L., 229, 230 Ironson, G.H., 262 irrationality, 25, 293-6 Isaac, J.e., 4 1 5

Hennig, M., 224

Humphreys, L.G., 1 56

Henriques, J., 1 52

Hunt, D . M . , 2 1 9

Isambert, F . A . , 332

Herlihy, J.M., 2 1 9

Huo, Y.P., 88

Isen, AM., 290, 29 1 , 301

Herrigel, G . B . , 9

Huxham, e., 425

Isherwood, B., 3 1 6

Herriott, S.R., 78

Huyssen, A., 2

isolationism, 5-6, 2 7 , 346, 396-7

Hersey, R., 2790

Hybels, R.e., 83

Ivancevich, J . M . , 299

Herzberg, F., 29 1

hybrid structures, 1 1 6 - 1 7, 234

Iwanska, A., 323

Hyde, e., 221

Izraeli, D., 2 1 2, 2 1 7, 377

Heskett, J.L., 1 23 Hesterly, W.S., heuristics, 323

I I I,

123, 1 36

Hickson, D., 32, 55, 57-8, 3 7 1 -2, 433, 436

Hyman, R., 374 hyperreality, 199, 203-4

Jackall, R., 4 1 , 266, 294, 298

hypothesis testing, 273, 278, 346, 410,

Jackson, B.V., 220

412

hierarchy, 10, 1 7, 29, 5 1 -3, 56, I I I , 428-9; governance decision, 1 1 2- 1 3 , 1 1 6-17, 1 2 3 , 135; and power, 34, 370-2

Iadicola, P., 228 Iaffaldano, M.T., 290 Iannello, K., 221-2

Higgins, e., 362

Ibarra, H., 2 1 9

Higgins, W., 407, 4 1 5 Hill, C.w.L., 59, 1 14 - 1 5, 1 1 7, 1 2 1

Ibarra-Colado, E . , 434

Jackson, N., 5, 6, 8, 26, 44, 202, 396, 4 1 7 Jacobs, J.A., 2 1 9 Jacobson, R . , 109, 1 23-4 Jacobson, S.W., 2 12, 220 Jacque, L., 1 1 6 Jacques, R., 2 1 2, 2 1 7 , 220, 232 Jaegar, A, 348

identity, 379, 442-3; diversities, 8;

Jaggar, A . M . , 2 1 3, 2 1 6, 220, 226, 229

fragmented, 200- 1 ideological contexts, 291 -2

Jago, A.G., 2 1 7 James, L.R., 1 50

ideological hegemony, 373 ideology, 4 1 3 ; critique, 192-6

James, N., 301

Hintikka, M., 2 1 3 Hirsch, P.M., 6 1 , 122-3, 1 36

ignorance, 374

James, W., 289 Janz, T., 261 Jaques, E., 290, 294-5, 327-8, 350-1

Hindess, B., 380 Hinings, e.R., 58, 348, 406, 4 1 7 Hinshelwood, R.D., 294, 295

Hirschheim, R . , 197

ligen, D.R., 146, 2 1 9

Hirschhorn, L., 294, 295-6

images, 204; of time, 16- 1 7, 327-42

Jardin, A., 224, 291

Hirshleifer, J . , 296

incentives, 1 10- 1 1 , 1 1 5, 1 2 1-2, 129-35

Jardine, A.A., 229

Hirst, P., 37, 38 Hisrich, R.D., 2 1 9

incommensurability, 5, 8, 1 3, 1 8 , 44-5,

Jaros, S.J., 255

historical context (action research) ,

indeterminacy (research), 199, 204-5

258, 322, 393-4, 396-8, 416, 4 1 7

Jarrell, G.A., 1 22 Jeffcutt, P., 205, 255, 267, 345-6, 3 5 1 , 356-8, 437

273-4, 283

individual: differences, 1 56-7; feminist

Hobbes, T., 382

research, 2 1 7, 219; in organization

Jehenson, R., 202

Hochschild, A., 292, 300-2, 303

studies, 14, 142-65, 4 1 1 ; subject,

Jelinek, M., 225, 265

Hodder, I., 323

432-40

Hodge, H., 1 9 3

individualism, 39, 4 1 , 2 1 6- 1 7

Hodson, T . e . , 332

ind ustriallorganizational psychology,

Hofstede, G., 396 Hogan, J., 1 5 5

142-59, 263 industrial revolution, 3 1 3 , 329

Jencks, e., 2, 434 Jensen, M.e., 63, 109, 1 1 8-20, 122 Jepperson, R.L., 426 Jermier, J.M., 1 55, 195, 258, 359, 438 Jick, T.D., 2 1 7, 377

STUD YING ORGANIZA TION

458

Kolb, D.M., 225

left-censored organizations, 98

2 1 7 , 2 1 9 , 290-2 Joerges, B., 3 1 4

Kondo, D., 36, 4 1 , 2 3 1 Konrad. A.M., 2 1 9 Koput, K.W., 7 9 , 8 2 , 85

legitimacy, 82-3, 1 73, 370, 372, 375-7, 382

John, G . , 1 1 4

Korn, H.l., 86, 102

job: attitudes, 149, 290, 292; related criteria, 1 53; satisfaction, 1 54, 1 56,

Leiba, S., 427-8, Leidner, R., 2 2 1 , 228, 300, 302

Kosnik, R.D., 1 2 1

Leigh, A., 293 Leong,

Johnson, M . , 29 1 , 328, 329

Kovalainen, A . , 2 1 2 Kram, K.E., 2 1 9

Johnson. R . E

Kreft, I.G.G., 1 74

Lev, B., 1 2 1

Johnson, J . , 353 Johnson, J.M., 264 .•

122

F.,

217

Letiche, H . , 359

Kreiner, K., 350, 355

Levin, M . , 273, 276

joint ventures, 1 1 6, 1 32, 1 33, 1 35

Kristeva.

Levins, R., 77, 86, 1 0 1

lones, C, 2 1 9

Kroeber, A . L . . 332

lones, G.P., 1 1 7

Kubler, G., 3 1 6, 3 1 9

Levitt, B., 95, 355

Jones, M.O., 3 1 2

Kue, B., 58

Levy, D.T., 1 14

lones, R . , 284

Kuhn, T., 8, 26, 45, 5 1 , 255-7, 346, 358,

Lewin, K., 273, 276-7, 279

lohnson, T

.•

35. 36

Jones, S., 39, 283, 405

1.,

229, 230

392-4, 398-9, 406

Levinthal, D.A., 7 3 , 75, 8 8 , 9 1 , 94, 1 00

Lewis, J., 2 1 6

lonsson, S., 348

Kumar, K., 32

Lewis, J.D., 424

loreen, 221

Kunda, G., 34, 193, 195, 265, 298-9.

liability of adolescence hypothesis, 75, 77

30 1-2, 345. 350, 352, 356-7 , 359, 362

loseph, G., 2 1 6

liability of aging hypothesis, 75, 77

Joskow, P . L . , 1 1 4, 1 1 6

Kunkel, P.l., 264

liberal feminist theory, 2 1 3-20, 237

ludge, T.A., 290

Kuznets, S . , 335

liberal theory of organization, 33-4

Julkunnen, R.A., 330

Kvande, E., 228

Liebeskind, J., 1 2 1 , 122 Light, D., 353

just-in-time production, 1 2 justice. 2 8 , 36-9, 1 56, 224

labour, 408-9; emotional, 292, 300- 1 ; market (managerial), 1 22; power,

Likert, R . , 52, 29 1 Likert scales, 259-60

Kahn, R . L . , 144

368-70; process, 235, 330 - 1 . 368-70,

Lincoln, Y.S., 264-5, 272, 435, 437, 440

Kakar, S., 29 1

374, 4 1 4

linear chains, 8-9

1.,

linear time, 327-31

Kamata, S., 33 1

Lacan,

Kamens, D . , 1 7 1 Kamins, M.A., 267

Laclau, E., 2, 1 86, 380, 440 Lakatos, I., 26, 257, 393

Kanfer, R., 1 56, 1 63

Lake, D., 286

356-7, 362

Kant, I., 187. 1 8 8 , 323

Lakin, S., 284

Lippman, S., 1 28

Kanter, R . M . , 8, 2 1 9, 228, 266, 350, 378, 425

229-30

linkages, 8-9, 89 Linstead, S., 20 1 -3, 205, 292, 298, 345,

Lakoff, G., 29 1 , 328, 329

Lipset, S.M., 32, 376

Lammers, C, 37, 38, 58, 4 1 7

LISREL, 263

Kaserman, D . L . , 1 1 4

Landes, D.S., 329

Littler, C, 2, 35

Katz, 1 . , 77

Landy,

local: concepts, 1 89-9 1 , 276; global

Katzell, R., 143, 149, 1 52, 1 54, 1 58-9

Lane, C, 424, 425

Keat, R., 405, 406

Langer, S.K., 3 1 9-20

Kellner, D., 1 86

language, 1 86, 199-203, 205-6, 229-30,

Kelly, D., 93, 95 Kelly, H . H . , 301

F.J.,

2 1 9, 264, 290

debate, 39-4 1 , 45 localism, 437 localization, 36, 37

323, 38 1 , 40 1 , 416, 434, 440, 445;

Lockard, J.S., 300

games, 8, 399; of words, 3 1 9-20

Locke, E.A., 1 54, 1 56, 264, 290

Kemper, T.D., 292, 296-7, 302-3

LaNuez, D., 1 55

Kennedy, A., 348

Lapierre, L . , 294

Loden. M . , 225

Kerfoot, D., 228, 374, 383

Larsen, J . , 3 1 8

logical empiricism, 392

Kerr, K.A., 8 Kersten, A., 1 85, 1 97 Kets de Vries, M . , 29 1 . 294 Ketterer, R., 273

Larson, M . S . , 35 Larwood, L., 2 1 7 Lasch, C , 407 Lash, S., 36. 440

Lomi. A . , 78, 84, 89 Long, M . , 1 2 1 loop analysis, 8 6

Keynesian economics, 18, 390 Khandwalla, P., 55 Kidder, D.L., 1 55-6

Laslett. P .. 337 Latham. L . L . , 1 53, 1 5 5 Latour, B., 8, 3 14- 1 5, 385, 389, 433

Locke, K., 264

loose-coupling, 430 Lopez, S . R . , 1 6 1 - 2

Lorber, J., 2 1 3 , 226, 229 Lord, R.G., 1 57, 259

Kieser, A., 59, 369

Lauden, L., 1 00, 1 0 1 Lauer, R . H . , 336

Lorde, A., 22 I, 233 Loree, D.W., 89

Kihlstrom,

Laughlin, CD., 3 1 5

Lorsch, J., 32, 54, 59, 78, 1 7 1 Louis, M . R . , 264, 350, 3 5 1

Kiernan, M.1., 1 0

1.F.,

1 50

Kilduff, M . , 267, 4 1 2 Kilmann, R . H . , 257, 353

Laughlin, R . , 197, 202 Laumann, E.O., 424

Kirkpatrick, I., 35

Law.

Kitayama, S., 1 6 1 , 1 6 3

Lawler, E.E., 255, 294

Luckmann, T., 1 73-5, 297, 425

Klein,

Lawler. E.l., 29 1

Lugones, M . C , 2 1 2, 227

H.1.,

146

1.,

36, 43, 44

Lowith, K . , 407 Lucas, R., 350, 359

Klein, M., 295

Lawrence, P., 32, 54, 59, 78, 1 7 1

Luhmann, N., 424, 425

Kleinschmidt, E., 9

Layder, D . , 34, 36, 39, 40, 41

Lukacs, G., 194

Knight, D.B., 299

Lazarus, R.S., 292

Luke. T., 1 8

Knights, D., 2, 35, 1 9 1 , 194-6, 200- 1 ,

Lazear, E.P., 1 2 1

Lukes, S . , 35, 195, 373, 376, 380, 4 1 3 , 44 1

Lazega, E . , 194

Lumsden, CJ., 72, 79, 85-6, 88, 95

204, 206, 228, 350, 374-5, 38 1 -3, 4 1 4, 425-7, 441 Knoke, D., 424, 425 knowledge, 1 1 6, 229-30, 423, 428;

Leacock, E

.•

235

leadership, 145-6, 1 57-8, 2 1 7 , 22 1 , 232, 290, 293-4, 349, 375

Lundin, R Luthans,

.•

F.,

348 264

Lutz, CA., 292-3, 296, 301

aesthetic, 3 19-24; claims, 40, 1 87;

learning, 1 5, 274, 295

Lyman, S., 1 72, 257-8

organizational, 3 1 2- 1 4; power and,

Leavitt,

Lyon, D., 34, 38

H.1.,

145

1 2 - 1 3 , 27-8, 35-6, 39, 199, 202-3,

Leblebici, H., 175, 1 78, 409

229-30, 368 , 374, 38 1 , 400- 1 , 409,

Lee, G . , 58

4 1 5 , 439; social, 3 1 2- 1 4

Lee, R . L . M . , 434

Lyotard,

1.,

2, 1 88, 202-3. 205, 229,

357-8, 403 Lyytinen, K., 1 9 7

Koedt, A . , 220

Lee, Y.T.. 1 6 1

Koen, S., 2 2 1 -2

Leeper, R . W .. 289

McClelland, D.C, 1 57

Kogut, B., 109-10, 1 1 7, 1 32-5

Lefebvre,

MacDonald, 1 . M . , 1 14

H ..

434

INDEX

459

McDonald, P., 349

mass dependence, 82

McEwen, W., 1 7 1

mass production, 52

Mitroff,

McGee, J . , 86

Massie, J., 30

Mittman, B.S., 72

McGrath, J.E., 1 0 1 , 264, 336, 338, 340,

Masten, S.E., 1 14, 1 1 7

Mitz, L.F., 2 1 7

Masterman, H . , 393 master narratives, 202-3, 205

mobility barriers, 1 26, 1 2 7

material reality, 3 1 2, 3 14 - 1 6, 3 1 8 Mathewson, S.B., 1 52 Matteson, M.T., 299

modernism, 255, 356, 358, 377, 38 1 -2,

McHugh, G., 5, 6

Mauksch, L.B., 295

modernity, 3 1 3, 390, 399, 402, 407-8,

Macinnes, J., 4 1 4

Mauss, M . , 332

353 McGregor, D., 143, 145 McGuire, J.B., 426 Machiavelli, N . , 34, 377, 382 McHugh, D., 27, 3 1 , 33, 433

Mitchell, W., 9 1

1.1.,

257, 425-6

Moch, M . , 350, 360 389, 401-2, 4 1 6, 432, 434, 436, 444; critical theory, 1 85-6, 1 88-9 430, 434

Mcintosh, G., 225

Mayes, B .T., 375, 377

McKelvey, B., 7 1 , 72, 86, 100- 1

Mayo, E . , 1 1 , 3 1 , 29 1 , 378, 388, 409

Mohanty, c.T., 2 1 2, 2 1 5, 233, 235

McKendrick, N . , 329

Mead, M . , 20 1 , 322

Moi, T., 229, 357

McKinley, W., 64, 4 1 1 , 4 1 2

meaning, 3 1 5- 1 6, 396, 4 1 3 ; management

Monaci, M . , 3 14

McKinsey Report ( 1 993), 9

of, 396-7; paradox, 432, 434-6

McLaughlin, K.J., 1 2 1

Mechanic, D., 37 1 , 372

McLean Parks, J . , 1 55-6

mechanistic organizations, 53-4

Moe, T.M., 1 1 7

Mone,

M.A, 64 I I I,

monitoring,

1 3 1 , 1 35; agency costs,

1 1 9-2 1 , 1 29

McMillan, c.J., 58

Meckling, W.H., 63, 109, 1 1 8 - 1 9

MacMillan, I., 1 14, 374, 377

Meehl, P.E., 263

monopoly, 109

McPherson, J . M . , 84

Meindl, 1.R., 147, 1 5 7

Montagna, P., 202

MacRae, G., 259

Meltzer, H., 1 44, 1 46

mood, 290

MacVe, R., 390

Menzies-Lythe, 1., 295, 296

Moore, L., 2 1 7 , 262

Magee, J.E., 293

mergers and acquisitions, 122, 123

Moore, W.E., 328-30, 336, 338

Mahoney, J . M . , 1 2 1

Mericle, M . F . , 2 1 9

Moraga, c., 221

Mahoney, J.T., 6 1 , 1 14, 1 20, 1 2 1

Merkle, J . , 29

moral hazard, 1 1 9, 1 34-5

Mai-Dalton, R.R., 2 1 9

Merleau-Ponty, M., 400

morale, 290

Mainiero, L.A., 2 1 7

Merton, R.K., 1 7, 3 1 , 56-7, 1 70, 262,

morality, 1 1 9, 224, 297-8, 377-8

Malinowski, B . , 409

332, 388, 4 1 0, 433

monopolistic competition, 1 24

Morasch, B., 2 1 9 Morey, N.C., 264

Mallette, P., 1 2 1

Mestrovic, S., 402

Mamiani, M . , 3 1 3

meta-analysis, 268, 346

Morgan, D., 28

management, 1 20-2, 128-9, 194, 224,

meta-narratives, 26, 28, 229

Morgan, G., 2, 4-5, 6, 26, 33, 37, 56, 1 85-6, 1 89, 1 93-4, 200, 206, 255,

236, 303-4, 347, 350, 354, 370, 4 1 2;

meta-theory, 206, 355-6, 358, 394

strategies, 374-5; styles (new), 429

metaphors, 7, 1 2, 1 97, 3 1 8, 328, 409, 4 1 6; of analysis, 388-403; war games, 1 7,

managerialism, 376-7, 4 1 3 , 433, 439 Mandelker, G., 1 2 1

345-62

257-8, 264-5, 29 1 , 328, 346, 3 5 1 -3, 355, 374, 38 1 , 383, 394, 396-8, 4 1 1 , 413

Mangham, 1.L., 284, 292

Meyer, A.D., 323

Morgan, R . , 2 1 2

Mani, L., 233

Meyer, G.W., 257

Morgen, S . , 2 2 1 , 223

Mann, M . , 374

Meyer, J.W., 14, 37, 59, 64, 72, 82, 88-9,

Manning, P.K., 328, 3 5 1

1 69, 1 7 1 -4, 1 76-7, 377

Morley, I.E., 294 Morley, L., 228

Mansfield, R . , 5 8 , 59

Meyerson, D.E., 3 14, 349-50, 355-6, 362

Morrison, A.M., 144, 2 1 9-20

March, J.G., 30, 33, 36, 95, 97, 109, 1 1 8,

Mezaros, I., 370

Morriss, P., 373

Mezias, S.J., 78-9, 82, 84-5, 1 0 1 , 1 79

motivation: alliances, 1 32-3; of

144, 1 7 1 , 1 76, 267, 362, 3 7 1 , 441 Marcus, G.E., 204-5, 357, 359, 434, 437

Miceli, M.P., 298

Marcuse, H., 1 86

Michael, c., 2 1 9

individual, 145, 1 56, 1 63-4 Motowidlo, S.J., 1 55, 29 1

Marecek, J . , 1 60

Michell, J . , 259

Mouffe, c., 1 86, 380, 440

marginalization, 345-6, 353, 358

Michels, R., 1 70

Mount, M.K., 1 5 3

Margolis, S., 1 87

middle range theory, 262, 263

Mouzelis, N., 29, 3 1 , 389

Marin, L., 234

Mies, M . , 2 1 2, 235

Mowday, R.T., 144, 147

Marinetti, F. T., 3 1 7 Mariotti, S . , 1 1 6 market: based theories, 32-40; discipline,

Miles, M.B., 257, 272, 282 Milgram, S., 298 Milgrom, P., 1 1 7 Mill, H.T., 2 1 6

Muchinsky, P.M., 290 Mueller, A, 235 multiculturalism, 347 multidivisional form, 6 1 , 63, 1 14- 1 5

122; failure, 33, 4 1 1 ; power, 82, 95; transaction costs, I 1 0- 1 2, 1 1 5- 1 6,

Mill, J.S., 2 1 6

multinational enterprises, 1 1 6

Miller, D . , 62, 97, 294 Miller, E., 290, 294

Mumby, D., 193-5, 197, 204, 232, 29 1 ,

Markus, H . , 1 6 1 , 1 6 3 Marris, R . , 1 1 8 Marsden, R., 5, 6, 406, 4 1 7

Miller, E.J., 3 1 Miller, J.B., 225

Mumford, L . , 329

Marshall, J . , 2 1 2, 223, 225 Marshall, W., 1 1 7

Miller, L., 377

1 22, 1 24-5, 1 33

Martell, R.F., 2 1 9

Miller, P., 30, 34, 35 Millet, K., 223

Martin, J . , 36, 42, 20 1 -2, 204, 206, 220,

Mills,

228, 232, 255, 258, 302, 345, 348-59 Martin, I.E., 2 1 9

Mills, C . W . , 2 6 5 , 29 1 , 300

Martin, M . , 290

A J.,

42, 228, 350, 378, 405, 4 1 4

Miner, A S. 72, 82, 89, 95, 98, 169, 1 76, .

,

Martin, P.Y . , 2 1 2, 2 2 1 -3, 228

Minh-ha, T.T., 233

Martinez, M., 35

Minsky, M., 296

Marx, K., 17, 1 8, 1 87 , 1 93, 225, 328-9,

Mintzberg, H . , 8, 10, 55-6, 1 1 8, 369, 375,

4 1 2 - 1 3 , 4 1 5 , 4 1 7, 429-30, 433 Marxism, 2, 1 85-6, 192-3, 196, 202, 3 5 1 ,

Munsterberg, H . , 143, 290 Murgatroyd, S.J., 378 Murphy, K.J., 1 2 1 Murphy, L.R., 299 Murray, F., 375 Murray, V.V., 374, 377 Musgrave, A., 26 mutually determining processes, 142,

1 79

369-70, 372-3, 380, 388-9, 406-9,

293, 296, 300- 1 , 304, 350, 377, 405

1 50-2 myth, formal structure as, 1 7 1 - 3 Nanda, A . , 1 32

377, 439 Mir, R., 236

Narayaran, V.K., 374, 377

Mirvis, P.H., 362

narratives, 27, 28, 403, 439; grand, 2, 186,

Mischel, W., 1 59, 1 62

1 88, 199, 202-3, 205, 255-7, 440;

Marxist feminist theory, 2 14 - 1 5, 225-6

missing person reports, 149-50

master, 202-3, 205; universal, 256-7

Maslow, A.H., 1 59, 232, 29 1

Mitchell,

226

Nash, J., 235

Mason, E.S., 1 24

Mitchell, T.R., 144, 147, 1 50

Nass, c., 355

370, 3 8 1 , 4 1 4- 1 6, 430

1.,

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460

STUD YING ORGANIZA TION

Nathan, M . L., 425-6

operations technology, 53-4

Palmer, G . , 426

nation-state, 402 natural reality, 3 1 7 naturalization, 193-4 Neale, M.S., 299

opportunism, 12, 13, 1 34, 1 35, 425;

Panofsky, E., 3 1 7

O'Reilly, e.A., 146-7, 352 O'Reilly, e.R., 290

Near, J.P., 1 54, 298

Organ, D.W., 1 54, 155, 1 56

256. 258; politics and, 4-8; structural

need models, 149

organic organizations, 53-4, 1 86

contingency, 52, 56-8, 63-4

Neilson, E.H., 84

organization: creation of, 408-9;

transaction cost, 1 1 2-14, 1 1 7, 1 1 8, 1 2 1

panopticism, 3 9 1 , 398, 400 paradigms, 3, 12, 26-7, 2 8 1 , 4 1 3 ; analysis, 388-403; -making research,

Parasuraman, S., 2 1 9

Nelson, D.L., 2 1 7

metaphors. 1 2; theorists ( 1 960s),

Pareto, V., 3 1 , 388

Nelson, R.R., 72, 86, 9 1 , 95, 1 09, 124,

388-92; theory in practice, 12, 405- 1 8

Pareto Circle, 388

organization studies: action research,

175-6 neo-classical economics, 33, 1 1 0, 1 1 7 - 1 8,

272-86; approaches, 1 85-2 1 1 ; critical,

Park, D., 328 Park, O.H., 290

197-9; data in, 255-68; definition,

Park, R.E., 1 70

neo-liberal theories, 37, 38

3-4; feminist approach, 1 1 , 14- 1 5 ,

Parker,

Nes, J.A., 228

2 1 2-39; identities in, 442-3;

Parker, M . , 5, 16, 1 7, 186, 255, 357-9,

networks, 8, 9-10, 1 16, 172; actor­

individual in, 14, 142-65; representing

123, 409, 41 1

network, 36, 43; interorganizational, 424-6

subject in. 423-4; as subject, 440-5 organization theory, representation of,

206

407, 4 1 6, 427-8 , 430, 435-6 Parkin, P.W., 228, 378 Parkin, W .. 197, 292, 30 1 , 303, 405, 4 1 4 Parry, B . , 233

422-46

Neurath, H . , 392

I.,

new institutionalism, 37

organizational analysis, 1 1 0, 400-2

Parry, G., 373

Newton, A., 299

organizational behaviour, 142-52, 263

Parsons, T., 3 1 , 57, 1 72, 388, 409-10,

Newton, I., 16, 3 1 3 , 329, 392

organizational change, 1 3 , 72; structural

Newton, P . M . , 294

y

4 1 7, 433 participant observation, 264-5, 303, 353

inertia theory, 93-100

participatory action research, 274-5

niche-width theor , 74, 77-8, 101

organizational citizenship behaviour, 1 55

niche overlap, 85

organizational control, 3 1 8-22

Parvikko, T., 2 1 6

Nichiguchi, T., 1 1 6

organizational culture, 205, 265, 377;

Pasadeos, Y. 6

Nichols, T., 3 1 Nicholson, L.J., 1 9 1 , 2 0 1 , 229, 2 3 1

.

artifacts, 3 14 - 1 5 ; emotionalizing,

Pascale, R., 348

298-9; war games, 1 7, 345-62

Pasquero, J., 424

Nieva, V . F . , 2 1 7 , 2 1 9

organizational democracy, 38

Passeron, J.e., 435

Nilsonn, P., 2 3 2

organizational ecology,

Passmore, W., 256

438

Nisbet, R.E., 264 Nkomo, S . M . , 42, 220, 232, 438

II,

13, 7 1 - 102,

path dependence, 1 28

organizational economics, 2, 1 3-14,

Nohria, N., 7 , 9, 55 nomological relations, 262

organizational failure/founding, 73-92

non-decisions, 373

organizational forms (new), 8 - 1 0.

non-profit organizations, 3 1 9

patriarchy, 220, 224, 226-7, 236-7, 3 0 1 , 379

109-36, 438

Paulus, D.L., 260 Pavan, RJ., 61 Payne, R., 299

423-32

Nord, W.R., 7, 144, 1 54, 194, 256, 345,

organizational justice, 1 56

Pearce, D., 2 1 2

35 1 , 362, 3 8 1 , 436, 438 normal science, I I , 1 8 , 26, 423, 432-4,

organizational knowledge, 3 1 2-14

Pechman,J.A., 2 1 2

organizational learning, 1 5 , 274, 295

Peck, M J . , 407

436-9; of analysis, 388-403; model, 2,

organizational niche overlap, 85

Pedhazur, E.J., 257

5, 6, 7; structural contingency, 5 1 -64;

organizational order, emotions and,

Pekrun, R., 290, 292

297-8

theory in practice, 406, 409- 1 3, 417-18

Pennings, J.M., 5 1 -2, 57-8, 60, 63, 1 72,

organizational paradigms, 393-7

348, 41 1

normative dualism, 2 1 6, 2 1 7

organizational performance, 98, 122-3

Penrose, E . 1 24, 127

North Atlantic Theory o f Organization, 390 Norton, S . M . , 2 1 9 Nowotny, H . , 330

organizational population, 7 1 -3, 74-85, 100-1 organizational psychology, 148-64, 290 organizational reality, 257-8, 265-6, 442

Pepper, S., 398 perception, 320 performance, 63, 98; appraisals, 2 1 9; of

Nutt, P.e., 284

organizational research: critical theory,

performativity, 188, 203, 205, 403

Nyland, e., 328

192-9; postmodernism and, 1 99-205 organizational structure, 36-7, 4 1 0- 1 1 ;

.

firms, 1 14, 1 1 6, 123-9 Perlow, R . , 1 53, 1 5 5

Oakley, J., 292, 293, 297 Oatley, K., 302

contingency theory, 5 1 -64 organizational symbols. 3 1 4 - 1 5

Perrow, e . , 30, 3 3 , 54, 6 1 , 1 1 7- 1 8, 123, 1 36, 321 , 35 1 , 405, 424, 430 Perry, E.L., 2 1 9

object-relations theory, 224

organizational theory (development),

Perry, N . , 36, 37, 45, 4 1 0

objectification, 1 75-8, 197 objectivism, 199

organizations: aesthetics of, 3 1 1 -24;

1 2- 1 3 , 25-45

objects (meaning of things), 3 1 5- 1 6

diverse identities, 8; performance,

O'Connor, E.S., 427

1 23-9; role of power, 12, 1 7 . 368-83;

Oedipus complex, 223-4

sociological analyses, 1 70- 1

personality, 1 52-4, 1 57, 1 6 1 -2; trait approach, 73, 145, 160, 289 Pervin, L.A., 1 50

Peteraf, M . A ., 128

Peters, M . , 274

Offe, e., 194, 368

Orlikowski, W., 1 78

Peters, T., 186, 225, 29 1 , 298, 347-8, 406

Offerman, L.R., 143

Ortony,

Petersen, T., 79, 82, 85

Okin, S., 358, 359

Osborne, D., 406

O'Leary, T., 35

Osborne, R.N .. 2 1 9

Pettigrew, A., 346, 348, 3 5 3 , 356

O'Leary-Kelly, A.M., 2 1 9

Ostner,

Pettigrew, A.M., 283, 372, 374, 376-7

A.,

I.,

290

Peterson, M.M., 2 1 9

300

oligopoly, 6 1

otherness, 203-4, 230, 437.

Oliver, e . , 77, 82-3, 88-9, 98, 1 0 1 , 1 74,

Ott, J., 348

425-6

444

Ouchi, W.G., 1 1 5- 1 6, 1 1 8, 1 22, 1 34, 1 36,

Ollinger, M., 1 1 4

346, 348, 353

Pettigrew, T.F., 220 Peven, D., 298 Pfeffer, J., 6, 8, 1 3 , 26, 44, 5 1 -2, 6 1 , 63, 7 1 , 78, 95, 109, 146-7, 149-50, 1 7 1 ,

Olsen, J.P., 36

outcomes (research), 275, 276-9

1 73, 2 1 9 , 255, 294, 297-8, 346, 348,

Olzak, S., 83

Overington, M.A., 292

372, 374, 376-7, 390

O'Neill, J . , 4 1 7

phenomenology, 1 74-5, 1 99, 334, 4 1 3

Ong, A .. 235

Paetzold. R . L . , 6, 8, 2 1 9, 255

ontology, 41, 44, 3 1 4, 327, 333, 336,

Paige, J M . , 229

Phillips,

A.,

229

Phillips, J.S., 2 1 7

.

3 8 1 -2, 394, 396, 406, 4 1 3 , 424, 434,

Paige, K.E., 229

Phillips. N . , 7, 424, 425

442

Palmer, D., 6 1 , 63, 64. 1 79

physical reality, 3 1 1 - 1 2 , 3 14 - 1 5 , 3 1 8

T h i s

S A G E

e b o o k

i s

c o p y r i g h t

a n d

i s

s u p p l i e d

b y

INDEX

46 1

pictures (social artifacts), 322-3

Pronovost, G., 332

Piller, P., 228

property rights, 1 1 8, 409, 4 1 2

recruitment, 2 1 9

Pilotta, J., 2 1 7

protectionism, 5-7

Pinder, e.e., 1 56, 1 64, 262, 328, 346

psychoanalytic approach, 1 87, 294-6;

Reed, M . , 5, 6, 8, 25-7, 3 1 , 34-5, 38, 40, 42, 60, 346, 350- 1 , 358, 388, 396-7

feminist theory, 42, 2 1 3 - 1 5, 223-5,

Pinfield, L., 438 Piore, M., 36

237-8

Pitre, E., 5, 6, 392-3 Plant, G., 25 Plant, W.T., 2 1 9

2 1 7, 2 19; role of individual, 14, 142-64

Platz, S.J., 2 1 7

psychological contract, 1 56

CJ.,

Pliskin, N . , 432

Puccia,

Plutchik, R., 289

Pugh, D . , 32, 5 1 , 5 5 , 57-8, 4 1 0- 1 1 , 433,

Podsakoff, P.M., 26 1 -2, 263, 265

Reed, R., 1 28 Reeves, e., 1 77

psychodynamics of emotion, 294-5 psychological approach, I I , 142;

emotion, 289-310; feminist research,

Plato, 400

recognition, 443-4

86, 1 0 1

436

reflexivity, 4, 14, 1 6, 37-8, 45, 1 63, 206, 434-6, 438, 440-4; self, 43, 359 Reger, R., 1 26 Reich, R . B . , 428 Reid, D.A., 329 Reid, P.T., 1 6 1 Reimann, B.e., 58 Reineit, e., 2 2 1

Polanyi, M., 3 1 3, 320

Pulakos, E.D., 2 1 9

Reinharz, S., 2 1 3

political economy, 36-7

Putnam, H . , 27

relativism, 2 6 , 44-5, 201 , 2 1 3, 400,

political turbulence, 88

Putnam, L.L., 197, 204, 225, 232, 291 ,

politics: emotion and, 294-5; legitimacy

293, 296, 300- 1 , 304, 405

4 1 6- 1 7 reliability, 73, 94, 262

and, 375-7; paradigms, 4-8; power

Putterman, L., 1 1 7

Remnick, D., 4 1 5

relations and, 373, 378, 380

Pyke, F., 9

Rennie, J . , 4 1 7

Pym, D., 353

repetitive momentum, 9 5 , 97-8

Pollert, A., 330 Polsby, N.W., 373

replication (contingency), 58-9

Pondy, L.R., 265, 348

qualitative research, 26 1 , 352-3, 356, 437

Poole, M . , 58, 59 population: density, 74, 78-85, 100- 1 ;

qualitative time analysis, 330-5

dynamics, 74, 78-9, 88, 90-2; ecology, 2,

II,

1 2, 14, 33, 4 1 , 7 1 , 109, 4 1 1 , 438,

440

Porter, M.E., 82, 125-7 positivism, 1 2, 26, 39-40, 1 85, 346, 358;

Quality of Working Life, 145, 188, 29 1 , 3 3 1 , 350

representations, 3, 1 8- 19, 422-46; data and process, 257-60, 265-6 reproducibility, 73, 93, 94 research, 1 5- 1 9, 433-5; critical theory

quantitative-linear tradition, 328-30, 3 3 1

and, 1 92-9; data, 255-7 1 ; feminist

quantitative research, 1 7 1 , 26 1 , 352-4,

approaches, 2 1 7-20; implications

356, 359

(institutional theory), 1 78-80;

questionnaires, 261 - 2

outcomes, 275-9; process, 279-83; as

theory in practice, 7, 406, 4 1 0 - 1 2, 4 1 4,

Quick, J.e., 2 1 7

resistance, 204-5; see also action

4 1 6 - 1 7 , 434, 436

Quinby, L . , 229, 230

post-chip generation, 43 1 -2

research and development, 54, 56

Rabey, G . , 293

resistance, 206, 414; new forms, 427-8;

postcolonial feminism, 2 14- 1 5, 232-6, 239 postmodernism, 2-3, 8, 10, 1 7 , 36-7, 44,

research; organizational research

Quinn, R., 144, 1 7 5

researcher (role), 2-3, 1 5 - 1 6, 437 Rabinow, P., 399, 400

and power, 372-4, 378- 8 1 , 382-3;

346, 3 8 1 -2, 406-7, 4 1 6- 1 7; critical

Rabkin, J.G., 292

theory and,

race, 42

Reskin, B . F . , 2 1 2, 228

data, 255, 267; feminist theory,

Radhakrishnan, R . , 233-4

resource: allocation, 33, 409; based view

2 1 3- 1 5, 229-32, 238-9; normal

radical feminist theory, 2 1 3- 1 5, 220-3,

I I,

14, 16, 1 85-206, 442;

science, 389-90, 402-3; organizational culture, 356-60; representations, 423, 428, 430-2, 434-7, 439-40, 444 poststructuralism, 36-7, 4 1 , 44, 255;

237 Rafaeli, A., 267, 300, 405

research as, 204-5

of firm, 1 1 7, 1 27-9, 1 32; dependence, 109, 1 7 1 , 1 73-4, 1 80, 372, 376, 4 1 1 ; partitioning model, 78, 83, 1 0 1

Ragin, e.e., 265

Revans, R.W., 274

Ragins, B.R., 2 1 9

revolutionary science, 26

Rahman, M.A., 275

Ricardo, D., 1 27, 330

Rainey, H.G., 424

Rice, A.K., 3 1 , 265

Powell, G.N., 2 1 7 , 2 1 9

Ramesh, e.R., 290

Rich, A., 220

Powell, W.W., 8, 9, 3 5 , 3 7 , 6 3 , 7 2 , 79, 82-4, 88-9, 1 0 1 , 109, 1 1 6, 169, 1 75,

Ramirez, M . , 43

Richardson, L., 280, 284, 438

Ramirez, R., 3 1 2, 3 1 8

Richardson,

feminist, 2 1 3- 1 5, 229-32, 238-9 Potter, J., 206

1 79, 377, 425-6 Power, F.e., 439

Ramsey, V.J., 225 Randolph, W.A., 57, 63

Power, M . , 197, 202-3, 4 1 6 power, 34, 1 7 1 , 4 1 3 - 14, 427; knowledge

Ranger-Moore, J., 75 Ranson, S., 373, 375, 376

and, 1 2- 1 3, 27-8, 35-6, 39, 199,

Rantalaiho, L., 228

202-3, 229-30, 368, 374, 38 1 , 400- 1 , 409, 4 1 5, 439; relations, 42, 194, 200,

Rao, H . , 79, 83-4, 1 0 1 Rao, M.V.H., 256

203, 2 1 3, 226, 23 1 . 373, 378, 380, 425-6, 430; role, 12, 1 7, 368-83

Rasmussen, B., 228 rational: actor, 37, 1 70- 1 , 293-7; legal

Prahalad, e.K., 9, 1 27 Prakash, G., 233 Prasad, P . , 7 Pratt, J.W., 1 19 prescriptive theory, 441 presence philosophy, 20 1 - 2 Presthus, R., 29

authority, 29; universalism, 39 rationality, 1 6 , 28-30, 197, 43 1 ; emotion and, 293-4, 296-7, 303; see also

TJ.,

407

Riger, S., 2 2 1 right-censored organizations, 98 Riley, P., 350 Rime, B., 302 Ring, P.S., 1 1 7 , 424 risk, 109, 1 1 5, 1 2 1 , 1 33 -4, 430 Ritti, R., 1 77 Ritzer, G . , 304, 394, 402 Robbins, A., 4 1 1

Robbins, S . , 22 1 Roberts, J . , 1 1 7

Roberts, K . H . , 1 5 1

bounded rationality; instrumental

Robins, J.A., 1 1 7

rationality

Robins, K., 38, 43

rationalization process, 1 88, 408, 4 1 3 , 418

Robinson, J., 1 24 Robinson, S.L., 1 5 5 Robinson, V . , 274

price, l l O, 1 29, 1 30-1

Ratner, e . , 292

Pringle, R . , 20 1 , 2 1 2, 226, 228, 23 1 , 378

Raven, B., 372

Rochberg-Halton, E . , 3 1 5- 1 6, 320

pro-social organizational behaviour, 155

Ravenscraft, D.M., 1 22

Roelofs, H . M . , 376

problem solving, 54, 340 - 1

Ray, e., 378

Roethlisberger, F.G., 1 1 , 3 1 , 52, 2 1 7 , 290,

process, action research, 275, 279-83

Ray, L . , 34, 38, 388

product: differentiation, 1 24, 1 3 1 ;

reality, 360; empirical, 259-61 , 263, 267;

innovation, 9-10; life-cycle, 55, 427 production technology, 53-4 profit-maximization, 109, 1 1 5, 1 1 7 , 1 1 8 profits, 1 23, 1 24

388, 409 Roger, A., 3 1 8

material, 3 1 2, 3 14- 1 6, 3 1 8; natural,

Rogers, D.L., 425

3 1 7 ; organizational, 257-8, 265-6;

Rojek, e., 430, 43 1 , 444-5

physical, 3 1 1 - 1 2, 3 14- 1 5, 3 1 8 Reason, P . , 272, 275, 276

Roldan, M . , 235 role-choices, 1 55

462

STUD YING ORGANIZA TION

Romanelli, E., 73, 86

Scarselletta, M . , 1 79

Romm, c.T., 432 Ronai, C.R., 303

Roos, P.A., 2 1 2, 228 Rose, D., 205

Sherer, P.O., 147-8, 1 58

Schaar, J.H., 376

Shergill, G.S., 59, 6 1

Schacht, R., 370 Schattschneider, E.F., 373

Shilling,

c.,

400

shirking, l l O- l l , 120, 1 2 1

scheduling, 338, 339

Shleifer, A., 1 22, 1 2 3

Rose, G.L., 2 1 6

Scheff, T.J., 293, 297

Shoda, Y . , 162

Rose, M . , 29

Schein, E . H . , 3 14, 348, 352-2

Shore, L.M., 1 56

Rose, N., 30, 34, 35, 400

schematas, 320

Shott, S., 292, 297

Rose, S.M., 425

Scherer, F.M., 1 22, 1 24, 126-7, 1 29- 3 1 ,

Shotter, J., 202, 206

1 33-4

Rosen, B., 2 1 9

Shrivastava, P., 197, 198, 223

c.,

Rosen, M . , 195-6, 206, 321 -2, 350- 1

Schlesinger, A., 347

Siehl,

Rosen, S . , 1 2 1

Schmelkin, L.P., 257

Sievers, B., 194-5, 197, 3 1 7

3 5 1 , 353, 359

Sigelman, L . , 2 1 9

Rosenbaum, A., 2 1 9

Schmittlein, D., 1 1 4

Rosenberg, M . , 293

Schneider, B., 145-6, 149, 352-3

signifier/signified, 357, 434

Rosener, 1.B., 225

Schneier,

Silberman, B.S., 34, 37, 38

Rosenkopf, L., 1 77

Schoenherr, P.A., 58

silence, 345, 353, 432, 436-8

Rosenthal,

Scholes, J., 284

Silver, J., 34, 1 77

U.,

263

c.,

217

Rosnow, R.L., 263

Schon, D., 266, 274-5, 28 1 , 352

Silverman, D., 2, 8, 1 8 , 3 1 , 58, 64, 4 1 3

Ross, J., 294

Schoonhoven, C.B., 63

Simon, H.A., 29, 30, 109, I l l , 1 1 8, 142,

Rotchford, N.L., 336, 338, 340

Schrober, M.F., 260

Rothe, H.F., 290

Schuler, R.S., 144, 148

Simons, H., 359 simulations, 200, 204

1 62, 1 7 1 , 1 76, 260, 264, 267, 296

Rothschild, J., 2 2 1 -2, 376

Schultz, M., 3 1 8, 345-6, 348, 355

Rothschild-Whitt, J., 2 2 1

Schumpeter, J.A., 9 1 , 1 27

Sinclair, J., 432

Rothwell, R., 9

Schussler, R . , 75

Singh, H., 1 2 1 Singh,

1.Y.,

Rousseau, D . M . , 1 56, 1 58 , 353

Schutz, A., 1 74, 425

Routamaa, Y., 58

Schwab, D.P., 2 1 9, 260, 262-3

routinization, 433

Schwartz, A.Y , 22 1

Sirianni,

Rowan, B., 14, 82, 88-9, 169, 1 7 1 -3,

Schwartz, H . S . , 294, 296, 298

Sitkin, S., 1 77

Schweitzer, D., 370

size dependence, 73-7, 95-8

1 77-8, 377

.

c.,

Rowan, J . , 272, 274-5, 280

Schwenk,

Roy, D.F., 1 7, 265, 3 3 1 , 333-4

science of organization theory, 409- 1 3 ,

Ruback, R.S., 1 22 Rugman, A.M., 1 1 6

293, 374, 377

423, 433

72, 78-9, 84-6, 88-9, 95, 98,

100- 1 , 146

c.,

1 85

skills, 1 14; deskilling, 33 1 , 37 1 , 428 Skoldberg, K., 205, 206 Slater, D., 437

scientific management, 1 2, 14, 29, 143,

Slaughter, J., 427

rules, 1 5 1 , 370, 374, 377, 380, 382

1 52, 29 1 , 303, 327, 330- 1 , 37 1 , 427-9,

SIess, D., 202

Rumelt, R.P., 6 1 , 1 23, 1 26-8

433

Smart, B., 32, 3 8 1

Rura, T., 169, 179

scientific revolution, 3 1 3, 392-4

Russo, A., 2 1 5

Scott, 1.W., 2 1 3, 226, 229, 2 3 1

Ryan, J . , 297

Scott, M . , 1 72

Ryan, R.M., 147

Scott, R., 1 73-4

Smith, A . , 6 , 1 10, 1 12, 330, 406

Rycroft, C.A., 295

Scott, W.G., 4 1 2

Smith, C.B., 2 1 9

Sabel,

c.,

204-5, 2 1 9, 225, 232, 256, 267, 345-6, 352-3, 356-9, 3 6 1 -2, 377, 379, 4 1 3

Scott, W . R.. 26, 37, 52, 64, 84, 88-9, 143, 36

Smircich, L., 36, 4 1 , 1 85, 1 87 , 197, 201-2,

169, 377

Smith, D . , 4 1 , 4 3 , 2 2 1 , 228, 235 Smith, D.B., 2 1 9

Sachdeva, P.S., 376

Scully, M., 362

Safa, H., 235

Sealander, J., 221

Smith, K.K., 296 Smith, N., 4 1 7

Sahlin-Andersson, K., 228 Saias, M.D., 60

secondary data, 266- 7 Secord, P.F., 282

Smith, N.C., 298 Smith, P.c., 290

Said, E., 233, 381 Saint-Simon, c., 1 2, 25, 28, 29, 32

sedimentation, 1 75, 1 76, 1 78

Smith, Y., 224

Seidenberg, R., 299

Snell, S.A., 1 2 1

Sekaran, U . , 2 1 7

Snyder, R.A., 2 1 9

selection, 2 1 9; ecological theory, 100 self, 1 60-2, 1 88, 200, 203-4, 3 1 5- 1 6, 430,

social conflict theory, 1 87 social contexts, 143-8, 162

Salaman, G., 34, 1 9 3 Salancik, G.R., 6 1 , 63, 78, 95, 109, 149-50, 1 7 1 , 1 73, 372, 409

Sampson, E.E., 160- 1 Sandelands, L.E., 148, 258, 292-3, 3 1 2, 409 Sanders, P., 4 1 3 Sanderson, K . , 227 Sandford, N., 279

434; actualization, 232, 2 9 1 ; consciousness, 3 14; exploitation, 258;

social constructionism, 2, 40,1 60, 20 1 , 442

image, 442-3; reflexivity, 43, 359; regulation, 297, 399, 439

social Darwinism, 202

self-interest, 1 1 2, l l 8, 120, 194, 1 98 , 2 1 7, 294, 296, 299, 375, 382

social exchange theory, 1 56 social identity theory, 2 3 1 social individual, 1 5 1

Sangren, S., 204-5

Selye, H., 292, 299

Sankey, H., 393

Selznick, P.,

Sarbin, T.R., 296-7

Semler, R., 9

Sargent, A., 2 1 9

Semprini, A., 323

Sarup, M . , 1 87

Sen, G., 235

Sassoon, 1., 3 2 1

Senge, P.M., 406

social philosophy, 327-8 social power, 33, 34

II, 31,

social information processing, 149, 1 62 56, 1 70, 1 72, 32 1 , 348

social knowledge, 3 1 2- 1 4 social order, 2 5 , 29-30, 3 2 , 3 6 , 426; emotions and, 297-8; naturalization, 193-4

Sathe, Y., 348

Sengenberger, W., 9

Saunders, P., 373

sensibility, pattern of, 3 1 9 , 320

social reality, 197, 205

Saussure, F. de, 1 87, 20 1 , 229

sensory maps, 3 1 9

social reproduction, 198-9

Savage, M., 4 1

sentiment, 290

social system, 3 1-2, 2 19-20, 323

Sawicki, J . , 229-30, 380- 1 , 383

sequencing, 327, 339, 342

social time, 332, 336

Saxenian, A., 1 1 6

Sergiovanni, T., 348

social welfare, 1 24, 1 27 , 129, 1 32

Sayer, A., 406, 407

sex, gender relations and, 2 1 3, 378

socialist feminist theory, 2 1 3- 1 5, 226-9,

Sayer, 0 . , 405, 408, 4 1 8

shame (social codes), 297-8

Sayers, J . , 160

Shearer, T.L., 232

socialization, l l 6, 193, 2 1 3, 224-5, 297,

Scarbrough, H., 43 scarcity, 329, 339-40

Shenoy. S., 59 Shepard, J.M., 4 1 1

socio-technical systems, 3 1 , 3 3 1

Scarry, E., 3 1 5

Sheppard, D.L., 228

sociobiology, 1 60

238 3 1 8, 342, 425, 427

INDEX sociological approach, 425

JI,

1 70- 1 , 2 1 9,

sociological functionalism, 56-7

463

Strati, A . , 3 1 1 - 1 2 , 322, 362

task uncertainty, 5 1 -3, 338

Strauss, A., 272, 276, 279, 282, 337, 352,

Tavistock Institute, 265, 273, 290

380, 426

Taylor, B., 229

sociological paradigms, 393-7

Street Corner Society, 324

sociopolitical legitimacy, 82-3

stress, 1 54-5, 2 1 7, 291-2, 299

Solomon, R.C., 303

Stretton,H., 28

Taylor, M.S., 2 1 9

Sommer, D., 234

Strober, M . , 2 1 2, 228 Stroh, L.K., 2 1 2

Taylorism, 12, 1 4 , 29, 143, 1 52, 29 1 , 303,

Sorokin, P.A., 1 7, 332, 335 space (corporate landscape), 3 1 6-18

Stromquist, N.P., 229

specialism, 77-8, 1 98

Strongman, K.T., 290

specialization, 1 7 1 , 336-7, 339, 342;

structual adaptation to regain fit

functional, 55-6, 58-9, 329, 336, 339-41

(SARFIT) theory, 59, 60 structural contingency theory, 1 3 , 5 1 -64,

Spector, P.E., 1 53, 1 54-5

41 1

Taylor, F.W., 29, 1 52, 188, 2 1 7, 29 1 , 330, 428, 433 Taylor, P.V., 436, 437 327, 330- 1 , 37 1 , 427-9, 433 team production, 1 10- 1 1 technical reasoning, 1 94 technocracy, 44, 1 97-8 technological determinism, 330 technological innovation, 89, 9 1

speech, 4-5, 8, 197, 399, 438-40

structural covariation, 170-1

technological processes, 75, 89-93

Spelman, E.V., 2 1 2, 224, 227

structural functionalism, 3 1 -2, 396-7,

technology, 8, 430, 434; cycles, 88, 9 1 -2;

Spence, J.T., 2 1 9 Spence, M . , 1 3 1

425 structural inertia theory, 7 1 -2, 93-100

transfer, 9 technoscience, 42-3

Spielberger, C.D., 289

structural linguistics, 187, 229

Teece, 0.1., 59, 1 14, 1 1 6, 1 27

Spivak, G., 233

structural Marxism, 436

temporal structuring, 330- 1 , 335-42

Spradley, J.P., 260- 1 , 265, 3 5 1

structural research, 2 1 9

temporality, 1 6- 1 7, 327-44

Srivatsan,

structuralism, 199, 33 1 , 399

Tenbrunsel, A.E., 439

V., 409

Stablein, R.E., 194, 256-7, 266, 345, 3 5 1

structuration, 374

Terborg, J.R., 2 1 7, 2 1 9

stakeholders, 1 1 8, 1 94, 360- 1 , 439

structure: agency debate, 39, 40; conduct­

Terkel, S., 289

Stalker, G.M., 53-4, 59

performance paradigm, 123-9;

Tetrick, L.E., 1 56

standardization, 33, 93, 4 1 6, 433

dynamics of, 59-60; symbolic

text, 199, 267-8, 401

Stander, H., 123

properties of, 1 7 1 -2

textuality, 1 86, 1 99, 230

Standing Conference on Organizational Symbolism (SCOS), 265, 349 Stanley,

J.c.,

264

Struening, E.L., 292

Thanheiser, H.T., 59, 6 1

Stryker, R., 1 7 3

Tharenou, P., 2 1 9

Stuckey, J . , 1 14

theory, 1 5 - 1 9, 44-5; development

Stanley, L., 28

Suarez, F.F., 9 1

Starbuck, W.H., 58, 433

sub-units, 3 7 1 -2

Starkey, K.P., 330-1

subcultures, 350, 353, 354-6

stasis, 1 74, 391

subject, 45, 1 87, 434; enterprising,

(action research), 277-9; in practice, 12, 405- 1 8, 423, 434-5, 441 ; in-use,

275, 281 -4; see

Therborn, G., 442

also critical

theory

state, 400, 407

424-32; representation, 423-46;

Thibaut, J.W., 3 0 1

Staw, B.M., 145, 147, 149-50, 1 58,

resuscitated, 432-40

Third World, 43; feminist theorization,

293-4, 30 1 , 303 Stead, J.G., 197 Stead, W.E., 197

Stearns, P.N., 29 I

subjectivity, 2, 4, 1 99-200, 204, 383, 436, 445 subordination, 195, 203, 220, 224, 374, 379

2 1 4 - 1 5, 232-6, 239 Thomas, H . , 86 Thomas, W.I., 170 Thompson,

c.,

223

Steer, P., 1 1 4

Sugrue, N., 292

Steffy, B . , 1 93, 198, 434

Sullivan, J.J., 2 1 9

Thompson, E.P., 328, 329

Steier, F., 206

Summers, L.H., 1 23

Thompson, J., 1 94, 196

Stein, N.L., 290

surplus value, 328-9, 330

Thompson, J.B., 1 97

Steinbruner, J . , 347

surveillance, 38, 368, 374, 377-8, 400,

Thompson, J.D., 3 1 , 32, 54, 78, 1 7 1 ,

Steiner, G., 390 Steinfield,

c.,

37

432 survey data, 261-3

Thompson, D.E., 143, 149

338-9, 370-1

Stephens, C.D., 3 1 5

'survival of the fittest', 34, 44, 202

Thompson, P., 27, 3 1 , 33, 35, 37, 1 86, 199, 433

stereotypes, 320, 440; gender, 2 1 6, 2 1 9-20, 225 Sternbach, N.S., 234

Susman, G.!., 275, 281 Sutherland, E.H., 300 Sutton, J., 1 7 3

Thompson, R.S., 1 14 Thorelli, H . B . , 1 1 6, 426 Thosrud, E., 273

Sterrett, J.H., 2 1 9 Stewart, D.W., 267

Sutton, R., 7, 1 4 4 , 147, 267, 300 - 1 , 303, 352, 405

Thrift, N., 328, 330 Tibbetts, P., 257

Stewart, R., 439

Suzuki, Y . , 6 1

Tidd, K.L., 300

Stewart, T.A., 427 Stiglitz, J., 1 1 7 - 1 8

Swaminathan, A . , 78, 84, 86, 100 symbol system, 173, 258-60, 268, 320

stimulus-response (SR), 292

symbolic analyst, 428

Tilly, c., 83 time: images, 1 6 - 1 7 , 327-42; problems solving, 340- 1 Tinker, T., 328

Stinchcombe, A.L., 37, 73, 75, 94

symbolic interactionism, 284

Stivers, C., 228

symbolic power, 376

Tirole, J., 109, 123-4, 129-30

Stogdill, R . M . , 1 57

symbolic properties of structure, 1 7 1 -2

Tittman, S., J l 8

Stoller, E.P., 228-9

Symon, G . , 282

Tolbert, B.S., 1 69, 1 74-5, 1 77, 1 79-80

Stopeck, M . H . , 2 1 9

synchronization, 327, 329-30, 336-42

Tompkins, P.K., 194

Stopford, J.M., 5 5

passim

Tong, R., 2 1 3 , 2 1 5 - 1 6, 220, 223, 225-6, 229

Storey, J . , 1 94, 4 1 4

Sypher, B., 345

Storing, H . , 25

systems theory, 3 1 -2

Storms, P.L., 1 53, 1 54, 1 5 5

Szell, G., 37, 38

Torres, L., 2 1 5

Strang, 0., 1 69, 1 74, 1 76-7, 179

Sztompka, P., 32

total quality management, 1 0 , 1 77

tacit collusion, 109-10, 124, 129-32, 1 34

Toulmin, S., 27

totality, 2

strategic alliances, 8, 9 - 1 0, 109, 1 10, 1 32-5

Torbert, W.R., 274, 276

strategic choice, 40, 60-3, 4 1 2

Tai, E., 58

Toulouse, J-M., 62, 294

strategic contingency, 3 7 1 , 372

Tajfel, H., 163

Townley, B . , 1 5 1 , 201 , 203, 400, 4 1 5 - 1 6 Trabasso, T . , 290

strategic essentialism, 233-40

Tancred, P., 41, 223, 228

strategic groups, 86, 125-6

Tancred-Sheriff, P., 405, 4 1 4

trait approach, 73, 145, 160, 224, 289

strategic management, 1 10, 125-7, 198

Tandon, R., 274

transaction cost theory, 1 3, 33,

strategy: dynamics of, 59-60

tangible organization, 3 1 1 - 1 2

1 35, 425, 442

sed distribution forbidden.

I I 1-17,

464

STUD YING ORGANIZA TION

transaction economics, 1 10

Walker, G., 1 1 4

transformational: change, 229; shields,

Walker, H . , 1 73 Walking, R., 1 2 1

4 1 4, 436, 438-41 Wilpert, B., 147-8 Wilson, O.E., 1 60

98 translation paradox, 432, 433-4

Wall, T . , 291

transnationalization, 234, 236

Wallraff, G., 289

Treiman, D.1., 229

Walton, e.e., 297

triangulation, 179, 266, 282-3

Walton, P. , 370

Trice, H., 348, 349

Walton, R.E., 266

Trist, E., 265, 273, 425-6

Walton, S., 1 2 3

trust, 1 1 7 , 1 35, 424-6, 432

Waltzer, M . , 1 8 7

truth, 200, 230, 357-8, 36 1 -2, 38 1 , 400,

Walzer, M., 3 8 1

Wilson, T.D., 264 Winkleman, M., 8 Winnicott, D.W., 224, 295 Winship, e., 1 2 1 Winter, S.G., 33, 72, 79, 84, 86, 95, 109, 124, 1 75-6 within-type variation, 98. 100 within and between analysis, 1 57-8

war games (organizational culture), 1 7 ,

4 1 0, 4 1 6, 432 Tsui, A.S., 2 1 9

Witkin, R.W., 3 1 2, 3 1 6, 32 1

345-62

Tuana, N . , 2 1 3 , 2 1 5

Wittgenstein, L., 8, 201, 380, 396, 399,

Warner, M . , 400

Tucker, D.J., 84, 88-9, 1 00, 1 0 1

445

Warr, P., 1 53, 1 54, 290, 29 I

Witz, A., 4 1

Warren, K.B., 235

Tuma, N., 1 79 Turk, T.A., 1 1 5

Warren, R.L., 425-6

Turner, B., 345-7, 352, 356, 359, 362, 400

Watanabe, S., 290

Turner, J., 1 70

Waterman, R.H., 347-8

Turner, V., 302

Waters, e.W., 2 1 9

Tushman, M.L., 9, 9 1 -2, 1 7 5

Waters, L.K., 2 1 9

two-way correspondence, 258-60,

Wolff, J . , 378 Wolfinger, R.E., 373 Wolin, S., 25, 29, 3 1 , 37-8, 406 Wollstonecraft, M . , 2 1 6 women, 378; in-development, 234-6; in­ management, 2 1 6-20, 223; see also

Watson, T.1., 375

feminist theory

wealth, 122, 1 23

263-4, 267

Wood, R.E., 1 56

Weaver, e.N., 2 1 9 uncertainty, 72, 78, 1 1 2, 1 l4, 1 l6 - 1 8,

Webb, E.1., 260

338-9; task, 5 1 -3

Weber, D., 1 14

unified-systems theory, 226-7

Woodul, J., 222, 223

Weaver, G . R . , 258

128, 1 33, 1 79, 3 7 1 -2; control and,

Woodward, J., 32, 53-4, 57, 59-60, 63, 171 work: emotions, 1 54-6, 290- 1 , 293-5,

Weber, M . , 6, 8, 1 2 , 1 7 , 1 8, 34, 38, 55, 58, 1 57, 1 70, 1 88, 266, 29 1 , 3 1 3- 14, 339,

United Nations, 2 1 2, 236, 437 universal narrative, 256-7

302-3; group, 29, 294-5; images of time in, 1 6- 1 7, 327-42; wages, 2 1 2,

369-70, 372-4, 388-9 1 , 406- 10,

Urry, J., 36, 398, 405-6, 440

2 1 9, 228, 229

4 1 6- 1 8 , 428-9, 433

workplace, 1 92, 197-8, 4 1 4

Urwick, L., 29, 1 7 1

Webster, F . , 38, 43

Usdiken, B . , 6

Weedon, e., 200, 2 1 5 , 229, 357-8

Usher, J . M . , 78

Weick, K.E., 2, 6, 9, 1 50 - 1 , 1 62, 1 7 1 , 263,

Utterback, J.M., 9 1

World Bank, 3, 437 Worth, S., 3 1 8 , 323 Wouters,

297, 3 1 9, 355, 362, 4 1 1 , 434

e.,

301

Wright, L., 329

Weigert, A., 424

Uzzi, B . , 89

Weinberg, I., 32

Wrong, D., 34, 1 70. 380

valence, 290

Weinberg, R.B., 295

Wuthnow, R., 348

Valentine, P., 225

Weingast, B.R"

validity, 262-3, 2 8 1 -3

Weisbach, M.S., 1 2 1

Vallas, S., 1 9 5

Weiss, L . , 9, 426

value engineering, 348-9

Weiss, R.M., 377, 409, 433

Van de Ven, A.H., 57, 63, 72, 88, 1 1 7, 4 1 0, 424

Weitz, B.A., 1 1 4

Van Dyne, L., 1 5 5 Van Houten, D . R . , 228, 378 Van Katwyk, P., 1 54

Wentworth, W . M . , 297 Wernerfelt, B., 1 24, 1 27, 128

Van Maanen, J., 6, 257, 260- 1 , 265, 298, 3 14, 3 1 8, 346, 350-3, 357, 359, 362, 422 Vattimo, G., 197

117 Yakovlev, A . , 4 1 5 Yammarino, F.1., 148, 1 57 Yasai-Ardekani, M., 58 Yasuki, H., 1 14

Wells, L.T.Jr., 55

Yates, J . , 1 78 Yelton, P.W., 52 Yin, R., 283

West, e., 228, 229 Westley, F.R., 424

Young, D.R., 295 Young, E., 350, 3 5 1 , 359

Weston, J . F . , 1 1 8 Wetherell, M . , 206

Young,

Wexley, K.N., 2 1 6 Wharton, A.S., 227, 292, 301 Whetten, D.A., 425

Venkatraman, N . , 86 verbal data, 264 Vernant, J.P., 3 1 7 verstehen, 3 14, 388, 389

Whipp, R., 439

vertical integration, 1 14, 1 1 6, 129, 1 3 5

White, R.W., 1 59

Vicars, W.M., 2 1 9

White, S.K., 3 8 1 , 426

Zajonc, R.B., 289 Zaleznik, A., 291 , 294 Zammuto, R.F., 64, 2 1 9 Zander, U . , 1 1 7 ZaveJla, P., 236

Vickers, G . , 2 8 1 , 320, 362

Whitehead, J., 274

Vico, G . , 397

Whitley, R., 10, 37

Vidich, A.J., 257-8

Whittington, R., 40, 4 1 , 60, 63

Vishny, R.W., 122

Wholey, D.R., 72, 84, 85

voice, 422, 438-40

Whyte, W.F., 265, 272, 274, 3 1 4, 324

Von Glinow, M.A., 144, 2 1 9

Wiedenmayer, G . , 72, 73, 79, 84

Vredenburg, H . , 424

Wiesenthal, H., 194

Vroom, V.H., 52, 144, 2 1 7 , 290

Wiley, M.G., 2 1 7

Vurdubakis, T., 382

Wilkins, A.L., 346, 348

Zeckhauser, R.I., 1 1 9 Zeffane, R.M., 58 Zeitgeist, 36 Zenger, T.R., I l l , 1 2 1 , 123, 1 36 Zerbe, W.1., 260 Zhou,

Znaniecki, F., 1 7 0 Zuboff, S., 38, 4 1

1 1 1 - 1 8 , 1 34-6

Zucker, L . G . , 7 9 , 82-4, 88, 1 0 1 , 1 69-70,

Willman, P., 33

Wade, J.B., 78, 84, 9 1 , 1 2 3

Willmott, H., 2, 5, 6, 8, 26-7, 35, 40,

T h i s

1 72-5, 1 77-80, 425 Zurcher, L., 292,

44-5, 1 86, 193-20 1 , 206, 257, 304, 345, 350, 358, 374-5, 377, 38 1 -2, 396.

S A G E

e b o o k

i s

c o p y r i g h t

1 69

Zimmerman, D . H . , 228, 229

Waddock, S.A., 424

Waldo, D., 25, 29

X.,

Zimmer, L., 225

Williamson, O.E., 33, 59, 63, 109,

wages, 2 12, 2 1 9, 228-9

227

Zald, M.N., 7, 1 72, 255, 444

White, G., 292, 293

Waddock, A., 8

1.,

Young, R.C., 1 0 1

a n d

Zwicky, J., 3 9 1

i s

s u p p l i e d

b y

N e t L i b r a r y .

U n a u