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SAGE DIRECTIONS IN ORGANIZATION STUDIES

This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.

How to go to your page This eBook contains two volumes. Each volume has its own page numbering scheme, consisting of a volume number and a page number, separated by a hyphen. For example, to go to page 5 of Volume 1, type Volume I - Page 5 in the “page #” box at the top of the screen and click “Go.” To go to page 5 of Volume II, type Volume II - Page 5 in the "page #" box.

The SAGE Library in Business and Management brings together first-class reference collections containing the most influential and field-defining articles, both classical and contemporary, in a number of key areas of research and inquiry in business and management. Each multivolume set represents a collection of the essential published works collated from the foremost publications in the field by an editor or editorial team of renowned international stature. They include a full introduction, presenting a rationale for the selection and mapping out the discipline’s past, present and likely future. This series is designed to be a ‘gold standard’ for university libraries throughout the world with a programme or interest in business and management studies. Stewart Clegg is Professor at the University of Technology, Sydney, and Research Director of the Centre for Management and Organization Studies; he has recently been a Visiting Professor of Organizational Change Management, Maastricht University Faculty of Business, and Visiting Professor and International Fellow in Discourse and Management Theory, Centre of Comparative Social Studies, Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, and also at Copenhagen Business School as well as a Visiting Professor to the EM-Lyon Doctoral Program. He is a prolific publisher in leading academic journals in management and organization theory, and is the author and editor of over 40 monographs, textbooks, encyclopaedia, and handbooks.


SAGE LIBRARY IN BUSINESS AND MANAGEMENT

SAGE DIRECTIONS IN ORGANIZATION STUDIES VOLUME I

Edited by

Stewart R. Clegg


© Introduction and editorial arrangement by Stewart R. Clegg 2010 First published 2010 Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form, or by any means, only with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction, in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers. Every effort has been made to trace and acknowledge all the copyright owners of the material reprinted herein. However, if any copyright owners have not been located and contacted at the time of publication, the publishers will be pleased to make the necessary arrangements at the first opportunity. SAGE Publications Ltd 1 Oliver’s Yard 55 City Road London EC1Y 1SP SAGE Publications Inc. 2455 Teller Road Thousand Oaks, California 91320 SAGE Publications India Pvt Ltd B 1/I 1, Mohan Cooperative Industrial Area Mathura Road New Delhi 110 044 SAGE Publications Asia-Pacific Pte Ltd 33 Pekin Street #02-01 Far East Square Singapore 048763 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN: 978-1-84860-868-9 (set of four volumes) Library of Congress Control Number: 2009923638 Typeset by NuWave eSolutions Private Limited, New Delhi Printed on paper from sustainable resources Printed by MPG Books Group, Bodmin, Cornwall


Contents Appendix of Sources Foreword Editor’s Introduction: Directions in Organization Studies Stewart Clegg

xi xix xxi

Volume I Histories 1. The Roots of Uncertainty in Organization Theory: A Historical Constructivist Analysis Yehouda Shenhav and Ely Weitz 2. From King to Court Jester? Weber’s Fall from Grace in Organizational Theory Michael Lounsbury and Edward J. Carberry 3. ‘Dead Selves’: The Birth of the Modern Career Alan McKinlay 4. Shouldn’t Organization Theory Emerge from Adolescence? William H. Starbuck 5. The Study of Organizations and Organizing since 1945 James G. March 6. Managing Foucault: Genealogies of Management Alan McKinlay 7. From Freemasons to the Employee: Organization, History and Subjectivity Tim Newton 8. Ties to the Past in Organization Research: A Comparative Analysis of Retrospective Methods Julie Wolfram Cox and John Hassard 9. The New Structuralism in Organizational Theory Michael Lounsbury and Marc Ventresca

3 31 57 77 91 103

119 145 167

Institutions and Evolutions 10. Lords of the Dance: Professionals as Institutional Agents W. Richard Scott 11. Co-Evolution of Entrepreneurial Careers, Institutional Rules and Competitive Dynamics in American Film, 1895–1920 Candace Jones 12. Co-Evolution of Firm Capabilities and Industry Competition: Investigating the Music Industry, 1877–1997 Marc Huygens, Charles Baden-Fuller, Frans A.J. Van Den Bosch and Henk W. Volberda


191 213 249

vi Contents

13. The Co-Evolution of Institutional Environments and Organizational Strategies: The Rise of Family Business Groups in the ASEAN Region Michael Carney and Eric Gedajlovic 14. From Moby Dick to Free Willy: Macro-Cultural Discourse and Institutional Entrepreneurship in Emerging Institutional Fields Thomas B. Lawrence and Nelson Phillips 15. New Practice Creation: An Institutional Perspective on Innovation Michael Lounsbury and Ellen T. Crumley 16. The Institutional Entrepreneur as Modern Prince: The Strategic Face of Power in Contested Fields David Levy and Maureen Scully 17. A Critical Realist Approach to Institutional Entrepreneurship Bernard Leca and Philippe Naccache 18. How Institutions Form: Loose Coupling as Mechanism in Gouldner’s Patterns of Industrial Bureaucracy Tim Hallett and Marc J. Ventresca 19. New Organizational Forms: Towards a Generative Dialogue Ian Palmer, Jodie Benveniste and Richard Dunford 20. The Rise of Post-Bureaucracy: Theorists’ Fancy or Organizational Praxis? Phil Johnson, Geoffrey Wood, Chris Brewster and Michael Brookes

291 321 345 367 389

413 431

451

Volume II Process and Practice Theories 21. Faith, Evidence, and Action: Better Guesses in an Unknowable World Karl E. Weick 22. Organizing Is Both a Verb and a Noun: Weick Meets Whitehead Tore Bakken and Tor Hernes 23. The Sites of Organizations Theodore R. Schatzki 24. Introduction to the Symposium on the Foundations of Organizing: The Contribution from Garfinkel, Goffman and Sacks Dalvir Samra-Fredericks and Francesca Bargiela-Chiappini 25. Goffman on Organizations Peter K. Manning 26. Harold Garfinkel, Ethnomethodology and Workplace Studies Anne Warfield Rawls 27. Organization in Actual Episodes of Work: Harvey Sacks and Organization Studies Nick Llewellyn 28. Organs of Process: Rethinking Human Organization Robert Cooper 29. Organizations as Distinction Generating and Processing Systems: Niklas Luhmann’s Contribution to Organization Studies David Seidl and Kai Helge Becker This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.

3 19 39 61 85 109 143 175 205

Contents vii

Discourses 30. Varieties of Discourse: On the Study of Organizations through Discourse Analysis Mats Alvesson and Dan Karreman 31. Standardization, Globalization and Rationalities of Government Winton Higgins and Kristina Tamm Hallström 32. Discourse Analysis in Organization Studies: The Case for Critical Realism Norman Fairclough 33. Embedded Ethics: Discourse and Power in the New South Wales Police Service Ray Gordon, Stewart Clegg and Martin Kornberger 34. On the Multi-Modality, Materiality and Contingency of Organization Discourse Rick Iedema 35. Organizational Context and the Discursive Construction of Organizing John A.A. Sillince 36. The Application of Rhetorical Theory in Managerial Research: A Literature Review E. Johanna Hartelius and Larry D. Browning 37. Meaning in Organizational Communication: Why Metaphor Is the Cake, Not the Icing Raymond Hogler, Michael A. Gross, Jackie L. Hartman and Ann L. Cunliffe

231 253 273 301 331 349 379 405

Volume III Organizing Time, Space and Embodiment 38. On Time, Space, and Action Nets Barbara Czarniawska 39. Organizational Time: A Dialectical View Miguel Pina e Cunha 40. The Temporalization of Financial Markets: From Network to Flow Karin Knorr Cetina and Alex Preda 41. The Night of the Bug: Technology, Risk and (dis)Organization at the fin de siècle David Knights, Theo Vurdubakis and Hugh Willmott 42. Place, Space and Time: Contextualizing Workplace Subjectivities Susan Halford and Pauline Leonard 43. Stretching Out and Expanding Work Practices in Time and Space: The Case of Telemedicine Davide Nicolini 44. Knowing Bodies at Work: Embodiment and Ephemeral Teamwork in Anaesthesia Jon Hindmarsh and Alison Pilnick This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.

3 21 47 71 93 115 145

viii Contents

45. Dance-Work: Images of Organization in Irish Dance Donncha Kavanagh, Carmen Kuhling and Kieran Keohane

169

Organizing Identity 46. Identities and Insecurities: Selves at Work David L. Collinson 47. The Tyranny of the Epochal: Change, Epochalism and Organizational Reform Paul du Gay 48. Theorizing the Micro-Politics of Resistance: New Public Management and Managerial Identities in the UK Public Services Robyn Thomas and Annette Davies 49. Cages in Tandem: Management Control, Social Identity, and Identification in a Knowledge-Intensive Firm Dan Kärreman and Mats Alvesson 50. Double Agents: Gendered Organizational Culture, Control and Resistance Beverley Hawkins 51. Sexuality, Power and Resistance in the Workplace Peter Fleming 52. The Importance of Being ‘Indian’: Identity Centrality and Work Outcomes in an Off-Shored Call Center in India Diya Das, Ravi Dharwadkar and Pamela Brandes 53. Albert and Whetten Revisited: Strengthening the Concept of Organizational Identity David A. Whetten 54. Mobilizing Identities: Uncertainty and Control in Strategy Harrison C. White, Frédéric C. Godart and Victor P. Corona 55. Desperately Seeking Legitimacy: Organizational Identity and Emerging Industries Stewart R. Clegg, Carl Rhodes and Martin Kornberger

189 209 231 255 283 303 325 355 379 401

Volume IV Cultures and Organizations 56. Culture and Organization Theory Calvin Morrill 57. Governmentality Matters: Designing an Alliance Culture of Inter-Organizational Collaboration for Managing Projects Stewart R. Clegg, Tyrone S. Pitsis, Thekla Rura-Polley and Marton Marosszeky 58. The Political Dynamics of Organizational Culture in an Institutionalized Environment Suzana Braga Rodrigues


3 31

53

Contents ix

59. In Search of Identity and Legitimation: Bridging Organizational Culture and Neoinstitutionalism Jesper Strandgaard Pedersen and Frank Dobbin 60. Hofstede’s Model of National Cultural Differences and Their Consequences: A Triumph of Faith – A Failure of Analysis Brendan McSweeney 61. D’Oh: The Simpsons, Popular Culture, and the Organizational Carnival Carl Rhodes 62. Pop (Culture) Goes the Organization: On Highbrow, Lowbrow and Hybrids in Studying Popular Culture within Organization Studies Alf Rehn

75 87 115

133

Organization/s and/as Relations of Power 63. Reflections on Seven Ways of Creating Power Mark Haugaard 64. What B Would Otherwise Do: A Critique of Conceptualizations of ‘Power’ in Organizational Theory Galit Ailon 65. The Politics of Gossip and Denial in Interorganizational Relations Ad van Iterson and Stewart R. Clegg 66. Metaphors of Resistance Peter Fleming 67. The Fox and the Hedgehog Go to Work: A Natural History of Workplace Collusion Graham Sewell 68. Rituals and Resistance: Membership Dynamics in Professional Fields Thomas B. Lawrence 69. Circuits of Power in Practice: Strategic Ambiguity as Delegation of Authority Sally Davenport and Shirley Leitch 70. Necrocapitalism Subhabrata Bobby Banerjee 71. From Binarism Back to Hybridity: A Postcolonial Reading of Management and Organization Studies Michal Frenkel and Yehouda Shenhav 72. Organization Studies and Epistemic Coloniality in Latin America: Thinking Otherness from the Margins Eduardo Ibarra-Colado


155 183 213 233 251 269 295 317 343 367


Appendix of Sources All articles and chapters have been reproduced exactly as they were first published, including textual cross-references to material in the original source. Grateful acknowledgement is made to the following sources for permission to reproduce material in this book. 1. ‘The Roots of Uncertainty in Organization Theory: A Historical Constructivist Analysis’, Yehouda Shenhav and Ely Weitz Organization, 7(3) (2000): 373–401.

Published by Sage Publications Ltd. Reprinted with permission.

2. ‘From King to Court Jester? Weber’s Fall from Grace in Organizational Theory’, Michael Lounsbury and Edward J. Carberry Organization Studies, 26(4) (2005): 501–525.


3. ‘ ‘‘Dead Selves”: The Birth of the Modern Career’, Alan McKinlay Organization, 9(4) (2002): 595–614.


4. ‘Shouldn’t Organization Theory Emerge from Adolescence?’, William H. Starbuck Organization, 10(3) (2003): 439–452.

5. ‘The Study of Organizations and Organizing since 1945’, James G. March Organization Studies, 28(1) (2007): 9–19.



6. ‘Managing Foucault: Genealogies of Management’, Alan McKinlay Management & Organizational History, 1(1) (2006): 87–100.


7. ‘From Freemasons to the Employee: Organization, History and Subjectivity’, Tim Newton Organization Studies, 25(8) (2004): 1363–1387.


8. ‘Ties to the Past in Organization Research: A Comparative Analysis of Retrospective Methods’, Julie Wolfram Cox and John Hassard Organization, 14(4) (2007): 475–496.



xii Appendix of Sources

9. ‘The New Structuralism in Organizational Theory’, Michael Lounsbury and Marc Ventresca Organization, 10(3) (2003): 457–480.


10. ‘Lords of the Dance: Professionals as Institutional Agents’, W. Richard Scott Organization Studies, 29(2) (2008): 219–238.


11. ‘Co-Evolution of Entrepreneurial Careers, Institutional Rules and Competitive Dynamics in American Film, 1895–1920’, Candace Jones Organization Studies, 22(6) (2001): 911–944.


12. ‘Co-Evolution of Firm Capabilities and Industry Competition: Investigating the Music Industry, 1877–1997’, Marc Huygens, Charles Baden-Fuller, Frans A.J. Van Den Bosch and Henk W. Volberda Organization Studies, 22(6) (2001): 971–1011.


13. ‘The Co-Evolution of Institutional Environments and Organizational Strategies: The Rise of Family Business Groups in the ASEAN Region’, Michael Carney and Eric Gedajlovic Organization Studies, 23(1) (2002): 1–29.


14. ‘From Moby Dick to Free Willy: Macro-Cultural Discourse and Institutional Entrepreneurship in Emerging Institutional Fields’, Thomas B. Lawrence and Nelson Phillips Organization, 11(5) (2004): 689–711.


15. ‘New Practice Creation: An Institutional Perspective on Innovation’, Michael Lounsbury and Ellen T. Crumley Organization Studies, 28(7) (2007): 993–1011.


16. ‘The Institutional Entrepreneur as Modern Prince: The Strategic Face of Power in Contested Fields’, David Levy and Maureen Scully Organization Studies, 28(7) (2007): 971–991.


17. ‘A Critical Realist Approach to Institutional Entrepreneurship’, Bernard Leca and Philippe Naccache Organization, 13(5) (2006): 627–650.



Appendix of Sources xiii

18. ‘How Institutions Form: Loose Coupling as Mechanism in Gouldner’s Patterns of Industrial Bureaucracy’, Tim Hallett and Marc J. Ventresca American Behavioral Scientist, 49(7) (2006): 908–924.

Published by Sage Publications, Inc. Reprinted with permission.

19. ‘New Organizational Forms: Towards a Generative Dialogue’, Ian Palmer, Jodie Benveniste and Richard Dunford Organization Studies, 28(12) (2007): 1829–1846.


20. ‘The Rise of Post-Bureaucracy: Theorists’ Fancy or Organizational Praxis?’, Phil Johnson, Geoffrey Wood, Chris Brewster and Michael Brookes International Sociology, 24(1) (2009): 37–60.


21. ‘Faith, Evidence, and Action: Better Guesses in an Unknowable World’, Karl E. Weick Organization Studies, 27(11) (2006): 1723–1736.


22. ‘Organizing Is Both a Verb and a Noun: Weick Meets Whitehead’, Tore Bakken and Tor Hernes Organization Studies, 27(11) (2006): 1599–1616.


23. ‘The Sites of Organizations’, Theodore R. Schatzki Organization Studies, 26(3) (2005): 465–484.


24. ‘Introduction to the Symposium on the Foundations of Organizing: The Contribution from Garfinkel, Goffman and Sacks’, Dalvir Samra-Fredericks and Francesca Bargiela-Chiappini Organization Studies, 29(5) (2008): 653–675.


25. ‘Goffman on Organizations’, Peter K. Manning Organization Studies, 29(5) (2008): 677–698.


26. ‘Harold Garfinkel, Ethnomethodology and Workplace Studies’, Anne Warfield Rawls Organization Studies, 29(5) (2008): 701–731.


27. ‘Organization in Actual Episodes of Work: Harvey Sacks and Organization Studies’, Nick Llewellyn Organization Studies, 29(5) (2008): 763–791.



xiv Appendix of Sources

28. ‘Organs of Process: Rethinking Human Organization’, Robert Cooper Organization Studies, 28(10) (2007): 1547–1573.


29. ‘Organizations as Distinction Generating and Processing Systems: Niklas Luhmann’s Contribution to Organization Studies’, David Seidl and Kai Helge Becker Organization, 13(1) (2006): 9–35.


30. ‘Varieties of Discourse: On the Study of Organizations through Discourse Analysis’, Mats Alvesson and Dan Karreman Human Relations, 53(9) (2000): 1125–1149.


31. ‘Standardization, Globalization and Rationalities of Government’, Winton Higgins and Kristina Tamm Hallström Organization, 14(5) (2007): 685–704.


32. ‘Discourse Analysis in Organization Studies: The Case for Critical Realism’, Norman Fairclough Organization Studies, 26(6) (2005): 915–939.


33. ‘Embedded Ethics: Discourse and Power in the New South Wales Police Service’, Ray Gordon, Stewart Clegg and Martin Kornberger Organization Studies, 30(1) (2009): 73–98.


34. ‘On the Multi-Modality, Materiality and Contingency of Organization Discourse’, Rick Iedema Organization Studies, 28(6) (2007): 931–945.


35. ‘Organizational Context and the Discursive Construction of Organising’, John A.A. Sillince Management Communication Quarterly, 20(4) (2007): 363–394.


36. ‘The Application of Rhetorical Theory in Managerial Research: A Literature Review’, E. Johanna Hartelius and Larry D. Browning Management Communication Quarterly, 22(1) (2008): 13–38.


37. ‘Meaning in Organizational Communication: Why Metaphor Is the Cake, Not the Icing’, Raymond Hogler, Michael A. Gross, Jackie L. Hartman and Ann L. Cunliffe Management Communication Quarterly, 21(3) (2008): 393–411.

Published by Sage Publications, Inc. Reprinted with permission. This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.

Appendix of Sources xv

38. ‘On Time, Space, and Action Nets’, Barbara Czarniawska Organization, 11(6) (2004): 773–791.


39. ‘Organizational Time: A Dialectical View’, Miguel Pina e Cunha Organization, 11(2) (2004): 271–296.


40. ‘The Temporalization of Financial Markets: From Network to Flow’, Karin Knorr Cetina and Alex Preda Theory, Culture & Society, 24(7–8) (2007): 116–138.


41. ‘The Night of the Bug: Technology, Risk and (dis)Organization at the fin de siècle’, David Knights, Theo Vurdubakis and Hugh Willmott Management & Organizational History, 3(3–4) (2008): 289–308.


42. ‘Place, Space and Time: Contextualizing Workplace Subjectivities’, Susan Halford and Pauline Leonard Organization Studies, 27(5) (2005): 657–676.


43. ‘Stretching out and Expanding Work Practices in Time and Space: The Case of Telemedicine’, Davide Nicolini Human Relations, 60(6) (2007): 889–920.


44. ‘Knowing Bodies at Work: Embodiment and Ephemeral Teamwork in Anaesthesia’, Jon Hindmarsh and Alison Pilnick Organization Studies, 28(9) (2007): 1395–1416.


45. ‘Dance-Work: Images of Organization in Irish Dance’, Donncha Kavanagh, Carmen Kuhling and Kieran Keohane Organization, 15(5) (2008): 725–742.


46. ‘Identities and Insecurities: Selves at Work’, David L. Collinson Organization, 10(3) (2003): 527–547.


47. ‘The Tyranny of the Epochal: Change, Epochalism and Organizational Reform’, Paul du Gay Organization, 10(4) (2003): 663–684.

Published by Sage Publications Ltd. Reprinted with permission. This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.

xvi Appendix of Sources

48. ‘Theorizing the Micro-Politics of Resistance: New Public Management and Managerial Identities in the UK Public Services’, Robyn Thomas and Annette Davies Organization Studies, 26(5) (2005): 683–705.


49. ‘Cages in Tandem: Management Control, Social Identity, and Identification in a Knowledge-Intensive Firm’, Dan Kärreman and Mats Alvesson Organization, 11(1) (2004): 149–175.


50. ‘Double Agents: Gendered Organizational Culture, Control and Resistance’, Beverley Hawkins Sociology, 42(3) (2008): 418–435.


51. ‘Sexuality, Power and Resistance in the Workplace’, Peter Fleming Organization Studies, 28(2) (2007): 239–256.


52. ‘The Importance of Being “Indian”: Identity Centrality and Work Outcomes in an Off-Shored Call Center in India’, Diya Das, Ravi Dharwadkar and Pamela Brandes Human Relations, 61(11) (2008): 1499–1530.


53. ‘Albert and Whetten Revisited: Strengthening the Concept of Organizational Identity’, David A. Whetten Journal of Management Inquiry, 15(3) (2006): 219–234.


54. ‘Mobilizing Identities: Uncertainty and Control in Strategy’, Harrison C. White, Frédéric C. Godart and Victor P. Corona Theory, Culture & Society, 24(7–8) (2007): 181–201.


55. ‘Desperately Seeking Legitimacy: Organizational Identity and Emerging Industries’, Stewart R. Clegg, Carl Rhodes and Martin Kornberger Organization Studies, 28(4) (2007): 495–512.


56. ‘Culture and Organization Theory’, Calvin Morrill The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 619(1) (2008): 15–40.



Appendix of Sources xvii

57. ‘Governmentality Matters: Designing an Alliance Culture of InterOrganizational Collaboration for Managing Projects’, Stewart R. Clegg, Tyrone S. Pitsis, Thekla Rura-Polley and Marton Marosszeky Organization Studies, 23(3) (2002): 317–337.


58. ‘The Political Dynamics of Organizational Culture in an Institutionalized Environment’, Suzana Braga Rodrigues Organization Studies, 27(4) (2006): 537–557.


59. ‘In Search of Identity and Legitimation: Bridging Organizational Culture and Neoinstitutionalism’, Jesper Strandgaard Pedersen and Frank Dobbin American Behavioral Scientist, 49(7) (2006): 897–907.


60. ‘Hofstede’s Model of National Cultural Differences and Their Consequences: A Triumph of Faith – A Failure of Analysis’, Brendan McSweeney Human Relations, 55(1) (2002): 89–117.


61. ‘D’Oh: The Simpsons, Popular Culture, and the Organizational Carnival’, Carl Rhodes Journal of Management Inquiry, 10(4) (2001): 374–383.


62. ‘Pop (Culture) Goes the Organization: On Highbrow, Lowbrow and Hybrids in Studying Popular Culture within Organization Studies’, Alf Rehn Organization, 15(5) (2008): 765–783.


63. ‘Reflections on Seven Ways of Creating Power’, Mark Haugaard European Journal of Social Theory, 6(1) (2003): 87–113.


64. ‘What B Would Otherwise Do: A Critique of Conceptualizations of “Power” in Organizational Theory’, Galit Ailon Organization, 13(6) (2006): 771–800.


65. ‘The Politics of Gossip and Denial in Interorganizational Relations’, Ad van Iterson and Stewart R. Clegg Human Relations, 61(8) (2008): 1117–1137.



xviii Appendix of Sources

66. ‘Metaphors of Resistance’, Peter Fleming Management Communication Quarterly, 19(1) (2005): 45–66.


67. ‘The Fox and the Hedgehog Go to Work: A Natural History of Workplace Collusion’, Graham Sewell Management Communication Quarterly, 21(3) (2008): 344–363.


68. ‘Rituals and Resistance: Membership Dynamics in Professional Fields’, Thomas B. Lawrence Human Relations, 57(2) (2004): 115–143.


69. ‘Circuits of Power in Practice: Strategic Ambiguity as Delegation of Authority’, Sally Davenport and Shirley Leitch Organization Studies, 26(11) (2005): 1603–1622.


70. ‘Necrocapitalism’, Subhabrata Bobby Banerjee Organization Studies, 29(12) (2008): 1541–1563.


71. ‘From Binarism Back to Hybridity: A Postcolonial Reading of Management and Organization Studies’, Michal Frenkel and Yehouda Shenhav Organization Studies, 27(6) (2006): 855–876.


72. ‘Organization Studies and Epistemic Coloniality in Latin America: Thinking Otherness from the Margins’, Eduardo Ibarra-Colado Organization, 13(4) (2006): 463–487.



Foreword

I want to take this opportunity to write a brief note on methods and offer some thanks. When Sage asked me if I would be interested in creating another collected Major Work set we agreed that we would keep it recent, so as to update the previous eight volumes of Central Currents in Organization Studies published in 2002. The start of the new century seemed to be a simple point of demarcation. I suggested that we used only Sage resources in order to be able to make the volume available as an online product as well as a bound volume. To select the chapters I had my assistant, Mandy Tolladay, copy the table of contents of a large number of journals (not all of which are reflected here in the final choices) which I then spent some days perusing. The field narrowed down quite a lot through this exercise. Next, I started to read the articles initially selected. Some of these were already familiar to me as I might have read them as a reviewer for the journal in the first place or I might have read them when they were published. Many were unknown to me, however, despite my rational choices being as bounded as our field would suggest would be the case. What bounded my choices, in addition to the selection factors that I have already mentioned, were several other factors. One was obviously personal knowledge: of some authors, some fields, and some journals which I knew better than others. Another was a desire to construct a coherent volume for which I could write a coherent editorial narrative. Initial choices changed greatly as my ignorance of some works was replaced by an appreciation for them; as my appreciation for some works diminished when I revisited them; as the contours of the narrative structure changed shape and the framing categories were re-aligned. What we have here is one person’s view of a field, obviously, but it is a field constituted by processes of peer review prior to my sense of the field being made. The one person whose editorial name is associated with this project had much help and advice, however. Mandy Tolladay was a great help, making the task a lot more manageable than would otherwise have been the case. My colleagues and friends, Chris Carter, Martin Kornberger, Tyrone Pitsis,


xx Foreword

and Carl Rhodes, also offered advice and suggestions, some of which found their way into earlier versions of the volume and then got dropped for various reasons, and some of which made it to the final cut. Overall, the collection is testament to the work of the many editors, editorial boards, and reviewers of the excellent journals that I have been able to draw on for the four volumes. I have been associated in various ways with several of the journals selected from and already had a high opinion of the work of the many colleagues who contribute to them as authors, reviewers, and editors. That opinion has been greatly enhanced by the experience of reading so much material, across so many fields, in the concentrated bursts of energy that the editorial task entailed. To all these people, especially the contributors, a big thank you. Stewart Clegg Sydney, February 2009


Editor’s Introduction: Directions in Organization Studies Stewart Clegg

Histories

T

here is no such thing as history. Only histories, contested accountings of things past and present and things yet to come – for all histories of the past have implications for how we understand our fleeting present and its possible future projections. There is not nor can their ever be any definitive intellectual history of ideas in any field. All we can hope for are interesting viewpoints, fragmentary accounts, and shifting perspectives that for moments of variable duration stabilize some understandings in some places. The understandings contained in these pages relate to a particular range of understandings in a particular range of places. The moments are the past nine years; the understandings are overwhelmingly, although not exclusively, non-American, and the places are Sage journals that are mostly but not exclusively seen as European. With these limits and opportunities what is contained herein can hardly be representative of anything other than one scholar’s way of making sense of some recent things in some recent places. Other scholars, other places, other histories: bounded rationality is a reflexive category. Histories provide buttresses against the uncertainties of existence, especially concerning who we are and where we have come from and what makes us what we might take ourselves to be and become, as well as providing ammunition for knowing and not knowing, understanding and not understanding, and agreeing and not agreeing with authorities that try to prescribe these things. Uncertainties manifest themselves in all sorts of ways: over prosaic matters, such as dates, over questions of interpretation, or contestation about matters of what are taken to be fact. In organization


xxii Editor’s Introduction

studies, however, it is the notion of uncertainty as an abstract noun on which organizations wage ceaseless war that has been promoted. Unpredictability, indeterminacy, and indefiniteness stand at the genealogical heart of the organization condition. In organization studies’ histories of ideas uncertainty has played a starring role. Uncertainty became one of the key concepts of organization theory from its inception. Shenhev and Weitz chart the rise of discourse on uncertainty in organization theory between 1879 and 1932 – from the onset of one ‘great depression’ to another, roughly. Writing in early 2009 in the midst of a current global financial crisis, such a point of departure seems entirely appro priate. The period was one in which modern management and modern organizations were being invented in a quite explicit discourse and related sets of practices that were later exported globally from the US. At the core of that discourse then and subsequently was the idea of organizing against uncertainty. Standards were central to the enterprise – as we shall see repeatedly in subsequent chapters. Canonically, successful organizing meant regulating and ordering, limiting and bounding, uncertainty. The chief canonist proved to be James D. Thompson, a soft-spoken son of the southern United States, based in Nashville, who formulated uncertainty as ‘the fundamental problem for complex organizations and coping with uncertainty as the essence of the administrative process’. With Thompson (1967) contingency theory coalesced around what became a nodal point of 1960s’ and 1970s’ organization theory, with elements surviving as traces to the present day (Donaldson 2005; Greenwood and Hinings 1988). Not only functionalist contingency scholars embraced uncertainty; it also drove the institutional theory machine from DiMaggio and Powell (1983). The institutional theory machine is a simple device for doing theoretical work which, perhaps because of its relative simplicity, has been widely adopted as the intellectual technology par excellence of post-1980s’ organization theories. In this machine, theoretically, uncertainty about what is a legitimate organizational form drives organizations to practice mimetic isomorphism, explaining why there are so many similar sorts of organizations. That which is held in high regard, culturally, becomes a normalizing modality that other organizations’ designers, managers, and leaders aspire to. Culturally, sensemaking involves the reduction of equivocality, says Karl Weick (1969, 1979); equivocality turns out to be a synonym for uncertainty. The genealogical roots of this convergence on uncertainty run deep into another discourse that streams as a cold current through organization theory: engineering. The stream of this cold current emerged from the professionalizing project of American engineers, charted in popular magazines and periodicals of the nineteenth century. The cold current washed up in the Philadelphia steel mill in which Frederick Winslow Taylor (1911) charted ‘scientific management’ as a new political economy of the body conceptualized as if it were a machine (Clegg, Courpasson, and Phillips 2006).


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Of course, outside science fiction, bodies are not machines but the loci of all human sentiments, including those opposed to their treatment as if they were machines – resistant bodies both singular and collective, of which there were many examples, as Shenhev and Weitz demonstrate. Management’s discourse of docile bodies and their organization against the uncertainties of a wicked world was never uncontested; nonetheless, the objects and ideas that were fabricated around the uncertainty complex, however idiosyncratic they might have been, proved durable. In equal parts their longevity could be related to the simplicity of the core ideas as well as the capacity these ideas provided for discussing essentially political activities apolitically. Constituting a discourse for organizing the hierarchical bondage of masses of people in technically neutral and apolitical terms was quite an achievement. Especially when one considers that one of the narratives against which organization theory was deployed, the socialism of the common man, focused precisely on human bondage as the fulcrum of its argument. The preceding history of the field started in practice and only latterly moved into theory. Other histories began in theory and only latterly moved into practice. Max Weber is a case in point. Writing on organizations in the first twenty years of the twentieth century and virtually unknown to English-speaking audiences until a flurry of post-Second World War translations (Clegg and Lounsbury 2009), Weber became the intellectual rallying point for those sociologists who emerged from the war curious about how bureaucracies functioned: men such as Robert Merton (2002), for instance. For myself, as a young Behavioural Scientist specializing in sociology in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Max Weber made organization theory both interesting and intellectually respectable in a way that the prevailing systems orthodoxy did not. Today, Weber barely makes the hot-100 of citations in leading US journals such as the Administrative Science Quarterly. The second of our histories records his decline and fall from grace, ‘from King to Court Jester’. Weber was King when the typological approach to organization analysis was dominant; shifting to a taxonomic contingency theory in the 1970s, the prime movers claimed to have overthrown the King (Pugh and Hickson 1976); if not quite cutting off his head then at least contesting his sovereignty. Lounsbury and Carberry confirm this scenario yet, in a spirit of nostalgic engagement with his past theory and a concern for present concerns, they argue for a reinstitution of Weber’s sovereign power in the field. A central Weberian notion at the core of his theory of bureaucracy was the idea of career. McKinlay charts the emergence of career as a keystone of the once great and respected institution of Scottish banking. At the core of the concept of career as it was deployed in practice was an inspectorial regime making the career not just a matter of progression through the ranks but also a moral project tying body, soul, and institution in an ethical accord. It was an ethics steeped in power relations of paternalism, of registration of


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data, of disciplinary devices, of social ordering and the Calvinist character of everyday Scottish protestant life, one that would have been wholly explicable to Weber (1976). Weber was an active participant in major affairs affecting Germany, researching landed estates and peasant conditions east of the Elbe, investigating factory conditions and their impact on workers, writing constitutional submissions, lecturing officers, working as a hospital administrator, and organizing scientific debates and journals, as well as investigating many of the major world religions, and, in passing, writing on bureaucracy, the protestant ethic, and the nature of vocation. An engaged scholar; a type of historical figure that is exceedingly rare, Weber was a a broad-ranging public intellectual and scholar of distinction. For organization theorists the major interest in his work has been in his treatment of bureaucracy. Starbuck suggests that in this respect Weber’s work was at the core of one of the two earliest concerns of the field: the effects of governmental bureaucracies on societies. Bureaucracies have histories that are traced by Starbuck from the French finance minister Colbert’s stress in 1655 on rules to his successor de Gournay’s 1751 contemptuous coinage of the term bureaucratie – government by desk-bound officials. The contempt stuck, and apart from those German scholars such as Weber, who admired the role played by the military and state bureaucracy of Bismarck in creating Germany as the pre-eminent turn of the nineteenth-century European power, has often suffused bureaus with an air metaphysical pathos. That the German stateformation was made from the unlikely resource base of a motley collection of principalities and small states after the Customs Union of 1848 made bureaucracies’ achievements all the more remarkable. Nonetheless, it was the contempt for red tape and its effect on organization members and clients that subsequently has been parlayed most, rather than admiration for bureaucratic efficiency. Bureaucratic efficiency in the increasing number of large private sector organizations that emerged from the late nineteenth-century became one of the defining streams of organization theories’ histories in which F.W. Taylor often played an iconic role, cast either as hero or villain in almost equal measure at different times and for different constituencies of interest. Prescriptive in nature, often amounting to little more than a list of proverbs that often conflicted from one writer to another, it was not until the post-war era that Barnard’s (1937) call for a science of organizations began to be heeded, notably by Herbert Simon (1946, 1950, 1952). By the late 1950s this call had the weight of authoritative official reports from the Ford and Carnegie foundations behind it; reports that were not only influential in the United States but were subsequently institutionally copied in other advanced states such as the UK and Australia. The field grew in numbers, professionalism, differentiation, and distance from the world of social issues that had spawned it. The student body, apart from the irruptions of the 1960s around civil rights and Vietnam, was docile in its determination not to hear bad


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news: the appetite for critical thinking about social issues never really captured an audience of young people intent on fast careers and fast bucks. Nonetheless, not all academics acceded to the general professional myopia: one of the privileged aspects of the academic vocation is to speak truth to power, even when power prefers other brands of truth less discomforting – which, incidentally, plenty of professors are prepared to provide. Three arenas of conflict are identified by Starbuck as potential points of departure for future histories: the conflicts between corporations and nations; the conflicts between top management and other stakeholders, and the conflict between the short run and the long run. While all of these are worthy points of departure for a critical history of the present and future, the latter must be the timeliest in an era of the collapse of neo-economic liberalism and the dogmas that have dominated commercial and political life since Thatcher’s and Reagan’s doleful influence on economic affairs and in an era in which global warming reminds us of the difference between the short term and the long run in the starkest terms. Given Starbuck’s commitment to a predictive science he proved to be right on the money in 2003; what he feared most has come to pass in that ‘the emphasis on short-term results that distinguished the 1990s may have done more harm than good’. Of this there can be no doubt as we take stock in the midst of what one can only hope will be creative destruction but right now seems like destruction, plain and simple. Another history; another point of departure, from James March, someone there to observe it all as it unfolded. The year 1945 marks the point of departure: the end of one war and the beginning of another Cold War. Histories need markers and the Second World War is one that March chooses; the others are the social and protest movements of the 1960s and the early 1970s, and the collapse of the Soviet empire and the ‘triumph’ of markets. (In 2009 one cannot avoid the inverted commas: things look a lot less triumphant than they used to.) The era from 1945 to 2000 can rightly be regarded as a half century of American hegemony internationally, whose demise, retrospectively, one will, in all probability, date from the Bush presidency. The United States dominated just about everything in this era: global culture, international affairs, the political economy, and intellectual life in almost every sphere (the latter immeasurably nourished by Jewish émigrés from Hitler’s carnage and devastation). US universities churned out a generation of scholars on the GI Bill who had become fascinated by organization and bureaucracy, having experienced its finest examples in the US war effort. Many of them were to contribute to journals that increasingly marked out the post-war field and to handbooks such as that which March edited in 1965. As he remarks, they were all white, all male, all under 40, and all American. Organization theory was not born from social diversity. Nor was it born from intellectual diversity: there was a remarkable behavioural science homology about the disciplinary


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formation of the contributors that celebrated science, multivariate statistics, and predictive modelling. The European histories of organization studies were more diverse socially and intellectually while being slower to develop. Significantly, they developed largely after 1968 and were marked by very different generational formation, as well as intellectual dispositions, to the United States of the 1950s and early 1960s. Moreover, especially in the United Kingdom, they emerged largely from social science intellectual formations rather than from Business Schools – which barely existed on a large scale before the 1970s – and made more sense of the qualitative sociological and action-oriented approach of scholars unknown to most Americans at the time, such as David Silverman (1971), than they did of the quantitative fetishism of many American scholars. Moreover, not being ‘trained’ in the North American sense through many years of comprehensive examinations and coursework but being lonely apprentices to supervisors largely uniformed by such training, they were less likely to confirm to US patterns of scholarship because they did not know them. Languages, cultures, politics, styles, youth, and Vietnam, as well as the Atlantic, separated them from the United States even as their everyday life was tangled up in Tamla and Stax, Dylan and Hollywood, Levi’s and Marlborough’s, Friedan and Steinem. Then came Thatcher’s and Reagan’s metaphorical children, schooled in the centrality of individualism, economics, and the failure of government and the success of markets who, after the fall (of the Soviet system), saw the proclamation of the end of history and the triumph of the markets: a category error double fold. Still, with history presumably ending and markets triumphing, Business Schools flourished not only in the UK but throughout Europe, sprouting much as do mushrooms after a thunderstorm, as the evil empire receded. In these Schools, the approved sciences increasingly were modelled on neo-classical and related economics and were taken up with vigour by young minds in thrall to the idea of the market. The older class of ’68 either kept faith with versions of the new left or moved rapidly in the wake of French philosophical fashions that were themselves post-1968. Future histories are likely, for reasons of sheer demography, to be written from Asia, suggests March. Factors sustaining intellectual innovation will be the importation of ideas from fields other than the recognizably professionalized field, as it is constructed differently in different centres; demographic growth and generational renewal, and parochialism, which allows ‘strange’ intellectual brews to ferment outside of variously institutionalized pathways with their respective histories. Against these sources of innovation there are strains of conservatism, chief amongst which will be the Business School locale, suggests March, and its privileging of economics as the discourse of capital. Of course, from the vantage point of 2009 and the widespread collapse of so many of the financial edifices of capital and their associated rhetoric, other concerns may well emerge. Few discourses survive wholesale public


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discrediting by evidence and Business School economics may be no exception: perhaps concerns will shift to issues of sustainability of business, in the broadest sense, and to the ethics of its practice, given the present conjuncture. The historian of histories, par excellence, is Michel Foucault and in the next chapter Alan McKinley reviews how his histories have been used in the field. The main focus has been on the centrality of surveillance to modernity as it has been assimilated from Discipline and Punish (1977), which, in a critical spirit, McKinley links through consideration of Robert Owen’s New Lanark to the diffusion of administrative innovation and the creation of institutional isomorphism. Of greater interest, however, is Foucault’s fascination with the body as an object of analysis, which leads McKinley to reconsider the importance of vitalism as a source of resistance to managerial projects, projects that, in so far as they are totalizing projects for control of the workforce, always have to deal with vitalism’s resistant spark even as management discourse seeks seduction of the human spirit. Debates about historiography lurk in the interstices of the histories we have encountered thus far and the next chapter has been chosen because it surfaces some of these concerns. What is significant about Tim Newton’s chapter is less the concrete histories under scrutiny and more the debates that their interpretation implies. The ghost of Foucault hovers over this chapter as it did the preceding text. Foucault is widely condemned and celebrated as a historian of discontinuities yet, as Newton argues, the central issue for debate is not whether history is discontinuous, because it never can wholly be so – there are no total or complete ruptures in history – but there are many deviations, mutations, and inflections and it is these that should be the object of analysis. Newton recovers some important debates that not only sketch alternative ways of constructing histories for organization studies but also affirm the centrality of such exercises to a discourse in which various dominant orthodoxies have tended to register the essentialisms of functionalism rather more than the specificities of many and varied critical conceptual histories, which is what Newton calls for in his conclusions: histories of professions, religions, colonialisms, classes, genders, etc. Conceptual histories, inasmuch as they take as their point of departure from concepts that are widely used in current social science work are critical inasmuch as they do not take for granted the continuities (and discontinuities) assumed in current accounts. The chapter is an essay of refreshing sophistication in a field, the use of Foucault and history in organization studies, which has not always been marked by great subtlety of analysis but instead has inscribed analysis which, ironically, as in the case of panopticism, has functioned as a grand narrative device (see Knights 2002). The focus shifts from Foucauldian and other histories with the next chapter, in which Julie Wolfram-Cox and John Hassard investigate the ways in which various positions in the archives of pre-eminent journals in organization studies use research materials that retrospectively glance back at the


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histories they construct. There are, they suggest, four such positions: controlling the past; interpreting the past; co-opting the past and representing the past. A concern with controlling the past seeks to eradicate the errors of retrospection and to capture the objective truths that were taken to exist there. A grammar of ‘hindsight bias’ is widely deployed where the chief error is the propensity to interpret the past from the knowledge of the present – as if it were possible to do other than this! It is assumed that there is a definitive reality back there and the researcher must somehow recover it accurately by controlling various sources of error that might arise. Those who engage in interpreting the past accept that they live in the present and that this inevitably colours the past they construct. In some wellknown cases, such as Karl Weick, the concern with accuracy still features as a concern not with accurate representation of this past but of the present from which it is viewed. Other interpretive concerns with the past may be focused on how it has been socially constructed from various here-and-nows and how these constructions open or limit opportunities for the future: the reifications of the present concerning how we came to be there and where we might go in future form the focus for critical realist accounts of the past. Researchers co-opting the past are concerned to trace causal paths from past’s that research subjects are presumed to know, to consequences that are presumed to flow from this knowledge, based on attribution. Pettigrew’s (1985) research on ICI is a classic case in point, as is the use of narrative methods pioneered by researchers such as Boje (2001) and Czarniawska (1998). Closely related to this work is the fourth position identified: representing the past, a position that does not assume that the present is ontologically independent of the past or that the path between the two can be easily captured by a schematic conception of time (see Clarke and Mailli 2008). There are, instead, likely to be several and conflicting time-reckoning systems at work in most organizational settings, a plurality of chronological codes, in some of which time is linear and seamless and in others seasonal or cyclical, while still others may see time as discontinuous. In this world of pluralities there is no ground for stable knowing outside of the representations in which that knowing is encoded. Hence, attention shifts to the narrative codes organizing accounts of times past, present, and future which, reflexively, make possible whatever accounting is accomplished. (Reflexivity is not a concern solely with the narrating self as subject as it is often represented to be but is instead more acutely oriented to what assumptions, narrative devices, and frames make that sense possible.) No privileged position from which the commanding heights of history can be surveyed is possible. Each position, suggest Wolfram-Cox and Hassard, displays a distinctive commitment to method, ontology, epistemology, exemplars, and variants and makes a distinctive contribution to retrospective research. The usefulness of the chapter is in clarifying for readers the various frames that they might


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encounter in research that is not always as reflexively secure about its auspices as the reader might want. Most organization studies lack the sensitivity to historiography that McKinley and Newton display. While in the past, in the 1960s/1970s heyday of ‘organizational structuralism’ (which, it should be remarked, had very little to do with structuralism as it was more broadly understood in the social sciences), the concern with structure was extremely simplistic, deterministic, and one-dimensional, a new structuralism was afoot in twenty-first century organization studies. From a vantage point built on this new structuralism, Lounsbury and Ventresca present a further possible history of organization studies, to close this section. They review the development of organizational theory since the mid-twentieth century, when the core of the area was defined by researchers concerned to investigate the role of organizations in society (Selznick 1949; Gouldner 1954; Stinchcombe 1965). As the study of organizations developed and became increasingly professionalized in the United States in the 1970s and 1980s it became increasingly disconnected from the study of societal stratification, politics, and social change, core issues in classic studies of organizations and society (the same argument is also elaborated by Greenwood and Hinings 2002). Empirical research on organizations became captured by highly rationalistic and instrumental imagery, often showing a strong influence from economists. However, they suggest, in the 1990s a new structuralism began to challenge narrow conceptions of organizations and environments by broadening the focus to include cultural processes and meaning systems (Meyer et al. 1987; Friedland and Alford 1991) and cultural-cognitive perspectives (DiMaggio 1997). Thinking about structure, in the glorious era of the sociology of organizations, stretching from the 1940s to the early 1960s, prior to the migration and institutionalization of discourse about organizations overwhelmingly into Business Schools, had been largely conditioned by terms that deferred to or in some way related to Weber. From the late 1960s the Weberian influence waned markedly, as we have seen in Lounsbury’s earlier chapter (with Carberry), and more scientistic, economistic, and positivistic approaches to organizations dominated. Resource-based views from neighbouring fields such as strategy were increasingly attended to – but in a way that largely ignored the political relations inherent in the analysis of ownership, access, and control of resources that one finds in scholars engaged in dialogue with Marxist currents, such as had been the case with Weber (1979) and was the case with Braverman’s (1974) labour process theory (whose marginalization and decline is another story which the present context does not allow sufficient space to address). By the 1980s the emergence of a new structuralism could be discerned, suggest the authors, with a renewed emphasis on classic elements of Weberian thought, such as understanding meanings, as well as everyday social practice that reproduce and transform social structure (Bourdieu 1977;


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Clemens 1997; Stryker 1994). The influence of Bourdieu is particularly emphasized, bringing a ‘practice’ perspective into the heart of organization theory. Practice theorists focus attention on ontological problems that address how conceptions of reality are rooted in broader social and historical processes that operate beyond immediate consciousness but which are nonetheless evident in structuring experiences and events. These new structuralist directions involved a shift towards richer conceptualizations of social structure and process drawing on the sociology of culture, stratification and politics, and institutional analysis (see Mohr 2000 for a review). The new social structuralism involves an ontology oriented to a more critical realism (see next section) which, rather than theorize organizations as hyperrational and driven by functional imperatives, situates rational action within broader institutionalized belief systems. Concluding this first section of the collection with this article leads nicely into the next section, where the implications of the new structuralism may be seen in a concern with large-scale structural phenomena, of institutions and evolution, and the practices that sustain them.

Institutions and Evolutions The histories of organization studies position few works as citation classics but DiMaggio and Powell’s (1983) ‘The Iron Cage Revisited: Institutional Isomorphism and Collective Rationality in Organizational Fields’ is undoubtedly one such article. Drawing on the new institutional theory pioneered by Meyer and Rowan in 1977, and influenced by Bourdieu’s ideas about practice, the article considered how rational myths lodged in institutional settings shape organizational action to the extent that they can secure semblances of organizational legitimacy in order to capture resources and mobilize support. There were two main signposts to subsequent research in the article: the importance of the concept of organizational fields and the focus on mechanisms of organizational change through institutional isomorphism. The organizational field was defined in relational terms as ‘those organizations that, in the aggregate, constitute a recognized area of institutional life: key suppliers, resource and product customers, regulatory agencies, and other organizations that produce similar services or products’ (DiMaggio and Powell 1983: 148). Later they add that the field includes all those who have ‘voice’ as well as those who do not – picking up on Bachrach and Baratz’s (1962, 1970) influential critique of Robert Dahl’s (1961) work by stressing non-action, or absence from a field, as a significant form of presence. On the whole, this element of power has been largely absent from engagement with DiMaggio and Powell’s work. Institutional isomorphism has become, perhaps, the key concept for much mainstream organization studies work of the past decade. Three ideal type mechanisms of organizational change by institutional isomorphism were This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.

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sketched: coercive (when external agencies impose changes on organizations – most obviously through practices of state regulation), normative (when professionalization projects shape entire occupational fields), and mimetic (essentially the copying of what is constituted as culturally valuable ways of doing or arranging things – cultural capital). Interest in the latter has far outweighed the former two in US empirical studies as Greenwood and Mayer (2008) note, while European researchers have been more oriented to the role of the state and other regulatory agencies, such as standards setting bodies (see Higgins and Hallström, this volume). Ideal types tend to reification, and institutional isomorphism mechanisms are no exception. It is this reification that makes so many institutional analyses so mechanical; as a theory designed to explain how things got to be the way they are it does not really handle discontinuous change very well. Indeed, the most significant subsequent innovation in its theoretical corpus has been the development of the idea of the institutional entrepreneur, as we shall see shortly, designed to save the theory from its implicit functionalism. In a famous turn of phrase, Zucker concluded that institutionalization means that ‘alternatives may be literally unthinkable’ (1983: 5). Tolbert and Zucker (1983: 25) suggested three indicators of institutionalized practices: they are widely followed, without debate, and exhibit permanence. The notion that alternatives may be literally unthinkable is not a new one; it was, for instance, the basis of Steven Lukes’s even more famous and, as it transpired, deeply problematic turn of phrase that coined the radical face of power as threedimensional. Insofar as power relations have been addressed, for instance, by Greenwood and Hinings (1996), they have been addressed in terms that were largely those of Lukes (1974). I shall not address why Lukes’s approach is problematic other than to note that it is a curious mix of normativism and analysis. Perhaps the absence of an adequate account of power in institutional theory is most evident in the massiveness and solidity that is attributed to institutional ordering. It is at this point that institutionalism displays its origins in sociological functionalism most clearly. The pre-eminent opponent of this functionalism has always been Garfinkel (1967), for whom order is always fragile and open to disruption through agents who either do not know the rules or deliberately seek to reveal them by flouting what they take to be the normative order. Hence, for Garfinkel and ethnomethodology in general, a great deal of ordinary repair work of social breaches has to occur for a sense of normalcy to be sustained. In other words, order is deeply problematic for all everyday actors engaged in normal contexts of interaction. Order is fragile and much work is needed to maintain its ceremonial facade – a notion that, of course, comes straight from Goffman (1959). For insitutionalists, I think, this suggests that processes of habituation are under way. For power theorists with an insitutionalist flavour it suggests that order is often a fragile construct, likely to be contested, and rarely fully institutionalized, except in contexts of total institutions – another strangely neglected area of more recent institutional scholarship (see Clegg Courpasson, and Phillips 2006). This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.

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If we look to symbolic interactionism and the acute observations of Goffman (1961), it is obvious that structural reproduction is not always a foregone conclusion in every interaction, thus structuration has to be negotiated. If we look to Foucault (1977), we also see that systems of meaning are frequently contested. For any social order to be established as ‘the way we do things around here’ – as obligatory passage points that become institutionalized – a great deal of strategic agency has to be carried out, which means that social structures and structuration practices are always open to interpretation. In a sense, destructuration or the breaking down of structures is every bit as important to our understanding as routine structuration practices are. In contested social systems, which all systems to a greater or lesser extent are, the powerful try to maintain their power by ensuring predictability in structuration, while the less powerful have an interest in counter-hegemonic, destructuration practices. These introduce changes that sometimes may be radical and are not at all exogenous. All theories of order must also be theories of change, as I have argued in Frameworks of Power (Clegg 1989), and the most important sources of change – because functionalism neglected them – are endogenous. Institutional theory, as largely functionalist, had to invent the overused category of institutional entrepreneur to ‘save’ the theory and include an account – amongst all this stasis, conformity, and legitimacy – that things and times change. Introducing the character of the institutional entrepreneur is an effect of a theory that institutes and institutionalizes macro/ micro divisions, and then faces the embarrassment of bridging between that which it has sundered. Part of the reason that structuration theory – perhaps the most famous attempt to build the macro/micro bridge – never translated into an interesting empirical research agenda is that it constitutes only half the picture, as Mark Haugaard has argued (Clegg and Haugaard 2009). If all action entails structuration, it is banal to describe social interactions in terms of acts of structuration. What makes analysis interesting is the fact that structuration is contingent and frequently met by destructuration. If we look to the ‘petty confrontations’ which Foucault describes as part of epistemic change, these battles were between ways of ordering social life which were destructuring each other. The ‘victory’ of one order of things over the other occurs when it becomes the norm for authorities to structure institutions and actions relative to that order – the point of the contrasts that introduce Discipline and Punish (Foucault 1977). In contemporary everyday interaction, social activists are always confronted with the dilemma of structuring and thus legitimating the existing order of things or of destructuring and thus, hopefully, trying to change the order of things. The primary organization securing social order is the state – a chief concern of both Max Weber (1979) and Tocqueville (2000), for whom democracy did not simply mean having elections but referred to the equality of conditions in a given territory. Hence, as Therborn (1977) has argued, the


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democratic state may have emerged in capitalist societies, but not because capitalists created it; instead what capitalism creates is a working class and the working class organizes and struggles for an extension of rights. Thus, successful capitalism precedes democracy by many years; indeed, the first modern democracies are Australia and New Zealand at the turn of the nineteenth century, where, because of chronic undersupply of labour in settler societies, the strongest working classes were to be found, and in which there was no entrenched feudal landowning elite. Likewise, in recent transitions to democracy in countries such as Poland, Brazil, South Africa, and South Korea, the organized working class has played a key role, against states which, in each case, were prepared to forgo legitimacy for institutionalized violence. Where are the accounts of the deinstitutionalization of states in institutional theory? Equally, where are the accounts of the institutionalization of illegitimacy? Myanmar may be an institutionalized state but it is barely legitimate. The institutionalization of the Soviet bloc collapsed like a house of cards in 1989. Interestingly, in many cases where democracy was won at the barrel of a gun, as in many national liberation struggles, the transition has been to authoritarianism rather than democracy – even in notionally democratic countries such as Zimbabwe. Elsewhere, it is possible to argue that although political democracy has been maintained or extended in many formally democratic states, the extent of social democracy has been under consistent attack by neo-liberalism destined to return as much of human existence and struggle to the market as it is possible to achieve; even ‘social democrats’ espoused these beliefs before the market failed, spectacularly, in 2008. Where are the accounts of the institutionalization of the market as a not-so-rational myth in institutional theory? The political elites representing unfettered capital are some of the most active agents engaged in the destructuration of the fruits that secure democracy’s legitimacy, and their primary weapon is the abandonment of hard won and democratically developed state-delivered citizenship rights and the assertion of consumer sovereignty in markets as the most effective and efficient mechanism for delivering services. The triumph of economic liberalism from 1978 to 2008 was built on these dogmas. We need to think about the relation between power, democracy, and institutionalization in terms of these issues and struggles. Let us recall what an organizational institutional theory is generally acceded to be: the idea that captured the imagination was that organizations are influenced by their institutional context, that is., by widespread social understandings (rationalized myths) that define what it means to be rational. Meyer and Rowan (1983: 84) referred to the institutional context as ‘the rules, norms, and ideologies of the wider society.’ Zucker (1983: 105) looked to ‘common understandings of what is appropriate and, fundamentally, meaningful behaviour’. And Scott (1983: 163) offered ‘normative and


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cognitive belief systems’. The underlying focus of these institutional theorists, in short, was the role of shared meanings, institutional processes (such as cultural prescriptions, Zucker 1977), and institutional conformity. What is wrong with these views? Well, the obvious: they downplay conflict. Let’s go back to states as organizations. Are states secured organizationally because they are bound by the rules, norms, and ideologies of the wider society, by common understandings of what is appropriate and, fundamentally, meaningful behaviour, by normative and cognitive belief systems? Well, the answer is that some states are to a great extent and some states are less so. The most stable states appear to be those liberal democracies which diffuse tensions throughout society; rationalized myths are important in this – think of the role that was played by ‘market forces’ under Thatcherism. But the rationalized myth did not create anything like common understandings; quite the opposite: the miners’ strike, the poll tax riots, and so on. The rationalized myth was a mobilization by political and media elites. Institutional conformity was not the result. It was not the result because the political actors at that time did not accept the categories of the myth. It was only after Blair gained control of the Labour Party that the myth became institutionalized because only then were the categories of market forces established and stabilized. The important thing is that it was not the myth that did the stabilizing; on the contrary it was a political decision. It was political agency making choices about the categories of reasoning. At base, structuration and destructuration, institutionalization and deinstitutionalization, are about the categories of reasoning. Categories are the means through which we routinely, albeit largely unconsciously, observe and classify events and experiences as we understand them to be in the languages that we ordinarily use. They are ontologically prior to both discourse and rhetoric, more fundamental or philosophically primitive, as it were. Lakoff (1987: 5–6) suggests that, ‘There is nothing more basic than categorization to our thought, perception, action, and speech. Every time we see something as a kind of thing, for example, a tree, we are categorizing. Whenever we reason about kinds of things – chairs, nations, illnesses, emotions, any kind of thing at all – we are employing categories.’ And these categories are necessarily experiential and empirical; they are grounded in our ways of being in the world. Perhaps the most astute observer of this necessity was Harvey Sacks. Within ethnomethodology and conversation analysis, Sacks (1972) suggests that membership categorization devices, which systematically follow rules of economy and consistency, signal how everyday activities are accomplished locally and recognizably. The terms he addresses are the members, not analysts, and they signify how members make sense of the world. It is in investigating how these categories are deployed that we can gain a grounded appreciation of the way that members construct the world. What I miss in institutional theory is much concern for the categories of other than the members of the institutional theory domain: it is strangely self-referential


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and inattentive to the everyday reasoning of everyday people. Again, functionalist auspices are evident. Returning to states as organizations again, we can see functionalist auspices clearly. Where the categories of political discourse are shared between political elites and the masses, as they were in the American colonies, in opposition to British rule, civil society flourished, as Tocqueville identified. Elsewhere, where they did not cohere, as in France for instance, organizations were branded illegitimate and forced underground. A general theoretical point is in order. Institutionalized myths by themselves are insufficient to create institutionalization: the social processes by which obligations or actualities come to take on a rule-like status in social thought and action. On the contrary, they will only be likely to achieve this outcome where there exists regulated conflict leading to a fair degree of cooperation creating a ceremonially observed social ordering. Where the sources of such conflict are sought to be excluded tensions will be raised, ordering diminished, and institutionalization limited. If organizations become isomorphic with their institutional context in order to secure social approval (legitimacy), which provides survival benefits, then this requires that the institutional context is already secured and is seen as such a sign of legitimacy. Perhaps scholars disinclined to comparative or historical analysis might imagine that legitimacy is somehow a universal and enduring standing condition, but we should be well aware that it is not. Organizationally, we should not start by looking for rationalized myths; on the contrary we should research those situations where such myths have failed to take general hold and where the myths that do take hold do so in a way that almost defies legitimacy – I have discussed the cases of the Holocaust, Magdalene Laundries, Stolen Generation, GDR, and Abu Ghraib elsewhere as examples of the latter (Clegg, Courpasson, and Phillips 2006). For the former, any good sociologies of the state, such as John Hall’s (2008), will do. Let’s maintain the focus on states some more – this time the United States. Following Derrida (1976), one would not want to deny that there are moments of undecidability, when institutionalization does not shape what occurs, which are decided by strategic action according to the principles of oppositional logic. George W. Bush’s intervention immediately post-9/11 was exactly such a moment. The attack on the Twin Towers could have been described in many ways. If Al Gore had been elected, with his legal background, one could hypothesize that it might have been described as ‘an international criminal act’, which would have justified pursuing the perpetrators through the International Criminal Court. As events happened we got a ‘war on terror’ waged by ‘terrorists bent on destroying our freedoms’. However, the point is that this description was a particularly impoverished one that only made sense to a particularly unsubtle, binary, black-and-white way of thinking. The hypothetical Gore interpretation is slightly better in its consequences but it still falls foul of a binary logic of ‘law-abiding citizens’ versus


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‘criminals’. From a sociological perspective, the most accurate and interesting approach would be to try to resist putting any labels on the perpetrators until we understood their motivation relative to their construction of reality and structured context. Needless to say, as Weber observed, understanding is not equivalent to identifying with or legitimating. Such a deliberate avoidance of binary logic would have meant that the proper response of the US government would have been to send anthropologists and sociologists to the Middle East, rather than soldiers! Or, at least, seek the advice of such specialists at home. Of course, that would have been hard to sell but it would have been the more intellectually sophisticated response. The binaries that you use depend on the categories that you attend to. It is clear from analysis of the evidence collected by the commission that enquired into 9/11 that the President, George W. Bush, and Condoleezza Rice, the National Security Adviser, had received at least forty briefings from the CIA alerting them to Osama bin Laden specifically, as well as the threat of a terrorist attack in the months of 2001 preceding the attack (Shenon 2008). However, these were not the categories that policy concerns before 9/11 dictated. They were not institutionalized. Instead, as a speech that Condoleezza Rice was due to give on 9/11 indicates but which was cancelled because of the attacks, the focus was on big Dollar defence not the security of the state. The speech, which was intended to outline her broad focus on the Bush administration’s plans for a missile defence system, included only passing reference to terrorism and the threat of radical Islam (Shenon 2008). One may be justified in assuming that the categories with which the top management team of the United States dealt at that time were those that were widely promoted by the military-industrial complex rather than the daily briefings received from George Tenet, head of the CIA. Indeed, the effect of this disavowal of the CIA-inspired advice, which one would assume did benefit from anthropological, sociological, and political science input, given the organization’s resources, was to leave the administration in an essentially untutored position immediately after 9/11. Indeed, Bush’s first statements after 9/11 called for a ‘crusade’ against the enemies of America who had launched the attack. One would not think that culturally sensitive social scientists would have advised such a binary positioning. There is a connection here with C. Wright Mills’ (1940) argument. Motives are socially constructed. Motives are not intentional states of being but, as Blum and McHugh’s (1971) revision of Mills suggests, available categories with which to assemble sense and attribute motive. When we find agreed routines or structures in place then their being taken for granted is a sign of power at work. What power is can be gleaned from its effects; where we find social realities that take on a stable, durable, and material form in routines, actions, practices and we may take these to be effects of power that need not have any specific or particular intention ‘behind’ them. There is no need to develop lengthy causal chains of power at


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a distance linking an originary intention with a far distant effect; tracing the effects is sufficient in itself. Thus, various forms of inscription, such as maps, accounting systems, and spreadsheets, can produce definite effects far and wide. Using this map that navigator avoids that reef; using this accounting system that manager makes that purchase decision; using those numbers this dean makes that curriculum decision. Good navigators, astute managers, and destructive deans assume their identities through the actions they engage in. These identities of ‘good’, ‘astute’, or ‘destructive’ are subject to constant processes of ‘translation’; using other inscription devices might have produced different effects. Institutionalization depends on constant translation, inscription, and reinscription. What is institutionalized in each case is an accounting device rather than any particular order or ceremonial ensemble. In each case the actors are managing by the numbers: the navigator, through charts and compass; the manager, through, sales figures and forecasts; the dean, through enrolments. In consequence, ships sail successfully or not; profits are made or not; and courses, subjects, and curricula survive or not. The normative identities of ‘good’, ‘astute’, or ‘destructive’ depend on the interplay of the outcomes of the application of these calculation devices and the categories for making sense of the world of actions that result that are available to members in the worlds in which they live. Note the plurality of worlds; one of the ways that changes ensue is when the devices of one world start to colonize another. Institutional theories’ key category is legitimacy. From nearly all perspectives in recent power debates it has emerged that legitimacy itself is a problematic category, in which domination may well be present, as Weber, writing about the Bismarckian state, was well aware. If we look to Lukes’s (2005) third dimension of power, Foucault’s (1977) power/knowledge hypothesis, the various traditions of power analysis that build upon the Gramscian (1971) concept of hegemony and Bourdieu’s (1990) concept of symbolic violence etc., what lies at the centre of all these perspectives is the image of social actors acquiescing in their own domination. One way of theorizing this is to argue that these individuals perceive certain exercises of power, and structured relations of authority, as legitimate but (for various reasons) the observing sociologist or political theorist/scientist believes that the actors in question should not view them in this manner. In Lukes, actors consider power legitimate because they do not know what their real interests are. In Foucault, they consider their objectification as subjects as legitimate because it is derived from some locally perceived concept of truth. In Gramsci, the subaltern classes accept bourgeois domination because they have internalized the latter’s interpretative horizon and in Bourdieu, symbolic violence makes people ‘misrecognize’ reality. In all these versions of power and domination actors view social relations as legitimate due to some kind of cognitive shortcoming; the granddaddy of these accounts, of course, comes from Marx (and Engels). If it were not for the cognitive


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shortcoming, the very same social relations would appear straightforwardly as domination. If this is the case, then it is unhelpful to separate power from authority because the very separation is actually central to the efficacy of this form of domination. This changes the conception of legitimacy in important ways. In institutional theory there is the risk of, as Garfinkel (1967) once observed of Parsons’ functionalism, that one treats the person as a ‘judgmental dope’, as someone who doesn’t know their own mind. Another way of thinking about it is to say that while people may not do or want what various sophisticated social theorists might in similar situations, this does not, in itself, invalidate their choices, although it might point up some of the implications and limits of those choices in ways that would not be immediately apparent. Now consider some less contested legitimacy. Advanced �� liberalism represents a valorisation of business, its models, management and manners, across all the realms of government in what Pusey (1990) refers to as ‘economic rationalism’, defining the enterprise state. The central tool of the new economic rationality becomes, Power (1997) suggests, the ‘audit’, a tool that is deeply corrosive of traditional conceptions of authority based on deference, respect, or professional noblesse oblige. Authority becomes entangled with auditable standards of performance and claims to legitimacy become more acutely empirically testable, as in Research Assessment Exercises in universities, or in regulatory oversight of various professional realms, such as the delivery of health services. Thus, new forms of authority are not only targeted at newly created types of subjects but audit becomes a stratifying practice for differentiating between the more and the less deserving amongst those organizations, institutions, and subjects deemed ‘normal’. Current ‘normalizing’ practices in many national education systems influenced by the British Research Assessment framework are based upon making a fetish of market rationality without the slightest understanding that large-scale institutions, such as universities, also operate on trust and reciprocity. Once measurement, quantification, and competition enter the picture, trust and reciprocity are undermined. Furthermore, outputs in research environments are virtually impossible to quantify and ridiculous to compare across diverse fields. When dealing with advanced-level research, the only people capable of evaluating the ‘outputs’ are the researchers themselves and, possibly, a few colleagues scattered across the globe. Yet, nonetheless, a whole institutional regime of audit has been imposed. If this institutionalization is not, fundamentally, a transformation of power relations, I don’t know what is. To be sure, for some it is a very positive power – but power nonetheless. Institutional theory may have passed its adolescence but it still seems to suffer from arrested development. Scott’s (1987) adolescence of organization theory included Foucault, but, for all intents and purposes, as with other theorists who have resisted splitting the world into a priori theoretical binaries, such as Garfinkel, Sacks, and Goffman, Foucault has been strangely


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neglected by institutional theory. Somewhere along the way the more sophisticated conceptions of power relations as constituting the core of the social went missing in action. Where they are to be found in major contemporary statements they are inscribed in the core actors, in terms of normative isomorphism, as the professions, the subject of Richard Scott’s contribution. Disarmingly, Scott begins by admitting that he is a post-positivist – not just a pure observational device but a person, a theoretical actor, with all the attributes of intelligence that this implies: he makes assumptions and uses theoretical models. He begins by outlining a genealogy of the professions as they have been constituted in social analysis, commencing with functionalist and conflict models of the professions, models which in the post-war era were dialectically related: the conflict models associated with researchers such as Terry Johnson (1972) and Elliott Friedson (1970) were spawned as a critique of functionalist assumptions. He moves on to a discussion of the institutional logics of professions, drawing on institutional theory to do so. Professions as institutions rest on three different pillars: the regulative, normative, and cultural-cognitive pillars, familiar from DiMaggio and Powell (1983). Two views are contrasted concerning how these pillars emerge. One stresses naturalistic evolution while the other agent-based view places emphasis on power and intentional design. In practice, Scott suggests, the two accounts become tangled up; agency has unintended effects, creates routines, and is not always self-interested, such that action becomes quasi-naturalized. Professions, Scott maintains, define, interpret, and apply institutional elements such that they are the most influential contemporary creators of institutions. In arguing this he is at odds with other sociological accounts, such as Bauman’s (1987) analysis of a historical shift in liquid modernity from legislators to interpreters; in this view, the professions’ power to legislate interpretations has declined markedly and we now live in an age in which every person potentially becomes their own authority on matters of diet, health, lifestyle, and general management of their selves, matters that in an earlier era would have been the preserve of professionals. Views allied with Bauman would expect to see a weakening of professional institutionalization rather than a tightening as the plurality of interpretive sources available in liquid modernity overtake authoritative legislative knowledge, which, comparatively, declines in importance. The professions can be addressed in terms of the three pillars: first, cultural-cognitive agents who fix ontological frameworks, distinctions, typifications, and principles that range from the metaphysical realm of the theologian and philosopher to the material realm of engineers and applied scientists. Internal professional control is largely embedded in shared sensemaking. Second, normative agents do moral work of various kinds that stakes out areas of legitimated action premised on professional standards, codes, precepts, and rulings. Third, regulative professions correspond to the ideological and coercive state apparatuses (Althusser 1971) of modernity while the custodians of


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the law and the managers of the corporations comprise the ideological apparatuses. The repressive state apparatuses comprise the military, police, and security services whose task is to restore order where ideological controls do not operate: in the ghettoes, from time to time; amongst disaffected subcultures in the population such as Muslim minorities in Europe and America, or at times of emergency and mobilization, such as natural or spectacular disasters – Hurricane Katrina or 9/11. Within professions there are distinctions between different generic categories of social action suggests Scott. Creative professionals are lodged in the universities, think-tanks and research centres. Carrier professionals are those who translate professional messages and spread them to new actors, arenas, and agencies: educators, trainers, consultants, and so on. The largest sub-category comprises the clinical professionals who deal with specific cases and clients. All professions are regarded as a component of Florida’s (2002) creative class – a somewhat elastic and amorphous category. Typically, in terms of endogenous change, increasing professionalization leads to greater specialization within the primary profession, increased use of mechanization and routinization, and the consolidation and formalization of knowledge. Exogenously, these professionals are overwhelmingly organizationally organized rather than being the independent practitioners of the past. Not only that; their clients are increasingly corporate as well. One consequence is that the organizational form of the independent professions increasingly mirrors that of their clients in some important respects: they are becoming increasingly managerial. A shift is occurring from professional partnerships as the major organizing device to a managed professional business form (Hinings et al. 1999). Such managed professional businesses are, as they grow in size, likely to become more specialized and differentiated. These tendencies are altering the institutional logic of the professions away from the old ethos of altruism and service towards a more market-oriented provision of technical services. Overall, mixed in with the old functionalism there is an equally familiar account of professional change occurring as a result of both endogenous organizational changes – increased size leading to greater specialization, differentiation – and exogenous changes which can be glossed as modernization. One of the central ideas characterizing recent work in the arena of institutional theory is that of co-evolution. The next three chapters are all examples of analysis of this phenomenon. What is co-evolution? It happens when changes occur over time in multiple levels of analysis, such as organizations, institutions, and institutional fields. The question of co-evolution arises when a new industry and its institutional rules and competitive dynamics emerge and then change. Entrepreneurs make strategic choices that have determinate consequences for the industry; however, these choices are limited by institutional rules that frame what are legitimate or viable strategies for action. At the core of co-evolution processes are agents’ choices and


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strategies, their framing by institutional rules and industry trajectories, and their mutual interaction or co-evolution. Candace Jones’s study of the early years of the American film industry from 1895 to 1920 marries institutional theory with resource-based theory. From institutional theory she takes the idea that firms’ practices depend on the strategic choices that key agents make; these choices, in turn, depend on the social construction or enactment that they make of the environment in which they are operating, which frame their mental models of the institutional field. When a particular set of mental models becomes embedded in agents’ practices then a trajectory is launched for the development of an institutional field. Thus, initial conditions, entrepreneurs’ career history, as defined by their choices, help shape the frame through which subsequent choices can be made by privileging certain frames. Coupled with this is a resource-based view in which organizations are seen to erect barriers to imitation based on their control of either property rights or knowledge; where they are successful in terms of consumer responses to their practices they entrench non-imitable competitive advantages that will depend on the unique mix of local resources and knowledge that they can continue to corral and control. Thus, a resource-based view is used to complement institutional theory through focusing on barriers to imitation and how consumer feedback affects competitive dynamics. The methodology employs a narrative account of those events taken to function as generative mechanisms of changes in the field. At the field level, the multilevel analysis approaches the past in what Wolfram-Cox and Hassard would term a spirit of co-optation: causal paths are traced from what past agents were presumed to know in order to explain how it was possible that certain consequences occurred, where it is presumed that these consequences flowed from attributes that the theory spotlights. A fascinating window is opened on to the early years establishing one of the most potent cultural encoders of our collective pasts, presents, and futures. If Hollywood has played a key role in shaping our collective consciousnesses then so has the music industry: the Jazz Age, Swing Era, Bebop, Rock n’ Roll, Punk, Rap – these all define not only distinct styles but also places and times: Chicago in the 1920s, Harlem in the 1930s, 42nd Street in the 1940s, Memphis and the South in the 1950s, New York’s and London’s underbelly in the late 1970s, the Bronx and West Central LA in the 1980s. Styles and artists, however, despite the popularity and longevity they might have, are merely the content providers of a dynamic and rapidly shifting industry of production and distribution. As such, they are a source of inimitable competitive advantage: for instance, while there were many imitators, there was only one Elvis, one Beatles, one Dylan, or one Aretha. The record labels that corralled and controlled their production and distribution were clearly using a resource-based view to build capabilities for competitive advantage. Marc Huygens, Frans A.J. Van Den Bosch, Henk W. Volberda, and Charles Baden-Fuller, whose chapter looks at the co-evolution of firm capabilities


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and industry competition in the music industry from 1877 to 1997, work in a more conventional co-evolutionary framework than does Candace Jones. Their work flows directly from the foundational behavioural theory of the firm developed by Cyert and March (1963). The theory assumes that firms have variable degrees of control over their market environment and that they adapt to this environment through learning processes. Learning takes place when problems are encountered through feedback from markets to organizations (such as certain styles of music or artists not selling) and firms respond to such problems through search behaviour, looking either for local adaptations to exploit or more radical departures to explore. The story that emerges is a complex account of an institutional field configured by changing technologies and social relations between key organizations such as publishers, radio stations, record companies, artists, and repertoires. In this field innovative record companies compete with each other in their search for capabilities that enable commercial and creative success. As they do so, they become more alike in their strategies – a process of institutional isomorphism is apparent. Institutional isomorphism in not necessarily encountered globally as there are distinct national patterns of business, according to research by scholars such as Richard Whitley (1992), who has singled out business systems in East Asia for their specificity. A dominant business form in the region is the Family Business Group (FBG) owned and operated by entrepreneurs of Chinese ethnicity. Michael Carney and Eric Gedajlovic investigate the co-evolution of institutional environments and organization strategies in the case of ASEAN FBGs. As befits a co-evolutionary perspective the emphasis is on change that occurs through mutual and reciprocal influence between institutional environments and organizational action. The level of analysis is important: many prior studies of Chinese FBGs have adopted a single-country focus while these authors have a regional focus. They investigate how organizational forms and practices have their genesis in a particular set of social and political circumstances forged from the interplay of endogenous (market and institutional) and exogenous (non-local social, economic, political, or technological) influences. What is recounted is a story of how FBG strategies for battling environmental adversity turned into a significant source of competitive advantage. Relational contracting through kith-and-kin networks and the formation of conglomerate businesses were adaptive strategies to contextual conditions framed by an uncodified legal and regulatory environment. Attempts by state agencies to reform these business infrastructures are unlikely to bring about organizational compliance because the path dependencies that have developed are largely inimical to state regulation. ‘From Moby Dick to Free Willy’ must be one of the better titles in this collection. Thomas Lawrence and Nelson Phillips studied the emergent industry of whale-watching in Pacific Canada and chart the translation of whales from being the prey of whalers such as Ahab, Moby Dick, to becoming an object of rare and organized appreciation by ecologically oriented


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tourists. The evolution was not naturalistic: key institutional entrepreneurs were involved in transforming an institutional field. To understand the process whereby this occurs, institutional theory is hooked up with structuration theory and discourse analysis to explain the emergence of the institutional field of commercial whale-watching. The industry emerges in the context of macro-institutional changes discursively signalled by the emergence of an ecological consciousness in which the whale becomes a spectacle to be reverentially appreciated and commercially consumed – not in the flesh but in the spirit – the spirit of ‘Free Willy’. The whale is essentially social constructed in its meaning; for the Japanese and Norwegian authorities it is a source of food; for much of the rest of the world it is an object of wonder and delight rather than a dinner. The transition from being an object of prey to a source of delight is bounded by professionalized discourses of whaling and anti-whaling while, in turn, these are increasingly framed within a popular consciousness that is shaped by the changing representational practices of Hollywood. A network of collaborative entrepreneurs began to colonize the previously unknown niche in which there was a demand for whale-watching by coordinating information on sightings. As the trade grew it became increasingly institutionalized at the regional level. New actors emerged representing the interests of neither tourists nor tour operators but the whales. All of these developments were local and emergent rather than central and planned. Other accounts of change can be found in institutional theory, such as Lounsbury and Crumley’s institutional perspective on innovation in the mutual funds industry, where they argue against the category of the institutional entrepreneur. The institutional entrepreneur is the category that institutionalism’s functionalism requires in order to make the change from isomorphized regimes possible. If so much energy goes into being similar to culturally valued organizations through mimesis, how is it possible that organizations can change? This is the question the institutional entrepreneur is designed to answer. Yet it is an answer that focuses overly on a few champions of change and neglects the wider social fabric in which they are embedded. Nelson Mandela may have been an institutional entrepreneur in South Africa, but without the long struggle, armed resistance, and civil disobedience campaigns of the ANC he could not have achieved much. Of course, he is a remarkable political actor, but he is precisely that – a political actor tangled up in a complex web of power and political relations. The chapter seeks to fuse elements of practice theory, which we will encounter in its own right later, with an institutional perspective; the former for the intra-organizational view, the latter for analysis of the organizational field. Practice is seen as that which provides order and meaning to a set of otherwise banal activities, a local institution. The focus is on how innovation in activities (a lower order concept than practices) can lead to the establishment of practices that become locally institutionalized. The answer is provided by the practice framework shifting attention to knowledgeable and


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skilled actors engaged in creative performativity, mobilization, and theorization of emergent practice that constantly innovates in small but potentially significant ways, as well as being shaped by strategic direction and the existing institutional matrix of rules, beliefs, and actions. Local anomalies that make extant activities problematic may, as in Kuhn’s (1962) account of scientific revolutions, where social recognition of a novel innovation allied with political processes capable of outflanking resistance from institutionally already embedded actors, creates radical change when a new practice achieves theorization and legitimation. Institutional theorists are certainly adaptively entrepreneurial. Structuration theory, practice theory, and discourse theory, have been joined to the main corpus: in the next chapter the corpus is stretched to include the Italian political theorist Antonio Gramsci (1971) so as to better incorporate the missing power perspective. Gramsci is the theorist of hegemony – domination by consent – par excellence. Institutional fields interlace material, discursive, and organizational dimensions, as we have seen previously. Within these fields local institutional entrepreneurs can emerge who are essentially political actors, because they are positioned as agents of strategic action and strategic change. To understand how such strategic action is possible Levy and Scully draw on Gramsci’s coded account of Machiavelli’s The Prince, as The Modern Prince, to develop a strategic theory of power that enhances the understanding of institutional entrepreneurship, which builds on Gramsci’s account of the ‘war of position’ led by ‘organic intellectuals’ of the working class against the structures dominating the institutional field. The account drops the class rhetoric from Gramsci but retains the politics, translated into an organizations and institutions framework, using the case of the international distribution of AIDS drugs to developing countries. Strategic action by institutional entrepreneurs demonstrates a strategic face of power reliant on skilled analysis, deployments, and coordination grounded in local knowledge with which to outflank dominant actors with superior resources. In turn, these dominant actors are able to exercise hegemony over the field with which accommodation is necessary. It is evident that the coexistence of stasis and change and power and order comprises a key theoretical tension in institutional theory: as Leca and Naccache put it, how is institutional change possible if actors’ intentions, actions, and rationality are conditioned by the institutions they wish to change? Or in other words, how can such actors exert agency as power against those structures that constrain them if those structures do, indeed, constrain them? In the terms of the authors of the next chapter, on ‘A Critical Realist Approach to Institutional Entrepreneurship’, how do we avoid reducing structure to action, or action to structure, or of merging both? Either actors’ freedom or structural constraint must be denied. The answer resides in developing a more focused way of thinking about practices as standing at the intersection of structure, events, and experiences.


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Critical realism distinguishes between structures, events, and experiences. All three operate in the domain of the real, where structures and causal powers generate events. Causal powers are the inherent dispositions of things to act in certain ways: for instance, of iron to corrode when exposed to a moist atmosphere; of a well-drilled soldier to fire when a command to halt is ignored at a tense checkpoint. In each case, given the appropriate standing or contextual conditions, causal powers will trigger certain actions such as rusting or firing. In the domain of the actual are categorized events, whether they are observed or not. Finally, the domain of the empirical is the realm of the senses and what they structure as sense data. Reality, for critical realists, is stratified on these three levels. The social actions that ensue through practice interpreting experience either reproduce or transform structures and events. (A football team is performing badly; fans no longer attend games; revenues reduce and the team cannot afford to buy new players to reverse the teams’ fortunes in a highly competitive market and thus reverse decline; relegation occurs and the team declines further.) The realm of the actual corresponds to the discourse analysis of subjects’ utterances as sense data, according to this view. Yet, while actors may say a great deal there is a great deal more that happens that is not discursively articulated because it forms a part of the taken-for-granted institutions of everyday life. These institutions are actual inasmuch as they exist as self-reproducing recurrent patterns of behaviour – even if they are not acknowledged as such in discursive formulations. For instance, the institution of football as a spectator sport depends on the actual practices of supporters; not only must they say they support a team but they must also attend matches: a self-reproducing recurrent pattern of behaviour, shaping their interactions and negotiations as spectators, consumers, social organizers, hooligans, and so on. A committed fan remains so even if the team is performing really badly; being a supporter becomes the basis for a significant part of their identity and the self-scripting and ascription that sustain it, something which empirical events (the team consistently disappointing) might make of questionable legitimacy but does not. In this way the practices of supporters in actuality produce the institution of the team and its place in the football code. The code, as the set of rules, is clearly a part of the institution but it is only a part. The institutional ethos is sustained not through the formal rules but the everyday practice of a great many everyday supporters and this is why institutions belong to the domain of the actual. The code and its rules belong to a higher-order institutional logic, comprising structures located in the domain of the real. These institutional logics provide the frameworks that sustain the assumptions, beliefs, and rules through which individuals organize time and space, according to the seasonal fixture list and the sponsoring arrangements that permit the televising of matches, for instance. Each level of institutional logic, institution, and practice is tangled up in the others but it is practice that helps reproduce or transform structures/institutional logics and events/institutions.


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Actors do not create or construct social reality de novo or merely in the present: they live in intersecting histories. Because these histories are overlapping and essentially contested, incomplete, and indeterminate, they do not comprise a coherent whole. Any agents’ practice that seeks to organize life wholly in terms of a singular institutional logic quickly becomes dogmatic, ideological, and deeply divisive: think of the impact of various kinds of religious fundamentalism on social ordering in plural societies. Yet, whatever the impact, it depends on three things: practices, such as proselytizing, including, and excluding; institutional logics, such as belief systems whose legitimacy is not questioned; such as Islam, Pentecostalism, or Catholicism, and structures, such as places of worship, clergy, and networks of relations between offices, organizations, and other institutions, such as government commissions, charities, and other circuits through which power relations might move. Institutional logics offer opportunities for causal powers to be elaborated if the standing or contextual conditions that enable them can be configured in a sustainable and stable way. Institutional entrepreneurs thus become those categories of agents that both stabilize standing conditions for causal powers to operate and use these casual powers in practice. The standing conditions will be configured in and across various institutional logics and institutional entrepreneurs will seek to use institutional logics that can rally and translate potential allies to their interests. The effects of their practice reproduce and transform the domain of the real through changing or maintaining patterns of events and experiences as these are registered or not registered discursively. While all discursivity is a practice, not all practices are discursive. Using the theoretical logic outlined, Leca and Naccache researched the institutional entrepreneurship of a French social rating agency operating in the field of Socially Responsible Investment. In so doing they make a significant contribution to reducing the inherent functionalism and improving the ontological depth of institutional accounts and bringing agency, practice, and structure into the forefront of its analysis. (For another example of work that seeks to accomplish a similar programme, the reader might look at Clegg’s (1989) Frameworks of Power, where the central model of circuits of power has a similar set of auspices and ontology; also see the later chapter by Davenport and Leitch.) How do institutions form? That is the question that Hallett and Ventresca pose in the next chapter, doing so in a significantly celebratory way by revisiting one of the fruits of the first wave of post-Second World War organizational analysis by the great sociologist Alvin Gouldner, his 1954 classic, Patterns of Industrial Bureaucracy. The significance of Gouldner’s work is that it addressed one organization over time and demonstrated that what might appear to be the same organizational form underwent significant negotiation, interpretation, and change as a result of complex local politics, with the form shifting from an ‘indulgency pattern’ of bureaucracy where there were rules that no one – management or workers – took seriously, to a


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situation resulting from the appointment of a new mine manager in the gypsum plant that he studied, where the rules were strictly enforced in what he termed a ‘punishment-centred bureaucracy’. As is well known to generations of organization students, this precipitated a wildcat strike and the replacement of the tightly coupled punishment-centred bureaucracy with one where the rules were much more loosely coupled to action, a ‘mock bureaucracy’, which in time, in turn, gave way to a situation where both management and workers vested legitimacy in the rules and arrived at a ‘representative bureaucracy’ characterized by more tightly coupled relations between rules and practices. At the core of their analysis is the reinterpretation of Gouldner’s classic in terms of an institutional form of bureaucracy changing as it is assembled, reconfigured, edited, and negotiated through plural coupling processes that are stabilized and then reconfigured as a result of changing patterns of power and resistance. Gouldner’s account did not trace the emergence of a new organizational form so much as changes in the meaning and practice of an extant form. Of late, however, new organizational forms that are seen as ‘post-bureaucratic’ have been very much in vogue, as Ian Palmer, Jodie Benveniste, and Richard Dunford outline in their account. That there is little agreement on what constitutes the characteristics of a new organizational form is the point of departure for these authors. Realizing this, the researchers analysed the occurrence of the term in 135 articles that were identified as dealing with the concept in the major journals. A total of 346 instances of the term’s use were identified, which were then coded in terms of five key differences. These differences dealt with the types of change (revolutionary versus evolutionary); the outcomes of change (simplification versus increased complexity); the drivers for change (management driven versus environmental selection); the level of analysis (intra-organizational versus interorganizational) associated with discussing new organizational forms; and the meaning of new (new in time versus new in context) in new organizational forms. Part of the reason for so much variance and lack of agreement on fundamental terms, they suggest, is that the term is used widely across different theoretical perspectives. As an antidote, adapting Gergen et al.’s (2004) ideas about ‘relational coordination’, they suggest the conditions for a generative dialogue that enables diverse perspectives and interests to interrelate. How successful the call for dialogue might have been it is, in some respects, difficult to gauge; however, in the journal International Sociology two years after the Palmer et al. piece was published, when Phil Johnson, Geoffrey Wood, Chris Brewster, and Michael Brookes published an article addressing ‘The Rise of Post-Bureaucracy: Theorists’ Fancy or Organizational Praxis?’, reference to the earlier work was notably absent from the latter’s bibliography. In fact, given the commonality of topic between the two articles, (post-bureaucracy being one of the terms tagged as a new organization forms synonym), it is noteworthy that there is not one co-citation in their respective bibliographies.


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The authors take the occurrence of employment conditions of responsible autonomy as a key indicator of post-bureaucracy and then proceed to investigate the empirical variance of these across different institutional forms of market economy: more collective versus more liberal.

Process and Practice Theories The ‘understanding of organizations is simultaneously a study of the organization of understanding’ (Jeffcutt 1993: 50) and the ‘knowledge of organizing and the organizing of knowledge implicate and explicate each other and are thereby inextricably intertwined’ (Chia 1998: 2). Such propositions recall those posed by Foucault when he addressed orders of discourse and things (Foucault 1977), which may be transformed, organizationally, into a concern with how the organizing and ordering of discourses and things is possible. Put simply, what is the organization of the discourse and those things it makes possible? Moreover, how is the discourse of organization structured? These questions imply the ‘turning back of organization theory upon itself’ (Chia 1996: 7). Thus, organization theory can be considered as supplementary, ‘for its texts always present the “organization of organization”, that is to say, that as texts on organization they are themselves “organized” according to certain normalized criteria’ (Cooper 1990: 196). Organizing organizations through textual practices occurs in the context of socially legitimized public institutions – organizations are part of ‘socially “organized” bodies of knowledge claims and, as such, are always the effects of primary organizing processes’ (Chia 1996: 25), such as journals, with their protocols, genre-requirements, reference cliques, and cabals, and so on. In this sense a theory of organization is pragmatic rather than mimetic as it constructs rather than discovers the world (see Rhodes in this volume). Paying attention to these processes implies that ‘instead of generating analyses of organization that assume its objects to exist “out there”, waiting to be captured by the tools of the social scientist, analysis is informed by the reflexive understanding that the (methodical) organization of analysis (for example, within different paradigms) is productive of what we know’ (Willmott 1998: 214). As Foucault has shown, power and knowledge are mutually dependent on one another and produce each other. Organizing and thinking implicate each other in a similar way: organizing and thinking are mutually parasitic upon each other, they constitute each other, and they relate to each other in a process of ‘supplementarity’ (Derrida 1976, 1982). The process is one of substitutive signification ‘which could only come forth in a chain of differential references, the “real” supervening, and being added only while taking on meaning from a trace and from an invocation of the “supplement” ’ (Derrida 1976: 7). Supplementarity has a ‘subversive quality in which a term is necessarily inhabited by its opposite, and hence possesses the potential for


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its own corruption. [. . .] it carries the sense of the negation of the term itself being necessary for it to have meaning at all, as well as reflecting the neversatisfied need for something to be “added” to determine its meaning’ (Linstead and Grafton-Small 1992: 341). Hence the meaning of a concept (for example organization) is not separable from the process of its temporal and spatial passage or from signifying operations (Derrida 1996). Using terms such as ‘organization’ putatively to describe phenomena is generative – it is a supplement and not just a substitute for a signified or previous signifier (Rhodes and Garrick 2002). Organizing and thinking implicate and complicate each other: they occur in the space in the fold between them where what we refer to as learning and becoming unfolds. ‘[W]hat is between is where the real action’ is to be found (Cooper and Law 1995: 245). There is a growing interest in ‘exploring the space between’ (Bradbury and Lichtenstein 2000) and in searching for the ‘divisions and gaps that constitute the “between” of systems’ (Cooper 1990: 168). Following Gephart et al. (1996: 361), therein resides the difference between modern and postmodern organization theory: ‘The gap is problematized; that is, it is made a topic of analysis.’ The emphasis on divisions, gaps, difference, and in-between bears witness to the insight that organizations do not first pre-exist and then create their relationships. Instead they ‘occur in existential gaps’ (Cooper and Burrell 1988) of organizing. The focus on relations and dissatisfaction with ratiocinated and definition-bound notions of organization suggests also that organizing is not necessarily logical or linear. Rather than being purely rational, there is an ‘inner world of passion, ambivalence and contradiction which may be experienced as repressed, expressed or controlled, diffused or diluted, but never actually obliterated’ (Antonacopoulou and Gabriel 2001: 438). Organizations are thus infused with the non-rational and non-cognitive where emotions and learning ‘form their own unpredictable mixture, which can shape, guide and inhibit change . . . mediated through a thick layer of emotion, fantasy and desire’ (Antonacopoulou and Gabriel 2001: 448). With regard to mainstream analyses, organization is not understood in terms of flux, emotion, and unpredictability; instead it is seen as a means of ordering, structuring, and controlling the chaotic world outside. In a seemingly chaotic world, it appears that human beings ‘need to create a sense of order and make arrangements with each other, both to achieve security and to meet material needs’ (Watson 1994: 222). Organization provides means for trying to achieve a stable, predictable, and secure world. For such a notion of organization, that which is not rationally unified is considered to be a threat to the very condition of being organized such that, for example, anything emotional and messy should be institutionalized through the regulation and repression of emotionality (Scherer and Tran 2001). This implies that to be irrational, emotional, unpredictable, or undefined is a kind of organizational (and theoretical) pathology that must be controlled, organized, brought into


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line or even eradicated. The desire, organizationally, as the name suggests, is to be ‘organized’ – that is to be controlled, defined, and predictable. Foucauldian-inspired organization theory is instructive here in that it draws attention to how such desires are manifested in practice through ‘the workings of primary organizing micro-practices, involving ordering, codifying, framing and classifying, etc., which, in turn, generate stabilized effects such as “truth”, “knowledge”, “individuals”, “organizations” and “society” as well as their attributes’ (Chia 1996: 32). In this context, organization is a “reality-constituting and reality-maintaining activity’ (Chia 1998a: 366), an ‘initial, artificial stabilizing of this incessant and relentless change which, itself, is not entity-like at all’ (Chia and King 1998: 466). Organizing is an ‘inscription of order in relation to the otherness (and disorder) of the “unreal”’ (Jeffcutt 1994: 245). The world is chaotic, in flux and transformation, and our effort to organize is ‘the intrinsically human activity of forging order out of disorder, cosmos out of chaos . . . organizations are provisionally ordered networks of heterogeneous materials whose resistance to ordering has temporarily been overcome’ (Chia 1996: 51). Organizing involves ordering and reducing complexity such that ‘as we embody and perform ordering modes, so, too, we delete. This is what agency is about. It is what ordering is about: ignoring; simplifying; fixing what is complex for a moment in a stable form; reifying (Law 1994: 132). The recent fascination with chaos, disorder, noise, paradox, and the whole range of concepts like différance, supplement, deconstruction (Derrida 1976, 1996), différend (Lyotard 1986), and deterritorialization (Deleuze and Guattari 1987) resides in the growing recognition that ‘organization coexists with surprise; that unpredictability does not imply the absence of order; that recurrence does not exclude novelty’ (Tsoukas 1998: 292). Organization does not involve defining and ordering per se, so much as a desire for order and intelligence in situations where the conventional sense of orderliness reveals only confusion and noise. Organization can be understood as oscillating between complexification and simplification, de- and re-construction, de- and re-territorialization; it is threatened by the danger of imploding and exploding (Mintzberg 1991). It becomes an unfolding process of tension between order and disorder which pluralizes and cross-connects artefacts and subjects, human and non-human elements. Organization is not driven by intentions (of management) but is always ‘in-tension’ (Cooper and Law 1995). It is a process of linking and connecting that which otherwise would be separated. Organization is space in which the order and disorder inherent in everyday organizing meet, creating and transgressing the boundaries between old and new, stable and unstable, drawing attention to the boundary areas: that ‘margin created by the will and vision of a recurrent and predictable world on the one hand, and on the other the other the reality of a molten universe that is always on the verge of fusing its elements’ (Kallinikos 1996: 23).


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Thus, organization is occurring in the border zones, in the grey area, where the collision of order and chaos, inside and outside, formal and informal, rationality and irrationality, structure and process, meet. Theoretically, this calls for an exploration not of the hard-edged being of an organization, but rather the ‘building of a syncretic dialogue which recognizes both mutuality and difference, maintaining a heteroglossic in-between that is both diverse and hybrid as well as creative and critical’ (Jeffcut and Thomas 1988): this way lies process theory, an approach best known globally through the work of Karl Weick. Ever since his first book, The Social Psychology of Organizing, published in 1969, Karl Weick has been one of organization theories more distinctive voices. For one thing, he writes well, he writes interestingly, and people typically remember what he writes because he uses vivid stories to make his point: firemen dropping and not dropping their tools in the face of an advancing bushfire (Weick 1996), a poem in which mountaineers using maps to get off mountains in blizzards subsequently discover that the map was not what they thought that it had been, and in the chapter selected here, paediatricians who slowly learn that some children do not have ‘brittle bones’ but have been subject to abuse by their parents. What all these stories have in common is a shared focus on how organization members – troops on a mountain climbing trek, firemen confronted with bushfires, and paediatricians encountering evidence of severe trauma in young children – make sense. Indeed, what Weick is most associated with is an approach called sensemaking. The approach derives from a number of auspices, notably the phenomenology of Alfred Schutz (1967) and the ethnomethodology of Harold Garfinkel (1967), as well as American pragmatism and its allied social psychology in people such as William James (1890). At its core is an approach that attends closely to the methods that ordinary members of organizations use to make sense of their situation, enact their sense of the environments they are in, and to negotiate meaning with those people and things with which they interact and have social relations. Making up meaning and establishing it as a point of reference is the core issue. Now, I do not mean by this some form of fabrication, some form of inauthentic relation to matters of fact by knowledgeable actors that is economical with the truth. On the contrary; in Weick’s world, organizational actors strive to make the best sense they can with the best tools that they have to hand. As characteristics of the ways that these members use such tools, Weick suggests that members are involved in ongoing processes of redoing, labelling, discarding, enacting, believing and substantiating, processes that he proceeds to elaborate. Organization is more than just a ‘grammar to reduce ambiguity’ (Weick 1979) through a putatively stable final vocabulary (Rorty 1989); instead, organization always implies an ‘irreducible otherness’ (Lee and Brown 1994). Organization is not just managing uncertainty, it does not just suppress and


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repress, rather it is a process of increasing complexity and reducing it; ordering and dis-ordering are interdependent, supplementary, and parasitic. These relations are such that if ‘organization is enacted only through the refusal and containment of whatever is thought to represent disorganization and instability, then organization (qua placement) and disorganization (qua displacement) are mutually constitutive and interdependent’ (Bloomfield and Vurdubakis 1999: 626f). Indeed it is forms of non-rational disorganization (for example through irrationality, myths, aesthetics, affectivity, and tradition) that are significant in their impact on behaviour in organizations (Strati 1999). Often we make sense with ways of sensemaking that construct modes of rationality in which irrationalities, myths, aesthetics, affects, and traditions can compound and spin out of control – the credit crunch based on a trade in derivatives generated from the Nobel Prize-winning work of Merton and Scholes (1973), for instance, created a monster that devoured itself and much of the capital of the Western world in 2009. Jobs and lives followed into the abyss that had initially been opened by mortgage lending practices allied to trade in derivatives. As Tore Bakken and Tor Hernes acknowledge in the following chapter, Weick is one of the most significant of those organization studies theorists who conceive of its enterprise as an enquiry into process. There are others, of course, whom the authors name-check. What collects them is a concern with flow in social, temporal, organizational, and other affairs. For some theorists holding a view labelled as a ‘weak’ account of process, the interactions that flow occur between already existing and ontologically secure entities; for ‘strong’ process theorists, however, their ontology does not populate the world with pre-existing things, with empirical objects that are taken to be real, but with flows and processes which throw up entities whose existence is contingent on being products of processes rather than being something that exists before them. Overlapping in part with those institutional theories that were discussed earlier, as well as with some process concerns, practice theories have recently been highly influential, especially in cognate fields such as strategy (see Carter, Clegg, and Kornberger 2008a, 2008b, 2008c; Whittington and Jarzabkowski (2008)). The figure who is most often identified with the approach in recent years has been Theodore Schatzki. The chapter by Schatzki, on the sites of organizations, offers a practice perspective on process theories. It is a perspective that takes issue with both structuralist (societist) and individualist ontology. Against these he champions site ontology. As a philosopher he draws on Heideggerian auspices in developing site ontology. What is site ontology? A site, in terms of social science, is composed of nexuses of practices and material arrangements. Practices comprise any types of organized human activities such as, to cite his examples, political practices, cooking practices, educational practices, management practices, shop-floor practices, and design practices. Any practice is defined as being


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an organized, open-ended spatial-temporal manifold of actions. The set of actions that composes a practice is organized by three phenomena: understandings of how to do things, rules, and teleoaffective structure. Rules comprise explicit formulations that prescribe, require, or instruct that a specific something or other be done, said, or is the case; a teleoaffective structure is an array of ends, projects, uses (of things), and even emotions that are acceptable or prescribed for participants in the practice. In everyday life, its organization and accomplishment, practices and material arrangements are entangled together: lecture theatres define lecturers and students and their appropriate place and practices, for instance. Schatzki’s site ontology clearly differentiates his approach from that of the process theorists in general. However, there are echoes of earlier conceptions of ‘situated action’ that originated with C. Wright Mills (1941/2002) and which, in turn, recur in ethnomethodology, with its emphasis on the inherent indexicality of meaning in terms of contexts of time and space. As is especially apparent from the first edition of Weick’s (1969) The Social Psychology of Organizing, the ethnomethodological approach was a major influence in shaping his theorizing. Indeed, in some respects his work is very much a translation of Garfinkel’s (1967) terms into organization studies. For complex reasons related to the politics of knowledge and the timing of ideas, when Garfinkel’s (1967) work first appeared, organization theory barely registered it, with a few exceptions such as Silverman (1971). In the late 1960s functionalism reigned almost everywhere; the Aston School was a dominant approach in the pages of the Administrative Science Quarterly, and in general sociology ethnomethodology was viewed with great suspicion because of its radically reflexive programme, one that seemed to threaten many of the structural assumptions of more conventional sociologies such as Marxistinspired conflict theory or Parsonian structural functionalism. While Garfinkel may have been theoretically radical he did not appear to be politically radical in a way that was apparent to the generation of ’68. Moreover, in so far as there has been substantial development of Garfinkel’s ideas empirically, they have occurred largely outside of what is ordinarily considered to be the canon of organization studies or the sociology of organizations, being instead found in studies of everyday life in laboratories, police work, and so on. Given the lack of explicit recognition attributed to Garfinkel it is refreshing that a major journal such as Organization Studies should have devoted an issue to a special symposium on the Foundations of Organizing, which considered the central work of Garfinkel, Erving Goffman, his most evident precursor, and Harvey Sacks, his most talented student. Garfinkel, Sacks, and Goffman sought to interrogate the foundations of social and moral order as something emergent from mundane processes and practices situated in everyday life, talk, and action. A sense of order is both oriented to and emerges in the practices of everyday life. These practices temper and shape


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organizing processes as agents attend not only to each other but also those things, such as machines and systems, with which their everyday life is populated. Ordinary people and ordinary organizations of these people routinely reproduce the sense of order that sustains the normalcy of their projects in subtle, nuanced, and fine-grained ways. For the researcher to gain access to these ordinary and ordinarily unremarkable ways of doing and being, everyday language use opens a window on the world being constructed and oriented to. Each researcher approached the mystery of the mundane in a distinctive manner. For Garfinkel, the key was to be found in close and detailed study of the folk-methods – the ethno-methods – that we all use to make more or less provisional sense of what we attend to and do not attend to in the course of our everyday life. Hence, Garfinkel’s interest is in the ‘seen-but-unnoticed’ reasoning procedures, sequential organization, ethno-methods, identified actors and objects, trust, account-making, and the moral accountability of action and expressions of the ‘documentary method of interpretation’ (Garfinkel 1967; see Heritage 1984 ). Goffman (1959; see Drew and Wootton 1988; Fine and Smith 2000) whose career began with a doctoral project in the unlikely context of the Shetland Islands, studying everyday crofting folk, went on to stress devices such as keying/frame analysis, role-distance/ embrace, front/backstage, the importance of face-work, repairs, demeanour, and working consensus (Goffman 1959, 1967, 1974). Sacks, who died tragically young in an automobile accident in 1975, developed a complex notational system for showing the order present in the most mundane aspects of conversation, attending to devices such as the categorizing devices that members normally use to order their world, the turn-taking rules that they respect and breach in everyday conversation, the sequential organization of such conversation and other elusive forms of knowledge-in-use such (Sacks 1992; see Silverman 1998). Samra-Fredericks and Bargiela Chiappini provide a thorough and welcome introduction to the work of these theorists in their consideration of the contribution from Garfinkel, Goffman, and Sacks, each of which is elaborated in the subsequent chapters by Peter Manning, Anne Warfield Rawls, and Nick Llewellyn, respectively. Goffman, Garfinkel, and Sacks were clearly theorists of process, although each attended to process in terms of what they adduced to be underlying structural features embedded in the organization of language. In doing so they prefigured the linguistic and discursive turn in most organization studies by some thirty years or more (Clegg 1975 and Silverman and Jones 1976 are exceptions). As we shall see later, Garfinkel, especially, has been important in turning analytical interest towards practice – what people actually do in situated actions, to use C. Wright Mills (1941/2002) felicitous phrase. However, there are versions of process theory that draw on quite different roots to those found in Garfinkel et al. In British organization studies, Robert Cooper is one of the best-known exponents of these alternative approaches to process.


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Cooper commences his chapter on ‘Organs of Process’ by suggesting that, from a process perspective, we ‘should think of the human world as the transmission of mutable events rather than as a scene of stable structures. Society as process becomes pure action and ongoingness. Structures and objects become secondary to the movement of process. Process requires that we no longer think of the human world in terms of finished forms or completed systems. Instead, a mobile and provisional way of thinking is called for. The unfinished and incomplete calls out for serious recognition and understanding. Process precedes all finite forms and always proceeds beyond them.’ Echoing, in a somewhat different language, the approach that we saw in Hernes and Bakken, with their insistence, after Whitehead, that we need to pay more emphasis to nouns than Weick allows, Cooper maintains that ‘the social body is a corpus, a corporation of organs, whose fundamental work is to create and recreate itself through the constant construction and maintenance of images and structures that reflect and thus speak back to it’. Or, in Hernes and Bakken’s terms, we make nouns out of process to make sense of that which we experience; in doing so, potentially, we construct the prison house of language (Jameson 1972) in which we finds ourselves captive as our nouns become reifications, frames that constantly trace the limits of the understandings that imprison us in taken-for-granted normalcy and reality. Analytically, interruption of process questions indefiniteness and lack of perceptual clarity to create a world of distinguishable and meaningful forms out of what Cooper refers to as structural absence; at the core of this activity are the practices of bodies sensing and making sense of the various and indeterminate sense-data that flood the senses and their extensions through various technologies. In this way organs/organizations project the mappable onto the unmapped or remap old maps, translating raw, infinite matter into concrete, finite forms and objects and redrawing these in a perpetual work of (re)generation, which Cooper illustrates with the examples of the supermarket, the art gallery, and the Church. Cooper regards the vast body of organization studies as conventionalist in its approach to matters of ontology; the world is as theorists believe it to be because of the ways in which they register it and the categories and methods they use to gauge the appropriateness of those beliefs (and doubts) that they hold. These categorical devices and methods both enable theory to grasp and represent reality but they simultaneously mask its inherent complexities with their accentuations and absences (an approach which has subsequently been developed by Nayak 2008, drawing on Cooper and Weick, amongst other icons of process approaches). Most of the theorists who dominate the field of organization studies are American; hardly surprising as their means of production and reproduction of official knowledge dominate the English-speaking world and, intellectually and culturally, English-speaking dominates the scientific world; yet, there are important theorists of process who would be virtually unknown to


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North Americans and their readers but whose ideas are held in profound respect in Europe. Niklas Luhmann is a case in point, represented in this collection by two critical explorations of his work and its implications for organization studies. As a process theorist Luhmann starts from the implications of process-based theory, taking it in a recursive direction, in order to criticize the foundations of systems theory in Talcott Parsons’s (1951). The key element of Luhmann’s thought is an autopoietic theory of systems. Autopoiesis is another attempt to combine process and structure, verbs and nouns, in a single frame. Auto-poesis means simply to self-create, and is a term derived from the Chilean biologists Maturana and Varela (1980) who were also one of the sources of inspiration for Weick (1969) in his first edition of The Social Psychology of Organizing, where their ideas framed his ideas about cycles of selection, enactment, and retention. The key idea is that systems interact with themselves – with those properties, knowledges, and sensemaking devices that they have already produced and lodged in their being – as they recursively produce and reproduce through becoming. David Seidl and Kai Helge Becker consider Niklas Luhmann’s contributions to organization studies. Summarizing, they see three key aspects inherent in his work that contribute to organization studies: epistemologically, by drawing on process theory; theoretically, by correcting systems theory, and organizationally, by emphasizing that what organizations produce are decisions. In accord with process theory organizations are seen as processes that continuously construct and reconstruct their systematicity by virtue of the distinction with which they define themselves and the world that they construct. Because the major medium of organization is communication they have a reality that is sui generis and cannot be reduced to the actors who constitute them: organizations are agents in their own right. As agents, organizations produce decisions: they are, in short, autopoietic decision systems.

Discourses If all histories are a specification of possibilities that are more or less plausible, empirically, politically, intellectually, so are divisions. Calling this section ‘Discourses’ is designed to capture the recent turn to discourse analysis in organization studies. However, in a revisionist history, one could as easily incorporate ethnomethodology and some of its offshoots as marking the start of the linguistic turn some thirty years or so earlier, as has been noted elsewhere (see Clegg, Courpasson, and Phillips 2008). On this occasion of collection convention overdetermines the politics of knowledge and the history of ideas. The section begins with two statements of a discursive approach from 2000, the start of the accounting limits that I have defined for this


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collection. Mats Alvesson and Dan Karreman perform an under-labouring, or ground-clearing, operation on discourse and organizational analysis. They identify two major and quite different approaches to ‘discourse’ in organization studies: the study of the social text (talk and written text in its social action contexts) and the study of social reality as discursively constructed and maintained (the shaping of social reality through language). Everyday interaction in organization is framed in talk and texts, such as memos, websites, reports, etc. These may be studied in their own right, but, in turn, are framed by historically situated discursive forms – Discourses with a capital D and an epochal-defining character, in which particular power/knowledge relations are taken as ‘truths’. For instance, the period from about 1980 to 2008 was defined by the truths of neo-economic liberalism; however, these were shattered by the unfolding financial crisis that unwound from late 2007 onwards. Various authors differentiate discourse and its analysis in different ways, with Foucault’s archaeological and genealogical approaches often being points of reference. However, the authors of this chapter propose that discourse analysis can be best distinguished by two dimensions: first, the connection between discourse and meaning (broadly defined), where a key question is the extent to which discourse precedes and incorporates cultural meaning and subjectivity or refers to talk and other forms of social texts that are only loosely coupled to meaning; second, where a key question is whether discourses is to be understood as inherently local and context-dependent or seen as a part of a broader, more generalized discursive structuring of the social world? These distinctions are elaborated via a discursive device whose implications are then discussed, prior to substantive consideration of how discourse figures (or not) in relations between journalists, leadership, and ethics in a newspaper, before addressing research by Fournier (1998), to tease out the distinctions between little d discourses and big D Discourse: micro-discourse to mega-Discourse. The authors’ sympathies are with more fine-grained approaches to local, situated discourses than all-encompassing mega-Discourses. One of the most symptomatic big D discourses of modern times has been the growth of international standards. One of the major factors working to make organizations more alike globally is the spread of formal written standards. As Brunsson and Sahlin-Andersson (2000) have elaborated, standards are a major mechanism of institutional isomorphism rendering organization spaces, at least superficially, more alike, because they are defined by common rules. Since the late 1980s, starting from a concern with quality, international standards bodies have issued rules for an increasing number of arenas of organizational activity, such as ecological impact. A significant industry of global consultancy, auditing, certification, and accreditation accompanies these new managerial standards. Finding inspiration in Foucault’s conception of governmentality, Winton Higgins and Kristina Tamm Hallström


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investigate ‘Standardization, Globalization and Rationalities of Government’ with respect to organizations. The focus is on discursive practices governing a variety of institutional settings, including both ‘public’ and ‘private’ ones. They focus on the evolution of the national standards bodies, the pioneers of standardizers’ participation in government, and how their relationship with public authorities developed in reference to rationally and consensually arrived at ‘technically best’ solutions, and the growing prestige of putatively independent expertise. Standards and regulatory routines based on them play a specific instrumental role in organizations as a mode of political rationality that is premised on producing a particularly neurotic discursive subject: the constantly improving manager. The role of the highly abstract (‘generic’) ISO 9000 quality assurance standards, and of ISO’s subsequent management standards, elaborate ‘practices of the self’ for corporate managers that provide a platform for certification and an occasion for recurring audit. As audit never finds perfection – perfectability is impossible – then the manager must constantly live and manage with the need to constantly improve; any error or inadequacy uncovered by audit simply serves as further justification in small d discourses at the local level for improvements embedded in the big D discourse of the ISO standard. The chapter by Guowei Jian, Amy M. Schmisseur, and Gail T. Fairhurst is a further and more recent survey of the field of organizational discourse. By reviewing 112 organizational discourse studies from major journals in communication, organizational studies, and interdisciplinary journals published between 1981 and 2006, they identify diverse conceptualizations of the basic concepts of discourse, building on Alvesson and Karreman’s little d and big D distinction, and link them to the theme of organizational communication. As a literature review it is an essential starting point for any researcher wishing to do further work in the broad field of discourse analysis. While the sample could obviously be extended it is already quite large, including Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, Communication Monographs, Communication Theory, Critical Studies in Media Communication, Discourse & Society, Discourse Studies, Human Relations, Journal of Applied Communication Research, Language and Communication, Language and Social Psychology, Management Communication Quarterly, Organization Studies and Women’s Studies in Communication. For instance, extension could incorporate Organization which has published 260 articles with a key reference to discourse during this period. Nonetheless, the chapter is a valuable starting point for subsequent researchers. Subsequent researchers are sure to encounter the work of Norman Fairclough, for he has been an influential figure in recent controversies about discourse; for instance, he has been embroiled in several debates in the journals Discourse & Society and Language and Literature. Stepping out of these realms he has also made incursions into organization studies. His


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contribution ‘Discourse Analysis in Organization Studies: The Case for Critical Realism’ seeks to extend discourse analysis from a concern with textual matters, in a pure sense, to other elements of the social, seeing ‘discourse’ as a term that subsumes both linguistic/semiotic elements of social events and linguistic/semiotic facets of social structures, as well as those ‘social practices’ which mediate between events and structures (see the previous chapter by Leca and Naccache and Schatzki). ‘Discourse analysis’ addresses: relations between discourse and other elements of the social; relations between linguistic/semiotic elements of social events and linguistic/semiotic facets of social structures and social practices, including ‘discourses’. As a critical realist Fairclough is concerned not only to oppose positivism but also overly constructivist accounts of discourse that focus on the discursive to such an extent that they neglect that which cannot be represented discursively. The latter are associated with, in the terms of the organization of these volumes, process approaches to analysis (which in turn are labelled, somewhat promiscuously, ‘postmodern’). Too much process runs the risk of collapsing ontology into epistemology, and undermining the ontological reality of organizational structures as constraints on organizational action and communication, he suggests. Both organizational structures and the agency of members of organizations engaged in processes of organizing have causal effects on actual organization. Examples of what are taken to be erroneous approaches to discourse in previous literature are then briskly attended to. Building on these foundations, Fairclough outlines his account of Critical Discourse Analysis, drawing on similar resources to those outlined in the earlier contribution by Leca and Naccache, notably the influential realist philosophy in work by Roy Bhaskar (1975). On this basis he claims to have shown that a commitment to discourse analysis in organizational studies entails neither a reduction of organizations to organizational discourse, nor a reduction of organizational analysis to the ‘organizing’ that goes on in organizational processes. Discourse analysis in a realist mode distinguishes organizational process and agency from organizational structures, and focuses research on their relations and tensions, avoiding reductionism. In order to connect organization structure and processes of organizing, using a discourse analysis, one does not have to buy into the whole CDA frame that Fairclough proposes. Relation, tensions, and the avoidance of reductionism are possible through focusing on what happens discursively and organizationally in specific situational contexts, investigating how elements of the structure, together with dominant modes of discourse in an organization, can combine to undermine reform intent. Such research was done in one organization in question, the New South Wales Police Service, one of the world’s largest police services, which, in the late 1990s was rocked to its core by widespread findings of institutionalized corruption in the service. A programme of organizational reform and change management ensued, designed to reform the service’s ethics: instead relations of power, as they were mediated


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between discursive dominance and organizational structural arrangements, served to undermine the reforms. The main thrust of the reforms was to shift formal power relations from a coercive bureaucracy into more democratic and team-based forms. The idea behind these changes was that more democracy at the base of the organization would create space in which officers could resist corrupt tendencies and act more ethically rather than be subject to overbearing and corrupt authority. Power relations were addressed in the change programme by reforming the formal rules, relations, and protocols of the organization, in particular through the introduction of new routinesituated practices within the existing bureaucracy. Notably, these were the Operations Control and Review (OCR) meeting and the Employee Management System (EMS). The boundaries of the OCR and the EMS were coextensive with a particular style of speaking, characteristic of the new style of reformed policing to which police were expected to conform. Hence, organizational structuring and discourse were mutually implicated. One of the most important aspects of organizational discourses is the diverse narratives that they sustain. Eero Vaara researched the discursive construction of success and failure in accounts of post-merger integration. Analysing eight case studies, four different types of narrative were identified. Each constituted a different form of discourse: rationalistic; cultural; role-bound, and individualistic, with various specific forms being preferred as coherent accounts by different narrators. Narratives about what happens after a merger typically are couched in terms of success or failure, a familiar trope not only for all business people and business students but for everyday life in general. These discursive frameworks are implicit and underlying structures (big D discourses?) that enable specific discursive strategies to be espoused in situ. These discursive strategies are allied to political moves for (re)framing the success/failure and justification/legitimization of action. They also allow for the reconstruction of responsibility in socio-psychological terms when dealing with the success/failure of these mergers in narrative. One consequence is that success stories are more likely to lead to an unwarrantedly optimistic belief in the possibilities of management control while failure stories lead to too pessimistic predispositions. We have seen in Fairclough’s specification of CDA that discourse need not be interpreted narrowly as just written or spoken materiality. Rick Iedema continues this direction by noting that discourse is not limited to language but also includes image, design, technology, and other modes of meaningmaking. Each of these may be said to have a specific mode of communication, a discursive materiality, embedded in them. Design, for instance, speaks to us; it can attract, pleasingly seducing us – think of the iPhone or iPod. We might refer to the family resemblances of i-objects as having a common grammar of meaning, for instance. Iedema suggests that there is a general grammar of social (and organizational) order, referring to rituals, routines, and practices generally. Discourse clearly has an unclear and contingent


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relation to materiality. Consideration of these relations leads out from specific texts of writing and speech to the materialities of workplaces, their politics and (dis)organization. Materiality and discourse are, Iedema suggests, coemergent. With this formulation of co-emergence he argues that we can move beyond the realism/anti-realism positions inherent in Fairclough’s position. He begins, as almost all the chapters thus far in this section, by providing an overview of discourse analysis. Notable contributors to the ‘organizational discourse’ canon are taken to task for their ambiguities and inconsistencies. Writing seven years after Alvesson and Karreman he still finds a lack of clarity in the way that prominent organizational discourse theorists have used the key term of ‘discourse’. He finds that drawing the boundaries between discourse and non-discourse, such as beliefs, are not as easily drawn in practice as in principle. Moreover, the strictures of critical realists such as Fairclough about maintaining a separation between language, the material word, and other forms of the material world, are also given short shrift. Old forms of materialism are found to be lurking in such positions, where the discursive becomes seen as an effect of the real or, in their antithesis, the real is simply seen as that which gets talked into being. Of particular note is his attack on Michael Reed’s well-known endorsements of forms of realism opposed to constructivism, nominalism, determinism, localism, and reductionism. In divorcing discourse from ‘long-term institutional effects’, Iedema suggests that Reed understates how ‘institutional effects’ are played out as well as reifying such effects as independent of the multi-semiotic discourse practices that sustain and challenge them. Finally, he suggests as a critique of the existing literature that it pays limited attention to in situ interaction and the practical, political, and historical complexities that constitute it, in the way that approaches such as ethnomethodology place discourse research in a unique position from where it becomes possible not just to describe, but also to engage with and intervene in, the practice of organizing. Discourse centres on analytically engaging with the semiotic, material, and contingent character of social–organizational processes, suggests Iedema. Meaning-making is always historically situated in encompassing material semiosis embodying the intensities and excesses of late modern socio-cultural and organizational life. Iedema suggests that the approach he favours implies a new form of theoretical practice addressing the ways in which researchers position themselves in relation to organizational actors and processes, who they share data and analyses with, and the level of engagement with organizations and diverse actors that they entertain as desirable, ethical, productive, and worth risking. If the previous chapter shows the significance and usefulness of studying little d discourse in situ, so does the next. John Sillince ‘Organizational Context and the Discursive Construction of Organizing’ provides a clear account of what is important in organizational discourse analysis of situated action. He notes that organizational discourse has very little meaning


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outside its context. To understand any discourse’s meaning, we must theorize about both the discourse’s possibility and the circumstances of its constitution. Otherwise, we abstract text, sundering it from context. The chapter addresses the importance of context and the types of discourse structures and discourse strategies that construct context. The author develops four distinct dimensions of context: when, where, as whom, and why people speak. To construct meaning collaboratively, an organization’s members use several discursive means whereby a discourse from one context can be inserted, reframed, appropriated, and recursively placed into a discourse from another context – to achieve cross-contextual organizing of their accounts. Through such cross-contextual discursive work, members strive to balance these four (sometimes conflicting) contextual dimensions, demonstrated by reference to the case of Enron. John Sillince is one of the best-known analysts of rhetoric in organization studies, as is evident from the bibliography of E. Johanna Hartelius and Larry D. Browning’s contribution on ‘The Application of Rhetorical Theory in Managerial Research: A Literature Review’. Their review of the field suggests that five themes identify the use of rhetoric in organization research. Rhetoric considered as a theory and as an action that is inherently practical; as the substance that maintains and/or challenges organizational order; as being constitutive of individual and organizational identity; as a managerial strategy for persuading followers, and as a framework for narrative and rational organizational discourses. The persuasive strategies that managers deploy are seen as the most important rhetorical actions in organizations: in a classical sense of the term, rhetoric should be seen as a stylistic resource, as Sillince argues, rather than regarded as a form of deceitful, ideological, or manipulative discourse. The message that rhetoric should not be treated as a mask is deepened in the next chapter by Raymond Hogler, Michael A. Gross, Jackie L. Hartman, and Anne L. Cunliffe on ‘Meaning in Organizational Communication: Why Metaphor is the Cake, not the Icing’. The dominant approaches to the use of metaphor in organization studies have suggested either that a limited set of metaphors can capture the sense that organization theorists make (Morgan 1985) and that each metaphorical trope represents the nature of things in a distinctive manner, for different instrumental purposes, or that metaphors simply get in the way of good research: adopting a representational and positivist stance, the world is seen to exist as objectively real; figurative language is thus a distraction from literal meaning (Pinder and Bourgeois 1982). More recent views have focused on the power of metaphors to shape sensemaking (Grant, Keenoy, and Oswick 1998; Grant and Oswick 1996; Oswick, Putnam, and Keenoy 2004) but, as the authors suggest, there is no accepted understanding of how metaphors work (Cazal and Inns 1998; Cornelissen 2005, 2006; Oswick and Jones 2006). In an influential perspective Lakoff and Johnson (2003) suggest that metaphors are a form of extension of human senses: just as we make sense through visual and auditory and other cues,


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we also use metaphorical cues similarly. From this perspective, metaphorical language is categorically distinct: it is an objective form of language that is in the world through which we understand the world but neither wholly socially constructed – metaphors are social facts – nor an objectivist reflection of something already there. Metaphors are one of the aesthetic forms through which we know the world in an active and unified apprehension of knowing as an affective state simultaneously of cognition and appreciation, an argument that the authors elaborate with reference to debates in philosophy and aesthetics.

Organizing Time, Space, and Embodiment The body, space, and time are fundamental coordinates of existence and of organizations. Bodies move through that time and space in which they come to be, pass away, and are remembered and forgotten. No auto-organization has yet existed; all organization requires some embodiment amongst the technology’s pasts and presents. Embodiment is fundamental to existence and existence is lived in spaces and through times. Barbara Czarniawska’s contribution ‘On Time, Space, and Action Nets’ makes time problematic by contrasting chronological and kairotic time. Chronos (chrónos) was the Greek god of time and Kairos was the god of right time, of proper time. Kairós in Greek means ‘time, place, circumstances of a subject’. Chronological time is measured by watches, spaced out in seconds, hours, days, months. Kairotic time is measured by events, not by hours; it is embodied, organic, and rhythmic. Kairotic time creates temporal autonomy for a system. Most organizations run on varying mixtures of both types of temporal reckoning. Time in contemporary complex organizations is condensed and it is counted in many places concurrently; it is not only coeval but also multiple, reckoning by and in terms of multiple routines; production schedules, seasons, economic cycles, and so on. Routines are central: organizations seek to be tools, running as if automata but always susceptible to the uncertainties of being in a world of uncertain subjects and objects and their interpretations. Obviously, different actors and actants (such as computer systems) will have different discursively (big D and little d) constructed accounts. Hence, meaning inheres not in events, actions, etc., but in the conventional ways of making sense of such phenomena. Intentions, motives, and other components of meaning form a social grammar rather than being attributes inherent to entities. They comprise what I have elsewhere called a ‘mode of rationality’, a way of making sense that is discursively available, explicable, and routine (Clegg 1975). In constructing routines organizing creates various kinds of action nets that lace together events comprising people, things, places, and times, made sense of by meaning being attributed to the event by linking it to actor’s conceptions of the social order in which it takes


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place. It is these interconnected acts of organizing, suggests Czarniawska, which comprise the action nets that organizing constantly creates, recreates, and transforms. And it does this work across many spaces simultaneously, a net of fragmented multiple contexts, multitudes of kaleidoscopic movements in her felicitous phrase, many places, many times, overlapping, contradictory, and interlaced. As Czarniawska addresses, such a realist conception of organizing makes the task of the researcher extremely problematic: it is impossible to be in all the times and spaces. One of the most consistent contributors to an understanding of how time and organization are entwined has been the British sociologist of organizations, Peter Clark (2000; Clarke and Mailli 2008). Clark’s (2000) reading of the importance of temporality for organization analysis suggests that human experience amalgamates many temporal frames and horizons, sometimes in a paradoxical way. Although we might typically think of time in a chronological manner, organized by clocks and calendars, there are, in fact, forms of periodization embedded in events, as Gurvitch’s spectrum of social time suggests (Clark 2000: 118). Organizations constitute, experience, and make decisions about time and temporality that vary systematically, suggests Miguel Pinha e Cunha in his chapter on ‘Organizational Time: A Dialectical View’. When organizations favour action over reflection they tend to rely on event time to handle scheduling issues, to use entrainment to synchronize with their environment and to hold a linear view of time. Organizations that privilege reflection tend to rely on even time (rhythms that are autopoietic) to handle scheduling issues, to impose their internal pacing on the environment and to hold a cyclic view of time. Organizations that attempt to find a synthesis between planning and action tend to solve scheduling issues via ‘even-event’ time, synchronize via ‘internal and external’ pacing, and hold a spiral (cyclic and linear) view of time. Temporality in a heightened form is a characteristic of financial markets as we have all been made aware of in recent times, during the financial crisis of 2008 and onwards, when lexical devices such as ‘short-selling’ became part of everyday newsworthy currency. Over time, the tendency has been for such markets to become more immediate as they have been more technologically mediated. Karin Knorr Cetina and Alex Preda contribute a fascinating account of ‘The Temporalization of Financial Markets: From Network to Flow’ to this collection. They begin by noting that in the course of their development, at least some markets moved from a network-based architecture with human processing at its core to one based on a mode of coordination that can technologically mediate and disperse information simultaneously to a large audience of observers, with a historically unprecedented, integrated system of new institutional components, electronic circuits, software, hardware, and systematic information processes, enabling a flow market to emerge that moves across time zones with the sun, 24/7, year in year out. The specialized lifeworld of flow markets is stable only for long enough to enable


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transactions to occur and changes with transactions – as financial crises make abundantly clear. In contemporary financial markets, characterized by what the authors term scoping media, a multitude of epistemic functions are included as knowledge systems and sensemaking devices that make available unprecedented data streams processed by divisions of analysts, model builders, and strategists located on the trading floors of major banks. The market rests on a system of observation and projection that assembles dispersed and diverse activities, interpretations, and representations which in turn orient and constrain the response of an audience in a cycle that has no finitude. The reality attended to is one of flux and flow, a constant becoming, as action is enacted on the basis of observational cues that this action will necessarily, reflexively, change, in an autopoietic system without end, one in which finitude does not exist. The mass of individuals’ enactments changes the nature of that which is being enacted in a constant process of its becoming a new market reality, in a process of endless ontological fluidity. The process of reality constantly changing on the screen is composed of an infinite succession of data that is the market, a series of time-envelopes for managing space, where the world is composed of time zones rather than physical features. Global markets have their own time-reckoning systems: dates and hours set for important economic announcements and for the release of periodically calculated economic indicators and data, structuring participants’ awareness and anticipation and anchoring market developments in national or regional economies’ fundamental characteristics. The technologies that make contemporary markets possible are almost all based on computers, chips, and software. In the late 1990s there was considerable anxiety about the ‘Millennium Bug’, a future event whose anticipated effects were potentially catastrophic. Millennia, for reasons of superstition, are regarded by many people as key turning points in time rather than merely calendar conventions. In the late 1990s superstition allied with fear about technology to produce a panic about anticipation that, on the last minute of the last day of the last year of the twentieth century, organizations would find that the computer systems upon which they relied crashed irrecoverably, due to programming that prevented the computers from registering that the end of 1999 would be followed by 2000. A standard assumption had been built into many electronic and computer systems that all years start with 19 and that only the last two digits needed to change. Consultancies and computer experts, having sounded the alarms, could point with satisfaction to how their actions had saved a hitherto complacent world from disaster; other commentators were not so sure and suspected that behind the panic and hype stalked self-interest in creating a moral panic about time. David Knights, Theo Vurdubakis and Hugh Willmott’s chapter provides a fascinating documentary account of the times at the end of the century and of how corporate panics were amplified and addressed. Apart from the


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documentation, however, the chapter makes some important points about time, events, and corporate memory. In large complex organizations in the more globalized parts of Europe and America, it is argued that, driven by an ethic that celebrates success, an institutionalized disinclination to acknowledge, let alone learn from, cost-ineffective decision-making combined with low tolerance of ambivalence, meant that there has been no proper accounting of the resources swallowed in the panic and the necessity of their deployment. In many ways this corporate timelessness prefigures the inability of many of the same organizations to anticipate, acknowledge, or learn that the assumptions that held their certainties in place were as fragile as the uncertainties that they most feared, as the unfolding of the sub-prime crisis and the ensuing meltdown of global financial markets and economies unfolded in 2008 demonstrated. In their own way, both sets of events teach the futility of time-reckoning systems that are too heavily oriented towards chrónos. Fundamentally, organizations are spaces in which people work. The trading room of a stock exchange or the currency dealing spaces of a global bank represent particular organizations of space. Wall Street is not just a place but a metaphor for a particular space – one that is dynamic, energetic, throbbing, and busy, if not always, in the older sense of the term, industrious. Organizations should be thought of as material, spatial ensembles – not just cognitive abstractions writ large. Space is both the medium and outcome of the actions it recursively organizes: what space is experienced as being limits and enables the possibilities of further social construction within it. Susan Halford and Pauline Leonard follow the previous contributors in this section by considering the interrelation of ‘Place, Space and Time’ and how these contextualize workplace subjectivities. They begin by noting how big D discourse analysis has focused on how people in organizations use generic discourses, such as those of gender or profession, to organize social relations and identities. Against this emphasis, the authors wish to recognize more fully the situated interdependence of life (Pile and Thrift 1995): that the subject is derived primarily in practice, ‘dependant to some degree on the immediate resources available to them at the moment they show up in time and space’ (Pile and Thrift 1995: 29). In other words, generic big D discourses are always enacted in situated contexts as small d discourses. Their interest is in how organizational context shapes the construction of workplace subjectivities both between and within organizations. Organizational contexts are tangled up with all the other contexts of everyday life through which we move and with which we interact as embodied subjects. The shifting contexts of individuals’ everyday lives in the multiple times and spaces of their workplaces as well as experiences elsewhere, such as the home, all shape the subjective effects of organizational discourse. The power of organizational discourse to define subjectivity is limited because it always works on the indeterminate plasticity of lives lived elsewhere as well as at work; thus, power relations between organization and employees are complex and


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fluid, as the empirical research of the article demonstrates. The field sites for the research are two UK National Health Service hospitals, Seaside and Lakeside, offering distinct resources for the construction of subjectivities in an institutional field that is subject to changing institutional logics. Discourses, they suggest, are something whose doing is inscribed in different landscapes and timescapes. It is evident that timescapes and landscapes change as a result of technologies that traverse, redefine, constitute, and reconstitute them. Telemedicine, the focus of Davide Nicolini’s contribution ‘Stretching Out and Expanding Work Practices in Time and Space’, is one such technology. Telemedicine is that form of health care work that has become distributed and disconnected in time and space. Such distribution and disconnection is an irruption into a field that is largely characterized by a great deal of face-to-face and body-work. Medical work is still mostly organized around the convention of the physical co-presence of the parties involved. Spatial co-location and direct observation and apperception of nuances constitute two fundamental resources of diagnostic and nursing practice (Cicourel 1990, 1999; May and Ellis 2001). Telemedicine functions as a boundary object, a tool, object and concept that allows cooperation across boundaries. Such objects are plastic enough to adapt to local needs and the constraints of the several parties employing them, yet robust enough to maintain a common identity across sites. Telemedicine stretches and expands medical practices in space and time. The metaphor of ‘stretching out’ is meant to capture the idea that medical practices extended in space and time change significantly, redistributing, reframing, and reconfiguring existing practices. To capture data on such practices Nicolini observes everyday practices and understandings in situ. Telemedicine constitutes both a new way of accomplishing medical activities and a repositioning of the identity and positioning of the different elements involved in its practice. A reconstitution of the object, the nature and content of the activity, and a reframing of the ways in which the activity is made accountable, occurs. There is a redistribution of work between the human and non-human elements implicated in the practice, a changed accountability of actions and interactions, and a reconfiguration of power relationships. In Czarniawska’s terms, the action nets are being reconfigured. The chapter provides a good exemplification of the practice approach espoused by Schatzki in his earlier contribution. Medical work places the body at the centre of its gaze. Recently, researchers in organization studies have sought to emulate medicine by placing the body at the centre of analysis. To do so is to break with the dominant Cartesian tendencies of the field, that have elevated mind over body. Jon Hindmarsh and Alison Pilnick demonstrate what a concern for the body at the centre of analysis might look like with their account of ‘Knowing Bodies at Work: Embodiment and Ephemeral Teamwork in Anaesthesia’, a rare article in that it is illustrated


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with representations of people actually doing work and organization. They note that at the heart of the contemporary concern with the body in organization studies is that the recognition of the body in accounts of work, organizing and organization is something that has been largely overlooked. Given that one of the genealogically possible origins of the field was situated in a political economy of the body, in the work of F.W. Taylor, this absence is somewhat surprising. Their analysis investigates how coordination is organized in anaesthesia, revealing the tacit practices that underpin the artful, interactional, and dynamic accomplishment of team- and routine work. The body is a central ‘site’ for this organizing work. The authors note that in the field of organizational discourse, while practices of managing, organizing, motivating, and the like, are routinely built on, delivered through, and exist in talk (for example Grant et al. 1998), among all this writing on talk, the body disappears from focus. The text of interacting bodies at work needs to be rewritten into organization studies, they suggest. Their recommendation is that we should begin by recognizing how participants see bodies within, and with regard to, material contexts of tools, technologies, and suchlike. Bodies move in space: discipline, drill, and formation are often thought of as the preserve of particular kinds of military power, shaping the bodies of recruits to the purpose of a fighting machine. These terms – of discipline, drill, and formation – however, can just as easily be applied to forms of dance. Dance as a social, temporal, and spatial practice, as Donncha Kavanagh, Carmen Kuhling, and Kieran Keohane narrate, entails different discourses becoming organized and embodied. They take as their object of analysis the changing history of Irish dance as a socially organized form. Prior to the global success of the cultural and organizational phenomenon known as Riverdance, they chart a story of Irish dance in which the megadiscourses of a poor, marginal, underdeveloped Catholic nation were writ into the body through the organization of dance. They argue that transformations in dance can be seen as a microcosm of the transformations in Irish culture and economy in the Nineteenth and Twentieth centuries. The transitions that they represent are from pre-national, ‘Traditional’ Ireland to national, ‘Modern’, parochial Ireland and, in the 1990s, to global ‘post-modern’ Ireland. They trace the development of Irish dance from a traditional gemeinschaft organization where work and dance were organized as constituent elements of a unified whole, through its organization as a gessellschaft, where a modern, rational, differentiation of the spheres of work and aesthetics saw the realm of ‘dance’ constituted as a distinct activity seized upon by the independent Irish state as a state-approved ‘invented tradition’ supporting the organizing practices of a nationalistic and highly Catholic society. Traditional dance offered an activity in which the sexes could mingle in an organized mode without really getting close; in the dance they remained ramrod straight and erect in bearing without the connotations of sensuality or sexuality associated with other religiously more decadant forms of dance.


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Traditions, of course, are always ready for reinvention, as was the case in 1994 when Riverdance first appeared on television in the context of the Eurovision Song festival as a spectacle. Irish dance was redefined in what the authors refer to as a postmodern form of highly specialized professional work organized as a simulacrum of ‘tradition’, reborn as something seemingly sexualized, sensualized, and eroticized, a fragmmentierte, zersplitterte und flüssige gessellschaft. Yet, Riverdance consists of professional dancers drilled since childhood in hierarchically organized and officially adjudicated competitions; Riverdancers’ bodies may appear to be liberated and eroticized but, they suggest, these are disciplined bodies, subjectified, transformed, improved, and put to work as surely as the bodies of the patient, the prisoner, or the proletariat. In this contribution we see that discourse with a big D, derived from themes of changing national sentiment, can reconfigure the deportment and embodiment of organized bodies in a spectacle in which the bodies of the dancers become a discourse linking the past imagined in invented traditions with a present in which stylized, eroticized consumption is a major organizational form of diversion and entertainment. Nice work!

Organizing Identity Issues of identity became increasingly discussed in the past decade. I have chosen several articles that address general theoretical issues of identity as well as specific aspects of gendered and ethnic identities at work, as well as the question of organizational identity and its relation to individual identities. Of course, there are many other aspects of identity that one could choose, such as age, sexuality, class, and religiosity. While the selections made are not exhaustive, they are representative of some of the major contours of debate. Organizational identity was initially conceptualized as those aspects of an organization that its members consider central, enduring, and distinctive (Albert and Whetten 1985), although more recent work has advanced an interpretive approach (Gioia, Schultz, and Corley 2000). The special issue of the Academy of Management Review, 2000, on organizational identity was clearly a rallying point as was the work of Albert and Whetton (1985), which argued that an organization’s identity is bound up with its central, distinctive, and enduring features. These, in turn, are closely related to institutional sources of organizational legitimacy. Some of these themes will be taken up by later contributors but first we focus on questions of individual identity. David Collinson begins his enquiry into ‘Identities and Insecurities: Selves at Work’ by clearly demarcating his interest from that of traditional conceptions of the self as a unitary organism. The currents of the social live in and wash over the person just as much as the person swims in and against the prevailing currents of the social. The resulting subjectivities are specific historical products embedded within particular conditions and consequences,


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constituted discursively, that are non-rational, gendered, and multiple in nature. Foucault’s traces, especially his emphasis on how power works productively through strategies of normalization, are evident currents that have washed over Collinson’s project. At core, he regards subjectivity as a defence against the ontological insecurities of existential, social, economic, and/or psychological pressures, in which organizations abound. In part, the growth of complex organizations, along with accompanying phenomena such as industrialization and urbanizations, have created a world in which the securities of ascribed identity, rooted in place, class, status, and family, have given way to the much more insecure world of identities that have to be achieved in the shadow of ideologies of meritocracy and egalitarianism, leading to status anxiety both for those who manage to achieve enhanced status and especially for those who do not. These ideologies traverse a world fractured by ideologies of gender, racism, and so on, offering multiple opportunities for the construction of one’s subjectivity and multiple opportunities for anxiety and confusion. Rather than being unitary subjects the normal experience of selfhood is to be the manager of multiple selves of whose contradictions and creative tensions one may be more or less aware. Managing multiple senses of subjectivity is eased by self-survival strategies that Collinson outlines. Three in particular are identified: conformist, dramaturgical, and resistant selves, thus making a connection back to both the power literature and the discourse approaches surveyed earlier in the volume. Paul du Gay is well known internationally for his consistently critical engagement with the doctrine known as ‘new public management’ (NPM), something that was certainly a big D discourse. Inspired in part by general management enthusiasms for entrepreneurialism this doctrine substantially reshaped the public sector bureaucracies of the neo-economically liberal ‘Anglo’ world from the 1980s onwards. At the core of the doctrine was a particular discourse of organizational ‘change’ deployed as a rhetorical device for reshaping the identity of public service. As du Gay notes, there was a distinct epochalist bent to much of this theorizing about contemporary economic and organizational change indicated by a reliance on a logic of overdramatic dichotomization constructing opposed and ethically juxtaposed categorical imperatives, where the dice was clearly loaded in favour of change. The discourse of organizational change mobilized support for attempts to ‘reinvent’ and ‘modernize’ public administration. In doing so, stark disjunctures and oppositions were deployed in simple narratives that politicians and their stakeholders could easily grasp, acting as catalysts for ‘transformation’. Simple answers positing universal and invariable managerial recipes predictably failed to deliver on their promise. The NPM has not been uncontested by public servants, however much their political masters and mistresses in office might have embraced it. A micropolitics of resistance at the level of meanings and subjectivities, with multidirectional and generative effects for identity construction, characterized its


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reception in street-level bureaucracies. Focusing on the UK public services, Robyn Thomas and Annette Davies use interviews with public service professionals in the police, social services, and secondary education to explore the meanings individuals ascribe to NPM discourse and how they see themselves within these meanings. These meanings do not posit NPM as the hegemonic big D discourse that it is sometimes represented as being; instead it is seen as highly dynamic with individuals appropriating and ‘conforming’ to or ‘resisting’ disparate elements. The resistance that occurs is not rooted in some grand narrative, such as public sector virtue or a class identity; instead, it is discursively produced within specific contexts, taking different form and emphasis with different groups. The intersection of self and organizational identity is also at the heart of the following contribution by Dan Kärreman and Mats Alvesson, ‘Cages in Tandem: Management Control, Social Identity, and Identification in a KnowledgeIntensive Firm’. They use identity as a bridging concept between individual, group, professional, and organizational levels. In particular they focus on social identity on the individual level, in contrast to organizational and individual identity. In a study of two knowledge-intensive firms they distinguish types of control that occur simultaneously but are differentially sedimented, historically. One type is technocratic control, which is a residue of bureaucracy, one whose contemporary expression is to be found in performance measures, while more recent socio-ideological control addresses values, meanings, and ideas, including identities. Technocratic control is embedded in structural arrangements such as hierarchy, regulated career paths, feedback procedures, and work methodologies. By contrast, the socio-ideological layer of control, works on social identity and identification, through ideas of social positioning, career orientations, subordination and obedience, loyalty and commitment, the discourse of the self as a part of a collective and corporate ‘we’, and the homogenization of selves. While technocratic control focuses on the behavioural level, bureaucracy also exercises a socio-ideological influence. Bureaucratic structures create centrally organized standardized, formalized, rationalized, and routinized experiences, facilitating the development of a shared universe as well as stimulating a shared identity. (The research thus allows for a fresh reading of some of the classics of organization analysis, such as The Aston Studies, reinterpreting their structural variables as power practices.) The iron cage of bureaucracy is enmeshed with a web of soft domination, as Courpasson (2000/2002) has argued. The iron cage of metal combined with a mental cage of subjectivity regulates and influences a broad spectrum of organizational members’ activities, feelings, thinking, and self-understandings. The crucial element in the mental cage is the degree of identification with the company and its career options. As the metaphorical metal cage loosens, the mental cage tightens around subjects. There is not much resistance visible in the mental cage; however, in a further contribution it becomes possible to see that socio-ideological controls


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contain their own potential for subversion and resistance. Beverley Hawkins contributes a discussion of ‘Double Agents: Gendered Organizational Culture, Control and Resistance’, in which employees, who are recruitment ‘consultants’ (mis)use corporate culture artefacts (symbols, rituals, myths, and so on) as resources in their own cultural production. In organizational ceremonies clearly inappropriately gendered categories organized activities; however, these could be and were used to undercut the sense that these ceremonies sought to secure. Individuals, then, do not passively absorb managerial cultural control techniques; they actively interpret, reproduce, and alter the meanings of practices based upon the same cultural frame of reference as these goals, in this case, a gendered frame. Corporate culture and resistance practices employ overlapping cultural resources, with ambiguous effects. The gendered corporate culture demonstrated three ways in which culture was engaged: defiance, parody, and ritual. The author is well aware that tensions exist within many of the more mechanical accounts of resistance seen as a necessary corollary of power relations, even when embodied in seemingly slight, individualistic, and disorganized practices of ambivalence (Casey 1995), cynicism (Fleming and Sewell 2002), or parody (Hodgson 2005; Hopfl 2002), through which employees may be seen to question organizations and their values, or vent their frustration and overcome the monotony of work (Burawoy 1982). Resistance is seen to encompass not only visible challenges and changes to an established social order, but also the coping strategies of individuals within existing narratives (Thomas and Davies 2005; see also Knights and McCabe 2000). Indeed, for resistance to be meaningful, it must partake of some elements of overlapping narrative space. While the chapter problematizes gendered discourse, it seems to assume that masculinity is clearly a privileged, if problematic, big D discourse in many organizations. In social science generally, maleness is often treated in terms of notions of ‘hegemonic masculinity’ where authors such as Connell (1995) have imported the Gramscian notion of ‘hegemony’ from earlier studies of class formation into the field of gender relations and identity. Connell’s use of the term is imprecise. On the one hand there is a more overtly Gramscian meaning of cultural or ideological leadership to ensure popular or mass consent to particular forms of rule; on the other hand hegemony is used to refer descriptively to dominant conceptions of what manhood really entails, either in the abstract or by reference to empirical cases. Many powerful men fail to conform to these stereotypes even though the discourses that promote them may be widely used. The separation of essentialist notions of masculinity from equally essentialist notions of femininity is a topic that is still an issue in discussions of gender and organization. Gender relations and questions of identity are closely related to issues of sexuality and sexual relations at work. A traditional view of the separation of the public and the private sphere as an element of Weberian


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rationalization used to see sexuality as something excluded from the public realm of organizations and restricted to the private spheres of pleasure, but this view fails to take account of the long-standing organization and organizations of the sex industry. Brothels have long been social arenas in which men of affairs might relax away, hopefully, from prying eyes, and in which young women might find money and, perhaps, some pleasure, along with exploitation. But sexuality enters organizations more directly than merely in the recreational pursuits of male employees and the routines of female sex workers (Linstead and Brewis 1999); organizations themselves and the roles available in them are increasingly masculinized (Ferguson 1984), as well as feminized (Filby 1992; Abbot and Tyler 1998; Gherardi 1995; Fondas 1997) in sexualized modes of being, especially in front-line office and service work. Sexuality manifests itself in organizations as a field of battle in various ways. In Fleming’s discussion of ‘Sexuality, Power and Resistance in the Workplace’, everyday expressions of different sexual identities – gay, straight, masculinized, feminized – are, in organizational terms, forms of sexuality that can be as easily used for managerial control, become a site of empowerment, or an object of resistance. (While I could have placed this contribution in the section on Power and Resistance I decided that, as a treatment of sexuality, a key component of identity, that I would place it here.) In the contribution by Diya Das, Ravi Dharwadkar, and Pamela Brandes on ‘The Importance of being “Indian”: Identity Centrality and Work Outcomes in an Off-Shored Call Center in India’, the intersection of global and transnational service work is used to explore issues of the centrality of national identity, religious identity, and occupational identity, along with organizational identity. Organizational identification refers to the process by which membership in an organization becomes a defining aspect of an individual’s self-concept. As is clear from the previous contributions this is something that many organizations do not leave to chance but seek to engineer. For instance, employees in these Indian call centres are expected to act as if they were in the country of the caller, and were at ease with its idioms and speech, so that the customer retains the illusion of talking to a helpful voice familiar with her and her problems. In short, national and religious identities must be concealed. Indian employees receive intensive voice and accent training, through which they are required to eliminate or at least significantly reduce their Indian accent(s), and are encouraged to adopt the accents of the customers’ country. In addition, they adopt a name that would be common in the country they serve – so they became Angie, say, rather than Anarghya. International call centres in India provide a unique experience for the employees whereby within the organization, every night, they live with a different name and pretend to live somewhere that they are not actually physically located in. The experience has been described as one of virtual migration. Such identity demands, we argue, would make national identity an extremely crucial social category in these workplaces.


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Employees often experience a surge of consciousness about their national identities as they may often be subject to hostility by customers who suspect the ‘real’ nationality of the callers and abuse them as imposters. The more firms try to suppress the local and highlight the global the more the local/ national can become critical in a variety of different ways. Masking and concealing the local would have different implications for employees depending on the strength of their national identity. The same is true of religious identity: for a profoundly Muslim person, for instance, becoming a Michael rather than a Mohammed is a real renunciation of identity. In the empirical results of the study that the authors conducted into identity, they found that national identity had the highest salience, followed by occupational and organizational identity, with religious identity being the least salient in its prediction of measures of work outcomes. The concept of organizational identity really developed as a result of the foundational contribution of Albert and Whetten (1985). In 2006 David Whetten returned to the themes of that article from twenty years previously. He iterated the three principle components of his idea of identity: first, the ideational component, which equated organizational identity with members’ shared beliefs regarding the question ‘Who are we as an organization?’ Second, the definitional component, which proposed a specific conceptual domain for organizational identity, characterized as the central, enduring, and distinctive features of an organization. Third, the phenomenological component, which posited that identity-related discourse was most likely to be observed in conjunction with profound organizational experiences. In this contribution these characteristics are teased out in detail, in counterpoint to some critics, to establish organizational identity in terms of referents that are known by the distinctive functions they perform, the distinctive way in which they are structured, and the distinctive organizational circumstances that provoke their use. The main criticism of the organizational identity concept as Whetten has deployed it is that it makes the notion both too static and too likely to be identified exclusively with senior managerial wish-fulfilment rather than the reality of the ways in which organizations are represented and their representations received. An example of a contribution that is diametrically opposed to Whetten’s conception follows (although it does not cite Whetten’s work, it is evident that it shares little in the way of assumptions with it). Harrison C. White, Frédéric C. Godart, and Victor P. Corona contribute a chapter that addresses ‘Mobilizing Identities: Uncertainty and Control in Strategy’, in which they dispute the common-sense dictum (and the basis for Whetten’s work) that organizations have identities. They argue instead that organizational identities are reshaped with different strategies, and that network and institutional infrastructures have a significant impact on the viabilities of strategic stances, along with rhetorics. In complex settings, organizations’ overall identity can only subsist out of interactions among many identities


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and then, they suggest, only as triggered by the erratic and unexpected. Organizations will seek to mobilize strategy to subsume other possible bases of identity than those conjured up in the strategists’ plans and seek to use their rhetoric to outflank these other challenges to the posited identity. Hence, strategies are born out of clashes and conflict rather than consensus and rational planning per se. Their rhetoric has to travel across many different contexts, far and fast. Posited identities for organization emerge from a process that comes from clashes among identities as they seek control in an environment suffused with uncertainty. ‘Organization’ should be thought of as the trace left behind by strategies of identities for mobilizing among other identities, at any level. Hence, identity does not flow from organization and is not dependent on the central, enduring and distinctive features of an organization; on the contrary it is the trace of competing rhetorics. Finally, in this section, is a chapter that considers the question of embryonic organizational identity – when organizations have no clear sense of what their identity is – by Stewart Clegg, Carl Rhodes, and Martin Kornberger, titled ‘Desperately Seeking Legitimacy: Organizational Identity and Emerging Industries’. They argue that organizations operate according to an established order of things; otherwise the identity that they espouse would not make sense. Where no such order is established, such as in emerging industries, they must construct one for themselves – they ‘must learn new roles without having old models, and they must establish ties in an environment that does not acknowledge their existence’ (Aldrich and Fiol 1994: 648). Organizational identity, they argue, is best understood in terms of the relationship between temporal difference (that is, the performance of a stable identity over time) and spatial difference (that is, by locating organizational identity in relation to other firms, both similar and different). It is the relationship between these two forms of difference, they argue, that enables the construction of a legitimate sense of organizational identity. Hence, the contribution combines those theories of organizational identity that see it as both dynamic (for example Gioia, Schultz, and Corley 2000) and temporal (for example Clegg, Kornberger, and Rhodes 2005), with those that construe identity in terms of interorganizational and intra-industry comparison (for example Porac, Thomas, Wilson, Paton, and Kafner 1995; DiMaggio and Powell 1983). Where an industry is defined by the ways that firms identify comparable sets of other firms considered to be rivals in the same industry (Porac and Rosa 1996), the identity of individual organizations can be expected to involve an attempt to establish a unique position (identity) within that industry, while at the same time being similar enough with other firms in the industry so as to still be able to define themselves in relation to it. The development and maturation of an industry is a process by which the industry moves from conditions of unstable, incomplete, and disjointed conceptual systems to con-


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ditions of coherent inter-member sensemaking. In such a process, identity can never be thought of as being accomplished at one point in time. It is the ongoing interaction between multiple identities that creates the dynamic and dialectic struggle between being and becoming. To illustrate how organizations, through their managers, engage in such processes of identity formation, the chapter reports an empirical analysis of data drawn from the business coaching industry in Australia, which serves to demonstrate how a group of managers attempted, discursively, to secure a sense of organizational identity in an ambiguously defined industry environment. The coaches investigated were haunted by ontological insecurity and sought to create a stable identity (Collinson 2003) and to construct a discourse that secured their identity, using spatial and temporal strategies and resources to do so. Stakeholders enacted the performance of identity not for its own sake, but in order to facilitate legitimacy formation as the endorsement and support of their organization’s actions and its goals. Such legitimacy can be regarded as ‘a generalized perception or assumption that the actions of an entity are desirable, proper, or appropriate within some socially constructed system of norms, values, beliefs, and definitions’ (Suchman 1995: 574). The evidence supported the view that identity is something that can be regarded as conflictual, multiple, and negotiated, in which discursive identity work proposes a secure identity as a ‘staging post to the future’ (Linstead and Thomas 2002: 16) that would both reduce and hide conflict and negate the plurality. So, while organizations might desire a sense of stable identity, this is only the case because of the potential for multiplicity of both self and other. Thus, identity plurality and identity stability can be seen not as alternative ‘perspectives’ through which to consider identity, but rather mutually constitutive discursive conditions in the balance of which identity tentatively emerges.

Cultures and Organizations The section opens with a synoptic review by Calvin Morrill of ‘Culture and Organization Theory’. The author demonstartes how, in the study of organizations, a split has opened up between those who maintain a focus on organizations as rational instruments, or tools, and those who see them as patterns of culture oriented around norms, claims to legitimacy, and the symbolism and artefacts that embedded these claims and counter-claims. Business consultants, such as Tom Peters, recognized organization culture’s potential for moulding individuals and collaborative relations in the service of management in the early 1980s when questions of culture came into renewed focus due to the perception of the Japanese threat as having organizational (and national) cultural roots. Consultancies mushroomed that claimed to be able to build organizational cultures akin to communities or tight-knit ‘clans’,


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replete with images of mutual support, solidarity, and commitment. Meanwhile, more anthropologically oriented researchers, horrified at this instrumental, naive, and managerialist appropriation of ‘culture’, enquired into the topic in terms of a more conflict-oriented, and fragmentary view, questioning the managerialist’s unitary assumptions. These directions are reviewed under the rubric of change, boundaries and deviance. What is required now, suggests Morrill, is a reworking of existing organization theory and research through integrating accounts of culture, power, and agency. In the following chapter, by Stewart Clegg, Tyrone Pitsis, Thekla RuraPolley, and Marton Marosszeky, organization culture is considered as a consciously designed phenomenon. In many ways, it answers to the call made by Morrill for a focus on power, culture, and agency. The authors use the concept of ‘governmentality’ to achieve this focus. The concept of governmentality was developed by Foucault to address the specificity of contemporary neo-liberal forms of governance – premised on the active consent and subjugation of subjects, rather than their oppression, domination, or external control. These neo-liberal forms of governance are evident in new forms of alliance contracting in the construction industry. Project management has been a historically evolving field: the major innovations in organization form in the sector are reviewed, before considering the specific management practices of surveillance and control typically associated with governance in these projects. The article reports on an example of governmentality applied to the practice of project management. While governmentality refers to the design of project governance as an activity, the management of projects as a mode of organization, irrespective of the mode of governance, is highly complex and uncertain. These themes have been widely addressed in organization theory and recent treatments of them that combine transaction costs and resource dependence perspectives are drawn on. Projects also display an acute sense of temporality as Schutzian-influenced approaches have explored. In keeping with what one would expect from Morrill’s account, economies in authoritative surveillance were sought through building collaborative commitment and transparency into the moral fibre of a project. The governmental tools used to do this were a strong project culture, monetized key performance indicators, and a stakeholder conception of the project, to bind different organizational stakeholders together. Governmentality projects premised on stakeholder conceptions are particularly susceptible to discrepancies between ambition and outcome. In such a context the constant injunction to improve may itself be an integral part of the governmental method. Hence, governmentality is particularly appropriate for understanding quality management issues as inducing, when taken seriously, a more or less permanent organizational neurosis that one could do better. Suzana Braga Rodrigues is a Brazilian academic who has spent much of her career between Brazil and, latterly, the UK. She has contributed a number


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of studies of organization culture to the literature, drawing on a longitudinal programme of research into a Brazilian Telco as it moved from the public to the private sector. I have chosen as a representative contribution her account of ‘The Political Dynamics of Organizational Culture in an Institutionalized Environment’. The article presents a rare historical and contextual account of organizational culture. By focusing on a long slice of the diachronic dimension, by organization studies perspectives, she provides insight into Martin’s (1992, 2000) views of cultural integration, differentiation, and fragmentation as they unfold politically over time. Most studies of organizational culture, including those that focus on the three perspectives, have been cross-sectional and therefore unable to explore in any depth the questions of how and why culture changes in the direction of differentiation or otherwise over time. Rodrigues shows that institutional forces interact with internal political actors in organizational culture change. Institutions empower or disempower certain categories of actors and create or deactivate the rules that foster alliances and different social formations. When a powerful group or leading coalition supports an organizational culture it tends to be integrated; where there is incapacity by the leading group to satisfy the interests of other groups, fragmentation is likely. The more institutionalized an organization’s environment, the more likely it will be that institutional agencies will influence its prevailing culture. In such environments, power and legitimacy do not necessarily cohere, where the leadership’s mandate is controlled from above by external institutional actors. The dynamics of culture change are seen to centre on the confluence of internal political forces with external institutional parameters, and cultural change is a multifaceted and multilevel process. Whether change pushes culture in organizations in the direction either of cultural integration or differentiation depends on the legitimacy of internal coalitions and their capacity to sustain integrative ideals. Students confronting the organizational culture literature confront a paradox: institutional theorists argue that organizations copy one another’s practices, resulting in substantial isomorphism across organizations, whereas culture theorists observe that organizations institutionalize distinctive cultures comprising practices premised on meaning that is socially constructed within organizations through the creation of unique practices and the collective attribution of significance and identity to those practices. The paradox arose as a result of reaction against the dominant functionalism of the 1970s, where organization forms were regarded as functional adaptations to environmental contingencies. The reaction was shaped differently by different allegiances: based in a sociological tradition, institutional theorists seek similarities among organizations; being based in the symbolic anthropological and social psychological traditions, organizational culture researchers find similarities across individuals within organizations. Building on the paradox and trying to resolve it, Jesper Strandgaard Pedersen and Frank Dobbin conducted research on management schools which suggested that organizations


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pursue individuation through seeking uniqueness, and signal legitimacy through commonality. Organizations make claims to being a recognizable member of a genus, and species, but also make claims to being distinct. They do so simultaneously, with organizations bridging the two processes in four ways, which the authors dub imitation, hybridization, transmutation, and immunization. Culture is one of the most widely used concepts in organization studies; as we shall see, as well as being used to refer to internal characteristics of organizations it is also widely used to refer to national cultures and their framing of organizations. One important element in this work has been the field of cross-cultural studies of management, which has long been dominated by Hofstede. Hofstede has championed a view of unique national cultures, variable in terms of a limited number of pattern variables. If it is a big assumption to think that organizations have a singular culture, how much bigger is the assumption that countries have a singular national culture? And that it can be measured? Some researchers argue that we can measure an organization’s culture and its effects on performance (see Gordon and DiTomaso 1992). One prominent researcher along these lines is Ashkenasy (2003), for whom values are the core component of organizational cultures. He says that conceptions of organization culture are more reliable when they can be measured rather than just described and argues that the concept of a value system allows you to do this. Hofstede (1980) goes one step further: he says that you can measure the values of a national culture. Geert Hofstede, the writer best known for having measured national culture, in terms of values, studied only one organization – but he studied it in over forty countries! It is now widely known that the unidentified organization that Hofstede (1980) reported on in his book Culture’s Consequences: International Differences in Work-Related Values was the multinational company IBM. He describes culture as ‘mental programming’, as ‘software of the mind’, as ‘subjective’. Hofstede is a cultural determinist: for him the national culture will determine the shape of the organization culture. While the population of a nation can be differentiated on many grounds, Hofstede claims that, nonetheless, a national population shares a unique culture. His empirical basis for this claim, however, is a statistical averaging of the principal data – questionnaire responses from IBM employees. His conception of a nationally unique culture derive from a statistical average based on individuals’ views, which he calls a ‘central tendency’ (1991: 253), or ‘an average tendency’ (1991: 253). In other words, it is a statistical artefact. Hofstede’s data drew on a data bank of 75,000 employee attitude surveys undertaken around 1967 and 1973 within IBM subsidiaries in sixty-six countries, which he analysed statistically. He found that the data demonstrated that there were four central dimensions of a national culture, such that forty out of the sixty-six countries in which the IBM subsidiaries were located could be given a comparative score on each of these four dimensions (1980). Hofstede defines these dimensions as follows: Power distance: ‘the extent to which the less powerful members of organizations and


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institutions (like the family) expect and accept that power is distributed unequally’ (Hofstede and Peterson 2000: 401); Uncertainty avoidance: ‘intolerance for uncertainty and ambiguity’ (Hofstede and Peterson 2000: 401); Individualism versus collectivism: ‘the extent to which individuals are integrated into groups’ (Hofstede and Peterson 2000: 401); Masculinity versus femininity: ‘assertiveness and competitiveness versus modesty and caring’ (Hofstede and Peterson 2000: 401). Hofstede arrived at the national patterns by averaging the means of the distribution of the data collected on individuals in terms of the national samples. Consistent patterns were established in terms of national variation – variation according to the means, which were, of course, statistical devices for representing the sum of individual variance. The upshot would be similar to saying that the average Dutch person is taller than the average Chinese person; the statement accepts that the average is a summary device. The average tells you nothing about what any particular Dutch or Chinese person’s height may be any more than it informs you about the values they hold. An average of values, although it is economical, is about as meaningful as an average of height. Just as there would be wide variance in the height of any given population so there would be wide variance in the values of that population, a point that is well established in McSweeney’s critique of ‘Hofstede’s Model of National Cultural Differences and Their Consequences: A Triumph of Faith – A Failure of Analysis’. As he says, Hofstede assumes that it is national cultures that produce the variance in his data but provides no evidence to support the assumption; any other classification made on the basis of another assumption would have done just as well – or as badly – as an explanatory device. To accept Hofstede’s analysis is to assume the cultural homogeneity of nations – that lines on a map inscribe a unitary, patterned, and consistent common culture. In the vast majority of cases in the contemporary world, this is hardly feasible. There are few singularly ethnically, linguistically, and culturally homogeneous countries among the major nations in the world today. Indeed, one of the countries that Hofstede (1980) treated as a unitary cultural space in his study, Yugoslavia, no longer exists as such – precisely because it was not a unitary cultural space in the first place, as indicated by the horrors of the ‘ethnic cleansing’ and associated mass murders in the early 1990s that were its major contribution to world affairs. In many countries, modern identities are much more likely to be plural than singular, as shown in hybrid, hyphenated identities such as Anglo-Indian, VietAustralian, and so on. Will the diversity that the organization’s members display in their everyday life not be reflected as diversity in the organization as well? You could argue that it is precisely because organizations are able to pick and choose who joins them – through human resource management practices – that they may be said to have cultures (but the countries they operate in also have equal employment and anti-discrimination laws!). In other words, they select people to fit the culture. Contrary to this viewpoint,


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however, many organizations have been riven by bitter internal conflicts, even when professionally managed, which make the idea of their having only one culture seem questionable. Interestingly, popular cultural representations, more attuned to the comedic and dramatic possibilities of cultural tensions than presumed universals, seem closer to the mark than Hofstede. Organization theory is outflanked by Homer Simpson, suggests Carl Rhodes, in his contribution ‘D’Oh: The Simpsons, Popular Culture, and the Organizational Carnival’. Organizations are everywhere in television and, if we want to look for critical accounts of contemporary organizations, then the wickedly satirical and funny, The Simpsons, is the place to go, he suggests. Using Bakhtin’s analysis of the carnival, Rhodes subjects the Simpsons to organizational analysis, finding in bumbling Homer Simpson a grotesque realist critique of contemporary management and organizations. Popular culture is increasingly finding its way into the objects of analysis of organizations studies; given that one of its possible originary points was Weber’s detailed analysis of nineteenth-century popular culture, this is a turn that has precedent and is long overdue (see Clegg 1995, 2005). Further justification for it is found in Alf Rehn’s chapter on ‘Pop (Culture) Goes the Organization: On Highbrow, Lowbrow and Hybrids in Studying Popular Culture within Organization Studies’. He argues that any study of management and organization always involves a study of popular culture. Nonetheless, organization studies are marked by condescension towards the popular and genuflection to the highbrow. Studying popular culture should not be seen merely as an amusing niche within organization studies but can bring something to cultural studies as well. Rehn commences analysis with investigation of the ‘Tycoon’ genre of computer games, the television show, Dallas, and Japanese manga comic book representations of Warren Buffet, as potent readings of business situated in popular culture. Later, some of the same territory that Clegg (2005) traversed in terms of popular culture – The Apprentice and The Office – is also examined. The former is particularly interesting, in that for young people with little or no work experience watching the show it presents a model of authoritarian bullying relations as normal for superordinates and chicanery and trickery as normal for subordinates – much as The Simpsons does, in fact.

Power/Organization Power relations are the central concept of the social sciences because they anchor order. Mark Haugaard argues that in complex societies social power is based on the reproduction of social order; a form of power that is more important in such contexts than is coercion. Simpler conceptions of power tend to see it as coercive: where some agent requires some other agent to


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do something that the other agent would prefer not to do but with which they comply, either because of the threat of sanctions or, in some cases, because of some inducement. An inducement is, of course, a threat at one stage removed: ‘don’t do this and you won’t get that’. It is for this reason that the assertion that all organization represents a fair exchange because the balance of organization inducement and employee contributions would not produce the equilibrium position that the organization is assumed to be in, are false; what is an inducement varies with circumstances and contexts. If circumstances and context dictate that this job must be accepted on those terms and that the alternative is no job, then the inducements are clearly coercive. The whole labour market is, in fact, a vast apparatus of compulsion organized through the appearance of inducements. More complex and sophisticated accounts of power argue that power is an outcome of the creation of social order which goes beyond coercion. Actors reproduce social order which constrains, and is responsible for relations of power and powerlessness, but it also facilitates phenomena by conferring upon actors a capacity for social action. Such a capacity enables them to make things happen which would not otherwise occur; a form of power that can be exercised as ‘power to’ or ‘power over’ in the interests of all, contrary to their interests, for collective goals or solely for selfish ends. In this more sophisticated account of power, Haugaard argues, there are seven well-developed options in broader social theory.1 In each, power is created by a different set of phenomena: according to Parsons, it is created by system consensus directed towards systems goals; Luhmann sees the key elements to be trust in system reproduction; Barnes maintains that power is produced by self-reinforcing knowledge of rings of reference which define objects; for Giddens the capacity for social action derives from structuration; for Bachrach and Baratz it is the bias of a system that creates power; for Lukes it is ‘false consciousness’; for Foucault it is an inseparable link between power and knowledge; for Clegg it is circuits of power that constitute social order; Arendt focuses on the ability to act in concert through the creation of legitimate polities; while for Weber and the Weberians, elements of coercion enter into the shaping of power relations. From Haugaard’s account it is possible to construct a typology that adds some organizational examples to those that he provides, in order to see how the different elements of the theoretical synthesis that he produces can address different concrete aspects of power in organizations. The chapter repays careful reading as it is a masterly synthesis of a great deal of important social theory. In Table 1 a summary of the argument and its implications for organizational analysis is provided. The following contribution starts from the simple definition of power offered by one of its pre-eminent ‘simple’ theorists: Robert Dahl. Galit Ailon asks ‘What B Would Otherwise Do?’ The point of asking the question is to offer a critique of conceptualizations of ‘power’ in organizational theory. In


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Discipline

Coercion

Weber, Dahl, Bachrach and Baratz, Mann and Poggi

‘False consciousness’

Lukes

Foucault

Systems of thought

Foucault

Power/knowledge, obligatory passage points

System bias

Bachrach and Baratz

Foucault and Clegg

Social order

For whom power is created from

Parsons, Luhmann, Barnes, Haugaard, Clegg, and Giddens

Theorists

Natural power as a base: violence and coercion as a substitute for the creation of social power

Routine is used to make actors predictable through the inculcation of practical consciousness knowledge

Social order has to appear as non-arbitrary

‘Power over’ based upon social knowledge that is not discursively challenged. Empowerment through the transfer of knowledge from practical to discursive consciousness

Certain acts of structuration are incommensurable with particular interpretive horizons

Order precludes certain actions: destructuration

Causal predictability created through the reproduction of meaning; theorized as structuration and confirmingstructuration

Theoretical example

Table 1: Adapting Haugaard for organization studies

Organizational strike-breaking; lockouts; bonded and indentured labourers who are unfree to quit; resource extraction against the wishes and interests of local communities but in cahoots with local comprador elites

The importance of organizational routines that are drilled into the being of organizational members and that shape the practices of work: for example, Taylor’s scientific management as a political economy of the body; the realization that, as a skilled knowledge worker, you make your pay from 9 to 5 (in the organization’s time) and your promotion from 5 to 9 (in your time)

The organizational fixity of processes, procedures, and practices is normalized such that deviant action cannot achieve its ends and is thus not productive

Acceptance of one’s subordinated position in the organization through translation of its subordination into a sphere of privilege: e.g., workingclass ‘lads’ for whom dirty hands and overalls equate with masculinity while white-collar work is equated with femininity. Empowerment occurs as a result of a coming-to-another-awareness of the way things are, perhaps through tutelage or critical incidents redefining reality

The reification of missions and visions; the ordering of certain forms of privileged disciplinary knowledge

Selection biases embedded in the actually existing structure of organizations: freemasonry, forms of gendered, ethnic, religious, or other identity exclusion

Training, induction, workshops, retreats, organizational communications

Organization example

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Table 2: What organization theorists think B would otherwise do Theorists

Theory

What B would otherwise do

F W Taylor Oliver Williamson Jensen and Meckling

Scientific Management Transaction Cost Economics Agency Theory

Cheat

Mayo March and Simon Schein; Ouchi; Deal and Kennedy

uman Relations Approach H Decision-Making Approach Managerialist Versions of Culture

Go astray

Braverman Calás and Smircich

Labour Process Theory Feminist Theories of Organization

Be emancipated, (according to different criteria of what constitutes emancipation )

Emerson; Pfeffer and Salancik Crozier Hickson et al.

Resource Dependence Theory Uncertainty Theory Strategic Contingencies Theory

Carry on regardless

Foucault nights and Willmott, and K collaborators

Power/Knowledge Approaches Subjectivity + Labour Process Theorists

Assert subjective resistance more forcefully

Dahl’s original applications of his definition of power as an A getting a B to do something that the B would otherwise not do, what the ‘otherwise’ is seems quite clear; a son not mowing the lawn for his father, for instance. However, such simple examples hardly capture the complexity of power in organizations. What Ailon does is to build a typology of what the normative assumptions embedded in theory suggests the otherwise would be. Again, for ease of exposition I have represented these in tabular form (see Table 2). The chapter goes on to consider what, in emic terms (those of the subjects rather than the analysts), B might actually do. The problem is that, in terms of the problematic of several of the approaches considered, such a question does not make analytical sense for if what B might think is the source of their oppression how can it make them free? (In this respect it is worth reading the conclusions of this chapter again after re-reading the synthetic model that Haugaard produces and asking oneself to what extent it allows one to address the emic question.) Van Iterson and Clegg’s discussion of ‘The Politics of Gossip and Denial in Interorganizational Relations’ builds on Bachrach and Baratz’s (1962) approach to the analysis of ‘non-issues’ in order to analyse the strange case of the Australian Wheat Board’s role in the Iraqi Oil-for-Food bribery scandal and its relation to the Federal Government of Australia. What is strange is the discursively apparent but realistically unbelievable non-relation that was promoted as a defence against changes of complicity in malfeasance by both the Australian Wheat Board Organization and the federal government’s representatives. Resistance has been a core topic in organization theory for a long time. Scientific management began as a practice designed to minimize resistance


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by instilling orderly rule in the workplace; in the 1940s resistance to change became a hot topic; in the 1970s labour process theorists chided Braverman for not installing resistance in his analysis, and, ever since, have been discovering new forms of its instantiation. One accounting of these is provided by Peter Fleming in his contribution on ‘Metaphors of Resistance’. The article concentrates on cynicism as an employee response to culture management, theorized as resistance. It sees cynicism as entailing the ongoing production of subjective space rather than just its defence or distancing. There has been a tendency in a great deal of the literature about power and resistance to see examples of power as ‘bad’ and resistance as ‘good’. The former represents the cunning of those in control while the latter represents the many covert and occasionally overt ways that the controlled can reclaim a little space for themselves, even if only psychic. In a beautifully constructed set of reflections on the sterility of the constant opposition of these themes, Graham Sewell introduces us to the metaphors of the ‘the fox’ and the ‘hedgehog’. (I shall not spoil the charm of the account by revealing all the complexities of these personae.) As he rightly suggests, in an echo of emic thought, the clash between these two ways of seeing things represents not so much anything embedded in the everyday life of organizations, as the interpretive apparatuses that organization theorists bring to bear on them. The confrontation between a desire to inscribe power and consent as good and resistance as bad, or the contrary position, that the imposition of control through power relations is bad and resistance to it is good, represents nothing so much as a clash of values. Let’s be clear: resistance would not have the iconic status it has achieved in many labour process theories if its theorists were not demonstrating their commitment to a view of the world shaped by a political antipathy to capitalist ‘freedoms’. Likewise, the celebration of power relations as authoritatively given and thus as necessarily good and resistance to them as deviant and coercive, would make no sense except in a world view shaped by a functionalist commitment to order and authority as the anchor of normalcy, and a predisposition to accept whatever passes for order organizationally, as in fact, legitimate. Where the one discourse sees coercion the other sees consent: a clash of grand narratives with political axes to grind over the data of everyday organizational life. Of course, these grand narratives or big D discourses are not equivalents. The discourse of order and consent and power and legitimation dominates the landscape; it organizes almost all organizational life, and inscribes itself in civil society as well. Most of the time, if power theorists such as Lukes are correct, we don’t even notice big D domination, so accustomed are we to its normalcy. When we do recognize it, as it rubs up against our local projects in work and elsewhere, suggests Sewell, we manage through ironic accommodation to the social facts of life as we are obliged to live them. Most of the time, there is little clash between the discourse of domination and consent and the discourse of emancipation and resistance. When such clashes occur, as Sewell


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suggests, the weaker discourse is usually overwhelmed. A rare and beautiful essay for organization theory! The issue of membership and its terms stands at the heart of debates about power and resistance in organizations. What does being a member entail and to what extent does membership constitute identity on terms that favour whom or what? From this basic question one can address issues of selfhood, subjectivity, and existential autonomy in one direction, issues of the legitimacy of organizational control in another dimension, and issues of how those identities that are taken-for-granted are shaped not only organizationally but also institutionally in a further direction. It is the latter direction that is followed by Thomas Lawrence in his discussion of ‘Rituals and Resistance: Membership Dynamics in Professional Fields’. The discussion begins firmly from within the institutional theory camp, with DiMaggio’s (1991: 267) argument that institutional membership is critical to organizations, because ‘[f]ield boundaries, as they are perceived by participants, affect how organizations select models for emulation, where they focus information-gathering energy, and where they recruit personnel’. DiMaggio and Powell (1983) identified the structuring of membership and the negotiation and construction of field boundaries, together with the ‘emergence of sharply defined interorganizational structures of domination and patterns of coalition’ (DiMaggio and Powell 1983: 148) as central issues in the creation of institutional fields. Lawrence’s particular object of analysis is the construction of the professional field of environmental audit as it has been constituted by Canadian public accountants. He develops an institutional theory of membership in professional fields through the development of a theoretical framework that highlights the importance of firmlevel action in constituting the membership rules of professional fields, which draws on important but neglected sociologists in organization studies, such as Goffman, and his account of ‘interaction rituals’. In professional fields, interaction rituals define the boundaries of the profession by structuring the relationships among professionals, clients, regulators, and other stakeholders. Consequently, interaction rituals also structure the distribution of the field’s economic benefits. Hence, these boundaries and the rituals that sustain them are likely to be resisted by those who see their interests potentially compromised by this assertion of membership in a field. Such potentially excluded actors will strive to gain access to privileged positions or attempt to enact new rituals in order to change institutional rules and redistribute access to sources of reward, status, and prestige in the field – what Bourdieu labels as various types of capital. Exogenous contingencies of social and technological change always have the potential to reconfigure the circuits of power in any field. The membership of professional fields may be transformed either through the impact of such external disruptions or through the strategies of interested actors engaged in the field as it is being configured. On the basis of research conducted into environmental audit as it emerged in Canada, using this framework he produces


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an empirically based typology of membership strategies in professional fields. The strategies are those of association, stratification, and colonization. Sally Davenport and Shirley Leitch contribute a study of ‘Circuits of Power in Practice: Strategic Ambiguity as Delegation of Authority’ to the volume, which uses Clegg’s (1989) ‘circuits of power’ framework in an empirical investigation of New Zealand research policies. It is an instructive empirical example of Haugaard’s example of power that works through organizationally fixing processes, procedures, and practices; it does so in such a way as to redefine the parameters of the normal and the deviant in a field of interorganizational relations. It represents an instance of subtle methods of creative engagement within a field, that of research policy and funding, within which an agency delegates authority to stakeholders through its use of strategic ambiguity, thereby increasing its own power, but also empowering the stakeholders to respond. These responses may well be creative but their creativity can involve dissent through both active and passive resistance. Resistance to strategic ambiguity can be viewed as a means of reducing the perceived power of the agency creating the ambiguity in the field in the first place. In situations where an organization is dependent on altering stakeholder behaviour in an institutional field in order to achieve results, the high discretion associated with the use of strategically ambiguous forms of intervention is likely to stimulate creativity in the field. The focus shifts with the final contributions to the discussion of power relations. In ‘Necrocapitalism’, Subhabrata Bobby Banerjee develops the concept of necrocapitalism, defined as contemporary forms of organizational accumulation that involve dispossession and the subjugation of life to the power of death. It is an excellent account of the coercive category of power that Haugaard defines in terms of natural power involving violence and coercion as a substitute for the creation of social power. Coercive power works institutionally, materially, and discursively in the political economy with the results of violence and dispossession. Contemporary forms of organizational accumulation that are rarely addressed in the managerialist literature involve dispossession and death and are thus described as necrocapitalist practices. Examples of these include the impact of the resources industry in developing countries and the privatization of war and the military. Banerjee draws on contributions from classic social science discussions of colonialism and imperialism. Three characteristics of colonialism are the domination of physical space, usually to extract resources, creating not only long-standing dependency relations in economic terms but also cultural domination through the reformation of the indigenous and subjugated peoples’ minds (particularly in terms of knowledge systems and culture), and the incorporation of local economic histories into a Western perspective. Alllied with imperialism, the globe was carved up into a series of Western centres and ‘other’ peripheries. Imperialism also operates in economic, political, and cultural guises and is operationalized through different kinds of power:


lxxxviii Editor’s Introduction

institutional power (agencies such as the IMF, WTO, and the World Bank), economic power (of corporations and nation states), and discursive power that constructs and describes uncontested notions of ‘development’, ‘backwardness’, ‘subsistence economies’ while disallowing other narratives from emerging. Banerjee not only traces these manifestations of power but provides a number of examples, easily drawn from recent histories, of organizational violence committed on employees and citizens by both imperial states and imperialist corporations. Moreover, the boundary relations between states and corporations are blurring, especially in matters of warfare, where the state is increasingly outsourcing elements of war to the private sector. Colonialism and imperialism created export-oriented, often single-resource-based economies, centred on plantation agriculture of cash crops, or resource extraction, and today it is particularly the latter arena, dominated by a few global companies, that routinely commit violence and rains down devastation, in the process of developing regions and consorting with local elites, on communities that have the misfortune to be the recipients of their investments. Banerjee concludes by expressing an ambition for the future of science: New theoretical perspectives are required to rethink the relationship between the economy, the polity, and the corporation as alternatives to necrocapitalist practices. Emerging insights from a postcolonial critique of management and organizations can offer new theoretical avenues to explore less repressive regimes of management (Prasad 2003). These new perspectives may allow us to envision a future where sustainable development does not mean sustainable corporations, where the poor are not structurally adjusted by tightening their belts while loosening the belts of the rich, where biotechnology does not reduce the diversity of life into a replication of uniformity, where food exports do not lead to an increase in a nation’s GNP while their children starve, where billions of dollars are not spent developing drugs to cure balding and impotence while millions die elsewhere of malaria and tuberculosis.

Banerjee thus reconnects the reader to the outset of the journey through this book. He calls for an alternative history of the science of organizations, one that is socially relevant, echoing Starbuck, and one that is emancipatory. He is not alone: Michal Frenkel and Yehouda Shenhav propose ‘A Postcolonial Reading of Management and Organization Studies’ in a journey that takes the reader from binarism back to hybridity. The institutional auspices of organizations studies are something overwhelmingly situated in European and US universities. The hegemonic intellectualism of Western ways of knowing have been critiqued widely in the humanities and social sciences more generally in recent years, following critiques that flow from the postcolonial literature that Banerjee draws on: Orientalism, associated with the work of Edward Said (1978), and hybridity as a third space, associated with the work of Homi Bhabha (1994). Orientalism is founded on a binary This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.

Editor’s Introduction lxxxix

epistemology that necessitates a sharp distinction between colonizers and the colonized, whereas Bhabha’s work represents a hybrid epistemology, taking into consideration the fusion and the mutual effects of colonizers and the colonized. Orientalism and hybridity are often described as mutually exclusive: either as two consecutive phases in postcolonial theory or as two competing epistemologies. Their contribution examines the effect of the colonial encounter on the canonization of organization studies and management more generally as well as on the boundaries of it as a canon and argues, theoretically, that ‘Orientalism’ and ‘hybridity’ are neither competing nor mutually exclusive concepts, but rather two complementary aspects of the same process. Their argument is that the identity that has been canonized as the mainstream of management and organization studies followed two contradictory principles simultaneously at work: hybridization and purification. Hybridization refers to the mixing of practices between colonizers and the colonized, to the translation of texts and practices from the colonies to the metropole, and vice versa. Purification refers to the mechanisms that construct colonizers and colonized as two distinct and incommensurable, ontological zones. Examined from this point of view, such encounters were always hybrids, albeit that they were represented in purified binary terms of the West versus the rest. Historically, they argue, the construction of the Western discourse was clearly based on a system of omissions and exclusions, largely of the experiences of slavery and plantation modes of production, experiences which fed directly into early industrial practices but were excluded from formal academic accounts of the origins. Moreover, as they argue, where Orientalist assumptions were apparent in the corpus of a scholar, such as Elton Mayo, they were edited out of accounts of the work; the corpus was purified. Similar processes are seen to be at work in the evolution of international management as a field where the good is exclusively (rational) Western and the bad (irrational) non-Western practice. At its worst, this genre lapsed into pure condescension and stereotyping of non-Western practice that would not have been out of place in a ‘Black Sambo’ book or Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Management adopted an essentially colonial viewpoint casting the non-Western as the inferior ‘other’ while seeing ‘Western’ culture as a universal model. Management became the spearhead of neo-colonialism in the age of decolonization. Furthermore, it assisted in the reproduction of the West’s control of the global economy and culture, while at the same time increasing management’s ostensibly scientific legitimacy. Finally, in a reversal of theoretical directions, let us join Eduardo IbarraColado, in his investigation of ‘Organization Studies and Epistemic Coloniality in Latin America: Thinking Otherness from the Margins’. The article discusses the current state of organization studies in Latin America, disclosing the epistemic coloniality that prevails in the region. Rather than address local issues or develop locally relevant theories, the discourse is characterized by subservience to the icons of knowledge generated in a centre that is


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elsewhere: in North America or Europe. One consequence of this obeisance is that while the term ‘organization’ as an artifice facilitates the comparison of different realities through structural variables, such as we have seen critiqued in Hofstede’s work, any reality that escapes instrumental rationality and the logic of the market becomes virtually invisible as big D discourses of neo-liberalism shape local discourses. What is necessary, Ibarra-Colado concludes, is an appreciation of the organizational problems of Latin America from the vantage point of a research agenda built from original and local approaches that recognize otherness. Normally, the ideology of science calls for unified and global systems garnering ever more of the world in less and less propositional knowledge. It is a language game that almost anyone can be taught to play, as any look at some of the leading journals in the field will convince the reader. However, given the paucity of any worthwhile global theory or covering law propositions, other than the banal – as organizations increase in size they produce more documents and become more centralized – as Starbuck suggested near the outset of this journey, we might do better to heed the call of these last two contributors. Look for difference, not create sameness; look for relevance to local communities not just some abstracted community of science; be reflexive both theoretically and as a person embedded in local practices. And, if your local practices dominate the world of science and scholarship, be aware that difference is always possible and productive.

Notes 1. It should be apparent that, for the present author, organization theory is a sub-field of social theory more generally. I would erect no self-denying ordinances around a small piece of technicist turf with a sign that says, ‘Keep out, trespassing not allowed’ (on whose reverse there would also be inscribed ‘Keep out, trespassing not allowed’). Organization theory is a component of social science; social science should be constituted in relation to social theory if it is not to be some poor, empiricist, and orphaned progeny.

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Donaldson, L. (2005), ‘Vita Contemplativa: Following the Scientific Method: How I Became a Committed Functionalist and Positivist’, Organization Studies, 26(7): 1071‑1088. Drew, P. and Wootton, A. (eds) (1988), Erving Goffman: Exploring the Interaction Order, Boston, MA: Northeastern University Press. Ferguson, K.E. (1984), The Feminist Case against Bureaucracy, Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Filby, M.P. (1992), ‘The Figures, the Personalities and the Bums: Service Work and Sexuality’, Work, Employment and Society, 6(1): 23–42. Fine, G.A. and Smith, G.W.H. (eds) (2000), Erving Goffman, 4 vols, London: Sage. Fleming, P. and Sewell, G. (2002), ‘Looking for the Good Soldier, Švejk: Alternative Modalities of Resistance in the Contemporary Workplace’, Sociology, 36(4): 857–873. Florida, R. (2002), The Rise of the Creative Classes, New York: Basic Books. Fondas, N. (1997), ‘Feminization Unveiled: Management Qualities in Contemporary Writings’, Academy of Management Review, 22(1): 257–282. Foucault, M. (1977), Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, London: Allen & Lane. Foucault, M. (1979), ‘Governmentality’, Ideology and Consciousness, 6: 5–21.   Fournier, V. (1998), Stories of Development and Exploitation: Militant Voices in Enterprise Culture, Organization, 5: 55–80. Friedland, R. and Alford, R. (1991), ‘Bringing Society Back in: Symbols, Practices, and Institutional Contradictions’, in W.W. Powell and P.J. DiMaggio (eds), The New Institutionalism in Organizational Analysis, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Friedson, E. (1970), Professional Dominance: The Social Structure of Medical Care, Chicago: Aldine. Garfinkel, H. (1967), Studies in Ethnomethodology, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: PrenticeHall. Gephart, R.P., Jr, Boje, D.M., and Thatchenkary, T.J. (1996), ‘Postmodern Management and the Coming Crisis of Organizational Analysis’, in David M. Boje, R.P. Gephart, Jr, and T.J. Thatchenkary (eds), Postmodern Management and Organization Theory, Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, pp. 1–20. Gergen, K., Gergen, M., and Barrett, F. (2004), ‘Dialogue: Life and Death of the Organization’ in D. Grant, C. Hardy, C. Oswick, and L. Putnam (eds), The Sage Handbook of Organizational Discourse, London: Sage, pp. 39–59. Gherardi, S. (1995), Gender, Symbolism and Organizational Cultures, London: Sage. Gioia, D.A., Schultz, M., and Corley, K.G. (2000), ‘Organizational Identity, Image, and Adaptive Instability’, Academy of Management Review, 25(1): 63–81.   Goffman, E. (1959), The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Goffman, E. (1961), Asylums, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Goffman, E. (1967), Interactional Ritual, New York.   Goffman, E. (1974), Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience, Harper & Row. Gordon, G. and DiTomaso, N. (1992), ‘Predicting Corporate Performance from Organizational Culture’, Journal of Management Studies, 29(6): 783–798. Gouldner, A.W. (1954), Patterns of Industrial Bureaucracy, New York: Free Press. Gramsci, A. (1971), From the Prison Notebooks, London: Lawrence and Wishart. Grant, D. and Oswick, C. (1996), Metaphor and Organizations, Sage Publications. Greenwood, R. and Hinings, C.R. (1988), ‘Organizational Design Types, Tracks and the Dynamics of Strategic Change’, Organization Studies, 9: 293–316. Greenwood, R. and Meyer, R.E. (2008), ‘Influencing Ideas: A Celebration of DiMaggio and Powell’ (1983), Journal of Management Inquiry, 17(4): 258–264. Greenwood, R. and Hinings, C.R. (1996), ‘Understanding Radical Organizational Change: Bringing Together the Old and the New Institutionalism’, Academy of Management Review, 26: 1022–1054.


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Hall, J.A. (2008), ‘Liberalism for Hobbesian Reasons’, Journal of Power, 1(1): 75–85. Heritage, J. (1984), Garfinkel and Ethnomethodology, London: Wiley. Hinings, C.R., Greenwood, R. and Cooper, David (1999), ‘The Dynamics of Change in Large Accounting Firms’, in D.M. Brock, M.J. Powell, and C.R. Hinings (eds), Restructuring the Professional Organization: Accounting, Health Care and Law, London: Routledge, pp. 131–153. Hodgson, D. (2003), ‘“Taking it Like a Man”: Masculinity, Subjection and Resistance in the Selling of Life Assurance’, Gender, Work and Organization, 10(1): 1–21. Hofstede, G. and Peterson, M.F. (2000), ‘National Values and Organizational Practices’, in N.M. Ashkanasy, C.P.M. Wilderom, and M.F. Peterson (eds), Handbook of Organizational Culture and Climate, 401–405. Hofstede, G. (1980), Culture’s Consequences: International Differences in Work-Related Values, London: Sage. Hopfl, H. (2002), ‘Playing the Part: Reflections on Aspects of Mere Performance in the Customer-Client Relationship’, Journal of Management Studies, 39(2): 255–67. James, W. (1998), Principles of Psychology (1890), Chicago: University of Chicago Press.   Jameson, F. (1972), The Prison-House of Language. A Critical Account of Structuralism and Russian Formalism, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Jeffcutt, P. (1993), ‘From Interpretation to Representation’, in J. Hassard, and M. Parker, (eds), Postmodernism and Organizations, London: Sage, pp. 25–48. Jeffcutt, P. (1994), ‘From Interpretation to Representation in Organizational Analysis: Postmodernism, Ethnography and Organizational Symbolism’, Organization Studies, 15(2): 241. Jeffcutt, P. and Thomas, M. (1998), ‘Order, Disorder and Unmanageability of Boundaries in Organized Life’, Realm of Organization. Essays for Robert Cooper, pp. 67–87. Johnson, T.J. (1972), Professions of Power, London: Macmillan. Kallinikos, J. (1996), Organizations in the Age of Information, Academia Adacta, Lund, Sweden. Knights, D. (2002), ‘Writing Organizational Analysis into Foucault’, Organization, 9(4): 575–593. Knights, D. and McCabe, D. (2000), ‘Ain’t Misbehavin? Opportunities for Resistance within Bureaucratic and Quality Management Innovations’, Sociology 34(3): 421–436. Kuhn, T.S. (1962), The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lakoff, G. (1987), Women, Fire and Dangerous Things, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lakoff, G. and Johnson, M. (2003), Metaphors We Live By, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Law, J. (1994), ‘Organization, Narrative, Strategy’, in J. Hassard and M. Parker (eds), Towards a New Theory of Organizations, London: Routledge, pp. 248–268. Lee, N. and Brown S. (1994), ‘Otherness and the Actor Network: The Undiscovered Continent’, American Behavioral Scientist, 37(6): 772.   Linstead, S. and Grafton-Small, R. (1992), ‘On Reading Organizational Culture’, Organization Studies, 13(3): 331.   Lukes, S. (1974), Power: A Radical View, London: Macmillan. Lukes, S. (2005), Power: A Radical view (2nd edition), London: Palgrave-Macmillan. Lyotard, J.F. (1986), ‘Defining the Postmodern’, Postmodernism ICA Documents, 4: 6–7. March, J.G. (ed.) (1965), Handbook of Organizations, Chicago: Rand McNally. Martin, J. (1992), Culture in Organizations: Three Perspectives, New York: Oxford University Press. Martin, J. (2000), ‘Hidden Gendered Assumptions in Mainstream Organizational Theory and Research’, Journal of Management Inquiry 9 (2): 207–16.


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Maturana, H.R. and Varela, F.J. (1980), Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of the Living, With a preface by Sir Stafford Beer, Dordrecht, Holland: D. Reidel.   May, C. and Ellis, N.T. (2001), ‘When Protocols Fail: Technical Evaluation, Biomedical Knowledge, and the Social Production of “facts” about a Telemedicine Clinic’, Social Science & Medicine, 53(8): 989–1002. Merton, R.C. (1973), ‘Theory of Rational Option Pricing’, Bell Journal of Economics and Management Science, 4: 141–183.   Merton, R.K. (2002), ‘Bureaucratic Structure and Personality’, Central Currents in Organization Studies I: Frameworks and Application, London: Sage, pp. 357–366. Meyer, J.W and Rowan, B. (1983), ‘The Structure of Educational Organizations’, in J.W. Meyer and W.R. Scott (eds), Organizational Environments: Ritual and Rationality, Beverley Hills: Sage, pp. 71–97. Meyer, J.W., Boli, J., and Thomas, G.M. (1987), ‘Ontology and Rationalization in the Western Cultural Account’, in G.M. Thomaset et al. (eds), Institutional Structure: Constituting State, Society, and the Individual, Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, pp. 12–37. Meyer, J.W. and Rowan, B. (1977), ‘Institutionalized Organizations: Formal Structure as Myth and Ceremony’, American Journal of Sociology, 83: 340–363. Mills, C.W. (1940), ‘Situated Actions and Vocabularies of Motive’, American Sociological Review, 5: 904–913. Mintzberg, H. (1991), ‘Learning 1, Planning 0: Reply to Igor Ansoff’, Strategic Management Journal, 12(6): 463–466. Mohr, J. (2000), ‘Introduction: Structure, Institutions, and Cultural Analysis’, Poetics, 27: 57–68. Morgan, G. (1985), Images of Organizations, London: Sage. Nayak, A. (2008), ‘On the Way to Theory: A Processual Approach’, Organization Studies, 29(2), 173–190. Oswick, C. and Jones, P. (2006), ‘Beyond Correspondence? Metaphor in Organization Theory’, Academy of Management Review, 31(2): 483.   Oswick, C., Grant, D., and Keenoy, T., (1998). Discourse and Organization, London: Sage Publications. Oswick, C., Putnam, L.L., and Keenoy, T. (2004). ‘Tropes, Discourse and Organizing’. The Sage Handbook of Organizational Discourse, London: Sage, pp. 359–378. Parsons, T. (1951), The Social System, New York: The Free Press of Glencoe.  Pettigrew, A.M. (1985), The Awakening Giant: Continuity and Change in Imperial Chemical Industries, Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Pile, S. and Thrift, N.J. (1995), Mapping the Subject: Geographies of Cultural Transformation, Routledge. Sinclair. Pinder, C.C. and Bourgeois, V.W. (1982), ‘Controlling Tropes in Administrative Science’, Administrative Science Quarterly, 27(4): 641–52.   Porac , J., and Rosa, J.A. (1996), ‘In Praise of Managerial Narrow-Mindedness’, Journal of Management Inquiry, 5(1): 35–42. Porac, J.F., Thomas, H., Wilson, F., Paton, D., and Kafner, A. (1995), ‘Rivalry and the Industry Model of Scottish Knitwear Producers’, Administrative Science Quarterly, 40: 203–227. Power, M. (1997), The Audit Society: Rituals of Verification, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Prasad, A. (2003), Postcolonial Theory and Organizational Analysis: A Critical Engagement, New York: Palgrave Macmillan.   Pugh, D.S. and Hickson, D.J. (1976), Organizational Structure in its Context: The Aston Programme 1, London: Saxon House. Pusey, M. (1991), Economic Rationalism in Canberra: A Nation-building State Changes its Mind, Sydney: Cambridge University Press.


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Rhodes, C. and Garrick, J. (2002), ‘Economic Metaphors and Working Knowledge: Enter the Cogito-economic Subject’, Human Resource Development International, 5(1): 87–97. Rorty, R. (1989), Contingency, Irony and Solidarity, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.   Sacks, H. (1972), ‘An Initial Investigation of the Usability of Conversational Data for Doing Sociology’, Studies in Social Interaction, New York: Free Press, pp. 31–74. Sacks, H. (1992), Lectures on Conversations, Oxford: Blackwell.   Said, E. (1979), Orientalism, New York: Vintage.   Scherer, K.R. and Tran, V. (2001), ‘Effects of Emotion on the Process of Organizational Learning’, Handbook of Organizational Learning, pp. 369–392.   Schutz, A. (1967), The Phenomenology of the Social World, Evanston, Ill: Northwestern University Press. Scott, W.R. and Meyer, J.W. (1983), ‘The Organization of Societal Sectors’, in J.W. Meyer and W.R. Scott (Eds.), Organizational Environments: Ritual and Rationality, Beverly Hills, CA: Sage, pp. 129–154. Selznick, P. (1949), TVA and the Grass Roots, Berkeley: University of California Press. Shenon, P. (2008), The Commission: The Uncensored History of the 9/11 Investigation, New York: Hachette Book Group. Silverman, D. (1971), The Theory of Organizations, London: Heinemann. Silverman, D. (1998), Harvey Sacks: Social Science and Conversation Analysis, Oxford University. Silverman, D., and Jones, J. (1976), Organizational work, Collier-Macmillan Ltd.   Simon, H.A. (1946), ‘The Proverbs of Administration’, Public Administration Review, 6: 53–67. Simon, H.A. (1950), ‘Modern Organization Theories’, Advanced Management, 15(10): 2–4. Simon, H.A. (1952), ‘Comments on the Theory of Organizations’, American Political Science Review, 46: 1130–1139. Stinchcombe, A. (1965), ‘Social Structure and Organizations’, in J.G. Marsh (ed), Handbook of Organizations, Chicago: Rand McNally, pp. 142–193. Strati, A. (1999), Organization and Aesthetics, London: Sage. Stryker, R. (1994), ‘Rules, Resources, and Legitimacy Processes: Some Implications for Social Conflict, Order, and Change’, American Journal of Sociology, 99: 847–910. Suchman, M. (1995), ‘Managing Legitimacy: Strategic and Institutional Approaches’, Academy of Management Review, 20(3): 571–610.   Therborn, G. (1976), Science, Class and Society, London: NLB. Thomas, R. and Davies, A. (2005), ‘Theorizing the Micro-politics of Resistance: New Public Management and Managerial Identities in the UK Public Services, Organization Studies, 26(5): 683–706. Thompson, E.P. (1967), ‘Time Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism’, Past and Present, 38: 56–97. Tocqueville, A. de (2000), Democracy in America, trans George Lawrence, ed. J.P. Mayer, New York: Perennial Classics. Tolbert, P.S. and Zucker, L.G. (1983) ‘Institutional Sources of Change in the Formal Structure of Organizations: The Diffusion of Civil Service Reform, 1880–1935’, Administrative Science Quarterly, 28: 22–39. Tsoukas, H. (1998), ‘Introduction: Chaos, Complexity and Organization Theory’, Organization, 5(3): 291. Watson, T. J. (1994), In Search of Management, London: Routledge.


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Weber, M. (1976), The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, London: Allen & Unwin. Weber, M. (1978), Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology, Berkeley: University of California Press. Weick, K.E. (1969), The Social Psychology of Organizing, Reading: Addison-Wesley. Weick, K.E. (1979), The Social Psychology of Organizing (2nd Edition), Reading, MA: Addison. Weick, K.E. (1996), ‘Drop your Tools: An Allegory for Organizational Studies’, Administrative Science Quarterly, 41(2): 301–313. Whitley, R. (1992), Business Systems in East Asia: Firms, Markets and Societies, London: Sage. Whittington, R. and Jarzabkowski, P. (2008), ‘Directions for a Troubled Discipline: Strategy Research, Teaching, and Practice – Introduction to the Dialog’, Journal of Management Inquiry, 17(4): 266–268. Willmott, H. (1998), ‘Re-cognizing the Other: Reflections on a ‘new sensibility’ in Social and Organizational Studies’, Realm of Organization: Essays for Robert Cooper, London: Routledge. p. 213–241. Zucker, L.G. (1977), ‘The Role of Institutionalization in Cultural Persistence, American Sociological Review, 42: 726–743. Zucker, L.G. (1983), ‘Organizations as Institutions’, Research in the Sociology of Organizations, 2: 1–47.



Histories



1 The Roots of Uncertainty in Organization Theory: A Historical Constructivist Analysis Yehouda Shenhav and Ely Weitz

T

he literature is marked by a paucity of empirical research into the historical roots of organization thought, and little has been done to understand the factors which formed and shaped the professional development of the field. This study attempts to do so by means of a qualitative historical examination of the concept of ‘uncertainty’, which is of critical importance in almost all formulations of organization theories. We attempt to advance the development of organization theory by providing a newer and more reflexive epistemology to the usage of uncertainty. We combine constructivist theory, which is historically oriented, with qualitative data to examine the manner in which the concept of uncertainty entered and became so central in management practice and ideology, and was institutionalized in organizations during the period 1879–1932. This time span is exceptional in the history of American industrialism. It captures the years of rapid industrialization during the latter decades of the 19th century, the turbulent relationship between capital/management and labor, the Progressive Era (1900–17) during which professional management emerged in American firms, and culminates with the year in which Berle and Means (1932) proclaimed the ‘managerial revolution’ with the appearance, in the US, of their now classic book, The Modern Corporation and Private Property. The US was chosen as the focal point of this study because of its uniqueness, which served as model for engineering-based industrial management Source: Organization, 7(3) (2000): 373–401.


Histories

worldwide. As Locke unambiguously claimed: management is an American creation (Locke, 1996). At the turn of the century, the US had the largest proportion of industrial workers to administrative staff, indicating that in the US economy the separation of ownership from control in industrial firms was the strongest (Guillen, 1994). It was in the US that the new class of salaried management first emerged in significant numbers, and set the blueprint for American management practices. As Guillen points out, only then ‘the topics of “efficiency”, “unpunctuality”, “inaccuracy” . . . became fashionable’ (1994: 98). Furthermore, the scientific justification of management practices and organizational ideas sets it apart from European countries where more importance was attached to religious, nationalistic, and cultural specific ideas in determining human relations in the work place (Guillen, 1994). It was in the US that an independent discourse on management and industrial organization emerged.2 The approach posited in this research is that the concept of organizational uncertainty emerged and solidified during the period 1879–1932, through the pervasive work of American mechanical engineers, who successfully dealt with technical uncertainties in manufacturing, and, in line with their professional ideology, ‘translated’ concepts to the organizational domain and thereby expanded their professional territory to include organizational and societal issues. We employ a genealogical analysis which, according to Foucault, locates traces of the present in the past (Foucault, 1979; McKinlay and Starkey, 1998). The genealogy of the discourse on uncertainty during the years in which organization theory was beginning to crystallize as a distinct field can shed light on the ‘blueprints’ that remain in our field to this day. While drawing on Foucault’s power/knowledge epistemological position on organizations (Burrell, 1988; Clegg, 1990; Armstrong, 1994; Savage, 1998) we also make use of two additional bodies of knowledge: constructivist actornetwork theory (Callon, 1980; Latour, 1987) and institutionalism (DiMaggio and Powell, 1983). The former defines the agency (engineers) in the power/ knowledge scheme, and the latter focuses on legitimization of organizational constructs.

The Concept of Uncertainty in Organization Theory: An Overview The concept of uncertainty plays a major role in the development and rise of complex organizations, and in contemporary management and organization theory (Chandler, 1962, 1977; Thompson, 1967; Scott, 1987). In this canonical view (to which organizational actors subscribe as well) the industrial enterprise remains successful largely because its administrative efficiency continues to eliminate uncertainty, to regulate and to control future contingencies (Williamson, 1975, 1985). This view emerged at the turn of This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.

Shenhav and Weitz • The Roots of Uncertainty

the century with the rise of managerial ideologies. Scientific Management (1900–23) focused on uncertainty reduction: it sought to regularize the functioning of the industrial organization by imposing standard work procedures on the workers. Subsequently, the Human Relations School (1925–55) attempted to improve on Taylorism by focusing on uncertainties generated by the work group and the workers’ social needs. Elton Mayo, Fritz Roethlisberger and William J. Dickson attempted to reduce variations in output and performance by manipulating the social organization (Roethlisberger and Dickson, 1939). During World War II, the military employed teams of scientists who sought to devise methods for solving logistical problems. These operations research teams were so successful that the field quickly spread to industry (Wren, 1994). Systems rationalists (1955–80) searched for universal dictums and programmatic techniques that would enable man agers to plan, forecast, and operate more effectively (Barley and Kunda, 1992). These approaches – scientific management, human relations, and systems rationalism – were driven by a desire to reduce uncertainty and genuine efforts to provide management with tools and methods for improving the operation of the enterprise. Organization theory, which followed these managerial ideologies, went through various phases each seeking to conceptualize the functioning of the firm. The appearance of the now classic texts of March and Simon (1958), Likert (1961) and Blau and Scott (1962) provided necessary integration and formalization. James D. Thompson, in his canonical formulation, placed the concept of uncertainty squarely in the epicenter of modern organization theory: ‘Uncertainty appears as the fundamental problem for complex organizations, and coping with uncertainty, as the essence of the administrative process’ (Thompson, 1967: 159). In departing from the classical theories of organizations, he and other contingency theorists suggested that organizational forms vary as a function of the environment in which they operate. Uncertainty, to them, remains the primary variable in determining organizational structure and patterns of behavior (Lawrence and Lorsch, 1967; Galbraith, 1973, 1977; Scott, 1987). A more radical departure from the rational conceptualizations of organizations was taken by institutionalists influenced by Berger and Luckmann (1966). The behavior of organizations, to institutionalists, is neither an internally directed, nor an externally determined, rationality; rather, special emphasis is placed on the socially constructed nature of organizational realities, and on the creation of shared knowledge and belief systems (Meyer and Rowan, 1977; DiMaggio and Powell, 1983). Uncertainty is perceived by institutionalists as a powerful engine that drives mimetic isomorphism, and is an important and potent force that encourages imitation which accords the organization, and its activities, legitimacy. Although the institutionalists’ approach casts doubt on the construction of ‘objective reality’, they do not apply this same view to the construct of uncertainty. The underlying This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.

Histories

view of uncertainty as an objective environmental phenomenon remains unchanged. Similarly, organization culture theorists (Deal and Kennedy, 1982; Schein, 1985; Kunda, 1992) also view uncertainty as playing a crucially important role. Thus, Karl Weick’s view of organizing centers around a ‘consensually validated grammar for reducing equivocality by means of sensible interlocked behaviors’ (Weick, 1979: 3–6). The approaches to organization studies, while differing on their view of organizational rationality, share the underlying assumption that organizations exist in a world teeming with uncertainty, an objective fact of life, which poses a real and actual threat to the business enterprise. We do not attempt to offer a genealogy of organization theory, from the 1990s back through the 1880s. Our approach is to go back to the genesis of social phenomena and to capture key events in their formative or embryonic stages, the time from which they develop until the period in which they are institutionalized. We concentrate on the time period 1879–1932 because during this time frame the blueprints were cast. We do not continue the genealogy past 1932. Organization theory is described after 1932 only to demonstrate uncertainty’s salient role within it. The importance of uncertainty is also clearly manifested in the everyday conduct of empirical research in management and organization studies. For example, we found that 14 percent of the 350 papers published in the Academy of Management Journal and 16 percent of the 254 articles published in the Administrative Science Quarterly during the period 1985–95, deal explicitly and directly with uncertainty.3 The concept of uncertainty, then, is important to discussions of organizations and their management. The prominence of the construct of uncertainty in theory and practice led us to investigate how the concept reached such exalted status. In the following section, we propose a sociology of knowledge perspective, in particular we make use of the constructivist approach to reformulate the concept of uncertainty.

A Constructivist Approach to `Uncertainty’ in Organizations We take the sociological stance that the human mind is a social one, and we therefore assume knowledge, science and professional constructs are produced and shaped by human communities in institutionalized fields of knowledge.4 Sociologists of knowledge argue that the very definition of a situation as a ‘social problem’ is the outcome of social negotiations within a particular field (Yonay, 1998). To define a condition as a ‘social problem’, it is first necessary to show that the situation is ‘bad’, that the outcomes are undesirable, that there are numerous options available to remedy the situation, and that the outcomes may be bettered. This constructivist approach to scientific development emphasizes the diversity of choices inherent in



any sphere of action and the socially constructed nature of empirical objects (Latour and Woolgar, 1979; Callon, 1980; Knorr-Cetina, 1981; Latour, 1987); that is, among several alternatives of plausible routes of action, one is chosen and colors the reality with its meaning. This framework neither dismisses functional arguments regarding necessity (usually accepted by organizational actors), nor does it argue that people’s objective reality is unreal. Rather, it attempts to describe the manner in which such ‘objective reality’ is constituted and constructed (i.e. treated as a given) from the available options. In this sense, constructivist and functional logic provides two differing, not necessarily negating, theoretical stands. The question the constructivists deal with is the selection of the course of action actually chosen and institutionalized. Bruno Latour (1987) and Michel Callon (1980) provide us with a framework for dealing with this very issue: the actor-network approach. Accordingly, the authority of professionals and respected practitioners (in our case the network of mechanical engineers), examples from neighboring fields, or from other prestigious communities, and their methodologies, can become part of the network that supports a particular scientific claim to ‘reality’. The constructivist approach often engages in historical studies that seek to show how knowledge is actually constructed. Therefore, to determine how the construct of uncertainty became so central to management thinking – and became a claim to reality – we found it necessary to go back over a hundred years and to locate it within a network of mechanical engineers. This temporal distancing serves two purposes. First, the time period under study is management’s formative period; the investigation of this time span has the potential to shed light on the way the construct took shape and was actually constructed within managerial thought. Second, it enables us to search for an alternative – or at least complimentary – interpretation of the traditional discourse.5 The analysis which follows leans on what Latour and Callon call ‘translation’. This affirms the underlying unity between elements distinct from one another and involves creating convergences and homologies by relating things that were previously unrelated (Callon, 1980). We posit that ‘uncertainty’ was used by a network of engineers-managers, or more specifically professionals in the field of mechanical engineering, as a rhetorical device to justify and promote their professional agenda.6 These engineers ‘translated’ social and organizational problems to be homologous with technical uncertainty. The influence of this network, against the backdrop of the cultural and political forces existing at the time of the formation of management as a distinct discipline, best explains the reason and the manner in which organizational ‘uncertainty’ entered and became so central in management practice and organization theory. ‘Uncertainty’ was constituted within the field of mechanical engineering and was then ‘translated’ to human organizations. Furthermore, the context of the times, the politics of capital/management – labor relations and the ethos of the Progressive This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.

Histories

Era – which comprise what we term the enabling context – facilitated these professionals’ success in the project. The writings of engineers and managers themselves, therefore, serve as the vehicle by which the historical discourse on the concept of uncertainty is traced and analyzed in this study. The empirical analyses for the period 1879–1932 make use of primary data, not reuse and interpretation of secondary materials. Before we elaborate on the two elements of the theory – (1) the notion of ‘translation’, and (2) the enabling context: the network of engineers, labor unrest and the Progressive Era – we present the reader with the sources of the empirical data.

Empirical Sources The data are compiled from the American Machinist founded in 1877, and the Engineering Magazine, which began publication in 1891. They were the premier trade journals in the field, the central forums for discussion, and main sources of documentation, of management practices, dilemmas and techniques during the latter period of the 19th century and the early 1900s (Jenks, 1961; Jelinek, 1980; Shenhav, 1995). These trade journals were unique and enduring, and captured the rise of modern management. They provided engineers with forums for discussion of management ideas and practices, especially in machine shops and factories (Mott, 1957; Jenks, 1961; Calvert, 1967; Nelson, 1975; Jelinek, 1980; Sinclair, 1980; Jacoby, 1985). These magazines portray the mechanical engineering network, its actors, beliefs, ideology and practice. The American Machinist’s founders and editors belonged to the elite inner circles of US mechanical engineering, led the drive toward the professionalization of mechanical engineering, facilitated the creation, in 1880, of the American Society for Mechanical Engineers (ASME), and provided the resources necessary for its development. It was to this society that Frederick W. Taylor first read his papers dealing with his ideas on shop management, and he became president of the society in 1906. The ASME, especially in the first few years of its existence, was very strongly aligned with the American Machinist. The first treasurer of the Society was Lycurrgus C. Moore who held the full-time position of treasurer of the American Machinist Company. The headquarters of the ASME were located within the very offices of the American Machinist (Sinclair, 1980). The Engineering Magazine, a New York monthly (a British edition was published from 1896 onward), was founded by John R. Dunlap, who remained its editor and publisher until 1927. Dunlap was the most active journalistic proponent of the emerging management movement (Jenks, 1961). His magazine quickly chose to pay special attention to management issues of interest to its engineering readership. The explicit editorial position of the This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.


publication was that organizations should be the object of scientific study. It was the first periodical dedicating itself to the practice of management to appear on the American industrial scene. In 1916, the journal, in line with the magazine’s growing emphasis on management, became Industrial Management. This transfigured publication refashioned itself again in 1927, when it merged with Factory to become Factory and Industrial Management. The Engineering Magazine, as well as the American Machinist, enjoyed a wide circulation among industrial mechanical engineers. The two publications were central to the mechanical engineering field and served the practicing mechanical engineers in all of the profession’s varying interests. For these reasons, we focus on these magazines, as a mirror to the mechanical engineers’ professional beliefs, ideologies, concerns and, through these, their engineering practices. The American Machinist sought to advance the recognition of mechanical engineers and to protect their reputation. It perceived itself as the watchdog of the field. On various occasions, the editors of the periodical emphasized that they deemed the ‘machine tools’ to be the future of the country (American Machinist, 32(8), 1922: 353). In 1890, the editors complained that mechanical engineering was not recognized as an independent profession in the 11th census and began a campaign to remedy the situation (American Machinist, 22(6), 1890: 8). Early on, the editors of the American Machinist sought to establish an editorial policy that transcended the give and take of politics (American Machinist, 44(11), 1886: 8). They tried to change the public perception that engineers, experts in machinery and materials, were blind to the human beings employed by big business. The magazine showed concern for the so-called ‘human factor’ from the very beginning. In 1888, the editors criticized what was then considered a success story. They warned that the Pullman company town was not an ‘industrial paradise’ and referred to the ‘monarchial nature of everything in Pullman’ (American Machinist, 15(3), 1888: 8). As early as 1905, the editors of the magazine suggested that engineers should be interested in the new field of sociology since engineering work produces a ‘profound result upon the manner of the life of the majority of people living under modern conditions’ (American Machinist, 15(3), 1905: 369). The Engineering Magazine published articles in engineering-related areas such as ‘The European war from an engineer’s standpoint’, as well as management issues (e.g. ‘The relation of the railway to its employees’, ‘American railways and their management’) and labor issues (‘Reflections on the Homestead Strike’, ‘The history of strikes in America’). From its inception, the Engineering Magazine was concerned with professional matters. Articles discussing pressing questions such as ‘Who is an engineer?’ or ‘Shall the professions be regulated?’ were present from the very first. In 1901, the editors became involved in the internal battle over ASME dues (Engineering Magazine, December 1901: 423). The editorial stance of the Engineering Magazine,


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like that of the American Machinist, sought to protect the reputation of the mechanical engineering profession (Engineering Magazine, April 1902: 98). As early as 1897, a significant number of articles on accountancy systems emerged, carrying such titles as ‘Mine Accounts’, ‘Cost Keeping Methods in Machine Shops and Foundry’, ‘An Effective System of Finding and Keeping Shop Costs’, or ‘A Simple and Effective System of Shop Cost Keeping’. In 1899–1900, there was a growing number of articles on wage systems, production control and inventory control. The main contributors to the development of these issues during 1891–1916 were Harrington Emerson (who chaired the Efficiency Society), C.E. Knoeppel (who was Taylor’s disciple and worked with Emerson in his New York consulting firm), Charles U. Carpenter, Alexander Hamilton Church, and Horace Lucian Arnold, Henry Gantt, Lewis Slater, Carl Barth and Henry Towne. Some were active systematizers (e.g. Church), or efficiency engineers (e.g. Emerson), while others were writers in the technical press with an interest in management and labor (e.g. Arnold). The American Machinist and the Engineering Magazine were carefully and methodically screened for the period 1879–1932. All the issues of the American Machinist for the years of the study, 52 issues per year, were examined. On average, 2000 pages were published in the American Machinist each year. The Engineering Magazine, a monthly, published 61,985 pages during the 42 years between 1891 and 1932. We focus on the time period 1891–1916 because the magazine was an engineering organ during this time only. By 1916, it had transformed itself into a management trade journal and no longer served as a clearinghouse for engineering issues and practices, as it focused solely on management and its practice. In the years following, the magazine no longer reflected the shifting emphases and concerns of the engineers-managers. The contents of the American Machinist and the Engineering Magazine were analyzed in order to trace the ways the concept of uncertainty appears in the literature over time, to understand the terminology (e.g. fuzziness, haziness, ambiguity, unpredictability), and the manner in which the construct was used by management and mechanical engineers of the period. That is, the magazines were manually screened in their entirety, page by page, for all years under study. This task was carried out over a period of two years.7 We introduce figures later in the article (Figures 2 and 3) depicting the changes in the uncertainty discourse over time.

The Professional Network of Mechanical Engineers and the Notion of ‘Translation’ Engineering, as a profession, is a relatively recent phenomenon. It is not a direct descendant of the military engineer but, rather, of the millwright and the metalworker, of the craftsman (Braverman, 1974). The very term engineer first crops up in this setting, used to describe the engine operators This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.

Shenhav and Weitz • The Roots of Uncertainty 11

Source: American Society of Mechanical Engineers, Transactions.

Figure 1: Membership in the american society of mechanical engineers

(Calvert, 1967). The engineering profession grew during the late 1800s and early 1900s by leaps and bounds due, primarily, to massive industrialization. The American Society for Mechanical Engineers’ (ASME) membership stood at 191 mechanical engineers in 1881, 2129 in 1900, reached 3978 by 1910, and was well over 10,000 in 1918 (see Figure 1). The American corporate engineers adopted professional values similar to those of other professions (clergy, medicine, law) – autonomy, collegial control of professional work, and social responsibility (Layton, 1971). With the factories growing more widespread, with the appearance, in the 1880s, of the first integrated corporations, and with the rapid advances in emerging technologies, the perceived need for standardizing production processes became paramount (Noble, 1977). Mechanical engineers became concerned with the problem of systematizing and standardizing the materials with which they worked, and with rationalizing the manufacture of machinery. The professional engineering community called for the establishment of systems of letters, numbers, and symbols for rationalizing the description of machine parts to put an end to ‘mechanical provincialisms’ and the idiosyncrasies of machine shop labeling (American Machinist, 4(6), 1881: 6). The role of the engineer as an expert in making production predictable and rational, through uncertainty reduction, was widely accepted. ‘One of the ways in which engineers serve humanity is in the elimination of chance . . . . There are innumerable uncertainties to be cleared up whose laws are yet to be discovered’ (American Machinist, 40(3), 1914: 434). The American Machinist lauded the positive effects of standardization, especially its role in eliminating uncertainty. This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.

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The essence of the professional engineering ideology is the application of the laws of nature in the search for order and stability. Following the framework suggested by Latour (1987) and Callon (1980), whereby elements distinct from one another are made homologous, we posit that mechanical engineers ‘translated’ elements from the realm of the technical to the uniquely different sphere of the social and organizational. This is the effect we wish to highlight. The American Machinist was very explicit about this engineering ideology: ‘They [machines] are not the only mechanisms which are subject to scientific analysis, and which are worthy of the closest scrutiny . . . . To them must be added human machines. . . . As physical entities such workers are complexes of body and mind. They are human organisms, and may be regarded with reference to standards of industrial efficiency as human mechanisms’ (American Machinist, 55(8), 1921: 226). Engineers strove to achieve predictability and regularity in production, and, later, to extend technical paradigms to social and organizational endeavors. Their working assumption was that both mechanical and social entities can, and should, be subjected to engineering techniques (i.e. they ‘translated’ technical uncertainty into social and organizational uncertainty): ‘Mechanics and workmen are in a certain sense engines whose energies are directed toward a certain end’ (American Machinist, 14(4), 1888: 8). A science-based industry was beginning to emerge by the middle of the 19th century (Bendix, 1974). Industrialists desired to make profits at a rate faster than their competitors. To achieve their goals, they searched for means to achieve complete control over their production processes, both mechanical and labor. In the mechanical industries the creation of standard parts and uniform practices gave mechanical engineers additional opportunities and techniques to reduce uncertainty and thereby increase the seeming control over anomaly. To achieve utmost efficiency and profitability, scientific methods were introduced into the shops. Science was held in very high esteem during the Progressive Era. Indeed, the story goes that the catchy name for Taylor’s principles of shop organization, Scientific Management, was coined by Louis D. Brandeis while he was preparing for the Interstate Commerce Commission hearings on the Eastern Railroad’s request for fare hikes (Haber, 1964). Brandeis heard Frederick W. Taylor using the term ‘scientific’ so often that he named Taylor’s principles Scientific Management.

The ‘Translation’ Achieved: Engineering and Organizational ‘Uncertainty’ The rise, in the 1880s, of large-scale, capital-intensive, bureaucratic forms of production heralded the replacement of hand tools with machines, of skilled craftsmen with semiskilled and unskilled laborers, with standardized parts rather than customized ones (Guillen, 1994). The new industrialists sought a This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.


system that offered greater predictability and control over the workforce, the means and process of production. Engineers were well equipped with professional schema, tools and metaphors, the primary one being that the organization is analogous to a machine composed of interchangeable parts. In this view, human and non-human entities can equally be subjected to engineering manipulation. What works for one will work for the other in bringing order and certainty to a chaotic world. It was widely believed among engineering circles that standardization and systematization of the workplace would take the industry well beyond the anarchy which so characterized the robber-baron era and lead it toward more progressive and prosperous times (Chandler, 1977; Sinclair, 1980). Examples are ample. The American Machinist glorified the machine as ‘canned human intelligence’ (56(10), 1922: 584). The distinction between the worker and the machine was becoming blurred: ‘There seems to be an ever increasing desire to make the worker more and more part of the machine he is manipulating, until even his understanding is mechanical . . .’ (American Machinist, 4(6), 1891: 27). And, ‘the human as well as the non-human machine must be standardized’ (American Machinist, 57(6), 1923: 939). Workers were viewed as a commodity, something one could buy, utilize, or sell: ‘Hiring a man and buying a machine are very much alike since both are the buying of something which someone has for sale’ (American Machinist, 23(3), 1900: 208). The engineers’ professional ideology, simply stated, was: ‘If the human machine could be controlled by the set of rules that govern machine tool operation, the world would be a much different place’ (The Review, 1910: 35 cited in Bendix, 1956: 271). They therefore sought to standardize not only technical mechanical matters but also social organizational and administrative issues. Elements clearly distinct from one another were made to converge (Callon, 1980) by the engineering community. The American Machinist called for the widespread application of the same principles used so successfully in the technological core of the organization in all aspects of the enterprise: ‘. . . to the engineer one interesting phase of the matter is the movement toward standardization in business methods. The advantages of standards are so vital in connection with material things, and are so well recognized by manufacturers that we wonder that so little standardization has crept into the mechanism of business. We believe that in this field, at least, business can learn from the engineering profession’ (American Machinist, 31(8), 1908: 212). And so the previously distinct fields were made to merge, a new professional concept was institutionalized8: organizational uncertainty. This is in line with our finding that, as shown in Figure 2, simple counts of the mentions of technical uncertainty increased in the last decade of the 19th century and, generally, remained relatively high through the 1920s. Figure 3, which depicts counts of the mentions of organizational uncertainty, reveals a different pattern: a relatively low level of discourse during the latter decades of the 19th century, a substantial surge during the first two decades of the


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Figure 2: Technical uncertainty discourse* in American Machinist and Engineering Magazine *Technical uncertainty discourse is measured by the total number of pages in the American Machinist and the Engineering Magazine dealing with technical uncertainty in a given year divided by the total number of pages published in the magazines in that year, multiplied by 100,000.

Figure 3: Organizational uncertainty discourse* in American Machinist and Engineering Magazine *Organizational uncertainty discourse is measured by the total number of pages in the American Machinist and the Engineering Magazine dealing with organizational uncertainty in a given year divided by the total number of pages published in the magazines in that year, multiplied by 100,000.

20th century, and a decline thereafter.9 That is, at first, engineers in industry were concerned with technical uncertainty and only later began to deal with organization uncertainty. By viewing organizations as technical systems and the management of the enterprise as a part of the growing field of professional mechanical This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.


engineering, engineers were able to expand the boundaries of their profession and, concomitantly, to increase their sphere of influence within and outside industrial firms.10 Henry R. Towne, while addressing the ASME, invoked ‘. . . a broader definition of engineering, as that skill or profession which controls and adapts the forces of nature for the benefit of mankind . . . we find that the engineer must be a man of large experience, not only in technical construction, but in the management and direction of men and machinery, and in meeting and mastering of all the many problems that confront him at every side . . .’ (American Machinist, 28(1), 1905: 98–101). Well in line with this thinking, Henry Gantt, in 1916, formed an organization, called the ‘New Machine’, whose aim was to place professional engineers in positions of national leadership because of their deep and thorough understanding of the operation of the industrial apparatus (Haber, 1964). In sum, the rapidly growing group of professional mechanical engineers used their knowledge, paradigms, metaphors and techniques in dealing not only with the technical aspects of the work environment but also with the complex, at times flighty and unpredictable, social environment. Entities previously distinct became related, ‘translated’ into a single unified field (Callon, 1980; Latour, 1987). One of the major issues confronting engineers was the impending danger of labor unrest. This issue, which threatened to disrupt production, enabled the creation of a single field of significations (Callon, 1980; Latour, 1987) and was instrumental to the social construction of uncertainty as a managerial concept. Thus far we have focused on the internal aspects of the engineers’ network. In the following two sections we will demonstrate the role of uncertainty as a rhetorical device and the external enabling context in which the engineers operated. We begin with the labor-management relations and proceed to the role of the Progressive Era.

Enabling Context I: Engineering and Management–Labor Relations Facts do not speak for themselves. Pervasiveness of professional positions depends not only on arguments, metaphors and analogies but also on people, finances, methodologies, machines, practices, ideas and organizations which constitute the enabling context, the network which ratifies and upholds claims to reality. Tumultuous labor-management relations constitute such an enabling context. Labor unrest, at the turn of the century, was mainly a result of the rejection, by the workers, of submissive obedience to management’s apparently arbitrary rule (Perrow, 1972; Guillen, 1994). Although the US labor movement has not had a radical history, the labor struggle has been intense and violent (Edwards, 1981). The annual frequency of strikes (Figure 4), standardized for the number of non-agricultural workers, indicates This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.

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Source: Peterson (1938)

Figure 4: Annual frequency of strikes

that the figure rose in the 1880s, fell in the 1890s, and rose to peak levels in the early years of the 20th century. It remained high throughout the Progressive Era and declined dramatically in the 1920s (Peterson, 1938). The level of worker involvement was rather constant for the period 1880–1909, and peaked around the years 1919–22 (Peterson, 1938). American labor history is rife with violent episodes. Among the best known are the 1877 nationwide railroad strikes, the 1885–6 Southwestern railroad strike, the Chicago Haymarket bombing in 1886, the 1892 Idaho metal mines violence, the Homestead struggle of 1892, the Pullman boycott in 1894, the 1902 anthracite strike, the Colorado mine clashes of 1903–4 and 1913–14, and the steel strikes of 1919. Federal troops, state militia and local police were often used to combat and repress organized labor. As the growing labor unrest and the increasing complexity of the industrial enterprise became pressing problems, the new professional group of mechanical engineers started to gain power and influence in managerial circles. Its goal was to regularize, rationalize and systematize all the components of the manufacturing process. As one engineer explained: the ultimate purpose of organizational system ‘is to resolve the various forces at work into their component parts – to arrange them so as to enable these forces to follow well defined channels that work may be guided along the most logical lines and responsibility placed where it properly belongs; and finally combine these forces firmly into one harmonious effort, placing at the head a master mind to supervise and direct’ (Engineering Magazine, April 1908: 82–91). Mechanical engineers argued that a mechanically organized and scien tifically standardized society would not need to resort to conflictual politics, and that in the process the employer–employee relationship would become harmonious. In the spirit of their ‘translated’ agenda, professional engineers This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.


viewed the industrial enterprise as a machine, a mechanism which is stable, precise, orderly and, therefore, efficient. They took for themselves the occupational role of uncertainty reduction. They positioned themselves as a middle group, between labor and capital, between man and machine, and were therefore charged with the task of harmonizing management–labor relations (Calvert, 1967; Layton, 1971). ‘The engineer alone speaks the language of both these and hence he should be the interpreter of each to the other. . . . Therefore from his ranks will come the remedy’ (Industrial Management, October 1919: 340). Labor unrest, which wreaked havoc on all organizational systems and made planning an impossibility, was treated by mechanical engineers as a particular case of uncertainty, seemingly stemming from the human side of the machine, to be dealt with in much the same manner as they had so successfully dealt with technical uncertainty. Whatever disrupted the smooth running of the organizational machine was viewed and constructed as uncertainty: ‘. . . labor troubles are . . . found throughout the United States, and will continue to disturb business until a satisfactory solution of the problem is found, and this condition of affairs makes prosperous times extremely doubtful and uncertain while they prevail’ (American Machinist, 10(1), 1887: 2). This is well illustrated by the following from an early writer in the American Machinist: ‘The habit hitherto has been to regard metals and the other materials of manufacture as certain and reliable elements to be dealt with, while human nature has been regarded as the uncertain and capricious element. But as we grow wiser and go deeper into things we find that all material which we handle is more or less uncertain. . . . On the other hand, the assumed uncertainties of human nature are largely dissipated as we learn its proper manipulation’ (American Machinist, 17(8), 1894: 6). The agenda of ‘elimination of chance’ and clearing up uncertainties (American Machinist, 40(3), 1914: 434) was the prevalent tone – and a rhetorical device often used – during the Progressive Era, and also afterwards, during the labor turmoil of 1919–20. A typical American Machinist editorial proclaimed: ‘Strikes are in evidence everywhere, but these strikes do not mean the country is going to the dogs or that business is going to be halted. They are the natural outcome of the spirit of uncertainty and turmoil and nerve tension through which the world has been passing for the last six years’ (52(9), 1920: 1161). To be sure, labor unrest was not framed as a political issue, but was ‘translated’ (Callon, 1980; Latour, 1987) to be a technical matter, an organizational outcome of uncertainty: ‘Can the complicated phenomena vaguely termed ‘labor troubles’ be taken out of politics?. . . . We believe the answer is in the affirmative’ (American Machinist, 51(4), 1919: 807). In this engineering ideology, the link between engineering-based techniques and labor unrest was made clear: ‘That the real cause of the present day unrest lies in the fact that there is no unit of measurement which both employers and employees


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can use’ (American Machinist, 52(1), 1920: 331); that is, the strife between capital and labor was ideologically neutralized by mechanical engineers who had taken industrial unrest as a given and made use of it to promote their professional agenda and to construct ‘uncertainty reduction’ at the forefront of the industrial agenda. Mechanical engineers’ call for ‘uncertainty-reduction’ in the field of labor relations, viewed as a technical matter, was very appealing to shop owners. Industrialists of the period were very much concerned with labor unrest, felt threatened by it, and sought ways to mitigate and neutralize it. The linkage between systems for uncertainty reduction and the labor problems acted to legitimate the engineering solution to labor unrest and to defuse it politically. Top management found the paradigms and metaphors offered by the engineers to be comforting. As one editorial suggested: ‘There is no more vital need today than that of applying to the labor question the same enlightened common sense which has lately revolutionized machine shop equipment and practice’ (Engineering Magazine, May 1903: 161). By dealing successfully with what they had framed as uncertainties, mechanical engineers were able not only to expand their profession but also to make their role within the organization more primary.

Enabling Context II: Engineering and the Ideological Context of the Progressive Era Mechanical engineers – like many of their contemporaries – believed they could solve social and class differences by creating a world of material plenty. Just as they had created the steam engine governor, which regulated and prevented tumultuous and unpredictable behavior, they felt they could solve organizational and social issues by use of their engineering paradigms (Sinclair, 1980). This professional ideology was in perfect harmony with the spirit of the Progressive Era (1900–17). The political culture of the Progressive period facilitated the claim of the engineers to reduce uncertainty. First, the period was the golden age of professional expertise, engineering included (Hays, 1959; Sinclair, 1980). Second, the rise of several professions, such as economics, law and social work among others, indicates that the period was characterized by The Search for Order (Weibe, 1967), objectivity and rationality that would be above political conflict (Abbott, 1988). Third, this era was marked by a reaction to corruption in local and federal politics and the immense power wielded by big business. Ambiguity and uncertainty were perceived as conducive to political corruption and for the amassing of power and wealth by a select few. Engineering ideology and professional methods, it was felt, would be above the fray and there would no longer be the need, nor the possibility, to resort to political infighting and conflictuality. Fourth, the Progressive Era was characterized by the ideals of equality and progress. This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.


Progress was expressed in terms of efficiency and productivity, the emphasis placed on technology, machines and organization. Equality was spoken of in moral terms, and was concerned mainly with the redistribution of wealth by welfare legislation, the limitation of economic power by antitrust laws, and the protection of workers and their rights to unionize. The Progressive Era was an emergent culture that had given widespread recognition and acceptance to the notion of science and engineering in management (Weibe, 1967). Efficiency experts, while claiming to be neutral and objective, argued that ‘the efficiency systems had uncovered the underlying harmony of society and their spread was inevitable’ (Haber, 1964: 60). Science and engineering were deemed to be arbiters of truth, and, it was hoped, would replace the give and take of conflictual politics. As Harrington Emerson, one of the more famous efficiency experts, wrote: one ‘cannot but regard disputes over wages as the effect rather than the cause of unsatisfactory and unscientific relations between employer and employee’ (ASME Transactions, 25, 1903–4: 878). The editors of the Engineering Magazine argued that the scientific methods introduced by Frederick W. Taylor, Frank B. Gilbreth, Carl Barth, Morris Cooke, Henry Gantt and others ‘Would remove the present chief cause of antagonism between employer and employed’ (Engineering Magazine, February 1910: 653). Similarly, an Engineering Magazine editorial stated: [where] ‘the true spirit of Scientific Management has come to permeate an organization, labor troubles are as rare as planetary collisions’ (Engineering Magazine, February 1916: 748).

Other Voices: The Various Countenances of Organizational Uncertainty There are always hubs of opposition to professional actor-networks’ projects (Yonay, 1998). The organizing concept around which systematization, rationalization and standardization efforts were built was ‘uncertainty reduction’. The underlying assumption was that the machine-like organization would generate predictability, stability, consistency, continuity and certainty. Capricious behavior – likely to evoke uncertainty – will be controlled and tamed through machine-like organizational arrangements. This was the goal of mechanical engineers who had created a cognitive equation containing two opposite binary poles: on the one hand, the desired end of rationality and certainty; on the other hand, that of uncertainty and irrationality. Many mechanical engineers subscribed to this appealing binary scheme. In practice, however, some voiced dissatisfaction with its application. The ASME, for example, had a long history of opposition to setting and enforcing uniform codes and standards. ASME officials were aware of the dialectic nature of uncertainty. They were concerned about unforeseen hazards, which may This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.

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be caused by standards themselves, and the precarious legal position the ASME would be in as a result. Some ASME members argued against taking an improper stand in business competition (framed as reducing market uncertainty), while those siding with small shop owners felt that standardization would prove a costly burden and make them less competitive in the marketplace. Others took a more equivocal stance, arguing that very few professionals were competent enough to judge codes and standards. Similarly, there were voices within the field of mechanical engineering, which expressed dissatisfaction with the dominant machine-oriented voice. That is, the engineering community was not unanimous in its attempt to colonize the management of firms with tools and concepts that were designed and developed by mechanical engineers to reduce uncertainty. Strong reservations were expressed within engineering circles regarding the homogenizing concept of certainty. The editors of American Machinist, concerned over restricting the autonomy of machinists and with the imposition of bureaucratic rules, found it questionable that machine-oriented uncertainty-reduction would improve the ‘value of product per man employed’ (American Machinist, 13(4), 1891: 8). They reported in 1891 that ‘one of the best and most successful shop managers in this country, employing 1200 workers, decided to take down all the framed rules, and have no shop “rules and regulations” whatever’. A theoretical article appearing during the same year rejected the notion of universal certainty. It argued that such systems must be made for the shop rather than vice versa, as ‘it is utterly impossible to dictate a standard system that shall be applicable to all classes of manufactures’ (American Machinist, 1(1), 1891: 7). A 1904 American Machinist article entitled ‘Over-systemizing’ conceded, ‘systematic management is cer tainly a necessity’, but fads are troublesome things and, ‘there are indications that this subject of “production engineering” and “systemizing” is rapidly developing into such a fad’. While a ‘proper amount of system’ decreases the cost and improves the quality of a product, too much system does not necessarily increase certainty (American Machinist, 48(11), 1904: 1499). ‘Wake up America!’ (Engineering Magazine, September 1906: 801–8), an article by Louis Bell, a university professor and a prominent consulting engineer, admonished the technological and business community. Invoking the ‘disaster’ that American manufacturers were facing given international competition, Bell warned of ‘lurking in over-confidence in system’. Manufacturers, particularly the smaller ones, did not subscribe to the industry-wide ideology of uncertainty-reduction and viewed systematization and standardization as strategies employed by engineers to expand their professional territory. Systems were costly and seemed unnecessary. To them, they appeared to generate unpredictability, lack of control, conflicts and instability (Shenhav, 1995). As one supervisor, describing the work of these engineers, put it: ‘they had every man in the place running around with a pencil over his ear, and we didn’t get the work done’ (American Machinist, 16(4), 1915: 750).



The employers’ objections troubled and perplexed mechanical engineers. An 1891 American Machinist editorial argued that, while engineers sought to increase efficiency, they unfortunately found their efforts to control the firm impeded by the very men who stood to gain the most by the reforms (Shenhav, 1995). The tension between engineers and employers over systematization as a means for achieving certainty was discussed frequently in the engineering literature during the first decade of the 20th century. Engineers lamented about the ‘unprogressive manufacturer’ who ‘does not understand that the losses he is daily bearing are many times the amount that his extra clerks would cost him. In fact, his “extra clerks” would probably prove the best investment he could ever make’ (Engineering Magazine, April 1902: 15–18). As late as 1907, engineers observed that ‘there are still many manufacturers who are not satisfied to give their unqualified approval to modern methods . . . The number is growing less every day, but there are thousands to whom these remarks apply’ (Engineering Magazine, January 1907: 481–92). Opposition to systematization and standardization, however, dissipated with time. The adoption of new systems and standards was led by the larger and more successful firms which in turn influenced the entire industry. The widespread adoption of uniform standards is well in line with the notion of mimetic isomorphism argued by institutional theorists (DiMaggio and Powell, 1983).

Summary and Conclusions This research, in an effort to demonstrate the importance of understanding the impact of social, political and cultural factors on management practices and organization theory, zooms in on one of the main managerial concepts, ‘organizational uncertainty’. We demonstrated that mechanical engineers at first focused their professional energies on dealing with technical uncertainty and, building on their success, expanded their professional domain to include the reduction and elimination of organizational uncertainties. Further, we contend that discourse regarding organizational uncertainty is closely associated with labor unrest. The textual materials demonstrate that labor unrest was conceptualized as a problem of mechanics and was treated as a particular case of organizational uncertainty. The engineers-managers viewed their professional expertise, their tools and methods of organization and management practices as a remedy for the labor turmoil. The first paper Taylor read before the ASME was not incidentally entitled ‘A Piece Rate System: A Step Toward Partial Solution to the Labor Problem’ (1894–5). To buttress his argument, and to make scientific management more palatable to owners and management, Taylor emphasized that there had never been a strike by men working under his scientific system (1903). The professional tools and techniques developed by mechanical engin eers were deemed scientific and objective by the host business community.


22 Histories

Social problems and the struggle over the division of wealth were placed within the domain of professional engineering and thereby the political conflictuality was flattened, objectivized and neutralized. The political struggle was recast, it was technologized and rationalized. The rationalization of politics was made possible by engineering expertise which reduced divisive social issues into technical matters which were suitable to unemotional and calculable engineering manipulation, and by the political ideology of Progressivism which aspired to achieve a neutral, administrative state (Merkle, 1980). It was this transformation of technical uncertainty into the language of management and organization that marks the constitution of uncertainty discourse. It was then institutionalized and diffused in the literature and in organizational practice. This research has theoretical, methodological, historical and epistemological implications, linked and intertwined, for the study of the origins and development of organization theory. Generally, American organizational thinkers treat the field of organiza tion theory as a relatively recent phenomenon. Mainstream and canonical texts, such as Scott (1987), peg its appearance to the late 1940s, with the translation into English of Weber’s work on bureaucracy and Selznick’s study of the Tennessee Valley Authority (1949); others date the beginning of organization studies to the appearance of the Administrative Science Quarterly in 1956. The current study suggests that organization theory ought to be historicized, and that the roots of the field go much deeper (Burrell, 1988) than ascribed by the classical texts and are closely linked to the inception of salaried management, the rapid growth of the machine shops and, more importantly, to the rise of the large industrial business organizations during the second half of the 19th century. At the theoretical level, the technique of tracing the evolution of the usage of the concept of uncertainty presents us with the possibility of offering a distinct and unique way of interpreting it and enables us to develop novel hypotheses. The traditional view, espoused by organization thinkers such as Thompson (1967), Crozier (1969), Pfeffer and Salancik (1978), and Scott (1987), is that hierarchies arise in order to achieve stability, order and efficiency which are defined in terms of rationality and the reduction of uncertainty. We suggest that uncertainty – a dominant intellectual thread in the history of organization theory – be treated not only as a feature of the internal and external organizational environments but also as an ideological construct used to legitimate the rise of professional managers and to justify a variety of managerial and organizational methods of control.11 It may be argued that current organizational theory adopted the concepts of rationality and of ‘uncertainty reduction’ too readily, without sufficiently distancing itself from the objects of its inquiry. In other words, the tendency of the early organizational theorists was to adopt the actors’ categories, i.e. the classifications and state of mind of management (Douglas, 1992). In a similar vein, Foucault poignantly remarked: ‘I should like to know whether the subjects



responsible for scientific discourse are not determined in their situation, their function, their perceptive capacity, and their practical possibilities by conditions that dominate and even overwhelm them’ (Foucault, 1970: xiv). The main issue at stake is the relationship between the engineering community and the objects they constructed: ‘material objects’, ‘ideas’ and ‘theories about the world’. Given their central role in industrial firms at the time, engineers were able to monopolize their idiosyncratic frameworks and to universalize them throughout the entire organizational community. Engineering professionals, because of the unique context of the politics of management – labor relations and the ethos of the Progressive Era, were in a position to create convergences and homologies among previously unrelated entities thereby enacting a new organizational reality (Callon, 1980; Latour, 1987). Historical analysis often leaves one with the impression that the narrative is deterministic and unidirectional. Though our attempt to expose the underlying perspectives may blur controversies, it is not to say that engineers were all cut from the same cloth. Two distinctions are noteworthy. First, many engineers showed no interest in management and managerial problem solving and chose to pursue ‘traditional’ engineering vocations. Second, not all engineers supported the trend to standardize all aspects of machine shop work; some fought this sweeping movement. They felt that standardization served the industrialists and mass production, and would, eventually, inhibit creativity and originality in machine design and production. Furthermore, many shop owners were apprehensive about adopting standardization and new management techniques that were viewed as costly, unnecessary, and impractical. These different views of the organizational rationality are in evidence in the pages of the American Machinist and the Engineering Magazine. Finally, a similar analysis may be made regarding widely used managerial concepts such as ‘hierarchy’, ‘efficiency’, ‘effectiveness’, or ‘quality control’. This would warrant a combined effort of collecting historical quantitative and qualitative data, which describe the genealogical relationship between actors, concepts and objects in changing environmental conditions. This brings us back to the theoretical position with which we started this discussion. Every theory is based on an epistemological anchor that is achieved through reflexivity, reached through an historical analysis. Thus, we need to demonstrate that theory development, methodology, epistemology and history are intertwined.

Notes We should like to thank Gideon Kunda with whom we discussed our research project from its inception. We are also indebted to Galit Ailon-Souday, Michal Frenkel, Noah LewinEpstein, and Yuval Yonay for useful comments and suggestions. Yasmin Alkalay provided valuable technical assistance. The services and help received at the Engineering Foundation


24 Histories

and the Engineering Societies Information Center, Linda Hall Library – East are greatly appreciated. This research was supported by grants from the Israel Foundations Trustees, Ford Foundation, 1994, the Israel Science Foundation and the David Horowitz Institute. 1. For exceptions see Barley and Kunda (1992), Guillen (1994), Shenhav (1995), Jacques (1996), Abrahamson (1997), Weitz (1997) and Shenhav (1999). 2. American creation of management grew out of engineering practices that were different from the European experience. The US engineers-managers were very much attuned to the economic constraints of the enterprise and the management of production processes. This was not the case with European engineers, especially the French and German, who were more concerned with technical variables in line with their scientific traditions. Germany’s economy was organized around ‘rational lines’ and bureaucratic formulas, and did not experience the kind of managerial discourse that developed in the United States. It is true that bureaucratic ideas about order and duty were borrowed from the German Army and state administration (Guillen, 1994). But it did not enjoy the professional discourse that developed in the United States during the Progressive Era. In the United States, professional discourse emerged within engineering circles and was then diffused in industry. In Germany, the bureaucratic model was formed in state apparatuses. To the extent that managerial thought developed in Germany to its modern form, it was an American influence. Scientific Management arrived in Germany a few years before the First World War (Merkle, 1980; Rabinbach, 1990). In the mid 1920s Germany’s acute economic problems drove engineers, manufacturers, academicians and intellectuals to make pilgrimages to the US in order to unravel the American romance with modern management. Every serious business and engineering magazine in Germany regularly covered American success stories, usually not without mention of Fordism, Scientific Management or Sears, Roebuck and Company (Nolan, 1994). Economic historians estimated that in the mid 1920s there were 600 private organizations, 85 state offices, and 67 state research institutes in Germany that dealt with issues related to rationalization (Guillen, 1994). 3. We examined the title, abstract, introduction, and summary of each of the articles. We coded these for explicit and unambiguous appearance of the construct ‘uncertainty’. For it to be counted, the concept had to appear in any one of the above-mentioned sections of the articles published. A comparison of the mentions of uncertainty with the mentions of ‘organizational goodness’ constructs is instructive: out of 2760 articles that appeared in the ASQ, AM], AMR, and OS since their inception through 1990, 349 (or 12.6 percent) of them deal with the key constructs of organization theory: ‘effectiveness’, ‘efficiency’, ‘productivity’ and ‘performance’ at the organizational level (Shenhav et al., 1994). 4. To distinguish between individuals and social entities, organizational theorists use concepts such as organizational fields (DiMaggio and Powell, 1983), interorganizational field (Benson, 1975), sectors (Scott and Meyer, 1991), industrial systems (Hirsch, 1972) and business systems (Whitley, 1992). The concept of ‘field’ is used here to mean a configuration of objective relations between positions (Bourdieu, 1992) that ‘delimit a socially structured space in which agents struggle, depending on the position they occupy in that space, either to change or to preserve its boundaries and form’ (Wacquant, 1992: 17; quoted in Kjir, 1998). The concept is useful as it situates social entities as part of a decentralized relational structure that shapes and gives meaning to them (Kjir, 1998). 5. The concept ‘discourse’ denotes the process of articulation as a struggle to establish the meaning of social phenomena by continuously forming a series of distinctions relating to a particular phenomenon – ordered by a particular ideal conception. A discourse is not a body of ideas but, rather, a set of rules of concept formulation.



6. To be sure, it is not denied that the industrialists and professional engineers operated in environments rife with uncertainty. This research, however, is concerned with understanding the parameters which cultivated the dis course regarding uncertainty, which enabled it to grow and eventually become legitimized and pivotal in management and organization theory. 7. Each reference to uncertainty, in the American Machinist and the Engineering Magazine, both ‘positive’ and negative’, was tabulated and the page space that was allotted to each reference to the term was recorded; that is, the variable captures the total volume of pages dealing with uncertainty divided by the total number of pages published in a given year. Uncertainty was defined by the actual reference to the word, its synonyms or antonyms: certainty, ambiguity, haziness, chaos, vagueness, steadiness, stability, chance, standardization, rationality, predictability, risk, order. 8. Once institutionalized, the very elements that were instrumental in a process’s formation may cease to affect it as the discourse achieves a life of its own. This is the essence of the institutionalization process: factors affecting a process during its inception may no longer affect it once it has become institutionalized (e.g. Tolbert and Zucker, 1983). 9. A plausible explanation for this decline may be that the discussion regarding organizational uncertainty shifted from engineering literature to other organs (e.g. the Journal of Applied Psychology); that is, as management became a distinct discipline and was separated from mechanical engineering, we expect that the forum for discussion would also change. 10. The ASME established its Management Division in 1920; by 1922, it was its largest division (Merrick, 1980). The rapid growth of engineers in managerial positions may be explained in a variety of ways: their middle-class status and ambitions, their technical skills and analytical abilities, and their filling of a void created by the rapid industrialization (Layton, 1971). Exploring the reasons for this phenomenon is outside the scope of this paper. 11. Throughout the paper, we advanced the position that engineers-managers are free agents promoting their own interests, often against the position of their employers. Thus, we see the interests of managers and capitalists as divergent, and managerial capitalism not as a natural organ of traditional capitalism. This stand runs counter to both economic functionalism (Chandler, 1977) and the Neo-Marxist perspective (Braverman, 1974; Edwards, 1979). Both perspectives treat capitalists as the main agents for social change.

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2 From King to Court Jester? Weber’s Fall from Grace in Organizational Theory Michael Lounsbury and Edward J. Carberry

‘Weber has all but dropped from sight because the questions addressed by organizational researchers have not been and are not now the issues raised by Weber, good intentions and multiple citations notwithstanding.’ (Meyer 1990: 191)

M

ax Weber’s corpus of writings remains a fount of inspiration for many sociologists and other scholars. In organizational theory, where the impact of his work has arguably been the greatest, engagement with Max Weber’s scholarship has dwindled to a whisper, although there may be the occasional howl. This is despite the fact that Weber is widely acknowledged as one of the founding fathers of organizational theory. From pioneering research in the mid-20th century that built on Weber’s theory of bureaucracy to contemporary research on organization-environment relations, it is undeniable that organizational theory is profoundly imprinted by the Weberian gaze. Yet, current researchers rarely cite Weber, and if they do, it is more often than not a mere ceremonial nod. In this paper, we take a closer look at how Weber has informed organi zational theory by providing a detailed explication of the historical dynamics of Weberian-inspired research on organizations through an examination of all articles that cite Weber from 1956 to 2002 in the Administrative Science Quarterly (ASQ), the premier scholarly outlet for organizational theory research. While Weber’s contributions to our understanding of organizations and the development of organizational theory include his emphasis on Source: Organization Studies, 26(4) (2005): 501–525.


32 Histories

authority, domination, power, and conflict within organizations as well as his attention to the complex connections between organizations and broader social, political, and cultural dynamics, our ASQ data show that organizational scholarship has increasingly moved away from a direct engagement with such Weberian problematics. This is mainly due to the concomitant shift in research orientation since mid-century within North American organizational theory in the 1970s towards more instrumental and structural conceptions of organizations operating in narrowly conceived resource environments, most vividly evidenced in the organization-environment tradition (e.g. see Hinings 1988; Lounsbury and Ventresca 2002). However, we argue that the time is ripe to more explicitly revisit the work of Weber as a way to understand how organizations may be changing in tandem with broader societal and global shifts as well as to more generally reconnect the study of organizations to broader societal concerns (see also Stern and Barley 1996; Hinings and Greenwood 2002; Lounsbury and Ventresca 2002). In the following section, we provide a brief overview of Weber’s approach to the study of organizations, including his historically situated understanding of the origins of bureaucracy. Next, we draw on our analysis of ASQ articles to track the historical dynamics of the intraorganizational, social organization, and organization-environment relations content streams. While we show that Weber’s relevance has empirically declined in terms of citations and depth of engagement, we conclude with a discussion of where we see opportunities for the revitalization of Weber’s work in contemporary organizational research. For instance, we believe that current efforts to understand issues having to do with globalization, postindustrialism, and varieties of capitalism in the information age make Weber’s historical analyses of capitalism, domination, authority, legitimacy, and inequality as relevant today as they were during the transitions to industrialization, urbanization, and rudimentary forms of market capitalism in his lifetime. In addition, new research on the relationship between social movements and organizational behavior provides particularly fertile ground for a reengagement with Weber. Finally, Weber’s distinctive theory of economic sociology could help bridge theoretical divisions between network-oriented research, rational choice approaches, and more culturallyoriented institutional scholarship within organizational theory.

Weber’s Approach to Organizations and Organizing The legacy of Max Weber looms large within sociology, particularly within economic sociology, the sociology of religion, social stratification, and organizational sociology. Weber’s corpus of scholarship includes efforts to understand the origins of Western rationalism, capitalism and bureaucracy in works such as The Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism (1930) and his comparative studies of world religions such as ancient Judaism (1952),


Lounsbury and Carberry • From King to Court Jester? 33

Confucianism and Taoism in China (1951), and Hinduism and Buddhism in India (1958). His comparative historical orientation to the study of ideas and the economy importantly shaped Weber’s overall thinking about organiza tions, embedding his conceptualization of organizations in a broad political sociology of economic life which is especially evident in his encyclopedic masterpiece Economy and society (1978).1 Weber is widely considered to be one of the ‘founding fathers’ of organizational theory, mainly because of his insights into the functioning of bureaucracy, the dominant administrative system that emerged with capitalism. Although Economy and society was originally published posthumously in 1922, the first English translation of Weber’s writings on bureaucracy did not appear until 1946 with the publication of From Max Weber (Gerth and Mills 1946). The following year, Talcott Parsons’ translation of the first four chapters of Economy and society was published (Weber 1947). This included three sections of Chapter III entitled ‘Legal Authority with a Bureaucratic Administrative Staff’.2 As Scott has noted, these translations were crucial to the development of scholarly interest in Weber in the United States: ‘Shortly after selections from Weber’s seminal writings on bureaucracy were translated into English during the late 1940s, a group of scholars at Columbia University under the leadership of Robert K. Merton revived interest in bureaucracy and bureaucratization, its sources, and consequences for behavior in organizations.’ Scott (1995: 17)

This gave rise to a number of studies such as those by Selznick (1949), Gouldner (1954), Blau (1955) and Lipset et al. (1962) that provided a solid foundation for the emergence of organizational theory as a distinct specialty area. Much of this early research focussed on empirical examinations of the existence of ideal type bureaucracy as posited by Weber (Albrow 1969).3 Although Weber articulated an eloquent description of bureaucracy that continues to provide a baseline for organizational theorists, to fully appreciate the depth of Weber’s analysis of bureaucracy and his continued relevance for organizational theory, it must be placed within his broader historical analysis of the development of capitalism, systems of domination and authority, and social organization. For instance, in tracking the development of capitalism in Western societies, Weber highlighted how traditional structures of power and domination in social life were replaced by new forms of domination emanating from the institutional development of bureaucracy, calculable law, and democracy that supported the genesis of capitalism. For Weber, the structure and social reality of modern economic organizations and administrative systems, including bureaucracy, emerged out of specific historical processes relating not only to markets, trade, and technology, but also to political and legal structures, religion, and socio-cultural ideas and institutions. This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.

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In addition to his deep analysis of the socio-historical context in which the modern organization developed, Weber’s contributions to organizational theory are also contained in his analyses of intraorganizational power and conflict, and how systems of authority were connected to broader sociohistorical dynamics (Hinings and Greenwood 2002). Weber conceptualized struggles for power, authority, and domination as pervading all social life, including organizational and bureaucratic life. The concept of domination, often rooted in authority systems, is a foundational element of Weber’s analytical framework (Roth 1978). In contrast to Weber’s definition of power as the probability that one actor is in a position to carry out his own will despite resistance, he defined domination as the probability that a command will be obeyed by a group of persons, typically through voluntary compliance or an interest in obedience. Domination, therefore, is not the forceful imposition of power, but relies on a shared belief system that structures interactions between and among rulers and subjects. As a result, domination cannot be understood as the mere sum of isolated occurrences of specific social relationships, but as the outcropping of the institutionalization of values and norms that stabilize and govern a wide range of social, economic, and political behavior. In particular, Weber’s typology of administrative systems – traditional, charismatic, and rational-legal – represent three kinds of authority systems that differ primarily in the types of belief or cultural systems that legitimate the exercise of authority (see Scott 1995: 11). These three ideal-typical administrative systems provided an overarching framework by which Weber tried to understand the key distinguishing aspects of modern bureaucracy, a rational-legal administrative system. In contradistinction to rational-legal authority that is rooted in a belief in legal codes that justify normative rule patterns and the right of those in authority to issue commands under those rules, charismatic authority rests on the heroism or exemplary character of a particular individual, and traditional authority is supported by longstanding beliefs, customs, and traditions. Since charismatic authority is more fragile and fleeting, Weber spent more time tracking the historical shift from tradi tional to rational-legal authority systems as a way to understand the origins of modern modes of economic and social action.4 The transformation from traditional to rational forms of authority emerged out of macro-historical changes relating to the development of capitalism. As Collins (1986) has articulated, Weber saw the development of capitalism as resulting from a complex causal chain and unique patterning of events rather than a linear progression or process of evolution. At the core of the development of capitalism was the emergence of the modern state and an economic ethic that broke down the barriers between internal and external economies. However, capitalism did not usher in the rational-legal form of domination. Instead, rational-legal ideas rooted in a number of interpenetrated social, economic, religious, and political developments, including the development of bureaucracy, enabled capitalism to emerge. To wit, bureaucracy was not



the natural by-product of capitalism, but rather a precondition for the latter since it developed from the presence of literate administrators, long-distance transport and communication, writing and record-keeping technology, and other factors. To Weber, bureaucratic administrative systems represented the most sophisticated expression of rational-legal authority. It is within this sophisticated historical analysis that Weber assessed the operation and consequences of the bureaucratic form. While Weber argued that bureaucracy was an extremely efficient system of administration, Derlien (1999) has noted that organizational theory has widely mischaracterized Weber’s view of the effectiveness of bureaucracy as a prescriptive model of how administrative systems should be structured. According to Weiss (1983), this narrow characterization of Weber’s theory of bureaucracy as prescriptive was the result of the mistranslation of Weber’s work by Parsons. Nonetheless, Weber did recognize that bureaucratic systems were more efficient than traditional administrative systems that often relied on overt force and coercion, and charismatic systems that were less stable and enduring than either traditional or bureaucratic systems. Furthermore, Weber claimed that the emergence of bureaucracy contributed to a leveling of social differences because official positions within a bureaucracy were filled according to technical qualifications rather than the personal loyalty to a master. Despite the positive consequences of bureaucratic administration, Weber was deeply concerned with the concentration of power and the tragically dehumanizing nature of life in bureaucracies. Although bureaucracy has its own logic and power, and opens up administration to broader groups of people, it is still similar to traditional authority, controlled by a master or group of masters that use it to advance their own ends (see also Perrow 2002). As Weber (1978: 980) noted, ‘the bureaucratic structure goes hand in hand with the concentration of the material means of management in the hands of the master’ because the rules of bureaucracy restricted officials from ownership in the organization, and the hierarchical nature of the bureaucratic structure made it ultimately obedient to the commands of the master. Another negative consequence is the emergence of what Whyte (1956) called the ‘organization man’, in which the orientation towards the rational technical rules of bureaucracy and obedience to its abstract norms of legal-rationality leads to the creation of the infamous ‘iron cage’, a dehumanizing subservience to the rational rules of administration. While most organizational theory scholars have bracketed investigation of the positive and negative sides of the bureaucracy coin, the downside of bureaucracy garnered some attention by intraorganizational researchers in the 1950s and 1960s who examined authority conflict (e.g. Gouldner 1954; McEwen 1956; Scott 1965; Crozier 1969) and subsequent research that has had a more critical edge to it (e.g., Barker 1993; Adler and Borys 1996; Ezzamel and Willmott 1998; Martin et al. 1998). Most organizations analysts have favored more ‘neutral’ empirical analyses, whether they explicitly relied


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on Weber’s model of bureaucracy to guide intraorganizational research, drew on his comparative historical understanding of organizing to investigate broader questions about social organization, or ceremoniously cited his work to pay homage to the ‘classics’ in an effort to situate empirical research in a broader tradition of thought. Despite Weber’s foundational impact on the development of organizational theory, some scholars have claimed that Weber has been narrowly interpreted by organizational scholars. Scott (2003: 43), for example, has noted that ‘although Weber’s writings had a profound influence on the development of organizational theory in the United States . . . because his arguments were available in disconnected fragments, they were taken out of context and incorrectly interpreted’. Similarly, Swedberg (1998: 169) opined that ‘contemporary organizational theory and economic sociology have a restricted picture of Weber’s theory of organizations’. These criticisms suggest that, although Weber has influenced many organizational scholars, the full range of his contributions has yet to be explored.

An Analysis of Weberian Scholarship in Organizational Theory To develop a more concrete understanding of shifts in how Weber’s scholarship has informed research in organizational theory, we performed a citation analysis of Max Weber in the Administrative Science Quarterly (ASQ) from 1956 to 2002. Our analysis focusses on the evolutionary dynamics of three distinct Weberian-inspired research streams and the depth of engagement that organizational scholars have had with Weber. In this section, we first describe our analytical strategy and then discuss our results.

Analytical Strategy Citation analyses of the organizations literature have taken three general forms. The most basic form consists of counting the number of times a particular work, author, or group of authors has been cited as a way to assess the overall level of influence (e.g. Usdiken and Pasadeos 1995). The second form of citation analysis involves both counting citation frequencies and classifying the citation and/or article according to a coding scheme (e.g. Moravcsik and Murugesan 1975; Aldrich 1998; Hargens 2000). The final form of citation analysis involves more in-depth content analysis of the text containing and relating to the citation (e.g. Locke and Golden-Biddle 1997). While counting citation frequencies is the simplest and quickest approach, it provides a more superficial analysis than that provided by deeper content analyses. The main downside of textual analysis of latent meanings in text is



that it is more subjective than the other two analytical strategies. To track the usage of Weber by organizational theorists, we chose to employ a middling strategy of combining citation counts with an analysis of how the content of articles varied across time and space in their usage of Weber. In the first step of our analysis, we counted the number of articles in ASQ that cited Weber. Although this provided an initial glimpse into the general influence of Weber, we then coded each article along two dimensions to understand the historical dynamics of how Weber was actually employed. We first constructed a simple coding scheme based on three broad conventionally understood streams of Weberian-inspired research: social organization, intraorganizational, and organization-environment.5 Research in the social organization tradition more directly examines the embeddedness of organizational phenomena in their broader societal contexts (e.g. Parsons 1956; Gusfield 1958; Stinchcombe 1959). We coded an article as intra-organizational if its analytic focus was on internal organization dynamics. Intraorganizational research includes many classic studies of bureaucracies and their dynamics (e.g., Gouldner 1954; Janowitz and Delany 1957; Zald 1962) as well as more contemporary ethnographic research inside organizations that builds on and extends that early work (e.g. Barker 1993; Adler and Borys 1996; Martin et al. 1998). The third and final category was organizationenvironment, which captures articles primarily concerned with the interaction between organizations and their environments. Articles in this genre tend to conceptualize organizations primarily in instrumental terms and organiza tional environments as resource spaces to be navigated, whether resources are defined as forms of capital, legitimacy, or labor. Research on organizationenvironment relations includes studies rooted in paradigmatic theories of contingency (e.g. Pugh et al. 1969), resource dependence (e.g. Pfeffer et al. 1976), organizational demography (e.g. Haveman 1993), institutional analysis (e.g. Strang 1987), and transaction cost economics (e.g. Ouchi 1980). The second part of our citation analysis examined whether articles used Weber in a substantive way or cited his work more ceremoniously. This distinction is similar to the organic/perfunctory dimension advanced by Moravcsik and Murugesan (1975: 88) that distinguishes articles based on whether the ‘reference is truly needed for understanding the referring paper . . . or is mainly an acknowledgement that some other work in the same general area has been performed’. For our purposes, a ceremonial citation was one that noted or cited Weber but engaged in little or no discussion of the relation of the particular work of Weber with the article’s theoretical argument or empirical analysis. Articles coded as substantive used Weber in many different ways, but are all similar in that they engage with Weber in a more significant way than a passing reference. Substantive articles, for example, include those that directly tested or applied a theory of Weber, those that used a concept from Weber as a theoretical basis for research or to operationalize a variable, and those in which Weber was not a primary


38 Histories

component of the theory or research approach, but provided a key supporting point that was discussed extensively. Our two-part coding strategy allowed us to develop a more nuanced understanding of the dynamics of Weberian scholarship than that which would emerge through counting citation frequencies. However, our approach has distinct limitations. First, we focus on evidence from one journal. We chose ASQ because it has been the premier outlet for organizational theory research since the 1950s, allowing us to systematically analyze historical shifts in the citation and use of Weber in organizational theory. To limit the bias inherent in focussing on one journal, we also examined Weber citations in Academy of Management Journal, Academy of Management Review, American Journal of Sociology, American Sociological Review, and Organization Studies. Our analyses show that the ASQ citation patterns are not anomalous and provide a useful window into shifts in Weber citation patterns. Second, we concentrated our analysis on those articles that specifically cited Weber. Our analysis, therefore, does not capture the cumulative effect of a theorist like Weber. For example, while Weber’s theory of rationalization provides a crucial theoretical foundation for the new institutionalism (e.g. Meyer and Rowan 1977; DiMaggio and Powell 1983), articles in this research stream may not directly cite Weber even though they may have been influenced by his work. Finally, since our analysis does not include in-depth textual analysis, it does not tap into some of the complex ways in which Weber has informed different streams of organizational theory, both in ASQ and in other venues. Despite these limitations, our methodology allows us to examine the ways in which North American organizational scholars have used Weber, explicate some of the key dynamics within Weberian organizational scholarship, and assess the extent to which authors have directly engaged with Weber’s work. To situate our citation analysis of ASQ, we first track aggregate Weber citation patterns in prominent US management journals (ASQ, Academy of Management Journal, and Academy of Management Review), sociology journals (American Journal of Sociology and American Sociological Review), and in Organization Studies. For the management journals, we counted all articles that cited Weber. Since Weber is a theoretical pillar for a diverse range of sociological inquiry, we only counted organization theory-specific articles that cited Weber in the sociology journals.6

Results Figure 1 examines the historical patterns of citations in ASQ as well as the other management and sociology journals from 1958 to 2002, providing the yearly percentages for the total number of organization theory articles citing Weber.7 The most notable trend is that the percentage of articles citing Weber



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Figure 1: Organizational theory articles citing Weber in Administrative Science Quarterly, Organization Studies, and American Management and Sociology Journals (%)

in ASQ has steadily declined since its peak of 36.5% in 1961 to its lowest point of 6.8% in 1991, with an increase from 1977 to 1987, a sharp decrease from 1989 to 1992, and a modest increase up to 15% by 2002. This figure also reveals that the annual percentage of Weber citations has been consistentlyhigher in ASQ, Organization Studies, and the sociology journals than in US management journals, although the gap has narrowed substantially over time. While the annual citation percentages for US management publications are lower than those for ASQ (5% vs. 19%), there were peaks around 10% in the mid-1960s, mid-1970s, and mid-1990s. Despite variance in peaks and troughs, the pattern of Weber citations is comparable in ASQ and Organization Studies, the prominent European management journal founded in 1980. The average citation percentage was 15% in both journals from 1980 to 2002. For the sociology journals, articles examining organizations and citing Weber tended to be generally higher (around 24%) than in ASQ on average, but the general pattern of declining citations were similar.8 The citation of Weber in organization articles in sociology journals peaked at around 50% in 1959, bottomed out at 10% in 1987, then increased to around 30% by the new millennium. This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.

40 Histories Content Streams (%)

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Figure 2: Articles citing Weber in ASQ by social organization, organization-environment and intraorganizational content streams (%)

In order to gain a better understanding of the dynamics underlying these broad trends, we now turn to our more detailed citation analysis of Weber in ASQ. Between 1956 and 2002, 238 articles in ASQ cited Max Weber; of these, 140 (59%) were coded as intraorganizational, 58 (24.4%) were classified as social organization, and 40 (16.6%) were coded as organizationenvironment. Figure 2 examines the historical trends for the percentage of ASQ articles citing Weber, broken down by genre. The percentage of intraorganizational articles rises steadily from 1958 to its highest point in 1968 (29.7%), declines dramatically to 6% by 1982, increases between 1982 and 1985, and then decreases again to its lowest point in 1996 and 1997 (1%) before a slight rebound to around 6% by 2002. The annual percentage of social organization articles peaked early in 1961 at 15.8% of all ASQ articles, remained relatively stable at lower citation rates between 1970 and 1990, and experienced a slight resurgence in the 1990s; the average citation rate of the social organization tradition was around 7% up until 1970, dropped to 3% from 1970 to 1990, and has increased to 5% since then. The percentage of organization-environment articles citing Weber was low until the late 1970s, mainly because that tradition was still emerging at that time. We coded only 11 Weber-cited articles (or 1% of all ASQ articles) from 1956 to 1978 as organizationenvironment. However, the percentage of articles in this genre increased dramatically from 0.8% in 1977 to a peak of 11.6% in 1987 before falling sharply in the 1990s.



If we return to the overall citation trends for Weber in ASQ (Figure 1), a more nuanced picture emerges. The peak of 36.5% in 1961 represents a large number of intraorganizational and social organization articles. The gradual decline between 1961 and 1977 primarily represents the gradual decline in intraorganizational articles between 1968 and 1982 and a sharp drop in social organization articles between 1961 and 1964. The modest increase in the percentage of articles citing Weber between 1977 and 1987 reflects the increase in the number of organization-environment articles, although the peak period of these articles was much lower than the peaks for the other two categories. The sharp drop in the percentage of articles citing Weber between 1989 and 1992 represents the nadir of Weberian influence since 1956. In this period, there is a decrease in all categories of articles. Finally, the increase in percentage of Weber citations that started in the 1990s is the result of sharp increases in social organization articles since 1995 and in intraorganizational articles since 1997. Figure 3 shows the historical trends in the percentage of articles that cite Weber ceremoniously. At its lowest in 1967, less than 20% of the articles cited Weber ceremoniously. This percentage rose sharply between 1967 and 1972, decreased between 1973 and 1975, but then increased gradually to its peak of just over 80% in 1992.9 These overall trends show that engagement with Weber was most significant between 1956 and 1967, but then dropped significantly between 1967 and 1992, the period in which the number of organization-environment articles increased. 0.9 0.8 0.7 0.6 0.5 0.4 0.3 0.2

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Figure 3: Ceremonial Weber citations as % of total articles citing Weber in ASQ, 1956–2002


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To analyze temporal shifts in the three streams of research, it is useful to parse our analytical frame into three periods: 1956–1970; 1971–1989; and 1990–2002. The first period contains the highest overall percentage of ASQ articles citing Weber (24.5%). The early years of ASQ were dominated by articles in the intraorganizational and social organization streams of research as well as by substantive engagement with Weber (only 43% of the citations were ceremonial). Intraorganizational articles increased sharply from 1958 to 1967, but then dropped in the last three years, while social organization articles reached their peak during the early 1960s. Among both social organi zation and intraorganizational articles, there were relatively few ceremonial citations. Within the social organization category, the early articles engaged directly with Weber’s broad view of bureaucracies as systems of authority that emerged within particular socio-historical contexts (e.g. Stinchcombe 1959; Constas 1961; Presthus 1961). Intraorganizational articles examined a wide range of phenomena, but approximately half explored aspects of Weber’s theory of bureaucracy and bureaucratic authority. Many of these focussed on case studies of single organizations and attempted to critique, revise, refine, or expand Weber’s ideal type bureaucracy through penetrating analyses of internal organizational dynamics (e.g. McEwan 1956; Bennis 1959; Peabody 1962; Albrow 1969). Towards the end of the 1960s, challenges to Weber’s ideal type bureaucracy based on larger samples of organizations began to emerge within the intraorganizational stream (e.g. Kaplan 1968a; Meyer 1968; Pugh et al. 1968). In contrast to the large number of intraorganizational and social organization articles, there were only six organization-environment articles during this period. During the period between 1971 and 1989, the percentage of articles citing Weber in ASQ rose incrementally but then fell. Of the 107 articles citing Weber in this period, 61 were intraorganizational, 25 were organizationenvironment and 20 were social organization. During this period, the ratio of substantive to ceremonial citations shifted as the percentage of articles that cited Weber ceremoniously rose to 59%. Intraorganizational articles continued to dominate, but two-thirds of these articles were ceremonial citations, as opposed to less than half in the previous period. The shift in intraorgani zational research in the 1970s can be characterized as one away from direct studies of Weber’s theory of bureaucracy and authority to articles on organizational structure that cited Weber ceremoniously (e.g. Mohr 1971; Pheysey et al. 1971). Some articles in the 1970s did examine authority, but emphasis was on variable operationalization and structural characteristics, not on the struggle and contestation inherent in organizational life (e.g. Hrebiniak 1974; Ouchi and Dowling 1974; Bacharach and Aiken 1976). By the beginning of the 1990s, Weber was still an important reference point for scholars examining intraorganizational phenomena, but substantive citations that referenced Weber’s concepts of authority, domination, and bureaucracy had diminished.



Between 1971 and 1989, the percentage of social organization articles remained fairly steady, both in terms of the number of articles and the percentage of ceremonial citations, but the percentage of organizationenvironment articles citing Weber increased sharply, especially in the 1980s. The most prominent Weberian-inspired theoretical approach to the relationship between organization and environment in this period was institutionalism (e.g. Baron et al. 1986; Strang 1987), and about half of all organization-environment articles cited Weber substantively. By the late 1980s, Weber citations in organization-environment articles had declined precipitously. The most recent period of Weberian scholarship had the fewest Weber citations. Of the 40 ASQ articles citing Weber from 1990 to 2002, we coded 17 as social organization, 15 as intraorganizational, and 8 as organizationenvironment. Furthermore, the rise in ceremonial citations continued and reached a peak of 62.5% in 1992. Between 1990 and 1992, only five articles cited Weber, while only one article cited Weber in both 1994 and 1995. However, the numbers alone do not tell the entire story of the current period. Although the percentage of substantive citations in the social organization stream fell to 35%, three special dialogue articles in this period engage directly with Weber’s legacy and call for more social organization research (Blau 1996; Scott 1996; Stern and Barley 1996). In addition, intraorganizational articles in this period revealed an important reconnection with Weberian concepts of bureaucratic authority and domination in the workplace (Barker 1993; Adler and Borys 1996; Martin et al. 1998). The content of many of these articles and the way in which they engage with Weberian scholarship suggests an important shift, particularly towards the end of the period, towards broader uses of Weber that were evident in the 1950s and 1960s. Overall, the ASQ data show that between 1956 and 1970, the legacy of Weber loomed the largest in organizational theory, as demonstrated by the number of substantive citations in the intraorganizational and social organization traditions. The former remained close to Weber’s concepts of domination and authority within bureaucratic structures, while the latter offered analyses of bureaucracies that were rooted in broader socio-historical analyses. The period from 1970 to 1989 represented a time in which articles in ASQ became more disconnected from the Weberian themes of intraorganizational authority, and the interaction between organizations and richly conceptualized social, political, and cultural environments. By the beginning of the final period, 1990–2002, the legacy of Weber appears to be quite tenuous within organizational scholarship published in ASQ. However, since 1993, there has been a modest growth in the number of articles that reconnect with the broad intellectual legacy left by Weber and his concerns with authority, domination, and situated socio-historical analysis. We applaud this direction and research, and believe that more direct engagement with Weber’s work could be quite fruitful for the field.


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Discussion: The Relevance of Weber for Contemporary Organizational Theory Despite recent efforts to reconnect with core Weberian issues of bureaucracy and social organization, the long secular decline in the number of substantive citations suggests that the overall relevance of Weber to organizational theory scholars has waned. However, although intraorganizational research citing Weber is still below its historical average (6% vs. 11%) and the percentage of organization-environment articles citing Weber remains at its relatively low average of 3%, Weberian-inspired social organization articles are now above that genre’s historical average (6% vs. 4.7%). Hence, even though scholarly use of Weber has narrowed over time with the ascendancy of organization-environment research, the social organization tradition does appear to be resilient, and we believe that it is this tradition that provides the best avenue for the future reengagement with Weber by the discipline. In fact, we believe that the most provocative intraorganizational and organization-environment research has actually begun to shift towards the social organization tradition and highlights the power of that lens. For instance, new institutional research has increasingly moved away from a more restrictedresource dependency view of organization-environment relations that was popular through the 1980s to develop richer analyses of fields that take culture and social organization seriously (e.g. Thornton and Ocasio 1999; Ruef 2000; Scott et al. 2000). This research builds on the idea of field in the natural sciences to examine regularities in the actions of actors by recourse to position vis-a-vis others (see Martin 2003 for a review). The concept was imported and adapted to neoinstitutional approaches to organizational analysis via Bourdieu by DiMaggio (1983) and DiMaggio and Powell (1983) in now classic statements. As opposed to focussing on the study of single populations of organizations as organizational ecologists emphasized, DiMaggio and Powell (1983) argued that the field is the appropriate analytical focal point for neoinstitutional researchers. While field-oriented research has taken shape slowly, it has become increasingly popular as a way to account for both local, situated action on the one hand and societal level processes on the other (see Scott 1994). Fields have been defined as both the organizations that produce common outputs (whether these are automobiles, social services, or spiritual salvation) as well as the organizations that supply resources, effect constraints, or pose contingencies, particularly government agencies, trade associations, and professions (DiMaggio 1983). The field concept can be extremely useful for mapping how structures, stabilized through entrenched power relationships, change as a result of dynamics that involve a renegotiation of those power relationships. To the extent that organization-environment research begins to account for the multidimensional nature of the contexts This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.


within which organizations operate, this tradition begins to merge with longstanding conceptualizations and research strategies in the social organization tradition. There have also been efforts to bring together intraorganizational and social organization research by examining the coevolution of organizational and institutional processes (Baron and Bielby 1980; Barley 1996; Lounsbury and Kaghan 2001). Greenwood and Hinings (1996) developed a framework that focussed attention on how the internal dynamics of organizations may lead some organizations to respond differently than others despite exposure to the same institutional pressures, highlighting the importance of studying internal organizational dynamics in concert with broader social organizational processes. Ruef and Scott (1998) demonstrated the fruitfulness of a more detailed multilevel approach to institutional and intraorganizational change in their study of how the legitimacy of hospitals with different ownership characteristics shifted in tandem with a transformation in logics. All of this research could be usefully advanced by more directly engaging with the work of Weber. As organizational theory and research became concerned with organizational effectiveness and organizational environments narrowly defined as resource spaces, it lost touch with the location of organizations in society and the persistence of systems of power both within and outside organizations. However, organizations remain firmly embedded within broader historical contexts that are shaped by complex social, political, and cultural processes. Similarly, authority, domination, and conflict continue to permeate organizational life. Weber’s attention to the interaction between society and intraorganizational processes provides an especially useful way to open up new approaches to multilevel research. We see at least three areas where such a multilevel Weberian perspective would be particular valuable: analyses of postindustrial forms of organizing; the emerging literature connecting the study of social movements and organizations; and the application of theoretical and research approaches of economic sociology to the study of organizations.

The Postindustrial Organization Numerous scholars have claimed that the globalization of production and consumption markets, the compression of product cycles, and the expanding role of information technology in production has ushered in a postindustrial economy and society (e.g. Piore and Sabel 1984; Applebaum and Batt 1994; Barley and Kunda 2001). A large and diverse group of trends relating to contemporary organizational life have been identified as manifestations of this transformation, from the rise of temporary work and the end of bureaucratic career trajectories, to the flattening of organizational This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.

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hierarchies and the emergence of network forms of organization. Weber’s focus on how systems of authority emerge and become institutionalized, and his attention to how broader social, political, and culture processes influence organizational life offer a useful framework for understanding the causes, characteristics, and consequences of this transformation both inside and outside of organizations. For example, systems of decentralized decision-making such as selfmanaged teams, total quality management (TQM), and other forms of employee involvement have become an important way for the postindustrial firm to organize (Applebaum and Batt 1994; Cole 1995; Osterman 2001) but we know very little about the extent to which these systems have altered bureaucratic authority patterns. Barker (1993) presents an instructive application of Weber’s theory of bureaucratic authority in his study of self-managing teams. He found that a system of bureaucratic authority evolved into a new system of concertive control in which ‘value-based normative rules . . . controlled [employees’] actions more powerfully and completely than the former system’ (Barker 1993: 408). In his ethnographic study of the work of technicians, Barley (1996) argues that the pressures for organizations to flatten their hierarchies and authority systems do not stem solely from organizations reacting to external pressures, but from the broader distribution of technical expertise within the postindustrial organization. These two contributions demonstrate how the Weberian perspective can be used to examine how and why authority relations are changing, but many questions remain regarding the extent to which decentralized management approaches alter, replace, or reinforce bureaucratic authority systems. A deep engagement with Weber’s analytical approach to how authority systems develop and become institutionalized would be particularly useful for answering such questions. We also know very little about the field-level conditions under which new systems of authority in the postindustrial economy emerge and become institutionalized, or are contested and resisted, and how these processes are related to broader social and political systems. Existing explanations view the emergence of these systems primarily as rational organizational responses to distinct competitive challenges. There have been remarkably few studies that have examined the extent to which the postindustrial forms of organizing have been shaped by broader societal dynamics, such as political struggles surrounding the welfare state, the accumulation crises of advanced capitalism, social movements around globalization, the rise of the shareholder view of the firm, new ideologies about managing and organizing, the impact of technology on social organization, new patterns of consumption, and cultural definitions and images of work and leisure. Weber’s expansive analysis of the emergence of capitalism incorporated a wide range of societal phenomena, and our analysis of the postindustrial



organization will be incomplete until it incorporates such a similarly expansive lens to examine the impact of contemporary social, political, and cultural change on organizations. Some might argue that the transformation to a postindustrial society has rendered Weber, who was observing the emergence of the mass production economy, peripheral to today’s organizations. However, the extent to which bureaucracy has in fact become less prevalent remains a very open question. Although the last two decades have ushered in a variety of organizational forms that are much different from the ideal type of bureaucracy described by Weber a century ago, bureaucratic forms remain central and important ways of organizing. For Weber, bureaucracy is a durable social form that is very successful in maintaining itself. Furthermore, the movement towards postindustrial forms of organizing may represent the next stage in the progressive rationalization of economic and social life as described by Weber, rather than anything fundamentally new. Davis and McAdam (2000), for example, have argued that the postindustrial transformation has been driven by two forces: a movement away from the bounded organizational form and the significance of international capital markets. The rise of the network form has meant that ‘everything a firm might do has a ready market comparison in the form of a specialist contractor’ (Davis and McAdam 2000:199). Likewise, the power of capital markets and the shareholder conception of the firm have meant that the activities and meaning of organizations have been reduced to their financial statements. Hence, it remains an open question whether postindustrial forms of organizing represent dramatic departures from the processes of rationalization that coevolved with industrial capitalism or an important expansion of them. To remain honest to Weber’s legacy, organizational theorists need to examine the ways in which new forms of domination and authority are emerging in the postindustrial age, how these relate to rational-legal forms of domination, and how they relate to issues of power and stratification. In doing so, organizational researchers must examine how social, political, and economic realities influence the generation of new types of administra tion, organizational structures, and forms of domination, and in turn, how new organizational realities influence social and political life outside of organizations.

Social Movements and Organizations Major transformations such as the emergence of new postindustrial forms of organizing often involve social movement-like processes that challenge existing configurations of resources and meanings (Fligstein 1996). While Weber is not known as a social movement theorist per se, his discussions of the


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relationship between substantive and formal rationality provide useful focal points for those interested in the study of values (and valuing) and economic organization. Formal rationality is ‘the extent of quantitative calculation or accounting which is technically possible and which is actually applied’ (Weber 1978: 85). In sharp contrast to means – ends calculations, substantive rationality draws attention to how social action is shaped by ultimate values. This kind of social action often motivates social movement activists who challenge conventional arrangements and authority systems that rely on institutionalized arrangements rooted in formal rationality. The tension between substantive and formal rationality becomes especially apparent when aspects of society that are considered sacred are profaned by equating their purported value to the price that these ‘products’ can bring in the course of commercial exchange (Espeland and Stevens 1998). Such tensions have been identified in the development of money (Simmel 1978), efforts to establish commercialized blood banks (Titmuss 1971), and the pricing of children (Zelizer 1994). Beyond the study of bureaucratization and co-optation, an analysis of the intertwining of different forms of rationality should also be crucially important to those interested in how social movements penetrate organizations, leading to changes in the structures, practices, and ideas that shape economic activity (e.g. Zald and Berger 1978). For instance, as Lounsbury (2001) showed, social movement activity tied to ecological and recycling concerns that penetrated particular colleges and universities facilitated the creation of new full-time recycling coordinator positions that brought young ecological activists into the physical plants of schools, creating tension around how to value various solid waste practices of the university. While many ecological activists believe that recycling is the right thing to do from a moral standpoint, those promoting recycling needed to engage in formalistic dialogue and evaluation of solid waste practices to form a bridge between the formal rationality of extant physical plant staff and their substantive rationality in order to garner resources for the creation of recycling programs and a broader set of ecological practices. Weber’s theoretical discussion of the routinization of charisma has also provided an apt metaphor for those studying the bureaucratization of social movements. For instance, scholars showed how the initial ferment of move ments often becomes packaged into more bureaucratically structured social movement organizations, leading to the co-optation of movement leaders and participants as well as the subversion of the original goals and ideals of movements (Michels 1962 [1911]; Selznick 1949; Zald and Ash 1966). More directly highlighting the utility of Weber’s comparative historical lens, Clemens’ (1997) comparative historical analysis of three kinds of movements and the organizational forms they used to contest extant political institutions highlights the value of Weberian scholarship. She showed how social



movement activists rely on cultural repertoires in choosing organizational forms in an effort to alter social organization, but that their choice of forms must be neither too similar nor radically different from what is acceptable by incumbents in order for the activism to be efficacious. The current literature on social movements and organizations is burgeoning (e.g. Strang and Soule 1998; Davis and McAdam 2000; Rao et al. 2000; Lounsbury et al. 2003; Davis et al. 2004), and we believe the research at this interface is providing a robust direction for social organization research that fruitfully embeds questions about organizations and organizing in broader societal dynamics.

Economic Sociology Finally, during the last 20 years, economic sociology has witnessed a dramatic resurgence of interest, producing what is now called the new economic sociology. The growing number of readers and textbooks highlight the vitality and diversity of interest in this growing domain (e.g. Granovetter and Swedberg 1992; Smelser and Swedberg 1994; Carruthers and Babb 2000; Biggart 2002; Swedberg 2003; Dobbin 2004). While sociology journals have seen a growing number of economic sociology articles published since the 1980s, ASQ itself published 15 such articles from 1994 to 2000. Hence, this is an area of research that has become important in organization theory proper. As Swedberg (1998) details, in addition to the historical analysis of capitalism and systems of domination that situated his theory of bureaucracy, Weber made the first systematic attempt at formulating a distinctive economic sociology. Weber developed an original theoretical framework for examining economic phenomena by offering a sophisticated definition of economic social action and using this as the basis for examining economic organization generally. In particular, he was attempting to bridge the divide between the rational actor of economic theory and the socially constructed nature of reality, a divide that remains relatively unexplored (Swedberg 1998). Going back to Weber may not only provide inspiration for the development of more historical comparative approaches to economic sociology (e.g. see Stinchcombe 1983), but may provide a useful starting point for dialogue among structurally-oriented network research, rational choice approaches, and more culturally-oriented institutional scholarship. In particular, Weber’s attention to the interpenetration of culture and rationality is apropos to research camps that emphasize one to the exclusion of the other (see Strang and Macy 2001). This is particularly evident in field analyses that employ practice theories and relational methods to study temporal and spatial variations in meaning and the ways in which actors, enmeshed in relatively durable power


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relations, engage in continual struggles for positional advantage (Bourdieu 1977). For example, in an analysis of the cultural and organizational dynamics underpinning the 1992 impeachment of Brazilian President Fernando Collor de Melo, Mische and Pattison (2000) highlighted how proand anti-impeachment organizational coalitions formed as a result of discursive positioning in the field of Brazilian politics. They showed how a wide variety of organizational forms, the interconnections and alliances between them, and their discursive claims about the particular kinds of projects in which they were engaged, shaped the impeachment dynamic. Since Weber has been such a central figure in economic as well as organizational sociology, it is not surprising that the recent rise of organizational theory interest in the domain of economic sociology provides fertile ground for reengagement with Weber’s work. In this final section, we have highlighted how organizational scholarship could benefit from a serious engagement with Weber’s core analytical framework, a framework that takes seriously the dynamics of domination and conflict within organizations and the complex social, political, and cultural context in which organizations are embedded. We believe that Weber’s corpus offers a sophisticated lens through which organizational theory can begin to make deeper connections between systems of authority inside of organizations, and broader structures of power and privilege within society, as well as the complex ways in which such systems and structures are legitimated. In its primary focus on developing a science of effective organizational management and its view of environments as resource spaces, contemporary organizational theory has become alarmingly disconnected from such issues, which were at the core of Weber’s attempt to understand modern capitalism. The time is ripe to more critically reflect on dominant strands of organizational research that valorize instrumental conceptions of organizing with an eye towards managerial relevance. Weber’s historical analyses of capitalism, domination, authority, and bureaucracy are as relevant today as they were during the transitions to industrialization, urbanization, and rudimentary forms of market capitalism in his lifetime. Like the time of transformation in which Weber developed his ideas, we grapple with contemporary transformative issues involving the growing importance of information technology, globalization, and post-Fordist forms of organizing economic activity. Current researchers would be wise to revisit Weber’s corpus since his foundational statements and empirical efforts provide many insights into current issues and problems in addition to offering many unsolved puzzles that should fuel future theoretical research and development. Our hope is that this may also provide an opportunity for further collaboration and dialogue among organizational theorists in America, Europe, and elsewhere.



Notes We would like to thank Richard Swedberg for his very astute and helpful insights about Max Weber and Weberian scholarship. Royston Greenwood, Tom Lawrence and three anonymous reviewers also provided very sage comments and suggestions that usefully sharpened our arguments. 1. For more complete explications of Weber’s scholarship, see Bendix (1960), Käsler (1988) and Swedberg (1998). 2. The relevant sections on organizations in Economy and society include: Part 1, Chapter I, section 12; Part 1, Chapter III, sections 3–5; Part 2, Chapter II; Part 2, Chapter X, section 3; and Part 2, Chapter XI. 3. Weber’s model of bureaucracy included administrative characteristics such as a fixed division of labor, a hierarchy of offices, a set of general rules that govern performance, the separation of personal from official property and rights, and the selection and promotion of personnel on the basis of technical considerations and merit (see Scott 1992 for a more complete discussion). 4. As part of Weber’s analysis of charismatic, traditional and rational-legal authority systems, he developed the idea of rationalization that was the process by which, for example, charismatic and traditional forms changed to become more formally rational, often in accordance with rational-legal authority systems (see Weber 1978: 1121-1122). 5. Our categorization of ASQ articles was inductively derived, but guided by our understanding of the literature. 6. For our analysis of sociology journals, we searched for articles that cited Weber and had any of the following words in the abstract: bureaucracy, bureaucratic, organization, organizational, firm, administration, or administrative. 7. We began counts for ASQ from its inception in 1956; for the Academy of Management Journal from its inception in 1957; for the Academy of Management Review from its inception in 1976; and both sociology journals from 1956, although both were founded prior to 1956. Since there is variation in the volume of articles across our journal categories, we focus on Weber citation percentages across the total number of articles by category to gain leverage in comparability. 8. The dramatic spike in Weber citations around 1978 in sociology journals may be partially due to the Roth and Wittich translation of Economy and Society published in that year. 9. The general pattern in ceremonial citations is similar in ASQ and Organization Studies in the period from 1980 to 2002. The average percentage of articles citing Weber ceremoniously over this time period was only slightly higher in ASQ (64% vs. 60%).

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Ezzamel, Mahmoud, and Hugh Willmott 1998 ‘Accounting for teamwork: A critical study of group-based systems of organizational control’. Administrative Science Quarterly 43/2: 358–396. Fligstein, Neil 1996 ‘A political-cultural approach to market institutions’. American Sociological Review 61: 656–673. Gerth, Clifford, and C. Wright Mills, editors and translators 1946 From Max Weber: Essays in sociology. New York: Oxford University Press. Gouldner, Alvin 1954 Patterns of industrial bureaucracy. New York: Free Press. Granovetter, Mark, and Richard Swedberg 1992 The sociology of economic life. San Francisco: Westview Press. Greenwood, Royston, and C. R. Hinings 1996 ‘Understanding radical organizational change: Bringing together the old and the new institutionalism’. Academy of Management Review 21: 1022–1054. Gusfield, Joseph R. 1958 ‘Equalitarianism and bureaucratic recruitment’. Administrative Science Quarterly 2/4: 521–541. Hargens, Lowell 2000 ‘Using the literature: Reference networks, reference contexts, and the social structure of scholarship’. American Sociological Review 65/6: 846–865. Haveman, Heather 1993 ‘Follow the leader: Mimetic isomorphism and entry into new markets’. Administrative Science Quarterly 38/4: 593–627. Hinings, C. R. 1988 ‘Defending organization theory: A British view from North America’. Organization Studies 9/1: 2–7. Hinings, C. R., and Royston Greenwood 2002 ‘Disconnects and consequences in organization theory?’ Administrative Science Quarterly 47/3: 411–21. Hrebiniak, Lawrence 1974 ‘Job technology, supervision, workgroup structure’. Administrative Science Quarterly 19/3: 395–410. Janowitz, Morris, and William Delaney 1957 ‘The bureaucrat and the public: A study of informational perspectives’. Administrative Science Quarterly 2/2: 141–162. Kaplan, Berton 1968a ‘Notes on a non-Weberian model of bureaucracy: The case of a development bureaucracy’. Administrative Science Quarterly 13/3: 471– 483. Kaplan, Berton 1968b ‘A commentary on organizations and social development’. Administrative Science Quarterly 13/3: 484– 490. Käsler, Dirk 1988 Max Weber: An introduction to his life and work, trans. Philippa Hurd. Cambridge: Polity Press. Lipset, Seymour Martin, Martin Trow, and James Coleman 1962 Union democracy. Garden City, NY: Anchor Books. Locke, Karen, and Karen Golden-Biddle 1997 ‘Constructing opportunities for contribution: Structuring intertextual and “problematizing” in organizational studies’. Academy of Management Journal 40/5: 1023–1062. Lounsbury, Michael 2001‘Institutional sources of practice variation: Staffing college and university recycling programs’. Administrative Science Quarterly 46/1: 29–58. Lounsbury, Michael, and Bill Kaghan 2001 ‘Organizations, occupations and the structuration of work’ in Research in the sociology of work. S. P. Vallas (ed.) 10: 25–50. Lounsbury, Michael, and Marc Ventresca 2002 ‘Social structure and organizations revisited’. Research in the Sociology of Organizations 19: 3–36. Lounsbury, Michael, Marc Ventresca, and Paul Hirsch 2003 ‘Social movements, field frames and industry emergence: A cultural political perspective of US recycling’. Socio-Economic Review 1/1: 71–104. Martin, Joanne, Kathleen Knopoff, and Christine Beckman 1998 ‘An alternative to bureaucratic impersonality and emotional labor: Bounded emotionality at the Body Shop’. Administrative Science Quarterly 43/2: 429–469. Martin, John Levi 2003 ‘What is field theory?’ American Journal of Sociology 109: 1–49.


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McEwen, William 1956 ‘Position conflict and professional orientation in a research organization’. Administrative Science Quarterly 1/2: 208–224. Meyer, John, and Brian Rowan. 1977 ‘Institutionalized organizations: Formal structure as myth and ceremony’. American Journal of Sociology 83: 340–363. Meyer, Marshall 1968 ‘The two authority structures of bureaucratic organization’. Administrative Science Quarterly 13/2: 211–228. Meyer, Marshall 1990 ‘The Weberian tradition in organizational research’ in Structures of power: Papers in honor of Peter M. Blau. C. Calhoun, M. Meyer, and W. R. Scott (eds), 191–215. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Michels, Robert 1962 Political parties. New York: Free Press. Mische, Anna, and Philippa Pattison 2000 ‘Composing a civic arena: Publics, projects, and social settings’. Poetics 27: 163–194. Mohr, Lawrence 1971 ‘Organizational technology and organizational structure’. Administrative Science Quarterly 16/4: 444–459. Moravcsik, Michael, and Poovanalingam Murugesan 1975 ‘Some results on the function and quality of citations’. Social Studies of Science 5/1: 86–92. Osterman, Paul 2001 Securing prosperity. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Ouchi, William 1980 ‘Markets, bureaucracies, and clans’. Administrative Science Quarterly 25/1: 129–141. Ouchi, William, and John Dowling 1974 ‘Defining the span of control’. Administrative Science Quarterly 19/3: 357–365. Parsons, Talcott 1956 ‘Suggestions for a sociological approach to the theory of organizations’. Administrative Science Quarterly 1/1: 63–85. Peabody, Robert 1962 ‘Perceptions of organizational authority: A comparative analysis’. Administrative Science Quarterly 6/4: 463–482. Perrow, Charles 2002 Organizing America: Wealth, power, and the origins of corporate capitalism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Pfeffer, Jeffrey, Gerald Salancik, and Huseyin Leblebici 1976 ‘The effect of uncertainty on the use of social influence in organizational decision–making’. Administrative Science Quarterly 21/2: 227–245. Pheysey, Diana C., Roy Payne, and Derek Pugh 1971 ‘Influence of structure at organizational and group levels’. Administrative Science Quarterly 16/1: 61–73. Piore, Michael, and Charles Sabel 1984 The second industrial divide. New York: Basic Books. Presthus, Robert 1961 ‘Weberian v. welfare bureaucracy in traditional society’. Administrative Science Quarterly 6/1: 1–24. Pugh, D. S, D. J. Hickson, C. R. Hinings, and C. Turner 1968 ‘Dimensions of organizational structure’. Administrative Science Quarterly 13/1: 65–105. Pugh, D. S, D. J. Hickson, C. R. Hinings, and C. Turner 1969 ‘The context of organization structures’. Administrative Science Quarterly 14/1: 91–114. Rao, Hayagreeva, Calvin Morrill, and Mayer Zald 2000 ‘Power plays: Social movements, collective action, and new organizational forms’. Research in Organizational Behavior 22: 237–282. Roth, Guenther 1978 ‘Introduction’ in Economy and Society. Max Weber. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Ruef, Martin 2000 ‘The emergence of organizational forms: A community ecology approach’. American Journal of Sociology 106: 658–714. Ruef, Martin, and W. Richard Scott 1998 ‘A multidimensional model of organizational legitimacy: Hospital survival in changing institutional environments’. Administrative Science Quarterly 43/4: 877–904.



Scott, W. Richard 1965 ‘Reactions to supervision in a heteronomous professional organization’. Administrative Science Quarterly 10/1: 65–81. Scott, W. Richard 1994 ‘Conceptualizing organizational fields’ in Systemrationalität und Partialinteresse. Hans-Ulrich Derlien, Uta Gerhardt, and Fritz W. Scharpf (eds), 203–221. Baden-Baden, Germany: Nomos Verlagsgesellschaft. Scott, W. Richard 1995 Institutions and organizations. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Scott, W. Richard 1996 ‘The mandate is still being honored: In defense of Weber’s disciples’. Administrative Science Quarterly 41/1: 163–171. Scott, W. Richard 2003 Organizations: Rational, natural, and open systems. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall. Scott, W. Richard, Martin Ruef, Peter J. Mendel, and Carol A. Caronna 2000 Institutional change and healthcare organizations: From professional dominance to managed care. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Selznick, Philip 1949 TV A and the grass roots. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Simmel, Georg 1978 The philosophy of money. New York: Routledge. Smelser, Neil, and Richard Swedberg, editors 1994 The handbook of economic sociology. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Stern, Robert, and Stephen Barley 1996 ‘Organizations and social systems: Organization theory’s neglected mandate’. Administrative Science Quarterly 41/1: 146–162. Stinchcombe, Arthur 1959 ‘Bureaucratic and craft administration of production: A comparative study’. Administrative Science Quarterly 3/4: 509–525. Stinchcombe, Arthur 1983 Economic sociology. New York: Academic Press. Strang, David 1987 ‘The administrative transformation of American education: School district consolidation, 1938–1980’. Administrative Science Quarterly 32/3: 352–366. Strang, David, and Michael Macy 2001 ‘In search of excellence: Fads, success stories, and adaptive emulation’. American Journal of Sociology 107: 147–182. Strang, David, and Sarah Soule 1998 ‘Diffusion in organizations and social movements: From hybrid corn to poison pills’. Annual Review of Sociology 24: 265– 290. Swedberg, Richard 1998 Max Weber and the idea of economic sociology. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Swedberg, Richard 2003 Principles of economic sociology. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Thornton, Patricia H., and William Ocasio 1999 ‘Institutional logics and the historical contingency of power in organizations: Executive succession in the higher education publishing industry, 1958–1990’. American Journal of Sociology 105/3: 801–844. Titmuss, R. M. 1971 The gift relationship. New York: Vantage. Usdiken, Behlul, and Yorgo Pasadeos 1995 ‘Organizational analysis in Europe and North America: A comparison of co-citation networks’. Organization Studies 16/3: 503–526. Weber, Max 1930 The Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism. London: George Allen & Unwin. Weber, Max 1947 The theory of economic and social organization. New York: Oxford University Press. Weber, Max 1951 The religion of China: Confucianism and Taoism. Glencoe, IL: Free Press. Weber, Max 1952 Ancient Judaism. Glencoe, IL: Free Press.


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3 ‘Dead Selves’: The Birth of the Modern Career Alan McKinlay

Introduction

A

conventional history of the rise of the modern career in Scottish banking would stress the growth in the scale of enterprise, geographic spread and the increasing complexity of internal transactions before 1914. To this would be added the cartelization of Scottish banks that took place after the banking crisis of 1857. In 1863, all the major Scottish banks were signa tories to an agreement that their rates would shadow changes initiated by the Bank of England, competition was to be constrained and gentlemanly, focus ing primarily on developing the branch network. For the Bank of Scotland, each decade from the 1870s to 1900 saw the net addition of between 10 and 15 branches. From 1900 to 1920 there was a net gain of a further 47 branches (Collins, 1995; Saville. 1996). Quite simply, as the branch network grew so the number of junior and promoted posts increased. Each branch was a rep lica of the other: staffing, procedures and reporting protocols were identical throughout the network. In turn, the rapid growth of the branch network triggered the development of middle management to bridge the gap between a still small head office and the periphery. The cartelization of Scottish bank ing directly affected the labour market, as wages across the entire sector were now set by meetings of the general managers of all the Scottish banks. The banks also agreed not to hire any defectors from each other’s organiza tion: the sector’s labour market was balkanized into a series of closed inter nal labour markets. This was the context for the birth of the modern career. Source: Organization, 9(4) (2002): 595–614.


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First, we begin with some introductory comments on the idea of the career; second, we will outline the Victorian banking employment system before turn ing to the gradual but strategic bureaucratization of banks as organizations. In particular, we will stress the fresh importance of the inspection process tying the branch network to headquarters, as inspection was at the heart of the banks’ employment system. The conventional tale is of the growth of a machine bureaucracy triggered by the stabilization of the competitive envi ronment and shaped by executive decision-making. On the face of it, the con ventional account is compelling: it has the empirical and theoretical merit of pointing to the banks as prime examples of an early form of managerial capitalism. However, a quite different reading of the modern banking career’s emergence is possible. For one thing, it reads long-term organizational change as being determined wholly by economic factors. This over-reliance on eco nomic logic neglects the social and systemic factors at work inside the bank’s employment structure, factors shaping careers. A Foucauldian interpretation alerts us to the importance of inspection, not just as a mechanism for apprais ing individual task performance, but also as permanently recording the orga nization’s reflections on the body and soul of the bank clerk. In essence, the word ‘career’ speaks of a promise, the vow that an organi zation makes to the individual that merit, diligence and self-discipline would be rewarded by steady progress through a pyramid of grades. The career was a promise by the organization to the employee not just in the short-term but one that would hold good for decades. Career progression would mean measurable progress and commensurate rewards for specific levels of perfor mance and particular demonstrations of character (Collins, 1995; Osborne, 1994). Therefore, the contract was more than economic, it encompassed the whole person. Self-management became the joint responsibility of the organization and the individual. The very idea of the career epitomized the reflexive self at the heart of the modernist project: we are what we make of ourselves. It was the permanent nexus between the individual and the orga nization, and its disciplinary effect hinged upon the individual’s knowing acceptance that they had embarked upon a lifelong moral project, always subject to validation by the organization. Erving Goffman’s understanding of the career, control and self anticipated Foucault by almost two decades (Goffman, 1968: 154; see also Burns, 1992: 160–6; Schrift, 1995): Each moral career, and behind this, each self, occurs within the confines of an institutional system, whether a social establishment such as a men tal hospital or a complex of personal and professional relationships. The self, then, can be seen as something that resides in the arrangements prevailing in a social system for its members. The self in this sense is not a property of the person to whom it is attributed, but dwells rather in the pattern of social control that is exerted in connection with the person by himself and by those around him. This special kind of institutional ar rangement does not so much support the self as constitute it.


McKinlay • ‘Dead Selves’ 59

For the organization, constructing the compact of the career had the major benefit of creating a powerful reason for employees to monitor themselves. This relieved the organization of much of the burden of supervision. But in turn, this opened up a new and serious contradiction for management. The promise of the career created enormous potential for dissatisfaction since it unleashed a range of hopes that may be difficult, if not impossible, to satisfy. If individuals were given the prospect of advancement how could they feel fulfilled without it? On the other hand, if staff were not given realistic pros pects of predictable advancement then the career lost its moral force, and could not exercise significant control. It was precisely those individuals who had become disenchanted with the moral demands of the career whom the organization’s internal systems identified as deviant.

The Aristocracy of Clerical Labour Bank employees were the aristocrats of clerical labour: their employment was more secure, their workplace was safe, clean and brightly lit, and their salaries were consistently higher than any other clerks (Anderson, 1976; Wilson, 1998). From the early 19th century salaries increased with age and seniority, supplemented by irregular, sizeable supplements, or ‘presents’. Until 1830, salaries were adjusted solely at the discretion of the bank’s direc tors, a regime that created anomalies and which rewarded only the most able, leaving experienced ‘low-flyers’ somewhat disgruntled. Directorial fiat did little to cement the staff to the organization. John Sim, the Bank of Scot land’s accountant, explained the rationale behind a seniority system: Assiduity and length of service even when there is but little talent [is] I think entitled to its recompense – and in recommending the adoption of some gradually increasing scale of official remuneration, I have chiefly in view a desire to engage the heart and goodwill of all in the prosperity of the establishment – and to displace that apathy to its concerns which my own observations lead me to believe exists even now. (Boot, 1991: 650)

Before 1880, the Bank deliberately rejected a career structure based on meri tocracy. Age-related salaries rewarded long service, a relationship designed to deter individuals with transferable skills in a tight labour market from simply moving to another Scottish bank. This was not a wholly successful strategy. On average, the Bank endured labour turnover of between 15 and 20 percent (Munn, 1981: 166–7; Munn, 1997). The benefits of tying salaries to age were simplicity and broad acceptability to staff. Set against this were two major disadvantages. First, the construction of manorial labour markets specific to each bank meant that promotions could only come from within. Men of ability could not be lured from competitors. Second, the age-related salary scale did little to stem the outflow of experienced bankers, principally


60 Histories

for better opportunities overseas. The Bank of Scotland’s directors had to construct an internal labour market that balanced a need for deep organi zational commitment with salary incentives and promotion opportunities, irrespective of age. The emergence of a recognizably ‘modern’ career in the Bank of Scot land can be safely dated from 1896 with the publication of ‘The Rules for the Government of the Salaries Scheme’. A uniform salary scale had been in force from 1881, but the 1896 Rules were both more comprehensive and broke with the pattern linking salary solely to age.1 The strategic imperative for the bank was no longer staff retention – cartelization had all but elimi nated that as an issue – but to establish, understand and monitor an internal labour market: to motivate and govern the individual employee. From the mid-1890s, salary was to be linked to individual merit rather than service. And how was this merit to be evaluated? The 1896 Rules added an important new dimension to the role of the inspector. No longer was the inspector only responsible for ensuring that branches followed administrative procedures exactly (Cassis, 1994); they now had responsibility for reviewing manpower planning at branch level, ‘with a view to effecting a reduction of the Staff wherever practicable’. Inspection was at the heart of the Bank’s emerging administrative bureau cracy. After an exhaustive examination of the branch’s cash, ledgers and procedures, the inspector then interviewed the agent about his staff – their ‘individual character and habits’. The salary and performance of every employee was recorded in ledgers and permanently held at head office. Carefully recorded entries spanned a person’s entire career, and aspired to provide a complete, continuous audit of the individual. Such annual reports were the main way in which centralized control was exercised. The ledgers were based on a consistent and subtle code that graded individuals accord ing to their technical and cultural capabilities. There was no numerical evaluation, but the meaning of the assessement ‘well suited to present post’ was unmistakable. As a career unfolded, these assessments became more searching. For the new recruit, tidy handwriting and boyish enthusiasm was enough for a favourable rating. More experienced employees were evaluated on a host of intangible signs that were read as proxies of class, character, and commitment. Increasingly over time, not only behaviours but attitudes were rated; these ratings became both more critical to the pace of the individual’s career and their meanings more subtle as opportunities narrowed. Individu als were inspected but were not given sight of their reports, nor the opportu nity to contest their superior’s verdict. This was a serious issue, since neither seniority nor competence was in itself sufficient to guarantee promotion: ‘The number of Officers in any particular grade, especially at the larger Offices, to be limited, and promotion from one Grade to another granted only when a vacancy arises in the higher Grade’. Promotion was dependent solely upon the annual reports prepared for every employee. The message was clear. All



senior jobs were filled from below. And there was only one port of entry – routine clerical work – even the most senior managers had to spend con siderable time in the lower ranks. There was to be no vestige of sponsored promotion because of family or business contacts, no hint of nepotism, but an unbiased selection process in which every person competed equally for a limited number of places. In practice, this meritocratic ideal was never achieved. Implicitly, the 1896 Rules also told of a search for administrative improvement. No longer did profits simply reflect external conditions; mar gins were also protected or fattened by internal efficiency. For the Bank, one of the main virtues of inspection was that branches would never know when it might occur and so they would routinely act as if an inspector might arrive at any moment. In practice, inspectors rarely had the power of surprise. Inevitably, there was a pattern to inspection rounds and local branches would warn each other of an impending visit. Despite the sophistication of the inspection process, visual scrutiny alone was unable to deliver rigorous checks on branches and their adherence to bank procedures. A much more important form of control over behaviour was that of selfmanagement: that is, in return for the promise of the career, bank employ ees undertook to manage themselves in the most profound sense; to dili gent performance and deep conformity with the organization’s culture. The Bank’s emerging bureaucratic system was not dependent upon compulsion and never aspired to be a system of domination. Rather, the bank bureau cracy was, in Foucault’s terms, an inventive, productive form of power. As Honneth (1993: 167–8) put it, ‘the modern techniques of power are now dis tinguished for Foucault in that they are able not merely to suppress or simply control the conduct of human bodies but also systematically to produce it’. By constructing the possibility of a career and a system of monitoring the depth of individual self-discipline, the Bank established the necessary pre conditions for a modern, productive system of power.

Recruitment Mr Archibald McLean, although his examination papers are satisfactory, has been rejected for the staff on account of his height and insignificant appearance.2

Unlike other clerical jobs, bank employees were seldom recruited anony mously through the press; in banking, personal recommendations were essential. There were two main routes. The first was through the personal contacts of existing bank employees. Above all, fathers recommended their sons and close male kin. For the bank, this maximized the possibility of recruiting boys partly socialized into the expectations of a banking career (Taylor, 2000). Apprentices hired in this way were under a double discipline.


62 Histories

First, they were subject to the normal rules of their employer. Second, they were obligated to their sponsor. Misbehaviour or under-performance by the recruit risked invoking paternal discipline and could damage the sponsor’s reputation, and so his ability to place other young candidates (Grieco, 1987). Nor was this a disciplinary mechanism that diminished over time. As the recruit reached maturity his behaviour and demeanour were critical, not just to his career, but to his ability to sponsor employment opportunities for others. The second important route into bank employment was recruiting the sons of important clients or individuals who might become clients. For the apprentice, this was not necessarily a training for banking but often a means of learning commercial procedures which would be useful on their joining the family firm. The bank was under no illusion about this. Indeed, it welcomed the opportunity to strengthen its ties to existing clients and to their managerial successors. Recruitment was a critical element of the bank’s long-term strategy to embed itself deeply in the intergenerational fabric of its business clients. Recruitment was largely devolved to the branches and the Bank’s central officers ratified but did not regulate recruitment. Personal knowledge of the boy and his family by the branch manager was the rule. The priority was to hire boys from middle-class homes – or at least middle-class addresses. The Bank offered only the most general guidance. The qualities desired of an apprentice were ‘character, ability, manners, education, appearance, and general health’.3 In short, the Bank looked to recruit boys to train for basic clerical duties and, much more important, those who were capable of becom ing gentlemen in manners and bearing. After a fairly rudimentary test set by the head office – good penmanship was something of an obsession for the Bank – the apprentice was admitted to his local branch.

Promotion Keep open the door of advancement to the lowest clerk in your establish ment, and you at once raise honest merit to a premium, and sink indo lence, apathy, and incapacity to a hopeless discount. (Bullion, 1850: 162) How is it that the human subject took itself as the object of possible knowl edge? Through what forms of rationality and historical conditions? And finally at what price? This is my question: at what price can subjects speak the truth about themselves? (Foucault, 1988: 30; Szakolczai, 1998: 81)

The four-year apprenticeship was the first foot on the ladder; after that, gains in salary and grade were determined by competitive assessment. Pro motion hinged on more than technical ability. As the branch reports make abundantly clear, the individual’s character, their social standing and that of their family, were routinely considered as part of the annual inspection.



The inspection reports were concerned with the individual’s technical com petence, their diligence and their adherence to the Bank’s unwritten codes of conduct. These expectations were never made explicit but were implicit throughout the inspectors’ reports. Steady progress through the salary bands and promotion to the next grade was wholly dependent upon conformity to the Bank’s behavioural code. More than this, inspection looked not only at behaviour but attempted to read the soul of individual employees. Inspection attempted to go beyond ‘outer-directed narratives – what we say about oth ers, say to others, have said to ourselves by others, do to others, or have done to ourselves’. The ambition of inspection was to go beyond such narrative presentations of self and to eavesdrop on ‘the inner monologue, what I say to myself to the process of ‘self-discipline, what I do to myself: ‘the permanent heartland of subjectivity’ (Hacking, 1986: 236). And, moreover, to record and decode this inner monologue over an individual’s entire working life. Mere conformity to procedural and behavioural codes was insufficient to ensure promotion; the individual had to convince the branch manager that they were becoming what they were. The individual was responsible for policing himself: career success turned upon the careful monitoring of how one presented oneself to colleagues and customers, and the inspectors’ reports rate the depth of this self-policing. That is, the reports offer a contin uous commentary not just on the individual’s career but on their conformity to the Bank’s expectations of behaviour and attitudes. This linking of the individual’s economic prospects to their performance and their behavioural conformity made the career an enormously powerful disciplinary device (Savage, 1998). In every respect, the modern career fully met Foucault’s threefold definition of the disciplinary regime: . . . firstly, to obtain the exercise of power at the lowest possible cost (economically, by the lowest expenditure it involves; politically, by its dis cretion, its low exteriorization, its relative invisibility, the little resistance it arouses); secondly, to bring the effects of this social power to their maximum intensity and to extend them as far as possible, without either failure or interval; thirdly, to link this ‘economic’ growth of power with the output of the apparatuses . . . within which it is exercised; in short, to increase both the docility and the utility of all the elements of the system. (Foucault, 1977: 218)

There was an inevitable intimacy associated with branch life; they often had but a handful of staff, and this intimacy meant that individual employees were under the constant scrutiny of their peers, and never far from the gaze of their superiors. In turn, the bank clerks’ awareness of collegial scrutiny intensified the self-policing of identity through daily self-presentation. By virtue of his expertise in administrative procedures, the agent or branch man ager could efficiently supervise clerical tasks: ‘If a manager understands the system of book-keeping thoroughly, he can maintain a constant check, with


64 Histories

out much trouble to himself; and the mere knowledge of this fact will often ensure honesty’ (Anon, 1877: 147). In effect, the staff’s awareness of the possibility of managerial scrutiny was sufficient to ensure a high degree of self-policing in following administrative routines. The manager’s procedural competence was also central to maintaining his personal authority inside the branch. There was at least one daily reminder of the manager’s presence and his control. Branches had a time-book to be signed every morning under the manager’s gaze. At the appointed time, the manager would draw a line under the names registered and walk away from the open book, leaving any latecomer to sign below the default line, under the manager’s unseen eye. But there was much more to branch life than formal procedures. No less important was the management of working relationships, the maintenance of hierarchical authority by strict adherence to a culture of conservatism and deference. To be a banker was to be complicit, not just through one’s own subjection, but also through one’s peers (Cutrofello, 1994: 68). To the ‘faithful performance of daily routine’ the successful banker added ‘the ordinary virtues: notably courtesy, patience, [and] self-effacement’. Conformity in terms of wor ship and abstinence from political opinion were essential to maintaining one’s status in the community and minimizing the possibility of friction at work. Ambitious young clerks were warned that: ‘Cranks – artistic, scientific, reli gious, or political seldom succeed, as every Bank’s staff records show’ (Anon, 1910: 224). A ‘conciliatory manner’ towards colleagues was much prized. To be the source of ‘friction’ with colleagues, on the other hand, was to jeopardize one’s progression. Outspoken opinion, even if voiced only to colleagues, risked controversy and so opened the individual to informal warning and formal caution. If maintaining good working relationships with one’s colleagues was important, then unfailing obedience to one’s superiors was an absolute. The tension between the nascent bureaucratization of the bank and the highly personalized power of the branch manager remained a constant fea ture of organizational life. It was not that emergent bureaucracy rapidly displaced the highly personal power of the branch manager. There was no administrative revolution but an insidious incremental drift towards a more disciplinary regime. Nor did bureaucratic and personal – monarchic and dis ciplinary – power simply coexist. Rather, the rudimentary forms of disciplin ary power were utterly dependent upon the active involvement of the little ‘monarchs’ of the branch network. More than this, the emerging routines of a primitive disciplinary power buttressed ‘monarchic’ power. The branch manager became a ‘Napoleonic’ figure who embodied both the technical expertise of the new administrative procedures and the continued impor tance of monarchical power. With unusual hesitancy, Foucault encapsulated this interpenetration of antiquity and modernity in the emblematic form of Napoleon (see Figure 1): The importance, in historical mythology, of the Napoleonic character probably derives from the fact that it is at the junction of the monar This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.


Source: HBOS Group Archives (see also note 14). Reproduced courtesy of the Governor and Company of the Bank of Scotland.

Figure 1: ‘On the Bellaphon’, cartoon of Napoleon by Robert Shirlaw

chical, ritual exercise of sovereignty and the hierarchical exercise of in definite discipline. He is the individual who looms over everything with a single gaze which no detail, however minute, can escape. (Foucault, 1977: 217)

To paraphrase Foucault, even as the monarchic manager exercised his power through routinized spectacle, so he was also an organizer of the new bureaucratic disciplines that gradually extinguished sovereign power. One anonymous insider offered a caustic commentary on the continuation of the monarchic power of the branch manager: The manager of a bank has the same power over his crew as the captain of a ship, and he can enforce it in ways quite as objectionable. There is a story told of a mate of a whaling schooner whose skipper had offered him all sorts of nice things because of his success as a harpooner. The mate, remembering many incidents on the voyage, replied: ‘Capting, I don’t want no promotion; I don’t want no honourable mention; I don’t want no This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.

66 Histories

share in the profits. All I want is common civility, and that of the damned est kind’. This is what bank employees ask, but it is not always what they get. (Moneta, 1904: 6–7)

In his speech accepting a portrait which was commissioned to commemorate his long and successful tenure, the retiring treasurer, George J. Scott, reflected on what he regarded as his main contribution to the Bank, an attempt to shift bank management towards a more benign form of sovereign power:4 However short I have fallen on my aims, the Staff recognise that my con stant effort has been to cultivate mutual understanding and courtesy, good will and kindliness; in short, to humanise the relations throughout the service. Only those who remember the old days in the Banks as else where can fully appreciate what the new order of things has brought. The little courtesies of everyday life are within the power of everyone what ever position is occupied, however important or humble.

Monarchic power remained a vital element of bank organization. In the short term, each bureaucratic encroachment constituted an enhancement of dis persed sovereign power. For example, to question a superior’s decision about workload allocation, was to invite serious censure or an invitation to seek employment elsewhere. The penalties for what read as minor social offences were real enough. A short suspension, remaining in post but under extended probation, or a series of annual refusals to award salary increases were typ ical punishments for a lack of collegiality or repeated, minor disciplinary infractions. We can get a sense of how important the Bank considered conformity and sociability when we contrast the instant punishment of even minor breaches of social etiquette with its tolerance of poor task performance. Indifferent work performance, particularly if this followed a lengthy period of exem plary conduct, was noted but seldom acted upon formally. Indeed, the Bank consistently demonstrated considerable lenience towards lapses in perfor mance so long as this was tempered by a previously unblemished record of precision in one’s duties and collegiality. One mature teller, a ‘son of clergy’, was excused a run of cash shortages because he dealt with the branch’s most complex transactions under great time pressure. Indeed, in the same year he was promoted to Second Teller and awarded a 20 percent salary increase. Technical offences seldom affected a man’s career progress. Punishment, whether in the shape of a delayed rise or a fine, generally wiped the slate clean. In most cases, punishment for technical flaws was geared to specific offences and not to hampering career progression. Cash shortages were redeemed from a 10 percent bond levied on the salary of every employee and appeals for clemency were normally rejected.5 Such pleas were usually couched in terms of family responsibility. Appeals were con sidered in detail by the Bank but always with the same punitive outcome. There



were limits to the effectiveness of fining as a disciplinary device; fines were only used to compensate the Bank for cash shortages and did not cover any other deviations from bank procedures. They were also retrospective, doing little to rectify routine shortcomings. The dominant means of dealing with offenders against the Bank’s procedures or, just as important, its unwritten rules of con duct, were formal cautions issued through the reporting system. If a ‘technical’ offence was combined with a failure of sociability towards colleagues – or worse, disdain for managerial authority – then punishment was measured and severe. In 1888 John Morison, an Edinburgh branch clerk, was reported as being a ‘fairly correct clerk’, of tolerable competence, but who shrugged off gentle reprimands for his occasional flashes of temper. Two years later Morison was warned that his personality could damage his promotion prospects. His technical performance improved considerably but his temper did not. This clerk’s promotion prospects were bleak. He received none of the annual or biannual rises of his peers. Over the next few years his ‘rather sour temperament’ and deficiencies in ‘courtesy and obedience’ were constantly remarked upon. This was a serious charge. To flout the highly personalized power of the senior clerks, the accountant and the agent was to endanger the branch’s authority structure. Finally in 1896, after eight years of trying to bend Morison’s personality to the Bank’s culture, he was told that although ‘he gets through his work well enough . . . he is not the style of man for the Bank and is not qualified for any better position’. He was warned that his recent, and much delayed salary increase, would be withdrawn unless he displayed a consistent civility. In effect, the Bank was imposing a bounty against Morison’s future behaviour. The next entry reported, with some satisfaction, that ‘he has been more civil and obliging than during previous years’. Finally tamed, Mori son was rewarded with a £10 salary increase. Disciplinary regimes were not solely punitive; the trained individual was rewarded, not just punished. In discipline, punishment is only one element of a double system: gratification-punishment. And it is this system that operates in the pro cess of training and correction. (Foucault, 1977: 180)

Financial penalties, or having one’s career impeded, were obvious examples of the Bank exercising discipline. But there were other, gentler forms of dis cipline. The first level of disciplinary practice was reserved solely for the most able clerks or tellers, men of rare promise but who lacked the gentil ity necessary for the next stage in their career. For the ‘superior clerk’, ‘who lack(ed) polish’, was ‘rather forward in manner’ or, much worse, ‘slightly uncouth’ a secondment to head office or the inspectors’ department was the way to smooth away the rough edges. But others were not as fortunate. After six years’ employment, James Fraser had proved ‘intelligent, willing, and able’ and ‘promised to make a good clerk’. However, the inspectors’ reports had concluded that Fraser, at just 21 years of age, was unlikely to progress


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beyond the rank of clerk. His career had virtually ended before it had begun: ‘fairly smart, a little abrupt in manner. Somewhat rough and ready, fair abil ity but lacks discretion, better suited to clerkship in larger office than for tellers’ table’. Other capable but uninspired tellers who lacked the neces sary social graces were more likely to be transferred to a rural branch, away from the more sophisticated expectations of an urban clientele. About one able teller, the inspector reported that his career had been somewhat handi capped because he ‘lacks dignity’ and that despite his evident popularity with customers he should be considered only as ‘suitable for meeting farmers’.6 On the sliding scale of discipline, a determination to retain, or amplify, one’s own personality at the expense of the Bank’s expectations was to chal lenge the established culture. In such circumstances, the refusal to defer to one’s bank superiors or an over-familiarity with customers to whom the branch manager was deferential, were visible displays of defiance. Take the case of John Elder. Elder’s imposing physique and social stature made him wilful, insubordinate, and ‘a little independent’. Local connections and a wide circle of friends emboldened the already self-confident Elder still fur ther. Eventually, he was fined £20 and transferred to a different branch, one where his new anonymity would blunt his familiarity with clients and allow a different manager to attempt to bring him to heel. The result was that Elder was ‘much subdued and more respectful’ both towards his customers and bank superiors. The Bank was nothing if not dogged in its determination to remake men in its own image.7 There were instances of more severe disciplinary action for ‘social’ offences. The demonstration effect of punishment was all the greater because the Bank was an immensely tolerant organization, so long as the individual was compliant. The Bank’s tolerance and generosity were absolutely on its terms and its terms alone, but there were limits, however. Consider the experience of David McNeillie in the winter of 1888–9. McNeillie had been apprenticed to the Bank in 1871, aged 14. After fifteen unremarkable years as a ‘smart teller’, McNeillie’s performance took a sudden turn for the worse. In March 1889 the ledger noted that he ‘has more than once given trouble’ and after a few day’s absence had returned to work ‘not fit to take up his duties’. There is the unmistakable whiff of whisky about McNeillie’s deteriorating record. Drink was the cardinal sin – it betokened a loss of self-control that not only endangered an individual’s work but also threatened to become public and so injure the Bank’s local reputation. In a very real sense, the man embodied the Bank’s reputation. McNeillie’s salary was reduced by £30 per annum, or 18% of his salary. Put another way, his salary level was rolled back to just below that of six years before. His infraction equated to six years’ service, his crime wiped out six salary increments awarded for satisfactory performance.8 The Bank took an extremely dim view of occasional inebriation, far less alcohol ism. In extreme cases, an individual’s ‘intemperate habits’ triggered much



tighter surveillance of his conduct. One 56-year-old teller was ‘retired’ to head office after the superintendent visited his branch – ‘he was never posi tively drunk, but only a little dazed’.9 The message was clear: this transfer to a back office job had the benefit of minimizing, if not eliminating, the threat to the Bank’s reputation in the community while offering the miscreant the opportunity for moral improvement. Dismissal was rarely employed, for this was not only a public condemnation of the individual but also an admission that the Bank had failed to remake the man. The severe punishment meted out to McNeillie was unusual. Far more common was the silent discipline exerted through the annual appraisals reported in the inspectors’ ledgers. McNeillie’s case alerts us to another hidden dimension of bank employ ment: the body and demeanour of the man. The tellers’ table was the loca tion of the service encounter, where front line employees met customers, and face-to-face interaction was an inevitable feature. The importance of the aesthetic labour process is emerging as an important area of contemporary research (Hancock and Tyler, 2000). However, the Bank’s records suggest that the strategic attention to the aesthetics of the service encounter and to the body of the man was a critical element of the early managerial bureau cracy. There was a clear, if always implicit, notion of the ideal banker: manly, mature, imposing, polite but never deferential to customers. For the tellers’ table one had to convey maturity and a sense of calm efficiency. The 1892 obituary notice of David Davidson commented on the contrast between his imposing physical presence and ‘his whole bearing . . . of quiet dignity . . . his gravely simple manner and deliberate low-voiced speech’.10 George Anderson, the Bank’s treasurer, embodied the ideal of the senior banker: Picture to yourself a tall, handsome, medium-built man of about six feet, hazel eyes, aquiline nose, iron-grey hair, firm moustache, oval chin, and cheeks slightly tinged with red. Attired in a frock-coat – the Edinburgh professional garb. . . . You feel in addressing him that the matter in hand will pass through the crucible of a judicial mind . . . . It is in his nature to regard matters and persons very coldly but impartially. . . he transacts his business and then becomes withdrawn. (Moneta, 1904: 9–12)

One had to be imposing without being aloof, respectful but never submissive. Careful, grammatical speech and personal grooming reinforced an image of administrative order. ‘Probity of character, urbanity, a refined and cour teous bearing and speech, and a cultured mind’ were the elements of the ideal banker. There is no doubt that the physical appearance of some clerks accelerated their promotion to tellers. To be ‘of gentlemanly appearance’ was sufficient to compensate for minor technical deficiencies, and qualified, experienced clerks were passed over for promotion because of their appear ance or less than imposing stature. We find individuals being retained on clerical duties, largely removed from the public eye, because of their ‘some


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what juvenile appearance’, ‘diminutive stature’, ‘voice a little peculiar’, shortsightedness, slovenly appearance and in one notable instance, for their jug ears and red hair.11 Nor did the strictures over appearance, bearing, and manner diminish with promotion to the tellers’ table. Maintaining one’s appearance and man ner was essential. Consider the fall from grace of John Valentine Craigie.12 Until his mid-40s Craigie’s career had been unremarkable. Over the next few years his performance and demeanour gradually slipped until his superior noted that ‘at one time’ he was ‘reported to have a good appearance and agreeable manner to be qualified for a Tellership at a large Branch, but in recent years reports have been less favourable’. Part of the problem was his failure to process routine work quickly and his obvious boredom with the work. But, more important, Craigie was increasingly taciturn towards the clients. This was a stalled career. Although regular customers had become accustomed to his abrupt style, there was little chance that this was a man who could use his natural charm to widen his social network and grow the business. Once considered for promotion to his own agency, Craigie was now ‘well suited for his present post, appears to be a little sour’. This was the dif fidence of the man who knew he was going nowhere. In principle, every apprentice had an equal opportunity of reaching the Bank’s highest offices. Realistically, the highest stage in a Bank career before 1939 was that of agent. The agent was the Bank’s local representative, but he was also allowed to represent other financial institutions, particularly insurers. Effectively, the agent was the branch manager and responsible for maintaining procedures and exercising grassroots discipline. They were typi cally recruited from the Bank’s experienced tellers who were judged to have displayed the greatest business awareness; and to become an agent required all of the administrative knowledge, poise and personability of that position. The move from senior teller to agent was by no means guaranteed: it was not unusual for a teller to be poised on the brink of promotion for over a decade, and for the individual’s frustration to become clear. This period of career limbo called for enormous self-discipline. For the Bank, a prolonged exami nation of the candidate was not simply determined by the supply of capable men and the demands of the branch network. Rather, this was a period in which a man’s character would be rigorously tested: only those with abil ity, patience and the willingness to assist their superiors despite being over looked, would be successful. Virtue alone was not always rewarded. In 1886, at the comparatively tender age of 32, Robert Petherance’s ‘unblemished record’ as a teller and his popularity with the customers marked him out as a man of some promise. He was ready for promotion to the rank of agent ‘at a small Branch or Accountant at a large office’. There was no promotion, however. Undeterred, Petherance qualified as an accountant and by assist ing his agent acquired the business experience to make him a fully-rounded banker. Every year for the next five years Petherance was recommended for a more demanding role at a larger branch. And every year he was passed over. This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.


In 1900 there was an air of resignation in that year’s annual endorsement. It noted that Petherance remained an impeccable teller but had become ‘rather taciturn’.13 The rating system which he had embraced as an aid to his career development had failed him completely. For this was a judgement that was clearly about Petherance’s character. After all, his technical ability and business sense were beyond reproach: his failure to progress registered the Bank’s misgivings about him as a person. Frustration at a career that has plateaued had led to a withdrawal of the deep identification of the individual with the organization. The Bank could expect the continuation of exemplary task performance, but that aside reveals a man who had withdrawn his emo tional labour. Petherance had served notice that he would remain in but no longer wholly of the Bank. How did bankers think of themselves and of their careers? The Bank archives are silent on these questions. But we can gain occasional glimpses into this hidden dimension of late Victorian banking. In 1912, A.W. Kerr, a senior figure in the Royal Bank of Scotland and author of several standard texts on banking history and practice, gave an address on banking as a career to a packed meeting of the Institute of Bankers in Edinburgh. For Kerr, bank ing did not offer the same intellectual rewards as ‘the so-called learned pro fessions’. Nor did it provide for the same possibilities of affluence as trade or the public influence of politics. The compensations of a banking career were essentially moral. The ‘continuous routine’ and ‘steady attention to details’ of banking allowed staff ‘to strengthen their own moral constitution’. Maintain ing the continuity and absolute clarity of banking procedures was morally cleansing. The career, perhaps especially in its least dramatic form, was a moral project for the individual. Kerr wrote: The essential principles of Banking [are] founded on absolute debtor and creditor conditions, precluded dubiety in its relationship with the world. It must be clean if it would live. This was a high vogue, and reconciled many to the comparative obscurity of the ordinary experience of those who were actively engaged in it as their life-work. (Kerr, 1912: 33)

What Kerr was suggesting was that there were compensations to be found in bank work that went far beyond salary, status and career. The selfpolicing and sublimation of self to administrative routine required by bank ing were ways of improving the soul. To give oneself wholeheartedly to bank culture and to its routines was adequate consolation for a stalled career. The very mundanity of this ceaseless routine was redemptive. This was not an endorsement of fatalism. Rather, the career constituted a regime of selfreflection that permitted the individual to consciously, rationally pursue the ‘state of grace’ that comes with the fulfilment of duty (Owen 1994: 124; Mommsen, 1974: 20). This was the application of instrumental rationality to himself rather than a passive acceptance of a calculative regime (see Dean, 1994: 61–3, for contrast). This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.

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For Kerr, similarly, banking was not so much a profession as a vocation. This was an attempt to define the bureaucratic career as a calling echoing that of Weber’s ‘spirit of capitalism’: calculability and calculation by the indi vidual about his soul defined bureaucratic life. The bureaucrat . . . engages in capitalistic economising not purely as a matter of expe diency, of constrained adaptation to the mundane necessity of making a living, but in the expectation that such activity would test his inner resources as an agent, a person in charge of his own existence, and affirm his human worth.

The bureaucratic routine becomes the . . . very centre of the subject’s life, [endowed] with intrinsic dignity. There is nothing degrading about them, nothing demeaning about the attention to detail they require, nothing requiring apology in the style they impart to the [bureaucrat’s] whole existence. He indeed expects his work to shape his very identity, to mobilise and develop his most personal qualities. (Poggi, 1983: 40–1).

One bank clerk offered his grim reading of the career as a moral project. Each step in the career was formed by clerks squashed by the routine of com pleting ledgers. But this was the only path to promotion: ‘we climb upwards on the stepping stones of our own dead selves’ (see Figure 2).14 The success

Source: HBOS Group Archives (see also note 14). Reproduced courtesy of the Governor and Company of the Bank of Scotland.

Figure 2: ‘We climb upwards on the stepping stones of our own dead selves’, cartoon by Robert Shirlaw



of his despised branch manager, who scowls from the top of the stairs, hands bunched into fists, is tainted by the suspicion that he had an alternative route – the ladder – to his ‘victory’. Equally, there is a deep ambiguity about this representation of the career and self. Only the bank manager is free to move, and yet this is a freedom that can only look backwards at others mak ing the same journey that he had made: the manager had captured the high ground from which to survey the clerks. The clerks confined by their routine can only progress in one way: to further deaden themselves or to climb over the prostrate bodies of their unfortunate colleagues. Only the bank manager is represented as an individual, the anonymous clerks are all identical. This was the moral project of the modern career.

Conclusion The idea of the career was firmly established by the closing decades of the 19th century. It was not the inevitable consequence of the expansion of the Bank’s branch network, rather it was a disciplinary device of enor mous power and immense efficiency. That is, the system of inspection was the expression of a continuous and intimate form of surveillance by one’s colleagues and superiors. More important still was the intense selfsurveillance undertaken by individuals – the desire to bend themselves to the bank’s culture. Inspection was not the organizational equivalent of the confessional; the objective was not that the individual would confront one’s identity in order to reject oneself (Fraser, 1999: 11). Rather, the self was put under a state of organizational siege: attrition, not confrontation, was the hallmark of this process. The importance of self-surveillance was clear from the disciplinary priority of social over technical performance. Taken together, we can see the first glimmer of formal appraisal systems similar to those we are all subject to today. But there was no quantitative dimension to the assessment and therefore no centrally regulated notion of the statisti cal norm. In other ways, the inspection system was much more searching than contemporary appraisal systems. Since the employee had no right to read or challenge reports made on him, there was no restraint from below on the appraisal process. Nor were there any systemic checks on the process at the level of the Bank as a whole. The absence of any checks and bal ances give the inspectors’ ledgers of individual reports an uneasy texture. On the one hand, the reports were based on deep personal knowledge, some times sympathetic, often empathetic, shot through with occasional flashes of antipathy. On the other hand, they read as judgements from on-high, the accounts of the judgements of men who understood themselves as superior in terms not just of organizational place but also of moral status. The dia logue between the inspector and the branch manager was a conversation between men who knew that they were both members of the Bank’s ‘elect’,


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men who consciously adhered to – and enforced – the form of life prescribed by bureaucratic morality. The inspectors and managers had been subject to the same appraisal system and thrived: they had made themselves into the embodiment of the bank. Bureaucratic and self-regulation meshed to pro duce a highly controlled working environment in which everyone under stood the technical and social standards of bank employment.

Acknowledgements My thanks to the Governor of the Bank of Scotland for permission to consult the Bank’s archive and to the archive team who were such knowledgeable guides. My appreciation to Mike Savage and Martin Taylor who have both carried out innovative research in the historical formation of the modern career.

Notes 1. Bank of Scotland, ‘Rules for the Government of the Salaries Scheme’, 1896, BS1/273/7, Bank of Scotland Archive, The Mound, Edinburgh. 2. Branch Procedure Books, Glasgow, 9 May 1889, uncatalogued deposit. 3. Regulations, 1924, BS1/278/3. 4. George Scott, ‘The Memory of a Great Day, Freemasons’ Hall’, Edinburgh, 28 April 1934. 5. Regulations, 1865, BS1/278/1. 6. See Edinburgh Branches, Staff Report Books, BS1/270/B/1–9. 7. See Bank Staff Report Book, August 1893, BS1/270/A/7. 8. McNeillie, Edinburgh Branches Staff Report Book, BS1/270/B/1. 9. Glasgow Branches Staff Report Books, BS1/270/A/8. 10. Obituary notice of David Davidson, read on 6 June 1892, Proceedings of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. 11. Staff Report Book, 1905, BS1/270/A/9, for examples. 12. Craigie, Bank Staff Record Book, 1905, BS1/270/A/9. 13. Petherance, Bank Staff Record Book, BS1/270/C/7. 14. The cartoons were the work of Robert Shirlaw (1883–1930), who joined the Bank in 1899 and worked as a clerk until his death. Shirlaw kept many hundreds of cartoons hidden in a ‘Ledger 99’: the cartoons overwhelmingly depict the daily grind of the bank clerk and the management style of his superiors.

References Anderson, G. (1976) Victorian Clerks. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Anon (1877) The Banker’s Clerk: Comprising the Principles and Practices of Banking. London: Houlston & Sons. Anon (1910) ‘Banking as a Profession’, The Scottish Bankers Magazine, January: 224–6. Boot, H.M. (1991) ‘Salaries and Career Earnings in the Bank of Scotland, 1730–1880’, Economic History Review XLIV: 629–53. Bullion, T. (1850) The Internal Management of a Country Bank. London: Groombridge and Sons.



Burns, T. (1992) Erving Goffman. London: Routledge. Cassis, Y. (1994) City Bankers, 1890–1914. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Collins, M. (1995) ‘The Growth of the Firm in the Domestic Banking Sector’, in M. Kirby and M. Rose (eds) Business Enterprise in Modern Britain. London: Routledge. Cutrofello, A. (1994) Discipline and Critique: Kant, Poststructuralism, and the Problem of Resistance. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Dean, M. (1994) Critical and Effective Histories: Foucault’s Methods and Historical Sociology. London: Routledge. Foucault, M. (1977) Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Harmondsworth: Allen Lane. Foucault, M. (1988) Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and Other Writings, L. Kritzman (ed.). London: Routledge. Fraser, M. (1999) Identity Without Selfhood: Simone de Beauvoir and Bisexuality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Goffman, E. (1968) Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Grieco, M. (1987) Keeping it in the Family: Social Networks and Employment Chance. London: Tavistock. Hacking, I. (1986) ‘Self-Improvement’, in D. Couzens Hoy (ed.) Foucault: A Critical Reader. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Hancock, P. and Tyler, M. (2000) ‘ “The Look of Love”: Gender and the Organization of Aesthetics’, in J. Hassard, R. Holliday and H. Willmott (eds) Body and Organization. London: Sage. Honneth, A. (1993) The Critique of Power: Reflective Stages in a Critical Social Theory. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Kerr, A.W. (1912) ‘Banking as a Career’, The Scottish Bankers’ Magazine, January: 33–5. Mommsen, W. (1974) The Age of Bureaucracy. Oxford: Blackwell. Moneta (1904) Scottish Banks and Bankers. Edinburgh: North British Publishing. Munn, C. (1981) The Scottish Provincial Banking Companies 1747–1864. Edinburgh: John Donald. Munn, C. (1997) ‘Banking on Branches: The Origins and Development of Branch Banking in the United Kingdom’, in P. Cottrell, A. Teichova and T. Yuzawa (eds) Finance in the Age of the Corporate Economy: The Third Anglo-Japanese Business History Conference. Aldershot: Ashgate. Osborne, T. (1994) ‘Bureaucracy as a Vocation: Governmentality and Administration in Nineteenth-century Britain’, Journal of Historical Sociology 7(3): 289–313. Owen, D. (1994) Maturity and Modernity: Nietzsche, Weber, Foucault and the Ambivalence of Reason. London: Routledge. Poggi, G. (1983) Calvinism and the Capitalist Spirit: Max Weber’s ‘Protestant Ethic’. London: Macmillan. Savage, M. (1998) ‘Discipline, Surveillance and the “Career”: Employment on the Great Western Railway 1833–1914’, in A. McKinlay and K. Starkey (eds) Foucault, Management and Organization Theory: From Panopticon to Technologies of Self. London: Sage. Saville, R. (1996) Bank of Scotland: A History 1695–1995. Edinburgh: Edinburgh Univer sity Press. Schrift, A. (1995) ‘Reconfiguring the Subject as a Process of Self, New Formations 25: 28–39. Szakolczai, A. (1998) Max Weber and Michel Foucault: Parallel Life-works. London: Routledge. Taylor, M. (2000) ‘Banking on Promotion’, unpublished PhD thesis, University of Edinburgh. Wilson, R. Guerriero (1998) Disillusionment or New Opportunities? The Changing Nature of Work in Offices, Glasgow 1880–1914. Aldershot: Ashgate.



4 Shouldn’t Organization Theory Emerge from Adolescence? William H. Starbuck

Complaining about the Deficiencies of Bureaucracy

T

he term ‘bureaucracy’ originated as a protest against incompetence and inefficiency. In 1665, the French King made Jean-Baptiste Colbert his Comptroller General of Finance. The French economy was in turmoil, and to improve the situation, Colbert prosecuted corrupt officials and reorganized commerce and industry. To assure the populace that the government would act fairly, Colbert insisted that officials abide by rules and apply them uniformly to everyone (Wolin, 1960: 271). About 80 years later, in 1751, another French King appointed Jean-Claude Marie Vincent de Gournay to be France’s Administrator of Commerce. Gournay judged the numerous governmental regulations to be suppressing business activity. To symbolize the idea that rule-makers and rule-enforcers who did not understand or care about the consequences of their actions were ruining the French government, he coined the sarcastic term bureaucratie – government by desks. Because Gournay defined bureaucracy as an undesirable form of government administration, it is understandable that ‘bureaucracy’ has had unpleasant connotations. Nearly everyone who has written about bureaucracy has complained about it, the exceptions being a few German economists and sociologists writing between 1870 and 1915 (Michels, 1911; von Schmoller, 1898; Weber, 1910–14). By the 1930s and 1940s, complaints about governmental bureaucracies were coming from France, Germany, the United

Source: Organization, 10(3) (2003): 439–452.


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Kingdom, and the United States (Mannheim, 1935; Von Mises, 1944; Warnotte, 1937). Following the Second World War, writers began to see bureaucracies outside the governmental context and began complaining about ‘organizations’ rather than just bureaucracies. People had not complained about ‘organizations’ earlier because the word ‘organization’ did not acquire its current meaning until around 1930. By the late 1950s, complaints about organizations had become widespread. One very influential book was Whyte’s (1956) best-selling critique of American corporate society, which asserted that a troubling ‘Social Ethic’ gripped America. Many employees, at all levels of management and in technical specialties, were allowing their employing organizations to dominate their lives and the lives of their families. Organizations were shaping employees’ personalities, were specifying employees’ dress and behavior, and were cutting off employees’ roots in communities by moving them and their families frequently. Another influential book was Argyris’s (1957) academic critique, which documented how organizations impede employees’ development and foster unhealthy personalities.

Seeking Prescriptive Generalizations to Make Things Better Large organizations remained rare until steam power became safe and reliable around 1900, making it feasible to undertake large-scale construction projects, to build and operate railroads and large ships, and to power factories. Internal combustion engines added transport via automobiles, trucks, and aircraft. Large construction projects and geographically dispersed markets called for large organizations. As these new organizations proliferated and imitated each other, they created a population of similar social systems that invited generalizations. These new organizations brought problems as well as accomplishments. Specialization and division of labor made women and children more employable and skilled workers less valuable. Compliance received larger rewards and skill smaller ones. Division of labor lowered job satisfaction and increased the advantages of owners versus employees (Engels, 1872; Marx, 1867). Much greater productivity, an absence of government control, and predatory business behavior enabled owners to reap enormous profits. Nevertheless, most of those who wrote about organizations wanted to help make them work better. The widespread strife between business owners and employees gave impetus to the Scientific Management movement, which purported to reduce conflict by increasing productivity and allowing higher wages (Merkle, 1980; Shenhav, 1995). Taylor (1903) showed business how to extract value from white-collar work that emphasized measurement and calculation and looked like ‘science’. Early in the 1920s, books began to


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view organizations as integrated systems and to discuss the best structures of these systems. Fayol (1923) initiated a debate by offering prescriptions that he claimed would apply in all kinds of organizations. Others, however, expressed skepticism about the validity and usefulness of general principles and advocated separate theories about distinct types, such as churches, armies, governmental agencies, and business firms (Dennison, 1931). From the 1910s through the 1940s, prescriptive writings generally derived from the experiences of managers and consultants and focused on administrative functions. Barnard (1937) reacted by arguing that propositions about organizations should have bases in social psychology, and Simon (1946, 1950, 1952) began to campaign for scientific theories of management and organizations. As Simon (1952) used the term, ‘organization theory’ was a large category encompassing scientific management, industrial engineering, industrial psychology, the psychology of small groups, human resource management, and strategy.

A Loss of Relevance From the late 1950s organization theorists started to become more numer ous, and the following decades offered the largesse of expanding degree programs in business. Expansion and affluence brought fragmentation, selfabsorption, and a lack of concern for environmental issues. Pressures to become self-absorbed and irrelevant have come partly from organization theory’s growing numbers and rising status and partly from support by degree programs in business. By 1956, almost 43,000 Americans were receiving baccalaureates in business annually, and by 1998, this rate had quintupled to 233,000 annually. In 1956, slightly over 3000 Americans per year were receiving MBAs annually, and by 1998 this rate had exploded to over 100,000 annually. For people who could teach about organizations, every year brought more jobs, higher salaries, and more academic journals in which they could publish. As organization theory grew larger and gained respectability, it also became more autonomous from external constraints, more organized, and more fragmented. Academics gained freedom to focus on what interested themselves. Research methodology received progressively more respect, almost to the exclusion of validity or relevance. The most prevalent forms of empiricism became stylized types that encouraged observers to remain detached from the situations observed. Subtopics within organization theory proliferated and derived their popularity from their intellectual properties, and theories and methodologies evolved differently in different societies. Social fragments separated along academic fissures. People with psychological orientations labeled their focal interest as ‘organizational behavior’ to


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distinguish it from ‘management’ or ‘organization theory’, a secession that linked ‘organization theory’ more closely to sociology. Other people first defined their interest as ‘strategic management’, then they began splitting into two subfields, one closer to economics and the other closer to behavioral science. Immersed in their academic milieus, few organization theorists have focused on connections between organizations and social problems, although long-standing social problems persist and new ones appear. The problems have reluctant audiences within universities, as business students dislike hearing that their future occupations have negative aspects. Students generally want to learn how to succeed within the existing system, not why they should overturn it. When academic organization theorists write easy-to-read books or arti cles for managers, the authors lose status as other academics sneer. The influential management fads – such as Japanese management, downsizing, reengineering, teamwork, Quality Circles, Six-Sigma quality management, the Learning Organization, outsourcing, knowledge management – have originated from managers and consultants, and the most respected organi zation theorists have ignored them. Indeed, the most respected organization theorists have ignored long-run changes in organizations arising from technological and population changes such as rising educational levels, computerization, telecommunication capacities, or globalization.

Three Arenas of Conflict For organization theorists to focus on their self-centered academic interests while ignoring their environment is wrong. It is wrong because it deprives organization theory of an extrinsic reason to exist, wrong because the issues arising in the environment are both challenging and interesting, and wrong because organization theorists might actually have something to contribute to world affairs. However, for a science to benefit anyone but scientists themselves, the science needs to develop predictive power. Not until a science can predict reliably the consequences of alternative actions, can people use it to choose better actions. As the 21st century is beginning, organizations are participating sig nificantly in at least three grand arenas of social conflict: the conflict between corporations and nations, the conflict between top managers and other stakeholders, and the conflict between the short run and the long run. Organization theorists could map their dimensions, describe their development, and propose changes to mitigate them. Of course, these are not the only arenas in which conflicts are going to be occurring. Organizations will also be dealing with the chronic conflicts that arise from differences in wealth and



ethnicity and from social and economic changes. However, organization theorists should be able to offer useful insights and ideas about these three arenas at least.

The Conflict between Corporations and Nations Berle and Means (1932: 313) long ago observed, ‘The rise of the modern corporation has brought a concentration of economic power which can compete on equal terms with the modern state.’ At that time, few corporations had ventured abroad, so Berle and Means were pointing to the power of large corporations within their home nations. Over the last seven decades, large corporations have indeed shown their economic power, but ‘competition’ has proven to be a misleading description because large corporations cooperate with national governments as well as compete with them. Nevertheless, corporations and nations do compete in the sense that some activities of large corporations undermine the loyalties that citizens feel toward their nations and their national governments. Bonds of nationalism may be weakening as bonds of allegiance to corporations strengthen. After the Second World War, many large corporations offered reliable employment and benefits such as medical care and insurance in exchange for the employees’ committing themselves to their jobs. Thus, for some people, corporations were supplanting local and national governments. In the mid1950s, The Organization Man and The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit made the public aware of organizations’ influence on lives outside of jobs (Whyte, 1956; Wilson, 1955), and the social importance of large corporations became a topic of widespread discussion. There was also widespread discussion of the idea that business and government had formed coalitions that might oppose the interests of the public (Eisenhower, 1961). Then corporations’ human resource practices ran into financial problems and changing managerial ideologies. Executives discovered that they could lose their jobs if they did not achieve short-run goals. The 1980s brought a wave of aggressive takeovers that often used target firms’ own cash to pay for their acquisition and frequently produced layoffs and actions to raise short-run profits. The 1990s brought management fads – reorganization, reengineering, and downsizing – that emphasized efficiency and profitability and deemphasized loyalty to employees, paternalism, or continuity. So, corporations retreated from the human resource practices that had made them alternatives to governments. However, during the last decades of the 20th century, corporations accelerated a long-term global expansion that had been infringing national loyalties and national governments (Vernon, 1977, 1998). From 1985 to 2000, organizations created about 600 million new jobs worldwide, but only 5 percent of these jobs were in Europe, Japan, or North America. Transoceanic


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travel more than tripled from 1985 to 1998 and transoceanic communications multiplied 28 times from 1986 to 1997. For instance, McDonald’s has restaurants in 118 nations, and British Petroleum has facilities in 100 nations. Mitsui has offices or subsidiaries in 87 nations and its stock trades on eight exchanges in four nations. Daimler Chrysler manufactures in 37 nations and has sales organizations in 19 nations, and its stock trades on 19 exchanges in seven nations. According to the World Bank, in 1999, 73 nations had annual incomes over $15.6 billion, Sri Lanka had an annual income of $15.6 billion, and 73 nations had annual incomes below $15.6 billion. In 2002, Fortune magazine listed 324 corporations with annual revenues exceeding $15.6 billion, and only 20 nations had Gross National Incomes greater than Wal-Mart’s annual revenues. Not only have corporations created social bonds that span national boundaries, but hundreds of corporations are big enough to have membership in the United Nations. Corporate control has been loosening from nationality during the last decade. Owners of corporate stock may live outside the corporation’s home nation. As well, more and more senior executives have come from outside the corporations’ home nations. Some corporations have been emphasizing their multinationality to please host nations and to attract potential employees. Corporate human resource practices have been alienating employees in their home nations even as they have been attracting employees elsewhere. Some corporations have moved their locations of incorporation to nations that offer them tax or legal advantages. Many corporations that originated in nations speaking languages other than English have shifted their official language to English. These changes suggest an evolution in which large corporations are challenging the traditional roles of nations. Geographic location and societal traditions give strength to national governments but also limit what they can do. For people working in globalizing firms or buying their products or supplying their inputs, aspects of organizational culture are overlapping aspects of national cultures. This evolution is almost inevitable in the face of free commerce and advanced telecommunications, which give mobility and flexibility to corporations. As well, corporations, with their clear hierarchical structures and rewards that link to compliance, usually act more agilely than do national governments, with their conflicting goals and long-tenured civil servants. Although corporations presently seem to have competitive advantages with respect to national governments, both corporations and governments can gain from cooperation and so coalitions between them may be multiplying. The competition between corporations and governments has been developing slowly and it seems likely to continue at a slow pace. The many corporations and nations form a sizeable population with substantial variations. The differences between governments and corporations suggest some



plausible hypotheses. Thus, not only is this topic an excellent candidate for familiar forms of academic research but it is a domain in which simple extrapolations may give fairly accurate predictions, at least over the short run.

The Conflict between Top Managers and Other Stakeholders Two hundred years ago, managers were few and little respected because people saw them as menial tools of the wealthy (Starbuck, 2003). As late as 1900, people generally viewed businesses as properties owned by identifiable individuals who employed managers as agents. Such managers kept records and relayed instructions, but few of them exercised power autonomously. However, this conception of managers grew less and less tenable throughout the 20th century. By the 1930s, Berle and Means (1932) were reporting that stock ownership in large corporations had so dispersed that stockholders could not effectively control half of the largest corporations. Thus, it was becoming unrealistic to think of managers as agents of owners: On the one hand, the owners of passive property, by surrendering control and responsibility over the active property, have surrendered the right that the corporation should be operated in their sole interest . . . At the same time, the controlling groups [managers], by means of the extension of corporate powers, have in their own interest broken the bars of tradition which require that the corporation be operated solely for the benefit of the owners of passive property. (1932: 311–12)

By the start of the 21st century, nearly all stockholders had ceded their voting rights to corporations’ senior executives, who consequently control shareholders’ meetings and the choice of directors. Directors, in turn, have endorsed these executives’ decisions and they have bestowed vast wealth on them. Business Week has reported that whereas the average chief executive of a large American corporation made 42 times the pay of a factory worker in 1980 (Reingold, 1997), this ratio had multiplied ten times by 2001. The spiraling compensation of senior executives has borne weak rela tionship to their contributions to corporate performance and has too often diverted corporate wealth to executives themselves. In 2002, 23 large American corporations were investigated for accounting irregularities. The chief executives of these corporations had compensation that averaged $62 million from 1999 to 2001, in contrast to an average of $36 million for all CEOs of large corporations (United for a Fair Economy, 2002). In 2003, Paywatch, a website maintained by American labor unions, argued: The flagging economy and poor corporate performance – including falling stock prices, declining profits and big layoffs – have barely


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made a dent in executive pay. Median pay actually grew by 7 percent – meaning half of all executives made more and half made less. This rate is twice the growth of workers’ paychecks. Elite corporate chiefs at the top of the CEO pay range took some cuts – lowering average CEO pay by 8 percent – but the majority of CEOs got raises. In contrast, a typical company’s corporate profits declined by 35 percent in 2001.

Generous stock options have turned some senior executives into major stockholders and so partly undermined Berle and Means’s idea that management was separating from ownership. Lavelle et al. (2002) remarked, ‘Salaries and bonuses are now afterthoughts compared with the potential wealth that options represent.’ However, to make options valuable, executives have to raise their corporations’ profits. If they achieve short-run profits at the expense of long-run profits, only the executives themselves gain (Kay, 2003). Some stockholders have been trying to restructure corporate governance (Deutsch, 2003). They are proposing limits on executive compensation, changes in accounting practices for executive compensation, and changes in the make-up of boards of directors. However, changes in rules and structures may have negligible effects. Sonnenfeld has said: The key isn’t structural, it’s social. I’m always amazed at how common groupthink is in corporate boardrooms. Directors are almost without exception intelligent, accomplished and comfortable with power – but if you put them into a group that discourages dissent, they nearly always start to conform. (Hymowitz, 2003: R3)

Executives’ financial gains have cost them respectability. The Harris Poll (Taylor, 2001) has surveyed Americans regarding the prestige of 17 occupations since 1977. In 2001, the occupation of ‘businessman’ was the least prestigious of these occupations, and just 12 percent of the respondents rated ‘businessman’ as having ‘very great prestige’. A year later, Taylor (2002) reported that 87 percent of those surveyed said that top managers get more pay than they deserve, and 87 percent said they thought top managers became rich at the expense of ordinary workers. The powers of senior executives lie at the heart of organizational phenomena, their rise to power exemplifies a structuration process that converts informal practices into formal structures, and the conflicts between executives and others are exposing the limitations of existing norms about governance. The last decade has indeed brought rising public concern about corrupt corporate governance and senior executives’ power, but governmental agencies have made only weak responses and public understanding of corporations has changed only faintly. Research could enhance understanding of what has been going on, raise public awareness, and generate useful proposals. Perhaps organization theorists can generate useful proposals about better forms of corporate governance. These issues, no doubt, seem to



challenge accepted beliefs about what corporations actually are, what their legal rights ought to be, and what roles they should play in society.

The Conflict between the Short Run and the Long Run Organizations oscillate endlessly between short-run targets and long-run goals. Prosperity brings forth long-range plans, large-scale projects, and policies that benefit long-term employees. Recessions focus attention on shortrun targets and temporary measures, and companies sell off non-essential facilities and fire personnel. Management fads may have effects unrelated to economics. Downsizing and reengineering became fashionable during the munificent 1990s. In the 1980s and 1990s, aggressive acquisitions led to actions to boost short-run profits. Wall Street and television gave new prominence to quarterly results, and companies replaced executives who had failed to meet quarterly targets. In some instances, short-run results stimulated deceptive accounting (Glassman, 2002; Rockwood, 2002). Long-run plans are usually beneficial and sometimes necessary. Problems that would become insoluble after they build up may be soluble if attacked early. Global warming and overpopulation may be such (Natural Resources Defense Council, 2003; World Population Awareness, 2003). Simon (1996) studied 500 very profitable small and medium-sized companies. He remarked that their significant characteristics included long-run thinking and avoidance of management fads such as diversification, outsourcing and strategic alliances. Miller and Le Breton-Miller (2004) have said that some large family-controlled companies have been considerably more successful than large publicly owned corporations because family control has enabled these companies to gradually achieve dominant positions in specialized domains. According to Miller and Le Breton-Miller, publicly owned corporations have too often pursued short-run goals that diverted their efforts from more valuable long-run goals. However, long-run plans fail because long-run forecasts turn out to be wrong. The simple extrapolations that work well in the short run rarely hold up over long periods (Pant and Starbuck, 1990). Since adhering stubbornly to an obsolete long-run plan will bring ruin, effective behavior eventually requires deviations from long-run plans. Too-strong commitments to current methods of operation gradually render people and organizations incapable of responding to current challenges (Starbuck and Hedberg, 2001). Miller (1990) documented many cases in which firms had focused so intently on what they deemed their strategic strengths that they overlooked important developments outside the range of their attention. Short-run targets are also usually beneficial and sometimes necessary. Organizations may require never-ending changes merely to remain vital. Not only may fleeting opportunities be extremely profitable, but immedi


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ate threats may prove extremely costly. Statistics indicate that strategizing has erratic effects and it produces harmful results nearly as often as it produces beneficial results (Starbuck, 1992). Starbuck and Nystrom (1981: xiv) observed: . . . the most impressive characteristic of current organizations is how unsuccessful they are. Large organizations do not grow out of small ones: nearly all small organizations disappear within a few years, the great majority of middle-sized organizations are just a few years old, and many large organizations are new organizations. For a small organization to grow into a large organization is very rare, and it is quite unusual for a middle-sized organization to grow large. The very smallest organizations are more prone to disappear . . . but so are the largest new organizations . . . Three-eighths of all new corporations reach the age of five; 65 percent of the ten-year-old corporations attain the age of 15; 83 percent of all 50-year-old corporations survive to the age of 55. Thus, older organizations are more likely to survive. But even very old organizations are far from immortal: approximately one-eighth of all 100-year-old corporations disappear without reaching the age of 105.

Nevertheless, the emphasis on short-run results that distinguished the 1990s may have done more harm than good. The profits that made senior executives wealthy may not be renewable or sustainable, and they may not have benefited most shareholders, most employees, and most suppliers. Cooper (1999) argued that in Britain, weakened commitments to long-run employment have lowered job satisfaction and morale and they are undermining workers’ belief that work provides more than financial benefits. This conflict again raises governance issues and poses questions about the nature of organizations and their roles in society. When are tightly controlled organizations superior to widely held ones? Should societies provide for different organizational forms that promote longevity versus opportunism? If so, in what circumstances should societies foster the more rapid replacement of narrower-purpose organizations that have shorter life spans versus the slower replacement of broader-purpose organizations that have longer life spans? How do criteria for organizational performance relate to the distribution of wealth among people?

Conclusion Occupations, like people, need reasons for being that are greater than themselves. Most people go through a self-centered stage during adolescence, and then as they mature, they come to recognize the importance of their relations to others and the importance of functioning effectively as a part of society.



Although self-absorbed people may be very content in their egocentrism, others see such people as aberrant. Self-absorption produces a vicious cycle that makes people more dependent, shortens their time horizons, and limits their behavior repertoires. Certainly, such people make poor communal contributions and receive no satisfaction from influencing their environments. Thanks to the popularity of business education, organization theory has been living in a self-indulgent state in which external impacts have little or no significance. Although this state may seem pleasant, it does not encourage organization theorists to attain their full potential or to demonstrate the value of their work. In order to develop into a healthy and robust maturity, organization theory needs to engage and contribute to the rest of the world. It will be better able to attract good minds if it can demonstrate an ability to benefit people other than students. Confronting real-world problems forces theorists to rethink their assumptions, dislodges them from ritualistic patterns of thought, and stimulates them to try new methods. Data-gathering strategies vary along many dimensions, of course, but two dimensions seem particularly critical to the maturation of a science. Scientists must decide whether to focus on retrospective explanations of events that have taken place or to attempt to predict events that might occur. Scientists must also decide whether to restrict their work to passively observing events that occur naturally or whether to engineer events (Starbuck, 1974, 1976). Passive-retrospective orientations are healthy for a science’s early development. They highlight prominent, non-pathological phenomena. They reduce distortions caused by scientists’ observational activities. They minimize the costs of erroneous theories and thereby foster the generation of alternative hypotheses. They promote revision, modification, correction, combination, and elaboration. They insulate scientific development from extra-scientific payoffs. However, just as an adolescent needs to venture out from the family and to engage the world independently, a science should start to venture out of its passive-retrospective mode when it grows strong enough to do so. Firstly, as long as the costs of error are low, incentives remain weak to discriminate carefully between better hypotheses and worse ones. Secondly, because the scientists who propose retrospective theories know what phenomena their theories must explain, all serious proposals are generally consistent with the most prominent facts. Thirdly, scientific disciplines develop social structures and codes of behavior that, despite their fundamental virtues, can stifle innovation, creativity, and progress. To prevent this drift into sterility, scientific development needs punctuation by extra-disciplinary influences (Gordon and Marquis, 1966; Starbuck, 1974). Fourthly, a focus on naturally occurring phenomena generates data dominated by uninteresting events – nearly everyone has brown eyes, nearly all rock formations are stable, nearly all prices are the same as last week. To expose differences between theories, in quantities that make comparisons conclusive, scientists


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must be able to select settings that are likely to yield interesting, revealing observations – meaning that scientists have predicted what they will observe. Lastly, until organization theorists test their theories by suggesting ways to improve organizations, their research will remain a version of historical analysis. Organization theory can and should contribute more to human welfare. Efforts to make such contributions can inject vitality into organization theory as well as benefit our neighbors, our societies, and people far away.

Acknowledgements This essay has benefited from the suggestions of John Mezias and John Naman.

References Argyris, Chris (1957) Personality and Organization: The Conflict between System and the Individual. New York: Harper & Row. Barnard, Chester I. (1937) The Functions of the Executive. Lectures presented at the Lowell Institute, Boston. Harvard University Press (Cambridge, MA) published an expanded version as a book in 1938. Berle, Adolf A., Jr. and Means, Gardiner C. (1932) The Modern Corporation and Private Property. New York: Macmillan. Cooper, Cary (1999) ‘The Changing Psychological Contract at Work’, European Business Journal 11: 115–18. Dennison, Henry Sturgis (1931) Organization Engineering. New York: McGraw-Hill. Deutsch, Claudia H. (2003) ‘Revolt of the Shareholders: At Annual Meetings, Anger Will Ratchet up a Notch’, New York Times, February 23, Section 3, pp. 1, 12. Eisenhower, Dwight D. (1961) ‘Military-Industrial Complex Speech: January 17, 1961’, Public Papers of the Presidents, Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1960, pp. 1035–40. Engels, Frederick (1872) ‘On Authority’. First published 1874 in Almanacco Repubblicano. English translation by Robert C. Tucker, ed., The Marx-Engels Reader, 2nd edn (1978), New York, W. W. Norton, pp. 730–3. Engels’s complete writings are on the website: http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/index.htm Fayol, Henri (1923) ‘The Administrative Theory in the State’, Address before the Second International Congress of Administrative Science, Brussels. English translation by Sarah Greer in Luther H. Gulick and Lyndall F. Urwick (eds) Papers on the Science of Administration (1937), New York, Institute of Public Administration, Columbia University. Glassman, James K. (2002) ‘How to Protect against Another Enron’, Testimony before the House Committee on Financial Services, March 13. Washington, DC: American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research. Gordon, Gerald and Marquis, Sue (1966) ‘Freedom, Visibility of Consequences, and Scientific Innovation’, American Journal of Sociology 72: 195–202. Hymowitz, Carol (2003) ‘How to Fix a Broken System: A Rush of New Plans Promise to Make Corporate Boards More Accountable. Will They Work?’, Wall Street Journal, February 24, pp. R1, R3. Kay, Ira (2003) ‘Corporate Governance in Crisis: Executive Pay/Stock Option Overhang 2003’, Watson Wyatt Worldwide. http://www.watsonwyatt.com/research/ This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.


Lavelle, Louis, Jespersen, Frederick F. and Arndt, Michael (2002) ‘Special Report: Executive Pay’, Business Week, April 15. Mannheim, Karl (1935) Mensch und Gesellschaft im Zeitalter des Umbaus. Leiden: A. W. Sijthoff. Mannheim published an expanded English translation of this work: Man and Society in an Age of Reconstruction (1940), New York: Harcourt Brace. Marx, Karl (1867) Das Kapital. Kritik der Politischen Oekonomie. Hamburg: O. Meissner; New York: L. W. Schmidt. Parts of Capital appeared in print between 1859 and 1883, and Volume 1 first appeared in English in 1887. Marx’s complete writings are on the website: http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/index. htm Merkle, Judith A. (1980) Management and Ideology: The Legacy of the International Scientific Management Movement. Berkeley: University of California Press. Michels, Robert (1911) Zur Soziologie des Parteiwesens in der Moderne Demokratie. English translation by Eden and Cedar Paul, Political Parties: A Sociological Study of the Oligarchical Tendencies of Modern Democracy (1915), New York, Hearst’s International Library. Miller, Danny (1990) The Icarus Paradox: How Exceptional Companies Bring About Their Own Downfall. New York: HarperCollins. Miller, Danny and Le Breton-Miller, Isabelle (2004) Winning for the Long Run: Lessons from Remarkable Family Controlled Businesses. Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press. Natural Resources Defense Council (2003) Global Warming, http://www.nrdc.org/ globalwarming/ Pant, P. Narayan and Starbuck, William H. (1990) ‘Innocents in the Forest: Forecasting and Research Methods’, Journal of Management 16(2): 433–60. Paywatch, http://www.aflcio.org/corporateamerica/paywatch/ Reingold, Jennifer (1997) ‘CEO Pay – It’s Out of Control’, Business Week, April 21. Rockwood, Richard M. (2002) Accounting: Focus on the Red Flags. FocusInvestor.com, http://www.focusinvestor.com/AccountingRedFlags.pdf Shenhav, Yehouda (1995) ‘From Chaos to Systems: The Engineering Foundations of Organization Theory, 1879–1932’, Administrative Science Quarterly 40: 557–85. Simon, Herbert A. (1946) ‘The Proverbs of Administration’, Public Administration Review 6: 53–67. Simon, Herbert A. (1950) ‘Modern Organization Theories’, Advanced Management 15(10): 2–4. Simon, Herbert A. (1952) ‘Comments on the Theory of Organizations’, American Political Science Review 46: 1130–9. Simon, Hermann (1996) Hidden Champions: Lessons from 500 of the World’s Best Unknown Companies. Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press. Starbuck, William H. (1974) ‘The Current State of Organization Theory’, in J. W. McGuire (ed.) Contemporary Management: Issues and Viewpoints, pp. 123–39. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. Starbuck, William H. (1976) ‘Organizations and Their Environments’, in M. D. Dunnette (ed.) Handbook of Industrial and Organizational Psychology, pp. 1069–123. Chicago: Rand-McNally. Starbuck, William H. (1992) ‘Strategizing in the Real World’, International Journal of Technology Management, Special Publication on Technological Foundations of Strategic Management, 8(1/2): 77–85. Starbuck, William H. (2003) ‘The Origins of Organization Theory’, in Haridimos Tsoukas and Christian Knudsen (eds) The Handbook of Organization Theory: Meta-Theoretical Perspectives, pp. 143–82. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Starbuck, William H. and Hedberg, Bo L. T. (2001) ‘How Organizations Learn from Success and Failure’, in M. Dierkes, A. Berthoin Antal, J. Child, and I. Nonaka (eds) Handbook of Organizational Learning and Knowledge, pp. 327–50. Oxford: Oxford University Press. This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.

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Starbuck, William H. and Nystrom, Paul C. (1981) ‘Designing and Understanding Organizations’, in Paul C. Nystrom and William H. Starbuck (eds) Handbook of Organizational Design, Vol. 1, pp. ix–xxii. New York: Oxford University Press. Taylor, Frederick Winslow (1903) Shop Management. New York: Harper. Taylor, Humphrey (2001) Doctors The Most Prestigious Of Seventeen Professions And Occupations, Followed By Teachers (#2), Scientists (#3), Clergy (#4) And Military Officers (#5). The Harris Poll #50, October 10. Taylor, Humphrey (2002) The Enron Effect: The American Public’s Hostile Attitudes Toward Top Business Managers. The Harris Poll #55, October 18. United for a Fair Economy (2002) Executive Excess 2002: CEOs Cook the Books, Skewer the Rest of Us. Boston, MA: United for a Fair Economy, August 26. Vernon, Raymond (1977) Storm Over the Multinationals: The Real Issues. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Vernon, Raymond (1998) In the Hurricane’s Eye: The Troubled Prospects of Multinational Enterprises. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Von Mises, Ludwig (1944) Bureaucracy. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. von Schmoller, Gustav Friedrich (1898) Umrisse und Untersuchungen zur Verfassungs-, Verwaltungsund Wirtschaftsgeschichte besonders des Preussischen Staates im 17. und 18. Jahrhundert. Leipzig: Duncker & Humblet. Warnotte, Daniel (1937) ‘Bureaucratie et Fonctionnarisme’, Revue de l’Institut de Sociologie 17: 245–60. Weber, Max (1910-14) Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, Part III, Chapter 6. Tubingen: Paul Siebeck, 1922. Although the book appeared after Weber’s death, references in this chapter indicate that Weber wrote it before 1914. Whyte, William H. (1956) The Organization Man. New York: Doubleday. Wilson, Sloan (1955) The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit. New York: Simon & Schuster. Wolin, Sheldon S. (1960) Politics and Vision. Boston, MA: Little, Brown. World Population Awareness (2003) World Population Awareness and World Overpopulation Awareness. http://www.overpopulation.org/


5 The Study of Organizations and Organizing since 1945 James G. March

M

y status as an honorary member of EGOS is a status that I treasure, as I do the invitation to speak on this occasion and to pose as a European. I am especially grateful for your tolerance of me since the last March of my family to have been born in Europe came to America almost 400 years ago. My intention is to take advantage of your invitation and your tolerance to provide one man’s impressions of the last 60 years of organization studies. They are the impressions of an affectionate enthusiast who has the advantages and disadvantages of having lived through those years. I would not want to underestimate the disadvantages. I learned early to be skeptical about the words of aged scholars. Now that I have become one of them, I am even more skeptical. Age generates self-indulgence more reliably than it generates wisdom.

Introduction The field of organization studies is a large, heterogeneous field involving numerous enclaves having distinct styles, orientations and beliefs. It is integrated neither by a shared theory, nor by a shared perspective, nor even by a shared tolerance for multiple perspectives. It retains substantial intellectual, geographic and linguistic parochialism, with separate enclaves persisting in their own worlds of discourse and forming a common field only by a definition that overlooks the diversity. Source: Organization Studies, 28(1) (2007): 9–19.


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The Myth of Organization Studies And, yet, EGOS exists. EGOS was originally conceived, I believe, as a kind of intellectual social movement within organizations scholarship, defending, developing and extending a particular scholarly point of view and producing, augmenting and proclaiming European resistance both to the hegemony of North American scholars and to the glorification of quantitative analysis and other symptoms of scholarly testosterone. It has, however, increasingly positioned itself as a broad association of scholars brought together by the myth of organization studies, by the idea that such a thing exists (or might exist), and by the idea that we are, however uncomfortably, united in a common endeavor. This myth of a distinct field of organization studies cannot easily be sustained by a contemplation of either our teachings, our writings, or our research. It is sustained by our hopes. In the spirit of those hopes and that myth, I ask what the history of organization studies since the Second World War can tell us about the processes by which the field of organization studies refines old ideas and introduces new ones. Given the variety of our commitments, it is a hopeless task, made only somewhat manageable by gross simplification.

A Simple Model The story I will tell neglects those aspects of intellectual history that involve ideas competing for acceptance on the basis of evidence or other forms of gradual scholarly winnowing. Such things certainly exist and are important, but they are subordinated here to a simple story of diffusion. I imagine that ideas, frameworks and worldviews invade a scholarly field and, if successful, reproduce from scholar to future scholar and so on through generations with reliability that declines over generations. Ideas, frameworks and worldviews also migrate from one part of a field to another and from one enclave to another and are modified in the course of migration. The observed distribution of scholarly commitments over time and over geographic and linguistic regions is generated by this interaction of invasion, reproduction, migration and transformation. To explore such a model of the history of a field thoroughly would require a more precise specification of the enclaves and the parameters of invasion, reproduction, migration and transformation, as well as their interaction. I do not propose to provide such a specification today. I want, however, to call attention to one aspect of such a process – the way the history of a scholarly field is embedded in its times and the way those times affect different regions differently. In particular, significant features of the field of organization studies were molded by three critical events in 20th-century history: (1) the Second World War, (2) the social and political protest movements


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of the late 1960s and early 1970s, and (3) the collapse of the Soviet Empire and the triumph of markets. The invasions of ideas associated with the aftermaths of these three events have produced a community of scholars with strong generational imprints. The story is obviously considerably complicated by the reproduction of world-views through the education of new scholars by old ones. Each generation reproduces scholars at a rate dependent on the number of old scholars still active and the opportunities for employment of new scholars. These new scholars and their own progeny extend the impact of earlier invasions. In addition, ideas travel, leading to their spread and modification within the field. These complications are important, but generational imprinting is a striking feature of the intellectual history of organization studies. Moreover, since the three waves of ideas arose during times of different rates of growth in universities in different parts of the worlds, the temporal imprints of ideas have tended to become geographic imprints.

Three Invasions Although it is possible to point to precursors of organization studies in Asia and Africa, written contributions to organizational scholarship had their Western origins in the writings of Aristotle and developed in Europe after the Renaissance and Reformation and up through the 1930s, primarily as elements of the fledgling disciplines of social science and human engineering. The early contributors to the field were few, scattered among the disciplines, and primarily European. The easily recognizable ancestors of modern organizations scholarship include such notable European social scientists as Emile Durkheim, Alfred Marshall, Robert Michels, Gaetano Mosca, Vilfredo Pareto, Adam Smith and Max Weber. They were supplemented by early European organizations engineers such as Henri Fayol and Lyndall Urwick. Some North American writers, such as Luther Gulick, Elton Mayo (actually an Australian for most of his life), John Dewey, Mary Parker Follett and Frederick Taylor were pioneers, but the field’s pre-Second World War origins were primarily European.

The Second World War The Second World War changed things. The massive material, intellectual and economic devastation of Europe, including the decimation of the German, Austrian, Italian and Eastern European scholarly communities, made the recon struction of European scholarly strength a relatively slow process. Although there were significant European scholars working on studies of organizations


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earlier in the postwar period, it was not until well into the 1970s that European studies of organizations achieved a scale adequate to reassert itself as an important force. In contrast, economic recovery in North America was relatively fast and contributed to the postwar economic and political expansion of North American institutions. A significant factor both in the recovery of North American scholarship and in the directions that recovery took was the extraordinary immigration of scholars to North America from Germany, Austria and the rest of Central Europe during the 1930s. These scholars, who were born as Jews in Central Europe and came to the United States to escape persecution, included some of the more distinguished subsequent contributors to North American academic concern about organizing. Peter Blau, Fritz Heider, Kurt Lewin, Fritz Machlup, Jakob Marschak, Leo Hurwicz, Oskar Morgenstern, Anatol Rappoport, Joseph Schumpeter, Alfred Schütz, Friedrich A. von Hayek, Ludwig von Mises and John von Neumann, among others. In many ways, the greatest single benefactor of North American social science and organization studies in the mid-20th century was Adolf Hitler. Because of the rapid peacetime recovery and the massive growth of American higher education in the years immediately after 1945, the most obvious feature of the history of organization studies in North America after the Second World War, and a major factor in the invasion and reproduction of post-Second World War ideas, was growth in the size of the scholarly community. Although the magnitude of that growth in North America is difficult to assess precisely, it seems to have been on the order of at least 100-fold. The field did not grow as a response to exciting new discoveries, findings, or theories, nor as a response to a clear, overwhelming demand for knowledge on the part of society. It grew as a function of the rapidly increasing supply of scholars. The demand that led to the increase in scholars was not a demand for scholarship, but a demand for teachers to teach the increasing numbers of university students. As the number of scholars increased, so also did the number of papers produced. As the number of papers increased, so also did the number of journals to publish them. In 1965, Rand McNally published a Handbook of Organizations. The field that that handbook described was focused on a variety of institutions as much as it was on general principles. Nine of the chapters dealt with specific institu tional spheres (e.g. unions, public bureaucracies, political parties, military units, hospitals, schools). The field was also based in the disciplines. Of the contributors to the handbook, 60 percent held appointments in disciplinary departments when the handbook appeared. They had different degrees and lived in different scholarly communities, but they shared a diffuse worldview and a vision of scholarship. They were a postwar North American generation of social scientists. They were – every one of the 30 contributors to the 1965 handbook – American, white, male and young. About two-thirds of them were less than 40 years old in 1965.



The generation represented by the handbook contributors was a postwar generation and was profoundly influenced by, indeed intertwined with, the development of a scientific behavioral science in North America. The postwar era in the United States was one that saw the election of the first social scientists to the National Academy of Science, and the inclusion of social science as a division of the National Science Foundation. It saw the conversion of economic theory into a workable mathematical form. It saw the development of mathematical models in psychology, sociology, economics, geography, political science and anthropology. It saw an extensive elaboration of techniques for the gathering and multivariate analysis of quantitative data in economics, psychology, political science and sociology. The postwar North American contributors to the study of organizations included a long list of scholars, not only refugees from Central Europe but also such other academics as Alex Bavelas, Richard M. Cyert, Robert Dubin, Alvin W. Gouldner, Mason Haire, Harold H. Kelley, Charles E. Lindblom, Seymour M. Lipset, Robert Merton, John Meyer, Roy Radner, Leonard R. Sayles, W. Richard Scott, Philip Selznick, Martin Shubik, Herbert A. Simon, William H. Starbuck, Arthur L. Stinchcombe, James Thompson, Karl E. Weick, Harrison White and William F. Whyte. For the most part, they identified with, and were viewed as part of, the effort to make postwar studies of human behavior and institutions more scientific. The attitudes of this generation of scholars were strengthened by, and gave strength to, the simultaneous effort to make North American business schools more explicitly academic, to increase the role of academic knowledge and methods and reduce the role of experiential knowledge and methods in management education.

The Protests of the 1960s and 1970s The European story is similar in many respects to the North American. In the first two decades after the Second World War, a number of distinguished European scholars interested in organizations established themselves: for example, Sune Carlsson, Michel Crozier, Walter Goldberg, David Hickson, Knut Dahl Jacobsen, Edith Penrose, Derek Pugh, Claude Riveline. The Aston Group and the Tavistock Institute produced both research and new scholars. However, the European story differed from the North American in one impor tant respect. Because the negative economic and political impact of the war was much greater in Europe than it was in North America, postwar economic recovery, and consequently scholarly recovery, was slower. As a result, the major European expansion of organization studies was delayed. It not only occurred in a different place; it occurred at a different time. By 1970, European universities had largely recovered from the ravages of the Second World War and had started to experience the same kind of exceptional growth that had profoundly affected North American universities


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20 years earlier. During the 1970s and 1980s, numerous vigorous research centers emerged, and numerous scholars interested in organizations became visible: for example, Mats Alvesson, Nils Brunsson, John Child, Stewart Clegg, Barbara Czarniawska, Lars Engwall, Erhard Friedberg, Anthony Hopwood, Håkon Håkonsson, Alfred Kieser, Cornelius J. Lammers, Bruno Latour, Nikolas Luhmann, Renate Mayntz, Johan P. Olsen, Andrew Pettigrew, Jean-Claude Thoenig. The re-emergence of European organizations scholarship followed different paths in different countries, particularly across different linguistic groups. Like their North American colleagues, many European organization scholars found homes in business schools at a time when business schools were increasing in size, importance and research emphasis. There were other patterns, however. For example, the early prominence of political scientists in the development of organization studies in North America was replicated in Norway and Sweden where Johan P. Olsen and Nils Brunsson created substantial communities of scholars dedicated to research on public organizations and to an institutional perspective. Michel Crozier and his associates in France created a tradition that was based in political sociology and focused particularly on issues of bureaucracy and power. European organization studies, like North American organizations studies, developed a scholarly identity and canon; but there was a striking difference between the intellectual mood of the 1970s and 1980s, when organization studies expanded rapidly in Europe, and the intellectual mood of the 1950s and 1960s, when organization studies – along with other social and behavioral sciences – expanded rapidly in North America. European organization studies were influenced deeply by the fact that expansion occurred in the decades following the protest and counterculture movements of the 1960s and 1970s. These movements created a distinctive intellectual setting in universities throughout Europe. The setting combined: • opposition to American involvement in Vietnam and more generally to American hegemony • support for a feminist sensibility, rhetoric, and historical perspective • a radical (primarily Marxist) critique of society and social science • a post-structuralist, post-modern, social constructivist worldview • a romantic enthusiasm for ‘flower power’ and other accoutrements of countercultures. In contrast to the mood of the 1950s, which was optimistic about social science and its possibilities for becoming a science that served an enlightened society through rational analysis and social engineering based on systematic quantitative research, the later mood was pessimistic. It was likely to portray the apparatus of social science as an instrument of white, male,



capitalist oppression. Adam Smith and Max Weber were displaced by Michel Foucault and Anthony Giddens. Although important parts of European organization studies developed and retained the commitments that were characteristic of the earlier period, the timing of European growth in higher education produced an intelligentsia that had, compared to the immediate postwar group, substantially less positive attitudes about the academic establishment, about business, about science, about mathematics and numbers, about males and the intellectual prejudices attributed to them, about the older generation, about progress, and about things associated with North America, but most of all about the quantitative methods and the mathematical theoretical forms that were hallmarks of the earlier period. Most strikingly perhaps, this era in organizations studies produced a major change in the gender composition of the community of scholars. From being an almost exclusively male domain, the field of organization studies was transformed into a field with a substantial female presence. The change was unmistakable in North America but it was – because of the timing of growth in Europe – even more visible there. By the end of the period, women scholars represented at least 25 percent and in some areas more than 50 percent of the community. Both the Second World War and the protest movements are, of course, fading from memory now and are hardly recognized by scholars who have entered the field in the last 25 years; but their intellectual progeny and artifacts still litter the field and form barriers to subsequent invasions both in North America and in Europe. The first period’s effects are found particularly in such things as quantitative research on institutional diffusion in populations of organizations, organizational demography, decision making, information processing, networks, learning, evolution and comparative structures. The second period’s effects are seen particularly in such things as qualitative research on culture, gender, sense-making, social construction and power.

The Triumph of Markets When the Soviet Empire collapsed in 1991 after almost a decade of gradual disintegration, it signaled the triumph of capitalism both as an economic system and as an intellectual basis for social thought. That event reverberated through North American and European universities because of the special importance of oppositional and particularly Marxist positions in social science. A central traditional feature of university culture, more conspicuous in schools of humanities and social science than in schools of business or engineering, was the oppositional role of the university. For most of the 20th century, the conventional basis for opposition in university cultures – both in North America and in Europe – was Marxism. This relatively stable


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ideational and acculturation system in universities fell apart when the Soviet Empire collapsed. Marxism as an instrument and a symbol of opposition to the establishment lost appeal. Insofar as Marxism was replaced in university oppositional enthusiasms, it tended to be replaced by a new program of social reform that emphasized competitive markets and a much reduced role for government. The economic ideas of the Austrian School became fashionable among young students. In Europe and North America, the result in organization studies, as in many other domains of social science, was twofold. The first was an effect on the cohort of organization scholars recruited to organization studies during the 1970s and 1980s and the scholarly commitments they had reproduced in their students. Assertions that what was believed was not what was true, which had been buttressed by a Marxist portrayal of the real truth, were transformed into assertions that nothing was true, that scholarship could not involve the pursuit of truth because truth in the sense intended by most traditional scholars did not exist. The second result of the triumphs of markets in Europe and North America was an effect on young radical scholars. The new radicals were libertarian liberals, and markets became the preferred revolutionary mode of organizing, in the public sector as well as the private. The preeminence of markets was taken for granted, and discovering the factors contributing to individual or organizational success within a market system, or discovering new uses of markets as instruments of organizing, became prototypic forms of research in organization studies. Just as young scholars entering the field in the 1950s had been drawn to science and young scholars in the 1970s had been drawn to the humanities, young scholars in the 1990s were drawn to markets. They became fascinated by the excitements and rewards of market competition. Leadership, mergers and acquisitions, outsourcing and entrepreneurship became major topics of research. These third-wave invaders faced a situation that, on the one hand, was made more difficult by the fact that the scholarly world was no longer growing rapidly in either North America or Europe. Organization studies had become less vulnerable to invasion by virtue of its location in relatively stable institutions both in North America and in Europe. On the other hand, the situation was made more favorable for the third wave both by the gradual dissipation of the reproduced scholarly residue of the postwar and postprotest invasions, and by the way the third wave resonated with a business school emphasis on immediate relevance. The revolution in business schools that occurred in the 1950s and 1960s in North America and later in Europe had made the schools more academic and research-oriented. This contributed to, and was promoted by, the first two invasions into organization studies. In the 1980s and 1990s, this revolution was challenged by a counter-revolution, led by the business press. This counterrevolution threatened to alienate and isolate the scholars of the revolution and their heirs but opened the schools to the post-1985 invasion. This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.


Although it clearly exists and is important in North America and Europe, the third wave seems likely to be even more prominent in Asia. The rapid expansion in the number of scholars that was experienced in North America in the decades after the Second World War and in Europe in the decades after the protest movements of the 1960s characterized most Asian countries in the decades after the fall of the Soviet Empire. This growth is likely to move China, India and other Asian countries to leading positions not only in terms of their educated work forces, economies and political power but also in terms of their research. Because of the timing of Asian expansion, the kinds of organization studies that will be carried out and the kinds of scholarship that will be reproduced are likely to reflect a greater degree of concern for understanding and fostering the success of enterprises in a market-based world than is currently found in North America and Europe with their legacies of earlier invasions and expansions.

The Future Forecasting the future is a fool’s conceit. There is no reason to expect the next 60 years of organization studies to unfold in a way that is any more predictable from the perspective of today than the last 60 years would have been from the perspective of the end of the Second World War.

The Sources of Novelty There are, however, elements of the post-Second World War history that seem to cast light on the generation and persistence of novelty in organization studies. First, a primary source of novelty in organization studies has been importation from outside. Both after the Second World War and after the protests of the 1960s and 1970s, new ideas entered the field from other fields, particularly from the behavioral sciences and natural sciences in the former and from the humanities and feminist studies in the latter. Second, novelty is facilitated by growth. When a scholarly community is growing rapidly, the instruments of socialization that are essential to exploita tion and resistance to novelty are less effective. Turnover facilitates the entry of new ideas. Scholarly communities that grow at different times are likely to be invaded by different ideas. Third, novelty and variety are sustained by parochialism. The mutual isola tion of European scholars and North American scholars has been extensively documented. This isolation has allowed separate scholarly communities to thrive and to develop different ideas and prejudices. The mutual isolation of Asian and Western communities is likely to produce a similar situation in which Asian ideas are protected from socialization into the conventions of dominant groups in North America and Europe. This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.

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Does this demonstrate that by some magic we have discovered the optimal mix of exploitation and exploration? Not at all. The fact that there appear to be as many voices describing the level of novelty and diversity in organization studies as too high as there are describing it as too low does not demonstrate that it is exactly right. What the present story suggests is not that history is efficient in locating optimal paths but that some features of the history of organizations studies have affected the mix of exploitation and exploration in the field without any conscious intent to do so, and that the future mix as well as the level of diversity in organization studies that it fosters are likely to be similarly affected.

The Future of the Present There are many conspicuous features of the present that may have implications for the future: • The movement toward global economic, political, and cultural linkages • The continuing elaboration of information and biological technologies • The reduced economic, political and cultural centrality of Europe and North America • The changing distribution of wealth • The rising tide of fundamentalist religious belief in Judaism, Christianity and Islam • The earth’s declining tolerance for the human species. In one form or other, each of these seems inexorable; and each of them will affect organization studies in ways that, although they are not easy to predict precisely now, are likely to be substantial. Future invasions of the field will reflect critical events of the future, just as past invasions have reflected critical events of the past. Speculating about the unfolding of these trends is, however, discouraged by an awareness that neither their timing nor their magnitudes can be specified with any precision.

The Business School Locale There is, however, one feature of the context within which the future of organization studies apparently will be realized that may be worth noting – the business school location of much of the research. For the last few decades, business schools have provided stable financial and occupational bases for organization studies and many of the scholars who consider themselves students of organizations have secured both their training and



their employment in business schools. The business school context is not a neutral one: • It encourages the mutual isolation of business school scholars of organizations and disciplinary scholars. • Insofar as it encourages contact with the disciplines, it makes contact with ideas from economics more likely, and contact with ideas from the sciences, psychology, sociology, or political science less likely. • It focuses research on the private sector, reducing the attention to institutions of the public sector that characterized much early work in the field. • It brings an emphasis on the audience of practitioners, on finding the correlates of organizational performance rather than other organizational phenomena. • It brings an orientation to the problems and possibilities of individual orga nizations (firms) and less attention to populations of organizations or to ‘organizing’. • It stimulates an emphasis on organizational strategies, rather than societal strategies. The implications of the business school context for research are not so clear that they can be asserted with enormous confidence, but they appear to cast doubt on the long-term future of some programs of research congenial to scholars of the first two waves and their progeny. Most of the time in the history of business schools, business school locales have been less welcoming to fundamental research than to applied research, less welcoming to critiques of the market/hierarchical orders than to research that accepts or extols them. A business school culture is not normally supportive of excursions into such things as philosophies of science, mathematical social science, interpretive social science, complexity theory, post-modern sensibilities, organizational demography, or critical theory. Those excursions often maintain postures of intellectual disdain for discourse comprehensible to others and typically provide little immediate, demonstrable utility. The pressures in business schools toward immediate relevance and practical comprehension seem to point in different directions. It may be seen as ironical that programs of organizations scholarship rooted in science and programs of organizations scholarship rooted in antipathy for science are not only out of step with each other; they are both out of step with important elements of the modern mood and with business schools. Unless organization studies can re-create the academic ambitions that permeated North American business schools in the 1950s and 1960s and European business schools in the 1970s and 1980s, those parts of organization studies that trace their origins to either the aftermath of the Second


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World War or to the aftermath of the protests of the 1960s are likely to become less welcome in business schools.

A Scholar’s Job The future, like the past, is destined to be shaped by invasions of ideas and by growth in the numbers of scholars. In a real sense, however, the fact that the intellectual future will be at the mercy of historical happenings over which we have little control is not relevant to those of us who are practicing scholars. Our task is not to discern the future in order to join it; nor even to shape it. Our task is to make small pieces of scholarship beautiful through rigor, persistence, competence, elegance and grace, so as to avoid the plague of mediocrity that threatens often to overcome us. If we do that, we may not protect scholarship from future historical waves of renewed enthusiasms; but neither will we disgrace it.

Note I am grateful for the comments of Mie Augier and Johan P. Olsen.


6 Managing Foucault: Genealogies of Management Alan McKinlay

Introduction

M

ichel Foucault’s influence has penetrated every nook and cranny of the arts and social sciences, with the exceptions of economics and business history. While economics has retreated into a mathematical ghetto, business history has become an increasingly interdisciplinary space occupied by sociologists, historians and economists. There is no doubt that business history has been rejuvenated by this inter-disciplinarity. For too long, theoretical debate in business history had been captivated by Alfred Chandler’s persuasive history of corporate America and his dictum that organizational structure should follow corporate strategy (Chandler 1962). Despite the theoretical openness of business history, Foucault has had little or no impact outside the specialist niche of accounting history (Hoskin and Macve 1986; Miller and O’Leary 1987). In a sense, this neglect of Foucault is hardly surprising. Not for Foucault are the concerns of conventional historians, far less of conventional business historians: of productivity comparisons, the adequacy – or otherwise – of managerial decision-making, or the competitiveness of firms, regions and nations. Foucault’s central text for business historians is his study of the emergence of the modern penitentiary, Discipline and Punish (1977). Here we follow Foucault’s lead in the prison book by examining the factories of the industrial revolution, focusing on the influence of Jeremy Bentham upon managerial theory and practice and the case of Robert Owen’s New Lanark in the first and second sections. We shall use Source: Management & Organizational History, 1(1) (2006): 87–100.


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these cases as the basis for a discussion of Foucault and his work’s implications for business history. We then turn to images of the ‘impossible factory’ in section three, drawing attention to the centrality of the body in Foucault’s work. Foucault is a controversial historian who has stimulated debate about medicine, penology, sexuality and power. In none of these fields, however, has his work reshaped mainstream historiography. For Foucault, the archive is not an objective source of representations of the ‘real’. Foucault’s relationship with the archive was as ambivalent as his relationship with realism was ambiguous: ‘whatever I assert in my writing can be verified or refuted as in any other history book . . . . Despite that, people who read me, even those who appreciate what I do, often say to me, laughing: “but in the end you realise the things that you say are nothing but fictions!” I always reply: who ever thought he was writing anything but fiction?’ (Foucault 1991, 33). That is not to say that he was indifferent to archival research, quite the reverse. In one of his most important essays on historical method – ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’ – he observed that effective history ‘requires patience and a knowledge of details and it depends on a vast accumulation of source material’ (Foucault 1971, 140). The archive must be interpreted in terms of the language and practices it signified rather than simply for its substantive content. In other words, forms, ledgers and instructional manuals are important not just for the information they contain but also for the way in which they collect and codify data: the basic infrastructure of a specific deployment of power/knowledge. The new disciplinary institutions and practices of the early 19th century are important, Foucault argues, because they provide the organizational and architectural possibility for the accumulation of observation, documentation and experimentation. These new institutional forms generate new bodies of knowledge that in turn legitimize and ‘perfect’ the organizing principles of the clinic, the prison and the factory – thus, the necessary intertwining of power/knowledge. As these institutions and practices become familiar so the operation of disciplinary power becomes increasingly intimate, ever more refined, and ever more opaque to the subjects of the gaze. Here we can see the radical purpose of Foucault’s work: to remain on the margins, the better to expose ‘the secret workings of power’ (Levin 1997, 443–4). We can hear an echo, surely, of Marx’s determination to follow ‘Monsieur Le Capital’ into his secret lair, the factory, in order to understand the basis of capitalism. Foucault, like Marx, is much more than a monochromatic historian of control. For Foucault, liberalism and citizenship were necessarily bound to the emergence of disciplinary practices. Disciplinary practices were the ‘dark side’ of the rise of capitalism and liberalism: ‘The real, corporal disciplines constituted the foundations of the formal, juridical liberties. The contract may have been regarded as the ideal foundation of law and political power; panopticism constituted the technique, universally widespread, of coercion … . The “Enlightenment” which discovered


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the liberties also invented the disciplines’ (Foucault 1977, 222). The interplay of discipline and liberty lies at the heart of our institutions. Rule must be ceded to self-reflexive subjects who in turn constantly assess the institutions of which they are a part. It is this inherent tension which renders every institution of liberal capitalism inherently unstable, and which also provides the suppleness that underwrites their durability (Rose 1999; Joyce 2003). Perhaps the main difficulty in using Foucault to understand the long-run dynamics of management and organization is the all but total absence of the factory from his work. A few scattered allusions and conversations aside, Foucault simply takes the fact of capitalism for granted and broadly endorses Marx’s account of its development. Indeed, one can read Marx as supplying the answer to the question of ‘why’ capitalism developed but not ‘how’. Foucault, on the other hand, concerns himself with the ‘how’ of power. Or, as Richard Marsden (1999, 149–50) so eloquently puts it, ‘Foucault reasons that to understand the “architecture” of power one must first know something of stone-cutting; hence, he analyses the “political economy of detail”, the “microphysics of power”, the “calculus of the infinitesimal and the infinite” (Foucault 1977, 140). The calculating eye of the manager is no longer the focal point of analysis. We are no longer forced to assess the quality, rationality and far-sightedness of particular entrepreneurs or their decisions, a hallmark of so much mainstream business history derived from neoclassical economics. Rather, Foucault requires us to examine the conditions of possibility of new forms of knowing and of exercising power, to pay attention to the administrative practices, the forms and records essential to particular forms of managing (Hoskin and Macve 2000).

Abundant Panopticons, Perfected Gazes One important point should be noted: Bentham thought and said that his optical system was the innovation needed for the easy and effective use of power. It has in fact been widely employed since the end of the eighteenth century. But the procedures of power that are at work in modern societies are much more numerous, diverse and rich. It would be wrong to say that the principle of visibility governs all technologies of power used since the nineteenth century. (Foucault 1980, 148)

Discipline and Punish opens with a long, lurid description of the slow mortification and execution of Damien for attempted regicide. Damien’s agonies, relieved occasionally by medical and priestly intervention, were witnessed by huge Parisian crowds that lined the streets through which the torturers and their victim processed. The crowd watched, pacified by the awesome spectacle and cowed by the sovereign’s power. For Foucault, Damien’s execution symbolized sovereign or monarchic power, that is, a form of power that relied upon occasional, dramatic displays rather than imperceptible infiltration into


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everyday life. Sovereign power, Foucault implies, is not just repugnant to modern sensibilities but literally unthinkable as a method of displaying and legitimizing power. With the rise of the penitentiary the purpose of punishment took a decisive turn. No longer was punishment a public spectacle geared to confirming or enhancing the monarch’s power. Rather, sovereign power gave way to disciplinary or carceral power: anonymous, prosaic, routine and continuous. The intimate control of the prisoner’s space, time, bodily functions and personal habits were designed to reshape the miscreant into a docile, productive member of society. Where the subject of monarchic power was inherently passive, the disciplinary subject was thoughtful and ceaselessly restless, requiring constant monitoring and tutelage. The fine-grained techniques that develop discipline over workers and tasks are summarized by Marsden (1999, 165): segment, seriate, finalize, hierarchize, examine, rank, routinize/train, synthesize. All of these steps are necessary before one can speak of a fully developed disciplinary technique. A complete form of power/ knowledge must encompass the smallest detail of labour in an analytical grid that permits comparison and managerial intervention. Think not just of the dressage of ‘scientific management’ but of contemporary ‘six sigma’ quality regimes that depend upon workers’ continual, systematic examination of themselves and their tasks: define, measure, analyse, improve, control. The relentless surveillance of the prison and the workhouse, contra Marx, precedes and prefigures, echoes and anticipates, the disciplinary regimes of the factory (Flynn 2005, 91; Ignatieff 1978, 214–5). On this point Foucault is at his clearest and his most elliptical: the rise of disciplinary power in schools, factories and prisons ‘cannot be separated from the technological mutations of the apparatus of production [and] the division of labour . . . . Each makes the other possible and necessary; each provides a model for the other’ (Foucault 1977, 221). It was precisely the concentration of factory children in specific buildings and their regulation by ‘military discipline’ that made inspection possible (Bolin-Hart 1989, 63–6). Within a few decades the new technology of power symbolized by Bentham’s panopticon had become ubiquitous as the logic of institutional practice, always the measure of how far short of the ideal actual practices were. The new time discipline demanded by the factory required ‘constant visual surveillance which depended on long visual axes and spatially shallow production spaces’ (Markus 1993, 250). Bentham’s failure to secure funding for his prison design has been unjustly used as a stick with which to beat Foucault (Thompson 2003). However, this is to neglect just how mainstream Bentham’s architectural – both physical and social – schemes were. Bentham’s panoptic principle of ‘inspectability’ was fundamental to mid-19th century factory and social reform. Nor was Bentham without direct influence on industrial practices. In the final decade of the 18th century Jeremy Bentham’s brother, Samuel, reorganized the Portsmouth naval dockyard. Samuel Bentham’s vision of the factory was based upon functional organization and centralized vigilance (Ashworth 1994,



409, 435). To increase efficiency and eliminate waste and pilferage, all tasks were clearly ascribed to specific labour ranks; a standard administrative and cost system was applied; specialized, deskilling machinery was designed and installed: labour discipline became a matter of prior managerial analysis, rather than wasteful punishment posthoc. This was Benthamite industrial discipline: a ‘new system of terror’ (Cooper 1984, 192–5; Ashworth 1998). In turn, the Benthamite vision of the factory also penetrated penal practices. Prison treadmills – ‘discipline mills’ – were widely used as a form of meaningless labour to compel moral improvement but also to power nearby factory production (Ashworth 2002, 50–3). Here one can see a politicized, rationalizing theology as much as utilitarian political economy. In practice, the greatest good for the greatest number overlapped with the severe demands made on individuals and communities by non-conformism and Calvinism. The enormous physical demands and obscure purpose of the treadmill for the toiling convict were an extreme physical representation of the austere reworking of the Calvinist soul before an unblinking and unknowable god. The essence of the treadmill and the Calvinist road to redemption is isolation and endless repetition of mindless secular tasks, the better to ensure the dominance of the perfect system over the flawed individual. If the Benthamite prison was a mill to grind rogues honest then the motive force was quite literally to be provided by the penitent prisoners. That is not to say that every school, or factory, or even prison was modelled on the panopticon. Foucault’s argument is much more subtle and more pragmatic. Local interventions by poor law administrators or factory managers, whether shaped by tactical or benign objectives, operate within a certain paradigm of what constitutes the institution’s raison d’etre. This is what Foucault calls the micro-physics of power: the host of small-scale institutional innovations in the classification and administration – concepts and practices – of knowledge and the making of subjects (Hacking 2002, 82). What could be more material, more realist than this?

Governing the Impossible Factory In the model factory villages of the 19th century the inescapable ties between social order in the workplace and the locality meant that industrialists were concerned with preserving hierarchy and order in both domains (Bauman 1982, 70–2). Robert Owen’s parallelogram housing scheme – outlined in his unheard evidence to the 1817 parliamentary committee on poor law reform – imagined communities of up to 1,000 to live in regimented, semicommunal housing blocks overseen by superintendents at each corner. The objective was moral regeneration through collective visibility (Halevy 1928, 251; Harrison 1969, 158). Here Owen owed as much to Calvinist and nonconformist theology as he did to utilitarian political economy. For Thomas This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.

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Chalmers, the influential Calvinist minister and social commentator, the creation of the godly commonwealth on earth hinged upon the intensity with which individuals, families and neighbours policed themselves. Salvation, or at least a check on human corruptibility, was dependent upon communal surveillance under the unwavering eye of the pastor, an intense circle of surveillance in which the individual was both subject and object, watcher and watched (Brown 1982, 122; Hilton 1988, 57–8). As Foucault notes, the principle of visibility pervades these Utopian experiments. But we should be wary of assuming that visibility was associated with inspection and individual record-keeping. Visibility does not necessarily signify panopticism. Consider the case of Saltaire. A model village built just outside Bradford in 1871, Saltaire’s twin focal points were the church and the textile factory. At the corner of George Street and Titus Street, the central point of the village, stands a narrow-fronted house with the little architectural flourishes that single out the householder as a member of Saltaire’s managerial corps. In 1871 the mill’s commissionaire and security officer, Sergeant Major Hill, lived there. The tower had unobstructed views across the radial streets that fanned out across the hillside, the better to monitor attendance at mill and chapel (Reynolds 1983, 269). We should note that the notion of communal surveillance has given way to a less ambitious model of an external gaze on a recalcitrant population. Equally, there is no systematic archiving of individual behaviour over time: this is a form of surveillance that falls well short of any reasonable definition of a disciplinary technology. Nevertheless, it is tempting to describe this as a panopticon, a watchtower from which Saltaire’s Sergeant Major could survey the village. But the Sergeant Major’s house can be read in a quite different way. Rather than an observatory to scrutinize the successful imposition of the master’s social discipline, it could equally be seen as a vantage point from which to map the breakdown of order, the beginnings of riot or cholera. In other words, the watchtower spoke of Salt’s fear of labour and his anxiety about riotous contagion, rather than as a symbol of his hegemony. In his autobiography Robert Owen concluded that his greatest achievement was not so much bringing management to New Lanark as ‘government’: ‘I say “government”, – for my intention was not so much to be a mere manager of cotton mills . . . but to introduce principles in the conduct of the people’ (Owen 1857, 56–7). Perhaps Owen’s most famous disciplinary innovation was the ‘silent monitor’: a small wooden cube with four coloured planes to signify the quality of a worker’s performance. ‘But that which I found to the most efficient check on inferior conduct, was the contrivance of a silent monitor for each one employed in the establishment. This consisted of a four-sided piece of wood, about two inches long and one broad, each side coloured – one side black, another blue, a third yellow, and the fourth white, to hang upon a hook with either side to the front. One of these was suspended in a conspicuous place This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.


near to each of the persons employed, and the colour at the front told of the conduct of the individual during the preceding day, to four degrees of comparison. Bad, denoted by black, and no. 4, indifferent by blue, and number three, – good by yellow, and number two, – and excellent by white and number 1. (Owen 1857)

The contemporary analogue of the ‘silent monitor’ lies somewhere between the coloured lights that signify the intensity of the just-in-time manufacturing process and performance management databases. Each day’s individual scores were recorded in a permanent register – ‘the book of character’. Such registers were not unique to New Lanark. Other cotton masters, such as Samuel Oldknow, maintained a ‘disgrace account’ that recorded worker behaviour and performance (McKendrick 1961; Williams 1997, 111). But there is no evidence that the numeric codes were aggregated, far less categorized, analysed and used as the basis for managerial intervention. To render the individual visible and so calculable was a significant innovation in principle that was not always sustained in practice (Miller and O’Leary 1987). Of itself, calculability does not necessarily result in calculation and comparison between individuals, far less the imposition of effective and durable discipline. Rather, the immediate and visual value of the ‘silent monitor’ far outweighed the long-run and calculative. While Owen reported his use of these registers to maintain control in his absence, their greatest practical value derived from his tours of the mill. If this represented a form of protodisciplinary power then it was suffused with Owen’s personal, monarchic power. There is no sense, for example, of Owen compiling a moral trajectory of his mill hands as they matured, or of a comparison between genders, or between long-established employees and newcomers. Nor were such moral ledgers accompanied by a menu of sanctions and rewards. Owen’s elaborate scheme – ‘four degrees of comparison’ – did not escape the confines of the local and the temporary; it did not lay the foundations for a broader understanding of motivation and performance. Finally, it is not clear from Owen’s autobiographical account of just who was responsible for awarding the daily grades, far less how grading consistency was achieved between functionaries or over time. Indeed, the image of regimented work and community was belied by Robert Owen’s diary which routinely lamented indiscipline in the mills and the village. We should also note that Owen’s purpose was not solely surveillance of worker behaviour and morals. The ‘silent monitor’ was also designed to check his supervisors’ eagerness to flog the mill children (Butt 1971, 189). Nor was there any sense that these records were maintained for populations or for individuals over the long run. Without the steady accumulation of data, without systematic interventions to modify – and measure – behaviour, without comparisons between factory regimes, it is difficult to conclude that in itself this amounted to much more than the most flawed form of power/knowledge. Indeed, as Owen was well aware, his techniques may well have delivered profitability This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.

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but did little to fundamentally shift the morals of his mill workers. For Owen, the primary reason for this was his failure to develop or embed a sufficient range of disciplinary techniques to induce durable self-surveillance. Owen, ‘the Social Father’, embodied the persistence of sovereign, paternal power, even as he experimented with innovative disciplinary techniques. One sympathetic, if jaundiced, visitor to New Lanark commented both on the singularity of the experiment and the enormous personal – monarchical – power exercise by Owen: ‘He keeps out of sight from others, and perhaps from himself, that his system, instead of aiming at perfect freedom can only be kept in play by absolute power’ (Southey 1929, 265, 264; Royle 1998, 23–4). Owen in reality deceives himself. He is part-owner and sole Director of a large establishment, differing more in accidents than in essence from a plantation: the persons under him happen to be white, and are at liberty by law to quit his service, but while they remain in it they are so much under his absolute management as so many negro-slaves. His humour, his vanity, his kindness of nature . . . lead him to make these human machines as he calls them (and too literally believes them to be) as happy as he can, and to make a display of their happiness. And he jumps to the monstrous conclusion that because he can do this with 2210 persons, who are totally dependent upon him – all mankind might be governed with the same facility. (Southey 1929)

‘Et in Utopia ego’, concluded this commentator, dismissing Owen’s belief ‘that men may be cast in a mould (like the other parts of the mill) and take the impression with perfect certainty’ (Southey 1929, 259; Storey 1997, 275–6). Would that Foucauldian commentators were equally sceptical of Owen’s portrayal of his utopian – panoptic – community. Foucauldians, desperate to discover disciplinary power at every turn, describe New Lanark as a panopticon, ‘a new form of incarceration which does not require physical barriers around individuals which could be economically inefficient. It is an automatic functioning of power where the individual is now the principle of his own subjection – an automatic binding to his work – prevention rather than punishment’ (Walsh and Stewart 1993, 797). We are told emphatically that the shift to Foucault’s disciplinary power ‘is all here’ as perfect in practice as it is in principle. Yet the dearth of business records make it difficult to gauge New Lanark’s commercial performance let alone the impact of Owen’s experiment on the behaviour and morals of the workforce. We should be wary of Foucauldian history that is little more than an endless reprise of perfect panopticons discovered. There is more nuanced interpretation available, one that takes us beyond Foucault’s broad brush-strokes of ‘monarchic’ and ‘disciplinary’ power: that the long transition to disciplinary power requires the active involvement of little monarchs – managers – as the bearers of new disciplinary techniques (McKinlay 2002). Perhaps, monarchic power does not simply disappear but fills the symbolic space left – or created – by flawed or incomplete disciplinary practices. Or, perhaps, to paraphrase Page DuBois This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.


(1991, 154–7), there is a symbiotic relationship between monarchic and disciplinary regimes of power. This is a direct challenge to Foucault’s seductive chronology that torture gives way to punishment, which in turn was replaced by the insidious pleasures of discipline. Here is an important theoretical and empirical task for business historians, to examine the interplay of these two modes of power/knowledge in particular historical and business settings. After all, looking at the diffusion of administrative innovations and the convergence of firms on sectoral recipes – institutional isomorphism – is a staple of mainstream organizational analysis.

Monstrous Bodies One of Foucault’s most important theoretical innovations is his location of the body as a central theme of political economy and of the governance of place and population. Across his writings, Foucault offers a visceral social theory that places great importance on bodies, on the corporeality of patients, convicts, supplicants and workers. The body was to be rendered docile in order to be examined, categorized, trained and so made more docile, more pliant. For Foucault, the microphysics of power ‘centred on the body as a machine: its disciplining, the optimization, the extortion of its forces, the parallel increase of its usefulness and its docility, its integration into systems of efficient and economic controls, all this was ensured by the procedures of power that characterized the disciplines, the anatomo-politics of the human body’ (Foucault 1990, 139). Here we can point to another connection between Foucault and Marx in terms of their conception of the first factories. A central protagonist in Marx’s interpretation of early factory regimes was the ‘philosopher of the factory’, Andrew Ure. For Ure, the importance of the factory’s mechanical control was twofold. First, mechanization and deskilling increased productivity and consolidated managerial control over feckless, unreliable workers or, at least, some degree of control over their immorality. Second, disciplined bodies allowed for the moral improvement of workers. The factory, Ure insisted, must always be thought of in this double sense: either moral improvement was designed into the factory or it would generate depravity. Ure’s vision of the perfectly disciplined factory was inspired not just by utilitarianism and Calvinism but also from images from the laboratory and the dissecting table. Andrew Ure was not just the author of The Philosophy of Manufactures (1835), but also a professor of chemistry. Specifically, in 1818 Ure conducted a famous galvanic experiment on the body of the murderer Matthew Clydesdale cut down from the scaffold barely 30 minutes before (Ure 1819). Before a large audience Ure attached his ‘philosophical apparatus’ – a set of powerful batteries – to Clydesdale’s corpse, seated at centre of the anatomy lecture theatre. Incisions were made and current passed through different


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areas of the nervous system. In turn, the cadaver grimaced, clenched its fist, extended its arm, and shot out its leg, so kicking a terrified laboratory assistant. Finally, in his coup de grace, Ure exposed the phrenic nerve: Clydesdale’s eyes opened, his chest heaved as if breathing, and he lurched bolt upright. ‘At this period several of the spectators were forced to leave the apartment from terror or sickness, and one gentleman fainted’, the professor reported gleefully. Ure raised his lancet high in the air before plunging it into the body, ‘killing’ Clydesdale who slumped back into the chair: executed again but this time by his creator. For Ure, this was not simply the activation of nerves. Rather, he had used galvanism to take a corpse to the very brink of life, an experiment whose greatest peril was what his legal status would have been if he had not eliminated the life he had restored to the murderer’s corpse. Or, as Shelley’s scientist Victor Frankenstein explained, his objective was ‘to infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing that lay at his feet’ (Shelley 1818, 167–8 cited by Vasbinder 1984, 80). In his eyes, Ure had created a life or, at least, an automaton, bereft of a soul, whose every movement, whose very existence depended on his command (Morus 1998, 129). Ure’s advocacy of mechanization and the subjugation of labour drew as much on his morbid anatomy upon Clydesdale’s corpse as on his tours of cotton factories. For Ure, the term ‘factory’ should be restricted to large-scale production organized around ‘the idea of a vast automaton, composed of various mechanical and intellectual organs, acting in uninterrupted concert for the production of a common object, all of them being subordinated to a self-regulated moving force (1835, 13–4). The materialist empiricism of Enlightenment science was based upon observation, experiment and generalization, a logical trinity that underlies Bentham’s panopticon and Ure’s ‘impossible factory’. In a revealing exchange with Michelle Perrot, Foucault conceded that he rarely discussed productive work explicitly. This absence he attributed to his focus upon the insane, the infirm and the imprisoned for whom work was ‘mostly valued for its disciplinary effects’. Productive labour, on the other hand, prioritizes efficiency and value over therapy and discipline. ‘The triple function of work is always present: the productive function, the symbolic function and the training, or disciplinary function. The productive function is near zero for (the mad, the sick, prisoners), whereas the symbolic and disciplinary functions are quite important. But in most instances the three components coexist’ (Foucault 1996, 237). The factory, as the workhouse or prison, was an institution that could be designed to manufacture virtue (Driver 1993). For Ure, ‘it is . . . excessively the interest of every mill-owner to organise his moral machinery on equally sound principles with the mechanical, for otherwise he will never command the steady hands, watchful eyes, and prompt co-operation essential to the excellence of the product’ (Ure 1835, 417). In manufacturing, for Foucault as for Ure, discipline is a means to a profitable end rather than an end in itself. This is an important corrective to



those for whom the factory was a total institution. Of course, in practice, even the poorhouse and the prison lost much of their moral purpose as their disciplinary practices were eroded over time. An institution can be closed, deploy a harsh, punitive morality without being disciplinary in Foucault’s sense (Mahood 1990). In the poorhouse, the charitable provision of sanctuary gave way to mean-spirited confinement while in the prison, punishment displaced rehabilitation. Utilitarian and humanistic – disciplinary – voices were crowded out by the clamour for cheaper gruel: the design of the ‘impossible prison’ became ever more adulterated, not more firmly established over time. Here, then, is a more telling criticism of Foucault. Paradoxically, his depiction of modern power/knowledge offers a teleological vision in which, despite and because of resistance, disciplinary practices inevitably accu mulate and saturate institutions of every kind. This closed, ahistorical logic allows for no break-points, no epochal transitions similar to the shift from monarchic to disciplinary power. This is the bleak fatalism that has seduced so many Foucauldian scholars. It is one thing to argue that a technology – say, management accountancy – renders subjects calculable, quite another to assume that they are calculated. Moreover, the mere existence of disciplinary technologies does not necessarily result in disciplined subjects. It is all too easy to exaggerate the role of the factory regime and innovative accounting systems in enforcing rigid work discipline and in disciplining workers to an unrelenting pace of work. Factory work routines were strict but irregular. Disciplinary control was pervasive but far from uniform or absolute. There is an alternative, no less Foucauldian, interpretation available, however. That is, the constant managerial obsession with discovering ever more ‘perfect’ systems of visibility, inspection and control speak not of the weight of domination bearing down upon weak, disciplined subjects but of the resilience and potency of worker resistance. After all, surveillance systems, however perfect, may register the weakness of control and signal the realities of worker and community resistance. Indeed, the inevitability of the failure, or, at most, the partial success of the peni tentiary – or the factory – becomes a vital form of legitimation for the institution. In turn, the proliferation of anomalies, technical failures and successful resistance campaigns increases the need for more extensive, more refined forms of power/knowledge (Dreyfus and Rabinow 1982, 192–6). This is the dynamic that drives innovations, reversals and failures of disciplinary techniques. At any given moment, then, we must speak not of perfect, complete forms of power/knowledge but rather introduce more cautious, more discriminating terms: weak, flawed, incomplete, exhausted, aborted and so on. Again, Foucault’s exchange with Perrot is important. First, he acknowledges that the ‘illusion’ of ‘democratic surveillance’ that underpinned Bentham’s utopian vision of the panopticon completely failed to acknowledge, firstly, that ‘economic and political interests’ would usurp and colonize the new technologies of the gaze. The purpose was no longer the democratization


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of social life but the consolidation and extension of entrenched power. Second, he accepts Perrot’s argument that workers consciously and effectively resisted ‘the compulsive, subjugating, unbearable nature of this surveillance’ as axiomatic (Foucault 1996, 238–9). [O]ne must analyze the constellation of resistances to the Panopticon in terms of tactics and strategies and bear in mind that each offensive on one level serves to support a counter-offensive on another level. The analysis of power-mechanisms does not seek to demonstrate that power is both anonymous and always victorious. Rather, it is a matter of locating the positions and the modes of action of everyone involved as well as the various possibilities for resisting and counter-attacks on either side.

For Foucault, discipline is always a failing project, never a settled reality.

Conclusion It is time to stop picking over the bones of Foucault and to go beyond Discipline and Punish. Here I have suggested that historians of management and organization have an important theoretical role to play: to use historical research to understand the complex, protracted transitions involved in the shift from monarchic to disciplinary regimes. Equally, we have to examine the links between the mundane collection and categorization of data inside the organization and meta-level management theories of efficiency, motivation and organizational structures. In turn, we have to ask how managers and workers ensnared in such systems of power/knowledge comply, accommodate and resist disciplinary processes. Foucault forces us to look beyond the firm, or even the narrowly economic, to understand the cultural roots of management, if I can be excused such an unfoucauldian expression. If Foucault is correct to argue that Bentham’s ‘impossible prison’ exemplified the design imperatives of a surveillant institution, then we should not imagine that corporations and consultancies are the sole sources of contemporary managerial innovation. If we take Foucault seriously, then to understand, say, employee empowerment and team-working we should look to the anti-psychiatric and decarceration movements as important sources of novel languages and practices. There is a double paradox here. First, the emancipatory languages and practices of such social and literary projects have been colonized by managerialist rationalities and techniques. Second, given the contemporary organization’s increasing reliance on ‘invisible’ knowledge work, so management has intensified its search for more sophisticated ways of understanding, monitoring and policing the depth of individual and collective self-surveillance. The development of human resources as a competitive asset has been cloaked in the liberatory language of personal development.



But Foucault is much more than a melancholy theorist of social control. Both continuity and change are evident in Foucault’s final works on the history of sexuality. Continuity in his examination of power, knowledge, body and soul; change in his shift away from the overwhelmingly bleak vision of a carceral society, a vision only partly leavened by subsequent qualifications. ‘I’ve insisted too much on the technology of domination and power. I am more and more interested in the interaction between one-self and others in the technologies of individual domination, the history of how an individual acts upon himself, in the technologies of the self, (Foucault 1988, 19). Contemporary power, Foucault insists, does not bludgeon or confine us. Rather, power is productive, and seeks mechanisms that seduce rather than merely confine us. [W]hat makes power hold good, what makes it accepted, is simply the fact that it doesn’t only weigh upon us as a force that says no, but that it traverses and produces things, it induces pleasures, forms knowledge, produces discourse. It needs to be considered as a productive network which runs through the whole social body, much more than a negative instance whose function is repression. (Foucault 1980, 119)

References Ashworth, W.J. 1994. The calculating eye: Baily, Babbage and the business of astronomy. British Journal for the History of Science 27: 409–41. Ashworth, W.J. 1998. ‘System of terror’: Samuel Bentham, accountability and dockyard reform during the Napoleonic wars. Social History 23: 63–79. Ashworth, W.J. 2002. England and the machinery of reason, 1780–1830. In Bodies/ machines. ed. I.R. Morus, 39–65. Oxford: Berg. Bauman, Z. 1982. Memories of class. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Bolin-Hart, P. 1989. Work, family and the state: Child labour and the organization of production in the British cotton industry, 1780–1920. Lund: Lund University Press. Brown, S. 1982. Thomas Chalmers and the godly commonwealth. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Butt, J. 1971. Robert Owen as a businessman. In Robert Owen, prince of cotton spinners, ed. J. Butt, 168–214. Newton Abbot: David & Charles. Chandler, A.D. 1962. Strategy and structure: Chapters in the history of the industrial enterprise. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Cooper, C. 1984. The Portsmouth system of manufacture. Technology and Culture 25: 182–225. Dreyfus, H. and P. Rabinow. 1982. Michel Foucault: Beyond structuralism and hermeneutics. Brighton: Harvester Press. Driver, F. 1993. Power and pauperism: The workhouse system, 1834–1884. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DuBois, P. 1991. Torture and truth. New York: Routledge. Flynn, T. 2005. Sartre, Foucault and historical reason. Volume Two: A poststructuralist mapping of history. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Foucault, M. 1971. Nietzsche, genealogy, history. In Language, counter-memory, practice, ed. D. Bouchard, 139–64. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.


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Foucault, M. 1977. Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Foucault, M. 1980. Truth and power. In Power/knowledge: Selected interviews and other writings 1972–1977, ed. C. Gordon, 109–33. London: Harvester. Foucault, M. 1988. Technologies of the self. In Technologies of the self: Seminar with Michel Foucault, ed. L. Martin, H. Gutman and P. Hutton, 9–15. London: Tavistock. Foucault, M. 1990. The history of sexuality, volume 1: An introduction. London: Penguin. Foucault, M. 1991. Remarks on Marx. New York: Semiotext(e). Foucault, M. 1996. The eye of power. In Foucault live: Collected interviews, 1961–1984, ed. S. Lotringer, 226–40. New York: Semiotext(e). Hacking, I. 2002. Historical ontology. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Halevy, E. 1928. Growth of philosophic radicalism. London: Faber & Gwyer. Harrison, J. 1969. Robert Owen and the Owenites in Britain and America: The quest for a new moral world. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Hilton, B. 1988. The age of atonement: The influence of evangelicanism on social and economic thought, 1795–1865. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Hoskin, K. and R. Macve. 1986. Accounting and the examination: A genealogy of disciplinary power. Accounting, Organizations and Society 11: 105–36. Hoskin, K. and R. Macve. 2000. Knowing more as knowing less? Alternative histories of cost and management accounting in the US and the UK. Accounting Historians Journal 27: 91–149. Ignatieff, M. 1978. A just measure of pain: The penitentiary in the industrial revolution, 1750–1850. London: Macmillan. Joyce, P. 2003. The rule of freedom: Liberalism and the modern city. London: Verso. Levin, D.M. 1997. Keeping Foucault and Derrida in sight: Panopticism and the politics of subversion. In Sites of vision: The discursive construction of sight in the history of philosophy, ed. D.M. Levin, 397–465. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. McKendrick, N. 1961. Josiah Wedgewood and factory discipline. Historical Journal IV: 30–55. McKinlay, A. 2002. ‘Dead selves’: The birth of the modern career. Organization 9: 595–614. Mahood, L. 1990. Magdalenes: Prostitution in the nineteenth century. London: Routledge. Markus, T. 1993. Buildings and power: Freedom and control in the origin of modern building types. London: Routledge. Marsden, R. 1999. The nature of capital: Marx after Foucault. London: Routledge. Miller, P. and T. O’Leary. 1987. Accounting and the construction of the governable person. Accounting, Organizations and Society 12: 235–66. Morus, I. 1998. Frankenstein’s children: Exhibition and experiment in early-nineteenth century London. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Owen, R. 1857. The life of Robert Owen: Written by himself, Volume 1. London: Effingham Wilson. Reynolds, J. 1983. The great paternalist: Titus Salt and the growth of nineteenth century Bradford. London: Maurice Temple Smith. Rose, N. 1999. Powers of freedom: Reframing political thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Royle, E. 1998. Robert Owen and the commencement of the millenium. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Southey, R. 1929. Journal of a tour in Scotland in 1819. London: John Murray. Storey, M. 1997. Robert Southey: A life. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Thompson, P. 2003. Fantasy island: A labour process critique of the ‘age of surveillance’. Surveillance and Society 1: 138–51. Ure, A. 1819. An account of some experiments made on the body of a criminal. Quarterly Journal of Science 6: 283–94.



Ure, A. 1835. The philosophy of manufactures. London: Charles Knight. Vasbinder, S. 1984. Scientific attitudes in Mary Shelley’s ‘Frankenstein’. Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press. Walsh, E. and R. Stewart. 1993. Accounting and the construction of institutions: The case of a factory. Accounting, Organizations and Society 18: 783–800. Williams, R. 1997. Accounting for steam and cotton: Two eighteenth century case studies. New York, NY: Garland.



7 From Freemasons to the Employee: Organization, History and Subjectivity Tim Newton

‘You might think you made a new world or a new self but your old self is always gonna be there, just below the surface, and if something happens, it’ll stick its head out and say “Hi”. You don’t seem to realize that. You were made somewhere else. And even this idea you have of remaking yourself, even that was made somewhere else. Even I know that much, Mr Wind-up Bird.’ (Murakami 1998: 261–262, original emphasis)

Introduction

I

n recent decades, there has been a growing interest in organizations and employee subjectivity. Writers have addressed managerial attempts to ‘manage’ subjectivity, whether through activities such as culture change programmes (e.g. Kunda 1992) or through the delivery of ‘appropriate’ emotional labour (Hochschild 1983; Fineman 2000). Others have lamented the neglect within organization studies of ‘the way in which power relations are subjectively experienced’ (Collinson 1994: 52) or pleaded for researchers to address the emotional flavour of everyday organizational life (Albrow 1992). At the same time, this growing interest in employee subjectivity has been theorized from a variety of perspectives such as labour process theory (e.g. Collinson 1992; Thompson and McHugh 2002), Foucault (e.g. Knights 1990; Willmott 1994; Du Gay 1996), actor-network theory (e.g. Michael 1996; Newton 1996, 2002) and Elias (e.g. Newton 1999, 2001; Iterson et al. 2002).

Source: Organization Studies, 25 (8) (2004): 1363–1387.


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This paper aims to place these studies of employee subjectivity within a historical context, yet simultaneously explore what we mean by history (cf. Newton 2003a). It is influenced by Elias’s sense of ‘human identity as stretching over time and generations, rather than as self-contained, timeless and autonomous’ (Van Krieken 1997: 445; cf. Newton 2003b). The paper is presented in two parts. The first part examines two historical analyses relevant to the development of early modern organizations, while the second part debates historical assumption and method. Part I explores Alfred Kieser’s (1998) contention that early modern organizational forms, such as that of 18th-century German freemasonry, were influential on the disciplined employee subjectivity required in subsequent industrialization. The interrelation between English freemasonry, subjectivity and commerce is further analysed through reference to the argument of Norbert Elias and to the work of the social historian, John Brewer. Part II then uses the work of Kieser and Brewer in order to explore contentious issues relating to historical work within organization studies. It remains the case that in spite of a ‘history’ of applying historical analysis to organization studies, from early work (e.g. Bendix 1956; Chandler 1962, 1977) to more recent studies (e.g. Smith et al. 1990, Rowlinson and Hassard 1993), as well as defence of the value of historical analysis (e.g. Kieser 1994; Brady 1997), there remains a paucity of historical analysis and debate within organization studies. In addition, interpretive and postmodern/post-structural argument has raised doubts as to the relevance of historical analysis to organization studies (Rowlinson and Procter 1999). For example, the historical analyses described below by Kieser, Brewer and Elias all implicitly assume that we can talk about, say, a ‘bourgeois subject’ or an ‘industrial subject’. Yet the question arises as to whether we can apply such ‘unity’ to subjectivity, particularly in the context of post-structural suggestion that subjectivity is inherently fluid, mobile and fragmented (Ferguson 1993; Newton 1998a). In addition, Kieser, Brewer and Elias also assume that we can speak more generally of historical continuity across time. Such assumptions are open to question, particularly following critique of historical continuity, such as that of Foucault. However, the value of Foucault to historical analysis has also been questioned, as recently observed in a symposium on Foucault, management and history (Carter et al. 2002). On the one hand, writers such as Alan McKinlay and Ken Starkey argue that ‘Foucauldian categories and procedures . . . throw fresh light on the history of the factory, management and the modern corporation’ (1998: 3). For example, in his study of the development of modern careers in the Bank of Scotland, McKinlay (2002) suggests that his ‘Foucauldian business history’ (Carter et al. 2002: 522) provides an account of the disciplinary power of careers that would be lacking in a ‘conventional’ history. On the other hand, Rowlinson and Carter contend that ‘it is misleading to equate Foucault with an historical perspective’ (2002: 528) and they are dismissive of those who deploy Foucault. For instance, they are highly


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critical of Roy Jacques’s (1996) influential Foucauldian study of the history of organization and subjectivity, asserting that ‘Jacques uses a series of familiar Foucauldian ruses to avoid debating his historical claims’ (Rowlinson and Carter 2002: 540). In discussing historical assumption and method, the present paper will contribute to this debate. Part II focuses on Baert’s (1998) discussion of Foucault, extending it through a re-analysis of Jacques’s (1996) study. The latter work provides a point of contrast to those of Kieser, Brewer or Elias (addressed in the first part of the paper) since it principally relies for its effect on assumptions of historical discontinuity rather than continuity. Yet it will be argued below that Jacques’s assumption of sharp historical discontinuity can be as problematic as that which assumes linear continuity. In addition, it will be suggested that continuity and discontinuity do not present mutually exclusive choices for historical analysis, and that we do not have to choose between a Foucauldian sense of ‘rupture’ and a traditional historical interest in continuity across time. In sum, in this paper I wish to examine a particular historical ‘story’ and use it to explore contentious issues relating to the nature of history, organization and subjectivity. I will put forward particular theses that arise from the interrelation of the work of Kieser, Brewer and Elias, but then question the assumptions upon which these theses rest through reference to Foucault, Baert, Jacques, Halttunen and Morgan, among others. In so doing, the first part of the paper will explore and illustrate the interest of historical analysis to organization studies. The second part of the paper will then debate some key assumptions of historical inquiry, drawing on material across disciplinary boundaries.

Part I Four important qualifications must be made with regard to the two historical studies examined below. Firstly it must be stressed that I do not wish to imply that the only influences upon emergent bourgeois subjectivity are those described by Kieser and Brewer. Secondly, there are the usual constraints of social and historical research. As with contemporary social science analysis, historical research is characterized by ‘finitude and incompleteness’ (Bryant 1994: 5) and is always partial. Just as when we focus on the present, historical analysis is always selecting particular ‘voices’, and editing, interpreting and representing our ‘material’ within implicit or explicit narratives. Thirdly, a limitation of Kieser’s and Brewer’s argument is its androcentrism: both tend to implicitly assume that, in understanding 18th/19th-century subjectivity, we need only refer to the male bourgeois subject. Fourthly, I employ Elias because of his relevance to social discipline. It is not my current intention however to provide a critique of Elias (see Newton 1998b, 2003a, for such critique). This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.

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Kieser: Disciplined Subjectivity Kieser’s (1998) study provides an introduction to what follows. Using secondary sources, it attempts to show the historical interrelation between organization and subjectivity. Kieser’s analysis begs the following question: What did early organizations look like, and in what ways did early organizations encourage a ‘disciplined’ subjectivity? More specifically, Kieser (1998) argues that though writers such as Elias, Weber, Oestrich and Foucault have alerted us to the gradual disciplining of the self within western society, we still lack studies that explore the instantiation of such discipline within early organizational forms. As Kieser notes: ‘None of these theories trace processes of disciplinization up to the early factories. On the other hand, studies of disciplinization during industrialization do not raise the question of how the factory owners and their confidants learned to organize and discipline.’ (1998: 52)

In consequence, we cannot answer questions such as: ‘Where, then, did the designers of the early organizations come from? Moreover, from where did they get the personnel responsible for running these institutions and in command of the necessary self-discipline?’ (1998: 48)

Kieser asserts that prior to the 18th century much of our present sense of organizational discipline did not exist, a situation which we often overlook because we take many elements of organizational behaviour for granted, such as time-keeping and punctuality, or accepting authority based on hierarchy rather than pre-modern criteria such as social rank. As Kieser comments: ‘Today, organizational behaviour has become so common that we are no longer aware of the amount of learning about new behaviour that members of the early organizations had to manage.’ (1998: 48, emphasis added)

Kieser’s paper focuses on what he sees as the ‘first formal organizations’ in 18th-century Germany (1998: 46), namely, those of freemasonry, and reading and patriotic societies. His central thesis is that these organizations engendered a self-discipline among their members which was subsequently ‘urgently needed in the process of industrialization’ (1998: 49). In sum, Kieser challenges the notion that the interweaving of organization and subjectivity is simply a 20th-century phenomena, as reflected in Taylorism, human and neo-human relations, organization development, corporate culture, or the study of emotion work (Hochschild 1983; Rose 1990;



Hollway 1991). Instead, Kieser reveals how the interrelation of organization with subjectivity was integral to modern organization. Indeed, he suggests that what particularly distinguishes early organizations was their association with modernity. German 18th-century freemasonry is deserving of the label ‘organization’ precisely because it enshrined a number of features that distinguished it from the pre-modern. For instance, freemasonry organizations ‘constructed the first hierarchies, the origins of which were divorced from either kinship or feudal tradition’ (Kieser 1998: 55). Unlike feudal and pre-modern society, membership of freemasonry was also voluntary and its rules and practices, though involving significant ritual elements reminiscent of feudal tradition, nevertheless enshrined a rational and modern organizational spirit, offering their members a chance to ‘broaden their horizons from being confined within the barriers of religion, nation, estate, and language’ (1998: 55). At the same time, the secrecy of freemasonry ‘provided a shield under which it was possible to practice new forms of behaviour without disturbing the ruling order and without having to expose oneself to others’ (1998: 56). Kieser argues that central to this modernist project was the promotion of social discipline. Masonic lodges provided ‘a field of exercises for the acquisition of self-discipline’ (1998: 65). This was furthered through the promotion of virtuous behaviour such as punctuality and the enjoyment of ‘dutiful’ and ‘useful’ work (1998: 54), and through exercises designed to make members ‘more well-mannered, self-controlled, and moderate’ (1988: 57). In this manner, the aim was to ‘produce enlightened human beings able to bring reason to triumph over passion’ (1988: 54). Kieser therefore implies that organizing and social discipline have long been interwoven and that the discipline associated with the industrial employee was prefigured within early modern organizations such as the Masonic lodge.

Elias, Brewer and Bourgeois Sensibility: Liberation and Discipline From the perspective of Elias, we need to explore the figurational context of the disciplined subjectivity which Kieser (1998) associates with freemasonry. As Elias notes, ‘actions and ideas cannot be explained and understood if they are considered on their own; they need to be understood and explained within the framework of [figurations]’ (1970: 96). For Elias, figurations refer to the interdependency networks that have gradually developed across the changing social and political landscape of particular epochs. They reflect the ‘underlying regularities by which people in a certain society are bound over and over again to particular patterns of conduct and very specific functional chains, for example as knights and bondsmen, kings and state officials,


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bourgeois and nobles’ (1994: 489). This stress on interdependencies reflects Elias’s depiction of power as relational, as a ‘game’ where ‘the participants always have control “over each other”’ (Elias 1970: 81, original emphasis). Kieser’s (1998) study points to the figurational context of freemasonry. For example, Kieser notes that freemasonry was relevant to the changing interdependencies between the nobility and the growing bourgeoisie in 18thcentury Germany since Masonic lodges simultaneously offered ‘a compen sation for the loss of functions’ for the nobility and ‘a fulfilment of its need for prestige and recognition’ for the emergent bourgeois (1998: 55). Never theless Kieser’s (1998) study lacks a detailed attention to the figurational context in which Germany freemasonry developed. In this context, John Brewer’s (1982) analysis of 18th-century English freemasonry is of particular interest. It illustrates how the social discipline of one kind of early modern organization, namely freemasonry, appears figurationally interwoven in England with changing interdependencies, namely those associated with emergent networks of financial credit. In other words, Brewer’s analysis can be seen as illustrative of Elias’s argument. There are clear differences between Brewer’s (1982) and Kieser’s (1998) analyses. The former contains primary historical source material whereas the latter is chiefly reliant on secondary sources. In addition, one study relates to England, the other to Germany. Yet in relation to the latter difference, social historians such as Margaret Jacob assert that, though Masonic lodges might vary in the social mix, ritual and finance, there was nevertheless remarkable commonality among British, French, Dutch and German freemasonry in terms of their ‘masonic rhetoric, principles and practices’ (1993: 113). Jacob argues that ‘what holds true for British freemasonry seems to hold true for continental freemasonry’ (1993: 113). While noting such argument, we must however be wary of neglecting differences between English and German freemasonry and the figurational context in which they developed. For instance, Kieser argues that commerce and credit were not significant to the development of freemasonry in Germany (personal communication, 2001) even though, as we shall see, Brewer and others suggest it was highly significant to English freemasonry. This difference receives support from Elias in his argument that ‘the commercial professional bourgeoisie . . . [was] relatively undeveloped in most German states in the eighteenth century’ (1994: 22). Yet these differences do not detract from the central Eliasian implication of Brewer’s analysis – that both early modern organizations and disciplined subjectivity need to be seen within a particular figurational context, namely the emerging commercial networks of the English eighteenth century. Brewer’s (1982) analysis suggests that in order to understand fully such early modern organizations as English freemasonry, we need to explore the relationship between emergent commercial networks and the bourgeoisie. His analysis focuses on this latter relationship in the context of 18th-century



England and it makes a number of interrelated arguments. Firstly Brewer argues that financial credit was highly significant to social change in England in the 18th century, as a consequence of the spread of credit instruments such as mortgages and inland bills of exchange. These financial devices proved highly flexible, a characteristic which encouraged their use so that ‘producers, distributors and consumers were linked not only by the products of the market, but also by a highly elaborate (and extremely delicate) web of credit’ (1982: 205, emphasis added). Secondly, Brewer suggests that for the emerging English bourgeoisie, credit networks represented a source of liberation from the ‘client economy’, the feudal legacy of a ‘nation conveniently divided into the two classes of “patricians” and “plebeians”’ (Brewer 1982: 197). Formerly, peasants, labourers or traders had been heavily dependent upon the aristocracy since they constituted the principal source of income or livelihood. Growing credit networks meant that the emergent bourgeoisie had access to alternative sources of finance than that of the patrician class. In consequence, the availability of credit was one principal means by which ‘the middling sort or bourgeoisie . . . began . . . to distinguish themselves socially and politically from the patrician elite and the labouring poor’ (1982: 197). Yet though credit was a source of liberation from the client economy, it also represented a continual threat for the emergent bourgeois. Both personal circumstances and market volatility meant that being in credit generally implied continuing, and serious, risk. The consequence of indebtedness could be severe since continued inability to meet debts usually resulted in imprisonment, ‘a hazardous and expensive experience’ since ‘fever was rampant’ and many debtors ‘found themselves even more heavily in debt because of the expenses incurred in gaol’ (Brewer 1982: 211). Brewer (1982) argues that these simultaneous credit elements of liberation and risk encouraged two related developments – first, the emergence of early forms of organization such as freemasonry, and second, changes in subjectivity associated with the ‘social discipline’ of credit and commerce. With the first, Brewer’s studies suggest that English freemasonry was figurationally grounded in liberation from a client economy and in emerging credit networks. ‘Liberation’ was aided by the composition and the activities of freemasonry lodges (and other ‘clubs’). Like their American counterparts (see Blumin 1989), membership of English Masonic lodges was ‘drawn from all social groups’ and ‘often transcended traditional social, economic and religious boundaries’ (Brewer 1982: 219).1 Aside from the breakdown of traditional social barriers that this wide composition represented, freemasonry lodges also furthered the attack on the client economy by providing a collective insurance against the ‘spectre of debt’ (Leyshon and Thrift 1997: 17) that credit networks entailed. As Brewer notes, ‘joining a club [whether freemasonry or otherwise] enabled the tradesman to extend the ambit of his acquaintance, to meet potential customers, creditors and partners in a highly convivial, and amicable atmosphere’ (1982:


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222). In so doing ‘masonic lodges and pseudo-masonic societies also helped cushion their members against indebtedness and social misfortune’ (Brewer 1982: 220). The perils of credit were ameliorated because ‘masons would rally round a brother whose creditors threatened to foreclose on him’ (Brewer 1982: 220). As Brewer argues, freemasonry ‘association became a way of escaping economic clientage whilst providing protection against the vicissitudes of the open market’ (1982: 200).2 In an Eliasian sense, Brewer’s study indicates that freemasonry was therefore part of a broad figurational change. The ‘liberation’ of freemasonry was figurationally embedded within the liberation provided by the new financial interdependency networks, namely ‘webs of credit’. In Eliasian terms, the marked asymmetry of a client economy where the poor were heavily dependent on the whims of the rich became ameliorated by the ‘functional democratization’ (Elias 1994: 503) of a developing credit economy where ‘the fortunes of the lender were tied to those of the borrower’ (Brewer 1982: 229, emphasis added). Critically, the ‘power game’ (Elias 1970: 81) had shifted since the increased availability of credit reduced the prior asymmetry between patrician and plebeian, and furthered the development of the bourgeoisie. In other words, credit networks played a constitutive role in changing power relations (Ingham 1999), and Brewer’s analysis suggests that freemasonry was embedded within this figurational shift through its erosion of social barriers and its collective insurance against credit risk. In a similar fashion, the changes in social discipline that Kieser attributes to freemasonry also appear embedded in a wider figurational context within Brewer’s analysis. For Brewer (1982), both freemasonry and social discipline appear situated within the figurational development represented by credit and commercial networks. As Brewer argues: ‘Affability, courtesy and reliability were all qualities to make up a business character and a trade ethic. Such attitudes oiled the wheels of commerce . . . But they also served as a check or constraint, a means of ordering and regulating the trading community in such a way as to protect its members by reducing the risks involved in credit or debt. In sum, the mannerly conduct necessary to improve business and secure credit was as much a form of social discipline as those values connected with work itself.’ (Brewer 1982: 215, emphasis added)

Brewer’s thesis is quite clear: credit and commercialization encouraged a fashioning of the self toward both civility and probity. Brewer notes that foreign visitors to London such as Pierre Jean Grosley (1772) ‘remarked on the extraordinary civility of the shopkeepers and tradesmen’ (1982: 214). At the same time, ‘presentation of the self as sober, reliable, candid and constant was not merely a question of genteel manners, but a matter of economic survival’ (Brewer 1982: 214). In making this argument, Brewer is of course far from alone. Direct support for the significance of English credit networks to social discipline is contained in detailed social historical work such as that



of Julian Hoppit (1986, 1987, 1990) and Craig Muldrew (1993, 1998; see Newton 2003b). In addition, the significance of commerce as a social disci pline was noted by 18th-century observers such as Defoe (1969 [1725–27]) and Montesquieu: as Montesquieu notes, ‘commerce . . . polishes and softens barbarian ways’ (1949: i; quoted in Sennett 1998: 140). Related arguments have been proposed and debated by a number of social historians including Pocock (1985), Langford (1989), Barker-Benfield (1992), Morgan (1994) and Klein (1995). Yet what Brewer’s analysis does in Eliasian terms is to place this commercial discipline within a figurational context, namely the financial interdependency networks associated with ‘webs of credit’, and the reduced political asymmetry (between patrician and plebeian) and increased risk (of penury) associated with such networks. This does not however imply that Eliasian argument is without limitation, and elsewhere I have employed the history of credit and money in order to discuss, and critique, the work of Elias (Newton 2003a).3 Yet Brewer’s analysis does suggest that, at least in early English modernity, changes in subjectivity toward a greater social discipline may have reflected a more commercialized self because they were figurationally grounded within developing credit networks.

Part II The above analyses have re-examined Kieser’s (1998) study through reference to Elias and Brewer. In so doing, they support the thesis that ‘organization’ and ‘subjectivity’ are interrelated. As Brewer’s (1982) work indicates, Masonic lodges represented a transformation of social interdependencies. On the one hand, they encouraged new forms of social discipline. Yet on the other, English freemasonry helped to liberate its members from the former social discipline associated with patrician favour and plebeian dependence (Brewer 1982). As organizations, English Masonic lodges therefore encouraged a radical change since they created interdependency networks beyond that previously circumscribed by kinship or feudal relations. At the same time, Brewer’s study illustrates how the ‘organizing’ of subjectivity is not just a 20th- or 21st-century phenomena – as witnessed in Taylorism, teamwork, organization development, organizational culture, emotional labour, etc. – but instead appears prefigured within early modern organizations such as freemasonry as well as the broader financial interdependencies in which they were embedded. ‘Modern’ organization and ‘organized’ subjectivity appear interwoven whether we are concerned with corporate culture or the 18th-century Masonic lodge. Taken together, Kieser’s (1998) and Brewer’s (1982) analyses inform our understanding of what ‘organization and organizing’ represent by depicting (1) their relation to modernity, (2) their significance for subjectivity and social discipline and (3) their embedding within broad figurational change such as


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that associated with emergent credit networks. Yet, at the same time, these analyses rely on certain assumptions about historical inquiry. In the second half of this paper, I wish to debate these assumptions and thereby further explore what we mean by history, organization and subjectivity. In other words, though I have tried above to illustrate the interest of history, I do not wish to avoid its controversies, particularly those that arise in relation to postmodern argument (Rowlinson and Procter 1999). In particular, I will question whether: 1. we can talk about subjectivity in the same manner as Kieser, Brewer and Elias? Can we ascribe continuity, closure or unity to the bourgeois subject? Do we not need to address how subjectivity is intersected by class, gender, age, ethnicity, etc.? 2. we can speak of historical continuity? This assumption is critical to the argument of Kieser and Brewer. For instance, Kieser effectively asserts that industrial society inherited the social discipline which he associates with early organizational forms such as that of freemasonry. Similarly, Brewer argues that ‘the values espoused to obtain a creditworthy society may have had just as significant a social impact as those intended to secure an industrious and compliant workforce’ (Brewer 1982: 215). Such statements clearly imply continuity across time, whereby the ‘self-discipline’ acquired in one period is ‘vital’ in its subsequent employment. Yet, as writers such as Foucault have suggested, can we assume such continuity? Detailed reference will be made to the work of Jacques (1996) since it provides a study of organization, subjectivity and discipline which invokes discontinuity, rather than continuity, to achieve much of its effect. In sum, studies such as that of Kieser (1998) and Brewer (1982) help to place our understanding of the interweaving of organization and subjectivity within a historical context. Yet they rely on historical assumptions which have been questioned by postmodern and post-structural debate. I shall now address such debate by first exploring whether we can speak of continuity of subjectivity, and second, examining whether we can invoke historical continuity at all.

Subjectivity and Continuity The writers discussed in this paper have generally assumed that there is a coherence, commonality and continuity within the subjectivity of particular groups and classes. For instance, both Kieser (1998) and Brewer (1982) assume that there was a shared male bourgeois subjectivity of discipline and civility associated with early organizations, and similar comments could be made of Elias’s general treatment of courtly and bourgeois society (Elias 1983, 1994). All these writers also suggest that earlier forms of subjectiv-



ity influenced – and therefore had some continuity with – later periods. Yet sensitivity to our present-day post-structural inheritance, and perhaps especially the influence of the (rather structural) Foucault, has tended to make many readers cautious about ascribing a unity, coherence or continuity to the self. The argument is made that the subject does not exist prior to culture, and since culture is itself fluid, fragmented and pluralistic, so must the self inhabit a land of ‘molecular multiplicities’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1988: 30). Historical sociologists, social historians and organizational analysts alike are generally aware, and wary of, this argument. For instance, the social historian Ann Bermingham draws on Foucault in order to question whether ‘classes are homogeneous, and identity is unified and transparent’ (1995: 14). She further argues that ‘rather than seeing class and identity as stable and homogenous we need to see them as mobile, fragmented and inventive’ (1995: 14). Similar arguments are common in gender studies (e.g. Ferguson 1993) and within social theory more generally. They imply that writers such as Kieser and Brewer take too much for granted in their portrayal of 18thcentury male bourgeois identity since there remains a need to consider the stability of such identities and the way in which bourgeois society was intersected by gender, class, ethnicity, etc. Yet though such writers rightly question the ‘homogenisation’ of subjec tivity, there also remains a need to question post-structural representations of the self. This is a broad and complex issue, and discussion here must remain brief and focused. On the one hand, it is clear that 18th-century writers spoke of a notion of the self that was implicitly underwritten by assumptions of class, gender and colonialism (Wilson 1995). Furthermore, writers concerned with early commerce and commercial discipline, such as Daniel Defoe (1969 [1725–27]), largely assumed that they were addressing a male bourgeois subject. Yet while such implicit attributions need to be critically examined, this does not necessarily imply the wholesale rejection of a coherent self, or shared experience among particular groups. To put this another way, is our subjectivity really so particular, fragmented, mobile and fragile that writers such as Brewer and Kieser can no longer allude to, say, a bourgeois subject? If we follow Elias, our subjectivity is not entirely fragile and fragmented, but neither is it stable and determined. Central to this perspective is the concept of habitus, or what Elias also called our ‘second nature’.4 The notion of habitus represents one way in which Elias links the individual with the collective: ‘The make-up, the social habitus of individuals forms, as it were, the soil from which grow the personal characteristics through which an individual differs from other members of his society. In this way something grows out of the common language which the individual shares with others and which is certainly a component of his social habitus – a more or less individual style, what might be called an unmistakable individual handwriting that grows out of the social script.’ (1991: 182)


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Thus the courtier lives within the habitus of courtly society, or the bourgeois within that of the bourgeoisie. While he or she is not defined by such society, it forms the ‘soil’, the social script from which develops the individual script. If we apply Elias’s sense of habitus to the foregoing argument, our attention is drawn to the likelihood that subjectivity is likely to be intersected by social stratification since gender, class, and ethnicity all imply variation in figurational context. Habitus implies a sharing of social scripts, but any one individual is likely to be implicated within a plethora of scripts (Ferguson 1993). Following Elias therefore, the analyses presented by the likes of Kieser (1998), Brewer (1982), and indeed Elias himself, are open to the charge that they focus on particular groups, yet have a tendency to expand their analyses to encompass the entire social universe. But at the same time, Elias’s stress upon habitus underlines that all is not fragmentation, that there is some stability to our subjectivity reflected in the ingrained, and shared, scripts which we carry through time and space. While there may be no unity to subjectivity, this does not mean that we do not share many of the same ‘fragments’ with others. Furthermore, many of these fragments show short-to medium-term stability, as reflected in the continuance of social codes – voice, posture, codes of formality or informality – among a particular class, ethnic group or gender. In consequence, though there is a need for caution, it makes sense to talk of some degree of coherence, commonality and continuity, such as the shared bourgeois subjectivity of discipline and civility which Kieser ascribes to early organizations, or which Brewer identifies with commercial society. As Elias argues, it is not that people are defined by such habitus, or that it is static and immune to change. Yet at the same time, it does refer to social scripts that are shared for a while across time and space, reflected as much in bodily habits as value or attitude.

Historical Continuity? The ‘post-structurally aware’ reader may feel that the above arguments are all very well but they do not address the ‘default’ position of history, particularly its bias towards continuity. After all, the argument for history is frequently justified by the assumption that the present secretes the past through a channelled and selective continuity. As Joseph Bryant asserts: ‘present arrangement[s] – institutions, roles, cultural forms – are the product of past human actions. The “past” is thus never really “past”, but continuously constitutive of the “present”, as a cumulatively and selectively reproduced ensemble of practices and ideas that “channel” and impart directionality to ongoing human agency.’ (Bryant 1994: 11, added emphasis)



We assume, for example, that we can learn about industrial or contemporary organizations from researching the ‘selective channelling’ of earlier organizational forms. This is Kieser’s and Brewer’s gambit. Both argue that freemasonry or ‘creditworthy society’ (Brewer 1982: 215) are vital to the social discipline of the later industrial age. One can extend this kind of argument further. For example, it might even be suggested that the emotional labour which Hochschild associates with the mid-20th century onward is related, in part, to the interweaving of organizing and social discipline which Kieser and Brewer associate with early modern organizations, or even to Elias’s study of court society (Wouters 1989; Newton 1998b). But can we in any way justify such assertions of continuity, whether short- or long-term? In order to address this question I shall consider Patrick Baert’s (1998) discussion of Foucault, illustrating it through detailed reference to a study of organization, subjectivity and discipline which invokes discontinuity, rather than continuity, namely that of Roy Jacques (1996). Foucault remains of interest because he appears as the historian’s bête noire, especially where he is seen as symbolic of what is very loosely termed the postmodern ‘turn’. For many historians, crude postmodernism appears to reduce ‘the historian’s work . . . to its ideological positions’ (Evans 1997: 219). Its ‘profoundly relativist’ connotations (Hobsbawm 1997: 271) threaten to ‘dispense with professional university historians altogether’ (Evans 1997: 205). Similarly, as Rowlinson and Carter argue, ‘advocates of Foucault in organization studies largely ignore the damming criticism of his work from historians’ (2002: 531). It could also be added that ‘organizational Foucauldians . . . tend to ignore the wider criticism of Foucault within the social sciences’ (Newton 1998a). Yet although some historians see Foucault as a ‘very bad’ historian (Bentley 1999: 141), and postmodernism is seriously questioned (e.g. Elton 1991; Evans 1997; Hobsbawm 1997), it is difficult deny the influence of the postmodern and post-structural thinking, with which Foucault, rightly or wrongly, is associated. Furthermore, for those who are not historians, it may seem extraordinary to dismiss either Foucauldian or post-structural argument when it has generated considerable creative argument within the social sciences. In addition, some historians acknowledge that Foucault had ‘a historical imagination’ (Smith 2000: 107), while even Rowlinson and Carter admit that Foucault’s ‘writings proved to be a powerful stimulant for a new wave of historiographical publications’ (2002: 534). In relation to such argument and debate, Baert’s discussion of Foucault is particularly interesting. Baert firstly makes the conventional point that Foucault detracted from the assumption of continuity (Poster 1984). As Foucault notes, ‘discontinuity was the stigma of temporal dislocation that it was the historian’s task to remove from history’ (1989: 8). As Baert (1998) argues, in his archeological period Foucault identified himself with a ‘new’ history that, instead of concealing discontinuity, made it their subject matter so that it became transferred ‘from the obstacle to the work itself’ (Foucault 1989: 9). Similarly in his


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genealogical work, Foucault emphasizes that genealogy is about ‘the accidents, the minute deviations – or conversely, the complete reversals’ (1977: 146), rather than about preserving the semblance of historical continuity. As Baert observes, the search for the ‘rupture’ and discontinuity remained a distinct (and ironically, continuing) feature of Foucault’s work across both his archeological and genealogical periods. Baert links this strategy to French historians of science such as Bachelard and Canguilhem who opposed a continuous conception of history. Foucault’s deployment of this stance was not however just about continuing this scepticism to traditional history, but about questioning the present. Through attending to discontinuities and ruptures, Foucault both contrasted between periods, and provided a distinct point of contrast with the present day. Baert asserts that this search for discontinuity and rupture was therefore central to Foucault’s method precisely because it provided historical contrasts which allowed him to ‘elucidate and undercut present belief and ethical systems’ (Baert 1998: 124). In other words, unearthing discontinuity was vital to Foucault’s problematization of the present. The central implication of Baert’s analysis is that, just as the traditional historical stereotype biases continuity, Foucault biases discontinuity. It might of course be objected here that Foucault partly portrays continuity, such as that of ancient Greece (1987, 1990) or postpanoptic modernity (1979). Yet Baert’s argument is that discontinuity and rupture are nevertheless key tools in Foucault’s ‘history of the present’, central to his method. As I have already explored historical analyses which rely on continuity, I shall now explore Baert’s thesis by focusing on a study which assumes discontinuity, namely Roy Jacques’s (1996) analysis of the historical produc tion of the ‘employee’. Jacques (1996) provides one of the most detailed Foucauldian studies of the historical interrelation between organization and subjectivity, and in consequence I shall focus on his study in some detail. Underlying Jacques’s study is a Foucauldian commitment to discontinuity. As Jacques notes, he aims to illustrate the ‘discontinuity in people’s mode of consciousness, a rupture in common sense’ (Jacques 1996: 96, emphasis added). For Jacques to achieve this task, it is necessary to draw a strong contrast between two periods – which necessarily means that their continuities must be downplayed. Jacques follows his mission by contrasting the US employee subjectivity of the late 19th/early 20th century with that which he portrays as preceding it, what he calls ‘Federalist reality’. Jacques argues that the latter represented the triumph of a particular code of behaviour over the continuation of a European ‘feudal order based on a landed aristocracy’ (Jacques 1996: 24, emphasis added). This Federalist code valued honour, honesty, integrity, benevolence and, especially, self-reliance. It was typified by the business writings of Freeman Hunt (1857) and his commercial journal, Hunt’s Merchant’s Magazine. For Jacques, Freeman Hunt exemplified the ‘discourse of character’ (1996: 27) which underwrote ‘the conduct of an upright man of business’ (Hunt 1857: 28, quoted in Jacques 1996: 26).



Jacques argues that although the Federalist discourse of character triumphed within American society, its relevance was subsequently erased by rapid industrialization. In consequence, ‘the difference between Federalist and industrial realities provides a point of rupture across which meanings cannot be transported’ (Jacques 1996: 144, emphasis added). This rupture was characterized by the emergence of management discourse (such as Taylorism), modelled around a new subject, namely, the employee. In contrast to the self-reliance of the Federalist citizen who ‘was his own person’ (Jacques 1996: 71), the employee represented a ‘human resource’ (Jacques 1996: 72). Whereas the Federalist citizen controlled his own work process, was paid according to outcomes and saw subordination as ‘one of the ills of aristocratic Europe’, the employee was a subordinate, a wage worker who sold ‘a unit of time’ (Jacques 1996: 76, original emphasis) rather a product, and an individual who experienced a fundamentally divided self. Industrialization and its new management practices occasioned a split between businessman, politician and lawyer; a divorce of women from perceived production; and a separation between the roles of producer and consumer. According to Jacques, these changes were so profound that the world of the employee was ‘alien to the reality of the Federalist citizen’ (1996: 70). A rupture had occurred within the space of 50 years resulting in ‘a radically different order’ (Jacques 1996: 78) due to ‘fundamental shifts in belief about human nature’ (1996: 123). In sum, instead of Kieser’s or Brewer’s continuity of social discipline, Jacques emphasizes the discontinuity that resulted from the displacement of Federalist ‘upright’ self-reliant subjectivity by that of the newly Taylorized employee who, in contrast, appeared as an ‘ignorant, childlike . . . self’, dependent on ‘knowledgeable, adult and capable . . . managers and professional “experts”’ (1996: 82). Jacques’s (1996) study presents a notable contrast in historical method to the studies of organization and social discipline provided by Kieser and Brewer. Yet it remains limited because of its failure to situate Freeman Hunt within the historiography of management thought. Hunt’s significance is assumed by Jacques rather than demonstrated. For example, though we are told that ‘Hunt was a good reflection of the business “common sense” of his time’ (Jacques 1996: 26), limited evidence is presented to substantiate this claim. In addition, questions arise with Jacques’s portrayal of rupture because of the closure which he forces upon his Federalist citizen and his emergent employee. Jacques’s ‘rupture’ derives from a contrast between two social classes, namely the bourgeois realities of Freeman Hunt’s socially climbing merchants, retailers and entrepreneurs, and the new working class associated with industrialization and the Taylorized employee. Yet Jacques’s argument appears difficult to sustain. In particular, the work of a number of social historians (Halttunen 1982; Blumin 1989; Morgan 1994) suggests that Jacques forces his contrast in order to achieve a sense of rupture. For instance, such work suggests that there was no prior unified bourgeois


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subjectivity in mid-19th-century America or Europe centred around a particular set of values, character or conduct – whether Jacques’s Federalist values or English and American ‘polite society’. Instead these studies indicate a competition between desired bourgeois codes of behaviour, such as that between Christian moralist prescription for ‘upright’ character and conduct (Morgan 1994) and the desire to ‘cultivate a showy appearance at the expense of moral character’ (Halttunen 1982: 63). The work of social historians, Karen Halttunen (1982) and Marjorie Morgan (1994), is of particular interest here since they illustrate these competing bourgeois social codes within the US and England respectively. They both argue that the concern for ‘show’ and impression management ‘triumphed’ over the moral prescription for upright ‘character’ associated with Jacques’s Federalist bourgeois subjectivity, and that the former represented a refashioning of aristocratic codes of behaviour. As Halttunen argues, ‘after 1830, the American middle classes proudly proclaimed their usurpation of courtesy from the courts of the Old World’ (1982: 95). On both sides of the Atlantic, these ‘fashions’ were prescribed by a host of etiquette books that instructed the nouveau riche and the emergent middle class in an appropriate external ‘show’ of behaviour rather than the internal development of character. Contra Jacques (1996), the discourse of character did not ‘triumph’ nor was the old feudal order simply displaced. Instead there was a ‘battle’ between different bourgeois social codes with ‘old order’ values of etiquette and external appearance proving ‘triumphant’ in both England and America. For Halttunen and Morgan, this triumph occurred because the latter codes were more appropriate to the emergent bourgeois as a result of their need for impression management within a developing industrial society. As Halttunen puts it, ‘within the new [US] corporate context, personality skills, such as that subtle quality called charm, were more useful to the ambitious youth than the qualities of industry, sobriety and frugality’ (1982: 207). Contra Jacques (1996), such studies suggest that there was no prior unified bourgeois self associated with a ‘discourse of character’. Since there was no prior unified self, there was also no distinct rupture. Instead, Karen Halttunen suggests that a ‘gradual replacement’ (1982: 207) occurred in 19thcentury North American bourgeois subjectivity, while other social historians such as Marjorie Morgan emphasize continuities from the Renaissance onwards. Halttunen notes that something akin to Jacques’s ‘character ethic’ was relevant in the US to ‘an early industrial capitalist stage . . . dominated by self-employed entrepreneurs’ (1982: 207). Yet it gradually ‘lost out’ because of the need for ‘show’ and impression management among urban dwellers for whom ‘the notion of “stranger” loses its meaning’ (Giddens 1991: 152). In this society of strangers ‘where no one occupied a fixed social position, the question “Who am I?” loomed large’ (Halttunen 1982: xv). In this context, refashioned aristocratic codes enabled the socially climbing American middle classes to show that they ‘were true ladies and gentlemen deserving



of the higher social place to which they aspired’ (Halttunen 1982: xvii). Once again, contra Jacques, they provided a means for the aspirant ‘middling sort’ to ‘puff . . . themselves’ up (Morgan 1994: 117) through the ‘all-powerful polish’ (Morgan 1994: 117) of refashioned aristocratic codes of etiquette and gentility. Morgan’s and Halttunen’s analyses, and those of other social historians (e.g. Blumin 1989), do not therefore support Jacques’s (1996) contention that there was a mid-19th-century dominant bourgeois discourse of character which was then ‘ruptured’ by growing industrialization. Instead they illustrate how there were competing bourgeois social codes throughout the 19th century in America and England. They suggest that Jacques uses a questionable closure, with Freeman Hunt’s espousal of ‘character’ placed in one historical ‘box’ and the emergent ‘employee’ put in another. Yet such closure is always problematic. In particular, those who are placed in a box may try to ‘jump out’. For instance, Jacques portrays Freeman Hunt as the defender of the honest business ‘character’. Yet as Stuart Blumin notes, Hunt’s Merchant’s Magazine and Commercial Review was specifically aimed at a bourgeois ‘commercial class’. It repeatedly espoused what might be called a ‘commercial theory of value’ (Blumin 1989: 80, 128) where value is seen as created by markets and consumption rather than by the production of goods. As Blumin argues, this argument ‘appears in a variety of forms throughout the [Merchant’s] magazine’s many issues’ (1989: 128). Following Blumin, Freeman Hunt does not therefore appear as Jacques’s defendant of business ‘character’. Instead he serves as the promoter of the very divisions that Jacques associates with the later ‘ruptures’ of industrialization and the employee, such as that between consumption and production (see above). Rather than being emblematic of a particular position, Freeman Hunt appears as the symbol of the problems of Jacques’s closure – namely, that there are competing trends at any one time. In sum, Jacques achieves his effect by conflating different social classes, namely the emergent bourgeois addressed in Hunt’s Merchant’s Magazine and the new industrial working class, and by ignoring the competing social codes current within the bourgeoisie throughout the 19th century. What does all of this imply for history and subjectivity? I wish to suggest, that contra Jacques, and to some extent, Kieser, Brewer, Halttunen and Morgan, there is rarely a simple triumph of a particular social code (in the sense that there is a ‘displacement’ and rejection of an alternative). Even Kieser and Brewer’s ‘social discipline’ may not have represented an integrated and welldefined code of subjectivity. Instead this 18th-century social discipline may simply have contained and prefigured later 19th-century competition, such as that between the moral imperative of Jacques’s ‘upright’ character and the ‘show’ and ‘puffery’ of Halttunen and Morgan’s refashioned aristocratic codes of gentility and civility. For instance, one implication of Brewer’s analysis is that the 18th-century English business discipline of ‘affability, courtesy


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and reliability’ (Brewer 1982: 215, emphasis added) already contained tensions between the growing desire to be ‘a businessman of character’ who can evidence reliability and probity, and refashioned courtly concerns to ‘show’ courtoisie and civilité which allowed businessmen to appear as ‘gentleman’ traders. In sum, differing social codes are likely to coexist and intermingle across time. As Jacques acknowledges, Freeman Hunt’s ‘discourse of character’ still remains alive and well in ‘the present day’ (Jacques 1996: 39), particularly within management discourses such as leadership, motivation, TQM or BPR (Jacques 1996: 146–173). Yet because Jacques believes in the reality of rupture, he must portray the discourse of character as being an ‘outdated’ myth (1996: 160). In spite of the supposed rupture of notions of ‘character’, Jacques asserts that we must still ‘exorcise the ghost of Freeman Hunt’ (1996: 163). However this problem only arises for Jacques because he largely adheres to a sense of discontinuity and rupture. In consequence he ignores the way in which people ‘play’ with social codes and how they are rarely simply displaced at any one time but remain a part of our cultural repertoire. Freeman Hunt encapsulated a range of codes of social discipline rather than a dominant ‘discourse of character’. What does this imply for continuity and discontinuity? I would suggest that it means that we do not need to choose between continuity and discontinuity since it is possible for researchers to explore, and be sensitive to, the possibilities of either orientation. To do otherwise is to create unnecessary closure. For instance, in the context of the present paper, it appears equally foreclosing to assume that there is either no continuity or no discontinuity between, say, Brewer’s ‘business discipline’ and subsequent industrialization. In addition, continuity and discontinuity do not present mutually exclusive historical stances. Different theoretical stances can be employed toward similar ends. As Deirdre McCloskey argues, ‘continuity and discontinuity are narrative devices, to be chosen for their storytelling virtues’ (1990: 22). I would suggest that, just as we should expect discontinuity, we should not dismiss stories of continuity. In relation to subjectivity and the self, we need to retain the post-structural emphasis on plurality and mobility but recognize that pluralities contain different forms of continuity. Individuals and groups play with different, and possibly competing, social codes, refashioning them in the context of figurational change. The emotional and behavioural displays of present-day organizations (e.g. Hochschild 1983) may partly reflect that of Kieser and Brewer’s bourgeois society or even Elias’s courtly society, albeit that such reflection is likely to include the discontinuities consequent upon inflection, mutation, deviation, and so on. Yet mutations and deviations still represent continuities. They mutate or deviate from something already existent. To deny the possibility of continuity is to assume the likelihood that historical development is characterized by the emergence of ‘clean slates’, entirely novel situations which owe nothing to the past. ‘Revolutions’ represent reactions to past episodes rather than truly new worlds (see McCloskey



1990: 16–18). They are not discontinuous from the past but rather re-invent and work from it. In this sense, the distinction represented by historical continuity vs discontinuity is really about the form of continuity, whether it is an inflected, deviated or mutated continuity, or the kind of inverted continuity stereotypically represented by revolution. To put this another way, the ‘dis’ of discontinuity is misleading since it suggests a mutually exclusive ‘other’. I am suggesting instead that it would be more helpful to see discontinuities as particular kinds of continuity. Though I cannot develop this argument here, one way to see this is in terms of the perception of pace or speed (see Newton 2003b). Though notions of speed and ‘acceleration’ may be questionable, whether in relation to the French Revolution or the present day (Virilio 1986, 1991; Luke 1998), the sense of speed nevertheless captures the way in which history appears to represent different processes of continuity, whether ‘fast’ and ‘revolutionary’ or slow and intractable. Historical analysis requires a sensitivity to these different forms and paces of continuity (Newton 2003b), whether we observe ‘fast’ inflections, deflections, deviations and inversions or ‘slow’ extensions, reflections, retractions and intractabilities.

Conclusion What does the foregoing imply for organization studies? First, it reminds us that organization studies still exhibits a disinterest in the historical context in which organizing has developed, particularly when compared with other academic fields of inquiry (Brady 1997). In the present case, it is important to remember that the association between organization and subjectivity is not just a 20th- or 21st-century issue (as reflected in the concern with, say, organizational culture or emotional labour), but one that may have charac terized the earliest forms of modern organization. Second, it indicates that historical analysis cannot be dismissed through a crude reading of postmodern argument (Evans 1997). For instance, there is no mutual exclusivity between historical continuity and discontinuity, and certainly not one that could justify treating them as though they reflected supposedly hostile ‘camps’. The social terrain is neither composed of total fragmentation, fluidity and discontinuity nor total stability, solidity, coherence and continuity. To present history as though it involved a choice between mutually exclusive assumptions is to invoke a closure which benefits neither debate nor analysis. History is of course about representation and social construction. Yet as McCloskey (1990) implies, historians can be playful with method through, say, exploring the possibilities presented by stories of continuity and discontinuity. In narrative terms, I have played in this paper with different kinds of historical story. In the first place, I sought to dramatize the possibilities of history, to note how the social discipline of organizational life can be seen within the history of modern organization, and may even characterize, as


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Kieser (1998) suggests, the earliest forms of modern organization. Then I sought to add to this ‘drama’ by exploring figurational changes surrounding freemasonry. I employed Brewer (1982) to illustrate the slow shift in interdependency which occurred when the asymmetries of a pre-modern English client economy were slowly transformed through devices such as credit. In Brewer’s hands, freemasonry appears interwoven with credit interdependencies because English Masonic lodges provided a convivial setting in which to meet creditors and partners as well as a collective insurance against the risk of debt. In so doing, the liberation of freemasonry (from pre-modern tradition) was also interwoven with the liberation of credit networks since the latter eroded the client economy and shifted power relations by providing an alternative source of finance to reliance on patrician favour. In sum, these historical stories are helpful in exploring two interrelated propositions: that organized subjectivity characterized the earliest forms of modern organization and that such subjectivity needs to be seen, following Elias, in the context of figurational change in interdependency network. Yet in exploring these historical analyses, I was aware of recent debate within social history, sociology and organization studies which questioned historical method, particularly in relation to Foucault (e.g. Bermingham 1995; Baert 1998; Carter et al. 2002). My discussion of these issues led to conclusions which lack the drama of negation. Rather than simply negating the unified and continuous subject through its opposite, the fragile, discontinuous and fragmented self, I preferred the less glamorous notion of ‘shared fragments’ which could be selectively continuous, at least in the short to medium term, within and between individuals. Instead of the image of a ‘dominant’ subjec tivity strongly implicit in Jacques’s discourse of character, I sought an image of a mobile, fragmented, yet selectively continuous, subjectivity. Similarly, I resisted either a ‘bold’ negation of historical continuity through grand narratives of discontinuity and rupture, or a ‘thorough’ defence of continuity. ‘Falling’ for either of these options represents an unnecessary polarization and closure that limits the possibilities of historical analysis. I preferred the notion of a range of continuities from stasis all the way to inversion and ‘revolution’. There are many variants of continuity, from the time-resilient intractabilities of, say, social inequality to the ‘radical’ revolutions and inversions against such inequality. All work from and against a past, and therefore represent some form of continuity with that past. In researching history, organization and organizing, there is no reason why we cannot explore across this range of continuity in relation to both the form and pace of change. To some extent, I have tried to do so in the present paper by working across the accounts found in Kieser, Brewer, Elias and Jacques, and the seemingly divergent assumptions of continuity and discontinuity which they contain. The contrast between these accounts enabled me to refine my argument and be sensitive to, say, the questionable images of closure and ‘triumph’ found not just in Jacques’s discourse of character but also in Kieser and Brewer’s



social discipline. Mine is a plea for openness in historical assumption and method even though I am aware that such a plea lacks the drama of a thorough defence of historical tradition (Evans 1997), or a dismissal of some of the key assumptions of this tradition, or a clear rebuttal of Foucauldian argument (Rowlinson and Carter 2002). I wish to close by stressing that a host of other histories of organization and subjectivity remain unexplored by organization studies scholars, such as that of profession, religion, colonialism, class, gender, etc. I believe that much scope exists in this field through blurring the boundaries between organization study, social history, historical sociology, literary criticism and so on. In this paper, I have begun to explore across such boundaries through interrelating and questioning the work of organizational researchers (Kieser and Jacques), social historians (Brewer, Halttunen and Morgan), and those who deliberately work across philosophy, the social sciences and the humanities (Elias and Foucault). Yet I have really only scratched the surface of the possibilities of such analysis and there remains considerable scope for integrative organizational study that works across current fields of historical endeavour.

Notes 1. In this respect they differ from German freemasonry which Kieser argues were composed ‘of the absolute top layers of the society’ (1998: 54). Elias (1994, 1996) argues that there was a much greater division in the 18th century between the upper and middle classes in Germany than in England or France, and the narrower composition of German freemasonry should perhaps be seen in this context. 2. This aspect of Brewer’s thesis receives support from social historians such as Margaret Jacob and economic historians such as Douglas Knoop and G. P. Jones. Jacob draws on a range of Masonic documents, though particularly those associated with the main 18th-century lodge in Amsterdam, La Bien Aimée (held at the library of the Grand Lodge of the Netherlands, The Hague), the Paris Grand Lodge (held at the Bibiothèque Nationale, Paris), and the Masonic lodge at Dundee, Scotland (based on varied sources though especially the Archives and Record Centre, Dundee), all of which are rare for the completeness of their records. Based on these and other documents, Jacob asserts that common to Dutch, French, Scottish and English freemasonry was a desire to ‘mitigate and negotiate the effects of the market’ (1993: 115). For instance, Jacob notes how the letters and manuscripts of the Paris Grand Lodge indicate that ‘no other agency of church or state was able to provide sufficient net for men and women who for whatever reason were in danger of falling through, literally, as their letters tell us, of starving to death’ (1993: 105). Similarly the manuscripts of La Bien Aimée at Amsterdam suggest that ‘the vagaries and uncertainties of market life were never far from day-to-day concerns’ (Jacob, 1991: 165). Jacob notes that the Amsterdam lodge ‘had a poor box for the relief of [Masonic] brothers who regularly appealed to it’ (1991: 165), while the Paris Grand Lodge ‘had a committee that did nothing else but dispense charity’ which helped to relieve the ‘miserable state’ that might befall freemasons (1993: 103). Knoop and Jones provide further examples of charity given to fellow masons in Scotland and England. With the former, they note how a manuscript of a Masonic lodge at Dumfries in the late 17th century included the precept that masons ‘shall at all times cheerfully distribute your Charity to ye reliefe of distrest & sicke fellow masons’


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(Knoop and Jones, 1947: 200). However most of Knoop and Jones’s attention is devoted to documenting the development and formalization of such charity at the Grand Lodge in London in the early part of the 18th century. They note that fellow masons were given relief through this charity as early as 1717 and that a standing committee for the formalization of charity to ‘brethren’ was agreed at the Annual Assembly of the Grand Lodge in January 1730 (Knoop and Jones 1947: 200–202). The research of Brewer, Jacob, and Knoop and Jones suggest that despite their differences, British, French and Dutch freemasonry shared a common concern to provide welfare to ‘distressed’ fellow masons and thereby defray the perils of the market. Together they support Brewer’s thesis that freemasonry helped to address the risk entailed in credit and commerce. 3. As I argue elsewhere (Newton 2003a), the history of credit and money does not provide consistent support for Eliasian argument. On the one hand, the localized, often face to face, credit relations observed by Brewer (and other social historians such as Muldrew, 1998) support Elias’s contention that lengthening interdependencies are associated with increased social discipline. On the other hand, the modern sense of paper money challenges this association. Instead of social discipline, modern money allows for a ‘growing [social] indifference’ (Simmel 1990: 441) deriving from the ‘abstractness of its form’ (Simmel 1990: 504). Though modern money involves extremely complex and lengthy credit networks, it does not necessarily encourage the social discipline that Elias associated with such networks. Present-day consumers can remain largely indifferent to those producing the goods and services they buy. In sum, Elias’s association between interdependency complexity and social discipline appears contingent upon the character of that interdependency. 4. It is important to distinguish this sense of habitus from that employed by Pierre Bourdieu (1984). Elias’s reference to habitus clearly has a family resemblance to its now better-known usage by Bourdieu. Yet there remain major differences. First, Bourdieu’s work remains rather static and lacks the sense of historical development found within Elias (Mouzelis 1995). As Chris Shilling notes, ‘Bourdieu is unable to account fully for the sort of historical changes which occur in the body and which have been examined elsewhere by Norbert Elias’ (1993: 146). Second, Bourdieu does remain open to the criticism that his image of human agency is passive since people appeared trapped within the interaction between particular ‘fields’ and their habitus (Alexander 1995; Mouzelis 1995). In contrast, Elias continually stresses that human beings are active agents, a stress reflected in Elias’s game models (Elias 1970) and in his emphasis on figurational change, such as that from a courtly to a bourgeois habitus. Equally, as noted above, Elias stresses how individuals are embedded within particular habitus but are not defined by them.

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8 Ties to the Past in Organization Research: A Comparative Analysis of Retrospective Methods Julie Wolfram Cox and John Hassard

I will have to assume that I had a childhood, but I cannot assume to have had the one I remember. (Jeanette Winterson, Sexing the Cherry, 1990: 92)

I

n their introduction to critical management research, Alvesson and Deetz (2000) argue that much mainstream management research is built on modernist science, which itself is founded on the Enlightenment prom ise for an ‘autonomous subject progressively emancipated by knowledge acquired through scientific methods’ (Alvesson and Deetz, 2000: 13). In con trast to a past defined by authority and traditional values, the 18th century Enlightenment represented the rise of reason and a modernist science, which 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 enhance ment of the quality of life. The Enlightenment’s enemies were darkness, tra dition, ideology, ignorance, and positional authority (Alvesson and Deetz, 2000: 13; see also Cooper and Burrell, 1988). Within the associated grand narratives of progress and emancipation (cf. Lyotard, 1984), the past was displaced and ‘the traditional was marginalized and placed off in the private realm’ (Alvesson and Deetz, 2000: 14). Citing Schaffer (1989), Alvesson and Deetz (2000) even suggest that modern phi losophy of science overcompensated for the fear of authority, rhetoric and Source: Organization, 14(4) (2007): 475–496.


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ideology by producing its own ideology manifested in scientific procedures such as hypothesis testing. In both its interests and practices, modernism therefore looks to the future rather than to the past, for its emphasis rests on hope, prediction and control for a better future. In contrast to the dignity of the present and hope for such a future, the past is marginalized, romanticized, oversimplified as kitsch, or overcomplicated as pandemonium (cf. Burrell, 1997). Although it is important to distinguish between the periodization and epistemology of modernism (cf. Parker, 1992), and to avoid overly simple polarization, if not its repudiation (Archer, 1998; Lewis and Keleman, 2002; Weiss, 2000), it is perhaps not surprising that social science methods for researching the past receive less attention than methods that assist us in understanding the pres ent or predicting the future. In an effort to redress this imbalance, our paper analyses the applica tion of retrospective methods in management and organizational research. This is achieved notably in the context of the style of research found within the journals of the Academy of Management and the pages of other lead ing organization studies journals. We are concerned primarily with retro spective research based on interviews and ethnography, as opposed to the methods of documentary historical research on organizations, as presented either in position statements (see Kieser, 1997; Usdikenand Keiser, 2004) or case research (see Hassard and Porter, 1990; Hassard and Rowlinson, 2002; Kieser,1987; Rowlinson and Hassard 1993). As such, the purview of the paper is to identify various positions on retrospective research and discuss the methodological assumptions of each. From this analysis, representative arguments are illustrated and variants of the positions described. Thereafter, the various positions are summarized and comparisons between them made in order to provide a classification of methodological similarities and dif ferences. Finally, implications from this comparative analysis are drawn in terms relevant to the practice of retrospective research in management and organization studies.

Positions on Retrospective Research The main body of the paper identifies, describes and analyses four positions on retrospective research – Controlling the Past, Interpreting the Past, Coopting the Past and Representing the Past. In brief, Controlling the Past sees attempts made to maximize accurate recall or to reveal potential sources of error or bias. Interpreting the Past reflects how our understanding of the present is informed by the construction of past reality. Co-opting the Past sees causal explanations link the past and the present. And Representing the Past involves the problematization of time and research on time.


Cox and Hassard • Ties to the Past in Organization Research 147

Controlling the Past This first position we identify, Controlling the Past, assumes that there was an objective truth in the past and that any ‘difficulties’ in uncovering or capturing such truth lie with the efficacy of present research methods and accounting processes. In terms of epistemology, or ‘the relationship between the knower or would-be-knower and what can be known’ (Guba and Lincoln, 1994: 108), such assumptions derive from positivism. Both dualist and objectivist, positivism assumes that: (a) ‘objective’ reality can be cap tured; (b) the observer can be separated from the observed; (c) observations and generalizations are free from situational and temporal constraints, that is, they are universally generalizable; (d) causality is linear, and there are no causes without effects, no effects without causes; and (e) inquiry is value free (Denzin, 1989: 24; cf. Blaikie, 1993; Brewerton and Millward, 2002; Bryman, 1988; Chia, 1996, 1997; McKelvey, 1997; Williams, 2000). In qualitative positivist research, problems in accessing the past are typified by ‘pitfalls in retrospective accounts’ (Golden, 1992: 849). These occur due to faulty memories, oversimplifications and rationalizations, sub conscious attempts to maintain self-esteem due to needs for acceptance, achievement and security, and social desirability. In addition, recall problems are caused by inaccessibility and by hindsight bias, which has been defined by Azar (2000) as the way the memory of judgements changes when we learn the outcome of an event (see also Fischhoff, 1975). As March and Sutton (1999: 345) point out: Performance information itself colors subjective memories, perceptions, and weightings of possible causes of performance. Informants exist in a world in which organizational performance is important . . . As a result, retrospective reports of independent variables may be less influenced by memory rather than by a reconstruction that connects standard story lines with contemporaneous awareness of performance results.

Work by Louie et al. (2000), for example, reported that the memory of judge ments by MBA students playing a market simulation game was affected by knowledge of team performance. Azar (2000) suggests that we may become more confident of our judgements in retrospect than we were at the time, giving the example of a physician’s confidence in a diagnosis being affected by knowledge of the outcome of the case. In addition, if we are told of an outcome and then asked to reconstruct the events that led to that outcome, the reconstruction will be affected by what is known even if we try to ignore the outcome (Azar, 2000). Also, people are concerned with reproducing response patterns that seem appropriate to the accuracy expected for a task (Winman and Juslin, 1999). Similarly the methodology used in studies of ‘implicit leadership’ (see Landy and Trumbo, 1980; Vecchio, 1991) presented subjects with This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.

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performance information and asked them to describe the likely characteristics of the leader. Subjects often described leaders in the classic terms developed by the Ohio State (Bureau of Business Research) researchers, such as ‘con sideration’ and ‘initiating structure’ (Fleishman and Harris, 1962; Stogdill, 1948, 1975), suggesting that the correlations found between leader behav iour and performance may actually be artefacts. Interest here lies not only in understanding the nature and functions of such faults, but also in reducing the potential for epistemological space between the real and the known. For this position, the nature of reality, or ontology, is one of realism, where ‘[a]n apprehendable reality is assumed to exist, driven by immutable natural laws and mechanisms’ (Alvesson and Deetz, 1996: 109; cf. Blaikie, 1991; Marsden, 1993; Tsoukas, 1989; see also Chia, 1997). While the distinctions between positivism and realism have been well articulated by these and other authors, Chia (1996: 51) argues that: both positivism and epistemological realism are fully committed to the view that theories are serious attempts to accurately mirror and represent the real world as it exists out there. It is this representationalist injunction which unites positivistic and realist science.

Accordingly, particular remedies have been devised in order to control for the impact of judgement processes on accounts of the past. The issue is how not to bias recall and how to minimize the potential for such bias to affect/infect the present and, potentially, the future. In retrospective qualitative organiza tional studies, efforts to reduce ‘errors’ (Golden, 1992: 855) include the use of free rather than forced reports, multiple knowledgeable informants per organization, a focus on simple facts and concrete events, avoiding discus sions of the distant past, ensuring confidentiality, minimizing inconvenience, and following ‘guidelines generally associated with proper retrospective data collection’ (Miller et al., 1997: 201). In an influential paper, Golden (1992), for example, discussed the use of these efforts as part of his concern with the accuracy of chief executive offi cers’ retrospective accounts of past strategy. Such key informants may have difficulty in recalling the past due to ‘inappropriate rationalizations, over simplifications, faulty post hoc attributions, and simple lapses of memory’ (Miller et al., 1997: 189). In addition, ‘[k]ey informants may try to present a socially desirable image of themselves or their firms’ (Miller et al., 1997: 189–190). While Golden’s study ‘underscores the value of a healthy dose of scepticism in the study design stage, and ultimately, in the interpretation of retrospective data’ (Golden, 1992: 857), Miller et al. (1997) were more opti mistic. They suggested that if such guidelines are followed, ‘scholars could be truly comfortable with the idea that retrospective reports are not fiction’ (Miller et al., 1997: 201). In response, Golden later maintained his call for



researchers to be critical of retrospective data but argued that ‘if significant efforts are made to minimize retrospective biases and error and these data can be validated, retrospective data may well provide unique access to past organizational events’ (Golden, 1997: 1251; emphasis in original). Measurement issues are also important in retrospective quantitative research designs. For example, in experimental studies, a retrospective pretest-posttest control group design has been developed for the assessment of training interventions through self-report measures (Sprangers, 1988). This design controls for the effect of a response shift that occurs when train ing affects participants’ understanding or internal standard of measurement for the dimension under consideration. If training affects this understanding, the self-report data will otherwise be confounded by the response shift and trainers may fail to document the benefits of their training (Sprangers, 1988; see also Sprangers, 1989). Similar concerns have been noted with respect to collective learning. Busby (1999) for example investigated postdesign reviews as a mechanism for learning from collective experience and reviewed the argument that ret rospective reviews can promote double loop learning. In addition to prob lems with hindsight bias, Busby pointed out that there are limits to the extent to which retrospective reviews can examine judgements that have not been made with conscious attention or access behaviour that is ‘instinctive, auto mated and unavailable to conscious processes’ (Busby, 1999: 110). With ref erence to March et al. (1991) Busby (1999: 111) argues that: [p]eople’s recall tends to exaggerate the consistency of experience with their prior conceptions; they often fail to notice incorrect predictions (or interpret them as measurement errors) and remember as being real data that are consistent with mental models that are in fact missing.

In the neighbouring field of historical research there are similar concerns with accuracy of access to the past. With respect to the work of Frederick Taylor, for example, historians Wrege and Hodgetts (2000: 1290) have expressed concern that ‘what the typical management reader “knows” about what hap pened at Bethlehem Iron a century ago is more fiction than fact’. They cau tion against the acceptance of published sources, commenting that: The reason for the continued acceptance of Taylor’s observations largely lies in the persistent reliance of management scholars on published sourc es (usually those appearing in management publications) rather than on original documents prepared at the time of the actual events Taylor de scribed. Unfortunately, for the majority of the readers of management publications, the printed word has an aura of authenticity that is seldom questioned, and original documents are neglected. (Wrege and Hodgetts, 2000: 1283; see also DiMaggio, 1995 for a similar argument with respect to the reading of management theory)


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As historians, Wrege and Hodgetts hope that such neglect will not continue, arguing that ‘in the new millennium, managers will have to increasingly focus on data collection and analysis and fight the tendency to accept anec dotes and hearsay as accurate’ (2000: 1290). Thus, accuracy is paramount, and the task of both the researcher and reader is to maintain a critical stance so as not to be duped into receiving a less-than-objective view of the world. From the position of Controlling the Past, therefore, retrospective research is potentially flawed research that is at best avoided and at worst controlled through careful attention to method and measures, depending on the nature of the research design. The various forms of control, such as experimental control in quantitative designs, or limitation to recent, concrete events, and use of multiple informants in qualitative interview surveys are employed to improve the validity and reliability of the research and to reduce the many sources of potential interference that affect the potential of the research to mirror (or at least access) a past reality. Under such assumptions, retrospec tive research is only employed on a qualified and even apologetic basis. In their study of changes in employee perceptions of psychological contracts, De Meuse et al. (2001: 113–114) wrote, for example: To track employee perceptions of the psychological contract over 50 years in a truly longitudinal fashion would have been virtually impossi ble. Consequently, a retrospective methodology was utilized in this study. The authors recognize that there are problems associated with this ap proach . . . Despite justifiable concerns about the accuracy of retrospective designs, this study supports the contention of researchers who assert that these designs can be useful in identifying patterns indicative of dynamic processes.

Such qualification can be contrasted with the greater affirmation of retro spective research that occurs from the other three positions, which are now examined.

Interpreting the Past Under Interpreting the Past the emphasis is not so much on obtaining a clear picture of a past reality, but on the present interpretation of past reality. Whether or not that interpretation has ties to any actual past is immate rial from this position, which is sympathetic to the idea that present reality is socially constructed (Berger and Luckmann, 1966) and that the conse quences of such construction can have material effects (Thomas, 1937). With reference to ethnomethodology, for example, Weick argued that ‘[t]o talk about sensemaking is to talk about reality as an ongoing accomplishment that takes form when people make retrospective sense of the situations in which they find themselves and their creations’ (Weick, 1995a: 15). Initially,



such sensemaking is an equivocal process due to elapsed experience making ‘many different kinds of sense’ (Weick, 1995a: 27), and it only becomes less tentative at a later stage of interpretation. Weick’s interest lies in the firming up of this sensemaking, and he suggests that such firming up has a particular functionality: If people want to complete their projects, if effort and motivation make a difference in completing those projects, and if the environment is mal leable, then a reading of past indeterminacy that favors order and over simplifies causality . . . may make for more effective action, even if it is lousy history. (Weick, 1995a: 28–29)

It is here that Weick distinguishes his emphasis from work on hindsight bias, arguing that discussions of this bias ‘tend to emphasize how much the backward glance leaves out and the problems that this can create’ (Weick, 1995a: 28). Based on the relatively short time between act and reflection and an argument that ‘people are mindful only of a handful of projects at a time’ (Weick, 1995a: 29), Weick argues that distortions due to hindsight bias are unlikely to be substantial in everyday life. However, his interest is more in how making sense of the past is important for present action and future decision making, and he comments that ‘students of sensemaking find fore casting, contingency planning, strategic planning and other magical probes into the future wasteful and misleading if they are decoupled from reflective action and history’ (Weick, 1995a: 30). It is not that such activities are unin teresting, but that they need to be more broadly conceived: Strategists take credit for their foresight when they are actually trading on their hindsight. A well-developed capability for hindsight is neither a dramatic accomplishment, nor especially rare, which is probably why strategists shun that depiction of their contribution. (Weick, 1995a: 78)

Weick’s retrospection is, therefore, a pragmatic, normative retrospection rather than one that is purely interpretive (cf. Allard-Poesi, 2005; Burrell and Morgan, 1979; Deetz, 1996). It is one centred more in the present than in the past, and his critique is not of inadequate access to the past but of inadequate representation of the present. His calls for greater appreciation of the past (see, for example, Weick, 2001: 462) aim to improve the accuracy of that representation and it is in this emphasis on accuracy that Weick’s posi tion can be seen as not all that different from the position of Controlling the Past discussed above. Both emphasize accuracy, but while the first position is concerned with an accurate past, this second is concerned with an accurate (and more humble) present in which ‘people know what they have done only after they do it’ (Weick, 2001: 462; cf Schutz 1967). There are also several variants of this second position. As noted above, more interpretive studies may be, arguably, distinguishable from the


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functionalism of Weick’s argument and focus solely on the interpretation of a past situation or event (see, for example, Isabella, 1990; Wolfram Cox, 1997). More social constructionist positions are concerned not with indi vidual constructions of the past but with how those constructions develop in interaction with and generative potential for new futures (see, for example, Cooperrider and Srivastva, 1987; Gergen, 2001; Gergen and Thatchenkery, 1996, 2004). As Mir and Watson (2001) argue, constructivism itself ‘tra verses a spectrum of epistemological positions’ between realism and episte mological relativism (see also Kwan and Tsang, 2001). More critical retrospective studies may draw attention to or disrupt pre vailing discourses of the past or historicize and politicize present order, pointing to potential for future action, emancipation, or transformative redefinition (see, for example, Alvesson and Deetz, 2000; Deetz, 1996; New ton, 1996). Much critical management work for example is informed by Habermas’ emancipatory interest, ‘which aims at stimulating self-reflection in personal and social life in order to free man from the restrictions and repressions of the established order and its ideologies’ (Alvesson, 1991: 216). Here the past informs the present and research assumes an histori cal realism, where a once plastic reality has become inappropriately shaped and reified over time (Guba and Lincoln, 1994). Thus, in critical studies the fuller picture that emerges is more disturbing than ‘accurate’, directing atten tion to issues such as mystification and colonization (see Alvesson and Will mott, 1996), and highlighting material or psychic disadvantage or defense (cf. Brown and Starkey, 2000; Casey, 1999). As Reed (2001: 216) has argued, critical realist explanation: is necessarily structural and historical to the extent that it must attempt to account for the complex interplay between ‘structure’ and ‘agency’ as it works its way through reproducing and/or transforming the institutional arrangements that temporally preceded them and the dialectical relation between them.

In critical realist studies informed by the works of Bhaskar (1978, 1986, 1989), an explanation of structural impediments to human development may also facilitate emancipation (Houston, 2001). While Bhaskar held a ‘conviction’ that reality is independent of our thoughts or impressions (cf. Mir and Watson, 2001), he also argues that open systems in the natural world mean that simple cause–effect prediction and determination is not possible (Houston, 2001: 850). Within the social world, this includes the need ‘not only to uncover psy chological and structural mechanisms, but to challenge their existence where they lead to human oppression’ (Houston, 2001: 851; see also Reed, 2001). Houston sees such challenging and exposure as a nonlinear, retroductive pro cess, arguing that more linear hypothesis testing is unsuited to a transitive view where the known is constrained by psychology and ideology and where a positivist correspondence between the real and the known cannot be assumed. This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.


Hypothesis testing is instead a more tentative process, with an emphasis on the role of replication as verification and falsification are never conclusive (Mir and Watson, 2001; Kwan and Tsang, 2001).

Co-Opting the Past Our third position, Co-opting the Past, is in some ways like the first in that it assumes that the past and the present are discrete. Rather than attempting to gain access to the past from the present, or to understand how constructions of the past affect the future, the emphasis here is on why particular causal links are made between the past and the present, or why the past is co-opted, and on individual cognitive processes in making causal explanations. In the case of retrospective research it is attribution theories that provide the clear est exemplars of this position, and some of the major works from this tradi tion are now discussed. Martinko and Thompson (1998) reviewed Kelley’s (1973) attributional cause model that describes how different types of information affect social attribution processes. Under this well-known model, it is suggested that the cause of behaviour can be judged to come from an internal/person, external/ situation or stimulus source depending on the information available about the event. Three information variables that determine the attribution of causality are consensus (whether or not the same behaviour is exhibited by others in the same situation), consistency (whether the behaviour is usual or unusual for this person in this situation), and distinctiveness (whether or not this person also exhibits this behaviour in other situations). Martinko and Thomson (1998) extend this analysis through synthesis of Kelley’s model with Weiner and colleagues’ (1971) achievement-motivation model in terms of the locus of causality (internal or external), stability (whether or not the cause of the outcome changes over time), and global or specific attributions (the degree to which the cause of an outcome is generalizable across situa tions). In contrast to such complicating of causality (see also Blount and Janicik, 2001; Brown and Jones, 1998), Hewstone and Augoustinous (1998) have instead extended the unit of analysis for attribution theory. They argue that ‘[a]ttribution theory is predominantly a North American theoretical per spective which seeks to understand the processes by which people attribute causes to their own behaviour and to the behaviour of others’ (Hewstone and Augoustinous, 1998: 60). Hewstone and Augoustinous reviewed major works on attribution theory and drew attention to Weiner’s (1985) examination of whether ‘the extent and nature of attributional activity that the research sug gests is an artefact of the reactive methodologies used in attribution research’ (Hewstone and Augoustinous, 1998: 62). As there have been few attribu tion studies in natural contexts, such as conversation or in the print media,


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Hewstone and Augoustinous (1998) suggest that in such settings it is impor tant to examine the social and collective nature of explanations. As they argue, their aim is ‘to make clear that attributions or lay explanations are not only the outcome of individual cognitive processes but are also linked to social and cultural representations’ (Hewstone and Augoustinous, 1998: 76). They draw on social representation theory as a relevant basis for this exten sion of attribution theory in an effort to ‘reveal pre-existing knowledge struc tures and expectations which people use to filter and process incoming infor mation’ (Hewstone and Augoustinous, 1998: 63). In workplace settings, such structures and expectations may lead managers to enhance their identities and undertake impression management through engaging in what McHugh (1997) has termed attributional labour, or the regulation and ascription of intent and commitment. As a result of such regulation, attributions about the causes of organizational problems will therefore tend to be an effect of the nature of the labour process (McHugh, 1997), internal/dispositional and external/environmental attributions varying in accordance with managerial interests rather than cognitive processes. In general, issues of whether or not causal explanations are ‘accurate’ and how they alter future understanding are neither as central nor as interesting to researchers taking this position as why the explanations are formed in the first place. However, as in the previous cases, there are variants of this third position and these variants overlap with the two previous ones. For example, Bell-Dolan and Anderson (1999) examine the consequences of inaccurate attributions, distinguishing between proximal consequences (thoughts, emo tions, behaviours) and distal consequences (academic achievement, depres sion, anxiety, relationship satisfaction, and aggression). They also examine implications for clinical intervention, concluding that ‘[a]lthough wildly inaccurate attributions (and attributional styles) are certainly maladaptive in the long run, it is less clear that this positive relation between accuracy and adaptiveness holds true at less extreme levels of inaccuracy’ (Bell-Dolan and Anderson, 1999: 58). Similarly, Cannon (1999) was concerned with the cur rent implications of attributions for past experiences, examining memories of failure experiences and finding that these memories triggered strong emo tion reactions that affected sense-making and distorted current reasoning. In contrast, Harvey and Weary (1981: 6) suggested that by using attri bution processes to understand workplace violence, participants attempt to find an ‘inference about why [violence] occurred’. Thus, knowledge of attri bution processes may assist both in understanding a particularly difficult past and in functioning in the present. Similarly, storytelling work examines not only causal attributions for the past events but narratives of how the past is told. For example, telling retrospective accounts of organizational atroci ties attributed to others may provide the storyteller with additional time and experience to ‘reconstruct a story’ (Charmaz, 1999: 372). While such stories maybe anxiety provoking and hard to hear (Frank, 1995), their telling may



allow the expression of a mix of emotions in an effort to deal with a process of change (Bromley et al., 1979). In this analysis of Co-opting the Past attention to attributional processes has thus been extended from the individual to the social arena, and from accounts of particular events to full sequential narratives. Elsewhere, in the field of organizational history, Pettigrew’s (1985) well-known study of ‘con tinuity and change’ at Imperial Chemical Industries, The Awakening Giant, in which he documented the way the company responded to the changing social, political, business and economic developments from the early 1960s, employed a kindred pluralist methodological form of ‘retrospective and realtime analysis’ (1985: 40), specifically through a mixture of personal inter views and archival material. Pettigrew, however, is keen to acknowledge some of potential ‘disadvantages and threats to reliability and validity’ (1985: 40) associated with his form longitudinal retrospective interviewing, such meth odological problems being discussed in greater depth in his earlier associ ated work on the ‘craft skills’ of historical research on organizational culture and change (see Pettigrew, 1973, 1979), a discussion addressed similarly by Martin et al. (1985) in their ‘collecting histories’ study of founder/employees culture creation, which drew upon Pettigrew’s (1979) methodology. Also in organizational research, narrative methods have gained increasing prominence (Boje, 2001; cf. Czarniawska, 1998), demonstrating not only the importance of different narrative genres for accounting for the past (e.g. Barry and Elmes, 1997; Collins and Rainwater, 2005; Doolin, 2003; Jeffcutt, 1994) but also the variety of narrative methods now available to researchers. It is important to note that the growth of interest in such methods extends not only from attempts to create a fuller understanding of attribution pro cesses but also from a questioning of the very nature of research and of the configuration of temporal relations in the first place. Such questioning informs the fourth position identified in our paper, for this concerns representing, or re-presenting, the past.

Representing the Past Our first three positions attempt to recall the past more accurately, to make sense of it, or to examine causal links between the past and the present. In all three, the present exists independently of the past. At issue are the nature of temporal recall, understanding and evaluation. In contrast, our fourth position, Representing the Past, does not assume that the present is ontologi cally independent of the past, or that there is schematic time. Under such assumptions, time is often presented as one-dimensional, and it has been argued that ‘the notion of a single, unitary form of time which is objective, absolute, homogeneous, linear, evenly flowing, measurable, readily divis ible and independent of events’ is ‘massively inhibiting’ (Clark, 1990: 143;


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see also Hassard, 2002). For Burrell (1992), such linearity is associated with notions of progress, where what is contemporary and fashionable is claimed to represent a ‘higher’ level of development (as well as a newer one) than that which has preceded it. This assumption of linear progress rests heavily on an optimistic view of the Enlightenment and a belief that rationalistic management of change is possible (Burrell, 1992: 168). In contrast, and with reference to organizational contexts, Clark (1990: 141) for example calls for recognition that ‘all corporations require and pos sess a plurality of chronological codes’, some focusing on time as unfolding and regular, others holding more heterogeneous conceptions of time where interpretations of pace and duration are socially constructed and affected by events of local cultural importance (see also Ancona et al., 2001; Hassard, 1989, 2001, 2005). Further, and from a contextualist stance, there are not merely different chronological codes but an interpenetration of the past and the future, for ‘[a]n event is never what is immediately available but also includes its contiguous past and present’ (Tsoukas, 1994: 767). It is this stance that informs Representing the Past, for when the very defini tion of past-present-future is problematized, facts themselves may vary over time (Gergen, 1973) as there is no stable knowledge outside of the representation of that knowledge (see Calás and Smircich, 1999; Thrift, 2004). This argument differs from that of Weick presented above, whose concerns are epistemological rather than ontological. Weick argues that our knowing of the present is affected by our knowing of the past, but does not go so far as to suggest that the past, present and future are other than discrete, real phenomena. Importantly, when the semblance of realism is no longer attainable or valued, retrospective research shifts from the status of poor science or poor history to art, craft or fiction. The researcher is no longer a ‘disinterested scientist’ (Guba and Lincoln, 1994), analytical excavator or historian, but writer, storyteller and editor ‘embedded in a social context and in relation to others’ (Calás and Smircich, 1999: 653). For example, in their discussion of strategy as fiction, Barry and Elmes (1997) argued that strategy is created or made up rather than something that is ‘fake’. Thus, their interest is not in the distinction between the fake and the real, but in the construction of the real or at least the taken-for-granted (cf. Latour, 1987). As noted above, narrative methods are not ‘just stories’ but legitimate means for representing, accounting for and constituting the past, present, and play of their charac ters, events, interconnections and fragmentations (see Boje, 1995, 2001). Within narrative, the past may affect the present to varying degrees depending on genre (see also Jeffcutt, 1994). Roemer (1995) for example pays particular attention to the deterministic role of the past in tragic narra tives and argues that here the plot embodies the past: Since plot preexists the action, we can think of it as embodying the past. Like time and process, the past constitutes necessity, for we can neither



escape nor undo it. We are the past . . . . In story, the plot is the past and our attempt to escape it is the action. Paradoxically, though the figures cannot escape it, their effort to do so is mandated by the past. (Roemer, 1995: 53, emphasis in original)

Overall, where there is no assumption of transcendent truth, the variability among research genres becomes more than an array of different methods for data capture in the positivist sense. Retrospective research methods do not merely assist in the investigation of a past reality but constitute the very nature of that reality from the position of the researcher. As an objective stance is no longer possible, questions of interest concern not error, construc tion or attribution but reflexivity in the sense of ‘the ability to be critical or suspicious of our own intellectual assumptions’ (Hassard, 1993: 12, with reference to Lawson, 1985). Method is thus not primarily a matter of ‘data management’ or the mech anics and logistics of data production/processing, but is a reflexive activ ity where empirical material calls for careful interpretation – a process in which the theoretical, political and ethical issues are central. (Alvesson and Deetz, 2000: 5)

Macbeth (2001) for example has argued that reflexivity has become a central topic in contemporary discussions of qualitative research and that positional reflexivity involves the researcher in efforts to examine how pace, biogra phy, and delineations of self and other combine to shape the nature of the research endeavor. The extent to which this reflexivity takes place is depen dent more upon the researcher than the method. Hall and Callery (2001) for example discuss various interpretations of grounded theory method, arguing that while some claim that grounded theory incorporates reflexivity, others treat interview and participant observation data as if they mirror informants’ realities. For others, even the extent to which reflexivity is possible is under question if one recognizes that there can be no unmediated truth and that ‘[n]o privileged position exists from which analysis might arbitrate’ (Hardy and Clegg, 1997: S5; cf. Lewis and Keleman, 2002). Thus there is also variety within this fourth position on retrospective research, and like each of the other three, it deserves fuller explication. In an effort to assist such endeavours, a short summary of each position is now presented to allow comparison of their similarities and differences.

Comparative Analysis In Table 1 each of our four positions on retrospective research is described and compared in terms of its method, ontology, epistemology, exemplars, variants, and potential contribution. While Controlling the Past, Interpreting


Method

4. Representing the past

3. Co-opting the Past

2. Interpreting the Past

Realist

Ontology

Problematization of time and research on time

Anti-realist

Understanding of the Historical present is informed by the realism construction of past reality Causal explanations linking Realist past and present

1. Controlling the Past Attempts to maximize accurate recall or to reveal potential sources of error or bias

Position

Table 1: Comparison of positions on retrospective research

Constructionist

Mixed: Positivist; Interpretive

Mixed: Interpretive; Retroductive

Positivist

Epistemology

Variants

Studies of hindsight bias Degree of control of (e.g. Fischhoff, 1975) emphasis on design, measures and methods to improve validity and reliability Sensemaking Interpretive; Social (e.g. Weick, 1995) constructionist; Critical realist Attribution theory Social representations; (e.g. Kelley, 1973) Narrative accounts; Some overlap with Positions 1 and 2 Fragmented narrative Possibility and nature of methodologies reflexivity (e.g. Boje, 2001)

Exemplars

Of interest for illustration of questioning of the takenfor-granted

Necessary; Valued for a more manageable present

Necessary; Valued for better futures

Marginal; research Best avoided

Potential contribution of retrospective research

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the Past and Co-opting the Past all exhibit realist ontologies, Representing the Past differs in that it takes an anti-realist stance, one that, in Houston’s (2001: 847) terms, may emphasize either the role of ‘human agency’ in con stituting the social world (after, to varying degrees, Giddens, 1991; Mead, 1962) or the discursive shaping of the social world, and, indeed, human subjectivity, by knowledge and power (Foucault, 1972). It also adopts a con structionist epistemology that differs from the social constructionism of the second position, Interpreting the Past. As noted above, there is a distinct dif ference between the two, for Interpreting the Past is based on the assumption that constructions of the past inform a fuller understanding of the present, and that such understanding can be of assistance in determining a better future. The past may well exist as real, even though its construction may vary depending on interpretive, retroductive or sensemaking processes. In contrast, the fourth position, Representing the Past, is anti-realist in both its ontology and epistemology, and has no progressive intent. Unlike the first position, its proponents would not view retrospective research as something to be avoided, but as primarily of local interest for questioning the taken-forgranted in research methods. It is the second and third positions, Interpreting the Past and Co-opting the Past, in which retrospective research is not only of interest but also of central importance. In both, this importance derives from the value of interpretations and explanations of the past. In Co-opting the Past, such interpretations have instrumental value for managing the present, while in Interpreting the Past that value relates to the future and may be emancipatory or even generative (cf. Gergen and Thatchenkery, 1996). While the more interpretive variants of the second position are informed by what Habermas called a ‘practical interest’, ‘concerned with the understanding of the historical and traditional context of human life’ (Alvesson, 1991: 216), the emphasis on management across most of the second and third positions adopts instead a ‘technical interest’, ‘which aims to find laws or law-like relationships, through which processes can be manipulated and controlled’ (Alvesson, 1991: 216).

Conclusions This paper has examined an area of management and organzational research generally considered of marginal relevance to mainstream professional practice – retrospective research. Such research receives relatively little atten tion in either the professional research journals or methodology textbooks. The paper has attempted to fill the void by developing a taxonomic classifica tion of the use of retrospective research methods. The aim has been to provide a focus for the future employment of retrospective methods in organizational analysis.


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In so doing, we have identified, described and analysed four positions on retrospective research: Controlling the Past, in which attempts are made to maximize accurate recall or to reveal potential sources of error or bias; Interpreting the Past, in which understanding of the present is informed by the construction of past reality; Co-opting the Past, in which causal explanations link the past and the present; and Representing the Past, which involves the problematization of time and research on time. These positions have been compared in terms of method, ontology, epistemology, exemplars, variants and potential contribution. This comparative analysis has attempted to draw out some the main methodological implications for the practice of retrospec tive research in organizational analysis. Of course, there are many limitations to this analysis. First, and as with any typology or list of classifications, this one includes ‘tacit messages’ such as that positions not on this list are less critical than those on it (cf. Weick, 1995b: 388). It is largely dependent for example on a review of qualitative research and may thus exclude or fudge the subtlety of positions within or outside what has been termed Controlling the Past. Second, it is informed largely by studies within the traditions of organizational behaviour, orga nization theory and social psychology and will undoubtedly gain from the inclusion of work from other disciplines. Third, and with reference to its inclusions rather than exclusions, each of the four positions incorporates several variants. As such, the classificatory system used here is, of necessity, tentative rather than exhaustive. Within these limits, however, we feel the paper makes several con tributions. It takes seriously an area of research methods that tends to be marginalized and regarded as relatively unimportant by mainstream man agement researchers. This is done with the aim of stimulating others to take an interest in retrospective research, and to adopt and develop retrospective research practices in line with their particular ontological and epistemologi cal assumptions. For those who already do retrospective research, the paper provides a point of departure for the debate and refinement of the categories proposed here. For example, it identifies some unlikely paradigmatic bed fellows within the second category of Interpreting the Past, grouping inter pretive, social constructionist and critical retrospective studies in terms of a common interest in the creation of better futures (cf. Alvesson and Deetz, 2000). No doubt, many will find this alignment unusual, if not provocative. In addition, the separation of generative postmodern work (e.g. Cooperrider and Srivastva, 1987; Gergen, 2001; Gergen and Thatchenkery, 1996) into this second category and away from the fourth classification, Representing the Past, may also invoke further discussion. The distinction has been made due to the normative intent of such work, which is distinct from the prob lematization emphasis of the fourth category. More generally, it is hoped that the paper will encourage further inter est in the micropractices of other research methods that occupy a marginal



or at least non-traditional place in management and organization studies. While narrative methods have been gaining ground (e.g. Boje, 2001; Czar niawska, 1998), and discursive and rhetorical studies have attracted consid erable attention (e.g. Abrahamson, 1997; Grant et al., 1998, 2004; Jackson, 1999; Kieser, 1997; Wolfram Cox, 2004), aesthetic endeavours are perhaps still borderline (e.g. Gagliardi, 1996; Linstead and Höpfl, 2000; Strati, 1999; Wolfram Cox and Minahan, 2002, 2005) and worthy of further review and development. The challenge is for research methods that occupy such a mar ginal, liminal or non-traditional place in management and organization stud ies to be developed with care.

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9 The New Structuralism in Organizational Theory Michael Lounsbury and Marc Ventresca

O

ver the past decade there has been a gradual reemergence and revitalization of social structural approaches to organizational analysis (Lounsbury and Ventresca, 2002). This new structuralist sensibility in organizational theory draws inspiration from a rich conceptual and methodological toolkit, energized by contemporary social theorists such as Bourdieu (e.g. 1984), and is taking shape at the interface of a number of sociological subfields including research on organizations, stratification, culture and politics (e.g. Breiger, 1995; Mohr, 2000). In organizational theory, this new structuralism has become most evident in the work of institutional scholars who view organizational action as fundamentally shaped by broader social and cultural processes (e.g. Scott, 1995). In contrast to perspectives such as resource dependence (Pfeffer and Salancik, 1978), transaction cost analysis (Williamson, 1975), and organizational demography (Hannan and Freeman, 1977), which focus on concrete exchange processes within and between organizations, the new institutionalism is explicitly anti-reductionist and rejects the causal primacy of efficiency or narrow selfinterest (Schneiberg and Clemens, forthcoming). Even though institutional analysis is well known for the study of legitimacy and isomorphism (Hirsch and Lounsbury, 1997), new structuralist thought has spurred the development of field-analytic approaches that examine the co-evolutionary dynamics of logics, actors, practices and governance structures (e.g. Haveman and Rao, 1997; Thornton and Ocasio, 1999; Scott et al., 2000; Jones, 2001).



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In this essay, we situate these intellectual shifts in a historical context through a review of the development of organizational theory since the mid20th century, when scholars were concerned about the role of organizations in society with a big ‘S’ (Michels, 1949; Selznick, 1949; Gouldner, 1954; Stinchcombe, 1965). Our review shows that through the 1970s and 1980s, the study of organizations in the US became increasingly disconnected from the study of societal stratification, politics and social change, which were the core problematics in classic studies of organizations and society. Empirical research on organizations became dominated by a conceptualization of interorganizational relations as highly rationalistic and instrumental, a conceptualization that continues to provide a central imagery in our field. Yet, in the 1990s the new structuralism gradually made its way into organizational theory, challenging narrower conceptions of organizations and their environments. Unlike mid-century approaches to social structure, however, these new conceptualizations include more direct consideration of cultural processes and meaning systems (Meyer et al., 1987; Friedland and Alford, 1991), including a cultural-cognitive perspective (DiMaggio, 1997). For new structuralists, social structure includes not only distribution of resources, but also meanings along with the everyday social practice that support and can contribute to the reshaping of social structure (Bourdieu, 1977; Clemens, 1997; Stryker, 1994). While our historical arguments are centered mainly on developments in the US and North America, new structuralist research also involves theorizing from communities of scholars in Europe, Canada, and the Pacific region, the influence of Bourdieu being a prime example. After our historical review, we offer an overview of key aspects of the new structuralist agenda and highlight how new structuralist thought is reshaping the institutional analysis of organizations. We argue that the time is ripe for organizational theorists to renew their attention to broader social structures and to bring ‘society’ back to center stage. We review a sampling of recent work in this genre to demonstrate the utility of the new structuralism in organizational theory and then suggest new spaces for development. To those who despair at the apparent restricted ambition of organizational research exemplified in many of the prominent journals in our field, take note that the social structural tradition is alive and well!

Social Structure and the Development of Organizational Theory The development of sociological approaches to organizations in the 1950s and 1960s was informed by a deep engagement with the work of Max Weber. While Weber is well known for his work on bureaucracy, he situated his theorization of organizational processes within a broader political economy framework, emphasizing aspects of social structure such as power, domination, authority, and legitimacy. This engagement with the corpus of Weber’s This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.

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work helped to forge a collective sociological imagination that spawned an approach to organizational analysis intertwined with the study of broader political processes and related societal-level social structures (e.g. Selznick, 1949; Gouldner, 1954; Bendix, 1956; Lipset et al., 1956; Stinchcombe, 1959). For example, Selznick’s (1949) classic study of the Tennessee Valley Authority showed how organizations are explicitly enmeshed in broader political negotiations that involve some degree of cooptation. Focusing more on the constitutive power of societal beliefs, Bendix (1956) helped to forge a comparative tradition that highlighted how variations in state-building projects and associated ideas of authority resulted in distinct configurations of work and management practices. The development of rich empirical case studies was a point of convergence for much of this work, which intended to generate concepts for a middle-range theory of organizations as complex, often contentious contexts for action, as well as collective actors. A legacy of the Mertonian tradition, much of this research resisted the high abstractions of dominant social theory and sociological theorizing to cultivate a more grounded understanding of how organizations mattered for social change as a result of relatively overt struggles over material resources and control. While social structure was often treated as a social fact with general analytic consequences for organizations, the empirical studies investigated how the interplay of interests, intentional choices, and broader political dynamics resulted in particular patterns and impact of social structure. Given their interests in broader social organization, mid-century sociologists did not aim to build a synthetic theory of organization and rarely studied organizational phenomena outside of a consideration of broader societal values, commitments and institutional arrangements. Instead, organizations were seen as sites for understanding the constitution and consequences of power, always situated and embedded in broader social structures. These case studies were important because they challenged the overly rationalist conceptions of organization built from narrower US readings of Weber’s ideal-type theory of bureaucracy. By emphasizing organizational activity as embedded in broader social structure, these studies offered a basis for empirically grounded skepticism about a conception of organizations as simply a social ‘tool’ that extended the capacities of individuals and that could be characterized by unitary purpose, and integrated in tightly-coupled formal structures (Scott, 1992). They focused on work processes and on the varieties of social organization of such activity. They recognized and provided explanations for conflict and change by emphasizing the dynamics of complex organizational systems, as well as how authority relations took shape and became manifest in meaningful contexts of beliefs, ideologies, and cultural models. Research in organizational analysis outside the US developed and reinforced similar analytic sensibilities, research designs, and core problems of society and organization (e.g. Crozier, 1964). By the early 1970s, however, sociologists and increasingly researchers in management and other professional schools generated a distinctly different This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.

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set of theoretical arguments and empirical research traditions (Scott, 1992). A new tradition of ‘organization theory’ paid direct attention to formal organizations across settings and sectors, often with a reforming or meliorative focus: understanding organization structures in order to better manage them. For example, Peter Blau developed propositional theories about formal organizational structure and administrative capacity (Blau and Scott, 1962; Blau and Schoenherr, 1971). Other researchers developed theories of general contingency to explain patterns of organization structure, and reduced their focus on general societal structures either as a driver of formal organization structures or as impacted by the formal features of organizational hierarchy, size, and complexity. Instead of focusing on how social structure shaped organizations, contingency theorists built on the administrative theories of Taylor, Barnard and Fayol to identify optimal or necessary structure-context congruence and develop prescriptions for managers to take effective actions and enhance the performance of their organizations. Thompson’s (1967) synthesis of propositions about environments, technology, and organization structures exemplified a high point in this tradition and presaged modern ‘open systems’ theories of organizations and environments that came to intellectual and professional prominence in the late 1970s and since (Aldrich and Pfeffer, 1976; Scott, 1992). This new work was facilitated by the growing allure of social exchange approaches to power and animated by aspirations for more parsimonious quantitative models and the development of a more synthetic, and universal, organization theory. For example, Warriner et al.’s (1981) call for the creation of a standardized approach to the analysis of organizations that would unify the field and enable the progressive cumulating of knowledge offers a prototypical view of where the core of organizational theory was headed. The pathos that guided this shift in sensibilities restricted conceptions of politics, resources, and their interplay in societal context. Weberian concerns about the institutional and legal bases of organizations became implicit, typically assumed or unexamined. Theoretical and empirical work paid less attention to wider societal patterns and distributions of resources. Concomitantly, mid-century attention to social structure became narrowly transformed into a more sterile conception of organizational environment as an abstract, exogenous force that constrained organizational behavior.

The Institutionalization of Organization Theory in the US True to our arguments, it is important to reflect on the institutional contexts of these developments. In US sociology departments, organizational theory as a synthetic research tradition has had limited spread since the aspiration to build a theory of complex and formal organization, latterly



organization theory, had been historically contested by a wider sociological community skeptical of this abstraction (see Perrow, 1986, 2002). Some specialty concentrations in organizational analysis began to appear in sociology departments in the late 1960s, often accompanied by foundation and federal support for research in applied areas such as education, mental health and policy services. But one is hard pressed to find many mainstream organizational theorists located in sociology departments today. In the 1970s, the few sociologists that specialized in organization theory began to migrate to professional schools, most prominently to schools of management and business. One of the consequences of this out-migration was that business schools became the dominant site for organizational theory discourse and development. Over the next couple of decades, research in organization theory increasingly concentrated on issues of relevance to managers and leaders of for-profit enterprises, which in turn focused attention on questions of internal organization structure and process as well as the relationship between organizations and their resource environments. As Stern and Barley (1996) passionately argued, the study of how organizations related to broader social structures became a neglected topic that was often derided and viewed as an anachronism among mainstream organizational researchers who valorized the development of knowledge about strategy and performance. One of the main infrastructural factors driving this shift in research sensibilities away from the study of social structure pertains to efforts of organizational scholars to professionalize their work around issues of management and organizational effectiveness (Lounsbury and Ventresca, 2002). This professionalization mainly occurred through the Academy of Management, the leading professional association for management researchers in the US (Wrege, 1988). In particular, the creation of the Organizational and Management Theory division in 1971 marked the formation of a subfield for organizational theorists which included all the self-conscious professional apparatus for managing and maintaining jurisdictional boundaries – professional prizes, organizations, informal colleges, etc. With a few notable exceptions (e.g. Aldrich, 1972; DiMaggio, 1983; Kanter, 1977; Hirsch, 1972; Zald and Berger, 1978), this boundary-making reduced interactions between organization theorists and sociological researchers specializing in the study of stratification, culture and other subfields. The formalization of the Academy of Management dovetailed with the rise to prominence of leading management schools, many of which had hired social science disciplinary-trained faculty by the 1970s. The incorporation of scholarly researchers from disciplines such as sociology and psychology into business schools was pragmatically catalyzed by the Ford and Carnegie foundation reports (Gordon and Howell, 1959; Pierson, 1959) that suggested that this was a key way to transform the existing vocational business school model into a more prestigious research-focused one. These developments This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.

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changed the terms and stakes of organization theory significantly since the presence of research-focused, Academy-affiliated researchers solidified a space for the valorization of managerially centered theories that emphasized instrumental notions of organization and their exchange relations with other organizations in their environment. Hence, by the 1970s, there was a distinctive trend away from asking big questions about organizations and society (Perrow, 1986) and towards producing narrowly oriented research in the idiom of normal science. While this is clearly evident in contingency theoretic formulations and much of mainstream organizational research, even more sociological approaches to organizations became codified and packaged into standard research strategies that smacked of rational-functionalism and economic determinism (Ventresca and Mohr, 2002). This was quite explicit in organizational ecology where empirical analyses often seemed like a variant of industrial organization economics, focusing on how competitive interactions among producer organizations are shaped by industry-level resource availability (Hannan and Freeman, 1989). Network analysis relied on the conceptual apparatus of resource dependence theory to examine how an organization’s network position affects its behavior and performance outcomes (e.g. Burt, 1992; Mizruchi and Schwartz, 1987). New institutionalists in organizational analysis conceptualized organizations as legitimacy-seekers that became more homogeneous in appearance as a result of isomorphic processes (DiMaggio and Powell, 1983; Strang and Soule, 1998). In short, as organizational theory emerged as a management subfield, conceptualizations of both social structure and organizations became increasingly instrumental, driven by functional imperatives, and animated by the prominence of narrow exchange approaches to behavior (e.g. Emerson, 1962). In these treatments, social structure finds expression only in a conception of the ‘environment’ that is abstract, unitary and exogenous to the actual workings of organizations and social life (see Scott, 1995). The instrumental approach de-emphasized the insights of political economy approaches to organizations (Perrow, 2002; Stern, 1979; Zald, 1970), which underscored complex organizational arrangements in heterogeneous relation to varied constituencies. In addition, prominence was given to a notion of controllable ‘uncertainty’ in preference to the recognition of fundamental ambiguity and loose-coupling that inspired earlier works in the behavioral and cognitive traditions (March and Olsen, 1976; Meyer and Rowan, 1977; Weick, 1995). These shifts reinforced a conception of organizations as goaldriven unitary entities interlocked in concrete exchange relations. Efforts to construct a ‘parsimonious and elegant’ organization theory were not entirely uncontested (Burrell and Morgan, 1979). While the core of organizational theorists in the US wanted to develop a more positivistic science, progressing by hypothesis-testing and adjudicating among competing theoretical claims, social constructionists argued that such efforts were This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.


inherently misguided given the ambiguous nature of organizational phenomena, which was shaped by social and cultural meanings, including the meaning-making of organizational theorists. For example, in reviewing research on internalization – bringing activities from an organization’s environment into the boundaries of a firm – Astley (1985) highlighted the pervasiveness of multiple analytical interpretations of the same empirical phenomenon. He concluded: . . . It is quite possible that any one instance of internalization may simultaneously exhibit all of the empirical elements needed to lend support to each of these respective theories [absorption of critical contingencies, adjustment of portfolios, efficient allocation of resources, and political control by elite giant corporations], in which case each theory would capture a different aspect of the phenomenon. This, however, is not the point. Rather, the key issue is that different observers tend to apply favored theoretical perspectives in a more or less exclusive manner. (Astley, 1985: 500)

Nonetheless, organizational theorists generally neglected the insight that wider environments, including the researchers’, provide constitutional materials for organizations – and that particular elements, ideologies and rationales are contingent, time-dependent, and potentially in conflict one with another. Rather, research began to focus on hyperrationality and resources as the main drivers of structure and activity, without sufficient attention to how social structure shapes behavior and mediates the effects of resources – as well as how resources and rationality are institutionally contingent (e.g. Bendix, 1956; Dobbin, 1994; Douglas, 1986; Hamilton and Biggart, 1988). By truncating the sociological imagination to functionalist conceptions of social structure and reducing conceptions of organization to objectifiable and tractable measurements, organizational theorists sidelined concerns with history, context, and more situated, relational approaches to social analysis.

The New Structuralism and the Renewal of Structural Approaches to Organizations Despite the apparent dominance of instrumental thinking in contemporary organizational theory, we see a broader dialogue emerging that is animated by concerns with broader societal issues, theories of practice and fields, and related methods. These new structuralist directions involve a shift towards richer conceptualizations of social structure and process that have taken shape at the intersection of the sociology of culture, stratification and politics, and institutional analysis (see Mohr, 2000 for a review). Contemporary practice theorists reject ‘older’ structuralist lines of investigation rooted in the work of Lévi-Strauss (1963) and the early work of Foucault (1972)


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that suggest that discourse can be studied as a cultural phenomenon that is discrete and separate from social interaction.1 Practice theorists believe that cultural systems are ‘structured as an embodiment of the range of activities, social conflicts, and moral dilemmas that individuals are compelled to engage with as they go about negotiating the sorts of everyday events that confront them in their lives’ (Mohr, 1998: 353). Similar to social constructivist and related interpretive approaches to social analysis (e.g. Berger and Luckmann, 1967; Burrell and Morgan, 1979), practice theorists focus attention on ontological problems having to do with how conceptions of reality are rooted in broader social and historical processes that operate beyond the direct consciousness of actors but are visibly instantiated in daily activities (Meyer et al., 1987). In exploring the deeper cultural categories and meanings that inform practices in fields, social structural researchers are moving towards a more direct examination of social ontologies that aim to ‘uncover the rules that bound the objects populating our natural and social worlds’ (Ruef, 1999: 1405). As opposed to theorizing organizations as hyperrational and driven by functional imperatives, much of this research situates rational action within broader belief systems such as institutional logics. Friedland and Alford (1991: 243) define logic as ‘supraorganizational patterns of human activity by which individuals and organizations produce and reproduce their material subsistence and organize time and space.’ At the level of societies, the capitalist market, bureaucratic state and the nuclear family can be conceptualized as logics that constitute the interests of actors and thereby shape cognition and action. As Friedland (2002: 383) has argued, . . . institutional theory is not about the leftovers of rational action, the ways in which cultural conventions rush in where means-ends relations are opaque. Rather, institutional logics constitute the cosmology within which means are meaningful, where means-ends couplets are thought appropriate and become the naturalized, unthought conditions of social action, performing the substances at stake within them.

Unlike most theoretical approaches in the social sciences, practice theorists do not assume that actors have any real essence, but instead regard them as constituted by the broader scale arrangements within which they are embedded. The concept of field helps to provide a systematic approach to the employment of these theoretical commitments. Pierre Bourdieu claims that: The notion of field reminds us that the true object of social science is not the individual, even though one cannot construct a field if not through individuals, since the information necessary for statistical analysis is generally attached to individuals or institutions. It is the field which is primary and must be the focus of the research operations. This does not imply



that individuals are mere ‘illusions,’ that they do not exist: they exist as agents – and not as biological individuals, actors, or subjects – who are socially constituted as active and acting in the field under consideration by the fact that they possess the necessary properties to be effective, to produce effects, in this field. And it is knowledge of the field itself in which they evolve that allows us best to grasp the roots of their singularity, their point of view or position (in a field) from which their particular vision of the world (and of the field itself) is constructed. (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992: 107)

Reflecting on the work of Bourdieu, Swartz (1997: 285) notes that ‘at the heart of Bourdieu’s sociological inquiry is the question of why forms of social inequality persist without powerful resistance. The answer, Bourdieu argues, lies in how cultural resources, practices, and institutions function to maintain unequal social relations.’ Power is therefore embedded in cultural rules and meaning systems that overlie societal stratification (e.g. classes) and make unequal resource distributions and allocation systems seem natural or inevitable much of the time. While there is a strong emphasis on covert forms of power (Lukes, 1974; Stryker, 2002) in the work of Bourdieu and field theoretic/practice research, it would be a mistake to view this research as taking an overly sanitized view of power relations since concerns about power and stratification are central. In fact, much of this research also explicitly focalizes overt forms of power by analyzing the origins of logics and other cultural meaning systems that constitute actors and valorize certain dimensions of inequality over others. In addition, as Bourdieu’s work emphasizes, there is constant struggle at the boundaries that demarcate social space, highlighting that social change often occurs as various social groups renegotiate the meaning of boundaries (see Lamont and Molnár, 2002 for a review of research on boundaries). Further, by revealing hidden, and subversive, forms of power embedded in culture, the new structuralist research program can foster a more critical and reflective set of analyses that can inform policy efforts to alleviate the most insidious aspects of inequality and related forms of domination. Analytically, new structuralists draw on a wide variety of relational methods such as multidimensional scaling, cluster analysis, network analysis and correspondence analysis to study how cultural beliefs and social relationships provide distinct yet overlapping dimensions that structure practices in fields (Mohr, 1998). Also on the horizon are important new breakthroughs in the development of more dynamic forms of network analysis as well as agent-based and related evolutionary modeling techniques (see Macy and Willer, 2002; Padgett, 2003; Powell et al., 2003; Watts, 2003), which will no doubt help to expand our ability to theorize about mechanisms of institutional change in a much more grounded, yet non-reductive way. These methods take inspiration from network analysis, but have been adapted to study the evolution of practices in a way that takes the structure–agency duality seriously (Bourdieu, 1984; Breiger, 2000).


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Field-level analyses employing practice theories and relational methods expand the scope of social structural analysis by redirecting attention to temporal and spatial variations in meaning and the ways in which actors, enmeshed in relatively durable power relations, engage in continual struggles for positional advantage. These field approaches promise to usefully extend analyses of social structure by providing a systematic means for exploring and uncovering the dimensions of similarity and difference that structure conflict and social interaction patterns. Altogether, these new analytical approaches provide methodological rigor to the study of culture and, more important, foster deeper connections between theories of practice (e.g. Bourdieu, 1977) and the analysis of organizations and society. Consider, first, new structuralist empirical studies that have become an important part of the organizational theory landscape via discourse in the institutional analysis of organizations. For instance, Mohr and GuerraPearson (forthcoming) show how meaning-making activities that defined the status categories of welfare relief recipients facilitated the replacement of settlement houses with social work bureaucracies as the key organizational solution in the emerging field of community social welfare services around the turn of the 20th century. Through a multidimensional scaling analysis of welfare organization discourse, they showed how demographic categories (e.g. men, women, boys, girls, etc.), classes of social problems encountered (e.g. criminality, delinquency, disability, etc.), and technologies of organizational action (e.g. general relief, employment assistance, characterbuilding, etc.) formed a matrix that organized relief recipients and shaped the provision of welfare services. In a similar vein, Ruef (2000) tracked how changes in medical journal discourse shaped the ecological dynamics of organizational forms in the US healthcare field after the passage of Medicare/ Medicaid Acts in 1965. Relational methods have also been used to uncover logics and docu ment more fine-grained dynamics that unfold over shorter time periods. For instance, through an analysis of Congressional testimony on solid waste in 1969 and 1970, Lounsbury et al. (2002) showed that incineration became defined as a standard practice as a result of the dominance of a market efficiency logic over a competing central governmental logic that provided an alternative belief system that might have led to the development of different practice standards. This occurred even though public hearings and discourse suggested that incineration and recycling practices were equally viable in the late 1960s. Methodologically, they coded Congressional testimony to create an affiliation matrix of testifying witnesses and their espoused views on various solid waste techniques and then used multidimensional scaling techniques to uncover logics underpinning the centralization of the US solid waste management field. In an insightful analysis of the cultural and organizational dynamics underpinning the 1992 Brazilian impeachment of President Fernando Collor



de Melo, Mische and Pattison (2000) highlighted how pro- and antiimpeachment organizational coalitions formed as a result of discursive positioning in the field of Brazilian politics. They drew on public relations materials, pamphlets, resolutions, and other organizational documents through Galois lattice techniques (Duquenne, 1991; Freeman and White, 1993), to show how a wide variety of organizational forms, the interconnections and alliances between them, and their discursive claims about the particular kinds of projects in which they were engaged, shaped the impeachment dynamic. Moving to more organizationally centered analyses, institutional scholars have developed the concept of organizational field to direct attention to how broader social forces shape the actions of similarly situated organizations (Hoffman, 1999). Different from institutional analyses of organizations in the 1980s, however, which detailed processes of legitimacy and isomorphism by depicting institutions as constraining and institutionalization as a binary outcome variable (Tolbert and Zucker, 1996), field approaches have redirected researchers towards the explicit examination of variation across time and space (e.g. Greenwood and Hinings, 1996; Ruef and Scott, 1998). Organizational fields have been defined as both the organizations that produce common outputs, whether these are automobiles, social services, or spiritual salvation, as well as the organizations that supply resources, effect constraints, or pose contingencies, particularly government agencies and trade associations (DiMaggio, 1983: 149). Field analyses require attention to both the cultural beliefs and material interactions that stabilize practices among actors in a field as well as exogenous factors such as governmental regulation, economic conditions and consumer demand. For example, Jones (2001) showed how a shift from a technology to content focus in early 20th-century American film was driven by entrepreneurs with different career histories. Her study highlights how a co-evolutionary perspective on entrepreneurial careers, institutional rules and competitive dynamics is more generally useful for understanding the dynamics of emerging industries. Shifting attention to how specific organizational practices change in tandem with shifts in logics, Thornton and Ocasio (1999) demonstrated that a change from an editorial to market logic in higher education publishing led to lower-level organizational changes in executive succession. Rather than tracking shifts in dominant logics and associated forms and practices, Leblebici and colleagues (1991) argued that changes in practices in the radio broadcasting field occurred as a result of innovations at the periphery of the field, which migrated to the core after they had been shown to be effective. Among several important contributions, the study highlighted how the existing social structure of a field – the historical, network, and cultural elements that comprise field ‘texture’ at any particular time – shaped the sources and efficacy of non-routine action. In still another example, Lounsbury (2001) showed how an environmental social movement organization helped


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to instantiate ecologically committed recycling activists in bureaucratic educational organizations. He focused on how broader field-level processes and actors shape variation in organizational work practices. While field analyses are still a nascent development within organization theory, the embrace of the concept of organization field has occurred with a concomitant broadening out of institutional research circles to include sociologists and other new structuralist scholars who have been focusing on issues and debates in cultural and political analysis. Encounters between these research communities suggest the development of a more sociological orientation to organizational analysis that harks back to the classic social structural studies of mid-century. However, they also promise richer and more nuanced approaches for the understanding of social structure that will advance the study of institutions by enabling more systematic studies of social change and organizations.

Hopes for the Future Mid-century sociologists faced few subfield boundaries that segregated the analysis of organizations from politics, culture, social movements and stratification. Our hope is that the new structuralism will catalyze a movement to eradicate, or at least make more porous, current boundaries dividing the study of organizations from broader societal problematics. Even though we have emphasized the contributions in this regard of new structuralist conceptualizations and methods incorporated into institutional analysis, we also see some encouraging examples in other domains of organizational theory. For example, the analytical engine of organizational demography has recently been extended to analyze the dynamics of labor markets across firms (e.g. Haveman and Cohen, 1994). Network researchers have expanded the scope of their work in a more sociologically rich direction by developing the concepts of embeddedness and social capital (e.g. Adler and Kwon, 2002; Dacin et al., 1999; Granovetter, 1985; Zukin and DiMaggio, 1990). Taking network ideas in a more historical direction, Padgett and Ansell (1993) advanced a multi-network conception of social structure and robust social action to show how Cosimo de’ Medici was able to gain and maintain political control in 15th-century Florence by managing network disjunctures within the elite. However, the embrace of broader societal concerns by organizational theorists in the US remains quite limited overall. Nonetheless, we believe that the seeds for a broader appreciation of a more robust social structural research agenda are in place. Yet, to be clear, we do not advocate the replacement of a one-sided view of organizations mainly influenced by instrumental exchange processes with another one-sided view of organizations as culturally constituted. Following social theorists such as Bourdieu (1984) and Sewell (1992), we view symbolic and material realms



as mutually constituted and contend that analyses of organizations that fail to account for broader social structural processes are woefully incomplete. Further, we believe that both overt and covert forms of power need to be foregrounded. Let us outline a few organizational research problematics and directions suggested by new structuralist scholarship and that have already begun to take shape in concrete ways.

The Social Construction of Performance and Rationality While much of mainstream organizational theory studies performance in a highly unreflective manner, the new structuralist agenda urges that more attention be paid to the social construction of performance and how the ability to judge performance or efficiency depends upon the kind of institutional infrastructure that is built (Polanyi, 1944). As Fligstein (1990) showed, the goals and performance-drivers of corporations changed over the course of the 20th century as dominant leadership backgrounds and related conceptions of control shifted from operations to sales and marketing to finance. Similar arguments have been made by new structuralists about the situatedness of rationality (see Friedland, 2002) which has, in turn, led new institutionalists in organizational analysis to rethink the distinctions they had made between the ideas of technical efficiency and institutional forces in the 1980s, and focus on how technical considerations such as performance are institutionally constructed. As Richard Scott has argued, . . . who has the right to have interests, what interests are regarded as reasonable or appropriate, and what means can be used to pursue them are all products of socially constructed rules: Institutional rules invent ration ality, defining who the actors are and determining the logics that guide their actions. This means that, as the rational choice theorists argue, if actors pursuing interests take actions to create institutional frameworks, this can occur only under particular circumstances in which selected actors are constituted as having those interests and powers. Where social agency is located – who has the right to take self-determined and selfinterested actions – is expected to vary over time and place. (1995: 140)

The Study of Variation While little progress has been made on the study of how performance and rationality are socially constructed, following Scott, we believe that organizational theory can make headway in these directions by focusing on the study of variation – both temporal and spatial. Along the lines of Fligstein’s (1990) research mentioned above, a variety of scholars have demonstrated how temporal variation in institutional circumstances shapes decision-making


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processes that guide organizational behavior (e.g. Leblebici et al., 1991; Scott et al., 2000; Thornton and Ocasio, 1999). Other research has shown that institutional shifts can have consequential effects on the survival of organizational forms (Haveman and Rao, 1997; Ruef, 2000). A focus on spatial variation can facilitate analyses of how different positions in a field, relational connections or identities shape whether organizations adopt novel practices and how they then implement them (Carroll and Hannan, 2000; DiMaggio and Mullen, 2000; Lounsbury, 2001; Schneiberg and Bartley, 2001). Too much organizational research on diffusion and population ecology has analyzed organizations as unitary actors. Recently, Strang and Macy (2001) argued that research on diffusion that has found evidence of contagion may in fact be wrong, or at least misguided, since such empirical work often lacks serious attention to organizational decision-making processes. We are similarly skeptical of much of the research that has stressed contagion, and suggest that researchers engage in much more fine grained analyses to uncover substantive aspects of spatial variation leading to more nuanced explanations of organizational behavior not necessarily in opposition to general notions of rationality or sensible action. Building on these directions, we especially need focused attention on how social and organizational change is influenced and shaped by multiple forms of rationality (Stryker, 2000; Weber, 1978) and how organizations come to define their interests in the first place (Clemens, 2002). As new structuralist research suggests, this requires an analysis that integrates attention to culture, politics and history. Stryker (2002: 176) has argued that crucial to the study of . . . the emergence, success or failure of any organizational form is the specification of relevant (multi-level and intersecting) lines of political conflict, along with corresponding identification of the relevant interests, values and cognitive schema at stake and the relevant resources available for mobilization and counter-mobilization oriented to these interests, values and schemas . . . [this] requires deep historical knowledge. It is impossible to apply the conceptual apparatus of politics unless the analyst can give concrete historical specificity to actors, interests, resources, cognitive schema, etc.

The Study of Organizations and Occupations Further, while the role of disenfranchised actors has been neglected in organizational theory (Lounsbury and Ventresca, 2002; Perrow, 2002), the new structuralism highlights the usefulness in embedding organizational analysis within the broader study of stratification systems (e.g. Breiger, 2002; Sacks, 2002). One obvious and important way to make stratification issues more central would be to reconnect the study of organizations and occupations.



Even though organizations and occupations used to be studied simultaneously (e.g. Zald, 1971), they became increasingly separate intellectual realms and professional domains since mid-century with organizational sociologists employing structural approaches to the analysis of rational bureaucracies, while sociologists of work mainly engaged in interpretive studies of workers inside single organizations (Hirsch, 1985; for alternatives, see Musselin, 2003 and the integrated tradition of sociology of work and organizations at CSO/CNRS in Paris). If organizational theorists began to focus attention on the dynamics of occupations and organizations in fields, extant theories of institutional process could be usefully extended to account for conflict over authority and jurisdiction (Abbott, 1988). A central analytical focus could be on how status competition among different kinds of organizations and specialized occupations opens up opportunities for upward and downward mobility as new actors emerge, others die, and as boundaries structuring the organization of work get refashioned (Lounsbury, 2002). New expert occupations can often usher in new sets of practices and provide an important mechanism that drives institutional change processes such as the reconfiguration of fields. While organizational institutionalists have stressed the role of professionals in catalyzing institutional transformation, much could be gained by focusing more on how the multiplex relationships among organizations, work and knowledge are interpenetrated in fields. Further, research in the sociology of work suggests that it may also be useful to draw on ethnographic approaches to the study of work and organization to develop a deep understanding of the dynamic interrelationship between knowledge construction processes and the realignment and transformation of social structure (Lounsbury and Kaghan, 2001). This would enable researchers to elaborate social structural dynamics in a more grounded way.

The Study of Social Activism Another line of inquiry gaining momentum attends to the role of social activism and movements in transforming institutions and organizations (Clemens, 1997; Davis and McAdam, 2000; Rao et al., 2000). An explicit focus on how social-movement-like efforts reshape institutions concretely returns conflict and struggle to the analysis of organizations and further underscores how grievances and dissent foster identity and resource mobilization processes challenging extant rules and beliefs. Recent studies illustrate the benefits of integrating social movements analysis with institutional ideas by showing how broader societal mobilization enables the rise of new kinds of industries (e.g. Schneiberg, 2002; Lounsbury et al., 2003). Schneiberg (2002), for instance, used historical methods and time series analyses to show how the growth of mutual fire insurers in the late 19th and early 20th centuries


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was influenced by the movement-like activity of a variety of actors such as property owners and agrarian groups that resisted corporate development and enabled more decentralized and cooperative forms of economic development. Developing the concept of field frame, Lounsbury et al. (2003) tracked an archaeology of recycling practices across sectors to show how activists in the 1960s and 1970s promoting recycling provided crucial cultural materials, social infrastructure, and practical innovations that enabled the later rise of a commercial recycling industry in the US solid waste management field. The efforts of activists made available alternatives to the industry consensus that had marginalized recycling in favor of incineration and landfilling as standard solutions. While early community recyclers had promoted non-profit forms of organizing with social justice aims, the development of curbside collection programs in collaboration with waste haulers, the rise of Not In My Back Yard (NIMBY) social activism challenging incinerator sitings, and a new model of organized recycling politics spurred the development of a for-profit recycling industry that has largely displaced non-profit alternatives. Moving inside organizations, Scully and Segal (2002) interviewed workplace activists to develop an understanding of how social movement energy takes shape in the context of bureaucratic authority relations. By focusing on what workplace activists actually do, they developed a theory of piecemeal change that highlights the need to examine incremental changes that occur, avoiding both the naive optimism that major organizational transformation in authority relations can occur and the pessimism that nothing can change since bureaucracy is inherently repressive. Creed and Scully (2000) developed similar theoretical insights by examining gay and lesbian activists in a variety of work organizations. These studies are pioneering exceptions. Zald and Berger (1978) argued 25 years ago for the study of social-movement-like activity in organizations, and the opportunities for progress here remain broadly available. The paucity of studies on activism in organizations is surprising since such research provides tools and a design strategy to uncover silent voices (Calás and Smircich, 1999) and emancipatory possibilities (Alvesson and Wilmott, 1992) in organizations. In the spirit of Bourdieu, new structuralist approaches suggest that useful insights may be gained by connecting localized investigations of intraorganizational activism to an analysis of broader societal dynamics that shape the possibilities for voice and emancipation in particular settings (e.g. Armstrong, 2002; Moore and Hala, 2002). Through such research, critical traditions may be placed in direct dialogue with more mainstream organizational theories (Westwood and Clegg, 2003). Overall, as we scan empirical and methodological developments across organizational theory and the wider discipline, we are encouraged by the growing sensibilities towards sociologically rich analyses of organizational phenomena that specify directly and variously society and societal-level



dynamics. These innovations give credence to and support our interest in further expanding the scope of organizational theory to embrace more fully specified conceptions of social structure and organizations. We believe that the most exciting work evidences the borrowing and translation across existing theoretical programs and research traditions. Building on the new structuralism, thus, we advocate a more culturally and politically informed analysis on how broader elements of stratification and societal beliefs embodied in category schemes such as logics, models, and frames constitute social actors and change as a result of multi-level political processes, involving a wide variety of actors such as producer organizations, state agencies, trade associations, social movement organizations and other field-level organizations. The examples we have cited are necessarily partial and selective, but these studies share a research strategy that involves traffic across previously separate perspectives in organizational theory such as organizational demography, network analysis, and institutionalism, while also reconnecting the study of organizations to core questions of the discipline (Kilduff and Dougherty, 2000; Scott, 1995) and increasing traffic among various subfield traditions and constituencies (Huff, 2000). To wit, we call for organizational theorists to engage more directly with contemporary social theory and design/methodological developments, and to put the distinctive insights of an organizational approach to work in exploring pressing questions about social organization and social change that speak to audiences in sociology, across the social sciences, and in policy circles. Organizational sociology further sharpens Mills’s (1959) vision of the distinctive contribution of a sociology at the intersection of history and biography. By attending to politics (both overt and covert), culture, and history, the new structuralism opens up a new realm of possibilities for a more critical and reflective organizational theory that addresses broader societal concerns.

Note 1. See Swartz (1997) for a discussion of how Foucault’s work has shifted over time, in ways that reinforce the Weber/Foucault comparisons about method.

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Institutions and Evolutions



10 Lords of the Dance: Professionals as Institutional Agents W. Richard Scott

I

n keeping with the EGOS conference theme for its annual meeting in Vienna, ‘Beyond Waltz – Dances of Individuals and Organizations’ – I thought it appropriate to raise the question: If all of us are dancing, who is calling the tune? As we together observe and participate in the ongoing dances of individuals and organizations, who is supplying the choreography? It is the thesis of my paper that, more than any other identifiable group, it is that set of individuals whom we broadly characterize as ‘professional’ that perform this function in modern society. This may seem a rather overblown conclusion about a set of occupations that, variously, manage our divorce processes in court, take out our tonsils, or calculate our income tax, but I will argue that, viewed through the proper lens, this claim has merit. Our conception of professionals, as is true of all social phenomena, is shaped by two distinctive, but interrelated factors. It is influenced, first, by changes in the structure and composition of those occupations that we identify by this label; and, second, it is affected by changes in the theoretical lenses we bring to bear in examining these occupations. With this approach, I embrace a post-positivist conception in which all our scientific analyses involve some combination of elements selected from the ‘empirical environment’ of observations as well as elements we and our colleagues collectively create in the ‘metaphysical environment’ of assumptions and theoretical models (Alexander 1983). All of our descriptions, propositions, and generalizations – our scientific ‘truths’ – are varying admixtures of these empirical and metaphysical elements.

Source: Organization Studies, 29(2) (2008): 219–238.


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In the first part of this paper, I describe changes over time in the theoretical lenses sociologists have applied to the study of professions. I briefly review two earlier dominant paradigms employed and, in more detail, describe an emerging institutional conception.1 The second part of the paper describes changes in the empirical environment as new types of occupations have arisen during the past century and, more or less successfully, claimed professional status. Changes resulting from both endogenous and exogenous processes are discussed.

Changing Conceptions Functional and Conflict Models Early scholars focused their work primarily on the ‘free’ professions – in contrast to those that were ‘institution bound’ (i.e. employed by public or private organizations; Hughes 1958: Ch. 10). One reason for this focus was that early studies were conducted in the UK and the USA, two societies in which the emergence of professional occupations preceded the development of a strong central state. Scholars such as Carr-Saunders and Wilson (1933) and Parsons (1939), focusing on lawyers and physicians, compiled lists of attributes in an attempt to identify characteristics that distinguish such occupations from others. In general, professions were more likely to claim that their practice was based on formal knowledge, to demand autonomy in their decision-making, and to adopt norms espousing a service orientation. Such features were viewed as working in combination to insure that the provider’s expertise would be employed to serve the best interests of the client (rather than the provider or a superior). This functionalist interpretation dominated sociological discussions of the professions from the 1930s well into the 1960s (e.g. Marshall, 1951; Goode 1957; Goss 1961; Greenwood 1957). During the decade of 1960s, however, an alternative, conflict lens was crafted that cast a different light on the professions. In the wake of a period of antiwar protest and increasing distrust of established authority, a number of scholars dismissed the views of functionalist scholars as apologies for entrenched monopoly power. Observing the contests among contending occupations for professional status and the obvious rewards – money, status, influence – accruing to winners, these critics refocused the debate, shifting attention from clients’ to providers’ interests and from technical or knowledge-based claims to political explanations. Thus, Freidson’s influential account of the privileged position of physicians in America vis-à-vis other medical occupations concluded that: ‘The process determining the outcome [one’s position in the medical division of labor] is essentially political and social rather than technical in This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.

Scott • Professionals as Institutional Agents 193

character – a process in which power and persuasive rhetoric are of greater importance than the objective character of knowledge.’ (Freidson 1970b: 79)

In addition to considering competition from multiple occupations, Freidson and numerous others, including Johnson (1972), Larsen (1977), and Derber (1982), embraced a more historically informed and comparative perspective, examining both the social-movement-like struggles that accompanied the rise of a professional occupation as well as the wide differences, by time and place, in the role of the state in overseeing the process. Of course, differences between the experiences of would-be professions in the more statecentric countries in Europe versus America and Britain loomed large in these accounts (see Jackson 1970; Johnson 1972; Jones 1991; Millerson 1964; McClelland 1991; Thorstendahl and Burrage 1991). As Morgan and Quack (2006: 406) summarize: ‘In effect, the nature of professional power is a reflection of the way in which the state relates to social groups within it: is the predominant mode of state engagement toward structuring and shaping social groups or is the state itself an outcome of the actions of social groups and not dependent or “superior” to it?’

This change in theoretical approach was accompanied by an often implicit shift in the level of analysis. Whereas functional scholars had concentrated their attention on the history and functioning of a single occupational group, conflict scholars upgraded to a population ecology level, comparing and contrasting the history and experience of multiple occupations as they competed for dominance, or even to an organization field level, taking into account the existence of numerous, competing players, as well as the role of the state. The tensions between the functionalist and the conflict models have not been completely resolved, but more recent efforts have attempted to accommodate insights from both perspectives. Thus, for example, Abbott’s (1988) influential account of the struggles between contending occupational groups for jurisdictional control over a given field of human problems emphasizes the central role played by efforts to control the more advanced technologies or new kinds of knowledge. The approach attends to the contending interests but also acknowledges the distinctive nature of these occupations and the rules governing these contests that requires them to compete in particular ways.

An Institutional Model I believe the time is ripe for the development of an alternative model that can not only accommodate some of the conflicting claims of earlier models but also both provide theoretical elaboration and open up a new research agenda. As noted, Mark Suchman and I have taken the first steps in this direction, proposing an institutional conception of professions (Suchman and Scott, This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.


forthcoming), and we are not alone in our efforts (see Hwang and Powell 2005; Leicht and Fennell 2008; Meyer and Jepperson 2000). Our formulation shifts to a social constructionist conception of the role of professions – a view that permits us to argue that the knowledge claims advanced by professionals can be both somewhat arbitrary and sincerely advanced, that professional jurisdictions can be contested and changing without being a simple matter of political clout, and that in many circumstances the advancement of professional interests is not inconsistent with attention to client welfare. But this begs the question of what is meant by an institutional approach to professional work.

A Pillars Framework During the mid-1990s, I began to develop a broad framework for approaching the study of institutions (Scott 2008/1995). I argue that ‘Institutions are comprised of regulative, normative, and cultural-cognitive elements that, together with associated activities and resources, provide stability and meaning to social life’ (2008: 48). My framework stresses that, although institutional elements – rules, norms, beliefs – are primarily symbolic in nature, to be of interest these symbols must impact social behavior: they must be reflected in activities, relations, and resources. In the phrasing of Hallett and Ventresca (2006), relevant institutions are ‘inhabited’ by people. The framework also points out that institutions are composed of diverse elements – they rest on different ‘pillars’ – that depend on different bases of compliance, employ varying mechanisms, evoke differing logics of action, are signaled by different indicators, and offer multiple bases for determining legitimacy (see Scott 2008: Ch. 3). In summary, we have: • the regulative pillar, which stresses rule-setting, monitoring and sanctioning activities, both formal and informal; • the normative pillar, which introduces a prescriptive, evaluative, and oblig atory dimension into social life, stressing (employing March and Olsen’s 1989 terms) ‘appropriate’ behavior – given the demands of the situation and the actor’s role within it – vs ‘instrumental’ behavior, in which atten tion is focused on the actor’s preference and pursuit of self-interest; and • the cultural-cognitive pillar, which emphasizes the centrality of symbolic systems: the use of common schemas, frames, and other shared symbolic representations that guide behavior.

Two Accounts of Institutional Construction Where do these institutional frameworks come from? Who erects these pillars? Institutional theorists provide two different accounts of the processes at work. There are those who employ what Strang and Sine (2002: 502)



term a naturalistic account, treating institutions as a ‘natural and undirected process’. This view corresponds to the turn-of-the-century views of William Graham Sumner’s (1906), who identified crescive institutions – which evolve slowly through instinctive efforts over long periods of time. Among more recent proponents of naturalistic narratives are cognitive institutionalists, such as Schutz (1967/1932) and Berger and Luckmann (1967), who stress the unconscious ways in which ‘activities are habitualized and reciprocally interpreted’ during social interaction; as well as organization ecologists Carroll and Hannan (1989), who view increasing organization density as an indicator of their increasing legitimacy and taken-for-grantedness. In these accounts, institutions are not created by the purposeful actions of interest-based agents, but rather emerge from the collective sense-making and problem-solving behavior of actors confronting similar, problematic situations. Alternatively, other analysts stress an agent-based view, which emphasizes the extent to which intentionality and power are at work (Strang and Sine 2002). This view corresponds with Sumner’s (1906) conception of the enacted institution, which is the product of rational invention and intention. Scholars such as DiMaggio (1988, 1991) and Fligstein (2001a, 2001b) embrace this conception. For example, based on his empirical study of the creation of museums to enshrine high culture in early 20th-century America, DiMaggio (1988: 13) concludes: ‘Put simply . . . institutionalization is a product of the political efforts of actors to accomplish their ends.’ Economists and rational choice political scientists generally align themselves with this conception. This distinction between more or less conscious and intentional institutional construction is no doubt overdrawn. First, as Emirbayer and Mische (1998) point out, agency typically involves iterative, more routine-based and routine-reproducing activities as well as more prospective, imaginative and creative activities. Conversely, naturalistic accounts of the diffusion of institutional elements gloss over the motives and decision processes guiding the actors who propel these changes. Second, as Meyer (1994) argues, professionals, at least in their collective capacity, often embrace and espouse positions that are more disinterested – having to do with the use of knowledge to advance the collective good – rather than directly self-interested. That is, social agency can be employed in the service of self-interest, service to other actors, or on behalf of ‘nonactor entities recognized in the cultural system’ (Meyer and Jepperson 2000: 108), such as ‘the environment’ or the unorganized poor. Third, and finally, even ‘rational’ actors attempting to design and construct institutions that will advance their own interests often fail because the institutions created have unintended effects, conditions may change, or their own goals and/or interests may undergo transformation (Pierson 2004) Hence, as I employ the concept ‘agent’ in the following discussion, these caveats should be kept in mind. This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.


Professions as Institutional Agents My first thesis can be succinctly stated: More so than any other social category, the professions function as institutional agents – as definers, interpreters, and appliers of institutional elements. Professionals are not the only, but are – I believe – the most influential, contemporary crafters of institutions. In assuming this role, they have displaced earlier claimants to wisdom and moral authority – prophets, sages, intellectuals – and currently exercise supremacy in today’s secularized and rationalized world. Observe that earlier claimants to institutional agency, such as wizards and sages, based their authority on the possession of exclusive, proprietary knowledge – a ‘closed system’ mentality emphasizing restrictive access (see Suchman 1989). Succeeding professional systems, by contrast, embraced an open-system view of knowledge, allowing for competition among occupations and the possibility of displacement. The latter framework enabled and legitimated processes promoting change and innovation – and, as a result, stimulated competition as well as the possibility of progress and improvement. With his discussion of the evolution of cognitive functions and human cul ture, Merlin Donald (1991) helps us to understand the current significance of the professional in contemporary society. Donald argues that primate/human culture evolved through several stages over a few million years, from: • episodic – involving intelligence but a limited range of expressive outputs to • mimetic – involving an increase in motor skills and the use of ‘repre sentational acts that are intentional but not linguistic’ (e.g. toolmaking) to • oral-mythic – characterized by a shared narrative tradition based on spo ken language to • theoretic – marked by a long and culturally cumulated history of symbolic invention, a shift from ‘internal to external memory storage devices’, and the preponderant role of ‘argument, discovery, proof, and theoretical syn thesis’. (Donald 1991: Chs 5–8) It is the development and elaboration of these external symbolic, ‘theoretic’ systems – social institutions – and their interplay with individual cognitive mechanisms – human minds – that defines what is novel about modern cultures. And, it is primarily the professions that build and tend these systems. Donald spells this out: ‘Theoretic culture is the realm of the professional and the theoretician, and its institutional structure depends on high levels of symbolic literacy, which, in its broadest definition, includes all the mental skills that are relevant to the effective use of symbolic systems. Theories emerge from



pursuing the algorithms stored in these disciplines. Once developed, they are usually preserved in permanent form in various external media, such as legal codices. Theoretic culture is a large subsection of the larger culture. It engages many thousands of individuals whose lives are lived in its service. It includes many theoretic domains, including management, political and legal systems, and other specializations. These domains share the principle that, whatever their area of expertise, theories rule.’ (Donald 2000: 4)

A Pillars Typology of Agency Aided by the three pillars, I believe it is possible to identify three different types of theoretic cultures which are associated with three kinds of professions at work in contemporary society: cultural-cognitive agents, normative agents, and regulative professions.

Cultural-Cognitive Agents An important category of professions is in charge of what Knorr-Certina (1999) terms ‘epistemic cultures’: groups that create and warrant knowledge. The primary weapon of many professions is ideas. They exercise control by defining reality – by ‘devising ontological frameworks, proposing distinctions, creating typifications, and fabricating principles’ and generalizations (Scott and Backman, 1990: 29). Examples of such knowledge systems vary from the periodic table and the laws of physics to medical diagnostic categories and the rules of grammar for a particular language. All such efforts are broadly constructivist, as agents observe the world, but also select, combine, enhance, reconstitute and organize our ideas about it. Important variations exist among the symbolic frameworks produced in the extent to which they are connected to or corrected by empirical observations. The professions array themselves broadly along the continuum stretching from the metaphysical (e.g. theology and philosophy), which are relatively remote from empirical reality, to those more exposed to empirical evidence (e.g. the sciences and engineering).2 As functionalist theorists have emphasized, professional occupations employ distinctive controls over their own members as well as in their relation with wider publics. As Knorr-Certina (1999) has emphasized, collegial control in professions emphasizing cultural-cognitive elements do not stress interpersonal obligations (normative controls) or the manipulation of extrinsic rewards (regulative controls), but rely principally on a shared conception of the problems to be solved and the approaches to be employed, and, indeed, what constitutes a ‘solution’. Work is governed by common understandings of ‘the substance of the work’, giving rise to ‘object-centered management’ or ‘management by content’ (1999: 171). In their dealings with external



publics, cultural cognitive agents employ ‘cultural authority’, based on the dependence of client groups on ‘the professional’s superior competence’ (Starr 1982: 15) Professionals’ ‘orders’ are followed to the extent that the client accepts the knowledge claims made by the professional and believes that they are being employed on the client’s behalf.

Normative Agents Many types of professional occupations are active in constructing institutions based primarily on normative elements, efforts to devise and promulgate principles specifying what individuals, groups, organizations, and states ‘should’ do. Such prescriptions rest on the introduction of a moral or obligatory dimension as the basis of compliance. Some professions, such as theologians, ethicists, and various members of the clergy, carry on work that is primarily oriented to formulating and promulgating normative beliefs. In addition, most other kinds of professions, including scientists and engineers, often collectively develop various principles and standards espousing normative conclusions that bear on their area of expertise. The internal, collegial controls exercised by professionals working as nor mative agents emphasize the exercise of evaluative, interpersonal controls in day-to-day practice. Even more fundamentally, normative controls are built into the role systems and identities associated with membership in a profession. Van Mannen and Barley (1984) describe the types of controls activated by ‘occupational communities’ – by a group of people who ‘consider themselves to be engaged in the same type of work’ and ‘whose identities are drawn from the work’ (1984: 287). Such controls ‘correspond to a pervasive logic embedded within the historically developed practices of occupational members doing what they feel they must’ (1984: 291). As noted, virtually all professions collectively attempt to exercise normative influence in the areas of expertise when dealing with external publics. In a variety of guises, professions take steps to provide prescriptive guidance to numerous special publics and to the general public. Such actions take differing forms, including issuing principles or guidelines or promulgating standards ranging from the appropriate size of threads for screws to the frequency of vaccinations. As globalization processes have progressed, particularly since World War II, efforts of this type formerly restricted to a given society have increasingly become transnational. In their instructive book, Brunsson and Jacobsson (2000) describe the rise at the world-system level of a collection of international professional associations and international nongovernmental organizations (INGOs), who labor to devise and promulgate standards in many arenas. Such bodies lack the coercive powers exercised by states or corporations, and typically do not have sufficient economic resources to induce compliance to the ‘rules’ enunciated. Rather, these professional



organizations attempt to influence the behavior of others by setting standards, propagating principles, or proposing ‘benchmarks’ to gauge progress and to guide behavior. The primary types of arguments made in support are that (1) the proposals are objectively superior, backed by scientific evidence or based on ‘best practices’; (2) they are in the best interests of the adopters; or (3) they are broadly consistent with the long-term interests of humanity (Brunsson and Jacobsson 2000; Boli and Thomas 1999; Drori et al. 2006). The creation of normative frameworks underlie many of the newer modes of governance that rely on ‘soft’ rules – standards and guidelines – rather than ‘hard’ legal frameworks backed by sanctions (Mörth 2004). As Djelic and Sahlin-Andersson (2006: 13) point out: ‘New modes of governance are largely expert-based; they are often legitimized by references to science and expressed in terms of measurements. A general societal trust in science and expertise is undeniably a driving force behind [the rapid expansion of] transnational governance.’ 3

Regulative Professions Some professions have privileged access to the use of regulatory powers. Such occupations include members of the military and domestic police and security services, the legal professions who populate our legislatures and courts, and managerial professionals, who ascend to positions of power in our agencies and corporations. Although great variation exists among societies, and among professional occupations within societies with regard to public employment, a much wider range of professions are able to obtain state backing to enforce their jurisdictional claims, conditions for entry into practice, and some of the specific powers they exercise as practitioners (e.g. the right to write prescriptions). In most European countries, professionals are trained at the expense of and largely employed by the state. Such is not the case in the USA, but nevertheless, many types of positions – both in public agencies and private organizations – are reserved for those with appropriate professional qualifications (Freidson 1986). A subset of professions are able to legitimately lay claim to a wider range of coercive power, both public and private. Such powers are employed, along with cultural-cognitive and normative mechanisms, to exert hierarchical control over their own members, but are particularly conspicuous in relating to the external public. It is here that the power to control rewards and penalties looms large. Although members of the police, the army or corporate management claim to possess specialized expertise, their ultimate authority rests on their legitimate access to coercive powers, such as the use of weapons or incarceration, or to the control of monetary resources.



In sum, the insight that professional authority is based on the ability to create and apply a set of cultural-cognitive, normative, and/or regulatory elements that provide frameworks for dealing with various types of uncertainty is at the core of the institutional perspective. As Leicht (2005: 604) states: ‘Recent theoretical development in the study of professions focuses on the rise and dominance of professions as institutions. Professions as macrolevel institutions represent distinct and identifiable structures of knowledge, expertise, work, and labor markets, with distinct norms, practices, ideologies and organizational forms.’

In our own time, the professions are the primary societal institutional agents. And, as I have emphasized, different types of professionals stress one or another of the institutional elements – cultural-cognitive, normative or regulative. There exist multiple vocabularies of control and multiple modes of legitimating professional authority. Attention to professionals as institutional agents also encourages use of the organizational field level of analysis. Our sights are raised from the individual practitioner or professional organization and beyond the consideration of competing professions – the population level – to a consideration of the level of the organization field. At this level, attention is directed to the assessment of a larger panoply of structures and systems – professional schools, universities and research institutes, professional associations, and invisible colleges – as they affect the acquisition and maintenance of professional authority (see, e.g. Greenwood, Suddaby and Hinings, 2002; Scott et al., 2000).

A Role Typology In addition to noting the varying bases of professional authority, I believe it helpful to recognize that professionals occupy a variety of roles as institutional agents. At the risk of oversimplification, it appears useful to identity three generic categories: creative professionals, carrier professionals, and clinical professionals.

Creative Professionals Within every professional occupation there exists a relatively small number of individuals whose function it is to augment and warrant various aspects of the cultural-cognitive, normative, or regulative frameworks that underlie the work of their profession. Such professionals are typically employed in research universities, scientific and research institutes, and ‘think tanks’, and, generally speaking, enjoy the highest status (albeit perhaps not the highest monetary rewards).



Carrier Professionals For institutional frameworks to be of relevance to the ‘real world’, they must not only be generated but diffused by various ‘carriers’ (Jepperson 1991; Scott 2003: Scott 2008: Chs. 4, 6). While multiple modes of transmission exist, among the most influential are the human actors that work as advocates and interpreters, spreading the message to diverse and distant locales. Typical carriers for professional messages include educators at all levels, lawyers, librarians, missionaries, and consultants (Sahlin-Andersson and Engwall, 2002; Suchman and Cahill 1996). As Czaraniawska and Joerges (1996) and Sahlin-Andersson (1996) have emphasized, carriers are never neutral conveyers, but must adapt and translate their messages to fit specific recipients and varying local circumstances. In short, carriers are responsible for substantial innovation and creative adaptation in the messages they carry.

Clinical Professionals Far and away the largest proportion of those who make up a professional occupation are those who apply professional principles to the solution of problems presented by individual clients or by specific problematic situations. As we will note below, these clients may be individual consumers, like you and me, or collective clients, such as corporations or public agencies. In either case, the more experienced clinicians do not simply apply mechanically their textbook remedies, but rather more or less creatively adapt their generalized principles to the specific problems confronted. In doing so, in a case-by-case incremental fashion, clinical professionals, like carriers, participate in the creative process of proposing new distinctions, measures and methods in a ‘bottom-up’ incremental fashion (see Suchman 1995). The role of ‘precedence’ – the accumulated effect of past court decisions in the legal world – is only a more tangible recognition of a mode of institution building that occurs in every professional community. In sum, all professions host multiple roles, and while a subset of members occupies specialized roles specifically dedicated to growing the science or practice, this task, in varying degrees, is widely shared throughout the full spectrum of professional roles.

Empirical Changes in the Professions To this point, I have only discussed changes in the theoretical conceptions social scientists have employed to examine occupations deemed to be professions. I now turn to briefly describe changes that have occurred in the empirical world of professions – both in long-existing professions and through the appearance of new occupations successfully claiming professional status. I consider two categories of changes: endogenous and exogenous. This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.


Endogenous Changes: Growth of Knowledge I have put much emphasis on professionals as creators/carriers/appliers of knowledge systems: custodians of the theoretic culture. In this regard, the professions are in the vanguard of a growing collection of occupations termed by Richard Florida (2002) ‘the creative classes’, in which he includes knowledge workers, symbolic analysts, and professional and technical workers. Adopting a very generous definition of these occupations, Florida argues that roughly 30% of today’s workforce in a developed society is included, up from roughly 10% at the beginning of the 20th century. However, at the heart of this larger collection of information processors are those occupations with a stronger claim to be part of the ‘creative core’: scientists, engineers and managerial professionals, educators, and artists – comprising roughly 12% of the workforce. It is this subset that qualifies as full-fledged professional agents. As domains of specialized expertise and knowledge develop and expand, there is an inevitable drive toward increasing internal complexity and differentiation. These developments, in turn, set in motion a number of secondary processes, some of which work at cross purposes. I illustrate some of these occurrences, using physicians in the USA as an example.

Greater Division of Labor Specialization within the primary profession In 1900, there were no formally recognized specialist physicians in the USA. The first such specialty was created in 1917. Today, there are more than 25 categories of board-certified specialties (encompassing over 125 sub-specialties), and well over 80% of all practicing physicians are qualified as specialists (Scott et al., 2000: 182–187). It appears that the knowledge base of modern medicine is such that the overwhelming majority of physicians elect to concentrate their energies on mastering only a selected piece of it. (Of course, the greater monetary rewards associated with specialization provide additional motivation.) Fragmentation of interests within the primary profession An unexpected consequence of increasing specialization within a profession has been the fragmentation of interests – both professional and political. One or another type of specialist no longer sees him- or herself as sharing the same knowledge base or as holding common interests with other types of physicians. One general indicator of this development within American medicine has been the decline in membership within the American Medical Association, the flagship association of ‘general’ organized medicine, from a peak of over 80% of practicing physicians holding membership during the 1950s to fewer than 40% at present (Scott et al. 2000: 178–180). By contrast, the



number of, and membership in, specialist associations has increased rapidly throughout the past half-century. As a consequence, physicians’ collective influence on American heath care policy has substantially diminished during the past half-century. The profession of medicine no longer speaks with a unified voice. Expansion of hyphenated professionals As professional systems expand, a higher proportion of the workforce no longer is engaged in direct practice – applying knowledge to the solution of individual client problems – but rather in advancing, testing, and disseminating this knowledge, and in coordinating and overseeing the work of specialized practitioners. Physicians are increasingly employed in universities, laboratories, pharmaceutical companies, insurance companies, in teaching and continuing education functions, and in administrative and policy positions. There are teaching physicians, research physicians, consultant physicians and manager physicians. I term this the growth of the ‘hyphenated professional’. Parallel and subordinate functions As the conflict theorists remind us, every professional arena is crowded with a number of competing and/or defeated contenders who exist alongside or have settled for subordinate roles in the division of labor. In the case of medical doctors, we have such additional occupations as osteopaths, chiropractors, alternative healers, pharmacists, and nurses, who fill a variety of parallel or subordinated functions. In addition, we have the much larger, and ever-growing cadre of semiprofessionals, allied health workers, and medical technicians. Currently, in California, more than 40 officially certified health occupations exist alongside numerous other technical categories (Scott et al. 2000: 187). While these occupational groups may work as employees of hospitals or other types of medical care organizations, their activities are overseen by and operate under the authority of the medical profession (Freidson 1970a: 145).

Mechanization and Routinization Increases in knowledge give rise to higher levels of commodification, mechanization, and routinization. Subdivision of work is associated not only with the development of higher levels of specialization and greater expertise, but also with the possibility of mechanization. Some complex tasks that formerly required expert, experienced dexterity can now be performed by machines operated by semiskilled technicians. As many students of technology have shown, new machinery may result not in the enhancement but in the replacement of human skill (e.g. Zuboff 1988) and in the deskilling of work (Braverman 1974). Indeed, many of the kinds of tasks now performed by technicians and paraprofessionals were once performed by mainstream professionals.



Consolidation and Formalization of Knowledge Although some efforts by scholars and academics seek to expand the body of knowledge, these same groups also devote substantial energy to its consolidation, organization, and codification. Such efforts to demystify, formalize, and routinize knowledge lead variously to the development of computer-aided diagnosis, protocols to guide practitioner decision-making, or to self-care manuals. Such efforts can supplement, but can also undermine or replace the judgments of individual clinicians.

Exogenous Changes In addition to the kinds of changes just described that result from processes generated by the development of the professions themselves, other significant forces have been at work, stemming largely from wider societal changes. I describe below three that have consequences for the professions:

Rise in the Number, Size, and Social Power of Organizations As the industrial/organization revolution occurred, beginning early in the 19th century and continuing on to the present, we witness the emergence of a large range of collective actors, both private corporate and public forms, who play increasingly central roles in virtually every sector of modern society. Chandler (1977) has compellingly described the growth, beginning in the middle of the 19th century, of a new cadre of specialized managers (primarily associated with the railroad industry) who gradually began to view their specialty as independent of any given organization and to connect their craft to professional schools – first to engineering, then to business – within universities. Mechanical and chemical engineers were soon followed (and superseded) by accounting, marketing, and financial specialists. In short, the rise of large-scale organizations is associated with the emergence of a large and growing new spectrum of professional occupations. (Note that most of us involved in organizational studies, whether willingly or not, currently aid and abet this process.) Indeed, it is no exaggeration to claim that no significant new claimant to professional status has arisen during the 20th century that has not been spawned by the organizational revolution.

Change in the Nature of Clients As organizations have grown in size and influence, many existing professions were motivated (or obliged) to change the nature of their practice to accommodate the interests of a new type of client: the collective or corporate actor. This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.


Among those established professions that successfully did so are accounting, architecture, and law. Indeed, in each of these cases, there is a relatively clear division between professionals who service individual, and those who work for corporate, clients. In every case, the latter are regarded as the higher-status segment (consider the case of lawyers or accountants; Heinz and Laumann 1982) and enjoy superior monetary rewards. Having organizations for clients provided impetus for professions in which independent practitioners had been in the majority, such as doctors and lawyers, themselves to become organized into group practices, or medical organizations, or law firms. (Heinz and Laumann 1982; Robinson 1999; Shortell et al. 1994).4 These changes have, in turn, gradually altered the internal organizational structure of the professional organization itself. As a decade-long research program carried out by organization and management scholars at the University of Alberta has documented, professional firms that originally were governed by a professional partnership model – similar to what I have labeled an ‘autonomous’ professional organization (Scott 1965, 1982) – emphasizing ‘collegiality, peer evaluation, autonomy, informality, and flexibility of structure’, have increasingly given way to a managed professional business form, similar to what I have labeled a ‘conjoint’ form (Scott 1982). This form gives priority to strategic planning and marketing and to structures aimed at tighter integration and coordination of activities by managers who may or may not themselves be members of the particular professional group being managed (Hinings et al. 1999: 130). More recently, with the rise of the multinational corporations, formerly single-profession organizations, such as accounting firms, have been compelled to hire other types of business-service practitioners, so that all of their clients’ diverse business needs can be more readily met (Aharoni 1999; Hinings et al. 1999). The upshot is that professional organizations have become much larger and more differentiated, incorporating a wide range of business service professionals – auditing and accounting, engineering, financial, legal, marketing, and management consulting – and more corporate-like in their internal structures (see Brock et al. 1999; Greenwood and Suddaby 2006).

Change in Institutional Logics Any given complex of activities in a particular realm is governed by what Friedland and Alford (1991: 248) term an ‘institutional logic’, defined as ‘a set of material practices and symbolic constructions which constitute its organizing principles and which is available to organizations and individuals to elaborate’. In this sense, a given organizational field, such as higher education, or a particular profession, such as law, can be said to be governed by distinctive institutional logics. In addition to these more specific instances, contemporary societies have available a variety of broader ‘meta-logics’ that provide guidance across a diverse set of particular fields (Scott and Meyer



1991). Examples of such meta-logics would be generalized frameworks such as ‘bureaucracy’, ‘corporation’, ‘non-profit organization’, ‘education’ or, of more interest for present purposes, the ‘profession’. Indeed, we commenced this paper with a brief description of what is generally regarded as the defining features of a professional occupation: its distinctive institutional logic (see also Freidson 2001). However, during the course of the 20th century, we have witnessed a continuing shift in generalized beliefs about the relative value and morality of public service vs private gain. This long-term change has received a significant boost from the neoliberal doctrine that has been ascendant in recent decades, in which the market is viewed as the ultimate arbiter of social value. As Steven Brint (1994) has pointed out, most of the later (successful) claimants to professional status have forsaken civic-minded moral appeals – ‘the social trusteeship’ model that had long prevailed – to emphasize instead the value of ‘technical expertise’, as validated by the market. In Abbott’s (1988: 115) terms, such a substitution represents an important change in the ‘currency of legitimacy’ for professions. The doctrine of ‘social trusteeship’ did not exist in isolation but was associated with a distinctive structural vocabulary concerning the ways in which work should be organized. Institutional logics, as ‘interpretive schemes’ are associated with differing structures of control and systems of decisionmaking, as Greenwood and Hinings (1993) emphasize in their concept of ‘organization archetype’. Historically, the organization and work of the professions have been associated with the use of partnership forms, public or non-profit auspices, greater reliance on public and/or philanthropic funding sources, and, specifically, a rejection of the institutional logics associated with market-based and for-profit forms. By contrast, the emergence of a collection of business-oriented professionals connects to quite another structural vocabulary: an emphasis on privatization, the ascendance of for-profit enterprises, and the increasing reliance on market controls and managerial mechanisms.5 This substantial change in the institutional logics governing professional work is, of course, most readily observed in the beliefs, practices, and organization of the newer professional organizations, e.g. engineering, management, and business services, which developed in tandem with organizational forms embedded in the operation of market processes. But these newer logics have increasingly invaded many of the more traditional professions. As noted, more and more lawyers practice corporate law, either as direct employees of corporations or as members of professional firms who service them; and physicians are less likely to practice as ‘independent’ practitioners and more often work as employees of some type of health care corporation or physicians’ organization, many of which, at least in the USA, operate as for-profit enterprises. Old-line professionals increasingly recognize that, if they wish to retain control of ‘their’ professional organization, they are well



advised to seek specialized management training. More and more engineers, physicians, and lawyers are seeking MBA degrees to augment their specialized training. These, then, are some of the ways in which empirical changes in professional occupations have operated to affect our conception of professions: who – which occupations are coded as professionals – and what is the content of this concept.

Coda The more discerning and attentive readers of this article will have observed that I have been employing the concept of institution in order to do two kinds of work. First, I have applied my conception of institution to argue that professions can be regarded fruitfully as institutional agents. By this, I mean that their primary social function can be described as variously specializing in creating, testing, conveying, and applying cultural-cognitive, normative, and/or regulative frameworks that govern one or another social sphere. This formulation, I believe, illuminates what is distinctive about these occupations. Moreover, the recognition that various professions specialize, to some extent, in promulgating one or another type of institutional element helps us to more clearly observe important differences among various types of professional occupations. The professions vary in their attention to and dependence on cultural-cognitive, normative, or regulatory elements in establishing their credentials and claims to authority. Also, although I have devoted less attention to this in the current paper, an institutional approach helps to reconcile some of the disputes between earlier functional and conflict models (see Suchman and Scott, forthcoming). Second, I have employed the concept of institution at a broader level, to argue that the notion of profession is itself an institutional model specifying the characteristics of the social structures of those actors performing knowledge work in our society. And, like all institutional forms, our model of what a profession is has undergone change over time, roughly over the past century and a half.6 It is important that we recognize that the occupations we code as professions vary from time to time and place to place. (Such is the case as well with the concept of organization, which has undergone changes over time that reflect changes in the empirical world of organizations, an argument I have developed elsewhere (see Scott and Davis 2007: Ch. 14.) In response to larger social forces, both endogenous and exogenous, several changes have transpired in our model of professional work: • although formal knowledge remains strongly salient, the knowledge base mastered by each participant has become increasingly differentiated and compartmentalized;



• while expertise remains highly valued, to retain its viability given the overwhelming growth of the knowledge base, it has become increasingly specialized; • norms espousing a service orientation, in particular a public trusteeship model, have increasingly been replaced by a narrower conception of service, often relying on market-based tests; and • an emphasis on individual autonomy and collegial controls has given way in many circles to a greater reliance on hierarchical and managerial controls.

Notes An earlier version of this paper was presented as a keynote talk at the 23rd European Group for Organization Studies (EGOS) Colloquium, 5–7 July, Vienna, Austria. 1. A companion paper, co-authored with my colleague Mark C. Suchman (Suchman and Scott, forthcoming), provides a fuller account of this history. 2. This distinction is similar to what Suchman and I identify as that between ‘intrinsic’ and ‘extrinsic’ professions. We provide a more extensive analysis of the implications of this variation in the justificatory warrants that underpin the symbolic frameworks of the various professions (see Suchman and Scott, forthcoming). 3. At the same time, however, these authors note the existence of considerable ambivalence in the public’s attitudes toward expertise and science (Djelic and Sahlin-Andersson 2006: 13). 4. According to the ‘law of limited variety’, actors, including organizations, develop so as to map the complexity of the environment they confront into their own structures (see Pondy and Mitroff 1979). 5. In his revealing history of the development of professional business schools in the USA, Khurana (2007) argues that the rise of agency theory in economics has substantially contributed to the view that, far from being exempt from market processes, higher education has come to be increasingly viewed ‘as a purely instrumental system of production and consumption’ (2007: 334). 6. Arguably, this is the second major shift in the institutional model of the professions. Bledstein (1976) chronicles the first transition, during the mid-Victorian era in the late19th century, from a model of profession as a calling for talented amateurs seeking to employ talent and expertise to improve their station in life, to one based on the creation of a more orderly career grounded in higher education. (For an informative analysis of George Eliot’s documentation of this transition in her fictional chronicle of Middlemarch, see Mintz 1978.)

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11 Co-Evolution of Entrepreneurial Careers, Institutional Rules and Competitive Dynamics in American Film, 1895–1920 Candace Jones

Introduction

H

ow does a new industry and its institutional rules and competitive dynamics emerge and then change? For greater insight into macroorganizational change, scholars call for examining dynamic processes, including identifying specific mechanisms, and the interplay among multiple levels of analysis (e.g. Hunt and Aldrich 1998; Lounsbury 1997; Schneiberg and Clemens, forthcoming). A co-evolutionary approach examines change over time by using multiple levels of analysis, multidirectionality, the role of positive feedback, and the importance of historical context (Lewin and Volberda 1999). Thus, it allows scholars to unpack complex processes such as how new industries, their institutional rules,1 and their competitive dynamics emerge and change. Although some scholars argue for demarcating institutional rules from players’ strategies because they define individual choice sets (e.g. North 1991), institutional rules are created and altered through players’ strategies. For example, entrepreneurs’ legitimacy tactics influence what institutional rules are formulated and how new industries develop (e.g. Aldrich and Fiol 1994). Entrepreneurs’ actions may range from passive acceptance to active resistance (Oliver 1991) and these actions may, in fact, spur deinstitution alization (Oliver 1992). However, one cannot focus solely on entrepreneurs’ Source: Organization Studies, 22(6) (2001): 911–944.



strategic choices because institutional rules limit the range of viable strate gies and choices open to actors. Thus, to understand the processes by which an industry, its institutional rules and competitive dynamics emerge and change, we need to examine how players contest or justify institutional rules through their choices and strategies, and how institutional rules and industry trajectories expand or contract players’ choices (Schneiberg and Clemens, forthcoming). This requires understanding co-evolutionary processes. A co-evolutionary process marrying insights from institutional and resource-based views provides the conceptual base for this study. Institutional theory reveals how entrepreneurs’ careers are embedded in social systems (e.g. Baum and Dutton 1996; Dacin et. al. 1999) and ‘serve as the primary conduit by which larger social conditions become incorporated into organizational strategy and structure’ (Boeker 1988: 35). Entrepreneurial careers provide mental models and definitions that construct competitive markets through rivals’ definitions and observations (e.g. Porac et al. 1995; Porac and Rosa 1996). These mental models, which form the basis for strategic choices, are reflected in firm practices (Mintzberg 1987; Webb and Pettigrew 1999). When prior choices are retained, despite successful alternatives, they are institutional isolating mechanisms – preferences for and reluctance to acquire competitors’ resources or imitate their strategies (Oliver 1996, 1997). When many firms or a few dominant firms commit themselves to certain practices, despite alternatives, they initiate an industry’s trajectory. In co-evolutionary terms, institutional theory enhances our understanding of initial conditions (i.e., how entrepreneurs’ career history affects current firm practices through retention processes) and feed forward (i.e. how entrepreneurs’ strategic choices carve an industry’s future through selection processes) (Levinthal and Myatt 1994). Institutional theory explains where firm strategies and practices come from and how competitive moves and resource claims take place within a specific institutional context. A resource-based view complements an institutional perspective (Oliver 1997). A resource-based view explains how firms erect barriers to imitation, based on either property rights or knowledge (Miller and Shamsie 1996). Property rights preclude others from imitating a valuable resource whereas knowledge inhibits imitation because firms do not know how to replicate a competitor’s success. Barriers to imitation engender heterogeneity in firm performance. When these barriers create above average returns for a firm, they are called strategic isolating mechanisms, which ‘make competitive positions stable and defensible’ (Rumelt 1984: 567; Mahoney and Pandian 1992). Positive feedback by consumers encourages firms to retain successful practices and institutionalize them as routines and rules of thumb (Aldrich 1979). When barriers to imitation fail to generate positive feedback, firms eventually alter their practices or exit an industry. For example, Kraatz and Zajac (1996) found that, contrary to neo-institutional theory predictions, changes in consumer preferences and local economic and demographic


Jones • Co-Evolution in American Film, 1895–1920 215

characteristics predicted changes in institutional practices for private liberal arts colleges. In co-evolutionary terms, a resource-based view enhances our understanding of how the role of positive feedback, due to imitation barriers, shapes competitive dynamics. A realist and narrative approach guides this study. Realism and narration seek to identify generative mechanisms (Tsoukas 1989) – the events or principles that govern a result (Goldstone 1998: 833). Generative mechanisms are the underlying structures that drive processes (Pentland 1999) and in this study, they are firms’ institutional and strategic isolating mechanisms. A narrative approach illuminates how and why change occurs, by examining sequences of events (Van de Ven 1992) to reveal linkages amongst context and action (Pettigrew 1992). Entrepreneurs’ microprocesses, their sequences of actions and reactions seen in their short-run decisions about how to compete in a given context, are the key to understanding the creation of and shifts in institutional rules and competitive dynamics (North 1991; Hirsch and Lounsbury 1996; Johnson et al. 2000). It is the very nature of institutions and individuals as nested systems operating at multiple levels that facilitate change (Holm 1995). Co-evolutionary processes are exposed through ‘detailed, comparative and longitudinal data’ to assess change over time; this ‘tilts’ the researcher towards historical methods and skills (Pettigrew 1992: 5–6; Van de Ven 1992). Historical studies allow researchers to trace the relationship between environmental and organizational changes (Aldrich and Mueller 1982; Tushman and Anderson 1986; Romanelli 1989, 1991). A narrative approach based on historical, longitudinal data is used to identify sequences of events and to examine how these sequences are related to antecedents and shaped consequences (Pentland 1999). The American film industry is well suited for studying co-evolutionary processes because it experienced a shift from being technology-driven to content-driven. During the industry’s emergence, entrepreneurs were preoccupied with gaining exclusive access to technology. Later, this shifted to a concern for exploiting content as the basis for competitive advantage. This shift provides a quasi-natural experiment for observing co-evolutionary processes among macro socio-economic conditions, entrepreneurs’ careers and strategies, institutional rules and competitive dynamics. In addition, there is a wealth of archival data due to the intense efforts by the American Film Institute and historians to archive all available information from the industry’s inception to its present day. This reduces, if not eliminates, left censoring problems that plague most studies of new industries (Aldrich 1999). The paper is organized as follows. First, a brief overview of the relevant theoretical lenses and literature is provided. Second, methods and data sources are described. The study is primarily inductive, evolving out of the author’s immersion in the details of the industry’s history. Third, a case study of the industry’s dominant technological and content entrepreneurs is This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.


provided. I delve into the industry’s rich historical details, but try to spare the reader by not overwhelming them with extensive information on interesting industry events, conflicts, and personalities. Finally, the findings of the study are discussed and concluding remarks are offered.

Entrepreneurial Careers and Co-Evolutionary Processes New industries do not emerge de nouveau; they are shaped by extant social institutions, social trends that create new opportunities, and by entrepreneurs who both open up and cultivate those opportunities. Several theoretical perspectives illuminate how new industries emerge. Evolutionary scholars argue that entrepreneurs must generate legitimacy at multiple levels for their novel activities (e.g. Aldrich and Fiol 1994; Hunt and Aldrich 1998; Aldrich 1999). Resource-based scholars argue that industry emergence and change is intimately related to capabilities of firms comprising the industry (e.g. Collis 1990; Levinthal and Myatt 1994). Neo-institutional scholars focus on field formation and trace how entrepreneurs’ interests, networks (e.g. Stern 1979; DiMaggio 1991) and use of cultural, and historical elements create and alter institutional trajectories (e.g. Leblebici et al. 1991; Holm 1995). Changes in social and economic conditions open up opportunities that allow entrepreneurs to blossom (Peterson and Berger 1971). For example, Hoffman (1999) shows that disruptive events became opportunities to renegotiate how environmental management was enacted. Entrepreneurs cultivate these opportunities by applying their repository of knowledge and relationships gained through their careers (Bird 1994), which are sequences of work experiences (Arthur et al. 1989). A career captures an entrepreneurs’ embeddedness in specific institutional and historical context and entrepreneurs’ repository of knowledge and networks derive from these specific contexts. In this sense, entrepreneurs’ careers provide institutional resources that include cultural models, widely understood rules of thumb, sociopolitical legitimacy, networks of relationships and structural positions (Zukin and DiMaggio 1991; Aldrich and Fiol 1994; Baum and Dutton 1996; Hunt and Aldrich 1998). Entrepreneurs deploy their institutional resources through their firm practices such as their legitimacy strategies and firm capabilities. These practices can be viewed from institutional and resource-based theoretical lenses to triangulate and reveal co-evolutionary processes in industry emergence, stability and change.

Legitimacy Strategies Legitimacy strategies are critical for entrepreneurial firms in emerging industries because legitimacy secures important resources, enhancing survival (Aldrich and Fiol 1994; Rao 1994). Legitimacy is an institutional resource This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.


gained when an entrepreneur’s actions are perceived as appropriate by adhering to normative, cultural or regulatory processes to garner support and acceptance (Zukin and DiMaggio 1991; Scott 1995; Suchman 1995; Hunt and Aldrich 1998). Regulatory processes involve using laws and lawsuits to make claims and control behaviour amongst parties (Edelman and Suchman 1997). In contrast, cultural processes include imitating symbols or forms to signal a correct approach (Scott 1995; Suchman 1995) and evoke acceptance. The use of symbols involves cultural capital that includes ‘business and artistic symbols, claims on artistic properties, such as ideas, premises, and screenplays; and claims on others’ reputations’ (Baker and Faulkner 1991: 284). Legitimacy is indicated by whether firm practices garner support or condemnation (Galaskiewicz 1991; Zukin and DiMaggio 1991; Scott 1995). Entrepreneurs’ tactics for claiming legitimacy reveal their institutional isolating mechanisms, since firms vary in their preference for regulatory, normative, or cultural means to gain opportunities and advance their interests. Legitimacy tactics may also erect barriers to imitation if firms with legitimacy claims preclude others from acquiring, substituting or imitating important resources.

Firm Capabilities Capabilities are the means by which firms convert resources into products and services to gain competitive, and hopefully, sustainable advantage (Rumelt 1984; Mahoney and Pandia 1992; Teece et al. 1997). Firm capabilities include distinct skills, knowledge and tacit understandings gained through experience (Leonard-Barton 1992; Teece et. al. 1997) and relational assets which provide social and positional resources (Eisenhardt and Schoonhoven 1996; Jones et. al. 1998). They also include complex routines seen in technical or managerial systems and processes, such as new product development protocols (Leonard-Barton 1992; Teece et. al. 1997). Sustainable advantage is gained if competitors are unable to acquire, imitate, or substitute valuable resources (Barney 1991). A key issue for sustainability is how firms adapt existing capabilities and learn new ones in dynamic environments (Teece et al. 1997). If firms cannot learn or adapt their existing capabilities, core competencies become core rigidities (Leonard-Barton 1992). Institutional isolating mechanisms are revealed when entrepreneurs are reluctant to alter their capabilities, especially in dynamic environments (Oliver 1996, 1997). Capabilities generate barriers to imitation when knowledge about resource conversion processes is ambiguous or socially complex (Reed and DeFillippi 1990; Miller and Shamsie 1996). By examining multiple levels of analysis – entrepreneurial careers, firm practices, socio-economic trends, institutional rules of play, and competitive dynamics – during the film industry’s formation and its shift from technology to content, we illuminate an industry’s co-evolutionary processes. Next, the research methods and data that enabled these comparisons are described. This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.


Research Data and Methods Although the first moving picture was shown in 1893, this was for scientific purposes. Films were not exhibited to the public for an admission price until 1895. Hence, 1895 is the date used to compare firms competing in an emerging industry. The date of 1894 is often used on graphs to show the zero point from which the industry grew. In this study, two time periods within the industry – a technology driven time period and a content driven one – are compared to gain an understanding of the emergence of the one and the shift to the other. The technology-focused era occurred during the industry’s formation, from 1895 to 1910, and shifted to a content-focused era marked by the rise of the feature film, between 1911 and 1920. Between 1911 and 1917, the dominant technology and content entrepreneurs competed with one another for control of the industry. By 1920, eight of the ten major technology players who had dominated the early industry between 1895 and 1910 were bankrupt or had exited the industry. Data from 1920 to 1930 eliminated right censoring problems and are used to show industry consolidation by major content players, once the battles for dominance between technology and content firms had been resolved.

Research Data Since co-evolution involves multiple levels of analysis (Lewin and Volberda 1999), data at four levels were gathered to capture processes and identify generative mechanisms: individual, firm, industry and national. Entrepreneurial and firm-level data were gathered by culling historians’ accounts of the industry to identify key players, both firms and individuals. A variety of historians’ accounts were used, allowing within-method triangulation (Jick 1979). Additionally, the use of multiple theoretical lenses allowed the comparison of historians’ accounts. The Film References list the historical secondary data sources. Historical narrative accounts were also triangulated with archival quantitative data from the American Film Institute Catalog (henceforth AFI) for between-method triangulation (Jick 1979). AFI data were used to identify (a) first entrants to the industry and then into feature films, and (b) top producers and distributors. Three volumes of the American Film Institute Catalog were used: Film Beginnings, 1893–1910, Feature Films, 1911–1920, and Feature Films, 1921–1930. The AFI has employed teams of historians to identify every film produced and released since 1893. This extensive database is composed of film entries and indexes. Film entries catalogue each film and list firms and individuals that produced and distributed a film. Data include film length, release date, genre and a story synopsis. Indexes, in contrast, list corporations’ and key individuals’ (e.g. actors, directors, or producers) films for each year.



Industry-level data were calculated using the AFI data, including trends in new entrants per year, firm life-spans, and the volume of film product per year. To eliminate right-censoring problems when calculating firm life spans for the period 1895 to 1920, duration rates used data from 1895 to 1930. Left-censoring was not a problem in this industry, since the AFI cat alogue starts with the first moving pictures demonstrated to a mass audi ence in 1893 (one film). Population statistics were calculated from 1895 onwards, because that was when movies were exhibited for profit to a mass audience. My theoretical assumptions guided the selection and cleaning of AFI data. Since I am concerned with tracing how entrepreneurs’ knowledge and net works, captured by a career history, co-evolve with an industry, multiple firm foundings by the same entrepreneur were counted as one firm founding. Likening an entrepreneur’s institutional resources to DNA, then multiple foundings by an entrepreneur represent cloning rather than the creation of new DNA through combination. When two or more entrepreneurs founded a new venture, it was listed as unique, since new combinations of knowledge and networks came into the industry. When a firm both produced and distributed a film, I counted it as one firm, even if the firm used distinct subsidiaries. National-level data of economic growth and immigration rates for the time period 1890 to 1930 were obtained from the Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times to 1970. Historical accounts directed which national-level data were collected. For example, historians detailing the era from 1895 to 1910 (e.g. Musser 1994, 1991) rarely discussed the importance of immigrants to the United States, whereas historians detailing the era from 1907 to 1915 did (e.g. Bowser 1994). I gathered immigration data from 1890 to 1930 to gain an understanding of whether these differences were idiosyncratic to historians’ concerns or whether they indicated the shifting importance of immigration during these periods.

Research Design and Strategies The research design compares co-evolution across two periods: 1895 to 1910 and 1911 to 1920. Two research strategies were employed: quantitative and qualitative. A quantification strategy, using time series, made it easier to detect patterns (Langley 1999). Quantitative data to assess industry trends included calculating the number of firms in the industry each year, the number of films produced and distributed, and the survival length of firms. Since populations for each period were compared, descriptive statistics such as means were provided. When samples of firms from the two periods were compared, statistical tests were employed. To trace key events, visual mapping rather than event history analysis was used. Court decisions (i.e., the event) had differential effects on population dynamics, depending on whether they



were in favour or against a key plaintiff. This lack of consistent direction associated with an event made the use of event history analysis problematic. It points out how industry participants’ interpretation of events such as Court decisions on lawsuits are important in understanding institutional dynamics (Edelman and Suchman 1997). A visual mapping strategy, as seen in Figure 1, was used to examine the relationship between the outcomes of litigation cases and industry growth in firms and film production. A qualitative research strategy focused on identifying ‘events, activities and choices’ over time and revealed who did what, when (Langley 1999: 692). This allowed for developing a narrative and timeline of key events, and mapping relationships among industry players. Qualitative data analysis, using Miles and Huberman’s (1984) three steps of data reduction, data displays, and interpretation and verification, was employed. Data reduction was achieved by reading historical accounts, creating thematic categories and representing these in four data displays to capture variance within and between technology and content periods. The first data display captured individual career histories of key players, including work experiences prior to and within the industry, key relationships with others (e.g., litigation, partnerships, and kinship, etc.), key attributes (ethnicity, and religion, etc.), firm foundings, and exit from the industry (if applicable). The second data display was of company histories, including birth, founders, product function and changes in function (e.g., shift from distribution to production), name changes, mergers and acquisitions, key personnel changes, legal skirmishes, and deaths. The third data display of strategic network histories included founding dates, events leading to founding, founders, company membership, terms and types of relationships within a network. The fourth data display was of key industry events and timelines such as law suits, court decisions, and world events (e.g., World War I). To draw conclusions and assign meaning to data and themes, I relied upon my contextual knowledge and immersion into the history of the American film industry. Culling, categorizing and integrating data provided contextual indicators for developing and guiding the narrative (Pentland 1999). The triangulation of quantitative and qualitative data was achieved by using multiple qualitative sources and quantitative data (Jick 1979), multiple theoretical lenses (Denzin 1978), and multiple sense-making strategies (Langley 1999).

The Co-Evolution of American Film, 1895 to 1920 To situate the film industry within its historical context, as co-evolutionary (Lewin and Volberda 1999) and evolutionary (Aldrich 1999; Romanelli 1989) analyses demand, an overview of the industry is provided. The emergence of the industry focused on resolving technical challenges and developing



hardware for the industry; this focus shifted to movie content – software in the early 1900s – and, by 1915, feature films were the industry standard (Balio 1985a: 112). The American film industry experienced two distinct periods and two groups of entrepreneurs were critical to each time period. These two groups battled for control over the industry from 1911 to 1917. This period shift from technology-driven to content-driven influenced all firms in the film population; it also organized and directed the case narrative and industry analysis (Aldrich 1999).

From Technology to Content: Changing Institutional Rules and Competitive Dynamics When the industry began, entrepreneurial efforts were directed towards solv ing technical challenges and developing hardware. This defined industry institutional rules, and shaped competitive dynamics among firms. As technology was refined and hardware standardized, audience interest in the new medium grew. Entrepreneurial challenges shifted to developing techniques for, and providing high-quality film content. This shift required different competencies, defined new competitive dynamics and altered institutional rules. A key event marking the shift from technology to content was the production and release of the first American feature film, The Life of Moses, released in five parts between December 1909 and January 1910 (AFI Catalog, 1911–1920: xv). Figure 1 reveals these two key periods – the emergence of the industry from 1895 to 1910 and the emergence of feature films from 1911–1920 – and shows the industry’s shift from technology to content. The data from 1911 to 1930 in Figure 1 capture only feature films, because after 1910, the AFI categorized product into feature films, short films, and newsreels. Currently, the AFI has catalogued only feature films after 1910, because, by 1915, they became the industry standard (Balio 1985; Bowser 1994; Musser 1990). A feature film is a ‘multi-reel film with unusual content and high production costs that merited special billing and advertising’ (Balio 1985: 110). Figure 1 shows how firms made a rapid shift into feature films, from four films in 1911 to 610 films by 1915. The shift from actualities to feature films is seen in the reversal of firm to film ratios (Figure 1). On average, a firm produced 66 films a year between 1895 and 1910, whereas it averaged 5 films a year in the period 1911 to 1920. This shift reflected the move to fewer, but longer and more expensive films by firms, and more firms in the industry, thereby intensifying and altering the competitive dynamics. The shift from technology to content focus was accompanied by distinct economic and social trends, as shown in Figure 2. The beginning of the technology period, from 1895 to 1900, is marked by limited available capital (e.g., an average of $15.5 billion GNP, which translates to an average per capita income of $211, reported in 1975 dollars),2 a limited number of



1897 Edison initiates Patent War

films

Figure 1: Industry trends 1895–1930

Films

1907 Appellate Court ends Patent War

firms

1917 Court rules trust illegal

1915 Feature film industry standard

1909 Trust Strategic Network formed

1910 first American feature film released

1927 Sound introduced

Firms


Jones • Co-Evolution in American Film, 1895–1920 223 GNP and Immigration

No. Firms

No. Firms

GNP

Immigration

Year

Figure 2: Socioeconomic and firm population trends

firms entering the industry (from 1 to 8, i.e., an increase of 800 percent), and wildly fluctuating film production (see Figure 1). In contrast, the beginning of the content period (1909 to 1914) is marked by double the available capital (e.g., an average of $37 billion GNP, which translates into an average per capita income of $390, reported in 1975 dollars), exponential growth in the number of firms providing feature films (from 2 to 170, i.e., an increase of 8,500 percent), and exponential growth in film product (from 4 to 610, i.e., an increase of 15,200 percent). The content period had greater national economic prosperity and industry growth than did the technology period. A key social trend influencing the shift to feature films was massive immigration into the United States. Figure 2 reveals how immigration averaged 4 percent of the population during the industry’s emergence (1895 to 1900) and 10 percent during the emergence of feature films (1909 to 1914), dropping back down to 3.2 percent between 1915 and 1918 due to World War I. The most rapid growth in immigration rates occurred between 1899 and 1907, during the industry’s emergence and its transition to narrativebased films, which began around 1904. The rise of the feature film, between 1909 and 1914, occurs after massive immigration into the United States. These different rates of economic growth and immigration rates generated distinct opportunities for entrepreneurs, and those with specific careers were able to cultivate the industry at different points in time. Although we have rough outlines of key industry events, we do not know how these events unfolded. To understand how the industry moved away from and onto specific trajectories, I compare technology and content periods.



To reveal co-evolutionary processes, I examine entrepreneurs’ practices, and, in particular, their legitimacy strategies and firm capabilities.

Entrepreneurs’ Legitimacy Strategies and Institutional Rules of Play In emerging industries, a key strategy of entrepreneurial firms is negotiat ing and gaining legitimacy, because it enhances not only firm, but industry survival. In the technology era, firms used regulatory claims in the form of patents and law suits to garner the right to control key resources. In the content era, entrepreneurs tapped cultural capital to garner approval, by using symbols associated with the high culture of Broadway theatre. These different legitimacy strategies were associated with distinct competitive dynamics and institutional rules of play. The historical context, including social trends and economic conditions, illuminates why some entrepreneurs entered and used particular legitimacy claims. The American film industry was born in 1893 when innovations in mass communication (e.g., telegraph, stock ticker, phonograph, and tele phone) (Musser 1990) were opening up new markets and when technically skilled entrepreneurs were entering to take advantage of these markets. Edison, whose firm was the first to enter the American market, was at the heart of these activities. He held the patent for the stock ticker, was hired by Jay Gould to improve Western Union’s telegraphs, invented a phonograph and was working on the telephone as well as cameras and projectors (Musser 1991). Edison, through his relationships, bridged many innovative groups, and this structural position provided him with knowledge of the emerging industry. Indeed, Edison did not invent his own camera. Rather, he purchased the rights to Armat-Jenkins’ vitascope projector and merged it with his own ideas (Musser 1990, 1991). Biograph was the second firm to enter the emerging industry. One of its founders, W.K.L. Dickson, worked simultaneously with three inventors of film equipment, unbeknown to each other (Musser 1990): Edison (his employer at the time), Woodville Latham, and his future Biograph partners. Dickson’s structural position and relationships within the emerging industry allowed Biograph to purchase key patents and evade Edison’s patent claims by developing a viable alternative. Edison and Biograph contested one another for the market and over which technology had legitimate claims to royalties. Initially, entrepreneurs focused on resolving technical challenges such as the emulsion peeling off film stock (whereby the visual image was lost), images that leapt spastically about the screen, film that broke when advanc ing through cameras and projectors, how to standardize equipment and film stock, and how to prevent fires in theatres due to flammable film stock and electrically charged machinery (Musser 1990, 1991). The entrepreneurs,


Jones • Co-Evolution in American Film, 1895–1920 225 Table 1: Entrepreneurial resources of dominant firms in two eras Firms

Market share (in %)

Prior career and film industry role

1895–1910 Technology-period Firms Top eight firms Entry 1. Edison 2. Biograph (Dickson) 1893– 3. Lubin 1894 4. Pathé Frérès 1896 5. George Kleine 1898 6. Selig Polyscope 1903

7. Vitagraph 8. Gaumont 1911–1920 Content-period Firms

• 14 • 23 • 11 • 9 • 12 • 4 • 4 • 5

Top eight firms 1913 1. Famous Players (Zuckor)

• 15

2. Universal (Carl Laemmle)

• 6

3. Fox Film

• 8

1914

4. World Film (Lewis Selznick) 1914– 5. Paramount (Hodkinson)

• 7 • 7

1915

6. Triangle (Aitken, Kessel and Baum)

• 7

1915

7. Metro

• 6

1917

8. Goldwyn

• 5

• inventor, manufacturer, American • inventor, manufacturer, American • optician, manufacturer, German immigrant • manufacturer of film, French • vaudeville, distributor, American • magician and theatre owner, producer, American • vaudeville, producers, British • inventor, manufacturer, French Entered through exhibition (theatres) 1903 to 1907, moved into production and distribution • retailer, vaudeville, Eastern European Jewish immigrant • retailer, vaudeville, Eastern European Jewish immigrant • retailer, vaudeville, Eastern European Jewish immigrant • railroad, film exchange (distribution), American • insurance, film exchange (distribution), American • distribution, Eastern European Jewish immigrant • production, Eastern European Jewish immigrant

who could resolve these technical challenges, were those who had acquired specific skill-sets during their careers. Of the first ten entrants into the film industry, six were technically oriented (e.g., inventors, opticians) with man ufacturing backgrounds. In contrast, two were magicians with theatre back grounds, and two were Vaudeville or equipment distributors (see Table 1). Given the need to resolve technical challenges with film equipment early in the industry’s history, entrepreneurs’ used a regulatory legitimacy strat egy based on patents. This legitimacy strategy required both entrepreneurial careers with technical experience and the institutional rules of patent laws. For technology-driven firms, Edison’s practices set the industry’s initial trajectory and shaped the rules of play of the industry. Edison, who had had difficulty gaining patents, was finally granted one for his sprocket method of advancing film on 23 February 1897, but delayed taking it out until August 1897. In December of the same year, he launched patent infringement suits against every major competitor and exhibitor, arguing that anyone who used film equipment needed to pay him a royalty (Musser 1990, 1991). Edison held the patent for a sprocket-advancing film and he attempted to hold up an industry by his control over sprockets.



Edison’s lawsuits formed the basis for his competitive strategy and revealed regulatory legitimacy as his institutional isolating mechanism. He initiated 33 suits on patent rights and copyrights at federal level between 1897 and 1905, whereas his competitors only initiated 13 federal-level suits (calculated from Musser’s 1990 Appendix, pp. 540–542). Edison’s practices forced competitors to respond; they could fight and incur the costs or quit the industry, as did early entrants such as Lumière, International Films and F.M. Prescott. As William T. Rock, a Vitagraph partner and Edison competitor, told a reporter ‘all they have to do is draw up a general complaint, print fifty or a hundred copies and file suit in as many cities in the union . . . done at very little expense but look at the thousands of dollars that will have to be spent by the other side in engaging lawyers and defense’ (quoted in Musser 1991: 380). Lawsuits raised competitors’ costs – either in defending themselves or in paying royalties. Patents and litigation were Edison’s strategic isolating mechanisms; he precluded others from acquiring or imitating solutions to technical challenges without paying him. Law suits amongst industry players negotiated rules of play, defining who could play and what constituted a viable barrier to imitation in the industry. These legal contests negotiated institutional rules of play and shaped com petitive dynamics, as Figure 1 shows. In December 1897, Edison launched litigation. After an initial rise in 1898, film entrants remained flat and pro duction stagnated or declined until 1902, despite consumer demand for, and fascination with films (Balio 1985; Musser 1990). In December 1901, the lower Court upheld Edison’s claims. Biograph, Edison’s main competitor, appealed. In March 1902, Judge Wallace of the Court of Appeals declared: ‘It is obvious that Mr. Edison was not a pioneer . . . He was not the inventor of film. He was not the first inventor of apparatus capable of producing suitable negatives . . . No new principle was to be discovered, or essentially new form of machine invented’ (quoted in Musser 1991: 196). He dismissed Edison’s patent right and legitimacy claims. Film production shot up dramatically between 1902 and 1903. Edison re-issued patents (granted on 20 September 1902) and a week later initiated another round of lawsuits against three key competitors – Lubin, Selig and Biograph (Musser 1990). On 23 November 1904, he struck out at four other key competitors – George Melies, William Paley, Pathé Frérès, and Eberhard Schneider. On 26 March 1906, Judge Ray dismissed Edison’s complaint. Edison appealed. In March 1907, the United States Appellate Court ruled that ‘the moving picture apparatus of all the numerous companies in this country, with one exception, is an infringement on the patents covered by the Edison Co.’ (New York Times, 9 March 1907, cited in Musser 1991: 334). Biograph, which used a friction feed system invented by Edison’s prior employee, W.K.L. Dickson, was the exception. These legal contests and court reversals created uncertainty about institutional rules of play. Production dropped between 1903 and 1907. Then, after the 1907 Appeals Court decision, Edison and Biograph gained legitimacy



and rules of institutional play were clarified, yielding exponential growth in new entrants and film production. In January 1909, ten firms, who had litigated and held 16 key patents, pooled their patents, forming a strategic network called the Motion Picture Patents Company or Trust’.3 The Trust created a new strategic isolating mechanism and new institutional rules of play, since access to film stock and equipment now required membership in or licensing by the Trust. While technology entrepreneurs engaged in industrial warfare, content entrepreneurs, many of whom were immigrants with careers in retail (e.g., garments, jewellery) and vaudeville, entered the industry through exhibition between 1903 and 1905 (see Table 1). Initially, from 1895 to 1906, films were exhibited in vaudeville theatres, often with lectures, or as short entertainment pieces within a longer programme that attracted middle-class families (Bowser 1994; Musser 1990). Because technology entrepreneurs introduced films to American audiences through ‘highly respected vaudeville managers’ such as J. Austin Fynes of Keith’s, films received initial legitimacy (Balio 1985: 6). However, after 1906, they were shown in nickelodeons – cheap movie houses dedicated to showing films. Nickelodeons mushroomed from 350 in 1905 to 3,500 in 1908 (Balio 1985), becoming the dominant outlet for films between 1905 and 1914 (Merritt 1987). The growth in nickelodeons was fuelled by immigration, which averaged 11 percent between 1905 and 1914 compared with 5.5 percent between 1890 and 1900. Thus, nickelodeons attracted and were associated with ghetto dwellers – immigrants and blue-collar workers (Merritt 1987). This shift in movie exhibition outlets and audience membership altered social attitudes towards film from technological awe (Musser 1990) to concerns that movie houses were ‘recruiting stations of vice’ (Bowser 1994). The periodical, Moving Picture World, noted, in 1909, that, since 1905, ‘the moving picture business occupied in public esteem a position so offensive, so contemptible, and in many respects so degrading that respectable people hesitated to have their names associated with it’ (quoted in Bowser 1994: 37). A challenge, therefore, from 1905 onwards, for content entrepreneurs, especially immigrants, was to legitimize film as an acceptable rather than suspect activity of ghetto dwellers, and to legitimize their participation in a new country and a new industry. Institutional rules shifted as immigrants de-legitimized and then re-legitimized the emerging industry by their participation in it. The legitimacy strategy of immigrant content entrepreneurs was cultural rather than regulatory. They imitated the high culture symbols and formats of Broadway theatres to evoke accepted cognitive heuristics from consumers, such as providing uniformed ushers, plush chairs, two-hour shows, and elaborate buildings (Balio 1985). When these firms moved into production and distribution, they used similar tactics. Adolph Zuckor, who moved from exhibition to distribution, was aware of the success of foreign films with theatrical stars and narrative qualities. In the autumn of 1912, he imported the



content

Percent of Population

technology

Firm Life Span by Years

Figure 3: Comparing technology (1895–1910) and content (1911–1920) periods

theatre diva Sarah Bernhardt’s film Queen Elizabeth, which was so successful, that it financed his move into production. Both Adolph Zuckor and Jesse Lasky (who merged in 1916 to form Famous Players Lasky, the forerunner of Paramount Studio) specialized in filming established Broadway plays or novels with prominent Broadway actors (Bali 1985; Koszarski 1994). Zuckor’s motto was ‘famous players in famous plays’. In contrast, technology-driven entrepreneurs treated films as commodities and branded the company’s not the star’s name (e.g. Biograph girl) (Bowser 1994). Content firms, founded primarily by immigrants, built the industry’s consumer base by establishing the legitimacy of film as a form of entertainment. Legitimacy was critical to firms, since, between 1895 and 1920, 60 percent died within their first year of commercial life. Technology and content eras had distinct legitimacy strategies that created different competitive dynamics. As Figure 3 shows, technology-period firms were half as likely to fail in their first year and four times more likely than content firms to live at least 12 or more years. Regulatory legitimacy is formally granted by the State through patents, and provides exclusive property rights to a firm for a guaranteed number of years. Thus, firms lived longer, if they could secure important patents, even in the midst of intense litigation and conflict. In contrast, cultural legitimacy, through the mimicry of high-culture symbols, provided a public good by legitimizing the emerging industry, as seen in the rapid growth of feature films from 4 in 1911 to 610 in 1915. Therefore, the competitive dynamics for content-era firms were higher rates of entry and shorter lives.


Market Concentration


technology (1895 to 1910)

content (1911 to 1920)

Number of Top Firms Paired T-test: Tech = .1148, Content = .0615, df = 4, T stat: 20.578, P value (one tail): .000016

Figure 4: Herfindahl measures for two time periods

Regulatory and cultural legitimacy strategies had distinct patterns for timing entry and for market share.4 With regulatory legitimacy, early patents render later patents on similar ideas obsolete, thus making it easier to gain and hold market share. Biograph and Edison, the first entrants and the ones who also held key patents, captured 23 and 14 percent of the market, respectively.5 Of the first twelve entrants, six went on to become toptwenty producers and/or distributors by 1910. In the content era, there was no relationship between early entry and market share. Nearly 90 percent of the first fifty entrants into feature films made fewer than ten films, and 58 percent made only one film. Skilled content entrepreneurs learned from first movers’ mistakes and were able to leapfrog competition by utilizing cultural symbols more effectively. To compare market structure for the two periods, the Herfindahl index,6 which measures the size and power of firms within an industry (Greer 1980), is calculated for the firms that produced and distributed the most films. Although both periods were highly competitive, with very low concentration ratios averaging 11 percent compared with 6 percent, their market concentration differed significantly (paired t-test, p = 0.000016, see Figure 4). The technology period was twice as concentrated as the content period, where almost perfect competition reigned. Because key technology entrepreneurs controlled critical patents and gained royalties from film equipment, they had little incentive to limit film production and exhibition. Figure 5 illuminates competitive dynamics over time. It shows that when institutional rules were clear (i.e., when technology battles were resolved by Court decision in 1907 and when feature films became a



Firms in Industry

Figure 5: Firm lifespan by year, 1895–1920

Patent Wars 1897–1907

6–11 years

1 year 12+ years

2 years

1909 Trust formed

Year

1907 Court resolves patent rights

3–5 years

By 1915, feature film is industry standard



standard product by 1915), new entrants poured into the industry, but few survived. Thus, although the two periods have different market structures in terms of firm market share and concentration, their competitive process is similar – firm entry and death were the most pronounced once standards had been established. As the two groups of entrepreneurs – technical and content – battled each other for the control of the industry between 1911 and 1917, institutional rules were negotiated. In 1909, the top ten technology firms formed a Trust by pooling their patents. The Trust required licensing from non-members, who tried to evade this control. In 1910, the Trust formed its own distribution company, General Film, and proceeded to exclude independent distributors from their product in order to gain greater control over the industry. In 1912, William Fox, a Jewish immigrant and independent exhibitor, was told by the Trust to sell or lose access to films. He initiated a restraint-of-trade suit, which gained the attention of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). The FTC launched an anti-trust complaint against the Trust. In 1915, Judge Dickson noted the Trust’s consolidation of the value chain and reduction in competitors. The Trust had started with 116 jobbers (independent distributors) and ended with only one, the General Film Company, which was owned by the Trust. Judge Dickson ruled that the Trust had violated the Sherman Anti-Trust Act and had gone ‘far beyond the fair and normal scope of any efforts to protect [patent] rights’ (United States v. Motion Picture Patents Co, No. 889, p. 811). The Trust appealed. In 1917, the Appellate Court rejected its appeal, ordering the Trust to be disbanded. The Trust’s strategic isolating mechanism of pooling their patents was ruled an illegitimate form of competition and new institutional rules of play were invoked by Court order. By comparing the legitimacy strategies of these two periods, we illuminate how entrepreneurial careers, isolating mechanisms, institutional rules of play, and competitive dynamics co-evolved. Technology entrepreneurs’ legitimacy claims and strategic isolating mechanisms were based on patents, lawsuits, and finally on pooling their patents into a technology cartel. Content entrepreneurs’ legitimacy strategies involved cultural symbols to evoke consumer acceptance and interest. These different legitimacy strate gies demanded distinct resources and firm capabilities, which are discussed next.

Firm Capabilities and Industry Competitive Dynamics Firm capabilities provide important insights into firm success. Less clear is why some resources are perceived as valuable and why some capabilities developed. In the film industry, dominant technology firms came from manufacturing careers and imported an economizing logic of action. In contrast, content firms came from retail careers and imported a marketing logic. These



distinct logics of action played an important role in determining what kinds of resources entrepreneurs pursued and what sorts of organizational capabilities they developed. Technology firms, as described above, focused on patents as their key resource and on manufacturing efficiencies as their key capability. To understand why these institutional rules dominated early film production, we need to examine the careers of early entrepreneurs and their logics of action imported into film. The first three American entrants and dominant firms Biograph, Edison, and Lubin came from careers in manufacturing, indeed most early firms called themselves manufacturers (Bowser 1994). Their logics of action were steeped in efficiencies, as reflected in their annual production rates of 255, 153, and 139 films respectively, and their emphasis on volume and product turnover. Film content was of secondary importance to these firms. Films were undifferentiated products – short and simple snapshots of life events (e.g., coronations, train wrecks) or staged events (e.g., a couple dancing, a woman tossing salad), called actualities. They were treated as a commodity and sold by price per foot regardless of quality or cost of production, thereby creating incentives for producers to lower costs. An alternative logic of film – as a craft with innovative content – was also available to American entrepreneurs. For example, the production practices of two early entrants with magician careers were significantly lower than the technology firms. Selig Polyscope produced 57 films. Georges Méliès, who emphasized films as aesthetic challenges, crafted only 22 films a year that used novel techniques and captured the interest of American consumers (Balio 1985). These three firms – Selig, Pathés and Méliès – provided successful alternative models. Pathés Frérès was innovative and a high volume manufacturer averaging 180 films a year. Indeed, Georges Méliès and Pathés Frérès, two French firms, produced almost as many films as their top eight American competitors combined (i.e., 236 vs. 374 in 1906, and 302 vs 408 in 1907). However, dominant American firms did not adopt their successful competitors’ practices that would have required them to create original film content, reveal an institutional isolating mechanism of film as commodity, and a focus on cost reduction. The dominant economizing logic of action is seen in the competitive tac tics of technology firms – re-labelling, re-making, and duping. Re-labelling meant that a new title was given to one’s previously released film before re-distributing it. Re-making meant re-shooting a competitor’s film that had been successful, thereby undermining its exclusivity. Duping meant copying competitors’ negatives and selling them as one’s own. For example, Edison posted an agent in London who purchased European competitors’ originals, mainly those of Méliès and Pathés Frérès, shipping them to Edison to be duped before the foreign manufacturer could market the films in the United States (Balio 1985; Musser 1991: 239). Even when Edison had won his initial suits and had gained virtual dominance over the industry from July 1901



to March 1902, he did not invest in feature productions, but instead made ‘inexpensive actualities and duped European spectacles to avoid high negative costs’ (Musser 1991: 190). Méliès established offices in New York in 1903, and Pathés Frérès followed, in 1904, so that they could copyright their own negatives in the United States, thereby stemming ‘free riding’ (Musser 1991: 239–240). By 1907, duping was so pervasive, that American producers used trademarks of easily moveable wood or metal in almost every scene to help identify duped films (Bowser 1994). Only 364 (33 percent) of the 1,092 films released in the last ten months of 1907 were American made (Musser 1991: 335). By copying rather than creating innovative film content, technology firms minimized production costs, inhibited their capability development in original film content, and shaped competitive dynamics in the industry. However, an economizing logic of action became a source of competitive disadvantage when consumers desired films with narrative qualities. During the period 1904–1907, Edison’s production records showed that staged or acted films sold at three and a half times the rate of actualities (Musser 1990: 375). Narrative films, exemplified by dramas, went from 67 percent of films in 1907 to 97 percent in 1909 (Allen 1985: 78). Narrative films told a story, which required longer and more complex films. This shift in film content precipitated a ‘crisis in narrative’ (Bowser 1994). Longer films confused audiences, who could not follow character and plot development. Film language, described succinctly by contemporary screenwriter Robert Towne as advancing narrative through image rather than dialogue (McBride 1977: 72), had not yet been developed. Since early entrepreneurs and directors lacked this capability, they relied on dialogue in the form of providing story synopses in theatre lobbies, flashing inter-titles across the screen, or using a lecturer to explain films (Bowser 1994: 19–20). However, dialogue was problematic, as audiences may not share a common language. This was especially likely, given that 50 to 70 percent of immigrants to the United States between 1895 and 1914 came from three distinct languages areas and cultural communities:7 German, Russian/Baltic, and Italian. This meant that, to appeal to such a diverse audience, a film had to communicate its story line visually and simply. Additionally, dialogue undermined the illusion of and audience participation in a film’s story. Creative talent, those who developed and used film language, attracted consumers to their films. In 1909, Biograph hired D.W. Griffith as its director and ‘the sudden improvement in the quality of Biograph product that resulted from Griffith’s innovations did not go unnoticed by the public. Attendance at theaters that featured Biograph films rose dramatically’ (Katz 1994: 560). Feature films shifted capabilities from manufacturing commodities efficiently to creating and marketing unique films. This shift in capabilities from technology to content re-defined the com petitive landscape. Nearly 90 percent of the top twenty firms during 1911– 1920 were new entrants. Indeed, of the top eight firms, six were founded



by Eastern European Jewish immigrants (see Table 1). Only two technologera firms, Pathé and Vitagraph, adapted and performed as top twenty firms in both eras. Pathé, the French firm discussed earlier, had always, from its inception, combined original film with manufacturing efficiencies. As seen in Table 2, Pathé was the first of the top technology firms to release a feature film on the American market. Vitagraph’s entrepreneurs were British immigrants who had come from careers in vaudeville; their careers were similar to those of the content entrepreneurs (see Table 1). By examining the top twelve firms founded by the entrepreneurs of each era, thereby capturing the largest market share, as the Herfindahl measure shows (Figure 4), we see the difference in capability development and com mitment to feature films (see Table 2). Although the majority of both groups entered feature film production in 1914, content firms were much faster in committing themselves to feature films; they produced and distributed more than twice as many feature films. In contrast, top technology firms, with the exception of Pathé, had lower rates of feature film production. To examine whether these two groups of twelve firms had significantly different capability development and to pinpoint the years when the two groups of firms diverged in capability development, paired t-tests are performed for each year from 1911 to 1920. The results show that the paths of technology and content entrepreneurs diverged in 1914 and remained distinct up to and including 1920. The greatest divergence occurred between 1915 and 1917, and is evidence of how the vertical integration that started in 1918 reduced the number of firms in the industry. Overall, the two groups of firms – technology and content – were significantly different from feature films in their capability development and commitment (paired t-test on pooled firms and years, p = 0.007, see Table 2). For technology firms, their creation of a Trust by pooling their patents may have re-inforced their commitment to technological capabilities. For example, the Trust’s CEO, a former engineer and banker, rejected fellow member George Kleine’s arguments for longer films. Kleine, an importer rather than an inventor, saw that imported European films generated impressive box office revenues (over a million dollars for three films in six months time). In a memo to him, the Trust explained that, ‘feature subjects of more than five reels . . . [were] too long for the average picture theater’ and that, instead, they wanted programmes of no longer than three reels (quoted in Anderson 1985: 150). Adolph Zuckor, a content-era entrepreneur, applied, in 1912, for a production license for feature films from the Trust. He was refused. The Trust told him that ‘the time is not ripe for feature films, if it ever will be’ (Gabler 1988: 30). An economizing logic was so dominant that when Edison’s film company was on the brink of bankruptcy, he hired an engineer who specialized in efficiency to provide solutions to his com pany problems instead of committing the company to feature film produc tion (Musser 1991). Trust members’ reluctance to engage in feature film


Jones • Co-Evolution in American Film, 1895–1920 235 Table 2: Comparison of firms’ entry into and commitment to feature films 1914

1915

1916

1917

1918

1919

1920

Total

Biograph Co.

1911

1912

1913

8

4

~

~

~

~

~

12

Edison Mfg. Co.

1

18

7

26

1

1

~

54

3

12

16

11

~

~

~

~

42

11

~

~

~

3

14

1

6

7

2

~

~

~

~

16

1

18

18

58

10

1

~

106

14

21

30

49

47

78

59

299

4

1

15

9

6

1

2

38

10

25

55

60

49

53

25

277

Empire Film Co.

0

Lubin Mfg. Co. Gaumont Co. Kalem Co. Kleine Optical Nordisk Films

0

Pathe Freres

1

Selig Polyscope Urban-Eclipse Vitagraph Co. Total Variance

1

0

4

56

110

149

202

113

134

89

858

0.08

0

0.79

27

93.42

265

611

355

673

314

11158

18

59

75

75

227

51

80

53

47

2

~

233

8

36

53

72

74

68

71

382

38

44

44

51

200

222

149

759

41

57

56

58

46

40

298

Goldwyn Distr. Greater Vitagraph Fox Film Corp. Famous Players

1

10

Metro Pictures Mutual Film Corp.

5

Paramount

20

53

12

68

27

1

~

186

40

104

104

99

9+

+

+

356

Triangle Distr.

19

109

110

85

26

1

350

11

36

53

58

38

52

49

299

World Film

31

79

75

53

50

49

1

338

Jesse L. Lasky

16

37

39

43

6

++

++

141

1

50

56

50

10

~

167

501

676

737

703

551

386

3736

3840 2223 26248

Universal Film

2

Bluebird Total

0

1

17

164

Variance

0

0.08

9.54

237

863

1055

588

2533

t-stat

1

1

–1.7

–2

–3.7

–4.38

–5

–3

1.7

–1.71

0.17

0.17

0.06

0.01

0.05

0.06 0.0009

P-value (one tail)

0.04 0.002 0.0005 0.0002

–4

Notes: ~ exited industry; ++ merged with Famous Players, + acquired by Famous Players. Pathé and Gaumont made feature films in France. General Film Co is excluded from analysis of 1911–1920 period though it was a top twelve firm. It was founded in 1910 by the Trust primarily to distribute their short films. Although General Film distributed some feature films, Greater Vitagraph was formed by Trust members to distribute their feature films.

production hindered their ability to sustain market dominance. By 1918, eight of the ten Trust members (all except Pathé and Vitagraph) were either entering bankruptcy or had left the industry. Technology and content firms differed significantly in what resources they saw as critical and how they managed their relational assets of creative talent. Biograph typifies the problems of technology firms. They were the first to capitalize on talent, but consistently lost it because they refused to recognize, market or manage that talent. For example, Biograph was the first to develop a star [Florence Lawrence]. She was known as the Biograph girl (so that the brand would accrue to the firm). However, Biograph also



refused to promote its stars; it refused, for example, to ‘capitalize on [Mary Pickford’s] drawing power by building her up in the press’, as she requested (Balio 1985: 156). Biograph reported to the New York Dramatic Mirror that ‘it was not the personality of a particular player that made for successful motion picture production, but rather “first the story, second the direction, and third competent people as a class not as individuals’” (Balio 1985b: 156). In addition, most technology firms insisted on short film formats, as described above. This policy frustrated creative talent. For example, Edison Mfg. lost Edwin Porter in 1910, its primary director and cameraman, due to creative conflicts (Musser 1991). In 1913, Biograph lost D.W. Griffith, its key director, who generated consumer interest in Biograph’s films; Griffith took with him most of his regular actors and the best technical crew, most importantly cameraman Billy Bitzer (Katz 1994: 560). In contrast, content entrepreneurs recognized talent and cultivated new systems for managing them. Adolph Zuckor exemplifies talent management. He not only used long-term contracts to tie talent to his firm, but also man aged the commitment of top talents better by creating organizational systems to promote their talent. In 1916, he created a ‘special distribution subsidiary, called Artcraft’ to market Mary Pickford’s pictures individually (Balio 1985b: 160). With this deal, Zuckor created a new organizational entity and changed industry practices (e.g., made a feature film a single product rather than part of a package in which films had been sold in blocks known as block booking that required distributors/exhibitors to take a firm’s entire output). Pickford stayed with Zuckor from 1912 to 1918, her popularity fuelling Famous Players’ economic growth (Balio 1985b: 159). Mary Pickford was Adolph Zuckor’s strategic isolating mechanism; she provided above average returns. By 1917, when stars determined a film’s box office success, Adolph Zuckor had the top six film stars on long-term contract (Koszarski 1994: 71). A key aspect of managing talent was by promoting and developing stars that attracted audiences. Clearly, by tying up talent on long-term contract, content entrepreneurs perceived talent rather than technology as their key resource and developed organizational capabilities and systems for managing talent. The rise of feature films also required capabilities in managing relation ships and synergy among the value chain (e.g., production, distribution, and exhibition). Actualities – short commodity films – were distributed through film exchanges, which pooled together many different films for a local market, much as video rental stores do today. In contrast, feature films entailed higher production costs and required specialized marketing campaigns to promote a unique film. To recoup production costs, features had to be exclusive to a geographic area, as too many theatres in close proximity, each showing the same feature film, would deprive it of a large consumer draw. When the popular 101 Bison films were distributed through film exchanges, they rarely received more than 14 orders, whereas through a States right system (geographic exclusivity), their films rented for more money (15 rather than 10 cents per foot) and more prints were rented (50 rather than 14) (Bowser This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.


1994: 221). Feature films required a new form of distribution – States rights rather than exchanges. To develop stars and sell feature films as star ‘vehicles’, greater coordination between production, distribution and exhibition was needed. Content firms handled the demands of feature films – e.g., higher costs, specialized distribution and greater coordination within the value chain – in different ways. One route was to focus on the stars and integrate production vertically through exhibition, thereby promoting a star by coordinating the image of that star with the film’s advertising campaign. Most of the top firms (e.g. Paramount, Fox, Loew’s/MGM, and RKO) pursued this route. Adolph Zuckor, who founded Famous Players in 1912, pursued this strategy. In 1915, he merged with producer Jesse Lasky to form Jesse Lasky Feature Plays. In 1916, they engaged in a hostile take-over of their distributor, Paramount, with whom they had a sole sourcing agreement. By 1917, Zuckor was head of the largest film production company in the world. In 1918, Paramount distributed 220 feature films in one year – the most ever produced by one company (Balio 1985). In 1919, Zuckor, armed with a $10 million-dollar loan, moved into exhibition. By 1921, he had acquired or built 303 first-run theatres. By 1926, he had gained control over a thousand theatres, consolidating them into Publix Theaters Corporation. An alternative route was a low-risk strategy of specializing in a few gen res populated by low-cost talent (actors rather than stars) producing B movies for distribution via major studios (i.e., Paramount or MGM/Loews). Two firms followed this route: Universal and Columbia. Universal’s founder Carl Laemmle referred to his strategy as the ‘Woolworth’s’ of film – gaining a ‘profit through merchandising vast quantities of cheap goods’ (Koszarski 1994: 86). His strategy appeared to be similar to that of the technology firms; he focused on cost containment, searched for talent not stars, and produced high volumes of actualities. However, he also produced twice as many features as the technology firms during this time period (see Table 2), and developed specific capabilities in genres such as Westerns, melodramas and short comedies (Koszarski 1994). He neither avoided feature films in the way that technology firms did, nor did he produce star-studded dramas as Paramount and MGM did. Feature film, as a new product, spurred the co-evolution of value chain governance, industry rules of play, and competitive dynamics, all of which were significantly different from those based on film as a commodity prod uct. Entrepreneurs participated in this co-evolution. Zuckor’s massive ver tical integration precipitated competitors, such as Marcus Loew, William Fox and First National Exhibitors, to follow his lead or become bit players. Industry consolidation through vertical integration continued throughout the 1920s (see Figure 1). By 1926, the industry’s five major studios – Paramount, MGM/Loews, Warner Brothers, Fox Films, and RKO – dominated by Jewish immigrants from the content era, were fully integrated, vertically. Three – Columbia, Universal, and United Artists – were partially integrated This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.


firms (in production and distribution only). Columbia and Universal supported the five major firms with their B film product. By 1927, the United States was supplying 90 percent of the motion pictures watched by consumers outside the United States (Halsey et al. 1985: 200). Content firms developed control over distribution channels and capabilities in film genres that were easily understood and appealed to diverse audiences. These became a major source of national competitive and sustainable advantage for the United States. The introduction of sound in 1927 by Warner Brothers, who sought to strengthen its competitive position, raised barriers to entry, as film costs soared from $60,000 per film in 1920 to $375,000 in 1930 (Balio 1985: 130; Gomery 1985). By 1930, the eight major studios had captured 82 percent of the market share, which they held throughout the 1940s (Huettig 1944). Today, Paramount, Columbia, Warner Brothers (now Warner Communications), and Universal remain important players in the global entertainment– communications industry. These firms, although greatly transformed over time, have achieved sustainable competitive advantage.

Discussion By examining the emergence of an industry and the ways in which it changed across two distinct periods, the study explores how socio-economic conditions, entrepreneurial careers, firm practices, institutional rules and competitive dynamics co-evolved. Table 3 summarizes the co-evolutionary aspects of the technology and content periods. Entrepreneurs’ careers are a repository of knowledge and networks that provide institutional resources (i.e., cultural models, rules of thumb, structural positions, and socio-political legitimacy) and important insights into firm practices, such as the legitimacy strategies pursued, the resources perceived as valuable, and the capabilities developed. These firm practices generated differential outcomes in terms of market share and survival rates between technology and content-era firms. The findings suggest that legitimacy strategies may either constrain or spur the entrance of competitors to an industry, depending on the type of legitimacy strategy used by incumbents. In the technology era, the regulatory legitimacy of patents and patent infringement suits inhibited new entrants by raising barriers to entry. Indeed, new entrants did not emerge until patent litigation had been resolved. In contrast, content-era firms used cultural legitimacy strategies by mimicking high culture, which legitimized the industry and lowered barriers to entry, thereby encouraging new entrants. Content-era firms were not able to stem the inflow of new entrants until they discovered the importance of locking up talent in long-term contracts and controlling the value chain through vertical integration. Few studies have compared how distinct legitimacy strategies may have differential effects on population dynamics or market share. The effectiveness


Jones • Co-Evolution in American Film, 1895–1920 239 Table 3: Industry shift in entrepreneurial careers, legitimacy strategies, and organizational capabilities 1895–1925 Time line Industry period

1895

1900

1905

1910

Formation

1915 Transition

1920

1925

1930

Consolidation

Socio-economic • Low then high immigration rates trends • Moderate per capita income

• High then low immigration rates • Higher per capita income

Entrepreneurial careers

• Technical skills and manufacturing careers • Economizing logic of action (create manufacturing efficiencies and product is commodity) • Structural (brokerage) positions

• Marketing skills and retail careers • Marketing logic of action (build consumer interest and provide unique experiences) • Embedded relations of Jewish immigrants

Legitimacy strategies

Regulatory claims through property rights (patent and law suits)

Cultural claims through imitating high culture symbols and artifacts

Organizational capabilities

• Film equipment (cameras, projectors) • Manufacturing efficiencies • Actualities – short commodity films

• Creating consumer experiences and interest • Managing and retaining talent • Feature films

Timing

First entrants capture market share

Fast followers capture market share

Industry governance

Firms compete on one aspect Strategic networks of value chain (e.g. production, – groups of firms distribution, exhibition) → competing →

Vertical integration

Interfirm cooperation of major studios

of a legitimacy strategy also shifted over time. As immigrants poured into the United States and the film industry, they influenced where films were shown (i.e., in vaudeville houses instead of in nickelodeons) and who participated as an audience. This increased diversity in participants de-institutionalized the industry (Oliver 1992) and demanded that immigrant entrepreneurs use new and different legitimacy strategies. An important area for future study is a more finely grained comparative study of the types of legitimacy strategies employed by firms and the consequences of their use. Additionally, the study reveals how law is a strategic and institutional resource that firms draw upon and utilize as part of their competitive arsenal. Litigation was used to raise competitors’ costs in defending themselves, to threaten competitors so that they would exit the industry, or to compel firms to enter into licensing arrangements. This strategy co-evolved with institutional rules as firms contested one another and negotiated patent infringement and antitrust laws. Institutional rules were not static, but shifted over time as parties contested and negotiated their interpretation by means of the court system. Additionally, since many of these cases were being tried in Circuit courts, they were setting a precedent for laws that guided businesses across many industries, not just the film industry. Although litigation, such as patent infringement in high technology or copyright infringement in entertainment industries, peppers the popular press and is used strategically by firms, few scholars examine how law is negotiated and contested to advance



firm interests and gain economic benefits (e.g. Suchman 1994; Caeldries 1996). We need more studies that examine how firms use lawyers and law as part of their competitive arsenal. Strategic isolating mechanisms are central to the resource-based view; however, few studies explore the processes by which firms gain or destroy them. This in-depth case analysis shows how technology entrepreneurs used their extensive technological knowledge and their structural positions as bridges between distinct groups (Burt 1992) to acquire key patents or develop viable alternatives. They used property rights in the form of patent claims and lawsuits to prevent these resources from being imitated. They also created a strategic network by pooling their patents to exclude competitors and used the network to extract rents through licensing fees from competitors. Content entrepreneurs used property rights in the form of employment contracts to lock up key talent and vertically integrated the value chain to control their talent and product. In both eras, participants contested property rights, negotiating when and how a resource became a strategic isolating mechanism. Yet, this dynamic and institutionally embedded aspect of property rights is not often assessed empirically or discussed theoretically. The selection and development of organizational capability is not well understood (Oliver 1997). Only a few studies trace a firm’s or a group of firms’ capability developments in a longitudinal direction (i.e. Collis 1990; Kazanjian and Rao 1999; Miller and Shamsie 1996). An insight from this study is that founding entrepreneurs’ careers provide clues into what resources (i.e. technology or stars) are perceived by firms as valuable and which capabilities firms develop (i.e. manufacturing efficiency or marketing). Additionally, entrepreneurs’ careers may predict when industry changes are experienced as competency destroying or enhancing (Tushman and Anderson 1986). When consumers demanded narrative films, technology entrepreneurs experienced this shift as competency destroying. Only two out of the ten dominant technology firms survived past 1920. In contrast, content entrepreneurs with marketing backgrounds experienced the shift to feature films as competency enhancing. They extended their marketing and branding skills from theatres to stars. By understanding entrepreneurs’ careers, we may be in a better position to predict shifts in an industry that may render current capabilities disadvantageous. Additionally, the study suggests that a firm’s speed and commitment to capability development may predict whether firms cultivate or destroy capabilities. Content entrepreneurs committed to and extended their skills in feature films by producing twice as many as technology entrepreneurs. A co-evolutionary framework anchors resource-based views in a specific institutional and market context, as Collis (1994) suggests, to show when and what capabilities are valuable. Future research may assess microlevel studies of how entrepreneurs pace and commit themselves to developing firm capabilities.



Contrary to popular wisdom, fools did not rush in; they waited to see. As Figures 1 and 5 showed, in both the technology and content eras, the great est increase in number of new entrants with a shortest life-span was after an industry standard had been set, either after the Court decision in 1907 or after 1915, when the feature film had become the industry standard. Mezias and Mezias (2000) found a similar pattern of low density associated with low rates of founding and high density associated with high rates of founding in the film industry between 1912–1929, which contradicted earlier ecological studies. By waiting for uncertainty to lessen, entrepreneurs entered the industry when institutional rules of play and competitive dynamics had already been contested and negotiated. Thus, newly entering firms had less leverage in co-evolving the industry to meet their own needs. In both the technology and content periods, the dominant players had entered before standards were set and consolidated the industry after the standards had been acknowledged. The liability of newness (Stinchcombe 1965) did not constitute a liability when institutional standards, roles, and routines had not yet been agreed upon. Figure 5 showed that new firms in both eras experienced the liability of newness most intensely immediately after standards and institutional rules had been established. In essence, a firm experienced the liability of newness most when pressures for isomorphism (i.e., conformity to exemplars or standards) were greater. An important area for future research is exploring whether interfirm net works facilitate institutional and industry change. In this study, the Trust, a strategic network, was only used for a short time, from 1909 to 1917, essentially during the industry’s transition from emergence to consolidation. Djelic et al. (forthcoming) suggest that networks are intermediate governance mechanisms that allow transitions between governance forms during times of turbulence within an industry. In contrast, Mezias and Kuperman (2000) argue that community dynamics found in networks and strategic networks are vital to understanding how entrepreneurs form and evolve an industry. They suggest that entrepreneurs’ co-location, cooperation, and formation of competing cartels introduced, spread and standardized new products and organizational innovations.

Conclusion This study demonstrates aspects of co-evolution, such as nested phenomena and cross-levels of interactions, by providing a detailed examination of an industry from its inception through its first 25 years. It is not a test of coevolutionary theory, but rather provides insight into co-evolutionary processes. As with all historical studies, the limitations of this study include data availability (e.g., after 1911, only data for feature films were available), which may reflect archivists’ biases when cataloguing the data.



A contribution of the study is its focus on institutional and strategic iso lating mechanisms, which provides a parsimonious but rich description of a complex process. By examining how and when entrepreneurs cultivate isolating mechanisms, we may reach a better understanding of path depen dencies. Institutional isolating mechanisms committed entrepreneurs to spe cific legitimacy strategies and organizational capabilities. Thus, institutional isolating mechanisms may provide a firm with either industry leadership or obsolescence, depending on whether firm practices generate and sustain strategic isolating mechanisms in their competitive context. Strategic isolating mechanisms influenced industry trajectories by providing positive feedback on firm practices.

Notes Many people provided insights and suggestions that vastly improved this paper. I am indebted to the special editors Arie Lewin and Mitchell Koza, as well as the following col leagues: Howard Aldrich, Paul Carlisle, Lis Clemens, Doug Creed, Jane Fountain, Marta Geletkanycz, Andy Hoffman, Joe Lampel, Benyamin Lichtenstein, Mike Lounsbury, Ivan Manev, Jamal Shamsie, Steve Tallman and Marc Ventresca. Comments from participants at the following workshops also enhanced the paper: Meso Conference at Duke, Spring 1999; Organization Research Seminar at MIT, Fall 1999; Workshop on Institutional Change and Conflict at Northwestern, Winter 1999; University of Arizona presentation, January 2000; Kennedy School Harvard presentation, and the ILR department at Cornell, Spring 2000. Ron Dufresne, Mary Dunn, Pacey Foster, and Sharon McKechnie offered comments that improved the clarity of writing. Joy Beatty provided research assistance in gathering and inputting data. Jeff Barrell offered insights, support and enthusiasm throughout the process. Any remaining errors are the sole responsibility of the author. 1. North (1991) defines institutional rules as rules of the game including informal and formal mechanisms. 2. To calculate per capita income, I divided total US GNP by total population. These num bers were derived US Statistical Abstract cited in the text. 3. Not every member of the Trust held key patents. For instance, George Kleine was a distributor who was included to import foreign films and distributed Trust members’ films, whereas Pathé was the largest firm and dominated the American market in 1908. 4. Levinthal and Myatt (1994) suggest using product volume to calculate an emerging industry’s market share, since revenue and profitability data are unavailable. 5. In film, early entrepreneurs both produced and distributed others’ films. Market share is measured as follows: I tracked the flow of unique films through each firm and divided this number by the total unique films produced in the industry. To match each film with a firm and allocating portions (i.e., 1/2 or 1/4 for each distributor) was onerous and required tracking over 17,000 films. Thus, the total market share for all firms adds up to 118 percent rather than 100 percent. However, the market share data capture the percentage of unique product that flowed through a firm, either from production or distribution, or both. 6. The Herfindahl index ranges from zero to one, where zero indicates perfect competition and one monopoly. 7. These numbers are calculated from the census data cited in the methods section.



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12 Co-Evolution of Firm Capabilities and Industry Competition: Investigating the Music Industry, 1877–1997 Marc Huygens, Charles Baden-Fuller, Frans A.J. Van Den Bosch and Henk W. Volberda

Introduction

S

chumpeter (1934) claimed that industrial growth and development is a direct product of the competitive process. It is ‘a force from within’ because discovery is determined by the things that people do in organizations. Although firms disrupt current methods when they force themselves upon their rivals through innovative behaviour, they bring new ideas and practices to an industry, triggering its further development. This paper builds on such a perspective and investigates the relationship between capabilities and competition. This is consistent with Henderson and Mitchell (1997), who called for an enhanced understanding of the endogenous and reciprocal relationships between capabilities and competition. They argued that organizational capabilities shape the competitive environment, a process that, in turn, shapes capability development further. These interactions cross multiple levels of analysis and make capabilities and competition co-evolve over time. McKelvey (1997: 360) also argues that the development of capabilities at the firm level is both a cause and an effect of the competitive process at the industry level. In his explanation that ‘co-evolutionary effects take place at multiple levels’, McKelvey (1997: 360) stressed the need for this compound approach to the dynamics within and between firms. He maintained that Source: Organization Studies, 22(6) (2001): 971–1011.



reciprocal relationships between firms in a competitive environment are coevolutionary in nature and that such a perspective allows for the mutual inclusion of seemingly contradictory assumptions in social science that organizations are either idiosyncratic or uniform in nature. McKelvey (1997: 356) expressed the latter dilemma as one in which ‘it seems impossible to simultaneously accept the existence of idiosyncratic organizational events while at the same time pursuing the essential elements of justification logic’. It is clear that the co-evolution concept has the potential to integrate the discordance between Schumpeterian streams of ideas and those of the resource-based view. Whereas Schumpeterian theory suggests that firms will converge in their appearance and behaviour (as the dynamic of imitation will reduce variety among rival firms), contemporary resource-based theory claims that firms are idiosyncratic in what they have and what they do (Barney 1991; Grant 1996). Yet, empirical research efforts into co-evolving drivers and effects have been limited thus far (Lewin and Volberda 1999). We have the valuable contributions of Kieser (1989), who narrated how medieval guilds were replaced by mercantilist factories as markets and institutions co-evolved. Furthermore, Levinthal and Myatt’s (1994) study of the mutual fund business confirmed the existence of feedback effects between the firm’s ability to sustain market relations and its competitive position. Here, we respond to the lack of understanding about co-evolutionary processes within the field of strategic management and to calls for more studies that synthesize firm- and industry-level perspectives in strategy and organization research (Levinthal 1995; Lewin and Volberda 1999). The purpose of this article is to gain insights into the co-evolution of capabilities and competition within the competitive environment by developing an integrative framework suggesting several propositions, and by illustrating these in a longitudinal analysis of an industry. This framework is based on the assumption that search behaviour drives co-evolutionary processes. The framework will be illustrated by means of a longitudinal study of the music industry and will be divided into two parts. The first part, dealing with the period 1877–1990, discerns various competitive regimes at industry level, and analyses the capabilities that were founded and proliferated in each regime. The second part contains a multiple-case study covering the period 1990–1997 and focuses, at firm level, on the interaction between capabilities and competition during a particular competitive regime. The paper closes with a discussion of the findings, limitations, and key issues for future research.

An Integrative Framework of Co-Evolution The ‘behavioural theory of the firm,’ developed by Cyert and March (1963), pays attention to both organizational and competitive behaviour, and therefore can be helpful for a co-evolutionary analysis of capabilities and


Huygens et al. • Co-Evolution in the Music Industry, 1877–1997 251

competition. This theory assumes that firms have some degree of control over their market environment, and that they adapt to their habitat through learning processes. Learning takes place after feedback loops bring new market knowledge to the organization, which confronts the firm with particular problems. Firms respond to such problems through what is called ‘search’ behaviour, by which they pursue new or alternative ways of doing. According to Cyert and March (1963), firms display two basic types of search behaviour: they can search in the neighbourhood of current practice, or they can search for radically new alternatives. Cyert and March (1963) treated this distinction primarily in organizational terms, but stressed its applicability at the competitive level. Nelson and Winter (1982) also embraced this dichotomy by referring to it as local and distant search. This dual nature of search closely resembles March’s (1991) paradox of exploitation versus exploration. Below, we develop a conceptual framework of the co-evolution of capa bilities and competition, where we assume that firms can be involved in different search processes (such as exploitative and explorative search behaviour) at both the firm and the industry level. Indeed, we assume search to be the coupling mechanism between both levels, and also between the literatures at firm level dealing with organizational capabilities, and those at industry level focusing on competition. We will theorize on the search behaviour of rival firms starting at industry level, following this with analysis at firm levels. We will suggest a number of propositions, which, combined, form an integrative framework of co-evolution. Figure 1 provides a road map, showing where we are going and the position of our propositions. Propositions 1a, 1b and 1c refer primarily to the industry level of analysis and 2a, 2b

Search behaviour

1b

Foundation and

1c

Proliferation of Capabilities

Competitive Regime

1a Industry level Firm level

Process of

Co-evolution:

Innovation–Imitation

Competitive

Process of

dynamics

New Organization Forms

Manipulation–Adaptation 2a Search behaviour

2b

Creation and Refinement of 2c Capabilities

3*

New Business models

Organizational Change

Figure 1: An integrative framework of co-evolution of capabilities and competition * The numbers 1a–1c, 2a–2c and 3 refer to the corresponding propositions, see the text.



and 2c to issues at firm level. Proposition 3 captures the reciprocal relationships in the co-evolution of new organizational forms at firm level and new business models at industry level.

Co-Evolution from an Industry-Level Perspective Search behaviour leads to capability development (Barnett and Hansen 1996; Stuart and Podolny 1996), and we begin by examining industry processes. Firms build capabilities in an industry environment where they compete with other rival firms, each of which employs its bundle of capabilities in the competitive process. Some firms try to create competitive advantages by introducing new capabilities to the industry; in response, others will replicate these capabilities. As more rivals find ways to build the capabilities required for competing under the new rules of the competitive game, the pioneer’s advantage disappears. Such interaction patterns of innovation and imitation form the endogenous drivers of an industry’s evolution (Schumpeter 1934). It appears that, in a competitive context, many rivals are involved in search behaviour to upgrade their capabilities. Below, we will discuss the upper part of Figure 1 by explaining why search behaviour, the foundation, and subsequently the proliferation of capabilities and the resulting competitive regime, relate to each other over time. In a behavioural view of the firm, rival firms relate to each other as each one searches for new capabilities to compete within their industry (Cyert and March 1963). In so-called ‘ecologies of competition’, ‘the competitive consequences of learning by one organization depend on learning by other organizations’ (March 1991: 81). In other words, actions taken by one company in search of capabilities have implications for the direction of search behaviour pursued by its rivals. In their study of local search for technological positions, Stuart and Podolny (1996: 36) pointed out that ‘firms do not search in isolation; rather they search as members of a population of simultaneously searching organizations’. Companies become rivals not simply because they happen to operate in the same habitat, but because they influence each other’s search behaviour. As Barnett and Hansen (1996: 141) pointed out: ‘competition triggers self-reinforcing, reciprocal effects in an ecology of learning organizations’. In their search for capabilities, firms not only evolve in their role as competitors, but also activate new search behaviour by the other players in a particular industry. The idea that it is the search behaviour of players which underlies the competitive dynamics of an industry can be rephrased into the following Proposition 1a: Innovation and imitation behaviour at industry level drives the search for capabilities.



The Foundation and Proliferation of Capabilities That competition evolves around the dynamics of innovation and imitation is common knowledge these days. Intuitively, one would think that innovation and imitation of capabilities at the industry level resemble practices of exploration and exploitation, respectively: new capabilities are introduced by the innovator, while the imitators take care that the capabilities are spread further, throughout the industry. Such reasoning would, however, ignore the notion that imitators ‘exercise entrepreneurship as much as the innovators themselves’ (Jacobson 1992: 788) because, even from the imitator’s point of view, the search for new capabilities embodies a highly innovative activity (Winter 1984).The hard act of detecting and appreciating new questions is characteristic of Schumpeterian entrepreneurs who search for new ways of competing that could make rivals’ positions obsolete. They reject simplistic ideas such as success being ‘predetermined by mechanistic formulas’ (BadenFuller and Stopford 1994: 26). Pioneering firms that successfully introduce new capabilities to the industry force their rivals to try to imitate those capabilities, usually with improvements. During this process, the industry is marked by a period of turmoil in which both innovators and early imitators engage in explorative search for new capabilities. The resulting creative destruction is at the heart of the foundation of new capabilities at the industry level which, according to Schumpeter (1934), acts as a disequilibrating force. Ultimately, the growing prominence of imitation during an industry upheaval represents an equilibrating force that brings rival firms back to an equivalent level of capabilities, strategies and competition (Iwai 1984). From the moment that the industry’s rivals have managed to adopt the new competitive rules, they concentrate their subsequent efforts on getting ‘every ounce’ out of them. In other words, competition does not turn into a state of perfect equilibrium once the industry leader’s competitive advantage has been eroded through imitation. Instead, the competitive behaviour of rival firms centres around a further modification of the latest competitive recipe, ‘yet relying on the fundamental designs pioneered by the innovator’ (Teece 1987: 190). Instead of exploring radically new alternatives, rivals are typically involved in exploitative search behaviour, which is directed at the stabilization over time of industry-wide conventional competitive practices (Cyert and March 1963). Put another way, after the initial phase of exploration, there is a phase of proliferation when search behaviour is directed at the improvement of current and accepted practice. Although competition is still characterized by the dynamics of innovation and imitation, capabilities tend to disperse more quickly among the population of rivals. Close resemblance in thoughts, capabilities and activities places competitors ‘in a much better position to imitate



or learn and build from each other’s work than firms with different strategies and capabilities’ (Nelson 1991: 70). The competitive process of imitation and innovation functions as a context in which rivals display two basic types of search behaviour. On the one hand, explorative search involves the pursuit of alternative competitive formulas, and results in the foundation of novel capabilities at the industry level. On the other, exploitative search involves the hunt for expansion of current competitive recipes, and causes their further proliferation. Rivals interact competitively in both situations, be it that there may be differences in the ‘closeness’ of competition and the presence of competitive advantages. In sum, Proposition 1b: Innovation and early imitation search behaviour at industry level provide the foundation for new capabilities, while later imitation positively influences their proliferation.

Competitive Regimes The premise that capabilities are proliferated at the industry level once com petitors have a shared understanding of the competitive rules has implica tions for the industry’s evolution. When the search behaviour of rival firms in an industry shifts towards the exploitation of known capabilities, endless proliferation of capabilities via excessive exploitative search behaviour may drive the industry into a downward spiral. In reality, most industries survive and continue to evolve as a result of two possible occurrences. First, there is almost always a basic level of diversity among the industry’s constituent firms (Nelson 1991) resulting in competitive pressures for explorative search and introducing a new strategic innovation to the industry. Second, the requisite variety may come from outside the industry. After all, the tendency of an industry’s incumbents to focus on exploitative search makes them rigid and susceptible to new entrants whose critical attitude towards established practice may return the industry to a state of creative destruction (Levinthal and March 1993). In both situations, competitive dynamics ‘comprise powerful countervailing forces to the tendency for experience to eliminate exploration’ (March 1991: 85). Repeated over time, this dynamic of explorative and exploitative search behaviour between incumbents and new entrants represents a principal dri ving force of industry evolution in which capabilities are founded and pro liferated again and again (Hensmans et al. 2001). Often, an industry evolves through a sequence of ‘competitive regimes’ based upon particular competi tive rules, business models, industry recipes, and capabilities. Dosi (1982) and Nelson and Winter (1982) coined the term regime and stressed that each period has its own distinctive paradigm of competition. Competitive regimes are characterized by distinct product markets, technologies, and stress particular business models such as those in which external networks This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.


and alliances are important for a firm’s competitive advantage (Koza and Lewin 1999). The creative destruction that starts a new competitive regime makes the industry go through a series of discontinuities. Similar patterns of development have been reported in empirical studies on technological inno vation (Abernathy and Clark 1985; Tushman and Anderson 1986). Thus, Proposition 1c: Triggered by the foundation and proliferation of capabilities, the competitive dynamics of the interplay between incumbents and new entrants drive the sequence of competitive regimes over time.

Co-Evolution from a Firm-Level Perspective According to Cyert and March (1963), organizational learning is guided by so-called ‘standard operation procedures’ (SOPs). These SOPs determine the degree and direction of the firm’s search behaviour as a response to market feedback. Nelson and Winter (1982) translated the notion of SOPs into the concept of routines that are organizational carriers of knowledge and expertise. They argued that such routines influence firms’ search for new alternatives. Not only do routines shape the organizational processes underlying capabilities (Winter 1995), but they are also keys to the learning processes by which firms adapt to changes in their environment. This conforms to the idea, in behavioural theory, that organizations have some degree of control over their habitat, and implies a voluntary perspective of firm behaviour as opposed to a deterministic one (Child 1972). In this connection, Hedberg et al. (1976) discriminated between adaptive and manipulative (search) actions: whereas adaptation embodies a firm’s response to an environmental stimulus, an act of manipulation actually provokes such environmental reactions. More specifically, ‘the adaptor defends, conforms or submits’, while the manipulator is ‘aggressive, proud, and perhaps selfish’ (1976: 46). Whereas the manipulating firm impresses itself on its competitive environment, the adapting organization maps its competitive environment onto itself. Thus, Proposition 2a: Manipulation and adaptation behaviour inside rival firms drives the search for capabilities.

Creation and Refinement of Capabilities Capabilities are difficult to relate to search behaviour at the industry level, as their origins lie unavoidably at the firm level. Although several definitions of capabilities focus on knowledge as the fundamental component of a firm’s capabilities (Grant 1996), for our purpose, more encompassing definitions are appropriate, such as the capacity to deploy both tangible and intangible



resources, including managerial resources (Penrose 1959) via distinct organizational and managerial processes (cf. Amit and Schoemaker 1993). Lado and Wilson (1994) suggest distinguishing four capability categories that allow for the explicit incorporation of search behaviour as fundamental to the creation and redefinement of capabilities. These capability categories are managerial-, input-, transformation- and output-based. Managerial capabilities point at search behaviour to do with the cognitive structures and mental models that underlie a strategic vision. The second category concerns search behaviour regarding the acquisition and/or mobilization of specialized and unique assets. The third category involves innovation and organizational learning. The last category refers to physical outputs and to knowledgebased, intangible assets such as reputation and relationship networks with, for example, suppliers and clients. Search behaviour at the firm level is initiated by market feedback loops related to, for example, the value of intangible assets that internalize environmental knowledge within the organization (Cyert and March 1963). According to Ghemawat and Ricat I Costa (1993: 59), firms can process information and know-how in two ways: ‘using it to search for improvements within a framework of fixed beliefs about how the environment behaves and responds to organizational actions vs. using it to reconsider the beliefs themselves’. Intuitively, one would think that, at the firm level, manipulation of and adaptation to the competitive environment resemble acts of exploration and exploitation, respectively. While new practices are explored by manipulators, adapters engage in the exploitative search into existing practices. However, this would discount the idea of resource-based theory that firms which adapt to changes in their habitat are involved in creative behaviour, because they dissociate themselves from path dependencies (Teece et al. 1997). When adaptation becomes a prerequisite for survival, firms often tend to stick to these routinized capabilities, turning them into core rigidities (Leonard-Barton 1992, Tushman and Romanelli 1985). In spite of inertia, while their organization overcomes obstructions and their management experiments with new alternatives, some firms do take part in explorative search (Volberda 1996). Both manipulators and adapters engage in this type of activity. Explorative search within a population of rivals is dedicated to the creation of new capabilities. At the industry level, rival companies will show an increasing degree of uniformity in (terms of the competitive outcomes of these) capabilities, as more of them manage to adapt to the changed rules. However, because individual firms have distinct histories that make them heterogeneous at a basic stratum, the way in which they create new capa bilities (as well as their particulars) may differ considerably (Nelson 1991). This variety in capability construction increases once the various rival firms have managed to adapt, and starts to refine the newly created capabilities. This two-phased process of capability development (creation and refinement)



has been noted by Winter (1995: 51) in his distinction between a firm’s creative ability ‘to combine resources in novel ways and establish new activities’ and its ability ‘to amplify the contributions of present resources and expand existing lines of activity’. Similarly, Tushman and Romanelli (1985) explained how organizations are often involved in fine-tuning during periods of convergent change, in which existing structures, activities and capabilities are even further exploited. These stages of fine-tuning are punctuated by revolutionary organizational adaptation in which novel strategies, processes and capabilities are explored. Such radical shifts represent ‘revolutionary changes of the system’ (1985: 185). Considering the above, we suggest the following proposition: Proposition 2b: Manipulative and early adaptive search behaviour within firms creates the foundation for new capabilities, while later adaptive search behaviour positively influences the refinement of capabilities.

Organizational Change The premise that capabilities are refined at the firm level once firms have managed to adapt to major changes in their competitive environment has implications for the way that organizations evolve over time. Most firms display a natural tendency to prefer exploitation to exploration (March 1991), so there is the danger that they will fall into so-called ‘competence traps’ (Levinthal and March 1993). When the need to adapt to major changes in the competitive environment arises again, such organizational rigidity (Volberda 1996) and lack of absorptive capacity can preclude the firm’s effective adaptation to the new circumstances by not being able to absorb the required new external knowledge (Van Den Bosch et al. 1999). In contrast, some firms may be able to turn their efforts towards explo rative search behaviour again. This is subscribed by Hedberg et al. (1976), who explained that, once the need to adapt has been recognized, a firm ini tially intensifies its efforts to ‘do as before, but more’. This search response represents ‘a course of action that can be rationalized as an attempt to last out a period of adversity that is perceived or hoped to be temporary’ (Nelson and Winter 1982: 122). At a certain moment, investment postponement, cost cutting and asset reduction shape restructuring policies to regain financial stability. The process of unlearning of established routines continues through changes in strategy, personnel and ideology. If the organization moves on, problem solving and exploration of new alternatives gradually build the routines and new capabilities required to pursue the firm’s novel strategic course (Baden-Fuller and Stopford 1994).



Routines seem to play a key role in capability development. This is because capabilities are built on hierarchies of routines, some of which are hidden (Nelson and Winter 1982). Routines permeate the process of capability building, so that, even during the creation of new capabilities, inertia starts to penetrate firms’ organization structure and processes (Rumelt 1995). In this connection, Baum and Korn (1999) distinguish between path dependent and path creation processes. In these processes, routines appear to be both a blessing and a curse: they are mandatory in processes of change to create new capabilities, but, at the same time, obstruct subsequent transformation processes as they increase inertia. Rival firms can therefore be expected to repeat the Hedberg et al. (1976) change trajectory over time, during which the search for new capabilities at the firm level switches from creation to refinement and back again. In other words, Proposition 2c: The dynamics between managerial intentionality to create new capabilities and the impact of path dependencies on their refinement propels the emergence of a sequence of organizational changes over time. The above implies that successful firms evolve through multiple periods of organizational change or strategic renewal, in each of which, capabilities are created and refined. The creation of capabilities is enabled by several attributes of the context-, content- and process dimension of strategic change. The appointment of a new CEO is an important attribute of the context, while a change in the strategic intent and/or market positioning is a key attribute of the content of strategic change. Important attributes of the process dimension are the establishment of new ventures, alliances, and acquisitions, including learning new skills and resolving dilemmas sup porting the search for new capabilities during strategic change.

Combining Firm and Industry: Co-Evolution of Business Models and Organizational Forms From the above analysis, it appeared that the dynamics of explorative and exploitative search behaviour drive the evolution of both the firm and the industry over time in a world where capabilities and competition co-evolve. At the same time, however, the foregoing made it clear that it can be dif ficult to split up distinctively search behaviour at firm and industry levels of analysis. For instance, the concept of strategic innovation was discussed from an industry-level perspective, though, essentially, it describes indi vidual behaviour at the firm. In a similar vein, the interaction between new entrants and incumbents relevant to the firm-level perspective also applies to



the industry as well. The search concept appears to be crucial in combining the firm and industry perspective of co-evolution, as it not only highlights apparent similarities, but also exposes some noteworthy contrasts between the two. One of these differences concerns the difficulties encountered by rival firms in different dispositions. Explorative search can be more labourious for the innovator than for its imitators, as the latter group of rivals searches for answers to a question already found by the pioneer. At the same time, however, it has been noted that explorative search is more difficult for adapters than for manipulators, as the latter are free from the rigidity arising from established routines. The irony, of course, is that, in a competitive environment, innovating and imitating do not have an isomorphic correspondence with either the role of manipulator and adaptor, respectively, or with those of incumbents and new entrants. Instead of adopting a one-sided point of view towards search, an integrative perspective in which both firm and industry levels are taken into account could forestall such biases. Our integrative framework of co-evolution of capabilities and competition (summarized in Figure 1) centres around the unifying concept of search behaviour. The firm searches for capabilities to adapt to, or even manipulate its competitive context. As a collection of rival companies, though, firms are engaged in the search for capabilities at the more abstract level of compe tition, where the dynamic process of innovation and imitation rules. Obviously, the creation and refinement of capabilities by firms impacts the development of capabilities at the industry level in terms of foundation and proliferation (and vice versa), simply because they co-exist in an ecology of competition. Over time, these reciprocal relationships shape both firm and industry evolution as competitive forces make the search for capabilities alternate between the rejuvenating properties of exploration and the self-destructive tendencies of exploitation. Search at the industry level ulti mately results in the emergence of new business models. These business models and the manifestation of competitive regimes can be defined by factors such as the nature of customer interaction, asset configuration and knowledge leverage (Venkatraman and Henderson 1998). In a similar way, search at the firm level results in the emergence of new organization forms or blue prints, often discussed in the literature (e.g. Daft and Lewin 1993; Lewin and Volberda 1999; Lewin et al. 1999; Volberda 1998). In short, new organizational forms emerge alongside new business models in a coevolutionary manner, and so we suggest that: Proposition 3: Co-evolution of firm capabilities and industry competition manifests itself in a reciprocal process between the emergence of new organizational forms at firm level and new business models at industry level.



Methodology To illustrate the integrative framework on co-evolution developed in this paper, we investigate processes of search and co-evolution at two different levels of analysis in the music industry. Covering the period between 1877 and 1990, we detect shifts in competition, i.e. competitive regimes, over time. In contrast, processes of search and co-evolution at the firm level are examined via a multiple-case study of individual record companies over the more limited time frame of the period 1990–1997. The rationale for studying co-evolution between capabilities and competi tion in the music industry is threefold. Ranked second only behind book publishing, music is the oldest software industry with a history that spans more than 100 years, which makes it particularly suitable for the detection of long-term patterns. Furthermore, knowledge is crucial in the performance and survival of record companies. That capabilities are in essence integrated knowledge components (Grant 1996; De Boer et al. 1999) makes this industry adequate for investigation. Finally, the music industry is one of the socalled cultural industries, which have, until recently, only been of marginal interest to management and organization scholars as objects of empirical research. Although the film industry has gained some ground as a research site (e.g. DeFillippi and Arthur 1998; Miller and Shamsie 1996), relatively little is known to strategy scholars on organizational and competitive dynamics. The present study aims to fill this gap by means of both a historical study and a multiple-case study of the music industry, of which methodological issues such as data collection, analysis and validity are discussed below. The music industry ‘is a complex animal’ (Malm and Wallis 1992: 5) encompassing a variety of actors. In describing the music industry envi ronment, however, we primarily focus on the issues raised in the propositions about competitors and the competitive environment (micro- and meso level of analysis). We exclude an extensive discussion of field formation in the music industry (Anand and Peterson 2000), important institutional dimensions and extra institutional influences such as social movements (Lewin et al. 1999) and the impact of changing management logic on the emergence of new organizational forms (Dijksterhuis et al. 1999). We will come back to several of these limitations in the discussion section.

Historical Study 1877–1990 The historical study of the music industry builds on data that has been dis closed in a variety of articles and books on the music industry outside the boundaries of strategic management research. Malm and Wallis (1992) have pointed out that before the 1970s there were remarkably few relevant stud ies of the music industry. Because of this, the many secondary sources from which our qualitative data was retrieved stem from the 1970s and can be This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.


roughly divided into three streams. First, research publications on the eco nomics of the music industry offered insights into topics of industry orga nization, musical innovation and structural changes (Peterson and Berger 1975; Lopes 1992; Christianen 1995). The second domain involved writ ing about individual firms, and provided intelligence on the activities and organization of record companies as well as the technologies they applied (Peterson and Berger 1971; Denisoff 1986; Negus 1992). Finally, studies in communication supplied information on the relationship between the record business and the media industries (Gronow 1983; Laing 1992; Malm and Wallis 1992). Quantitative data was collected from three respected industry associations: the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), the National Music Publishers’ Association (NMPA) and the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI). The observed diversity in secondary sources enabled a check for data consistency both within and across these streams of cultural studies. In addition to such ‘within-method’ triangulation (Denzin 1978), the reliability of the historical study was enhanced by means of ‘between-method’ triangulation (Jick 1979). This was achieved via a confrontation of the longitudinal body of qualitative data with the more robust and quantitative data that had been collected at the various industry associations, and covered parts or most of the period under consideration. In line with previous co-evolution studies (Lewin and Volberda 1999; Pettigrew 1997), analysis of the organized data set was performed along two related activities: (1) a search for patterns in processes out of a sequence of events, and (2) a search for the underlying mechanisms that shaped these patterns. To illustrate the advanced propositions on co-evolution at the industry level, the first of these activities involved the detection of various competitive regimes in terms of distinct product markets (Porter 1980), organizational value chains (Porter 1985) and technologies (Tushman and Anderson 1986). In a similar vein, the second activity concerned the identification of record companies’ capabilities around which competition evolved during a particular competitive regime. As mentioned above, these were classified according to one of four capability categories, as proposed by Lado and Wilson (1994): managerial, input-based, transformation-based and output-based. This particular typology allows for the explicit incorporation of search behaviour.

Multiple Case Study 1990–1997 Whereas the historical study deals with co-evolution over various compet itive regimes, the multiple case study is directed at the reciprocities between capabilities and competition during a particular competitive regime. While the focal issue of inquiry at the various case companies was their search for new capabilities, differences in the way these companies searched were of special interest. The case companies were selected from the British music industry. Over the years, the significance of the British music industry has This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.


Table 1: The record companies in the case study Case category

Formal owner

Date of incorporation1

Number of employees

UK market share2

Island Records

Acquired PolyGram4 1962 62 2.0 (1.4–2.6) independent Virgin Records Acquired EMI 1973 161 8.5 (6.4–10.7) independent BMG International Major operating Bertelsmann 1980 303 6.4 (4.7–8.3) UK company Warner Music UK Major operating Time-Warner 1970 330 10.4 (7.2–12.6) company Roadrunner Independent Private 1987 7 (120)3 0.1 (0.1–0.2) Records Independiente5 Independent Private 1983/1996 17 (19) 0.9 (0.2–1.5) Notes: 1. Incorporation refers to date of establishment in the UK. 2. UK Market Share refers to the annual averages for the period 1990–1997; figures between brackets are the highest and lowest values in this period. 3. The figures between brackets in the Employees column are worldwide ones. 4. In May 1998, Philips sold PolyGram for an amount of $10.4 billion to Seagram, whose aim was to integrate the company with Universal. 5. Independiente was formerly known as Go! Discs (hence the two dates of incorporation); UK market shares therefore concern the Go! Discs label in the period 1990–1996.

increased, both within the United Kingdom and to music markets in the rest of the world. With a sales value of over £1 billion, the United Kingdom is the world’s third largest market, and the trade association of the industry, British Phonographic Industry (BPI), even claims that the UK music industry is far more important as an international repertoire provider. It was acknowledged that different types of record companies operated in the music industry, each experiencing different types of organizational change processes: acquired independents, major operating companies, and independents. Our six case companies were chosen (see Table 1) based on the theoretical classification above (Eisenhardt 1989). In each company, a top manager was contacted and asked to participate in the research project through two semi-structured, usually tape-recorded, interviews lasting between 60 and 90 minutes. These interviews asked about the context and content of capabilities and competition over the period of study. The timeconsuming exercise of mining multiple informants throughout the company was traded off for the top manager’s position, this being the most knowl edgeable source of information on the (impact of) changes within the firm (Glick et al. 1990). To offset a resulting bias in data collection, further public information on the case companies was accumulated, primarily through the inspection of all issues of two respected trade journals for the industry, Music Week and Music Business International, for the period 1990–1997. In addition, all six editions of The UK Record Industry Annual Survey (from 1993 to 1998) were consulted to retrieve financial and accounting data on individual record companies.



For each case company, a ‘data collection file’ was created in which all longitudinal data was chronologically ordered. The company files came to be the groundwork for our in-depth case descriptions of organizational change at each of the companies, and our tables that outlined the major events during the period of transformation. Both the case descriptions and the event tables were reviewed, corrected and commented upon by the interviewees, and provided a basic input for further analysis. In each case, the three core dimensions of organizational changes, as described above, were used to illustrate the advanced propositions of co-evolution at the firm level. First of all, the context of change was analyzed along possible drivers of transformation e.g. new executives or a performance decline. In addition, the content of change at each case company was explored in terms of its vision, scope, positioning and capabilities – in other words, its competitive strategy. Finally, the change process was measured in terms of attributes (such as learning new skills, internal ventures and new alliances) as deduced from prominent management literature on strategic change (e.g. Tushman and Romanelli 1985; Barker and Duhaime 1997). These inquiries facilitated cross-case analysis on the role of change in record companies’ search for capabilities. The internal validity of a multiple case study concerns the verification of the causality between key constructs (Eisenhardt 1989), and it appears to be significant. All the individual case studies showed how their search for capabilities embodied a process of organizational change which, in the end, determined their market performance. The external validity of the multiple case study concerns the generalizability of its findings (Yin 1984) and seems to be high for the music industry: six companies, which together held an average share of 30 percent of the UK music market over the period 1990– 1997, were studied in up to three different types of companies. The construct validity of the multiple case study deals with the question of whether the gathered evidence truly supports its findings (Eisenhardt 1989) and appears to be at an acceptable level. Both data sources (private and public) and data collection techniques (executive interviews and article tracking) were subjugated to triangulation, whereas the case descriptions and event tables were reviewed by the interviewees (i.e., the key informants) themselves.

Historical Study of the Music Industry Starting near the end of the nineteenth century, the following section pre sents a longitudinal study into more than hundred years of co-evolution of capabilities and competition in the music industry. On the basis of the pro posed integrative framework, we will describe and analyze the history of the music industry from 1877. Table 2 classifies the competitive regimes that



Table 2: Classifying competitive regimes in the music industry, 1877–1990 Regime Basic product Technology logic Gramophone (early 1900s) cabinets

Target market Market for home entertainment

Company value point Separate recording and manufacturing

Software shift (mid 1910s)

Gramophone records

Market for musical Batch-based capacity variety production

Star system (mid 1930s)

Music recorded by Market for mass celebrity artists entertainment

Carrier technology Drums/Disc system Disc system

Scale-based marketing and distribution

Radio

Alternative music Music recorded by Youth market (mid 1950s) alternative artists segments

A & R integrated with flexible distribution

Vinyl record Tape recording

Federal system (late 1960s)

Label autonomy and HQ Tape cassette control

Music as social awareness

Rights shifts (mid Music as property 1980s) right

Multi-market segments

Global multimedia Chain cooperation and markets publishing

Compact disc

Source: Huygens (1999).

existed in the music industry from 1877–1990, and these will be described below. Table 3 summarizes our analysis which links capability foundations to competitive regimes. Tables 2 and 3 are related to the industry level, the upper part of the integrative framework, see Figure 1. Table 4 captures our findings about the connection between changing business models at the industry level and new organizational forms at firm level, as indicated by Proposition 3.

Competition for Hardware Technology: 1877 to 1914. Edison, Berliner, and Colombia Today’s music industry with its global presence and worldwide sales of more than 40 billion US$ has its foundations in the vision and determination of two individuals. The first was Thomas Edison who invented the phonograph in 1877. Edison was convinced that the most important applications of his new machine lay in the reproduction of speech for purposes of dictation and education. This was reflected in the name of his enterprise: the Edison Speaking Company (Schicke 1974). Recordings were in short supply and a lack of an acceptable degree of fidelity limited its adoption by consumers. Although companies such as the North American Phonograph Company and the Dictaphone Corporation acquired licenses and marketed the dictating machines, it was under the Colombia Phonograph Corporation license that the real commercial value of the phonograph was recognised as resting in the entertainment sector (Frith 1992). The Corporation noticed how its machine’s sound-provoking characteristics attracted public attention in penny arcades, fairs and amusement centres. In 1887, Berliner patented a rivalling phonograph that reproduced sound through a horizontal movement of the stylus over a flat disc that rotated on a turntable, rather than Edison’s drums. Berliner recognized that the


Huygens et al. • Co-Evolution in the Music Industry, 1877–1997 265 Table 3: Competitive regimes and their relevant capabilities foundation Competitive regime Technology logic

Software shift

Star system

Alternative music

Managerial capabilities

•H orizontal disc • Market for home technology entertainment •Z inc masterplate •A vailability of for recording minimum software • Financial and • High fidelity of recordings technological knowledge • Theatre and opera •M arket for music performers recordings • Technological skills • Availability of and experience minimum hardware • Compact roster of • Consumer celebrities preference for • Marketing and celebrities promotion • Manipulation of consumer taste budgets

Transformation-based capabilities

• Structured firm organization • E fficient manufacturing plant • Separate recording and production • Innovation in recording/ manufacturing • Capacity-based production • Avant-garde marketing campaigns • Economic rationale of costs vs. revenues • Upcoming popular • Roster of unproven • Talent discovery and popular artists youth market and development • Continuous genera- • Low-cost recording • Entrepreneurial studios management tion of new music • All-round skills of • L abel culture of • High market owner/manager responsiveness musical innovation

Federal system • Multiple market coverage •S ynergy across focused labels

Rights shift

Input-based capabilities

•C ultivation of music property rights • Multiple-time buyers of music

• Collection of acquired record labels • Headquarters’ corporate knowledge • Multinational distribution networks •S cale-based CD manufacturing plants

Output-based capabilities •Q uality gramophone disc • Technology license agreements • International strategic alliance •H igh release variety in recordings •H igh technological status •N etwork of distribution channels •N etwork of jukebox contracts • Independent distribution network • Network of local radio contacts • Label reputation

• Label autonomy in • High musical variety A&R and marketing in album releases • Shared • Popular corporate image administration and P&D set-up • Cooperation within • Expansion of value chain record catalogues • Specialization of • Network of deals artist development with independents


commercial value of his gramophone was to bring entertainment – especially music – directly into people’s homes (Frith 1992). Seeing that a supply of high-quality sound recordings was a prerequisite in making his product attractive to the consumer market, he developed a system for the efficient manufacturing of high-fidelity recordings,by using a zinc plate as a master record. By separating the recording process from the reproduction stage, Berliner was able to make further duplicates at less cost, with easier distribution and higher quality (Jones 1992). The United States Gramophone Company launched Berliner’s gramophone onto the home entertainment market in 1895. This new competition forced Edison to respond fast. He improved his product by developing a spring-motor driven phonograph and joined with Colombia to sell the phonograph on the home entertainment market (Jones 1992). Over the next five years, rivalry between disc and cylinder manufacturers was governed This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.


Table 4: Competitive regimes, business models and new organizational forms Competitive regime

Changing industry input-market activities

Business models output-market activities

Changing organizational forms

Technology logic

—

—

—

Software shift

From theatre artists to anonymous performers

From standard cabinets to target models

From technology start-up to record company

Star system

From contracting artists to developing stars

From billboard to radio and movie promotion

From small company to corporate bureaucracy

Alternative music

From artist discovery to image building

From local to network radio and TV promotion

From A&R individuals to A&R departments

Federal system

From artist variety to overproduction

From sales promotion to elaborated marketing

From multiple labels to foreign subsidiaries

Rights shift

From music artists to entertainment stars

From local to global multi-media networks

From record company to music company

Source: Adapted from Huygens (1999).

by fights over patent rights and a stream of minor technological innovations (Negus 1992). For instance, Edison developed a molding process to ‘mass produce’ his pre-recorded wax cylinders, whilst Berliner joined up with Eldridge Johnson, who had talents in organization and finance, to form the Victor Talking Machine Company in 1901. Johnson, who had managed to create a structured organization out of Berliner’s chaotic laboratory, licensed Victor’s technology to new and exist ing firms, such as Colombia and British Gramophone. By 1907, it was clear that Victor had won the ‘standardization battle’ between disc and cylinder (Schicke 1974). Victor cemented its victory by taking out a 50 percent stake in British Gramophone and splitting up the world into various territories (Gronow 1983). Victor was responsible for the United States and established agencies in Central and South American countries, as well as in China, Japan and the Philippines. British Gramophone set up plants in Russia, India and the main countries of Europe, from which smaller countries and colonies in Africa, Southeast Asia and the Middle East were managed through agencies.

Competition for Software 1914 to 1930s: New Entry by Content Providers When Victor’s basic patents expired in 1914, more firms entered to supply machines and several major companies were involved in pressing discs not just for their own label, but also for third parties (Jones 1992). In addition, entrepreneurs established small recording companies to market their own products, recorded and pressed by larger companies, on a private label (Gronow 1983). These business practices emphasized the distinction between selling gramophones and making and trading recordings. It became clear that selling recordings in large quantities was very profitable. Most of the record



corporations recognized this switch from hardware to software, and aimed to capture the biggest piece of the newer market (Gronow 1983). The common approach was to provide a broad product range recognizing themes such as dancing, jazz and ragtime. Variety did not always give rise to high unit volumes. Sales of a few thousand records per title were typical and economies of scale could not be realized, even though the overall market was large. During these years, recording companies were managed and (partially) owned by engineers, supported mainly by technicians (Frith 1992). The emphasis in the firm’s policies was therefore largely technological in char acter: resources were primarily directed at a gradual improvement of the manufacturing and recording processes. At the same time, technically skilled managers decided on what was to be released on record, but they were only interested to a minor degree in the music itself. The continuing work on product and process innovation at the technolog ically oriented recording companies after the First World War further reduced the costs of machines (Jones 1992). By 1929, about 50 percent of all US households owned a machine, and firms stimulated sales of machines by introducing market segmentation policies. Gramophone models that fea tured electric motors were introduced in relatively small numbers at high prices; newly developed portable wind-up gramophones were manufactured and sold at low prices in huge quantities (Gronow 1983). This increase in machine sales stimulated the growth of record sales. In 1929, more than 150 million records were sold in the United States, an increase of 50 percent over the 1921 figure. During the 1920s, this stress on technology-related issues impacted the content of record companies’ release policies. The leading firms came to com pete for a limited number of well-known and very popular theatre and opera performers, often releasing exactly the same songs or new versions of those recordings. These imitative policies were even further amplified through lowcost recordings of popular songs or concerts by anonymous studio performers and symphony orchestras (Frith 1992). Instead of pursuing a more entrepreneurial policy of promoting and releasing new and promising artists, major record companies repeated their release policies, over and over again.

Competition for Markets 1930s – The Competition from Radio – Decca’s Entry – The New ‘Star’ System Due to the Great Depression and the success of radio broadcasting as a substitute form of entertainment, record sales fell from 150 million units in 1929 to 25 million in 1935, forcing many small recording firms and a few big ones out of business (Gronow 1983). The success of radio pointed to the need for new



strategy, and this came from an entrant not an incumbent. Decca Records, incorporated in the United States in 1934 by Jack Kapp and Ted Lewis, was the first record company that created economies of scale in an industry characterized by high initial costs of recording and relatively low reproduction costs (Sanjek 1991). Kapp realized that he needed to sell massive amounts of only a few releases in order to make his business extremely profitable. Instead of investing his partner’s $250,000 in gramophone manufacturing, Kapp dedicated his resources solely to records. On top of that, he developed the ‘star system’, a new business concept that was based on his ability to discover fresh market opportunities and to design new marketing techniques. Kapp created a compact artist roster of stars such as the Dorsey Brothers and Bing Crosby, whom he had lured away from Brunswick Records, his previous employer. In addition, he developed intensive aggressive marketing and promotion campaigns (Frith 1992). Kapp also exploited the emerging market for coin-operated machines, and obtained a substantial market share in the profitable jukebox market (Sanjek 1991). By 1939, the market had recovered somewhat, as consumers regained confidence (Gronow 1983). RCA-Victor, Colombia and Decca were the three largest firms. In 1939, Decca sold more than 13 million records, while its share of the jukebox market rose to 90 percent. However, it was not long before RCA-Victor and CBS-Colombia targeted the jukebox market segment in response to Decca’s success (CBS bought Colombia from American in 1938). The entrance of these established major record companies triggered a rapid growth of the jukebox business segment, which by then accounted for approximately 60 percent of all record sales. While responding to Decca’s successful strategy, the major record companies changed their organizations in fundamental ways. A business-orientated CEO, with a strong personality, replaced the technically skilled inventor, who had traditionally headed recording firms in the pre-recession years. The domination of technical staff was reduced as technological research activities were disconnected from record business operations and transferred to parent companies (Negus 1992). Furthermore, brand-new departments were installed with large marketing and promoting staffs. In the end, the established record companies managed to imitate Decca’s highly profitable market strategy. The immediate result was that both the amount and variety of new releases declined considerably, but that the quantity produced of each release was enormous (Sanjek 1991). Record sales in 1938 had an estimated value of $26 million compared to $6 million in 1933, the bottom year of the depression.

1930s and Early 1940s – New Strategies – Radio Moves from Competitor to Collaborator Profits in 1938 were still just a third of what they had been in 1929, and radio was still the record industry’s main competitor. This forced the major firms to reshape their strategy again in the early 1940s (Frith 1992). They shifted This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.


their focus from established, but expensive, celebrities to developing and building new, but relatively cheap, recording stars. This created new musical market segments. Whereas the public used to buy recordings by popular artists known from the theatre or concert hall, they now bought music from previously unknown company-created stars. As a consequence, live performances became replications of recordings, instead of the other way around. This new relationship between records, artists and markets coincided with new promotion techniques. Up to that moment, firms had used billboards and newspapers, but the market coverage of these tools was limited. Radio, with its extensive broadcasting networks and nation-wide coverage, became the new outlet to promote the new unknown artists (Sanjek 1991). A com petitor in the past, radio now co-evolved as collaborator. Radio stations gave record companies the opportunity of promoting their newly developed stars who, in turn, provided radio with a cheap form of programming. Secure links were established between the rival industries. In 1929, the RCA corporation with its NBC radio had purchased Victor network industry, which made it possible to exploit new stars on three fronts: film, radio and records. This was the time of Bing Crosby, Benny Goodman and Glenn Miller, and the start of a new era in which music, such as jazz and big band, came to dominate companies’ classical repertoire. Record sales rose: 1940 revenues doubled those of 1938, and, in 1940, 100 million records were sold. The Second World War not only triggered American sales, but also increased companies’ international revenues. The worldwide popularity of US-based music flourished as American soldiers, functioning as exporters, liberated many overseas countries (Gronow 1983).

The Arrival of Alternative Music The Late 1940s and 1950s During the first ten years after the war, major record firms were focused on the production of classical music on the one hand, and jazz and big band as alternative forms of popular music, on the other. In 1948, a new entrant called Atlantic Records stepped into the R&B (rhythm and blues) segment of the market (Gillett 1988). It was followed by other small independent, but highly entrepreneurial, labels, such as Imperial, Dot, Sun and Chess. Atlantic and other small independent record labels co-operated with local radio stations, as both realized that the consumer really wanted more variety in music styles (Peterson and Berger 1975). This made it possible for small independents to get their records played on air by a large number of radio stations. However, the new competitive radio environment in the United States was not the only factor in the emerging success of independent labels in search of new musical styles. The cost advantages of tape recording and the mobility of its equipment enabled small record companies to create their own studios This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.


and recordings at acceptable cost (Jones 1992). The new editing possibilities of tape recording, enhanced by the development of the two-track system and the invention of ‘stereo’ in 1958, also contributed to the development of new musical styles, as artists and producers experimented with the new opportunities offered by tape. In addition, the invention of the microgroove record had made it possible to distribute more records at much lower costs. As a consequence, a host of distribution companies were born, functioning as the minor record companies’ lifeline to the retail market (Peterson 1990). Independents mainly released individual songs on singles, and these 45-rpm records took far less storage space and handling time than the larger 331/3 LPs. Moreover, the number of different places where one could buy a record expanded as a result of new distribution channels. Next to the traditional retailers, records were now sold in department stores or other specialty retail outlets, and even by mail, via record clubs (Mittlestaedt and Stassen 1994). After 1955, a host of small but entrepreneurial record labels was responsi ble for a significant increase in both the variety and number of new releases. In these years, artists like Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, Chuck Berry and Little Richard achieved tremendous success. The independent sector flour ished. Whereas the big four had owned approximately 75 percent of the $277 million US record market in 1955, by 1959, their share had tumbled to 34 percent of a growing market that had reached a value of $603 million. The rigid organizational structures of the major corporations appeared to be one of the factors that inhibited their timely response to new market conditions (Peterson 1990). The person responsible for A&R (artist and repertoire) at the independent record firm was the entrepreneur (Gillett 1988) who usually had a feeling for what kind of music or artist could be successful in the future. Furthermore, s/he was an expert in all aspects of the business, from producer to promoter, and was often in charge of the firm. The significance of the A&R role and the key position of radio disc jock eys as gatekeepers were not immediately recognized by the lagging major companies. Initially, these firms tried to recapture lost market share by directing their attention towards the LP instead of the single, and by offer ing discounts to most of the country’s distributors. By 1964, the big four realized that the music styles of R&B and rock ‘n’ roll were not just passing fads. The market had continued to grow in these turbulent years, and this growth was a direct consequence of the independent record firms’ discovery that these new music styles strongly appealed to the youth section of the market (Frith 1992). The majors had never really addressed this younger generation (Denisoff 1986). The major companies that had been so successful in the first decade after the war were not only being hurt by a host of successful independents, but were also under attack from foreign companies that had entered their home market. In 1955, EMI acquired Capitol, one of the four majors, while Philips’ record division Phonogram purchased a mature independent com pany, Mercury, to enter the American market only six years later. Unlike their This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.


US counterparts, these European firms were deeply involved in the development of local music and artists. Eventually, the US firms re-organized their companies and altered their traditional marketing strategies. Emphasis was now placed on discovering and developing new talent in the popular music field, and special A&R departments were created (Peterson and Berger 1975). They also invested heavily to intensify their relationships with radio and the newly emerging TV. Recording stars not only had their own special style of music, but also propagated a unique and eccentric image; it was in these turbulent years that sound and image became inseparable (Frith 1992). By 1964, Colombia and Capitol showed that they had been able to adjust to the changing market conditions when their newly incorporated A&R departments achieved success with the discovery of hot acts like the Beach Boys and Bob Dylan (Peterson and Berger 1975). RCA failed to establish itself in the market for popular music. Within ten years, it tumbled from the first to the very last position in America’s top-ten record companies. It survived through its superior position in classical music and its highly profitable, but coincidental, contract with Elvis Presley (Gillett 1988). Even Decca, once a prominent entrepreneurial record company and pioneer of the star system, was unable to retain its competitive position as its rivals released hit after hit.

Competition for Labels 1960s and 1970s – Warner’s Entry and the Federal System The most remarkable new entrant during the 1960s was Warner, a diver sified firm that achieved success by introducing a new way of building and structuring a record company. The big movie corporation Warner Brothers had noticed the ease with which independent labels had ruined the domi nance of the major record companies (Sanjek 1991). This prompted Warner to create Warner Records and buy Frank Sinatra’s Reprise Records in 1963. When Steve Ross, president of Kinney Corporation, gained financial con trol of Warner Seven Arts (the holding company), he reconfigured Warner’s music assets, and acquired three of America’s most successful independent record labels; Atlantic, Elektra and Asylum (Sanjek 1991). Steve Ross’ innovation was the ‘label federation’ concept, in which indi vidual labels continued to operate in a relatively autonomous manner. Under the Warner umbrella, separate divisions were created according to music genre: middle-of-the-road (Warner and Reprise), rock (Elektra and Asylum), and R&B and soul (Atlantic). This formula enabled the labels to maintain their innovative character in accordance with the specific characteristics of their particular target markets (Denisoff 1986). At the same time, the parent company reaped synergistic benefits as it created a companywide manufacturing and distribution set-up called WEA to exploit economies of scale This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.


(Lopes 1992). As the first record company with a multi-divisional organizational structure, Warner became the leader of the US record industry with a 15 percent market share in 1969, only ten years after its diversification into recorded music. Warner became a role model and others replicated its radically new orga nizational approach. In 1969, Colombia purchased Bell Records, renamed it Arista and placed the label in a separate and semi-autonomous division. The Music Corporation of America (MCA), originally a talent agency, stepped into the record business by creating its own label, and in 1967 acquired Decca. To expand its interest in the American record industry, PolyGram (created in 1972 by merging Phonogram and Polydor) purchased RSO Records in 1975 and invested in Casablanca Records. All these companies adopted a divisionalized structure. This activity caused the number of successful independent labels to decline. The United States returned to an oligopolistic setting with the old names dominating the industry (Lopes 1992). For many firms, maximization of album sales became the prime objective, and it was in this era that new marketing and promotion tools such as cover graphics, radio and TV advertising, live concerts, press interviews and photo sessions were developed and refined (Denisoff 1986). Whereas the success of an established artist could be predicted without too much difficulty, forecasting whether a newcomer’s album would be a hit was more difficult. This uncertainty had much to do with the uncertainty about consumers’ taste. During the 1970s, the majors started to cope with this market uncertainty by spreading their risks (Denisoff 1986). As the average chance of success for a newly developed act was even less than 10 percent, major corpora tions began to release an enormous number of new products. Coincidentally, the industry experienced a sales growth of $2.1 million between 1973 and 1978 and there was a rise in the prominence of international players such as EMI and PolyGram. Using cassette as the medium, CBS was finally rec ognized by the American giants on an international level, and both CBS and Warner increased their activities in Europe during these years (Laing 1992). In addition to selling US-based records, their European units became more and more involved in the development of local acts and the creation of national artist rosters. Likewise, they built company-owned distribution channels in most of the countries on the European continent.

Competition for Catalogues The 1980s – Profits from Intellectual Property Rights In 1978, the global record industry flourished as it had never done before. However, this sunny situation was severely clouded when the industry went into a painful recession during the final months of 1979. Market sales



tumbled between 1979 and 1983 (Denisoff 1986). In response, the major companies restructured their organizations: marketing and promotion budgets were minimized, new talent inflow came to a halt, and artist development was restricted. All remaining resources were directed at the cultivation of superstars. Thousands of employees, especially within A&R and marketing functions, were fired. Then, as a result of the introduction of MTV and the development of the compact disc by Philips (Burnett 1996), consumer interest in music revived. CD companies were still modest in the early ‘80s, compared to LP and cassette sales. Prices for CD players fell rapidly, enabling the average customer to buy this new audio equipment, but the record industry maintained its original price levels for the compact disc. The compactness and solidity of the new format made shipping easier. Cutting distribution costs in this way more than compensated for higher recording costs. Profits on compact discs were considerably higher than profit margins on LPs and cassettes had ever been. Pleased with the enhanced quality of the CD system, consumers replaced their existing LP collections with a new assortment of compact discs. The demand for old music on new material was quickly recognized by the major record companies, who quickly re-released their existing catalogue on CD (Burnett 1996). The enthusiasm with which consumers purchased CDs con taining ‘old’ music material made the major record companies aware of the importance of owning a large inventory of music from the past. The profit in the business shifted from the physical manufacturing and distribution of music products to the exploitation of copyrights attached to old recordings (Qualen 1985). Revenues could not only be generated through sales of music released on a particular format, but could also be collected by exploiting the rights connected to that piece of music. Inspired by rising sales and bright forecasts, the major record firms looked for new avenues to exploit their rights on a larger scale, and intensified their international approach to the music market by increasing foreign investment (Wallis and Malm 1984). An international structure of operating companies made local artist development possible, while multinational distribution networks supported the multi-country release of records. Moreover, the major companies could cultivate their existing catalogues in new countries to new consumers. The expanding possibilities surrounding the exploitation of their copyrights made record companies jump into the business of music publishing during the second half of the ‘80s (Wallis and Malm 1984). As the majors recognized the significance of a large back catalogue, they turned their attention to independent publishing companies and they began to purchase small and local publishing houses (Burnett 1996). According to the NMPA, music-publishing revenues on a worldwide level grew by 10 percent a year from 1982 onwards to more than $3.5 million by 1990, more than 20 percent of which was accounted for by the United States.



The sudden emphasis on this secondary source of income also changed record companies’ attitude towards the value of television broadcasting and global advertising (Malm and Wallis 1992). Increasingly, company revenues came from licensing fees from media companies that created films, books, magazines, videos, and other consumer products. However, the opportunities to cultivate rights across a wide range of media did not escape the attention of corporations operating in other entertainment industries. These firms recognized the central role of music within different forms of entertainment, and were attracted by the increase in music sales and music’s potential to link these segments in a synergistic way (Laing 1992). Ownership structures within the music industry also changed radically as major record companies came under the control of multinational corporations in the multi-media and publishing industries, and in the consumer electronics industries. Warner Music had become part of Time-Warner, while the Japanese conglomerates Sony and Matsushita had incorporated CBS and MCA. Thorn, Philips and Bertelsmann (Germany) owned EMI, PolyGram, and RCA, respectively. At the start of the 1990s, these six companies dominated almost 80 percent of the global record industry.

Multiple Case Study of the 1990s The period described above has focused on co-evolution between streams of new entrants and incumbent firms, on strands of technology, and on radio versus record companies between 1877 and 1990. The next section presents a finer grained study that covers an eight-year period (1990–1997) of co-evolution of capabilities and competition in the British music indus try. It describes and analyses co-evolution from a firm-level perspective, as described in the lower part of the integrative framework in Figure 1. Below, we describe and analyze how six record companies created and refined capabilities during a particular competitive regime in which the rules of the game were again re-defined. Furthermore, we highlight the context, content and process of organizational change of these companies. In discussing the content of organizational change, we pay attention to the creation and refinement of capabilities.

EMI and PolyGram Introduce New Competitive Rules after Acquiring Former Independents At the start of the ‘90s, UK record sales declined, bringing a sudden halt to the UK industry’s successful path of development. At the same time, the joint market share of British independent labels began to erode when the most celebrated of these companies were attacked by major record corporations.



In their search for record catalogues and publishing rights, EMI and PolyGram purchased the four biggest independent record companies, Chrysalis Records, Virgin Music, Island Records and A&M Records, between 1989 and 1992, raising their combined market share from 29 to 45 percent. Because independent record companies were traditionally regarded as the engine of musical innovation, this merging of majors and ‘indies’ was not favourably received. In the press, many said that it would obstruct the symbiotic process between other groups and therefore block a renewal of artists and music, which the industry so badly needed now that it was perceived to be in a state of depression. However, an unexpected and constructive side-effect would emerge out of these take-overs. The 1989 acquisition of Island Records by PolyGram triggered organiza tional change (see Table 5). The context, content and process of this change process is particularly interesting. Although Island Records had enjoyed an average 3.6 percent of the market share between 1984 and 1988, its mar ket performance had suddenly declined. In the year of its take-over, Island Records’ market share was only 0.8 percent, due to the loss of its superstars. PolyGram appointed a managing director (MD) who noticed a new opportunity for his company around the exploitation of existing catalogues and development acts into mainstream pop music. According to interviews with the company, this MD developed a new vision in which the label’s successful music history could be merged with the commercial demands of the future. His primary aim was to lift Island to a situation in which it could introduce new alternative artists as well as new musical genres to the market, but to a much larger audience than was previously thought possible. Traditionally, the record industry held the belief that innovation in music and the commercial market were mutually exclusive opposites, but as the 1990s progressed they became integrated. The cases described in this section show this process of integration within and between firms. The MD based his change programme on a different perception of the business, and positioned Island among its rivals as a commercially alternative record label. To be successful, Island needed to create new capabilities to realize it novel strategy. Its dormant A&R capabilities had to be activated, while marketing capabilities had to be bred considering the near absence of marketing skills within the company. According to interviews with company executives, as a prelude to the mandatory restructuring of Island’s organizational processes, its video divi sion was streamlined, while the art department was terminated. In addition, 40 percent of the company’s staff was discharged to make room for new people from outside the firm with experience and skills in both A&R and marketing. The new MD structured Island’s organizational processes to conform with the designs he had observed at individual labels of major record companies. This enabled him to place managers with a ‘corporate’ history at top positions and put staff who had experience of working at ‘indies’ in front-line positions. The heightened awareness of commercial aspects also required



Table 5: Context, content and process of organizational change at acquired independents Island records Context New executives

Virgin records

Appointment of a new Managing Director

Formation of new three-headed management team

New ownership

PolyGram’s £272 million acquisition of Island

Thorn-EMI’s £560 million acquisition of Virgin

Threat/opportunity

Competition focused on catalogue and mainstream pop

No competition for new music on a global level

Performance decline

Rapid decrease of company market share over 1989

Sudden decrease of company market share in 1991

Vision

Merge Island’s musical past with future commercial demands

Merge Virgin’s entrepreneurial past with future global demands

Scope

Introduce new music/artists to a wide audience

Deliver new music/artists to a worldwide audience

Positioning

Island as a commercially alternative record label

Virgin as an internationally focused record company

Capabilities

Rebirth/formation of A&R and marketing caps

Convergence of new A&R and marketing capabilities

New philosophy

Discover high-quality repertoire with commercial potential

Discover alternative repertoire with global potential

Reorganization

Structure with new A&R and marketing staff at top and front-line positions

Internal network of divisionalized sub labels

Internal ventures

Launch of internal legal and business affairs department

Launch of alternative and dance departments

New alliances

—

—

Declining influence of founder Blackwell on label strategy

Increasing attention to research-based marketing

Learning new skills

Marketing new and alternative music (genres)

Coordinating creative and planning functions

Resolving dilemmas

Innovation in and commercialization of music

Diversity in A&R and targeted marketing

Content

Process

Status re-evaluation


a new legal and business affairs department that would keep track of the label’s property rights and contractual relationships. The original founder’s influence on the label’s direction was eroded. Finally, new skills were learned as new acts and music styles were marketed on a broad consumer market. In the end, Island Records managed to resolve the dilemma between innovation in, and commercialization of, music. The actions transformed Island’s financial performance, evidenced by its turnover and profits growth during the first half of the, ’90s. Virgin Records also experienced a successful turnaround. As a fast follower of Island’s strategic innovation (albeit Virgin pursued a more pronounced international strategy), Virgin managed to triple its turnover and double its profits during the first five years after the label had been acquired by ThornEMI in 1992. According to interviews at Virgin, the internal organization was



structured as a company-owned network of small satellite labels, which were categorized into three broader music divisions (pop, alternative, and dance). This new organizational set-up facilitated the development of specific A&R and marketing capabilities at the front-line level where creativity was key, while the company’s more general A&R and marketing course was planned at top level. All this cumulated in Virgin’s ability to resolve the dilemma between diversity in artist development and targeted marketing at the global level.

Majors BMG and Warner Respond In contrast to EMI and PolyGram, which relied on acquisition, BMG UK (part of Bertelsmann) built its strategy on a comprehensive approach to col laboration. Because the firm had its roots in RCA, the American record company that had been one of the ‘big four’ companies before the mid-1950s, BMG’s repertoire had been primarily US based. However, as British music was also important to the company’s international group, the UK company had to create a sound base of local repertoire. Table 6 shows the findings of interviews that revealed the context, content and process of organizational change, and summarizes BMG’s search for capabilities in a changing competitive environment. In contrast to Island and Virgin, there was no change of ownership to trigger the change process. Although RCA had been acquired by multi-media conglomerate Bertelsmann AG, this had already happened in 1986. While RCA’s US-based musical focus was indirectly responsible for the changes that were about to take place, a time lag of some six years makes it difficult to assume the presence of a direct causality. Although no executive replacements occurred at the highest managerial level within BMG UK, the appointment of a new Managing Director for the RCA label was an important catalyst for the firm’s transformation. There was an obvious trigger to change from poor performance. During the period 1986-1988, BMG UK had experienced a significant decline in market share from 8.2 to 5.2 percent by 1991. The increasing emphasis on local content in the world’s music markets provided an opportunity for BMG to recover. Bertelsmann made BMG UK the overall group’s main source of repertoire. This meant that the UK had to deliver commercially attractive music not only to the local market, but also to other parts of the world covered by the international group. Therefore, with almost no experience in local A&R, BMG had to create new capabilities to boost British artist development. The interviews revealed that the re-organization of BMG’s internal processes happened essentially at two different levels within the company (see Table 6). On the one hand, the creation of separate departments and projectbased structures enabled a focused approach to A&R and marketing at BMG’s front-line labels. On the other hand, more strategic concerns that surpassed



Table 6: Context, content and process of organizational change at majors NBMG international UK

Warner music UK

Context New executives

Appointment of a new RCA Managing Director

Appointment of new WEA MD and new Warner.esp GM

New ownership

—

—

Threat/opportunity

Increase in consumer attention for local content

Increase in consumer attention for local content

Performance decline

Significant decrease of company market share 1989–1991

—

Vision

Merge Bertelsmann’s management ethos with local market demands

Scope

Deliver commercial artists to international audience

Merge Warner’s traditional marketing approach with local market demands Deliver commercial artists to UK audience

Positioning

BMG UK as internationally-oriented ocal record corporation

Warner UK as locally-oriented American record corporation

Capabilities

Incorporation of local A&R capabilities

Coordination and development of A&R capabilities

New philosophy

Build local repertoire to be leveraged internationally

Build local repertoire to be leverage via catalogue exploitation

Re-organization

Music Division at corporate level; projects and departments at label level

Separate label groupings (WEA and East West) and Warner.esp

Content

Process

Internal ventures

Launch of satellite labels and Global TV

Launch of TV compilations division

New alliances

Various license deals and joint ventures

Various license deals and JVs at labels; compilation alliances


Increasing attention to cross-label coordination

Increasing attention to systematic market analysis

Learning new skills

Managing a network of interfaces with the creative community

Sharing of company knowledge across label groupings

Resolving dilemmas

Access to and internalisation of creative resources

Competition and cooperation at intra- and inter-firm levels


individual labels and other cross-label issues were made manageable through the formation of a new Music Division at the corporate level. Whereas the labels used to operate autonomously from each other, more emphasis was given to the coordination and leveraging of skills across the company’s frontline labels. The creation of a network of license deals, joint ventures and satellite labels took place at both the label and corporate levels within the company. In addition, the BMG Classics label was strengthened via the purchase of the independent Conifer Records, while a new business venture was launched to enter the TV compilation albums market. In the process of developing such an elaborate organizational structure, BMG created distinct skills in managing its interface with the creative community, and its evolving label infrastructure enabled BMG UK to both access and internalize creative resources. The company’s performance improved rapidly from 1992 onwards, when operating losses were turned into substantial profits.



Warner Music UK had also noted a shift in consumer preferences from US-based music to local artists. The interviews at Warner revealed that, like BMG, it also aimed to create new capabilities by means of an organizational change trajectory (see Table 6). Warner’s strategic renewal was largely a corporate issue; first in terms of the creation of separate label groupings, and later through the launch of ‘Warner.esp’, a new division focused on compilation albums, which acted as integrator and central intelligence unit. During this second stage, new skills were developed to share knowledge across label groupings, which enhanced the appreciation of both label groupings for a more scientific approach to market research. Furthermore, the move into compilations introduced Warner to cooperative venturing with other major record companies. Warner Music UK thus managed to achieve integration between innovation and commercialization both within the firm and across its boundaries. As a result, both turnover and profits increased at a rapid pace between 1992 and 1996.

Independents’ Response to the New Rules While the four major companies intensified operations to meet local inde pendent competitors, independent labels began to pay more attention to international market opportunities. One independent company that had already developed an international perspective in the second half of the ’80s was Roadrunner Records. It was a small label specialized in metal music, with its home base in the Netherlands, that had expanded its scope into surrounding countries (France, Germany and the United Kingdom), followed, in the ’90s, by establishing overseas units (in Brazil, Japan and Australia). These foreign affiliates were primarily responsible for marketing Roadrunner’s largely US-based repertoire, extracted by the label from its office in New York. Our interviews revealed that the appointment of a new A&R manager and Managing Director at the UK company, as well as a new Strategic MD in the international office were important catalysts to organizational change, see Table 7. The chairman of the company spotted an opportunity to increase Roadrunner’s international repertoire base. The sudden success of one of the label’s dance acts in 1995 and the rising popularity of British music led him to develop a vision in which Roadrunner Record’s historical strength in personal A&R could be combined with a move into other market segments. His primary aim was to convert Roadrunner into an international record company with a British accent to its US-dominated repertoire, that was also active in various non-metal styles of music. To realize this strategy, new A&R capabilities first had to be developed. Second, new capabilities were needed to increase efficiency and coordination at the international unit level. The process of change took place simultaneously at two distinct, but related,



Table 7: Context, content and process of organizational change at independents Roadrunner records

Independiente

Context New executives

Appointment of a new MD and A&R manager at UK; new Strat. MD at International

—

New ownership

—

PolyGram’s estimated £20 million purchase of 51 percent of Go! Discs

Threat/opportunity

Increase in consumer attention for British music

Increase in consumer attention for innovative music on an international level

Performance decline

—

—

Vision

Merge Roadrunner’s traditional A&R approach with diverse market demands

Merge Go! Discs A&R history with international alternative market demands

Scope

Deliver UK artists to international audience

Deliver creative artists to international audience

Positioning

Roadrunner as internationallyoriented diversified record label

Independiente internationally alternative record label

Capabilities

Creation of A&R and coordination capabilities

Incorporation of international and commercial capabilities

New philosophy

Build diverse repertoire to be leveraged internationally

Discover high-quality repertoire with international potential

Reorganization

Staff reshuffle in UK office; new IT systems at International

Temporary and cross-functional project teams

Internal ventures

—

Launch of New York office

New alliances

UK distribution agreement with PolyGram

UK distribution and international licensing deal with Sony


Increasing status of administrative and legal affairs departments

Increasing appreciation for creative action within a business setting

Learning new skills

Intra-company knowledge sharing; property rights protection

Effective and efficient communication via meetings

Resolving dilemmas

Local A&R and international coordination

Creativity in music and creativity in business

Content

Process


levels within the overall company: at the UK subsidiary and within Roadrunner International. At the UK office, re-organization took place in which new marketing and promotion staff was hired and the administrative function was brought inhouse. In the Netherlands, there were new information systems to enhance the flow of intra-company information, and increase the speed of adminis trative procedures. In addition, these departments were made responsible for the development of skills that involved the protection of intellectual property rights and cross-subsidiary coordination. The distribution deal with PolyGram in the United Kingdom not only assisted sales, but also showed an increasing commitment towards a more rational business approach. At the time of completing our case, Roadrunner Records appeared to have



made a promising start at integrating innovation and entry into commercial markets. Another internationalizing company in the independent category was Independiente, a company aiming to create new capabilities that were fun damental to a new and international approach to its business (see Table 7). It made an international licensing deal with Sony Music, which gave it access to Sony’s global distribution and marketing capability. At the same time, organizational processes were structured along project-based company lines where expertise and skills crossed functional boundaries. Formal and informal meetings were blended to create effective vehicles for communication and increase the organization’s operational efficiency. Creative action could thus take place within the company without obstructing a more rational business approach. In the end, Independiente succeeded in simultaneously managing creativity in music and creativity in business.

Discussion and Conclusions The empirical analysis illustrates the basic premise that search behaviour drives co-evolution. The first part of our empirical study of the music indus try, the period 1877–1990, shows how interorganizational search for capa bilities at innovative record companies such as Victor, Decca, Atlantic and Warner resulted in a competitive struggle at the industry level. This stim ulated the search behaviour of rivals that was directed at the imitation of previously unknown capabilities. In addition, the multiple-case study for the period 1990–1997 shows the firm-level point of view. It highlights the challenges faced by each firm when trying to increase their capabilities in the two dimensions: commercialization and creativity. In Figure 2, we depict how the case companies moved towards one another as followers adapted to changes in their competitive environment. Independiente, for example, was originally positioned in the upper left corner, but it moved further on the commercial business capability dimension by creating new capabilities, for example, in organizational coordination. As is illustrated in Figure 2, Island’s search behaviour was essentially manipulative in character, because it forced other rival firms to adapt to the resulting change in their competitive environment, and to search for new capabilities as well. These findings illustrate Propositions la and 2a on how search behaviour is connected among firms. Innovation and imitation appear to be important forces. The description and analysis of the music industry suggests that exploration at the industry level was a matter of explorative search by innovators and early imitators for distinct capabilities. This was observable during the six regimes in Table 3. Although the data presented in the historical study does not reveal in-depth knowledge on the search behaviour of imitators, it does indicate that early imitators (at least) were also involved in explorative




Figure 2: The dynamic of manipulation and adaptation, 1990–1997

search behaviour when trying to replicate the innovator’s new capabilities base. This can be observed by the fact that it took rival record companies (such as Decca) several years, thereby reflecting the strenuous nature of their search behaviour, before they had managed to erode the innovator’s competitive advantage. The multiple-case study is more informative in this respect. We saw how the record firms in the study created new capabilities and dissociated them selves from established practice, showing how both manipulators and adapters were engaged in explorative search. Table 8 provides ample evidence to support the idea that exploration at the firm level was, in fact, the creative search for new capabilities by both manipulators and adapters. It focuses on the A&R capability of Island, Virgin, BMG, and Warner, and on the internationalization of RoadRunner and Independiente. Moreover, the multi-case study shows the interplay between early movers and later followers. For example, Island Records appears to have been a manipulator of its environment, whereas most of the other firms in our study were early adapters. In sum, our findings echo Propositions lb and 2b about innovative and early imitative behaviour. Our story of manipulation and adaptation is not replicated across all sec tors of the economy. For example, it is well known that, in microcomputers, incumbents have been displaced in successive waves of entry (D’Aveni 1994). In contrast, incumbents in industries such as financial services (Hensmans et al. 2001), and, in particular, water (Baden-Fuller and Dean 1999), overcome inertia and adapt. The co-evolution story of the music industry seems closer


Huygens et al. • Co-Evolution in the Music Industry, 1877–1997 283 Table 8: New capabilities and organizational change Capabilities* Island

Formation of A&R and marketing

Virgin

Convergence of A&R and marketing Incorporation of local A&R

BMG Warner Roadrunner Independiente

Formation and coordination of A&R Creation of multinational coordination Development of international base

Organizational change** Major vs indie staff at top vs front-line positions Internal network of divisionalized sub labels Music division of project-based frontline labels Central division between separate label groupings IT-oriented headquarters with local units Temporary and cross-functional project teams

Source: Table 5, 6 and 7. * This column provides examples of new capabilities stemming from several capability categories. See for a more complete description, Tables 5–7. ** This column summarizes only one attribute of the process dimension of organizational change. See for other attributes, Tables 5–7.

to the latter industries than the former. Whilst we do not give reasons as to why this is the case, our research adds a new dimension to the work of Henderson and Clark (1990). Although they examine technological trajectories, we investigate a much wider set of forces, showing a more complex picture. How is it that the incumbents survive? Rival firms appear to be engaged in a sequence of organizational change trajectories (Craig 1996) or strategic renewal journeys (Volberda et al. 2001a, b), rather than single punctuated change processes, as examined by Tushman and Romanelli (1985) and others. The history of the music industry gives many examples of this, some of which are captured in the column headed ‘Transformational Capabilities’ in Table 3. For example, the text refers to the fact that Edison’s National Phonograph Company joined with Columbia records and undertook many kinds of innovations to survive Berliner’s onslaught. Another example was the challenge of the independents in the mid-1950s, when RCA and Decca were not able to conform to the new rules of the competitive game. It was only when both companies were acquired by Bertelsmann and Matsushita, respectively, and after they had undertaken a sequence of activities that they were able to regain their strength. In a similar manner, the multiple-case study clearly shows how record com panies also managed to adopt a strategic choice perspective (Child 1972). As Table 8 shows, this enabled them to shake off old habits and routines, and to renew their search for novel capabilities through radical processes of organizational change, eventually resulting in the creation of new organizational forms and business models. We again refer to Tables 5, 6, and 7 that describe This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.


some of the multiple steps that organizations took internally. We suggest that this co-evolutionary perspective sheds new light on industry development. Entrepreneurial record companies with different capabilities introduced new competitive practices that replaced the existing business models and rules of the game. This not only induced explorative search at rival companies, but also took the industry on to a next round of development or, in other words, to a new competitive regime. All these empirical observations illustrate Propositions 1c and 2c, thus suggesting that capabilities and competition co-evolve over multiple competitive regimes and trajectories of organizational change. By following an industry and some of its key players, we were able to see how new business models tracked new organizational forms, the issue high lighted in Proposition 3. Table 4 shows two aspects of this dynamic based on our industry-evolution study. On the one side, we see the input and output dimensions of the business model, and on the other side, we see the new organizational forms. The macro perspective gives a general view, but does not take into account the variation between (and within) firms. Here, the case studies fill the gap, as highlighted in Tables 5 to 8. We suggest that the juxtaposition of new business models and new organizational forms is no accident, but rather another co-evolutionary theme. Our findings echo other work, such as Djelic and Ainamo (1999), Koza and Lewin (1999), Webb and Pettigrew (1999), and Whittington et al. (1999), all of them empirical studies published in the Organization Science special issue on Co-evolution. Of course, we realize that our conceptual framework and empirical analysis have several important limitations. Although we discuss the coevolutionary effects of external influences such as radio and the changing importance of intellectual property rights, we do not emphasize the insti tutional features of government, the structure of the capital markets, and national culture. These attributes may influence various relationships in the proposed framework. For example, Lewin et al. (1999) argue that specific institutional arrangements tend to enable and restrict strategic and organi zational adaptation options, and will impact our framework. Likewise, Calori et al. (1997) point out the importance of nationally-bound administrative heritages and Dijksterhuis et al. (1999) observe the importance of extra institutional environmental factors such as demographics, social movements, and management logic. There are other limitations highlighted in our text, such as the lack of depth concerning transition processes towards new forms of organizing (Van Wijk and Van Den Bosch 2000) and managerial processes. In future research, the multi-case study could focus on cognitive interaction and interpersonal networks of the top management of the firms involved. To enable such an analysis, however, additional data are needed regarding the professional background of managers and their social networks (Van Wijk et al. 2002). Moreover, the focus of attention in our framework and empirical analysis was on the type of capabilities developed at firms. There was only



limited insight into how these capabilities are actually generated and refined over time. Insight into the refinement of capabilities is especially important, since such behaviour can cause core rigidities or competence traps to arise. Another important issue for future research is to investigate why some new capabilities and organizational changes have an impact on the industry, triggering changes in the prevailing competitive regime, while others are unsuccessful. A more extensive analysis of the context in which new capabilities and organizational change are created, taking into account the impact of, for example, network externalities or market power on the likelihood of successfully triggering changes in the existing competitive regime, seems a fruitful approach to explore this issue further. Related to the enabling impact of network externalities, and similar to developments in other industries, such as the financial services sector (Hensmans et al. 2001), a final issue for future research is undoubtedly the emergence of new entrants in the music industry. Examples are Napster (in which Bertelsmann through BMG recently acquired a stake), Gnutella and Duet (a recently announced joint venture of Vivendi-Universal and Sony) that allow their users to swap music files for free via their Internet service. According to the Economist (2001: 68) Napster users at present ‘constitute the largest community of music-lovers on earth’, numbering over 50 million registered users. These new entrants not only challenge incumbent firms in the music industry (the incumbents have started a lawsuit against Napster), but might also trigger new capabilities and even a new competitive regime, including new business models and new organizational forms in which, for the first time in the history of the music industry, consumers become really powerful. Notwithstanding these limitations, we think our study highlights two important aspects of the co-evolution of capabilities and competition. First, combining the results of the historical study with those of the multiple-case study allows us to see how rival firms in a competitive environment can be simultaneously different and similar to one another, in terms of their capability bases. The industry history, focusing primarily on the meso-level, emphasizes similarities. It stresses the new capabilities that were founded (and later proliferated) during each competitive regime, and how rival firms moved towards uniformity as they copied and proliferated capabilities tied to the extraction, development and commercialization of creative resources. At the same time, the multiple-case study, focusing primarily on the micro level, showed how different record companies displayed a significant degree of diversity. For example, while all the companies in the study were sim ilar in their aim to converge creative music with commercial business (in line with the new competitive rules pioneered by one of them), each of them pursued a different search route. The basic features of the organiza tional change trajectories followed by the case companies show substantial variation in terms of market positioning, capability development, organi zational re-alignment, and the learning of new skills. As time passed, these



initial differences were amplified through exploitative search, and this increased individual firm idiosyncrasy (McKelvey 1997). Thus, based upon historical and multiple-case research into the music industry, and in line with the integrative framework, this suggests that co-evolution of capabilities and competition embodies multi-level, though counter-moving patterns of firm uniformity and idiosyncrasy. Second, we would like to point out that interaction patterns among rivals and path dependencies at individual firms can have both a positive and a negative impact on the development of new capabilities. Interactive behaviour through acquisitions, joint ventures and strategic alliances among record companies speeded up the capability development process at these firms. Although this was beneficial to the individual firms in their struggle to conform with the new competitive rules, it also pushed the industry into more intense levels of competition. In a similar vein, the existence of path dependencies due to long-term commitments and excessive learning effects slowed, but did not stop, processes of change in times of competitive tur bulence. Our firms were able to break free from competence traps, and even profited from their unique history by retaining its positive virtues and inte grating them into new entrepreneurial actions. In sum, co-evolution stems from endogenous interaction patterns between the search for capabilities and competition, and displays alternating forces of maturity and rejuvena tion at firm and industry level. To conclude, we think this study fits within Lewin and Volberda’s sug gested Prolegomena on Co-evolution (1999). Although they argued that the focal object of co-evolutionary studies should be populations of organiza tions undergoing discontinuous change (e.g. retailing, financial services, biotechnology, and multimedia), we think our study of the music industry shows some interesting dynamics. The co-evolutionary perspective allowed us to integrate old streams of ideas and thread in new ones, which seems ideal when studying complex industries. Old ideas, such as the evolution of capabilities and competition, are enhanced by the co-evolutionary approach. New ideas such as the co-development of organizational form and business model, still in their infancy in the literature, are advanced further. Messy industries such as music, vitally important in the knowledge-based economy, are, we suggest, excellent platforms for further exploration.

Note We gratefully acknowledge the helpful comments of three anonymous referees and the valuable suggestions of the editors of this special issue, Arie Y. Lewin and Mitchell Koza. Furthermore, we would like to thank Erik J. de Boer of the Rotterdam School of Management for his assistance with the research and the Erasmus Research Institute of Management (ERIM) for funding this Erasmus Strategic Renewal Centre (ESRC) research project.



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13 The Co-Evolution of Institutional Environments and Organizational Strategies: The Rise of Family Business Groups in the ASEAN Region Michael Carney and Eric Gedajlovic

Introduction

T

he influence of institutional environments (Hamilton and Biggart 1988) culture (Redding 1990; Hall and Xu 1990), and business systems (Whitley 1992) on East and Southeast Asian corporate organization has attracted a lot of attention recently. Such attention is due in part to the performance attributes of organizing principles that differ significantly from orthodox Western practice (Biggart and Hamilton 1992). Despite problems of definition, a number of popular and academic accounts of Southeast Asian industrialization have identified Chinese FBGs as the engine behind the region’s rapid economic growth in the post WWII period (World Bank 1993; Seagrave 1995; Hodder 1996; Lim 1996; Weidenbaum and Hughes 1996). While other types of corporation such as multinational enterprises (MNEs) (Hobday 2000) and state-owned enterprises (Lall 1990) have contributed to the region’s growth, FBGs controlled by ethnic Chinese entrepreneurs have undoubtedly played a key role in the economies of many East and Southeast Asian economies. The importance of FBGs in these economies indicates that their business models are an important subject for analysis.




In this paper, we consider the developmental path of FBGs as a form of business enterprise, and existing theoretical accounts of their behaviour. FBGs are prevalent in many emerging economies (Khanna and Palepu 1997) and have been analyzed from a variety of theoretical perspectives, yet they are not fully understood (Granovetter 1994). Institutional and cultural accounts of FBGs see causality running from external or institutional factors to internal organizational factors. In an earlier article in Organization Studies, Wilkinson (1996) argued that such deterministic accounts of Asian enterprise run the risk of legitimizing rather than critically evaluating nonWestern forms of business enterprise. Wilkinson takes particular issue with institutional theories of East Asian enterprise that lack a plausible account of human agency. Our theoretical exposition addresses these concerns. Concurrent with the debate regarding the origins of Asian corporate struc tures, there has been a series of studies reconsidering the accomplishments of institutional theory (e.g. Oliver 1991; Di Maggio and Powell 1991; Scott and Meyer 1994). A major concern in many of these reviews is that insti tutional theory focuses on the causes and consequences of organizational persistence and continuity. Organizations and institutional norms do change, sometimes quite radically, yet modern or neo-institutional theory has not put change at the centre of its agenda (Greenwood and Hinings 1996). Consequently, recent theorizing about institutions has focused on issues relating to change and the role of human agency (Kondra and Hinings 1998). In the light of these considerations, a number of theoretical perspectives such as structuration (Barley and Tolbert 1997), co-evolution (Keiser 1989; Baum and Singh 1994) and path-dependence (North 1990) have been advanced as either alternatives or complements to more deterministic accounts of the environment–organization interface. These alternative perspectives see human action as intendedly rational but constrained by circumstance, past action and existing norms. For example, North (1990) regards institutions as partially malleable entities that may be passively but critically influenced by sometimes small events that lock-in particular solutions to problems and subsequently limit the range of options available to later actors. Such a perspective highlights the fact that rational and reflective actors who are motivated by their values, economic incentives, or the need for collective action are often capable of significantly influencing institutional arrangements, but are nevertheless subject to constraints that limit their range of feasible and conceivable action. In this paper, we develop the idea of mutual and reciprocal influence between institutional environments and organizational action. We outline a co-evolutionary framework that incorporates the notions of interdependence, path dependence, and ‘system openness’. Because such neo-evolutionary perspectives bring back into account adaptive behaviour motivated by human agency and interests, they offer promising ways to capture the dynamics (Fligstein and Freeland 1995) and complexity (Baum and Singh 1994) of


Carney and GedajIovic • The Rise of Family Business Group 293 Table 1: Chinese entrepreneurial performance in southeast asia Country

Population (millions)

% Ethnic Chinese population

Ethnic Chinese % Number of largest ownership of private firms controlled by sector assets ethnic Chinese (in%)

Indonesia

182

2.8

70

80

Malaysia

60

33

65

44

Philippines

66

1.5

40

33

Thailand

56

11

90

N.A.

the interaction between institutions and organizations. The co-evolutionary framework is illustrated with a historical analysis of FBGs in Southeast Asia’s ASEAN member states.1 ASEAN members straddle a civilizational fault-line (Huntingdon 1997) consisting of predominantly Muslim (Malaysia, Indonesia), Buddhist (Thailand), Sinic (Singapore) and Christian (The Philippines) societies. Sinic culture is prevalent throughout the region due to a broad and continuing Chinese Diaspora (Purcell 1965), but it is far from dominant. Notwithstanding cultural variation, over a thirty-year period a similar prominent organizational form emerged in each ASEAN country. This prominent form is the diversified FBG created and typically operated by migrants (or their descendants) from mainland China. A precise definition of who constitutes this Chinese merchant class in Southeast Asia has long challenged scholars of the region (e.g. Somers-Heidues 1974; Wu and Wu 1980; Suryadinata 1989; Hodder 1996). The Chinese in ASEAN are not a homogenous group (Suryadinata 1989). Ethnic Chinese are a linguistically diverse, relatively small and fragmented demographic minority within ASEAN as a whole. Except for Singapore, where ethnic Chinese are a demographic majority, they are a minority in most ASEAN states, yet they control a large proportion of each country’s leading businesses (see Table 1). The co-evolutionary framework outlined below indicates how the aggre gate strategies of a prominent organizational form can produce collective outcomes such as successful system-wide economic performance. The framework also draws attention to self-reinforcing and self-limiting feedback effects of strategies that result in significant path-dependencies. Simply put, successful strategies run their course and what works in one set of conditions may not subsequently be functional, because strategies can change the very conditions that originally engendered them and allowed them to flourish. Consequently, strategies that at one point in time produce successful system-wide economic performance may later generate paradoxical or counter-intuitive outcomes. For instance, strategies that were once a source of system dynamism may later become a source of system rigidity (Oliver 1991). Our analysis is focused on the institutionalization of the business models and investment practices of ASEAN FBGs. We adopt an historical perspective which tracks the emergence of FBGs from their roots in Southeast Asia’s colonial past, and charts their ascendance through the Nationalist Era in the



aftermath of WWII and into the Modern Era and the onset and aftermath of the 1997 Asian financial crisis. Our historical analysis is organized around a co-evolutionary framework that anchors a narrative illustrating the significance and consequences of their institutionalization.

Organizations and Their Environments: A Co-evolutionary Framework Co-evolutionary perspectives have been primarily applied to the relation ship between organizations and their technical environments (e.g. Levinthal and Myatt 1994; Rosenkopf and Tushman 1994). Baum and Singh (1994) expanded the focus to examine the co-evolution of an endogenous institu tional environment and a population of social-service organizations. Following Meyer’s (1994) suggestion that specific institutional environments are embedded in even wider world environments, we explore the co-evolution of national institutional settings in the context of broader global forces. This approach differs from many institutional accounts of Asian business enterprise, which focus exclusively on national factors. Moreover, in contrast to institutional accounts which restrict their analysis to the role of institutions in shaping organizational action, a co-evolutionary perspective provides a greater role for human agency by also focusing attention on how organizational action shapes institutions. Figure 1 graphically portrays the elements of our co-evolutionary approach. The co-evolutionary framework indicates that organizational forms and practices have their genesis in a particular set of social and political cir cumstances (Keiser 1989). In turn, these environmental circumstances are forged from the interaction of both exogenous and endogenous influences (North 1990). Endogenous influences are institutional and market forces that emanate locally from within societies and include the impact of both established and emergent firms and their adaptations to each other as well as to other ele ments in their endogenous environments. In contrast, exogenous influences are non-local social, economic, political or technological forces that emanate from outside a business system, but which nevertheless impact in important ways upon firms and their environments (Meyer 1994). For example, organizations commonly adopt business models from exogenous sources and institutional agents routinely mimic norms and practice drawn from world society (Meyer 1994). Similarly, once a nation enters the international trading system they become subject to global isomorphic forces that are both economic (North 1990) and bureaucratic in character (Meyer 1994), that emanate from beyond the local economy. Below, we describe how the end of the Cold War, the emergence of Japan as an economic super-power and the rapid development and commercialization This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.

Carney and GedajIovic • The Rise of Family Business Group 295

t0

New Environmental Conditions

t1

t2

Established Firms Adapt

t3

Exogenous Influences

reciprocal adjustments

New Organizational Forms Emerge and Adapt

Endogenous Influences

New Environmental Conditions

t4

t5


Exogenous influences

Established Firms Adapt


New Organizational Forms Emerge and Adapt

Figure 1: The co-evolution of organizations and their environments: A generic framework

of new information and knowledge-intensive products and technologies (Shapiro and Varian 1998) are exogenous forces emanating from outside Southeast Asia, which have profoundly impacted upon firms based in that region. Such exogenous forces emanate from distant environments, but feedback effects from local environments on those distant forces are minimal. Thus a key distinction between endogenous and exogenous forces is the capacity of local agents to influence significantly endogenous, rather than exogenous forces. As such, our co-evolutionary framework highlights the fact that business systems are fundamentally open systems that evolve as a function of forces internal and external to the system. This is graphically portrayed in Figure 1, where both exogenous and endogenous influences and their interaction in to shape environmental conditions in t1. As illustrated in Figure 1, changed environmental conditions in t1 trigger organizational adaptations in t2.



The co-evolutionary framework predicts that organizational adaptations to environmental changes will take three broad forms in t3. First, established firms adapt and calibrate their business models and practices to fit better with their new environments. Importantly, these organizational adaptations constitute an endogenous influence on the environment to which they are adapting. In other words, as firms adapt to their environments, they can also shape those same environments (Baum and Singh 1994). A second organizational-level response to environmental change is the emergence of new organizational forms that match the altered environment more closely than that achieved by established firms (Hannan and Freeman 1989). The growth of particular organizational forms and business practices begin to feedback, and reshape environmental conditions (Levinthal and Myatt 1994). Such responses constitute another endogenous force for environmental change in subsequent periods. A third set organizational-level responses are the reciprocal adjustments that are made by both established and emergent firms (Kondra and Hinings 1998). Since adjustments by established firms alter the competitive environment of emergent firms, the latter must adapt to the adaptations of established firms. Similarly, the emergence of new organizational forms with novel business practices, and variants of existing models, alters the competitive landscape of established firms and provides the impetus for further adaptive behaviour on their part. This process is captured graphically in Figure 1, where the adjustments of established firms as well as the emergence of new organizational forms and their early adaptations in t2 interact and create endogenous forces for environmental change in t3. In stage t3, these endogenous influences interact with new exogenous influences emanating from outside the system to shape the environmental conditions in t4. In turn, the environmental conditions in t4 give rise to a new round of organizational-level adjustments in t5, which constitute new endogenous influences for environmental change in subse quent periods. While Figure 1 suggests that both endogenous and exogenous forces and responses operate within clearly delineated and discrete time periods, the reality is not so neat. A particular force may emerge weakly, but grow in strength until it is recognized and acted upon in some way. A decision to act upon a particular force may appear as an event or as a point of evolutionary punctuation. Such shifts may also unleash pent-up forces, shift the direction of other forces, or otherwise bring about discontinuous changes that usher in categorically distinct institutional eras. For example, we argue below that the post-war growth of Japanese economic power has constituted an important exogenous force on Southeast Asia. However, the full effect of Japanese power was felt in Southeast Asia following a specific event, namely the 1985 Plaza Accord between the G5 countries that stimulated a sudden increase of Japanese investment into the region (OECD 1999).



The notion of interdependence is fundamental to a co-evolutionary per spective. Interdependence means that firms are influenced by, and use, the same environments to shape their own environments (Pfeffer and Salancik 1978; Oliver 1991; Baum and Singh 1994). Lindblom’s (1968) ‘muddling through’ thesis suggests that strategies of mutual adjustment, reciprocation, accommodation and co-optation among a ‘policy community’ comprised of a diverse set of goal-directed actors can bring about significant institutional change. Similarly, Poroc (1994) proposes that co-evolutionary processes should be understood through the notion of an ‘organizational community’ comprised of institutions, regulatory bodies and a population of firms. According to Poroc, the essence of such an organizational community is the web of transactions through which members actively and passively exchange ideas, resources and commitments. As such, the evolution of an organizational community can be conceptualized as the co-evolution of its constituent parts (Poroc 1994). Importantly, the notion of interdependence reflects the fact that by employ ing purposive strategies in pursuit of their self-interested objectives, human agents can play a profound role in shaping their local environments. The influence of firms on their local environments may be a deliberate individual, or collective response to perceived threats and opportunities (Lieberman and Montgomery 1988; Nielson 1988). On the other hand, the influence of firms on their local environments may also be the product of unintended or emergent processes (Mintzberg and Waters 1985). Quinn (1980) has coined the term ‘logical incrementalism’ to describe such intuitive and evolutionary processes through which decisions made by human actors and external events flow together to form the context for action. For example, Pascale (1994) describes how Honda revolutionized the U.S. motorcycle industry in the 1960s, largely because it lacked sufficient resources to compete with established firms in conventional ways. The notion of path dependence (North 1990) is also fundamental to our co-evolutionary approach, since it accounts for the fact that firms and environments are partly, but not exclusively, dependent upon historical patterns of firm–environment interdependence. The environmental conditions faced by a firm at the time of its founding casts a long shadow on its ability to adapt to subsequent environmental changes. Path dependence means organizations are permanently influenced by the circumstances prevailing at the time of their founding and early growth (Starbuck 1965; Prahalad and Bettis 1986; Hannan and Freeman 1989). Strategic practices that are developed in the first few years of a firm’s operations become deeply rooted or imprinted in organizational memory and repertoires (Nelson and Winter 1987). In evolutionary terms, some strategies become ‘locked in’ while others are simultaneously ‘locked out’. Importantly, locked-in practices condition subsequent rounds of organization adaptation as organizations respond to



threats and opportunities in ways that, in the light of their origins, make sense. Thus, nascent conditions, and the adaptation of firms to them, exert an inertial force upon change and limit the range of options an organization may invoke in response to new environmental conditions (Tushman and Romanelli 1986). In the sections below, we use our co-evolutionary framework to anchor an historical narrative describing the evolutionary path of Chinese FBGs operating in Southeast Asia.

The Colonial Origins of Family Business Groups in ASEAN Although long established as petit entrepreneurs in Southeast Asia (SomersHeidhues 1974), Chinese entrepreneurship emerged as a significant eco nomic force during and immediately following World War II (Wu and Wu 1980). From early colonial times until the beginning of WWII, ethnic Chinese entrepreneurs typically worked as middlemen, or compradors for the British, (Chapman 1985; Davenport-Hines and Jones 1989) Dutch (Allen and Donnithorne 1957) and Japanese-owned trading houses (Yoshihara 1988) which were then dominant in the region. These colonial-era relations were abruptly and permanently disrupted with the establishment of Japanese military administration (Gunseikanbu) over Southeast Asia’s economy in 1941 (Purcell 1965). Gunseikanbu was draconian, but it propelled Chinese entrepreneurs into key trading and financial roles (Purcell 1965; Twang 1998). The immediate aftermath of WWII was a period of intense economic, political and social upheaval in Asia. The major political forces at work included colonial retreat, communist insurgency and the rise of nationalist governments. It is in this environment that FBGs emerged as the region’s major entrepreneurial force (McVey 1992). However, at the onset of WWII, the progenitors of now pre-eminent Chinese entrepreneurs occupied a precar ious social status. At this time, Southeast Asia’s ethnic Chinese were a fragmented and visible minority that was socially marginal, politically powerless and subject to legal discrimination, arbitrary state confiscation of their private property and sporadic popular violence (Purcell 1965; McVey 1992). While the specific threat faced by Chinese minorities differed from country to country across the region, ethnic Chinese faced a ‘relentless restriction’ on their commercial activities (Wu and Wu 1980: 89). The genesis of the Southeast Asian FBG in its modern form owes much to these unfavourable founding conditions. The emergence of FBGs as a major economic force in Southeast Asia can be traced to a number of environmental influences emanating both from within and from outside the region. In the following sections, we highlight the major exogenous and endogenous influences that provided the seedbed for the emergence of FBGs as a regional economic power. Figure 2 summarizes these important forces in terms of the co-evolutionary framework. This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.




Discrimination, Nationalist economic policies

Mass migration, Colonial retreat, The Cold War

Environmental Conditions in Post-WWH Nationalist Era

New Organization Forms Emerge and Adapt

Established Firms Adapt Many colonial businesses fail to adapt to new conditions


Instead most adapt by changing environments: repatriating investments and existing Southeast Asia

FBGs fill vacuum left by retreating colonial businesses They calibrate models to existing conditions by. . . 1. Adopting family as the focus of the firm 2. Using conglomerate holding company structures to disperse capital



The Plaza Accord Successive Waves of Capital China’s 4 Modernizations New Technologies

New Pro-Business Ideology from ASEAN Governments Nationalism Gives Way to “Regionalism“ Growing Pool of Professional Managers

Environmental Conditions in The Modern Era

New Organization forms Energy and Adapt

Established Firms Adapt FBGs have difficulties developing new capabilities 1. Plants relocated to low cost locations 2. Conglomerate strategy continued within ASEAN 3. New businesses entered through acquisition of high-tech start-ups


High tech start-ups struggle to survive in light of... 1. Underdeveloped capital markets 2. Absence of ‘patient‘ and venture capital 3. Poor legal safeguards for intellectual property 4. Acquisitive FBGs 5. The Asian Financial Crisis

Current Conditions and the Context for Future Reform

Figure 2: The co-evolution of Southeast Asian organizations and their institutional environments



The Nationalist Era: Environmental Influences Exogenous Influences Three exogenous influences played important roles in providing the envi ronmental conditions necessary for the emergence of the FBG in the post WWII Nationalistic Era of Southeast Asia: mass migration, colonial retreat and the Cold War. Forces emanating from mainland China profoundly shaped social condi tions in the region. Indeed, the mass migration or Diaspora of overseas Chinese in Southeast Asia was largely a product of turmoil in their native homes (Fairbank 1994). Recurrent civil wars produced a steady migration into countries bordering the South China Sea. Successive Imperial, Republican and Communist Chinese governments’ disdain for commercial activity did little to advance the interests of entrepreneurs, so they emigrated to improve their lives (Redding 1990). The migrant Chinese who were later to become a dominant economic class in the region emanated from an unstable, warring society that placed little value on commercial activity and had a weak entrepreneurial tradition (Chan 1982). In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, migrant Chinese workers settled in predominantly agricultural colonial societies where alien Westerners occupied elite economic and political positions. The main colonial industries of plantation agriculture, mining and oil extraction required new intermediary roles between colonists and indigenous groups (Allen and Donnithorne 1959; Davenport-Hines and Jones 1989), which recently landed Chinese immigrants were encouraged to take up (McVey 1992). New occupations such as tax collecting, retailing, money-lending and other ancillary roles related to resource-based industrialization were filled by migrant Chinese, who hitherto had had little entrepreneurial experience (McVey 1992). Within the colonial order, overseas Chinese entrepreneurs developed contacts with indigenous elites and developed commercial and manufacturing expertise that later filled a vacuum left by departing colonial businessmen (Yoshihara 1988). Chinese migration was widespread in the region and entrepreneurs main tained personal contacts among entrepreneurs from the same family or language group in many Southeast Asian countries (Suryadinata 1989). Close-knit and regionally dispersed networks offered ‘safe havens of capital’ (Wu and Wu 1980: 94) and channels for mobilizing assets and for sharing information about business opportunities (Kao 1993). Mass migration produced an entrepreneurial class that was well placed to operate international networks and was attuned to the behaviour of a diverse group of key actors. On the other hand, the same expatriate entrepreneurs having left their ancestral homes, were forced to re-establish themselves in settings where



they were a distinct minority and where they faced an uncertain future (Wu and Wu 1980; Hodder 1996). Colonial retreat and the Cold War represented two other exogenous forces that profoundly influenced the post-WWII Asian environment. In the wake of WWII, colonialism began to wane around the world and independent and sovereign states in Southeast Asia became the rule, rather than the exception. As self-rule was achieved in successive countries, large British and Dutch colonial trading houses began their retreat and initiated the process of repatriating their assets (Davenport-Hines and Jones 1989). The retreat of Japanese trading houses occurred even more abruptly when their assets were confiscated at the end of WWII (Yoshihara 1988). One consequence of colonial retreat was the creation of a vacuum of entrepreneurial expertise that Chinese business people were willing and able to fill. The Cold War and the rise of Asian communism represented an external threat to newly established independent countries and undoubtedly played an important role in setting up nationalistic economic agendas across the region (Stubbs 1999). The legacy of colonial rule left wariness of foreigners and along with the threat of ascendant communism added another reason for governments in the region to pursue nationalist agendas. As they were the largest indigenous group of experienced business people in Southeast Asia, these developments were highly propitious for migrant Chinese entrepreneurs.

Endogenous Influences Interacting with forces emanating from outside the region were two impor tant endogenous forces which shaped the nascent environments of FBGs: discrimination, and nationalist economic policies. In their traditional role as intermediaries for colonial trading houses, Chinese entrepreneurs were a highly visible ethnic minority that did not always enjoy the full protection of the state. In Thailand, (Laothamatas 1994), Indonesia (Twang 1998) and The Philippines (Hodder 1996; Hutchcroft 1994) official graft and bureaucratic rent seeking was common. In addition, Chinese entrepreneurs suffered official discrimination in Malaysia and Indonesia from nationalist policies intended to secure greater participation in the economy for ethnic nationals (Mackie 1992). Despite their economic success, and indeed possibly because of it, Chinese entrepreneurs faced an environment which they regarded as hostile (Brown 1995). The top priority of post-WWII governments in the region was national security. In the context of a Western Cold War containment policy, many governmental policies of Southeast Asian nations were driven by the need to fight civil wars, restore internal order and to repel communist threats.



Consequently, governments focused upon reinforcing coercive instruments of the state by channelling resources to the military, police, and intelligence services (Stubbs 1999). In Indonesia and in Thailand, senior government officials were predominantly drawn from the military. Where the bureau cracy was drawn from a more heterogeneous range of backgrounds, few knew much about business (McVey 1992). ASEAN economic agendas were limited to managing strategic industries and rebuilding basic infrastructure. Strategic industries were managed by establishing state-owned enterprises, and infrastructure was created with the assistance of US aid. Almost without exception, states in the region adopted highly nationalistic economic agendas featuring import substitution and export-oriented development policies (Stubbs 1999).

The Business Environment As suggested by the co-evolutionary framework, the nascent environment of FBGs resulted from the confluence of influences emanating from within and from outside the Southeast Asian region. More specifically, mass migration, colonial retreat, the Cold War, discrimination and nationalistic economic policies created the opportunity for the ascendancy of ethnic Chinese entrepreneurs and profoundly shaped the business models and practices they adopted when they were given that opportunity. These forces interacted in a number of important ways. For instance, mass migration from mainland China constituted an exoge nous force that created an available pool of entrepreneurs and managers who were trained and functioned as intermediaries for the colonial trading houses. However, this migration was but one condition necessary for the emergence of the FBG as the economic engine in the region. Another exogenous force, colonial retreat created the managerial and entrepreneurial vacuum that afforded an opportune environment for the emergence of the FBG. In addition, the influence of the Cold War and the legacy of colonialism drove nationalistic economic policies (an endogenous force) which favoured local entrepreneurs over foreign investors (Yoshihara 1988). At the same time, as migrants from a turbulent Mainland China, many of the entrepreneurs who founded FBGs brought with them deeply held ‘life-raft values’ (Kao 1993: 27) stemming from generations of economic and political uncertainty (Redding 1990). In their new homes, these entrepre neurs faced popular discrimination and bureaucratic harassment. The threat of discrimination in their new homes reinforced the belief that they faced a hostile environment and profoundly influenced both their world-view and their business practices (Brown 1995). Paradoxically, nationalistic economic policies that were discriminatory also created the opportunity for the ascendancy of ethnic Chinese entrepreneurs. Nationalization, import substitution



and export-oriented policies put great discretionary power in the hands of state officials and politicians (McVey 1992). Such bureaucratic discretion offered the opportunity for Chinese entrepreneurs to cultivate personal connections, or ‘guanxi’ in order to secure lucrative production franchises and other licenses (Mackie 1992).

Organizational Adaptations As suggested by the co-evolutionary framework, three types of organizational adaptations took place in response to the altered post-WWII environment. First, established firms adapted to their altered environments. Second, new organizational types emerged which were calibrated with and better attuned to the Nationalist Era. Third, established and emergent firms engaged in reciprocal adjustments to each other’s actions. In the wake of WWII, the large expatriate colonial trading houses that had long been the dominant economic force in Southeast Asia were faced with some difficult choices. Long accustomed to being the compatriots of colonial administrators, the trading houses were now operating in hostile environ ments as newly constituted indigenous governments instituted far-reaching nationalist economic programmes (Falkus 1989; Van Helten and Jones 1989; Mackie 1992). As an obvious symbol of the region’s colonial past, colonial businesses were especially vulnerable to anti-colonial sentiment. Thus, in a very short period of time, the benign operating environments enjoyed by colonial businesses for centuries were transformed into one that was fundamentally hostile to them (Drabble and Drake 1981). Unaccustomed to operating in such environments, and with business prac tices rooted in the colonial order, colonial businesses were confronted with two fundamental options. They could either radically transform their busi ness practices to the new nationalistic environment, or they could embark upon exit strategies designed to repatriate their investments in the region. Some colonial businesses chose the option of remaining and adapting, but many more chose the latter option of repatriating their assets (Allen and Donnithorne 1957; Drabble and Drake 1981). The fact that so many previously successful colonial businesses decided to adapt by changing environments, rather than adapting to their new envi ronments, illustrates the profound importance of path dependencies on the ability of established firms to adapt. Locked into business models based upon assumptions and calculations that were no longer valid, the radically altered business environment they now faced made them a vestige of a bygone era. The ascendancy of the FBG as the region’s economic engine and the gradual and progressive marginalization of many colonial businesses in the years following WWII offers further evidence that a firm’s nascent environment gives rise to powerful path dependencies.



Emergent Organizational Forms Emergent FBGs faced their own path dependencies that facilitated, rather than hindered their ability to develop and calibrate their business practices and models to the new nationalist environment. The confluence of forces emanating from within and from outside the Southeast Asia region created an environment that was filled with both opportunity and hostility for the ethnic Chinese entrepreneurs who established FBGs. As such, the essential challenge faced by the emergent FBGs was twofold. First, they needed to develop business models which would allow them to take advantage of the tremendous opportunities afforded them by the retreat of colonial busi nesses and nationalistic economic policies designed to promote regional economic development from within (Mackie 1992). Second, the emergent FBGs needed to manage the discrimination and open hostility they faced as an ethnic minority but a growing economic power in their adopted homes (Hodder 1996). The business models and practices developed by ethnic Chinese entrepre neurs were well-attuned to the post WWII environment in the Southeast Asia region and have become hallmarks of FBG business practices ever since. Perhaps, the most essential characteristic of FBGs is the fact that they are family-owned and managed operations, with family wealth creation and preservation as their overriding strategic goal (Wong 1985). Clearly, this form of business enterprise reflected both life-raft values and the grounded belief of ethnic Chinese entrepreneurs that they were confronted with a fundamentally hostile environment, where they could only trust close family members (Redding 1990; Kao 1993). In this regard, Fukuyama (1995) notes that, in the absence of institutional trust or faith in government, family firms and kin-based networks, such as the FBGs, arise as a basic defense mechanism against a potentially predatory state. As such, migrant Chinese brought suspicion of the state with them to their new homes, and their host societies did little to assuage such pre-dispositions. Together, their legacy as migrants and refugees from a feuding and war-like China and the discrimination they faced in their adopted homes played pivotal roles in driving the decision by Chinese entrepreneurs to utilize tightly controlled family-owned and managed operating structures as the basis for their business activities.2 The adoption of tightly controlled and family-centric operating structures as the building block of their business models has driven both FBG strategic goals and business practices ever since. Since, the focus of the FBG enter prise is the family unit, it is not surprising to observe that these firms have strategic goals related to creating and preserving familial wealth as opposed to the organization-building goals of professionally managed firms (Redding 1990). To the Chinese families who control FBGs, their business units are essentially goal-attainment devices (Selznick 1957), and are disposable once they no longer advance familial interests. Such an attitude towards the firms This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.


they own and manage explains in large part the FBG propensity for rapid asset turnover and wide, unrelated diversification. The operating structures of FBGs typically consist of multiple small-scale operating units tied together in a web of cross-holdings circuitously, but ultimately controlled by the family (Redding 1990). The subordination of FBG businesses to the interests of the family and the influence of the post WWII nascent environments of the FBG offer several interrelated explanations of why these firms adopted conglomerate structures. First, the adoption of such conglomerate structures provides a means for the family to protect and diversify its wealth (Fukuyama 1995). Since the FBG is largely based upon both the primacy of family interests and the distrust of outsiders, product-market diversification provides a means of wealth diversification without the need to relinquish control to outside investors. As such, given the context faced by FBGs in the aftermath of WWII, the conglomerate holding structures represented a rational response to an uncodified institutional context characterized by undefined property rights, cronyism, underdeveloped capital markets, weak or non-existent product liability laws and a shortage of managerial expertise (Ghemawat and Khanna 1998). These structures allowed the FBGs to exploit new business opportunities and to cope with their hostile environments, while limiting their family’s exposure to risk. Second, another benefit of the conglomerate holding company structures of FBGs relates directly to the discrimination and open hostility they faced in their adopted homes. Specifically, dispersing family assets across multiple small-scale enterprises limited their visibility and was a rational means of managing the risk of discrimination and asset expropriation they faced in countries such as Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand (McVey 1992; Mackie 1992). Third, fear and mistrust of outsiders resulted in a managerial capacity constraint (Carney 1998). As FBGs grew into large-scale economic enterprises, they faced the problem of how to manage and control their empires as the need for outside managers grew. The operating structures adopted by the FBGs addressed this problem in the following manner. Structuring the family business in terms of discrete small-scale business units meant that the outside managers who were required could be evaluated and monitored through the financial results of their business units. In such a structure, strategically placed family members could exercise effective control over their farreaching portfolio of diverse operating units. An added advantage of these operating structures was that the impact of hired managers on familial wealth could be minimized. Relatedly, the adoption of these structures meant that no outsider could become indispensable to the FBG and in a position to challenge the interests of the family (Wong 1985; Redding 1990). As such, the use of conglomerate holding company structures consisting of multiple small business units allowed these firms to diversify away many potential managerial agency problems.



At the time of their emergence, FBGs were clearly a product of both their operating environments and their path dependencies. In contrast to the retreating colonial businesses, the path dependencies of FBGs made them especially well positioned to take advantage of opportunities available in the Southeast Asian region following WWII. Owing to their different path dependencies, FBGs could adapt to the new environmental realities, while the majority of colonial businesses could not. Moreover, the hand of human agency is clearly evident in the adaptations described above. FBGs did not passively accept the constraints imposed by their environments. Indeed, it is apparent that the structures and practices of FBGs represented rational, goal-seeking behaviour by agents who were aware of their interests and were capable of organizing to achieve them.

Reciprocal Adjustments In the post-WWII period, the adjustments of colonial businesses facilitated rather than hindered the emergence of FBGs. At the same time, the adaptive behaviour of retreating colonial businesses was facilitated by the emergence of FBGs. Colonial businesses were faced with the problem of how to repatriate their investments. In this context, colonial businesses who were motivated sellers of assets found, in emerging FBGs, equally motivated buyers of those assets. One obvious conclusion which can be drawn from our analysis of the respective adaptive abilities of colonial businesses and FBGs in the aftermath of WWII is that a firm’s nascent environment and its path dependencies pro foundly affect its ability to adapt to environmental changes later on in life. Colonial businesses were very much a product of the colonial order. Once, the colonial order was replaced by the nationalist order, after WWII, the colonial businesses became relics of the past that they had played an impor tant role in creating. Their path dependencies made it difficult or impossi ble for most colonial businesses to co-evolve with their environments. Their environments changed, but most colonial businesses could not effectively change along with it, and responded by leaving Southeast Asia. In contrast, in the aftermath of WWII, FBGs were a product of their times, and they developed and later calibrated their business practices to the environmental realities they faced. But what of subsequent changes to the business environment of Southeast Asia? If the lesson to be learned from the history of colonial business enterprises in Southeast Asia is that firms are largely a product of their nascent environments and path dependencies, how would FBGs adapt to environmental changes later in life, as mature busi nesses? More specifically, how well would FBGs be able to adapt to epochal events in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, such as the emergence of Japan as an economic super-power, the opening up of China to foreign invest-



ment, the end of the Cold War and the emergence of new information and knowledge-intensive products and processes? These issues are addressed in the remainder of this article.

The Modern Era: Environmental Influences Exogenous Influences What can be referred to as the modern era in Southeast Asia began in the early 1980s and is defined by two geo-strategic events that profoundly changed the region’s political and economic environment. Both events are exogenous influences in terms of the co-evolutionary framework (Figure 2). The first major external event that marked the beginning of the modern era was the adoption by China in 1978 of Deng Xiao Ping’s four moderniza tions. China’s new open-door policy resulted in a gradual increase of foreign investment in China. China later became a major rival to ASEAN for foreign direct investment. More importantly, China’s open door signalled a reduction in Cold War tensions. A second major exogenous development was the 1985 Plaza Accord signed by the G5 countries in 1985 that led to the rapid appreciation of the Yen against the U.S. Dollar. While China’s open-door policy ushered in a new post Cold War era in ASEAN (Anatolik 1990; Frost 1990), the Plaza Accord stimulated the movement of capital into and within the region. After the Plaza Accord, a wave of Japanese foreign direct investment flooded into the Southeast Asia region and was followed in the early 1990s by an even larger in-flow of Western and Japanese portfolio investments and bank lending (OECD 1999). FBGs benefited from these capital flows by increasing their subcontracting business and partnerships, first with Japanese companies, and later with Western multinational enterprises. FBGs were also leading recipients of foreign bank debt and minority equity investments (Henderson 1998; OECD 1999).

Endogenous Influences As the economic power and influence of FBGs improved, so did relations between ethnic Chinese entrepreneurs and the state. In the early post-WWII environment, relations between the founders of FBGs and their host govern ments was one of mutual wariness and mistrust. Nationalist state bureau cracies of this era knew little of business and did little to promote business interests – except when it concerned the national interest. With the close of the Cold War, Southeast Asian bureaucrats began to realize the increased importance of sustained economic development to political legitimacy



(Bergsten 1992; Stubbs 1999). While the details differ in each ASEAN member country, the relationship between government officials and local business people became more mutually accommodating (Bowie 1994; Laothamatas 1989; Hutchcroft 1989; MacIntyre 1989). In this regard, Haggard (1994: 282) concludes that conflict between Chinese FBGs and the state was ‘mitigated by the development of personalistic relationships between top political elites, bureaucrats and the larger Chinese enterprises’. By many accounts, alliances between Chinese entrepreneurs and state officials in the modern era have produced a corporatist environment where pro-business values are flourishing (e.g. McVey 1992; McIntyre 1994). These developments have transformed many ethnic Chinese entrepreneurs from socially marginal petit entrepreneurs into Southeast Asia’s economic and social elites. More importantly, their political connections and their new social standing have afforded them access to senior officials and state-mediated resources such as franchises, licences and contracts (McVey 1992). With the end of the Cold War, threats to national security receded, permitting ASEAN member states to focus upon economic and trade concerns (Anatolik 1990; Frost 1990). States have recognized the benefits of trade and have taken some halting steps towards regional economic integration (Wu 1991). These endogenous developments have afforded well-connected firms like the FBGs with new opportunities for regional expansion and additional growth opportunities in emerging markets such as Vietnam and Cambodia. At the same time, new migratory patterns in the modern era have eased the region’s scarcity of trained professional managers with native sons and daughters returning home from the West with professional qualifications (Vogel 1991). Moreover, additional skilled managers were made available from the region’s established business and engineering schools and the sub sidiaries of multinational enterprises. In summary, in marked contrast to the hostile business environment of the Nationalist Era, the Southeast Asian business environment from the mid-1980s up until the Asian financial crisis was quite accommodating and munificent in a number of important ways. Threats to national security had receded, FBG–government relations were improving, moving from conflict to cooperation, and human and financial capital was more abundant than ever.

Organizational Adaptation As described above, FBGs developed their basic business models during the tumultuous aftermath of WWII. Consequently, their business practices reflected the need to exploit the diverse business opportunities created by departing colonial businesses, while coping with their social marginalization and the absence of many elements of a basic business infrastructure in



their adopted societies. One might expect that, since the business models developed by FBGs dealt so effectively with an environment of scarcity and hostility, these same models would serve them at least equally well during periods of relative munificence. On the other hand, a co-evolutionary perspective suggests that the practices developed during the early stages of a firm’s founding cast a long shadow on its subsequent adaptive abilities. In this regard, firm capabilities developed in an era of scarcity may become locked-in, while other types of capability are locked-out or imperfectly developed. In general, the ownership structure of a firm plays a key role in shaping the incentives of various organizational stakeholders, and consequently influences their willingness to make the contributions necessary for the development of many firm-specific capabilities (Barnard 1938; Cyert and March 1963; Pfeffer and Salancik 1978; Williamson 1999). In this regard, the family-centric ownership structures characteristic of FBGs engenders distinct inclinations and dis-inclinations towards the development of particular capabilities. More specifically, the coupling of ownership and control in FBGs creates strong incentives to manage businesses efficiently and profitably (Alchian and Demsetz 1972; Whitley 1992), but these same incentives make FBGs ill-equipped to operate in many capital-intensive and high-technology industries which require sustained investments in specialized human and physical assets (Redding 1990; Williamson 1991; Carney 1998). For example, the tendency of the entrepreneurs controlling FBGs to disperse their investments across multiple operating units is a potentially effective means of diversifying risk to the family’s wealth while maintaining undiluted control over business operations (Kao 1993), but such a tendency deprives firms of the patient capital needed to develop more specialized assets (Redding 1990). Similarly, while success in many technologically complex markets requires the hiring and retention of competent and specialized senior managerial, the insular and family-centric nature of the FBGs may deprive them of needed human resources (McVey 1992; Kao 1993). While the use of stock options as a means of attracting and motivating top management and technical personnel is standard practice in many high technology industries, FBGs rarely use such compensation strategies as it implies dilution of ownership and loss of familial control. Redding (1988) notes that even when FBGs hire skilled outsiders, they are often excluded from strategic decisions. Kao (1993) bluntly suggests that among such firms, an incompetent relative will be preferred to a competent outsider. Perhaps reflecting a consensus in the literature regarding FBGs, Redding concludes that they are governed by ‘values which facilitate the initiating phase of entrepreneurship but which place barriers to the higher levels of co-ordination necessary for growth of the individual firm to large scale’ (Redding 1988: 109). Like the business practices of colonial businesses in the wake of WWII, many FBG business practices have run



their course, but remain in place due to powerful path dependencies. These path dependencies represent formidable barriers to organizational adaptation. Their business model did not require FBGs to develop the capabilities and resources necessary to institutionalize new product development, (Phongpaichit 1991) establish brand-name equity, or build global distribution networks (Pananond and Zeithaml 1998). As a consequence, FBGs rarely developed these capabilities and instead focused on reproducing, or marginally improving, existing products at low cost and high quality (Hobday 1994). In the early stages of ASEAN industrialization, the cost advantages of FBGs propelled an export-oriented system of industrial development in labour-intensive and technologically mature industries (World Bank 1993). In the modern era, such cost advantages have declined in importance, partly due to lower cost competition from mainland China and other emerging economies, but also because of the increasingly global scale of product, capital and factor markets and because of the growing importance of new high technology industries (Shapiro and Varian 1998). Unfortunately, despite considerable governmental attention and effort (Robison 1992; Schein 1996), FBGs have not generally been successful in overcoming their path dependencies and developing the capabilities needed to compete as innovators in high-technology industries. Instead, FBGs have generally remained importers, rather than originators of new technology and techniques (Lall 1990; Yamashita 1991). Additionally, few FBGs have developed the marketing capabilities necessary to compete in global product markets (Lecraw 1993; Pananond and Zeithaml 1998). Rather than develop their competitive capabilities, FBGs in the modern era have continued to focus upon low-cost and high-quality manufacturing. When challenged by rising labour costs, FBGs have adapted by re-locating plants in lower-cost locations within ASEAN (Hobday 1994). Facing matu rity in their traditional markets, FBGs have used their financial resources to acquire new businesses within the ASEAN region (Henderson 1998). Insofar as many FBGs have chosen to adapt by changing environments rather than developing new capabilities, such a response parallels that of the majority of colonial businesses at the beginning of the Nationalist Era.

Emergent Organizational Forms and Reciprocal Adjustments In the Nationalist Era, the emergence of FBGs was facilitated by colonial retreat. FBGs, on the other hand, are unlikely to be the promoters of insti tutional reforms for which they are maladapted (Khanna and Palepu 1997). Both the path dependencies and ongoing business behaviour of FBGs may now have negative implications for the emergence of a new generation of firms in Southeast Asia.



For example, while a diverse range of specialized financial institutions is necessary to support the financing needs of firms with differing risk–return profiles, those operating in different industries and those at different lifecycle stages (Porter 1990; Prowse 1996), long-term debt and equity markets are under-developed in ASEAN economies. Such institutional voids reflect prior environmental conditions and firm adaptations. FBGs originally concentrated on non-capital-intensive industries, where expansion could be funded from internal sources. The availability of low-cost labour and the relative scarcity of capital in the Nationalist Era made the emphasis upon labour, rather than capital-intensive sectors an economically rational choice under the circumstances. Similarly, since equity markets were undeveloped or even non-existent in the wake of WWII, FBGs devised private financial networks as an alternative source of capital (Limligan 1986; Kao 1993). When industrial growth accelerated in Southeast Asia, equity markets did not develop rapidly, because FBGs already had private financial networks in place and did not need public markets as a principal source of capital. While insular FBGs do not especially need or want to rely heavily on public capital markets (Redding 1990; Kao 1993), it is now widely recognized that the underdevelopment of these financial institutions constitutes a serious impediment to the emergence of new high-technology firms in Southeast Asia (e.g. World Bank 1998; Henderson 1998; Prowse 1998). The acquisitive propensities of FBGs represent another obstacle hindering the emergence of high technology start-up firms in ASEAN. Due to weak nesses in public capital markets, FBGs have become the principle source of financing for new high technology start-ups (Carney and Gedajlovic 2000). Consequently, many new firms are established under the umbrella of FBGs. Such FBGs may furnish high technology start-ups with financing, but having failed to develop the necessary organizational capabilities themselves, are unlikely to be able to provide these firms with the patient capital, managerial assistance and other resources needed for long-term growth and survival in businesses specializing in high-technology lines (Prowse 1996; Business Week 1999).

Conclusion: The Co-evolution of Firms and Their Environments Organizational strategies and institutional environments co-evolve along path-dependent trajectories. As such, firms reflect the institutional condi tions in which they emerged. However, firms and their human actors also shape the environment both directly (through their strategies and resource allocation patterns) and indirectly with the passive development of infra structure and other institutional structures to support their needs. Our examination of the ascendance of FBGs in ASEAN suggests that dominant This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.


organizational forms respond to their institutional environments as they find them. In doing so, they influence and re-create their institutional context in a path-dependent manner. ASEAN’s diversified family business groups are both a product and a source of their institutional environments. Indeed, at the beginning of the Nationalist Era, emergent FBGs filled many institutional voids that would otherwise have arrested their development. For example, systems of relational contracting (Rajan and Zingales 1998) and internal capital markets (Williamson 1991) were developed by FBGs to cope with the scarcity of external sources of financing. Similarly, as a means of coping with environments that did not provide adequate mechanisms to protect their property rights or equitably enforce contracts, FBGs developed closed and tight business networks that ‘provided havens where property rights are respected’ (Khanna and Palepu 1999: 47). Such adaptive responses allowed FBGs to flourish, but also influenced the developmental path of important institutions in Southeast Asia. Hitherto, the aggregate behaviour of dominant corporate forms in Asia has not been seen as a source of institutional path dependence, but more as the product of institutional patterns derived from (national) history (e.g. Hamilton and Biggart 1988; Whitley 1992). The co-evolutionary perspective adopted here highlights the reciprocal effects that firms and environments have on each other. As McVey (1992) puts it, since the end of WWII, FBGs have graduated from being ‘pariahs to the paragons’ of the Southeast Asia business class. Lacking political and economic power at the outset of Southeast Asia’s industrialization, FBGs proactively negotiated a hazardous environment to achieve their private interests. The history of Southeast Asia’s FBGs also indicates that dominant organizational forms can influence their institutional environments in an emergent fashion (Mintzberg and Waters 1985). For instance, as we describe above, the response of FBGs to the weak business infrastructure they faced in the Nationalist Era was to develop relational forms of contracting. In doing so, FBGs effected the subsequent development of institutions in the region. In this regard, contemporary efforts by the region’s policy makers to replace the institutions of relational contracting with rules based on norms of ‘arms-length’ contracting have been frustrated, not by active resistance, but by the presence of deeply embedded institutional practice. Such a perspective on the influence of human actors on their environments differs markedly from views that emphasize unreflective behaviour (Di Maggio and Powell 1991). On the contrary, it suggests that locally rational responses of human actors to the stimulus of challenges that are specific to a particular time and place can fundamentally influence their institutional environment. This ‘muddling through with purpose’ as Lindblom (1968) puts it, is the essence of rational human agency from the perspective of the actors in their context.



Viewed in this light, the contemporary prevalence of relational contracting and weak capital markets in Southeast Asia can be seen to be outcomes of economic actors seeking self-interest objectives in an environmental context which they inherited, but fundamentally changed. Responding to post WWII forces, FBGs developed robustly competitive business routines and a structural form to safeguard their assets. The conglomerate organizations that emerged as the dominant business form across the wide range of national cultures found in ASEAN may be properly viewed as a superbly adaptive response by human agents to the region’s uncodified legal and regulatory environments. The package of organizational capabilities that co-developed was also well adapted to the prevailing conditions. However, the institutionalization of forms of business enterprise that require little legal or regulatory infrastructure may have profoundly negative implications regarding the ability of modern-day ASEAN economies to carry out needed infrastructural reforms. In other words, a co-evolutionary perspective implies that changes initiated in the institutional environment, even changes widely perceived as legitimate, will not necessarily bring about organizational compliance. Instead, agents in dominant organizational forms may accurately perceive both their interests as well as the means to achieve them (Kondra and Hinings 1998) and act to offset any institutional processes that threaten them (Oliver 1991). As such, our co-evolutionary framework predicts a slow cycle of co-evolution between firms and their environments, rather than rapid and radical re-alignments. In this respect, the within-species evolution of a particular form in relation to its institutional environment may be less vital to the development of an enterprise system, than the inter-species competition between fundamen tally different organizational forms. Stinchcombe (1997) observes that institutions promoting organizational persistence (the protection of existing assets, jobs, and organizational competencies) generally enjoy greater legitimacy than those that promote the destruction of those valued assets. Consequently institutions that promote the destruction of old organizational populations or practices enjoy only a precarious legitimacy. Indeed, many economies never develop such institutions and evolve rigid and ossified economic structures that deliver persistently poor economic performance (North 1990). Unfortunately, while critical to policy makers and managers around the world, outside North American and Western European contexts, we know very little of the processes through which new corporate forms come to be legitimized and institutionalized. As such, further research is needed on the processes by which organizational forms emerge, become institutionalized and ultimately become de-institutionalized in the context of emerging, developing and transformational economies. The co-evolutionary frame-work developed and described here may provide a useful basis for such research.



Notes Acknowledgements are due to two anonymous reviewers as well as Pursey Heugens and Erwin van Gulik of Erasmus University for their comments and helpful suggestions. 1. ASEAN is an international organization established to promote economic, technical, scientific, and political cooperation between its members. Formerly created by the Bangkok Declaration in 1967, the original ASEAN founders were Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, The Philippines, and Thailand. Our analysis focuses upon FBGs in these five countries. Sufficient commonality of interest was perceived that The ASEAN Concord of 1976 called for greater industrial, trade and economic cooperation between these nations (Antolik 1990). Brunei, Laos, Vietnam and Myanamar subsequently joined ASEAN. 2. There is some evidence that earlier generations of Chinese migrants who faced less hostile environments developed enterprises along very different lines than those characteristic of FBGs. For example, the long established elite Chinese business class in the Dutch East Indies, (the Peranaken) were largely assimilated into Dutch colonial society. The Peranaken were educated in Dutch schools and were afforded legal rights similar to Europeans. Under these conditions, the Peranaken developed Dutch business habits and techniques. During the Japanese occupation and thereafter, the Peranaken declined in importance. Interestingly, Twang (1998) suggests that their approach to business was disrupted by new political conditions and became out of tune with the new times. In contrast, Indonesia’s current Chinese business elite (the Totok), faced a distinctly more hostile environment in their adopted homes. The Totok were Chinese-born and migrated to Southeast Asia during the first three decades of the 20th century. Most Totok established their initial businesses between 1940–1950 during the Japanese occupation and the subsequent communist–republican Civil war. In contrast to the earlier arriving Peranaken, the Totok were not generally assimilated into Indonesian society and were confined to the margins of Indonesia’s social and economic life. According to Twang (1998), it was under these conditions that the Totok acquired many of their characteristic business practices.

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14 From Moby Dick to Free Willy: Macro-Cultural Discourse and Institutional Entrepreneurship in Emerging Institutional Fields Thomas B. Lawrence and Nelson Phillips

‘That captain was Ahab. And then it was, that suddenly sweeping his sickle-shaped lower jaw beneath him, Moby Dick had reaped away Ahab’s leg, as a mower a blade of grass in the field . . . Small reason was there to doubt, then, that ever since that almost fatal encounter, Ahab had cher ished a wild vindictiveness against the whale . . . The White Whale swam before him as the monomaniac incarnation of all those malicious agencies which some deep men feel eating in them, till they are left living on with half a heart and half a lung.’ (Melville, 1851: Ch. 9)

I

n this paper, we discuss how changes in macro-cultural understandings of the nature of whales – from Moby Dick to Free Willy – provided the critical institutional preconditions for the development of a commercial whale-watching industry in North America. But we will also argue that these preconditions were not enough. Although these broad discursive changes created the possibility of whale-watching, they did not determine its final form. We discuss how the development of commercial whale-watching depended on individual action that resulted in the development of several geographically distinct institutional fields. In other words, we will argue that discursive activity at a macro level can act to provide the building blocks for new




institutional fields, but how these building blocks are used to construct a field depends upon local action and the strategies of local actors. In order to understand the emergence of institutional fields, we draw on neo-institutional theory (Greenwood and Hinings, 1996) to develop a theoretical framework focusing on the interplay of institutional entrepreneurs and the institutional context in which they operate. Although relatively little of the work in institutional theory has been devoted to understanding the emergence of new institutional fields (DiMaggio, 1991), the literatures on institutional entrepreneurship (e.g. DiMaggio, 1988; Aldrich and Fiol, 1994; Lawrence, 1999) and the transformation of institutional fields (e.g. Tolbert and Zucker, 1983; Greenwood and Hinings, 1996) provide a range of useful insights that form the theoretical foundation of this paper. We believe that understanding how institutional fields emerge is an important next step in the development of institutional theory. Our framework and analysis contribute to the management and organ ization literature, and especially research in institutional theory, in several ways. First, our framework connects a number of ideas from the institutional theory literature with concepts from structuration theory and discourse analysis to help explain the processes that underlie the emergence of institutional fields. Second, our study highlights the important role of macrocultural change in the emergence of new institutional fields. Although there has been some discussion of the relation between macro-cultural discourse and industries or fields, this connection has not been explored in depth in the literature despite its importance in understanding the development of new commercial activity. Third, our framework highlights the importance of the effect of both purposeful action and institutional processes in the production of fields. Although fields are highly emergent in that their final form is unintended by any actor, strategic activity on the part of powerful actors also plays an important role in processes of structuration that determine the characteristics of the field. The remainder of this paper is in four parts. First, we outline a theoretical framework for the examination of the emergence of new institutional fields. Second, we draw on this theoretical framework to examine the emergence of commercial whale-watching around Vancouver Island and the San Juan Islands. In the third section, we draw on both the theoretical framework and the case study to discuss the dynamics of new institutional fields. We conclude with a discussion of the implications of our study for research on the emergence of institutional fields and on institutional processes more generally.

The Emergence of New Institutional Fields According to one of the most cited definitions, institutional fields consist of ‘those organizations that, in the aggregate, constitute a recognized area of life’ (DiMaggio and Powell, 1983: 148). Discussions of institutional fields have This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.

Lawrence and Phillips • From Moby Dick to Free Willy 323

argued for the importance of two constitutive elements: a set of institutions, including practices, understandings and rules; and a network of organizations (Tolbert and Zucker, 1983; DiMaggio, 1991; Leblebici et al., 1991). Combining these ideas, we define an institutional field as a set of organizations that constitute a recognized area of life, are characterized by structured network relations, and share a set of institutions. The definition of a field therefore cuts across traditional industries and focuses on the activities in which groups of organizations participate and their relationship to each other. Institutional fields are produced and maintained through processes of structuration where patterns of social interaction are shaped by, and reproduce, the institutions and relationships that characterize the field (Giddens, 1984; Barley and Tolbert, 1997). But whereas the link between structuration and institutions has been discussed at some length (Giddens, 1984; Barley and Tolbert, 1997), the complex structuration processes underlying the emergence of institutional fields have not been considered in sufficient depth (DiMaggio, 1991). The remainder of this section focuses on these processes in terms of two issues: the role of macro-cultural institutions and the ways in which interested individuals – institutional entrepreneurs – draw on these pre-existing institutions to structure new networks of relationships and sets of institutions.

The Impact of Macro-Cultural Discourse At the broadest level, the context in which new fields emerge is constituted by macro-cultural discourse, by which we mean the broad discourses and associated sets of institutions that extend beyond the boundaries of any institutional field and are widely understood and broadly accepted in a society (Berger and Luckmann, 1967). In examining the emergence of new institutional fields, macro-cultural institutions come into play through the ways in which they facilitate and constrain behavior. The institutional context in which a new field emerges involves sets of broad macro-cultural institutions as well as more local, specific or technical institutions. These macro-cultural institutions often act as templates or set boundaries on the degree of innovation possible within a new field. Macro-cultural rules, practices and understandings provide important raw material from which actors can fashion new patterns of activity and new relationships. Although it has been argued that the structuration of institutional fields is logically and historically prior to the institutionalization of organizational forms (DiMaggio, 1991), we would argue that the processes of structuration of fields and the institutionalization of practices, understandings and rules are inevitably intertwined as actors draw on existing concepts from other discourses to institutionalize local concepts and patterns of interaction. No institutional field is born in a vacuum: new areas of life are developed as actors work to overcome the limitations of existing fields through innovative concepts and patterns of interaction, bringing with them the discourse of other arenas. In other words, actors who This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.


wish to innovate draw on related fields and on macro-cultural discourse to produce the innovations that lead to the emergence of a new institutional field. This leads to our first research question: Research Question 1: What role does macro-cultural discourse play in the emergence of new institutional fields?

The Role of Institutional Entrepreneurship The importance of pre-existing practices, rules and understandings in the development of institutional fields does not mean that this process is simply determined by the existing institutional context. Rather, actors have the option of drawing on multiple pre-existing institutional fields and the ambiguous and contested macro-cultural discourse. They engage in what Cassell (1993: 10) refers to as the ‘tricky business of “trying on” ‘these institutions: adapting and modifying them to fit their own purposes. Although preexisting institutions constrain the potential range of activities and relationships that will make sense to other actors, they also provide the potential for innovative combinations and new practices. Like the elements of language, institutions do not specify a fixed outcome but rather define a context from within which actors can produce a wide range of actions and relationships (Pentland and Rueter, 1994). As well as providing the potential for innovative usage, the institutions themselves are potentially subject to innovation and transformation. And, in the context of a new institutional field in particular, the likelihood of concepts being transformed seems high. As new actors in new relationships employ institutionalized concepts, the local meaning of those concepts may well change to reflect the local conditions under which they are used. Thus, institutions are not fixed and determined but rather the subject of ongoing transformations by motivated actors. The general importance of local action in the emergence of new institutional fields is clear. Without local actors, the concepts embodied in existing fields would never come into play; without local action, no new networks of relationships or sets of institutions could be formed. What we will focus on, then, is the development of a more detailed understanding of the role of agency in the formation of a new field and the relationship between that agency and pre-existing institutions. This leads us to our second research question. Research Question 2: What role does institutional entrepreneurship play in the emergence of new institutional fields?



Methodology Our research methods reflect our interest in the role of macro-cultural discourses and the strategies of local actors in the dynamics of emerging institutional fields. In this section, we first describe our research site and then go on to describe our approach to data collection and analysis.

Research Site: Whale-Watching in Victoria The institutional field that we chose was commercial whale-watching in Victoria, a city of approximately 300,000 on Vancouver Island off the west coast of Canada. This field had three important characteristics for the purposes of our study. First, whale-watching in this area had begun within 10 years of the beginning of the study; this aspect of the field ensured that people would remember the events that led to the emergence of the field and that early participants would still be available to be interviewed. Second, the field, although significant in financial terms, was still small enough that it was practical to interview all of the important actors in the field. Third, and most importantly, whale-watching in Victoria met the basic characteristics of an institutional field – it was a recognized area of life characterized by distinct institutions and inter-organizational networks. Whale-watching in Victoria cuts across a range of traditional industries and activities. It consists of professional and amateur whale-watchers who watch whales for fun, research or commercial purposes. The commercial aspect of whale-watching comprises a rapidly growing ecotourism sector that specializes in taking tourists to view various kinds of marine life including dolphins, grey whales, sea lions, seals, eagles and killer whales. The industry has been growing rapidly since its birth in the 1970s and is made up of operators of small boats in the lower Vancouver Island area, where Victoria is located, and of larger boats in northern parts of Vancouver Island. In addition, there are a number of marine research organizations that focus on the whales (particularly killer whales). Researchers spend considerable amounts of time studying the behavior, habitat and movements of the whales. Finally, the institutional field is also populated by a range of other, less central, actors: the amateur whale-watchers; related industries such as sea plane companies (which often spot whales and pass on the information), ferry companies and fishing boat companies; and the various regulators such as the Government of British Columbia, the Canadian and American Coast Guards, and various travel and tourism boards and associations.



Data Collection and Analysis Our approach to data collection and analysis involved two main stages. The first stage focused on the local whale-watching field. This involved the collection of data through a series of 17 interviews with a range of industry stakeholders, including commercial whale-watching operators, regulatory agents, tourism industry association representatives, environmentalists and marine biologists. Each interview took between 60 and 90 minutes and all interviews were taped, transcribed and entered into a NUD*IST qualitative data analysis program. In each interview, the interviewees were asked to describe in detail their activities and relationships with respect to whale-watching and to relate the history of commercial whale-watching in the area. In addition to this traditional case study, we also performed a much broader discourse analytic study of the discursive construction of whales across three important arenas: the regulatory structures that govern human– whale interaction, and particularly the commercial hunting of whales; the anti-whaling discourse that has argued for the protection and preservation of whales; and the images of whales in popular culture, especially those in popular movies. The data for this analysis came from a range of sources. Data on the regulatory and anti-whaling discourses came largely from a number of scholarly texts that have detailed the history of human–whale interaction (Herscovici, 1985; Barstow, 1989; D’Amato and Chopra, 1991; Ellis, 1991; Gambell, 1993; Kalland, 1993; Ris, 1993; Ford et al., 1994; Heimlich-Boran and Heimlich-Boran, 1994; Stoett, 1997). Initial data on the presentation of whales in popular movies was drawn from the Internet Movie Database and Microsoft’s Cinemania CD-ROM, with more detailed data then being collected through a variety of sources, including film-oriented internet newsgroups, personal communications and watching the movies ourselves. The process of data analysis involved a combination of traditional qualitative data analysis and more interpretive discourse analytic methods. Our intention was to understand the conditions that preceded the development of the field and the processes that underpinned the structuring of the field.

The Emergence of Commercial Whale-Watching in Victoria The emergence of commercial whale-watching was the result of the interaction of significant change in a set of macro-cultural discourses and individual action that capitalized on those discourses. Changes in macro-cultural discourses made commercial whale-watching possible; individual action provided the impetus for structuration that led to the formation of the field. In this section, we begin by exploring some of the more important macro-



cultural discourses that provided the preconditions for commercial whalewatching and then describe how the field came into being in one particular community on Vancouver Island.

The Evolution of ‘the Whale’ in Macro-Cultural Discourses Society’s conceptualization of whales has changed profoundly over the past 150 years. Animals that were considered horrifying monsters in Melville’s time have been reconstructed into almost mythical creatures deserving of our respect and admiration. The change in societal representations of killer whales has been particularly startling. The general tenor of representations of killer whales from ancient times up to the 1970s can by summed up in the words of Pliny the Elder: ‘a killer whale cannot be properly depicted or described except as an enormous mass of flesh armed with savage teeth.’ These animals were monsters to be feared and hunted. Yet, by 1992, understandings of killer whales had changed to the point that a Hollywood film, Free Willy, featuring a killer whale as an endearing creature worthy of empathy, compassion and even admiration, generated over US$150 million and spawned two sequels, Free Willy II in 1995 and Free Willy III in 1997. In understanding the development of commercial whale-watching, it is critical to understand the radical changes that occurred in societal understandings and representations of the whale. Whale-watching as a tourist activity depends on a particular construction of the whale. Different constructions of whales make possible different forms of human–whale interaction and only some constructions of the whale lead to commercial whalewatching. Several important macro-cultural discourses shape conceptualizations of whales, affect the sorts of activities that can be legitimately carried out around the whales, and reflect both the intended effects of skillful actors and the unintended effects of dispersed and unconnected actions. For our purposes, it is less important to determine why these discourses changed than to come to some understanding of how they changed and how that affected the emergence of commercial whale-watching as an institutional field. We will focus here on three discourses that have been dominant in the recent history of human – whale interactions: the regulatory discourse, the anti-whaling discourse, and the popular culture discourse.

The Regulatory Discourse Humans have been hunting whales since the beginning of history (Francis, 1990; Gambell, 1993). Despite the existence of commercial whaling since at least the 12th century (Francis, 1990; Ellis, 1991), no attempts were made to regulate the industry at an international level until the 20th century (Gambell, 1993). From the commercial whaling perspective, whales were



understood as ‘a common property resource, which implies that no single user has a right to the resource, nor can they prevent others from sharing in its exploitation’ (Gambell, 1993: 98). Consequently, as local coastal stocks of whales were exhausted, whaling operations expanded into the international waters of the open seas. As in many other fisheries, this approach led to over-exploitation and the rapid depletion of marine stocks (Francis, 1990; Gambell, 1993; Stoett, 1997). Beginning in the 1930s, a series of international regulations were developed aimed at controlling the number and type of whales harvested. Initially, these agreements were the result of whaling companies’ financial concerns: an ‘uncontrolled and great slaughter’ of whales in the 1930–1 Antarctic season had led to an oversupply and consequently depressed prices for whale oil (Gambell, 1993: 98). Later agreements through the 1930s and 1940s continued to treat whales as a resource in need of management: the 1944 protocol, for example, established the Blue Whale Unit (BWU), which fixed 1 blue whale to equal 2 fin whales, 2.5 humpbacks or 6 sei whales, and set the overall limit to 16,000 BWU. The conceptualization here is of ‘whale stocks’ rather than whales as individuals or as a species, and it is human need for those natural resources that is the pre-eminent concern. Beginning in the 1960s, the regulatory discourse around whales began to shift significantly, from an understanding of whale stocks as natural resources to a concern for the preservation of species. Regulations protecting humpback and blue whales were enacted in 1963; sustainable yields were calculated for each species; and in 1972 catch limits were set by individual species rather than by Blue Whale Units (Francis, 1990). The regulatory discourse also became increasingly scientific as advances in the understanding of whale biology led to the calculation of maximum sustainable yields (MSY) for various species. Although this approach was initially viewed with optimism, the difficulty in calculating both the MSY and the size of the whale stocks was such that, by the early 1980s, the International Whaling Commission (IWC) was unable to reach any agreement regarding the catch limits of stocks subject to commercial whaling (Gambell, 1993). These difficulties were an important factor in the IWC’s 1982 decision to implement a moratorium on all commercial whaling beginning in 1986 (Kirkwood, 1992).

The Anti-Whaling Discourse Since the moratorium, the ecological argument that whales are endangered has been losing credibility among the scientific and regulatory communities. Even whale protection advocates are admitting that the scientific evidence clearly demonstrates the possibility of sustained, limited, regulated whaling without endangering some species (Barstow, 1989; Ris, 1993; Stoett, 1997). The arguments against whaling, however, have not abated. Maintaining the anti-whaling argument has necessitated another shift in the image of the whale. This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.


The anti-whaling discourse currently conceptualizes the whale neither as a resource to be managed nor as a species in danger of extinction, but as an animal with special qualities that make it inherently valuable. Protection arguments focus on whales, not as a species, but as individual animals, with inalienable rights (Barstow, 1989; D’Amato and Chopra, 1991). The anti-whaling discourse has moved from an ecological foundation to an ethical one. This position was adopted by Greenpeace early in the antiwhaling movement (Herscovici, 1985), but has been taken on much more widely since the scientific discourse again began to support limited catches (Kalland, 1993; Stoett, 1997). Organizations such as the Cetacean Society International and the Worldwide Fund for Nature (WWF), which have traditionally taken an ecological position, now argue that the primary reason not to resume commercial whaling is ethical. Similarly, the US Commissioner to the IWC in 1991 stated in an interview that ‘he thereafter would have to oppose whaling on ethical grounds since scientific evidence now indicates that some stocks can be hunted under proper protective measures’ (Marine Mammal News, cited in Kalland, 1993: 124). Ris argues that the antiwhaling discourse has constructed as its goal ‘the total protection of all cetaceans, irrespective of scientific findings, sustainable development principles and social and cultural considerations’ (1993: 156).

The Popular Culture Discourse As in the regulatory and anti-whaling discourses, the image of the whale in popular culture has changed dramatically over time. This is particularly important because the idea of whales held by the majority of the population is both produced and reflected by popular culture. In order to explore how whales have been constructed in society, we examined the roles that whales have played in one important form of popular culture – movies. Table 1 presents a list of movies in which whales were portrayed between 1930 and 1997.1 Although this list does not include every movie in which whales were characterized, because data on their characterization could not be gained for Table 1: The characterization of whales in popular movies Movie title

Year of production

Characterization of whales

Moby Dick

1930

Negative

20,000 Leagues Under the Sea Moby Dick

1954 1956

Negative Negative

Pinocchio

1940

Negative

Orca

1977

Negative

Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home

1986

Positive

The Whales of August

1987

Positive

Free Willy

1993

Positive

Whale Music

1994

Positive

Free Willy 2

1995

Positive

Free Willy 3

1997

Positive



several movies, those movies for which the data could be gathered show a marked shift that corresponds approximately with the shift that occurred in the regulatory and anti-whaling discourses. All of the movies produced in the 1970s and earlier present a negative image of whales, primarily as threats to people. The 1930 and 1956 characterizations of Moby Dick serve as powerful prototypes of our traditional conception of a whale. Huge, man-eating and ship-destroying, Moby Dick showed no hint of compassion for Ahab or his crew. Pinocchio (1940) echoes this characterization, although drawing more explicitly on biblical images, as Pinocchio and Gepetto are trapped in the belly of the whale. In 20,000 Leagues under the Sea, no physical whale is present, but what turns out to be a submarine is initially thought to be a giant narwhal destroying and sinking ships in the late 1800s. More recently, Orca (1977) presents a killer whale going on a rampage in a harbor after seeing its mate killed. The movies produced after 1980 present a very different image of whales and their relationship to people. The 1986 film Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home invokes both ecological and ethical discourses in its characterization of whales: a space probe, which is threatening the earth’s destruction, is emanating humpback whale calls and waiting for a reply by the now extinct species. So, a humpback whale from the 20th century is needed to save mankind by replying to the probe. The films that follow Star Trek IV focus more directly on the image of the whale as a special creature, worthy of particular attention and caring. Whale Music (1994) explores a reclusive musician’s efforts to create a piece of music that will summon the whales. In The Whales of August (1987), the whales are a positive factor, though not central to the story line: they are used metaphorically to depict an earlier and happier time in the lives of two elderly sisters. Perhaps the films most emblematic of the cultural transformation of the whale, however, were Free Willy (1993) and its sequels, Free Willy II (1995) and Free Willy III (1997). In the first of the series, Willy the killer whale ends up in a marina after being separated from its parents by fishermen. Meanwhile, Jesse, a street kid assigned to clean up the marina after being caught vandalizing it, befriends Willy. Jesse teaches the whale to perform tricks, which the trainer has been unable to do. But, when Willy is a dud in front of the marina audience, the owner plans his revenge and the boy and his friends must try to free Willy. Thus, the initial focus is an ethical one, in which the unique nature of the whale is highlighted through its connection to the boy. In Free Willy II, the film engages both the ecological and ethical discourses, as a crashed oil tanker endangers human and animal lives and Willy and Jesse must both work to save the day. Free Willy III refocuses squarely on an ethical conceptualization of the whale, as this time Willy is threatened by illegal whalers.



In combination, the changes in the three discourses discussed here – regulatory, anti-whaling and popular culture – indicate some of the ways that whales, and in particular killer whales, have been reconstructed in macrocultural discourses over time. Currently, the reconstructed whales are no longer resources to be harvested or even species to be saved, but rather individuals to be appreciated and respected. The whales exhibit almost human behaviors and are associated with mythical properties. These macro-cultural discourses provide a powerful context that confronts anyone interacting with whales. In particular, these discourses, along with a variety of local resources including the whales themselves, create the conditions of possibility for the emergence of whale-watching as a tourist activity and a commercial industry.

‘We’re Missing the Boat’: The Story of Whale-Watching in Victoria The basics of commercial whale-watching are the same the world over. Companies take tourists out on boats to areas where it is likely that whales will be found. These tours also generally include visits to a range of other animals and sites that they visit for more or less time depending on the availability and accessibility of the whales. But, although there is an underlying similarity to whale-watching, versions of it vary significantly across location and company. Local conditions present different opportunities depending on local topography, the type of whale and the flow of tourists by season. Whale-watching companies, too, differ greatly in terms of the kind of tours that they provide. In particular, they vary in the type of boats they use and in the length and nature of the trip. Some whale-watching occurs on large boats and includes dinner or lunch. Some use smaller, faster boats and provide shorter, more focused trips. Other whale-watching takes place in kayaks on multi-day excursions. In the remainder of this section, we describe the emergence of whale-watching in Victoria, Canada, highlighting both the local action that took place and the impacts of the macro-cultural discourses described above. Whale-watching in Victoria as a commercial activity began in the fall of 1987 when John Cyprus began offering wildlife tours from Victoria Harbour.2 Understanding the development of the distinctive characteristics of the local field begins with an understanding of the importance of Cyprus’s early choices. Cyprus’s decision to launch a wildlife tour business grew out of a complex set of factors that led him to recognize an opportunity: tourism operators were failing to offer ocean-based products to the growing numbers of tourists who were visiting Victoria. So I came down to Victoria and I started looking around . . . And I thought, I think there’s an opportunity here. Because what I saw, I saw a bunch



of land-based attractions: all stationary – Butchart Gardens, the Wax Museum, the Land of the Little People or whatever . . . and all these things that people went to. And I thought, we’re missing the boat: we’re literally missing the boat. (Interview, JC)

But Cyprus did not begin his company as a ‘whale-watching’ company. Instead, he intended to use fast boats to provide exciting and educational tours of the wildlife around Victoria – what he called ‘adventure coastal tours.’ The tours would therefore combine the excitement of getting there with the ecotourism appeal of learning about the ocean around Victoria. But it was the whales that interested his clients. By the late 1980s, representations of the killer whale in popular culture and the anti-whaling discourse had established the animal as distinctly valuable and interesting. Thus, the culturally conditioned attitudes of his clients led Cyprus to see that the real opportunity was in whale-watching. A problem rapidly emerged, however: how could he consistently find the whales? Pods of killer whales move continuously and can swim long distances in a day. Cyprus’s solution was to cooperate with another whalewatching company across the strait that was looking for the same whales but not competing for the same tourists: The first year we went out we realized that we were bumping into killer whales about 30% of the time. We thought about that a little bit, and joined up with then the only other tour operator in the San Juan Islands and communicated over the radio the next year. By agreement we would share some sighting information. Our sighting success went up to 60% of the trips that we ran. We worked on it a little harder the next year, and it went up to 80%, or almost 80%. (Interview, JC)

These early decisions were critical in shaping the emerging institutional field of whale-watching in the Victoria area. Whereas the whale-watchers further north on Vancouver Island’s west coast used large boats to carry large numbers of people to see the whales, Cyprus’s decision to use small boats set the tone for the whole field in Victoria. Similarly, his decision to start a spotting network set the stage for the basic structuring of the field around two competing spotting networks that developed as more firms sprang up to compete for the growing numbers of tourists: They basically studied our operation, went out with us, followed us on the water – by literally following us in a little boat – and learned that we had land-based spotters to find the whales and followed them to find out what sites they were using . . . And that’s what everyone else has done, except now they don’t do that, they just follow us out in the harbor. ... So the competitors who have cropped up in the last two years are basically followers. (Interview, JC)

The result of this process is a set of undifferentiated companies providing very similar trips in similar boats to see the same whales. Victoria



whale-watching companies use small, fast boats to take tourists out for twohour trips to killer whale pods as much as 100 kilometers from Victoria. They all work from the same location, visit the same sights, use the same boats and outfit their guests in the same storm suits. They also have practically indistinguishable brochures: almost all of the marketing material takes the form of uniformly sized one-page brochures adorned with one or two pictures of jumping killer whales that are reminiscent of scenes from the Free Willy movies. Although the early choices made by Cyprus became the standard pattern in the industry, this mimetic isomorphism was based on a perception of success that was simply not true. But the hardest thing, I guess, was that we did all the groundwork for those that followed us. That’s a tough one. . . . And there’s the perception that you’re doing well, and we never did well financially. There was the perception that we were doing really well. (Interview, JC)

As the field grew, two organizations emerged that served to cement the isomorphic quality of the field: the Victoria Marine Tourism Association (VMTA) and the Northwest Whale-Watchers Association (NWWA). The VMTA came into being at the request of the City of Victoria as a way to manage access to the harbor and dock facilities. Membership in the Association is required for all firms (including whale-watching companies, fishing charters and seaplane operators) that operate out of the harbor. In order to obtain a license, a firm must become a member in good standing, which requires appropriate insurance, safety inspections and adherence to a set of guidelines for operating out of the harbor. The NWWA was created to set basic standards for commercial whalewatching around Victoria and the San Juan Islands. The basic concern was to avoid regulation by instituting a set of voluntary guidelines. We keep hearing rumblings, from the Department of Fisheries and Oceans now. We keep hearing noises about they’re gonna regulate, control, or they’re gonna shut it down altogether. . . . unless we can control ourselves, the government will step in and regulate it. How they regulate it is what we’re afraid of. (Interview, DT, owner of competing firm)

The primary problem faced by the NWWA is the perception of harassment owing to the large number of boats that often surround the whales: And you get out to the whales, sunny afternoon, mid-summer, and you know there could be 30 boats that are commercial going over towards the San Juan [Islands]. You’re looking at 30 to 35 commercial boats plus the pleasure operator. There can be up to a hundred boats around whales. (Interview, SC, owner of competing firm)

Amateur whale-watchers – some on shore, some in other boats – have begun to suggest that this intense observation of the whale might constitute ‘harassment.’ This notion of harassment is strongly tied to the macro-cultural This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.


discourses described above. Descriptions of the harassment of whales echo ideas from human culture, such as bullying, stalking and sexual harassment, and are consistent with the popular culture and anti-whaling discourses, which represent whales as unique and special individuals. Threats to the whales and the reactions to those threats also illustrate, however, the ongoing tensions and overlap in the adoption of ideas from macro-cultural discourses: when killer whale stocks appeared to be lower one summer, for instance, there emerged a strong and immediate reaction that invoked notions of preservation and species depletion, even though these ideas were not generally prominent within the anti-whaling or even regulatory discourses. Beginning with one boat providing wildlife tours in 1987, Cyprus’s company, and the field of commercial whale-watching more generally, grew rapidly. By 1995, Cyprus’s company had three boats and sales of C$500,000. By that time, there were 5 companies with 11 boats providing whale-watching tours in the Victoria area, and total ticket sales by Victoria-based whalewatching companies were over C$2 million and growing at about 40 percent per year. John Cyprus’s decision to offer wildlife tours had sparked the creation of a whole new arena of activity in Victoria – an arena that was part of a broader industry but was characterized by a discrete network of actors and a distinctive set of institutionalized practices and rules.

Discussion In this section, we return to the two research questions that motivated this paper. Our first research question addressed the issue of the role of macrocultural discourses in the formation of new institutional fields. Our study highlights two issues that we see as critical to understanding the role of macro-cultural discourses: the importance of widely available and highly legitimate discourses; and the potential for dramatic field-level change as change occurs in macro-cultural discourse. Our second research question focused on the role of individual actors in shaping the development of new fields. Again, our study points to two important issues: the role of innovation and isomorphism in institutional action; and the emergent, contingent nature of institutional entrepreneurship.

Macro-Cultural Discourses and the Dynamics of Institutional Fields The first issue highlighted by our study concerns the availability and legitimacy of macro-cultural discourses. In collecting data for this study, it became clear early on that the manner in which people conceptualized killer whales was a critical element in understanding the field. In particular, the reverence This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.


and personification of the whales was extraordinary, and led us to examine the societal discourses around these animals. What we saw was that the concept of a whale is one that was constructed and contested in discourses that were widely available and highly legitimated. The regulatory and antiwhaling discourses had interacted in highly public ways to reconstruct the concept of a whale multiple times with significant economic and cultural impacts. These discourses had also worked to establish and maintain their legitimacy by drawing variously on economic, scientific and ethical forms of argument as the impacts of commercial whaling were assessed and reassessed. The discourse of popular culture acted more directly on the field of whale-watching. Its products, especially Hollywood movies, picked up the myth of the super-whale established in the anti-whaling discourse, elaborating and personifying it in the form of Willy. Whereas the positive image of whales had previously been promoted primarily by groups such as Greenpeace working through the news media, movies such as Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, The Whales of August and, most dramatically, Free Willy suddenly reached mass audiences with a message that was not filtered through a third-party medium – the concept of a whale became unequivocally valuable and admirable. In the local context of Victoria whale-watching, the impact of macrocultural discourses played out in specific ways that were contingent on the interests and capabilities of the network of actors involved. Two aspects of broader discourses were enacted in quite elaborate ways: the anthropomorphizing and the individualizing of the killer whales. In the discourse of popular culture, the killer whale has been radically anthropomorphized, being associated with human qualities such as compassion and bravery. In the Victoria context, the harassment issue led some actors to try to foster a humanistic image of the whales that, while still sympathetic, also lent the whales an air of independence and sophistication: I call them urban whales. They’ve been dealing with pleasurecraft since pleasurecraft existed. (Interview, AS) I mean the fact is that these whales have grown up in these waters and they’re totally habituated to boats and I think anybody who has the same kind of experience as we have in observing them will tell you that. (Interview, JC)

Along with their humanization, killer whales have also been significantly individualized in the Victoria context, particularly through the naming of all of the ‘resident’ killer whales – those whales that spend the summer period around the island. Each whale lives in a specific pod, labeled A through K, and is assigned a corresponding alphanumeric ‘name,’ such as A1, A2, B1, B2. This has made the whales available as individuals and as members of families for resources in the production of interesting and engaging whalewatching tours – it is more fun to see and talk about specific individuals than This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.


anonymous animals. Many of the animals have also been given ‘personalities’ by the researchers and the commercial operators: This one whale has a sense of humor as well – you’ll never convince me that he doesn’t. We were out with the whales, pretty calm water, we were just sort of putting along, the whales were mucking around, and they’re fishing and playing, and all this stuff . . . The next thing I hear is ‘Shit!,’ and the whale is right in front of the motor and he’s come up and deliberately exhaled really hard. . . . [T]hey do have a sense of humor. (Interview, AS)

The anthropomorphization and individualization of the whales draw heavily on ideas developed in the anti-whaling and popular culture discourses. As species depletion became a less convincing argument, whales were presented by anti-whaling advocates not just as members of an important animal species, but as individuals whose innate qualities made them worthy of protection. Based on these dynamics, we argue that, when new fields are emerging, the impact of other discourses and fields will depend on their availability and legitimacy to key actors. In many areas of life, these will be macro-cultural discourses, such as science, law and popular culture, which are widely available through a variety of media and whose institutionalized concepts tend to pervade a wide range of fields (Friedland and Alford, 1991). The legitimacy of these concepts will depend on the local context within which the new field is emerging. For instance, in some counter-cultural contexts, the legitimacy of concepts from popular culture, science or law might be explicitly rejected simply on the basis of their origins. At the same time as they are being rejected, however, these concepts are still working to structure the emergence of the field. This leads to our first proposition: Proposition 1: Macro-cultural discourses will have a greater impact on the emergence of new institutional fields when they are easily accessed and legitimate to participants in the emerging field. A second issue highlighted by the case study is the potential negative impact of change in macro-cultural discourses on the activities within institutional fields. Although the generation of new fields may require local action, changes in macro-cultural discourses can potentially undermine the basis for institutional fields without the cooperation of, and often in spite of resistance by, local actors. For example, over the history of commercial whaling, the fates of whalers were largely out of their hands. Negotiations at the international level in regulatory bodies and in the international media led to changes in the concept of the whale and associated changes in regulatory and political structures. Several transitions in the 20th-century history of commercial whaling exemplify this dynamic. Beginning with the first regulation of commercial whaling in



the 1930s, the reconceptualization of whales over time led to an increasingly hostile environment for commercial whalers. Originally conceptualized as an implicitly infinite resource, whales were there for the harvest. But, as they were reconstructed as a scarce resource measured in Blue Whale Units, and then as a potentially endangered species with Maximum Sustainable Yields, whales were increasingly protected from commercial hunting. More recently, with the advent of the ecological and animal rights movements, commercial whaling has faced an overall loss of legitimacy, particularly in North America and southern Europe. Finally, the commercial whaling industry was all but wiped out with the 1982 moratorium. It could be argued that these changes were the result of an increasingly scientific understanding of whale populations, but we argue that a simple ‘progress’ model is misleading. Although the scientific understanding of the dynamics of population growth and biodiversity has unquestionably grown over the past 100 years, this does not account for the shift in focus from ecological to ethical concerns: the transformation of whales from an endangered species to individuals with inherent rights. The movement within the antiwhaling discourse from ecological talk to ethical talk and the corresponding shift in the portrayal of whales in popular movies illustrates the degree to which macro-cultural discourses can delegitimize an activity in ways that are beyond the resistance of local actors: a commercial whaler operating out of Tofino has no real chance of influencing a discourse that emanates from Hollywood or Washington, DC. This possibility exists because most fields depend on concepts that are constructed and maintained outside of the field. If the macro-cultural discourses that support these concepts change such that these concepts are delegitimated, then the foundation for the field may crumble. This leads to our second proposition: Proposition 2: The delegitimating effects of change in macro-cultural discourses may deinstitutionalize the activities of a field despite the actions of local actors.

Institutional Entrepreneurship in Emerging Fields Our second research question focused on the role of the individual actors, and especially institutional entrepreneurs, in the development of new fields. The first critical issue with respect to individual action that was highlighted by our study was the degree of intentionality associated with institutional entrepreneurship. In the theoretical development of the concept of institutional entrepreneurship, organizational researchers and writers have emphasized its intentional nature (DiMaggio, 1988; Aldrich and Fiol, 1994; Lawrence, 1999): institutional entrepreneurship has been presented as an alternative to the deterministic images of isomorphism where organizations reactively



adopt practices and structures because of a desire to avoid uncertainty, sanction or a loss of legitimacy. Although research has certainly provided examples of institutional entrepreneurs working proactively and intentionally to shape their institutional environments (e.g. Lawrence, 1999), what appears prominently in our study of whale-watching in Victoria is the actions of an institutional entrepreneur whose strategies were emergent, contingent and reactive and yet also highly influential in shaping the field. Many of the practices and ideas associated with the local field of whalewatching in Victoria stem largely from the initial decisions made by John Cyprus – the type of boats, the method of whale-spotting, the timing of tours, the look of the brochures. And yet, as the case shows, many of these decisions were done in a reactive manner for which the consequences were largely unintended. For instance, the ability of the tour operators to reach whale pods that are significant distances from the harbor is dependent on their use of small, fast boats, and yet the initial decision to use these boats was based on wholly other reasons: I connected with a builder in Sidney ... At the time they were working on the prototype for the Coastguard of the rescue-style Zodiak boats – one of the first rigid hulls that they built. I looked at it and thought, that looks like fun. The guy tried to dissuade me or discourage me because they’re so expensive. So that sort of rolled around in the back of my head. I looked at it and I thought, people would like to go out in that, it looks like fun. (Interview, JC)

Of course, small fast boats, such as Zodiaks, are used in a wide range of marine communities for a variety or purposes, and often serve those purposes extremely well. Our point is not that Cyprus’s choice was unique or dysfunctional, or that other operators’ imitation of this choice was irrational; rather, his initial decisions emerged out of a confluence of factors that were not necessarily connected to what emerged as the commonly understood rationale later in the development of the field, and other operators imitated these decisions in an attempt to overcome the high levels of uncertainty that were associated with this emerging field. We therefore argue that, although strategies of institutional entrepreneurship can be either intended or emergent (Mintzberg and Waters, 1985), and likely are a mix of both, the dynamics of new and emerging institutional fields will make emergent strategies much more likely. The strategic, social and technological uncertainties associated with the emergence of new fields are likely to make the realization of intended institutional strategies a matter of chance. This means not that institutional entrepreneurship is simply luck, but rather that rapid recognition of failed strategies or changing environments, and adaptation to them, will be more important than long-term planning or rigorous analysis.



Proposition 3: The effects of institutional entrepreneurship in emerging fields are likely to be highly uncertain and therefore the strategies of institutional entrepreneurs are more likely to be emergent than intended. The second critical issue with respect to individual action concerns the degree of innovation, conflict and imitation evident in the formation of new institutional fields. One of the basic premises of institutional entre preneurship as a concept is that different institutional structures will work to advantage actors in different ways (DiMaggio, 1988; Clegg, 1989; Lawrence, 1999). Thus, the dominant motive for institutional entrepreneurship will be the development of institutional arrangements that work in favor of the protagonist. At the same time, this suggests that the formation of institutional fields is a process likely to be rife with conflict over the specification of those arrangements (Aldrich and Fiol, 1994), as has been illustrated in other research contexts (e.g. DiMaggio, 1991; Lawrence, 1999). In examining the emergence of whale-watching in Victoria, however, what was in evidence was not so much an extended conflict over the structuring of the field, but rapid cycles of innovation, imitation and institutionalization. An example of this dynamic illustrates the field’s tendency toward rapid isomorphism. As mentioned in discussing the previous issue, one of the first key decisions made by John Cyprus was the adoption of small, fast boats. These boats favored particular types of tours – shorter, more focused tours in which whale-spotting is the dominant feature, with no provision for any sort of amenity such as food or even toilets. Although a competitive model of the industry might suggest that rival start-ups might offer alternative accommodations and tour styles, instead a series of copycat firms emerged that imitated JC’s offerings almost exactly. Another source of the rapid, low-conflict institutional isomorphism came from the field-specific organizations that emerged. These organizations were developed by John Cyprus and other early entrants in response to the threat of government regulation of the industry and the demands of the local municipality. Despite their specific origins, however, these organizations further entrenched the original product and service design decisions by providing mechanisms for the dissemination of ‘best practice’ types of information from established operators to new and potential entrants. Although the definition of networks and institutions in any new field clearly has a significant strategic impact on the competitors within the field, the manner in which that definition took place in the field we examined suggests that this may not necessarily lead to significant conflict. We argue that this dynamic, where initial innovations are rapidly imitated and institutionalized, may be common in many emerging institutional fields, and may contrast with those situations where more established fields are undergoing transformation. Rather than being concerned with obtaining competitive advantage, early entrants may be worrying more about organizational



survival and thus be keen to imitate approaches that seem to be working and be willing to comply with demands from apparently legitimate bodies. Proposition 4: Institutional entrepreneurship in emerging fields is likely to be associated with rapid imitation and relatively little conflict. In combination, our two propositions concerning individual action suggest that emerging fields are highly fluid, reactive, competitive environments. In new fields, institutional entrepreneurs are engaged in emergent, contingent strategies, where their initial choices lead to unintended and unexpected consequences to which they then adapt. At the same time, early followers are relatively blindly imitating the choices of those institutional entrepreneurs out of a desire for certainty and legitimacy. Consequently, emerging institutional structures that define the field are highly vulnerable to the initial decisions of institutional entrepreneurs as well as the early influences of customers and other stakeholders. In other words, processes of structuration in emerging fields amplify the effects of early decisions and reactions.

Conclusion The aim of this study was to examine closely the emergence of a new institutional field and understand the roles of pre-existing institutions and local action. The development of whale-watching around Vancouver Island has highlighted several important issues with respect to these dynamics: the importance of availability and legitimacy in the impact of macro-cultural discourses; the potential disruptive force of a relatively distant macrocultural discourse; the contingent and emergent nature of institutional entrepreneurship in emerging fields; and the potentially rapid cycle of innovation, imitation and institutionalization in new institutional fields. This study and these issues lead to several important implications for research in institutional theory. First, ideas from linguistic theory more generally, and discourse analysis more specifically, can play an important role in the development of institutional theory. Studies in the institutional theory tradition have made clear the importance of symbols and myths in the evolution of inter-organizational networks and fields of activity (e.g. Meyer and Rowan, 1977; Greenwood and Hinings, 1988; DiMaggio and Powell, 1991). From the perspective taken here, discourse analysis provides a means of delving more deeply into the dynamics of those cultural objects. Our examination of the concept of a whale across three macro-cultural discourses, and its role in the emergence of a new institutional field, points to the potential utility of integrating discourse analytic approaches with institutional analyses. For instance, understanding the dynamics around the ‘harassment’ of the whales is aided by recognizing



that there are multiple conceptions of the whale available to actors in this domain, with potentially conflicting conceptions emphasizing their special, sacred quality and their human, social side. Second, analyses of institutional entrepreneurship should recognize its contingent and emergent nature. What became clear in our examination of the role of institutional entrepreneurship in the emergence of whalewatching was the important roles of chance and of reactive decision-making. John Cyprus was in many ways a classic institutional entrepreneur – an innovator whose ideas and actions set the tone for the whole industry. Yet those ideas and actions were clearly evolving in unexpected ways, to the extent that he never even intended to form a whale-watching company, let alone a whole field of whale-watching in the Victoria area. Thus, in examining institutional entrepreneurship, we need to adopt a broad, processual understanding of strategy, rather than retain a limited view of strategic action that recognizes only intended, rational action. Finally, studies incorporating discourse analysis with institutional theory must be sensitive to the interplay of multiple discourses in the social construction of new institutional fields. The discourses of commerce, science, animal rights and Hollywood are all deeply involved in the construction of the whale-watching industry. At the same time, however, the flow of concepts among these discourses is partial and strategic. Whereas Hollywood and the tourism industry promote the intelligence and social characteristics of killer whales documented by marine biologists, they do not incorporate the killer-whale behaviors that might be viewed as ‘vicious’ or ‘mean’ into their conceptualization. Killer whales might ‘play’ with a seal for an hour before finally killing it and they might ‘graze’ on a blue whale for days, slowly eating away at the flesh of the larger animal, but these aspects of killer whale biology are not a part of the ecotourism or Hollywood discourses. Thus, an understanding of the discursive foundations of whale-watching as a field of activity requires a recognition of the ways in which concepts move between discourses and are transformed in the process. At a more general level, our study demonstrates the effectiveness of institutional theory as a framework for understanding the emergence of a new industry. Concepts such as institutional field, institution and institutional entrepreneur provide a theoretical framework that highlights the interplay of agency and structure in the emergence of a new area of activity like whalewatching around Vancouver Island. Although other theoretical frameworks provide useful ways of thinking about the development of technologies (e.g. Latour, 1987) or markets (e.g. White, 2001), institutional theory provides an understanding of the relative roles of existing institutions and the actions of institutional entrepreneurs in constructing new ‘recognized areas of life.’ It highlights the limitations placed on action by existing institutions and the importance of local action in structuring new fields.



Notes 1. This list represents all of the movies in either the Internet Movie Database or Microsoft’s Cinemania for which information regarding the characterization of the whales could be ascertained. 2. All names of individuals and companies are disguised for purposes of anonymity.

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15 New Practice Creation: An Institutional Perspective on Innovation Michael Lounsbury and Ellen T. Crumley

W

here do new practices come from? While neoinstitutional research is most widely known for its focus on tracing how novel innovations or activities become established as taken-for-granted practices as a result of isomorphic diffusion, little work in this tradition has focused on the origins of new practices (Scott 2001). Part of the problem is that diffusion studies treat practices as objects that are either adopted or not, essentially leading to the ‘black-boxing’ of practice. This more structural emphasis on institutionalization processes has resulted in a number of critiques about the lack of attention paid to the role of actors in creating and promulgating innovations, as well as efforts to revise early neoinstitutionalist formulations (DiMaggio 1988; Greenwood and Hinings 1996; Hirsch and Lounsbury 1997; Schneiberg 2007). One response to this disquiet has been the introduction of the concept ‘institutional entrepreneur’, featuring the role of powerful actors such as the state and professions that are able to reshape the social organization of fields and/or help establish a new dominant practice (e.g. Garud et al. 2002; Greenwood et al. 2002; Lounsbury 2002). However, this redirection has not shed much light on the sources of new practices. This is because the emergence of new practices results from spatially dispersed, heterogeneous activity by actors with varying kinds and levels of resources, while the notion




of ‘institutional entrepreneur’ too often invokes ‘hero’ imagery and deflects attention away from the wider array of actors and activities (e.g. Maguire et al. 2004). In addition, research that focuses upon the most powerful actors tends to emphasize the latter stages of practice creation where new sets of activities are theorized, facilitating their spread (Strang and Meyer 1993); bracketed are the earliest moments when the possibility of a new practice first emerges and is recognized as an opportunity for some social group. In this paper, we aim to contribute to the development of a more comprehensive institutionalist approach to the problem of practice creation that extends the scope of analysis to organizational activities and processes that occur prior to theorization efforts and diffusion-driven taken-for-grantedness. To do this, we draw on some elements of practice theory (e.g. Schatzki et al. 2001) that have been mainly employed in the ethnographic study of micro intraorganizational processes (e.g. Ahrens and Chapman 2007; Dougherty 1992; Nicolini et al. 2003; Orlikowski et al. 1995). While the examination of internal organizational processes has been a neglected aspect of institutional analysis, practice scholars have tended to conversely bracket the importance of broader field-level actors and institutional dynamics (Contu and Wilmott 2003; Hopwood and Miller 1994; Jarzabkowski 2004; Whittington 2006). Thus, an approach to new practice creation that seeks points of integration between practice and institutional scholarship promises contributions to both theoretical perspectives, given that they have the potential to address each other’s blind spots. To aid in this broader theory-building effort, we draw on the empirical case of the creation of active money management practice in the mutual fund industry. The first mutual fund, Massachusetts Investors Trust, was created in Boston in 1924, and the industry was dominated by funds in Boston until the 1950s. Before mid-century, the imprint of the Boston trustee tradition, which emphasized the preservation of wealth and conservative investment strategies, was strongly maintained. Within this milieu, various actors began to experiment with money management strategies. Even though the vast majority of funds were still considered to be conservatively oriented, this experimentation led to increasing variety among supposedly similar funds. However, this variation was considered nonproblematic until the early 1960s, when some money managers began more explicitly to create variation among these ‘conservative’ funds by promoting active money management strategies. This effort was linked to the overall professionalization project of money managers, which aimed to create a more autonomous and higher-status occupational group. In turn, this professional mobilization triggered political conflict within the industry as ‘old guard’ funds argued that new renegade approaches to the management of mutual funds would undermine the foundations of the industry. Ultimately, this conflict was resolved by efforts to re-theorize the mutual fund money management field to incorporate this new kind of activity. The new theory centered on the concept of risk (Bernstein 1996) and This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.

Lounsbury and Crumley • New Practice Creation 347

gained currency as a result of the rise in status of academic finance, the connection of academic finance to microeconomics, and the subsequent use of theories of financial economics to shape the activities and social organization of the money management profession. As a result of theorization, a risk framework was constructed to recognize active money management as appropriate, allowing organizational actors to continually create active money management variants that were understandable in relation to the array of activities that comprised the field of money management. Active money management is largely a taken-for-granted practice today. We use a field analytic approach (Scott et al. 2000) to track changes over time in money management activities and practice in the US mutual fund industry, which has grown from US$448 million in assets and 296,000 shareholder accounts, in 1940, to over US$8.1 trillion in assets and over 92 million individual mutual fund owners by 2005 (Investment Company Institute 2005). Our historical account of the creation of active money management practice is based upon analysis of primary sources such as Congressional Hearing testimony and Securities and Exchange Commission reports as well as a wide variety of mutual fund documents, speeches, and memoranda of the Investment Company Institute (ICI), the main trade association for the mutual fund industry. We also systematically analyzed discourse and data in the Wiesenberger Investment Companies Yearbook, an annual sourcebook, which was considered the ‘bible’ for the mutual fund industry up until the mid-1980s (Golden-Biddle and Locke 1997). In addition, between 1997 and 2000, we interviewed over 30 industry insiders, including current and former ICI staff, former Wiesenberger editorial staff, money managers, and heads of major mutual fund companies. In the next section, we discuss how institutional and practice scholarship can be combined to shed light on practice creation, motivating our empirical case. We then provide an analytical narrative that tracks the creation of active money management as a practice in the mutual fund industry. After offering an overview of the early development of the mutual fund industry and the emergence of variation among conservative funds, we explore the origins of money management and lay out the broad contours of the development of financial economics and the professionalization project of money managers. Following the presentation of our empirical case, we provide a process model of practice creation and discuss its implications for future research and theorizing on institutional entrepreneurship and practice.

Theoretical Motivation Although neoinstitutionalists use the term ‘practice’ widely, most scholars employ the term without theoretical justification. Despite the fact that there is no unified theory of practice (see Schatzki et al. 2001), there is a diverse and growing literature that has taken practice seriously from This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.


theoretical and philosophical standpoints (e.g. Chia and Holt 2006; Giddens 1984; Gherardi and Nicolini 2000; Jarzabkowski 2005; Lave and Wenger 1991; Orlikowski 2000; Tsoukas 1996). Particularly useful with regard to neoinstitutional theory is the effort by some practice scholars to draw on activity theory (Engeström 1999) and to conceptualize practice as subsuming activity. For instance, Jarzabkowski (2005) views activity as the actions of and interactions between actors as they perform their daily duties and roles, while practice refers to activity patterns across actors that are infused with broader meaning and provide tools for ordering social life and activity. Said another way, activity involves acts that are generally devoid of deeper social meaning or reflection, such as pounding a nail, while practice, such as professional carpentry, provides order and meaning to a set of otherwise banal activities. Defined this way, practice is best understood as a kind of institution – sets of material activities that are fundamentally interpenetrated and shaped by broader cultural frameworks such as categories, classifications, frames, and other kinds of ordered belief systems (see Bourdieu 1977; Lounsbury and Ventresca 2003; Mohr 2000). Thus, a focus on the relation between activity and practice may provide a useful starting point for fruitful interchange between neoinstitutional and practice theorists and the study of time-inflected micro–macro linkages that reveal how activity innovations enable new practice creation. However, among scholars in the practice community inspired by MacIntyre (1985) who argued for a conceptual segregation between the concepts of practice and institution, there may be resistance to the conceptualization of practice as an institution. MacIntyre’s notion of institution is quite particularistic and value-laden since it refers to modern capitalism, which he believes is vile, while practice is conceptualized with regard to virtue (see Beadle and Moore 2006). In contradistinction, the conceptual apparatus of neoinstitutionalism approaches the notion of institution in more pluralistic terms, as forms of material interactions or behaviors that are made understandable and durable by their interpenetration with wider cultural rules (Scott 2001). This view is broadly construed to encompass a wide variety of kinds of institutions such as practices, logics and organizational forms. Given this approach to practice as a kind of institution, the research question guiding our efforts is: how may innovation in activities lead to the establishment of a new practice via institutionalization? Although much of institutional research has suffered from the paradox of embedded agency, more recent work on changes in practice and routines (e.g. Feldman 2003; Feldman and Pentland 2003) offers a useful road into the conceptualization of institutional change as an endogenous process. This work has developed the notion of performativity, which assumes that individual performances of a practice play a key role in both reproducing and altering a given practice through variation in its enactment (e.g. Feldman 2003; Orlikowski et al. 1995). In contradistinction to the longstanding emphasis on This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.


stability and homogeneity, scholars advancing the notion of performativity start with the ontological position that innovations are continually produced (e.g. Orlikowski 2000). Performativity emphasizes the fact that activity is often accomplished by skilled actors (Fligstein 2001) who rely on practical – evaluative agency (Emirbayer and Mische 1998) to understand and assess how practices can be altered or tailored in order to accomplish specific tasks or to cater to different audiences. Thus, performativity encompasses both strategically engineered deviations to, for instance, address competitive markets, as well as variations triggered by less strategic efforts to modify practices to address localized contingencies (e.g. Orlikowski 2000). While the initial seeds of a new practice may often stem from naturally occurring variation in the implementation, use, and tailoring of extant practices, such efforts must be conceptualized as fundamentally constituted, but not determined, by institutional rules and beliefs that are embedded in those existing practices (e.g. Lounsbury and Ventresca 2003). Understood this way, an institutionalist approach to practice requires attention to the broader cultural frameworks that are often devised and altered by field-level actors (Lounsbury et al. 2003), as well as the activities and ‘work’ of organizations and other actors that articulate with those frameworks (Dorado 2005; Lawrence and Suddaby 2006). While there have been other attempts to address the relationship between innovation and institutions (e.g. Barley and Tolbert 1997; Hargadon and Douglas 2001), there have been no explicit efforts to draw upon practice and institutional theories to develop a more comprehensive framework to address how new practices are created from activity innovations. In the next section, we present an empirical case of the creation of active money management practice as a foundation for the development of a theoretical model of how performativity-driven variation in activities can spur field-wide efforts to establish a new innovation as a practice.

Creating Active Money Management Practice Passive Money Management Practice and the Emergence of an Active Variant The first three decades of the mutual fund industry were dominated by Boston-based organizations that operated as trustees and originally provided fiduciary management services to wealthy families (Grow 1977). Trusteeship, dating back to the early 19th century in Boston, is distinguishable by its focus on capital preservation and the intergenerational transfer of wealth, as opposed to short-term gain. The dominant investment theory at this time focused on broad diversification of portfolios and passive investing strategies. While there was scant formal academic theory about and This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.


measurement approaches to risk, the vernacular theory of diversification led to the construction of portfolios that typically comprised a variety of securities of well-known, established firms. Passive investing was exemplified by Boston mutual funds that were well known for their conservatively oriented, Brahmin financial culture (Grow 1977). For instance, a 1925 brochure for the Massachusetts Investors Trust highlighted that ‘the trust, by complete diversification, both geographically and industrially, has eliminated the human element of prediction by adopting the mechanical Law of Averages as successfully demonstrated by insurance companies’. Even though there was some buying and selling of securities, such turnover was kept to a minimum. This orientation was further reinforced by the stock market crash of 1929 and the ensuing Depression, and was also scripted into law. For instance, the US Revenue Act of 1936 mandated that no more than 30% of a fund’s gross income could be derived from gains from the sale of securities held for less than three months (Fink 2005). Through the 1950s, funds located in Boston still controlled a large portion of industry assets, and the vast majority of funds still comprised broadly diversified but fairly static stock portfolios. However, beginning in the 1950s, growing variation among funds created disquiet among industry insiders. While there had always been some degree of variability driven by differences in the portfolios of individual funds, experimentation with different kinds of investing approaches – especially active money management – became more prominent. This was fostered by a confluence of developments. First, as the mutual fund industry began to flourish amidst the increased attractiveness of postwar investing, there was a corollary rise in fund creation and competition. This increasingly led to differentiated funds. Second, the emergent professionalization project of money managers created a more astute and growing labor supply of money managers that sought direct decisionmaking control of funds. Third, the development of academic finance provided a cultural resource for money managers to make claims about how longstanding theories of diversification and passive investing need not provide the exclusive wisdom for the operation of mutual funds. Finally, increasing attention was placed on the performance of funds (e.g. US House of Representatives 1962), and as some funds employing more active investing approaches demonstrated that they could produce higher returns than passively run funds, they gained popular support. However, the increasing use of active money management activities remained marginal until the 1960s. To track the increasing variability of mutual fund money management, we explore how industry stakeholders symbolically understood and organized their world via the Wiesenberger Investment Companies Yearbook, the



premier annual sourcebook for the mutual fund industry over the time period of our study. Through the 1950s, Wiesenberger distinguished mutual funds by their investment policy, which referred to the type of securities that a fund invested in (e.g. stocks, bonds, etc.). Product categories in this era included ‘Bond’, ‘Preferred Stock’, and ‘Diversified Common Stock’. However, approximately 80% of all funds and industry assets were located in just one category – ‘Diversified Common Stock’ – a category that contained most of the original Bostonian funds. The majority of the industry was classified into this category, signaling as well as reinforcing the dominance of passive money management investing, given that ‘Diversified Common Stock’ funds preached a low degree of buying and selling. Through the 1950s, however, fund variability within the ‘Diversified Common Stock’ category increased. Since product categories provide important cognitive devices for consumers and producers in an industry, to understand which kinds of products are similar to each other, increased variability within a particular product category can create ambiguity regarding product similarity. While we do not have access to details about the portfolios held by individual funds, one way to gauge difference between funds is by analyzing their performance relative to other funds (Lounsbury and Rao 2004). A focus on performance variability is especially useful in investment industries, where variation in the performance of products is a result of differences in the investment portfolios maintained. To assess variability among funds in a product category, we employed a standard variance calculation for each year. For the ‘Diversified Common Stock’ category, performance variance increased from around .03 in the mid-to-late 1940s to almost .20 by 1960. The annual trend shows a systematic increase over this time period, suggesting that funds may have been increasingly diverging in their approaches to money management. This interpretation is supported by an inspection of the fund data that shows that dramatic differences were indeed occurring among funds, a point we develop further in the next section. Over this time period, there was also a systematic increase in the number of funds in the ‘Diversified Common Stock’ category, from 22 in the mid1940s to over 180 by 1960. Hence, some of this variability was created by new entrants. But the heterogeneity created by an influx of funds and performance variance within the ‘Diversified Common Stock’ product category was not problematized until the 1960s. That is, through the 1950s there was virtually no discussion within the industry or in the press about this growing variability. Interviews and historical evidence (e.g. Securities and Exchange Commission 1962) suggested that this was mainly because industry insiders wanted to protect the stable social world they created, by resisting awareness of these developments with the hope that such shifts were a fad that would quickly disappear.



Mobilizing around New Sources of Variety A more explicit movement to promote active money management emerged in the 1950s. This was driven by aspiring money management professionals, who argued they had skills and abilities that would enable them to outperform more conservative approaches linked to Boston trusteeship. Historical evidence indicates that this variability among ‘Diversified Common Stock’ funds was especially fomented by the growing use and allure of more active money management strategies by self-labeled ‘growth funds’ that involved the churning (i.e. high levels, and frequent buying and selling, of securities) of fund portfolios (e.g. Burk 1988). This mobilization did not occur spontaneously, but was part of a broader professionalization project of money managers that was just coming to fruition. Until the middle of the 20th century, money management was a craftbased vocation that did not rely on rigorous theories, analytical tools and techniques (Bernstein 1996). Decisions about securities held in a mutual fund portfolio were made by a committee of senior men who had no formal training in money management, since there was none available. Some firms began to hire securities analysts, referred to as ‘statisticians’, that drew on emerging techniques in statistics to analyze stock market trends and make recommendations about possible changes to the fund’s portfolio. The rise in status of securities analysts and the emergence of a money management ‘profession’, where individuals were trained and credentialed in portfolio management, was a long process that only began to be realized during the 1960s. It was facilitated by the creation of a body of abstract knowledge in financial economics and the translation of this knowledge into practitioner credentialing. The creation, in 1932, of the Cowles Commission for Research in Economics was an early step in this direction, drawing on statistics and the emerging field of econometrics to create a ‘scientific’ approach to stock market analysis. This effort was affiliated with the Econometric Society and aimed to create central resources and approaches for large-scale quantitative analyses of stock market behavior.1 Around the same time, there were attempts to develop more systematic approaches to securities valuation and investing – what Burk (1988) refers to as ‘pragmatic ideology’. Graham and Dodd’s (1934) book, Security Analysis, often cited as a watershed event in the development of securities analysis, focused on reorienting stock market investing away from speculation and toward a focus on a particular security’s fundamentals, such as earnings, dividends, and managerial competence. These developments built on many ideas rooted in vernacular investment theory that was constructed by practitioners (see Preda 2004). In addition to his efforts to develop analytical theories and tools for securities analysts, Graham played a crucial role in fostering a money manager professionalization project by promoting a standard approach to money management education.2 Debates about whether financial analysis was an This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.


art or science, however, hindered the creation of a professional school system as in medicine or law. At the time, investment analysis was more likely to be compared with psychoanalysis than with quantitatively oriented predictive disciplines such as engineering (Association for Investment Management and Research 1997). In 1947, Graham helped create the Financial Analysts Federation (FAF), a national association that unified money management practitioners.3 However, this organizing effort did little to enhance the status of statisticians until a more concrete linkage was made between money management activities and a more abstract body of academic financial knowledge (Bernstein 1996). In 1945, the American Finance Association created the Journal of Finance, the most prestigious publication for the dissemination of scholarly financial knowledge. This provided an important infrastructural element that enabled the development and growth of knowledge pertaining to money management. Rooted in developing ideas about risk in microeconomics, Blume et al. (1993: 85–86) claim that ‘from the 1950s onward, three basic concepts – market efficiency, diversification, and the pricing of derivative assets – would largely transform money management from an art to a skill approaching a science’. This development of theory that linked portfolio management to microeco nomics helped to transform ‘business finance’ into the more prestigious ‘finan cial economics’ (Whitley 1986). As an indicator of this shift, articles in the Journal of Finance prior to the 1960s were mostly descriptive and practitioner oriented, and finance-related courses in business schools focused largely on technical problems related to corporate investment and the raising of capital (Gordon and Howell 1959). By the late 1960s, published articles in the field of finance were more theoretically oriented and courses in finance became infused with the rigor of microeconomics. Financial economics discourse, however, was not uniformly in support of the ability of money managers to employ portfolio management skills in a way that would lead to better results than one could obtain randomly. This view was prominently endorsed by advocates of efficient markets theory, beginning in the 1960s (e.g. Fama 1970; Malkiel 1973), and generated great debate in the investment community about the value of active money management. While such challenges to the efficacy of money managers inhibited the development of a truly autonomous profession, it did not deter the general rise in prominence of money managers and the development of active money management. For example, Burk (1988: 65) notes that ‘by the 1950s, individuals and financial institutions both believed that security analysts were competent experts, able to discriminate sound from unsound investment’. In this milieu, money management practitioners sought linkages to financial economics in an effort to gain status (Lounsbury 2002). This occurred concretely when the Financial Analysts Federation created the Institute of Chartered Financial Analysts (ICFA) in 1959, to focus on developing a standard educational and credentialing program that would be based on the



mastery of academic financial knowledge and its application.4 This resulted in the creation of the Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) designation, a prestigious credential for money managers and other finance professionals. The Association for Investment Management and Research (1997: 72) describes the development of this certification as ‘the single most important marker of professional status’. However, given that the broader abstract knowledge base of financial eco nomics was contested regarding the ability of money managers to outperform the market, significant mobilization had to occur within the mutual fund industry in order for this occupational community to gain status. Throughout the 1950s, money management was still a craft vocation, and individuals that had more ‘modern’ training in finance were still subservient to a committee of senior men that had no academic training in finance. Drawing on ideas in financial economics to justify more speculative investing, aspiring money management professionals began to create their own ‘growth funds’, to demonstrate their capacity to outperform existing funds. While there was only one growth fund in 1950, that number had increased to 40 by 1960 and, by the end of the 1960s, there were close to 100 such mutual funds available to the public. By the early 1960s, Wiesenberger and other industry insiders could no longer ignore these developments, and the ‘Diversified Common Stock’ product category became explicitly problematized, resulting in struggles over the nature of the industry.

Politics and Practice Theorization There is a good deal of evidence corroborated by our interviews to suggest that the rise of growth funds induced political contestation between old and new funds as well as between longstanding industry insiders and aspiring professional money managers. Old guard trustee fund managers actively resisted and lamented disruptive industry developments, such as the creation of more aggressive growth funds, that they thought would undermine the industry they had built (e.g. Securities and Exchange Commission 1962). The conflict also had a geographic dimension. While the industry was dominated by Boston trustee funds up until the 1950s, the influx of new funds beginning in the 1950s, and especially the creation of growth funds, were driven by the New York financial community (Lounsbury 2007). Boston-based mutual funds valued pedigree and prudishness (Harriman 1932) and disdained the kind of class mobility opportunism that characterized Wall Street. Henriques (1995: 43) writes: ‘Boston investment managers developed an intense clubbiness and an almost religious disgust for the more exuberant display of wealth practiced by their counterparts in the financial community of New York where having too much money to spend was considered a very fine thing.’



Nonetheless, by the 1960s, the center of gravity in the industry had shifted from Boston to New York, and the popular and business press began to glamorize the money managers that ran growth funds (Berger interview in Griffeth 1995: 44). In order for active money management approaches to become more of a taken-for-granted practice within the industry, they needed to be theorized (Strang and Meyer 1993). In the mutual fund industry, this became tangibly manifest in the conceptualization of the product category system in the 1960s, when Wiesenberger explicitly drew on ideas about risk, developed in the emerging field of financial economics. This theorization included an effort to link notions of risk–reward with an individual’s life course, and to develop a framework that categorized mutual fund products in ways that enabled consumers to evaluate the risk associated with different funds. The principal idea behind risk–reward is that younger individuals with no dependents can afford to take on greater risk than those closer to retirement. This idea has become elaborated over time and was embedded in a broader theoretical architecture of financial planning that positioned mutual fund products amidst various other financial products such as life insurance. With regard to product categories, Wiesenberger launched a new dimension – investment objective – by which products became categorized. Beginning in 1963, objectives such as ‘Growth’, ‘Income’, ‘Stability’, and ‘Maximum Capital Gain’ were used to directly embed theories of risk into the Wiesenberger product category scheme. This enabled funds using active money management strategies (e.g. growth funds) to be segregated into their own category of ‘Growth Common Stock’, but in a way that made them appear as an appropriate mutual fund product that would be recommended for investors with a higher-risk tolerance. Hence, by 1963, the original ‘Diversified Common Stock’ product category ceased to exist and was split into a variety of other categories, each of which had minimal performance variance in contrast to the growing variance in the ‘Diversified Common Stock’ category up until the categorical revision. In turn, this product category system revision and theorization of money management in terms of risk provided a boost to the professionalization project of money managers and enabled the practice of active money management to become more established, since these activities became ‘normalized’ via cognitive classification. However, significantly, this shift in the theorization of money management via mutual fund product categories did not lead to a replacement of passive money management with a more active approach. Instead, the new theory embedded in product categorization considered all active and passive money management activities to be appropriate. This allowed more passive strategies to persist and continue to be promulgated, as in the case of the creation of new ‘Index’ funds in the early 1970s. As a result of these changes, more product categories proliferated and the industry was no longer dominated by the conservatively oriented ‘Diversified Common Stock’ fund category. The dispersion of assets across product



categories, as measured by a Herfindahl index, was .66 in 1960.5 By 1970, there were 36 product categories, with assets and funds considerably more dispersed across product categories – the asset dispersion Herfindahl measure declined to .23. This trend continued, and by 1985 there were 52 product categories with an asset dispersion Herfindahl of .14. In discussing the growth of products, a 1961 mutual fund column in Forbes (15 August: 15) commented that: ‘from a small group of financial managers, the funds had become one of the major institutions of popular capitalism. In the process, the entire field has become almost unbelievably complicated. Originally the whole concept was rather simple: you could have either a stock fund or a balanced fund and that was about it. Now there are almost 250 individual funds and the investor has a bewildering variety of choices. There are growth funds, science funds, income funds, foreign funds, plowback funds, no-load funds and every variety of industry funds.’

As a result, a ‘new class of bright young money managers rose from obscurity to influence and affluence’ (Forbes, 15 June 1967: 24). In turn, mutual funds increasingly devolved portfolio management responsibilities from a committee of senior officers with no formal finance training to individual fund-level professionals (Mayer 1968). Interviews and historical research suggest that this devolvement process swept through the industry, and virtually all mutual funds were managed by professional money managers by the late 1960s. Mayer (1968: 23) commented that ‘to relieve the committees of the danger of apoplexy and allow the young men to move fast, the portfolio managers were given ever-increasing leeway in making investment decisions’. However, this was a contested process within firms, highlighting the more general resistance to adopt more active money management strategies promoted by upstart professionals. This is exemplified in the case of mutual fund sponsor Putnam (Grow 1995). George Putnam, co-founder of one of the first mutual funds, Incorporated Investors, in 1925, launched the George Putnam Fund in 1937, which was managed by a committee of trustees until the end of the 1960s. Amidst the emergence of growth funds in the 1950s, Putnam created a second fund, the Putnam Growth Fund, in 1958. The poor performance of both funds in the early 1960s led formally trained securities analysts aspiring to become money managers to challenge the portfolio management authority of the senior officers. Ted Lyman, a Putnam security analyst, commented that: ‘We had two Funds and no manager of any one of them. Instead the Funds were run by a committee. [We – the research group] felt the Funds should no longer be run this way. Results had been disastrous. There was no real portfolio planning. There was no assessment of overall volatility as no one was looking at portfolio risk characteristics.’ (Grow 1995: 262)



Lyman and his fellow security analysts mobilized internally to try to create professional money management positions within Putnam, but were fiercely resisted by Putnam management that maintained the belief that ‘Trustees should maintain control over all activities’ (Grow 1995: 267). Through the 1960s, however, fund coordinators gained increasing control and, finally, in 1969, Putnam created an in-house money management labor market and gave individual professional money managers decision-making authority over fund portfolios. As a result of these developments, active money management became an established money management practice. This was driven by a change in product categorization through the incorporation of theories of risk, the growth of actively managed funds, and the concomitant spread of professionally trained and credentialed money managers who applied new financial theories and tools to manage those funds. Hence, the creation of this practice involved a wide variety of actors and kinds of institutional work (Lawrence and Suddaby 2006) that was far beyond the scope of any powerful institutional entrepreneur to carry out.

Toward a Process Model of Practice Creation Based on our case, Figure 1 provides a process model of new practice creation. Within a given practice field, actors can perform activities in a multitude of ways, thus creating innovations. A focus on performativity-driven variation provides an endogenous mechanism and useful ontological starting point to understand how institutional change is catalyzed (e.g. Feldman 2003;

Practice Field

Revision of Extant Practice Field Theory

Theory/ Normal Theorization Performativitydriven Variation in Activities

Appropriate Variety

Legitimacy/ Boundary Redrawing

Theorization/ Mobilization

Anomalous Variety

Yes Socially Recognized as a Problem?

Field-level Negotiations/ Politics

Creation of New Practice Field

Protect Extant Boundary/ Resist Anomaly

No Reinforce Extant Boundary

Figure 1: A process model of new practice creation



Feldman and Pentland 2003; Orlikowski 2000; Orlikowski et al. 1995). From an institutionalist standpoint, the performances of practice are intertwined with the prevailing theories in a practice field that constitutes actors and activities, and provides coherence to practice, despite variety. In the early decades of the mutual fund industry, money management was informed by a vernacular theory of investing and conservative money management approaches. While the actual performances of each fund differed, based on diverse portfolios and slightly altered approaches to money management, most fund varieties were deemed appropriate and easily encapsulated in the ‘Diversified Common Stock’ category. On occasion, Wiesenberger modestly edited the product category scheme to accommodate incremental innovations, such as when they created the ‘Diversified Stock Bond’ category, in 1951, as an extension to the ‘Diversified Common Stock’ category. Such edits were nonproblematic and unremarkable, in contradistinction to the radical retheorization of product categories that was required to account for active money management in the early 1960s. The recursive relationship between theory and practice innovations produced via performativity suggests a degree of theoretical elasticity and the ability to modify theory in minor ways in response to variation – what we refer to as normal theorization. Hence, while much of the innovative variety produced was acceptable and understood with extant theory, leading to no substantive change in established practice and understandings, the creation of active money management approaches via growth funds was ultimately understood as an anomalous activity that could not be easily incorporated into existing theory, which supported extant money management practice. What is anomalous, however, is socially constructed. Although the ‘Diversified Common Stock’ product category experienced increased variety over a 15-year period beginning in the mid-1940s, this was remarked upon very little until the early 1960s. Thus, the case of active money management suggests that a key condition for new practice creation is whether innovations generated by practice performativity become socially recognized as anomalies by field-level actors such as professions, industry, trade associations, media, etc. If the irregularities are not problematized, then extant theory will not be challenged, and rogue activities will wane or persist in a marginalized fashion. However, if anomalous variation does become socially recognized as a problem, field-level political negotiations will tend to ensue, as various actors with different interests make claims about the value of counter-normative activities, and whether or how they should or should not be incorporated into an extant practice field. As our case suggests, the social recognition of an anomaly may require some sort of collective mobilization to make a particular innovation salient. This is evident in the professionalization project of money managers that supported and helped to foment the growth fund movement and garner public support for the idea that mutual funds run by highly skilled and



credentialed money managers could outperform the market. The professional association for money managers (AIMR) helped to promote and justify the growth fund movement in the wake of naysayers and controversy, by broadcasting their efforts to develop training and credentialing that would, in a sense, legitimize money managers as ‘risk managers’ as opposed to ‘speculators’. But discussion about how to deal with this innovation was contested, since Boston-based funds and other incumbents were eager to maintain an industry focus on conservative investing. Hence, if incumbents feel threatened by innovations, they may engage in efforts to reinforce the importance of extant theory and appropriate activities, while working to destroy or marginalize anomalous activities. While most established mutual fund firms initially took this approach, some key insiders began to embrace active money management and encourage the theorization of money management practice to include more active variants alongside longstanding appropriate activities. This led to explicit efforts by Wiesenberger to draw on developing ideas of risk, to reconstruct their product categorization scheme in order to account for product varieties rooted in active money management. While active money management was somewhat contested through the 1960s, the re-theorization of money management successfully enabled its spread via the redrawing of practice field boundaries to unproblematically include both conservatively and aggressively managed funds. While theorization enables the flow of a new innovation, it was the actual diffusion via the establishment of active money management funds across firms in the mutual fund field that enabled legitimacy of active money management to occur (see Scott 2001 for a discussion of the relationship between theorization and legitimacy). Even though political processes may result in the eschewing of novel innovations or their incorporation into an existing practice field via retheorization of that field, it is also possible that an entirely new practice field may be created. While this did not occur in the case of active money management, if anomalous activities are constructed as qualitatively distinct, some actors may decide to splinter off to cultivate their own cultural frameworks that establish a new practice. Hence, a new practice field may emerge as a result of the division between actors wanting to develop novel activities into a practice via theorization, and those who reject those innovations, seeking to buffer their existing practice field. Further research is needed on the described processes related to practice creation, but especially on the conditions under which innovative practices are incorporated into existing fields versus providing a foundation for an entirely new practice field. Thus, a focus on practice creation should provide a focal point to theorize more compellingly about new field creation, a question that has been given little systematic attention beyond the invocation of institutional entrepreneurship as a deus ex machina.



Discussion By focusing attention on the processes that lead to the creation of a new practice, we may expand our understanding of institutional entrepreneurship as well as the relationship between the literatures on practice and institutions. The discourse of institutional entrepreneurship has helped to redirect neoinstitutional analysis toward the study of actors and their role in catalyzing institutional change. The downside of this redirection, however, has been that the ability of actors to create, alter, and transform institutions, has been greatly exaggerated. This, of course, is a longstanding critique of the literature on entrepreneurship more generally, which tends to ignore the broader institutional forces, beliefs, and structural configurations that constitute and shape individual activities (Aldrich and Ruef 2006). A deeper engagement with the social theoretic commitments that underlie the neoinstitutional tradition (e.g. Scott 2001) should lead to a more nuanced and situated approach to institutional entrepreneurship. The process perspective on practice creation advanced in this paper is a step in this direction. While institutionalists have pointed to the importance of theorization as a key element of institutional entrepreneurship that enables new practice models to diffuse (e.g. Strang and Meyer 1993), by focusing also on earlier stages of practice creation, we may be able to provide more complete explanations of institutional change that can account for the processes that generate theorization efforts as well as resultant outcomes. In particular, concentrating on performativity and mobilization, in addition to theorization, as key components of practice creation, future research should emphasize how interactions among a broader array of actors can produce institutional change. This is a reciprocal process that has multiple phases that include the emergence of anomalous activity, the problematization of extant practices, social recognition of a novel innovation, and political processes that may involve resistance by incumbents, as well as the theorization and legitimation of a new practice. In addition, by giving field- and organization-level actors equal billing, a more distributed notion of institutional entrepreneurship emerges (Hutchins 1995). For instance, in the case of the creation of active money management, we highlighted the role of actors in the field of academic finance, the broader professionalization project of money managers, and the actions and activities of aspiring professional money managers and mutual fund organizations themselves. These actors were distributed across multiple dimensions including space, status, and time. However, even though actors and activities were distributed, they were united by shared cultural beliefs that define the boundaries of and give meaning to the practice field of mutual fund money management. A more complete account of institutional entrepreneurship, therefore, would attend not only to the variety of actors that contribute to a particular change to be explained, but also to their relation to wider This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.


meaning systems and theories embedded in cultural elements such as categories, conventions, and discourse (e.g. Biggart and Beamish 2003; Lamont and Thévenot 2000; Phillips et al. 2004). Our process model of practice creation also highlights a useful direction for organizational studies of practice. While the study of practices inside organizations has yielded important insight, there is an opportunity to expand intraorganizational practice research in a way that better appreciates the relationship between organizational and institutional dynamics. For example, Lounsbury’s (2001) study of how a field-wide social movement organization enabled ecologically committed recycling practices to be instantiated in a population of US colleges and universities is instructive. He used ethnographic methods to understand variations in the recycling practices used by organizations, and then drew on survey and archival research methods to cultivate a broader understanding of how field-wide processes contributed to organization-level practice variation. Hence, such research can be ethnographically based, but must also strive to achieve a broader historical and field-wide perspective. To wit, this theoretical orientation can also enhance recent work on practice. For instance, the ‘strategy-as-practice’ research community has been motivated by the premise that our understanding of what strategists do and how strategy is made is very limited (e.g. Whittington 2006). By invoking the notion of practice, research in this vein seeks to reorient the longstanding tradition of process-based strategy research (e.g. Mintzberg 1990; Pettigrew 1985). However, this nascent line of inquiry tends to be concerned with revealing the understandings of practitioners and how ‘practices-in-use’ are mediators of action (see Jarzabkowski 2005). This focus could potentially lead to a conceptualization of practice that emphasizes localized meanings to the neglect of broader sources of meaning that define and shape appropriate activity. While this is a concern that has been raised by some practice researchers who have emphasized the need to examine multiple levels of analysis (e.g. Contu and Wilmott 2003; Jarzabkowski 2004), without attending to wider theories of activity, it is unclear exactly what a practice is and how practices differ from routines and other interaction rituals. In addition, a focus on broader cultural meaning systems will enable strategy-as-practice researchers to provide a richer conceptualization of agency that accounts for how practitioners are constrained by wider theories and belief systems that not only supply meaning to activity, but also prescribe roles for actors that delimit the scope for performativity. More generally, for practice scholars who are concerned about the narrow focus on intraorganizational dynamics, our emphasis on bridging practice approaches with neoinstitutionalism provides one useful direction. Such a joint project on practice creation would simultaneously contribute to a more nuanced conceptualization of institutional entrepreneurship that eschews the celebration of powerful individual actors.



Notes 1. In 1933, the Cowles Commission sponsored a new journal, Econometrica, which published articles by Joseph Schumpeter and Irving Fisher in its first issue. 2. Graham was a seminal figure on Wall Street who taught in the literature, economics, and philosophy departments at Columbia University. 3. Initially named the National Federation of Financial Analysts Societies, the name was changed to the Financial Analysts Federation in 1960. 4. In 1990, the FAF and the ICFA merged to become the Association for Investment Management and Research (AIMR). 5. A Herfindahl index was calculated by taking the sum of squared market shares of all product categories. The index is controlled to be between 0 and 1, and the closer the index is to 0, the more dispersed are the industry assets.

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16 The Institutional Entrepreneur as Modern Prince: The Strategic Face of Power in Contested Fields David Levy and Maureen Scully

Introduction

I

nstitutional entrepreneurs play a pivotal role in creating or changing institutions (Clemens and Cook 1999; Fligstein 1997; Greenwood and Suddaby 2006). As a specific mechanism for institutional change, ‘institutional entrepreneurship represents the activities of actors who have an interest in particular institutional arrangements and who leverage resources to create new institutions or to transform existing ones’ (Maguire et al. 2004: 657). This emphasis on the dynamics of political contestation contrasts sharply with the more traditional focus on structural pressures inducing convergence, conformity, and stability among relatively passive and homogeneous actors. Drawing from eclectic sources such as social movement theory, the ‘old’ institutional theory, and discourse theory (Greenwood and Hinings 1996; McAdam and Scott 2005; Phillips et al. 2004), institutional entrepreneurship literature has made valuable empirical and theoretical contributions to our understanding of institutionalization as an ongoing political process that engages the agency and strategies of institutional entrepreneurs (Washington and Ventresca 2004). Building on these foundations, we develop a theoretical framework that draws from Gramsci’s concept of hegemony as the contingent stabilization of socioeconomic systems and his discussion of the Modern Prince as the Source: Organization Studies, 28(7) (2007): 971–991.



collective agent who transcends such systems through critical analysis, organizational capacity, and strategic deployment. This framework advances our understanding of institutional entrepreneurship in three respects. First, to understand how institutional entrepreneurs effect change within institutional fields, ‘an intermediate level between organization and society’ (Greenwood et al. 2002: 58), it is vital to characterize field structures and instabilities. Our framework highlights the interlaced material, discursive, and organizational dimensions of field structure. Second, institutional entrepreneurs are ‘interest-driven, aware, and calculative’ (Greenwood and Suddaby 2006: 28). We contend that institutional entrepreneurship must take strategy seriously as the mode of dynamic interplay between entrepreneurs and fields. Third, we argue that institutional entrepreneurship, in challenging the position of incumbents and overcoming field stability, reveals a ‘strategic face of power’. This framework is particularly useful for considering institutional entrepreneurship within controversial ‘issue-based fields’ (Hoffman 1999) in which non-governmental organizations (NGOs) engage with business actors, though it also holds relevance for understanding processes of political contestation in fields where competition is ostensibly commercial or technological (Garud et al. 2002; Munir and Phillips 2005). The following section reviews the institutional entrepreneurship literature and identifies three areas of weakness, relating to field structure, strategy, and power. We then introduce the Gramscian concepts of hegemony and political strategy, noting points of connection with institutional theory. The third section discusses the implications of these ideas for our understanding of field structures and strategies, and develops a strategic conception of power by which institutional entrepreneurs, even if located in a subordinate position, can shift field structures to their advantage.

Theoretical Background Field Structure The increasing attention paid by institutional theory to politics, interests, and strategy has been accompanied, somewhat paradoxically, by a growing emphasis on the discursive structure of fields. Institutionalists have made valuable contributions to understanding the embeddedness of technologies and markets in institutional structures (Fligstein 2001a; Garud and Karnoe 2001; Granovetter 1985). In rejecting economic determination of the social, however, institutional theory has tended to neglect the role of the material dimension in structuring fields. Institutionalists have traditionally sought to understand organizational behaviors that could not be attributed to competitive market pressures (Scott


Levy and Scully • The Institutional Entrepreneur as Modern Prince 369

and Meyer 1994). ‘To survive, organizations must accommodate institutional expectations, even though these expectations may have little to do with technical notions of performance accomplishment’ (Greenwood and Hinings 1996: 1025). Since Meyer and Rowan’s (1977) study of the legitimation of school practices, researchers have focused on how ‘the persistence of institutionalized practices and structures cannot be fully explained by their technical virtuosity or unparalleled efficiency’ (Colomy 1998: 266). Rather, institutions persist as ‘socially constructed, routine-reproduced programs or rule systems’ (Jepperson 1991: 149), undergirded by ‘models, schemas, or scripts for behavior. Consequently, institutions endure because these models become “taken-for-granted” through repeated use and interaction or “legitimate” through the endorsement of some authoritative or powerful individual or organization’ (Clemens and Cook 1999: 445). This hint of coercive, or regulative pressure, complements cognitive and normative forces in stabilizing institutions (Scott and Meyer 1994). The organizations inhabiting institutions are often distinguished from more abstract institutional governance mechanisms (Greenwood and Suddaby 2006: 28). Scott and Meyer (1994: 56) define an organizational field as ‘a community of organizations that partakes of a common meaning system and whose participants interact more frequently and fatefully with one another than with actors outside the field’. Increasingly, however, scholars employ a more expansive conception of field that includes ‘two constitutive elements: a set of institutions, including practices, understandings, and rules; and, a network of organizations’ (Lawrence and Phillips 2004: 692). This more encompassing definition suggests the mutually constitutive nature of organizations and institutions, and permits greater heterogeneity and even conflict within fields. Social movement (SM) theory has been influential in developing a conception of fields as politically contested terrain (McAdam and Scott 2005). ‘More than a mere aggregate of organizational players, however, fields exhibit distinctive “rules of the game”, relational networks, and resource distributions that differentiate multiple levels of actors and models for action’ (Rao et al. 2000: 251). Hoffman’s (1999: 352) analysis of environmental practices in the chemical industry illustrates how ‘field constituents are often armed with opposing perspectives rather than with common rhetorics. The process may more resemble institutional war than isomorphic dialogue.’ Institutions are increasingly understood as discursive constructions. ‘Discourses, put simply, are structured collections of meaningful texts’ (Phillips et al. 2004: 636), including the meaning systems embedded in routine practices. Discourses are thus closely related to ‘institutional logics’, defined as the ‘belief systems and associated practices that predominate in an organizational field’ (Scott et al. 2000: 170), or ‘taken-for-granted, resilient social prescriptions’ (Greenwood and Suddaby 2006: 28). The concept of discourse is more than a semantic substitution, as it opens up a range of theoretical and methodological approaches (Fairclough 1992).



The poststructural connotations of the term present some limitations, however. Discussions of institutional conformity have traditionally included an element of rational choice; non-compliance could risk formal sanctions, social ostracism, or economic costs. The concept of discourse is more diffuse and penetrating, constituting identities and interests, while leaving little room for discretion or sovereign authority. Moreover, a discursive focus risks obscuring material dimensions of field structures and strategies. For example, Munir and Phillips’ (2005: 1669) examination of Kodak’s transformation of photography into a simple consumer practice proceeds from the premise that ‘institutions are social constructions produced by discourses’. They consequently ‘focus on how Kodak managed to strategically embody its interests in the evolving institutional framework through carefully planned and executed discursive practices’ (2005: 1667), rather than the development of low-cost roll film cameras. Similarly, the development of Canadian whale watching was contingent not just on the emergence of a positive macrocultural discourse, but also on commercially viable techniques for whale location (Lawrence and Phillips 2004). A limited focus on discursive dimensions of field structures thus constrains theorization of strategies to transform them.

Strategy Institutional entrepreneurship can be understood as strategic action: ‘Institutional strategies are patterns of organizational action concerned with the formation and transformation of institutions, fields, and the rules and standards that control those structures’ (Lawrence 1999: 168). Similarly, Fligstein (1997: 398) describes ‘strategic action’ as ‘the attempt by social actors to create and maintain stable social worlds’. In elaborating these strategies, the literature has drawn from SM theory to examine how institutional entrepreneurs ‘lead efforts to identify political opportunities, frame issues and problems, and mobilize constituencies’ (Rao et al. 2000: 240). A discursive conception of institutional structure, however, has led to a focus on discursive strategies (Hensmans 2003; Lounsbury et al. 2003; Maguire and Hardy 2006). If fields ‘are not objective, predetermined structures, but processes of social construction and meaning creation, wherein social order is negotiated’ (Hardy and Phillips 1998: 218), then one key strategic task is to forge awareness of relationships among actors. Maguire et al. (2004) identify three strategies used by successful entrepreneurs: the occupation of positions with wide legitimacy and bridging diverse stakeholders; the theorization of new practices; and connecting these practices to stakeholders’ routines and values. Institutional entrepreneurs actively import and translate discourses from other arenas (Boxenbaum 2006; Creed et al. 2002; Lawrence and



Phillips 2004: 693). Though frequently motivated by competitive pressures (Greenwood and Suddaby 2006), their strategies are usually conceived in discursive terms. One notable exception is the study of radio broadcasting by Leblebici et al. (1991), which describes how entrepreneurs developed economic strategies, including advertising and ratings systems, to profit from a public good. Institutional entrepreneurship presents a ‘paradox of embedded agency’ (Seo and Creed 2002: 226), the puzzle of how actors can ‘change institutions if their actions, intentions, and rationality are all conditioned by the very institution they wish to change’ (Holm 1995: 398). Institutional scholars locate agency and dynamics in the interstices and contradictions of plural, overlapping, and incomplete logics (Barley and Tolbert 1997; Clemens and Cook 1999; Phillips, et al. 2004). ‘Discourses are never completely cohesive and devoid of internal tensions, and are therefore never able totally to determine social reality . . . These limits of discourse provide a substantial space within which agents can act self-interestedly.’ (Hardy and Phillips 2004: 304)

While this perspective creates theoretical space for strategy, it is not a theory of strategy. The centrality of strategic action at the interface between agents and institutions warrants a deeper analysis of strategy as a theoretical construct and political activity, indeed, as a form of power.

Power Power is clearly implicated in the political contestation to reshape institutions, though it is rarely examined explicitly. It has long been recognized that institutions reflect and reproduce power relations (Seo and Creed 2002; Stinchcombe 1965: 194). Fields exhibit a ‘dominance hierarchy’ (DiMaggio and Powell 1983) or ‘dominance order in which a few groups of actors operate at the apex while others survive on the bottom’ (Rao et al. 2000: 262). Institutional entrepreneurship highlights that: ‘Institutional change is thus a political process that reflects the power and interests of organized actors’ (Maguire et al. 2004: 658), whose goal is to reconfigure power relations and distributional outcomes (Fligstein 1997; Greenwood and Suddaby 2006; Lawrence and Phillips 2004). SM theory has contributed to a political perspective of ‘how entrenched, field-wide authority is collectively challenged and restructured’ (Rao et al. 2000: 276). It has also provided a greater appreciation of the different positions of field ‘dominants – those individuals, groups, and organizations around whose actions and interests the field tends to revolve’, and ‘challengers – those individuals, groups and



organizations seeking to challenge the advantaged position of dominants or fundamental structural-procedural features of the field’ (McAdam and Scott 2005: 17). While field dominants have superior material and network resources to engage in entrepreneurship (Greenwood and Suddaby 2006), challengers generally have stronger incentives and fewer institutional constraints (Clemens and Cook 1999: 452; Rao et al. 2000: 262). The strategic implications of their differential resources and locations have not been thoroughly explored, however. At the core of institutional theory is a structural theory of power (Clemens and Cook 1999; Jepperson 1991; Sewell 1992). Institutions reproduce themselves by establishing routines, disciplining deviance, and constructing agents’ identities and interests (DiMaggio and Powell 1991; Phillips et al. 2004). McAdam and Scott (2005: 10–11) note the Weberian roots of ‘institutionalized power: power coded into structural designs and bolstered by widely shared cultural norms and ideologies’. By contrast, they observe how SM scholars draw from more critical traditions to analyze ‘change efforts that require the conscious mobilization of marginalized or disenfranchised elements’. Institutional entrepreneurship has drawn upon SM theory to consider the strategies of institutional entrepreneurs, but has not linked these strategies to an agent-based theory of power. Implicit in several studies is a notion of power based on institutional location and access to material and discursive resources. Hardy and Philips (1998: 219), for example, have argued that ‘formal authority, the control of critical resources, and discursive legitimacy’ are important sources of power for institutional entrepreneurs. Similarly, Fligstein (2001b: 123) observes that ‘the basis of a group’s power [is] its claim over resources and rules’. Yet field dominants will generally have superior access to these resources of power on account of their structural location. What is lacking is a theory of how institutional entrepreneurs can overcome structural power by outmaneuvering field dominants. Fligstein (1997) argues that challengers need to rely on ‘social skills’, such as bargaining, framing, and alliance building (Garud et al. 2002: 203). SM theory offers a more overtly political ‘collection of skills, from persuading others on an idea or tactic to maintaining commitments and morale, from allocating resources to recognizing potent weak points, from writing and speaking to taking initiatives in moments of decision, from forming alliances . . . to issuing authoritative commands’ (Barker et al. 2001: 6). Alinsky (1971) uses the metaphor ‘political jujitsu’ to describe turning the force of the power structure against itself. We suggest that these skills represent a strategic repertoire, and we draw from the classical tradition of Machiavelli and Gramsci to develop a strategic theory of power that enhances our understanding of institutional entrepreneurship.



Hegemony and Political Strategy Antonio Gramsci was an Italian Marxist who rejected economic determinism and emphasized the political significance of a cultural ‘superstructure’ in dialectical tension with material forces. Gramsci has been profoundly influential in many areas of social theory, particularly cultural studies (Hall 1986) and labor process theory (Burawoy 1979). Recent scholarship on social movements and political strategy has drawn from Gramsci’s conception of hegemony and political contestation (Barker et al. 2001; Hardt and Negri 2000; Sanbonmatsu 2004). Though Gramsci has received barely a mention in institutional theory, his influence is discernible in the scholarship stream that draws from dialectical Marxism, with its attention to contradictions and praxis (Benson 1977; Clemens and Cook 1999; Seo and Creed 2002; Sewell 1992). Our exploration of Gramsci’s work reveals a deeper relevance for institutional entrepreneurship and continues a tradition of appropriating key Gramscian ideas while shifting the focus from class conflict toward more local struggles. Critical to our perspective on field structure is Gramsci’s concept of hege mony, referring to the contingent stability of a social structure that protects the privileged position of a dominant alliance, or ‘historical bloc’ (Gramsci 1971). Hegemony relies on coalitions and compromises that provide a mea sure of political and material accommodation with other groups and on ideologies that convey a mutuality of interests. Crucially, the values and interests of the dominant group are represented as those of society as a whole. For Gramsci (1971: 328), ideology constitutes ‘a conception of the world that is implicitly manifest in art, in law, in economic activity and in all manifestations of individual and collective life’. Ideology thus represents a relatively coherent and politically charged discursive structuring of the social. Dominant groups exercise power through the coercive and bureaucratic authority of the state, dominance in the economic realm, and the consensual legitimacy of civil society. When hegemony is established, ‘the development and expansion of the [dominant] group are conceived of, and presented, as being the motor force of a universal expansion . . . In other words, the dominant group is coordinated concretely with the general interests of the subordinate groups’ (Gramsci 1971: 181). As with institutions, hegemonic stability entails a balance of coercion and consent, though the discursive component receives most attention (Laclau and Mouffe 1985; Mumby 1997). Williams (1980) has described hegemony as ‘the central, effective and dominant system of meanings and values, which are not merely abstract but which are organized and lived … [and] appear as reciprocally confirming’. Hegemony implies the articulation of discourse into a coherent ideology and an array of institutions that project the moral and intellectual leadership of dominant elites. Many theorists are wary, however,



of instrumentalist interpretations of this ‘dominant ideology thesis’ in which elites unilaterally impose ideologies to induce behavior inimical to people’s interests (Abercrombie et al. 1980; Clegg 1989). Poststructuralist sensitivities countenance neither the implication of objective interests in the ‘false consciousness’ of passive dupes nor the sovereign subjectivity of elites, who somehow stand outside ideology. Attempting to rescue hegemony from these charges, Laclau and Mouffe (1985: 67) assert that ideology is ‘an organic and relational whole, embodied in institutions and apparatuses, which welds together a historical bloc around a number of basic articulatory principles’. Gramsci’s hegemony represents a nuanced notion of consensual stability in which even dominant ideologies remain fragmented and contradictory. Parallel to the institutional literature, the persistence of competing ideologies opens space for agency and resistance, in which people can develop a ‘critical conception of the world’ (Gramsci 1971: 324). For Laclau and Mouffe, hegemonic politics are premised on ‘antagonism’, described by Contu (2002: 166) as ‘the experience of the limits to any structuration, order, symbolization, legislation’. This contestability leads Mumby (1997: 344) to assert that the ‘equation of hegemony with the notion of “domination through consent” elides the extent to which Gramsci’s formulation is dialectical, emphasizing a complex interplay between power and resistance’. The burden of securing hegemonic stability does not lie with ideology alone, however. Gramsci proposed a dialectical relationship between society’s material ‘base’ and ideological ‘superstructure’. Crucially, hegemony is rooted in an alignment of material, organizational, and discursive forces within a complex social matrix. Gramsci describes the interaction of these factors in securing workplace consent: ‘it was relatively easy to rationalize production and labour by a skilful combination of force (destruction of working-class trade unionism on a territorial basis) and persuasion (high wages, various social benefits, extremely subtle ideological and political propaganda) . . . Hegemony here is born in the factory.’ (Gramsci 1971: 285)

The dialectical perspective suggests that fields are at once more entrenched, as the economic and discursive dimensions are mutually reinforcing, yet also more rife with contradictions. Markets and technologies are constructed within particular cultural contexts (Bijker et al. 1987; Callon 1998), as has been well recognized in institutional theory (Fligstein 2001a; Lawrence and Phillips 2004; Munir and Phillips 2005). Yet, discourse does not reproduce itself in a vacuum, but rather within a political economy of advertising, consumerism, and academe (Golding and Murdock 1991; Morgan 2001). The third pillar of hegemonic stability lies in the organizational domain. Gramsci used the term ‘historical bloc’ in a dual sense: to refer to tangible organizations and alliances among dominant actors, as well as the This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.


alignment of economic and ideological forces undergirding them. Historical blocs thus resemble organizational fields in their more expansive conception. SM scholars have particularly emphasized how ‘mobilizing structures’, such as industry associations and unions, actively channel economic and ideological forces (McAdam and Scott 2005: 14). International relations scholars have employed Gramscian concepts to examine the ideological and strategic function of transnational industry organizations in generating policy consensus, forging coalitions, and socializing professionals into business values, language, and practices (Cox 1987; Gill 1995). The nature of consent and stability is conditioned by a variable balance of forces, sometimes more tethered to dominant ideologies, other times more anchored in economic incentives. Marginalized groups might express more overt opposition but lack the resources or organizational capacity to mount a challenge. From this perspective, consent is a multifaceted, contingent concept that connotes strategic acquiescence as much as ideological colonization. Tensions within and between the dimensions of hegemonic structures generate opportunities for strategic agency, giving rise to a dialectical dynamic, ‘a relation of forces in continuous motion and shift of equilibrium’ (Gramsci, 1971: 172). Understanding hegemony was, for Gramsci, a prerequisite to political action. Inspired by Machiavelli, Gramsci posited the Modern Prince as the collective agent of praxis, of ‘political action embedded in an historical system of interconnected yet incompatible institutional arrangements’ (Seo and Creed 2002: 3). For Gramsci (1971: 133), ‘the Modern Prince is at one and the same time the organizer and the active, operative expression’ of the collective will. Gramsci demonstrated a keen awareness of the importance of strategy and organization if subordinate groups were to outmaneuver those with superior material and coercive means. Effective strategy requires skillful analysis, so the Modern Prince ‘must be able to map, as accurately as possible, the complex terrain of parties, movements, institutions, economic forces – in short the dynamic balance and relations of will and force – in order to exploit places in the hierarchical network of power nodes, where hegemony is unstable or breaks down’ (Sanbonmatsu 2004: 135). To this end, the Modern Prince would also provide decisive leadership to exploit critical windows of opportunity. The Modern Prince would be active on two levels. In the realm of ‘grand strategy’ Gramsci (1971: 233) used the term ‘war of position’ to suggest how subordinate groups might avoid a futile frontal assault against adversaries entrenched in the ‘fortresses and earthworks’ (1971: 238) of civil society. Instead, the war of position entails a longer-term strategy, coordinated across multiple bases of power, to gain legitimacy, develop organizational capacity, and win new allies. Led by ‘organic intellectuals’ serving as educators and organizers, the Modern Prince would also act more locally to enhance the capacity of core organizations fomenting change. In Gramsci’s epistemology, This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.


lived experience is a source of knowledge and consciousness, but in the tradition of the Frankfurt School and Freire’s (1972) radical pedagogy, organic intellectuals could facilitate the emergence of a critical worldview that links diverse experiences to an emergent ideological framework (Clemens and Cook 1999: 449; Sanbonmatsu 2004: 192). Far from being an external elite imposing its own ideas and agenda, organic intellectuals are immersed in ‘active participation in practical life’ (Gramsci 1971: 10), facilitating an emancipatory process. The Modern Prince thus represents the unity of philosophy and politics, of theory and practice (Fontana 1993; Gramsci 1971: 333).

Implications for Institutional Entrepreneurship Many parallels exist between the role of the Modern Prince in challenging hegemonic structures and institutional entrepreneurs in shifting fields. A common focus is the nature of contingent stability in complex socioeconomic systems comprising networks of actors interacting with structural forces. The following section discusses several contributions of the Gramscian framework to our understanding of field structures, and the strategies and modes of power wielded by institutional entrepreneurs as they contest them. We illustrate our argument with the case of the international distribution of AIDS drugs to developing countries, which we briefly introduce here (for details, see Sell and Prakash 2004; Spar and Bartlett 2005; Vachani and Smith 2004). The rapid spread of HIV/AIDS in the USA during the 1980s provoked activist groups such as ACT UP to pressure pharmaceutical companies and health authorities to devote more resources to combating the disease. By the early 1990s, new antiviral drugs had dramatically cut mortalities, but the annual cost of treatment was around US$10,000–15,000 per person. Infection and mortality rates in developing countries soared during the 1990s, affecting more than 30 million people by 2000, with several countries in sub-Saharan Africa suffering infection rates of over 15%. The cost of patented antiviral drugs was clearly prohibitive for widespread use in these countries. In the latter 1990s, Thailand, South Africa, and Brazil developed plans to issue compulsory licenses to enable local companies to produce generic versions of the drugs, reducing the cost of medication to about US$350 per person. At the urging of western pharmaceutical companies, the USA responded by threatening trade sanctions, invoking TRIPS (Trade Related Intellectual Property Rights) clauses of World Trade Organization (WTO) agreements. TRIPS entered the WTO framework in 1994, following a well-organized campaign by more than 1,500 companies from various sectors interested in extending international enforcement of intellectual property rights (IPRs). In response, an international group of NGOs, including gay rights activists, African American organizations, and generic drug manufacturers, developed the Access Campaign to advocate for low-cost drug access



in developing countries. The multilevel alliance enrolled the support of developing country governments and key multilateral organizations like the World Health Organization. The Access Campaign successfully pressured the Clinton administration to reverse its position in 1999, forcing concessions from the pharmaceutical industry. We return to this case as we develop our framework below.

The Nature of Field Structure We propose that the concept of hegemony is a fruitful way of understanding the contingent stabilization of politically contested fields. Indeed, institutional theorists in the dialectical tradition employ a similar conception of fields characterized by contradictions and competing logics (Clemens and Cook 1999). Seo and Creed (2002: 225) draw from Benson’s (1977) interpretation of dialectics in which fields are ‘part of a larger whole composed of multiple, interpenetrating social structures operating at multiple levels and in multiple sectors. However, the linkages between the components are neither complete nor coherent.’ Stability in such fields is more precarious than is usually portrayed in institutional theory, requiring ongoing political efforts. McAdam and Scott (2005: 18) acknowledge this precariousness in their effort to synthesize SM and institutional theory: ‘The stability we have in mind is rather the hard fought for and fragile state of affairs that Zysman (1994) terms an “institutional settlement” – an agreement negotiated primarily by the efforts of field dominants (and their … allies) to preserve a status quo that generally serves their interests.’ From this perspective, field stabilization does not rest narrowly on isomorphism and normative consensus, but rather on a negotiated outcome reflecting a balance of forces. For McAdam and Scott, a particular institutional settlement is based on an alignment of the institutional logic, actors’ interests, and the governance structure of the field. These forces broadly map onto the discursive, material, and organizational dimensions of hegemony. Indeed, an institutional arrangement that commands widespread consent but serves particular interests embodies the essence of hegemony. The key contribution of the concept of hegemony is to view field stabiliza tion as an alignment of forces within an organic totality. Garud and Karnoe (2001: 11) display an appreciation for this when they describe how ‘constituent elements of a technological field begin working with one another, they become “aligned” and begin reinforcing one another. Meanings of objects constituting these fields emerge through a process of negotiation and provisionally stabilize.’ They describe the dialectical development of technological artifacts and supporting cognitive frames as the ‘coevolution of minds and molecules’ (2001: 18); we would suggest that the inclusion of economic interests points to a coevolution of ‘minds, molecules and money’.



These dynamics and fragile institutional settlements are illustrated in the AIDS drugs case, in which diverse actors have shifting and only contingently aligned interests. Prior to the 1990s, the pharmaceutical industry was generally willing to overlook patent infractions in developing countries, because of their small markets. Moreover, patents were still widely viewed as a privilege rather than an absolute property right (Sell and Prakash 2004). Rapid growth in some emerging economies, combined with the growing importance of IPR-based international trade, led key industrial sectors to push for a new settlement that extended IPR enforcement internationally. In the process, IPR infractions were reframed as piracy. Industry successfully exploited concerns about competitiveness to graft its agenda onto multilateral trade institutions. The stability of this settlement was secured, temporarily at least, through the organizational capacities and governance structures of the WTO and issue-specific industry associations. The growing AIDS crisis energized actors whose material interests diverged sharply from branded pharmaceutical companies and who did not share the discursive construction of IPRs as sacred property. Indeed, increasing awareness of the relationship among the pharmaceutical industry, public health, and trade governance exacerbated tensions over defining relevant boundaries for the shifting field. The institutional settlement that emerged after 1999 achieved a degree of hegemonic stability by accommodating the interests of major actors and providing a common discursive framework. Branded pharmaceutical companies protected their profitability by limiting their concessions to a small group of existing antiviral drugs for a specified set of markets. Simultaneously, they deflected more serious regulatory and reputational threats. Developing countries were able to manufacture and even export generics, while greatly expanding access to low-cost drugs. IPRs gained broad recognition and protection, except for specific public health emergencies. New tensions soon arose, however, as the HIV virus mutated and older drugs became ineffective. Pharmaceutical companies again attempted to enforce patents on newer drugs, and some developing countries with growing IPR-based industries are now more reluctant to challenge them (Lakshmanan 2007).

Strategy The strategies of institutional challengers and defenders need to encompass the multiple dimensions in which fields are structured. The complex, multidimensional nature of fields also creates more opportunities for field dominants to stumble and for challengers to apply strategic skills and identify contradictions and points of leverage. Discursive moves that project common interests constitute an important component of strategies to build alliances. Maguire et al. (2004: 658) argue that: ‘Key to their success is the



way in which institutional entrepreneurs connect their change projects to the activities and interests of other actors in a field.’ Material and organizational facets of strategy are also crucial, however. The Access Campaign illustrates how smart strategy encompassing discur sive, material, and organizational elements could outmaneuver a coalition of well-resourced multinational companies. While business castigated IPR violations as piracy, the Access Campaign advanced the framing that patents caused death and represented a form of ‘medical apartheid’. The campaign found a point of economic leverage at Yale University, which owned a key antiviral patent and organized students to pressure Yale to waive its rights. The campaign successfully mobilized the material interests of generic drug companies, health agencies, and developing country governments, while offering a compromise to branded pharmaceutical companies that only marginally affected their profits and secured substantial reputational benefits. The careful construction of a broad alliance and the execution of specific tactics required considerable organizational and political capacity. The Access Campaign leadership demonstrated strategic vision and skill in shifting the struggle away from the corporate-dominated WTO forum and into the media and public health arenas, while leveraging the vulnerability of politicians around the 2000 US elections. Institutional entrepreneurs, like the Modern Prince, must attend not only to external ‘grand strategy’ but also to enhancing the agility, adaptive capacity, and creativity of organizations leading institutional change efforts (Eisenhardt and Martin 2000; Mintzberg 1990). Organizational agility could constitute an advantage for challengers when field dominants are securely embedded within existing institutional logics, technologies, and practices (Greenwood and Suddaby 2006: 29). Ganz’s (2000) study of the successful organizing of Californian farmworkers sheds rare light on the role of ‘strategic capacity’: movement leadership teams that are flexible, imaginative, knowledgeable, well networked, and accountable. They develop strategy through dialogue with their membership, ‘each participant drawing on their specific knowledge about the overall situation, about other movements, about potential supporters and their values, about tactical matters’ (Barker et al. 2001: 10). Effective leadership teams serve, in effect, as Gramsci’s organic intellectuals.

Institutional Entrepreneurship and Power Our discussion of institutional entrepreneurship points to a strategic face of power. While Gramsci’s hegemony is widely understood as a form of structural power, much less attention is given to his analysis of strategies for challenging hegemony. If institutional entrepreneurs successfully shift the asymmetries of influence and resources within a field’s web of relations, they



clearly exercise power. It is a facet of power that transcends the possession of material resources, formal authority, or discursive legitimacy; rather, it relies on the skillful coordination and deployment of resources, a sophisticated analysis of field structures and processes, diplomatic acuity in constructing alliances, and creative agility in responding to evolving circumstances (Levy et al. 2003). The Access Campaign, for example, lacked the financial resources of the pharmaceutical industry or the authority of the WTO. Yet, it was able to envision and construct a new field configuration by shaping, mobilizing, and aligning the material interests of diverse actors while promoting a discursive frame to underpin the new settlement. In the process, the campaign developed the organizational and strategic capacity to shift field boundaries, mobilize new actors, and leverage the formal authority of states and multilateral organizations. Our focus on strategy as a form of power draws from the classical theoretical tradition of Sun Tsu and Machiavelli (Fontana 1993). Clegg comments that, within this tradition: ‘power is simply the effectiveness of strategies for achieving for oneself a greater scope for action than for others implicated by one’s strategies. Power is not any thing nor is it necessarily inherent in any one; it is a tenuously produced and reproduced effect which is contingent upon the strategic competencies and skills of actors who would be powerful.’ (Clegg 1989: 32)

Fleming and Spicer (2005: 95) suggest that Clegg’s integrative ‘frameworks of power’ model reflects ‘what we might call a Machiavellian theory of power. This involves conceptualizing power as a network of relations in which actors are embedded.’ Our invocation of a strategic face of power invites comparison with other ‘faces of power’, to employ Lukes’ (1974) metaphor. Lukes critiqued the conceptualization of power as a resource possessed by A that coerces B to do something that B would not otherwise do (Dahl 1957). Lukes viewed this ‘first face of power’ as overly behavioral and episodic, neglecting systemic aspects of power. The second face was based on Bachrach and Baratz’s (1962) observation that dominant actors frequently manage agendas to exclude certain policies from any consideration. Lukes advocated a ‘radical view’, his third face of power, in which ‘the sovereign power exert[s] dominion over the very ingredients of individual consciousness: the appetites, passions, and especially interests that these individuals have’ (Clegg 1989: 29). Foucault’s poststructuralist critique shares Lukes’ interest in the constitutive power of discourse, but breaks sharply from the notion of agents consciously wielding power over others. For Foucault, sovereign agency dissolves as identities and subjectivities are themselves constituted and disciplined by discursive texts and practices that suffuse everyday life. Sanbonmatsu (2004: 137) contends that, as a result, Foucault undertheorized strategies for challenging power. This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.


Our conception of strategic power is relational, systemic, and dialectical, in that agents are institutionally constituted and constrained, yet have the capacity to transform these fields of relations. Institutional entrepreneurs are primarily concerned with shifting field-level norms, routines, and rules rather than directly coercing a particular adversary (Garud et al. 2002; Lawrence and Phillips 2004: 690). Actors may exert episodic agency and exploit the resource dependencies of others, but these instantiations of power are rooted in a wider context. For Gramsci (1971: 172), strategy is the domain of the ‘active politician who wishes to create a new balance of forces’ rather than the ‘diplomat’ whose ‘specific activity is not the creation of some new equilibrium, but the maintenance of an existing equilibrium within a certain judicial framework’. Jepperson (1991) makes a similar distinction between ‘human behavior’, which reproduces existing institutions, and ‘human action’, which entails deliberate, reflective departures from institutionalized practices. Strategic power resonates with Laclau and Mouffe’s (1985) conception of counter-hegemonic politics as the struggle to articulate diverse social grievances and contests into a more coherent formation. Strategy can thus be a generative form of power, expanding the scope of action and freedom for broad sectors of society. Strategic power is both constituted and constrained by the indeterminacy, contingency, and inertia of fields. The social world possesses sufficient regularity to enable purposive action, yet is not so structurally rigid that it extinguishes meaningful agency. Moreover, bounded rationality in the face of complexity and uncertainty prevents the calculation of rules yielding deterministic outcomes; strategy is necessarily a form of ‘satisficing’ (Simon 1962). Some strategies will yield superior outcomes, though we can never be sure which ones will succeed a priori. This indeterminacy is critical, because if field dominants held the levers of power in a deterministic world there would be no scope for political contestability. Yet, the same indeterminacy constrains the power of institutional entrepreneurs, as they cannot fully comprehend and control a complex field (Lane and Maxfield 1996). Their power is also constrained by field inertia and path-dependence. In Garud and Karnoe’s (2001) terms, strategy is a process of ‘mindful deviation’, of steering an evolving field rather than creation de novo. A range of alternative futures is possible, but not an infinite set of possibilities. In Gramsci’s words, (1971: 172): ‘The active politician is a creator, an initiator; but he neither creates from nothing nor does he move in the turbid void of his own desires and dreams.’ The counter-strategies of institutional defenders trying to protect their position within a field present another constraint on the power of institutional entrepreneurs. SM theory has paid limited attention to the activities of ‘incumbent social movement organizations’ (Hensmans 2003) or ‘counter-movements’ (Rao et al. 2000: 268), while empirical research on institutional entrepreneurship provides several examples of institutional defense, such as Microsoft’s efforts to block Sun (Garud et al. 2002) and competitors’ This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.


opposition to Kodak’s moves (Munir and Phillips 2005). Attending to the agency of defenders avoids the problematic asymmetry of viewing entrepreneurs as external agents endeavoring to change institutional fields stabilized by impersonal, structural forces. Although defenders enjoy systemic advantages from their location in a hegemonic system, both defenders and challengers are institutionally embedded agents employing similar strategic repertoires, suggesting a degree of theoretical equivalence (Sell and Prakash 2004).

Power and Hegemonic Accommodation The interaction between the strategies of institutional entrepreneurs and defenders frequently gives rise to a characteristic pattern of limited accommodation while preserving, or even reinforcing, the essentials of field power structures. Pragmatic entrepreneurs, seeking to legitimize their claims, frequently use insider language and practices to drive change (Meyerson and Scully 1995) and ‘embed calls for change within accepted models’ (Clemens and Cook 1999: 459). Dominant groups typically respond with material concessions that address the most serious grievances, discursive strategies that co-opt challengers’ linguistic forms, and organizational moves to build ‘partnerships’ with moderate elements while marginalizing more radical groups (Barker et al. 2001: 7; Levy 1997; Levy and Egan 2003). These strategies generate ‘a continuous process of formation and superseding of unstable equilibria between the interests of the fundamental group and those of the subordinate groups’ (Gramsci 1971: 182). The interaction between Canadian AIDS activists and the pharmaceutical industry illustrates this process of hegemonic accommodation. Maguire et al. (2004: 668) describe how ‘treatment advocacy‘ activists successfully established a national institution for the pharmaceutical industry to exchange information with the AIDS community. Instead of challenging industry dominance with radical language, treatment advocacy ‘was presented as a new style of activism, focused on working with the pharmaceutical industry rather than fighting against it’. In agreeing to establish a forum for consultation, industry not only enhanced its legitimacy but also gained financially from the marketing value of this information and from expanded insurance coverage. Moreover, the new Canadian forum represented a minor, local concession in the contemporaneous context of the bitterly fought war of position waged by AIDS activists against IPRs. Though the Access Campaign is generally credited with having ‘won’ the struggle to allow low-cost generic drugs in developing countries, this institutional settlement was also a hegemonic accommodation. The campaign was successful precisely because it focused pragmatically on a narrow set of drugs for a small group of countries and relied on a loophole in the TRIPS legal framework allowing exceptions for medical emergencies (Sell and Prakash 2004). The campaign thus implicitly



reinforced the overall legitimacy of IPRs and the WTO, while conceding the dominant role of pharmaceutical companies in key aspects of field governance, such as pricing and research priorities. Indeed, pharmaceutical companies quickly moved to claim credit for expanded drug access and embraced the discourse of corporate social responsibility. The power of even the most skillful institutional entrepreneurs is constrained by the nesting of issue-level fields within wider, well-entrenched institutions. Institutional entrepreneurship has been characterized using salient episodes and discontinuities but is an ongoing, situated process.

Conclusions This paper extends the Gramscian concepts of hegemony and political strategy to provide a richer and more coherent view of the engagement by institutional entrepreneurs with field structures. Fields are viewed as networks of actors within a contingently stable alignment of material, organizational, and discursive forces. These elements mutually reinforce each other to enhance field stability, yet the tensions within and between them open space for strategic agency. The existing literature on institutional entrepreneurship resonates with many of the themes in this paper, yet does not address them directly in a sustained, analytical manner. Our framework connects with an established theoretical tradition to provide a more integrative and nuanced understanding of institutional entrepreneurs, who, like Gramsci’s Modern Prince, develop and deploy strategies to transform field structures in the face of institutional inertia and resistance from institutional defenders. The significance of strategic action by institutional entrepreneurs points to a strategic face of power, which relies on skilled analysis, deployment, and coordination to outmaneuver dominant actors with superior resources. Simultaneously, an understanding of the nesting of fields within more firmly entrenched institutions highlights the limits of strategic power and illuminates the contours of hegemonic accommodation. The achievement of immediate goals might reveal deeper power structures, creating strategic dilemmas and obscuring conceptions of interests. One implication of viewing institutional entrepreneurship as an ongoing strategic contest is that success or failure is difficult to assess in absolute terms at any specific juncture, given the indeterminacy of field dynamics and the fallibility of strategy. Viewing a field as an organic totality provides a useful corrective to the tendency to posit a sharp distinction between institutional and competitive, or technical, environments. Lawrence (1999) pursues this distinction into the strategic domain, arguing that competitive strategy operates within existing rules and structures, while institutional strategy is geared toward changing them. Yet if economic forces are important in structuring institutions, then competitive strategy is simply one component of institutional



strategy, equally as imbricated in politics. Recognizing the multiple and interdependent dimensions of a field, institutional entrepreneurs frequently pursue integrated strategies across these dimensions in an attempt to reconfigure the field and gain a measure of advantage within a complex web of relations. Gramsci’s conception of the Modern Prince offers a number of insights and paths for future research into institutional entrepreneurship. On a theoretical level, the role of the Modern Prince as a catalyst for auto-emancipation suggests a path out of the structure–agency imbroglio, one that locates the kernel of change within an internal process of organizing and education rather than external shocks or the importation of foreign discourses. More pragmatically, it encourages a deeper exploration of the relationship between institutional entrepreneurs as leaders and their organizations (Barker et al. 2001). Existing literature either personifies entrepreneurs as individuals or as unitary organizational ‘black boxes’ devoid of internal processes. Strikingly, the Modern Prince is an emotive leader as much as a calculating strategizer, a mythological figure reminiscent of some contemporary business heroes. For Gramsci (1971: 126), the Modern Prince exemplifies a Sorelian myth, a ‘concrete phantasy which acts on a dispersed and shattered people to arouse and organize its collective will’. Eyerman and Jamison (1991) similarly refer to the ‘cosmological tasks’ of social movement leaders, who generate a mobilizing vision of the future. The Modern Prince both creates and embodies this vision, a ‘myth-prince’ (Gramsci 1971: 128) generating passionate identification toward this fusion of idealized leadership with its cause. Jones and Spicer (2004: 236) suggest, using Lacan, that the mythical, undefinable character of the entrepreneur serves ‘to structure phantasmic attachment’. Though the emotive, mythical character of the entrepreneur might well be critical to a project of institutional transformation, we need to remain alert to the discursive power and strategic implications of the term ‘entrepreneurship’, particularly for theorizing progressive projects of institutional transformation (Zald 2002). ‘Entrepreneurship’ conjures masculine images of heroic individuals amassing wealth rather than collective action toward more democratic, egalitarian goals. Entrepreneurship discourse successfully mobilizes capital and people in ‘reproducing the current relations of economic domination’ (Jones and Spicer 2004: 237). Since the 1990s, most top business schools have centers or programs on entrepreneurship, predictably crafted from institutionalized logics; most are funded by and celebrate financially successful entrepreneurs, the very emblems of a contemporary nobility constructed on a gendered discourse of charismatic achievement. The organizational literature offers several alternative terms: ‘bureaucratic insurgency’ (Zald and Berger 1978), ‘grassroots activism in the workplace’ (Scully and Segal 2002), and ‘tempered radicalism’ (Meyerson and Scully 1995). The SM literature offers terms conveying more radical images of activism.



Substituting terms legitimated within the mainstream is precisely a clever strategic move, but one that highlights the strategic dilemmas discussed in this paper; the pragmatic approach risks diversion from deeper structural change unless connected to a longer-term strategic project.

Note We are grateful to Jeffrey Keisler, Benyamin Lichtenstein, Debra Meyerson, John Selsky, Pat Thornton, Marc Ventresca, Hugh Willmott, and the participants in the 2006 Research Colloquium on Corporate Political Activities in an Internationalizing Economy, Free University of Amsterdam, for providing insightful comments on earlier drafts of this paper. We also thank guest editor Steve Maguire and two anonymous referees for their constructive guidance.

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17 A Critical Realist Approach to Institutional Entrepreneurship Bernard Leca and Philippe Naccache

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ecent research in institutional analysis has tried to emancipate itself from the over-deterministic views of traditional institutional works, to provide deeper explanations of institutional reproduction and change, power mechanisms, and actors’ capacities to develop strategies and shape institutions (e.g. DiMaggio, 1988; Hirsch, 1997; Hirsch and Lounsbury, 1997; Hoffman and Ventresca, 2002; Lounsbury, 2003; Seo and Creed, 2002). In this perspective, it is crucial (Battilana and Boxenbaum, 2004; Dorado, 2005; Seo and Creed 2002) to overcome the paradox of institutionally embedded agency – i.e. how institutional change is possible if actors’ intentions, actions, and rationality are conditioned by the institutions that they wish to change (Holm, 1995). At stake here is a central question in social sciences – conflation. Conflation refers to the problem of reducing structure to action, or action to structure, or of merging both (Archer, 1982, 1995). This leads to the denial of either actors’ freedom or the constraining power of structures (Archer, 1995). Overcoming the paradox of the institutionally embedded agency implies developing a non-conflating institutional theory. We can find two solutions that have been advanced in the literature. Barley and Tolbert (1997) proposed a diachronic approach to institu tional change, based on Archer’s criticism of conflation. In this approach, an analytical distinction between actors’ actions and institutions can be made through a sequential analysis. Barley and Tolbert state that ‘the worth of the [conflation] critique actually lies in the epistemological rather than the Source: Organization, 13(5) (2006): 627 – 650.



ontological issues that it raises’ (1997: 99). However, this approach does not fully address the conflation issue. Archer (1982, 1998) indicates that diachronic models bracketing sequentially structures or actors are logically unable to consider the interrelations of both at the same time. Hence, she states that these models are not really dual and remain conflating, because they do not recognize the causal emergent properties of both structures and actors’ actions. Works on institutional entrepreneurship have tried to solve this issue by stating that institutional creation or change are provoked by ‘organized actors with sufficient resources (institutional entrepreneurs) who see in them an opportunity to realize an interest that they value highly’ (DiMaggio, 1988: 14). Institutional entrepreneurs are conceptualized as being able to disembed themselves from existing institutional arrangements (Beckert, 1999), in order to create new institutions or change existing ones. In order to do so, there must be some form of crisis that existing institutional arrangements cannot resolve (e.g. Dorado, 2005; Seo and Creed, 2002). Yet by proposing such sequential models – in which actors are able to disembed from existing institutional referents – they go back to what Emirbayer and Mische (1998: 963) called the ‘abstract voluntarism of rational choice theory’, which is precisely what new institutionalism initially tried to avoid (e.g. DiMaggio and Powell, 1983; Meyer and Rowan, 1977), and propose a conflating model in which actors’ actions can develop outside existing institutional referents. Hence, these works tackle neither the paradox of embedded agency nor the issue of conflation. To remain coherent with institutional theory, a model of institutional entrepreneurship must provide a model of change in which actors can create and change institutions without disembedding from the social world. We suggest that these two solutions contradict a central assertion of institutional theory – that actors cannot escape institutional embeddedness (e.g. Friedland and Alford, 1991; Powell, 1991). To move forward on these issues, we intend to address the question: how can we develop a non-conflating model of institutional entrepreneurship? In this paper we propose to outline such a non-conflating model of institutional entrepreneurship. This model recognizes the ontological status of structures and actions – i.e. their distinctive emergent properties, relative autonomies, previous existences, and causal efficiency – as well as their permanent interaction, and provides tools to understand how actors can create and change institutions by using existing structures. We base our work on critical realism (Archer, 1995, 1998; Bhaskar, 1979; Sayer, 1992). Critical realism makes it possible to overcome the conflation issue (Archer, 1995). We also intend to show that this approach can provide a strong basis for the study of institutional entrepreneurship, while remaining coherent with the central institutional view that actors are embedded in socially constructed meaning systems that they cannot escape. To do so, we proceed in six parts.


Leca and Naccache • Institutional Entrepreneurship 391

In the first part, we present the main features of critical realism. We then draw on this point to develop, in the second part, an outline of a nonconflating institutional theory that is based on critical realism. In the third part, we show how institutional entrepreneurs can be conceptualized in such a approach, as actors who use the causal powers of pre-existing structures to create new institutions or challenge existing ones. This explains how they can create or change institutions whilst remaining institutionally embedded. In the fourth part, we present the methodological implications of using critical realism. In the fifth part, we provide an illustrative case that makes the first empirical use of this model. We study how ARESE contributed to legitimizing and institutionalizing social rating and Socially Responsible Invest ment in France. We show how critical realism can help understand how this strategy was based on the use of a structure’s causal powers. In the final part, we discuss the implications and develop suggestions for future research.

A Stratified Model of Reality: Critical Realism The aim of critical realist authors is to develop a non-fusionist approach that considers actors’ actions and structures as two separate ontologically different but related levels of reality. These levels are related but not reducible (Bhaskar, 1979; Ekström, 1992). Both structures and actors’ actions possess distinctive emergent properties, relative autonomy, a previous existence, and causal efficiency, and they are in constant interaction (Bhaskar, 1979). To develop a model that accounts for both the constraints due to the structures that actors must face and their freedom of action, it is necessary to recognize the ontological specificities of both actions and structures. Critical realists develop a stratified model of reality, and distinguish between three domains. The domain of empirical is the domain of experienced events. This is the level of actors’ sensations, impressions, and perceptions of reality. Actors have an immediate access to this level. The domain of actual includes events, whether observed or not. Such things can happen independently of the experience and perception that actors may have of them. Events can happen, and yet not be transferred into the domain of empirical until human agency has identified correctly those events and transformed them into experience (Bhaskar, 1978). Researchers will be able to identify events that might have escaped actors’ perceptions, because of their particular focus and training. Indeed, the domain of actual is the realm of theory building by scholars. However, the domain of actual is still the surface of reality (Selboe, 2002). Such events happen when the causal powers of the objects and structures are activated. One of the key features of critical realism is that explanation involves penetrating behind the surface of reality to access the domain of real, identify those structures and causal powers, and the ways they act (Sayer, 1992, 2000; Selboe, 2002). This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.


Table 1: Ontological assumptions of the critical realist view Domain of real

Domain of actual

Structures

V

Events

V

V

Experiences

V

V

Domain of empirical

V

Source: Drawn from Bhaskar, 1978: 13.

The domain of real consists of the structures and causal powers that generate events. For realists, the world exists independently of the idea that we have of it. Structures have specific causal capabilities. Tsang and Kwan note that ‘to ascribe a power to a [structure] is to say something about what it will or can do, in the appropriate conditions, in virtue of its intrinsic nature’ (Tsang and Kwan, 1999: 762, emphasis added). Causal powers are transfactual – i.e. they exist whether or not they operate in the specific context under study. According to Tsoukas (1989: 553), ‘from the realist viewpoint, causal explanation is not about the deterministic or stochastic associations of patterns of events, nor about experiences, but the ascription of causal powers to [structures]’. In a nutshell, causal powers can exist independently of empirical results. According to the critical realists, causal laws are seen as transfactual. This stance is informed by the fact that the social world is an open system in which different causal powers may coexist (Archer, 1998; Sayer, 1992). These three levels provide a stratified view of reality and thus give critical realism a specific ontological depth (Table 1).

Emerging Conditions of Actors’ Action In a critical realist approach, society exists prior to human action (Bhaskar, 1979: 31). Sayer (2000: 18) argues that actions presuppose existing resour ces and structures, including shared meanings. For example he points out that ‘speaking presupposes a language (. . .) as well as material resources such as vocal chords’ (Sayer, 2000: 18). Social forms and structures are seen as necessary conditions of any intentional human act. Social action and human agency presuppose a social context (Selboe, 2002). Bhaskar’s critical realism argues for a transformational model of social activity, in which social action is endowed with both the reproduction and transformation of practices and structures (Ekström, 1992). In this perspective, actors are not passive. They shape the social structures that are the social product of human agency. As Ekström (1992: 115) noted, actors ‘possess causal powers and capacities for bringing about change in reality, this through conscious and intentional activities’. Yet, critical realism emphasizes that structures and actors’ actions are separate and related entities, which means that they can neither collapse nor conflate into each other (Archer, 1998; Sayer, 2000: 18).



Effect/Event Effect/Event

Casual CausalPowers Powers

Contextual conditions Stucture Stucture

(Drawn from from Sayer, Sayer,2000: 2000:15 15))

Figure1: Causation in critical realism

The Importance of Context The transfactual feature of structures’ causal powers does not deny the importance of context. On the contrary, context is crucial, and any critical realist study must be contextualized. The way the structures’ causal powers will develop, or not, will depend on the contextual conditions (Figure 1). As Tsoukas (1994: 291) states, ‘in other words, causal powers operate as tendencies whose activation, as well as the effect(s) of the activation, are not given but contingent’.

A Critical Realist Approach to Institutional Analysis Drawing on recent research in institutional analysis, we articulate the institutional approach within the three levels of critical realism. Within the domain of empirical, institutional analysis considers actors’ actions and the actors’ empirical experience and perceptions. Researchers will render actors’ subjective view of the world by mean of discourse analysis (Phillips et al., 2004). Yet, as actors are not always aware of the existing institutions, researchers cannot access all the institutions merely by rendering what actors perceive and analyse. Some institutions are so ‘taken for granted’ that actors may well enforce them, despite not perceiving them as institutions. Therefore, institutions must be considered in the domain of actual. As defined within the tradition of institutional theory, institutions are selfreproducing recurrent patterns of behaviour (Jepperson, 1991; DiMaggio and Powell, 1991). They ‘gradually acquire the moral and ontological status of taken-for-granted facts which, in turn, shape future interactions and negotiations’ (Barley and Tolbert, 1997: 94). Eventually, actors will reproduce those ‘taken-for-granted’ scripts without being totally aware of them, and without questioning their efficiency or even legitimacy (Scott, 1995). However, although actors may not perceive the institutions, they do exist. Given



Table 2: A stratified model of institutional analysis Domain of real

Domain of actual

Institutional logics

V

Institutions

V

V

Experiences

V

V

Domain of empirical

V

their training, researchers will be able to reveal and characterize the recurrent nature of those behaviours, and then to qualify them as institutions. This is why institutions belong to the domain of actual. Recent research highlights that, although institutions shape organiza tional actions, they are themselves embedded in higher-order institutional logics (Thornton, 2002: 82). Those institutional logics correspond to structures located in the domain of real. First introduced by Friedland and Alford (1991), institutional logics are defined as central logics that supply principles of organization and legitimacy. Institutional logics are frameworks that incorporate the assumptions, beliefs, and rules through which individuals organize time and space, and which give meaning to their social reality (Thornton, 2002; Thornton and Ocasio, 1999: 804). Institutional logics provide justification principles and frameworks to articulate claims (Scott, 1995: 60). As such, they parallel Boltanski and Thévenot’s (1991) ‘regimes of justification’. While institutions are the rules of the game, institutional logics are the underlying principles of the game. Just as structures cannot be reduced to elements from the domain of actual, institutional logics cannot be reduced to institutions. The ontological status of institutional logics is acknowledged. As Lounsbury et al. state (2003: 72), ‘[institutional] logics are conceptualized as exogenous to actors (Friedland and Alford, 1991), they are analytically removed from the more active struggles over meaning and resources’. Depending on contextual factors and the actions of actors, institutional logics will unfold in the domain of actual as institutions. Institutions are the results of the ways in which actors transpose these institutional logics through precise scripts, rules, and norms in specific contexts. This stratified model of institutional analysis is summarized in Table 2.

The Use of Structures’ Causal Powers by Institutional Entrepreneurs Critical realists consider that actors do not create or construct social reality in the present. The structures of social reality are always preexisting givens. Anything actors do happens within conditions that preexist them (Archer, 1995; Bhaskar, 1989). Thus, to act, actors have to use the structures, and, more precisely, their causal powers. In so doing, they can either reproduce the existing institutions or change them. Institutional reproduction does not



require any specific effort, since institutions are self-reproducing patterns of behaviour. On the other hand, institutional change or creation implies a specific effort, because entrepreneurs must then go beyond the existing routines to elaborate and diffuse new ones. Critical realists emphasize that actors have reflexivity and are not mere ‘cultural dopes’. However, this reflexivity does not develop in an institu tional void (Archer, 2002). To develop new models, actors build on the existing institutional logics that are necessary conditions of any intentional human action. Institutional logics do not constitute a coherent whole. They can be conflicting as well as complementary (Friedland and Alford, 1991). This is especially true in contemporary western societies, where many inconsistent logics exist (e.g. Berger and Luckmann, 1995; Boltanski and Thévenot, 1991). The diversity of institutional logics defines a diversified cognitive world in which actors can find principles to justify new institutions and challenge existing ones. Institutional logics do not provide ‘ready-made’ institutions. Institutional entrepreneurs can only use them as underlying principles to justify the institutions they want to establish. Such institutional entrepreneurs must frame the concrete institutions according to the selected logic(s) and the interests of their potential allies (Benford and Snow, 2000). An important point here is the emerging properties of structures (Bhaskar, 1979), which imply that institutional entrepreneurs can use institutional logics without being fully aware of all their causal powers. Institutional entrepreneurs develop a practical knowledge of the institutional logic – i.e. knowledge of the causal powers they expect to use in the specific context in which they operate.

The Importance of Context for Institutional Entrepreneurs Depending on context, some of those institutional logics’ causal powers will work and others will not. According to critical realism, the emerging causalities of both structures and actors’ actions render any deterministic causality impossible. Critical realists reject the idea that a causal power will always generate the same effect in different contexts. Related to this argument, institutional entrepreneurs must skilfully select the institutional logics on which they intend to base the institution, depending on the context in which they operate. However, they cannot be sure of the empirical effects of the causal powers they use. A tenet of critical realism is that the future is open (Sayer, 2000). The institutional logics that institutional entrepreneurs use will depend on the organizational field in which they operate. To some extent, members of an organizational field share a common ideology (DiMaggio, 1983). This ideology includes dominant institutional logics, and varies depending on



the field. References to certain principles will legitimate actions in certain fields but not in others. Empirical studies indicate that most institutional entrepreneurs do not have enough resources to act alone and must ensure the support of other actors (e.g. Fligstein and Mara Drita, 1996; Garud et al., 2002; Greenwood et al., 2002). To ensure such support, they must mobilize institutional logics that are likely to match potential allies’ interests and/or values. As such, the strategies used by institutional entrepreneurs are both political and cultural (Fligstein and Mara-Drita, 1996; Rao, 1998). Institutional entrepreneurs are organized actors who skillfully use institutional logics to create or change institutions, in order to realize an interest that they value highly (DiMaggio, 1988; Haveman and Rao, 1997). The selection of institutional logics will depend on the allies whose support is sought. Institutional entrepreneurs will use institutional logics that are likely to be valued by those potential allies, because they support their values and/ or their interests. In other words, institutional entrepreneurs will select the structures depending on the context, to ensure that the causal powers of the structures that they intend to use will work. Critical realism also suggests a specific method to link the different domains.

Methods We cannot see objects and structures, only the effects of them. Drawing on the domains of empirical and actual, researchers must reveal the causal powers at work in the domain of real. They reveal those powers at work, in the domain of real, that give rise to patterns of events in the domain of real and experience in the domain of empirical. These causal powers at work in the domain of real are the main concern of critical realism. To explain the social world, the critical realist researcher must ‘go beyond common sense and reach a deeper understanding of more abstract character’ (Selboe, 2002). The central problem for critical realism is how to establish the plausibility of the hypothesized structures and causal powers, given that they are not immediately available to experience (Sayer, 1992). To do so, critical realist research adopts a mode of inference called a strategy of retroduction, in which events are explained by postulating and identifying structures and causal powers that are capable of generating them (Sayer, 1992: 107). Three steps can be distinguished. The research starts in the domain of actual, by observing connections between phenomena. The issue is to identify how such connections occur, to abstract from contextdependent data to capture the not-directly-observable causal powers and structures that generate observable phenomena and events (Ekström, 1992: 116–117). To do so, as a second step, researchers build a hypothetical model, involving structures and causal powers located in the domain of real, which, This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.


if it were to exist and act in the postulated way, would provide a causal explanation of the phenomena in question. The third step is to subject the postulated explanation to empirical scrutiny. When gathering and analysing data, critical realist researchers must consider the domains of both empirical and actual. This implies both performing discourse analysis and going beyond this analysis, which is not sufficient to reach the domain of actual (Laclau and Bhaskar, 1998). Central to critical realism are the primacy of practice over language (Archer, 2002), and a critical stance on the part of researchers. Meanwhile, researchers must observe actors’ actions and practices beyond the discourses they develop. We now illustrate this approach through an empirical case study.

An Illustrative Case Study: ARESE as an Institutional Entrepreneur Using Measurement In this empirical part, we use the model developed above to analyse how a social rating agency, ARESE, acted as an institutional entrepreneur in developing and institutionalizing a new activity, social rating in France. Founded in 1997, ARESE was the first company to act as a social rating agency in France. It contributed to the legitimation and institutionalization of social rating and Socially Responsible Investment (SRI) in France, before it was dissolved in 2002, following strategic and personal disagreements between the major shareholders and the founding CEO, Geneviève Férone. Yet, the ARESE model was a success as in 2002 it had secured a 85% market share among SRI fund managers (Déjean et al., 2004) and the basis of the ARESE model has since been adopted by most of the newly created social rating agencies that developed in France. Critical realism can be used for several research purposes (Sayer, 1992). In this study, we concentrate on how the causal powers of a structure operate in this specific context, and how an institutional entrepreneur used them. To do so, we display the three steps of the retroductive research strategy. We proceed as follows. The first empirical investigation is an exploratory research in the development of social rating agencies, and the development of socially responsible investment in France. In particular, we focus on how a social rating agency, ARESE, used the measurement of corporate social performance as a way to help develop those activities, and to attain a prominent place in the field. The second step requires the provision of a list of the different causal powers of the structure under consideration, as drawn from previous literature. The third step is to establish which causal powers developed, and how, in the present case. To do so, we first use data from 46 semistructured interviews. Eight interviews were with former ARESE executives, and 38 with fund managers from 27 socially responsible funds. Second, data was taken from internal reports and industry reports.1 This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.


First Empirical Investigation The development of socially responsible investment in France is intriguing. First, despite much research, there has never been any clear-cut evidence of a positive correlation between social and financial performance (e.g. Griffin and Mahon, 1997; Margolis and Walsh, 2003; Orlitzky et al., 2003; Roman et al., 1999). In 1997–2001, when socially responsible investment funds took off, investors were not demanding socially responsible investment funds. That is, bankers were developing a new type of offer, rather than responding to a demand, and they could hardly legitimize those funds by offering higher financial performance. Moreover, no consensual definition of corporate social performance existed (Mitnick, 2000). To explain this development, we focus on the action of a social rating agency, ARESE. Déjean et al. (2004) showed that ARESE used the measuring of social corporate performance as an institutional entrepreneur’s strategy in an emerging industry, to legitimate its own activity and the activity of socially responsible fund managers, and to achieve a prominent place in the newly created field. Here we intend to deepen the analysis of the use of measurement in this context by an institutional entrepreneur, using the critical realist approach developed above. To do so, we list measurement’s causal powers, as established by previous research. Then, we analyse which causal powers develop in this specific context and how.

Measurement as a Structure Numerous works in the history of science (e.g. Porter, 1995; Crosby, 1997), economic sociology (e.g. Callon, 1998; Fligstein, 1998; Weber, 1978), and organizational studies (e.g. Hasselbladh and Kallinikos, 2000; Power, 2004) suggest that measurement – setting and counting the countable – is one of the major structures pervading western societies since the Renaissance (Crosby, 1997). These works provide many examples of the effects of measurement in specific historical, social, and organizational settings. Combining and analysing them all allows us to distinguish several transfactual causal powers of measurement as structure, independently of contextual settings. We now list the main causal powers, as established by previous researchers. 1. Measuring something implies giving a definition of it. In this definition, the measured object will be reduced to its measurable dimensions (Crosby, 1997; Porter, 1995). This reduced dimension tends to be perceived as an objectified definition (Callon and Muniesa, 2005; Déjean et al., 2004). Numbers are assumed to be ‘hard facts’, and, as such, to define a specific space of interpretation beyond subjectivity (Kalthoff, 2002).



Quantification is perceived as reducing subjectivity. A measure is a representation that brings something into existence, and, at the same time, makes something else disappear (Kalthoff, 2002). As such, measuring tends to shape the definition of the object (Fineman, 2004; Porter, 1995). 2. Measurement increases the scientific aspect. Crosby (1997) traced this to the diffusion of measure in Europe after the Middle Ages, as a way of moving beyond qualitative and theological views of reality. Nowadays, numbers are more likely than words to be viewed as facts. Fineman (2004: 724) points out that numbers ‘symbolize authority and “fact” in ways that other representations often fare less well in social scientific and other professional communities’. 3. Measuring makes things commensurable, and it favours standardization (Porter, 1995). 4. Measuring favours comparison between different objects, when they exhibit the same measured dimensions (Porter, 1995). Quantitative indi cators that allow the comparison of different objects facilitate decision making (Porter, 1995). Measuring different objects along similar dimen sions makes it possible to compare and scale them. 5. Measures make it possible to ‘mechanize’ the judgment – i.e. the judgment appears to be less subjective, because it is based on comparison between different objects compared along similar dimensions (Porter, 1994, 1995). An argument based on measured elements is considered more rigorous, precise, objective, and scientific than an argument based only on qualitative elements. 6. Measures are powerful mechanisms of transcription because of their reproducibility, durability, and communicability (Townley et al., 2003: 1060). 7. Callon (1998) argues that setting measures is a necessary step in the development of new markets. Measuring makes it possible to ‘frame overflows’ (Callon, 1998: 255) – i.e. to bring within market logic objects that were previously outside market logic. Modern markets need ‘extensive rules’ that are able to move beyond interpersonal relations, thus allowing markets to develop (Fligstein, 1998). As such, measures increase the possibility of trading the items measured. 8. Common measures make it possible to foster the feeling of a common identity in scholarly and professional communities (Fligstein, 1998). 9. Déjean et al. (2004) suggest that measuring makes it possible to legitimize a new activity in the eyes of stakeholders who value measurement highly. Measurers then develop ways to analyse that are in line with those stakeholders’ cognitive frames. 10. Authors emphasize that systems of measurement are about power. Since measurement is central in the development of markets and communities, the measuring instruments invest power in the measurers (Déjean et al., 2004; Fineman, 2004: 725).



11. Measuring is widely used to control the measured object, as critical accounting researchers have emphasized (Miller and Napier, 1993; Power, 2004). Measuring is also a crucial dimension of rationalization in organization (e.g. Hasselbladh and Kallinikos, 2000; Townley et al., 2003). Measures are used to govern the behaviours of individuals. Inspired by the work of Foucault, Miller (2001) notes that, since measuring appears as purely technical, it is a key resource for a ‘liberal’ form of government that is based on individualization and responsibility.

Contextual Elements about the Financial Markets in France Much research has recently been undertaken in the social studies of finance. Several pieces of empirical research show that quantification and measurement are well institutionalized in this field. Lounsbury (2002) documented that the academic field of business finance developed as a spin-off from economics, and was closely affiliated with the use of mathematical modeling to develop expert financial knowledge. Lounsbury found that, although finance became an autonomous field, it retained a very mathematically oriented approach. Common measures and classifications are also central. Zuckerman (1999) showed that an imperative to put into categories exists in financial markets. Analysts are eager to classify firms according to the established classifications they know. Companies whose activities do not fit these classifications will have to face an ‘illegitimacy discount’ that is not based on any financial reason. Standards are also crucial. Kerwer (2002) emphasized the importance of rating agencies, and their major influence as ‘standard setters’ for the global flow of credit. The same characteristics can be found in France. At a national level, quantification appears to be very powerful in France. Bourdieu (1998) noted that, in France, quantification is a powerful tool in setting the social order. According to Bourdieu, quantification plays a part in the process of domination, because quantification is perceived as the ‘truth’. He underlined how economists and financial markets used this quantification to legitimize themselves. More specifically, in the case of French financial markets, Godechot (2001) showed that, in trading rooms and financial markets, a higher cultural status is accorded to people with better skills in quantitative techniques. Indeed, quantified measurements appear to be especially important and valued, because most of France’s financial elites were trained as engineers in scientific Grandes Ecoles such as Polytechnique. Furthermore, Kleiner (2003) analysed the professionalization of asset management in France, and demonstrated that it was partly achieved by aligning with the American model. This includes a shared market-based analytical and mathematical approach.



The Development of the Measure’s Causal Powers in the ARESE Case SRI, defined as ‘a set of approaches which include social and ethical goals or constraints as well as more conventional criteria in decision’ to invest (Cowton, 1999: 60), took off as a distinct activity in France in the late 1990s. In 1997, only seven funds existed, but by 2001 there were 42 (sri-in-progress.com), and the total amount of assets invested had grown from 200 million euros to 1000 million (Muet et al., 2002). The total amount of managed assets remained limited. However, the exponential growth of these funds is in contrast with the amount of managed assets in the French market, which remained relatively stable over the same period (Muet et al., 2002). These SRI funds took off during the 1996–2001 period. Many actors see a relation between this take-off and the creation, in 1997, of ARESE, the first self-styled ‘environmental and social rating agency’. Although other organizations also provided extra-financial information on companies, by 2001 ARESE had managed to obtain 85% of French ethical funds as clients. As such, it was by far the first provider of such a service: its closest competitor, the CFIE, had only one regular client by that time (Déjean et al., 2004). From the founding of ARESE in 1997, its managers used measured ratings as a central dimension of their strategy. ARESE executives were well aware that a measure was necessary to develop the emerging market of social rating. Other suppliers of extra-financial information did not provide quantified measures. They were willing to oppose the financial actors, and would not consider their action as necessarily complying with the existing logic of the financial markets (Déjean et al., 2004; Gond and Leca, 2004, 2005). As an ARESE founder emphasizes, ‘their approach was just conflicting, not complementary at all’. Measuring was used as a strategy to improve ARESE’s legitimacy in the eyes of financial executives. An ARESE analyst in charge of developing the method noted that at first they worked with professionals from the financial markets. This collaboration led them to develop some quantified measures. As one ARESE funding executive said, We told ourselves, in front of this caste, all the graduate from Poly technique and the ENA, one must not be too qualitative. Because if you are qualitative, it’s like you don’t know what you’re looking for. Then in order to show that we were serious people we went very quantitative.

Hence, measuring was used to develop the objective and scientific aspect of ARESE rating. An ARESE executive indicated that If we had a qualitative approach, like saying ‘OK, we believe that Lafarge, whatever . . . . It’s so . . . it can be interpreted as subjective and consequently it would have been hard for financial analysts to integrate this in their own analysis.



Another stated that ‘the idea was to develop something very quantitative. Something you can’t contest’. Pierre Dutrieu, a top executive of the Caisses d’Epargne, who participated in the funding of ARESE, considered that the agency’s credibility in the financial markets comes from a ‘scientific approach’. Measuring different companies along the same dimensions also facili tated standardization. ARESE provided the same measures for all companies. All were rated on the five criteria mentioned below, along three dimensions (leadership, deployment, and results for the stakeholders considered). Each dimension was evaluated on a 100-point scale to obtain a score. A ranking of the firms based on these scores was then provided. This favoured the match between ARESE quantified data and other data that fund managers might obtain from other sources. ARESE executives pointed out that they intended to provide fund managers with a ‘social filter’ that they could use alongside their ordinary financial filter. ARESE provided fund managers with a standard Excel file to simplify use alongside traditional financial tools. As such, ARESE proposed to fund managers that they perform a double comparison. Fund managers would either first consider the companies’ social performance and then their financial performance, or first the financial performance and then the social one. This standardization favoured comparability between firms. Compara bility between companies and with existing financial indexes was an important concern for ARESE, and a major requirement of fund managers. The possibility of comparing companies depended partly on the way ARESE skilfully adapted comparability to contextual factors. For example ARESE offered measures that followed the traditional financial index. ARESE would provide measures of the companies rated in the most popular index (e.g. CAC 40, SBF 120, EUROSTOXX 500). A former ARESE analyst stated that Our clients were not interesting in the rating of 35 open companies, they want the rating of 120 companies . . . whether the company is semi-open or not open they don’t care . . . What they want is that ARESE got a methodology to analyse the information that will permit them, taking one year

with another, on average to classify the firms coherently and avoid the fundamental bias of information. Within the banks, fund managers used the ARESE rating to legitimate themselves with senior executives (Déjean, 2005). Several managers in charge of socially responsible funds consider that the creation of those funds was simply not possible, or at least very difficult, before ARESE. According to one of them, ARESE brought legitimacy to this activity, by providing ratings that could be integrated into the traditional fund management process. Overall, ARESE used, and adapted to the specific context, several causal powers of measuring. However, measurement also developed causal powers that the ARESE people do not seem to have foreseen. Interviews with former ARESE This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.


employees give no indication that they intended all the causal powers of measurement to operate. Indeed, it seems that they had not analysed all those causal powers but only some of them, mainly those linked to the legitimation of the activity. These powers are examples of the emerging properties of structures. Measuring corporate social performance had a feedback effect on the concept, and influenced its definition. There is no consensus among scholars on a common definition of corporate social performance (e.g. Mitnick, 2000), but ARESE proposed one that became commonly used. That definition is limited to five measurable criteria: employee relations, environment, customer and supplier relations, corporate governance, and community involvement. This approach thus reduces corporate social performance to its measurable dimensions. When asked how they would define corporate social responsibility, most fund managers tended to refer to the ARESE definition as the basis on which to propose a definition. Furthermore, using the same measures reduces subjectivity and increases the likelihood of making the same choices. The judgement of fund managers tended to be mechanized, to the extent that it was constrained by ARESE measures. According to one of the few fund managers who used an alternative provider, When 90% of the funds are using ARESE’s ratings, you find the same portfolio all the time and then the same performance for all the funds. They used ARESE and made choices from among high-return firms. But after a financial screening, you’d be left with the same set of high-return firms.

Hence, being the designer and provider of a widely used measure provided ARESE with a power that it may not have expected. A fund manager who was interviewed suggested that the choice of a social rating agency was a ‘structuring choice’. This is consistent with the statement quoted above on mimeticism among fund managers using ARESE. ARESE executives do not seem to have planned to use these causal powers. These powers emerged during the diffusion of ARESE measures, and their increasing use by fund managers. Some causal powers observed by previous research do not seem to operate in the present case. For example in this specific case, measurement was not used to control or govern.

Discussion In this paper, we have argued that critical realism provides a strong basis on which to develop a non-conflating model of institutional entrepreneurship that accounts for the entrepreneur’s institutional embeddedness and her capacity to shape institutions. Based on our model, we made suggestions about how an institutional entrepreneur can use institutional logics as structures to create or change existing institutions. We illustrated this model through the case study This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.


of the creation by ARESE of a measure to evaluate companies’ corporate social performance. We showed how the measure’s causal powers developed in this situation. We distinguished between those causal powers that were activated as part of ARESE strategy, and those that were emerging in the given context. We described this process as uncertain, because contextual factors affect the actual development of institutional logics’ causal powers.

Implications for Critical Realism Before considering the implications of our model for institutional theory, we want to highlight what we believe to be important contributions to the application of critical realism in organizational studies. First, although the existence of critical realism is well acknowledged in organizational studies (e.g. Kwan and Tsang, 2001; Tsang and Kwan, 1999), it still lacks empirical uses (Junor, 2001). We believe that this is due in part to the lack of any link with the existing tradition in organizational studies. McKinley et al. (1999) showed that, in order to be taken into account, new approaches must be linked with existing ones. We believe that our model can help to solve this problem. It links critical realism with one of the most lively and well established traditions in organizational studies – i.e. institutional theory. This enables our model to elaborate on already existing works. Hence, we believe that many previous institutional works can be relocated within a critical realist approach. For example, our model is consistent with recent institutional works, such as those that emphasize the importance of institutional logics (e.g. Lounsbury, 2002; Scott et al., 2000; Thornton, 2002). Second, in this paper we analyse how actors can use structures strategically. While critical realism does not consider actors as ‘cultural dopes’, and opposes conflating models in which structures are the sole determinants of actors’ actions, critical realist works do not address empirically the strategic action of actors. In particular, although critical realist works consider that actors set structures in motion and develop their causal powers, to the best of our knowledge they have never considered how actors can do so strategically. Hence, combining organizational studies, which are much concerned with actors’ strategic actions, with critical realism can make it possible to advance the understanding of such strategies.

Implications for Institutional Theory This paper makes several contributions, both to the ongoing elaboration of an ‘expanded’ institutional theory and to works on institutional entrepreneurship. The developing ‘expanded new institutionalism’ tries to bring agency back into the institutional framework without denying the crucial importance of institutional embeddedness and thus move beyond the vague notion of



institutional pressures to investigate the dialectical interplays between actors’ actions and institutional embeddedness (e.g. Hoffman and Ventresca, 2002; Lounsbury, 2003; Lounsbury and Ventresca, 2003; Lawrence and Suddaby, forthcoming). Yet, the underlying ontological assumptions implied by such an evolution have not been discussed, leading to an ambiguous ontology. Such an ambiguity would arguably make it very difficult to develop a coherent and unambiguous theory (Fleetwood, 2005). A critical realist approach can provide a robust and coherent ontological basis for those works by offering an unambiguous ontological position in which the ontological status of both actors and structures is recognized, as is their permanent interaction. As such, critical realism can set the basis for the development of a non-conflating institutional theory that would account for both the influence of institutional embeddedness and the partial autonomy of actors’ actions. This can lead to theoretical and methodological consequences. Theoretically, critical realism emphasizes the permanent interrelation between the three building blocks of current institutional theory – i.e. actors’ actions, institutions and institutional logics. Critical realism provides an ontological depth that neither traditional realist nor more recent interpretive approaches can reach. It calls for researchers to look for those underlying structures – i.e. institutional logics – on which actors draw to provide institutions with justifications and organizing principles. Much research can be done based on the analysis of the interplays between actors’ actions, institutions and institutional logics. For example, considering these interplays can allow researchers to move beyond the imprecise, and arguably misdirecting (Hoffman and Ventresca, 2002), notion of institutional pressures to disclose more precise mechanisms, both within the same strata (e.g. interplays between different actors’ actions) or between different strata (e.g. use by different actors of a common institutional logic) to explain isomorphism. Methodologically, critical realism also provides a robust ontological basis for the most recent evolutions in the methods used by institutional analysts. Recent works have moved from a traditional macro and realist approach of organizations populations (for a review see Schneiberg and Clemens, forthcoming) where little place was made to account for individual actions and sensemaking to more interpretive approaches (e.g. Hargadon and Douglas, 2001; Zilber, 2002) and eventually to critical discourse analysis (e.g. Munir and Phillips, 2005; Phillips et al., 2004). Such a critical discourse analysis cannot be related to interpretive approaches as it requires that the researcher needs not only to account for the actors’ discourse, but also to take a reflexive stance and look beyond the actors’ discourses. As Fairclough (2005) has recently indicated, critical realism provides the ontological ground to do so. Critical realism can also provide an ontological basis for the institutional works using framing analysis (e.g. Lounsbury et al., 2003; Creed et al., 2002). A critical realist approach can also bring several insights to research on institutional entrepreneurship. The concept of institutional entrepreneurship



has received increasing attention in recent years (e.g. Dorado, 2005; Garud et al., 2002; Greenwood et al., 2002; Maguire et al., 2004), as researchers have increasingly tried to bring back agency into the institutional framework, and to understand the interactions between actors and institutions. However, the different approaches to institutional entrepreneurship all considered that, in order to act, institutional entrepreneurs needed the ability to disembed from existing institutional arrangements (Beckert, 1999). Hence, remaining coherent with institutional theory makes such disembedding impossible thus leading to the ‘paradox of the embedded actor’ now central in research on institutional entrepreneurs (e.g. Holm, 1995; Seo and Creed, 2002). Our model suggests that institutional entrepreneurs should not try to reach a situation of institutional disembeddedness that is impossible, but rather to gain knowledge of the different institutional logics that can be mobilized and their causal powers in the specific context in which they are operating. Based on critical realism, we suggest that institutional entrepreneurs use the causal powers of institutional logics. We suggest that successful institutional entrepreneurs will be those who select skillfully the institutional logics, according to the context and to the interests and values of the other actors whose support they seek. Recognizing the ontological status of structures and actors’ actions, critical realism makes it possible to conceptualize better the unintended effects of institutional entrepreneurship, and the importance of context. When institutional entrepreneurs manipulate structures to impose new institutions, they should consider all the effects of these structures in the given context. Indeed, critical realism emphasizes that it is not possible to predict entirely how causal powers will operate in context. This makes it possible to account for the uncertainty that is linked to institutional entrepreneurship. Using structures always implies unpredictable consequences. As such, critical realism also makes it possible to account for the specificity of institutions that are shaped not only by the actions of institutional entrepreneurs, but also by other actors and by the influence of other structures in a given context.

Further Research We believe that critical realism and institutional theory can be complementary in overcoming the shortcomings of both streams of research. Critical realism can provide a stratified view of reality with an ontological realist basis, and then allow us to move beyond actors’ discourses, decipher between context and causal powers, and highlight hidden mechanisms. Recent developments in institutional analysis allow us to flesh out abstract notions of critical realism, such as ‘structures’, and provide a basis for further empirical research. We believe that this paper opens up avenues of research. In the case of institutional entrepreneurship, the model can serve as a basis for analysing how institutional entrepreneurs can combine several different institutional



logics, and how they will articulate these combinations, depending on contextual factors; and how they will frame their discourses and actions, and design institutions accordingly. This paper also makes it possible to investigate further issues related to power. Here we can use the proximity between Bourdieu’s critical sociology and critical realism to bring Bourdieu more into institutional analysis. Bourdieu (1980; 1992) concentrates on the sustainable power that actors gain by accumulating capital according to the dominant logics of the field. Examining how institutional logics determine a distribution of power between actors in the field may advance the analysis of power within institutional theory. This model can also be used to analyse complex contextual interactions between actors who do not share the same values and aims – i.e. who do not support the same institutional logics. Work should also address institutional change, caused either by institutional entrepreneurs or by other actors, and participate in the elaboration of an ‘expanded’ non-conflating institutional theory.

Notes We would like to thank Frédérique Déjean, and Jean Pascal Gond for their help and comments, Stefan Jonsson for providing us with a very useful text, and Steve Fleetwood for his help in accessing the most recent critical realist research. This research benefited from the support of the ACI ‘La construction sociale de l’investissement socialement responsible’ funded by the Ministère délégue de la Recherche and the Ministère des Affaires Sociales. A previous version of this paper was presented at the Academy of Management annual meetings in 2006 and we would like to thank the anonymous reviewers of the Academy for their comments. We want to thank especially the editors of this special issue of Organization for their insights and support. All mistakes remain ours. 1. All the interviews were transcripted and coded along the dimensions of measurement described below. Some codes categories remained empty, providing us with information on the causal powers that did not operate in the present case. Differences between the causal powers acknowledged by the actors and other empirical data beyond their interpretation allowed us to better understand the unintended consequences of a strategy based on measurement.

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18 How Institutions Form: Loose Coupling as Mechanism in Gouldner’s Patterns of Industrial Bureaucracy Tim Hallett and Marc J. Ventresca

H

ow do institutions form? This question is central to research in organizational analysis and other key social science and policy research. Oftentimes, the answers to the questions we ask are implicit in earlier research, even though we must labor to read these works anew.1 Thus, when confronted with the “new” question that motivates this issue of American Behavioral Scientist – “How do new institutional forms first emerge within and among organizations?” – we look to Gouldner’s (1954) classic study of authority, bureaucracy, and change in a 1940s gypsum mine, Patterns of Industrial Bureaucracy. We use this study and Gouldner’s insights to refocus on the potential of the “loose coupling” concept for understanding institutional processes and the mechanisms by which institutions form. In contemporary research, “loose coupling” is typically treated as an outcome, but returning to Patterns provides a different account of how coupling occurs and matters for emerging institutional forms. It is a process story of tangible conflict and active power struggles, competing definitions of the situation, a narrative that links external meanings with local organizational knowledge and practices. It is a story that sheds light on how bureaucracy, at that time in American history a new institutional form, emerged at the mine (Schneiberg, 2005). To make the case for this account, we first problematize how the coupling concept has been used in the literature, and we explain why Patterns is a

Source: American Behavioral Scientist, 49(7) (2006): 908–924.



good place to look at coupling as a process linked to institutional formation. Gouldner’s focus on local work arrangements and activity in addition to external organizational pressures contains wisdom that, ironically, has become “decoupled” in contemporary institutional research focused on macro environments. After discussing the background of Gouldner’s study and some links to contemporary debates in the new institutionalism in organizational analysis, we turn to Gouldner’s discussion of the “indulgency pattern” – the social order that characterized life at the mine before the arrival of bureaucracy. Then we examine how a new manager tried to impose a tightly coupled pattern of bureaucracy (which Gouldner labels “punishment-centered bureaucracy”). This imposition was met with resistance, and the emergent conflict revealed a power struggle and generated another coupling, this one “loose” in nature (which Gouldner labels “mock bureaucracy”). Although conflicts in the mine produced a loosely coupled form of bureaucracy, cooperation created another, more tightly coupled form based on shared interests (which Gouldner labels “representative bureaucracy”). We conclude that new institutional forms (in this case “bureaucracy”) are assembled, reconfigured, edited, and negotiated through plural coupling processes (Ventresca & Lacey, 2000). Prevailing views of organizational institutionalism importantly focus on broad rationalized systems of meanings and struggles among logics in fields of activity but without sufficient concurrent focus on the practices and local activities that both support and refract macro logics (Brown, 1978; Heimer, 1999). Because of this focus on the macro environment and diffusion processes, contemporary institutionalism has fewer tools to anticipate the emergence of the different patterns of bureaucracy that Gouldner describes in situ. However, rereading Patterns with a contemporary eye helps us to understand where new institutional forms come from and how they combine both durable features common to prototypes and also remain negotiated and fragile in local practice.

The Coupling “Problem” in Contemporary Organizational Research The idea of “coupling,” and loose coupling in particular, came to prominence in the ideas and writings of a group of dissenting organizational sociologists and social psychologists working on problems of change and reform in public schools in the mid-1970s.2 This research community introduced the loose coupling concept as a system description to challenge a common image of an organization as a set of densely linked elements held together by technical interdependencies and formal control structures.3 Coupling, simply put, directed analytic attention to the variety of couplings in interorganizational relations and made such linkages and their impact an empirical question, rather than making assumptions about necessary couplings. This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.

Hallett and Ventresca • How Institutions Form 415

The imagery of loose coupling challenged the assumption that organizations operated with intentional plans, clear means-end goals, responsiveness, and coordination. Moreover, it took into direct account the then novel idea of broader environments that interpenetrated organizations, further challenging the analytic integrity of a unit-level organization. It introduced an argument about educational bureaucracies as exemplars of loosely coupled organizations characterized by weak ties, ritualized activity, inconsistent responses, and segmentation with regard to plural external environments. The concept of loose coupling was analytically powerful because it helped scholars to understand why many organizations (particularly public agencies and cultural organizations) continued to operate by familiar routines and practices despite waves of policy reforms and environmental pressures to change. Weick’s (1976) study on “educational organizations as loosely coupled systems” made the full argument. In this essay, Weick calls for descriptive studies to refine our understanding of the different kinds of couplings and the mechanisms through which they are created. Although coupling related to environmental pressures, he argued that researchers would want to study coupling in terms of local organizational processes. The notion of coupling was incorporated into emerging insitutionalisms. This argument was congenial to ideas about ambiguity and how organizations change, developed by March and colleagues (March & Olsen, 1976), and also to early papers on social charters, institutional effects, and “institutionalized structures as myth and ceremony” (Meyer & Rowan, 1977, 1978). Meyer and Rowan (1977, 1978) argued that many of the formal structures of organizations incorporate broader cultural rules, what they term rationalized myths in the Durkheimian sense of accounts that provide meaning and rationales for activity. They made a dual argument in a series of papers. On one hand, they propose that conformance with these rules provide the organization with legitimacy on the terms of key authoritative external audiences and arbiters (e.g., state agencies, professional associations, and other publics). This legitimacy enhances the organization’s prospects for survival. However, many of these institutional rules conflict with the needs of actual work activity, and so they extend the work of Thompson (1967). Organizations avoid conflict by buffering “their formal structures from the uncertainties of technical activities by becoming loosely coupled, building gaps between their formal structures and actual work activities” (Meyer & Rowan, 1977, pp. 340–341). Through loose coupling, organizations incorporate elements proposed by broader cultural rules, even as technical activities are largely unaffected (Meyer & Rowan, 1977; Pfeffer, 1981). They made a second argument in the same study, developed more fully in a companion chapter (Meyer & Rowan, 1978). Here, they argue that loose coupling is less of a strategic action and more a mechanism by which “rationalized building blocks” of organization available in the environment This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.


are recombined and bundled into categorically correct forms. This argument, somewhat more provocative, does not start from the a priori organization seeking legitimacy but rather starts from the a priori rationalized cultural rules and social “charters” that specify a vocabulary of forms. This argument recognizes that activity is present and that rationalized myths provide the recipes for assembly of elementary forms in the organizational landscape – schools, firms, hospitals, and so on. Coherence, coordination, control, and forms of coupling are firmly rooted in rituals of deference and demeanor, of “logics of confidence” and “logics of avoidance” (Goffman, 1959; Meyer & Rowan, 1978). Despite this early centrality of loose coupling as systems and mechanism in the new institutionalism, much subsequent empirical work pushed these views to the side as a substantive topic: One line of research focused on macro-structural environments and defocused on coupling processes or coupling as a variable. Another line of research treated coupling only as a strategic outcome. Local processes such as loose coupling were glossed in the emerging focus on interorganizational relationships (Hirsch & Lounsbury, 1997, p. 411; Sahlin-Andersson, 1994; Scully & Segal, 2002) and the abstract focus on Durkheimian-like “institutional logics” (Stinchcombe, 1997). Over time, neo-institutional research has become less and less engaged with the local dynamics of real, working organizations. This is problematic because institutions are not inert categories of meaning. Rather, they are “inhabited” by people and their activity (Scully & Creed, 1997). The development of couplings is one such activity. Nearly 15 years after the coupling concept first emerged, Orton and Weick’s (1990) review of the literature criticized research that oversimplified loose coupling by treating it as a “flat” and “static” organizational feature. They reiterated the call to study coupling as a process, “as something that organizations do, rather than merely as something they have” (p. 218, emphasis added). They also call for attention to loose coupling as a situated system process, not only or even as a strategic one. With few exceptions (Coburn, 2004), this call has gone unrecognized, let alone answered. The silent response is symptomatic of what DiMaggio (1988), paraphrasing Gouldner (1954), argued in his essay on the “pathos of bureaucracy”: a need for a more supple conception of agency and activity, as well as more direct recognition of power, including cultural politics. Organizations, even highly “institutionalized” ones, are filled with activity and ferment (Fligstein, 2001; Lounsbury, Ventresca, & Hirsch, 2003). The overly blunt use of concepts such as “institutionalization” and truncated research designs has restricted the potential contributions of this line of work (Scully & Meyerson, 1996). The coupling concept ought not to be used as a static aside to focus on macro-structural environments but as a dynamic activity and local process. This is especially the case when new institutional forms are in the process of emergence. This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.


Almost 30 years after the concept was first introduced, we still have an impoverished sense of what couplings actually look like and how they coalesce at the local organizational level. How do couplings develop, and what can they tell us about the emergence of new institutional forms? To answer this question, we go back in time more than 50 years to Gouldner’s gypsum mine.4 We do so for three reasons. First, Patterns takes as its focus the “premier” institution in organizational sociology – bureaucracy. Moreover, Gouldner studied bureaucracy during a time in American history when it was a new institutional form. Although Gouldner was not writing in the contemporary era, in many ways, Patterns can be read through the lens of contemporary scholarship. When examined with this gaze, Patterns is centrally about institutional formation – not just how a new organizational logic diffuses but how it evolves during conflict and power struggles at the local level. Second, Patterns is recognized as a pillar of organizational sociology. DiMaggio (1988) cites it prominently in his invocation of the “pathos of bureaucracy,” and Perrow (1986, pp. 1–3) paraphrases it at length in his opening to Complex Organizations. The legitimacy of Patterns within organizational sociology ought to make our use of it to explore issues of coupling and institutional emergence all the more compelling. Third, although the imperative of “new” research propels us forward, the historical development of sociology equips us with hindsight and a reason to look back, not to forget. Oftentimes, these classic works speak to contemporary debates (if only we would listen), and we situate this article in the genre of revisiting sociological classics for the purpose of gaining new insights.5 For all of these reasons, it makes good sense to couple “new” research on institutional formation with the past.

The Intellectual Context, Purpose, and Relevance of Patterns Gouldner wrote Patterns at a key moment in the development of organizational studies. Sociology was transitioning from the work of Parsons toward more empirically driven theories of the “middle range.” Modern organizational theory was nascent. Researchers studied situated organizations with attention to work and occupations, and the border between studies of work and research on organizations was porous (Stern & Barley, 1996). Building from interests shared with his dissertation adviser, Robert Merton (1940), and another of Merton’s students, Selznick (1949, 1957), Gouldner sought to “evaluate,” “modify,” and “redirect” Weber’s (1978) theory of bureaucracy via an empirical study of work patterns in a gypsum mine (Gouldner, 1954, p. 9; Merton, 1982, p. 919). Gouldner’s empirical approach fit the spirit of Weber’s verstehen. Gouldner used ethnographic field observations to “get closer” to actors and action. This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.


Gouldner (1954) used the data collected at the mine to confront the prevailing readings of Weber (1978) on bureaucracy as an “ideal type” and “iron cage.” This confrontation was made possible by a serendipitous moment in his field site: In the midst of the study, the incumbent manager (“Old Doug”) died and was replaced by an outsider (“Vincent Peele”), a professional manager. This event created a unique opportunity to observe the local emergence of bureaucracy. This bureaucratic logic had grown in strength after World War II, when organizations of many types began to adopt the bureaucratic practices that had made the mobilization for war a success (Baron, Dobbin, & Jennings, 1986; Selznick, 1949). It was a period of industrial change, and Gouldner (1954) documents how this broader change affected not only the mine but also the community that was its home. In the first chapter of Patterns, Gouldner describes how “the ebb of ruralism may be witnessed”: The countryside was becoming industrialized and the farms mechanized. Canning, gypsum, paper, and other light industries moved in and grew. Farmers retired their horses, took to tractors, and adopted all manner of mechanical loaders, balers, and silage apparatus. Commercial farming was started; farming was becoming more of a business, like any other, and much less of a distinctive “way of life.” (p. 42)

Gouldner (1954) embeds his observations of the mine within this environment. Along with industrialization, the community and the mine were confronted with a new rationality, a bureaucratic one. Gouldner provides an empirical account of the sources and effects of this new form of rationality, promoted by the main regional office and enacted locally in the succession from “Old Doug” to Peele. Gouldner reports, The main office executives told Peele of his predecessor’s shortcomings, and expressed the feeling that things had been slipping at the plant for some time. They suggested that Old Doug . . . had grown overindulgent with his advancing years, and that he, Peele, would be expected to improve production. As Peele put it, “Doug didn’t force the machine. I had to watch it. Doug was satisfied with a certain production. But the Company gave me orders to get production up.” (p. 71)

The new management introduced a number of new rules and practices – hiring people outside of kinship networks, increasing the amount of paperwork, and rigidly enforcing disciplinary procedures – accompanied by a new emphasis on hierarchy. However, these bureaucratic trappings were not simply a response to production concerns. Rather, they were a practical expression of rationalized myths of productivity and efficiency. Gouldner (1954) explains that “with the renewed pressure of post-war competition, the main office expected things to start humming; traditional production quotas were about to be rationalized” This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.


(pp. 71–72, emphasis added), and “Peele, therefore, came to the plant sensitized to the rational and impersonal yardsticks which his superiors would use to judge his performance” (p. 72). Although rationalized myths of productivity help explain the emergence of bureaucracy at the mine, the shift in personnel is also central. Peele entered the mine as an outsider unable to tap existing social networks but with a mandate to change productivity. As a result, the informal relations of power and influence based on longstanding social interactions between Old Doug and the workers were closed to Peele. The formal authority supplied by bureaucracy was the option that remained (Gouldner, 1954, p. 98). Gouldner’s (1954) account of external environmental changes and pressures as they relate to the mine foreshadow many of the concerns of contemporary institutionalism. A key question for an institutionalist is, “Why bureaucracy as an organizational form for this mine?” In answering this question, Patterns displays the power of institutional analysis. Gouldner develops a magisterial account of external sources for the formalization of controls at the mine, the pressures for increased production coming from the regional office and more diffusely from a national postwar focus on productivity and rationality, and the mythology of bureaucracy as the appropriate solution. These concerns populate contemporary research on inertia (Bartunek, 1984; Hannan & Freeman, 1984), isomorphism (DiMaggio & Powell, 1983), and the spread of formalized, modern personnel practices (Baron et al., 1986; Dobbin, Edelman, Meyer, Scott, & Swidler, 1988; Dobbin, Sutton, Meyer, & Scott, 1993; Dobbin & Sutton, 1996; Edelman 1990, 1992). Gouldner also recognized the set of rationalizing beliefs that accompany managerial succession and the ways in which certain people (such as Peele) are “carriers” of institutional processes (DiMaggio, 1988; Scott, 2001, p. 79). However, the analytic value of Patterns for our understanding of the coupling process and institutional formation becomes most evident when we examine how these external pressures collided with the prior local order, or what Gouldner (1954) describes as the “indulgency pattern.” It is in this collision that different couplings between environmental pressures and local practices were actively negotiated by the people in the mine and from which the different forms of bureaucracy (“punishment centered,” “mock,” and “representative”) emerged.

The Indulgency Pattern Institutions seldom emerge from green field sites (Kogut & Zander, 2000; Lawrence & Suddaby, 2006). Gouldner (1954) goes to great lengths to describe what life at the mine was like before the introduction of formal bureaucracy. Gouldner labels this prior order the “indulgency pattern.” It consisted of routinized interactions characterized by management



responsiveness toward the workers, leniency and the flexible application of rules, second chances, and a blind eye toward pilfering (Gouldner, 1954, pp. 47–56). As a part of the indulgency pattern, Old Doug “never came around much; ‘ran the plant by phone’; gave the workers free (gypsum) board; related to everyone in a friendly and personal way; did not push men for their absences” (p. 82). To explain the development of the indulgency pattern, Gouldner (1954) describes how the mine was “enmeshed in a network of kinship relations” (p. 56). The workers describe how “the supervisors here have known each other for a long time. They grew up together. The same with a lot of the men” (p. 39). As a result, “everybody’s sociable,” and Gouldner describes “friendly and highly egalitarian relationships between supervisors and workers. ‘You see,’ explains a mechanic, ‘the bosses associate with the men. They will drink with them at the saloon or restaurant, and there is a fine sentiment’” (p. 39). These routinized but informal interactions precluded domineering management tactics and hierarchies. To quote one of the foremen, “You can’t ride the men very hard when they are your neighbors” (p. 56). Although these relations subverted formal authority, the indulgency pattern supplied the management with an abundance of informal legitimacy in the eyes of the employees. It prompted the workers to react favorably to the difficult and dangerous labor at the mine and to trust the management and follow its lead (Gouldner, 1954, pp. 55–57). In summarizing Old Doug and the indulgency pattern, Gouldner (1954) states that the workers praised Doug for “his informality, his lack of emphasis on formal hierarchy and status, his laxness with the rules, his direct interaction with the workers.” However, Gouldner adds, “These, typically, are traits which are the antithesis of bureaucratic administration” (p. 82). With the passing of Old Doug and the arrival of Peele, the end of indulgency was near.

The Imposition of a Tight Coupling: “Punishment-Centered Bureaucracy” Peele came to the mine with a fundamentally different mind-set than his predecessor. Gouldner (1954) states that with the arrival of Peele, “a college educated, authority conscious, rule-oriented individual was substituted for an informal, ‘lenient’ man who had little taste for ‘paper work’” (p. 63). Peele carried the logic of bureaucracy into the mine (Berger, Berger, & Kellner, 1974; DiMaggio, 1988) and used his formal authority as manager to create a tighter coupling between bureaucracy and everyday work practices. This coupling first took the form of increasing supervision. Where Old Doug trusted that the workers would get their jobs done, Peele put them on watch. As one worker said, “Peele is like a mouse in a hole. You don’t know when This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.


he will pop out” (Gouldner, 1954, p. 87). Peele required that his foremen do the same: Peele’s new directives called for weekly and daily reports from foremen and building supervisors. . . . In its turn, this constant check on the foremen necessarily constrained foremen to check up on the workers. As they perceived the source of the increasing pressure on them, the workers said: “As the super goes, so go the foremen.” (Gouldner, 1954, p. 66)

This coupling was tightened further by management activities that emphasized formality: Formal rules that had been ignored were being revived, while new ones were established to supplement and implement the old. Emphasis upon hierarchy and status were rupturing the older informalties. Distinctions between private and company property, between working and private time were expanding. A cold, impersonal “atmosphere” was slowly settling on the plant. (Gouldner, 1954, p. 69)

The imposition of a tight coupling between the logic of bureaucracy and everyday practices began to squeeze the life out of the indulgency pattern. The actions of the new management and Peele’s efforts to create a tight coupling generated a particular form of bureaucracy that Gouldner (1954) labels “punishment-centered bureaucracy.” In this tightly coupled pattern, formal rules are enforced for their own sake, regardless of their utility, and deviations are met with punishment.6 One of the examples of punishmentcentered bureaucracy involved new disciplinary measures. In the past, the workers at the mine could spend lax periods during their shifts away from their machines, and they could circulate and converse among friends. But now these “delinquent” actions were met with a “warning notice.” This notice consisted of a paper form with a long checklist of offenses onto which names, dates, and times were documented. The notice had to be signed by the management or foreman as well as the offending worker (Gouldner, 1954, p. 67). This was a dramatic shift from the lax enforcement of rules and the “second chances” that characterized the indulgency pattern. A related example of punishment-centered bureaucracy involved strict enforcement of the “no-absenteeism” rule. During the era of the indulgency pattern, employees could occasionally skip work with little justification or prior notice, particularly when gypsum orders were slow. Absenteeism cost little in the way of productivity and counted much toward the informal legitimacy of the old management. However, the new management strictly punished absences, and the rule was formalized by extensive paperwork, sending a shock through the employee ranks (Gouldner, 1954, p. 208). Moreover, because the rule required permission to leave work for such things as wedding, funerals, or sick relatives, it restricted the workers’ control over their outside behavior and began to colonize their private lives (p. 213). This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.


Despite the external pressures from the regional management and the broader industrial landscape, the emergence of punishment-centered bureaucracy was not the inevitable outcome of macro-institutional forces. After all, the previous management had lived and worked in this same context. Punishment-centered bureaucracy only emerged with the tangible efforts of the new management to create a tight coupling between these external pressures and everyday life at the mine. Nor was this the end of the story.

Conflict, Resistance, and Loose Coupling: “Mock Bureaucracy” The activities and the tight coupling that generated “punishment-centered bureaucracy” were made possible by Peele’s formal authority as manager. However, formal authority is not the only kind of power in organizations, and organizational cultures carry their own informal legitimacy (Hallett, 2003). The indulgency pattern was one such culture, and the workers held fast to its set of informal rights and expectations. The workers actively resisted the changes in the mine, setting up a struggle in which the formal authority of the management and the informal legitimacy of the indulgency pattern collided. As a result of this conflict, the workers and the management negotiated a loose coupling, which produced what Gouldner (1954) calls “mock bureaucracy.” Gouldner (1954) describes the workers’ response to the tightly coupled, “punishment” form of bureaucracy as “bitter discontent” (p. 68). The new emphasis on supervision violated the norms of equality that characterized the indulgency pattern, and Gouldner reports that “the more a supervisor watched his subordinates, the more hostile they became to him” (p. 160). This was especially the case in the sub-surface mine, where the workers believed that the dangerous nature of the job gave them the right to take occasional liberties, especially in regards to absenteeism. The emerging conflict took a number of forms, and the workers resisted in ways both tacit and overt. One of the tacit responses involved acts of “bureaucratic sabotage,” or “deliberate apathy fused with resentment, in which, by the very act of conforming to the letter of the rule, its intention is ‘conscientiously’ violated” (Gouldner, 1954, p. 175). Although punishmentcentered bureaucracy could regulate basic behaviors, it could not regulate feelings and attitudes. The workers would not break any rules, but they would not put forward any extra effort or enthusiasm to make the product of their labor better. They would punch in and out of work exactly on time, but they would not volunteer for extra hours when gypsum orders were high. This kind of basic “activity” without sincere “participation” undermined the very productivity that the management sought to increase. The tacit resistance of the workers also sabotaged Peele’s legitimacy. The workers accomplished this through the development of a “Rebecca Myth.”7 This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.


In their interactions with each other (and with the researchers), the workers idealized Old Doug and held Peele to an unrealistic standard that glorified and exaggerated the indulgency pattern: Peele’s the opposite of Doug. . . . He’s always around checking on the men and standing over them. As long as production was going out Doug didn’t stand over them. Peele is always around as though he doesn’t have faith in the men like Doug. (Gouldner, 1954, p. 81) When Doug was here, it was like one big happy family. Peele is all business. (Gouldner, 1954, p. 81) When Doug was here, all you had to say to Doug was, “Say, Doug, I need some board for the house.” “Take a truck or a box car and fill ’er up,” he would say. “But git it the hell out of here.” With Peele, you have to pay for any board you take. (Gouldner, 1954, p. 81)

Although the old indulgency pattern had been disrupted, its symbolic power was stronger than ever (Hallett, 2003), and these interactions undermined Peele’s authority. These observations led Gouldner (1954) to criticize Weber’s (1978) view of authority: “For Weber, authority was given consent because it was legitimate, rather than being legitimate because it evoked consent. For Weber, therefore, consent is always a datum to be taken for granted, rather than being a problem whose sources had to be traced” (p. 222). Eventually, these tacit conflicts and power struggles burst to the surface in the form of a wildcat strike (Gouldner, 1955). Gouldner demonstrates that the apparently spontaneous strike was actually the product of bureaucratic violations of the autonomy and control that the workers cherished under the indulgency pattern. During the strike, the workers fought for higher wages. However, Gouldner argues that the wages at the mine had always been low. During the time in Gouldner’s research when Old Doug was still alive and so was the indulgency pattern, a worker told him, “I like it here. They don’t push you around. A man’s got his work to do and they leave him alone. You know that’s one of the reasons they pay so low around here. . . . The pay is like a balance for the working conditions. It sort of balances things” (p. 32). The workers did not mind the low wages as long as they felt that they were being well treated. It was only when the low wages were fused with a tightly coupled “punishment” form of bureaucracy that the strike erupted. These conflicts made the tightly coupled pattern of bureaucracy unmanageable. A compromise had to be made, and this compromise is, to the contemporary reader, very much a loose coupling. Gouldner (1954) labels it “mock bureaucracy,” and he describes it as a work pattern in which bureaucratic rules are in place but are largely ignored or inoperative. As an instance of loose coupling, the mock bureaucracy involved an implicit agreement where the workers let the management save face and have their rules as long as they looked the other way as the workers went about their daily lives. This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.


A chief example involved the “no smoking” rules. These rules were formalized, but for the most part, the workers considered them “dead letters,” and so did the management. The mine was filled with signs that proclaimed the rules and punishments, but these rules were not enforced, except when an insurance or fire inspector came to the mine. Both the new management and the workers agreed to this arrangement, and when it was breached, punishment occurred not through the formal warning notices but through informal interactions. As one worker explained, “There are a few guys who didn’t even stop smoking when the inspector comes around. They are troublemakers, and we let them know where they get off ” (Gouldner, 1954, p. 186). Where punishment-centered bureaucracy was interpreted as a violation of the old indulgency pattern, “mock” bureaucracy was interpreted as the indulgency pattern dressed in bureaucratic clothing. Here Gouldner (1954) anticipates a set of ideas that are central for the new institutionalism: “rationalized myths” and the companion terms “myth and ceremony” (Meyer & Rowan, 1977). Recall that in classical usage, myth does not connote the modern sense of false or incorrect claims. Rather, myths are the accounts of fundamental cultural and ontological ordering that embody how and why everyday reality takes the forms it does. Myths are the source-of-origin accounts that authorize and justify the character of everyday life. “Rationalized myths” then map onto Weber’s (1978) concern with the rise of the technical mean-ends chain and with the broader “disenchantment” of modern society – that is, the reduced play of awe and majesty in their varied forms as sources of authority and the growth of apparently technical solutions. Recall also that Meyer and Rowan (1977, 1978) develop in considerable detail the micro processes that undergird and support organizations assembled from rationalized structural elements such as organization charts, personnel procedures, the mandates and rules of state agencies, and professional expertise: The “logic of confidence” and other face mechanisms incorporate the ideas of micro-interaction orders, ritual, deference, and demeanor as the cohering texture of organizations. However, instead of presuming that loose couplings prevent conflict, Gouldner (1954) demonstrates how mock bureaucracy is a living thing that develops in the midst of ongoing conflict. Gouldner argues that the emergence of bureaucracy and the forms that it takes can only be understood “in terms of a balance of power, of the relative strengths of opposing groups. It was by no means the inevitable outcome of an irresistible force” (p. 154). Instead of glossing these local dynamics to instead focus on macro “logics” and environments, this rereading of Patterns makes the coupling process central and identifies it as a mechanism through which new institutional forms emerge. This reading of Gouldner provides the basis for both appreciating the Meyer and Rowan (1977, 1978) arguments that rationalized myths of efficiency and productivity got coded into formal structures and also for extending



this point by focusing on how local struggles and interests confront and edit these abstract forms (e.g., myths and ceremonies of bureaucratic efficiency) with evidence about practical activity and local context.

Shared Interests, Cooperation, and Coupling: “Representative Bureaucracy” In discussing loose coupling, Weick and colleagues (Orton & Weick, 1990; Weick, 1976) note that it is not that entire organizations are “loosely coupled,” but rather some aspects are tightly coupled, whereas the relationship between others is loose. Coupling is a multidimensional process (Spillane & Burch, 2005), amenable to analytic treatment as a set of variables (Scott, 2001). Although the conflict between the workers and the management generated a loose coupling and a pattern of “mock” bureaucracy, the management and the workers did have some common interests that provided fertile ground for a tighter coupling that formed voluntarily around some concerns. Gouldner (1954) labels this emergent pattern “representative bureaucracy.” A key example involved safety operations. Gouldner describes the safety operations as the most “bureaucratically organized” sphere of the mine. There were extensive formalized rules, regulations, paperwork, and reports that centered on the safety program. In contrast to mock bureaucracy, these were not “dead letters.” In contrast to punishment-centered bureaucracy, the safety operations were not met with worker resistance. One worker explained, “Safety is another story. The men won’t resist that. It’s for their own good. They don’t want accidents, if they can help it” (p. 184). Although the safety operations consisted of a tight coupling between bureaucracy and actual practices, this coupling was not imposed from above but rather involved “the day-to-day participation of the workers in its administration” (Gouldner, 1954, pp. 204–205). Through ongoing workermanagement interactions, the safety rules were negotiated, enforced, and obeyed (p. 204). Moreover, these interactions had the latent function of building solidarity out of relationships that had been antagonistic. To quote one of the managers, It is really wonderful how things can be worked out in this safety field. You must know Tenzman? He’s regarded as a troublemaker. But when he got involved in safety work and discussed this with his supervisors, why they came away saying, “He’s not a bad guy after all.” He gained a lot of respect for himself. (Gouldner, 1854, p. 201)

The agreement and solidarity of “representative bureaucracy” emerges from this cooperation and dialogue of interests.



In comparing the success of representative bureaucracy to the failure of punishment-centered bureaucracy, Gouldner (1954) argues that the traditional Weberian approach “fails to weigh the possibility that a bureaucracy’s effectiveness, or other of its characteristics, might vary with the manner in which rules are initiated, whether by imposition or agreement” (p. 20). Gouldner also rejects Weber’s (1978) description of bureaucracy as a formal structure of oppressive conformity – the infamous “iron cage.” Although punishment-centered bureaucracy is the form that is least attentive to the interactions that support informal administrative legitimacy, mock and representative bureaucracies are based on implicit and explicit agreements between workers and management, creating a more optimistic alternative.8 By double-fitting Weber’s (1978) theory with his observations of the mine, Gouldner (1954) developed a supple, complex picture of bureaucracy. Instead of treating bureaucracy as a monolithic organizational form with “Gibraltar-like stability,” Gouldner notes that Weber “thought of bureaucracy as a Janus-faced organization . . . . On the one side, it was administration based on expertise; while on the other, it was administration based on discipline” (p. 22). Weber seemed to recognize multiple types, if only implicitly, and Gouldner rejected the ideal typical image of bureaucracy as a rational, efficient organizational form (an image that some of his peers had begun to take literally). Patterns is still relevant. Fifty years on from publication, Patterns recalls early analytic approaches integrating context, meaning, local activity, conflict and power struggles, and the couplings through which new institutional forms emerge. The modern segmenting of “interactionist” from “institutional” analyses reduces our practical wisdom about how institutions form and embody conflict.

Conclusion How can organizational sociologists explain the emergence of new institutional forms? In answering this question, we argue that the coupling process is central. New institutional forms emerge where environmental elements are coupled with everyday organizational life and the variety of local habit. This coupling process is neither seamless nor inevitable, nor is it determined by broader social “logics” (Alvarez, Mazza, Strangaard, & Svejenova, 2005). Rather coupling processes direct us to attend to several resources for assembly, to honor local activity, and to remember how wider cultural myths provide ordering rules for action. A coupling approach challenges the imagery of “merely” symbolic activity to instead focus on the everyday work of fashioning social reality (Creed, Scully, & Austin, 2002). It is also a process of



tangible conflict and power struggles. If we are to understand institutional formation, we must understand these mechanisms. This approach usefully re-emphasizes research within actual organizations that tracks coupling processes as historical, contingent, and situated. To support our argument about coupling and the emergence of new institutional forms, we return to an old study of bureaucracy. Gouldner studied bureaucracy at a time in which it was a new institutional form. Although he embeds the gypsum mine within a particular historical context, he focuses his analytic gaze on the actions and interactions of the mine personnel in relation to this context and the established indulgency pattern. His account of the different activities and changes in the mine, the emergence of the different patterns of bureaucracy (punishment centered, mock, and representative), and the conflicts and couplings therein reminds us that institutions are inhabited by people and their doings. As Gouldner (1954) says succinctly, “Bureaucracy is a man-made instrument and it will be made by men in proportion to their power in a given situation” (p. 27). This insight is too often lost in the contemporary focus on extra-local environments and interorganizational processes. Finally, we suggest that rereading Patterns can help bring an end to the “family quarrel” between old and new institutionalism (Hirsch & Lounsbury, 1997). In the caricatures of “old” and “new,” Gouldner is categorized as old.9 However, we argue that he is better viewed as a bridge between the two. As we have seen, Patterns can be usefully read through the lens of new institutionalism. Gouldner’s concern with the broad diffusion of bureaucracy, the spread of modern personnel practices, the authorizing beliefs that accompany these practices, and mock bureaucracy as a kind of “myth and ceremony” are central to the “new” institutional project. His astute focus on local activity, intra-organizational processes, conflict, and power resonates with “old” institutionalism. Old and new are not incommensurate (Hirsch & Lounsbury, 1997). They can and should be coupled.

Authors’ Note We thank both colleagues and institutions: Elizabeth Armstrong, Lonnie Athens, Tim Bartley, Howard Becker, Amy Binder, Gary Fine, Brooke Harrington, Bill Kaghan, Rodney Lacey, Eleanor Lewis, Ryon Lancaster, Doug Orton, Charles Perrow, Fabio Rojas, Michael Sauder, Michael Schwalbe, Dick Scott, and the editors of this volume. We benefit from the insights of participants in the PEC workshop at Indiana University, Strategy and Practices Workshop at Oxford, and the 2004 ASA culture roundtable. Key comments came from contributors to this volume at the New Models of Management Workshop at Skagen, DK 2005. Special thanks to Patricia Gumport, professor and director, and other colleagues at the Stanford Institute for Higher Education Research (SIHER) for a congenial working venue and intellectual space.



Notes 1. Sociologists too often have amnesia when it comes to the work of the past (Gans, 1992). This amnesia is debilitating, not because is shows a lack of respect for our predecessors but because it stunts the accumulation of knowledge and the forward progress of research. For an alternative view, see Stinchcombe (1982). 2. This was a conversation shared among researchers at a 1974 conference at the Stanford School of Education that included organization theorists, sociologists, and historians of education (Orton, personal communication). 3. However, Weick (1979) actually cites two earlier studies that invoked the concept: an article by Glassman (1973) and an unpublished manuscript by March and Olsen (1975). 4. Gouldner’s work is, of course, the focus of much debate (Burawoy, 1979, 2003). 5. Other works in this genre include Handelman’s (1976) reinterpretation of Donald Roy’s “Banana Time” and Burawoy’s Manufacturing Consent, which revisits the shop floor in Roy’s work over four decades years later (Burawoy, 1979, 2003). 6. Punishment-centered bureaucracy is the pattern of bureaucracy that Gouldner (1954) associates with Weber’s (1978) “iron cage.” 7. Gouldner (1954, p. 79) takes this term from a novel by Daphne DuMaurier about a young woman who married a widower but was vexed by the memory of his first wife (Rebecca), whose virtues were incessantly celebrated by her husband. 8. This is where Gouldner hoped that bureaucracy could be tamed to serve human goals within socialism, instead of subverting them (Stein, 1982, pp. 891–892). 9. In saying this, we recognize that after Patterns, Gouldner’s sociology took a decidedly Marxist turn, and he certainly would not have thought of himself as an institutionalist. We are referring specifically to Patterns as it is seen in organizational sociology. It is notable that Patterns actually fits into Gouldner’s developing Marxist project. Maurice Stein, who was Gouldner’s comrade and research assistant during the study, explains that “our search was for ways in which the process of bureaucratization could be tamed before it subverted the human goals of socialism” (Stein, 1982, pp. 891–892). For a penetrating analysis of Gouldner’s total sociological program and persona, see James Chriss’s (1999) Alvin W. Gouldner: Sociologist and Outlaw Marxist.

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19 New Organizational Forms: Towards a Generative Dialogue Ian Palmer, Jodie Benveniste and Richard Dunford

Introduction

A

s one of the authors of this paper, I (Ian) attended the 2002 Organization Science Winter Conference in Steamboat Springs, Colorado. Attracted as I was to the venue, it was the conference’s focus on new organizational forms that caught my attention and motivated me to experience a sleepless night on the long haul over the Pacific from Australia to the USA. Along with Richard Dunford, I had been researching new organizational forms for a number of years. In particular, we had been interested in the blizzard of metaphors which had emerged to describe new organizational forms, such as intelligent (Pinchot and Pinchot 1994; Quinn 1992), boundaryless (Ashkenas et al. 1995; Cross et al. 2000), self-managing (Purser and Cabana 1998), virtual (Davidow and Malone 1992; DeSanctis and Monge 1999), cellular (Miles et al. 1997) and modular (Galunic and Eisenhardt 2001). The literature suggested that these post-bureaucratic forms were more relevant to the turbulent business environment of the 21st century than were traditional bureaucratic forms. What bothered us was the novelty-value of such terms. The same few orga nizations were cited regularly as examples of new organizational forms – but often with a different metaphor used to describe them. We therefore started documenting the practices that scholars argued were associated with new organizational forms and then surveyed large numbers of organizations to




see how widespread was their use (Palmer and Dunford 2002; Dunford et al. 2007). But back to Steamboat Springs. Exploring these issues in more depth with other like-minded researchers seemed like a good reason to attend the confer ence. It was with some disquiet, however, that I sat through a variety of presentations and wondered if I was in the right place. My expectation was that scholarship in the field of new organizational forms would be developed by paying closer attention to the characteristics of the new organizational forms, the commonality of practices by which they were represented and by addressing questions such as whether they were replacing or coexisting with traditional organizational forms (such as functional or divisional hierarchies based on practices of centralization, formalization, etc). I had expected lengthy conversations on such issues. Instead, I sat through presentations that largely ignored these issues. The conversations were focused on networks, industries and whole populations of organizations. These scholars traced shifts over time, sometimes over hundreds of years, from one form of organizing to another, including the emergence of partnership networks in Renaissance Florence, and the emergence of organizational forms constituting the American magazine industry from the mid-1700s (e.g. see Haverman 2004). What was treated as ‘new’ in this conversation was the shift from one form of organizing to another, including how the shift occurred and the conditions associated with such transformations. In this conversation ‘new organization forms’ might be new in a particular context (e.g. the introduction of the M-form of organizing into a new field), but not necessarily new in terms of its existence per se (being borrowed from other fields or institutional domains). The issues I understood to be central to ‘new organizational forms’ seemed to have been lost somewhere over the Pacific. However, the real issue which both puzzled me and caused me disquiet was how the term ‘new organizational forms’ was being appropriated in different ways, with different fundamental assumptions, but with little acknowledgment of the alternative conversations about them occurring simultaneously elsewhere in the world. Is this really how a new field of knowledge develops?

New Organizational Forms as a Field of Knowledge Interest in new organizational forms appears to be more than ephemeral. The study of new organizational forms has been taken up by organizational behaviour, social psychology, organizational theory, computational organizational theory, HRM, corporate governance, sociology, international business and economics. In recent years there have been eight special issues of journals devoted to new organizational forms and related subjects: Organization Science 1996 and 1999, Academy of Management Journal 2001, International


Palmer et al. • Towards a Generative Dialogue 433

Journal of Economics of Business 2002, Journal of Management Studies 2003, Leadership and Organization Development Journal 2003, American Behavioral Scientist 2006, and Journal of Organizational Change Management 2006. One might surmise from this activity that there is an ever-increasing accu mulation of knowledge about new organizational forms such that we now have a ‘paradigm of new organizational form’ (Child and McGrath 2001: 1135). Paradigm does not necessarily mean consensus on all issues, but at least a minimal consensus on broad assumptions and key research questions (cf. Pfeffer 1993). The experience of the Steamboat Springs conference, however, suggested otherwise, as did our reading of some ‘new organizational forms’ writers who declared that empirical work remained fragmented, and no unifying theory existed (Pettigrew et al. 2003; Foss 2002a; Di Maggio 2001). The question emerges, therefore, are scholars talking about the same thing when they use the term ‘new organizational forms’ ? If not, what are the different ways in which they ‘do the talking’? To what extent are scholars even aware of these differences? Finally, how is it possible to move writings on ‘new organizational forms’ from a situation of possible fragmentation to one where agreements can be established on use of the term, the assumptions underpinning it, and the core research questions for analysing it? To anticipate our answer to the last question, in this paper we call on new organizational forms’ scholars to engage in a generative dialogue, one that is not contained within theoretical perspectives but rather occurs across them. The purpose of this generative dialogue is to identify where areas of agreement can be achieved about new organizational forms and where differences can be accepted and respected. The issues discussed in this paper reflect a deeper problem in social sciences, concerning inconsistent use of language. Using different terminology for the same construct, or the same terminology for different constructs, is not uncommon (Alexander et al. 1991; Kopple 1991) but creates confusion about the object of study. The linguistic turn in organizational sciences acknowledges that language use defines a field. Rather than simply communicating, language prompts cognitive schemata that influence understanding (Bicchieri 1988) and the representation of organizational realities (Keenoy et al. 2000). Where language is inconsistent or contains different, unacknowledged assumptions, then the field, or its constitution as a field, becomes problematic. A suggestion for overcoming language problems in the organizational sciences is by judging fields of study on their ability to develop meaningful constructs and language that researchers share (Astley and Zammuto 1992), thereby enabling them to ‘talk to each other and understand each other’ (Czarniawska 1998: 797). As such, communities of practice for the existence of knowledge become increasingly important (Bouwen 1998). More generally, consistent language use assists the development of a collaborative communication model, which enables shared investigation and innovation (Deetz 2003). This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.


Language Use and Assumptions about New Organizational Forms To examine language use and assumptions about new organizational forms we undertook a two-stage analysis of the business literature for the 14-year period 1992–2005. In stage one we conducted a search of the database Business Source Premier for a range of academic journals, as follows: Academy of Management Executive, Academy of Management Journal, Academy of Management Review, Administrative Science Quarterly, British Journal of Management, European Management Journal, Harvard Business Review, International Journal of Organizational Analysis (from January 1993 onwards), International Studies of Management and Organization, Journal of Management, Journal of Management Inquiry (from March 1992 onwards), Journal of Management Studies, Leadership Quarterly (from January 1996 onwards), Organization Science, Organization Studies, Organizational Dynamics, Sloan Management Review (from September 2000 onwards) and Strategic Management Journal. We identified 135 separate articles that used the term ‘new organizational forms’. The term was used at relatively low levels for the first four years (eight articles or fewer in each year, with a total of 18 articles 1992–1995), increasing substantially over the next four years, with just under a fourfold increase (68 articles for 1996–1999). This provided prima facie evidence of the emergence of a literature on ‘new organizational forms’. Our initial reading of the literature, however, revealed that there was common use of the term, but little recognition of the diversity of assumptions that underlay its use. Hence, in stage two we used NVivo, a qualitative software package, to source all instances of the term ‘new organizational forms’ in the articles. We included three lines of text both before and after the appearance of the term in order to understand the context. A total of 346 instances of the term ‘new organizational forms’ were found across the 135 articles. Each instance was coded according to the underlying assumptions or assertions made in the use of the term. Through ongoing discussion among the authors, five key differences were identified, which highlights the heterogeneity of the situations to which the term is applied. These are discussed below.

Results We argue that there are five differences in language use and assumptions about new organizational forms. The five differences cover (1) the type of change represented in moving to new organizational forms; (2) the outcome of changing to new organizational forms; (3) the drivers for changing to new organizational forms; (4) the level of analysis associated with discussing new organizational forms; and (5) the meaning of new in new organizational This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.


forms. We provide examples of the various theories associated with these differences. We also identify (those relatively few) authors who are aware of differences and who either debate the difference or incorporate them into their research.

Revolutionary Change versus Evolutionary Change Fundamental to the new organizational forms literature is the premise of change, but there is disagreement about the type of change that new organizational forms represent. One position assumes that new organizational forms represent a revolutionary change, entailing ‘complete departures from past practice instead of incremental improvements’ (Brynjolfsson and Renshaw 1997: 37). This position suggests incompatibility between ‘old’ and ‘new’ organizational forms, with new organizational forms designed for flexibility and traditional forms for stability (Dess et al. 1995; Powell et al. 2004). New organizational forms, facilitated by radical changes in the business environment and information technology (Dibrell and Miller 2002), represent a fundamental shift in structure, process and decision making (Bartlett and Ghoshal 1993). Work is structured along horizontal rather than vertical lines (Barley 1996), involving reduced formalization and specialization and a looser organizational form (Volberda 1996). Although there may be a transition period between old and new forms, it is argued that new forms will eventually replace traditional ways of organizing (Miles et al. 1997). In contrast to revolutionary change, a second position assumes evolutionary change, where new organizational forms emerge or grow organically out of older, more traditional structures. New organizational forms are viewed as ‘recombinations of previously successful organizational forms’ (Bruderer and Singh 1996: 1328). This approach suggests compatibility between old and new organizational forms, where old and new practices can coexist. Examples of new and old practices coexisting include virtual organizations with horizontal relationships and hierarchical tendencies (Ahuja and Carley 1999), a country fire department combining bureaucracy and flexibility (Bigley and Roberts 2001), a feminist bureaucracy embracing hierarchical power and egalitarianism (Ashcraft 2001) and transnational organizations that retain hierarchical governance as an overriding feature (Gooderham and Ulset 2002). Organizations, therefore, are viewed as dualistic entities (Pettigrew and Fenton 2000a) that combine traditional or hierarchical practices with new, more flexible, market-based practices (Holland and Lockett 1997; Tushman and O’Reilly 1997). Revolutionary change and evolutionary change present two contrasting approaches to the relationship between old versus new organizational forms. Revolutionary change, as found in theories such as information processing (e.g. Dibrell and Miller 2002), suggests a disconnect between traditional



organizational forms and new forms, whereas evolutionary change, as found in feminist theory (e.g. Ashcraft 2001) and population ecology theory (e.g. Oliver and Montgomery 2000), suggests a continuation from one form to another. For some writers such differences remain unacknowledged and appear to be largely based on the theoretical lens applied. For example, Oliver and Montgomery’s (2000) population ecology approach assumes that the process of environmental selection entails evolutionary change, with inheritance assisting organizational survival. For other writers, differences are acknowledged in the form of debate. For example, within the multinational corporation literature, Bartlett and Ghoshal (1993) argue that the transnational organization is a complete departure from traditional multinational forms, whereas Gooderham and Ulset (2002) agree that the transnational is an interesting typology, but dispute whether the form’s underlying logic differs from traditional multinational corporations. A different group of writers attempt to cross the revolutionary/evolutionary divide. For example, Lewin et al. (1999) suggest that both evolutionary and revolutionary change may spark new organizational forms, but this area remains under-researched. In summary, the new organizational forms literature harbours two relatively separate explanations for the same phenomenon, and we found only limited dialogue about this across different theoretical perspectives.

Simplification versus Increased Complexity Different positions exist in the new organizational forms literature about the outcome of changing from traditional to new forms of organizing. One posi tion, simplification, argues that new organizational forms are simpler ways of organizing compared to traditional organizational forms, as new organizational forms involve less bureaucratic and hierarchical structures (Ferlie and Pettigrew 1996). By removing organizational layers and increasing spans of control (Straub and Karahanna 1998), new organizational forms have ‘flat, open structures to promote the sharing of knowledge’ (Michalisin et al. 1997: 374), and ‘empower distinct stakeholders through the flatter design’ (Coff 1999: 130). In contrast, increased complexity argues that new organizational forms are more complex and less straightforward than traditional organizational forms. Increased complexity occurs because new organizational forms involve ‘simultaneous needs for innovation and control, for flexibility and efficiency, and for differentiated decision-making authority and participation’ (Child and Rodrigues 2003: 354). Interdependent systems increase management complexity because ‘although authority is dispersed, the actions taken by any member of an interdependent network influence others’ (Child and McGrath 2001: 1139). This requires ‘new forms of trust’ (Rousseau et al. 1998: 402). New organizational forms also involve ‘ambiguous and



changing [job] roles’ (Schein 1996: 87), and employees may therefore experience ‘difficulty understanding rules of governance for the newly created organizational form’ (Steier 1998: 530). The challenge for new organizational forms, therefore, is to develop new coordination mechanisms as ‘tasks and external demands in such settings are too complex, uncertain, and interdependent to be centrally or hierarchically managed’ (Choi 2002: 182). Simplification and increased complexity suggest different underlying assumptions about the nature of new organizational forms. The simplifica tion position, found in theories such as the resource-based view of the firm (e.g. Coff 1999) and processual organizational change theory (e.g. Ferlie and Pettigrew 1996), suggests that simplifying bureaucratic structures allows flexibility and adaptability, which are needed in a fast-paced, dynamic business world. In contrast, the increased complexity position, found in theories such as structural contingency theory (Choi 2002) and transactional cost economics (Steier 1998), suggests that new organizational forms involve their own type of complexity. A few scholars recognize and attempt to re-think the relationship between simplicity and complexity. For example, according to Child and Rodrigues (2003), increased simplicity through the reduction of organizational layers leads to the increased complexity of maintaining organizational control without the assistance of traditional bureaucratic hierarchies. The challenge, therefore, is to create more complex governance practices involving trust and cooperation within a simpler, de-layered organizational form. New organizational forms may, in fact, represent both simplification and increased complexity, but there is little in the literature, apart from Child and Rodrigues (2003), addressing how the two may be related.

Management-Driven versus Environmental Selection The new organizational forms literature contains differing assumptions about what is driving the change to new organizational forms. One position, management-driven, describes new organizational forms as emerging through management action. New organizational forms are ‘a management tool in the alignment of organization and environment’ (Dijksterhuis and Van den Bosch 1999: 569), where the management challenge is overcoming the inertia of bureaucratic organizations to change behaviour (Chakravarthy and Gargiulo 1998). Other challenges include trade-offs between decision making and innovation, and control and governance (Child and Rodrigues 2003), the lack of worker physical proximity (Conner 2003), and ensuring goal congruency (Joyce et al 1997). Experimenting with new organizational forms, therefore, is a strategic issue that ensures corporate renewal (Chakravarthy and Gargiulo 1998; Child and Rodrigues 2003; Miles et al. 1997; Sanchez and Heene 1997).



A contrasting position, environmental selection, proposes that the environ ment, rather than management action, explains the introduction of new organizational forms (Harder et al. 2004). New organizational forms are diffused through population behaviour (Cattini et al. 2003), and social contagion ensures their legitimacy (Cattini et al. 2003). Factors contributing to the emergence of new organizational forms include market forces (Miles et al. 1997), globalization (Baden-Fuller and Volberda 1997; Michalisin et al. 1997), knowledge-intensive environments (Whittington et al. 1999: 586), deregulation (Baden-Fuller and Volberda 1997), customer demands (Judge and Ryman 2001) and information technology (Ahuja and Carley 1999). Management-driven and environmental selection represent different assumptions about the emergence of new organizational forms. The management-driven position, as found in theories such as social interaction theory (Lee-Kelley et al. 2004) and contingency theory (e.g. Umanath 2003), suggests that management, in view of environmental factors as well as internal factors, actively ‘promote’ and ‘experiment’ with new organizational forms. In contrast, the environmental selection position, as found in theories such as population ecology (e.g. Cattini et al. 2003) and living systems theory (e.g. Harder et al. 2004), suggests that environmental factors dictate the necessity for, and facilitate the adoption of, new organizational forms, with little reference to an organization’s core capabilities, leadership or strategic direction. Some authors, such as Rindova and Kotha (2001), acknowledge that the processes affecting the evolution of new organizational forms include both organizational and environmental factors. Likewise, Whittington et al. (1999) highlight important environmental factors and new organizational practices within the firm that shape new organizational forms. For the most part, however, scholars tend to focus on either management action or environmental selection as the driving force behind new organizational forms.

Intra-Organizational versus Inter-Organizational Different assumptions exist about the level of analysis used when discussing new organizational forms. One position, intra-organizational, analyses new organizational forms at the level of the organization. This position describes new organizational forms as intra-organizational practices that include removing organizational layers, increasing spans of control, empowering employees, increasing information exchange (Straub and Karahanna 1998) and promoting knowledge-sharing (Michalisin et al. 1997; Wenger and Snyder 2000). New organizational forms also shift organizational routines (Lounsbury 2002) through outsourcing and increased contact with the customer (Chakravarthy and Gargiulo 1998). A second position, inter-organizational, analyses new organizational forms at the level of the industry. Rather than focusing on new organizational



practices or routines, ‘new industries (and by implication new organizational forms) emerge from the entrepreneurial activity of new entrants’ (Lewin et al. 1999: 545). New organizational forms come from ‘the existing stock of organizations’ (Lewin and Volberda 1999: 520) and occur at ‘a rate proportional to their frequency in the population’ (Bruderer and Singh 1996: 1329). Studies of organizational evolution, in particular, study the emergence of new organizational forms as the rise and decline of industries (Lewin et al. 1999). The intra-organizational and the inter-organizational positions make different assumptions about the level of analysis used to study new organizational forms. For the intra-organizational position, associated with theories such as social presence communication theory (e.g. Straub and Karahanna 1998) and the resource-based theory of the firm (e.g. Michalisin et al. 1997), changing organizational practices and routines, and their impact on organizational members, create new organizational forms. In contrast, for the interorganizational position, as found in co-evolution theory (e.g. Lewin et al. 1999) and institutional theory (Hirsch and Lounsbury 1997), organizational practices and routines are overpowered by industry-wide movements including the birth, sustainability and decline of organizational forms. For some scholars, however, there is a connection between the intra-organizational and inter-organizational perspectives. For Wenger and Snyder (2000), communities of practice through knowledge-sharing, learning and change cross both intra-organizational and inter-organizational boundaries. Likewise, for Lewin et al. (1999), both new entrants within an industry and radical technological innovation within an organization have produced new organizational forms. These views suggest a more complex interplay between organization and industry, and internal environment and external environment, than is acknowledged by many new organizational forms writers.

‘New in Time’ versus ‘New in Context’ A definition of ‘newness’ further complicates the new organizational forms literature. Two positions represent contrasting views on what constitutes ‘newness’. The first position, ‘new in time’, distinguishes ‘newness’ in terms of being recent. As such, new organizational forms are described as appropriate to the 21st century (Bhide 2000; Mankin and Cohen 1997), ‘for a new economic era’ (Miles et al. 1997: 411) and as being associated with the new economic pressures (Raghuram et al. 2001). New organizational forms, therefore, are no ‘passing fashion’ (Child and Rodrigues 2003: 343). In the second position, ‘new in context’, organizational forms are new if they are novel to a particular industry or context, even if the organizational form has been present in other contexts for a substantial period of time. So a new organization form for accounting firms is the change to a ‘multidisciplinary practice including accountants, lawyers and consultants’ (Greenwood



et al. 2002: 64). Likewise, ‘some national accounting firms are moving to a new organizational form referred to as the Managerial Professional Bureaucracy’ (Brown and Cooper 1996: 67). Similarly, ‘while “external hybrids” are perhaps seldom entirely new organizational innovations per se, they are now used on a much more massive scale, and they are applied in new contexts’ (Foss 2002a: 4). The ‘new in time’ position is associated with theories such as agency theory (Child and Rodrigues 2003) and social comparison theory (Conner 2003), while the ‘new in context’ position is associated with institutional theory (e.g. Greenwood et al. 2002) and organizational economics (Foss 2002a). Some scholars, such as Foss (2002a), recognize that new organizational forms that first emerged a decade ago have spread more recently to new organizational contexts, such that ‘new in time’ intersects with ‘new in context’. Nonetheless, widespread agreement about a definition of newness has escaped the new organizational forms literature, impacting upon the homogeneity of the concept and of the field of study.

Discussion: Creating a Generative Dialogue about New Organizational Forms There has been limited reflection by writers and researchers on the development of the new organizational forms field and there have been few attempts to systematically map its terrain. In the above discussion, we identified five divergent assumptions present in arguments about new organizational forms. Hence, on some of the literature’s defining research questions – the type of change new forms represent, the outcomes of adopting a new organizational form, the drivers for changing to a new form, the level of analysis for conceptualizing new forms and the definition of ‘newness’ – scholars invoke contrasting research approaches and conclusions. What is curious is that, despite the variance, the term ‘new organizational forms’ is often used as if it has a commonly understood meaning. As such, the heterogeneity of positions underlying its use is not widely acknowledged or debated. The heterogeneity is perhaps not surprising, given the variety of theories that employ the concept of new organizational forms, ranging from population ecology, institutional theory, organizational economics, resource-based theory, contingency theory, living-systems theory and co-evolutionary theory to social interaction theory, processual theory, social presence communication theory and agency theory. Ontological and epistemological assumptions vary across these theories (cf. Burrell and Morgan 1979), which has led to ‘paradigm wars’ (De Cock and Jeanes 2006; MacLean 2006), and sparked debate about the commensurability or otherwise of different theoretical traditions. If talk about new organizational forms tends to occur within differing theoretical traditions rather than across these traditions, then this is part of This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.


the wider reality of the field of organization theory and its ‘private language games’ (cf. Weinstein and Weinstein 1998). Responses to the issue of paradigm incommensurability vary. One response is to accept that epistemological development occurs within different theoretical traditions and this is inherent to the field. This has led to debates about the value of incommensurable theoretical traditions. For some, diversity is decried because the field is unlikely to develop a consistent body of knowledge about organizational phenomena (Pfeffer 1993); for others, diversity is celebrated because it represents ‘an open academic marketplace of ideas’ (Cannella and Paetzold 1994: 338) which guards against scientific authoritarianism (Jackson and Carter 1991). A second response is to address incommensurability by adopting a politicization approach and avoiding ‘buying into’ either the search for the middle ground or the language games of different approaches (De Cock and Jeanes 2006). A third response is to assert the ability of one particular approach to eliminate paradigm walls, such as an interpretive framework (see Watkins-Marhys and Lowe 2005), complexity sciences (see Mathews et al. 1999) or structuration theory (see Weaver and Gioia 1994). A fourth response is to reposition the concept of incommensurability through new ‘readings’, such as arguing that paradigm incommensurability may mean positions are undifferentiated rather than oppositional (Davies and Fitchett 2005). A fifth response is to shift the ground from theoretical incommensurability to practice-based commensurability (Scherer and Steinmann 1999). A sixth response is to adopt a postmodern perspective and focus on the discourse of incommensurability per se (Weinstein and Weinstein 1998). Clearly, the issue of incommensurability continues to plague the field of organization studies, with different responses entailing different approaches and assumptions. Without resolving the dilemmas suggested by the above responses, we are nevertheless attracted to an early view in the debate, which, drawing on Kuhn (1962), argued that ‘there is continuity as well as incommensurability in the process of theory development’ (Willmott 1993: 681). Willmott suggests that ‘although communication between alternative sets of worldviews is never isomorphic, such communication is not only possible, but is a necessary condition of theory development’ (1993: 688; italics in original). Consistent with Willmott, we argue a need to develop communication about new organizational forms across the different ‘worldviews’ or theoretical traditions in which it is discussed. Such communication is needed to enable bridge building across these traditions in order to identify a common stock of knowledge about new organizational forms and help researchers acknowledge, if not accept, any remaining incommensurable assumptions and the impact of these differences on new organizational forms research. We are calling on researchers to engage in a generative dialogue about new organizational forms. By ‘generative dialogue’ we mean a conversation that ‘allows for diverse perspectives and interests within a system to



interrelate with one another’ (Gerard and Ellinor 2001: 4). While we cannot be definitive about the final outcome of such a dialogue, we can nevertheless identify the ‘scholarly markers’ that will indicate its presence. To do this, we borrow and adapt a framework developed by Gergen et al. (2004). They suggest that generative dialogue is needed to facilitate the organizing process or what they term ‘relational coordination’ in organizations (Gergen et al.: 44). Relational coordination is a process that, through dialogue, produces shared realities. We adapt this framework by arguing that ‘relational coordination’ is needed to facilitate generative dialogue across the new organizational forms literature as a fragmented field of knowledge. Gergen et al. (2004: 45) propose seven core components of generative dialogue. Below, we outline these components, suggest how they can help to consolidate and develop generative dialogue about new organizational forms, and identify instances of generative dialogue already present in the new organizational forms literature.

Pivotal Act of Affirmation By affirming the existence of others’ assertions, meaningful connections are made and ‘conjoint realities’ are established (Gergen et al. 2004: 45). Affirmation grants worth and validity to the other speaker or writer, whereas failure to affirm questions the identity of the other (Gergen et al. 2004). Affirmation may take many forms, including paying attention, curiosity and asking questions. It provides acknowledgment of, and exploration of, alternative positions and subjects. In the new organizational forms literature, affirmation of alternative assumptions is relatively underdeveloped. Pettigrew and Fenton (2000b) form one exception, in acknowledging differing approaches used in the field, including the resource-based view of the firm, network theory and cognitive and decision-making processes. Foss (2002b) forms another exception in identifying how different fields, sub-fields and disciplines populate discussion of new organization forms. Most writers, however, fail to affirm dif ferent theoretical positions. Wider affirmation of the diversity of approaches within the field, and of the different assumptions that are invoked, is needed to create generative dialogue about new organizational forms.

Productive Difference Affirmation is the first step in productive dialogue, but it does not necessitate assent or agreement. Generative dialogue may occur through building upon acknowledged differences in order to create new meaning. New meanings are productive when they extend a position, add new, associated ideas or bring new voices into the conversation (Gergen et al. 2004: 47). Generative dialogue, therefore, considers alternatives and generates distinctions. We have shown that differences exist in the new organizational forms literature. This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.


However, because differences remain relatively unaffirmed by other writers, there is little cross-theory debate about these differences or consideration about how they might be addressed to further develop the field. As a result, differences appear unproductive or simply unacknowledged. One exception that we noted earlier, however, is Gooderham and Ulset (2002), who contested Bartlett and Ghoshal’s (1995) assertion that the transnational is a new organizational form radically different to the traditional multinational form (M-form). Such debates serve as both affirmation of alternative theoretical perspectives and provide the potential for productive differences to be established and explored. More generally, and as argued elsewhere, debates themselves are a form of engagement for furthering organizational knowledge about new organizational forms (Palmer and Hardy 2000: 20–33).

Creation of Coherence Coherence is a third feature of generate dialogue. To create conversational coherence, turn-taking is required, which involves ‘repeating conversational topics, offering comments relevant to a recognized issue, and providing answers to preceding questions’ (Gergen et al. 2004: 47). Metonymic reflection is another way of generating coherence. By including elements of other speakers’ or writers’ assertions in any new assertions, a coherent rather than disjointed conversation can proceed. Co-evolution of new organizational forms is one area that has attempted theory development by ‘talking across’ two positions, those of intra-organizational and inter-organizational change. Co-evolution argues that organization-level strategic change co-evolves with environmental and organization population changes. As such, co-evolution offers a potential bridge between strategic management and organization ecology’s different stances on the adaptation–selection debate (Lewin et al. 1999). Similar attempts to ‘create coherence’ can be found in Westenholz et al.’s (2006: 893) Special Edition, where they argue that both macro and micro processes need be brought together to understand how new organizational practices emerge and become diffused.

Narrative and Temporal Integration Integrating assertions temporally into a compelling narrative develops a dia logue of historical depth (Gergen et al. 2004). Accounts from the past are then used to enlighten, validate or extend present accounts (Gergen et al. 2004). In the new organizational forms literature, the opportunity exists for temporal-based narratives. For example, early enthusiasm about new organizational forms targeted at the practitioner audience was focused on dismantling bureaucracy and replacing it with new forms. However, some early zealots later changed their position. Tom Peters initially advocated that This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.


practitioners rid organizations from ‘vertically-oriented, staff-driven, thickheaded corporate structures’ (Peters 1992: 13). Later, he acknowledged that he had been ‘thriving a little bit too much on chaos’ and that there was a continuing role for bureaucracy (Peters 1996: 30). While this example is not a formal theory-based one, it does illustrate how integrating seemingly disparate, fragmented statements into a temporal narrative ensures a better understanding of the field’s development.

Repetitive Sequences (Dialogic Ritual) Generative dialogue needs repetition of key concepts, actions, relationships and scenarios, or a dialogic ritual, in order to be effective (Gergen et al. 2004). To avoid stagnation of meaning and inflexibility, only the core, and not all concepts, require repetition. Establishing an agreed usage with common understandings of points of convergence and divergence can then be facilitated by constant repetition. This process also helps to establish building blocks, reinforce the core areas of collaborative practice and enable ‘turn-taking’ as new knowledge develops. The new organizational forms literature suffers because there is little such dialogic ritual. One exception is the Organization Science special issue that began with the same definitional premise of a virtual organization, then explored different aspects of the communication process including communication content, structure and effectiveness (DeSanctis and Monge 1999). Although this turn-taking is valuable, dialogic ritual requires more than repetition among specific groups of writers. Rather, conversation needs to take place across multiple theoretical traditions, otherwise repetition will serve only to reinforce coherence within subsections of the field.

Reflexive Punctuation As meanings are inherently ambiguous, reflecting on the field periodically to assess what has been achieved and what requires further discussion is necessary (Gergen et al. 2004). By stopping to reflect on the accumulated dialogue, participants can consider objectives, maxims and future directions. This paper, by identifying the contrasting positions used within the new organizational forms literature, serves as one step in the reflective process. Journal special issues often serve as an opportunity for reflection but, in the case of the new organizational forms literature, special issues have appeared more concerned with asserting new points of view or speaking to new audiences, rather than consolidating what has been learnt. For example, The International Journal of the Economics of Business special issue acknowledged how ill-defined the concept of new organizational forms is but, instead of seeking to assess and consolidate differences, it sought to question why economists were missing from the field (Foss 2002a).



Constructing Bonds and Boundaries Generative dialogue relies upon boundary shifting, from ‘I’ to ‘we’, to establish collective statements about a field and proclaim a community of participants in the dialogue (Gergen et al. 2004). Currently, within the new organizational forms literature, there is a plurality of disconnected sub-communities. This plurality results from the existence of different writers grounding their work in different theoretical traditions, with little cross-boundary dialogue. In one contribution to constructing bonds across the field, Palmer and Dunford (1997) reviewed some 100 books and articles on new organizational forms in order to identify common ground. They identified eight recurring practices that underlie new organizational forms writings: collaborative networks/alliances, outsourcing of non-core activities, disaggregation of business units, de-layering, reduced internal and external boundaries, flexible work groups, empowerment and short-term staffing. Establishing generic, rather than fragmented, understandings of ‘who we are’ in the new organizational forms literature will assist in opening up generative dialogue about the field and its points of convergence and divergence.

Conclusion This paper has sought to make three contributions to the new organizational forms field. First, through an analysis of this literature, we have identified five differing, often unacknowledged, assumptions across the field. These differing assumptions illustrate the fragmented epistemology that exists about new organizational forms among scholars who use the concept. Second, we have argued that scholars should not shrug their shoulders at this situation, by pointing to the incommensurability of the theoretical traditions that use the concept. Rather, attempts at communication across theoretical traditions are needed so that points of both convergence and divergence in knowledge and assumptions about new organizational forms can be identified. Third, we have drawn on Gergen et al. (2004) to argue that such a communication process entails embracing a generative dialogue about new organizational forms. We outline seven ‘scholarly markers’ indicative of a generative dialogue and suggest these will assist in addressing, at least in part, the fragmentation that currently characterizes the new organizational forms literature. The aim, we suggest, is not ‘monologues that overwhelm’, but rather ‘dialogues that reconcile’ (Weick 1999: 804).

Note The authors greatly acknowledge the assistance of the Australian Research Council Discovery Grant # DP0211061 in the production of this paper.



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20 The Rise of Post-Bureaucracy: Theorists’ Fancy or Organizational Praxis? Phil Johnson, Geoffrey Wood, Chris Brewster and Michael Brookes

Introduction

O

ver the last two decades, a popular discourse has flourished that claims that work organizations confront a time of all-pervasive social, economic, political and technological change variously referred to as: the end of organized capitalism (Lash and Urry, 1987); the age of unreason (Handy, 1989); post-capitalist society (Drucker, 1993); a runaway world (Giddens, 1999). Regardless of the label used, a uniting axiom is that we have entered a new, unstable historical configuration, where the processes of production, distribution, exchange and consumption have accelerated and become increasingly diverse, specialized and temporary: a destabilized capitalism (e.g. Bluestone and Harrison, 1988; Rifkind, 2000) characterized by ‘globalization and relativization’ (Robertson, 1992), ‘intensified risk and reflexivity’ (Beck, 1992, 1997, 2000a, 2000b), ‘heterogenization’ (Daudi, 1990) and ‘time – space compression’ (Castells, 2000a, 2000b, 2004; Harvey, 1989). A key outcome of these developments is thought to be the emergence of new organizational designs as managers try to cope with irreversible dramatic changes – and changes that are thought to be gaining speed (e.g. Clegg, 1990; Davis and Meyer, 1998). According to this thesis, the main casualties here are bureaucratic organizations that are seen as incapable of coping efficiently with this new world order (e.g. Castells, 1996; Hastings, 1993; Heckscher, 1994; Heydebrand, 1989; Perrone, 1997). Source: International Sociology, 24(1) (2009): 37–60.



Summarizing this school of thought, Osbourne and Gaebler argued that bureaucratic organizations ‘increasingly fail us’ because what is demanded are institutions that are extremely flexible and adaptable, ‘that lead by per suasion and incentives rather than commands; that give their employees a sense of meaning and control, even ownership’ (Osbourne and Gaebler, 1992: 15). Key elements of this thesis are the immanent demise of bureau cratic organizations and their irrefutable replacement by an emergent alter native organizational form that goes ‘beyond bureaucracy’ (Laffin, 1998), to even ‘banish bureaucracy’ in order to constitute an ostensibly new work order (Osbourne and Plastrik, 1998) – the putative post-bureaucracy. The latter is represented as a flatter, less hierarchical, more networked and flexible organization, wherein employees are necessarily vested with high degrees of ‘responsible autonomy’ so as to cope with a more volatile work place (e.g. Adler, 2001; Applebaum et al., 2000; Kalleberg, 2001; Volberda, 1998; Wood, 1999). In sum, according to an extensive and expanding litera ture, we should have been witnessing the emergence of post-bureaucracies in response to the terminal ills that are assumed to afflict bureaucracies. The purpose of this article is to test these claims empirically. We proceed in the following manner: first, we explore the theoretical rationale underpinning the post-bureaucratic thesis; second, through a review of the relevant literature, we define the key characteristics of the putative postbureaucracy and identify responsible autonomy as its hallmark; third, we identify several factors that may mediate the adoption of post-bureaucratic features; fourth, we deduce three hypotheses that use responsible autonomy as a proxy for post-bureaucracy; fifth, these hypotheses are tested using longitudinal and comparative data collected by four transnational surveys conducted between 1991 and 2003; and we conclude with a discussion of the implications of the findings for the post-bureaucratic thesis.

Defining Post-Bureaucracy Bureaucracies, as an ideal type, are dependent upon hierarchically imposed rules, founded upon rational-legal authority as an epistemologically legitimate means of command and control. By contrast, it is often claimed that the post-bureaucratic organizational form liberates employees from the increasingly dysfunctional hierarchical constraints engendered by bureaucracies and enhances their ability to deal with the unpredictable requirements of an increasingly volatile workplace caused by the social and economic changes associated with destabilized capitalism (Adler, 2001; Beneviste, 1994). Postbureaucracies, it is argued, require and create functionally flexible highperformance workforces (Applebaum et al., 2000; Kalleberg, 2001), where employees are empowered to exercise discretion and cope creatively with discontinuous change by continuously (re)developing their organizational


Johnson et al. • The Rise of Post-Bureaucracy 453

roles in the face of the shifting demands created by destabilization (Volberda, 1998; Wood, 1999). Such diffusion downwards serves to blur the division of managerial and other forms of labour that was based upon a divorce of concep tion of how tasks were to be done from their actual execution – a critical feature of bureaucratized labour processes (Littler, 1982). In turn, these increasing levels of uncertainty and change require managers to develop away from roles founded upon their authoritative articulation of (usually incalculable and inevitably dysfunctional) rules aimed at the direct control of subordinates’ workplace behaviours (see, for example, Champy, 1995; Kanter, 1989; Mintzberg, 1998; White, 1994). Instead, the requirement is for managers capable of deploying ‘learning leadership’ (Senge, 1990) in the form of horizontal communication and dialogue in mutually therapeutic relationships (Tucker, 1999). Although the articulation of this alternative managerial role may entail the search for new bases of legitimacy, the perceived need for this reconfiguration is to facilitate the participation of self-directed employees in decision-making (Applegate, 1998; Hendry, 2006; Smith, 1997) so that employees can collaboratively adapt and deploy their continuously evolving task-related knowledge in a responsible manner (Drucker, 1993, 1999; Mueller and Dyerson, 1999; Scarborough, 1998). In making these assertions, these writers implicitly and explicitly drew heavily on the already burgeoning literature on employee responsible autonomy.

Employee Responsible Autonomy While there is a considerable body of literature that points to the existence of a trend towards post-bureaucracy, there remains much debate as to its specific nature (Hopfl, 2006: 8). In the simplest sense, post-bureaucracy is about the presence of non-hierarchical elements in an organization (Hopfl, 2006: 19; McSweeney, 2006). This may range from giving more employees a say in how work is organized, reducing management numbers and making them less intrusive through to a complete redesign of organizational forms. It is recognized that post-bureaucracy represents a broad and com plex phenomenon: for the purposes of this article, we only focus on a single dimension – the degree of autonomy the employees are allocated within the firm (cf. Hopfl, 2006; McSweeney, 2006). Here a caveat is in order: postbureaucracy/bureaucracy are not mutually exclusive or binary concepts: mixed models are possible (Hales, 2002; Harris, 2006: 80). However, investigating a key component of a particular phenomenon may shed further light on the broader process of organizational change. According employees more autonomy is only one part of the picture; the findings of this article need to be assessed in relation to those of other studies focusing on structural changes in organizational structures; but genuine network organizations remain relatively uncommon outside specific This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.


high-technology industries (see Martin, 2006: 143–4). A focus on internal autonomy allows us to explore a greater range of organizations, industries and social contexts than would otherwise be possible. As Castells summarizes, post-bureaucratic organizations have to cope with uncertainty through a ‘greater need for an autonomous educated worker able and willing to program and decide entire sequences of work’ (Castells, 1996: 241). This leads us to a central plank of the post-bureaucratic thesis: relating to how shared general principles, rather than rules, guide and integrate members’ actions (Heckscher, 1994: 24–8). The ‘master concept’ here is the replacement of bureaucratic controls with ‘structures that develop informed consent’ where command is replaced by dialogue, persuasion and trust (Heckscher, 1994: 24; see also Osbourne and Plastrik, 1998). So while the post-bureaucratic division of labour is conceived as being more informal, dedifferentiated and flexible, it also requires high levels of sociotechnical participation: where employees’ roles are extended to their local involvement in deciding the means through which strategic decisions are implemented (Abrahamsson, 1977: 189). As such, they are thereby (re)appropriating certain management functions. Such participation and autonomy may pose problems of integration (see, for example, Barker, 1999). The solution to this perceived problem is presented in the literature as requiring a shift from bureaucratic modalities of control to less obtrusive culturally based, normative, ideational or clan, modalities as more viable means of disciplining employees (see Adler, 2001; Alvesson and Willmott, 2002; Hodgson, 2004; Ouchi, 1980; Sewell, 1998; Volberda, 1998) that enable the integration of an ‘otherwise loosely coupled, centrifugal system’ (Heydebrand, 1989: 327). Here the ostensible aim is to harness employees’ local knowledge and adaptability so as to allow them to exercise their discretion and participate in self-management in a responsibly autonomous manner, the organization having won ‘their loyalty to the firm’s ideals (the competitive struggle) ideologically’ (Friedman, 1977: 5; 1990). Thereby, the control–consent dilemma is notionally resolved through the delineation of employees’ exercise of autonomy and power through reconstructing their subjectivity in line with management’s requirements (Elmes and Smith, 2001; Fournier, 1999; Hardt and Negri, 2000; Knights and McCabe, 2001; Maravelias, 2003). The presence of responsible autonomy is therefore a key indicator of the development of post-bureaucracy (Friedman, 1977, 1990). This may reflect greater participation in decision-making and the ability of employees to feed information to management. As such, it does not include forms of non-decision related (other than in terms of choosing to enter or not to enter the scheme) participation such as financial participation, nor information systems that are top-down. Works councils may give employees a greater say in the social organization of work (Müller-Jentsch, 1997) or working time (Singe and Croucher, 2003). Individual employees may develop their organizational role and capacities not only through top-down initiatives but also through This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.


project teamwork and/or involvement, and involvement in cross-organizational or cross-functional tasks (see Kochan and Osterman, 1998: 228). Practices such as peer appraisal are logically linked to responsible autonomy (Gold, 2001: 265). The ability of employees safely and effectively to voice views conflicting with the managerial orthodoxy represents an important component of responsible autonomy. Greater responsible autonomy in these areas represents a delegation of authority not only from line management, but also a delegation of many of the traditional roles of the personnel function, to the shopfloor.1

Research Questions What remains unclear from the literature noted so far is the extent to which the conceptualized and prescribed post-bureaucratic modes of organization have been adopted in practice (see also Clegg and Courpasson, 2004). Since responsible autonomy can be seen asa powerful exemplar of the move to post-bureaucratic organizations, a key empirical question becomes: to what extent has there been an increase in employee’s self-management or responsible autonomy? However, in order to investigate this question it is necessary to take into account several factors that could mediate the adoption of postbureaucratic features.

Intervening Factors Organizational size is likely to have an effect on the relative propensity of organizations to streamline bureaucratic systems, though there is considerably more debate as to its exact effects. It has been argued that larger organizations are likely to have disproportionately larger and wasteful bureaucracies resistant to change (Adams and Brock, 1985). Due to economies of scale, it can also be argued that larger organizations are likely to have greater resources at their disposal, and more able to experiment with new forms of work organization (Haveman, 1993), including those allowing for greater employee autonomy (Brewster et al., 2006). Moreover, it is often suggested that mechanisms to promote responsi ble autonomy are more likely to be encountered in some national settings than others, reflecting institutional context and informal rules and norms (Appelbaum et al., 2000; see also Lincoln and Kalleberg, 1990; Nonaka and Takeuchi, 1998). While much of the literature on post-bureaucracy is founded on the tacit assumption of an, albeit uneven, ‘global’ tendency towards more responsible autonomy, the varieties of capitalism literature points to the embedded nature of national institutional forms, making the development of national business systems a path-dependent process, resulting in persistent national diversity (Whitley, 1999). Moves towards post-bureaucratization This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.


may be more rapid in some contexts than others. A common distinction is drawn between liberal market economies (LMEs), such as Britain and the US, and cooperative economies, such as the ‘Rhineland model’ and cooperative market economies (CMEs) of Western Europe and developed Far Eastern economies, most notably Japan (Dore, 2001; Hall and Soskice, 2001; Lincoln and Kalleberg, 1990). It is often argued that the latter are more likely to be associated with ‘progressive’ or high-commitment organizational practices commensurable with responsible autonomy practices (Amable, 2003; Lincoln and Kalleberg, 1990; see also Guest, 2001: 98). Given the important differences in the CME category between Rhineland-type economies such as Germany, flexicurity economies (where lifelong training compensates for weaker employee tenure) such as Denmark, and Scandinavian flexible corporatist economies such as Sweden (see Amable, 2003; Harcourt and Wood, 2007), we have included one example of each in our analysis. In order to test the extent to which mechanisms for promoting responsible autonomy are more likely to be encountered in cooperative economies than liberal market ones, we also look at a single LME, the UK, as it is usually regarded as typical of this category of national setting (see Dore, 2001; Hall and Soskice, 2001) and thereby meets our comparative requirements here in a parsimonious fashion despite the likelihood that an analysis covering a larger number of such economies would shed further light upon variations within this very broad category. At a subnational level, sectoral-specific factors – such as the deployment of sectoral-specific technologies and the impact of variations in customer markets – may impact on the relative propensity to implement policies and practices associated with responsible autonomy (Hirst and Zeitlin, 1997); hence, we explore the effects of sector on the use of such practices. So, using responsible autonomy as our proxy for post-bureaucracy, we hypothesize as follows: Hypothesis 1: Responsible autonomy is widespread, and becoming increasingly prevalent. Hypothesis 2: Responsible autonomy is more widespread in cooperative economies than liberal market economies. Hypothesis 3: Responsible autonomy may vary from sector to sector, and according to the size of firm.

Methodology Much of the recently published empirical research that investigates the incidence and effects of post-bureaucracy in contemporary organizations has tended to use in-depth case study methodology (e.g. Briand and Bellemare, 2006; Fournier, 1999; Hales 2002; Harris, 2006; Hodgson, 2004; Josserand et al., 2006; Kellogg et al., 2006; Maravelias, 2003; Raisanen and Linde, 2004). This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.


In this respect, the research reported in this article is unusual in that it use uses survey methodology that is both comparative and longitudinal. Here we assess the increased prevalence of all the various mechanisms for promoting responsible autonomy, using the repeating Cranet survey, which now contains evidence on human resource management policies and practices within private and public sector organizations in 22 European countries (Brewster et al., 2004). The survey covers a range of issues on company policies and practices in HRM and is directed to the most senior HR professional. It is recognized that the usage of management-sourced information to measure empowerment is not an unproblematic issue. In practice, managers may formally espouse a rhet oric of debureaucratization – and claim policies are in place to promote this – while tightening up on formal procedures and targets (McSweeney, 2006: 27). Hence we have only focused on the existence of specific HRM practices (using close-ended questions, simply exploring whether practices are present or absent, rather than open-ended questions, allowing for explanations and aspirations). At the same time, exploring HRM-related dimensions of responsible autonomy means that the associated technical and organizational-structural dimensions are not covered, other than in the broadest possible context of size and sectoral effects: this constitutes a further limitation to this study. The dataset used here covers four waves of the Cranet survey (i.e. 1991, 1995, 1999/2000 and 2003/4). These data permit our longitudinal analysis to be brought close to the present in relation to the issues in hand (Brewster et al., 2007b). The data for each country are representative with respect to size of industrial sectors by employment, with each subsequent crosssectional wave being adjusted to reflect changes in the relative size of indus trial sectors (Brewster et al., 2007b). Hence the sample remains representative across the whole period considered. For the purpose of this study, data from the UK, Germany, Sweden and Denmark are used. First, this is because the UK can clearly be defined as an LME, while the other three are CMEs. And, second, data for these countries are available for all four waves. There are two broad alternative ways of assessing the degree of autonomy vested in employees in terms of overall HR policies and practices. The first approach explores the ability of employees to impact on firm policies within one or both of two distinct spheres: employment and work relations (Kessler and Purcell, 2003; Geary, 2003; see also Guest, 2001). This would encompass, first, the negotiation and renegotiation of the employment contract, and, second, the degree to which employees may decide how the work is done (Edwards, 2003). Alternatively, core strands of the varieties of capitalism literature locate employee autonomy in terms of the degree of delegation to employees in two distinct areas: more formal delegation through collective bargaining and formally constituted and defined structures, such as works councils, and more open-ended forms of delegation such as teamworking (Whitley, 1999; see also Hall and Soskice, 2001). The latter approach has been adopted for this article, given our cross-national scope, and our exploration of the effects of national institutional contexts: this will make our This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.


Table 1: Dependent variable definitions Dependent variable Collective voice

Definition Communicate views to management through a trade union representative, joint consultative committee or works council. Communicate views to management through attitude surveys or suggestion schemes. Some working hours may be determined by employees.

Individual voice Flexitime Peer appraisal Cross-functional tasks

There is a formal appraisal system involving peers. Joint consultative committee/ works council Organization has a joint consultative committee or works council. Cross-functional tasks are used as part of non-managerial career development.

Project teamworking

Project teamwork is used as part of non-managerial career development.

analysis more directly comparable with previous research of a similar scope (cf. Brookes et al., 2005; Hall and Soskice, 2001; Whitley, 1999). Formally constituted delegation most commonly takes place via collective bargaining and/or through formal participative and consultative bodies: works councils or joint consultative committees (Brewster et al., 2007a; Whitley, 1999). Delegation may also assume forms that are either more open ended, or operate through mechanisms vested with less formal structures and constitutional powers (see Brewster et al., 2007a; Whitley, 1999). The latter would include the ability of employees to make choices as to the timing of the working day or week (flexitime), individual and more consultative (as adverse to participative) voice mechanisms such as team briefings, project teamworking and associated peer appraisals, and the training of staff in cross-functional tasks giving them the powers to operate at a greater range of levels or areas (Brewster et al., 2007a, 2007b; Whitley, 1999). Logit models are estimated with each of these in turn being used as the dependent variable, all of the dependent variables are dichotomous with 1 indicating yes and 0 no and each is formally defined in Table 1. Reading down Table 1 indicates how each of the dependent variables is measured, therefore collective voice is deemed to be present within the organization if employees are able to communicate their views to management through a trade union representative or a joint consultative committee/works council. Individual voice is present if employees can do similarly through attitude surveys or suggestion schemes, and flexitime is taken as being in place if the employee can determine at least some of their working hours, and so on for the other dependent variables. In terms of the explanatory variables, first, dummy variables are used to represent each of the four waves, with 2003/4 as the reference group, this enables Hypothesis 1 to be tested since it predicts that the use of these mech anisms will increase over time. The size of the organization, measured by the total number of employees, plus dummy variables for industrial sector, are included as explanatory variables. In addition to testing Hypothesis 3, controlling for these is important since the prevalence of these mechanisms is likely to be affected by the environment in which the organization operates. This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.


Finally, a further dummy variable is included to identify the type of economy, this takes the value of 1 for the CMEs of Germany, Sweden and Denmark and 0 otherwise, hence the LME of the UK is the reference category. This then enables Hypothesis 2 to be explored.

Findings Tables 2–4 report the results from estimating logit models separately for each of the indicators of responsible autonomy, using the explanatory variables outlined in the previous section. The reference category is a UK metal manufacturing firm surveyed in the 2003/4 round of data collection. The sample size changes because for some of the indicators the information was not available in earlier surveys, the extreme case being the staff development questions which were only present in the 2003/4 questionnaire. Table 2 reports the results for the models where the dependent variables were recorded in all four waves, Table 3 for those available from 1995 onwards and Table 4 for those collected only in the most recent survey. Each of the columns records the estimated coefficients and t-ratios for the models (lack of space and the need for clarity prevent all of the results appearing in a single table). So, for example, Table 2 reports the results for the models with collective voice, individual voice and flexitime respectively as the dependent variables. As a further example, under collective voice the coefficient on total employees is 0.053 indicating that increasing the size of the organization by 1000 would increase the likelihood function by 0.053, i.e a larger firm would be more likely to make use of collective voice, and so on. Tables 3 and 4 follow the same format using an identical set of explanatory variables. Table 3 records the models where the dependent variable is available in 1995, 1999 and again in 2003/4, i.e. peer appraisal and the presence of a joint consultative committee/works council. With Table 4 reporting those models only estimable for 2003/4, these being the use of cross-functional tasks and teamworking in non-managerial career development.

Discussion First of all, year dummies were proven to be consistently significant. Over each wave, there was evidence that responsible autonomy was becoming more widespread in terms of most of the measures selected. However, with collective voice and flexitime, the path oscillates rather than increases smoothly. The latter is probably due to the tendency for many firms – par ticularly those operating in CMEs – to make greater use of flexitime arrangements as part and parcel of adjusting hours worked, in order to gain some of the benefits associated with numerical flexibility without having to make use This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.


Table 2: Logit results for collective voice, individual voice and flexitime

Constant Total no. of employees (000s) Coordinated market economy 1991 1995 1999 Agriculture, hunting, forestry, fishing Energy and water Chemical products Manufacturing other than metal Building and civil engineering Retail and distribution Transport and communication Banking, finance, insurance Personal, domestic, recreational services Health services Other services Education Dependent variable Mean Number of observations Iterations Log likelihood function Restricted log likelihood χ2 d.f.

Collective voice Coeff. t-ratio

Individual voice Coeff. t-ratio

Flexitime Coeff. t-ratio

Mean

1.135*** 0.053***

12.2 7.0

4.117*** 0.018***

20.6 3.1

−0.37*** −4.7 0.039*** 7.9

3.55

1.291***

21.5

0.393***

5.1

1.470*** 29.1

0.51

−0.32*** 0.197** −0.154* −1.18***

−4.0 2.2 −1.8 −4.8

−3.06*** −0.75*** −0.63*** −1.07***

−16.7 −3.5 −2.9 −3.1

−0.57*** −8.2 0.263*** 3.5 0.013 0.2 0.091 0.4

0.34 0.24 0.23 0.01

0.107 −0.39*** 0.057

0.6 −2.7 0.6

−0.053 0.458** −0.241**

−0.2 2.1 −2.0

0.400*** 2.8 0.289** 2.3 −0.32*** −4.2

0.04 0.05 0.19

−1.19***

−8.9

−1.03***

−6.0

−0.68***

−5.5

0.04

−1.44*** −0.266*

−14.3 −1.9

−0.50*** −0.299*

−3.5 −1.6

−0.162* 0.095

−1.8 0.8

0.10 0.06

−1.51*** −1.49***

−16.0 −5.9

−0.217* −0.568

−1.6 −1.4

0.232*** 0.078

2.7 0.3

0.12 0.01

0.927*** −0.68*** 1.124***

5.3 −4.9 5.5

−0.57*** −0.56*** −1.10***

−3.4 −2.8 −6.0

1.490*** 11.7 0.531*** 4.1 0.685*** 5.7

0.07 0.04 0.05

Collective voice

Individual voice

Flexitime

0.772 8358 9 −3815 −4484 1337.5 17

0.89 8358 8 −2331 −2891 1121.3 17

0.596 8358 8 −4926 −5637 1422.4 17

*,** and *** denotes significance at the 10, 5 and 1 percent levels respectively.

of widespread redundancies (see Hunt, 1998: 179). A temporary increase in the incidence of flexitime could reflect the responses of organizations to periodic adverse changes in the external environment, and a reduction to the amelioration thereof; this oscillation would not, however, preclude a longer term trend to a greater use of flexitime. Changes in the nature and extent of collective voice may again reflect changes in the external environment; in addition to adjustments in practices in line with periodic legislative changes, the propensity of firms to engage in collective bargaining would reflect the strategies and policies of trade unions (Hurd, 2004). However, such changes would not preclude the possibility of long-term trends – above all, to the greater use of works councils in governing a range of issues relating to work organization and the employment contract, even if this is in the form of the relatively weak European Works Councils (see Brewster et al., 2007a). Indeed, as Hall and Soskice (2001: 25) note, works councils can play a crucial role in ensuring that other forms of


Johnson et al. • The Rise of Post-Bureaucracy 461 Table 3: Logit results for peer appraisal and joint consultative committees/work councils Peer appraisal Constant Total no. of employees (000s) Coordinated market economy 1991 1995 1999 Agriculture, hunting, forestry, fishing Energy and water Chemical products Manufacturing other than metal Building and civil engineering Retail and distribution Transport and communication Banking, finance, insurance Personal, domestic, recreational services Health services Other services Education Dependent variable Mean Number of observations Iterations Log likelihood function Restricted log likelihood c2 d.f.

JCC/WC present

Coeff. –1.84*** 0.0001

t–ratio –12.5 0.2

Coeff. 0.580*** 0.014***

t–ratio 6.5 3.3

Mean

–1.28***

–10.6

0.731***

11.8

0.50

n/a –0.69*** –0.204* –0.755

n/a –5.2 –1.7 –1.0

n/a –1.35*** 0.054 –0.097

n/a –17.7 0.7 –0.3

n/a 0.36 0.34 0.01

–0.124 0.777*** –0.220

–0.3 3.0 –1.2

0.237 0.097 0.088

1.3 0.6 0.9

0.03 0.04 0.18

–0.468

–1.3

–0.75***

–4.8

0.04

–0.141

–0.7

–0.89***

–7.9

0.10

0.006

0.0

–0.109

–0.8

0.06

0.747***

4.5

–0.84***

–8.1

0.12

–0.435

–1.5

0.01

–0.602

–0.8

–0.427* –0.083 0.486***

–1.6 –0.3 2.4

1.760*** –0.305** 1.673*** Peer appraisal 0.075 5548 7 –1365 –1475 220.11 16

3.57

10.7 0.07 –2.1 0.05 9.4 0.07 JCC/WC Present 0.603 5548 8 –3176 –3726 1100.3 16

*, ** and *** denotes significance at the 10, 5 and 1 percent levels respectively.

responsible autonomy work in the manner intended. Works councils tend to be vested with considerable powers over the use of layoffs and working conditions: this provides employees with greater job security and discourages managers from capitalizing on the insider knowledge shared by employees to arbitrarily change working conditions. In turn, this will encourage employees to invest in firm-specific skills and exert greater effort, helping make other mechanisms for responsible autonomy to work better (Hall and Soskice, 2001). In view of the above, Hypothesis 1 has passed the test – there is a tendency towards the greater usage of responsible autonomy arrangements over time. Second, in most cases there was a significant difference between the specific variety of capitalism and the relative prevalence of specific measures of This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.


Table 4: Logit results for cross-functional tasks and project teamwork

Constant Total no. of employees (000s) Coordinated market economy 1991 1995 1999 Agriculture, hunting, forestry, fishing Energy and water Chemical products Manufacturing other than metal Building and civil engineering Retail and distribution Transport and communication Banking, finance, insurance Personal, domestic, recreational services Health services Other services Education Dependent variable Mean Number of observations Iterations Log likelihood function Restricted log likelihood c2 d.f.

Cross tasks Coeff. t-ratio 2.264*** 10.4 0.0101 0.8

Coeff. 2.813*** 0.116*

Teamwork t-ratio Mean 10.0 1.9 2.11

0.027

0.2

0.222

1.1

0.52

n/a n/a n/a –0.585

n/a n/a n/a –1.0

n/a n/a n/a –0.553

n/a n/a n/a –0.7

n/a n/a n/a 0.02

0.119 0.146 –0.278

0.2 0.3 –1.1

n/a 0.792 –0.341

n/a 0.8 –1.0

n/a 0.03 0.19

0.150

0.3

–0.645

–1.2

0.04

–0.77***

–2.7

–1.26***

–3.7

0.11

–0.308

–0.9

–0.701*

–1.6

0.07

0.009

0.0

–0.326

–0.8

0.13

–1.60***

–2.7

–1.66***

–2.4

0.01

0.848* 0.249 –0.556*

1.7 0.5 –1.8

0.227 0.497 –0.509

0.4 0.7 –1.3

0.07 0.04 0.09

Cross tasks 0.889 1668 7 –564.9 –579.1 28.26 14

Teamwork 0.933 1668 9 –391.4 –408 33.28 13

*, ** and *** denotes significance at the 10, 5 and 1 percent levels respectively.

responsible autonomy. In general, measures to promote responsible autonomy proved more common in CME economies than in the UK. A strong orientation towards maximizing shareholder value within LMEs creates greater short-termism, making it harder to justify investing in mechanisms to promote greater autonomy, where the dividends may only flow in the medium and longer terms (see Dore, 2001). In contrast, there is a tendency for many firms in CMEs to rely on production strategies centring on a highly skilled labour force with a high degree of autonomy (Hall and Soskice, 2001: 24). Again, effective collective bargaining provides a framework for regulating the basic terms and conditions of the employment relationship, imparting a degree of stability and continuity and legitimacy, thus providing a context in which strategies for promoting responsible autonomy may flourish. In contrast, while firms in LMEs may – and often do – experiment with such



measures, the lack of complementary institutions makes such strategies often unstable, with employers tending ‘to fall back on the lower cost route of pure deregulation’ (Thelen, 2001: 74). Legally enforceable employment rights preclude employers from overly opportunistic behaviour: in contrast, within LMEs, employers face intense pressure to respond in kind to competitors seeking short-term cost advantages through labour repression. Hence, much vaunted experiments in responsible autonomy in LME-based organizations have often proved fragile and transitory: examples would range from GM’s Saturn plant to Caterpillar (Moody, 1997). However, as can be seen from the Tables 2–4, there were two exceptions to this general rule. First, peer appraisal was more likely to be encountered in LME-based organizations than CME ones. This would reflect the fact that a greater proportion of employment contracts in LMEs are individual ones. Such contracts more readily lend themselves to individually orientated peer appraisal systems. It is difficult to implement the type of individually orientated incentives – or sanctions – commonly associated with peer appraisal systems without weakening the collective contract significantly. Second, the relationship between the incidence of project teamwork and cross-functional tasks was not significant. This would reflect the multitude of forms project teamwork may assume: the latter can range from genuinely autonomous working teams to clustering of employees around particular clusters of tasks with a strict internal neo-Taylorist division of labour. Again, team-based incentive-based reward systems may represent an alternative to collective bargaining, and, indeed, undermine the latter in the absence of a supportive legislative environment (such as that typically encountered in CMEs). Hence, in general, Hypothesis 2 has passed the test: responsible autonomy is more widespread in CMEs than LMEs. Finally, we found that both firm size and sector significantly affected the propensity of firms to make use of mechanisms to promote responsible autonomy. In general, larger firms are more likely to make use of such mechanisms. Larger organizations may tend to make more use of respon sible autonomy because existing hierarchical constraints make for inefficient and undynamic bureaucracies, which are no longer sustainable in the face of intensifying competition and an increasingly destabilized working environment (Adler, 2001; Beneviste, 1994). An alternative explanation is that the ability of larger organizations to reap economies of scale may free up administrative resources to devote to human resource development and the implementation and sustenance of innovative forms of work organization. Indeed, previous research has indicated that larger organizations are more likely to have proportionately smaller administrative staff components in any event, reflecting such economies; it is wrong to assume that size makes for ‘wasteful bureaucracy’ or that some constitutionality and predictability to organizational procedures is necessarily inefficient (Brewster et al., 2006). In contrast, the research revealed that smaller, supposedly more nimble,



organizations are less likely to make use of responsible autonomy. Greater effectiveness rather than bureaucratic breakdown thus may make for proportionately leaner bureaucracy and greater employee empowerment. This underscores a key issue – high levels of responsible autonomy may indeed be encountered in an organization that in other respects meets the criteria of a bureaucratic organization. People may exercise autonomy in a bureaucratic framework; the divide between bureaucratic and post-bureaucratic is not a binary one, with various forms of hybrids being possible (Harris, 2006: 82). Sector also proved an important determinant. This could represent the product of two distinct factors. First, firms operating in a specific sector will tend to adopt similar practices to minimize transaction costs (Marsden, 1999). Employees moving between firms will have a clearer idea of expectations. Second, specific types of industry perform better within specific varieties of capitalism (Hall and Soskice, 2001; Thelen, 2001). Patient investor behaviour, inter-firm alliances and cooperative industrial relations systems all lend themselves to the type of incremental innovation that is, in turn, conducive to the high value added manufacturing activity commonly encountered in CMEs (Thelen, 2001). In contrast, more fickle investor behaviour, higher levels of adversarial competition and greater external labour market flexibility may encourage not only ‘blue skies’ innovation, but also low value added service sector activity (Thelen, 2001; see also Wright and Dwyer, 2006). Hence, the sectoral variations in practice may partially reflect the effects of national context. Hypothesis 3, therefore, also passes the test: practices vary according to sector and firm size. The systemic economic crisis that began in the early 1970s impelled organizations to infuse new organizational designs and recast internal relationships. In many instances, the adoption of more functionally flexible forms of work organization centring on the greater empowerment of employees has proved conducive to the revival of incrementally innovative high value-added manufacturing activity. In CMEs, this has reflected the ability of firms to benefit from the complementarities that are associated with civil law based employment protection, ‘patient’ forms of corporate governance and cooperative alliances between firms, and with other stakeholders. In LMEs, limited employee rights, and the weakening of the countervailing power of effective unions, have enabled significant numbers of firms to cut costs through low wages and rapidly adjusted sizes of workforces. This does not mean that centralized managerial power has not gone hand in hand with some forms of employee autonomy: for example, limited incentive-based teamwork may take place, centring on commitments to the firm, rather than recognition of a genuine plurality of interests. Other LME-based firms have been able to capitalize on ‘blue skies’ innovations – most notably in the IT and related sectors – benefiting from mobile investor behaviour, and other systemically specific characteristics. In such cases, firms have also pro-



moted the autonomy of workers, encompassing both financial participation (see Brewster et al., 2007a), and pay systems more closely tied to individual performance. While there is clear evidence of dominant patterns of behaviour in the case of each economy type, we cannot draw general conclusions as to the state of LME behaviour based on a single country case. What we have found in the UK appears to vindicate a considerable body of the existing literature: responsible autonomy is rather less common than in the CMEs we looked at (see Brewster et al., 2007a, 2007b; Dore, 2001; Thelen, 2001). Again, the greater incidence of collective forms of representation in the latter context is likely to impart a greater robustness to the process, and make it harder for managers to implement new and more intrusive forms of control, and individual systems of performance appraisal and monitoring. More generally speaking, optimistic accounts of a new post-bureaucratic age of workplace consensus in the UK (e.g. Hirst and Zeitlin, 1997) – and indeed, other LMEs – seem misplaced. Suggestions that since the hierarchical ordering of knowledge is no longer sustainable there will be genuine progress to workplace democracy discount the multitude of forms that increasing employee autonomy may assume. Limited forms of empowerment may make fundamentally labour-repressive production paradigms work better, while more ambitious manifestations of responsible autonomy may revitalize incrementally innovative manufacturing industries, and others lead to the upsurge of new industries characterized by ‘blue skies’ innovation. Nor do these theories take account of the contested nature of workplace relations. Some firms may reap the synergies that flow from an essentially constitutional relationship with employees, making a virtue of the necessity of dealing with employee collectives and accommodating legally entrenched employee rights. Others may, when confronted by intense competition, make extensive use of effective labour repression, taking advantage of legally weak employee rights.

Conclusion The research confirmed both the existence of ongoing evolution and change in the social organization of work, and the uneven nature of the process. The latter would reflect the persistence of subnational, national and – potentially – supernationally specific mechanisms of regulation, mechanisms that impart a coherence and stability to workplace relations. We found national and sectoral-specific variations in the constitutionality and scope of responsible autonomy: responsible autonomy was more common in CMEs than in the UK (an LME), and in smaller organizations, and in certain sectors. There is little doubt that these factors are interconnected: stronger barriers to numerical flexibility in CMEs (it is harder for organizations to dispense



with the services of employees) lead to a stronger emphasis on specialization and skills enhancement, which, in turn, can underpin a greater use of measures to promote responsible autonomy (Hollingsworth, 1997). For a similar reason, certain types of industry are likely to thrive in particular national contexts; the former, in turn, are associated with particular usages of technology and skills, and a greater or lesser tendency to empower employees in specific ways (Thelen, 2001). What these cases have in common are institutional barriers to numerical flexibility (the right to ‘hire and fire’). These barriers make it relatively difficult for firms readily to increase or downsize staff numbers, leading to a greater emphasis on specialization and skills development (Hollingsworth, 1997). At the same time, the greater incidence of collective representation in such contexts is likely to make employee partic ipation more robust and durable: while all forms of responsible autonomy by definition make employees take responsibility for their work and what they produce, it is likely that the control dimensions will be less intrusive and more indirect in a collectivist situation (see Wood et al., 2004). The research confirmed a tendency, over time, for organizations to make greater use of mechanisms to promote greater responsible autonomy, in a wide range of national contexts. This would seemingly support a central proposition of theories of post-bureaucracy: a tendency for organizations to delegate more power to employees over time, reflecting the breakdown of traditional bureaucratically ordered power relations. At the same time, other dimensions to the post-bureaucracy thesis – such as the extent of the dissemination of new organizational forms like network organizations – need further scrutiny before it is possible to conclude that a general trend to postbureaucracy is taking place (see McSweeney, 2006). Despite the importance of the effects of common pressures faced by organizations worldwide, the research highlighted a more uneven and contested process of change, reflecting both the persistence of national, regional and sectoral modes of regulation, and the non-linear and episodic nature of systemic evolution (Hollingsworth, 2007). In some contexts, mechanisms to promote employee involvement and participation are more ambitious than in others. Moreover, the tendency for clusters of mechanisms to be encoun tered together would point to the existence of certain complementarities. Tendencies to the greater empowerment of employees through responsible autonomy remain uneven, and assume a multiplicity of forms: some may reinforce managerial power in key areas – especially where empowerment is on individual lines (McSweeney, 2006: 29; Wood et al., 2004), while oth ers may build on long traditions of codetermination. This would underscore the relevance of non-linear theories that explore the relationship between sectoral, national and supranational institutions and firm-level practices, in accounting for persistent but evolving diversities: general change mediated by continuity and difference (see Boyer, 2006).



Notes We would like to thank the three anonymous reviewers for their very helpful and insightful feedback on earlier drafts of this article. 1. As we have noted, delegation only represents one of the two central dimensions of responsible autonomy (Friedman, 1977, 1990), the other being a considerably stronger emphasis on monitoring and cultural control (McSweeney, 2006). While it is relatively easy to measure autonomy, control is a somewhat more difficult and complex measure. While it is acknowledged that the control dimensions of responsible autonomy would merit a closer and more direct analysis, the present dataset is inappropriate for such a purpose: this clearly constitutes an important agenda for future large-scale surveybased research on organizations and managers.

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SAGE DIRECTIONS IN ORGANIZATION STUDIES VOLUME II

Edited by

Stewart R. Clegg




Contents Volume II Process and Practice Theories 21. Faith, Evidence, and Action: Better Guesses in an Unknowable World Karl E. Weick 22. Organizing Is Both a Verb and a Noun: Weick Meets Whitehead Tore Bakken and Tor Hernes 23. The Sites of Organizations Theodore R. Schatzki 24. Introduction to the Symposium on the Foundations of Organizing: The Contribution from Garfinkel, Goffman and Sacks Dalvir Samra-Fredericks and Francesca Bargiela-Chiappini 25. Goffman on Organizations Peter K. Manning 26. Harold Garfinkel, Ethnomethodology and Workplace Studies Anne Warfield Rawls 27. Organization in Actual Episodes of Work: Harvey Sacks and Organization Studies Nick Llewellyn 28. Organs of Process: Rethinking Human Organization Robert Cooper 29. Organizations as Distinction Generating and Processing Systems: Niklas Luhmann’s Contribution to Organization Studies David Seidl and Kai Helge Becker

3 19 39 61 85 109 143 175 205

Discourses 30. Varieties of Discourse: On the Study of Organizations through Discourse Analysis Mats Alvesson and Dan Karreman 31. Standardization, Globalization and Rationalities of Government Winton Higgins and Kristina Tamm Hallström 32. Discourse Analysis in Organization Studies: The Case for Critical Realism Norman Fairclough 33. Embedded Ethics: Discourse and Power in the New South Wales Police Service Ray Gordon, Stewart Clegg and Martin Kornberger 34. On the Multi-Modality, Materiality and Contingency of Organization Discourse Rick Iedema


229 253 273 301 331

vi Contents

35. Organizational Context and the Discursive Construction of Organizing John A.A. Sillince 36. The Application of Rhetorical Theory in Managerial Research: A Literature Review E. Johanna Hartelius and Larry D. Browning 37. Meaning in Organizational Communication: Why Metaphor Is the Cake, Not the Icing Raymond Hogler, Michael A. Gross, Jackie L. Hartman and Ann L. Cunliffe


349 379 405

Process and Practice Theories



21 Faith, Evidence, and Action: Better Guesses in an Unknowable World Karl E. Weick

‘What the Romantics expressed as the claim that imagination, rather than reason, is the central human faculty was the realization that a talent for speaking differently, rather than arguing well, is the chief instrument of cultural change.’ (Rorty 1989: 111)

That reminds me of a story. Up until the mid 1950s pediatricians refused to believe that parents were beating their children even though they kept seeing X-rays where long bones in arms and legs had been broken and were in different stages of healing. This pattern suggested multiple traumas. But when pediatricians asked parents about these patterns, the parents usually said they didn’t remember and the physicians then diagnosed the child as having ‘brittle bones’. Here’s how Ron Westrum describes this troublesome period. Pediatricians: ‘were used to operating in a clinical context, with little control over what went on beyond the clinic. Many physicians, including pediatricians, had difficulty seeing themselves as the advocate of a child against the parents, even when the child had been savagely beaten. Thus, there was no immediate way to help the children, and it is tempting to hypothesize that the problem would not be recognized until somebody could see a solution. This is a particular application of a more general law: The system cannot think about that over which it has no control.’ (Westrum 1993: 336)




The breakthrough in diagnosing and treating child abuse occurred in the late 1950s when Henry Kempe formed interdisciplinary treatment teams in a Boulder, Colorado, hospital. These teams brought together radiology, pediatrics, and social work. The big change was the addition of social workers. Once social workers joined the team, there was no need for the other members to feel helpless in the face of manifest signs of child abuse because now there was a way to deal with it. Physicians didn’t know what to do with abusing parents but social workers did. They were familiar with protective services and how to separate abusing parents from the children that pediatricians kept handing back to them. With the addition of social workers, ‘Physicians now became more willing to see child abuse, to talk about it, and to prevent it. . . . Child abuse could thus be better seen when there was an explicit social organization to deal with it’ (p. 338). The important message about alertness in this example is that ‘A system’s willingness to become aware of problems is associated with its ability to act on them’ (Westrum 1993: 340). When people develop the capacity to act on something, then they can afford to see it. More generally, when people expand their repertoire, they improve their alertness. And when they see more, they are in a better position to spot weak signals which suggest that an issue is turning into problem which might well turn into a crisis if it is not contained. This is a story of imagining and speaking differently. The social workers spoke differently of ‘protective services’. Physicians spoke differently when they stopped talking about cases of ‘multiple unsuspected trauma syndrome’ and started talking about the much more vivid ‘battered child syndrome’. Henry Kempe spoke differently when he partitioned his staff into ‘teams’ rather than individual stars. This is also a story of redoing, labeling, discarding, enacting, believing, and substantiating. These six themes reflect a handful of assumptions common to my work and they reflect some of what is discussed in the preceding papers.

Redoing The story of child abuse is a story of impermanence. In William James’s familiar imagery, ‘The world is a buzzing, pulsating, formless mass of signals, out of which people try to make sense, into which they attempt to introduce order, and from which they construct against a background that remains undifferentiated’ (cited in Patriotta 2003). People make sense, try to introduce order, and then selectively single out manageable moments from a vast undifferentiated background. When people ‘introduce’ ‘order’, there is no guarantee that it will persist. Typically, order is transient and needs to be reaccomplished repeatedly. Thus, an undifferentiated background is a constant threat (opportunity?) to swallow up the order people keep trying


Weick • Faith, Evidence, and Action

to establish. But that undifferentiated background has been part of our theorizing for a long time in such forms as Katz and Kahn’s (1978) discussion of entropy, chaos in complexity theory (Stacey 1992), smoke in Taylor and Van Every’s (2000) adaptation of Atlan’s (1979) imagery of smoke and crystal (see below), the notion of Cartesian anxiety (Varela et al. 1993), and Eric Eisenberg’s ‘groundlessness’. Impermanence imposes odd constraints on truth. ‘(W)e have to live to-day by what truth we can get to-day, and be ready to-morrow to call it falsehood . . . When new experiences lead to retrospective judgments, using the past tense, what these judgments utter was true, even though no past thinker had been led there’ (James 1975: 107). Marianne Paget makes a similar point in the context of medical errors: ‘A mistake follows an act. It identifies the character of an act in its aftermath. It names it. An act, however, is not mistaken; it becomes mistaken. There is a paradox here, for seen from the inside of action, that is from the point of view of an actor, an act becomes mistaken only after it has already gone wrong. As it is unfolding, it is not becoming mistaken at all; it is becoming.’ (Paget 1988: 56)

For both James and Paget, a fundamental property of everyday life is that people believe ahead of the evidence. Pediatricians momentarily believe in brittle bones only to find later that the damage was more intentional. Things that seemed truthful at the time seem less hard and fast later. Anthropologists are well aware of this: ‘The after-the-fact, ex post, life-trailing nature of consciousness generally – occurrence first, formulation later on – appears in anthropology as a continual effort to devise systems of discourse that can keep up, more or less, with what, perhaps, is going on.’ (Geertz 1995: 19)

One way to focus the ‘life-trailing’ nature of consciousness on issues of orga nizing is to adopt the poetic imagery that Taylor and Van Every (2000) found so useful in depicting the emergent organization, the contrast between crystal and smoke (pp. 31, 324–326). They introduce this distinction, borrowed from Atlan (1979), in the context of self-organizing systems where life occupies the space created by the boundary conditions of crystal and smoke. ‘Crystal is a perfectly structured material, in its repeated symmetry of pattern, but because its structure is perfect, it never evolves: It is fixed for eternity. It is not life. But it is order. Smoke is just randomness, a chaos of interacting molecules that dissolves as fast as it is produced. It is not life either. But it is dynamic. Life appears when some order emerges in the dynamic of chaos and finds a way to perpetuate itself, so that the orderliness begins to grow, although never to the point of fixity (because that would mean the loss of the essential elasticity that is the ultimate characteristic of life.’ (Taylor and Van Every 2000: 31) This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.


Applied to issues of organization, the boundaries formed by smoke and crystal become the limiting conditions between which organizing unfolds. Taylor and Van Every equate crystal with repetition, regularity, redundancy, and the preservation of many distributed conversations in the form of texts that stabilize and reproduce states of the world. They equate smoke with variety, unpredictability, complexity, and conversations whose outcomes are unpredictable and transient. Organization resides between smoke and crystal just as it resides between conversation and text. Organization is talked into existence when portions of smoke-like conversation are preserved in crystal-like texts that are then articulated by agents speaking on behalf of an emerging collectivity. Repetitive cycles of texts, conversations, and agents define and modify one another and jointly organize everyday life.

Labeling The story of discovering child abuse is also a story of labels that make a difference (multiple trauma, brittle bones, battered child, child abuse, protective services). What becomes clear in the story is that vocabularies are tools for coping rather than tools for representation (Rorty 1989: 119). The question then becomes: What is the object that is at the focus of the coping? In the case of child abuse is it a child, parents, fellow pediatricians, medical teams, a reputation, symptoms, diagnosis, or getting through the day? Some of these objects are more social, some less so. And therein lies part of the issue for the vocabularies that are associated with organizing. The issue is what Robert Irwin has called ‘compounded abstraction’. That phrase summarizes the fate of initial perceptions as they are reworked in the interest of coordination and control. The essence of compounded abstraction is found in one of Irwin’s favorite maxims: ‘seeing is forgetting the name of the thing seen’ (Weschler 1982: 180). The naming that transforms originary seeing into consensual seeing is done to introduce order into social life. But the conceptions that accomplish this often come to ‘mean something wholly independent of their origins’ (p. 25). It is this potential for meanings to become divorced from their origins that predisposes to failures of inference. Baron and Misovich (1999) argue that sensemaking ‘starts’ with knowledge by acquaintance that is acquired through active exploration. Active exploration involves bottom-up, stimulus-driven, online cognitive processing in order to take action, and naming plays a secondary role. But if people want to share their cognitive structures, those structures have to take on a particular form. As social complexity increases, people shift from perceptually based knowing to categorically based knowing in the interest of coordination. Now they develop knowledge by description rather than knowledge by acquaintance, their cognitive processing becomes schema-driven rather than stimulus-driven, and they go beyond the information given and elaborate This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.


their direct perceptions into types, categories, stereotypes, and schemas. The result is that now people know less and less about more and more. Knowledge by description is largely the language of organizations, as Tsoukas makes clear when he argues that generalizing is the prototypic act of organizing: ‘A distinguishing feature of organization is the generation of recurring behaviours by means of institutionalized roles that are explicitly defined. For an activity to be said to be organized implies that types of behaviour in types of situations are connected to types of actors . . . An organized activity provides actors with a given set of cognitive categories and a typology of action options . . . On this view, therefore, organizing implies generalizing; the subsumption of heterogeneous particulars under generic categories. In that sense, formal organization necessarily involves abstraction.’ (Tsoukas 2005: 124)

By this reading, both the organization and its people are concepts, mentally formed collections of direct experience with a name. Although ultimately neither people, selves, nor organizations exist, conventionally these concepts convert James’s ‘formless signals’ into activities and people and then hold them together long enough for people to couple actions with reasons. Nevertheless, these conceptual moves toward shared meaning and permanence generate a durable tension. In order to see something, we need concepts. Perception without conception is blind. But concepts, abstractions, and schemas without perception are empty. The tension? Believing is seeing except that seeing is forgetting the name of the thing seen. To manage this tension we need observing that is more mindful, concepts that are more refined, and constraints on sharing that are less tight. Organizational designs that move in these directions should be associated with more reliable performance, less turnover, and greater innovation (Weick 2004). Organizational designs that accomplish these ends are often simultaneously loose and tight in their structures. They are tight around a handful of key values but loose around everything else. These softer constraints on coordination serve to increase the number of independent sensing elements that can register changes in the pattern of events (Campbell 1979). This increased capability for differentiated sensing allows for perceptually based knowledge to be better preserved in an otherwise schema-driven coordinated world. Differentiated sensing is the cornerstone of Western ideas about mindfulness. The progression from undifferentiated perception to shared public perceptions that are named, dimensionalized, reified, and treated as facts (Irwin 1977), can be done more mindfully if there is (1) active differentiation and refinement of existing distinctions, (2) creation of new discrete categories out of the continuous streams of events that flow through activities, and (3) a more nuanced appreciation of the context of events and of alternative



ways to deal with that context (Langer 1989). This combination of differentiation, creation, and appreciation captures more details, evokes more varied roles. And converts those details into richer conjectures. What is new in all of this is the possibility that mindful acts as defined by Western philosophy incorporate more of the properties of Eastern mindfulness than has previously been recognized (Weick and Putnam, 2006; Weick and Sutcliffe, 2006). When people engage in enriched distinction-making, their efforts often resemble acts with meditative properties. For example, when people make distinctions they may see some of the limits of a category and sometimes even of categorizing; they experience focused attention and see the costs of distraction; they pay more attention to what is happening here and now; they experience ‘entities’ as less substantial and more transient than they appear; they see the liabilities of swift thinking when they slow down to register finer distinctions and see how much is missed and distorted in the interest of speed; and there is gradual recognition that changes in events as well in oneself as perceiver are often not of one’s own making. When people engage in distinction-making, they begin to realize just ‘how quickly we put our experiences into tidy and unexamined conceptual boxes’ (Kabat-Zinn 2002: 69), how reluctant we are to examine those conceptual boxes, and how much is discovered when we do examine those boxes. Langer’s interventions to disrupt mindlessness tend to promote discrimination of subtle cues that had gone unnoticed before. When these cues are noticed, routines that had been unfolding mindlessly are interrupted. And when routines are disrupted, the resulting void is similar to the void induced by quiet meditation. When either void is created, past experience no longer serves as a firm guide and the disruption ‘stirs the cognitive pot’. Since the void is momentarily tough to categorize and label, it serves as a moment of overlap between Western conceptual mindfulness and Eastern non-conceptual mindfulness. During this moment more is seen and more is seen about seeing itself.

Discarding The story of child abuse is a story that is filled out by the irony that people enlarge their repertoire for acting by dropping some of their tools. Pediatricians dropped their belief that child abuse was unthinkable. They dropped the bizarre diagnoses that had dominated pre-social-worker days, diagnoses such as spontaneous subdural hematoma (child suddenly develop serious brain bleeds), non-specific bleeding disorders, family history of being easily bruised, born with brittle bones. They dropped the tepid label under which they grouped these cases, ‘multiple unsuspected trauma syndrome’, and replaced it with the much more vivid label, ‘battered child syndrome’.



They stopped arguing that child abuse was rare and was confined to insane parents (Westrum 1993: 333). And toughest of all, they stopped trusting parents who remained silent about relevant history when X-rays of their children revealed signs of trauma that parents didn’t remember. It’s also instructive to ask why the pediatricians didn’t drop their tools sooner, since those reasons closely resemble the reasons other groups such as wildland firefighters refused to drop their tools and perished (Weick 1996). Physicians refused to drop their face-saving diagnoses because, if they did, they would have to admit a terrible reality. In the words of one pediatrician, ‘if I believed the parent could abuse the child I would leave pediatrics immediately’ (Westrum 1993: 335). That’s no different than a firefighter keeping his chain saw while trying to outrun a fire because, to drop it, means that he has to admit the terrible reality that he’s trapped and the end is near. Pediatricians maintained the belief that they were central players in medical practice, which lured them into what Westrum calls the ‘fallacy of centrality’. They reasoned, ‘If abuse were going on, I in my central position would know about it. Since I don’t know about it, it’s not going on.’ That belief pretty much put an end to curiosity. Pediatricians also refused to drop their diagnoses because those diagnoses were questioned by radiologists who were lower-status medical personnel. Pediatricians also didn’t know how to drop their face-saving diagnoses (e.g. what do I do if I suspect that abuse is the problem?). But most of all, pediatricians kept their tools because none of the other pediatricians were dropping theirs. The larger point for learning may be this: ‘In pursuit of knowledge, every day something is acquired. In pursuit of wisdom, every day something is dropped’ (Lao Tzu, cited in Muller 1999: 134).

Enacting The abuse story is a story of enacting. Pediatricians create the environment which then constrains them. Having publicly chosen to make the irrevocable diagnosis of brittle bones, they then have no choice but to hand the abused child back to the abusing parents with the chilling counsel to pay closer attention to the child. Reuben McDaniel captures the essence of enacting in a way that meshes with James’s portrayal of a buzzing world: ‘Because the nature of the world is unknowable (chaos theory and quantum theory) we are left with only sensemaking. Even if we had the capacity to do more, doing more would not help. Quantum theory helps us to understand that the present state of the world is, at best, a probability distribution. As we learn from chaos theory, the next state of the world is unknowable. And so we must pay attention to the world as it unfolds. Therefore, it is


10 Process and Practice Theories

a good thing that we can’t do more than sensemaking . . . because then we would only be frustrated by our inability to know. But believing enables actions which leads to more sense (sometimes) and taking action leads to more sense (sometimes) and sensemaking connects actions to beliefs (sometimes).’ (Reuben McDaniel, personal communication)

Enacting involves shaping the world (e.g. a self-fulfilling prophecy verifies itself) as well as stirring the world so that it yields what we then treat as ‘answers’. Typically, all it takes to trigger and guide enactment is a small structure such as a melody, a map (even any old map under the right circumstances), a crack in a caribou shoulder bone, a simple if-then plotline, or a nudge at a tipping point. These minimal structures often are sufficient to produce order since they animate activity, calm fears, get people in motion, and focus attention, all of which serve to update the initiating structures. These sequences are moments of enactment. They inhabit and structure the territory between smoke and crystal, which means that enactment, faith, and improvisation are foundational in enactment. The close ties among faith and enactment are visible in Gilbert Ryle’s (1979) description of the improvisational quality of everyday life: ‘To be thinking what he is here and now up against, he must both be trying to adjust himself to just this present once-only situation and in doing this to be applying lessons already learned. There must be in his response a union of some Ad Hockery with some know-how. If he is not at once improvising and improvising warily, he is not engaging his somewhat trained wits in a partly fresh situation. It is the pitting of an acquired com petence or skill against unprogrammed opportunity, obstacle or hazard. It is a bit like putting some new wine into old bottles.’ (p. 129)

The important point is that improvisation does not materialize out of thin air. Instead, it materializes around a simple structure that provides the pretext for real-time enacting. Some of that composing is built from precomposed phrases that become meaningful retrospectively as embellishments of that structure. And some comes from elaboration of the embellishments themselves. The use of precomposed fragments in the emerging action is an example of Ryle’s ‘wary improvisation’ anchored in past experience. The further elaboration of these emerging embellishments is an example of Ryle’s opportunistic improvisation in which one’s wits engage a fresh, onceonly situation. Considered as a noun, an improvisation is a transformation of some original model. Considered as a verb, improvisation is composing in real time that begins with embellishments of a simple model, but increasingly feeds on these embellishments themselves to move farther from the original structure and closer to the flexibility that Martha Feldman (2000) observes in routines and that John Dewey (1922/2002) sees in habits.


Weick • Faith, Evidence, and Action 11

Believing Belief and faith are prerequisites of organizing and sensemaking. Enactment and improvising both represent bets that an unfolding action will have made sense. Such action often verifies itself. ‘Again and again success depends on energy of the act; energy depends on faith that we shall not fail; and that faith in turn on the faith that we are right – which faith thus verifies itself’ (McDermott 1977: 339). Applied to this essay and the work it describes, James’s deviation amplifying feedback loop looks like this. In the beginning I bet that the vocabularies of sensemaking and organizing will help people cope [this is James’s step which he labels ‘faith that we are right’]. I’m also betting that if I look for sensemaking and organizing, I’ll find them when I observe coping and recovering [‘faith that we shall not fail’]. I look persistently and enthusiastically in varied settings, mostly in the work of others, to see what their story is [‘energy of the act’]. And I find what looks to me like sensemaking and organizing [‘success’]. And so I place further bets on these concepts, which strengthens faith, which . . . This is not what you would call a rhetoric of falsification. Nor is it a particularly calming rhetoric. Think about the variable that James calls ‘faith that we are right’. Taken to the extreme that phrase raises the specter of the true believer, unwilling and unable to listen, and self-righteous to the core. While faith creates order, doubt (Ryle’s ‘wary improvisation’) fine-tunes that faith by differentiating things known from things not known. Simultaneous believing and doubting (Weick 1979), the signature of a wise act (Meacham 1990), do not sever the links in James’s depiction. Instead, that simultaneity weakens the link that goes from success to ‘faith that we are right’. Enthusiasm is the friend of action but the enemy of wisdom. Nevertheless, in an unknowable, unpredictable world, the energy of the act may temporarily displace wisdom, since we need to act in order to see what we think. Cognition lies in the path of the action but the forcefulness of that action makes a difference. Thus, despite the seeming emphasis on thought, belief, faith, and other ‘neck up’ determinants, the ideas being discussed are also about hard work, the energy of the act, intensity (Weick 1979: 54), effort expenditure (Weick 1964), enthusiasm, and forcefulness while ‘acting thinkingly’ (Weick 1983). Descriptions of the world are up for grabs, so presumptive descriptions (e.g. this music has been composed by a novice composer1) are sufficient to mobilize confirming actions (e.g. minimal attention to the music score while rehearsing), selective attention (e.g. novel passages are treated as signs of incompetence rather than creativity), the result being error-filled music that sounds bad and confirms the ineptness of the composer. There is order in the sound produced, order in the rehearsing, and order in the sense made of it all, but musicians tend to underestimate their centrality in producing this outcome.



I’ve treated belief and faith as if they were synonymous, but dictionaries warn against doing this. ‘Belief, faith, credence, credit are comparable when they mean the act of one who assents intellectually to something proposed or offered for acceptance as true or the state of mind of one who assents’ (Merriam-Webster 1984: 96). What sets faith apart from belief is intensity, full assent rather than mere mental acceptance. It is often that difference between ‘mere acceptance’ and ‘full assent’ that determines the likelihood of verification. Sooner or later, bets are made. And it is not clear that hedging solves much of anything. When vocabularies of the invisible (e.g. faith, belief) are focused on organizing, questions change. In what ways does an organizational culture based on belief differ from one based on faith? What is the role of guesses in organizing? Is distributed abduction a model for organizing in the face of unknowability? When considering issues of belief and faith, it is crucial that we reach outside traditional notions of deduction and induction, and revisit Charles S. Peirce’s third form of reasoning which he called abduction. Abductive reasoning is reasoning that forms and evaluates hypotheses in order to make sense of puzzling facts (Magnani 2001). Discussions of abductive reasoning are found in the work of people such as Ginzburg (1988), Harrowitz (1988), and Patriotta (2004) who argue that the conjectural paradigm, grounded in abductive reasoning, is the foundation of inquiry. The basic idea is that when people imagine reality, they start with some tangible clue and then discover or invent a world in which that clue is meaningful. This act of invention is an act of divination. The Naskapi Indians, for example, heat the shoulder bones of caribou until they crack, and then treat the cracks as a map of where hunters will find caribou. The crack is a tangible clue that gives meaning and becomes meaningful in the surrounding physical world (Moore 1957; Weick 1979: 262). The essence of conjecture and divination lies in the faith that a fragment is a meaningful symptom which, if pursued vigorously, will enact a world where the meaning of the fragment becomes clearer. Conjecture essentially utilizes ‘obscure or remote clues in a speculative manner to build an epistemological model’ (Harrowitz 1988: 183). Clues enable people to ‘leap from apparently significant facts, which could be observed, to a complex reality which – directly at least – could not’ (Harrowitz 1988: 184). ‘The importance of the conjectural model is not found in the notion of reading coded signs such as imprints [animal footprints], but rather in the fact that the systems . . . were developed and invested with meaning through a process much like abduction. The rules were postulated to explain the observed facts . . . As in abduction, a cultural or experien tial knowledge is required to codify a system. Abduction is literally the groundwork necessary before a sign is codified.’ (Harrowitz 1988: 184).

When an observed fact is read through an imagined rule, this action can generate a world not previously thought of. This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.


Substantiating So what is the thread in all of this? These ideas represent an effort to get a better grasp on what John Dewey portrayed as a fundamental dynamic in life: ‘In every waking moment, the complete balance of the organism [system] and its environment is constantly interfered with and as constantly restored. Hence the “stream of consciousness” in general, and in particular that phase of it celebrated by William James as alternation of flights and perchings. Life is interruptions and recoveries.’ (Dewey 1922/2002: 178–179)

Order, interruption, recovery. That is sensemaking in a nutshell. And organizing is the act of trying to hold things together by such means as text and conversation, justification, faith, mutual effort (heedful interrelating), transactive memory, resilience, vocabulary, and by seeing what we say in order to assign it to familiar categories. Efforts to hold it together are made necessary by interruptions such as regression, thrownness, inconsistency, cosmology episodes, forgetting, the unexpected, threats, and disasters. Our job as researchers is to develop theories about what ‘holding it together’ means, what it depends on, and when what it depends on happens (Gilbert 1998: 139). We can do better at such theorizing, Many people resonate to Kierkegaard’s statement that ‘It is perfectly true, as philosophers say, that life must be understood backwards. But they forget the other proposition, that it must be lived forwards’ (Gardiner 1988: 90). Fewer people are able to talk about the quandary of living forward with limited foresight and understanding backward with unlimited hindsight. To produce better theories means in part to make them more isomorphic with living forward. That means we have to find better descriptions of thrownness, making do, and expectations, all of which may amount to something, although we seldom know what that something will be until it’s too late to do much about it. Living forward that is unsettled, emergent, and contingent contrasts sharply with our backward-oriented theoretical propositions that depict that living as settled, causally connected, and coherent after-the-fact. Better theorizing lies in ‘keeping up with what perhaps is going on’ through the use of tactics that weaken hindsight, highlight interruptions, articulate the nature of ready-to-hand alertness, fold action and cognition together, and focus on projects as the unit of analysis. As an example of such tactics, consider a hybrid formulation that combines Heidegger (1962) and Thorngate (1976). When people act forward with what Heidegger (1962) calls ‘absorbed coping’ in a ready-to-hand mode of engagement, they are aware of the world holistically as a network of interrelated projects rather than as an arrangement of discrete physical objects such as tools. If one of these projects is interrupted, then their experience changes into an unready-to-hand mode. Problematic aspects of the whole This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.


situation stand out, but people still do not become aware of context-free objects. It is only when people step back from the project in a present-at-hand mode, and reflect on it using analyses that are general and context-free, that tools, artifacts, and objects emerge. These tools are treated as independent entities, removed from tasks, endowed with distinct measurable properties of mass and weight, and manipulable by distinct subjects. If we align Heidegger’s threefold distinction with Thorngate’s (1976) postulate that no explanation can be simultaneously general, accurate, and simple (Weick 1979: 35–42), then we arrive at an intriguing possibility. Thorngate’s postulate may hold true for present-at-hand theories, but not for implicit theories associated with ready-to-hand engagement. A present-at-hand explanation, by definition, is stripped of context, situation, configuration, relational meaning, and particulars, which means it has some combination of generality and simplicity but lacks accuracy. Generalsimple explanations fail to move us because they misrepresent the world of involved actors. They miss the fact that reason may take the form of ready-to-hand abduction rather than present-at-hand deduction and induction. Ready-to-hand reasoning tends to consist of reasons that are simultaneously plausible (general), accessible (simple), and consensually valid (accurate). Thus, the gap between living forward and understanding backward may be created by theories that are insensitive to context and situational particulars. If a theory incorporates more context, then it should be seen as either general-accurate or simple-accurate. And theories that incorporate some measure of accuracy should be seen as closer to ready-to-hand patterns found in absorbed coping. We all would like to create theories that contribute to absorbed coping. In my case I often come up short because of issues such as boundary conditions and self-referential inconsistency. For example, I’m prone to talk universals and to say things like, ‘everything we ever wanted to understand about the human condition is all right there in Mann Gulch: understand Mann Gulch, and you’ve got it!’ That’s a stretch to say the least. I wish I were better at crafting the differentiations that are found in the rich 2 × 2 matrices that anchor work by Schulman (2004), Eden (2003), Perrow (1984), and Tsoukas and Shepherd (2004). Harvard’s Steve Kelman (personal communication 7 March 2006) recently spotted a boundary condition in my work that I had never noticed, namely, most of that work is grounded in public sector organizations including CDC, US Navy carriers, United States Forest Service, Central Intelligence Agency, FAA air traffic control, NTSB accident investigations, UK health system, FBI laboratories, public schools, state universities, NASA, teaching hospitals, and the Bureau of Land Management. The small commercial remainder includes Union Carbide’s Bhopal plant, GE’s globalization efforts, Frank Gehry’s architecture firm, and AES when it was flying high partly because of its association with Bob Waterman.



The issue of self-referential inconsistency is a different kind of shortcoming. The term was coined by Richard Rorty (1989: 123, note 2) to describe those who claim to know things that they claim cannot be known. An example would be people who claim that what we call real is not really real. If that claim is true, how could they know it’s true? In my case I sometimes act as if I have an accurate view of a world in which only plausibility is possible. I claim to know that it’s all flux, that prophecies fulfill themselves, that a contour gauge somehow registers plausible accounts (this is Walter Nord’s nomination for my most blatant inconsistency). I claim to know how others make sense, but my efforts are nothing more or less than that same sensemaking, subject to the same resources of SIR COPE I attribute to others (social setting, identity, retrospect, cues, ongoing development, plausibility, enactments; Weick 2001: 461), which resources are themselves merely one reflective account of life between smoke and crystal. And who’s to say that SIR COPE matters anyway? The world is up for grabs, except that’s not true for the insight that the world is up for grabs. So is this the grand discounting of sensemaking, the ultimate sacrifice to help people shorten their readings lists? Nope. It is more like paying close, reflexive attention to social moves while staying as close as possible to people’s experience and what they do with what seems to happen to them, all the while accepting the fact that, regardless of how interesting the portrait may seem, things are likely to be otherwise. This should not be heard as a voice of nihilism resigned to the fact that we’re all in this alone, craving more crystal and less smoke. The message is just the opposite. Cognition and feeling lie in the path of the action. Is life worth living? When William James asked that question, he made it very clear that either answer is correct. Answer ‘no’ and that presumption generates the withdrawal and bad times that eventuate in suicide, the ultimate verification. Answer ‘yes’ and that presumption generates the engagement and good times that make for good company. The question then becomes, what kinds of vocabularies foster faith, coping, and better guessing? The answer, in science as in everyday life is that, if the goal is to compose useful vocabularies, then tests of usefulness lie in the outcomes of actions that take place in the presence of these vocabularies. The words I struggle with seem to contribute to resilience. But if they don’t, if interruptions lead instead to further collapse rather than resilience, then we need to find a different set of words, a different way of saying so we see and think differently, and a different way to imagine more energetically. On the wall above my desk is a smudged sign from a machine shop that was run by the old New York Central Railroad. The sign reads, ‘Be where you are with all your mind.’ That message influenced the content of this brief essay. But so did a second, more troubling sign. It reads, ‘A true philosopher says only one thing in his lifetime because he enjoys but one contact with the real’ (Wagner 1983: 115). As I’ve said elsewhere (Weick 2001: ix), my one



contact with the real seems to have been my dissertation in 1961 on cognitive dissonance (Weick 1964). Vestiges of these ideas still appear in my thinking (e.g. Weick 1995: 11–12; Weick 1993). This continuing affinity for cognitive dissonance undoubtedly can be traced back to pre-dissertation moments of consequential interruptions fostered by the unexpected, the inconsistent, the inexplicable. The two signs seem to pull in different directions, one toward the present, the other toward a consequential past. But those opposing pulls are more apparent than real. While it may be true that we have only one contact with the real, that one contact with the real is the present contact since that’s the only reality that ever exists. So, neither my remarks nor those of the others in this special issue are a leisurely stroll down memory lane. Instead, they represent our current joint best efforts to convert the terrain between smoke and crystal into mindful intensity, mindful ordering, and mindful listening.

Note 1. See Weick et al. (1973) for a field experiment that demonstrates the effects on performance of the presumption of logic when it is attached to a skilled composer and to an unskilled composer.

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22 Organizing Is Both a Verb and a Noun: Weick Meets Whitehead Tore Bakken and Tor Hernes

Process Thinking in Organization Studies

P

rocess thinking has existed since before the early Greek philosophers and continues to puzzle philosophers, as well as natural and social scientists. In early contributions to social science, both Weber and Marx were aware of the importance of process in organizations. Weber developed his theory of bureaucratic structure precisely around the processes of decision making, thinking that the structuring of organizations into formal routines would influence the processes that tied public bodies to rulers as well as to citizens. Marx, in a different vein, focused on labour process as the unfolding logic of productive forces. Weick (1979) is an early contributor towards the theorizing of process in organization studies, particularly by virtue of his analysis of the interaction between actions and meaning creation, what he refers to as sensemaking (Weick 1995). Drawing upon writers within philosophy such as William James and Alfred Schutz and systems theorists such as Heinz von Foerster, Geoffrey Vickers and Gregory Bateson, he probed into the dynamics of organizing processes, notably the relationship between the more fluid and the more stable aspects of organizing. This work is the basis for the verb–noun distinction, a central part of his work (Weick 1979; 1995). During the last few decades, a number of works have merged to debate the nature of process views and their implications for organization and




management theory (e.g. Pettigrew 1987, 1997; Chia 1999; Langley 1999; Tsoukas and Chia 2002; Styhre 2004; Van de Ven and Poole 2005; Carlsen 2006). Some of these contributions, while referring to Weick’s work on process in organization theory, tend to draw their inspiration from the works of process philosophers such as Henri Bergson, William James and Alfred North Whitehead. For example, James and Bergson figure prominently in Tsoukas and Chia’s (2002) discussion of the notion of organizational becoming, Styhre (2004) draws upon Bergson in his discussion of knowledge, Carlsen (2006) draws largely upon James in his discussion of identities in organizations, and Chia (1999) makes considerable use of Whitehead and Bergson in his discussion of a metaphysical perspective on organizational change and transformation. Process basically signifies movement in the sense of flow. Most people may associate flow with physically fluid substances, such as water. Flow, however, may equally refer to activity, information, as well as the passing of time. Process thinking is basically a way of thinking about the world while acknowledging the inherent gradualness of the phenomena under study. This does not necessarily impose on a study the assumption that everything undergoes gradual change. Most studies that could be called ‘processual’ may assume, explicitly or implicitly, that some of the things under study do not change, at least for some part of the time. Rather than dictate the pervasiveness of impermanence, process thinking directs attention to the analytical distinctions that we actually draw between continuity and discontinuity, between constancy and change, between entity and flow. In the discussion of organization as process, a key point relates to the analytical conception of process versus entity, which Van de Ven and Poole (2005) single out as a fundamental ontological distinction in the study of organization. When organization is seen from what Chia (1999) refers to as an ‘entitative’ conception of reality, process is conceptualized as the interaction between stable entities. These entities (such as actors, roles or technologies) may interact in a variety of ways, but analytically speaking they remain intact. Drawing upon Chia and Langley (2005), this is what we might call a ‘weak’ process view. It is ‘weak’ in the sense that the a priori assumption is of the world as consisting of entities, whose interactions constitute processes. In other words, processes take place whenever entities, such as individuals, interact. In this sense, individuals are seen as existing ontologically prior to the processes they engage in; they give shape to processes, while remaining intact throughout their participation in the processes. Writers tending towards a ‘strong’ process view, on the other hand, work from an ontological viewpoint of the world as process, where entities, as far as they are seen to exist, are products of processes rather than existing prior to them. If anything, they are what Rescher (2003: 53) refers to as ‘manifestations of processes’. ‘Strong’ process views draw their inspiration from early 20th-century process philosophers such as Bergson, James and Whitehead.


Bakken and Hernes • Organizing Is Both a Verb and a Noun 21

Among the works in this tradition, a consensus exists that process is a principal category of ontological description (Rescher 2003: 51), which is not an assumption found with weak process views. There is some divergence, however, at the level of epistemology, and particularly concerning assumptions about the ability of humans to usefully think ‘processually’. Here we find some parallels between Bergson and Weick, both of whom differ from Whitehead. Bergson argued that intuition takes us beyond mere representations by allowing us to enter into reality, which he saw as ‘uninterrupted continuity’ (Bergson 1988: 208). In a similar way, Weick’s argument, influenced by James’s notion of ‘streams of consciousness’ and Schutz’s (1967) idea of ‘pure duration’ (Weick 1995: 23–24), leads him to advocate the use of verbs as a means of accepting ‘life as ongoing events into which they are thrown, and less likely to think of it as turf to be defended, levels of hierarchy to be ascended, or structures to be upended’ (Weick 1995: 188). The quality of the perception of process is described using the term ‘mindfulness’ (Weick and Roberts 1993; Weick and Sutcliffe 2001). When people are mindful, they continually review and refine expectations in relation to events and context. Bergson has the somewhat idealistic view that humans could, and should, become better at perceiving reality as fluid. His view has some resonance with Weick’s (1979: 43) argument that researchers, as well as managers, should become better at thinking in terms of process: ‘It is the very fact that processes elude both researchers and managers, which makes it more important for us to suggest ways in which people can gain at least intellectual control over this property of organizations.’ Thus we sense that Bergson, like Weick, desires to find ways to represent processes and thereby avoid the dominance of the entitative perception alluded to by Chia. In Weick’s writings it is particularly through the language of sensemaking that the processes may be perceived by actors: ‘The language of sensemaking captures the realities of agency, flow, equivocality, transience, reaccomplishment, unfolding, and emergence, realities that are often obscured by the language of variables, nouns, quantities, and structures.’ (Weick et al. 2005: 410)

To remedy this situation, Weick (1979: 44) urges us to stamp out nouns. But working exclusively with verbs has its problems, which is a point at which Whitehead differs from both Bergson and Weick, and which marks divergence at the level of epistemology. Whitehead would agree with Weick when the latter argues that the reality of process implies impermanence and that the use of nouns distorts the understanding of this reality, and Weick’s argument fits well with Whitehead’s much cited warning against ‘the fallacy of misplaced concreteness’ (Whitehead [1929] 1978: 18). Misplaced concretion becomes a fallacy when nouns begin to live their own lives, separated and disconnected from the process that created them. This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.


However, Whitehead would add that entities (nouns) form an essential part of our sensemaking and, more importantly, that it is the forming of the nouns (Whitehead [1920: 33] referred to ‘abstractions’) and their subsequent implications for the process that we should focus our attention on. Hence, while Weick argues that we should stamp out nouns, Whitehead argues that nounmaking is necessary for human sensemaking, and that we are incapable of thinking purely in terms of process. It is erroneous to turn nouns into real entities which are independent of the processes that make them because this leads to ‘the fallacy of misplaced concreteness’. Hence, even according to a strong process view such as that proposed by Whitehead, nounmaking is an indispensable ingredient for coming to grips with processes, the point being that we make nouns from processes in order to make sense of processes. While Whitehead acknowledged, along with Bergson and Weick, that actors may have an intuitive perception of process, he did not believe that humans are able to go beyond an entitative understanding of process. According to Whitehead, we freeze processes into entities, precisely in order to make sense of the fluid, ‘real’ world. In other words, humans may live in a processual world, but they cope in a processual world by means of an entitative understanding of process; they do so because although they may have an intuitive perception of process, their understanding of process is nevertheless invariably entitative. Thus, rather than saying that humans should become better at thinking processually, Whitehead chose instead to focus on the ways in which entitative thinking forms part of processes. Importantly to Whitehead, however, entities, or abstractions, emerge from processes and enter into processes in turn. In other words, abstractions are part and parcel of processes and cannot be detached from them.

Process Illustrated by the Pseudopod Sensemaking (Weick 1995) is part of the organizing process, intertwined with actions of organizing. Weick’s sensemaking analysis corresponds somewhat to what is called the ‘linguistic turn’ in organization studies (Alvesson and Kärreman 2000), in that his analysis emphasizes the interactive talk and the resources of language in organizing processes (Weick et al. 2005). The latter authors suggest in particular that sensemaking is an issue of language, talk and communication, whereby situations, organizations and environments are talked into existence. Whereas on one level, Weick’s work focuses on the intersubjective production of meaning (Rhodes and Brown 2005), on another level he draws upon the structure of language as a lens through which to make sense of organization. This is seen most clearly in the distinction he makes between verbs and nouns, which is central to his work. To suggest that verbs and nouns are needed to describe process is perhaps to express a necessity, but it remains a crude characterization of process.



If we were to move beyond simply saying that process descriptions are made of verbs and nouns, we could explore how verbs and nouns relate to one another, or rather how they transform into one another, which is the sort of interplay that Cooper (2005) refers to as ‘relationality’. Cooper suggests that ‘relationality is the continuous reminder of the latent as an invisible presence that motivates the movement of being’ (Cooper 2005: 1706). Translating this into the verb–noun relationship serves to continually remind us of how verbs and nouns form part of one another. Both Weick and Whitehead explore the verb–noun interplay, that is to say, the interplay between the more fluid and the more stable, but in different ways. In his work on sensemaking Weick grants that verbs and nouns influence each other (Weick 1995), but they operate, he says, in a state of mutual tension, in a kind of dialectical relationship. For Whitehead, on the other hand, the verb and the noun are inextricably interlinked: abstractions emerge from experience in a seamless process, which makes them parts of a complex unity. Herein lies, we think, the potential for using Whitehead’s thinking to extend Weick’s work; by cutting verbs and nouns from the same cloth, we are in a better position to understand how they may transform into one another, and hence, constitute together a recursive view of organization. A recursive view expresses essentially the interaction between the more stable and the more fluid. We return to this point at the end of the paper. The extent to which a simple verb–noun distinction is crude when it comes to understanding the intricacies of process is demonstrated by the example of the pseudopod. The movement of the pseudopod, shown schematically in Figure 1, illustrates how the relationship between entity and process is one of seamless transition. Weick employs the pseudopod in order to visualize the fluid relationship between verb and noun, which is an example he

Figure 1: The pseudopod (source: Von Foerster 1967)



borrows from the cybernetician and philosopher Heinz von Foerster (1967), who uses the imagery to make a distinction between the explanatory powers of verbs and names. Von Foerster suggests that names are linguistic representations of spatial abstracts, whereas verbs are linguistic representations of temporal abstracts. His point is that without the abstracting power of both names and verbs, motion and change could not be conceptualized, which is much the same point as Rescher makes (2003), although Rescher refers to verbs and nouns, as does Weick. What we see in Figure 1 is that the unicellular animal moves from one spot to another by pulling itself up (stages 1–6) through its extended capillary (tubular pseudopod). More precisely, we see a sequence of six manifestations of quite distinct shapes. In stage 1 we see the animal as a static entity, which in stage 2 becomes dynamic and moreover does so by changing shape in the direction of its eventual new locus. Stages 3 and 4 consist chiefly of movement towards that new locus, which allows the animal gradually to become an entity in a new locus (stages 5 and 6). With reference to the figure, Weick points out that the spatial aspects of the animal are captured by nouns (‘animal’, ‘spot’, ‘pseudopod’, ‘capillary’), whereas its temporal aspects are handled by verbs (‘moving’, ‘extending’, ‘pulling’). Von Foerster points out (as does Weick) that the animal could not be described without the use of both temporal (verbs) and spatial (nouns) terms. Importantly, however, the ‘actual’ movement between noun and verb is seamless. Stages 1 and 6 do not make sense without verbs, just as stages 3 and 4 do not make sense without nouns. Note that the animal’s movement from one spot to another can be described as ‘pulling itself up through the extended capillary’. The expression ‘pulling itself up’, however, does not make sense without reference to ‘the animal’. Thus the movement defines the animal and the animal in turn defines the movement. In stage 2, the pseudopod as entity gives sense to its movement. Conversely, in stage 3, the movement gives rise to its new location in timespace. In other words, we are looking at a situation where verb and noun are inextricably interlinked, where each gives sense (meaning) to the other. Furthermore, we are looking at a situation where entity is not just entity and where movement is not just movement, but where entity and movement form a unity. It is, for all intents and purposes, a hybrid situation, which may be expressed by the term relationality used by Cooper (2005). Relationality, according to Cooper, ‘makes us see the world as a complex network of active connections rather than visibly independent and identifiable forms and objects’. As Weick points out, the pseudopod is useful because it reveals the intricacies of processes. Processes elude us precisely because they involve simultaneously impermanence and stability. Perhaps the most difficult task is to accurately describe this composite state of verb and noun. The pseudopod example illustrates that a simple separation between the two is by no means This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.


obvious, and in so doing it represents a persistent analytical dilemma posed by separation of entity and process. Bateson (1972: 18), for example, illustrates the dilemma by referring to the blind man and the stick: ‘If you ask anybody about the localization and boundaries of the self, these confusions are immediately displayed. Or consider a blind man with a stick. Where does the blind man’s self begin? At the tip of the stick? At the handle of the stick? Or at some point halfway up the stick? These questions are nonsense, because the stick is a pathway along which differences are transmitted under transformation, so that to draw a delimiting line across this pathway is to cut off a part of the systemic circuit which determines the blind man’s locomotion.’

A notable subtlety which can be observed in relation to the pseudopod example, however, is that movement is not to be construed as emanating from the entity. Rather, as mentioned above, according to a strong process view which emphasizes process over entity, processes are not to be interpreted as actions carried out by entities, but rather as actions which form entities. Therefore, in Bateson’s example of the blind man and the stick, the movement would be seen as forming the man and the stick, and not vice versa. Whitehead’s work is important precisely because he assumes verbs and nouns to be inextricably interlinked, as illustrated by the pseudopod example. Because the pseudopod depicts the hybrid character of movement and entity, we use the pseudopod example below to show that, although Weick and Whitehead might be seen to differ, Whitehead’s conception of process may nevertheless be used to further Weick’s ideas about the verb–noun relationship.

Weick on Verbs In his 1979 book The Social Psychology of Organizing, Weick situates the analysis at the level of actions; he sees ‘organizing’ as the interlocking of behaviours, an image he borrows from Buckley (1967). Interlocking behaviours are intelligible to actors and, moreover, they form ‘grammars’ that help actors not only to make sense of past actions and events but also to draw causal maps whereby their past experiences guide their future actions. Weick connects organizing to verbs because verbs are crucial to process descriptions. The interlocking takes place through actions that connect actors: ‘Connections among nouns are the stuff of process,’ argues Weick (1979: 44). The thrust of Weick’s empirical work lies in his seeing actions as central in the study of person-to-person interaction. For example, in his studies of groups such as firefighters (Weick 1993) and flight crews (Weick 1990), Weick shows how situations such as the rapid spread of a fire can trigger actions and behaviours based on group members’ interpretations of how to act, and, furthermore, how actions and interpretations propagate



among group members. In situations where rapid reaction is a matter of life or death, dilemmas about what action to take may be acute. In aircraft emergencies, the meaning that flight crews attach to information may be crucial to the outcome of the situation. Weick also highlights the volatility of situations which call for organized (learned) behaviour, wherein actors may choose to stick to prescribed behaviour even when circumstances may dictate that they should do otherwise, i.e. that they should follow their intuition. For example, for a firefighter in a life-threatening situation, it is problematic to drop one’s heavy tools and run, because to do so is contrary to one’s training. In the case, some firemen ignored an explicit order to drop their tools, behaved according to their training, and perished (Weick 1993, 1996). However, in other situations, Weick shows that the reverse may be the case; therefore, a major achievement of Weick in his studies of groups is that he shows how urgency, instinctive trust between members and the instantaneous codification of cues create opposition to prescriptions of formal, organized behaviour. Therefore, groups in such situations may opt for a verb-based rather than a noun-based understanding, the latter representing elements of formally prescribed behaviour, such as appropriate (learned) routines or learned models of organizing (March 1981). However, a note is warranted on power in groups. At first sight, Weick’s conception of groups appears consensual because it ignores aspects of power. Weick assumes that social structures are formed through interlocking behaviours rather than through a priori commitments to norms or values. The interlocking, however, is potentially unstable and might just as easily result in decoupling. As he shows in several of his studies (e.g. Weick 1990, 1993), equivocality may lead to temporary consensual actions based on learned responses, whereas uncertainty may lead to the temporary dissolution of norms. In a similar way, power is not to be taken a priori as an enduring quality of social groups, because it is always subject to change.

Weick on Nouns To be sure, Weick has not ignored the role of nouns in processes. As he points out, actors tend to initiate and make sense of organizing processes using nouns (Weick 1979). Elsewhere (Weick et al. 2005) the word ‘labels’ is used, but we shall assume for this paper that labels and nouns are synonymous. According to Weick, the ontological reality in which we act is made of verbs, whereas the epistemological reality in which we make sense of things is made of nouns. In his studies, particularly of emergency situations, Weick illustrates how patterns of organizing may switch rapidly from intuition to established models of organization, such as routines, which may surface and guide behaviour.



This may happen when, at some point in organizing processes, equivocal information needs to be treated as unambiguous. When information is taken to be unequivocal, it becomes a given ‘fact’ with a label on it, and therefore less attention is focused on the actual process of actions and behaviour. Or, as Weick says, ‘New information gets sorted into existing pools (variables) and channels (causal relations) and deepens these pools and channels’ (Weick 1979: 211). As he illustrates in his study of firefighters, the patterns of organizing may swing from being spontaneous to being routine; therefore, instead of taking potentially life-saving instinctive action that deviates from the learned routine, the firefighters may stick to the learned routine. In other words, when one is confronted with choosing between a spontaneous action and a learned routine, i.e. between a verb and a noun, one sometimes chooses the noun. In other words, the situation is one where actors impose ‘entitative’ (Chia 1999) labels or vocabularies on a fluid reality, which may succeed in controlling behaviour to a greater or lesser degree: ‘[People pull from several different vocabularies of organizations] . . . But all of these words that matter invariably come up short. They impose discrete labels on subject matter that is continuous. There is always slippage between words and what they refer to. Words approximate the territory; they never map it perfectly.’ (Weick 1995: 107) [emphasis added]

According to Chia (2000), by means of such imposition we construct our world of relative stability from a world where everything is fluid. Similarly, other organization theory scholars make this point; for example, Orlikowski and Yates (2002) illustrate how actors enact their notions of linear time in a processual reality. It must be remembered, however, that when such distinctions are drawn, the nature of the noun used and the process by which it evolved are commonly overlooked. We prefer to think that some entitative conceptions are closer to a fluid situation than others, although they may never ‘map the territory’ perfectly, to use Weick’s expression.

Weick on the Verb–Noun Relationship: A Tensional View A crucial link is the connections made between verb-based and noun-based understanding of processes. Weick suggests that organizing lies in the transition between what he refers to as the ‘intersubjective’ and ‘generic subjectivity’ (Weick 1995a: 72–73); that is, it lies between the person-to-person level and the structural level. The intersubjective takes place in direct communication between persons, largely unmediated by structural mechanisms such as rules, habits and routines. An example is provided in Weick and Roberts’ 1993 study of aircraft carrier operations, where both pilots and controllers have to respond to contingent (fluid) situations with extreme swiftness to This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.


ensure safe landings. The contingencies in such situations are highly local, and the actors’ responses to them are based on intersubjective factors that Weick and Roberts refer to as ‘heedfulness’. In other words, heedfulness between controllers and pilots is what allows them to respond rapidly to those contingencies. The intersubjective level, characterized by ongoing relational processes, is characterized by verbs rather than nouns, emphasizing attention to process rather than to structure. The ‘generic subjectivity’, on the other hand, corresponds to a different level of analysis, and is embedded in structures such as rules, habits and routines. Weick ties the noun-based understanding to what he calls ‘generic subjectivity’, which is the organizational level above interpersonal interaction. At the level of generic subjectivity we find the nouns that are used to talk about organizations and hence the nouns that are used to organize through structuring. These are nouns such as budgets, plans, roles, strategies, and so on, that enable organizations to outlast their originators (Weick and Gilfillan 1971) and that also make them relatively impervious to personal redefinition (Weick 1979: 35). As mentioned above, organizing consists of incessant fluctuation between the two levels: ‘I would argue that organizing lies atop that movement between the intersubjective and the generically subjective. By that I mean that organizing is a mixture of vivid, unique intersubjective understandings and understandings that can be picked up, perpetuated, and enlarged by people who did not participate in the original intersubjective construction.’ (Weick 1995a: 72)

Similar distinctions to that between the intersubjective and the ‘generic’ levels have been pointed out by other writers. Ciborra (2002), in his discussion of the introduction of information technology, distinguishes between procedures and what he calls bricolage. Procedures, he suggests, are dominated by clock time, diagrams and sequence maps. Bricolage and improvisation, on the other hand, exist in situated contexts that are local, short and sudden. The relationship between the two levels of subjectivity is particularly well illustrated by Weick’s use of Barley’s 1986 study of CAT scanners in radiology departments (Weick 1995: 71–72). In times of stability, generic subjectivity, represented by nouns, takes many forms, which Barley refers to as ‘scripts’, and defined as ‘standard plots of types of encounters whose repetition constitutes the setting’s inter-actional order’ (Barley 1986: 83). ‘Plots’ may therefore be taken as synonymous for ‘nouns’ because their entity-like nature is what enables plots to transcend the limits of the here-and-now experience. Weick suggests, in his interpretation of Barley, that when nouns (scripts) dominate interactions between people, they allow people to substitute for one another, because the focus shifts from people to roles and structure. An example may be found in routines (Feldman and Pentland 2005), which have a noun quality in the sense that they represent labels of standardized solutions to problems, independent of who executes them. This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.


In Barley’s study, when the CAT scanners are brought into the department, the prevailing scripts (nouns) change, in the sense that the scanners carry with them a different script for carrying out the work than that which prevailed before they were brought in. The arrival of the new scanners imposes a new generic subjectivity, and as this new generic subjectivity begins to take hold, the existing intersubjectivity becomes out of tune. In other words, two different plots, or patterns of nouns, at the generic level ‘collide’ with one another, as the new takes over from the old. Consequently, uncertainty increases, and intersubjectivity (the level of verbs) becomes the focus of the sensemaking activities, because the intersubjectivity was attuned to the old generic subjectivity. Therefore, tension arises between the levels of generic subjectivity and intersubjectivity (Weick 1995: 71). Two observations may be made about the relationship between the generically subjective and the intersubjective in this case. First, generic subjectivity and intersubjectivity are seen as operating at different levels, where generic subjectivity forms a context for intersubjectivity. Second, and following from the first point, the relationship between verbs and nouns is conceptualized as one of tension (Weick 1995: 72), where they are seen as struggling for dominance. Returning to the pseudopod example, it seems that the movement and the animal come from different realms; that the verb and the noun emerge from different realms of meaning; that the animal and its movement do not make up a single unified entity. Another way of approaching the verb–noun relationship, we argue, would be to view verbs and nouns as cut from the same cloth, where movement belongs to entity just as entity belongs to movement. From this viewpoint Whitehead’s process philosophy appears instructive.

Whitehead on Verbs (Experience) Whitehead’s contribution to ‘process philosophy’, epitomized by his 1929 book Process and Reality, derives from his assumption that the world is ultimately processual. Accordingly, he rejected any a priori notion of entities and developed a conceptual scheme about the ‘becoming’ of things whereby processes consist of what he called ‘actual occasions’ rather than of physical entities. Actual occasions are experiential events, or ‘drops of experience’. In Whitehead’s scheme, events take place in timespace and carry within themselves other events; furthermore, they come together to form a unified event, which in turn is the basis for the formation of new events. The process of experiencing is thus a perpetual unification of a pluralistic reality that, once unified, immediately becomes pluralistic again; thus, it is never fully (finally) unified (Hartshorne 2003). Accordingly, events do not occur in a linear fashion; on the contrary, Whitehead’s timespace is atomistic and pluralistic, consisting of multiple processes spread out in a field-like manner over regions of space (Rescher 1996) evolving through time. In this atomistic This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.


order everything is in principle interrelated; everything is connected through process. Indeed the world, including the subject, is constituted by process. For Whitehead, as for Bergson and James, intuitive experience is the most complex form of perception and hence such complex perception best comes to grips with the dynamics of process. Experience reflects ‘brute facts’; it reflects the actually felt, what Whitehead refers to as ‘the realization of our essential connection with the world without, and also of our own existence now’ (Whitehead 1938: 72). It represents facts that are real, individual and particular (Whitehead [1929] 1978: 20). Similarly, Cooper (1976), using Whiteheadian reasoning, refers to ‘the situation’ which he sees as the ‘immediately perceived field of actualities (objects, events), the concrete context in which we carry out our lives. It is the pith of existential meaning, where the perceptions do their work and find a unity. The situation is the rudimentary morphology of everyday experience – discrete, vivid, multiple.’ (Cooper 1976: 1006)

Translated into Weick’s verb–noun distinction, concrete experience is verbrelated because it relates to the ability to perceive process. Whitehead sees concrete experience as being of two different types. The first type is what we may refer to as ‘direct experience’, which belongs in the unconscious, spontaneous, instinctive-intuitive realm. The second type of concrete experience is what Whitehead (1938: 166) calls ‘conceptual’; such experience involves discrimination and choice. It is experience made sense of in a matter-of-fact way, where choices are made according to the relative importance of the matter being decided. Conceptual experience relates to the ability to rationalize and to make consistent choices between many alternatives based on experience. We will illustrate below how, according to Whiteheadian reasoning, experience may evolve to form abstractions, which is the Whiteheadian term which most closely reflects Weick’s ‘noun’. In a continuum with direct experience and abstraction at opposite ends, conceptual experience lies somewhere in between.

Whitehead on Nouns (Abstractions) Although Whitehead rejects a priori assumptions of concrete entities, he considers abstractions, such as persons, goals, and so on, as indispensable for understanding processes. Abstractions are subjectively created; they are models of the mind by which we cope in a fluid world. All perceived entities, according to Whitehead, are abstractions created from process. But he argues that as we create these abstractions, they tend to shape subsequent events and thus influence those events as processes of convergence, what Whitehead refers to as ‘concrescence’. Thus, when entities acquire subjective qualities they attract attention and become ‘data’ for ensuing occasions. In a fluid reality this is the order of the world once things take on subjective This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.


dimensions. But as entities they are not only outcomes of, but also participants in, processes. Thus, processes, viewed in this way, are the interactions between concrete experience and abstractions. From a Whiteheadian perspective, models of organizing would exist in the subjective world rather than in the natural world. Abstractions are entities created out of processes and are re-entered into processes in turn. According to Whitehead (1938: 123), they serve the purpose of distinguishing totality from its details; they are formations that unite attention. Abstractions are more or less random choices from a complex reality, but once they are formed they reproduce our understanding of the world, which makes them powerful and which makes their formation an important object of study. They are seen as indispensable for concerted actions because they unite attention, which may give the impression that they restrict the possibility for change. On the contrary, precisely because they unite attention they make possible a more complex understanding of the world, thus enabling change. Whitehead ([1929] 1978) argues that it is the creativity built into the construction of generalities that produces possibilities for diversification of process, i.e. change. We might say that abstractions are performative, thereby implying, as Feldman and Pentland (2005) do, that routines are performed as labels for a particular type of organized activity. Thus, for example, when a routine is adopted by an organization it is adopted as a name for a particular pattern of programmed activity. The example is relevant to organization studies because routines are arguably constitutive of formal organizations. They are part of what March and Simon (1958) in their seminal work saw as ‘programmes’ around which activity develops. Thus, when a routine is adopted, it is actually the script of connected nouns making up the routine that is adopted. The adoption of a routine, analysed from a Whiteheadian perspective, would not however be seen as the importation of a script from the outside, but rather as the gradual emergence of an abstraction from within (local experience). Even though a routine may have a name and a pattern of nouns that are recognized within a field of organizations, its emergence is seen as taking place through the evolution of local experience.

Whitehead on the Verb–Noun (Experience–Abstraction) Relationship Although Whitehead conceptualized reality as a flux of events, he stressed the importance of unity in process; he stressed that many disparate processes can attain some sense of commonality (unity). Entities that emerge as unities out of processes are abstractions. They arise from processes and they form in turn the basis for further processes. Abstractions are always ‘becoming’ rather than ‘being’; they are always in formation, and never exist as entities in themselves. For this reason, they cannot be seen as separate from their This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.


processes of becoming. Everything must be understood in the light of its development over time and space, according to Whitehead. In fact, everything is how it has developed: ‘How an actual entity becomes constitutes what that actual entity is’ (Whitehead [1929] 1978: 23). This point, intrinsic to Whitehead’s philosophy, is crucial for a reconceptualization of the verb–noun relationship because it explains how verbs and nouns emerge from the same process. They are not disconnected terms struggling for dominance in an ongoing tensional process as one might infer from reading Weick. On the contrary, one can infer from reading Whitehead that verbs and nouns co-evolve as inseparable, yet analytically distinct. The interaction between the two types of experience mentioned above and abstraction may be exemplified by looking generally at the formation of organizations. The initial stage may be characterized by direct experience, consisting of interactions between persons and ideas. This is the stage before concerted action is required and before organizational structure becomes necessary; what matters is the flow of experience and ideas within and among groups. As some ideas begin to crystallize, however, concerted action becomes necessary because ideas need to be tried out. At this stage, choices and selections have to be made, which marks the transition from direct experience to conceptual experience. Possible courses of action will present themselves, and some will be selected over others. As commitment is made to a long-term project with specific intentions, the need to establish institutional legitimacy in relation to other organizations arises, which calls for the development of recognizable characteristics, such as goals, a name and control procedures. These emerge in the form of labels (Weick 1995) that unite attention (Whitehead 1938) in the form of institutionally legitimate abstractions. It is thus possible to appreciate, at least in a simple, basic way, how experience may evolve through stages into abstractions. Throughout this evolution, abstractions are gradually formed, which again form the basis for direct experience and conceptual experience in turn. Of course, the actual evolution of an organization is far more complex. However, our point is that abstractions in this case emerge from experience and form the basis for experience in turn. We are, in a sense, back to the pseudopod, where the transition from entity to movement and back to entity again is ‘seamless’, like Bateson’s blind man and his stick.

Whitehead–Weick Complementarity and the Challenge of a Recursive View Perhaps Weick’s most significant contribution to organization studies has been to distinguish verbs from nouns, thereby encouraging increased focus on the processes of organizing. As pointed out above, this was a muchneeded step at a time when the field was dominated by entitative views. This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.


To draw explicit distinctions between verbs and nouns was necessary in order for verbs to be given their due attention in organization studies. However, by distinguishing verbs from nouns, verbs acquired a different ontological status, with the result that the relationship between verbs and nouns in organizational analysis became dichotomous. We can see an example of such reasoning in a 2005 paper by Van de Ven and Poole devoted to process thinking in organization theory, where they essentially distinguish between two views of organization: one sees organization as a social entity whereas the other sees it as composed of solely organizing processes. Debates about such distinctions, however, belong to the ontological backdrop of classical philosophical debate, and do not capture the epistemological and ontological considerations in process thinking derived from Bergson, James and Whitehead referred to at the beginning of this paper. Importantly, the distinctions tend to consolidate and exacerbate, rather than reconcile, the dichotomy between verbs and nouns. A problem in working with dichotomous notions is that they cannot be seen to interact relationally. To be sure, this is not a new challenge in social science. A persistent problem in organization studies as well as in social science at large lies in connecting the more fluid to the more stable. Theorists such as Giddens (1984) and Luhmann (1995) have proceeded from the idea that recursive relations exist between process and structure, where process is the more fluid and structure the more stable. Pursuing the idea of recursivity, for example, Luhmann developed a framework for describing the interaction between process and structure whereby they are defined in such a way that they may form part of one another even though they might be kept analytically apart (Bakken and Hernes 2003). Luhmann’s view of recursivity regards processes as flows of communication consisting of decisions, whereas it regards structure as codes of communication pertaining to a particular organization. Hence, because both process and structure are conceived as communication based, it becomes possible to study how they engage in mutual transformation. A major advantage of defining process and structure such that they can be seen to interact recursively is that the dynamics between the more fluid and the more stable can be studied. Such study allows, for example, a better understanding of how and when organizational practices may change from being stable to being unstable, as stability is not assumed to be associated with a final equilibrium state. In a similar way, one could infer from Whitehead’s theory that nouns may be seen as temporarily stabilized constellations of verb-based processes. Importantly, experience and abstractions (verbs and nouns) would not be seen as being different in kind, but rather as representing various degrees of stabilization, where the abstraction carries a label that is perceived as sufficiently stable to form a basis for understanding and concerted action. What we have seen in Weick’s work, on the other hand, are hints of a tension between verb and noun, a sort of dialectical relationship where verb



and noun originate from different levels – the structural and the intersubjective (Weick 1995) – and where they are different in kind, one being structural and the other being social. In Whitehead’s view, on the other hand, they would interact in a process whereby they grow out of one another and do not merely exist as different phenomena ‘grasping for’ one another. As pointed out above, the pseudopod example evokes the transitional relationship between verb and noun whereby at no point is something either completely verb or completely noun: movement defines entity and entity defines movement. Thus, Whitehead’s achievement lies in accentuating the importance of relationality between verb and noun, where verbs are made from nouns, and vice versa. Rather than being seen as ontologically different from verbs, nouns may be seen as temporarily stabilized configurations of recurring processes, which are given labels. Moreover, Whitehead brings attention to how such configurations are shaped as complex unities over time. If we accept that Whitehead’s notions are complementary to Weick’s, the implication is that Weick’s work on the verb–noun relationship may extend our understanding of processes if we take a closer look at the choice of verbs and nouns based on their possibilities to interact with one another. In recent years, a number of verbs have been chosen, such as act, behave, operate and practise. The choices have been made, usually through ethnographic studies, due to the need to describe accurately what takes place in organizations. However, nouns, on the other hand, have been chosen primarily on the basis that they reflect illustrative metaphors. Weick (1979: 50), for example, asks why military metaphors have such a grip on managers, and postulates two possible explanations: the first is that they represent ‘war situations’, i.e. that they are tough, macho and exciting; the second is that they impose control mechanisms to lend the impression of order where there is disorder. Whatever the rationale, a problem with metaphors is that they tend to be insensitive to the workings of processes. Consequently, rather than being chosen on the basis of how they evolve through verbs, they are chosen on the basis of how they form contexts within which verbs operate. Weick’s suggestion is that in organization studies we should become better at ‘mutating’ (Weick 1979: 50) metaphors, thereby creating a wider diversity. We would suggest that nouns might also be chosen based on their compatibility with the verbs that make them. Although terms such as ‘organizational culture’ make sense as metaphors, they tend to be far removed from the processes that go on in organizations. Latour makes essentially the same point, arguing that abstractions, such as structure, culture and norms are too distant from local situations to provide good explanations (Latour 1999: 17) of how things evolve. Nouns, such as organization, strategy, culture and so on, were not chosen because they could be seen to emerge from processes that make them, for them to re-enter those processes in turn, but because they were implicitly seen as quasi-stable states, forming stable contexts for processes.



Choosing nouns based on the need to make them interchangeable with the processes that create them may open the way for different and eventually more promising process approaches to organization studies, such as by making it possible to describe how organizational arrangements actually emerge through the processes. We have mentioned programmes and routines previously; both are examples of nouns in the sense that they are labels of processes. Feldman and Pentland (2005) and Feldman (2000) have studied different aspects of routines. Whereas routines may seem to be a mere incidental aspect of organizations, Feldman and Pentland argue persuasively that, on the contrary, they are intrinsic to organizational identity. What they called ‘routines’ were similar to what March and Simon (1958) called ‘programmes’, which they identified as basic constituents of organizations. Whereas programmes and routines both have the character of being essentially problem-solving processes, it is equally possible to see them as important institutional features of an organization, i.e. as recurring sets of activities that serve to distinguish one organization from another, or to connect an organization to a field of organizations (Feldman and Pentland 2005). We would like to add a final note on verbs and nouns. We have briefly touched above on the issue of power in relation to Weick’s work on verbs; we point out that he does not elaborate on power in groups, which might suggest a consensual view of group processes. Power is not an issue with Whitehead either. Therefore, it seems that power is not an important issue as far as process analysis is concerned. On the other hand, it is important to point out that the use of nouns for processual analysis cannot be disconnected from power, especially if nouns are seen as the ‘scripts’ that Barley and Weick refer to. Scripts guide behaviour, and the choice of scripts therefore cannot be deemed innocent, either for managing in organizations or for organizational analysis. Including the formation of nouns as an integral part of processes, as we suggest in this paper, may also make process analysis a useful tool in studying power in organizations.

Conclusion One of Weick’s major contributions has been to encourage organization scholars to pay more attention to process and less to entities. His advice was seen as more radical in 1979 than it would be today, in view of recent contributions in the process literature. Nevertheless, Weick’s work is unparalleled in relating process thinking to original empirical application, which is what gives richness to his contribution. Although more empirical studies pursuing Weick’s efforts would always be useful, we think that it is also useful to search for complementarity between Weick’s work and the theoretical insights from process philosophers. While Weick has drawn on James in different



writings (Weick 1979, 1995), our attempt has been to search for complementarity between Whitehead and Weick, who gave a somewhat different role to nouns in human sensemaking. As we have tried to illustrate in the paper, Whitehead provides a rapprochement between verb and noun that allows for a different reading of the sort of transition made manifest by the pseudopod example. His contribution highlights the potential for selecting verbs and nouns on the basis of recursive relations, which challenges researchers to use verbs and nouns more creatively in organizational analysis.

Note We would like to extend our thanks to two external reviewers and to Andrew Brown for insightful and constructive comments. We are also grateful to colleagues at the Norwegian School of Management to whom we have presented previous versions of the paper, for their comments and suggestions. And special thanks to Frank Azevedo for perspicacious language editing.

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23 The Sites of Organizations Theodore R. Schatzki

The Sites of Organizations

S

ocial ontology examines the nature and basic structure of social life and social phenomena. The present essay provides an overview of a new type of social ontology that has emerged in the last three decades. It also details a particular version of that type and discusses its relevance to organizations. The first two sections examine social ontology in general and the aforementioned novel approach. Subsequent sections endeavor to make palpable how the proposed new ontology bears on organizations. Being neither an organizational theorist nor a sociologist or economist, my remarks vis-à-vis organizations necessarily remain general and programmatic.

Dominant Forms of Social Ontology Since the mid-1800s when the nature of social life became an object of focused thought, social ontology has been divided into two camps: individualists and societists. Ontological individualists maintain that social phenomena are either constructions out of or constructions of individual people and – on some versions – their relations. The first type of individualist, constructionists, hold that social phenomena consist of individuals and their relations, for instance, people bound together through interlocking actions (e.g. a market) or




individuals who share commonalities and maintain certain interactions (e.g. an ethnicity or a club). Another way of formulating the thrust of constructionism is that what there is in the world to a social phenomenon is a collection of actions and mental states of, as well as relations among, individuals. Individualists of the second sort, institutionalists, maintain that social phenomena are brought into existence by virtue of people holding certain attitudes and beliefs and performing certain actions: the possession of certain mental states and the performance of certain actions makes it the case that certain social facts obtain. For example, the shared belief that these here pieces of metal and paper are money makes it the case that they are money. Similarly, that by virtue of which these here buildings, people, and actions are a university is nothing but the pervasive belief that they are such together with the many actions that are performed on this basis. Whereas constructionists hold that the properties of individuals are the stuff out of which social phenomena are composed, institutionalists claim that it is through these properties that social states of affairs obtain. Over time, above all in England and the US, individualism has become the dominant ontological approach to social life. Its ascendancy is due to the affinity between political and ontological individualism, and to the facts that individualism facilitates mathematical model-building and that American social science has a strong scientistic self-understanding. It also reflects strong prima facie experiential plausibility. What I call ‘individualism’ is broader than what is typically dubbed such. Individualists, it is often said, hold that social phenomena can be both decomposed into and explained by properties of individual people. This form of individualism is advocated by, among others, those who maintain that psychology, or, more broadly, a theory of the individual person such as rational choice theory, is the basis of social science. Prominent advocates of this purest individualism have included Max Weber (1972), Frederick Hayek (1952), John Searle (1985), and, within organizational theory, Herbert Simon (1947). What opposes individualism, it is further often said, is the thesis that social phenomena can be adequately analyzed and explained only by reference to facts about and features of collections of people (e.g. groups), as opposed to individual people. Examples of such analyses are Ferdinand Tönnies’s Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft (1955), Emile Durkheim’s social facts (1964), Harold Blumer’s joint actions (1969), and Barry Barnes’s interactionism (1995). According to this alleged anti-individualism, many features of collected individuals cannot be treated as, or ‘reduced’ to, sets of features of the particular individuals involved. According to my typology, however, this position is just a more capacious form of individualism. For it shares with its more austere cousin the conviction that all there is, in the end, to social phenomena are individuals and their relations. All social matters ultimately consist in and are explained by facts about people – either individual people or groups thereof.


Schatzki • The Sites of Organizations 41

The societist camp encompasses greater variety than does the individualist. For about all that ontological societists agree on as a group is that it is not true that all social phenomena are constructions of or out of individuals and their relations. Societists strongly disagree among themselves about what, in addition to features of people, individually or collected, is needed to analyze or explain social phenomena. Examples of the extra phenomena are modes of production (Marx 1973), whole societies (Malinowski 1926), abstract structures (Levi-Strauss 1963, Althusser 1970, Bhaskar 1979), discourses (Foucault 1976), and social systems (Parsons 1966, Luhmann 1984). According to societists, none of these phenomena are decomposable into features of individuals, however complex a set of individuals involved. The capitalist mode of production, for instance, is not a feature of the collection of people – the workers, managers, owners, and consumers – who participate in the capitalist economy, let alone a collection of features of the individual people involved. It is, instead, a system of relations among structurally defined positions such as steel worker, stock holder, information technology officer, and clothes purchaser. Flesh and blood individuals occupy these positions, are entangled in these relations, and therewith participate in the capitalist mode of production. In short, societism holds that there are social phenomena, and that analyzing and explaining many social affairs refers to phenomena, that are something other than features of individual people or groups thereof.

Site Ontologies Recent decades have witnessed the emergence of a new approach to social ontology. This alternative is societist in the sense of denying that all social phenomena are constructions either of or out of individuals and their relations. However, its claims about what beyond individuals is needed to account for social phenomena is sufficiently novel as to warrant describing it as an alternative to the historically prominent forms of societism. I call this alternative site ontology. Site ontologies maintain that social life, by which I mean human coexistence, is inherently tied to a kind of context in which it transpires. The type of context involved – called ‘sites’ – comprises contexts of which some of what occurs or exists in them are inherently parts. The thrust of site ontology, consequently, is that human coexistence inherently transpires as part of a context of a particular sort. This thesis, in turn, implies that a certain type of context is central to analyzing and explaining social phenomena. Just what this implication amounts to depends on both the type of social phenomenon in question and a specific account of the site of social life, that is, an account of the context of which human coexistence is inherently a part.



Nothing hangs on the choice of the word ‘site’ to label this context. Usually, something’s site is its place, or location: the site of a building, the site of the UN, the site of a battle. ‘Sites,’ as I use the term, are arenas or broader sets of phenomena as part of which something – a building, an institution, an event – exists or occurs. An example of a site is absolute space (assuming, for the sake of argument, that absolute space exists). Absolute space is the site of all spatial locations (e.g. the location of a building or battle) because any spatial location is inherently part of it. Absolute space is not, however, the site of events and entities. Even though at least most events and entities occur in space, even necessarily so, they do not occur as part of space; and something’s site is that context (if any) of which it is inherently a part. It is important to emphasize that sites need not be spatial. Elsewhere (1996, chapter three) I have argued that human activities are inherently part of social practices. Recording a student’s grade, for example, intrinsically occurs as part of educational grading practices. Along with acts of pondering grades and calculating them, acts of recording grades are moments of these practices. Grading practices, consequently, are the site of these actions. This fact, however, has nothing to do with the spatial properties of practices (e.g. the particular locations in objective space at which their constituent actions occur). Practices are the site, but not the spatial site, of activities. Indeed, activities do not have a spatial site – there is no type of space of which they are inherently part. A site is a type of context. For present purposes, a context can be loosely understood as an arena or set of phenomena that surrounds or immerses something and enjoys powers of determination with respect to it. Actions, for instance, occur in a spatial context; the objective spaces of the setting of action help determine how and which actions are performed (e.g. whether one reaches to the left or to the right to start the copying machine). Actions likewise transpire in historical contexts, dependent on times, places, traditions, and contemporaneous events. Sites, however, are a particularly interesting sort of context. What makes them interesting is that context and contextualized entity constitute one another: what the entity or event is is tied to the context, just as the nature and identity of the context is tied to the entity or event (among others). A particular episode of grading, for example, is tied to particular grading practices, just as the character of the grading practices is tied to this and the other grading episodes that compose it. In scrutinizing the episode, accordingly, one scrutinizes the practice, and vice versa. A site is inseparable from that of which it is the site. The distinctiveness of site ontologies can be clarified by considering the types of context that individualist and societist ontologies recognize. According to individualism, social reality is nothing but interrelated individuals. Social phenomena are either instituted in or composed of people’s actions, mental states, and relations. A given person’s actions, states, and relations,



however, often depend on those of others. These features of people thus exist in a context, namely, the context of others’ actions, mental states, and relations. Any human life proceeds amid others, and any social phenomenoninstituting or -composing configuration of features of individuals exists in the context of other such configurations. An individual life, however, is not inherently part of the context of lives amid which it proceeds, nor is a configuration of features of individuals inherently part of any context of such configurations. In order for X to be inherently part of Y, Y must help constitute the being of X (what it is). Individualists, however, do not believe that the identity of actions, mental states, and relations is intrinsically wedded to an interpersonal context of such items. A person’s actions and mental states might be contingently and causally connected to those of others, but not inherently. The only phenomena individualists sometimes countenance as intrinsically determining people’s actions and mental states are further properties of the particular people involved such as intentions, purposes, perceptions, and other actions. Of only the context composed of a given actor’s mental states and actions might particular actions and mental states of his be inherently a part. Hence, the social contexts that individualists recognize are not sites. Societist ontologies also recognize contexts. According to Marx (1973), for instance, the activities of workers transpire in a mode of production. A mode of production is an encompassing phenomenon that helps determine what occurs within it by subjecting people to certain conditions and outfitting them with particular interests and motivations. More generally, the social phenomena such as modes of production, discourses, abstract structures, and societies that societists argue are inhospitable to individualist analysis, always serve as the context of the actions, mental states, and relations of individuals. In all cases, however, societist contexts are not sites. For the societal phenomena that contextualize the features and relations of individual people are fundamentally different in being from the latter. Indeed, this is the defining mark of societism. So the individualist stuff cannot be part of them. People’s actions, mental states, and relations might be determined by, and even inseparable from, societal phenomena (in the sense that they would not exist in the context of other social phenomena); but they do not help compose these phenomena. Site ontologies steer a path between individualism and societism. Like societist ontologies, they immerse the relevant features of individuals in wider, distinctly social settings in the absence of which people with these features would not exist. Like individualist ontologies, however, they deny that the wider contexts in which these features exist fundamentally diverge in character from these features: properties of individuals are ontologically continuous with the distinct social contexts in which they exist.



The Site of the Social Most site ontologies are inspired by the philosophy of Martin Heidegger (for one drawing on Ludwig Wittgenstein see Collins and Kusch 1998). More specifically, Heidegger’s (e.g. 1978) notion of a clearing (Lichtung), or open (Offene), is central to their account of the site of social life. For Heidegger, the clearing is an open place, prior to all determinateness (things being such and such) and representation, in which anything that is, including human beings, shows up. (Imagine a litup expanse on the stage of a darkened theatre, in which people, actions, and entities appear.) The clearing has often been interpreted as a space of intelligibility on the grounds that something’s being, what it is, is equivalent to its intelligibility, as what it is intelligible. Qua figure of intelligibility, the clearing is an open of intelligibility in which whatever is shows up (intelligible) as such and such. It is within such an open, for instance, that this here rock is (intelligible as) a paperweight, that this here entity is (intelligible as) a rock, that (it is intelligible that) here is an entity (i.e., something that is), that the person weighting down papers with a rock used as a paperweight is (intelligible as) a writer, that words such as ‘rock,’ ‘object,’ ‘intelligible,’ and ‘is’ have meaning, and so on. The clearing is also typically construed as a horizon of possible intelligibility, that is, as embracing the totality of as what entities can be (intelligible). It is as a field of possible intelligibility, or meaning, that Heidegger’s clearing has infiltrated social theory. Heideggarian philosophies depict human lives as transpiring within a clearing: a person’s actions, mental states, and identities are what they are within a horizon of possible intelligibility/meaning. Social life, human coexistence, is likewise tied to such spaces. For example, the course and identity of people’s interactions depend on the space of intelligibility in which these interactions occur; so, too, do other phenomena through which human lives hang together (e.g. chains of action, shared mental states and actions, the material layouts and interconnectedness of settings). A space of intelligibility, however, is not a property or a set of properties of either individual people or a collection thereof. A social ontology that appropriates Heidegger’s clearing cannot, therefore, be individualist. Spaces of intelligibility are also, however, quite different from the nonindividualist phenomena hitherto affirmed by societists, for example Hegelian or functionalist wholes, Parsonian systems, Marxist modes of production, or structuralist combinatorial matrices. Many prominent Heideggarian site ontologies conceptualize the social as nexuses of practices that carry spaces of intelligibility. These ontologies treat practices such as those of politics, cooking, gardening, and education as collective, social arenas of action that are pervaded by a space of meaning in whose terms people live, interact, and coexist intelligibly. (These arenas are ‘collective’ in embracing multiple people and ‘social’ in being common to those people.) A good example of such an ontology is embodied in the dictum of the Canadian philosopher and political theorist Charles Taylor (1985) that This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.


social reality is practices (see also Spinosa et al. 1997). According to Taylor, the actions, mental states, and language that have previously composed a given practice articulate and hand down a ‘semantic space’ that establishes the meaningfulness of whatever currently transpires in the practice. Current actions and mental states perpetuate this semantic space, in which future actions and mental states will also be meaningful. Practices, in short, institute spaces of intelligibility in whose terms they themselves proceed. When someone participates in particular practices, her life and relations to coparticipants are beholden to these practices’ semantic fields. By virtue of their semantic spaces, practices thus constitute the site of the social: all social life inherently transpires as part of these practices. The political theorists Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe have developed a different sort of Heideggerian social ontology. Laclau and Mouffe (1985) analyze social orders as constellations of systematically and interrelatedly meaningful actions, objects, and words. The sum total of social orders that exist at any time – the total state of sociality at that time – subsides in something they call the ‘field of discursivity’. This field is an inexhaustible openness of articulable meaningfulness that outruns each and every social order that coalesces out of it. Social orders are inseparable from this field: the formation of any constellation of actions, objects, and words draws on it, and the field’s inexhaustibility makes transformations of existing constellations and the formation of new ones possible – and inevitable. All social life transpires as part of social orders, thus on the background of the constitutive field of discursivity. The site of social life is essentially tied to a field of possible meaning. A final example of a Heideggerian site ontology is the well-known work of the French anthropologist-sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. Central to Bourdieu’s (e.g. 1990) account of the social is the notion of a field. A field is a realm of activity in which people pursue certain stakes, drawing on the capitals available to them there, not just economic capital but cultural and symbolic capitals as well (e.g. prestige, credentials). Examples are the fields of education, politics, agriculture, and religion. In any such field, what people do is governed by batteries of dispositions (practical senses) that Bourdieu famously dubbed ‘habitus’. People acquire habitus by learning to carry on the practices that transpire in a given field under the objective socioeconomic conditions that reign there. Once acquired, habitus generates actions, and assigns meanings to the actions, events, and settings that people encounter, that perpetuate the field’s practices and objective conditions. The range of actions and meanings that habitus generates is limited to those compatible with the objective conditions involved. Consequently, in addition to stakes, capitals, and objective conditions, any field boasts a space of possible actions and meanings. All social life transpires in one or more such fields, hence is subject to the spaces of possible action and meaning that reign in them. The site of the social is these possibility space-carrying fields.



In recent publications (1996, 2002, 2003), I have developed a site ontology similar to those just discussed. I shall not presently defend its superiority over its kin, but instead simply sketch it and then expound some of its implications for organizations. I should point out, however, that the very idea of a site ontology, together with the cataloging of such disparate figures as Taylor, Laclau and Mouffe, and Bourdieu as site theorists, is of my own coining. On my account, the site of the social is composed of nexuses of practices and material arrangements. This means that social life inherently transpires as part of such nexuses. By practices, I mean organized human activities. Examples are political practices, cooking practices, educational practices, management practices, shop floor practices, and design practices. Any practice is an organized, open-ended spatial-temporal manifold of actions. The set of actions that composes a practice is organized by three phenomena: understandings of how to do things, rules, and teleoaffective structure. By rules I mean explicit formulations that prescribe, require, or instruct that such and such be done, said, or the case; a teleoaffective structure is an array of ends, projects, uses (of things), and even emotions that are acceptable or prescribed for participants in the practice. The actions that make up North American educational practices, for instance, are organized by (1) understandings of how to grade, teach, mentor, supervise, conduct research, use electronic equipment, perform administration, impress instructors, obtain desirable grades, and the like; (2) instructions, requirements, guidelines, and rules of thumb about these matters such as regulations that govern syllabuses, the timing of exams, or department affairs, rules of thumb about teaching introductory courses or about gender relations, and chair edicts; and (3) a teleoaffective structure that embraces such ends as educating students, learning, receiving good student evaluations, obtaining good grades, gaining academic employment, and enjoying a successful academic career; a wide variety of tasks that can be pursued for these ends; and acceptable uses of such equipment as computers, blackboards, pointers, manila folders, coffee mugs, and telephones. To say that educational actions are organized by these matters is to say that they express the same understandings, observe, contravene, or ignore the same rules, and pursue ends and projects included in the same structure of acceptable and enjoined teleologies.1 By material arrangements, meanwhile, I simply mean set-ups of material objects. Whenever someone acts and therewith carries on a practice, she does so in a setting that is composed of material entities. The material arrangements amid which humans carry on embrace four types of entity: human beings, artefacts, other organisms, and things. The site of the social is a mesh of practices and material arrangements. This implies that human coexistence inherently transpires as part of practice-arrangement bundles. To illustrate this claim, consider two prominent ways that humans coexist, that is, two avenues through which their lives hang together: (1) chains of actions and (2) commonalities in, as well as



orchestrations of, their ends, projects, and emotions (two or more such items are orchestrated when they nonindependently determine what different people do). A chain of actions is a sequence of actions, each member of which responds to its predecessor (or to a change in the world the latter instigates). Many of the chains of action through which lives hang together transpire within a given practice. A teacher poses a question, students raise their hands, the teacher calls on one or more of them, answers are ventured, the teacher or other students respond – this chain occurs entirely within education practices. It also transpires as part of these practices: the actions involved help compose the practice. Similarly, the ends and projects the teacher and students pursue in performing these actions – teaching, learning, impressing the teacher, demonstrating even-handedness etc. – are contained in the teleoaffective structure of educational practices: to pursue them is ipso facto to be carrying on the practice. Commonalities in and orchestrations of their ends and projects are likewise part of the practice’s teleoaffective structure. It is thus as part of educational practices that teachers and students coexist via particular chains of action and particular teleological commonalities and orchestrations. A third general sort of link among human lives is material arrangements that encompass, as well as physical connections (e.g. lines of communication) among, both specific entities in and the layouts of material settings. For example, teachers and students also coexist by virtue of the layouts of classrooms, email communication networks, and the use of blackboards. Such layouts, networks, and artefacts are arrangements of material entities. Hence, human coexistence transpires as part of, not practices alone, but material arrangements as well. This example illustrates, further, that the site of the coexistence among teachers and students is not practices, on the one hand, and material arrangements on the other, but a mesh of practices and arrangements, a mesh in which educational practices are carried out and determinative of, but also dependent on and altered by, particular arrangements. This fact holds of social life generally: all human coexistence inherently transpires as part of practice-arrangement meshes. In addition, practices, arrangements, and meshes thereof intrinsically interlace. The practice-arrangement mesh at the classrooms links and overlaps with the mesh at the department office, as with the ones at the college administration offices, the dorms, the bookstore, and the central administration building. In turn, this larger net of practice-arrangement bundles (the university) is tied to the similar nets that are other educational institutions, as well as to those that compose state governments, local city governments, foundations, and industries. This even larger confederation of nets (American education) itself links with other such confederations found in other countries etc. All these meshes, nets, and confederations form one gigantic metamorphosing web of practices and orders, whose fullest reach is coextensive with sociohistorical space-time.



The Social Site and Organizations All human coexistence transpires as part of this overall practice-order web. Any social phenomenon, accordingly, is a feature or slice of this web. Organizations are social phenomenon. Reminiscent of other social scientists, however, organizational theorists seem to disagree about what sort of social phenomenon they are. Some theorists lean toward conceptualizing organizations broadly as ensembles of interrelated actions, beginning with dyads (cf. Weick 1979). On this view, social life is replete with organizations of many sizes and characters; indeed, social life is almost nothing but a labyrinth of organizations. Most organizational theorists, however, define organizations less encompassingly. Barnard’s (1938) definition of organizations as ‘conscious, deliberate, and purposeful’ cooperation still covers a lot of sociality, but it no longer focuses on the mere fact of interrelatedness as does Weick’s. Many organizational theorists conceptualize organizations even more specifically, for instance as goal-oriented collectivities exhibiting a mix of formal (rational) and informal (organic) structure or as more loosely or tightly functionally integrated and constantly metamorphosing rule-governed collectivities seeking their own survival. Conceived in such ways, organizations are a type of social formation alongside other types such as communities, groups, crowds, markets, systems, and the like. In the following, I attempt to convey some appreciation for a site analysis of an organization. The organization to be described is an academic department, even though academic departments might not count as organizations on all definitions. For detailed analyses along the following lines of a Shaker medicinal herb industry, day trading on the Nasdaq market, and a day trading firm, see Schatzki (2002). An academic department is a bundle of practices and material arrangements. The practices it embraces include grading practices, research practices, advising practices, governance practices, administrative practices, meeting practices, community-building practices, and consultation practices. The material arrangements it encompasses include the layouts and material connections among individual offices, meeting rooms, hallways, front offices, lounges, and people’s homes (e.g. where evening events occur). Many of these arrangements are contiguous or continuous, some are connected by communication lines, and most are connected to further material arrangements that are not part of the department bundle. Similarly, many of the departments’ practices are part of the practice-arrangement bundles that are other academic departments, while also overlapping or conflicting with those constitutive of such formations as the dean’s office and central administration. Each of these practices possesses an organization of the type outlined in the previous section. Typically, moreover, they overlap and connect. Practices overlap, for instance, when particular actions are part of two or more practices or when practices share organizational elements. Practices This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.


connect when, among other things, actions from different practices form chains, actions from different practices (e.g. grading and conducting research) are performed in the same places in the department’s arrangements (e.g. an office), and actions from one practice are objects of the mental states (e.g. beliefs) of participants in others. The practices involved also rarely conflict in the sense that the perpetuation of one is incompatible with the continuation of the other. The fact that practices overlap and connect, however, does not preclude conflict among people either in a given practice or across practices. Disputes can break out about, among other things, individual grades, grading standards, the practice of grading, between the chair and the instructors, and so on. According to this site analysis, the college to which the department belongs is a confederation of such practice-material bundles; those of the academic departments, dean’s office, communications support team, various college committees, and so on. These bundles overlap and interact. They overlap when elements of practices and orders appear in different bundles. They interact in myriad ways: deans issue directives to departments, department secretaries confer, departments make decisions and draw up proposals that are communicated to committees, faculty coteach classes or conduct joint research, faculty from different departments discuss pedagogical issues, and so on. Many of these interactions are mediated by technological connections such as email, telephones, and blackboards. Since these interactions perpetuate the different departments, the departments cohere. Conflict exists when interactions are such that the bundles are not mutually sustaining (e.g. the dean’s office implements a plan to close a department). Two important questions about any social formation are: How did it originate? and How is it perpetuated? Together, answers to these questions constitute an explanation of the formation. An academic department arises from a decision by administrators or the founders of an university to open it. Implementing this decision usually involves hiring a chair and maybe also several faculty. These decisions and acts of hiring are components of already existing administrative decisionmaking and hiring practices, subject to these practices organizing structures. The department, in other words, results from existing practices. The hired chair, moreover, likely has experience in academe. In setting up the department, she extends academic practices learned and already carried on elsewhere in new circumstances: curriculum, administration, governance, advising and other practices are reinstituted and carried forward amid new material arrangements with a new cast of humans. (The arrangements also need to be at least partly set up.) Owing to particularities of the new circumstances and the personality of the chair (and new faculty), the practices involved are likely to be altered: understandings might subtly change (consciously or nonconsciously), different rules might be promulgated (by the chair or faculty), ends might be differentially emphasized differently (ad hoc or as part



of a plan), and a different array of projects might be deemed acceptable (either intentionally or not). Any of these changes might also result from discussion among members of the department. (Generally speaking, what is acceptable or prescribed in any practice – its teleoaffective structure – is always subject to discursive determination.) The new department’s material arrangements are likely also to differ from the previous material arrangements amid which the reinstituted educational practices were carried out. Connections among these practices, and among this practice-arrangement bundle and others (other departments, administration etc.), will also have to be forged by the new personnel, again by drawing on the existing academic practices with which they are familiar. As for perpetuation, the practice component of a practice-arrangement bundle is perpetuated largely by individuals being incorporated into and carrying them forward. Academic practices vary only so much across the various universities where students learn and graduate students receive training and gain employment. In learning to carry out such practices at one school, graduate students and students are introduced to, or at least provided analogues of, the practices they encounter in their subsequent places of education or employment. Similar remarks apply to arrangements. Carrying on the variant practices requires drawing on acquired know-how, acquiring additional know-how, and becoming familiar with whatever different rules, ends, projects, and equipment are germane to the new practice-arrangement bundle. Of course, practices are not static. They evolve as circumstances change, opportunities and problems arise, personnel changes, new ideas arise, and so on. Changes in practice-arrangement bundles can be intentional or unintentional and known or unbeknownst to participants. Changes are also typically piece-meal and gradual, alterations in any component of a bundle being accompanied by continuity in others. Practices can, however, be changed more wholesale, when conscious intervention (from the inside or outside) reworks goals, alters rules, and redesigns projects. These comments apply mutatis mutandis to a department’s material arrangements and to the mesh between its practices and arrangements. An organization, construed as a practice-arrangement bundle, (1) is a product of actions performed in extant practices, (2) is a mesh that embraces existing, to varying degrees altered, practices (possibly supplemented with new ones) and a mix of new and old material arrangements, and (3) continues in existence via a perpetuation of its practices and a maintenance of its arrangements that accommodates evolution and focused changes in the mesh. Notice that analyzing the origin and perpetuation of an organization differs from analyzing its workings. Analyses of operations examine, inter alia, lines of authority, routines and regular actions, responses to unusual events, how people interact, their ability to work together, and how decisions are made and implemented. Such matters transpire in the



practice-arrangement bundle that is the organization, subject to the organizations of its practices and tied to its material arrangements and mesh. This social ontology holds implications for studying organizations. One central task in comprehending an organization is identifying the actions that compose it. A second key task is identifying the practice-arrangement bundle(s) of which these actions are part. In the case of an academic department, as with any organization of appreciable complexity, doing this will involve identifying a net of bundles. The classroom, the front office, the meeting room, the coffee machine, private offices – all these terms are ciphers for different bundles that overlap and interact. Also contained in this second task is discovering whether the bundles cohere or compete. Incidentally, identifying practicearrangement bundles requires considerable ‘participant observation’: watching participants’ activities, interacting with them (e.g. asking questions), and – at least ideally – attempting to learn their practices. The names participants use for their activities are an important clue for identifying existing practices and bundles, as are also social theoretical considerations. A third task in studying an organization is identifying other nets of practicearrangement bundles to which the net composing the organization is closely tied. In the case of an academic department, these include other departments, college administration, and service suppliers. To grasp the ties among these nets is to study, among other things, commonalities and orchestrations in their actions, teleological orders, and rules; chains of action, including harmonious, competitive, and conflictual interactions; material connections among nets; and the desires, beliefs, and other attitudes that participants in one net have toward the other nets. Interactions among academic departments are often harmonious, sometimes competitive, and rarely conflictual. Because, furthermore, human action is the primary source of change in practicearrangement bundles and nets, investigators interested in change will pay particular attention to the chains of action that link and pass through bundles and nets. Depending on topic of study, relations between the nets involved and confederations that are (1) the university and (2) such extrauniversity formations as state legislatures, educational boards, local governments, funding agencies, industries, and contractors, might also be of interest. Often, of course, investigators do not need to track and register the potentially labyrinthine complexity of bundles, nets of bundles, and so on. In many cases, it is desirable and feasible to provide overviews of social phenomena and their workings that are couched in terms referring, not to the details of practice-arrangement bundles, but to entire formations and their relations. This is not the place to examine the art of giving overviews and the concepts and methods involved in their provision. The present point is that, at whatever scale and with whatever conceptual apparatus social affairs are studied, social phenomena, ontologically, are aspects or nets of practice-arrangement bundles.



To illustrate this point, consider Herbert Simon’s (1947) famous analysis of rational organizations. Simon is an individualist. He portrays organizations as systems of individuals at equilibrium, where equilibrium involves employees and managers so performing their tasks in the organization’s functional structure as to ensure its survival. Accordingly, organization analysis à la Simon focuses on the decisions and actions of members. The principal functional structures of an organization are the horizontal and vertical divisions of labour and of decision making. To be part of the division of labour is to be assigned particular tasks, the performance of which subtends the survival of the organization and the achievement of its objectives. To be part of the division of decision making is for decisions, orders, and instructions supplied by the organization to be premises in one’s own decision making. These two divisions interknit. The overall functional structure shapes members’ expectations of other members’ actions. The resulting shared or orchestrated expectations underwrite the considerable coordinated action that organizations exhibit. Regardless of how true this account might be of this or that organization, it is an abstraction, in the sense of an extraction, from the fuller reality that is an organization. Like any organization, a rational organization bundles a variety of practices, including executive board practices, managerial decision-making practices, communication practices between managers and employees, practices of design, construction, supervision, shop-floor activity, advertising, and upkeep, as well as dispersed practices of giving orders, asking questions, and reporting problems. Any decision made, say, by a manager is part of managerial decision-making processes, just as many actions assembly line workers perform are components of shop-floor practices. As such, these decisions and actions reflect not just whatever official strictures the organization’s formal structure (rules) places on the manager or worker, but also the know-hows of the manager and worker as well as the various end-project-use combinations that are acceptable for either to carry out. These ‘informal’ matters are not part of the formal (rational rulelike) structure of the organization. Nor are they values and meanings that develop beyond the formal structure (as the so-called natural conception of organizations has it, c.f. Baum and Rowley 2002). Nor do they compose a sector- or society-wide institutional structure that forms and is taken up in organizations, thereby shaping members’ goals and actions (as neoinstitutionalists would have it, cf. Powell and DiMaggio 1991 and Scott 2001). Rather, these matters of intelligibility, teleology, and normativity are inherent in the practices that are bundled together in the organization, practices that are descendent, sometimes considerably altered versions of practices that were appropriated at the origin of the organization (or subsequently incorporated or initiated). Indeed, all the interactions, coordinated actions, routines, collective activities, formal structures, rules and hierarchies, forms of communication, technologies, organizational ‘cultures’ (including moral



cultures), shifting coalitions of members, and the like that investigators of organizations study are features, often complicated features, of the interconnected practice-arrangement bundles that compose the organization. A rich account of an organization must capture this fuller reality, within which the subject-matter of Simon’s account, the actions and decisions of individuals, is contextualized.2 Accomplishing this task involves identifying manifolds of action, viz, those that compose practices, that differ from those typically studied in social science, for example those composing interactions, routines, or coordinated actions or those associated with roles, positions, subsystems, and other functionally defined units. A full account of an organization must also consider its material arrangements, the ways humans, artefacts, organisms, and things are ordered in it. This might seem trivial, but Simon’s (1947) approach, like Weick’s (1979) and Barnard’s (1938) definitions of organizations – and one further example, the claim that the structure of an organization is recurrent relations among its members (cf. Donaldson 1996) exemplifies a type of analysis, pervasive throughout the social sciences, that treats social life solely as a matter of interrelated people. These theorists would not, presumably, deny that artefacts and things sometimes subtend organizational activities. They do not, however, adequately acknowledge that nonhumans are active components of practice-arrangement bundles, shaping activity, redirecting practices, and inducing decisions (e.g. Latour 1999, Callon 1991, Law 1994, Pickering 1995). In recent centuries, the active contribution of nonhumans, in particular, artefacts to the perpetuation and transformation of practice-order bundles has only strengthened. Two prominent contemporary lines of thought that my ontology rejects are systems theories and Darwinian selection theories. To begin with, it denies that social formations, including organizations, as systems in any rigorous sense of the term (e.g. wholes whose workings, and the workings of whose subsystems, are subject to principles that apply to the wholes involved and not their parts).3 The operations of an organization lie in the complex, sinuous interlocking of its component bundles. This interlocking is sufficiently contingent and ad hoc that understanding the workings of a formation requires delving into the details of its web and not averting to a general theory about systems. Meanwhile, my approach challenges selection theories for reasons having to do with the replication of social formations and the embeddedness of culture within practices (see Schatzki 2001). On issues of power, this approach is closely allied with Foucault’s (1982) idea that power is one person’s actions structuring other people’s possible actions. How actions structure others’ possibilities depends prominently (but not exclusively) on material layouts and the organizations of and past actions that compose practices. The notion of power thus captures the responsibility that actions bear for the differential access that other people have to the possibilities carried in practice-arrangement bundles. Pace many social theorists,



power is not a possession, an ability or resource, the use of which reproduces hierarchical relations of autonomy and dependence that characterize and are defined by such ‘institutions’ as class, authority, markets, expertise, status, and gender. How actions expand, restrict, and shape what others can do constitutes what theorists mean by relations of autonomy and dependence. Generally speaking, the broad structures (e.g. cognitive structures and structures of domination) that theorists attribute to social life are not ‘carried by’ (Marx 1973), but are instead constituted in and, in fact, forms taken by, the web of practice-arrangement bundles. Broad structures and concrete bundles are not two interacting levels of social life. Many organizational theorists today stress the dependency of an organi zation’s behavior on its environment. On my view, the environment of a social formation is a net of practice-arrangement bundles (regardless of the terms that are used to denote features and slices of this net, for example ‘competing firms’, ‘markets’, ‘hostile states’, and ‘NGOs’). An organization’s relations to and interdependencies with extra-organizational formations consist of concrete connections and interactions between the bundle that composes the organization and those that compose extra-organizational phenomena. As with the internal workings of an organization, studying an organization’s relations with other phenomena requires delving into the details of these connections and interactions and not averting to a theory about the relation between an organization and its ‘environment’. Although throughput models, to take just one example, legitimately collate quantitative ‘macro’ features of organizations, what generates and explains the quantitative values is the contingent, complex interrelatedness among organizational and extra-organizational bundles. This messiness also implies that the boundaries between an organization and its environment are often indefinite and always dynamic. This site ontology is clearly allied with a variety of micro-oriented approaches to social life, for example, ethnomethodology, symbolic interactionism, and actor-network theory. Like these approaches, it contends that all social orders and formations arise from – in this case are instituted in or constituted by – local phenomena. It also concurs with those micro-approaches that do not deny the existence or efficacy of ‘macro’ (or ‘meso’) formations and structures, insisting only that the existence and efficacy of such phenomena be comprehended as and via interrelated practice-arrangement bundles. No macro level of institutions and structures over and beyond interrelated bundles need be reified. This position resembles micro-foundationalism (see Coleman 1990, chapter 1 and Little 1991, chapter 9). Similarly, the phenomena with which organizational theorists populate the environment of organizations, including institutions, surveillance/control mechanisms, and systems of rules, procedures, or symbols, must be conceptualized as aspects of or shapes taken by interrelated practice-arrangement bundles. Whether this approach



countenances any such entity as the ‘organizational field’ of neoinstitutional theory is a question that cannot be examined here (see Dimaggio and Powell 1983; Scott and Meyer 1991).

Mentality and Sociality I conclude by considering the psychological dimension of social life. Mental states are often cited for the purpose of explaining actions and social affairs. Individualist social ontologies also make mind partly constitutive of social affairs. My ontology converges with individualism on this point, though with a twist. Practices are nonindividualist phenomena. It is people, to be sure, that perform the actions that compose a practice. But the organization of a practice is not a collection of properties of individual people. It is a feature of the practice, expressed in the open-ended set of actions that composes the practice. The relation of the practice’s organization to its participants is that this organization is differentially incorporated into their minds. Understandings, rules, ends, and tasks are incorporated into participants’ minds via their ‘mental states’; understandings, for instance, become individual know-how, rules become objects of belief, and ends become objects of desire. Different combinations of a practice’s organizing elements are incorporated into different participants’ minds due to differences in participants’ training, experience, intelligence, powers of observation, and status. In every case, however, the organizational element is distinct from its incorporations: the end of learning that helps organize educational practices is distinct from each individual student’s and teacher’s goal of learning, and also from the sum of the latter. This organizing end is a feature of the practice that cannot be divided up into the goals of participants; the latter are versions of the former (see Schatzki 2002, 2003). Practices thus inject a deep dimension of commonality into social life. Participants in a given practice incorporate elements of, and are thereby governed by, a single, common structure: the organization of the practice. The perpetuation and workings of a social formation are likewise governed by the sum of organizations of its practices and also by its overall array of arrangements (though different pairs of members are likely governed by different commonalities: no member of an organization usually participates in all its practices and acts amid all its arrangements). This type of commonality grounds social life and helps makes it possible. In an article titled ‘Collective Mind in Organizations’, Karl Weick and Karlene Roberts (1993) designate as collective mind something that is inherent in all organizations (though more developed in some than in others): heedful interaction. Heedful interaction occurs when people who think of



themselves as a collective and aim to carry out joint actions, carefully, critically, and attentively attend and respond to one another’s actions. When people heedfully interact, their actions converge, supplement, assist one another and, together with the states of affairs to which these actions give rise, form an emergent pattern. This pattern reacts to events in the sense of generating results that are appropriate to events given the joint actions being carried out. This emergent pattern is not under the control of particular individuals or even the collective as a unit. It instead manifests collective mind. It ‘shape[s] the actions that produced it, persist[s] despite changes in personnel, and change[s] despite unchanging personnel’ (Weick and Roberts 1993: 374). This account, however perspicuous, overlooks the role that practices play in establishing emergent patterns of activity. Key to actions so converging and connecting that patterns therein arise is the organizations of the practices of which the pattern-forming actions are part along with connections among the practice-arrangement bundles involved (other than chains of action, which help compose the pattern). Weick and Roberts’s collective minds are contextualized within the commonalities and interlocking of practices and bundles. The organization of a practice is an array of understandings, rules, ends, projects, and even emotions. This organization can be described as a normativized array of mental states: a normativized array of understandings, desires, beliefs, expectations, emotions, and so on. As indicated, however, these organizational mental states are not the states of participants. They are features of the practice, expressed in the open-ended totality of actions that compose the practice. They thus constitute a sort of objective mind. A practice’s objective mind is distinct from the mind of any participant and also from the sum thereof. As described, in learning to participate in a practice, individuals acquire versions of many, though not all, of the objective mental states that organize it. To the extent that different participants acquire versions of the same objective states, they share mentality. Weick and Roberts’s collective minds – that is, people’s actions so converging and interlocking that patterns of activity emerge – depend on such shared mentalities. Collective minds also depend on orchestrations of the differential incorporation of the organizations of practices in participants’ minds. In turn, these shared and orchestrated mentalities rest on the objective minds that organize the practices implicated in the pattern. Hence, Weick and Roberts’s collective minds implicate shared and differential mentalities that themselves rest on objective mind. And, conversely, changes in objective mind and in shared/ orchestrated mentalities can depend on or arise from shared/orchestrated mentalities and collective minds. The mental structure of practices, practice-arrangement bundles, and the interactive patterns that emerge in these bundles is complex.4



Notes 1. For the sake of simplicity, I skip over the distinction between integrative practices and dispersed practices. The practices described in the text are all integrative practices. A dispersed practice is an open spatial-temporal manifold of actions largely organized by understandings alone. Examples are the practices of describing, explaining, and questioning. Dispersed practices weave through integrative ones and are often colonized by the latter and transformed in character. For discussion, see Schatzki (1996, ch. 3). I also pass over the account of action that accompanies my account of practices. According to this account, practical understanding is central to what people to. This theory draws heavily on Heidegger and Wittgenstein and is kin to the accounts found in Dreyfus (1991) and Bourdieu (1990). This family of accounts is an alternative to both rational actor models of action and the idea that action largely follows taken-forgranted or nonconscious scripts, routines, or schemes. 2. I concur with neoinstitutionalists that symbolic elements, in particular, meaning, norms, and regulations are vital to organizations. As suggested in the text, however, whenever intelligibility, teleology, and normativity pervade organizational fields, entire industries, or societies, they do so by virtue of being features either of many practice-arrangement bundles or of the practices belonging to particularly pervasive ones. Other key differences between my account and neoinstitutionalism concern meaning, which I treat as a phenomenon of action, and normativity, which I treat as a realm of behavioral and teleological acceptability and enjoinment. 3. ‘Organizational structures are viewed as spontaneously and homeostatically maintained. Changes in organizational patters are considered as the result of cumulative, unplanned, adaptive responses to the equilibrium of the system as a whole’ (Gouldner 1959: 405). 4. A version of this essay was presented at the 2004 annual meeting of the British Psychological Society’s section on the history and philosophy of psychology. I wish to thank the participants for their invigorating comments.

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Schatzki, Theodore 2002 The site of the social: A philosophical exploration of the constitution of social life and change. University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press. Schatzki, Theodore 2003 ‘A new societist social ontology’. Philosophy of the Social Sciences 33/2: 174–202. Scott, W. Richard 2001 Institutions and organizations, 2nd edn. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Scott, W. Richard, and John W. Meyer 1991 ‘The organization of societal sectors’ in The new institutionalism in organizational analysis. Walter W. Powell and Paul J. Dimaggio (eds), 108–139. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Searle, John 1985 The construction of social reality. New York: The Free Press. Simon, Herbert 1947 Administrative behavior: A study of decision-making processes in administrative organization. New York: Macmillan. Spinosa, Charles, Fernando Flores, and Hubert L. Dreyfus 1997 Disclosing new worlds: Entrepreneurship, democratic action, and the cultivation of solidarity. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Taylor, Charles 1985 ‘Interpretation and the sciences of man’ in Philosophy and the human sciences: Philosophical papers 2, 15–58. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tönnies, Ferdinand 1955 Community and association, trans. Charles P. Loomis. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Weber, Max 1972 Basic concepts of sociology, trans. H. P. Secher. Secaucus, NJ: Citadel. Weick, Karl E. 1979 The social psychology of organizing, 2nd edn. Reading, MA:, AddisonWesley. Weick, Karl E., and Karlene H. Roberts 1993 ‘Collective mind in organizations: Heedful interrelating on flight decks’. Administrative Science Quarterly 38: 357–381.



24 Introduction to the Symposium on the Foundations of Organizing: The Contribution from Garfinkel, Goffman and Sacks Dalvir Samra-Fredericks and Francesca Bargiela-Chiappini

Introduction

T

hree scholars whose paths crossed in the late 1950s/early 1960s each established distinctive fields of study which tackled central problems in sociology – the ‘missing what’ (Garfinkel 1967) – and which have an acute bearing on ‘the foundations of organizing’. The three men are Harold Garfinkel (ethnomethodology; EM), Harvey Sacks (conversation analysis; CA) and Erving Goffman (interaction order/dramaturgy). The puzzle which inspired us to compile this Symposium Issue arose from two linked concerns: First, the marginality of their work in the field of management and/or organization studies (hereafter, MOS) and second, the rarity of studies of people doing world/organization-making, then-and-there, with one another, and in the taken-for-granted, nuanced and intricate ways they do so. Garfinkel, Goffman and Sacks’ work is also timely in light of the polyphony of voices spread across a spectrum of theoretical traditions advancing important concerns and questions dealing with, for example, the ontological status of ‘organization’ and a critique of the reification of phenomena such as manager, competence, change, etc., alongside growing calls to get close to work/organizational practices happening.




It is acknowledged that organization studies is a field ‘characterized by diversity, disagreement, contest and intolerance’ (Watson 2006: 381; see also Westwood and Clegg, 2003). In a Forum issue of Organization Studies it was also interesting to see Starbuck (2007) springboard off James March’s (2007) notion of organization studies as a ‘myth’ to chastise the field on several counts including its lack of explicative and analytical power in terms of the category ‘organization’; its neglect of observational methods and hence a loss of involvement, complexity and dynamism; and a disregard for relevance and (practical) usefulness. As students of human interaction, we join this conversation and suggest that our three scholars provide alternative and insightful routes from which to address such concerns and explicate particular phenomena (e.g. social-moral order, methods/practice, identity/ becoming, critical study/power, etc.). It is also an effort which continues the conversation begun by David Silverman’s (1970) seminal sociological contribution challenging orthodoxy in our field. What will also become apparent is that our use of the term ‘organizing’ simply points to pervasive human relational processes which bring shape or form and meaning to mutually orientated-to phenomena, such as ‘organization’. Further, our use of the word ‘foundations’ in the title here should not be confused with essentialism or universalism. ‘Foundations’ is simply defined as ‘ground’ or ‘base’ ‘on which other parts are overlaid’ (Concise Oxford Dictionary). The particular ‘base’ or ‘ground’ here is exemplified through the seminal work of Garfinkel, Goffman and Sacks and contrasts markedly with other approaches and those who move first to overlay or foreground their own concepts (and hence, assumptions) while losing sight of the base phenomena itself. The Symposium Issue also meets requests from scholars to ‘bring work back in’ (Barley and Kunda 2001) but it does so in a unique and challenging way (Rawls 2008) while also extending notions of work itself (Llewellyn 2008). Further, we concur with Watson (2006: 382) who suggested after reviewing seven weighty books in the MOS field that ‘perhaps the field would benefit from a higher proportion of those who earn their living from organization studies getting out into the field and actually putting into practice their methodological and conceptual apparatuses to make sense of and explain the organizational structures, practices and discourses that prevail outside the academic debating chambers.’

Being in the field first and encountering phenomena first-hand is what each of the three scholars – Garfinkel, Goffman and Sacks – did. At this stage, our hope is that from engaging with Garfinkel, Goffman and Sacks’ work and ideas (indicated through the conceptual ‘items’ noted shortly and across the four papers selected) alongside empirical studies of human ‘interaction’ and their inherent fine-grained accomplishment of workplace/ organizational settings, tasks, allied identities and objects, we advance our


Samra-Fredericks and Bargiela-Chiappini • Introduction to the Symposium 63

understanding of the foundations of organizing, that is, of the social-moral order, of trust and reciprocity, of the methodical achievement of intelligibility and so on. Garfinkel’s programme in particular stands out since he has been the foremost scholar to push for a form of non-positivistic study which illuminates ‘foundational sociological issues’ (Rawls 2008). Of course, one Symposium Issue cannot condense or summarize even just one of these scholars’ work. Heritage (1984: vii), for example, took 311 pages to make Garfinkel’s ‘thinking available to a wider audience’. What also complicates matters is that in bringing these three names together and yet only surveying parts of their work, we risk overlooking the tensions and dividing lines between them.1 Like Heritage, then, we remain acutely ‘conscious of the pitfalls and difficulties’ as we attempt to provide a selective glimpse of Garfinkel, Goffman and Sacks’ thinking and ideas, distilled further to highlight particular contributions to our field. As we shall see, theirs is a programme of work with direct relevance for a number of MOS domains of study and, for illustrative purposes and given the four papers selected, we will touch on some of these at the close of this introduction. Equally, in keeping with a Symposium Issue, we also expect/hope to fuel ‘productive’ (whatever that may mean for social science communities) debate which comes back to challenge us and the scope of their legacies. To begin to lay out a basis for this outcome we first provide a very brief historical backdrop. The next three sections touch on particular aspects of each scholar’s stance while also noting the nature of their presence within MOS. As part of this, we weave in the relevant Symposium Issue contributing papers – Peter K. Manning (on Goffman), Anne W. Rawls (on Garfinkel), Steve Fox (on Garfinkel) and Nick Llewellyn (on Sacks). The implications in terms of challenges and possibilities for future research conclude this opening paper.

A Historical Backdrop We bring Garfinkel, Sacks and Goffman together here on the basis of their relentless quest to interrogate the foundations of a social and moral order – which temper and shape organizing processes – and on which that edifice we call ‘organization’ is built or rather, mutually orientated to and made intelligible. As part of this endeavour, one shared characteristic was their attention to human beings attending to each other and ostensibly ‘out-there’ inanimate objects in subtle, nuanced and fine-grained ways. As one crucial part of this, language use and members’ methods were foregrounded by them.2 Without doubt, each excelled at observation, description and astute insight into a range of face-to-face social encounters with ethnomethodologists centrally ‘animated by a curiosity for the organization of experience and the extraordinary organization of the ordinary’ (Boden 1994: 31). The shared interest in the everyday nature of human interaction was, however, pursued in This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.


distinctive ways, given their particular sensitivities and corresponding analytical mentalities. So too, particular conceptual vocabularies were generated from ‘bottom-up’ research including, for example, attending to the: • ‘seen-but-unnoticed’ members’ reasoning procedures, sequential organization, ethno-methods, identified actors and objects, trust, accountmaking and the moral accountability of action and expressions of the ‘documentary method of interpretation’ (Garfinkel 1967); • devices such as turn-taking, sequential organization, and elusive forms of knowledge-in-use such as membership categorization devices and the status and warrantability of memory and experience (Sacks 1992); • keying/frame analysis, role-distance/embrace, front/back-stage, face, repairs, demeanour, working consensus (Goffman 1959, 1967, 1974). Garfinkel, Goffman and Sacks’ legacy continues to influence (sub) disciplines such as discursive psychology, pragmatics, sociolinguistics, communication studies, linguistic anthropology, technology/workplace studies, social theory. However, while these three scholars are acknowledged within their mother discipline (sociology) as having founded vibrant fields of inquiry today, their initial influence was rather patchy and controversial. There are a number of reasons for this and we note just four. First, Harvey Sacks’ work and ideas remained confined to a small circle of colleagues and researchers with others only coming into contact with Sacks’ work through ‘photocopied versions of his lectures which circulated in the early 1970s’ (Silverman 2007: 6).3 When turning to EM, much of Garfinkel’s early work also remained unpublished until recently (see Rawls 2008). Further, a second possible reason arises from EM’s interest in the ‘contingency of meaning’ and references to ‘accounts’ and ‘accountability’ which led to it being subsumed under the label of the ‘sociology of everyday life’ together with symbolic interactionism, labelling theory and the phenomenologically derived treatise from Berger and Luckmann (1967) on the social construction of reality (see Heritage 1984). Burrell and Morgan (1979) also classified ethnomethodology as a kind of interpretivist perspective while recognizing it as forwarding a critique of positivism in the 1970s. In sum, though, the distinctiveness and full import of Garfinkel’s scholarship was diluted (Rawls 2008; see also Rawls 2006). The third reason arises from the debate and controversy involving prominent sociologists of the day. We learn from Silverman (2007: 6), for example, that during the 1972 ‘Ethnomethodology and Symbolic Interactionism’ conference at Edinburgh, his ex-tutor at LSE, Ernest Gellner, ‘noisily walk[ed] out in disgust from the hall during Sacks’ talk’. Another gatekeeper of mainstream sociology, Lewis Coser, also publicly attacked Garfinkel at his 1974 presidential address to the American Sociological Association.4 One accusation, says Anne Rawls, was that EM was taken to be ‘morally and scientifically irresponsible’ since it did ‘not focus on institutional constraint and power in conventional ways’. The ‘fact that Garfinkel’s



research had focused extensively on abuses of power up to that point, and promised to reveal power at work, was entirely ignored’ (Anne Rawls, personal communication, 2007, emphasis added; Rawls 2008). The ‘charge’ of not using the theoretical and conceptual vocabulary of the mainstream tradition was also levelled at Goffman (e.g. Gouldner 1970; see Charles Lemert’s (1997: xxiv) introduction). At this stage it is also important to emphasize that Garfinkel, Goffman and Sacks’ shared interest in members’ everyday doings must not be seen as a move away from the ‘big’ sociological questions or issues (as indicated above regarding power; also, class, race, gender) or, as sidestepping important debates such as agency-structure or the micro-macro distinction which Boden (1994) counters with regard to EM and CA (see also Cooren 2006, for similar stance in the organizational communications field) and which in Goffman’s work was transformed into the assertion that ‘society is constrained interaction’ (Manning 2008: 681). It would indeed be a grave misunderstanding or misrepresentation of each scholar’s enterprise to say such matters were not or could not be addressed. Instead, to reiterate, each researched ‘phenomena’ in ways which did not begin with, or succumb to, the conceptual armoury that sociology made available since it was felt that this would obscure members’ own efforts to render such phenomena visible and as everyday accomplishments. If such ‘big’ concepts/phenomena have an ‘existence’ or bearing on what is done, and/or how, then they should be observable (Sacks 1992): the contention, then, is that only from a focus on the small, the ostensibly trivial and mundane, the everyday, even the downright boring, can an understanding of some of the central problems in sociology (and MOS) be secured. For Garfinkel, these problems included the ‘theory of action, the nature of intersubjectivity and the social constitution of knowledge’ (Heritage 1984: 3; Rawls, 2008; also Fox 2008) and the tradition he founded pivots on a detailed analysis of institutionalized conduct and the social organization of knowledge. Next, influenced by the ethnomethodological enterprise, for Sacks the unimaginable intricacy involved in rendering the local production of something so ‘big’ as Social Order and orderliness was pursued, giving rise to a preoccupation with ‘how to study human sociality’ and the ‘social organization of mind, culture and interaction’ (Schegloff 1992: xii, emphasis added; Llewellyn 2008). Equally, for both Garfinkel and Sacks, the centrality of sequence – easily dismissed as trivial – is shown to be the foundation for the social constitution of intelligibility, a position which Fox (2008), Llewellyn (2008) and Rawls (2008) all indicate. When turning to Goffman, the primacy of the Interaction Order was forged as a legitimate and important field of study and, as Manning (2008: 678) eloquently puts it, one question at the forefront of research efforts would be ‘what do we owe each other?’ In sum, culture, power, politics, morality and social order occupied Garfinkel, Goffman and Sacks but not in the expected ways. This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.


The fourth (and linked) reason may have something to do with EM’s ‘radical respecifications of social science’ (see Button 1991; Sharrock and Anderson 1986). There are two elements to highlight here. First, to say in the 1950s that sociology itself was a (lay) methods-driven enterprise which cannot claim superior knowledge of the ‘facts’ or a ‘truth’ and that, correspondingly, we need to undertake close analysis of the practices for doing so and for doing sociology (or MOS in our case) was not only remarkably ahead of its time; it issued particular and unwelcome challenges to the sociological community at that time. The contours of this respecification are taken up by Rawls (2008) and further glimpsed in Fox (2008) and Llewellyn (2008). Second, Garfinkel, Goffman and Sacks were not ‘working with the same assumptions regarding social order as conventional sociology and cannot be understood unless the theoretical ground rules are re-specified’ (Rawls 1989: 149; see also Rawls 2008), a programme which the papers here advance in light of MOS concerns, curbed only by space issues. So too other, equally significant, issues have had to be set aside here,5 but we add6 that maybe EM and CA’s impact has also not been as great as it should have been within MOS because the ‘latter field remains locked in theoretical debates about the nature of organization theory’ itself (e.g. Burrell and Morgan 1979; Boje et al. 1996; Donaldson 1985; Reed and Hughes 1992; Tsoukas 2000): as we know ‘theoretical debates shape empirical studies done’ and are ‘used in published work to advance one theoretical school over another’. Today, though, a discernible shift towards fieldbased empirical studies is gaining momentum within particular subfields such as strategy-as-practice (Johnson et al. 2003; Jarzabkowski et al. 2007) and learning/knowing-in-practice (Nicolini et al. 2003). Moreover, given their concerns with the social, the relational and elusive forms of know-how, embodiment and object/tool use (etc.), additional contributions arise from the work of our three scholars, and to whom we turn to next.

Goffman and the Interaction Order Erving Goffman warrants inclusion here since he is the sociologist who sought to establish the study of face-to-face interaction as a domain worthy of attention. A number of well-known social scientists and philosophers have engaged with aspects of Goffman’s wide-ranging studies (e.g. Bourdieu 1983; Giddens 1988; Gouldner 1970) and while his disciplinary base was sociology, Goffman (1963) also wrote essays on the social psychology of deviance and socialization as well as drawing upon cognitive social psychology (Goffman 1974). In MOS, reference to Goffman primarily arises through his linkage to the theatrical/dramaturgical perspective (Gardner and Avolio 1998; Karreman 2001; Mangham 1986; Mangham and Overington 1983, 1987; Schreyogg and Hopfl 2004). Recently, Goffman’s influence upon Karl Weick was also considered by Czarniawska (2006). This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.


Touching upon just two particular elements next – order and the self – Goffman’s (1983) overall interest was in orderly interaction and a view that order arises because there is a ‘working consensus’. When that is violated, the interaction potentially collapses and/or intricate forms of ‘repair’ must be undertaken. This gives rise to an interest in the rights and obligations which bind us and which have been pursued, in different ways or with different emphases, by the ethnomethodologists. So, for example, repair work has been subjected to fine-grained analysis by CA scholars and others influenced by Goffman, such as those in the field of pragmatics who sought to revisit his notion of ‘face’ (Bargiela-Chiappini 2003). Parsing this issue of order further, for Goffman, order is ‘the product of commitment to a shared set of expectations’ and the ‘order of interaction is partly the product of constraints on the interactional treatment of selves’ (Rawls 1989: 150). Debates on what is the ‘self’ have raged across the various social science strands but this is not the place to air them: instead we point to one feature of Goffman’s stance, that the ‘self’ must be continually ‘constituted and re-affirmed in interaction’ and this remains ‘the basic moral and order constraint on settings of copresence’ (Rawls 1989: 152; Goffman 1967): it is a complex and elusive ‘foundation of organizing’. A conception of the individual as a ‘ritually delicate object’ (Goffman 1967) and the notion of ‘the self’ seemingly separates Goffman from Garfinkel and Sacks but this is not the main difference. Instead it is the issue that Goffman did not use ‘detailed data necessary to see the constitutive components of conversational and social settings and the sequential regularities of talk’ (Rawls 1989: 152). Yet, there are also those who blend Goffman’s insights with EM and CA, also substantiating the point that all three navigate an overlapping terrain. One example is Hindmarsh and Heath’s (2000: 531; Samra-Fredericks 2004b) empirical study where the analytic framework is drawn from Garfinkel’s ethnomethodology and Sacks’ conversation analysis but also Goffman (1971) and his notion of ‘body gloss’. While Goffman’s definition of organization in Asylums also echoes that of the ethnomethodologists such as Bittner (1974), his the prime interest turns on ‘the ways in which “organization” becomes meaningful to individuals’ (Manning 2008: 683). In this Symposium Issue, Manning (2008) surveys Goffman’s legacy and reminds us, for example, that organization is a ‘kind of analytical conceit’ and that rules are ‘used to display “organization”, as are records . . . [they] are ways the organization speaks to itself’ (Manning 2008: 684). Further, Manning reproduces a compressed illustration from his earlier studies of police work to highlight some key distinctions while also consolidating a particular view of ‘organizations’ where the notion of a ‘case’ worked on by the police, for example, is explicated. So, too, particular (research) questions for MOS are within Manning’s purview while also echoing Goffman’s sharp and engaging prose: for example, formal organization or institutions become ‘vehicles to which we assign our burdens’ (Manning 2008: 686). Like Goffman, Manning often halts us in our tracks as we consider



the significance and potential of such comments and others such as ‘what is called organization is that which is accountable, an ex post facto rationalization for action (Mills 1940)’ (see also Rawls 2008). It is a dense account where a framework for organizational analysis brings to the fore particular elements as foundations, that is, ‘trust, order and ordering’ (Manning 2008: 693). On this too, any presumption that there is order everywhere is shown to vary across our three scholars as we journey through each of the papers in this Symposium Issue. Finally, Manning closes his paper with a personal remark which evokes that complex and elusive human ‘touch’ (impact) from one thinker – Goffman – upon another: Often lost, this is welcomed too.

Garfinkel and Ethnomethodology The nature and significance of Harold Garfinkel’s thinking upon Anne W. Rawls’ (2008) scholarship is also evident and welcomed here.7 Rawls (2008) takes up the difficult task of surveying and synthesizing Garfinkel’s contribution in light of MOS interests and concerns. She draws on unpublished manuscripts alongside numerous conversations (some tape-recorded) with Garfinkel himself to outline the nature of the challenge to our thinking and implications for research. Given this, we have one paper solely devoted to characterizing Garfinkel’s stance and, in places, it is explicitly set against the terrain of both conventional theory and contemporary organization theory. A second paper (Fox 2008) empirically pursues just one particular strand therein, that is, accomplishing the moral order. Our sub-section here offers a selective incursion into the ethnomethodological canon which remains a diverse body of scholarship. The term ‘ethnomethodology’ (members’ methods of work; EM) was coined by Garfinkel in the mid-1950s to convey the focal interest in how, through members’ ethno (folk) methods in terms of the everyday mundane knowledge and reasoning procedures deployed by them, they ‘make sense of’ and ‘act on’ the situations in which they are involved – the order properties – which Rawls (2008) brings to our attention. Further we give those ‘actions and experiences a factual quality’ and this is all, unremittedly, reflexively and indexically imbued. In dealing with ‘fact production in flight’ (Garfinkel 1967: 79), Boden (1994: 46, emphasis added) also connects us to Max Weber’s problematic where ‘actions and the interpretations of their meanings are inseparable and occur simultaneously in the course of their production. Or, to put this in Garfinkel’s (1967: 1ff) words, ‘the activities whereby members produce and manage settings of organized everyday affairs are identical with members’ procedures for making those settings accountable’. This, asserts Boden (1994: 44), is ‘far from being the reductionist loop some have assumed, Garfinkel is simply acknowledging that society’s members have the capacity to be “knowledgeable agents noticeably and accountably” ’.



Unlike most of sociology at that time (mid-1950s), Garfinkel felt that researching members’ construction and mutual recognition of activities was ‘analytically primary to any theory of social action’ (Heritage 1984: 5). Further, while nearly 25 years ago Heritage (1984: 1) commented that there was a ‘curious “off-stage” role of theory’ in Garfinkel’s writings, today, from Rawls (2008), we learn that a theory was ‘worked out’ as early as the 1940s. More specifically, it was worked out from ‘ongoing courses of inquiry in real settings’ and from being a participant engaged in work while in the army. Garfinkel’s interest in practices as acutely situated initially arose from contact with the works of scholars such as Husserl and Schutz as far back as the 1940s where the ‘lesson from phenomenology’ was to ‘transform everyday categories and objects into activities that constitute them’. This, rather than being a concern for consciousness was, for Garfinkel, a concern with ‘embodied activity’ and the everyday ‘practical production’ of world-making ‘accounts in the detail of concrete talk and behaviour that participants coproduce’ (Maynard 2003: 11–12). Again, a connection to particular concerns and interests animating various MOS researchers interested in embodied practice and language/tool-use arises. The Hobbesian problem of social order was also foregrounded but while this was impressively pursued by Talcott Parsons, it was re-cast as a members’ concern by Garfinkel, a student of Parsons. From his encounter with Parsons’ work, a ‘distinctive perspective on the foundations of social order originated’ (Maynard and Clayman 2003: 174) which Rawls (2008) distils. It was where the solution to the problem of social order, for Garfinkel, was that ‘some set of constitutive expectations are needed to provide a shared foundation for every interaction’. Through examining the real-time processes, members’ reasoning procedures and the local production and ‘moral accountability of action’ (Garfinkel 1967; see also Heritage 1984; Fox 2008) was also one where they collaboratively construct a recognizable social order. Here, ‘trust’ and the ‘moral order’ (see Fox 2008) turn out to be two crucial and integral foundations. It is where ‘words […] like objects, must be mutually oriented to be seen in common. There must be methods of constituting objects that words are – in the context of ordered sequences of action’ (Rawls 2008: 721) and thus, participants/members must commit themselves to the same method of producing sequential order and believe that others have made the same commitment but also have the competence to carry it through. This, for Garfinkel, is the ‘trust’ condition of successful concerted interaction and it offers a profound rendering of trust (Garfinkel 1963). While the word ‘mutual’ (mutual orientation, mutual intelligibility) is likely to raise concerns and debate among the MOS critical studies fraternity, there is acknowledgement within EM of the uneven dispersal of ‘resources’ and, correspondingly, accomplishment of asymmetrical relations. Indeed, this is acutely attended to by those examining institutional ‘settings’ but it is not something assumed a priori, a point returned to at the close of this



introduction. Furthermore, we learn from Rawls (2008) that the actor is not to be considered as a whole person but only as a situated identity in relation to a particular situation and this gives rise to the term ‘identified actor’ (Garfinkel [1948] 2006). Equally, the ‘sociological object’ is ‘not the individual, collective, or any aggregated or approximate order resulting from the influence of one, the other, or any combination’; instead it is the ‘shared methods in the details of their use’ (Rawls 2008: 704). Today, Garfinkel’s thinking and ideas underpin a programme of ‘workplace’, ‘computer-assisted/supported interaction’ or ‘hybrid’ studies which Rawls (2008) and Fox (2008) both list. Notable social scientists also influenced by Garfinkel include, in the 1960s, Weick (1995: 11) and later Giddens’ (1979, 1984) development of structuration theory (Boden 1990).8 The social theorist and philosopher Theodore Schatzki (2005), when detailing the parameters of a practice turn and his site ontology, also mentioned EM (see Rawls 2008). When turning specifically to our field of MOS, there have been periodic referrals to EM although empirical studies remain rare, with notable exceptions including Lucy Suchman (1987) and Julian Orr (1996). Stewart Clegg (1975) took inspiration from EM too but perhaps more surprisingly, given the pervasiveness of research ‘in’ organizational behaviour or human resource management, Silverman and Jones’ (1973, 1976) classic study on recruitment, appraisals and career management processes seems lost to our field. If we were to follow its path, we would respecify scholarship in ways which yield fine-grained understandings of management/organizational practices and a sociology of knowledge as done, there-and-then. John Hassard (1993) also set out to remind us of EM’s potential contribution and included a brief discussion of Zimmerman’s (1971, 1973) study of the localized enactment of commonsense rationalities (including that surrounding social structure) set against notions of bureaucratic record-keeping and rule-following. Hassard (1993) also referred to Bittner’s (1974) ‘concept of organization’ which equally respecifies research agendas for those aiming to examine formal structures of organization – an interest which connects us back to Max Weber. Specifically, Bittner paves the way for examining the everyday accomplished facticity of organizational structure, something which Gephardt’s (1978) empirical study in Administrative Science Quarterly illustrates. EM as a tradition has also been briefly referred to by David Knights and Glenn Morgan (1991) when discussing subjectivity and corporate strategy from a Foucauldian perspective and, a year later, David Knights and Hugh Willmott (1992) also mentioned EM as they advanced an argument for reconceptualizing leadership research. All of these referrals point to particular domains of study awaiting ethnomethodologically inspired empirical studies. It is also interesting to note that Hugh Willmott (1998) drew on EM when considering Robert Cooper’s contribution to MOS and the notion of proximal thinking. Clearly, it is beyond the scope of this introduction to distil Willmott’s argument but he too cites Bittner’s classic for advancing social science as the ‘study of method’.9 More recently, Stephen Linstead organized a ‘celebration This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.


of Garfinkel’ (see Richards 2004; Linstead 2006) and lastly, EM’s potential contribution to the MOS sub-field of strategy-as-practice was specifically voiced by Stewart Clegg et al. (2004) and Timothy Clark (2004). Many of these colleagues rightly observe the potential contribution of EM, yet, both the full import of EM and/or EM influenced empirical studies either await attention or remain marginal (Samra-Fredericks 2003a, 2005a, 2005b). Crucially, as Tsoukas (2001, emphasis added) asserted in a special issue of Human Relations, ethnomethodology is a tradition which, literally, invites ‘reviewing organization’, with the Symposium Issue papers by Fox, Llewellyn and Rawls delineating just what this ‘re-viewing’ entails. They also indicate the implications for research and theorizing. Rawls (2008) specifically issues an invitation to reconsider our thinking (and thus research) on MOS topics such as: ‘information’ (pertinent also to the knowledge management field); the ‘group’ (or team); the ‘accountable character of records’ (and hence the problematic nature of statistics); the ‘institutional contexts of accountability’ as well as the issue of agency and theory. More profoundly, perhaps, just how we ‘see an object’ challenges our assumptions or taken-for-grantedness. Like no other, Garfinkel offers a radical respecification of inquiry, carefully worked out from his excavation of the everyday, the ‘seen-but-unnoticed’. Ultimately, we learn that Garfinkel’s EM is a move away from conventional theoretical standpoints to a ‘different kind of theory’ (Rawls 2008: 725). Further we are challenged to rethink the basis of social scientific inquiry as one which pivots on ‘preserving the ordered details of practices’ and close scrutiny of what members do interactionally. Only then, says Rawls (2008: 723), can the ‘discovery of those social orders themselves’ become possible: the prize. In this light, Fox’s (2008) contribution empirically seeks to elaborate upon one foundational feature: the moral order as a practical matter and accomplishment. He also observes, at the close, EM’s potential contribution to notions of becoming. Fox’s empirical setting is an MBA classroom, something familiar to many of us but which begins to become unfamiliar as we see the seen-but-unnoticed features. An inherent need for commitment and reciprocity is also glimpsed, laying support for the point that sequence relevancies ‘turn out to be moral relevancies’ (Rawls 1989: 165). This is also something which CA scholars uniquely advance from fine-grained studies of adjacency pairs and/or dis-preferreds (Sacks 1987; Sacks and Schegloff 1979; Sacks et al. 1974; Pomerantz 1984).

Sacks and Conversation Analysis Our fourth Symposium Issue contributor, Nick Llewellyn, outlines the implications and import for MOS if we were to take a ‘concentrated analytic focus on the detailed order of ordinary workplace activity’ in line with Sacks’ vision (Llewellyn 2008: 764). Founded with Schegloff, Jefferson, Pomerantz and others, Sacks’ CA also undertakes inquiry in real settings and advances the This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.


ethnomethodological enterprise in terms of ‘practical theorizing’ or ‘commonsense reasoning’ in a distinctive way (Schegloff 1992: xxiii). Having earned his LLB at Yale Law School in 1959, Sacks embarked on examining how law as an institution worked and, while searching for ‘intellectual resources’, he attended a Talcott Parsons seminar. There he met Harold Garfinkel (on sabbatical leave from UCLA) and a shared interest in language and conversation developed (Garfinkel and Sacks 1970). In 1964–1965 Sacks also undertook a study of how ordinary activities get done methodically in one particular ‘organization’, a suicide prevention centre (undertaken with Garfinkel). Tape recordings of calls received became the crucial resource for Sacks for understanding talk as activity and the launching of CA.10 Undertaking audio/video recordings of human beings’ talk-in-interaction and generating detailed transcripts have become one of the hallmarks of CA scholarship which Llewellyn (2008) indicates. Like EM, indexicality and reflexivity remain two cornerstones with the stipulation to attend to the sequential context in order to discern meaningfulness, something which Llewellyn’s paper also demonstrates. While we do not have the space here to outline Sacks’ argument concerning sequential organization of utterances, it is, nevertheless, the ‘most critical factor with regard to their meaning’ which also ‘provisions for a philosophy of language’ (Rawls 1989: 149) and intersubjectivity (Heritage 1984). Today, CA is a powerful strand of sociological research and Sacks’ legacy continues to inspire not just those who patiently comb through the minutiae of turns-at-talk (Sacks et al. 1974) – where pauses are timed to tenths of a second and intakes of breath are painstakingly transcribed – but also more broadly sociologists such as Gubrium (1988) undertaking ethnographies examining, for example, ‘how descriptions are locally accomplished’ by participants. (Other CA-influenced ethnographies across the disciplines include Moerman/anthropology (Moerman 1988, 1992) and Freebody/ education (Freebody 2003).) Yet, CA-based research within MOS remains rare, although referrals to it are evident. Hendry (2000), for example, mentioned it near the close of his paper as one potential approach for advancing understandings of strategic decision making as a social practice. Vaara (2002) also concluded that CA would add further depth to the ways discourses (of rationality, etc.) are invoked. The CA-based ethnomethodologist, Boden (1990, 1994) is also often favourably cited but rarely followed with empirical studies (e.g. Richards and Oswick 2004; Oswick et al. 2005). This is surprising since CA, like EM, would contribute to particular sub-fields and/or topics within MOS and is exemplified in the growing sociological Institutional Talk Programme (see for example, Drew and Heritage 1992; also Perakyla 2002; Perakyla and Vehvilainen 2003; Silverman 1997). It is also where that familiar MOS concept – power – is subjected to empirical study but not a priori assumed (touched upon shortly). Equally, major (ontological) issues such as the nature of the ‘context’ and how do we ‘see’ or account for it (Drew and Heritage 1992; Schegloff 1991) alongside



fine-grained studies of other ‘big’ sociological phenomena such as genderas-done (e.g. within discursive psychology; see Stokoe 2006) occupy CA researchers and indicate various intersecting points of contribution to MOS. While curbed by space issues here, Llewellyn (2008) nevertheless conveys and holds intact the demanding CA analytical mentality as he pursues scholarship in the mould laid down by Sacks. Indeed, he forwards a sense of the fine-grained analysis of the ways members accomplish mutual intelligibility and how – through sequence – order and orderliness are exhibited by members to each other. In addition, Sacks’ work on membership categorization, and hence a sociology of knowledges in everyday use, is evident here. He also yields a fleeting glimpse of the scope and form of contribution to MOS interests in identity-work and practice. Attending to sequential organization of conversational practices and membership categorization, Llewellyn also notes Sacks’ (1992) interest in storytelling in conversation and, from doing so, demonstrates what else a Sacksian ‘eye’ would add to the prolific literature on stories and narratives in MOS. In terms of the two settings Llewellyn selects, one is an emergency call centre but the second may seem like a strange choice – a public open space – a street, in other words. Stretching the orthodox conception of ‘work’ and bringing all sorts of ‘work back in’ (Barley and Kunda 2001) we are, once again, called upon to gaze anew on the everyday seen-but-unnoticed world-making that goes on around us. As Llewellyn deals with the intricate nature of the observable split-second ‘labour’ of a street seller and a buyer we are (hopefully) left unable to see such a ‘worker’ – or an MBA classroom (Fox 2008) – in quite the same way again. Clearly, there are particular challenges we face when aiming to undertake research in ways forged by Garfinkel, Goffman and Sacks: each of the four papers either explicitly or implicitly touch on this aspect. Yet we hope that the range of contributory possibilities touched on so far and in the next subsection spurs others to take up the challenge too.

Challenges and Contributory Possibilities It is no easy matter to go to see organizational members doing work. The usual access issues are a major hurdle, especially when we also want to record organizational members’ everyday doings across time and space (Samra-Fredericks 1998, 2003a, 2004c). Arguably too, it is hard to see afresh as proposed by EM/CA. But if ‘organization’, as a complex amalgam of material phenomena and epiphenomena, is accomplished by human beings doing particular things (given methods and reasoning procedures and those Goffman-imbued expectancies in terms of what we owe each other) then surely our attention needs to turn to what they do interactionally, in situ, and the intricate ways they orientate to and make meaningful or mutually intelligible objects, tools, technologies/knowledges, identities and so on. It is



also where the trivial, the overlooked, the mundane, the taken-for-granted – things we are usually inattentive to – turn out to have immense import and remarkability since they also intricately point to matters of order, of trust and reciprocity, of morality, etc. – our foundations of organizing. The distinctive and pivotal feature arising from the work of Garfinkel, Goffman and Sacks is to undertake fine-grained studies of the in situ, sequential production of social scenes where particular sets of people, objects, space and activities configure or crystallize (gloss) into what we term, for example, an organization (or a project team, or a science laboratory, or a strategy meeting, etc. For Manning (2008: 678), Goffmanesque research (following the early Chicagostyle (non-)participation observational-ethnographic mode) and ‘analysis cannot be based on “narrative” or stories for they are second hand versions’ and ‘not encounter based’. Rawls (2008; see also Fox 2008) also extends this critique from a Garfinkelian stance in terms of accounts and accountability and the all-too-often solicitation, in interviews, of a ‘retrospective’ ‘rewriting of history’ (Garfinkel 1967). Sacks’ ‘rigorous methodological demands’ also meant that even the ethnographer’s ‘praiseworthy attention to detail’ would not have satisfied him (Silverman 2007: 29). Indeed, as Llewellyn (2008) argues, well-known MOS ethnographic studies could insightfully be taken one crucial step further in terms of explicating and showing the intricate nature of the methods deployed by members to do mundane work such as that of ‘blame’ or an appraisal interview. In sum, we need to ‘follow the animal’ and bring to the foreground the ‘missing what’ (Garfinkel 1967). What we are proposing is a move beyond the glossing work of researchers and their ‘common-sense perspective’, something which Sacks, like Garfinkel, proposed as long ago as 1963. Sacks felt that sociologists were missing an important foundation for their theorizing (see also Boden 1994; and summary in Silverman 2007: chapter 2). As part of this, we are problematizing the interview as a route for accessing particular phenomena. For example, if, as Rapley (2004: cited in Silverman 2007: 42) asserts, the interview is an occasion where both parties are ‘doing analysis’ or, as Holstein and Gubrium (1995) assert, the interviewee shape their categories given the prior turn(s) taken by the interviewer, then there are important issues for us to deal with as a particular and dynamic notion of reflexivity enters the researchbased encounter. So too, if we accept that the self/identity is intricately narrated or accomplished in particular settings in particular ways, given the presence of particular others (and somehow, power plays its part) and that the response is crucial, then surely the interview is limited again? (See Antaki and Widdicombe 1998, on CA and identity.) Another ostensibly simple issue which turns out to have important implications is that if experience-reporting is subtly but also in complex ways occasioned as Sacks (1992) asserts, or that memory is occasioned as an ‘utterance by utterance phenomenon’, then what are we accessing in interviews? However, interview-based studies drawing on Sacks’ work could examine the ways interviewees occasion



an experience and/or how the interviewee claims ownership and warrants it. Linked to this is another interesting possibility where we may excavate those seen-but-unnoticed resources (methods) the interviewees and we/ researchers deploy to ‘do’ interview-as-practical-and-occasioned-work (see Rapley 2004). Other substantive topics (objects), though, which we ostensively pursue in the interview (e.g. managing change, or leadership skills, effectiveness, etc.) just cannot be made visible as Rawls’ contribution here outlines (see also Fox (2008) and Llewellyn’s (2008) papers). There are particular and immensely challenging issues for us as researchers arising from Garfinkel’s stance and which are summarized in Rawls’ (2008) closing section. Orientating to or achieving mutual intelligibility and thus ‘seeing’ the object resides upon shared methods, sequence and mutual attention work done among members. It is an interest which, again, connects us to a growing field of study mentioned earlier – ‘practice’ – where there is an interest in scrutinizing ‘how’ practitioners do what they do. Complex indigenous competencies of the ‘user’ arise in and through interaction and, crucially, from the mutual attention members pay to each other. This gives rise to a situation where we cannot imagine being, a priori, able to pose a question which could elicit an answer or ‘finding’ which shows, for example, the presence and significance of ‘perspective-display-series’ (Maynard 1991, 2003), or the discourse marker ‘well’ (Samra-Fredericks 2003a). Indeed, to ask the practitioner about their ‘tool-kit’ yielding effectiveness is flawed for a number of reasons (see Rawls 2008; also Silverman 2007: 39–18). So too, from something so trivial as ‘well’ we ‘learn of the wider social fabric’ (Silverman 2007: 108) – for example, how it functions to mitigate in ways which ensure that moral obligations – a foundation of organizing – are sustained in the workplace even as practitioners/members contest each other’s representations of the ‘situation-at-hand’ (SamraFredericks 2003a). Yet, it would also be wrong to deduce from this that EM and allied approaches are not concerned with what constitutes effective practice: this is its pivotal concern but any ‘answer’ lies in situated practice where certain features may be generalizable but whose efficacy does not relate to their generalizability (i.e. what is done, the resources, the devices, tools). Such features may also be differentially dispersed or available among organizational members, as mentioned earlier, but the line of inquiry would be to explore how asymmetry – and thus power or resistance – is accomplished turn-by-turn, simultaneously realizing contexts or settings (SamraFredericks 2005a). Ensuring that we do not simplify what practitioners/members do beyond recognition to them and hence, to whom our accounts are (often) supposed to be relevant or useful also takes us back to Starbuck’s (2007) concerns. In MOS there is periodic jostling around the relevance and application of research findings, and examples of studies delivering on this aspect are not hard to find in the EM/CA canon (see Rawls 2008). One such case is Heath



and Luff’s (2000) detailed ethnographic/video study of control room operators at London Underground, which gave rise to a number of practical implications for trainees. Others include Silverman’s (1997; see also 1987) or Maynard’s (1991; also cited in Silverman 2007) studies which, when made available to practitioners, have been found to prompt ‘cries of recognition’ and ‘lively’ discussion when the tape-recordings were replayed and feedback offered (Silverman 2007: 101); this was also experienced with an executive board (Samra-Fredericks 2003b). So, not only is a more complex and dynamic account and appreciation of practitioners’ competencies/skills – as sequentially and relationally realized – yielded, but the ‘ahah’ moment experienced by practitioners when they too ‘see afresh’ what they do and how also meets elements of practical relevance and usefulness. A third outcome arises from the possibility that practitioners also ‘see afresh’ the consequence of their doings as politically imbued undertakings. For instance, in a CA study in a children’s heart (outpatient) unit, the consultations were recorded and subtle differences emerged in the ways surgery or tests were proposed to parents of children with Down’s syndrome (Silverman 1981; cited in Silverman 2007: 112). In all but one case it led to refusal to have tests done and The Policy – ‘to discourage surgery’ for these children – as an everyday mundane accomplishment was intricately traced. Significantly, Silverman (2007: 114–15) reports that they ‘asked the doctor concerned to rethink his policy or at least reveal his hidden agenda to parents’. Surely, this is a study of power-at-work and a tracing of the most profound consequences for others who, in orthodox vocabulary, are powerless? How they are rendered powerless at those most critical points of contact becomes visible – visible to us, and to our students if we take such studies into the classroom (Samra-Fredericks 2003b), visible to the institutional representative (doctor here) and, if the doctor takes on Silverman’s suggestion, then an altogether different responsibility (world) to the parents is accomplished too (see also Heritage (1997) on CA and power). In this fashion, then, contributions to critical scholarship in MOS become possible with Sacks’ groundbreaking work on membership categories offering another route for those interested in examining the everyday, witnessable, mundane accomplishment of asymmetrical, value-laden relational webs (see also the critical perspective in Goffman’s work touched on here by Manning 2008). Briefly, nearly 30 years ago Sacks asserted: ‘what’s known about that category [blacks, ‘hot-rodders’, Catholics] is known about them [the member in question], and the fate of each is bound up in the fate of the other . . . if a member does something like rape a white woman, commit economic fraud, race on the street, etc., then that thing will be seen as what a member of some applicable category does, not what some named person did. And the rest of them will have to pay for it.’ (Sacks 1979: 13 in Silverman 2007).



Silverman (2007: 50) brings us more up to date when he asks us to think about the usage of the category ‘Muslim’ since 9/11 and here perhaps is an overlapping terrain with those ‘sitting’ under critical discourse analysis (CDA). What we suggest then is that developing understandings of how organizational members interactively accomplish social-moral order is also one which is easily extended to embrace the accomplishment of economic and political orders too as ‘practical’ and ‘occasioned’. Other MOS sub-fields to which these three traditions and their distinctive forms of fine-grained empirical studies could contribute include (new) institutional theory. Indeed, we recently saw a ‘call’ inviting MOS researchers to examine institution-as-accomplishment (e.g. Lawrence et al., 2008) and this reminded us not only of Sacks’ early interests in Law as an institution (and Garfinkel’s jurors study) but also of the EM/CA scholar Deirdre Boden’s (1994) journey through the works of familiar MOS names such as Selznick, Meyer/Rowan, DiMaggio and Zucker, together with March and Olsen and Weick: she delineates the connections and tensions between conceptualizations/research efforts into ‘institutions’ and that of EM. We feel this would be a productive move within MOS. Indeed, as Heritage (1997) simply states, we ‘talk institution into being’. Lastly, those interested in process-philosophies, becoming and the view that organization arises from the ‘ontological act of differentiation’ (Chia 1996) has resonances with EM conceptualizations of process (see Bittner 1974, for example). Elsewhere it has been claimed that EM/CA is a ‘truly processual social science’ (Samra-Fredericks 2005b) and here its distinctive parameters and points of potential contribution are glimpsed in the paper by Llewellyn (2008) and, more explicitly, close Fox’s (2008) account. In all cases, though, it is a move away from theorizing at a distance to actual scrutiny of those ‘workings of primary organizing micro-practices which generate stabilised effects such as truth, knowledge, individual and organization. In this expanded realm of organization theory the study of such realityconstituting practices becomes a central focus.’ (Chia 1996: 31)

Indeed.

Conclusion Boden, observing that Garfinkel’s EM and those he inspired (like Sacks as well as influencing Goffman in untold and untellable ways)11 has the ‘potential to explode long-standing myths about both the how and why of organizing and, ultimately, of organizations’, adds that ‘[n]ot surprisingly, and on solidly Kuhnian grounds, resistance has been high’ (Boden 1994: 45). (See also the points and issues raised by Westwood and Clegg (2003: chapter 1.) With Kuhn also arguing that breakthrough requires revolutionary change,



where do such affairs leave us? Answer: to continue conversing with others through efforts such as this Symposium Issue and where, as students of human interaction, we may inspire others to follow Garfinkel, who, ‘like Husserl, . . . [had] consistently sought to be a “true beginner” and he has never attempted to follow Weber or Parsons in building outwards from his analysis of social action towards a large-scale systematic theory of social structure. Instead he has persistently worked to secure and deepen the analyses of foundational social processes which he began as a doctoral student at Harvard in 1946.’ (Heritage 1984: 4)

Extending the community of ‘beginners’ who add to ‘analyses of foundational social processes’ and thus add to our understanding of ‘organizing processes’ motivates us and the contributors to this Symposium Issue. Second, if we pick just one aspect from Goffman’s orientation to scholarship, then, ‘for all his studied complexities, [he] thought of himself (and his field) in simple terms: a working sociologist, restless before categories and bold to do what analytical work can be done’ (Lemert 1997: xii). So we are restless and bold too (as far as that is possible given our own institutionally imbued ‘positionings’). Third, we are reminded of Silverman’s (2007: 8) opening remarks that we keep Sacks’ work ‘vital by treating it as an inspiration’. Restless and bold beginners, inspired and kept vital by their legacies, we hope this Symposium Issue also indicates that research accessing naturally occurring interaction – in all its various guises – first, and then seeing which questions it can provide an answer for (Sacks 1992) not only proved to be a valuable move for the three scholars, it does so for us in MOS too. It is also perhaps ironic that the 2008 Academy of Management Meeting theme revolves around ‘The questions we ask’. Could we not turn this upside down or inside out . . . perhaps to be rephrased as ‘The answers (or understandings) our empirical materials enable us to voice’? To go and see up-close is a good starting point, also enabling us to theorize about things ‘we could never imagine’ (Silverman 2007: 59). And yes, to gaze afresh in ways advocated by these three scholars’ work, especially Garfinkel’s, is challenging, and here we hope that each of the four Symposium Issue papers assist/invite conversations with their legacies, alongside substantiating the ‘call’ for fine-grained studies of the foundations of organizing.

Notes Without Haridimos Tsoukas this Symposium Issue would still be just an idea; his encouragement and wisdom were vital for completing the project. Second, we thank our four contributors who ‘put up’ with our stream of comments. Next, our small ‘store’ of reviewers must be thanked: they were purposefully selected from across disciplines, bringing all sorts of challenges as we too, literally, attempted conversations to learn from and understand each other. 1. Others who have engaged with and parsed the legacy arising from either one or more scholar include: Schegloff (1992) and Silverman (1998) on Sacks; Heritage (1984) on This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.


Garfinkel but also Sacks in places; Rawls (1989; see also 2006) whose treatment of Goffman and Sacks is informed by Garfinkel’s stance too; and Lemert (1997), Burns (1992) and Giddens (1988) on Goffman. 2. Detailing the nature of the influences upon them and among each other is beyond the scope of this introduction but we observe that their intellectual lineage includes: Alfred Schutz, Edmund Husserl, Emile Durkheim, Talcott Parsons and Max Weber. These (and others) were mobilized to move their projects forward in distinctive ways. Connections to the world of organization studies/organization theory is evident too: for example, Harvey Sacks did work at the Institute of Industrial Relations at Berkeley around 1959–1960 and was exposed to Philip Selznick’s interests. Garfinkel also worked on the Organizational Behaviour Project at Princeton in 1951–1953 with Wilbert Moore, producing a number of short studies alongside a series of memos which Rawls (2008) touches on. In 1953–1954 he worked at University of Chicago with Saul Mendlovitz and Fred Strodbeck on the jury study (Garfinkel 1967), thus bringing him to a formal, legal and bureaucratized worksite. 3. Sadly, Sacks was killed in a car accident in 1975 and it was not until 1992 that his lectures were published in two volumes, making his thinking more widely available. The lectures, amounting to over 1300 pages, were edited by Jefferson and were originally delivered in ‘Fall 1964’ to ‘Spring 1968’ at UCLA and from ‘Fall 1968’ to ‘Spring 1972’ at UC Irvine. 4. In 2007, the American Sociological Association sub-branch EM/CA bestowed a Lifetime Achievement Award on Harold Garfinkel. 5. For example, in terms of Sacksian CA and the development of a ‘naturalistic observational discipline that could deal with the details of social action(s) rigorously, empirically and formally’ (Schegloff and Sacks 1974: 233), this may be misconstrued as possessing positivist ‘tones’ (see Samra-Fredericks 2004a; Silverman 1998, 2007). 6. We are grateful to Steve Fox for his observations on this and we quote here from personal communication with him (2007). 7. We also learned that it was an interest that led to an ‘interrupted career’: in other words, six years of unemployment, given EM ties (Rawls, personal communication, 2007). 8. Garfinkel also had very close ties with several students, including Aaron Cicourel and Egon Bittner, who went on to make names for themselves in studies of organizations. 9. Willmott also observes that while EM embraces a particular concrete interest in the moral accountability of actions, it seemingly neglects the political and wider moral aspects. These are important points to debate and which demand a Symposium issue in its own right but three of the four papers here (Fox, Llewellyn, Rawls) do begin to indicate that these issues could be taken up by EM scholars, also mentioned by us in the closing section of this introduction (see also Cooper and Fox 1990; Fox 1989). 10. Taking talk as a ‘methodical account of action’, the early writings were eventually published in a 1972 chapter. 11. We discover from Rawls that one of Garfinkel’s unpublished manuscripts bears Goffman’s comments/scribbles on it, indicating the potential criss-crossing of influences (personal conversation in summer 2006).

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Silverman, David 1998 Harvey Sacks, social science and conversation analysis. Cambridge: Polity Press. Silverman, David 2007 A very short, fairly interesting and reasonably cheap book about qualitative research. London: Sage. Silverman, David, and Jill Jones 1973 ‘Getting in: The managed accomplishment of “correct” selection outcomes’ in Man and organization: The search for explanation and social relevance. J. Child (ed.). London: George Allen & Unwin. Silverman, David, and Jill Jones 1976 Organizational work: The language of grading/the grading of language. London: Collier-Macmillan. Starbuck, William, H. 2007 ‘Living in mythical spaces’. Organization Studies 28/1: 21–25. Stokoe, Elizabeth 2006 ‘On ethnomethodology, feminism, and the analysis of categorical reference to gender in talk-in-interaction’. Sociological Review 54/3: 467–494. Suchman, Lucy 1987 Plans and situated action: The problem of human machine communication. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tsoukas, H. 2000 ‘False dilemmas in organization theory: Realism or social constructivism?’ Organization 7/3: 531–535. Tsoukas, Haridimos 2001 Re-viewing organization’. Human Relations 54/1: 7–12. Vaara, Eero 2002 ‘On the discursive construction of success/failure in narratives of postmerger integration’. Organization Studies 23/2: 211–248. Watson, Tony J. 2006 ‘Review Essay: The organization and disorganization of organization studies’. Journal of Management Studies 43/2: 367–382. Weick, Karl 1995 Sensemaking in organizations. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Westwood, Robert, and Stewart Clegg 2003 ‘The discourse of organization studies: Dissensus, politics and paradigms’ in Point-counterpoint in organization studies. R. Westwood and S. Clegg (eds). Oxford: Blackwell. Willmott, Hugh 1998 ‘Re-cognizing the other: Reflecting on a “new” sensibility in social and organizational studies’ in In the realm of organization: Essays for Robert Cooper. Robert Chia (ed.). London: Routledge. Zimmerman, Don 1971 ‘Record keeping and the in-take process in a public welfare bureaucracy’ in On record. S. Wheeler (ed.). New York: Russell Sage Foundation. Zimmerman, Don 1973 ‘The practicalities of rule use’ in People and organizations. G. Salaman and K. Thompson (eds). London: Longman.


25 Goffman on Organizations Peter K. Manning

Introduction

C

hanges in styles and genres are not easily recognized in the semichaotic field of organizational studies. Almost 25 years ago, I wrote hopefully that organizational analysis was changing, and that the dominant functionalistic notions advanced by an old guard guiding a desiccated field were being challenged: ‘Recent work on organizations based on the phenomenological view, previously ignored by organizational theorists, is now frequently acknowledged, new directions are emerging and a dialectic animates the relationships between theorizing and research.’ Whether this has occurred is a moot point, but the consequences of the failure to take up the challenge are with us. ‘Organization’, like every key concept in the social sciences, is subject to wide variation in use and application and it is not surprising that cumulative knowledge is elusive in our field.1 To study organization in my view requires not only to identify its outlines or limits as a concept but to illustrate in some detail the consequences of actors-working-in-organizations or organizational effects. The primary thrust of Organization Studies over the years has been a contrast conception: a contrast to functionalism, to quantification in its technical guise, and to numerology. This move, although dramatic, has not drawn on the tight focus of Goffman’s writing while it does reflect his broad interests in the interactionally sustained aspects of order and ordering. I agree with Edgar Schein (2006: 291) who wrote, ‘To this day, people do not take Erving Goffman’s work seriously enough.’ In my view, there has been little Source: Organization Studies, 29(5) (2008): 677–698.



progress in Goffman-based work in the last 25 years because Goffman’s ideas have been instanced as illustrating this or that theory rather than a brilliant, unique and masterful evocation of the central dilemma – posed as a question – of modern life: what do we owe each other? In terms of the call for papers to which this article responds, it points to one crucial foundation for organizing. Crucially too, Goffman begins with, stays with and ends with interaction in situations and any organizational analysis that begins with variables, that asserts anything as shaping interaction a priori – for example, gender, class, social capital, race, rules, or narratives – misplaces and reifies the putative problem and its correlates. Goffmanesque analysis cannot be based on ‘narratives’ or stories for they are secondhand versions, accounts, tales, stories, myths, legends, and not encounter-based analysis. So, for example, excellent work that is based on a narrative approach such as Czarniawska’s (2006), or Dick’s (2005) based on textual analysis, hovers above the grounding of interaction. The Goffman-like actor is a person who seeks to be treated as he or she treats others; who reciprocates when responded to; who is as open as the interaction necessitates; who apologizes, explains, seeks remedies, and enjoys the flow of reciprocated exchanges (Chriss 1995). The indignities that arouse enmity are slights, in brief and erstwhile, because they reduce tenuous obligations and sustained reciprocity. While ambitious, given the range and depth of Goffman’s scholarship, I write here of some core aspects of Goffman’s work, their relevance to present concerns in organizational analysis, and further elaborate some points from my own work which suggest his influence in organizational studies (see Manning 1976, 1980). My primary interests are in his ideas concerning organizations, ordering and order, trust, and some of the secondary ideas such as organizational under-life, performance and framing. In this paper, I suggest that the most important idea for organizational analysis is the processing of bureaucratic information because it is there that the expressive aspects of actors’ involvement and the instrumental aspects of attaining stated ends come into dramatic convolution. I discuss later in this paper the importance of ‘organization’ and ‘organizational work’ and, given the nature of the empirical materials, the notion of a ‘case’ and the related idea of an ‘arrest’, because they show the interactions of formal purposes, and emotional involvement and expressiveness. In these analyses I try to show how performing in the interests of order is not the same as what the organization requires in formal bureaucratic terms. The paper begins with an overview of Goffman’s work and moves on to outlining the core of his ideas. Next, and given our objectives, Goffman is tied further to organizational analysis and, through doing so, points to his, still unrealized, contributory potential for the organization studies field. Once some background to my work is discussed, I selectively draw on a study of police work conducted in the 1970s ([1977] 1999, [1979a] 2003).


Manning • Goffman on Organizations 87

Goffman and His Work: A Legacy Erving Goffman wrote with parsimony and elegance, even while dying and in great pain (Goffman 1983a, b). Every sentence was quotable in part because each was so nuanced and multifaceted. It had a depth not easily fathomed. While a number of secondary commentaries on his work exist, a serious student of his work must read it carefully and come to an assessment. There is no ‘correct’, ‘proper’ or even generally ‘sanctioned’ reading or interpretation of his very subtle and extensive body of work. Like the situational analysis he favoured, any application to an organization should focus on how interaction takes place. His ideas have been widely interpreted and connected to a variety of topics and concerns and there is a large secondary literature on Goffman, some of which deals with his perspective on institutions and organizations (Lemert and Branaman 1997: 265–271).2 These reviews see the work within a context of perspectives, including symbolic interactionism.3 Goffman certainly resists classification and categorization. His thinking and writing are original. The most basic truth of his work is that it captures what ‘we all know’ in a literary and perceptive fashion and assembles examples that are themselves amusing, queer, even wacky. Whether this is indeed the aim of ‘theory’ is quite another question. What is the virtue of verisimilitude? I suppose one could fault Proust and Joyce for being too mundane. In my own overview of his work here, I focus on the key concepts noted earlier and lay some groundwork for his organizational analysis and my own organizational analysis which is touched upon at the end of the paper. Goffman published his first book, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (PSEL), in 1959,4 a polished version of points made in his dissertation that became in time one of the most influential social science books of the last century. He made a simple point in understated, dramatic fashion: we are all performers in the interest of order. After PSEL, he published essays based on organizational ethnography, Asylums (1960); essays on the social psychology of deviance and socialization in Stigma (1963b) and Encounters (1961); on interaction as a process in a collection of mostly previously published papers, Interaction Ritual (1967). In Relations in Public (1971) and Behavior in Public Places (1963a), he explored public association and management of appearances. His critique of rational game theory, taken to be an example of the thing he rejected, was published as Strategic Interaction (1969). His central work, based on an incipient cognitive social psychology, was called Frame Analysis (1974). Two later works, largely ignored by critics, were Gender Advertisements (1979) and Forms of Talk (1981). The last papers he published were brilliant, original and complex, like Hemingway, in their simplicity: ‘Felicity’s condition’ (1983a) and ‘The interaction order’ (1983b). In each, he asked what made possible the sometimes orderly interaction he found so engaging. That which is found on the surface was made possible



by something else. It is the ‘something else’ that is the heart of sociology and arguably too the heart of organization studies. These published works do not manifest a smooth developmental pathway, but an associative quest. PSEL is the most frequently cited and influential of his works. Asylums and perhaps Stigma have a continuing purchase on scholars’ imaginations and this may be because of their salient and poignant examples of spirited failed humanity rather than their contribution to social theory. Frame Analysis and Forms of Talk, perhaps the most analytically focused, are rarely applied (see Gonos 1977; Chriss 1995; Manning 2003). The next sub-section will draw out the core ideas across this body of work.

The Core of Goffman’s Ideas Goffman’s work highlights doing, performances in which an expression is given off in hopes of producing a reaction or confirmation. I outline this is as a narrative that reflects some ordering or progression toward a ‘working consensus’. Easily overlooked, though, is this issue that ordering requires some sort of ‘working consensus’ (PSEL: 9). Clearly, such a consensus is not guided or produced by individual motivations, values, norms or rules. It comes and goes as required, and it is not a stated purpose, end point or end of the interaction. Ordering begins here; it does not end as a result. It emerges. Performances are embedded in surrounding social systems. Embedded means the performance is always situated: it may be in a gathering, an occasion, in a setting, indeed, any place in which two or more people interact, or gather in sociability’s name. A performance is a ‘seeable’: something one sees, behaviour, not a value, a belief, or an attitude. A performance is a sequence of gestures, postures, verbalizations or actions seen by others (seen, not talked about) and responded to. The notion of response is an important validating point; it is through the response that the first move is confirmed as existing or having meaning. Each response may be a validation of what is given (somehow seen as motivated) and what is given off (that which is incidental but seen as ‘unintended’). Like Durkheim, his abiding and enduring concern is how strangers treat each other with respect. The axial distinction in the social organization of any grouping for him is between the public, something visible to several people without an interactional general centre, and the private, or a group that has something of a boundary around it, a gathering, small group, cluster, a little collection of people with mutual gaze and focus. His terms for these are many. On the one hand, actors enmeshed in interactions set out claims for recognition, status, prestige or even notice, a ‘face’ or a ‘line’ (defined shortly) and, on the other, audiences of various com positions react to or respond positively or negatively to this line or sequence of actions. Should the response not be forthcoming, misunderstood, obliquely countered, ignored or otherwise turned against the sender, alienation,



embarrassment, withdrawal, defence or retrying will result. This sequentially balanced interaction is a network (not his term) in which not only the dyad or group is involved, but the social organization in which it occurs is drawn in. Goffman’s theatrical metaphor is just that – a useful analogy. It has been influential, as have other uses of the metaphor (Schreyogg and Hopfl 2004; Mangham 2005). Goffman’s work is dramaturgical, but not all his work is easily captured by this label. He does not see life as wholly theatrical, but rather he argues that aspects of it can be so seen. As he has continually asserted a metaphoric way of talking about something that is not a literal rendition of social life. A metaphor captures one thing in terms of another, an absurdity that cannot be literally true. Any metaphor, while powerful, has its limits. The world is not a stage and, at times, it is not even dramatic (Goffman 1959: 254; 1974: 126–155). The importance of this analysis is that organizations are not mini-theatres, but they supply the fronts, appearances, manner, routines and stimulate the necessary teamwork.5 The idea is that in and through interaction, performances are selectively presented, selectively responded to, and selectively adequate to sustaining the working consensus on which interaction depends. It is the selected various presentational emphases and their sequelae that are of interest, not the fact that they are performances. His evocative metaphoric thinking, when combined with literalism, often confused people. He was not endeavouring to be funny, in my view; his work was pained, not ironic. When he lists a series of losses including a nose and some other banal losses, he is showing that a loss seen from the loser’s standpoint is always a loss whatever its value may be in some other scale of value. On the other hand, he believes that we understand this idea of loss without making hierarchical judgements and taking value positions. The vividness of the often amusing examples is intentional because the point is to demonstrate the orderliness of even the most apparently bizarre. The surface and underlying forces and processes may be in contradiction. There is also no micro–macro distinction in his work; society is constrained interaction. Unlike Simmel, his work is not about social forms but about the ways in which forms create interactional dynamics or pressures toward ‘working consensus’. Organizational artefacts such as mission statements, goals and objectives, strategic plans and the like function as tools to reduce choice, not to guide it. They are background knowledge, only on occasion front stage or immediate. When a detective, for example, gets a high-profile case, they are not told to ‘dot the I’s and cross the Ts’ and that clearances are critical; this is said if they fails to clear it or makes a mistake (Corsianos 2003). As Goffman stated frequently, the work of society is interaction; without it, no business can be done; in fact there is no business that can be done. Interactions differ in purpose, and this purpose is in effect ‘laid on’ by obligations and connections to larger social enterprises such as businesses, parades, ritual occasions, or even small interactional clusters such as This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.


queues (Goffman 1983b). Interactional obligations are entangled with other stated aims and requirements: making an arrest, cutting open a chest, getting a product sold, committing someone to a mental hospital, and the like. The interaction order for Goffman is problematic, almost fragile, because he makes validation and response so essential (Rawls 1987). The constraint varies, but the concern remains; thus, whether the self is cynical or more sociable, whether he is ransacking misleading, capricious rational formal models of ‘strategic interaction’ or using them to portray their weaknesses, Goffman’s aim is to show how situated constraints work on actions whatever their setting. The moral constraints on ‘rational choice’, on ‘gaming’ or any strategic analysis errs because it does not begin with (a) the moral meanings imputed to action prior to the first move, (b) the fundamental inequalities produced by the unequal distribution of resources prior to action, (c) constraints that do not inhere in the rewards at issue – the investment of moral stakes in the actions undocumented in the formal schemata. Thus, organizational ‘rationality’ cannot be explicated from the actor’s point of view outside practice-based exchanges (see Manning, 1977, 1979). All that passes for order is contingent. This assumption is marked in Frame Analysis (FA) where he sees the possibility that once an activity is framed, or defined in some collective sense, there are disruptions, or ‘normal troubles’, matters ‘out of frame’ that may well break the extent frame, or collapse interaction, and negative experience within the frame. FA, in some respects, is an effort, a bow toward formalization of meaning that fails (see Scheff 2006). On the other hand, PSEL seems to flow neatly into ethnographies beginning with selves, performance teams, teamwork and its vicissitudes and some aspects of the cultural and social organization of interaction. The essays in Asylums also present a rich panoply of concepts such as the underlife of an institution, lodged selves, and the betrayal funnel. Its heavily ironic tone with reference to authoritative arrangements is echoed in most of his work; authority’s face is always misleading at best and brutal and vicious at least. Asylums is a study of the interaction order (Rawls 1987). Certainly, his detailed, almost exquisitely so, depiction of the social orga nization of the mental hospital in Asylums is premised on the notion that a formal organization that denies what might be called humanity, recognition of the interactional ‘selves’ of participants, cannot function.6 If one considers the challenges to organization-as-usual presented by the introduction of talented and ambitious minorities, women, or others who are marginalized, the question arises: what forms of dispossession of selves and territories do they experience? What subtle cues of diminished personhood are passed as ‘the way we do business here’ ? The resultant complex interdigitation of the social worlds he presents demonstrates that the rational/purposive model of organizational function, with whatever elaborations and mystifications, is a partial and misleading picture at best. If actors cannot interact to sustain their sense of being affirmed, they will resist. The ways resistance unfolds



are various (see Manning 2003: 157–8). Asylums can be seen as an angry depiction of a failed organization, a form that exploits humanity in the name of care and concern. It is in many ways an exploration of the limits of the concept of a ‘rational’ organization, and of the concept of organization. Resistance may be feeble: indeed, as research on the back stage of police departments shows, the back stage can be more violent than the front stage in spite of arrestees’ resistance (Holdaway 1983; Young 1996; Bazley et al. 2006). For example, violence is not applied to the mentally ill, the drunk or old by the police on balance: they are seen as not being responsible (Bittner 1967; Alpert and Dunham 2004). Not all the weak are exploited by organizations. That is, police patrol practice is oriented to sustaining authority if and when it is questioned. When questioning is not possible – a drunk, an Alzheimer’s victim, a child or a disoriented homeless person – they are treated with a distant concern (Bittner, 1967). The context of power and resistance can only be understood by close attention to detail, in terms of realized context and practices ‘done’. This account of Goffman’s core ideas is necessarily condensed and partial: my intent was to indicate that it holds much analytical promise for those OS scholars undertaking empirical studies of human interaction realizing all kinds of organizational forms we witness today. Indeed, his legacy is a rich, complex, daring amalgam and inspirational resource. In the next subsection, I draw out some further specific links and connections for what form this organizational analysis may take.

Goffman and Organizational Analysis Goffman produced in reference to organizations a few key ideas which I intend to elaborate below and illustrate subsequently. Here is a shorthand version: in the freshness of encounters, equity reigns; it is the zero or base position of Goffman (see the first line in PSEL, 1959). Formal organizations shape and modify interactions. ‘Organization’ is an addition to the armamentarium of the powerful, those on top of an organization and those who influence them, because it places ecological, material, structural and cultural limits on choice. Constraint often produces response and resistance. These can be minor or major aspects of the organization. Exploring the nature of these limits and how they are imposed (or not) is the core of Goffman’s organizational analysis. I argue here that organization is the framework for considering trust, order and ordering, framing and performance. A definition of organization from Asylums (1960: 175–176, and qualified further on page 176) is: ‘An “instrumental formal organization” may be defined as a system of purposively coordinated activities designed to produce some overall explicit ends. The intended product may be material artifacts, decisions, This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.


or information, and may be distributed among participants in a variety of ways. I will be mainly concerned with those formal organizations that are lodged within the confines of a single building or complex of adjacent buildings, referring to such a walled-in unit, for convenience, as a social establishment, institution, or organization.’

Now this is a formidable attempt at definition because it mixes formal proper ties with the particular organization he studied and its very ‘walled-in’ aspect. By defining the instrumental formal organization as he does, he is pointing to the fact that more is done in organizations than those purposively coordinated activities designed to produce some explicit ends. I would assert that the moral and expressive aspects of organizations are of equal or perhaps more interest to Goffman than the instrumental aspects. Because the instrumental activities are recorded on paper, assessed for their success, used to evaluate personnel, and in every way seen as ‘rational’ (oriented to achieving the stated instrumental ends), they may mistakenly be seen as the full description of organizational action. His primary point is that organizations expect participants ‘to be visibly engaged at appropriate times in the activity of the organization’ (p. 176). Later (p. 177) he writes, ‘Any study then of how individuals adapt to being identified and defined is likely to focus on how they deal with exhibiting engrossment in organizational activities.’ I take this to mean that the ways in which ‘organization’ becomes meaningful to individuals varies situationally and that it can at times be liberating, enlivening or oppressive. It is not a thing: it does not always have ontological priority for individuals in organization; this varies. Goffman, because he draws heavily and most subtly on Durkheim, shares with Berger and Luckmann an interest in what is made of interactions, but he begins with the practices that build up and sustain order, not with typification, and other ad hoc concepts that punctuate the Berger and Luckmann arguments – one could say they build meaning down from forms rather than beginning with emotionally saturated practices that create and sustain connections. Goffman’s notions of organization and organized are close to Bittner’s (see Bittner 1965) in the sense that ‘organization’ is a concept applied to action by observers, or ‘a label . . . used to describe repetitive, common, authoritatively coordinated but situationally located activities’ (Manning [1977]1997: 40). An organization is a kind of analytic conceit, but insofar as it produces tacit knowledge (Polanyi 1966) about the where and when of behaving, it has meaning. This means that, while organization as an idea varies in its reality, it is a situated and situational view. For Goffman, the situation is pre-eminent and his concern is with moments and their men [sic], not men and their moments (1964). As a formal concept, ‘organization’ comes in and out of everyday life; we may or may not be self-aware while working. Organizations occasionally become visible’ or present – they intrude on the natural attitude or what is taken for granted day to day. This happens when mistakes are made, rules



are violated, celebrations of the organization are held (holiday parties, faculty meetings, retreats). Rules in particular are used to display ‘organization’, as are records. All forms of organizational records are ways the organization speaks to itself; they reflect only in a distorted fashion, an encoded fashion, the environment. For example, as explained below, records on drug arrests do not measure any relevant fact about drug use or dealing, but are used to monitor officers’ perfor mance. What is called organizational is that which is accountable, an ex post facto rationalization for action (Mills 1940). Even when Goffman defines an organization as goal oriented as he does in Asylums (1960: 175–177), it is to strike an ironic note because so much of what is done in an organization, and needs to be done, does not pertain to accomplishing the rational instrumental and stated goals or goals of the organization. To study an organization is to study not only what people do, but how they rationalize or explain the whys and wherefores of that work. Action is fluid, a movement, changeable, subject to definition and redefinition. If this is true, how can one reify ‘organization’ as a set of fixed, measured, variable relationships? In this sense, as Hughes (1958) first pointed out, mistakes are indicators, telling what can and can’t be done in the name of an organization. The more one looks into these matters, the greater the contradictions between what is done and why and as a result, the greater need for ideological or belief-based explanations. For example, police use crime maps to produce images of clusters of crimes, and frame them as technical re-doings, that is, ‘mock-ups’ of the real crimes in action; if one were to see them as drama, scripted and planned for entertainment, it would be a mistake, a misframing, of major proportions (Manning, forthcoming). The reaffirmation of the framing as ‘real crime’ by senior people makes the shared view shared and redundant. In organizations in which choice is made largely at the bottom, as in teaching, social services and policing, the framing of cases is left to the functionaries with the hope that they will not produce visible errors that embarrass the organization publicly. Those at the bottom, on the other hand, believe that they are covering the errors of those at the top. In each case the matter is reframed while still in what is called the real or primary frame.7 Let us again consider organizational interaction. If, in the course of interactional encounters, actors open themselves to response (sometimes we don’t and the order is private and bounded in which we interact), a response is required. This may take the form of a concerted sequence, in which case it is a ‘line’ or request for additional response. In this set of exchanges, we verify each other as worthy others. Drug police (see below), if asked to sniff or use a drug, always have an excuse ready to hand, for to turn down a gift is an affront in itself. Because this situation cannot be predicted, it is the basis for the informal assessment of an officer: she has ‘flair’ in the face of a potential collapse of a front. In this set of exchanges, we verify each other as



worthy others. If we do not or cannot, for whatever reasons, constraint arises which may be accountable (require an explanation) or not. These interactions may by implication include others and thus a working consensus may emerge. At this point, ‘organization’ comes into play. Limits arise from the actor’s perspective – whether they are what he calls ‘negative experience’, frame-breaking or threatening information or that which causes ‘re-thinking’ or reframing (which might be described as a sense of recognizing: ‘I got it wrong the first time’). Organizations are abstract entities, but organizing is a relational process of co-participants, and when these organizing processes come into contact with the hierarchical aspects of organizations, there may be conflict. Those in the command segments can create limits by involving rules and procedures. These limits are marked, dramatized or expressed, in the options and nuances of what is said and done. The saying and doing in such marking is often shadowy because power blinds and binds relations and their scope. This power is rarely expressed (it is part of the ‘felicity condition’ Goffman 1983b). The rest comes as organizing ideas, designed to move and integrate people in groups, penetrate and shape what is done with the other. If and in so far as organizations deny orders, they will be produced: they may be counter or oppositional such as the occupational ‘subculture’ of the uniformed patrol officer, or what he calls the ‘underlife’ of a mental hospital, or exaggerated versions of American individualism produced by CEOs and management gurus. At the edges of encounters ‘organizations’ do their work and if the encounters cannot unfold they become oddly shaped; they exist in the form of an ‘underlife,’ as Goffman detailed in Asylums. Every organization has an underlife – the modes of interacting in places and times that are contrary to the stated instrumental aim of the organization. Underlife may be revealed or indicated by sabotage, as in damage to audio and video equipment in police cars by officers who resent ‘big brother’ (Manning 2003: 157); back stage damaging of the product such as in restaurants; playing video games and using the internet to shop; playing games on the job (Roy 1960); or drunken confrontations at annual parties. These are forms of resistance. Since power relations are signalled by rules and their enforcement, hierarchy manifests itself in and around rules but they are in every way indexical, pointing to the situation, not to the ‘organization’, formal or otherwise. The most fundamental idea underlying any interaction among strangers and organizations as units is trust. It is a false and misleading assumption that trust is absent in modern life; it must be made present more in modern life where strangers have fewer cues to establish it in advance. As organizations span continents and communication is disembodied, disembedded (free of time and space constraints) and virtual, trust becomes problematic and legal resolutions such as the European notion of a ‘contract’ questioned, trust is re-examined in interorganizational relations (see Heimer 1992). Nevertheless, as Goffman asserts, quoting W. I. Thomas, we live by inference (PSEL: 3). This idea can be glossed by the idea that interactions require an



in advance assumption that the second person or other(s) is at least trying to do something like the first person, that is, to sustain an interaction. In the instant or current situation in industrial nations, ‘high modernity’, in which time, place and setting are flexible and range from virtual to face to face and all simulacra in between, performances rely on trust (Rawls 1987, 2002). Furthermore, the centrality of trust is evidenced in ongoing sequences of interpretation. Goffman, following J. L. Austin, terms this the necessary ‘felicity condition’. Social interaction is a communicative dance based on trust and reciprocity – the foundations of organizing. Thus mutuality and duality (responsiveness) constitute the ‘promissory, evidential character’ of social life’ (Goffman 1983a: 3). While trust, or acceptance of forthcoming outcomes, is necessary, it may be violated, new contingencies may arise, and a new line of action may unfold. People perform, respond, perform, respond and thus they symbolize. In Frame Analysis, Goffman ruminates on this in respect to fabrications (benign and exploitative), and the vulnerabilities of experience (Goffman 1974: chapter 12). That is, if the framing process is subject to redefinition by lies (fabrications) that may be damaging or those that are merely benign, or experience from which the frame is drawn come into doubt, the frame my be questioned. There is always the possibility of ‘existential dread’ in Goffman because if we create order via reciprocity and exchange, and those exchanges ‘spin’ or change, the uneasiness of disorder looms.8 It is in interaction, even long-lagged interaction, that trust is displayed. It is not an attitude. It can be seen but is not a predisposition to act: it is displayed in action. Presentation, that is interaction, is more important than self. The self is not the central concept of Goffman’s work, but it is there in various shapes and aspects (see pointedly, the quote on the last page of Frame Analysis). There is a tenacious insistence in Anglo-American society that such a thing as self exists, and thus it is always a potential way to explain or account for behaviour, make sense of the continuities of one’s experience, or to point out oddities or anomalous experiences. Goffman’s point in Asylums is this: there are very few materials from which that which people believe is fundamental can be created. Whatever, consequences of interaction seen as the self are more important than the consequences of some feature of the interaction labelled – such as a ‘self’. The notion of a self is strategic beginning point, because as Goffman acknowledges, one could start backwards and seek motivation in a biogenetic contest, or in larger units that engender obligation and loyalty such as families or organizations. Goffman is not presuming order. There is an abiding sense in which chaos and disorder lurk always at the edges of interactions and these require work to manage and keep on track. There is a dark shadow on much of what he writes: the shadow of interruption, loss of poise, alienation and betrayal.9 It is through and by interaction that all orders, small groups, formal organizations, institutions, and societies, are created and sustained. They are



the vehicles to which we assign our burdens. Enduring obligations one to another bind us. While slips and intentional disruptions of performances go forward, there is a lasting sense in which they can be and are managed, but the shadow remains. This means in effect that the overtly ‘obvious’ features of formal organizations, rules, roles, relationships, structures of power and authority, mission statements, strategic plans and goals are only meaningful in and through the interaction by which they are constituted. The constraints of organizational life are many, and some are material and in some sense obvious (computers, desks, chairs, meetings, rooms, other equipment, people-in roles), and their features are both subtle and immediate and visible, but in many ways organizational actions are doubledcoded, they take space and have material presence, but their uses and functions are socially defined and sustained. This holds true for technologies, visible and invisible, work routines, rules and their contexts, role and obligations and certainly the rhetoric, accounts and organizational symbolizing that is enacted (Barley 1986). Internally, organizations are clusters of work routines, dense interactions, cliques and embedded groups that are constituted and reconstituted over time. The ‘place’ of such standard conceptual paraphernalia as roles, selves, groups and even persons are negotiable in interactional sequences and are not free standing or incontrovertible. Even such cliché matters as statement of the rational purposes, goals and complex, differentiated positions of an organization are materials for doing things. While its ecological and material basis is present, the uses to which the animate and inanimate are put emerge through and by interaction. Organizations are composed of interacting segments, occupational groups, and archipelagos of order, which bring people into conflict, competition and co-operation that is occasioned and occasional. It is these interfaces that provide rich veins of data bearing on power, authority and careers. In the next section I introduce some background before moving onto an empirical illustration of a study drawing upon Goffman.

The Background Goffman’s emphasis on the differential use of symbols to convey a message to an audience, an impression as it were, intrigued me as I was embarking on my studies of policing in the early 1970s (see also Manning 1988, 1992, 1996, 2003). While many viewed Goffman at that time as a ‘micro-interactional’ theorist, I thought the questions of ordering remained at whatever level one considers. I stumbled upon the scope of his ideas when first working on a theory of policing. I imagined that an organization is an actor, or performer, a social object to which motives, purposes, aims and social features are attributed to and responded to by other actors. It could create and disseminate impressions to its advantage. It could create a sustaining imagery to compete in an organizational environment. It could produce a line and create order in This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.


its audiences. Policing could be seen as engaged in a kind of dramatic game of ‘impression management’ or effort to persuade audiences via strategies, tactics and information of the quality of its actions. If the police organization is an actor, it interacts with other actors in symbolically articulated games (city government, social control with other civic bodies; see Long 1960), and its actions have consequences for other actors. Its existence as an actor is not constant but a product of the moves and definitions relevant to the situations in which action occurs.10 The police organization, because it is rooted in local places, financing and obligations, cannot move, outsource it functions or redefine its mission. It has to sustain its legitimacy in the present. Policing as practice is an elaborate form of ritual, an illusion of control in a divided, democratic, secular society in which strangers must somehow get along. Using a quote from Durkheim in Police Work (Manning 1977), I hinted that societies create sacred objects from secular ones and that policing had through its own promotional rhetoric and politics created quasi-sacred status in the polity. The police are a kind of aberrant and sacred island amid a sea of secularization. At the same time, they are what society makes of them, ‘dirty workers’ of a kind, and so they keep much of their work out of sight and back stage (Holdaway 1983; Dick 2005). Police practices, what is done in the name of the police organization, require visible display of involvement in policing as an organization (see below on Goffman’s discussion of ‘organization’). In many respects, my sketch of police work as a kind of drama is what passes for an organizationally based theory of modern policing. Police Work was one way in which elements of Goffman’s framework (via Durkheim; see Rawls 2002) entered organizational analysis and the next section touches upon this study of police-at-their-everyday-work. Given space restrictions, more detailed illustrations and analysis is set aside but available elsewhere (Manning [1979] 2003).

An Example of Organizational Analysis Narcs’ Game (Manning [1979] 2003) is a study of drug law enforcement based on fieldwork, observation, interviews and records gathered in two drug enforcement units in the Washington DC area. While the drug of interest has changed from heroin to crack cocaine in big cities today, and the media attention has diminished in drugs as a category, more recent research in Boston suggests to me that the organizational processes that produced the loose supervision and the entrepreneurial spirit of the officers remain. The most important aspect of any research is the questions asked, not the answers. Here is a series of questions. 1. What is the organizational work: that which counts and is counted? The work is craftlike, rather than bureaucratic. The fundamental idea that drives this craft is trust, as Goffman has told us: you must trust your This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.


informants to do the job (make buys, report information, retrieve the evidence, describe the persons and settings in which the buy occurred); you must trust your colleagues to ‘back you up’ on raids; you must trust your sergeant to tolerate your errors, misconceptions and occasional lies. If trust fails, violence may arise to sustain a connection: violence fills in for the absent. If an informant fails to make a buy and pockets the money he will be arrested. Drug law enforcement is a performance, sometimes a team performance (PSEL, chapter 3), whether one is working an informant, making a buy, testifying in court, or acting (while undercover) as a ‘major player’ or dealer. The team features more in Goffman’s view of organization than the organization. It is the team to which the actor owes loyalty and from whom he or she takes direction (PSEL pp. 97, 214). The unit within the police organization was a context for action and rationalization, but most officers worked on their own, defined their own cases, met and paid their own informants, and only occasionally were seen in the office. If they did not see the organization as an accountable object, they ran the risk of being sanctioned for deviance (too much overtime, not enough arrests, unfinished and needed paperwork). Over the course of the work, making cases, the actors required the resources of organization, but defined themselves as entrepreneurs, small businessmen carrying out a creative, volatile and sometimes violent craft. 2. What is an organization? All organizations must produce and maintain a niche via claims or a licence and a mandate and a presentational rhetoric –an elaborate account or rationalization – that sustains their credibility. This can be done using a variety of rhetorics and tactics, some of which involve direct information gathering and processing. Harrison White (1981) has shown that like other interactions market moves are based on the last moveand the next imagined move, not actual market intelligence.11 This argument, what one might call the social construction of the relevant environment, is developed based on detailed ethnographic data in Narcs’ Game.Organizations create and bound their environmental ‘other’, that which is not the organization. The absent presence of an organization is as important in performance as the presence of it is as a rationale. The study was on the one hand an exploration of the ways in which the organization imagined, created, reproduced and maintained an ‘environment’ in which enforcement was to take place. This environment was a ‘social construction’, an interpretation based on organizational readings, what the members thought what was ‘out there’. This included beliefs about the distribution of drugs, the drugs at issue, the number of users, the social problems associated with use, the moral implications of use, and the role of the criminal sanctioning in controlling the market and use. Enforcement is carried out by casework. Investigators work cases. A complementary thread of my argument was an examination of the creation of cases within the two organizations. If it were based on information, this would be available and widely disseminated and



used. I found that case-making and working cases was a function of internal sanctioned and visible organizational practices rather than based on the facts associated with the use and/or distribution of cocaine, heroin or prescription drugs.12 The cases ‘worked’ were defined by investigators. 3. What is a case? The organizing idea in drug policing is the case, something like the patient’s file discussed by Goffman in Asylums, the file in Bittner, and Garfinkel’s ‘Good organizational reasons’ (Garfinkel 1967), or sense- aking (Weick 2001: 188–198). Agents define cases, work them or not, and close them without more than superficial guidance, reprimand or review. The word ‘case’ is a shifter, and varies in meaning by the context in which it is used. In a fashion used in the abstract by outsiders such as researchers, US attorneys and district attorneys, it is something about which paper must be generated (and perhaps once ‘opened’ or written up, must be closed in some fashion). In the organization it remains an ‘open text’ metaphorically, thus permitting agents to pursue hunches, leads, ideas and other ways of reducing uncertainty. The loose idea, the case (and arrest) and their fringe meanings, permits agents to wander, open and close cases, as they move toward closure. In Narcs’ Game, ‘case’ referred to any or all of the following overlapping and not mutually exclusive ideas: • An idea for a future investigation such as ‘I have a dynamite informant.’ This means that the current informant can either make buys, introduce an officer to a dealer to make a buy, or point out dealing places. Any of these can lead to arrests and more informants, and thus sustain ‘production’ of more cases. • A lead passed on to an investigator by a phone from citizen, or in person from an arrestee, or a fellow officer (e.g. ‘“Slick” is dealing again around 24th and U’). The question then is what do I want to do about Slick and an I do it? The later is the determinant concern, not the former. • An informant’s file which records valid information, given past buys, and may lead to future ones. • An affidavit or a warrant for a place or person. This typically states that evidence of a crime is to be found there based on reliable evidence provided. • A written report of a buy and arrest. • A pending court case after a person is charged and arraigned. In many units, those nominally arrested may not be charged but merely intimidated to work informally and dismissed when they have satisfied the investigator. This creates a tension between the organization that defines informants as general unit property and individual officers who see them as personal property. This tension exists in any entrepreneurial enterprise, including universities (professors and their students).



• A case officially assigned to an investigator (by a sergeant or lieutenant). This rarely occurs in an investigator-centred organization, but it can happen in an organizationally centred unit (see below). • Knowledge of a set of people, vaguely linked or said to be linked, who are considering or are importing or dealing in drugs. These are often quite moot points. These facts might be the basis for a larger case that involves working up to bigger dealers. In short, the concept was situated, useful situationally, and had no transcendent meaning or use. It had an organizational aspect, however. Of the two organizations studied, Suburban (a pseudonym) was an organizationcentred, case-processing department which tracked cases more closely and where sergeants had a closer idea about how and what officers were ‘working’. Supervisors, a lieutenant or sergeant, could determine what cases were assigned and in that sense, were ‘open’. The assigned and open cases in Suburban, because they arose from citizens’ calls, were deemed worthless. On the other hand, in Metro (a pseudonym), and ‘being’ an investigator-centred department, cases were handled much more informally and there was no official count of what was being done or could be done. In both units, investigators appeared busy, reported they had informants and pending cases (see above list for the range of things that this covers). No case in this unit was ‘open’, but a case could be closed when the outcome was positive and recordable, i.e. when it generated an arrest, evidence, or an informant. These all required considerable paperwork. These ‘closed cases’ were a numerator for an unknown and unknowable denominator. There can be no ‘clearance rate’ in a drug enforcement unit, only (at best, if kept at all) records of outcomes, informants and expenditures (overtime, buy money and reward money). These arguments also apply to the indexical term, an arrest.13 In all of these ways (the definition of the work, the organization, the case, and the arrest) efficiency, that is, putting effort into producing shortterm visible outcomes, is valued over effectiveness or impact on the market. Known places, known persons, known groups, ‘gangs’ or dealing groups, and drugs’ known patterns of distribution (source, size, shape, colour, standard units) and slang terms used are targeted more than others. Visible street sweeps or set of public arrests was good media time and seen as having a positive impact on public opinion. Recall that in the classic model taken from Max Weber (Gerth and Mills 1958), an ideal type of a bureaucracy is one where paper records (and now electronic ones) are kept assiduously to track past decisions, anticipated outcomes, the actions of staff, evaluations of staff and their performance; the disposition of cases and problems arising; rules and regulations of the organization itself, and other meta-rules used to guide and sanction members. These are nominal and idealized functions. A case in bureaucratic terms is an official record consistent with the organization’s stated purpose, what is



believed that the organization ‘knows’. This fieldwork suggests that it might be more accurate to argue that what is recorded is that which might be questioned in future about any decision. In this sense, what is recorded is an anticipated statement, or a forward- and/or backward-looking formulation of decisions taken. What is written then is a configuration of anticipated actions, actions taken, and agents’ understandings of what has happened. With reference to agents, records of buys, seizures (drugs and money), other evidence collected, outstanding buy money (given to an officer in anticipation of making a buy); informants registered (if such a file is created and made available in the unit), and other matters involved in a case as it unfolds (if it lasts more than a few days and involves more than a bust or hand-tohand buy and arrest) was recorded consistently across any of the seven cities we studied in detail (Williams et al. 1977). It was not possible at any given time to know what the aims, objectives, outputs or potential cases of the agents were in the unit. Narcs’ Game was a detailed analysis of the messy nature of formalized, purposive action. How is it that collective or joint actions are known and understood so that the organization can obtain an ‘embracing concept of the members’ (Goffman 1961: 179–180)? As Goffman writes extensively, collec tive actions must include trust; without it, nothing goes forward (1961: 174, citing Durkheim). Sergeants thus trust that their agents (squad members) are working on something; in the case of the squads that ‘work the street’ (six of the nine in Metro), the evidence is the arrests and warrants served. The visible evidence is seen when people are arrested, raids are staged and officers return with the evidence prisoners or ‘sad stories’. Those who work the schools and pharmacies squad were not trusted because they did not do real police work – make arrests. Their work was invisible. Another point arising but which cannot be pursued here is that rules do not reduce complexity; they produce it. The structural insulation and isolation of the drug unit enabled it to maintain some physical and social distance from the organized and organizing centre of the headquarters. At that time, often the drug unit was located outside the police department in a separate building without a sign: the cars were also unregistered in the state Department of Motor Vehicles and the identities of the officers were concealed in even city county or state organizational records. This both mystified the officers (PSEL: 71) and protected them. Drug law enforcement was theorized from this perspective as a constellation of uncertainties, or outcomes of which the consequences were unknown (facts may be available but can be estimated, such as the likelihood of drug dealing in a particular location in the city, but are not known at the time) or unknowable (cannot be known, such as the number of drug dealers in a metropolitan area). Closing this section, the organizations studied worked in several ways to manage the impression of impact and the control of drugs. Agents maintained a front and controlled the setting as much as possible (PSEL: 88).



They remained out of sight personally and professionally. They preferred not to appear in court or in the television news. They were never seen in uniform. They resembled, by costume, manner, appearance and front, the people they hunt and arrest. In sum, they were marginal and symbolically distinctive from the rest of the organization and they dramatized this in action (Manning 2003: 51–52). Necessarily, the organization is a social mirror that reflected the same structure, values and processes as the ‘bad guys’ (Manning 2003: 80–81). They are entrepreneurs, work secretly, act illegally, and in this and other ways they act much like their opponents. These could be called mutually shared projections of social reality, now a part of the working mandate of the drug unit and the beliefs of drug dealers. The secret of the menacing, omnipresent and effective drug police is that there is no secret. They are daily enacting, in Weick’s (2001) terms, their sense of the job. As noted above, the objective for turning to this study in broad terms was simply to indicate the ways Goffman’s work was a source of inspiration. Much more remains to be said and certainly learnt and drawn upon as the immense bank of books evaluating and summarizing and so on and so forth testify. The brief incursion into the study and the analysis here begins to show that paperwork, social roles, rules governing decisions and in effect how the organization is mobilized or moved into action, are defined occasionally and situationally, depending on the squad, the meaning of the term ‘case’, and the opportunities for enforcement as officers defined them. Further, given the nature of this particular organizational form realized, no long-term goals were stated, no objectives set, no standards or levels of performance extant. The practices were based on a seemingly enduring, well-understood situational rationality that took into account what was possible at the time, given the high levels of uncertainty in information terms that prevailed concerning the environment of use and dealing.

Final Comments The complexity of a situated analysis of organizations is best expressed in the last chapter of PSEL, ‘Conclusion’ (which it is not). Goffman keeps twisting the focus to show that one can see organized action as framed by technical, political, structural and cultural approaches (p. 240) as well as the ‘dramaturgical’. This would lead us to look at ‘impression management within the establishment, the role of teams, and the interrelationships of the teams within the establishment’ (p. 240). He then continues to show how deeply interrelated the approaches are. Here is the focus: not in types of establishments, their structure, function, product or service because these are in every way incidental to the ordering necessary to accomplish any of this. It is this grounding that is assumed in demographic studies, those based on records, surveys or official data of any kind. Since the organization defines its



product in ways that encompass and enfold its workers, any production process produces meaning. Clearly, variables that cohere into typologies exist, such as the mandate of the organization, service, or profit; the degree to which it directly serves the public; the internal emphasis on modes of compliance (money, loyalty, tradition), but these in Goffman’s framework must be linked to the processes by which they are negotiated. Again and again, work is interactional work in whatever organizational context. In this paper I have argued that Goffman’s work is an ambitious and ambiguous stimulus that has been widely interpreted. I believe that the core of his work lies in the analysis of performance, organizing and organization, the underlife and related selves, trust, and ordering. Goffman’s actor is an emotional being, and in truth a ‘democratic man’ or person, while for him the formal instrumental organization is a constraining bounded arena in which interaction occurs, creating often inhumane hierarchies. Clearly, all of these aspects could not be empirically illustrated nor discussed in depth but I hope that readers have been prompted to search out ‘the originals’ and take inspiration in ways that the brief case study drawn from Narcs’ Game did. On a more personal note, I came to Goffman and his work via reading Durkheim more closely after reading the essays in Interaction Ritual (1967) and later via conversations with Robert ‘Habi’ Habenstein at the University of Missouri. Habi was a PhD student in sociology in Erving Goffman’s cohort at the University of Chicago and a close friend. Indeed, I took the job at Missouri fresh from graduate school because I admired Habi. It was with Habi and Lee Hearn that we drove for most of a day from Columbia, Missouri, to Campaign-Urbana in Habi’s pink Nash automobile to hear Erving speak. The crowd assembled; no one knew where he was or how he was arriving. The host, Joe Gusfield, was anxiously pacing the aisles of a huge overflowing auditorium on campus. At the announced time for the speech, Erving walked down the centre aisle, mounted the stairs to the stage and took out a stack of 4 × 6 notecards. He placed them carefully in front of him and evened the edges with his hands. He looked up. He then delivered the finest lecture I have ever heard: poised, definitive, and eloquent, it was based on a failed paper he never published. He vanished soon after the talk because he wanted to return to Berkeley for his son’s senior prom. I spoke with Erving subsequently, once in a hotel bar, once in an elevator in Denver, and shared a Chinese meal at which he critiqued at length the food to several hovering waiters and to us. He argued against a title I had proposed for a book of mine and refused to write a forward to it (this was a principled decision; he never wrote for anyone else). I returned from England for the ASA presidential address he was to deliver, having been invited by him in a formal letter. But alas he was near death even as we congregated. I cried and mourned his departure when he died and could not bear to attend his wake at which John Lofland collapsed while delivering the oration. His personal influence was much like his work: oblique, refracted, misunderstood, rich and redolent.



I can only write now that I miss him. More importantly, the field misses his incisive, penetrating writing. He is not with us, but his work is with us yet. A legacy indeed.

Notes 1. Using a search engine (in December 2006) to probe the contents of Organization Studies for references to the term ‘organization’, I found 693 mentions, with almost as many definitions (or it functioned commonsensically without a precise definition). 2. My interpretive warrant extends for some years; but others have also struggled with the Goffman corpus. Two known commentaries are in profound and consistent disagreement about the nature and thrust of his ideas. Phillip Manning (1992) sees them as evolving, systematic, and containing hopeful fragments of a theory. Tom Burns, a colleague of Goffman’s at Edinburgh in the 1950s, flatly states, on the other hand, that Goffman’s ideas lack a systematic theoretic structure or end point (1992: 74ff). Thomas Scheff, in a recent book (2006) focusing on Frame Analysis, sees Goffman’s work as a detailed sociological cognitive social psychology. There is an abundant secondary literature too. To date, two edited collections of research papers in the dramaturgical perspective: Brissett and Edgley (1990) and Combs and Mansfield (1976); five edited collections on Goffman (Ditton 1980; Drew and Wooton 1988; Riggins 1990; Smith 1999; and Trevino 2003); and two collections of his work with lengthy biographical and interpretive essays (Fine and Smith 1999; Lemert and Branaman 1997) are available. Bennett Berger’s introduction to the Northeastern University Press’s edition of Frame Analysis (1986) is a useful commentary. The Lemert and Branaman book (1997) contains a complete bibliography, selections from Goffman’s writings, and cites the relevant secondary sources. Branaman’s essay, ‘Goffman’s social theory’ is a modest and non-contentious overview, while Lemert’s ‘Goffman’ sets his ideas succinctly in the framework of the sociology of knowledge. 3. The approaches with which his work has been connected include dramatism (Kenneth Burke’s term), Meadian symbolic interactionism (Brissett and Edgley 1990, Lofland 1969), semiotics (Vester 1989), structuralism (Gonos 1977), and even a separate version of theorizing (Denzin 2004). He has been also taken as a representative of the decadence of modern morality (Cuzzort 1976), as providing a vision of politics for mass democratic society (Berman 1982), a postmodernist in disguise (Clough 1992); an acute observer of modern democratic manners among interacting strangers (P. K. Manning 1976), an interesting writer (Becker 1993), an amusing writer with several odd voices who has done too little fieldwork (Fine and Martin 1990) and as a failed interactionist who employs no self-based human agency (Denzin and Keller 1981). 4. PSEL was originally published as a research paper by the University of Edinburgh in 1956. Phillip Manning (1992: 44–8) sees the modifications Goffman made in the Anchor 1959 edition as important in tempering the cynical view of the actor and self in the 1956 version. 5. Teamwork is situational and occasioned, not an ongoing and lasting idea based on shared norms, values or beliefs (PSEF: 79). It forms around producing a ‘a single routine’. 6. I am indebted to Anne Rawls for this point made in personal communication. 7. In spite of the ‘cognitive bias’ one might find in Frame Analysis, Goffman does not begin with sense-making as a source of coordination of actors as does Weick (2001) – there is a nagging sense in which the grounding in Weick’s arguments is cognitive rather than interactional. However, as Weick explains, his work and Goffman’s is about



interactions, processes, and on the natural and sometimes messy aspects of organizing (Weick 2001: xi) within the context of formal organization or formally organized groups. The explicit role of cognitive organizing, as in the evocative and important paper on ‘collective mind’ (Weick and Roberts 1993), is argued logically from fieldwork and posited as a cause of reliable action sequences. Gary Alan Fine’s Kitchens (1996: 54–79) is a near example of Goffman-like work in its focus on routines for putting out meals in kitchens. Fine mistakenly begins with a list of posited characteristics of cook’s time, but salvages some purchase on the process by describing what is done over and over and how it works. 8. This is a very complicated point which goes to the heart of FA and cannot be fully or properly elaborated in this context. My point is to show that unlike Garfinkel, who assumes an order is always present, Goffman sees it as friable. The framing process is an attempt to reveal the underlying cognitive aspects of mutual ordering. 9. Goffman is never self-referential when writing. One could discern almost nothing of his obligations, friendships, loyalties, needs, desires or emotions from his writing. 10. The idea or concept of the actor was specifically defined in elegant detail as a social object by Talcott Parsons in the Weberian tradition ([1937] 1949: 44–49) in which he delineates the concrete actions of a person from an analytical approach which sees acts, actions and the actor as relational and intended to specify outcomes and explanations of actions. The Parsonian concept does not refer to a ‘performer’ who intentionally performs to achieve a dramatic purpose, and whose motivations are to impress, manipulate or promote personal goals, but a socially defined unit is a social system with certain attributed orientations to norms and values, subjectively integrated in an action system and making choices in reference to these norms, values and subjectively understood meanings. Goffman, like Garfinkel, knew the Parsonian scheme (Garfinkel was a student of Talcott Parsons at Harvard), rejected the normative value and systemic aspects, but used the term to indicate those in interaction rambling toward a working consensus through which they became something of social value. The important differences between Garfinkel and Goffman have been carefully spelled out by Anne Rawls (2006: 4) where Garfinkel (2006: 107–117) states clearly and at length two versions of the actor. For our purposes here and similarly to Goffman, he argues (2006: 107) that an actor is ‘the short-hand generic designation of the agent to an action’. Garfinkel’s second meaning is the content of acting (p. 107) and need not occupy us here. 11. While I have argued for a view of organization and how Goffman sees the organization, it is important to note that, in recent years, organizational analysis is more inclined to accept the fallacious argument that some organizations are based on rationality and direct monitoring of the environment via ‘market forces’, while others do not. This position has been used to argue that school, welfare and policing organizing efforts are irrational and responsive only to institutional protective myths that buffer them from evaluation (Meyer and Rowan 1977; see also Powell and DiMaggio 1983, the most cited article in sociology in the last 25 years). These are elegant, data-free and evocative essays. Market dynamics, pricing, sales and new products are no more indicative of the next action than any other socially organized system. 12. At the time of the study, 1975–1977, ‘crack’ cocaine, inexpensive nuggets with a rapid and sometimes explosive effect, was not in visible use in the district. The primary interest of the officers in the two units was heroin. 13. That is, an arrest is also a ‘shifter’, a term that changes meaning in context for officers and has no fixed meaning organizationally. Drug officers in special units are expected to produce, usually in terms of arrests. There are local stories and rankings of skill and expertise, but the official records kept by supervisors bear only on what is done by officers that can be recorded. The ebb and flow of markets, price, quality, number of users, quantity of drugs are of no interest. The primary aim is to keep officers working as the



hours are flexible, the agents are invisible once they leave the office (these are often in buildings some distance from headquarters or any precinct or district), they operate on their own cases largely without direction, and the external evidence of activity work is nil. Conversely, a lot of work by an agent or agents on a case can yield nothing if an informant quits, dies or is killed, might have to appear in court, the district attorney will not charge on the case, witnesses drop out or leave the country, or evidence is lost or compromised.

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Garfinkel, Harold 1967 Studies in ethnomethodology. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. Garfinkel, Harold 2006 Seeing sociologically. Edited with an introduction by A. W. Rawls. Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers. Gerth, H. H., and C. Wright Mills 1958 From Max Weber. New York: Oxford University Press. (1st edition 1946.) Goffman, Erving 1959 The presentation of self in everyday life. Garden City, NY: Doubleday Anchor Books. Goffman, Erving 1960 Asylums. Chicago: Aldine. Goffman, Erving 1961 Encounters: Two studies in the sociology of interaction. Indianpolis, Indiana polis: Bobbs-Merril. Goffman, Erving 1963a Behavior in public places. New York: Free Press. Goffman, Erving 1963b Stigma: Notes on the management of spoiled identity. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. Goffman, Erving 1964 ‘The neglected situation’. American Anthropologist 66: 133–136. Goffman, Erving 1967 Interaction ritual: Essays on face-to-face behavior. Chicago: Aldine. Goffman, Erving 1969 Strategic interaction. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Goffman, Erving 1971 Relations in public. New York: Basic Books. Goffman, Erving 1974 Frame analysis. New York: Basic Books. Goffman, Erving 1979 Gender advertisements. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Goffman, Erving 1981 Forms of talk. Oxford: Blackwell. Goffman, Erving 1983a ‘Felicity’s condition’. American Journal of Sociology 89: 1–53. Goffman, Erving 1983b ‘The interaction order’. American Sociological Review 48: 1–17. Gonos, G. 1977 ‘“Situation” vs “frame”: The “interactionist” and “structuralist” analyses of everyday life’. American Sociological Review 42: 854–867. Heimer, Carol 1992 Reactive risk and rational action. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Holdaway, S. 1983 Inside the British police. Oxford: Blackwell. Hughes, E. C. 1958 Men and their work. Glencoe, IL: Free Press of Glencoe. Lemert, Charles, and A. Branaman, editors 1997 The Goffman reader. Charles Lemert and Ann Branaman (eds.). Malden, MA: Blackwell. Lofland, John 1969 Deviance and identity. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. Long, Norton 1960 ‘The local community as an ecology of games’. American Journal of Sociology 64/3: 251–261. Mangham, Ian 2005 ‘Vita contemplativa: The drama of organizational life’. Organization Studies 26/6: 941–958. Manning, Peter K. 1976 ‘Goffman and the decline of civility’. Canadian Review of Anthropology and Sociology 13: 13–25. Manning, Peter K. 1980 ‘Goffman’s framing order: Style as structure’ in The view from Goffman. Jason Ditton (ed.), 252–284. London: Macmillan. Manning, Peter K. [1977] 1997 Police work. Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press. Manning, Peter K. [1979] 2003 Narcs’ game. Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press. Manning, Peter K. 1988 Symbolic communication. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Manning, Peter K. 1992 ‘Technological dramas and the police’. Criminology 30: 327–345. Manning, Peter K. 1996 ‘Information technology in the police context: The “sailor” phone’. Information Technology Review 7: 52–62. Manning, Peter K. 2003 Policing contingencies. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Manning, Peter K. Forthcoming Technology’s ways: Police uses of crime mapping. New York: New York University Press. Manning, Phillip 1992 Erving Goffman and modern sociology. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press. Meyer, John, and C. Rowan 1977 ‘Institutionalized organizations’. American Journal of Sociology 83: 340–363.



Mills, C. Wright 1940 ‘Situated actions and vocabularies of motive’. American Sociological Review 5: 904–913. Parson, Talcott [1937] 1949 The structure of social action. New York: McGraw-Hill. Polanyi, M. 1966 The tacit dimension. New York: Doubleday Books. Powell, W. W., and Paul DiMaggio 1983 ‘The iron cage revisited’. American Sociological Review 48: 147–160. Rawls, Anne 1987 ‘The interaction order sui generis: Goffman’s contribution to social theory’. Sociological Theory 5:136–149. Rawls, Anne 2002 Durkheim and epistemology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Riggins, S. (ed.) 1990 Beyond Goffman: Studies on communication, institution, and social interaction. Berlin; New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Roy, Donald 1960 ‘ “Banana time”: job satisfaction and informal interaction’. Human Organization 18: 158–168. Scheff, T. 2006 Framing Goffman. Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers. Schein, Edgar 2006 ‘From brainwashing to organizational therapy’. Organization Studies 27: 287–301. Schreyogg, H., and H. Hopfl 2004 ‘Theatre and organization: Editorial introduction’ (special issue) Organization Studies 25: 691–704. Smith, Greg (ed.) 1999 Goffman and social organization: Studies in a sociological legacy. London; New York: Routledge. Trevino, A. Javier 2003 Goffman’s legacy. Foreword by Charles Lemert. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Vester, H. 1989 ‘Goffman and post modernism’. Semiotica 76: 191–202p Weick, K. 2001 Making sense of the organization. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Weick, Karl, and Karlene Roberts 1993 ‘Collective mind in organizations’. Adminstrative Science Quarterly 38: 357–381. White, Harrison 1981 ‘Where do markets come from?’ American Journal of Sociology 87: 517–547. Williams, J. R., L. J. Redlinger, and Peter Manning 1977 Police narcotics control: Patterns and strategies. 2 volumes. Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office. Young, Malcolm 1996 An inside job. Oxford: Oxford University Press.


26 Harold Garfinkel, Ethnomethodology and Workplace Studies Anne Warfield Rawls

Introduction

S

ome of the more important developments in the study of work and organization, including studies by Lucy Suchman (1987), Julian Orr (1996), Christian Heath and Paul Luff (2000), Richard Harper (1998) and Sellen and Harper (2003), establishing the importance of situated action, talk, sequential order and tacit understanding, have been inspired by Harold Garfinkel’s argument that social orders, including work, depend for their coherence on constant attention to, and competent display of, shared member’s methods (ethno-methods) rather than on formal structures, or individual motivation: hence the term ‘ethnomethodology’ (EM).1 Garfinkel’s notions of ‘taken-for-granted’ reasoning and the general importance of details of order, accountability and displays of attention have since the 1960s influenced the research of such well-known organization studies scholars as Egon Bittner (1965, 1983), Karl Weick (1969, 1995), John Van Maanen and Steve Barley (1984) and Peter K. Manning (1979a, b).2 In spite of Garfinkel’s impact on the development of detailed studies of work, his theoretical contribution, and the extent to which he has from the beginning been directly concerned with questions of organization and organizing, remains obscure. As a consequence, the studies of work he inspires tend to be framed by and appraised from conventional theoretical perspectives that treat contingent detail as theoretically insignificant. The result is




that details can become vague, treated as a symbolic and interpretive matter, or as habits and routines, rather than the detailed and specifiable process of producing orders based on shared methods, trust, competence, and attention that Garfinkel indicated. Furthermore, in the absence of a clear articulation of Garfinkel’s theory, the results of detailed studies are popularly treated as qualitative ‘findings’ and the data approached as though theoretically neutral. The general perception is that, while impressively thorough, such studies lack an adequate theoretical orientation. For instance, in the special issue of Organization Studies (2006) devoted to Julian Orr’s Talking About Machines (1996) Orr’s contribution is striking for the extent to which, in spite of the impact of his work and the clear appreciation of its originality, he is nevertheless held accountable to conventional theoretical expectations and criticized for not having focused on entities such as ‘the organization’ (Orr 2006: 1805–1810). Orr sidesteps the issue to some extent, citing his training in anthropology. But he also offers a persuasive defense of his focus on technicians and their work, citing Egon Bittner’s (1965) early work on organization as the best theoretical warrant for his approach. Bittner was an early student of Garfinkel and, given the approach Orr chose – an avowedly ethnomethodological approach – he was looking at the organization as a process of collaborative work, in just the way Bittner proposes. That’s why Orr’s work is so impressive. To insist that his ‘findings’ stand in need of theoretical framing forces on them theories they effectively challenge, while ignoring the theory they are premised on.3 Ethnomethodological studies are grounded in theoretical premises elaborated by Garfinkel principally in publications and manuscripts written between 1940 and 1967 that challenge conventional theory and research in significant ways. Garfinkel insists that mutual intelligibility (or sensemaking) in all situations from ordinary conversation through work in the most highly structured organizations (Garfinkel’s studies in the early 1950s focused on the military, prisons and hospitals) requires constant attention and competent use of shared methods of organizing action for its achievement. Work is like other social processes in this regard and thus, Garfinkel argues, the methods essential to work (and organization) will be found in details of attention and mutually oriented methods of work, and ordered properties of mutual action, rather than abstract formulations. It follows that mutual attentiveness and conversation reduce accidents and make high-risk work more reliable, as a number of studies have shown (Heath and Luff 2000; Shapiro et al. 1994; Weick and Roberts 1993), because of identifiable ways that attention to ethno-methods enable mutually recognizable orders to be produced and displayed – processes that depend heavily on the moment-bymoment management of contingent detail through sequential orderings (see also Barley and Kunda 2001).


Rawls • Ethnomethodology and Workplace Studies 111

It will be the task of this paper to make those theoretical premises and their implications for organization studies research clear while also recognizing the constraint on space here. After outlining the basic theoretical controversies that currently animate the reception of detailed studies of work, and considering the relationship between Garfinkel and contemporary organization theory, this article will: discuss Garfinkel’s principled treatment of social orders, objects, and identities as achievements of constitutive practice, considering why their theoretical character has been overlooked; examine the relevance of Garfinkel’s treatment of the actor, groups, oriented objects, accounts, and trust for studies of work; and, finally, consider the implications of Garfinkel’s premises for organization theory and research.

Garfinkel and Contemporary Organization Theory The fact that studies of work inspired by Garfinkel are premised on an alternative theory of social order, in which contingent details are considered theoretically significant, is fundamental to understanding the contribution of those studies to contemporary organization theory.4 Conventional social theories do not allow for the possibility that contingent details exhibit order in individual cases and in their own right. They require instead the establishment of general patterns because they treat order as an aggregate result of individual action in a context of either structurally constrained or goaloriented activity. Garfinkel has referred to this characteristic of conventional theory as ‘Parsons’ plenum’ (1988, 2002). Aggregation, and the statistical methods that support it, is considered fundamental to establishing order in this view.5 Garfinkel, by contrast, maintains that each action must exhibit an order that is recognizable to other members of the same situation in order to be meaningful. It is the achievement and display of such recognizable orders that allows for mutual understanding – sensemaking – and coordinated action. The argument that meaning requires order, and the empirical elaboration of how this is achieved through sequential devices and reflexive attention, are Garfinkel’s unique contribution to social theory. Several comprehensive reviews of the contemporary state of theories of work and organization are helpful in situating Garfinkel’s position relative to more conventional theorizing. In their introduction to a special issue of Organization Studies on theories of the ‘firm’, the editors succinctly sum up the current state of organization theory as reflecting a basic dichotomy between individual and collective theories of social order – wherein all theories have to take either an individual or collective position, or some combination (Koza and Thoenig 2003). This has been true of organization theory



since its inception, and even authors arguing for alternatives nevertheless acknowledge the main elements of the dichotomy (Schatzki 2005). Anthony Giddens’s (1982) The Constitution of Society is one of the best-known attempts to forge an alternative bridging the individual and collective positions. Because order is still treated as an aggregated effect of individual action, collective constraint, or a combination of the two, however, and not as evident in a single action or situation, even when these approaches include a significant focus on interaction they stress the importance of establishing analytic generalities that hold across situations (interactions become ‘routines’ and ‘habits’) – and hence prefer large data sets (albeit of different kinds), even where the data are primarily ‘qualitative’ and ‘bottom up’.6 A focus on situated detail like Garfinkel’s is not considered significant social science in any of these views, because things that only happen once cannot demonstrate general patterns of action across cases. Garfinkel’s insistence on contingent details tends to be seen as an extreme form of individualism. This is unfortunate, because he is not interested in the individual as such, nor the uniqueness of contingent details. Rather, Garfinkel is concerned with the patterned and instructable ways in which order properties of situated action are made public and mutually recognizable objects by workers at worksites from the contingencies at hand. He is interested in how – just how – contingencies are rendered as recognizable objects using shared methods that exhibit an immediate order that can be seen in each single case. From Garfinkel’s perspective, individual interests and attitudes are irrelevant to situated orders because each action, in order to be meaningful, must exhibit order regardless of any particular individual motivations. Similarly, organizational constraint, while relevant at the level of accounts, and oriented toward managing the accountability of actions, does not order action; its function is retrospective. This does not mean that organizational constraint does not have consequences, but only and very specifically that it does not order action. Nor can it exempt anyone or any action from the requirements of order. Any competent participant’s primary motivation must be to sustain mutual intelligibility, and to do so through the use of situated methods (constitutive expectancies)7 they share with others. For Garfinkel, these shared methods in the details of their use are the sociological object, not the individual, collective, or any aggregated or approximate order resulting from the influence of the one, the other, or any combination (Rawls 1989a). It is clear that Garfinkel’s position constitutes some kind of alternative to conventional organization theory. But, exactly what kind of alternative? Schatzki (2005) has recently outlined what he calls a ‘third alternative’ that is useful to consider as he regards it as broadly compatible with Garfinkel, and something like it is often adopted as a theoretical frame for EM studies. There are differences, however, and these differences help to clarify the distinctiveness of Garfinkel’s position. Schatzki proposes what he refers to as a ‘site ontology’: a position focusing on situated detail, while also retaining This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.


some basic premises of both individual and collective theories. He argues that this alternative position effectively combines the strengths of individualism and collectivism, while overcoming their weaknesses. On this ‘third’ view, habits and routines, at the conjunction of individual interests and organizational/collective constraints, provide a foundation for stable, intelligible organizational work. The argument basically constitutes a synthesis of Anthony Giddens’s ‘routinization’ (1982), Pierre Bourdieu’s ‘habitus’ (1972) and various innovations on these by others (e.g. Latour 1987). Habits and routines, because they can be construed as observable behavior, seem more amenable to empirical studies than the ‘values’, ‘attitudes’, and ‘institutions’ posited by conventional social science. This emphasis on the empirical constitutes a superficial fit between the study of habits and routines and EM studies of work in details. However, habits and routines are treated as existing in ways that distinguish them from what Garfinkel means by sequential order properties.8 In being routinized, habits and routines are in principle abstractions, or generalizations from the contingencies of real world events, and as such do not retain the complex and fluid order properties Garfinkel maintains are necessary to accomplish mutual intelligibilities of work. Ironically, this property of abstraction is part of their appeal as a theoretical device, offering the hope that they constitute something – a standardized ‘unit’ of some kind – that holds constant across time, person or place, and can thus be aggregated. Garfinkel’s argument, by contrast, is that routinized ‘units’ cannot explain intelligibility. At worksites and in interactions where nothing is ever exactly the same twice, something nevertheless makes it possible to discriminate the orderly and expected social ‘things’ from purely contingent happenings. There is much essential intelligible activity at any worksite that is neither habitual nor routine. Garfinkel argues that the contingencies of local orders are too complex and changeable to be handled by any standardized unit, and that would include habits and routines, in addition to rules, definitions, symbols, etc. In fact, it is his position that all such ‘units’, like any social ‘object’ or ‘thing’, only come to have recognizable and shared meaning (or appearance) to a working group when they are made using shared methods to create a situated order against which social ‘things’ can be seen in common. It is not the units that provide a constant; this is the mistake of conventional theorizing. It is the constantly kaleidoscoping order properties with which objects are rendered mutually intelligible which provide a constant: an epistemological and not an ontological problem in Garfinkel’s view. If one says, for example, that a worker accomplishes a task by the habitual use of a wrist flick, or by jotting down a particular set of words on paper, what remains to be explained is how the worker recognizes those situations that are appropriate for the use of that wrist flick, or just those words, and how the ordering of that activity achieves some mutually intelligible This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.


purpose. Saying it is a routine does not answer these questions. Slight variations in routines themselves also need to be explained. These variations constitute order properties that comprise both the intelligibility and the efficacy of action. Hughes et al. (2003) found that skilled iron workers have ways of turning a block of molten iron and changing the settings on the ‘rollers’ that might be called routines by some researchers. The interesting question is how ‘skilled’ workers recognize those situations in which these ‘routines’ might be appropriate. They must be able to ‘see’ within fractions of seconds that the iron is not looking right, and then select from a variety of options for altering the ‘normal’ rolling procedures. They must also be able to see how far ‘off the depth measurements are, to keep from damaging machinery. Operators who are ‘skilled’ at seeing these things produce less bad iron and do less damage to equipment, For Garfinkel, habits and routines, like any other social object, are only themselves constituted as intelligible objects against a background of constitutive order. Workers must be able to recognize what kind of a sequence they are in. Focusing on ontological units (things, habits, routines) begs the question of what order properties allow them to be mutually seen as units and intelligibly employed on any particular occasion. In looking at why doctors refused to make use of a new, very expensive, computerized record-keeping system in the UK, Heath and Luff (2000: 31–57) examined the order properties of the old written records the doctors preferred. They found the order of the entries exhibited an economy and sequential placement of terms that allowed doctors to make important inferences about patients, their complaints, the doctor who made the record, and the trustworthiness of complaint and/or diagnosis. The records typically consisted of two or three lines: the patient’s complaint, the diagnosis, and the treatment, in that order and on separate lines. By juxtaposing serious complaints with insignificant treatments, or placing the patient’s complaint in ‘quotation marks’ doctors conveyed their assessment of the patient’s complaint (e.g. ‘not to be taken seriously’) without making the assessment explicit in the written record. When insignificant treatment was combined with no diagnosis and a notation of referral to the social worker, the inference could be drawn that the patient was mentally unstable. The new computerized system, by eliminating the possibilities for creating an orderly and economical sequential construction of items recognizable to doctors and seeable at a glance, rendered the new, more complete records meaningless. To ‘read the chart’, doctors must be able to discern the order properties of the entries. The juxtaposition of diagnosis and complaint can be informative, the same diagnosis following a different complaint conveying different information. This approach treats both order and mutually intelligible ‘fact’ as an accomplishment of details – constantly changing details – that exhibit order properties in their sequencing. By contrast, the focus on detail in habits and routines does not look for order, nor treat meaning, intelligibility or mutual action as a matter of order.



Somehow the workers are pictured as managing to enact just the right routines at just the right time, and the question of how they know when or what is not problematized. It is only in Garfinkel’s view that the details of any particular situation are expected to exhibit order properties in their own right. Sequential order properties can be observed and studied only in their details, and thus, instead of treating order either as details generalized into habits and routines, the result of an aggregation of individuals more or less orienting toward collective norms and values, or as an ontological property of situated things, Garfinkel treats details themselves as exhibiting the order that workers have to go on. If one takes seriously Garfinkel’s proposition that sequential order is consti tutive of mutual intelligibility, then order properties of sequences become the primary research object. What is required for the study of how this order is jointly made is a method that preserves the contingencies of its local produc tion, those sequential details oriented toward by workers in doing their work, and a theory treating these contingencies themselves, not the routines and habits an observer might see ‘sedimenting’ from them, as essential. The ‘constant’ organization theory seeks will, on Garfinkel’s view, be found in the sequential order properties of the methods workers use for producing order, not in ‘units’ or abstractions that appear to the observer’s view.9 The basic problem most social science neglects, according to Garfinkel, is how we come to ‘see’ intelligible things in common in the first place – how we mutually constitute the ‘objects’ and ‘things’ that inhabit social situations (Garfinkel [1952] 2008). The problem as Schatzki sees it is one of ontology, or as he calls it ‘site ontology’: a concern with what social objects exist, and the relationships between them. This view takes the intelligibility of social objects and their existence for granted and explains the ‘routine’ treatment of them, and their relationships to individual and collective action. Schatzki, like Giddens and Bourdieu, accepts the individual/collective dichotomy, and tries to bridge that dichotomy theoretically. Garfinkel rejects the dichotomy outright (Rawls 1989a; Garfinkel [1948] 2006). For Garfinkel, individual identities only exist (and can only be seen, recognized, or understood) within social situations, or groups, defined by shared ways of producing order in details.10 In keeping with his treatment of the mutual intelligibility of objects and words as constituted by order properties, Garfinkel approaches the question of what constitutes a group as a situated production through working acts. He proposes that situated actors, engaged in constructing a sequential order of meaning, constitute a group only when, and only for as long as, the sequential character of the interaction in which they are currently engaged requires of them collectively a mutual commitment to constitutive properties of the situation. The group, as a set of interpretive procedures, is, as Garfinkel says, ‘there before the actor gets there and there after they leave like a ‘ “standing crap game” ’.11



What makes a group – a group for the moment – is that its members are committed to the same constitutive expectations or, loosely speaking, ‘playing the same game’ (Garfinkel [1948] 2006; 1963).12 Later participants in the group will join other situations and the sequential orders they build together with which to mutually orient objects will be different. The objects and identities they can ‘see’ and ‘be’ are also tied to constitutive expectations of game/group and change as they change situations and constitutive commitments. Individuals, objects, and groups cannot be taken for granted by the researcher. They only exist as and when they are made: a problem of epistemology, not ontology. This idea, that a group has nothing to do with the demographic characteris tics of the individuals who comprise it, but rather with their situated compe tences and commitments, is the kind of definition of society that Durkheim ([1893] 1933) offered when he said society is more than the sum of its parts. Garfinkel’s argument implies that what makes a group does not come from any of the parts. It is the individual that has a problematic reality for Garfinkel, not the group.13 This is an important treatment of collectivity that does not describe a traditional tribal, cultural, or gemeinschaft group bound together by shared beliefs. Rather, it corresponds to Durkheim’s argument that in modern society self-regulating practices replace groups characterized by boundaries, shared norms, values, or culture. For Garfinkel, the dichotomy between individual and collective is itself a social production that requires an explanation, not a place to begin. While conventional approaches treat the individual and collective as given and then ask how social order results from an intersection between them, Garfinkel treats the intelligible ordering of ‘actions’ which comprise mutually recognizable ‘individuals’ and ‘collectives’ as the primary problematic. They only ‘exist’, like any social object, in so far as they can be intelligibly (and mutually) seen and understood; and thus the epistemological question takes precedence over the ontological. This treatment of the order properties of situations as fundamental to mutual intelligibility does not fit within either of the two more conventional perspectives, nor Schatzki’s third alternative.

Why Is Garfinkel’s Position Not Recognized as Theoretical? There are good reasons for not thinking of Garfinkel’s position as theoretical. For many years he forcefully and explicitly criticized conventional theorizing, arguing that any researcher who ‘formulated’ research problems theoretically before entering the field could (in principle) not find the actual real-world problems of making action and objects mutually intelligible that people at the worksite faced everyday. But it is a mistake to think that because he criticized conventional theory, emphasizing the importance of the empirical and steering his own students away from theory, he did not work



out his own theoretical premises in great detail. Between 1948 and 1954, Garfinkel wrote extensively on the theoretical implications of his argument that the order properties of situations constitute their meaning.14 This theoretical work involved reformulating basic sociological ideas (including the assumption that the individual and the collective are the essential protagonists in the creation of social order) and working out a general framework for a new understanding of the problem of social order in which the perception of social reality depends on the particular order properties enacted. What it means to say that Garfinkel’s position is theoretical, while at the same time respecting Garfinkel’s own deep criticisms of theorizing, is that there are good reasons why he would work in some ways and not others, and that these reasons have to do with deep noticings about how social things work, paired with some basic theoretical premises about the nature of social order generated by Garfinkel to explain those noticings. This does not mean that Garfinkel employs abstractions, reduces details to generalities or that he formulates the details of social orders, or, as he would say, ‘makes them up’ in advance of research. What is radical about ethnomethodology theoretically is that it does not reduce details to generalities – a practice generally considered the hallmark of theory – but, rather, locates the constitutive order properties toward which members mutually orient in the contingent details of their work. Because conventional theory does not recognize the significance of ordered contingencies, a focus on details seems to be a-theoretical. But there is an intrinsic relationship between detailed studies and their theoretical premises, at the heart of which is the premise that order is an ongoing achievement of member’s methods for producing it – rather than the result of structures, cultures, habits, routines, power, or interests, as other theories assume. If the coherence of actions, objects and identities depends on shared ways of producing situated orders of practice, and a mutual commitment to, or trust in, those shared practices, and if that order is made at local worksites, out of just what people need to get the work done in mutually understood ways, then the order properties of that coherence will necessarily exhibit the constitutive expectancies used to make it. These order properties of the coherence of objects, identities, and situations do not involve the considerations of individual motivation and collective constraint that are the theoretical mainstays of conventional social science, and consist only and exactly in their details. They only work in practice if they can be seen and recognized by others. Thus, they are available to research. The situated need to make sense, to mutually orient objects and actions, imposes order requirements on participants. Objects and actions are recogniz able, and hence meaningful, only when they can be seen as orderly within a particular context of situated action. As Garfinkel says, ‘order = meaning’ ([1948] 2006). That order, and its properties of sequential and contingent detail, is the sociological object.



Garfinkel’s criticisms of theory were themselves theoretically informed. This is not a contradiction. Garfinkel did not criticize conventional theory merely for being theoretical. What he criticized was the practice of letting theory define in advance the research questions and relevant concepts such that the researcher entered the research site with a closed mind, or as an observer merely, a point taken up at the close of this paper. Garfinkel called this a ‘heads you win, tails I lose’ approach – pursuing a research agenda to a foregone conclusion ([1948] 2006: 105). Having formulated the problem tautologically in advance, conventional researchers cannot lose. On the other hand, they are sure to miss the lived problem of order, and there is always an actual lived problem, as opposed to the theoretical problem posed by the observer. Consequently, Garfinkel referred to the lived problems of social order at the worksite as the ‘missing what’ of conventionally theorized social science. Ethnomethodologists understand order as a local production: it’s why they do their research the way they do. The irony is that EM studies of work, sometimes called the new anthropo logical approach to studies of work,15 constitute a radical theoretical position in their own right, one that stands in contradiction to other theories. More than a method, Garfinkel’s position is not anthropological except in being deeply ethnographic (and not conventionally ethnographic in that EM looks for order properties rather than culture, beliefs, or symbolic meaning). EM studies are not in need of theoretical contexting; they constitute an inherently theoretical approach. Both theoretically and methodologically they provide a serious challenge to prevailing ‘social science’ theories and methods. While Garfinkel offered his premises without historical consideration, it’s worth noting Durkheim’s argument ([1893] 1933: 100) that, as social relations become more diverse, orders based on shared beliefs and traditional social structures can no longer maintain social solidarity. In a future characterized by diversity and differentiation, theory and research premised on formal structures, values, and beliefs become irrelevant, as the orders they describe lose efficacy (Rawls 2004a, 2007, forthcoming). Social orders in a modern context of communication between relative unknowns must come increasingly to rely on constitutive or, as Durkheim called them, ‘self-regulating’ practices (Durkheim [1893] 1933:100; Rawls 2003). Durkheim draws examples from science, in which shared competence in a practice replaces beliefs as the basis for both sustaining and challenging ideas. In a context of globalization and globally distributed work, where people who do not share beliefs and have only situated practices to fall back on must nevertheless work together, it is important to understand the relevance of a theoretical and methodological shift from the conventional view of structures versus individuals – requiring a solidarity of beliefs and values – to an appreciation of the utility of members’ methods for producing the order of the social situations they inhabit (Rawls 2005, 2007, forthcoming). It is instructive to see Garfinkel and ethno-methods as elaborating Durkheim’s argument.



Hybrid Studies of Work or Workplace Studies, in Details Since the 1960s, Garfinkel has been teaching and doing what he calls ‘hybrid studies of work’ (Garfinkel 2002). Also known as ‘workplace studies’ (Luff et al. 2000), what is unique about these studies is what makes them hybrid: they are a cross between research and work. Performed by trained researchers, the questions they raise orient toward the problems and taken-for-granted competences workers manage in doing their work. They are different from ‘applied research’, which takes its problems and questions about how the world is ordered from disciplinary interests with no immediate practical relevance to the worksite, and then attempts to ‘apply’ them. Hybrid studies, by contrast, take their problems and questions from the worksite – treating workers, not the researcher, as the experts – and bringing into sharp relief how work is done and how problems are detected and dealt with by workers, an approach that is of immediate relevance to work. As a theoretical perspective, its practical promise is unique. It is no coincidence, then, that the major impact of Garfinkel’s position has first been acknowledged in areas of work studied by EM researchers, and not in their home discipline of sociology. Garfinkel expected this for two reasons: first, the theoretical presuppositions of sociology – and conventional theories of organization – make it impossible to focus on work, or anything else, in details. Everything must be reduced to a correlation between attitudes, values, and demographics, or routines, to be considered sociological; and, second, because hybrid studies reveal practical issues involved in any worksite, it is not surprising that they make a significant contribution to the problems and orientations of the research sites studied. As a consequence of these studies, those responsible for technical work are coming to see the benefit of funding and participating in detailed studies of work.16 Training students for this work poses an interesting problem. Because the task is to see the work as a member/worker, and not as a researcher, time spent on theorizing, or even learning research techniques, could be time spent closing a researcher’s eyes to the order properties of a worksite. Conventional social science training, with its focus on ‘objectivity’, experimental controls, aggregated data sets, and hypothesis testing, has a tendency to do this. Garfinkel’s intention is to open the field of possibilities as much as possible, to get researchers to see the world of work in new and unexpected ways, and to use whatever tools seem appropriate to their research problem in doing so (audio, video, photographs, technical slides, drawings, stories, transcripts, etc.). Methods that enable researchers to preserve and record order properties of situations, and approaches like CA that help in identifying possible order properties, are useful in this regard, but only in combination with an embodied experience of the work in question. John Hughes (Hughes et al. 1993), This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.


for instance, has made creative use of computer programs that allow field notes to be inserted as links into visuals of the proximal relations between workers at the worksite. This not only allows for sharing the order properties of work across a team that includes designers, but also for constant updating of observations, and does not require reduction of fieldwork analysis to a single viewpoint. While many research approaches are useful, the objective is to locate and preserve the order properties of work. While Garfinkel elaborated his position theoretically between 1948 and 1954, after he got to UCLA in 1954 he focused more exclusively on research. Because constitutive orders must be experienced to be understood, theoreti cal explanations (even when correct) can prevent researchers from seeing the order properties of constitutive expectancies for themselves.17 At UCLA in 1954, Garfinkel began teaching a series of what he refers to as tutorial prob lems (Garfinkel 2002: 145–168). Tutorials are exercises designed to help students make a gestalt shift away from the taken-for-granted in any setting, and toward the details of the work at hand. They involve things like attempting to follow ordinary instructions while wearing inverting lenses (lenses that turn everything upside down and backwards) or recording an ordinary telephone ringing: could the students hear the difference between a phone ringing for them and one ringing for someone else?18 The exercises helped students realize how much work was involved in orienting objects (a phone ringing for someone else is oriented differently) and following instructions in the ordinary way, work they would not otherwise be aware of because they were taking it for granted. The objective is to get beyond the taken-forgranted, beyond habits and routines, to the order properties that constitute their recognizability on each next occasion. Explanations of EM have often focused on these tutorials as if they were intended as the EM method of research, with unfortunate consequences. Some tutorials disrupted an ordinary activity in order to reveal its ‘normally thoughtless’ orderly character and these came to be widely referred to as ‘breaching experiments’. Although it can be instructive when things fail, and Garfinkel did some things he called experiments early on that involved breaching, these tutorials were not intended as ‘experiments’. They are ways of learning to see the taken-for-granted details of members’ work in members’ terms – which takes a lot of practice. Challenges for organization studies researchers are considered in the conclusion.

Intelligibility, Reciprocity and Trust Methods (or practices) for producing mutually intelligible objects and actions, according to Garfinkel, require constant mutual orientation and sustained trust. They have the character of reflexivity, meaning that each next thing done or said is taken in relation to the last (reflects back on the last),



and this reflexive sequential chain constitutes a basic order of sensemaking ([1948] 2006). This gives social action and conversation a sequential, backand-forth character, a reflexive relationship between the last thing and the next thing, with mutual obligations to attend and contribute to sequencing at every point. Since objects and identities can only be mutually understood against sequential orders, the mutual work of creating and sustaining them is a necessary, and hence a moral, obligation that requires a deep mutual trust (Rawls 1987, 1989a, b). Contemporary discussions of trust that treat it as an attitude (Fukayama 1996) or a quality of social networks (Tilly 2005) are inconsistent with Garfinkel’s argument that in contexts of constitutive practice trust is a background requirement, not something to be developed, even if it could be achieved over the course of a single interaction (e.g. ‘swift trust’, Meyerson et al. 1996). Trust in a mutual commitment to a particular set of situated practices is constitutive of the order properties of situations, which give objects and words meaning. Trust must be assumed first, by all members of a practice, and then confirmed constantly through various displays of attention and competence. Trust, in Garfinkel’s sense, is not an attitude and can only be lost, not gained, as it is required to begin with. Much of what passes for ‘trust building’ in formal organizations would, on Garfinkel’s view, damage trust by calling it into question. Trust is tacit and taken for granted. Studies show that taken-for-granted issues are only topicalized when they become problematic. Topicalizing trust can mark it as a problem. In addition, many efforts to make work more efficient eliminate aspects of interaction that are crucial for displays of trust, attention, and competence. The tendency is to treat trust as an attitude toward whole biographical persons, their beliefs and actions over time and in different situations, not as the competence to concretely perform and display commitment to members’ methods in a particular situation of work. Everything meaningful for Garfinkel involves trust (Garfinkel 1963). Every action assumes (trusts) that the ordinary properties of objects (defined by con stitutive practices) are as they are expected to be. One assumes that tables are solid and that bottles are labeled properly – until something goes wrong. Then every assumption is open to inspection. This notion of trust is very different from what circulates in social science and organizational science. Because of the constitutive requirements with regard to trust, understanding technical problems of engineering and information – and communicating about and with objects and technologies – requires a deep familiarity with the constitutive details of the social practices involved, with a particular emphasis on their sequential character and the orientation of both practices and persons/actors to trust requirements. Where technical applications conflict with situated practices and/or their trust requirements, problems will necessarily arise.



Oriented Objects and Phenomenal Fields Garfinkel insists that the social world and the actors and objects in it do not have the character that conventional theories suppose. Social objects are not just there; they must be mutually oriented. They must be rendered in a mutually intelligible form in order to exist as social objects: thus the terms ‘oriented objects’, ‘oriented identities’, and ‘phenomenal fields’ (Garfinkel 2002). Problems involved in constructing a mutually intelligible object can only be handled by the properties of an organized sequence of interaction. This cannot be done in one turn but involves an interactional series, or sequence. This idea animated contemporary studies of work. In their study of the London Underground, for instance, Heath and Luff (2000: 88–124) found that workers with different jobs, watching different video screen feeds, nevertheless carefully attended one another. They relied on a sense of a developing course of action, to which many people attended, in order to be able to ‘see’ the objects that appeared on their own video screens in real time, and coordinate their responses to those objects with others. The sup posedly separate jobs all turn out to depend on each worker being able to see what others are ‘seeing’ in sequence and producing a finely coordinated response. Such complex, mutually attended sequences of interaction allow for ade quacy to be established through reflexive relations between parts of a series. By ‘reflexivity’ Garfinkel means that the next thing said, done or seen reflects back on the last thing and has the potential to show it in a new light.19 Thus ‘reflexivity’, for Garfinkel, is a feature of the witnessable order of a sequence of action, not something happening in the mind. No object or word is clear in itself. Over the course of a sequence they become clear. The idea that objects can be conjured in this way, and mutually oriented, is important. We usually assume that ordinary objects are just there in front of us and that we do not have the same job of mutually orienting them that technical objects require, but Garfinkel argues that we do. Anything about an object could be relevant. What is being mutually oriented? Picking out the ‘just what’ about present objects that is being oriented in common – the ‘what’ about them that makes them one kind of social object instead of another – is a similar job of work to mutually orienting technical objects. Ordinary objects must be oriented in contexts of constitutive practice. Friends seen in places they are not expected may not be recognized. A hand raised overhead in a classroom or town meeting is seen immediately as a ‘handraising’ because there is a practice of asking questions to which it belongs. But, if hands are raised on a subway or in a park the action is merely confusing, not recognizable as a handraising. Chuck Goodwin (1994) popularized the idea that professional training leads to being able to see objects untrained people do not see, which he calls ‘professional vision’. This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.


But Garfinkel argues that orienting any meaningful object – not just highly technical, scientific or academic objects – involves instructed and socially constitutive aspects of vision.

Constitutive Properties of Work vs Formal Rules and Manuals By contrast with Garfinkel’s focus on the constitutive properties of sequential orders, the conventional theoretical presumption is to treat generalizations and formal constraints of organization (including manuals and rules) as more important and more theoretically significant. Even leaving aside the extensive critique of the incompleteness of rules and plans that the conventional approach ignores,20 any actual worker’s problems and competences with regard to their work are too complex to be captured by rules, and too closely coordinated to be merely the result of aggregations of individual choices or organizational constraint. Studies like Lucy Suchman’s Plans and Situated Action (1986) demonstrate that workers orient toward tacit features of situated action in lieu of formal plans (see also Button 1993; Button and Sharrock 1994; Drew and Heritage 1992). Julian Orr’s (1996) study of Xerox technicians shows the superiority of mutual collaboration, over manuals. Finely coordinated practices are too complex to be imagined, or formulated theoretically in advance, even by technicians themselves. Garfinkel insists it is impossible in principle to represent these competences – situated and flexible as they are – with generalities, and social theories that do so are irrelevant to fields of action. Work requires ordering contingencies to produce the order properties of any particular worksite. But it is difficult to get theorists or managers who have been trained to orient toward a formal model of organizations to take these order properties seriously (see Orr 2006). That methods of work have a contingent character does not mean that ways of producing order cannot hold across situations. Some do. But every situation has its own essential contingencies and unless these are taken into account research fails in its practical application. It becomes a model of a theory rather than a model of a worksite.

Accounts and Institutional Contexts of Accountability Accounts and accounting practices are one way that institutional constraint, power and inequality manifest in interaction. Looking at accounts as orderly practices within institutional settings and, more systematically, at institutions as contexts of accountability, was one of the first ways that Garfinkel impacted on studies of work and formal organizations (1940, 1949). He elaborated ways that both formal and informal social orders were actualized by persons through the production of recognizable and acceptable accounts. Such accounts were produced to satisfy formal



organizational accounting procedures and to get work done – conflicting purposes. Studies of clinic record-keeping (Garfinkel 1967) and police record-keeping (Meehan 1986), the social organization of justice and policing (Cicourel 1968; Bittner 1967; Manning 1979a, b; Van Maanen 1979; Van Maanen and Barley 1984), and the social construction of problems through accountable practices were inspired by Garfinkel’s treatment of accounts (Kitsuse and Cicourel 1963). According to Garfinkel, each situation in social life (or in formal organizations) constitutes a location for particular accounts considered appropriate narrative justifications of order production in that situation, but not necessarily in others. Trust in any participant’s competence is related to the way they handle these expectations with regard to accounts. Garfinkel inspired many studies of organizational accounting practices, including studies by Larry Weider (1974) Dorothy Smith (2005) and Albert Meehan (1986) that influenced the development of formal institutional studies in significant ways. Smith developed institutional ethnography, which focuses on the career of institutional documents and their relationship to internal and external contexts of accountability, and situated identities within organizations. In Telling the Convict Code Weider demonstrated an informal context of accountability – a countercode – that inmates name in refusing to comply with formal institutional expectations. No other explanation was necessary. Naming the ‘code’ was sufficient. Meehan tracks the production of crime statistics, documenting that statistics measure organizational activity, not crime. Such studies have provided researchers a framework for looking at interactions in institutions with extreme power differentials and rethinking the relevance of statistics. In my own research on conversation between persons identifying with different racial groups in the US (Rawls 2000), I found that participants do not have adequacy with regard to each other’s methods. There is no one who can be treated as an expert at both. In this case, accounts served as important clues to what participants who self-identified with both racial groups found storiable (unexpected) about cross-race communication. Their narratives point toward problematic sequences and conflicting expectations: ‘white people are nosey’ was a widely recognizable account among persons identified as Black Americans.21 The account resulted from the fact that question sequences treated as normal and expected among white speakers were dispreferred among Black speakers. EM researchers have also focused on gender. Garfinkel’s early research on Agnes and the interactional work required to enact gender identity is well known. Candace West (1982) and Don Zimmerman and West (1975) focused on how gender relations of power and inequality are enacted through phenomena such as frequency of interruption. Roberta Sassatelli (2007), an Italian ethnomethodologist, has done substantial work on gender, extending Garfinkel’s original insights with regard to Agnes.



This idea of a context of accountable narrative practice, as a way of under standing how organizational workers formulate the order of their actions, accompanies Garfinkel’s studies of interaction from the beginning. It can be found later in his discussion of what he called ‘the documentary method of interpretation’ (1967), as well as in studies that more explicitly examine ‘institutional contexts of accountability’ such as ‘Good organizational reasons for bad clinic records’ (1967). However, accounts do not explain how actions are constructed to be mutually intelligible. Their purpose is to respond to expectations that have relevance within specific organizational contexts. The difference between the accountable relevance of records and their sequential production and use by participants is especially important. For example, in their study of medical records, ‘Bad organizational reasons for good records’, a play on Garfinkel’s original title, Heath and Luff (2000) argue that the good records that new computerized systems make possible do not facilitate the work of doctors. The good records are organizationally accountable, but not situation and sequence sensitive. Doctors need to share information that could be crucial to patient care during subsequent visits (e.g. the questionable status of a diagnosis, or questions about the patient’s mental health) but which is not appropriate for the official record. A shared practice of juxtaposing diagnosis and treatment decisions (described earlier) allows them to do this efficiently and ‘off the record’. The formal organization and its legal commitments might want to prevent this; but if they succeed then care, when doctors do not see the same patient twice, will be less adequate. The apparently ‘bad’ records that doctors prefer allow them to project essential inferences without making problematic issues accountable for the official record. Doug Maynard (1993) has demonstrated the importance of sequencing in the delivering of ‘bad’ news. There is another problem resulting from the accountable character of records. Because workers are oriented toward the need to produce certain documentary records of their work, while also attending the often conflicting situated requirements of work, they make sure that records are complete in just and only the ways they need. Thus, the ‘statistics’ produced by organizations reflect accountability practices and not instances of events or actions. Treating these records as if they constituted an actual count of events as we have overwhelmingly come to do is problematic (Garfinkel 1949, 1967; Meehan 1986). The use of statistics produced by institutions for accountable purposes as measures of crime, for instance, is subject to this critique. The records are tautological. If a department decides to ‘crack down’ on a particular category of crime, their efforts will produce increases in the statistical record that reflect a change in police activity rather than changes in instances of criminal activity. Put another way, organizational statistics are not a measure of events in the world. They measure how an organization, as a context of accountability, orients toward certain events, and how



organizational workers account for the contact they make with those events: an argument that influenced the development of social problems as a field. Because workers use accounts to formulate institutional work, while at the same time using practices or members’ methods not evident in those accounts to do that work (the work proceeds one way but is accounted for in another), the details of practices are not recoverable from accounts. Accounts that institutions and workers produce, both statistical and narrative, not only hide the actual work of any institution (and its problems), but create the false impression that they represent a count of actual instances of something in the world, which they cannot (Meehan 1986; Garfinkel 1949). Ironically, conventional research that insists on the importance of power and inequality, and which accuses EM of ignoring those issues, adopts a methodology that treats data sets accountably produced by organizational workers reflecting the accountable narratives that support race and power differentials as ‘objective’ EM, by contrast, challenges the institutional status quo.

Agency and Organization Theory The recent turn toward detail and sensemaking in studies of work has resulted in increased concern with the actor and the actor’s perspective, and a debate over what an adequate theory of the actor would consist of (Llewellyn 2007; Kallinikos 2003). As with organization theory in general, the theory of agency suffers from the classic dichotomy between individual and collective, or agency and structure. Consequently, efforts such as Giddens’s (1982) attempt to bridge that dichotomy are becoming increasingly important. Because Giddens was influenced by both Goffman and Garfinkel (and yet there are essential differences between them that allow Garfinkel to avoid the pitfalls of Giddens’s argument) a short review of the state of the actor in current organization theory will precede the introduction of Garfinkel’s position on the actor. Sue Llewellyn (2007), drawing on Giddens, points out the importance of the idea that most ‘actors’ projects are effected from within organizations’. Yet, she argues, most organization theories do not have an adequate account of agency, and what they have tends to rely on psychology rather than the capacities that being in organized relationships with others make possible for agents. Garfinkel would agree with the importance of agency to a theory of organization. However, his conception of an actor who constitutes the intelligibility of work and its objects in cooperation with others is very different from Llewellyn’s conception of the actor as a motivated individual whose capacities are enhanced by the group. On the latter view, organizations are treated as the location for aggregating, or organizing, qualities that add capacities and understanding to



individual actors. The individual agent is seen as a container for projects and motivations, moving between different organizational contexts in which their capacities are enhanced and shaped by particularities of the local practices in which they engage. Garfinkel, by contrast, locates practices in situations defined by constitutive expectations, not in persons, and his actor depends on order properties of the situated group and the methods that define that group, not the organization, or individual motives, for making sense. There are also some similarities between Garfinkel’s position and recent attempts to separate the actor, or role, from the whole person. Jannis Kallinikos (2003: 596) argues (building on Luhmann and Gellner) that ‘humans are involved in organizations qua roles, rather than qua persons’ in modern organizations. This is an important argument because it separates situated action from demographic characteristics of whole persons, a move Garfinkel made as early as 1948. However, conventional theory wants to see the actor’s interests (constrained by social structure) driving action. Therefore, Kallinikos’s argument faces the criticism that it eliminates agency, reducing it to role. If roles continue to be defined in organizational terms, a conflation of agency and structure remains and the identification of actor with role threat ens to reduce the agent to an abstracted and formalized organizational role. Instead of role, which tends to be seen in formal organizational terms, Garfinkel refers to the ‘identified actor’, a more local identity than role, and defines a group by its constitutive expectations (including possible identified actors) not by demographic members or formal organizational characteristics. What is necessary from Garfinkel’s perspective is to identify actors with the bundle of competences their jobs and situations require and to do so independently of formal organizational roles and values, or individual persons and individual motivation.

The Identified Actor as a Sequential Achievement In the 1948 and 1951–1952 manuscripts, Garfinkel effects a conceptual trans formation from the idea of social relationships, as existing in historical time, between whole historical persons and their values and beliefs, to a focus on interaction between embodied and identified actors engaged as participants in situated orders. In order to make this move away from the whole demographic person, the actor, in Garfinkel’s view, must be treated as entirely situated. He returns to this idea in the famous Agnes study of the enacted presentation of a gendered self by a trans-sexed person (1967). As an identified actor Agnes is the gender that she succeeds in enacting – something critics have often misunderstood. This approach does not reduce agency to role, but rather treats the identity of the actor on each next occasion as a mutual



accomplishment through constitutive practices. Garfinkel’s identified actors are situated identities, constituted through shared practices, whose personal characteristics and/or beliefs and values are of interest only insofar as they impact on competence to produce practices required to enact identity in the situation. Because Garfinkel does not need to know about the actor’s motivations, beliefs, or values, he is able to give up the model of the whole person, and treat the identified actor as entirely situated in practice. And, because he treats the principal organization as the group (defined by shared practices) his treatment does not conflate the actor with structure or reduce it to organizational role. Garfinkel argues that motivations are sufficiently accounted for by the procedural expectations of groups and/or situations. While engaged as an identified actor in a situated practice, everyone must be equally committed to using ‘just these’ practices to get the job done, ignoring personal differences except where relevant to the practice. There may be variations in competence. But it is important for the ability of the practice to generate intelligible action and objects that social demographics should not correlate with these variations. If they do, opportunities to interact are not open and fair, and trust relations and participation in practice are threatened. In cases where they do correlate (for instance when blindness prevents someone from performing bits of practice), participants work hard to ignore this so that it does not destroy the practice and the group constituted by that practice (Coates and Rawls 2003). In short, the actor becomes a location for practices instead of a container for motivations. This version of the actor as embodied identity work does not constitute an individual perspective or a focus on the actor, in any conventional sense. Changes in how identity work is done alter the actor’s identity even within the same situation. This does not deny the possibility of creative agency. Tacit knowledge of situated practices is not organizational knowledge. It belongs to the situated practice and the group that is defined by that practice. As long as they produce competent, recognizable and accountable practice the identified actor can innovate.22 The competence to perform intelligibly is necessary before an actor can make any claim to be an identified actor on any particular occasion. Garfinkel’s observations of the relationship between agency and organizational accountability began in the army. Working at the Gulfport army hospital, he made systematic observations of how the possible identities for doctors and patients were tied to situated rules and regulations in specifiable ways. There were only four identities sick soldiers could have and they were assigned these identities by doctors. Garfinkel noted especially that doctors attributed motives to sick soldiers based on identities that doctors (using the institutional context of accounts) assigned to them, as if those identities were the soldier’s very own motives. He notes that social scientific researchers do the same thing: making



up theoretical schematics and attributing motives to people based on where they fall within this schematic as if these were their very own motives. Garfinkel took this problem especially seriously, given the central role played by motivation in most research schemes. A large part of his 1948 manuscript is devoted to this issue. Since the real motivations of actors cannot be known, either by researchers or other persons, he argued that motives could not play the big role in social order that conventional theory assumed.23 In Garfinkel’s scheme, by contrast, motivations play no role, the primary motivation of any actor being to produce recognizable orders so they can be understood and accepted as a trustworthy participant. There is much more order than the conventional model of the actor can account for and there needs to be more order. Models based on an aggregation of demographic individuals assume social objects and identities have a constant and common meaning. They do not. Given Garfinkel’s understanding of interaction as constitutive of objects and identities, a number of serious questions must be raised about scientific description. Positivists and pragmatists, William James ([1907] 1975) and Alfred North Whitehead in particular, argued that in experiencing objects we must use concepts and consequently our understanding of the physical is conceptual. Thus, it is a problem – positivism – to attribute concreteness to objects. Whitehead ([1929] 1978) called this ‘the fallacy of misplaced concreteness’. Researchers have struggled with the implications of the argument ever since. The general tendency has been to focus on making concepts more precise, giving up any ‘real’ purchase on objects. What has been overlooked is that the processes through which objects and meanings are actualized (objectified) on each next occasion are empirical (seeable and hearable), not conceptual. I refer to the failure to appreciate the implications of this for empirical research as ‘the fallacy of misplaced abstraction’ (Rawls 2004b).

Words and Sequences as Oriented Objects Most theories of communication treat symbols and words as unit objects that carry meaning into a situation. The problem then is to explain how one meaning is distinguished from another through relationships (postulated as grammatical, or referential) between the units: words, phrases, and presuppositions attached to words. Garfinkel’s argument works differently. Of course, words carry meaning. However, according to Garfinkel, their ability to do this is not really helpful. The problem is that words carry too much meaning. Any word, he says, can mean anything (Garfinkel [1948] 2006). Words, like objects, have the property of ‘indexicality’. How we know exactly what conversational object any given word is on some particular next occasion is what requires explanation. Orienting sequences and sequential



properties of order turns out to be one of the more important jobs identified actors have as participants in interaction. In the 1948 manuscript (and again in the memos of 1951–1952) Garfinkel offers a theory of communication in which the meaning of each next thing said is located by reference to its position in a developing sequence, and each next thing said reflects back on what was said before: a relationship of reflexivity. This requires speakers to orient the developing sequence and its constitutive order properties. This approach had a particular influence on Sacks and the early development of conversation analysis, particularly the focus on adjacency pairs and the idea of turns and orders of turn taking. Garfinkel argues that on its own a first utterance by a first speaker is ambiguous. It takes a response, and a particular kind of a response, to nail down the meaning of a first utterance. To produce such a response, a competent listener is required to produce a next utterance that displays an orientation toward and understanding of the first, while also moving the conversation forward. Take for instance the following fragment of conversation between A and B:24 1. A: I hope the traffic is not bad going home. 2. B: It will be (.) it’s raining. The opening turn by A is, like many opening moves, grammatically complete and does not depend on a prior utterance or prior developing sequence for meaning. But it still has properties of ambiguity and could mean several things. The second utterance (or turn) by B, ‘It will be (.) it’s raining’ makes sense only in the sequential context of the first utterance, as a second of a pair of utterances. On its own it could mean anything and nothing. The second turn does the work of displaying an understanding of the first. B as second speaker displays an understanding of the wish for traffic not to be ‘bad’. B also displays, just through the taking of the turn, that she understood the first turn as an invitation to take a responding turn. But, in addition to this display of understanding and participation, B adds something. It is raining and, as B will go on to say, when it rains there is always a traffic problem. This does another sort of work building onto the sequence in such a way that the second turn adds something that can only be understood in the context of the prior utterance, thus maximizing the degree of mutual orientation required between speakers. Everyone must carefully orient prior turns to understand what comes next and what came before. Because a careful orientation toward sequence is required for sensemaking, displays of orientation toward sequence and turn are also required. These displays give participants essential information. This results in various devices such as turns having the property of being ‘owned’ by someone who is expected to speak in that turn space: to make a display. When they do not speak, the absence of speech is significant.



Conventional approaches treat it as a problem that language has the property of ambiguity, or indexicality, and can be interpreted in many ways. However, Garfinkel’s point is that all speech has this property of indexicality. In ordinary speech it is not treated as a problem but rather as a resource. In the sequential ordering of speech, indexicality has an important role to play. It is the response that an utterance gets that displays, reflexively, the understanding others have of the utterance and nails its meaning down to the order of a developing sequence. There are preferences in repair sequences for speaker-initiated repair (Schegloff et al. 1977) that display a sensitivity of actors toward one another’s ‘face’ and ‘feelings’. Preferences with regard to assessments, and pre-sequences (Pomerantz 2004; Terasaki 2004) display a similar sensitivity. Such work also displays a sensitivity to protecting the order of developing sequences. Competent displays by an identified actor not only affect the perception of the actor as a competent and trustworthy member of the situation but also have implications for the coherence of the situation itself. A silence or a pause (passing a turn) allows the prior speaker to repair their own turn without making a problem explicit, thus allowing subtle changes in the meaning of the first utterance without calling attention to problems, protecting both identified selves and the situation. Words in the workplace, like objects, must be mutually oriented to be seen in common. There must be methods of constituting the objects that words are, in the context of ordered sequences of action, on each next occasion as an order property of the situation, displaying this work for others – and this way of constituting their ‘thingness’ must be shared.

Information as a Sequentially Produced Oriented Object Most surprisingly, given the preliminary nature of the current interest in the social characteristics of information, Garfinkel developed a sociological theory of information in 1952.25 After the war, ‘information’ became important as a transmittable, computable ‘thing’ that could be quantified, bought, sold, and managed, on the basis of which decisions about complex organizations could be made: global society entered the ‘information age’. The first theories of information in the 1940s and 1950s, formulated in the languages of mathematics and engineering, focused on problems like the carrying capacity of telephone wires, which had no obvious social component.26 But in attempting to formulate the ways in which messages or information could be discriminated from everything else, even engineers and mathemati cians had to theorize about signs and signifiers, to formulate theories about redundancy in language, defining information (at least initially) as inhabiting the realm of the non-redundant.



Information is the thing that is not yet known, the thing that is different and can be discriminated from other things, that in some basic sense fails the identity test. It is not surprising then that social patterns, which by definition repeat, tended to be seen as extra, redundant, non-essential. Hence, the goal from the beginning was to pare information back to its essence, eliminating socially determined redundancies. The social aspects of information were treated as extra, as inefficient, as if information not only could but should be reduced to a problem of pure mathematics and engineering. Over the past several decades the degree to which information is socially embedded and cannot be reduced to mathematics or logic has been increasingly recognized (Brown and Duguid 2000). However, information itself is still usually treated as existing in its own right, as something that social things are done to and with. The position essentially is that, existing independently, information also comes to have a social life. By contrast, Garfinkel argues that information itself, like objects, words, and identities, is necessarily constituted as a recognizable and intelligible object in and through social orders of practice – ways of making sense of a world in common. His argument that information would and could not exist without social practices which depend on redundancy remains a relatively undeveloped area of inquiry. As a consequence, the relationship between ‘information’ and social processes is still an unhappy one theoretically and epistemologically in a number of ways. The essential thing about information for Garfinkel is that, in spite of the ambiguities conventional theory would lead one to expect, the social actor can make and recognize information. He says that ‘The important thing and the thing that stands without a standard with which to judge ironically is that the actor keeps going. Thus, the nature of his factual knowledge must somehow be accounted for by considering what characteristics of his experience permit this continuity of activity.’ (Garfinkel [1952] 2008: 23)

Because sequential properties of action are significant, most redundancies are in fact information. In Heath and Luff’s (2000) discussion of medical records, for instance, it is the relationship between lines in the entries that constitutes information for participants competent to read the record. The entry items themselves are not information in this sense. The entries are quite simple: ‘Says they are depressed’ and ‘gave aspirin’. The sequential relationship between items in a socially organized series, constituted by shared practice and competence, allows a competent reader to draw important information from the entries. Aspirin is not a treatment for depression. Garfinkel’s focus on the continuity of practice (sequential continuity) and the question of just how an identified actor does manage to go on is extremely important. In conversation, silences convey information by their sequential position, for example in adjacency pairs. The reflexive relationship between This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.


turns at talk constitutes an ordered sequential backbone to conversation. In all types of action, sequential ordering is what gives objectivity and concreteness to social things and creates information as a social object. While theoretical approaches to the problem of order/information that require conventionally ‘objective’ standards make it look unsolvable, there are methods or practices for constituting information that are known in common to members of any practice. Since there are no conventionally ‘objective’ standards, they must not be necessary. The key to social order, and hence information, must be in the methods by which people do go on. It is these situated members’ methods that constitute objectivity and these that we should study. Garfinkel’s position parallels Wittgenstein’s argument that the approach to language through words, reference, and a correspondence theory of meaning is what made the problem of meaning appear to be unsolvable in the first place (1945). Garfinkel ([1952]: 14) gives a Wittgensteinian twist to information: ‘We know the thing information,’ he says, ‘through usage. We’re looking for the ideas that are immanent to the concept of information in use.’ The problem has been the treating of information in abstraction, as a thing in itself. Seen in sequential contexts of use, as an oriented object, rendered mutually intelligible through shared members’ methods, the problem looks very different.27 Garfinkel presents a simple formulation of a big problem. Objects are always seen in situated social contexts by identified selves. They must be constituted using shared methods, ethno-methods. Since they are never seen in ‘objective’ contexts by transcendent selves, theories of objects and information, of work and organization, that depend on objects as they would exist and be perceived by transcendent observers have no objects. The implications for research will be highlighted in the conclusion.

Conclusion There are good reasons why applications and innovations fail. Workers do not just ‘resist’ change, but defend practices essential to their work. It is true that work has changed over the past several decades but that does not explain why work is not well understood. There never has been much known about work in details, even in its old, supposedly familiar form, because conventional methods (and theories) reduce the details of practices to generalities. Garfinkel argues that order, the social order we are all looking for, the order that constitutes the ‘thingness’ of social objects and social facts, has been achieved already – and is constantly being achieved again and again in and through the details of what people do. Our daily work is to make recognizable orders for one another. Only by treating objects, identities, and orders as social ‘things’ made on the spot, by persons using shared methods



or practices for doing so, can the essential social phenomenon of sensemaking, and the complex cooperative configurations of contingency and uncertainty that comprise social organization, be understood. Preserving the ordered details of practices is especially crucial to studies of work because one way that workers manage complexities is to create more complexity and uncertainty, and to order this process interactionally. Communication is crucial to this process. The way it works, and why it works, can only be found in sequential interactional details. It confounds and has confounded any attempt at systematization, and attempts to systematize it organizationally make it less effective. Social scientific approaches that stop short of grasping this inevitably miss the great prize, the discovery of those social orders themselves. What is essential to know about any worksite involves not only the particular details of work but how those details either provide for, or interfere with, constitutive interactional requirements. Situated constitutive practices make moral demands on both actors and situations (Rawls 1987, 1989b, 1990). Trust relations, and a commitment to practices, are required to make sense, to be an identified self, and to be seen as competent and trustworthy by others. Displays of competence are also displays of trust. Understanding these underlying presuppositions is at least as important as understanding what work consists of. It can be said in advance that when a company ‘re-engineers’ a worksite in ways that violate the interactional requirements for trust, constitutive practice, and/or intelligibility, serious problems result. Collaborative sensemaking is not just something that happens when things break down; it is happening in every meaningful moment. Luckily, this does not involve an unexaminable culture or ‘group mind’, but rather properties of group that are empirically available in the form of specific methods and devices that are used in specifiable ways. Better communication between researchers, managers, designers, and workers requires attention to these details. So-called ‘improvements’ that eliminate the essential structures of sensemaking make businesses less efficient – or even dangerous – as well as wasting huge amounts of money. For researchers studying work and organizations the implications are pro found. Research must preserve the real-time relationships at the worksite and pay close attention to orders and sequencing. Because essential order properties involve timing and sequencing, video is an invaluable tool for identifying sequential order properties. Field notes can reveal order properties when the fieldworker is trained to look for them, and the field notes preserve them. But because most interactional work is taken for granted, workers cannot be asked about it. Researchers must learn by observing and participating, but there are also essential problems with observation. What the conventional observer does, according to Garfinkel, is take the perspective of scientific reflection, which reifies the actor (their motives, inten tions, and attitudes). Questions asked by conventional scientific observers



deal with theoretical objects they bring with them to the situation and are based on reflection. Actors engaged in ‘working acts’ do not have these theoretical objects/issues before them and cannot reflect until they finish acting. When asked questions, they adopt the attitude of theoretical reflection to answer. But because they did not adopt this attitude when engaged in the action in question, their answer does not reflect the objects they had in front of them while they were engaged in work. Attempts to solve this problem through full disclosure of the observer’s per spective and assumptions (auto-ethnography) which became popular in the 1980s confuses the issue. The problem is not the assumptions and intentions of the observer, although insofar as they bring assumptions with them those are problematic. The problem is that the conventional observer participates (qua observer) in a different social world with different constitutive expectations from the identified actor engaged in working acts. The observer is not constructing the situation they are analyzing, the participants are. Focusing on the observer at all is a problem in itself. There are a number of challenges for organization studies researchers: to meet the unique adequacy requirement by treating workers as experts and involving them in the research; investing the time to learn work from the worker’s perspective and taking seriously in doing so the need to look for order properties, not beliefs and values; remembering that while some aspects of order properties do hold across situations (the same ‘tools’ so to speak being used over and over again) they may be used differently on each next occasion.Their identity rests on order properties, not ontological characteristics. That is what gives them such flexibility and utility; research that reduces them to generalities also loses the details that make them work. Researchers can only formulate questions as good as their theories, and if conditions of work and interaction are other than what those theories propose, as Garfinkel argues, then to discover the actual conditions of work researchers must stop formulating the questions and problems they will be concerned with before entering the research site. They must focus instead on what ‘methods’ participants in the setting are using to render the setting mutually intelligible, i.e. orderly. They must abandon ideas of demographic orders and gemeinschaft social structures, emphasizing instead the selfregulating communities of shared constitutive practice which inhabit contemporary worksites, oriented objects, and words.28 It is also not enough to begin research in the field and to work from the ‘bottom up’ so to speak. Garfinkel insists that something essential is lost if, after getting a sense of what workers are up against, this sense is formulated (generalized) in any way that obscures its situated order properties. To create a set of categories and concepts that organize ‘data’ in ways consistent with social science theories, even on the basis of field research, loses the essence of how work is done. Even asking questions, no matter how deeply



embedded in field experience, can be a problem. Workers formulate their narratives about work in organizationally accountable terms which obscure the details. From Garfinkel’s perspective, even phenomenology and ethnographic studies do not go into enough detail, and what they mean by detail is more conceptual and cognitive than empirical (see Garfinkel [1948] 2006; [1952] 2008). Observation itself poses a problem for research. The observer and the subject they are observing are each engaged in a different constitutive practice. Because of this they are also quite literally engaged in different social worlds. It follows then that they are constructing different worlds of objects, and consequently have different objects before them. The scientist’s observations of action and objects belong only to the world of the observer, but are nevertheless ascribed to the subject’s world, like the doctor’s ascription of motives to the soldiers at Gulfport hospital. A transformation is required. Garfinkel’s aim was to construct a sociology that would reveal the ‘more’ detail there was to social order and meaning, not a sociology that would obscure detail under scientific abstraction. Garfinkel is after a social theory that works, one that explains the details of what workers actually do, in sequence, without explaining detail away. It is a ‘hard’ science criterion applied to a social domain of reflexively constructed meaning, a way of talking that he was using as early as 1962 (‘ethno-methodology’ conference transcripts). From a conventional theoretical standpoint, sociology as a hard science is not possible. But, given Garfinkel’s theoretical premises, it is not only possible but the only viable approach. Whatever general theory will emerge from this endeavor will be held accountable to the details of social interactions, and not the other way round. Therefore, no details can be reduced in the name of theoretical clarity. It is theoretical clarity that must serve the interests of the details. Not positivist, not postmodern, not realist or idealist, not micro or macro – it is a new kind of theory, a different kind of theory, challenging the terms of conventional theoretical debate.

Notes Thanks are due to Peter K. Manning who has been endlessly helpful, John Van Maanen for his insights on early developments, my colleagues in ethnomethodology at Bentley College, Gary David, Tim Anderson, and Angela Garcia, for comments, encouragement and support, and students in my Spring 2006 Senior Seminar who worked through these ideas with me. Dean Birkencamp of Paradigm Publishers has provided invaluable support for several projects with Garfinkel and has also agreed to sponsor a new journal titled Workplace Studies to be devoted to detailed studies of work. Finally, I would like to thank Harold Garfinkel to whom I owe a great deal, and without whom none of this work is possible. The mistakes as always are mine. 1. Studies influenced by Garfinkel are often also influenced by Erving Goffman and Harvey Sacks (who initiated conversation analysis (CA) with Emmanuel Schegloff,



2. 3.

4.

5.

6.

Gail Jefferson, and Anita Pomerantz). Their groundbreaking paper ‘The simplest systematics for the orga nization of turntaking in conversation’ was published in 1974. In the late 1950s and early 1960s Garfinkel met regularly with Goffman and Sacks. Later, in the mid-1960s, Goffman and Garfinkel had a falling out, while Sacks and Garfinkel remained close until Sacks died in 1975. Garfinkel had very close relations with several other students, including Aaron Cicourel and Egon Bittner, who went on to make names for themselves in studies of organizations, but he never developed the very close – almost tutorial - relationship with Schegloff, Jefferson and Pomerantz (who continued Sacks’s work after his death) that he had enjoyed with Sacks. The Social Problems article (Garfinkel 1964) was an important early influence on these thinkers and laid some groundwork for the reception of Studies three years later. There is a concern on the part of conventional social scientists that if entities such as the ‘organization’ and organizational ‘constraint’ and ‘power’ are not a focus of attention something essential is left out. This concern has gotten in the way of an appreciation of Garfinkel and EM research from the beginning. It is a misplaced concern. Nothing is being left out. EM focuses on those constraints or power relations that manifest in the situated interactions being studied. The way conventional researchers approach power and constraint they are reifications, that is, artifacts of theory, power in some general sense theorized in some local manifestation. Garfinkel is not interested in this. He insists that there are actual constraints and power relations that situated actions constitute, and that these cannot be comprehended by the application of ideas like power in general. What is necessary is to focus on the ways that power and constraint are actually constituted in particular situations. It is wrong to think that because Garfinkel does not accept the conventional approach to power and constraint he is not interested in these issues. EM researchers have studied the police, public defenders, courtrooms, doctor–patient interaction, gendered interaction, interracial interaction, cross-cultural interaction, etc., all relations of power and authority. My analysis of Garfinkel’s theoretical position builds on a number of prior publications, in particular my introductions to Garfinkel’s three latest books, Ethnomethodology’s Program: Working Out Durkheim’s Aphorism (2002), Seeing Sociologically (2006), and Toward a Sociological Theory of Information (2008) and my chapter ‘Garfinkel’ in George Ritzer’s Contemporary Social Theory, for which I was able to tape-record Garfinkel discussing his experiences during the war years and his early years in graduate school. Several earlier papers on the work of Garfinkel, Goffman, and Sacks are also relevant to this analysis (Rawls, 1987, 1989a, b, 1990). There I elucidated the moral and social contract implications of constitutive interaction orders. I also draw on unpublished manuscripts and conversations with Garfinkel over many years. Because so much of his work remains unpublished, it has seemed particularly important to provide some sense of the scope of the unpublished work. The notion of a ‘plenum’ which has no order, until that order is theorized using professional social science methods to do so, is an oblique reference to William James’s ‘buzzing blooming confusion’. The quest for generalizable findings is not a characteristic of only some conventional research, but rather a matter of principle that does not vary between researchers. It is one of the things I mean by the term ‘conventional theory’. As such it is also taken for granted: every textbook teaches the importance of generalizability. Since it is assumed that order is an aggregate result of many actions, the researcher assumes in principle that they cannot look for it in individual cases. Any research approach that looks for tendencies, or generalizes in any way, or which treats individual cases as inadequate unless they can be shown to fit a more general trend, is assuming that order is only evident in the aggregate. This is the perspective of almost every theory or research method except Garfinkel’s and sets his approach quite apart from the rest. Some ethnographers,



like Howard Becker, John Van Maanen and Peter K. Manning depart from this tendency to some degree, but then each has been significantly influenced by Garfinkel. 7. Garfinkel uses the notion of constitutive in a fairly strict sense. Something is constitutive of something else if the one thing could not be what it is without the other. The rules of baseball are constitutive of the game of baseball. The rules of chess are constitutive of chess. And, according to Garfinkel, there are many taken-for-granted expectations that are constitutive of the order properties, and hence the meaningful and ‘normal’ character, of social situations. 8. Whether sequential order properties are considered as constitutive expectancies, instructable actions, or the preferences orders of conversation analysis. 9. Garfinkel’s argument that the observer cannot see what the participant sees because order is an ongoing accomplishment in which only the participant is embedded is a fundamental theoretical premise and will be considered in the conclusion. 10. See Garfinkel [1948] 2006 for an extended discussion and definition of ‘group’. 11. As a set of rules or situated background expectancies, a situation does not begin or end with the people who inhabit it. A standing crap game, like a game of pick-up basketball, is always there. People come and go but the properties of group remain the same. 12. It is essential to note that Garfinkel is not talking about rules in the conventional sense and therefore not actually talking about games. It is a very loose analogy. What is similar is that there are expectations that are entirely constitutive of games, and there are expectations that are entirely constitutive of situated orders of practice. It is the constitutive element of the expectations that makes them game-like, not anything about rules. 13. Karl Weick has referred to sustained mutuality as ‘group mind’. This is not a characterization that Garfinkel would accept. The idea of group mind suggests that mutuality consists of some mysterious merging of minds. For Garfinkel, by contrast, there is no mystery. There are very specific empirically observable practices of attention and sensemaking that constitute the coherence of a working group. 14. The writing from this period includes the 1948 manuscript on communication (Seeing Sociologically 2006), the three Princeton memos written in 1951 and 1952 that develop the idea of the order properties of situations and their implications for organization and information theory, several smaller research sketches from the Princeton period, and the dissertation completed at Harvard in 1952. There are also several manuscripts from these years that begin developing the idea of order properties that appear in the ‘trust’ paper in its various versions. 15. There have been decades during which ethnomethodology was so unpopular that those associated with it were encouraged not to broadcast that fact. Words like ethnographic and anthropological were used as substitutes, much to the confusion of those who would now be interested in tracing Garfinkel’s influence. 16. Studies inspired by Garfinkel’s work have brought recognition to the research centers that sponsored them: at Xerox-PARC California – Lucy Suchman (now at Lancaster) and Julian Orr, Marilyn and Jack Whalen, and Eric Vinkhuyzen; at Xerox Research Centers and Microsoft in the UK and the EU – Bob Anderson, Graham Button, and Richard Harper; at King’s College London, Christian Heath, Paul Luff, and Jon Hindmarsh; at the MITRE Corporation – Anne W. Rawls, Gary David, and Angela Garcia. John Hughes and Wes Sharrock pioneeredstudies in the UK as did Don Zimmerman and Doug Maynard in the US. 17. I have had many conversations with Garfinkel about theory over the years, in part because I write about theory and he continues to have deep reservations about it. But his concern goes far beyond theory to a conviction that even descriptions of order properties, if merely read, will be misleading. Garfinkel expressed this concern on a number of occasions and I wrote explicitly about it in the introduction to Ethnomethodology’s Program. Garfinkel insists that his argument can only be understood if the tutorials, instead of being merely read, are also enacted by the reader. This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.


18. The focus on gestalts was inspired by Garfinkel’s interest in and relationship with Aron Gurwitsch while he was at Harvard. Adelbert Ames originated gestalt experiments with lenses like these. 19. I have had the privilege of having two brilliant blind students and as a consequence am aware of the bias toward ‘sighted’ descriptions in descriptions of practice. I retain the bias purposefully because I have found in my research that sequential orders often do incorporate a bias toward sight, to the disadvantage of the sight-impaired (Coates and Rawls 2003). 20. Wittgenstein (1945), Mills (1940), Kripke (1982), Garfinkel (1963), John Rawls (1955), Winch (1958), Searle (1969) and others. See also the forthcoming special issue on ‘Two concepts of rules’ in Journal of Classical Sociology, and especially Jeff Coulter’s contribution. 21. No matter how widespread an account is, it is not generalizable. Generalizability is not a property of situated action. It is not a property that matters if order is made on the spot out of the resources at hand. Order is what matters, not generalizability. Furthermore, accounts are not methods for making order. However, situated orders do generate accounts and are sensitive to them. Therefore, discovering widely recognizable accounts is a clue that there are order properties that are widely divergent and problematic. The research task is then to discover the underlying order properties that generate accounts and explain them in details. 22. The tendency to treat groups as unorganized, or only loosely organized, while treating formal organizations as ordered leads to the conflation of tacit knowledge with lack of creativity. There is a long history of argument to the effect that formal institutions, organizations, and societies are much more organized than informal groups and situations. Conventional social science builds on this idea. Even Sartre’s existentialism, in extolling the importance of the authenticity of the individual, assumes that situations are only organized by virtue of their relationship to more formal organizations, or ‘constitutions’, and that order emerges as organizations become more formal. Garfinkel is the first – followed by Goffman – to argue that interaction is ordered in its own right. 23. Even Max Weber, who could be said to have introduced a focus on motivation into social theory, insisted in a fashion more consistent with Garfinkel than with conventional social theory, that motives are only publicly known and do not belong to individuals; they are only attributed to them by others after the fact. 24. Data courtesy of Angela Garcia. 25. In a series of three manuscripts written at Princeton in 1951–1952 while Garfinkel was working for the Organizational Behavior Project. Soon afterwards published as Toward a Sociological Theory of Information. 26. The classic theories of Shannon, Wiener, Bateson, and Deutsch. 27. The methods will be different for every situated action. There are no standardized methods. 28. ‘Community of practice’, as popularly used, ironically proposes a gemeinschaft community, not a community of constitutive enacted practices. I use it in Durkheim’s original sense to refer to membership in a self-regulating practice.

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27 Organization in Actual Episodes of Work: Harvey Sacks and Organization Studies Nick Llewellyn

Introduction

T

he work of Harvey Sacks addresses the order and organization of actual episodes of concerted activity. Sacks asks, through what mundane methods and practices of reasoning are orderly and intelligible courses of action produced; what do people use to project activities, recognize what has just been done and craft contributions in light of a prior? When applied to work and organization, Sacks provides resources for studying the detailed order and organization of ordinary work activities; what people use to get work activities done, how people recognize the projects of others and craft their contribution to unfolding courses of action. Moreover, by recording scenes of work, slowing them down and watching them repeatedly, the analyst can start to recover how real-time work activities are produced in light of distinctive organizational contingencies and accountabilities. Organization is revealed, as an intersubjectively recognized order, at a very fine level of detail. The focus on ordinary activity and mundane scenes of work might not sound especially radical. Many traditions within organization studies have taken ordinary workplace activity seriously, both empirically and conceptually. Well-known ethnographic studies (see Roy 1960; Kunda 1992; Barker 1993), for example, tether analysis to the mundane activities of the workplace. Such studies get close to work activities, with analysts on occasion actually doing the work itself (see Burawoy 1979). The relevant matter for understanding Source: Organization Studies, 29(5) (2008): 763–791.



Sacks’ potential contribution is not whether, but how, ordinary activities have been treated within organization studies. Here there is a paradox, for Sacks at least; ordinary work activities are simultaneously everywhere and nowhere. They are everywhere in the rich descriptive background; nowhere in the analytic limelight (see Strauss 1985 for this distinction). In contrast, Sacks places the detailed order of ordinary work activities centre stage. The result has been to show that workplace activities are remarkably organized and that members recognize, or ‘orient to’, this organization at previously unimagined levels, second by second. Moreover, the detailed order of work activities is not incidental or merely interesting but vital for understanding how people find themselves at work, find ways of dealing with others and find solutions to practical problems which arise along the way. It is not only that work activities are finely ordered; this order appears to matter. The aim of this paper is to consider Harvey Sacks, not in the abstract through an evaluation of his career (see Silverman 1998) or the trajectory of his thoughts (see Schegloff 1992a), but by attempting to locate where a concentrated analytic focus on the detailed order of ordinary workplace activity might take organization studies. It is one thing to say that organization studies has overlooked such matters; it is quite another to say it should make them part of its domain of study. In this regard, the main argument will concern the importance of real-time workplace activity as a site for the repro duction of workplace logics and arrangements. While organization studies has always had a rich tradition of binding studies to ‘the work itself’ (Strauss 1985), arguably contemporary developments have seen something of a gulf emerge between theoretical accounts and common scenes of work (see Barley and Kunda 2001 for this argument). Even the mechanisms which are thought to provide for meaning and identity at work – various discourses of work and organization (Hardy and Phillips 1999, 2004; Phillips et al. 2004) – are typically only examined in general terms; how they stand in relation to particular instances of talk or embodied conduct ‘is not always well spec ified’ (Bergström and Knights 2006). The functioning of such mechanisms thus becomes a mysterious affair, available only to the analyst. Harvey Sacks provides an alternative mentality and approach, which has the virtue of endeavouring to provide for actual occasions of intelligible utterance, recog nizable fact, orderly action, etc. Perhaps this is why Sacks is now especially relevant for contemporary developments in organization studies, where orga nizational practices are increasingly examined through the analysis of in situ work (Luff et al. 2000; Nicolini et al. 2003; Samra-Fredericks 2003, 2004; Hindmarsh and Pilnick 2007; Nicolini 2007; Llewellyn and Hindmarsh, in preparation). The present paper locates Sacks with respect to these develop ments. Through the illustrative analysis of two data extracts, it shows how the detailed order of the activities that constitute a practice can be recovered from live audio/video recordings.


Llewellyn • Organization in Actual Episodes of Work 145

Witnessing (and Witness-able) Scenes of Work It has been claimed that organization studies has tended to place ordinary activities in the rich descriptive background and not in the analytic foreground (Strauss 1985). This is a very general claim and requires some elaboration. Start by considering a brief extract from Catherine Casey’s (1995) ethnography, of events that took place during a meeting. ‘Another disciplinary practice was the self-initiated confession, most evident in the Sunrise Meetings. Employees would report, with expressions of culpability and remorse, their failures, delays and mistakes. More serious errors were punitively criticized and the offender would apologize again and promise to improve . . . Occasionally, an offending employee in his own ego-defense would blame others in the team or another team for the problem.’ (Casey 1995: 122)

It is worth listing the commonplace activities, expressions and identities that Casey witnessed: at least (1) expressions of culpability, (2) expressions of remorse, (3) orders of criticism (punitive criticism), (4) offenders, (5) apologies, (6) promises, (7) blaming, (8) a team, (9) employees, (10) orders of error (mistakes and more serious errors), (11) a meeting, (12) failures and (13) mistakes. Casey’s study takes mundane activities at work, even facial expressions, seriously. How social relations are reproduced through mundane interaction is one concern of the study. People feel guilt, promise to do better and shift blame. But Casey’s research also raises a series of intriguing questions. How is it possible to observe ‘criticism’? What exactly is an ‘expression of remorse’? How do people blame others? What does an ‘apology’ look like? How is it possible to distinguish orders of criticism, such that ‘punitive criticism’ can be observed? What does a ‘serious error’ look like? These questions are not addressed by Casey. As a result, the activities themselves (the blaming, the promise, the criticism, etc.) escape analytic attention. The reader learns only that such things happened, not how they happened or what they looked like. This is not Casey’s failure; Casey is interested in other things and writes from a different perspective. But there is an opportunity to take these concerns, so apparent in ethnographic studies, a stage further. It is worth considering a small number of further examples. Consider two brief extracts from studies by Paul du Gay (1996) and Michael Burawoy (1979). ‘ . . . he took visible delight in informing the store manager that he would take responsibility for filling it with his own Father’s Day promotion . . . which was then ceremoniously transported by two of his members of staff to the empty space in store. DM was obviously very proud of



his display and spent a considerable amount of time putting the finishing touches to it. However, in contrast to DM’s evident enthusiasm for and pride in his display . . . the younger sales managers were appalled and amused in equal measure.’ (du Gay 1996: 152–153) ‘Such royal attention had me flustered from the start. I couldn’t even set up the balance properly. The superintendent became impatient and started ordering me to do this, that and the other, all of which I knew to be wrong . . . As the clay piled up on the plate, way beyond what was necessary to balance it, the superintendent began to panic. He obviously thought his neck was on the line, but he had little idea as to how the machine works. He was an old timer, unaccustomed to this new-fangled equipment.’ (Burawoy 1979: 69)

It is worth listing the commonplace activities, expressions and identities reported. From Burawoy we have (14) orders of attention (royal), (15) impatience, (16) ordering, (17) panic, (18) another’s obvious thoughts, (19) another’s lack of ideas and (20) old timers. From du Gay there are (21) expressions of delight, (22) informing, (23) orders of transportation (ceremoniously transported), (24) displays of pride, (25) orders of time (considerable amounts of time), (26) finishing touches, (27) enthusiasm, (28) expressions of amusement, (29) members of staff and (30) younger sales managers. In these studies, readers do confront the raw realities of work. How much closer is it possible to get than Burawoy, labouring on those machines! We hear accounts of anger, getting by and indignation at others, for their lack of ability or co-operation. But even here, the activities themselves seem to slip through the analyst’s grasp. A series of enigmatic questions are left untouched. What do ‘finishing touches’ look like? How is it possible to discern someone is ‘displaying pride’ and ‘enthusiasm’? How it is possible to distinguish ‘considerable amounts of time’ from say ‘normal amounts of time’? What does ‘impatience’ look like? Given people are amenable to a multiplicity of alternative characterizations, why are ‘younger managers’ and ‘old timers’ described? This is not a criticism. These issues are raised simply to identify a point of departure. Organization studies has always had an interest in ordinary scenes of work. But there is a further step to take. What is in the descriptive background could be brought into the analytic foreground. Analysts could analyse the activities themselves to consider how they were accomplished as those activities. Such an endeavour would start to reveal practices that produce and sustain the appearance of recognizable organizational activities, expressions and identities; the witness-ability of ‘old timers’, ‘promises’ and ‘enthusiasm’. Of course, Sacks was not unique in drawing on recordings. A number of ethnographic studies within organization studies have accessed such data (see Gephart 1978; Gronn 1983; Watson 1995; Forray and Woodilla



2002). But these studies have also treated ordinary activities descriptively. To illustrate this point, consider a data fragment from Boje’s (1991) study of a large office supplies firm. 1 Ruth: . . . especially under Raymond 2 Smith, I’m sure Sam could 3 share a few examples 4 (laughter). Examples of when 5 he was out pulling invoices 6 out in the warehouse while 7 he was the frigging 8 controller of the company. 9 People were afraid to hire 10 people ((continues)) Consider how Boje renders this brief stretch of interaction. He says ‘Ruth, begins with (31) an assertion . . . and then follows it up with (32) an invitation to Sam to tell a story . . . Sam, while invited to follow up with his own story, (33) remains quiet’ (Boje 1991: 116). In Boje’s rendering, at least three mundane activities are witnessed: an ‘assertion’, an ‘invitation’ and ‘declining an invitation’. This raises a now familiar set of questions. What exactly does an invitation look like? How is it possible to see that someone has declined an invitation to speak, when they have not said anything? Going back to the extract, Boje’s version of events seems to turn on the utterance ‘I’m sure Sam could share a few examples’ (lines 2–3). This seems to be treated as the ‘invitation’ for Sam to tell a story. But is this an ‘invitation’? While these words could form part of an invitation, they could also be part of something else. They could be part of a ‘joke’ and nothing more. To decide one way or the other it would be necessary to explicate the labours of doing an ‘invitation’; to show the activity itself. Where might these labours be; what might they look like? Consider a few speculative possibilities. Perhaps as Ruth says ‘I’m sure Sam could share a few examples’ she turns to Sam and in some way gives Sam the floor. Perhaps she casts her gaze directly to Sam or gestures in some way, perhaps nodding. As the laughter (line 4) dies down, perhaps Ruth shows she is awaiting some contribution from Sam. Perhaps she is still looking at Sam and allows an extended pause to open up. For his part, perhaps Sam does more than simply remain silent. Perhaps Sam looks away, shrugs or in some other way actively declines the invitation to speak. After an extended pause, perhaps Ruth recognizes a declination by starting to give her own example. These are merely possible ways in which Ruth and Sam might have accomplished the witness-able properties of the activities which Boje’s description presupposes and which Sacks invites analysts to study.



Throughout its history, organization studies has had a close interest in mundane work activities. Yet the endogenous order and local organization of actual work activities has evaded successive generations of scholars, i.e. how members – rather than analysts – recognize and act in light of the ordinary actions, bodily movements and commonplace expressions of the workplace. In the first instance the question of what should be inferred from specific expressions, utterances and bodily movements is a problem – not for analysts – but for members. This raises the question of how members solve such problems. This is the project which Sacks sets in train. For Sacks, and those doing work in this tradition, the above list (1–33) would be full of analytic possibilities. Matters which are glossed, such as ‘promises’, would be upgraded into topics to see how members produce, recognize and act in light of such things. If part of the work of managing involves making and extracting promises (Casey 1995), we might look at actual instances of ‘promising’ to see how orders of commitment are produced, oriented to and negotiated in real time. Actual episodes might be video/audio recorded, slowed down and watched repeatedly. The detailed order of ‘promising’ might be unpicked to explore how social relations at work are recognized and reproduced second by second. This is one way of understanding Sacks’ relation to organization studies. His work allows longstanding interest in common scenes of work to be taken a stage further. Sacks poses an intriguing question – even a challenge – to those interested in the organization of ordinary work activities. How far is it possible to go; what level of detailed order can be found? If analysts were to ‘attack the phenomena at any point’ (Sacks 1984), perhaps for as little as two or three seconds, would it still be possible to recover members orienting to the distinctive arrangements and protocols of the workplace? Is ordinary work activity this orderly, this organized? But there is also a second way of thinking about Sacks’ relation to organization studies, which is a point of departure, rather than a development of already existing themes. This has already been alluded to above and concerns the ‘analytic mentality’ that can underpin research when authors have access to (video or audio) recordings. What may seem a fairly trivial or technical matter turns out to have radical implications for the mode of social science knowledge that can be produced. Consider this point in relation to the aforementioned studies. In these studies the reader learns that analysts are able to resolve various practical and inferential problems bound up with doing research. For example, the reader learns analysts are able to establish fine distinctions between orders of criticism (punitive), error (serious) and time (considerable). The reader learns analysts are able to recognize and name generic social activity types, when they report having observed ‘orders’, ‘apologies’ and ‘promises’. Third, the reader learns analysts are able to draw on commonsense associations between identities (‘old timers’) and various activities and attributes bound to those identities (‘being confused’) (see Sacks 1992: 236–266 for ‘category This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.


bound activities’). Much less is learnt, in contrast, about how organizational members resolve precisely the same practical and inferential problems as a necessary feature of accomplishing ordinary work activities. In the work of Harvey Sacks, Harold Garfinkel and others, there is the remarkable recognition that professional analysts trade (in part) on precisely the same methods, procedures and competencies that ordinary members of society use to pick their way through their everyday affairs. As part of doing their work, ordinary members of a society routinely make fine distinctions between various orders of phenomena, such as orders of commitment (‘you promised’) or orders of time (‘you’re late’). Confronted with combinations of words and gestures, people recognize and act in light of generic activity types (‘orders’ and ‘promises’). Further, in the flow of everyday activity, people trade on ways that various identities can imply activities, attributes and entitlements (Sacks 1992). The commonsense competencies and practices of reasoning that professional analysts trade on in order to accomplish their studies are revealed to be general social competencies and practices through which members of a society find order and intelligibility in their daily lives. This is the key difference between Sacks and Garfinkel and authors such as Burawoy, Casey, Boje and du Gay. These latter authors draw on and use what Sacks and Garfinkel want to study. The matter for Sacks is how members, not analysts, (a) delineate orders of phenomena, (b) recognize and act in light of generic activity types and (c) draw on ‘category bound activities’ (see Sacks 1992; Llewellyn 2004). The conventional analytic mentality has the analyst deploying such competencies and practices in the context of building their studies, rather than examining how members deploy such competencies and practices in the context of producing workplace activities. As a result, a whole domain of social practice, essential for understanding the production of orderly and intelligible discourse, has been consistently overlooked within organization studies and has not figured in debate. By using recordings, Sacks is able to bring these previously unexamined competencies and practices into the analytical foreground.

Sequence as the Unit of Analysis An initial attempt has been made to sketch something of Sacks’ analytic men tality via a brief consideration of well-regarded ethnographies, of the type Sacks himself approached with the greatest respect (see Sacks 1992: 27). The best way to illustrate Sacks’ approach is via the analysis of some data. Before this, however, two matters are introduced which figure large in the ways Sacks did analysis and which start to distinguish Sacks’ work from the work of Harold Garfinkel. These are the primacy of sequence and the analytic leverage gained via the next turn.



The central analytic problem for Sacks is what people use to assemble courses of action which are, in the first instance, orderly and intelligible for members. For Sacks, the unit of analysis is the sequence – discrete interac tional moves assembled, one after another, in orderly and coherent ways. Sequence is central, because the intelligibility of some utterance, gesture or bodily movement will be grasped by reference to its placement with respect to an immediate before and after, i.e. as a continuation or breach of some order of activity. Moreover, the way in which interlocutors understand a prior, as a continuation or breach of some order of activity, will be an accountable, i.e. publicly apparent and inspect-able, property of their next turn. This point is fundamental. In producing next-turn responses, participants display, to interlocutors and analysts alike, a practical analysis of what a prior was doing or at least might have been doing. This will happen regardless of the actual intentions or thoughts of the individual speaker; it is an inescapable constraint upon next actions (Garfinkel 1967). Consider a mundane example. Suppose one party were to say to another ‘do you know the time’. A practical analysis of this would have to be locally embedded into the sequence (Sacks et al. 1974). Practically, the recipient would have to find ‘do you know the time’ to be some order of activity. Because language does not map onto social action in a one-to-one fashion (‘do you know the time’ could be an attempt to realize various actions), a practical problem arises which members confront and resolve typically with little difficulty. In this hypothetical case, does ‘do you know the time’ concern the state of the recipient’s knowledge (the direct speech act, answer ‘yes’ or ‘no’); or is it a request for the embedded questions information (the indirect speech act, answer with the time, ‘7.30 pm’)? Or is it something else entirely?1 At one level, Sacks is concerned with ‘practices of reasoning’ (Garfinkel 1967), through which actors are able to ‘see’ various phenomena over others; such as ‘requests’ over ‘inquiries’; ‘lies’ over the ‘truth’ (Sacks 1992: 115); ‘normality’ over ‘subversion’ (Sacks 1992: 254). Such practical problems are resolved, typically in a ‘seen but unnoticed’ fashion (Garfinkel 1967), through the practical deployment of knowledge regarding, in this hypothetical example, possible circumstances where someone might genuinely want to know whether someone else knows the time. For Sacks, such practices and bodies of knowledge are not separated in a dualistic fashion from the flow of ordinary conduct. Members’ reasoning and knowledge are apparent in, and accountable features of, their participation in unfolding sequences of talk. The sequence thus remains the central unit of analysis. Should mistakes be made, inapposite conclusions drawn, they will be recognized by participants themselves and made the subject of correction, humour, annoyance, etc. More generally, Sacks is concerned with sequential practices through which people display an orientation to what a prior was trying to achieve, by



crafting contributions to unfolding courses of action. In this regard, suppose the recipient answered by giving the time (‘it is 7.30’). And then, in response, the speaker of the initial utterance said ‘thanks’. Through such utterly commonplace moves, the initial utterance has been practically recognized as a ‘request’ for the time. The recipient did not say ‘yes’ and then smugly walk off. Having been given the time, the initial speaker did not say ‘oh, I know the time, I wondered if you knew we were late’. The action has been accounted for one way and not another. It has been managed as a ‘request for the time’. Accounts of ordinary actions are thus not descriptions of those actions or endeavours to establish what someone ‘really meant’ by some utterance. Sacks is concerned, instead, with practical ways in which people publicly display their appreciation of what has gone before, and what should be done next, in the context of unfolding sequences of activity. The central points might be clarified, their relevance driven home. For Sacks, sequence organization – rather than grammar or isolated linguistic unit – must be the central locus of analysis. Any attempt to study metaphors, stories or other discourse phenomena outside sequential constraints within which talk is ‘condemned to be meaningful’ (Heritage 1984a: 110) would be a problem because the sense and function of such units arises from their positioning with respect to an immediate before and after. Furthermore, for the actual activities of the workplace, the meaning of metaphors, questions, stories and other discourse forms will always and inescapably be bound up with some action, or order action, that is being perpetuated or possibly transformed through that unit. To decouple discourse from real-time action is to strip out the key sociological dimension of the phenomenon at hand; discourse is, in the first instance, produced as a medium for the accomplishment of social action (Schegloff 2005). Second, the sequential organization of talk-in-interaction, as the orientedto project of participants, provides a foothold for analysis that is specific to the domain of talk-in-interaction; that is not afforded to those analysing text or other literary materials (Schegloff 1999). Analysts are not forced to speculate about what participants might have possibly known or understood, about ‘the procedures or constraints to which they conceivably have been oriented; instead . . . analysis can emerge from observations of the conduct of the parties to the talk themselves’ (Whalen et al. 1988: 342; Sacks et al. 1974). If someone says ‘7.30 pm’, in response to ‘do you know the time’, and then gets ‘thanks’ in response, it is possible to see participants orienting to a ‘request for the time’ and not something else. This is not to argue that social life is transparent, either to members or analysts – simply that the analysis of talk-in-interaction can be disciplined by the various ways in which next turns retrospectively embody a possible understanding of a prior.



Order and Organization in Actual Episodes of Work The paper now applies these guiding principles to two actual episodes of work. Illustrative analysis begins to reveal the detailed order of activities that constitute work practices. We start to see that members orient to orders of work very closely, second by second. This close orientation is more than simply interesting; it is shown to be vital for understanding how people find themselves positioned with respect to some activity, find ways of dealing with others and fashion solutions to practical problems which arise along the way.

Face-to-Face Sales Work The Big Issue is a company which produces, among other things, a weekly magazine called The Big Issue. The profits arising from sales are filtered into a charity wing called the Big Issue Foundation. At the time of writing, the circulation figures (England, Scotland and Wales) for the magazine stood at 154,932 issues sold per week. The company employs professional journalists to write the magazine, which it publishes and distributes via a network of local centres around the UK. The magazine is sold on the street by people who are homeless. Sellers do not sell from a fixed stand, but have to establish their own ‘pitch’ on the pavement (Clark and Pinch 1986). The mission of the company is to enable people out of homelessness and poverty, via work. People can register to become vendors. They are given basic training, sign a code of conduct and are given ten free magazines. After that, they have to buy each magazine at a cost of £0.70. The cover price at the time of writing was £1.50. As such, £0.80 from each sale goes to the vendor. The sustainability of the organization and its ability to meet its core mission depends on the ability of vendors to sell magazines in public places. It is to a single episode of this work which we now turn.2 This is an example of a vendor ‘Max’ interacting with a passer-by (transcription conventions are presented in the appendix). As the fragment begins, Max says ‘hello the big issue mam’. The ‘target’ of the utterance is walking towards Max while looking in her bag (plate II). Max then produces an account of her bodily movements along the street. He does not describe her movements; it is not this type of account. He says ‘arh, bless you, thank you very much’. This accounts for her conduct in a particular way, as embodying a ‘response’ to him. Moreover, Max has not seen just any response. This person is not coming over to ask for directions; Max orients to some forthcoming business. This is worth noting. From a range of possible alternatives, one order of activity has been privileged over others. For this encounter, the default setting is ‘buying and selling’. This is the ‘pattern’ (Garfinkel 1967) against



S = seller, D = donor S: Hello the big issue mam (1.1)

S: arh bless you, thank you very much (1.1) S: havin a good day (.7) D: not too bad [( ) S. [arh that’s good

(3.4)

D: I don’t want the magazine, I hope you don’t mind (·) S: no:: [I don’t mind ( )] [it’s just that ( ) I’m a catholic and ( [ )= S. [okay alright S: (·) woo] D: =)a lot] of) catholic st [uff ]t-huh= S. [alright whatever] D. = to read ((continues))

Figure 1: Face-to-face encounter of seller and donor



which Max finds the conduct of the passer-by to be orderly and intelligible. To establish this, Max has had to draw upon something, some practical knowledge of ways in which people move around urban spaces (Ryave and Schenkein 1974) with respect to others and, more specifically, with respect to him. The ‘offer’, the ‘walking towards’ and the ‘hand in the bag’ would seem to be enough, on this occasion, to document a forthcoming sale. The scene then shifts totally. Consider the initial alignment of activities and identities. As Max says ‘arh bless you’, he takes clear steps towards the target. His eyes cast upon her purse (see plate III). He thumbs the top copy of the pile of magazines he is holding with his right arm; he is waiting to take money in exchange for goods. This does not need to be inferred. It can be seen that this is how the participants were alive to the alignment of identities and activities (buyer/seller) at that point. The passer-by recognizes she is positioned as a ‘customer’ engaged in ‘buying’ when she says ‘I don’t want the magazine, I hope you don’t mind’. This brings about a realignment of activities and identities (from ‘buyer/ seller’ to ‘donor/recipient’) which is handled as a matter of potential ‘delicacy’. In this episode, ‘orders of delicacy’ are relevant matters for members. The passer-by says ‘I hope you don’t mind’ and even though Max says ‘he doesn’t mind’ she produces an account that explains why she is ‘giving’ and not ‘buying’. Notice this account locates the reason for her action in the conditions of her own life. It is worth noting that the realignment of activities and identities is something that Max has participated in. He has taken part even though, on the face of it, he seems to have done very little. All the passer-by said was ‘I don’t want the magazine’. Max does not orient to the possibility she might be about to exit the scene, perhaps because the passer-by has now extracted a purse. He does not say ‘oh, okay then’ and walk off. He remains in place and awaits the passing of money. In this case, remaining in place is doing something. Max has been reconfigured as a target of a ‘donation’ and has socially recognized this; he is playing his part in the emergent local organization of the scene. Finally, consider the account that is produced alongside the ‘donation’. Here we see that conditions of possibility are, in the first instance, practical matters that members address as they go about their daily lives. The passer-by begins by locating herself, and the act of giving, via catholicism. From all the possible categories available, a religious category is selected. The passer-by is a catholic, not once and for all, but for the practical purposes of accounting for a donation. At an early point, after less than one second, Max responds. This is worth noting. Max has already found some way in which her being a catholic makes sense, or could possibly make sense, at this point. Accountabilities and infer ences are being managed second by second. Moreover, Max takes a very particular stance towards this overlaying of ‘giving’ with ‘religion’. Max says ‘okay, alright, woo’ and raises his left hand (see plate IV). In ways that are



difficult to portray in a transcript, Max displays a sense in which things are getting a little ‘heavy’. Catholicism has shone an inapposite light on the action. Perhaps in response, the passer-by continues on with the account and a new relevance of catholicism is eventually established. Circuitously perhaps, the donation is not a virtuous act via catholicism, but a rational response to being overwhelmed by reading materials. This person does not need more literature. Constraints of space prevent focusing on the whole encounter; instead there has been a selective focus on just a few aspects. There is a lot more to say about the social and sequential organization of this brief encounter and about Sacks’ approach. We have only started to unpack an approach that considers how members, and not analysts, (a) orient to category-bound activities (ways religious categories might cast light on giving), (b) delineate orders of phenomena (the delicacy of some matter) and (c) build and recognize activity types (acceptances and donations). But even at this early point, two inter-related matters can be drawn out for further discussion. The first concerns the question of ‘context’. What was ‘the context’ of this encounter? For Sacks, and subsequently Schegloff (see 1991, 1997, 1999, 2005 for the debate on ‘context’), this question is not analytically resolvable. On the one hand, for actual episodes, there are always and inescapably a multiplicity of possible contextual relevancies. On the other, when analysts define ‘the context’ they unavoidably displace exactly what Sacks wanted to study; how members recognize the practical relevance of social structures for the constitution of actual episodes of social conduct. How people orient to, draw upon and act in accordance with contextual factors – such as religion – is part of the project. The endogenous concerns of members are privileged, because members’ solutions to problems of context are constitutive of sociointeractional reality and this is what Sacks wanted to study. It might be useful to elaborate these points in relation to the above extract. How did the participants orient to the ‘context’ of this encounter? Initially, (1) Max recognized a ‘buyer’ even though the passer-by had not said anything (she just walked towards him, hand in bag). He did not act in such a way that presupposed she was about to ask for directions. (2) The passer-by recognized the relevance of ‘buying’, for her conduct, even though this had not been explicitly stated or confirmed (Max just said ‘arh bless you’). (3) Max then recognized a ‘donation’ even though a donation had not been explicitly mentioned (all the person said was ‘I don’t want the magazine, I hope you don’t mind’). (4) Max found the overlaying of religion to be problematic at the point where all the person had said was ‘it’s just that I’m a catholic’. With and for each other, in the light of a multiplicity of possible contextual relevancies, these parties clearly have the ability to see how bodily movements, gestures and utterances document different ‘contexts’ or versions of ‘what is going on’. This does not happen by itself; such practical problems have to be solved by members through action.



Second, the way this is done is public and accountable, rather than private or cognitive. It is on this basis that concerted actions can be pieced together one after another. As the person walks towards Max he displays a public analysis of her embodied conduct. It is on the basis of this that the passer-by is able to determine how she is seen and thus how to respond ‘in kind’. She does not simply give Max money and then walk off. Her contribution is attentive to accountabilities set in play by Max’s prior utterance (‘arh bless you, thank you very much’). It is not simply that concerted activity is detailed; the detail is oriented to by members and it matters for the way activities are pieced together.

Emergency (999) Call Handling Work This section considers a second data extract, an emergency 999 call. The rea son for considering a second example is to look at a more thoroughly organi zational setting. The challenge is to recover how ordinary actions display an orientation to distinctive organizational auspices, arrangements and protocols. Toward such ends, two specific matters are analysed: (1) the organization of the call opening and (2) the handler’s initial effort to problematize the ‘reason for the call’. Start with the organization of the call ‘opening’. In previous studies, the openings of telephone calls have been shown to exhibit a highly recurrent, or canonical, organization (Schegloff 1968). They begin with a ‘summons– answer’ adjacency pair (the phone rings and is picked up). Participants then resolve problems of ‘identification’ and ‘recognition’. The completion of ‘greetings’ then paves the way for the ‘reason for the call’, which is the proper work of ‘caller’ and not ‘called’. In this canonical organization, the ‘reason for the call’ is held back, especially if identification and recognition prove troublesome. The openings of 999 calls are managed in light of distinctive organiza tional contingencies and pressures. As the caller might be in, or reporting, a life-and-death situation, the ‘reason for the call’ is brought forwards. In these openings, orderly variations to the canonical organization can be observed; in such data we find ‘not different or unique orders but adaptations of mun dane forms, [which are] selected and shaped to address the interactional contingencies of a given setting’ (Boden and Zimmerman 1991: 14).3 To illustrate these matters, consider an initial fragment from the opening of the call in question. 1 CH: ( ) police can I h:elp 2 you? 3 (.4) 4 C: hhh



5 (.4) 6 C: yeah: (.) this is huh: hh (.2) 7 I’ve been (tryin’a) stop In this extract, the call handler (CH) ‘answers’ the ‘summons’ with a ‘cate gorical self-identification’ rather than with a name (‘police’, line 1). This is a conventional organizational practice. In 999 calls, and service calls more generally (see Wakin and Zimmerman 1998), there is a preference for identification over recognition (Whalen and Zimmerman 1987). People tend not to give their names. When names are given, there is a presumption that recognition is neither likely nor relevant for the work at hand; names are given for other ‘organizational reasons’ (Garfinkel 1967). The handler then says ‘can I help you’. In and through this turn, organiza tional auspices are made practically relevant for the caller’s next turn. The absence of a ‘call for help’ in the next slot will be an accountable feature of the caller’s (C) talk. In sequential terms, the design of the handler’s turn has paved the way for a ‘request for help’ to be expressed in the caller’s very first turn. The caller responds in ways that display a fine-grained orientation to the distinctive organizational setting. How so? It was mentioned above that 999 calls exhibit a preference for identification over recognition (see Whalen and Zimmerman 1987). But this is not simply an analyst’s characterization; it is something that members recognize in and through the way they build actual episodes. Consider the caller’s first turn, following the handler’s ‘question’. 6 C: yeah: (.) this is huh: hh (.2) 7 I’ve been (tryin’a) stop Following what is hearable as an ‘answer’ to the handler’s initial ‘question’ (‘yeah’, line 6), the caller begins to produce a self-identification. She says ‘this is’ but then initiates ‘self-repair’ (Schegloff et al. 1977). She was about to give a name, but stops in her tracks. Following a brief pause, she then begins upon something else. Even though it is 4.05 am and, by the caller’s testimony she ‘is in agony’ and has ‘taken all the pain killers [she] can’, the caller nevertheless displays a lively orientation to distinctive organizational contingencies, which make personal recognition unlikely and unnecessary for the business of this call. Here we see formal auspices being ‘oriented to’ right down into the fine details of the call. Further, they are not simply rele vant but also normative. Having embarked upon something inapposite, the caller does not simply carry on regardless; she breaks off from that activity and repairs the mistake. Having briefly looked at the opening of the call, the analysis now shifts to consider how the handler problematizes the caller’s initial turn (lines 9–10 below). As mentioned above, talk in this opening slot will be practically



analysable in relation to distinctive accountabilities, here in terms of whether the talk contains a request for help regarding an emergency. The work of han dlers entails gleaning requests for help, often from jumbled descriptions of past or passing events. This work escapes codification; it is an ‘achieved organization’ (Sacks 1992). No formal protocol could ever be written to explicitly cover occasions where callers say, for example, that they ‘beat up a copper and cannot get health insurance’ (see below). Protocols governing the work of 999 call handlers are considerably more general. Handlers always have to find, in the details of each and every call, whether a legitimate emergency is being reported. The relevance and consequentiality of bureaucratic protocols for actual episodes is always and inescapably achieved through action. At line 9, the handler interjects with a question. He says ‘right madam is this an emergency 999 call’. This is not a simple question; it is a question that treats the prior talk sceptically. It presumes it is not a 999 call. By this warrant, the question does something. It works as a method for extracting a request in the next slot. This poses an analytic puzzle; how does the handler’s question get this work done? In the first instance, what makes ‘is this an emergency 999 call’ hearable as ‘this is not an emergency 999 call’? 1 C: .hh I beat up one of your coppers 2 last year and I can’t get health 3 insurance because of ºitº (.5) 4 now I know it’s over a year, (.5) 5 .hh and I’ve been ve:ry pol:ite, 6 (.4) and I’ve tried (to ring the) 7 court (.4).hh I’ve (2.2) waved 8 down hh (.) a policeman today= 9 CT: =>right< madam is this an emergency 10 999 c:all= 11 C: =Yes::[ I would like to talk [to the= 12 CT: [well wh-] [( )] 13 C =sergean[t at Bath Prison 14 CT: [>yeah madam < < > ↑↓ Word Hap:py Hap:py

Length of a pause. Micro-pause. A latching between utterances. Between adjacent lines of concurrent speech indicates overlap. Inbreath. Outbreath. Non-verbal activity. Sharp cut-off. Stretching of a word. Denotes an animated tone. Unclear fragment. Quiet utterance. Noticeably louder. The talk in-between is quicker. The talk in-between is slower. Rising or fall intonation. Underline indicates speaker emphasis. Less marked fall in intonation. Less marked rise in intonation.



28 Organs of Process: Rethinking Human Organization Robert Cooper

T

he question of process invites us to think of the human world as the transmission of mutable events rather than as a scene of stable structures. Society as process becomes pure action and ongoingness. Structures and objects become secondary to the movement of process. Process requires that we no longer think of the human world in terms of finished forms or completed systems. Instead, a mobile and provisional way of thinking is called for. The unfinished and incomplete calls out for serious recognition and understanding. Process precedes all finite forms and always proceeds beyond them. Human organization is the relentless praxis of process in pursuit of itself; it is the collective articulation of the social and cultural body. The social body is a corpus, a corporation of organs, whose fundamental work is to create and recreate itself through the constant construction and maintenance of images and structures that reflect and thus speak back to it. The work of the human organs and senses begins in indefinition and lack of perceptual clarity; their task is to create a world of distinguishable and meaningful forms out of structural absence. In this way, human organs sense and feel their origins in a condition of existential beginning that has yet to be expressed as definite forms and specific knowledge. The organ is an ergon or organon, an instrument for making and moving the forms of life. Human process now appears as relentless transmission or sheer action in order to keep life on the move. Viewed in this way, process has no end or goal; it simply generates




itself as generic making and movement; the specific forms and products of human organization are secondary and ancillary expressions of this generic force of creation and action. The organs and senses of the social body are primarily instruments of action and doing rather than knowing; they express and transmit not so much themselves as bodily functions but the pure process of generic making and moving. They are simply incomplete and unfinished parts that extend and project themselves into their environments in a process of ceaseless sensing and exploration in which they become indistinguishable from the process they project: the hand seeks something to hold and manipulate, the eye seeks a visual object to focus on, the ear needs to hear distinguishable sounds. Organs thus have to be seen as passages for the movement of feeling and sensation. Human organizations are thus more like assemblages of organs, senses and limbs which seek to extend and amplify themselves through the construction of routes for the transmission of physical and mental sensibility. Seen in this way, the existential basis of human organization lies in the work of the human organs and senses rather than in the conscious intentions and purposes of its individual members whom we normally assume constitute the social fabric of human organizations. Before the fully constituted individual, before the emergence of conscious thought, organs and senses represent the pre-human urge of the physical body to connect with and make meaningful sense out of the material environment from which it originates. The body extends and moves beyond itself through its organs and senses which reveal the material environment as an horizon of sentient possibilities. Organs and senses project themselves through the body’s limbs into a limbo of invisible and formless space and time out of which they make meaningful sense. Organs thus make sense out of a primal condition of pre-sense which in itself can never be known except as an invisible reserve for the ceaseless production of the products of human organization. Human organs must make human sense out of the pre-human invisibility of pre-sense. This means projecting human needs, feelings and desires onto a material environment that is intrinsically insentient to human experience. Human organization begins with this originating step of human projection. As a social body, human organization expresses the bodily forces of its human members which branch out from the human trunk into the four limbs and the head, extensions which enable the body to prolong itself in space and time in a continuous process of reaching out. The organs and senses of the body reach out to the external environment in order to experience the body’s inside; they turn the body inside out so that it can sense and feel itself as a reflection of the outside world. The body’s reaching out is thus at the same time a reaching in. The made objects of the human world are products of this inside-out movement; they represent the self-extension of the body’s sentient interior. The organs and senses project the capacities and incapacities of the body into external objects such as chairs, telephones, clothes, factories, hospitals,


Cooper • Organs of Process 177

which return to the body’s interior as sentient conversions of the external environment. They remind us that the body is an expression of existential being before it is seen as the residence of a human person. The concept of the modern organization can now be understood as an expression of the basic forces that drive the body’s organs and senses to project and prolong themselves in space and time. Human organizations are social bodies whose primitive feelings and sensings seek continuous expression through the construction and production of forms and objects that endow their primal and inchoate urgings with conscious sense in order to engage with the external environments that must complement their originating and sustaining sense of incompleteness. The organ as ergon is the ongoing work of human organization as a social body. It is the continuous act of working and making that reveals human organization as a process of infinite and unfinished acts of composition that never complete themselves in a final product or attained goal. The organ as ergon works to generate human being as an ongoing process of comingto-presence and not as a specific object that already exists. At this level of understanding, the person as a self-contained agent does not exist since it is dispersed in a space and time that is yet to come. Every act of work points to a negative condition that seems to withdraw from all attempts to make it positive and graspable. Human organization represents this universal process of composing a world of objects and forms that are already destined to disappear before they appear. The organ as ergon reveals human work to be the ceaseless pursuit of that which continuously withdraws from positive appropriation. The work of the organ is pure process whose pro- signifies a ceaseless moving forward and approaching and whose -cess signifies an equally ceaseless moving away and withdrawing.

The Work of Organs Organs represent the generic action of the body in its work of being. As an expression of being, the body lives outside itself, projecting and prolonging itself through its made objects. The body is an organic generator that comes before the idea of the human agent as a fully constituted individual. The body thus appears more like the expression of a pre-human force than a vehicle for human character. As a collective organ, the body itself is a made object that projects and prolongs a power whose origin is beyond its comprehension. At best, its organs and senses can only approach this origin through the continuous work of making existential extensions of themselves in space and time. The bodily organs of seeing, hearing and touching seek stimulation and information as ends in themselves; while they seek answers to the questions that emerge out of their probings, it is the generic suspension of existential comprehension that keeps them forever working. This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.


Organs and senses begin as ‘tentacles and feelers’ that project themselves into the environment in order to find and recognize themselves as reflections of the forces that surround them (Gibson 1968: 5). Their work originates in the unknown and uncertain out of which they make meaningful sense. Meaningful sense begins as rough feelings and sensings which are then transformed into distinctive forms and signs. In this way, the human organs and senses construct a world of visible signs and messages out of an environment which otherwise would be invisible and meaningless. Through its organs and senses, the body reaches out to its surroundings in order to know itself. The work of organs at this primal level is essentially the construction of artefacts that will enable the body to express its inner feelings and sensings. It is as if the senses can only make sense of themselves through their reflections in the objects of the outside world; that is, the body must realize itself through a continuous process of ‘sentient continuity’ with its supporting artefacts (Scarry 1985: 248). Inchoate feelings project themselves into the definitional clarity of specific forms and objects. The sentience of organs thus becomes the work of sending on in which both sense and send together constitute the ‘sentient continuity’ of the body with its world. The primal act of the communication of bodily organs with their environment is thus a sending on of sensation and sentience in order to bring body and world together. Sensing and sending are the body’s ways of reaching out to the world in order to communicate with its inside. Organs reach out in order to reach in. The organ as ergon and organon is primarily the existential means for making the forms of human life and for ensuring their continuation. ‘Sentient continuity’ includes regeneration and continuity over time as well as connection in space. The ancient meanings of ergon and organon reflect this basic existential need of the body and its organs to project themselves into a space and time that has not yet arrived in order to ensure the continued presence of a world of forms and objects that will serve as routes and passageways for the sending on of sentience. The organ can only find itself as a continuous process of generation and regeneration. The word itself reflects not so much an identifiable part of the human body but a process that must reflect itself in the act of generation. The word has its origin in a family of related roots – gan, gen, gin, ken, con, etc. – which mean empty, vacant, void as well as birth, reproduction, creation. A double and reversible action is thus suggested in this archaeology of the word organ: nothing and something, negative and positive, absence and presence, serve to generate each other in a mutual process of continuous creation. The archaic meaning of organ thus suggests a generative power, a vitalizing energy and a creative spirit that renews itself in a perpetual process of beginning. Organ as beginning is also a perpetual process of becoming that never reaches an end. Organ is thus an origin or source of perpetual, unfinished action which originates in a state of nothingness and absence. Some sense of



this absent origin appears in the ideas of a copy as an imitation of an original or an effect as the result of a cause. Copy and effect are normally assumed to come after their originating sources. But the interpretation of organ as a double and reversible action in which nothing and something, absence and presence, generate each other in a perpetual and unfinished process of beginning and becoming means that copy and original, cause and effect, reproduce each other. There can be no original until there is a copy, no cause without an effect. Copy and effect generate their beginnings just as much as original and cause generate their sequels. Organ in this primal sense of original generation and beginning appears as the implicit theme of the Book of Genesis as discussed by Elaine Scarry (1985) in her penetrating analysis of the roles of ‘making and unmaking’ in the ongoing constitution of human life. Scarry reveals Genesis as the story of the human body originating itself through the translation and projection of its organs and senses into the made objects of the human world. In other words, the sentient inside of the body can only express and recognize itself through the making and reflection of objects external to it. Like original and copy, cause and effect, the body’s sentient inside can only know itself through the objects and tools that support it. This is the essential meaning of ‘sentient continuity’ in which the body’s inside and outside generate and ‘continue’ or contain each other. Genesis illustrates the process of ‘sentient continuity’ as the projection and prolongation of bodily organs through the image of the religious altar which symbolizes the alternation or reciprocity between the body’s inside and outside which, like original and copy, generate each other and thus become indistinguishable. The altar represents the ‘turning of the body inside-out’ so that its organs and senses can begin to prolong themselves as symbolic and religious expressions: ‘The building of the altar externalizes and makes visible . . . the hidden interior of sentience (which) is lifted out through work into the visible world’ (Scarry 1985: 190, 204). The altar itself is like a surface on which the eyes and hands, for example, can make the world visible and manipulable. The body’s organs and senses now see themselves through their products. The altar symbolizes the original act of human creation in which the reaching out of the senses is also their reaching in and hence their sentient realization: inside and outside realize each other in a mutual act of ‘sentient continuity’. It is a surface on which the organs and senses of the body inscribe themselves in order to reflect the body in its continuous work of creating and re-creating itself as the pure process of beginning and becoming. The altar is that beginning point or origin where earth and body reveal themselves as ‘canvases on which God’s power of alteration continually re-manifests itself’ in its capacity to make ‘the awe-inspiring alterability of matter visible’ (Scarry 1985: 199, 192). The altar is the religious route to the ultra, that invisible resource which always exceeds and lies beyond the graspability of the human mind but which nevertheless sources the infinite and forever ongoing work of human creation. Genesis tells the story of this This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.


power to magnify, multiply and make visible the invisible forces and feelings that animate the organs and senses of the human body; it reveals human generation as a power that unceasingly repeats itself as the conversion or alteration of nothing into something, negative into positive, absence into presence. Human organization now appears as the creation of the world out of the primitive sensings of human organs. The products of human organization appear as reflections of human sentience. No longer simply useful objects or tools, human products reveal the invisible potential of the body’s organs and senses to make visible and real a world of infinite creation and production; in short, a world without end. The human product visibly reflects the ‘sentient continuity’ of body and world. The product echoes the call of the body’s primitive sensings to express and recognize themselves in externally identifiable and meaningful forms. The body senses the forms and objects of the world through its organs of sight, touch, taste and smell. Through its organs and senses, the body animates and humanizes the external world to create a ‘sentient community’ of body and world. This means that the made forms and objects of the human world are not simply instruments of use and convenience but are routes by which the body and its organs project and reflect their sentience. The organs and senses seem to serve as passageways for a primal, pre-human energy that maintains the ceaseless process of life while concealing itself behind the familiar and useful properties of the everyday world. ‘Sentient continuity’ is another name for this primal process. The organs of the body perceive and conceive as acts of generation. Their perceptions and conceptions become materialized in the supportive products of the human world with which they now experience the felt community of ‘sentient continuity’. Human products such as a chair, a table, a coat or a computer express in material form the invisible inner-body sensings of the organs which otherwise would remain physically inexpressible. The chair, for example, expresses the ‘complex, mysterious, percipient event’ of the body’s experience of weight and tiredness which it feels only to wish it could not feel it (Scarry 1985: 290). Here again we see the work of human organs as an alternating process between negative and positive, absence and presence. The chair ‘feels’ for the tired body and effectively says it is here to return the body to its desired state of non-tired weightlessness. More than a simple object of use, the chair is the visible materialization and representation of the body’s needs to reach out in order to reach in. The chair is the living form of the body’s organs and their continuous work of alternation and alteration between external visibility and internal invisibility. The organs thus do not merely seek the stimulation of externally sourced information but create such information in order to inform and re-form themselves: the chair expresses both the rudimentary genesis of tiredness and the promise of its disappearance. Like all human products, the chair is part of the ‘sentient continuity’ of human living in which ‘the structure of the act of perception’ is This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.


‘visibly enacted’ as the making explicit and visible of an implicit and inchoate bodily sensing which, in much the same way as origin and copy or cause and effect, can only properly know itself through the construction of an object that is made to defer and postpone it as a causal origin (Scarry 1985: 290). The externalization of the body in the supportive products of human existence can also be seen as a form of disembodiment, as if the body were reaching out to free itself from its physical limitations. This is precisely the role of the chair in its reminding us of its ability to free the body from the feelings of weight and tiredness so that its organs and senses can reach out to experience a world beyond its own physical limits. Constrained by its physical limits, the deficient body is reminded of its inability to generate and express itself through the alterability of the world’s mute and mutable matter. When the body can no longer exceed itself, it becomes more vividly aware of the sentient possibilities that surround it now that they are existentially absent. It is like a lost or broken tool whose disconnection from the wider world of sentient possibilities makes those missing possibilities even more obviously present. The deficient body reminds us that its internal sentience is no longer convertible to the externally identifiable and meaningful forms that enable its organs and senses to extend themselves through the passageways of ‘sentient continuity’ whose significance now becomes more vividly present in its felt absence. Disembodiment is a form of sentient transmission through which the organs and senses of the body project and prolong their feelings and sensings. The made objects of human production become transmission stations for the sending on of ‘sentient continuity’. Production in this context means prediction and projection as the continuous generation of routes and passageways for the transmission of feelings and sensings. The products of human production become more than objects and forms of use and convenience. They provide existential direction and meaning to the incipient inner sensings of the body and its organs. In other words, products express the altar’s primal work of alternation between nothing and something, absence and presence, as revealed in the archaic meaning of organ. The concept of production includes this primal alternation in its implicit reference (-duction from the Latin ducere, to draw out or trace from a source; and dicere, to specify, fix, locate) to the drawing out and tracing of an object or form from a rudimentary source. Every human product echoes this alternation between the made and the unmade. Every human act is the enactment of this primal alternation: a making that is also an unmaking, a reaching out that is also a reaching in. The work of organs is thus a double and reversible action which finds its source in an undifferentiated and unlocatable space and time such as we see in the mutually defining relationship between original and copy where each term is a counterchange of the other. Production as prediction is the repetition of this counterchange movement in space and time.



The production of useful products is also their prediction or assured presence in space and time but such prediction necessarily implies their absence or non-existence just as the lost tool emphasizes its presence through its absence. Every human product emerges out of an original space of absence which is undifferentiated and unlocatable like a territory before it is mapped. Production as prediction is an act of extracting something specifiable and meaningful from this secret, unknowable source: ‘This is a place that is everywhere and nowhere, a place you cannot get to from here. Sooner or later, in a different way in each case, the effort of mapping is interrupted by an encounter with the unmappable’ (Miller 1995: 7). As the primal site of human production, the altar mediates between this secret, unlocatable source and the functional, ready-to-hand products of the everyday human world. Every product is also a pre-dict or retracing and reminding of this unmappable source. The work of organs is thus the act of productionprediction as the alternation between the undifferentiated, unlocatable space of the unmappable and its differentiated, locatable representation in a map. Here again we note the double and reversible action suggested in the archaic meaning of organ which further implies a ceaseless alternation at the heart of all human actions between absence and presence, nothing and something, the unmappable and the mappable. The altar also reflects this alternating source of action in its allusion to the intrinsic counterchange and unlocatability of the otherness at the heart of primal alternation where there is neither one identifiable thing nor another but simply the movement of alternation itself such as we see in the original-copy relationship. The work of organs as production-prediction has to be seen as the projection of the mappable onto the unmappable or the translation of raw, infinite matter into made, finite forms and objects that will reflect the bodily organs and senses in their perpetual work of generation and reaching out beyond themselves. Here, it is the perpetual and repeated action of the organs and senses themselves that motivates their work rather than the specific nature and meaning of the forms and objects that serve to direct this work. It is in this sense that the work of organs is a process that exists independently of human needs and desires; the work of organs and senses appears more like a biological force that pre-exists the conception of the fully constituted human person. The ergon of organ predefines human work as the continuous alternation between the production of a world of positive presences and their coexisting absences. Process involves the ceaseless acts of approaching and appropriating the world’s raw matter as well as the equally ceaseless experience of the disappearance and withdrawal of its appropriated forms and objects. Process in this sense informs the organ as organon, an existential means for generating and moving the forms of life. Production as process now has to be understood not just as the creation of supportive existential structures but also, significantly, as the suspension of the productive act in space and time. For what animates and maintains the work of organs is the



existential need to keep things going and this necessarily means suspending any sense of completion and finality. Prediction now becomes the production of incompletion, unknowability and the absence of positive presences as well as its conventional meaning of predicting future events. Production and prediction express the reaching out of the body’s organs and senses in order to embody and feel themselves through the products of their work. Production and prediction thus become forms of projecting human sentience into the objects and forms of the external world as if to humanize the latter’s intrinsic insentience by making it respond to the body’s primal yearnings. Every human product can now be seen as a projection of bodily sensings: the chair, the coat, domestic heating, the newspaper, the motor vehicle, all in their different ways embody the act of reaching out in order to reach in and give form and direction to the raw, inarticulate feelings of the body’s inside. But while projection gives form and direction to the work of organs, it also opens up new and even unpredictable possibilities as though the human world were surrounded by an infinite and endless space that, despite its unknowability, continuously reminds us of its immanent presence. It is this infinite and endless space that maintains the work of ‘sentient continuity’ by which the organs and senses are kept moving through a permanent sense of incompletion and absence. Every human product is caught in this suspended field of incompletion and withdrawal. Every product predicts or projects itself into a space of new possibilities; it intimates and reveals new ways of creating the world. The computer is perhaps one of the most dramatic examples of a modern human product which has made us see the world as a plastic and pliable field of creative possibilities which seems to call out to us to explore it even further. The computer is itself an extension of the human central nervous system and can be seen as the reaching out by the nervous system in order to maintain its ‘sentient continuity’ with the body’s external space (Scarry 1985: 282). The computer expresses the body and its organs in the same way that a human limb projects the body as a moving and grasping organism which reaches out into a limbo of incompletion and absence. Like an organ, the computer originates a new and unexplored world of possibilities such as the hyperspace of hypertext or the globalization of the world through the expansion of information and related technologies. Computerization in this context reflects the primal energy of the organ to project and prolong itself as an origin (or original) that can only know itself through the making of new copies. The computer reveals the raw matter of the world to be a pliable and plastic source of computation and permutation out of which endless possibilities emerge. Human action appears never complete but seems suspended in a background of space and time that recedes on approach. The work of organs expresses this suspended background as an infinite origin which, like an horizon, withdraws from all our attempts to appropriate it. Process itself is the forever repeated action of grasping meaningful structures and forms



from disappearing into this infinitely receding origin which, like tomorrow, never comes. To understand organs as instruments of process requires that we view human action as the dynamic intertwining or ‘sentient continuity’ between the body’s organs and senses and the external structures and forms which provide intelligible routes and passageways for the expression of primal feelings and sensations. The computer, for example, represents the dynamic intertwining of the body and its organs with the plastic and pliable space of hypertext. The computer is no longer simply a tool to complete the practical purposes of its user; it now constitutes the existential action of the user’s body and mind and tells us that the user is as much a part of the computer’s action as the latter is part of the body’s action. In this example, the work of organs cannot be located in a specific object such as body or tool but is actively constituted by the interaction between objects. The interaction or intertwining of ‘sentient continuity’ requires that we perceive the work of organs not in terms of the actions of specifically determined objects but as the scattered and diffused expressions of movement itself. Intertwining refers to the betweenness or sharing of action and movement such as we see in the alternating or intertwining of original and copy or cause and effect. The movement of intertwining thus cannot be pinned down since it is the action of neither one thing nor the other but of both together. The work of organs follows the same logic since the organ can only reflect itself through the sensing of an externally located object or form. The work of the organ moves in a space and time that is shared between locations and thus intimates itself as part of a more encompassing space of withdrawal in which it is contained. This returns us to the archaic meaning of organ with its double and reversible movement between absence and presence, nothing and something. In order to grasp some sense of this double movement we have to stress the significance of absence and nothingness as hidden motivators of human action. Presence can only emerge out of absence just as the appearance of something requires the support of nothing as a silent and invisible background. Absence and nothingness have to be seen as the ultimate and infinite containers of the presence of finite things. Conventional perception of the everyday world is structured around the conscious capturing of clear, positive, ready-made forms and objects. Presence is defined in terms of the presentability or acceptable appearance and meaning of the forms and objects that make up the human world. The perception of presentable presences requires that we distinguish and differentiate the things of the world and hence focus our attention on specifics and particulars. We see the world largely as a display of well-defined, positive figures against a negative background that is normally excluded from our acts of perceiving. To understand the work of organs we have to include the absent background of the figure-ground relationship. The archaic meaning of organ embraces the idea of alternation and counterchange between a visible figure and its invisible background. The background may be excluded



from conscious perception but it is a vital and necessary support and origin of the figure. The ground is the ultimate, invisible container of figures which, like a mirror, reflects both the forms and movements of objects. In order to grasp the dynamic alternation between the presence of figure and the absence of ground, perception must view the forms of the world in ‘a single undivided focus’ of ‘scattered attention’ (Ehrenzweig 1967: 23). Conscious perception tends to structure the everyday world as a collection of specific and singular forms and objects; it views the world as a field of differentiation and divisions. The work of organs reminds us that human action forever alternates between origin and copy, presence and absence, and thus has no specific location in space and time, caught as it is between the mappable and the unmappable, between a knowable world of divided, finite forms and a pre-world of undividedness and infinitude. The work of organs tells us that human action is pure process and ongoingness before it is the experience of a world of ready-made forms and objects. An essential feature of such process is the invisible background to human action which serves as an essential support for the emergence and mobility of the ready-made contents of the world. In order to include the negative space of the background, perception must not select a specific form or figure but scatter its focus to contain figure and ground in one ‘single undifferentiated view’ (Ehrenzweig 1967: 23). Undifferentiation requires the relaxation of clear, definite, singular forms in order to take in the mutually constituting features of the entire visual field as alternating counterchanges. Such undifferentiated or dedifferentiated counterchanges are basic to the ‘sentient continuity’ between bodily organs and the external forms and objects that help express their primal feelings and sensings. The tired body and the chair, the central nervous system and the computer, now have to be seen not as separate and specific parts of the human scene but as interlocking processes that counterchange each other in an active field of undifferentiation and dedifferentiation. The ‘sentient continuity’ of body and environment now appears as a ‘blurred plasticity’ which ‘produces an awareness of intensely plastic objects without definite outline’ (Ehrenzweig 1967: 14–15). The chair and the computer are counterchanges of the body in the sense that they each represent ‘the structure of the act of perception visibly enacted’ and thus objectify the dynamic intertwining of organs and senses with their external supports (Scarry 1985: 290). Intertwining returns us to the fundamental role of undifferentiation in human action and reminds us that perception always occurs as the interaction between the divided and the undivided, between figure and ground. It is the undivided, undifferentiated ground of things, the gaps and intervals between specific terms, that serve to contain and move the differentiated, specific contents of the world. Intertwining in this radical sense tells us that our organs and senses express and reflect themselves in their external products so that the chair and the computer, for example, make the work of organs just as much as the work of organs makes them.



The continuous interaction between the body and its products is vital in order to maintain their mutual ongoingness or process which is sustained by the undivided ground from which the divisions of body and product derive their existential momentum. In other words, organs and senses are much more than physical components of the body. They seek to express something more than their singular physical structures. As limbs, they project the body into the limbo of the surrounding world where they re-enact their archaic double and reversible action between nothing and something, absence and presence. In this way, the body disembodies and scatters itself in a field of action that goes beyond the limits of specific, finite objects and forms to create a field of existential being where the intertwining of differentiation and undifferentiation can only be recognized through the ‘scattered attention’ of the ‘single undifferentiated view’ (Ehrenzweig 1967: 23).

The Work of Process Human organs represent a fundamental force of life that precedes the idea of the human subject as a rational actor in the social world. The work of organs originates in a pre-human impulsion to make and transmit the forms of life. Such elemental work of making occurs always in the permanent context of the unmaking and loss of visible and meaningful forms so that making and unmaking together constitute the basic work of human existence (Scarry 1985). Again we are compelled to note the archaic meaning of organ as that primal act which includes within itself the alternating action between something and nothing, presence and absence, appearance and disappearance. The religious altar captures this sense of originating alternation as the primal movement between the body’s inside and its outside (Scarry 1985). The work of the body and its organs seems to be permanently motivated by the recurring stimulus of loss and absence. The familiar world of everyday routine, for example, only becomes noticeable when some part of it breaks down or disappears. It is in this sense that absence and loss remind us that the missing forms of the world are those which source the work of organs as continuous making, for what moves us existentially is that which is distant, remote, unknown and even unknowable. The chair and the computer both in their different ways exemplify this reaching out by the body in order to reach in and thus know itself. The body’s organs and senses are instruments that make and transmit the forms of life but this making and transmission originates out of the primal alternation between presence and absence, appearance and disappearance. The work of organs and senses depends initially on the mutuality of absence and presence: presence can only appear out of absence and absence itself can only be understood as the missing ghost of presence. Here we see the existential basis of human process in its continuous work of saving the appearances of life from dissolution and



disappearance. The body can only know itself by extending itself through its products, by being other than itself. Disembodiment is the body’s continuous attempt to escape its physical limits in order to become what it is not. Every act of the body is moved by the elemental need to bring close to it what must also resist such immediate appropriation. The work of organs thus becomes the work of process as the ceaseless interaction and alternation between approach and withdrawal. To understand the work of organs as the alternation between approach and withdrawal is to recognize process as the continuous making of forms that is also accompanied by their unmaking. This, again, is the mutual and reciprocal nature of the primal work of organs which originates in the alternation between presence and absence, something and nothing. Alternation in this context simply means that presence can only be understood as an aspect of absence, that something always requires the presence of nothing, and that making can only be realized through its counterchange of unmaking. Production exemplifies the unmaking of making in its work of prediction. Production produces products that serve to structure and predict the forms and objects of the future but production in this sense also requires the background presence of unpredictability which now has to be seen as a field of negative absence without which production as prediction would be unimaginable. The presence of production thus emerges out of the absence of prediction. By the same logic, unpredictability as the absence of prediction is created by production. Production in this generic sense is therefore also the production and prediction of incompletion and withdrawal or what we earlier called the generic suspension of existential comprehension. Production and prediction have to be seen as generic and constitutive acts of human organization and not as the making of specific products that satisfy specific needs and desires. It is in this sense that we have to understand production and prediction as the primal work of organs and senses whose existential continuity depends on the creation of infinite process where infinity means without limit, unfinished, never-ending and hence everlasting. To say that the body expresses itself through the ‘sentient continuity’ of its organs and senses with the made forms and objects of the human world is also to say that what continues the body with its world is also what contains it and its actions: the containment and continuation of the work of organs require the perpetual stimulus of infinite withdrawal. Here we begin to understand the idea of the organon as an instrument for making and moving the forms of life. The process of production expresses making and moving as responses to the continuous withdrawal of the forms and objects of the world. Making and movement thus express the essence of process as ceaseless action that seems to exist only for itself and it is in this sense that we are led to recognize containment and continuation not as identifiable properties of singular individuals or specific forms and objects but as unidentifiable forces that draw us out of our existing presences into a forever expanding



field of absence. Making and production as expressions of human organization are projections of the body and its organs into the made objects of the human world and not simply the construction of useful and convenient products. The made object now becomes a lever or fulcrum which frees the body from its physical limits and creates a new field of possibilities in which the object ‘is itself only a midpoint in a total action . . . of human creating’ which ‘includes both the creating of the object and the object’s recreating of the human being . . . ’ (Scarry 1985: 310). Production is the projection of the body into new and unexplored spaces in which the body experiences itself in a radically revised version of its world: the chair re-creates the tired body by making it weightless so that the individual ‘projects this new weightless self into new objects, the image of an angel, the design for a flying machine’; and ‘as the bodily lens of the eye is projected in a camera, a new kind of camera that can enter into the interior of the human body (and film the events of conception, the passage of blood through the heart, or the action of the retina) comes into being’ (Scarry 1985: 321). Human production perpetually recreates itself as endless excess where ex-cess repeats the ceaseless moving away and withdrawal of pro-cess we noted earlier. The excess of production tells us again that prediction is the unfolding of an expanding field of absence in its generic work of containment and continuation: ‘what the human being has made is not object x or y but this excessive power’ by which production magnifies itself to recreate its human makers in their pursuit of ‘sentient continuity’ (Scarry 1985: 318). The work of process has no specific goal or end but is simply the regeneration of itself as pure action. An essential feature of this action is the double and reversible movement between negative and positive, nothing and something, absence and presence suggested in the archaeology of the word organ. Process here seems to be suspended in a primal condition of dynamic alternation. Production itself as a primal act also suggests an original, ambiguous state in its inclusion of drawing out (Latin ducere) and making explicit (Latin dicere) its products out of an implicit and rudimentary source. The process of production appears as a generic making of artefacts out of formless, unmade matter or, what we earlier called in the context of the alterity and alternation of the altar, the unmappable, or that undifferentiated, unlocatable space which both precedes and withdraws from all attempts to express and represent it in locatable, mappable forms. The work of process is the ceaseless alternation of the organon between the mappable and the unmappable. It becomes impossible to say with certainty what generates what: territory and map, absence and presence, negative and positive, seem to generate each other and hence refuse to be identified as singular origins of production. ‘Each is both prior to the other and later than it, causer and caused, inside it and outside it at once’ (Miller 1995: 21). Process thus seems to emerge from a placeless place, an origin that refuses to be identified in space and time, where both before and after are impenetrably intertwined.



Process now appears as the pure making and movement of the organon between the generic and the specific, between the indeterminate and the determinate. The specific and the determinate express that aspect of process which attempts to approach the world as a structure of locatable forms; the generic and indeterminate suggest process as that permanent presence of withdrawal which resists the work of representing the human world as a scene of specific, determinate and enduring forms. Production and prediction derive their significance and power from the negative field of withdrawal and incompletion which they reveal. They are essentially acts of making and moving before they are acts of knowing and knowledge. They project themselves ostensibly as existential strategies that impose some sense of structure and direction on the generic and indeterminate nature of the placeless and unmappable which forever accompanies them as an immanent absence. Production and prediction project the body’s sentience onto the negative ground of the placeless and unmappable in the form of transitory and partial representational takes or capturings of images and ideas from an origin that pre-exists the techniques and strategies of human representation. We can recognize the act of sentient projection in the term graph which reminds us that representation is the product of an act of writing or tracing such as we see in the photograph, the autograph and the topography of the map. Graph tells us that representation is a tentative grip or grab of forces that otherwise would be unrecordable. The photograph of a person, for example, is simply a momentary and partial visual take or capturing of an event extracted from a complex and ever changing social and cultural field whose process has already left the image of the photograph behind in space and time. The topography of the map is also a selection or partial take of an unknown and unlocatable territory which exists prior to the act of mapping; the graphing of the map serves to grab and helps us to grip what otherwise would be lost to sentient projection. The graph is thus a form of sentient projection which extends and prolongs the body and its organs into a pre-human placeless place which is predestined to withdraw from all attempts to locate and know it. This placeless place exists before human production and is what production predicts as a tomorrow that never comes. The work of organs as process derives its ceaseless movement between approach (pro-) and withdrawal (-cess) from the ghost-like presence of this motivating absence. The withdrawal and absence of production and projection cannot be understood without its accompanying work of approaching. Presence and absence together constitute the primal source of the ceaseless work of process. Human production as existential prediction and projection is less concerned with the attainment of specific ends and goals than with the continuation and prolongation of the power of making and moving the forces of life. Process becomes its own end. The construction of a house to create a protective environment for living or the making of a coat to maintain a person’s comfort



in cold weather frees the body and its organs from its physical limits and opens up a field of disembodiment in which the organs and senses can recreate themselves in yet-to-be discovered ways. The chair recreates the tired body by making it weightless and so freeing it to imagine and project itself in weightless extensions such as the image of an angel or a flying machine; the human eye projects and thus disembodies itself through the camera which then further remakes the body’s organs and senses through the technologies of cinema and television; the central nervous system projects itself in the computer and the flow of information the latter produces. The work of process becomes the generic flight from the body through the projection and prolongation of the body’s organs and senses in a field of excess where the production of products and artefacts always returns to their human creators to recreate them and their world in a generic act of leverage and reciprocation. Pro-cess becomes ex-cess in that it exceeds the limits of the specific and determinate to reveal the generic and the indeterminate. This means that it is not the product or artefact and what it makes possible that is significant but the work of continuous making and remaking: ‘what the human being has made is not object x or y but this excessive power of reciprocation’ (Scarry 1985: 318). The product signifies a power far in excess of its instrumental utility; it discloses a capacious power that seems to generate and move human action from an ultra-human distance. Process in this sense suggests itself as the generic making and movement of a pre-human urge that stimulates human action through its withdrawal and self-effacement. Human organization is conventionally expressed as the work of human beings in the everyday world of practical action. Work in this context is the making and moving of specific, determinate structures that produce practical, utilitarian results that have immediate relevance and meaning. Process in this context is the action that leads to a relevant, specific and meaningful result. Production is seen simply as a means of satisfying the variable needs of users and consumers in the performance of their daily tasks. Work is thus interpreted as the appropriation and construction of a utilizable world of forms and objects by collections of individuals who are themselves seen as rational agents capable of making decisions that sustain and even enhance their individual lives. In contrast to this picture of human organization as a general strategy of existential appropriation to reinforce expectations of utility and immediacy, the reconception of human organization as originating in a pre-human power that animates the human body through its organs and senses radically recontextualizes our conventional understanding of human organization which we now begin to sense as the expression of generic human being. The body itself becomes the translator and transmitter of forces that lie beyond the practical consciousness that sustains our comprehension of human existence as the appropriation of the useful and immediate. The body becomes a medium for the movement and expression of forces that defer and postpone all our attempts to make them part of our familiar and reassuring



everyday experience. As the expression of these ultra-human forces, human organization has to be seen as the domesticating and humanizing of a set of forces that do not naturally lend themselves to human control and understanding and that even resist the work of human appropriation. The work of organs and senses reflects this primal, unknowable and negative power in its relentless making and moving of the forms and objects of life. Human products and artefacts express not so much themselves or the specific, immediate needs of self-acting individuals but their work as levers ‘across which the force of creation moves back onto the human site and remakes the makers’ (Scarry 1985: 307). The product as lever is now a midpoint which mediates between objects in an ongoing process of making and moving that always exceeds its constituent components of transmission. Here again we note the stress on process itself rather than specific products of work; the making of making rather than the making of singular, useful forms and objects. Process as pure making reminds us that human existence always exceeds the conventional understanding of human agency as the utilitarian actions of the humanoriented world. Human organization as a generic process of making and moving hides itself in the daily routines of living. Human needs and desires become organized around the productive work of organizations and the demands they make on their human members: the school, the university, the supermarket, the factory, the television company, all create an immediate reality that gives the impression of a ready-made world of reliable forms and objects that are there to sustain and support us in the routines of everyday life. Such routines become habitual and assume a prescriptive role in the conduct of everyday existence so that we treat them less as products of human work and organization and more as natural structures of the lived environment. In other words, we do not see them as the work of organs ceaselessly expressing themselves as pre-human forces in the making and moving of the forms of life. Nor do we see ourselves and our bodies as pre-human organs that serve as vehicles and vectors for the transmission of these forces. Organs are ordinarily viewed as tools and instruments for realizing the specific purposes and specific goals that produce a sense of lived reality as immediate experiences. The products of human organization are thus invariably seen as things and presences, and the negative and absent background without which they would not exist is marginalized and even forgotten. Human products, as we have noted, are devices for predicting and making the future out of indeterminacy and disappearance. They are products of an act of graphing or tracing forms out of impermanence and dissolution. The photograph captures its subject matter in an instant that is already gone; it grabs and grips a temporary appearance in space and time in an attempt to preserve for the future what no longer exists. The photograph makes present that which is absent. It exemplifies the definitive work of the organ as ergon and organon in its pursuit of that which continuously withdraws from positive appropriation.



Human organization becomes reinterpretable as an organ whose existential purpose is to save the appearances of the human world from dissolution and disappearance. The primal sense of the organ is that of the ceaseless work of maintaining the forms and objects of human life by bringing them close to the human body and thus giving meaningful form to the primitive feelings of the organs and senses. Human organization in its generic work of making and moving the forms of life alternates between the mutually defining actions of making present and making absent, of approaching and withdrawing, such as we previously noted in the double and reversible action revealed in the archaeology of the word organ. Making present is the productive and predictive work of creating a sustainable and meaningful reality whose forms have to be made presentable as well as present and immediate. The modern world of production and prediction makes the present presentable as a scene of ready-made products; it presents an illusion of a world that is already constituted for our existential convenience. The supermarket expresses the essence of modern production as the making of presentability and the consumption of the ready-made and immediate. Its products speak to us as reflections of our bodily feelings and sensings: its medical section displays its products as ready-made solutions to all our common physical problems and questions; its extensive display of cereal packages tell us they are ready to serve us at breakfast as a start to our working day; its freezers and chiller cabinets are packed with an immense range of ready-prepared foods with which we can stock our domestic refrigerators in order to structure our meals for the coming week. The supermarket presents itself as a monumental display of readability and ready-madeness which reinforces the illusion of reality as a structure of immediate convenience. Each night it ensures that its presentability of immediacy and ready-madeness is maintained through the filling up of its empty shelves and spaces in readiness for the following day’s business. It further underlines the presentability and readiness of its products through their sell-by dates which again stress the need for immediate use and consumption. The supermarket’s immediacy of presence is even further complemented by the daily advertising of its merchandise on television. The supermarket now appears as a technology of immediate presence which makes the modern world immediately readable and ready for use and consumption. Such technologies of presence reveal production as an existential strategy for translating the raw, archaic matter of the world into a massive display of readiness and readability which structures reality as a scene of specific and reliable supports. The supermarket produces an overall effect of catering to the functional specifics that make up the pressing immediacies of daily living. In its emphasis on the specific and the here-and-now, we lose sight of the supermarket’s significant role as a major force in the translation of raw, unreadable matter into the ready-made and readable appearances that constitute modern reality as a series of constructions that make the world ready, readable and transmittable. To say that



the supermarket is an existential means for making the world readable and transmittable to its human habitants is to acknowledge it as an organon that makes and moves the forms of the world. The products of the supermarket perform an existential role inasmuch as they enable the organs and senses of the body to recognize themselves as reflections of the products on display: the aspirin bottle says it can relieve the body’s aches and pains; the cereal packet says it is here to prepare the body for the working day; the colourful display of fruit and vegetables calls out to the eyes and taste buds to consume them. The supermarket’s products are thus not merely ready-made and presentable objects but they remind the body that they are projections of its organs and senses which return to the body’s interior as sentient conversions of the external environment. They tell us that the supermarket is a projection and prolongation of the body in space and time, and that the supermarket informs and thus converses with its consumers in a general existential strategy of making the matter of the world ready and readable for movement and transmission. The organs and senses of the body thus locate and read themselves through the multiple products of the supermarket and remind us of the double and reversible action of the organ as an origin which can only recognize itself through the after-work of its copies and effects. Human organization as the pre-human expression of the organ which forever seeks to find itself in the mappable space and time of its after-effects is nevertheless also motivated by the indigenous co-presence of the unmappable and the placeless. The supermarket may produce an overall effect of immediacy and readability but this appearance of constant readiness is essentially a means of concealing the unmappable and placeless origin behind all human production and projection. In this sense, the supermarket’s existential strategy is one of saving the appearances of daily life from disintegration and withdrawal. Its products appear as transient expressions and momentary graspings of a covert process that never makes itself explicit but merely intimates its presence through hint and allusion. All human organization can be interpreted in this way, especially when viewed as the work of pre-human organs. The supermarket is perhaps a hypertrophic example of how human organization in the modern world projects its ‘sentient continuity’ and thus ensures its continuation. Human organization in its myriad and variable forms – the factory, the hospital, the school, the university, the hotel, the railway station, the department store – produces and reproduces its world by creating products that fit the needs and desires of the bodily organs and senses. This essentially means making forms and objects that will fit the body’s requirements and thus make distant and vague possibilities clear and convenient for sensory manipulation. The products of the supermarket can be conveniently observed and handled; the television set and the computer reduce the distances of the world to the space of the eyes and hands; the mobile telephone creates a sense of direct communication between its users’ organs of speaking and hearing. Goodness of fit between



the organs and senses of the body and the human environment assumes an increasingly motivating source in the technologically dominated projection of human organization in the modern world. Goodness and closeness of fit between body and environment may be a dominant pressure in the organizing of the modern human world but, since body and environment are intertwined in a double and reversible process of approach and withdrawal, presence and absence, the more immediate and presentable we make the world, the more we reveal the infinity of its latent and foreign spaces. Making and unmaking together constitute the basic work of human existence (Scarry 1985). But the purpose of readability and readymadeness seems to conceal the latent absence and withdrawal intrinsic to the existential work of organs. The supermarket’s production of immediacy and presence blinds us to the missing presence of absence and withdrawal that actively sources its programme of filling in its otherwise vacant space and time. The immediate utility of the supermarket’s interpretation of reality disguises its origins in latency and withdrawal. The work of organs is the continuous making and moving of forms and objects in order to supplement the gaps and intervals that threaten existence with the void of disappearance. While the supermarket’s work is focused on concealing these existential gaps and intervals and preserving the ‘sentient continuity’ of its consumer-product relationship, the work of other forms of human organization is more directly threatened by the challenge to readiness and readability posed by the disappearance of presence and presentability. The world of art and literature sustains itself with the general question of the human world as a scene of questionable forms and appearances. The modern art gallery and its associated institutions appear to be caught in an irresolvable struggle between the world of visibility and the unworld of the invisible. In this respect, art reflects the dynamic exchange between presence and absence, something and nothing, implied in the archaeology of the word organ. Art searches for an origin it can never locate; it wanders and explores an unmappable and placeless unworld which lies beyond conventional representation. Modern art even questions the idea that the world can be made readily readable and presentable. It draws us back to the act of generation itself in its struggle to trace the emergence of form and appearance out of the obscurity and indistinctiveness of raw matter. In Cézanne’s landscapes, for example, houses and mountains merge with each other to remind us of their common and predistinguishable source in nature so that we see the beginning of the act of representation as ‘the world’s uncertain visibility’ rather than its completed, readable form (Bersani and Dutoit 1993: 218). The paintings of the Impressionists also return us to this generic state of being when they conflate the raw materiality of their paint with the forms and objects represented so that we are again confronted with a spectacle of ‘uncertain visibility’. Carl Andre’s famous installation of builder’s bricks in a London art gallery confuses our usual expectation of finding bare bricks on a building site rather



than as a formally declared work of art. In these examples, the artists wish to return us to an unworld that pre-exists readability and ready-madeness. What we see is less the supermarket’s products of immediate utility and more a coming-to-presence that reminds us of the beginning of things rather than their complete and finished presence. The artist seeks to make present the invisibility of visibility as though to inform us that art is that original generic act ‘which seeks to affirm itself in its essence by ruining distinctions and limits’ (Blanchot 1982: 220). Yet the administrative purpose of the art gallery is to affirm art as a distinctive area of human culture, even to inform the public of art’s capacity to enlighten us about the aesthetic potential of existence which the immediate utility of everyday life conceals from us. The gallery attempts to make art presentable and meaningful as a collection of products; it explains and thus attempts to make explicit that which is destined to remain implicit and therefore beyond explicit expression and understanding. Beyond the gallery, the wider institutional context of the art world celebrates the cultural significance of art by awarding prestigious prizes to individual artists who thus become institutionally accredited with special cultural status as well as making art into a series of ‘events’ that demand the attention of the media. The gallery and its world occupy an ambiguous position between the public’s expectation of ready readability and the artist’s recognition that the essence of art originates in a profound refusal of easy explication. The work of organs is the work of process as the ceaseless alternation between the movement of approach and the equally ceaseless movement of withdrawal. The work of the supermarket stresses the movement of approach in its constant production of presence and prediction. The work of the art gallery struggles to find itself as a translator and interpreter of the ambiguous essence and ‘uncertain visibility’ of the art works it promotes. Supermarket and art gallery, in their different ways, exemplify the basic existential work of human organization: that of making and moving the forms of life in order to save the appearances of reality from dissolution and disappearance. But the work of the artist more directly addresses the question of process as that which is moved by withdrawal. The work of the artist seems stimulated by an unknowable force that says it is ultimately uncapturable and hence unrepresentable. At best, the artist can only admit that he or she is trying to represent the unrepresentable. In certain respects, the artist’s task of making the invisible visible is institutionally formalized by the Church whose task is to make visible and graspable the invisible power we call God. The Church recognizes the immanent presence of an invisible power in the general conduct of human affairs and assumes the responsibility for translating and interpreting this ultra-human presence into a language and symbolism that makes it somehow readily readable and thus brings it down to earth. God, as they say, is everywhere and nowhere. Despite ‘his’ apparent unlocatability and hence unpresentability, ‘he’ demands to be made present as an existential



necessity in the living of everyday life. The Church organizes ‘his’ presence and presentability through its architecture, its literature and its sacred rituals. We are able to address ‘him’ by giving ‘him’ a territorial address in the local place of worship. While we can never see or converse with ‘him’ directly, we construct institutional fictions which speak on ‘his’ behalf: Christ as the son of God assumes human form and tells us that God ‘himself’ is thus indirectly part of the human race; the Virgin Mary, as the mother of Christ, implies that she has had some direct, perhaps carnal, contact with God and thus also testifies to ‘his’ connections with humanity. The Church performs that primal act of generation and production which the Book of Genesis describes in the image of the altar with its power to magnify, multiply and make visible the invisible forces and feelings that animate the organs and senses of the human body in its work of ‘sentient continuity’ (Scarry 1985). It symbolizes the archaic double and reversible action of the organ as the production of presence out of absence, of something out of nothing. Projection, as we have seen, is a necessary move in this process of reaching out of the body in order to express its interior. The Church projects its work of production and generation in its architecture – the spire of the church reaches out and aspires to the invisibility of heaven – and in its furniture – the altar is both organ and origin of ‘God’s power of alteration’ which ‘continually re-manifests itself’ in its capacity to make ‘the awe-inspiring alterability of matter visible’ (Scarry 1985: 199, 192). The work of the Church reminds us that human organization is fundamentally grounded in the existential construction of the human world and the continuous making present of its supportive forms and objects. An essential feature of this work is the fitting together of the body’s organs and senses with the forms and objects that support and express them. The act of making present is also the act of making the world fit closely and conveniently to the body’s organs and senses. This again is another version of the body’s reaching out in order to reach its inside. Human projection is that basic generic act which makes the body fit the world and the world fit the body. The Church also expresses this primal need and desire in its literature which seeks to humanize the message of God through the projective device of personification. The invisibility of God and ‘his’ domain are made visible and meaningful – and hence readable and readily understandable – through the media of the Bible’s humanized narratives. We can thus interpret the specific books of the Bible as institutional strategies for translating the pre-human world into human terms by ascribing their narratives to what appear to be human persons. The gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John can be understood as personifications of such strategies. The names of these narrators may sound like human messengers of God but they also suggest a more basic existential meaning rooted in the primal act of the organ as organon or maker and mover of living forms and objects. On this interpretation, Matthew personifies the raw, indistinguishable Matter of the earth which, through the person of Mark, has to be Marked or humanly distinguished and differentiated which then, through the narration of Luke, enables



us to Look at the world as a scene of distinguishable features out of which, following the gospel of John, we can Generate (from Latin genius, genus, i.e. generative power, human creation) the multiple and varied forms that make up the human world. The Church, in its various institutional manifestations, expresses itself as an organ of generation and regeneration, reminding us through its rituals of the initiatory role of human organization in the making and moving of the forms of life and in their necessary reproduction. Perhaps more significantly, the Church constructs its signs and symbols, its images and messages, out of invisibility and absence as though to inform us that the visible world we inhabit is a necessary fiction which without its constructions would otherwise disappear. In their different ways, supermarket, art gallery and Church reveal human organization as an existential means for the creation and sustenance of a humanized world. An essential initiatory feature of their work is the translation of raw, unhumanized material and rudimental forces into forms that fit the organs and senses of the body. This clearly includes the increasing emphasis in the modern world of production on ready-madeness and readability in which everything, ideally, should be all ready for us. But the routine expectations of ready-madeness and readability also serve to conceal their origins in the invisible and absent. Invisibility and absence are immanent presences in all acts of human production. They stimulate the body to make them visible and connectable in the continuous work of ‘sentient continuity’. Human production originates in their strange powers of withdrawal and disappearance without which there would be no existential process or human ‘continuity’. The work of process is thus always preceded by an indeterminable condition of pre-work.

The Pre-Work of Process Human organization is the work of the social body as a corpus or corporation of organs before it is a collection of individuals. As a social body, human organization is the articulate community of organs and senses which constantly create and re-create connections and correspondences between themselves and their environment. The primary task of human organs in this context is to correspond with the world in order to create and maintain a sense of ‘sentient continuity’ between body and environment. Viewed in this way, human organization is essentially a series of compositional acts rather than a completed, self-sufficient structure. This is one way of approaching human organization as the work of process. We can thus never see the supermarket as a total entity but as a series of partial and fleeting correspondences between its staff, customers, products and building. The total field of the active and changing relationships between these various parts always exceeds and thus withdraws from our conceptual grasp. It is as though the dynamic field of



changing relationships between the supermarket’s parts were contained in a more comprehensive, more pliable space that must remain beyond our conventional and categorial systems of representation. To understand human organization as a field of compositional acts that take place in such a pliable and plastic background, we have to adopt a more flexible perceptual strategy for seeing the world as a process of interrelated events and not simply as a collection of differentiated, specific things. The world as process has to be perceived in ‘a single undivided focus’ of ‘scattered attention’ (Ehrenzweig 1967: 23) which enables us to see, for example, the work of organs as the dynamic alternation between origin and copy, absence and presence, between a knowable world of differentiated, finite forms and a pre-world of undifferentiation and incompleteness. The perception of process is the sensing of the human world as a ‘blurred plasticity’ which ‘produces an awareness of intensely plastic objects without definite outline’ (Ehrenzweig 1967: 14–15). The work of process is the work of organs as the alternation between differentiation and undifferentiation, between figure and ground. Undifferentiation and ground suggest that they serve as an accommodating negative background to the everyday world of ready-made, readable and hence positive things. The pre-work of process returns us to this invisible background before it is translated into the visible and readable presences of daily life; it is an absent and negative condition that is always with us as a ghost-like presence that refuses to make itself fully evident and that hides behind the familiar forms of the world. The work of organs indirectly recognizes the pre-work of process in its continuous making and moving of the forms of life. The work of the supermarket is essentially the translating of pre-work into the readily useful work of presentable reality. The art gallery attempts to make presentable the pre-work of artists who seem to be suspended in a perceptual limbo that refuses to be translated into the convenient visibility of the ‘work of art’. The Church addresses the pre-work of process as a power that cannot in itself be identified and represented when it invents the images of Christ and the Saints of the gospels as devices that can at best only allude to and suggest the presence of God. In each of these institutional examples, the pre-work of process appears as an unidentifiable presence that lies beyond the horizon of human thought but which demands to be translated into the identifiable and meaningful forms of the human world. The pre-work of process now suggests itself as the inaugural source of human organization and the generic production of the human world. Production in its existential sense is the projection of the body’s organs and senses onto the made forms and objects of the world. Production as projection reaches out to the world so that the world can reach into the body. Production reaches out as the projection of prediction in which the unknown and unmapped is translated into specific and identifiable forms and objects that help orient the body in its work of daily living. The pre-work



of process also suggests a reaching out to free the body from its limits. Production prolongs the body’s organs and senses into a space and time that exceeds the immediacy of the body to reveal new existential possibilities. Projection, as we noted earlier, is always more than the projection of the organs and senses into the forms of specific objects since a projected object further projects itself into new fields of possibility. The camera projects itself into the cinema, the calculating machine into the computer. The products of projection now appear as levers which elevate the body into new realms of experience and which, significantly, recreate the human being in a generic act of reciprocation (Scarry 1985: 318). Reciprocation opens up new fields of possibility which remind the human being that the source of its existence lies outside itself and not within the supposedly self-contained human person. The body is first and foremost an organ that expresses the generic making and moving of the world. Projection and reciprocation represent the body’s disembodiment of itself through its revealing of absence as a pre-objective, pre-specific space which invites the body’s organs and senses to explore it in order to reveal the body’s own potential for re-making and re-moving itself. The body and its organs thus disembody themselves in response to a generic call which, since it is subject to continuous withdrawal, never fully reveals itself and which thus can never be fully and finally answered. Every specific human product may be seen as an attempt to answer this generic call but each specific product simply defers the answer in a further call. The pre-work of process is this unidentifiable, unlocatable space which seems to refuse all attempts to make it speak in any ultimate sense. The work of the artist is one way of recognizing the pre-work of process as something that refuses explicit and readable expression while the work of the art gallery tries to overcome this refusal with its formal displays and explanations. The Church likewise recognizes that the term ‘God’ implies an inexpressible power that can only be approached indirectly through the familiar signs and symbols of the human world. Projection and reciprocation can be interpreted as a call-and-response relationship between the body and its environment. When the organs and senses project themselves into made objects, they respond to an existential lack or absence that calls them to make it present and presentable. But, since presence is always accompanied by a fundamental absence on which it is existentially dependent, every projected human product opens up a further absent space and hence a further call to make it present. Projection may express itself through the production of specific objects but it is more essentially the making of reciprocation as an ultra-human power that always exceeds the specific and particular. Projection and reciprocation return us to the idea of the organ as an organon that makes and moves the world of human objects; it is the generic making and moving of things rather than the things themselves that demands our attention and understanding. Process in this sense is infinitive action without ends or goals, all origin and cause



and no effect; it suggests a field of reciprocal relationship and transitivity rather than a scene of things. Again, we are reminded of pure process whose pro- signifies a ceaseless moving forward and approaching and whose -cess signifies an equally ceaseless moving away and withdrawing. The pre-work of process tells us that the absence that is immanent in all presence – the fundamental lack that constantly calls us to fill it with readymadeness and readability, just as we have to bridge the gaps between the letters and words of a sentence – is a placeless place where action seems to have no object and thus seems to be suspended in a limbo of infinitude. This is the vacant and void space of organ whose early meaning was rooted in the alternating action of the ergon and organon between nothing and something, absence and presence. Significantly, the organ generates negative space just as much as it generates positive things. The pre-work of process thus returns us to the archaic meaning of organ as pure action and ongoingness in which the significance of specific objects and specific tasks takes second place to their generation and movement in a field of generic relationship and transitivity. Action as simple doing instead of knowing, becoming instead of completing, starting instead of finishing. Pre-work as pure action tells us it is more about the coming-to-presence of forms rather than the production of ready-made presences; it thus reminds us that the existential origins of human organization are to be found in the ongoing compositional work that must precede the completed forms and objects of our taken-for-granted world. The pre-work of process implies a pre-world of potential appearances that have not yet made themselves explicit and clear, that are still suspended in a state of incompletion and will always remain so. The pre-world of prework also significantly suggests a condition of pure matter that has yet to be made into products that signify their human relevance. Again, we are brought back to the archaic function of the organ as a means for translating the meaningless materiality of the earth into the meaningful products of the human world. In this pre-world of pre-work, process finds itself irresistibly drawn back to a placeless place that seems to resist all attempts to give it locatable expression. We may name it as the Church names God but this simply represents something that is permanently unknowable and hence ungraspable; the Church and the name of God are devices for locating the unlocatable, for expressing that which originates in the inexpressible. The pre-work of process begins to look like a state of existential withdrawal that permanently provokes us to capture it in some way and to make it ever present to the immediacy of the body. It even reverses the coming-to-presence that precedes the conventional interpretation of work as the construction of finished products through the idea of withdrawal as a receding-to-absence. Pre-work thus becomes the pure absence of work, a state of being which precedes work as the production of presence and presentability but which is also the fundamental source of such production. It remains



always implicitly prior to work as the production of presence and thus must be understood as the pre-sense of presence, just as God is the implicit absence which comes before all the Church’s attempts to represent ‘his’ invisible power. Pre-work asserts itself as an anonymous, placeless and unmappable source which continually reminds us that the conventional world of ready-made representations is rooted in absence and departure. The world we make present to ourselves is strangely founded in an ungraspable void which we can only approach (but never reach) through the continuous work of transient representations and reproductions. Every human product thus appears as a pre-dict which, like the pre-sense of presence, finds its origin in a source that refuses to disclose itself. Pre-work as the pre-sense of process now appears as that which is ab-sent from sense but which the body’s organs and senses must make present to themselves as readily readable representations of their environment, however fictional and questionable these representations may at times appear. Pre-work as the ab-sence or off-sense of sense has been explored by Maurice Blanchot (e.g. 1982) in his analyses of the absence of work as the hidden source of art and literature. The institutional organization of art and literature presents its products as formal categories: pop art, cubism, action painting, etc.; novels, poetry, criticism, etc. Such institutional work attributes meaning and identity to specific works by placing them in a system where they can be made presentable and readily readable. They appear as the finished products of productive labour that are meant to inform, entertain or illuminate us within the categorical worlds they occupy. Art and literature, for Blanchot, reverse this institutional systematization by reminding us that they begin in a radical condition of suspense where nothing is identifiable or articulable. Once we express it and make it readily readable, we lose it. The pre-work of art and literature is this suspended condition that comes before the production and presentation of the painting or the novel. And yet this suspension of immediate sense and readability is implicitly present in all the systematized products of art and literature. It is a passive state of raw material that resists translation into specific meanings and uses; it is an origin that can never be expressed in human terms, ‘an abyss in which all things are equal in their utter indifference to the human mind and will’ and all attempts to give it form can only be sensed as ‘particular expressions of a persistent negative movement that resides in being’ (De Man 1983: 72, 73). Like God, pre-work can only reveal itself as an unknowable and indeterminable ‘it’ which permanently hides itself from conscious presence and presentability, intimating only ‘a fundamental distance at the heart of all human experience’ (De Man 1983: 76). This ‘persistent negative movement’ and ‘fundamental distance’ is the absent and negative side of the archaic organ as the double and reversible action which alternates between something and nothing, between the visible and the invisible. Blanchot (1982) calls it a state of ‘worklessness’ which



can never be made to work as a productive act in the conventional sense; it is impersonal and anonymous as though refusing to reveal itself to its human spectators. The products of conventional production are like vehicles of movement that carry us along and when they break down they reveal not just their inutility but the absence that serves to background them. Products as conventional organs of movement are taken-for-granted elements of everyday life; it is only when they break down that we really miss them and realize that their missingness or absence is also a significant part of their presence. Blanchot’s ‘worklessness’ is a negative condition in which the meaningful movements of existence are always missing but which nevertheless haunts all our efforts to attribute direction and purpose to the existential ground of our actions. The apparent immediacy and readability of the presentable world finds its generative source in what is unreachable and indeterminable: ‘the immediacy which common language communicates to us is only veiled distance, the absolutely foreign passing for the habitual, the unfamiliar which we take for the customary . . . ’ (Blanchot 1982: 40). The pre-work of ‘worklessness’ is thus an inexpressible source which withdraws from the immediacy and ready-madeness of conventional production; it resists every effort to fix and stabilize it in a definition or a category, despite all the institutionalized programmes of knowledge that try to capture it in a concept or explanation. It can only be glimpsed in a lateral way through allusion and suggestion and thus can never be appropriated by authoritative statement. For this reason, Blanchot argues that it is the infinite source of the question to which there are no finite answers. ‘Common sense believes that it does away with the question’ (Blanchot 1982: 211). Common sense seeks the answer which affirms the immediacy and presentability of everyday existence. But it is the question that keeps life on the move by reminding us that the pre-work of ‘worklessness’ is a primal process that is unknowable as a thing, that hides itself and at best can only intimate itself as a source of unanswerable questions. The question reasserts itself in production and projection as reciprocation which always undoes the making of a specific product to reveal a forever expanding field of absence. Question and answer are generic expressions of making and moving; they express process as that which continually undoes itself, which always departs from the present in order to disclose the vacancy and void of a permanent distance. The question thus ensures the ‘sentient continuity’ of production and projection by revealing human existence as a condition of unfoundation and infiniteness which has to be continually pursued and re-founded. Process appears in the form of the question as an infinite seeking or questing that knows no end, only an excess that knows no bounds, and which seeks for no other reason than the seeking of itself. The pre-work of process returns us to our initial discussion of human organization as a social body or collection of organs that mediate between the inside and outside of the human body in maintaining its ‘sentient continuity’



with its material environment. The body’s organs and senses appear to make and move the forms of life. But they also appear to serve as transmission routes for prehuman, impersonal forces which express themselves through the human body and its products. It is in this sense that we have to understand the body’s work of disembodiment or the reaching out by the body’s organs in order to express their intrinsic potential for feeling and sensing. Disembodiment and reaching out reflect the organs’ primal and generic work of making and unmaking in their alternating movement between presence and absence. The pre-work of process is pure alternation and movement that has no specific location, no end or goal. The body’s inside is conflated with its outside. At this primitive level, body and environment are continuous in the alternating movement of ‘sentient continuity’ in which body and ground become counterchanges of each other. The conventional idea of the selfcontained human subject loses its specificity so that individual subjectivities ‘move beyond their respective particularity toward a common ground’ in which their specific identities dissolve and which contains them all (De Man 1983: 64). The ‘common ground’ is a space of undifferentiation in which the particular and specific can only emerge as passing and transient forms in a field of ‘blurred plasticity’ (Ehrenzweig 1967: 15). It is another way of expressing the idea of withdrawal such as we see in Cézanne’s landscapes in which houses and mountains merge together and lose their individual forms or in the crossword puzzle where individually identifiable words seem to melt into a ‘common ground’ of mixed confusion to suggest an invisible and unmappable source where sense as a readily readable experience seems to disappear. The purpose of human organization is to make sense out of negative absence. Representation as a fundamental act of making sense reflects the crossword puzzle in its implying that pre-sense inhabits presence as the ‘common ground’ of pre-work in which everything is condensed and hence undifferentiated. The work of organs and process is the continual making present or re-present-ing of this ‘common ground’ in the distinguishable and meaningful language of the ready-made. Production as prediction originates in a principle of re-present-ation in its basic work of repeating the existential act of making and generating the pre-sense of presence: prediction may be conventionally seen as the foretelling of future events but, just as significantly, it is also the inescapable repetition of pre-sense as the common, undifferentiated source of all human action. The pre-work of process reminds us that the existential strategies of human organization have their source in the bodily organs and senses that make and move the forms of life. The organs and senses make presence out of absence, readability out of unreadability, but their work is also necessarily caught up in the re-creation of absence and unreadability without which there could be no readable presences. Prework is the continuous suspension and deferral of sense and meaning as their necessary anticipation. Process emerges as the pre-work of pre-sense that inhabits conventional representation through the infinite deferral of re-



pre-sent-ation as the infinite repetition of the organ’s primal work in its combined and enfolded double action of approaching and withdrawing, of making and unmaking.

References Bersani, Leo, and Ulysse Dutoit 1993 Arts of impoverishment: Beckett, Rothko, Resnais. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Blanchot, Maurice 1982 The space of literature, trans. and intro. Ann Smock. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press. De Man, Paul 1983 Blindness and insight: Essays in the rhetoric of contemporary criticism. London: Methuen. Ehrenzweig, Anton 1967 The hidden order of art: A study in the psychology of artistic imagination. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. Gibson, James J. 1968 The senses considered as perceptual systems. London: Allen & Unwin. Miller, J. Hillis 1995 Topographies. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Scarry, Elaine 1985 The body in pain: The making and unmaking of the world. New York: Oxford University Press.


29 Organizations as Distinction Generating and Processing Systems: Niklas Luhmann’s Contribution to Organization Studies David Seidl and Kai Helge Becker

N

iklas Luhmann (1927–98) was without doubt one of the most innovative and fascinating social theorists of our time. Having presented an entirely new approach to social phenomena, he has been widely influential in German-speaking countries for the past few decades. His oeuvre has been extensively discussed and has stimulated research in such diverse academic fields as media studies, political sciences, philosophy, theology, pedagogics, literature, law and sociology, and is generally considered of equal rank and standard to the works by such prominent social theorists as Bourdieu, Giddens, Foucault and Habermas. In contrast to these thinkers, Luhmann also developed a very original organization theory based on his general theoretical approach and his practical experiences in public administration. As such, his work has the potential to make a substantial contribution to organization studies in particular. Until very recently, however, Luhmann’s work received hardly any attention internationally from students of organization. It is only in the past few years that this has changed. Lately, there have been a number of (nonGerman) books taking up Luhmann’s ideas on organization (e.g. Bakken and Hernes, 2003; Højlund and Knudsen, 2003; Seidl, 2005c; Seidl and Becker, 2005; Vos, 2002) in addition to several European conferences (e.g. in 2002




in Munich and in 2003 in Copenhagen) and special issues [e.g. Nordiske Organisasjonsstudier, 2001; 3(2); Theory, Culture and Society, 2001; 18(1)] on his systems theory more generally. This can be interpreted as a clear sign of a growing awareness of the significance of Luhmann’s theory on the international stage. Due to this development, we decided to put together a special issue providing a comprehensive introduction to Luhmann’s way of theorizing and highlighting its potential contribution to organization studies. In his works, Luhmann combines a wide variety of (often even conflicting) theoretical traditions, both within and outside sociology. Particularly influential among them were the systems theory of Talcott Parsons, under whose supervision Luhmann studied at Harvard in 1960–61; Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology; Heinz von Foerster’s second-order cybernetics; the biological theory of autopoiesis by Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela; and the calculus of distinction by George Spencer Brown. However, instead of just putting the elements of these different traditions together, Luhmann redefined most of the concepts in order to fit them into the context of his other concepts, creating a highly consistent theoretical framework. As a result, many of his ‘borrowed’ and adapted concepts are at odds with the original concepts, as Luhmann himself often pointed out. Maturana, for example, famously disagreed with Luhmann’s definition of his concept of autopoiesis and claimed that he had ‘misused’ the term (see also Luhmann, 1995a: 37). Because of the plurality of theoretical traditions from which he drew and the way he integrated them with regard to each other, Luhmann’s work is very difficult to place. It falls between most of the common schemata for characterizing social theories, most poignantly with the distinction between modernism and postmodernism. While Luhmann’s theory is often presented as an exemplar of modernist thinking, several authors have placed him in the postmodern tradition (Koch, 2005). Robert Cooper and Gibson Burrell (1988) in their Organization Studies series on modernism and postmodernism, for example, planned to discuss (the early) Luhmann as a modernist thinker – next to Habermas and in contrast to Foucault and Derrida – while Cooper lately sees rather close affinities to postmodernist theorizing (Cooper, in this issue). Luhmann never associated himself clearly with any of the two approaches. The only label that he explicitly accepted for his approach was ‘systems theory’, since the domain of general systems theory is where he found the most important groundwork for his theory design. Luhmann’s entire oeuvre, which comprises more than 50 books and several hundred articles, is usually divided into two parts: the early Luhmann before and the late Luhmann after his so-called ‘autopoietic turn’, which can be pinned down to the publication of his most important book Soziale Systeme [Social Systems] in 1984. While his first phase can be characterized as adaptation and further development of Parsons’ systems approach, it was in his latter phase that he developed his very particular way of theorizing. Luhmann himself referred to his earlier phase as merely a ‘series of nils in


Seidl and Becker • Organizations as Distinction Systems 207 General theory of of social systems General theory social systems (e.g.Luhmann, Luhmann, 1995a) (e.g. 1995a)

(Face-to-face) interaction (Face-to-face) interaction Organization Society Organization Society (summarized inin (e.g.Luhmann, Luhmann, (e.g.Luhmann, Luhmann, (e.g. (summarized (e.g. Kieserling, 1999) 2000a; 2003) 1997) 1997) Kieserling, 1999) 2000a; 2003)

Economic system Economic system (e.g.Luhmann, Luhmann, (e.g. 1998) 1998)

Political system Political system (e.g. Luhmann, Luhmann, (e.g. 2000b) 2000b)

Legal Legal system system (e.g.Luhmann, Luhmann, (e.g. 1993) 1993)

System System ofof artart (e.g. Luhmann, Luhmann, (e.g. 2000c) 2000c)

etc. etc.

Figure 1: Structure of Luhmann’s work

theory production’ (Luhmann, 1987: 142). However, he went back to most of his earlier work in his later years and rewrote it from the perspective of his new theoretical framework. With regard to its subject, Luhmann’s (late) work follows a very clear structure (Figure 1). First, there is his general theory of social systems, in which he developed his unique perspective on social phenomena in general. In these works, he presented his general notion of social systems as selfreproducing communication systems. These works are unspecific with regard to the different types of social systems. Second, there are his works that focus on the different types of social systems: society, (face-to-face) interaction and organization. Third, there are his works on the different subsystems (or functional systems) of society: the economic system, the political system, the legal system, the system of art, and so on. Apart from that there are of course a number of works on other subjects that do not fit into this structure; for example, an article on an autopoietic theory of the mind, and books on the sociology of risk and power. These works, however, can be seen as clearly peripheral to Luhmann’s research project. At the heart of Luhmann’s (later) theory design, one can find two central building blocks. These are on the one hand a theory of distinction based on the Laws of Form by George Spencer Brown (1969) and on the other hand a concept of self-referential (autopoietic) systems based on Maturana’s biological theory of autopoiesis and Heinz von Foerster’s second-order cybernetics (see Mingers, 2005 for an overview). In all of his later works, these two building blocks guide the theory development. However, the emphasis of the two slightly shifted over time. While Luhmann initially integrated the theory of distinction into his autopoiesis theory, in his latter years, he more and more chose the theory of distinction as a starting point and integrated autopoiesis into it. It is this latter approach that seems to us of particular interest for the purpose of this Special Issue and which we thus want to pursue in this introductory paper; for the alternative approach, see Seidl (2005a). This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.


Given the high degree of interdependence between the different parts of Luhmann’s theory, we have decided to present in this introductory paper a comprehensive overview of Luhmann’s social theory rather than focusing on his organization theory exclusively. In this way, we believe that it will be easier for the reader who is not acquainted with Luhmann’s theory to appreciate his specific way of thinking. Accordingly, we will start with a first section describing the basic ideas of Luhmann’s theory of distinction (i.e. theory of observation), according to which every operation is conceptualized as the production of a distinction. This will lead us in the second section to the concept of autopoiesis as the self-(re)production of system/environment distinctions. In the third section, we will explain Luhmann’s concept of social systems as distinction generating and processing systems. After a general introduction to social systems, we will briefly distinguish the three types of social systems: society, (face-to-face) interaction, organization. Based on these explanations, we will present in the fourth section a detailed account of organizations as systems that (re)produce a particular type of distinction: decisions. In the fifth section, we will briefly summarize the key aspects of Luhmann’s theory before concluding with an introduction of the papers in this Special Issue.

The Observer at the Heart of Luhmann’s Theory Every researcher who wants to study an object of research has to choose (implicitly or explicitly) a way of observing his/her object. He/she has to distinguish what he/she observes from everything that he/she does not observe. For example, the organization theorist has to distinguish the organization from other phenomena. What distinction he/she uses for that is ultimately arbitrary. Several suitable distinctions abound: hierarchy/market, goal-attaining system/other systems, formal/informal organization, and so on. However, depending on the specific distinction chosen, the researcher will observe differently and he/she will also see something different. The problem for the researcher is that the distinction chosen for one’s observation usually blinds out all other possibilities of observation. Because of that, the observation is usually attributed to the object of observation rather than to the observer him/herself. One is not aware that it is the choice of distinction rather than what is being distinguished that produces the observation. This very basic insight can be taken as a starting point for Luhmann’s theory building. Drawing on Spencer Brown’s (1969) calculus of distinctions, Luhmann unfolds this basic idea. According to this calculus, observation can be conceptualized as distinction and indication: every observation draws a distinction in the world (e.g. between primary numbers and all other numbers)


Seidl and Becker • Organizations as Distinction Systems 209

Marked side Marked side

Unmarked side Unmarked side Distinction Distinction

Figure 2: Spencer Brown’s notation of the cross

and indicates the side it wants to observe (e.g. the primary numbers). That is to say, the observer has to focus on one side while neglecting the other. It is not possible to focus on both sides simultaneously. In this way, the relation of the two sides to each other is made asymmetrical; the observation creates a ‘marked side’ (the observed one) and an ‘unmarked side’ (the unobserved one). This can be expressed formally with Spencer Brown’s notation of the ‘cross’ (Figure 2). It is this act of distinction and indication that creates the specific observation. Every other distinction/indication would have produced another observation. Because the observation can only indicate one side of the distinction – and not both – every observation remains blind with regard to everything but that side. This means that the observation can neither observe its outside nor the distinction itself. It thus does not see what it excludes and does not see that there are other, equally valid distinctions that could have been chosen. As a consequence, for the researcher, the question arises of which distinction to choose for the observation. Any distinction is contingent and could be criticized for that. In the face of such a situation, Luhmann suggests choosing the distinction that the object of observation itself draws. Thus, if the social scientist wants to observe an organization, he/she should choose the distinction that the organization draws itself in order to distinguish itself from the rest of the world. In other words, the researcher should not infer a distinction from outside but use the distinction of his/her object of observation. To the extent that the object of observation makes a distinction between itself and the rest of the world (indicating itself, not the rest of the world), the object of observation can be treated as an observation (or better, observer). The researcher thus becomes a second-order observer: he/she observes another observer. Of course, this choice of distinction is still contingent, but at least it seems to be a promising approach to start the theory by looking for distinctions that are somehow intimately bound up with the object of observation. One (meta)theoretical concept that focuses exactly on the distinction that the object of observation produces itself is the concept of autopoiesis (< Greek autos = self; poiesis = production); or better, of the autopoietic system. According to this concept, the researcher observes his/her object of observation as a system distinguished from its environment, which itself



produces and reproduces its distinction from the environment. Luhmann in this sense writes: If we describe [something] as autopoietic system we are dealing with the production and reproduction of a distinction (in systems theoretical terms: the distinction of system and environment), and the concept of autopoiesis says, that an observer using it assumes that the difference is produced and reproduced by the operations of the system itself. (Luhmann, 2000a: 55; our emphasis and translation)

Using this metatheoretical concept, Luhmann conceptualizes organizations as systems that produce themselves as an organization by distinguishing themselves from their environments (Luhmann, 2000a: 45). It is important to understand that the concept of autopoiesis here is used as a purely theoretical concept that serves as a starting point for analysis. It simply provides a way of observing the world that will have to prove its fruitfulness by the insights it can generate.

Luhmann’s General, Transdisciplinary Concept of Autopoiesis In order to appreciate Luhmann’s theory design, it is important to distinguish between Maturana’s original concept of autopoiesis and Luhmann’s modification of it. Originally, the concept of autopoiesis was introduced by Maturana to describe what it means for a biological system to be alive. His answer was: a living system (re)produces itself. It uses its own elements to produce further elements. A living cell, for example, reproduces its own molecules, such as lipids, proteins, and so on, they are not imported from outside (Varela et al., 1974: 188). All operations of autopoietic systems are produced by the system itself and all operations of autopoietic systems are processes of self-reproduction. In this sense, autopoietic systems are operatively closed. The autopoietic operations are only produced internally, they do not come from outside – that is, only the cell itself can produce its specific molecules – and vice versa: all operations of an autopoietic system contribute to the reproduction of the system itself and not to any other system outside. The system’s operative closure, however, does not imply a closed system model. It only implies a closure on the level of its operations in the sense that no operations can enter or leave the system. Nevertheless, autopoietic systems are also open systems: all autopoietic systems have contact with their environment (interactional openness). Living cells, for example, depend on an exchange of energy and matter without which they could not exist. The contact with the environment, however, is regulated by the autopoietic system itself; the system determines when, what and through which channels energy or matter is exchanged with the environment. This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.

Organization 13(1) Introduction


Figure 3. Types of autopoietic systems (Luhmann, 1986: 173). Autopoietic systems systems Autopoietic

Living systems systems Living

Cells Cells

Brains Brains

Psychic systems systems Psychic

Organisms Organisms

Socialsystems systems Social

Societies Societies Organizations Interactions Organizations Interactions

Figure 3: Types of autopoietic systems (Luhmann, 1986: 173)

detail here, but merely want to highlight two important modifications: developed of autopoiesis further by abstracting theLuhmann temporalization andthis theconcept deontologization of the concept of element.it Luhmann’s general of toautopoiesis radicalizes the temporal from its biological roots. concept He wanted create a general, transdisciplinary conaspect of autopoiesis. Varela originally cept of autopoiesis that While should Maturana be open toand re-specifications by theconceptudifferent alized the (e.g. elements of their systems as relatively stable chemdisciplines sociology andbiological psychology). Luhmann in this sense wrote: ical molecules that have to be replaced ‘from time to time’, Luhmann If we abstract the fromelements life and define autopoiesis events as a general formany of systemconceptualizes as momentary without duration. building self-referential closure, we as would admit thatthey Events haveusing no duration but vanish as soon theyhave cometointo being; are non-living autopoietic systems, different modes of1995a: autopoiarethere ‘momentary and immediately pass away’ (Luhmann, 287). etic reproduction, and ageneral principles of autopoietic Through this shift from reproduction of relatively stableorganization elements to a which materialize as life, but also inLuhmann other modes of circularity self- of production of momentary events, radicalizes the and concept reproduction. In other if weoffind autopoietic systems the autopoiesis. Because thewords, elements thenon-living system have no duration, in our world, then and only then will we need a truly general theory of system is urged constantly to produce new elements. If the reproduction autopoiesis which carefully avoids references which hold true only for stops, the system disappears immediately. living systems. (Luhmann, 1986: 172) In addition to temporalization, Luhmann deontologizes the concept of element. Elements are defined as such merely through their integration Luhmann suggests that we speak of autopoiesis generally whenever the eleinto the system. Outside or independently of the system, they have no ments of a system are (re)produced by the elements of the system. This cristatus as elements; that is, they are ‘not ontically pre-given’ (Luhmann, terion, as he points out, is also met by two non-biological types of systems: 1995a: 22). Of course, the elements are composed of different compopsychic systemscould and social systems (with its three subtypes: society, organinents, which be analysed independently of the system but, as zation and interaction) (see Figure 3). elementary units, they are only defined through their relation to other Againstand thein backdrop of through categorization of typesthey of autopoietic elements this sense the function fulfil for thesystems, system Luhmann’s treatment of the concept of autopoiesis becomes clear. Rather as a whole. than transferring Maturana’s concept the fromconcept the biological domain the Asjust a consequence of deontologizing of element, thetoconsociological and psychological domain, Luhmann first abstracted the concept cept of ‘production’ (as in self-reproduction) gets a functional meaning. to a transdisciplinary it to these twonetwork domains. of In other Production refers tolevel thebefore use respecifying of an element in the other elements. The important in thissocial conceptualization is that the words, Luhmann’s concept ofpoint autopoietic and psychic systems is not elementbased and the of the element not two different but two directly on use Maturana’s conceptare of autopoiesis but onissues, an abstraction sides ofWe thecannot same coin. It isthe notabstraction that we first have here, the element and want then thereof. examine in detail but merely thehighlight system two makes use ofmodifications: it, but only by use of it—that by to important themaking temporalization and the is, deonrelating it to other elements—does it become an element. Thus, one can tologization of the concept of element. sayLuhmann’s that the element is produced as a result of beingtheused (Luhmann, general concept of autopoiesis radicalizes temporal aspect 1997: 65–6). We can compare this to the words in a text: only through the of autopoiesis. While Maturana and Varela originally conceptualized the elements of their biological systems as relatively stable chemical molecules that 16 Downloaded from http://org.sagepub.com by STEWART CLEGGUnauthorised on February 22, 2009 This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. distribution forbidden.


have to be replaced ‘from time to time’, Luhmann conceptualizes the elements as momentary events without any duration. Events have no duration but vanish as soon as they come into being; they are ‘momentary and immediately pass away’ (Luhmann, 1995a: 287). Through this shift from a reproduction of relatively stable elements to a production of momentary events, Luhmann radicalizes the concept of autopoiesis. Because the elements of the system have no duration, the system is urged constantly to produce new elements. If the reproduction stops, the system disappears immediately. In addition to temporalization, Luhmann deontologizes the concept of element. Elements are defined as such merely through their integration into the system. Outside or independently of the system, they have no status as elements; that is, they are ‘not ontically pre-given’ (Luhmann, 1995a: 22). Of course, the elements are composed of different components, which could be analysed independently of the system but, as elementary units, they are only defined through their relation to other elements and in this sense through the function they fulfil for the system as a whole. As a consequence of deontologizing the concept of element, the concept of ‘production’ (as in self-reproduction) gets a functional meaning. Production refers to the use of an element in the network of other elements. The important point in this conceptualization is that the element and the use of the element are not two different issues, but two sides of the same coin. It is not that we first have the element and then the system makes use of it, but only by making use of it – that is, by relating it to other elements – does it become an element. Thus, one can say that the element is produced as a result of being used (Luhmann, 1997: 65–6). We can compare this to the words in a text: only through the relation of the words to other words in the text – that is, the context – are (the meanings of) the words defined. In this sense, the integration of the words into the network of other words produces the specific words. One can of course analyse the substratum on which the individual elements of the system rest (i.e. scripture, letters, ink etc.) and find a whole range of factors that are involved in bringing them about, but the particular unities as which the elements function in the system can only be produced by the system itself.

Social Systems as Distinction Generating and Processing Systems Communication as the Basic Element of Social Systems Applying the general concept of autopoiesis to the study of particular systems requires specific operations to be identified on the basis of which the system reproduces itself. If the system is to be clearly distinguished from its environment, it is necessary to identify a single specific mode of operation. This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.


In other words, the researcher can only use the concept of autopoiesis if he or she can specify a single operation on the basis of which the system is reproduced (Luhmann, in this issue). If one cannot find such a type of operation, the concept of autopoiesis cannot be applied; the specific phenomenon cannot be conceptualized as an autopoietic system. For example, according to Luhmann, the ‘human being’ (consisting of live tissue, of a brain and of a psyche) cannot be treated as an autopoietic system as one cannot specify any single specific operation on the basis of which this system as a unity would be (re)produced and thus differentiated from its environment. Rather, the ‘human being’ has to be treated as consisting of four different types of autopoietic systems that do not form a unity (cells, brain, organism, psychic system). Luhmann in this sense writes: ‘A human being may appear to himself or to an observer as a unity, but he is not a system’ (Luhmann, 1995a: 40). A good example for explaining the application of the concept of autopoiesis is the psychic system; that is, the mind. According to Luhmann the psychic system can be conceptualized as an autopoietic system reproducing itself through thoughts: it is a system of thoughts that produces its thoughts through its (network of) thoughts; every thought (independently of its ‘content’) that is produced through the system of thoughts reproduces the psychic system. The psychic system is clearly operatively closed: no thought can enter the psychic system from outside – for example, the thought in the mind of one person cannot enter into the mind of another person – nor can any thought produced by the psychic system get out of the system and enter into the environment. Of course, the internal thought processes are influenced by perturbations (synonymously: irritations) from the environment, but what thoughts are ‘triggered’ from outside depends on the specific thoughts already present in the psychic system. In the case of the psychic system, it can be clearly seen how the system itself (re)produces its distinction to the environment. The distinction in question here is that between a network of thoughts (psychic system) and everything else (environment). Every single thought produced by the network of thoughts reproduces the system/environment distinction due to being a thought and not something else. And every single thought connecting to other thoughts distinguishes between the other thoughts (system) and everything else (environment). One could also say that every thought is constituted as the distinction ‘thought/everything else’ and, as such, it reproduces the system’s distinction ‘network of thoughts/everything else’. In addition, one could say that every single operation of the system reproduces the ‘boundary’ between the system and its environment. In this sense, we do not distinguish between ‘boundary elements’ and elements taking place ‘inside’ the boundary, as the classical systems theory assumes. As long as any thoughts (no matter what they are about) are produced, the ‘boundary’ between system and environment is reproduced. However, as soon as the thought processes



stop, the ‘boundary’ between system and environment disappears; which is equivalent to saying that the system disappears. Analogous to the psychic system, Luhmann conceptualizes the social system as a system that reproduces itself on the basis of one specific mode of operation. In contrast to all existing social theories, he chooses not person or action as the basic social element but communication (or more precisely, the communicative event). According to Luhmann, only communication (neither person nor action) fits the concept of autopoiesis. He writes: Social systems use communications as their particular mode of autopoietic reproduction. Their elements are communications which are recursively produced and reproduced by a network of communications and which cannot exist outside of such a network. (Luhmann, 1986: 174)

In order to understand this conceptualization of social systems, we have to clarify Luhmann’s concept of communication, which is considerably different from the conventional notion of communication as an asymmetrical process of transferring meaning or information from a sender to a receiver. Communication here is understood as a synthesis of three components: information, utterance and understanding, each of which is conceptualized as selection or distinction. In accordance with Shannon and Weaver (1963), Luhmann defined information as a selection from a repertoire of possibilities. Every communication selects what is being communicated from everything that could have been communicated. With utterance Luhmann referred to the form of and reason for a communication: how and why something has been said. One can say that the utterance is the selection of a particular form and reason from all possible forms and reasons. Understanding is conceptualized as the distinction between information and utterance: for a communication to be understood the information has to be distinguished from the utterance. For example, wearing a red tie might be understood as the utterance of a socialist conviction (information). The understanding as distinction between utterance and information ultimately determines the utterance and information, and thus the communication (Figure 4). If, for example, the red tie is not understood as utterance or different information is understood, a different communication altogether is realized. In this sense, Luhmann reverses the way in which communications are conceptualized. Instead of approaching communication from an ‘intended Understanding Understanding

Information Information

Utterance Utterance

Unit communication Unit ofofcommunication

Figure 4: Communication as synthesis of information, utterance and understanding



meaning’ of the communication, he puts the emphasis on the understood meaning. He writes: ‘Communication is made possible, so to speak, from behind, contrary to the temporal course of the process’ (Luhmann, 1995a: 143). An important point in Luhmann’s concept of communication is that the three selections form an ‘insoluble unit’. To be sure, this unit can be divided analytically into its three components, but only as a unit does it constitute a communication. Because of that a communication – as this synthesis of the three selections – cannot be produced by any one individual (psychic system). Instead, communication constitutes an emergent property of the interaction between many (at least two) psychic systems. In this sense, Luhmann writes: Communication is a genuinely social – and the only genuinely social – operation. It is genuinely social insofar as it presupposes the involvement of a multitude of psychic systems but, or better because of that, it cannot be attributed as a unit to a single psychic system. (Luhmann, 1997: 81; original emphasis, our translation)

Thus, although psychic systems are necessarily involved in bringing about communication, the communication (as this unit) cannot be understood as the product of any particular psychic system. At this point, the consequences of choosing the concept of communication – instead of action – as the basic element of social systems become clear. While the concept of action is intimately bound up with the concept of the actor, agent or subject as ‘producer’ of the action, the concept of communication is free of reference to any underlying subject. In this sense, the communication can be said to be produced by the communication system rather than by individual actors. In order to understand the self-referential reproduction of the communication system, it is necessary to take a closer look at the concept of understanding. Understanding, as we said above, is the distinction between utterance and information; but whose understanding is of relevance here? Again, for Luhmann, it is not psychic systems – that is, the individuals’ minds – that are of interest here. Instead, it is the understanding implied by the connecting communications – in the same way as the meaning of a word in a text is only determined through the following words of the text. Thus, the meaning of a communication – that is, what difference a communication makes for later communications – is only determined retrospectively through the later communications. This retrospective determination of the communication through ensuing communications is connected with a fourth selection: acceptance or rejection of the communication. This fourth selection, however, is already part of the ensuing communication. It is important to distinguish between the third and fourth selection: understanding does not imply acceptance; a communication can be understood and still be rejected. This concept of communication This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.


does not focus on acceptance; in contrast to, for example, Habermas’s concept of communication. The distinction between understanding (as part of the first communication) and the selection of acceptance/rejection (as part of the connecting communication) adds a dynamic element to the social system that bridges the gap from the production of one communication to the next: every communication calls for this fourth selection and in this sense calls for a connecting communication. This leads to a very important point concerning the (re)production of communications. In accordance with the general concept of autopoiesis, communications only ‘exist’ as communications through their relation to other communications; as explained above, a communication is only defined through the ensuing communications. This does not mean that without the relation there is nothing at all (there are, for example, words and sounds), but they have no status as communication. In this sense, one can say that it is the network of communications that ‘produces’ the communications. Luhmann writes: Humans cannot communicate; not even their brains can communicate; not even their conscious minds can communicate. Only communications can communicate. (Luhmann, 2002: 169)

This concept of autonomous communications must be considered as Luhmann’s own way of ‘decentring the subject’, a theoretical move that has proven particularly important to the development of postmodern theories and theories of social practices. Among the most influential examples of this shift in focus are Derrida’s notion of text and Foucault’s archaeological analyses of discourses, which reconstruct the socio-cultural world as a non-subjective chain of meaning that can be analysed without reference to a subject. Luhmann’s concept of social system has to be understood as an analogous notion of an autonomous sphere of the social sui generis. While the most radical poststructuralist approaches – such as Foucault’s (1970) prominent analysis of the historical development of science – describe the ‘subject’ as a mere effect of the discourse, Luhmann does not go as far. In fact, the concept of the psychic system, which also considers the psychic as an autonomous realm in its own right, marks an important difference to the early Foucault and Derrida and somehow preserves the idea of a mental, subjective sphere. Yet, by separating the social from the psychic, Luhmann, in his own way of theorizing, emphasizes in accordance with postmodern theories (Koch, 2005) and theories of social practices (Becker, 2005) that it is not adequate to consider the subject as the independent origin of social phenomena. Instead, any analysis of the social has to take into account its collective, inter-subjective ‘nature’ beyond anything that subjects, agents or actors could determine.



The Relation between Social and Psychic Systems Although communications are produced not by individuals (psychic systems) but by the communication system, the individual is not irrelevant for the social system. This is one point in Luhmann’s theory that has been mostly misunderstood and has led to many controversies. For an adequate understanding, it is thus necessary to outline carefully the relation between social and psychic systems. Luhmann conceptualizes social and psychic systems as two different types of autopoietic systems, which are operatively closed with regard to each other. Psychic systems operate on the basis of thoughts and social systems on the basis of communications. No operation of one system can enter into the other system; thoughts cannot become part of the network of communications, nor can communications become part of the network of thoughts. As such, the two types of system constitute environments for each other. However, this does not mean that there are no mutual influences between the systems. The relation between the two systems is not situated on the level of operations but on the level of structures: the systems are structurally coupled to each other. This means that the structures of the two systems are adapted to each other in such a way as to allow mutual irritations. Luhmann speaks of interpenetration between the two systems. Interpenetration occurs if ‘an autopoietic system presupposes the complex achievements of the autopoiesis of another system and can treat them as if they were parts of the own system’ (Luhmann, 1995b: 153; our translation, our emphasis). For the autopoiesis of the social system, the simultaneous (but separate) autopoieses of psychic systems are constitutive. Without psychic systems, social systems are impossible – and to some extent also vice versa. Every communicative event presupposes ‘parallel’ events in the psychic systems. Luhmann writes about the relation between the two systems: We can then say that the mind has the privileged position of being able to disturb, stimulate, and irritate communication. The mind cannot instruct communication, because communication constructs itself. But the mind is a constant source of impulses for the one or the other turn of the operative process inherent in communication. (Luhmann, 2002: 176–7)

Already for the perception of utterances, the social system depends on the psychic system: the social system cannot hear spoken words, nor read letters. Furthermore, psychic systems serve as a memory, since they can remember communicative events beyond their momentary point of existence. Because of their structural coupling, social systems can expect their communications to cause perturbations in the psychic systems and to receive perturbations from the psychic systems when necessary. They can, for example, count on



psychic systems to trigger further communications after every communication. While psychic systems trigger communication processes and vice versa, the processes of the psychic system and the social system do not overlap in any way. Although Luhmann’s strict distinction between social and psychic systems runs counter to our everyday beliefs and many social and psychological theories, it has one important theoretical advantage. It allows for a concept of the social that is clearly distinguished from the psychological. Consequently, the logic of both the social and the psychic can be analysed in its own right. This does not lead to a marginalization of the psychic for the social system, as the criticism has often been. On the contrary, through this differentiation it can be clearly shown that, and in what way, both systems are dependent on each other. The treatment of human beings as environments of the social system (and not as part of it), as Luhmann writes: does not mean that the human being is estimated as less important than traditionally. Anyone who thinks so (and such an understanding underlies either explicitly or implicitly all polemics against this proposal) has not understood the paradigm change in systems theory. Systems theory begins with the unity of the difference between system and environment. The environment is a constitutive feature of this difference, thus it is no less important for the system than the system itself. (Luhmann, 1995a: 212)

The Types of Social Systems: Society, Interaction, Organization Luhmann suggests that we distinguish between three types of system that reproduce their system/environment distinction on the basis of communication: society, (face-to-face) interaction and organization (whether there can be any other types of social system Luhmann leaves open; some people have suggested treating groups as a further type). Society is the system that encompasses all communications; all communications that are produced are part of society and as such they reproduce society. Hence, there are no communications outside society. Society is the autopoietic social system par excellence. Society carries on communication, and whatever carries on communication is society. Society constitutes the elemental units (communications) out of which it is composed, and whatever is constituted in this way is society, is an aspect of the constitutive process itself. (Luhmann, 1995a: 408–9)

As a consequence of this conceptualization, society only exists in the singular: there is only one world society. All communications are part of this one system; there cannot be a second one as there is no basis on which it could distinguish itself from the first one.



In the case of society, we can see very clearly how the system itself reproduces the system/environment distinction with every single operation. Every communication is constituted as the distinction ‘communication/everything else’. As such, every communication redraws the distinction between the system of communication, by which it is produced, and the rest of the world (environment). The communications cannot cross this distinction, as that would require them to become ‘anything else’ – other than communications (in which case they would not be communications). Neither can ‘anything else’ (e.g. a thought) transgress the distinction into the system, as that would require ‘anything else’ to be a communication, in which case it would not be ‘anything else’. Thus, if we conceptualize society as the system of communication, it logically implies an operative closure. In modern times, according to Luhmann, the all-encompassing social system ‘society’ is structured in the first instance into different functional systems; that is, subsystems that fulfil particular functions for society. There is, for example, the legal system, the economic system and the political system. These subsystems are themselves operatively closed with regard to each other in the sense that each reproduces itself on the basis of a particularly coded communication. That is to say, the communications of the different functional systems ‘carry’ different (binary) distinctions, which distinguish these communications as belonging to a particular functional system from those belonging to other ones. The communications of the legal system, for example, use the binary distinction ‘legal/illegal’, the economic system the distinction ‘payment/non-payment’ and the political system the distinction ‘power/non-power’. The particular code of a functional system determines what information value a communication can possess for other communications of the particular system: legal communications in this sense are (read by other legal communications as being) only about something being either legal or illegal, economic communications about payments, and so on. Because of their respective coding the different functional systems cannot ‘exchange’ communications; a communication about legality has no (direct) information value for communications about payments or about power. Put in a nutshell, this means that the different functional systems operate according to their own logic (determined by its coding) and treat other communications merely as perturbations that they process accordingly (for a reader-friendly overview, see Luhmann, 1989). Apart from its functional subsystems, society also encompasses the other two types of social system: (face-to-face) interaction and organization. These types of system are also communication systems and as such reproduce society (on the relations between the three systems, see Drepper, 2005; Seidl, 2005b). In contrast to society and its subsystems, however, they reproduce themselves on the basis of one specific type of communication each. In other words, within society, they reproduce the distinction ‘specific type of communication/other types of communication’. The specific communication on



the basis of which a social system of the type (face-to-face) interaction distinguishes itself is the communication based on the participants’ mutual perception of their presence. To be sure, perception as such clearly is a psychic phenomenon – communication systems cannot perceive. However, reflexive perception gives rise to communication, as Luhmann explains: If alter perceives that alter is perceived and that this perception of being perceived is perceived, alter must assume that alter’s behaviour is interpreted as communication whether this suits alter or not, and this forces alter to control the behaviour as communication. (Luhmann, 1995a: 413)

Thus, every communication refers to the fact that the participants perceive each other as being perceived as present – a physical contact (e.g. face-to-face or by voice during a telephone call) is thus a precondition. The organization is the other type of social system distinguishing itself within society from society. It reproduces itself on the basis of decisions (to be precise, decision communications). Luhmann in this sense conceptualizes organizations as ‘systems that consist of decisions and that themselves produce the decisions of which they consist through the decisions of which they consist’ (Luhmann, 1992a: 166; our translation, our emphasis). The system/environment distinction here is drawn as that between a system of decisions and all other communications. Every single decision produces and reproduces this distinction. The organization as such is nothing but the processing of this ‘decision/other communications’ distinction. So far, we have explained Luhmann’s general theory of social system. In the following section we will concentrate on the organization in particular and elaborate on its specific mode of reproduction.

Organizations as Decision Processing Systems The Decision as Element of the Organization Based on the conceptualization of organization as the self-referential reproduction of decisions, mentioned above, Luhmann unfolds his organization theory from an analysis and discussion of the concept of decision (Luhmann, 2000a; 2005). He complains that a thorough analysis of the concept of decision is lacking in organization studies so far and cannot even be found in the literature on decision theory. At most, one can find a definition of decision as ‘choice’, but this merely replaces decision with a synonym that is equally unclear. In this form, the decision is not distinguished from other concepts, such as action. Sometimes, the definition is enriched by adding that the choice has to be oriented according to ‘alternatives’. However, this does not This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.


help either as it does not say anything about the choice itself. It only displaces the problem to the question of how to conceptualize the alternatives. Usually, the answer is a tautology: the alternative is that between which one chooses; the choice defines which options are treated as alternatives and which are not. Another move is to attribute the decision to a ‘decision maker’: the will of the decision maker produces the choice. This again only displaces the problem to the question of what causes the will of the decision maker, leading to an infinite chain of attributions, which leaves the original question about the decision unanswered. Alternatively, this chain of attributions is cut short by referring to the arbitrariness of choice, in this case leaving open what this arbitrariness consists in. Treated in this way, the concept of decision itself remains a ‘mystery’. In order to arrive at a fruitful concept of decision, Luhmann suggests reconceptualizing the existing approaches. This new concept would have to acknowledge explicitly the fundamental circularity and thus paradoxicality in the notion of decision, rather than denying it or treating it as a sign of a faulty conceptualization. The circularity or paradox is not only a ‘part’ of the notion of decision, it is, one could almost say, its ‘essence’. In this sense, Luhmann also referred to Heinz von Foerster’s (1992: 14) famous aphorism: ‘Only those questions that are in principle undecidable, we can decide.’ Paradoxes and paradoxical concepts in particular are not easy to handle. They tend to block or lock up our thinking and communication. Because of that, paradoxes have mostly been avoided in organization studies. Based on his theory of distinction, however, Luhmann found a way of handling paradoxes in a fruitful way. A decision, as we said above, has something to do with a selection of one alternative from all given alternatives. This can be conceptualized as a nesting of two interlocked distinctions. The first distinction distinguishes the alternatives (marked side) from the rest of the world (unmarked side), the second distinction distinguishes within the marked side of the first distinction the chosen alternative (marked side) from the excluded alternatives (Figure 5). The decision is not just the distinction of the chosen alternative, but the combination of these two distinctions. This combination, as clearly indicated in Figure 5, is paradoxical. The marked side of the first distinction is both marked and unmarked – the excluded is included. The alternatives

Chosen Chosen alternative alternative (marked side) (marked side)

Excluded alternative Excluded alternative (unmarked side) (unmarked side)

Marked side Marked side

Unmarked side Unmarked side

Figure 5: The decision paradox



distinguished by the first distinction both are alternatives – in the sense of being equally valid (otherwise they are not real alternatives) – and they are not alternatives, otherwise the chosen alternative would not be the chosen one. On the basis of this analysis, Luhmann develops his sociological theory of organization. In line with his general theoretical framework, he conceptualizes decision not as a mental operation, but as a specific form of communication. In other words, decisions are not first made and then communicated, but decisions are decision communications. This is, of course, not to deny that there might be some mental operations that take a similar form, but for organization theory this is not of direct relevance. In contrast to ‘ordinary’ communications, decision communications are ‘compact communications’ (Luhmann, 2000a: 185) consisting of two interlocked distinctions. While an ordinary communication communicates only a specific content that has been selected (e.g. ‘I trust you’), a decision communication communicates also – explicitly or implicitly – a set of rejected alternatives (e.g. ‘We will employ person A as our sales representative and not any of the other candidates’). As such, the decision communication is paradoxical: the more it communicates that there are ‘real’ alternatives to the one that has been chosen, the less the chosen alternative will appear as justified and thus the less the decision will appear as ‘decided’; and the more the selected alternative is being justified as the right selection, the less the other options will appear as alternatives and thus the less the decision will appear as ‘decision’. Luhmann writes: The decision has to inform about itself, but also about its alternative, thus, about the paradox, that the alternative is an alternative (otherwise the decision would not be a decision) and at the same time is not an alternative (otherwise the decision would not be a decision). (Luhmann, 2000a: 142; our translation)

Due to their paradoxical form, decision communications are on the one hand much more ‘fragile’ than ordinary communications, calling for their own deconstruction by ensuing communications. If decision communications are to be successfully completed, particular communicative provisions are required. Luhmann refers to them as means of deparadoxization; that is, they are means of concealing the paradoxical form of the decision (on this point, see particularly Knudsen, 2005; Ortmann, 2002). Below, we will discuss several of these mechanisms, in particular the reference to previous decisions as decision premises and the fiction of the decision maker. On the other hand, it is due to this particular (paradoxical) form of decision communication that organizations can achieve results (e.g. mass production of goods) that would not be possible in other settings. The particular achievement of the decision can be described as absorbing uncertainty for ensuing decisions, as will be described in the following subsection.



Uncertainty Absorption: Organizational Process With the concept of uncertainty absorption, Luhmann describes the organizational process; that is, the process of one decision connecting to the other. The concept itself was originally taken form the work of March and Simon, who wrote: Uncertainty absorption takes place when inferences are drawn from a body of evidence and the inferences, instead of the evidence itself, are then communicated. (March and Simon, 1958: 165)

While for March and Simon uncertainty absorption was merely a peripheral concept in their organization theory, Luhmann puts it right at its centre: the concept of uncertainty absorption captures the very logic of organization. In the connection from one decision to the next one, the uncertainty of the first decision situation (i.e. uncertainty about the consequences of the given alternatives) disappears. For the second decision, it is irrelevant what the initial decision situation looked like, it can take the chosen alternative as a clear point of reference and does not have to evaluate the first decision situation once more. For the second decision, the first decision has been ‘decided’ and does not have to be decided once more. As such, every decision reduces the complexity for ensuing decisions by producing stable points of reference for them, which as a process makes possible extremely complex decision processes.

Decision Premises: Organizational Structures Directly related to the concept of uncertainty absorption is the concept of the decision premise, which refers to the structural preconditions that define a specific decision situation. It was again classical organization theory where the concept originated (Simon, 1947). Every single decision (unless just ignored, in which case it would not be a ‘real’ decision) serves as a decision premise for later decisions. It defines the conditions for these decisions, which accept those without further examination as simply ‘given’ (Luhmann, 2000a: 222). To bring the concepts of uncertainty absorption and decision premise together, we can say: uncertainty absorption takes place when a decision is used by subsequent decisions as a decision premise. For example, if it has been decided to sack an employee, subsequent decisions (orienting themselves according to the decision) will not decide on anything involving that employee in the future. (However, this does not exclude the possibility that it might be decided explicitly to reject the implication of the decision premise.) In many cases, decision



premises not only restrict subsequent decision situations, but also actually create them. For example, the decision about the sacking of the employee calls forth decisions on whether to replace him/her or not. This concept of structure as both limiting and enabling decisions, and as both medium and outcome of decisions, is in line with Giddens’ idea of the ‘duality of structure’ (1984). However, in contrast to Giddens, the relation between structure and action/operation is not ‘mediated’ by an agent but by the autopoiesis of the system – it is the network of decision that produces the decisions: ‘only decisions can decide’. While every decision can be said to possess structural value for subsequent decisions, Luhmann suggested restricting the meaning of the term ‘decision premise’ to those premises that are binding not only for the directly ensuing decision, but also for a multitude of decisions. As he writes, such decision premises serve as ‘some sort of anticipated, generalized uncertainty absorption’ (Luhmann, 2000a: 261; our translation). Most of these farreaching decision premises are explicitly decided upon – the so-called decidable decision premises. Luhmann distinguishes three types of these: programmes, personnel assignment and communication channels. Programmes are decision premises that define criteria for correct decision making. They may have an ‘if – then’ format – ‘if this is the case, then do that’ (conditional programme); or they may define some goals to be achieved with the decisions, for instance increase of market share (goal programme). Personnel recruitment and assignment concern the recruitment and appointment of the organization’s members to positions with regard to the expected ‘perturbations’ they will cause in the decision processes. Communication channels (or the ‘organization of the organization’) define what decisions have to be treated as decision premises by which other decisions. Typical examples are the hierarchy and the matrix organization. In his latest works, Luhmann (2000a) added another type of decision premise: the so-called undecidable decision premise. In contrast to the decidable decision premise described above, these are premises that are not explicitly decided on, but are merely some sort of ‘by-product’ of the decision process. These premises are undecidable, since the organization does not see their contingency and thus takes them as ‘necessary’ and unchangeable. There are two types of undecidable decision premises. Luhmann calls the first one organizational culture. Decision premises of this type refer to the way in which an organization deals with its own processes of decision making. For example, if the organization always produces the same kind of decision (e.g. recruiting merely male candidates), this might condense to an undecided decision premise for future decisions – in the sense of ‘we have always done it this way’. The second type of undecidable decision premise is the cognitive routine, which refers to the way the environment is being



conceptualized by the organization. Cognitive routines, for example, inform about characteristics of the customer (note that ‘the customer’ is an internal construct of the organization). Decision premises are an important means of deparadoxizing the paradox of decisions: decisions are usually substantiated by reference to previous decisions, which are themselves not questioned any more. For example, the decision to acquire a particular new company might be substantiated with earlier decisions to increase the production capacity, to buy only from a particular manufacturer, to make all investments before the end of the year and so on. In this way, the original undecidability of the decision is covered by shifting attention away from the decision to the decision premises, which at this moment are themselves not being questioned. The important point is that the arbitrariness (i.e. paradox) of the focal decision is not eliminated but merely covered. The focal decision, while ultimately undecidable, is presented (to a large extent) as merely the programmable application of fixed decision premises. As an additional means of deparadoxization, organizations produce the fiction of the decision maker, on which we will focus in the next section.

The Fiction of the Decision Maker In line with Luhmann’s distinction between social and psychic systems, decisions are not produced by ‘decision makers’ but by the network of decisions. In spite of that decisions are usually presented (internally and externally) as if they were made by a decision maker; that is, by the psychic system of one or several members. The ‘decision maker’ in this sense is a central organizational fiction (Luhmann, 2000a; 2005). This fiction usually takes the form of an attribution of motives to the decision: why certain decisions are made is explained with reference to the motives of the decision maker; for example, ‘rational’ considerations on behalf of the organization or personal career motives (see also Becker and Haunschild, 2003). Similarly to the reference to decision premises, the attribution to the decision maker redirects the attention away from the arbitrariness of the decision to the question of what made the decision maker decide in this way. As such, the original paradox of decision is shifted away from the decision itself to the (fictional) decision maker and thus out of the realm of decision – the motives of the decision maker are not part of the decision. Therefore, whether or not a decision is accepted as a decision premise by later decisions depends on whether it is assumed that the (fictional) decision maker had good (‘rational’) motives. Again, we want to stress that the paradox of decision cannot be solved or eliminated. The ultimate undecidability of decisions is merely moved out of sight.



Summary In this introductory paper to the Special Issue, we have presented and explained the key concepts of Luhmann’s oeuvre. Rather than focusing on his organization theory exclusively, we decided, as mentioned above, to outline his entire theory. Not only is it much easier in this way to access Luhmann’s complex way of theorizing about organization, but it also seemed necessary to us to show how his organization theory is embedded in his general theoretical framework. For this purpose, we chose to unfold his work from the perspective of his distinction theory. This is certainly not the only way of reading his work, but it is the one that Luhmann himself favoured towards his end. Apart from that, this perspective offers a view on Luhmann’s work that should help in removing the false prejudice against it as ‘old-fashioned theorizing’, ‘technocratic thinking’, ‘locked up in a structure-functional frame of mind’, ‘solely interested in order and stability’ (such descriptions abound). Rather, it shows that despite its heritage Luhmann’s theory can be counted among the most innovative approaches, having also many parallels to the latest sociological and philosophical modes of theorizing (in particular also postmodern approaches). At this point, we may summarize our explanation by highlighting three aspects of Luhmann’s theory: his epistemology, his social theory and his particular organization theory: (1) The epistemological aspect: organizations are processes that come into being by continuously constructing and reconstructing themselves by means of using distinctions, which mark what belongs to their realm and what not. In brief: organizations are ‘autopoietic’ systems. (2) The social-theoretical aspect: the organization belongs to a social sphere sui generis possessing its own logic, which cannot be traced back to human ‘actors’ or ‘subjects’. In brief: organizations are ‘social systems’. (3) The genuinely organizational aspect: organizations are a specific kind of social system characterized by a particular kind of distinction – the decision. In brief: organizations are decision systems.

Note This Special Issue has benefited immensely from the support of many people. The editors would like to thank particularly Dirk Baecker, Nils Brunsson, Robert Chia, Robert Cooper, Thomas Drepper, Doris Eikhof, Axel Haunschild, Alfred Kieser, André Kieserling, Werner Kirsch, Loet Leydesdorff, Stephen Linstead, Günther Ortmann, Veronika Tacke and Peter Walgenbach for their contributions to the review process.



References Bakken, T. and Hernes, T., eds (2003) Autopoietic Organization Theory: Drawing on Niklas Luhmann’s Social Systems Perspective. Oslo: Copenhagen Business School Press. Becker, K. H. (2005) ‘Luhmann’s Systems Theory and Theories of Social Practices’, in D. Seidl and K. H. Becker (eds) Niklas Luhmann and Organization Studies. Copenhagen: Copenhagen Business School Press. Becker, K. H. and Haunschild, A. (2003) ‘The Impact of Boundaryless Careers on Organizational Decision Making: An Analysis From the Perspective of Luhmann’s Theory of Social Systems’, International Journal of Human Resource Management 14(5): 713– 27. Cooper, R. and Burrell, G. (1988) ‘Modernism, Post Modernism and Organizational Analysis: An Introduction’, Organization Studies 9(1): 91–112. Drepper, T. (2005) ‘Organization and Society’, in D. Seidl and K. H. Becker (eds) Niklas Luhmann and Organization Studies. Copenhagen: Copenhagen Business School Press. Foucault, M. (1970) The Order of Things. New York, NY: Pantheon. Giddens, A. (1984) The Constitution of Society: Outline of the Theory of Structuration. Cambridge: Polity Press. Højlund, H. and Knudsen, M., eds (2003) Organiseret Kommunikation-Systemteoretiske Analyser. København: Samfundslitteratur. Kieserling, A. (1999) Kommunikation unter Anweseuden: Studien über Inter-aktionssysteme. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Knudsen, M. (2005) ‘Managing the Paradox of Decision Making’, in D. Seidl and K. H. Becker (eds) Niklas Luhmann and Organization Studies. Copenhagen: Copenhagen Business School Press. Koch, J. (2005) ‘Luhmann’s Systems Theory and Postmodernism’, in D. Seidl and K. H. Becker (eds) Niklas Luhmann and Organization Studies. Copenhagen: Copenhagen Business School Press. Luhmann, N. (1986) ‘The Autopoiesis of Social Systems’, in F. Geyer and J. Van D. Zeuwen (eds) Sociocybernetic Paradoxes: Observation, Control and Evolution of Self-Steering Systems, pp. 172–92. London: Sage. Luhmann, N. (1987) Archimedes und wir. Interviews, eds D. Baecker and G. Stanitzeck. Berlin: Merve. Luhmann, N. (1988) Die Wirtschaft der Gesellschaft. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Luhmann, N. (1989) Ecological Communication. Chicago. IL: University of Chicago Press. Luhmann, N. (1992a) ‘Organisation’, in W. Küpper and G. Ortmann (eds) Rationalität, Macht und Spiele in Organisationen, pp. 165–85. Opladen: West-deutscher Verlag. Luhmann, N. (1992b) ‘Wer kennt Wil Martens? Eine Anmerkung zum Problem der Emergenz sozialer Systeme’, Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie 44: 139– 142. Luhmann, N. (1993) Das Recht der Gesellschaft. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Luhmann, N. (1995a) Social Systems. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Luhmann, N. (1995b) Soziologische Aufklärung 6: Die Soziologie und der Mensch. Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag. Luhmann, N. (1997) Die Gesellschaft der Gesellschaft. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Luhmann, N. (1998) Die Wirtschaft der Gesellschaft. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Luhmann, N. (2000a) Organisation und Entscheidung. Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag. Luhmann, N. (2000b) Die Politik der Gesellschaft. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Luhmann, N. (2000c) Art as a Social System. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Luhmann, N. (2002) ‘How Can the Mind Participate in Communication?’, in N. Luhmann (ed.) Theories of Distinction: Redescribing the Descriptions of Modernity, pp. 169–84. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.



Luhmann, N. (2003) ‘Organization’, in T. Bakken and T. Hernes (eds) Autopoietic Organization Theory: Drawing on Niklas Luhmann’s Social Systems Perspective, pp. 31–52. Oslo: Copenhagen Business School Press. Luhmann, N. (2005) ‘The Paradox of Decision Making’, in D. Seidl and K. H. Becker (eds) Niklas Luhmann and Organization Studies. Copenhagen: Copenhagen Business School Press. March, J. G. and Simon, H. A. (1958) Organizations. New York, NY: John Wiley. Mingers, J. (1995) Self-Producing Systems: Implications and Applications of Autopoiesis. New York, NY: Plenum Press. Ortmann, G. (2002) ‘As If – Undecidability, Fictionality, Decisionism’, paper presented at the International Symposium on Niklas Luhmann and Organization Studies, Munich, 6–8 June 2002. Seidl, D. (2005a) ‘The Basic Concepts of Luhmann’s Theory of Social Systems’, in D. Seidl and K. H. Becker (eds) Niklas Luhmann and Organization Studies. Copenhagen: Copenhagen Business School Press. Seidl, D. (2005b) ‘Organisation and Interaction’, in D. Seidl and K. H. Becker (eds) Niklas Luhmann and Organization Studies. Copenhagen: Copenhagen Business School Press. Seidl, D. (2005c) Organisational Identity and Self-transformation: An Autopoietic Perspective. Aldershot: Ashgate. Seidl, D. and Becker, K. H., eds (2005) Niklas Luhmann and Organization Studies. Copenhagen: Copenhagen Business School Press. Shannon, C. and Weaver, W. (1963) The Mathematical Theory of Communication. Urbana, IL: Illinois University Press. Simon, H. A. (1947) Administrative Behavior. New York, NY: Macmillan. Spencer Brown, G. (1969) Laws of Form. London: Allen and Unwin. Varela, F., Maturana, H. and Uribe, R. (1974) ‘Autopoiesis: The Organization of Living Systems, its Characterization and a Model’, Biosystems 5: 187–96. von Foerster, H. (1992) ‘Ethics and Second-Order Cybernetics’, Cybernetics and Human Knowing 1: 9–19. Vos, J. P. (2002) The Making of Strategic Realities: An Application of the Social Systems Theory of Niklas Luhmann. Eindhoven: Eindhoven University Press.


Discourses



30 Varieties of Discourse: On the Study of Organizations through Discourse Analysis Mats Alvesson and Dan Karreman

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ecent developments in philosophy, sociology, social psychology and communications theory (Deetz, 1992; Potter & Wetherell, 1987; Rosenau, 1992; Silverman, 1993; Steier, 1991) have demonstrated the ubiquity and importance of language in social science. Indeed, it seems that language (and language use) is increasingly being understood as the most important phenomenon, accessible for empirical investigation, in social and organizational research. To the extent social research is an empirical enterprise, most of it seems to be connected to how people use language – sometimes how language uses people – in particular situations. Interviews, for example, are obviously rich in linguistic interaction and most observations concern people engaged in conversations. Arguably, the insight of the significance of language has contributed to an interest in discourses. This is part of the general turn in social science, including, among other disciplines, organization studies (Alvesson & Karreman, 2000). The question is what kind of discourse organizational analysts ought to pay attention to, and how much attention they ought to pay to dis course. The scope of this article is primarily theoretical and methodological (i.e. it concerns the interface between theory and method where we develop a standpoint on how we conceive and interpret empirical material). It aims to clarify the key analytical options available in discourse analysis and their consequences for the study of organizational and other social phenomena. There is a wide array of ways of using the term discourse in social science and organization studies. It is often difficult to make sense of what people Source: Human Relations, 53(9) (2000): 1125–1149.


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mean by discourse. In many texts, there are no definitions or discussions of what discourse means. Authors treat the term as if the word has a clear, broadly agreed upon meaning. This is simply not the case. An important aim of this article is to reduce the confusion and facilitate more informed research into organizational discourse. The article proceeds from what seems to be two major and quite different approaches to ‘discourse’ in organization studies: the study of the social text (talk and written text in its social action contexts) and the study of social reality as discursively constructed and main tained (the shaping of social reality through language). The former approach highlights the ‘talked’ and ‘textual’ nature of everyday interaction in organiz ation. The latter focuses on the determination of social reality through his torically situated discursive moves. Put differently, in the former approach discourses are viewed as local achievements, analytically distinct from other levels of social reality (such as the levels of meaning and practice), and with little or no general content. The latter approach, on the other hand, views discourses as general and prevalent systems for the formation and articulation of ideas in a particular period of time. In the latter approach – in viewing discourses as ‘Discourses’ – other levels of social reality are more or less shaped or even subordinated by the power–knowledge relations established in discourse. A common problem in organization analysis is, methodologically speaking, how to move beyond the specific empirical material, typically linguistic in its character (interview accounts, questionnaire responses, observed talk in ‘natural settings’ and written documents) and address discourses with a capital D – the stuff beyond the text functioning as a powerful ordering force. Traps and possi bilities will be discussed and the implications of moving from discourses to Grand Discourses are also considered.

The Many Meanings of Discourse The word discourse has, as indicated above, no agreed-upon definition, and confusingly many uses. As Potter and Wetherell remark, discourse and dis course analysis ‘is a field in which it is perfectly possible to have two books [on the matter] with no overlap in content at all’ (Potter & Wetherell, 1987: 6). Discourse may mean almost everything (Grant et al., 1998; Keenoy et al., 1997). However, it is possible to identify some distinctive takes on the term among discourse analysts. Keenoy et al. (1997), for example, make two dis tinctions. The first is between authors using discourse as a device for making linguistic sense of organizations and organizational phenomena versus seeing discourses in the context of revealing the ambiguities of social constructions and the indeterminacy of organizational experiences. The second is between a position looking at discourse in a social context, including the social and


Alvesson and Karreman • Varieties of Discourse 233

political dimensions in addition to the discursive versus a more narrow focus on the text per se (treated as existing in a contextual vacuum).1 In another review, Potter (1997) identifies five versions of discourse analysis. Three of these relate to linguistic and cognitive psychology and are of limited interest here. The fourth version is the standard Foucauldian pos ition as developed below. The fifth version is Potter and Wetherell’s (1987) own. Here the task is to study discourse as texts and talk in social practices. Language is viewed as a medium for interaction, rather than as a system of differences (as in structuralism), or a set of rules for transforming statements (as in Foucauldian genealogies). Analysis of discourse becomes analysis of what people do with language in specific social settings (Potter, 1997: 146). A well known and often copied take on discourse is usually attributed to Foucault. It is typically described to advance from the assumption that dis courses, or sets of statements, constitute objects and subjects. Language, put together as discourses, arranges and naturalizes the social world in a specific way and thus informs social practices. These practices constitute particular forms of subjectivity in which human subjects are managed and given a certain form, viewed as self-evident and rational (Foucault, 1976, 1980). Foucault proposed two ways of investigating discourses: archaeology and genealogy. Archaeology can be seen as directly related to the clarification of the history of the rules that regulate particular discourses. Genealogy looks after the forces and events that shape discursive practices into units, wholes and singularities. As Davidson (1986: 227) puts it: Archaeology attempts to isolate the level of discursive practices and for mulate the rules of production and transformation for these practices. Genealogy, on the other hand, concentrates on the forces and relations of power connected to discursive practices; it does not insist on a separation of rules for production of discourse and relations of power. But genealogy does not so much displace archaeology as widen the kind of analysis to be pursued.

The reviews of Keenoy and Potter are valuable but we feel that research options and interests signalled by the word discourse are not exhausted by their reviews. And although Foucault is probably the single most influential author on how social scientists use the word discourse, it is clear that students of discourse feel that neither the archaeological, nor the genealogical approach exhaust their research possibilities. Within social science and organization studies ‘discourse’ generally signals a variety of interests, often difficult to grasp. While recognizing the constraints of demands on rigour, we cannot help sometimes feeling that the word discourse is used to cover up muddled thinking or postponed decisions on vital analytical matter – as often is the case with popular words and areas. Discourse sometimes comes close to standing for everything, and thus nothing. One possible explanation is that


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researchers may want to avoid choosing between a language and a meaning focus –meaning here signalling a relatively stable way of relating to and making sense of something, a meaning being interrelated to an attitude, value, belief or idea. The motive may be to avoid the problems of assuming or investigating a set of stable and connected meanings at the same time as a desire to withhold an interest in substantive social phenomena beyond the level of language. This motive may be acceptable, but it calls for attempts to sort out the aspects involved: how language use is related to other issues (meanings, practices) must be clearly elaborated. Sometimes discourse is used to signal a firm shift from traditional con cerns (inner worlds such as values and cognition as well as from external issues such as practices and events) to a strong interest in language in action/ social context. Here the term is used to focus on language and language use in social context, not meanings, the actor’s point of view or something similar. For them, language represents another focus than cognition. There are, as critics of interviews referred to above point out, methodological reasons for this. We will refer below to Potter and Wetherell (1987) as coherent proponents of such a view. In many cases, however, discourse signals a less coherent, perhaps even more half-hearted – one might also say less reductionist – effort to get away from ‘older’ concerns about stable cognition, values, beliefs, ideologies and other meaning related issues. Discourse typically vaguely signals an interest in language and language use, but often also in these other issues. It may, for example, signal a set of representations and ways of structuring reality that put strong imprints on cognition and attitudes. Sometimes cognition and attitudes or a general way of relating to something become incorporated by the concept of discourse. Here the interest in discourse represents a started but not com pleted linguistic turn, a moderate version of it. Language per se is not strongly focused, as ‘other’ phenomena (such as ideas, meanings, etc.) get their share of attention. Quite often, discourse does not seem to signal any particular interest in language, but refers to conceptions, a line of reasoning, a theoretical pos ition or something similar. Kerfoot and Knights (1998: 21), for example, refer to ‘conceptions of the “New Man”, the Men’s Movement, Men’s Rights . . .’ and then, a few lines later, talk about ‘these various discourses’, and then again, ‘this diverse range of activities’, without any apparent distinctions.

Mapping Versions of Discourse Analysis It seems to us that many of the different versions of discourse analysis can be fruitfully analysed along two key dimensions. The first is the connection between discourse and meaning (broadly defined): does discourse precede and incorporate cultural meaning and subjectivity or is it best understood as referring to the level of talk (and other forms of social texts) loosely coupled This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.

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Close-range interest Close-range interest (local-situational context) (local-situational context) yopic MM YOPIC

Discourse Discourse determination determination

Discourse Discourse autonomy autonomy

Muscular M USCULAR

Transient TRANSIENT (discourse/meaning (discourse/meaning unrelated)

(discourse/meaning (discourse/meaning collapsed) collapsed)

unrelated)

GRANDIOSE Grandiose Long-range interest Long-range interest (marco-system context) (macro-system context)

Figure 1: Two core dimensions in discourse studies Figure 1 Two core dimensions in discourse studies

to the level of meaning? The second is the formative range of discourse: is discourse best understood as a highly local, context-dependent phenomenon meaning: overlapping, loosely broader, toDiscourse be studied and in detail or does it mean an tightly interestcoupled, in understanding coupled or uncoupled more generalized vocabularies/ways of structuring the social world? Below, we will develop and elaborate the meaning of each dimension. Combining language use is totally devoid– of meaning.range Language calls for intellitheNotwo dimensions used above formative and use discourse/meaninggibility.– Language distinct from other of noiseofmaking. Thestudies disrelation results in use theisfollowing matrix forkinds the analysis discourse tinction is, as always, a bit tricky as noise making without words may in social science (illustrated in Figure 1).

communicate intentionally. A cough, for example, may work as a warning or sanction. However, one may between transient meaning, Discourse anddistinguish Meaning: Overlapping, Tightlyemerging from specificCoupled, interaction,Loosely and durable meaning,or existing so to speak ‘beyond’ Coupled Uncoupled specific linguistic interaction, in a more or less inert and stable manner.2 This broader such ascalls cultural and Nolatter, language usemeaning is totallyincludes devoid meaning-phenomena of meaning. Language use for intelli 3 We have individual ideas, orientations, ways of sensemaking, and cognition. gibility. Language use is distinct from other kinds of noise making. The more of a is, spectrum of opportunities research positions in thewords relationdistinction as always, a bit trickyand as noise making without may ship between intentionally. discourse in the of language and language useas and communicate A sense cough, for example, may work a meanwarning ‘existing’ beyond – although hardly independent of – the temporal and orings sanction. specific use of These positions rangetransient from viewing discourse/ However, onelanguage. may distinguish between meaning, emergas inseparable or strictly overlapping, to imagining various of ingmeaning from specific interaction, and durable meaning, existing sokinds to speak

‘beyond’ specific linguistic interaction, in a more or less inert and stable Downloaded from http://hum.sagepub.com by STEWART CLEGG on February 22, 2009 This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.

236 Discourses

manner.2 This latter, broader meaning includes meaning-phenomena such as cultural and individual ideas, orientations, ways of sensemaking, and cognition.3 We have more of a spectrum of opportunities and research positions in the relationship between discourse in the sense of language and language use and meanings ‘existing’ beyond – although hardly independent of – the temporal and specific use of language. These positions range from viewing discourse/meaning as inseparable or strictly overlapping, to imagining various kinds of coupling, from tightly to loosely, and then to treat discourse and meaning as (almost) uncoupled – except from highly limited and temporal effects of discourse on meaning, fading away with the next moment of language use. We will start by illustrating the use of a concept of discourse including not only language but also other aspects, such as cognition. Language is the central focus of all post-structuralism. In the broadest terms, language defines the possibilities of meaningful existence at the same time as it limits them. Through language, our sense of ourselves as distinct subjectivities is constituted. Subjectivity is constituted through a myriad of what post-structuralists term ‘discursive practices’: practices of talk, text, writing, cognition, argumentation, and representation generally. (Clegg, 1989: 151)

Discursive practices are here a collection of various stuff, including cognition. Discourse drives subjectivity (our sense of ourselves, including our feelings, thoughts and orientations), presumably in an all-embracing and muscular fashion. This position is also expressed by Weedon (1987: 41) who views discourse ‘as a structuring principle of society, in social institutions, modes of thought and individual subjectivity’. This ‘structuring principle’ determines meaning and subjectivity: ‘subjectivity is itself an effect of discourse’ (1987: 86). Another version allows for some separation of discourse and meaning. The former affects (frames) the latter. Watson (1994: 113) for example, defines discourse as ‘a connected set of statements, concepts, terms and expressions which constitutes a way of talking and writing about a particular issue, thus framing the way people understand and act with respect to that issue’. Here we find a relatively tight coupling between discourse which influences talking and writing which in their turn frame cognition and actions. However, discourse does not incorporate the latter phenomena. Such framing could, one may imagine, be strong or weak, even though the assumption seems to be that discourse typically is powerful in this respect. This formulation still gives some space for variation in the relationship between discourse and other ‘extra-discursive’ social phenomena. The relationship is not solely a definitional matter. There is some space to investigate it empirically. Some authors clearly distinguish between discourse and other elements. Van Dijk (1993: 251), for example, argues that in order to relate discourse



and society, ‘we need to examine in detail the role of social representations in the minds of social actors’. He also suggests that (critical) discourse analy sis, ‘requires true multi-disciplinarity, and account of intricate relationships between text, talk, social cognition, power, society and culture’. Here cogni tion and other non-linguistic elements are not just something that is ‘run over’, included or colonized by discourse, but are vital elements to examine. Another possibility is to assume that the level of the discourse should, in terms of method, not be directly connected to another kind of phenomenon. We can study discourse and see what it accomplishes as a linguistic performance, but refrain from drawing any conclusions on, or making assumptions about the relationship to what is more strictly seen as other phenomena. One may argue that the level of discourse has some autonomy in relationship to other levels: language use follows its own dynamics. Talking in certain ways or reproducing a specific vocabulary does not imply any specific cognition, feelings or practices. One may talk about the weather without constituting one’s subjectivity as a meteorologist. People may produce politically correct opinions in interviews or conversations without any particular feelings or convictions being involved. One may also take the position that the study of the discursive is (a) a major task and (b) may be carried out with a fairly high degree of rigour. Addressing what may go on in people’s heads and hearts is another issue, disrupting discourse analysis, and may only be carried out in a speculative manner. This seems to be the position of discourse and conversational analysts and ethnomethodologists (e.g. Potter & Wetherell, 1987; Silverman, 1993). We can here talk about a ‘non-relation’ or an agnostic view on the relationship between discourse and other elements (such as emotions, con victions and beliefs). Instead of embracing the increasingly popular view of discourse as constituting reality and subjectivity one may be more careful in one’s assumptions. The idea of fragile subjects constituted by and/or within strong discourse may ascribe too much power to the latter (Newton, 1998), which is, of course not to say that discourse cannot be very powerful. There may be considerable variation. The ways in which subjects relate to discourse may be teflon-like; the language they are exposed to or use may not ‘stick’. Rather than the discourse-driven subject, the subject may be a politically conscious language user, telling the right kind of stories to the right audiences at the right moment. Jackall (1988) suggests that the world of corporate management calls for sophisticated, politically conscious language use, in which the language user separates or loosely couples discourse and meaning: The higher one goes in the corporate world, the more essential is the mastery of provisional language. In fact, advancement beyond the upperlevels depends greatly on one’s ability to manipulate a whole variety of symbols without becoming tied to or identified with any of them. (Jackall, 1988: 137)


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This is not to say that language use is without effects on the level of meaning (constituting subjectivity). The effects may, however, be uncertain, weak and temporal in terms of constituting subjectivity, defining the possibilities of meaningful existence or something similarly powerful. We refer to the first position sketched above, in which discourse directly implies or incorporates social and psychological consequences, as discourse determination. We label the other end of the spectrum, where discourse, in principle, stands on its own or is loosely coupled to the social (individual), discourse autonomy.4

The Formative Range of Discourse: Local-Situated and Macro-Systemic The other key dimension concerns the formative range of discourse – assumptions on the scope and scale of discourse. One option is to take an interest in discourse at close range, considering and emphasizing local, situational context. Language use is here understood in relationship to the specific process and social context in which discourse is produced. At the other extreme we see discourse as a rather universal, if historically situated, set of vocabularies, standing loosely coupled to, referring to or constituting a particular phenomenon. We may talk about long-range, macro-systemic discourse. We may, for example, talk about a discourse on masculinity, on management in the Western world or on consumption in affluent society. In order to clarify the difference between discourse in these two senses, we refer to long-range discourse as Discourse. There are, of course, also ‘middle-range’ conceptualizations of discourse/ Discourse. Starting with Potter and Wetherell’s (1987) concept of discourse and working ourselves ‘upwards’ it is possible to point out four versions of discourse analysis: (1) micro-discourse approach – social texts, calling for the detailed study of language use in a specific micro-context; (2) meso-discourse approach – being relatively sensitive to language use in context but interested in finding broader patterns and going beyond the details of the text and generalizing to similar local contexts; (3) Grand Discourse approach – an assembly of discourses, ordered and presented as an integrated frame. A Grand Discourse may refer to/constitute organizational reality, for example dominating language use about corporate culture or ideology; (4) Mega-Discourse approach – an idea of a more or less universal connection of discourse material. Mega-Discourse typically addresses more or less standardized ways of referring to/constituting a certain type of phenomenon, e.g. business re-engineering, diversity or globalization.



A Discourse, or rather indications of it, shows up at a large number of sites in more or less different ways and is, methodologically, treated as being of a more or less standardized nature. The idea is that it is possible to cut through the variation at the local levels through summaries and syntheses that identify over-arching themes operating in specific situations. Overall categories and standards then tend to be privileged in the treatment of empirical material. As Miller (1997: 34) describes Foucault-inspired work: ‘Whatever the form of the data, Foucauldian discourse studies involve treating the data as expressions of culturally standardised discourses that are associated with particular social settings’. This is, of course, accomplished at the expense of paying attention to the complex social practices and variations at the local level. Close-range studies focus on these. They emphasize the need to take social context and interactions seriously. For those interested in close-range studies, discourse is local business, not primarily expressions of imperialism. This does not mean that synthesis or connections to more general patterns are impossible; widely used cultural categories or resources may, for example, be identified in detailed studies of specific texts (e.g. Baker, 1997). Rather, it means that the richness of the material and considerations of uniqueness makes general patterns less visible and also somewhat beside the point. In a similar manner, long-range conceptions of discourse do not deny local variation. The point is, however, to address big issues and not the delicacies and nuances that might embed them. Sometimes researchers want to address both micro and macro levels. Fairclough (1993: 138), for example, is interested in discourse, in the sense of spoken or written language use at the level of discursive practice, as well as what he refers to as ‘the order of discourse’, ‘the totality of discursive practice of an institution, and relationships between them’. We think that there is a tension between these two levels. Investigations of the local construction of discourse treat discourse as an emergent and locally constructed phenomenon, while the study of Discourses usually starts from well established a priori understandings of the phenomenon in question. It is not easy, we believe, to accurately account for both in the same study. This should not, however, discourage such efforts. Rigour should sometimes be downplayed for the benefit of social relevance. From now on we will illustrate the framework from an empirical point of view. This will enable us to elaborate on the typology offered in Figure 2. We start by indicating how a piece of empirical material (an interview account) may be handled. In a later section we will discuss and reinterpret parts of Fournier’s (1998) full empirical study, examining how her conceptualization of discourse differs from those presented in Figure 2.


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Close-range interest Close-range interest (local-situational context) (local-situational context) Micro-discourse Micro-discourse

CLOSE-RANGE/DETERMINATION CLOSE-RANGE/DETERMINATION

CLOSE-RANGE/AUTONOMY CLOSE-RANGE/AUTONOMY

Meso-discourse Meso-discourse Discourse Discourse

Discourse Discourse collapsed collapsed

tightlycoupled coupled tightly

loosely coupled loosely coupled

unrelated unrelated

determination determination

autonomy autonomy

GrandDiscourse Discourse Grand

LONG-RANGE/DETERMINATION LONG-RANGE/DETERMINATION

LONG-RANGE/AUTONOMY LONG-RANGE/AUTONOMY

Mega-Discourse Mega-Discourse

Long-range interest Long-range interest (macro-system context) (macro-system context) Figure 2: Elaboration of core dimensions and summary of positions in discourse studies

The Analytic Options in Discourse Analysis: An Empirical Illustration The differences between the various perspectives is probably most effectively demonstrated through showing how each perspective would deal with a discursive fragment generated in an ongoing empirical study. The study concerns journalists, leadership and ethics in a newspaper. One of our informants communicated the following piece of discourse in an interview with one of us: Leadership involving reporters should ideally be an interplay tuned towards the optimal story, but in reality – due to deadlines and things like that – stories are often less than optimal. The normal case is that you assign a reporter to a loosely defined task, who goes out and gives the story his or her best shot, comes back and writes up the piece, and you skim through the piece, and put it in one of your drawers and that’s really how close you come to a discussion, unfortunately. That’s the bitter truth. (Editor-in-chief)



What makes this piece of discourse interesting from a close-range/autonomous point of view is how it is located in the stream of discourse, rather than what it may say extracted from the specific textual interaction that produced the statement. Thus, from this perspective, its meaning or significance cannot be decided in isolation from the interaction that shapes the context. The account is produced in interaction with a researcher from a business school, asking questions about ‘leadership’. This leads the interviewee to address this topic. In the account, the importance of the topic is acknowledged. Leadership is described as involving interplay tuned towards making articles better, even optimal. Whether the statement says anything substantial about the values, conceptions and practices of the newsmakers is a non-issue. ‘Leadership’, ‘reality’ and ‘deadline’, etc. are viewed as purely textual phenomena, meaning that what is of interest is what they do in the account (make it, for example, legitimate, innovative and/or trustworthy or make the social interaction run smoothly), and not whether they reflect ‘true’ conditions or not. Generally, or in other specific situations within the site of study, this discourse on ‘leadership’ may not be visible at all. In the account, ‘leadership’ is viewed as targeted towards the optimization of the journalist’s story. But ‘reality’, not human agency, means that not much ‘leadership’ in this sense can be produced. Deadlines ‘and things like that’ being part of ‘reality’ means that the optimal performance is not accomplished. The interviewee presents himself as an honest, realistic, down-to-earth person, not wanting to idealize things. He works and adapts to reality, and speaks the ‘bitter truth’. The account is brief and further research proceeding from a close-autonomous approach to discourse may benefit from more material allowing exploration of questions like: To what extent and with what means is the leadership theme sustained, varied and contradicted? What particular social reality is invoked and maintained? To what extent and how is a leadership discourse part of the interpretive repertoire of the people in the study (Potter & Wetherell, 1987)? It is these kinds of question – and only these – a researcher operating within a close-range/autonomous approach would ask and seek to answer. The editor-in-chief’s account of leadership and work practices is inter esting from a long-range/autonomous position to the extent that it displays standardized forms of speech on the subject matter. The relevant question is thus whether the utterance in question can be related to other, similar utterances on the topic of leadership and newsmaker work practices. Again, whether the statement (or the statements) reflects ‘true’ conceptions of leadership, and leadership and work practices, or not, is a non-issue.5 If the editor-in-chief’s utterance is broadly coherent with other examples of discourse – other people talking on the subject in other places and settings – then it is used, in this approach, both as part of and as evidence of a particular standardized and trans-local discourse on leadership. Such a discourse may for example be located in a Swedish cultural context, where ‘leadership’ nationally may be coupled with words like participation and dialogue rather


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than language use emphasizing the control and authority of the great leader. The macro-level discourse, of which the account is seen as an example, may also be interpreted as a professional discourse, perhaps independent of national cultural orientations. Professional discourses emphasize the competence and discretion of the professionals and this may affect leadership discourse. Another possibility is to interpret the account as saying something about organizational discourse on the subject matter. The particular organization, rather than the country or the profession, would be seen as the site or context of the discourse of which the account may be seen as an example. Words like ‘interplay’ and ‘discussion’ rather than leading or controlling may thus be seen as connecting to either a Swedish, a professional or an organizational (company-specific) discourse on leadership. Of course, more empirical material is called for before any conclusions may be drawn. If it cannot be connected to other statements it is ignored or regarded as an interesting deviant case, depending on how it relates to the conventional wisdom (and, perhaps, the researcher’s eye for detail). Researchers adopting the close-range/determination approach or interest assume that discourses offer important clues to other kinds of practices than pure language use, which of course stands in stark contrast to what ‘discourse autonomy’ advocates believe. This does not mean that they naïvely assume that what the editor-in-chief claims in the statement must be true in any representational sense of the word. Rather, it means that the account above may say something instructive on the local construction of leadership, including feelings and norms toward the subject matter. This means that the statement enables the researcher to further specify the domain of social reality of interest. Thus, when the editor-in-chief talks about leadership as tuning stories towards optimality, researchers acting from the close-range/determi nation perspective treat this as clues on a normative ideal, constructing the subjectivity of the person and framing his action. The ideal of leadership and the perceived failure to live up to it – discursively brought about by the self-scrutiny contingent upon the presence of this discourse – then invokes the notion of the subject confessing a less than optimal way of being. The temporal operation of the leadership discourse then would imply a temporal re-constitution of the editor-in-chief as a ‘leader-interplay-tuned-towardsthe-optimal-story’. In order to qualify for a close-range/determination notion of discourse, the account must be evaluated as having structuring effects, either on the sub jectivity of the interviewee (and other people in the site in question) and/or in terms of framing action. This would imply that the researcher would try to investigate the extent normative ideals are translated into practices in the setting under study or getting other indications on the subjectivity of the inter viewee (or other people) in the kind of situation/context the interview account is located within.6 Addressing the account as a discourse having effects is



something other than addressing it as pure talk (without the determining power of a discourse). From the close-range/determination perspective, dis course can reveal information on non-discursive phenomena but it can only do that for the particular, highly local domain of social reality under study. From a long-range/determination position the account of the editor-inchief provides discursive fragments that illustrate the rules that decide how we can talk about and experience leadership and work practices. Thus, in this perspective, the statement made by the editor-in-chief is produced, not by a concrete individual in specific circumstances, but rather by the rules that decide how individuals can articulate the leadership phenomenon, both in discourse (in the narrow sense of language use) and as an experiential phenomenon. The long-range/determination interest in discourse assumes that discourse, subjectivity and practice are densely interwoven, and that dis course is primary to subjectivity/practice through its constituting or framing powers. This means that dominant and widespread discourse shapes both how to talk about a subject matter and the meanings that we develop about it. The broad, long-range interest in discourse means that the empirical material is treated in a standardized way. It is not the details of the account and its context as much as a perceived general tendency that is deemed significant to use, together with other material broadly pointing in a similar direction. In the particular piece of (what may be read as) discourse communicated by the editor-in-chief, researchers interested in a long-range/determination notion of discourse may view an interesting illustration of discursive formation of leadership issues and various processes of normalization. One could then interpret the material as implying that it is ‘normal’ to avoid or minimize discussion on ongoing work, to not do much ‘leadership’, to present it as a question of dialogue and communication, and so on. The account would then imply the salience of a sort of laissez-faire, discussion oriented discourse on leadership in, for example, the editorial parts of newspaper organizations (in Sweden). This discourse would then constitute editors’ subjectivity or at least frame their way of thinking and orienting themselves in interacting with and influencing journalists. Of course, the account cannot stand on its own; it needs to be supplemented with other accounts before it is possible to say something about discourse on this macro-systemic level. This example primarily illustrates methodological issues in dealing with discursive material. We have proceeded from an interview extract and, proceeding from the four positions indicated by the crossing of the two major dimensions in discourse studies, discussed what can be done with it, what additional empirical material may be needed and how different lines of interpretation may be chosen. Our second example will address a full study, in which a ‘modest version’ of a middle-to-long-range/determination view on discourse (Discourse), will be targeted for re-interpretations from a more close-range/autonomous view on discourse.


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Climbing the Ladder of Discourse – Following Fournier from ‘discourse’ to ‘Discourse’ and Back Again This section investigates an example of discursive study addressing Discourse in detail, with particular focus on how the researcher arrives at this level. Since most organizational phenomena generally are believed to exist beyond the text, this route is most likely to be travelled by organizational researchers adopting a ‘discourse’ perspective. Rather few studies have focused on Dis course in a detailed and context-sensitive manner. We have chosen Valerie Fournier’s (1998) study on the new career model celebrated in managerialist discourse. The study is chosen because we think it is a good study that illustrates the fruitfulness of the idea of Discourse(s), as well as revealing some of its pitfalls. For our purposes it has the advantage that it presents more empirical material than is common, thus making re-interpretations less difficult. The new career model, as elaborated by Fournier, portrays career as a selfmanaged project through which individuals are empowered to cultivate their selves, to realize their dreams and at the same time to contribute to organizational excellence. This is partly accomplished through initiative and lateral moves and not just vertical promotions. The study, of graduates employed in their first job in a UK company, indicates that most of the graduates have ‘bought’ the career discourse, which according to the author, operates as a power/knowledge regime constituting subjectivity. Thus a high-powered or muscular view on the capacity of discourse is expressed. As with a lot of discourse talk, it is sometimes rather unclear what ‘discourse’ refers to. Mainly it refers to the career discourse promoted by the company – i.e. a set of statements about the subject matter – but also other expressions emerge in the text: Thus people in Teamco are discursively imagined. . . . The enterprise discourse maps and orders subject positions by defining what counts . . . ‘being close to a customer’ is not given but is an achievement, it has to be performed discursively . . . (Fournier, 1998: 66–7)

Here one can note the powers ascribed to discourse and a certain allembracing quality of discourse. If performing discursively (in the sense of using the right vocabulary) is what makes the achievement, it should not be too difficult to accomplish. If it also calls for a specific social interaction and establishment of a relation, it may be a more difficult enterprise, at least for people in administrative positions. Presumably, something ‘extra-linguistic’ is also included in this achievement; ‘to be performed discursively’ then goes beyond the use of the correct vocabulary.



In the study, graduates in finance, marketing and R&D used the ‘career discourse’ promoted by the company, while those in CIS (computing-related graduates) drew upon what Fournier describes as a more ‘militant register’. The CIS graduates were doing less well than the others, they generally had much less inviting material work environments and while all but three of the other graduates had been promoted to level 2 in the management and professional grade structure, all the CIS people remained on level 1. Earlier in the article, interview statements are described as ‘stories’, but later these are referred to as the ‘careering and militant discourses in Teamco’. The first is basically the same as the corporate version, the second is intended to distance oneself from it, for example through disclaiming any ownership or control over their careers, negative opinions of review and development techniques and ‘fatalistic’ rather than ‘enterprising’ accounts of the self. Rather than expressing any effective resistance against the dominant discourse, the militants become constructed/construct themselves as the Other, the marginalized, backward militant, unable to live up to the norm of engaging in a career. With all the interview statements it appears to be possible to pigeonhole them into one of these discourses. Some of the interview statements of ‘the militants’ imply a self-image of an honest and responsible individual not compromising with the corrupting world of business. This discourse does not solely submit to the enterprise by reproducing its dominant discourse or expressing the marginalization of those opposing it, but indicates a space of its own, new positions to occupy. One CIS graduate expresses him/herself as follows: I want to stay in a technical role. I don’t want to move into general or senior management; you have to be hard and tough as a manager, to manipulate people, I am not like that. I thought I’d go straight to the top but I realised what it takes to get there and I don’t want to change like that. They are not looking for people with technical skills but for slave masters. I’m sensitive, I can’t treat people like that. (1998: 75)

This is interpreted as expressing a logic of integrity and authenticity, which is not treated positively by the Foucauldian/anti-modernist author, referring to ‘the oppressive nature of the search for authenticity’ (1998: 76). Fournier continues by repeating the critique of the career discourse claims: And the supposedly emancipatory prospects of the enterprising self are hardly more promising: the freedom to continually re-invent ourselves has the bitter taste of compulsion. So any attempt to make a case for enterprise or for integrity/authenticity is doomed to failure. What seems more important is to give voice to a plurality of discourses for articulating one’s experiences. (1998: 76–7)


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It is a denial of plurality that is the major problem with enterprise discourses such as the one of careering: . . . enterprise flattens difference, threatens plurality, and deletes possi bilities for writing ourselves into scripts other than the ones in its cast. It denies us alternative worlds of experience. . . . (1998: 77)

Arguably, and slightly ironically, this is also what Grand Discourse studies are doing. Typically, as in Fournier’s own case, they reduce plurality to one or two Discourses. One could, of course, argue that ‘facts’ point in this direction, but this is not an effective defence these days. Empirical material may be interpreted in many ways. While recognizing that the empirical material lends itself relatively nicely to the two Discourses in which Fournier orders her material, there certainly is the option to take variation of the empirical content even more seriously. Let us follow such a line and take a more careful look at the quotation of the CIS interviewee on page 1141. We will then primarily concentrate on close-range analysis, but also move up the discursive ladder. In addition to addressing the formative dimension, we wish to also comment upon the autonomy-determination aspects. In the account the interviewee subject presents him/herself as a technical person, as too sensitive and human to be able to work as a (senior) manager. The subject is not hard, tough, a slave master or a manipulator and does not want to change in this direction. Being in a technical role is constructed as being morally superior to being a manager. Becoming a manager is then for the ‘rude bastard’ or somebody willing to become one. The interview account is a good example of what may be referred to as moral story-telling (Silverman, 1985). In interviews subjects present themselves in a positive light. The specific (micro) context of the account is not revealed. We only know that it is an interview situation. The interviewee of course notices that the interviewer is a woman, and most likely that she comes from a business school and that she is interested in the career theme. Whether the researcher’s slight scepticism towards managerialist ideologies – visible in the article –come through in the social interaction within which the interview account is produced is difficult to tell. (The majority of the accounts – being positive to the career discourse – do not reflect any such scepticism.) Nevertheless, it is likely that the account may be understood in the light of some of these circumstances. The interviewee’s self-presentation as a feminine person (this construction is not necessary contingent upon sex) may be facilitated by the female interviewer seemingly being interested in people. The strong antimanagerialism in the story may, to some extent, be seen as a dynamic effect of the situation of a temporary engagement in a story line. Questions about career may also trigger a kind of distancing from what is implied in the notion of career (promotion) by a person that may feel that s/he is, or anticipates being perceived as, doing less well. This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.


In the account, the firm identity of the interviewee is the source of motives, wants and options. But this identity is an outcome partly of the comparison with the brutal nature of the management world. It is against this somewhat mythical construction that being and remaining in a technical role makes sense for a sensitive person. Apart from the moral problems of managers, there is nothing in the account or self-construction that motivates staying in a technical role – apart from hints about a (general) unwillingness to change and the company’s lack of interest for people with technical skills. A sensitive person wanting to treat people in a human, soft, non-manipulative way would seem to fit better in a feminine occupation in a more humanistic organization than being a computer specialist in a company run by ‘slave masters’. The idea of this discourse ‘opening up new space [for CIS graduates] to occupy’ (1998: 75) should then imply that the new space in this case is outside the organization. We here want to make two points. The first is that the self-identity produced in relationship to the negative Other of management, leads to a defensive ‘staying in a technical role’. The second is that voluntary staying in this role implies being subordinated to slave masters (i.e. a compliance with a slave-like position). This is not directly at odds with Fournier’s position; a person accepting being subordinated to the manager-brutes may preserve integrity and authenticity. The point is that the account expresses considerable complexity and variation, suppressed by classifying it as a matter of integrity and authenticity. The interpretation here is conducted at the micro-discursive level: we read the account as a text (a story, not a truthful testimony of a personal con viction) and look at the claims and logic that it expresses. No assumptions are made regarding the constituting of subjectivity or expressions of mean ings (intentions, beliefs, standpoints) outside the situation of language use. From a discourse point of view, the interviewee may well talk and act in ways inconsistent with the account. One may, however, emphasize the subjectivity and expression of meaning in connection to the account. The account triggers the constitution of a way of relating to the world, if only a temporary one, tied to the discursive act. This invoking of subjectivity/meaning then means that we move from the autonomy, emphasized above in this section, to extreme determination, thus ascribing to discourse plenty of muscles, while still remaining within the close-range approach to discourse. A meso-discourse analysis would be somewhat more inclined to look for slightly broader and more general themes while still being careful to avoid gross categorizations. The construction of management as morally problematic and of those being or staying outside as more human then is viewed as an inclination to sometimes talk about the moral quality of management and managers in a pejorative way. Such talk may be more or less significant in the constitution of relations between (some) subordinates and senior managers or of people’s This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.

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orientation towards a managerial career. The discourse on the moral problems of management may be seen as comparatively autonomous or it may be seen as active in framing people’s ways of being and becoming. If temporary subjectivity-constituting and meaning-expressing qualities of discourses were to be targeted, the position embraced would be located at the determination pole. This (kind of) talk reflects or brings about sentiments of negativity to management and managers, not so much as a fixed or permanent stance, but as a temporary orientation that occasionally, and in connection to this kind of talk, becomes espoused. Being occasionally in operation, it sometimes has short-term action consequences. We classify Fournier’s own interpretation as a Grand Discourse approach – although she clearly uses a different vocabulary. We thus leave this level and briefly relate it to mega-Discourse. In a society more and more heavily characterized by managerialism, there are also increasing signs of antimanagerialism, discontent and subtle protests against its domination and moral problems. In this sense, the account could be treated as material synthesized with many other indications on an anti-managerial discourse. In terms of the autonomy-determination dimension, Fournier assumes, with Foucault, considerable constitutive powers of discourse. Fournier interprets this account as an example of integrity versus corruption. It thus becomes part of a militant, organizational-level Discourse, capturing the pos itioning and available space for those expressing this discourse and, hence, stand. In relation to the earlier matrix (see Figure 2), it thus proceeds from a (moderate, rather than extreme) long-range/determination stance. This is not unreasonable, but it illustrates gross categorization – the suppression of variation and nuance through matching ‘data’ to a pre-ordered framework and the wish to structure empirical material and sort it into a few fixed cat egories (Potter & Wetherell, 1987) – rather than taking the close-range level of discourse seriously. Having said that, we do not want to claim that our analysis/reinterpretations are superior to Fournier’s own interpretation. Her paper is, as we pointed out above, of high quality and its use of the empirical material is fully acceptable. Our point is mainly that concentrating somewhat more specifically on the details and variations of the discourse may be an alternative to a broader approach. Moves to the latter may benefit from carefully thinking through discursive material in relation to its production before turning discourses into Discourse.

Conclusion: ‘discourse’ and ‘Discourse’ In this article we have tried to contribute to clearer and more reflective con ceptualizations of discourse in social and organizational research. We have a feeling that discourse is too frequently used in a vague and incoherent way and functions as a smokescreen for an unclear and ambivalent view on This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.


language. Two key dimensions have been identified and explored in order to unpack the confusion around discourse: a) the relationship between discourse and meaning (broadly defined) and b) the attentiveness to detail and specific context versus an interest in more standardized forms of language use. In this article, we deal with the problematic relationship between language use in an institutional context and ‘other’ – extra-linguistic – phenomena from two alternative points of departures: (1) assuming that discourse in this sense stands in a relatively ‘free’, autonomous or loosely coupled relationship to these other phenomena; and (2) assuming that discourse works as a structuring, constituting force, directly implying or tightly framing subjectivity, practice and meaning. We have also identified some ideal-typical positions in terms of the formative range of what ‘discourse’ refers to: from micro-discourse to mega-Discourse. We have, from a methodological point of view, expressed some sympathy for reducing the range in the study of discourses, thus being more attentive to the local social context of language use in organizations. We have also, although to a minor extent, addressed a tendency to ascribe too much power to discourse, over for example fragile subjects and a discourse-driven social reality. We thus want to highlight problems with the tendency to work with a too grandiose and too muscular view on discourse. This leads to the ques tion about rigour versus significance. It may be argued that a great interest in the details of the social texts is rather myopic and neglects broader and more vital patterns. As Hardy et al. (1998) argue, the study of talk also needs to consider the social context and the participants: to just hear the story – focus on the talk – is insufficient. There is the trap of linguistic reductionism and/or a rather narrow focus on details of language use that may lead dis course studies to a somewhat peripheral position seen as esoteric by organiz ational participants. One may, however, also argue that a preoccupation with aggregated patterns means that one glosses over the operations of discourse. The degree of language-sensitivity – including language use in its specific contexts – may be low. One may also risk imposing a discursive macro order: diversity is neglected at the expense of broader entities (such as corporate culture, marketization, etc.). Inclinations to ‘jump over’ language use in a social context and make broader statements about discourse at an aggregate level (Grand or mega-Discourse) may reproduce the somewhat careless atti tude to language that the very idea of discourse studies, according to advo cates of a linguistic turn in social studies, should counter. This would imply some care in using the label discourse. In many cases, employing this label does not add anything new and simply brings confusion to the study of topics that can be addressed through the use of other, although perhaps less fashion able, concepts like, for example, ideology. A possible response to the complexity of interview statements and other accounts is to provide interpretations of the various ways the accounts may be used for research purposes (Alvesson & Deetz, 2000). Accounts provide uncertain, but often interesting clues for the understanding of social reality This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.

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and ideas, beliefs, values and other aspects of ‘subjectivities’. They may also inform the researcher about language use – an interesting topic in itself. Nevertheless, investigating talk (and other social texts) is difficult as talk varies according to setting and the variety of discourses available as well as different interviewees’ verbal skills and creativity in producing accounts. In order to conduct research that goes ‘beyond’ language the researcher must systematically consider all empirical material before deciding what it can be used for. The researcher must critically evaluate the empirical material in terms of situated meaning versus meaning that is stable enough to allow transportation beyond the local context (e.g. an interview conversation) and thus comparison. Conventionally, three interpretations are possible: (1) state ments say something about social reality (e.g. leadership behaviour, events); (2) statements say something about individual or socially shared ‘subjective reality’ (experience, beliefs, stereotypes, cognition, values, feelings or ideas); and (3) statements say something about norms of expression, ways of pro ducing effects (e.g. impressions, identity work, legitimacy) or something else where accounts must be interpreted in terms of what they accomplish rather than what they mirror – as action rather than in terms of true/false (Alvesson & Skoldberg, 2000). A fourth level, overlapping the other three (in particular the second and, even more so, the third) is the one of Discourse. One option is, as we have shown above, to use empirical material about social texts to move up on ‘a discursive ladder’ and build a case for the Discourse(s). This is, however, not a self-evident or easy move and the problem of going from the specific empirical materials to address Discourses is not frequently dealt with in the literature. Quite often Discourses are addressed directly or inspired by read ings of textbooks and popular management texts.7 Here texts are typically seen as exhibiting one Discourse. In organization studies there are one or possibly two Discourses in which the language use forming the empirical material may be ‘plugged into’. A vital question then is: How does one in empirical work proceed from encounters with texts (documents, interview talk, observed talk) to make summaries and interpretations of wider sets of discourses including aggregations of a variety of elements, an integrated framework of vocabularies, ideas, cognition and, interrelated with these, practices of various kinds? In short: To what extent – and if so, when and how – can we move from discourses to Discourse(s)? There is of course no final answer to this question. It calls for continuous reflection. It is quite clear that the move from discourse to Discourse includes a shift in perspective. Moving from discourse to Discourse is not only about aggregation. The analytical framework is already set in the decision to view utterances as potential Discourse material. The choice of being inattentive to local context and variation is made a priori (or at least in an early phase of the process). Since most organizational phenomena are believed to include something extra-discursive – beyond the text, so to speak – there is a strong



temptation to attempt quickly to climb the discursive ladder in organizational research and to ascribe to discourse determining capacities. This makes it possible to address important social issues. However, there are good reasons to sometimes resist the temptation and engage in further contemplation at the level of the text and perhaps make more of it (Alvesson & Karreman, 2000). Grandiosation and muscularization of discourse should be grounded and shown – rather than, as in some Foucauldian and poststructuralist writings, be postulated (see Newton, 1998). As we have shown, there are other ways of looking at discourse material – analytical options that might do the material at hand better justice.

Notes 1. We will return to the issue of context, arguing that it is important to distinguish between different levels of contexts in relationship to discourse. 2. One may talk about discursive meaning, meaning being tightly but temporarily connected to specific instances of language use, and cultural or subject meaning, which may call for going beyond the details of language use and attentiveness to local context in order to interpret meaning. 3. To repeat, meaning is here broadly defined as a (collectivity of) subjects’ way of relating to – making sense of, interpreting, valuing, thinking and feeling about – a specific issue. Meaning thus touches upon cognition and/or emotions. 4. Discourse determination may also be described as a thick concept of discourse while autonomy means a thinner notion, referring to a narrower set of phenomena. 5. If one wants to go outside discourse analysis and relate the account to signs on practice or whatever, this calls for specific investigations, i.e. a lengthy period of participant observation. Discourse analysis in the version here discussed cannot say anything about conditions outside language use. 6. Of course, if one has the conviction sometimes espoused in poststructuralist writings – that discourse runs the world and is sceptical to empirical inquiries, then efforts to get some empirical clues on the connections between the discourse in the account and levels of subjectivity and practice would be somewhat misguided or futile. It is assumed (or taken for granted) that discourse constitutes subjectivity. 7. There are for example within the rather extensive Foucault-inspired work in management studies not many scholars addressing discourses directly interplaying with corporate practices through first-hand empirical studies.

References Alvesson, M. & Deetz, S. Doing critical management research. London: Sage, 2000. Alvesson, M. & Karreman, D. Taking the linguistic turn in organizational research – Challenges, responses, consequences. Journal of Applied Behavioral Science, 2000, forthcoming. Alvesson, M. & Skoldberg, K. Towards a reflexive methodology. London: Sage, 2000. Baker, C. Membership categorizations and interview accounts. In D. Silverman (Ed.), Qualitative research. London: Sage, 1997, pp. 130–43. Clegg, S.R. Frameworks of power. London: Sage, 1989.


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Davidson, A.I. Archaeology, geneaology, ethics. In D. Couzens Hoy (Ed.), Foucault: A critical reader. Oxford: Blackwell, 1986, pp. 221–33. Deetz, S. Democracy in an age of corporate colonization: Developments in communication and the politics of everyday life. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992. Fairclough, N. Critical discourse analysis and the marketization of public discourse. Discourse and Society, 1993, 4, 133–59. Foucault, M. The history of sexuality: Volume 1. New York: Pantheon, 1976. Foucault, M. Power/knowledge. Selected interviews and other writings 1972–1977. New York: Pantheon, 1980. Fournier, V. Stories of development and exploitation: Militant voices in enterprise culture. Organization, 1998, 5, 55–80. Grant, D., Keenoy, T. & Oswick, C. Organizational discourse: Of diversity, dichotomy and multi-disciplinarity. In D. Grant, T. Keenoy & C. Oswick (Eds), Discourse and organization. London: Sage, 1998, pp. 1–13. Hardy, C, Lawrence, T. & Phillips, N. Talking action: Conversations, narrative and action in interorganizational collaboration. In D. Grant, T. Keenoy and C. Oswick (Eds), Discourse and organization. London: Sage, 1998, pp. 65–83. Jackall, R. Moral mazes: The world of corporate managers. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. Keenoy, T., Oswick, C. & Grant, D. Organizational discourses: Text and context. Organization, 1997, 4, 147–57. Kerfoot, D. & Knights, D. Managing masculinity in contemporary organizational life: A ‘man’agerial project. Organization, 1998, 5, 7–26. Miller, G. Building bridges: The possibilities of analytic dialogue between ethnography, conversation analysis and Foucault. In D. Silverman (Ed.), Qualitative research. London: Sage, 1997, pp. 24–44. Newton, T.J. Theorizing subjectivity in organizations: The failure of Foucauldian studies. Organization Studies, 1998, 19, 415–47. Potter, J. Discourse analysis as a way of analysing naturally occuring talk. In D. Silverman (Ed.), Qualitative research. London: Sage, 1997, pp. 144–60. Potter, J. & Wetherell, M. Discourse and social psychology: Beyond attitudes and behaviour. London: Sage, 1987. Rosenau, P.M. Post-modernism and the social sciences: Insights, inroads, and intrusions. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992. Silverman, D. Qualitative methodology & sociology. Aldershot: Gower, 1985. Silverman, D. Interpreting qualitative data. Methods for analysing talk, text and interaction. London: Sage, 1993. Steier, F. Research as self-reflexivity, self-reflexivity as social process. In F. Steier (Ed.), Research and reflexivity. London: Sage, 1991, pp. 1–11. Van Dijk, T. Principles of critical discourse analysis. Discourse & Society, 1993, 4, 249–83. Watson, T. In search of management. London: Routledge, 1994. Weedon, C. Feminist practice and poststructuralist theory. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987.


31 Standardization, Globalization and Rationalities of Government Winton Higgins and Kristina Tamm Hallström

N

ational and international standards bodies are typically nongovernment voluntary organizations that develop and publish formal, written standards. For most of their existence, these bodies have largely escaped social-scientific interest; except for occasional notice from economists, they have been consumers of research rather than objects of it. In the West at least, they have come together in non-government associations and appeared to ply a mundane technical calling in ensuring a modicum of convenience and safety in the (usually physical) accoutrements of modern life, one that might not otherwise be there. Electrical wiring rules, common railway gauges and safety requirements for consumer goods exemplify their traditional output. The usefulness of their work has long included supplementing that of government regulators where the latter had recourse to detailed and regularly updated technical specifications, for instance in local government ordinances and government purchasing. In the last decade or so, however, standards bodies have shown up on social-scientific radar screens, no longer as the unobtrusive servants of mod ern folk, but as prominent in the ranks of the ‘globalized’ world’s remote, faceless masters (Brunsson et al., 2000). They have taken on the role of regulators of first instance, rather than as minor suppliers of specifications to regulators exercizing the hallowed sovereignty of nation-states. Standards bodies now rank with global market mechanisms and the hierarchical organizations they spawn, to form a power triangle that produces the coordination



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and orderliness in socio-economic affairs which were once the responsibility and privilege of state functionaries (Brunsson, 2000: 21). Since the late 1980s, international standards bodies have issued rules on how an enterprise (and later, any significant organization) should be managed to ensure ‘quality’; how enterprises should deal with the environ mental impact of their operations; how they should manage their risks, their knowledge, and complaints made against them; how they should keep their accounts and ensure regulatory compliance and probity in other ways. At the time of writing, the main organ of international standardization, the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), is even developing a standard covering the social responsibility of organizations in such matters as social diversity and access, industrial relations, and north–south trade (Tamm Hallström, 2006). In most instances a formidable global consultancy, auditing, certification and accreditation network contributes moral suasion to (putatively) voluntary compliance with the new managerial standards. This ‘new regulation’ confounds our conventional conceptions of legit imacy and authority. In the West, the nation-state has been assumed to represent our prime form of political community, legitimate authority and identity. Its rulers have long since ceased to assert a personal right to rule, and instead appeal to public opinion and the ultimate sovereignty of ‘the people’ who belong to that community, as the unquestionable basis of their authority. Whence comes the authority of the new regulators? Are they not usurpers to whom we owe no obedience whatever? Authority is indeed an issue when international standards bodies develop their new quasiregulatory ‘deliverables’ (Tamm Hallström, 2004). Any sense of rupture we might gain from this apparent usurpation, how ever, may owe more to conventional, state-centred conceptions of political power, government and regulation than to any drastic discontinuity in actual modes of governing the complex socio-economic life of modern societies and their participation in an increasingly internationalized world (Rose and Miller, 1992: 173–4). Michel Foucault – champion of a ‘history of the present’ that emphasizes continuities – once described such a ‘discontinuous’ conception of the present as one of ‘the most destructive habits of modern thought’ (quoted in Barry et al, 1996: 4). This article will seek his and his school’s guidance in opening up another perspective on the new role of international standards bodies, one that emphasizes continuities and applies his notion of political (or ‘governmental’) rationalities; in his own coinage, governmentality. As Barry Hindess (1996: 108) puts it, Foucault uses the term ‘government’ to mean ‘the regulation of conduct through the more or less rational application of the appropriate technical means’, irrespective of institutional setting or state sovereignty. Nikolas Rose and Peter Miller (1992) have refined the key variables in this approach – political rationalities and technologies of government, the role of expertise, and ‘action at a distance’, among others – and brought the shifting


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relationships between them under the rubric of ‘the problematics of government’. This focus shifts the emphasis from the institutions to the discursive practices of government in a variety of institutional settings, including both ‘public’ and ‘private’ ones. We will begin by retrieving this discursive, ‘governmental’ view of regulation and the networks of ‘public’ and ‘private’ bodies that exercise it. Out of this retrieval we will identify the most important concepts for understanding the emergence of standards bodies as nodal points in these networks. We will then have a framework within which to review the historical emergence of standards bodies as bearers of political rationality. In this context we will focus on the evolution of the national standards bodies, the pioneers of standardizers’ participation in government, and how their relationship with public authorities developed, always with reference to rationally and consensually arrived-at ‘technically-best’ solutions, and the growing prestige of putatively independent expertise. As international economic coordination intensified from the 1970s, we will see how international standards bodies came to overshadow their national affiliates, especially in the fast-developing arena of management standards. Since the 1980s, these standards above all have earned their progenitors the salience they enjoy today in organizational theory. This pattern accords, we will suggest, with the most recent in the series of modern political rationalities – neo-liberalism.

The Dynamics and Problematics of Government Ever since the emergence of standardization as an identifiable, organized activity in the late 19th century, standards bodies have promoted themselves as the meeting points of politically disinterested experts who come together to hammer out technically optimal solutions to recurring problems: their standards apply scientific knowledge to the real world of getting things done and making things work. Those individuals who produced most of the early standards (and standards bodies) were engineers, members of a newly-emerged professional body who saw themselves precisely as the translators of scientific knowledge into industrial effectiveness. In Foucauldian terms, standardization began in this way as know-how, a savoir. As Giovanna Procacci (1991: 156–57) puts it, a savoir is a crucial ‘exchanger’ discourse (or discursive practice), one that links ‘the analytic-programmatic levels of the “sciences” and the exigencies of direct social intervention’. It forces scientific projects into contact with ‘all the rigidities, inertia and opacity which the real displays in its concrete functioning. And it is precisely in this sense that a savoir can more explicitly assume the viewpoint of power’. At first the potential link to power remained latent, and indeed firstgeneration standardizers tended to self-consciously distance themselves This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.

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from both state officialdom and raison d’état (Higgins and Tamm Hallström, 2008). It took subsequent shifts in the rationalities of government to activate that potential, such that standardization could develop, as we will see, into the prominent technology of government it is today. Much the same can be said for standardization’s more visible sibling, the discipline of management, sprung from the same engineering loins at roughly the same time. Like standardization, it too has carved out areas of application far removed from its parent discipline.1 In the recent period both disciplines have converged in management standards, the most important form of standardization as a technology of government. From the late 1970s until his death in 1984, Foucault broadened the scope of his studies of specific forms of power, such as disciplinary power, into the development and proliferation of political rationalities as such, and of practices dependent on them, throughout the modern period in the West.2 Since Foucault’s death, a whole school of exegetes has systematized his fragmentary literary legacy in the area, and in what follows we will rely on its work. For Foucault (1991: 100) the story of modern government starts with the transition from Machiavelli’s problematic in The prince (how a ruler might gain and retain control of a territory he has seized or otherwise acquired) to one concerned with the government of a population. Right from the start, ‘government’ itself was understood as a practice, ‘the conduct of conduct’, to be applied to a series of objects – from oneself, through one’s spouse, children, household and business, to the social and political entities under one’s sway. For instance, 17th century handbooks for rulers typically emphasized that good government began with the ruler’s own intimate practice of selfcontrol. From this bedrock grew various successive modern political rationalities (or ‘rationalities of government’). As Rose and Miller (1992: 178–9) develop this concept, it refers to the domain of political discourse, ‘a domain for the formulation and justification of idealised schemata for representing reality, analysing it and rectifying it’. A political rationality usually takes a moral form, and provides some account of the objects to be governed (nation, society, population, economy) as well as the persons to be governed. Each political rationality speaks in a particular idiom – an intellectual paradigm which ‘renders reality thinkable’ in political terms. A political rationality both inspires and constrains the development of concrete programmes and the choice of appropriate technologies of govern ment to operationalize them. The latter comprise a range of mechanisms – ‘strategies, techniques, and procedures through which different forces seek to render programmes operable, and by which a multitude of connections are established between the aspirations of authorities and the activities of individuals and groups’ (Rose and Miller, 1992: 183). A selective overview of successive modern political rationalities helps us to understand the continuities and reversals that mould today’s ascendant political rationality. This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.


The same may be said for technologies of government, for most of today’s examples have informative antecedents. A detailed discussion of the preliberal political rationalities lies outside the focus of this article; here we will briefly characterize them, contrast them with their classical-liberal successor, and indicate the technologies of government they would bequeath to the latter, as well as to today’s neoliberalism. The chief characteristic of preliberal rationalities was their treat ment of the governed as the passive objects of government. The first of the series, variously known as ‘police science’, ‘cameralism’ or ‘pastoralism’, had its origins in 17th century Europe. It explicitly dedicated itself to the welfare, wealth and security of the population, understood as a collectivity incapable of securing these boons for itself. It thus pursued the ambition of a totally administered society to achieve them, with the governors wielding unlimited state sovereignty (Paquino, 1991). They in turn relied on the technologies of ‘statistics’-gathering by expert functionaries and confessional obligations on the governed, so that the population to be administered might be known to its rulers in as much detail as possible. Foucault is perhaps best known for his analysis of the next political rationality, disciplinary power, which complemented cameralism but did not itself rely on state sovereignty or the (usually centralized) institutions that it spawned. Rather, disciplinary power was localized in such forms as armies, prisons and workhouses. It employed technologies of surveillance and regimentation that ‘drilled’ and normalized the behaviour of specific categories of the governed, such that they developed self-disciplinary habits independent of immediate forms of coercion (Foucault, 1977; Hoy, 1986). A third political rationality, ‘bio-power’, comprised an amalgam of cameralism and disciplinary power: it sought to normalize the sexual and reproductive behaviour of the governed in order to give effect to a new focus of government: population policy (Gordon, 1991). When we come to successive forms of liberalism, it is important to bear in mind the Foucauldian principle that they be understood for the purposes of this analysis precisely as distinctive approaches to the art of government, rather than as ideologies or philosophies that invite a partisan response. Classical liberalism from John Locke has mounted a critique of governmental ambitions to administer the population, which it reframed as ‘society’, and a reversal of the view of the governed as the passive objects of rule. In spite of its more modest agenda, however, liberal political rationalities until recent times have also relied heavily on ‘statistics’, and more particularly, social-scientific expertise. This expertise has often privileged economics, but it has also included such disciplines as public administration, political science, sociology, epidemiology, social work and psychology. These disciplines generated the know-how which, when fed into public inquiries and other policy-forming bodies, ‘render docile the unruly domains over which government is to be exercised, to make government possible and to make government better’ (Rose, 1996: 45). This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.

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In the classical-liberal perspective, society is seen as having its own immanent regularities and processes of self-regulation, which define the limits of institutional government, and which have to be known if government is to be effective. To govern well in the liberal mode, one has to work with and through the mechanisms of self-sustaining civil society, including its ‘natural’ self-regulating market.3 The distinctive feature of liberal rationalities is the treatment of the governed not as the objects of rule, but as formally free subjectivities to be engaged with and coordinated. The governed must become complicit in the processes whereby they are governed. Their free decision-making then constitutes not an obstacle to government, but a technical requirement of it. The latter’s effectiveness lies in how the subjectivities in question are moulded so as to reliably respond to the usual desiderata of government – the constants of security and prosperity (Barry et al, 1996: 7–16; Burchall, 1991; Gordon, 1991: 14–27; Hindess, 1996: 123–31). In this problematic, the ambiguous frontier between state and civil society – between public and private organizations – provides room for manoeuvre for pragmatic practices of government. In their turn, these practices rely on the effects of disciplinary power in producing citizens and their organizations with developed, dependable practices of the self – formally free agents whose choices are calculable for (and responsive to) governmental purposes. Conventional state-centred conceptions of government and political power rely on a perennial trope in liberal discourse: the presumed bound ary between – and opposing logics of – state and civil society. In these con ceptions, civil society is a realm in which citizens go about their business free from political interference; they form associations in pursuit of their interests, and contribute to a ‘natural’ coordination, self-regulation and equilibrium, as exemplified by market mechanisms. But if we move our analytic focus from the state as an institution to government as a practice, we see that ‘the will to govern’ moves freely across the state/civil society divide and sets the agenda in formally public and private institutions alike. The state itself is not a unified actor, and its various agencies enter into active networks and alliances with ‘private’ institutions. These networks follow common political rationalities and deploy shared technologies of government, rather than responding in unison to official fiat.

The Coming of Standardization The Birth of the National Standards Body On ceremonial occasions eminent standardizers are wont to unfurl a conventional hagiography of their craft from prehistoric times, one deeply rooted in the western legend of rational progress. Language relies on standardized relationships between human sounds and signs on the one hand, and things This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.


and actions on the other. Trade depends on standardized physical measurements and terms of exchange based on a currency standard, such as the gold standard. The ancient Babylonians built with bricks of standard dimensions, and the Romans standardized chariot axle lengths to 1435 mm to economize on road-building (rail networks nowadays do likewise, most with exactly the same gauge), and so on. Standardization gained an altogether new dignity with mechanized production, as the old crafts’ unique artefacts gave way to homogeneous manufactures with interchangeable parts. High-volume munitions and arms industries greatly encouraged standardization as a basic principle of process and product engineering. After World War I, the ‘second industrial revolution’ – based on the mass production of cars, household appliances, agricultural machinery, and diesel and electrical motors – relied intensively on standardized components and products, as well as standardized drawing conventions in precision engineering. This development, and the related rise of the engineers themselves as a professionalized body to a pinnacle of power and prestige in industry, triggered the emergence of an international (and internationalist) stand ardization movement in the late 19th century, and a new resurgence in the 1920s. It intertwined with similar ‘movements’ around industrial ‘rationalization’, and ‘simplified practice’ – the reduction of superfluous variety in manufactures (De Geer, 1978; Higgins, 2005: 38–43; Shenhav, 2002). Early 20th-century engineering hubris spawned another related development for any serious student of power and control: the engineers F. W. Taylor’s ‘scientific management’ and Henri Fayol’s prescriptions for systematic authority in productive organizations – the founding ideas of today’s management discipline. In the 1920s standardizers (at the time all drawn from the engineering profession) clinched their rise, from mere promoters of a conceptually simple production principle, to being the actual and potential bearers of a number of already-established political rationalities, as we will elaborate below. A rash of national ‘engineering standards associations’ – the organized expressions of the standardization movement – sprang into being out of initiatives taken jointly, in the typical case, between industry associations or engineers’ professional bodies on the one hand, and national governments on the other. The British (1901), American and German bodies (both 1917) arose a little earlier. Since the 17th century at least, as already noted, western nation-states have expressly promoted the ‘wealth’ of their own populations, including favourable trade. Now governments promoted national standards bodies (NSBs) as harbingers of industrial progress and facilitators of trade through the issue of ‘specifications’ appropriate to export markets. From modest beginnings in such matters as electrical wiring rules, governments also began to rely, for regulatory purposes, on their NSBs to formalize and keep updated a number of technical details of socio-economically important infrastructures This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.

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and amenities. NSBs could also become a vital part of national development strategies, including (in cases of late industrialization) basic industrialization and national economic integration, as in Australia. That case also illustrates the fertile links NSBs could develop with scientific research in aid of industrial innovation (Higgins, 2005: 31–61). When World War II broke out, NSBs were sufficiently integrated into public economic management and scientific research establishments to prove invaluable linkages in armaments and munitions production (Higgins, 2005: 62–80). National governments were quick to exploit the trade-facilitating role that their NSBs could play. The British empire between the wars illustrates this point, and prefigures the flurry of activity from the late 1980s around the harmonization of European standards to assist at the birth of an integrated European economy in 1992. As the Whitehall-centred ‘empire’ step-by-step gave way to a decentralized, federated ‘commonwealth of nations’, mechanisms for the harmonization of the latter’s national standards and associated trade-marking arrangements to boost imperial trade (and, soon enough, defence capacity) preoccupied the NSBs of the newly conceived, quasisovereign ‘dominions’. The authority of NSBs’ published standards rested (and continues to rest) on three linked claims – that they represented the optimal solution to a recurring technical problem; that they arose as consensus solutions out of an open, representative process; and that compliance with them is in principle voluntary. NSBs have adduced these claims in their own quest for authority for their ‘national standards’, against the standards developed by dominant firms (‘proprietary standards’) and by industry associations (‘industry standards’), both of which lack the representativeness, consensus and transparent developmental process of the NSBs’ products. Despite their entanglements with (and typically, financial support from) national governments, most western NSBs have asserted their status as independent voluntary associations, and as such, sturdy representatives of civil society. Each of those engine-rooms of standards development – the NSBs’ teeming technical committees – claims to bring together experts from every relevant discipline and representatives of every interest group with a legitimate stake in the standard it is developing or updating. Nonetheless the intimacy between national governments and standards bodies is striking. In most instances governments established them, at least partially funded them, and they have been well represented on standards boards and committees at all levels. Those belonging to belligerent states during World War II became nodal points in the eminently statist enterprise of waging war, out of which ISO’s own immediate predecessor arose. In the affairs of international standards bodies, western non-government NSBs work intimately with non-western counterparts which are unashamedly arms of national government in their homelands. A large and growing proportion of the western NSBs’ (and these days ISO’s) standards become



essential components of public authorities’ normal regulatory functions, and most NSBs now have a treaty or Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) to put their ‘partnership’ with national government on a visible, formal footing. Under these circumstances NSBs tend to be highly responsive to policy impulses from their national governments. By the end of the twenties, the discursive practice of standardization was finding applications well beyond the engineering world, and references to the latter then began to fade from the official names of NSBs (Higgins, 2005: 62–80; SIS, 1992: 35). In the postwar period, the discursive practice of standardization returned to its prewar peacetime applications. But in time – and at the behest of governments and social movements – it also spread to areas even further removed from production principles, especially as the notional ‘public good’ shifted in emphasis from ‘the standard of living’ (measured in physical consumption and ownership of selected consumer durables) to ‘the quality of life’. The latter comprised in particular the design, quality, safety and reliability of consumer goods and other modern amenities, and the newborn ‘consumer’s’ right to choose between them on the basis of accurate, detailed information. NSB leaders – once the intimates of screw threads, tram rails, boilers, cranes, railway fishplates and switching gear – now learned to weigh in on discussions of test methods for seat belts, condoms, tampons and the flammability of children’s nightwear. And they gained formidable political skills in battles with local councils over backyard pool safety, building codes to meet the anticipated severities of nature, and variable funereal monuments and graphic signage to meet the needs of the new multicultural communities. As standardizers spread themselves over new fields, governments became more and more dependent on incorporating standards into their regulatory regimes and purchasing routines. Once public regulators ‘called up’ a standard, it ceased to be voluntary and instead became ‘mandatory’ – or more colloquially, ‘grey-letter law’. NSBs’ most significant conquest occurred in management standards, starting with those focused on ‘quality’. Again, this was an application that crystallized slowly. Norman Harriman’s (1928) classic textbook of standardization notes the arrival of quality standards, albeit ones that applied to products rather than processes. The 1930s saw the foundations laid in the USA for the discipline of quality control management, at the time a statistical approach to managing serial-production processes. The British Standards Institution wanted to use this approach to ensure that mass-produced goods carrying its certification mark actually complied with the standard in question – an application of quality management it wanted to see replicated throughout the empire to reinforce mutual recognition of such marks.4 The quality control techniques developed in the 1930s found ready application in armaments industries during World War II, and indeed several NSBs (including those of USA, Britain, Canada and Australia) issued war


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emergency standards to boost their diffusion. In the postwar world, quality management remained firmly in engineering hands, tied to statistical methods and a creature of defence industries, until the late 1970s. Then, in response to Japanese inroads into the markets of major western consumer-durable industries, both NSBs and the ISO began to develop a new, encompassing notion of quality management, and standards and certification mechanisms appropriate to it. In 1979 ISO set up its now famous technical committee, ISO TC 176, to develop and keep updated quality management standards, and it has been doing so ever since (Tamm Hallström, 2000). Its standards build on the truisms of the mainstream management discipline, especially in prescribing top-down control of an organization and the insertion of control mechanisms at various levels of its hierarchy (Furusten, 2000). The publication of the ISO 9000 standards in 1987 – followed by updates in 1994 and 2000 – triggered a boom industry, to the benefit of NSBs and ISO alike, in the sale of quality management standards and certification thereto. The seemingly minor neologism, ‘quality assurance’, marked the transfor mation of the quality concept from a ‘hard’ engineering one backed up by shopfloor inspection, to a ‘cultural’, managerial concept supported by the recurring audit of the prescribed control systems (Power, 1999: 57–58). We will return to the significance of this shift below. The more entrepreneurial NSBs (and ISO in their wake) treated quality management standards as ice breakers for a raft of other management standards, including ones covering environmental management, risk and knowledge management, corporate governance and compliance, complaints and conflict handling, and now social responsibility. When ISO 9000 first saw the light of day, it met the demand for a more internationalized division of labour in manufacturing, in which major metropolitan manufacturers sourced components from many different firms and countries. All these links in the supply chain could subvert the quality of final products – the argument ran – in the absence of a mechanism like quality management standards, and audit and certification thereto. They promised to prevent defects being ‘bought in’, and to identify component manufacturers who might fail to deliver on time. Similar considerations applied to the other management standards as well, and to service industries. Throughout the 1990s corporate and other organizational life forms in dynamic economies were thus increasingly marching to the same drum.

ISO and the Rise of International Standardization While we are more concerned in this article with discursive practices than organizations, the latter’s development provides some guidance to inter preting the discourses and practices concerned. As the main bearer of ‘the new regulation’, ISO’s provenance warrants at least a casual glance.5



After the US entry into World War II in December 1941, that country, Britain and its dominions mixed and matched their military hardware with increasing intensity as their respective technological long suits, resource bases and proximity to operational theatres were identified and exploited for the war effort. The NSBs concerned worked frantically to produce the requisite emergency standards to facilitate these technology transfers, including resolving incompatibilities between US engineering-drawing practices and those of the British world. In June 1944 the Allies set up the United Nations Standards Coordinating Committee (UNSCC) – ISO’s immediate progenitor – to deal more effectively with these issues. Naturally, membership was restricted to the Allied belligerents (Higgins and Tamm Hallström, 2008). However, even at this stage, the NSBs involved acknowledged the future importance of ‘coordination’ between national standards for peacetime trade. When the UNSCC met for its second plenary session in October 1945, the guns had fallen silent, and the guest list now included friendly liberated countries, plus Mexico and Brazil. A year later, UNSCC’s third and last meeting, now including neutral Sweden and Switzerland among 25 participant countries, turned into the inaugural congress of ISO. Then as now, ISO’s constituent members were NSBs. But the delegates to its inaugural congress, like those who came to UNSCC meetings, officially represented their national governments, though they were drawn from their NSBs. From that time on, globetrotting delegates from NSBs to international standardization meetings have played an important, publicly subsidized (if usually unofficial) role as the diplomatic representatives of trade-maximising national governments. The nation-states were in the business of promoting postwar trade, a business ISO was intended to serve through the alignment of the national standards of potential trading partners on the basis of its published ‘recommendations’.6 ISO’s significant watershed came as early as 1970, when – under the influ ence of its legendary Secretary-General 1968–86, Olle Sturén – it decided it would not only issue ‘recommendations’, but also publish hitherto unheardof international standards to pre-empt the content of the relevant national standards. Ideally, NSBs would reissue ISO’s products, with minimal or no changes, as national standards. This represented a qualitatively higher level of ambition and a change of function for ISO; it is where its ‘quest for authority’, in Kristina Tamm Hallström’s (2004) phrase, begins in earnest, and continues to this day. Undoubtedly the widespread adoption ‘without deviation’ of the ISO 9000 series by NSBs as national standards greatly advanced the quest. More generally, international standards have gained salience from many countries’ accession to the GATT Standards Code and its successor, the WTO Agreement on Technical Barriers to Trade. Nevertheless, rather like Goethe’s freedom, ISO’s authority has to be retaken every day by storm. It was not only intensified trade in goods (including components) that has stimulated the uptake of international management standards.


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Corporate mergers and all manner of ‘symbolic trade’ in capital, currency and intellectual property (Clegg et al., 2005: 453–66) have also contributed to the burgeoning market in standards and other regulatory regimes. Firms have extended and complicated their corporate strategies and the markets they operate in. A common mechanism in ‘going global’ is to build strategic alliances and acquire established businesses in target overseas markets. Not surprisingly, these strategies attract a great deal of risk and uncertainty; for instance, on one estimate, 70% of the mergers and acquisitions fail. As Clegg et al. (2005: 466) comment, the resulting global corporate entities resemble dinosaurs more than the fleet-footed gazelles of the globalization dreamtime: they need all the neurological aids they can get. Implementation of international management and accounting standards, and the consulting, auditing and certification routines that often depend on them, can – at least to some extent – reduce risk and uncertainty. For this reason both ISO and its affiliated NSBs have themselves become major producers of the standards and attendant services that regulate international business. At the same time, national governments – and supranational ones such as the EU – have tended to shrink their own regulatory activities governing corporate life, and compensated for this partial withdrawal by increasing the reporting and other compliance obligations on companies, as well as the penalties for non-compliance (Clegg et al., 2005: 466). This trend has opened up yet another promising market for international management standards, not least corporate-governance and compliance standards, and the sale of standards-related literature such as handbooks and guidelines, together with the attendant paraphernalia of consulting, auditing and certi fication. Once again, both ISO and the western NSBs are the beneficiaries of the development.7

Standardization and Neo-Liberal Rule The above historical sketch of the western NSBs’ and ISO’s development illustrates the pragmatic meshing of the government – to adopt Hindess’s (1996) term for institutions officially wielding state sovereignty – and ‘private’ organizations. The practices the NSBs have increasingly engaged in since their emergence in the 1920s, not least as standards have become an essential regulatory mechanism, leave no doubt that they have participated in the practice of government in the Foucauldian sense. They do so even though their credibility rests on their insistence that, as elements of civil society, they have not been part of – and have worked at arm’s length from – the government. They wear the ‘non-government’ accolade with pride. We will suggest below, however, that standards and regulatory routines based on them now play a more specific role as a technology of government in support of the political rationality that has displaced classical liberalism –



neo-liberalism. But before we characterize the latter, it is useful to take stock of some contemporary features of standards-based regulation. The generality of today’s typical political programmes militates against their translation into substantive terms, as the emergence of ‘quality’ as a political goal and management concept over the last three decades illustrates. Kevin Foley and his colleagues (1997: 56–57) rue its vagueness and lack of support in hard-nosed scientific theory; Michael Power (1999: 58–59) points to its chronic but functional ambiguity; and Johan Quist (2003) shows it to be in need of yet another round of ‘translation’ if it is to make any difference in practice at the point of production. Thus the role of the highly abstract (‘generic’) ISO 9000 quality assurance standards, and of ISO’s subsequent management standards, may not lie in encouraging better products, environmental protection and services, but in elaborating ‘practices of the self’ for corporations. These practices provide a platform for certification, and thus an occasion for recurring audit – a crucial technology of neo-liberal ‘rule at a distance’, as we shall see. International standardization is one of several overlapping supports for the ‘audit explosion’, a phenomenon that Michael Power brought to public attention in 1994, before ramifying it into a more general analysis of ‘audit society’, one endlessly proliferating ‘industries of checking’.8 As Power, (1999: 42–60) notes, the rise of quality management in particular, and its diffusion into many aspects of public and private organizational life, constitute one of the main factors driving the audit explosion. Quality has to be made auditable, which focuses attention on the formalities of managerial processes rather than on the substance of what they produce. Audit has its own genealogy within the rationalities of government dis cussed above, one that begins with the practice of confession in the much earlier cameralist political rationality, and passes through the inspection-house scenario of disciplinary society, which had long been part of the civil-service tradition in many western countries (Gordon, 1991: 27). With the arrival of audit society, discipline, self-reporting and inspectability come once again to play an important part in the practice of government. Like the earlier forms of submission to authoritative examination, and like the notion of quality, the concept of audit is singularly vague and question-begging, which enhances the auditor’s power, including the discretion to liberally interpret public policy.9 Audit society promotes – in terms of Michael Power’s (1999) subtitle – rituals of verification, which also amount to rituals of obeisance for formally autonomous organizations. Hype notwithstanding, audits make no contribution to transparency in aid of democratic processes, and are more likely to foreclose questioning than stimulate it (Power, 1999: 138, 143). The organizational effects of government by audit follow the logic of the barium meal – the ingestion of something hardly nutritious or appetizing, but visible to the penetrating diagnostic gaze. Since the favourable outcome


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of an audit (not least a quality audit) constitutes the hallmark of legitimacy and, for a commercial(ized) organization, a competitive advantage, it can displace substantive goals in the organization’s forms of calculation. The latter now prioritize achieving auditability by inserting internal control systems into the organization. As Power (1999:53) observes: New roles have been created, such as financial services compliance officers . . . and environmental managers . . ., and new institutional stages have been provided for old roles, such as internal auditors who are an increasingly credible point of reference in public debate. Furthermore there has also been a reworking of inspectorial institutions. With enhanced managerial capability has come greater attention to systems of self-inspection.

To be auditable, then, is to be visible and governable at a distance, rather than to be efficiently pursuing the substantive goals of the organization. ‘Audit can provide assurance that the system works well even when substantive performance is poor’ (Power, 1999: 60). Today’s ‘rule explosion’ (Ahrne and Brunsson, 2004) is one indicator of this triumph of procedural formalism over attention to substantive out comes. And true to today’s marketization imperative, there now flourishes a market in rules on which standards bodies compete and thrive (Brunsson et al., 2000).10 Once-humble formal standards enjoy a new cachet, and their producers – NSBs and their international derivatives – have achieved a new prominence and profitability as bearers of soft regulation, not least if they have subsidiaries in the business of auditing and certifying organizations against their standards. The oft-remarked trend towards the replacement of the laws of sovereign nation-states with standards, norms and rules of varied provenance, enhances neo-liberal rule at a distance. When classical liberalism gave way to neo-liberalism as the dominant political rationality in the West during the last three decades of the 20th century, the earlier shift from a less institutional to a more discourse- and practice-oriented account of government became all the more crucial to understanding how neo-liberal political rationality came to manifest. In particular, the conceptual shift in question helps us understand standards bodies’ intensified participation in government now. The intellectual sources of neo-liberalism go back to the mid-20th century German school of Ordoliberalen, the postwar writings of Friedrich von Hayek, and the Chicago School and its derivatives, especially public choice theory. The Ordoliberalen contributed the idea that the business enterprise models the optimal way for individuals and collectivities to conduct themselves; the Chicago school suggested that all social phenomena and choices are in reality market-economic ones (Burchall, 1996: 22–30; Gordon, 1991: 41–46). These ideas underpinned the emphasis on financial calculation, reduction of value choices to technical ones, and the forging of organizational linkages on a quasi-contractual basis, that would characterize organizational life under neo-liberal rule (Rose and Miller, 1992: 199–200). This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.


While neo-liberalism is still recognizably liberal in founding the activities of government on the free (but disciplined) choices of formally autonomous agents, it has introduced drastic changes into how the governed are to be conceptualized and organized, in order to be reliably complicit in their own government. Unlike classical liberalism, neo-liberalism no longer seeks to maintain governmental functions within society; rather it governs without governing society (Rose, 1996: 61). For the purposes of neo-liberal rule, society is reframed as a plethora of ‘communities’, some of them technocratic ones or ‘epistemic communities’ (Haas, 1990). These ‘communities’ bear no resemblance to the organic premodern Gemeinschaften that classical sociology made much of. Instead, they are ‘autonomized groups’, such as ‘the business community’, ‘the accounting community’, ‘consumers’, ‘parents’, ‘retirees’ and so forth that neo-liberal rule conjures forth and builds on. To borrow terms coined by Bruno Latour (1986; cf Barry et al., 1996: 11–12) – these autonomized groups (including these days some semidetached state ones) are ‘enrolled’ to constitute the first points in the ‘relays’ whereby governmental impulses are sent out. These impulses are then ‘translated’ into codes of conduct, rituals and practices far from public insti tutions. These impulses and their local translations deploy technologies of government that neo-liberal rule has privileged. Individuals and private organizations face more and more onerous report ing obligations and recurring audit, which ensure that public authorities can enforce compliance with the codes of conduct in question. In a variety of institutional forms, the ‘communities’ are enrolled in – or networked into – government by entering into ‘partnerships’ with public authorities to fulfil self-regulatory functions on a ‘voluntary’ basis. In this way ‘networks of rule’ are brought into being and stabilized (Rose and Miller, 1992: 184, 189–91). The varieties of management standards (and audit and certification based on them) reviewed above provide vital linkages in this process. Like classical liberalism, neo-liberal political rationality relies not on the imposition of rule on objects of government, but on moulding networked subjectivities to be responsive to the implicit demands of government, and in this sense to govern themselves and others in their sphere of influence. The perennial liberal rhetoric of small government by no means betokens governing less or abandonment of the will to govern (Rose, 1996: 53). The essence of neo-liberal rule is governing at a distance in this way – to adapt Latour’s notion of ‘action-at-a-distance’.11 From its inception in the mid-19th century, telegraphy played a vital role in Western (not least inter continental imperial) government, by relaying directives to its operatives manning far-flung outposts, and relaying detailed information about the governed back to the centre. This ‘telegraphic politics’ (Barry, 1996: 129–32) foreboded – and provides a metaphor for – today’s ventriloquistic neo-liberal rule. In place of Morse code, however, there is another process of encryption and translation. As Nikolas Rose (1996: 42) puts it, this process consists in ‘the translation of political programmes articulated in rather general This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.

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terms – national efficiency, democracy, equality, enterprise – into ways of seeking to exercise authority over persons, places, and activities in specific locales and practices’. In the transition from classical-liberal to neo-liberal rule, expertise has greatly expanded its role in the technologies of government. As we have seen, all modern political rationalities have relied on expertise – from the earlier masters of ‘statistics’ to the later social scientists. But the experts have tended to be permanently or temporarily in-house – public servants, or experts serving on public policymaking inquiries. Now the experts, too, are more likely to be ‘autonomous’, such as today’s ubiquitous management consultants, as they relay and translate the priorities of government in a wide variety of locales. Their pretensions to autonomy, disinterested rationality and scientifically-established truth-claims endear them to private and public interests simultaneously. As Rose and Miller (1992: 188–9) write: The complex of actors, powers, institutions and bodies of knowledge that comprise expertise have come to play a crucial role in establishing the possibility and legitimacy of government. Experts hold out the hope that problems of regulation can remove themselves from the disputed terrain of politics and relocate onto the tranquil yet seductive territory of truth. By means of expertise, self regulatory techniques can be installed in citizens that will align their personal choices with the ends of government. The freedom and subjectivity of citizens can in such ways become an ally, and not a threat, to the orderly government of a polity and a society.

In particular, the expanded role of expertise in the neo-liberal practice of government has favoured those congregations of experts that publish standards. Standards are intellectual property which is designed for markets in expertise congealed into off-the-shelf commodified form. Hence the ‘market in rules’ noted above. Standards adapt well to the neo-liberal way of doing business (and regulation), even when they replicate existing noncommodified forms of regulation. The current project of developing a standard for organizational social responsibility (ISO 26000) exemplifies the special virtue of commodification. It will to a large extent replicate existing international agreements and conventions, such as the ILO core workplace standards and the UN Declaration of Human Rights. But critics of the current rule system supported ISO’s initiative on the basis that existing rules are too abstract and general, and lack verification mechanisms. In other words, they lack the applicable know-how that standardizers deploy, and for this reason, for example, the 2002 UN World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg identified ISO as an appropriate standard-setter (Tamm Hallström, 2006). We should not be too surprised to discover some familiar blemishes and vulnerabilities in the new arrangements, such as the problem of technocracy



and the related fragile legitimacy of today’s strategies of rule. The authority of international standards bodies in particular faces challenge because technocracy and counterproductive formalism are endemic to their oper ations, and because their new regulatory functions no longer partake of a state sovereignty underwritten in the last instance by popular sovereignty. The members of the standardizing ‘epistemic communities’ are essentially self-selecting, as their critics are quick to point out. While Foucault is right to emphasize discursive practices over institutions in the exercise of power, we should not jump to the conclusion that institutional forms and their legitimacy do not matter. They do matter, and for that reason international standards bodies’ quest for authority is likely to remain an unfinished project.

Notes 1. Clegg et al. (2005: 18–32) trace the early trajectory, starting with Taylor’s Principles of Scientific Management of 1911 and Fayol’s variation on that theme, and taking in the much more humanist influences of Elton Mayo (founder of the human relations school) and Mary Parker Follett in the interwar period. 2. The classic texts of Foucault’s earlier period of power analysis are Discipline and Punish and The History of Sexuality, volume I; the brief canon on governmentality as such took the form of Foucault’s 1978 lecture of the same name to the Collège de France (Foucault, 1991). The best overview of the area (including a handy glossary of terms) is probably Dean (1999), while Hindess (1996) provides an excellent reconciliation of Foucault’s thought with mainstream western political theory. 3. As Karl Polanyi’s (1944) classic account shows, the coming of liberal government to Britain in the early 19th century saw the crucial markets in question – in land, labour and capital – emerge out of energetic (not to say brutal) laissez-faire interventionism. Historically speaking, markets like these are artifices, a point that would become fairly uncontroversial for neo-liberal ideologues, such as the Chicago School of the latter 20th century. 4. John Boli (1999: 273) has theorized this claim to authority by standardizers as an extension of Max Weber’s types of authority. Thus they lay claim to ‘rationalvoluntaristic authority’, based not on coercion but freely exercised reason, itself the product of the unconstrained deliberations between putatively equal individuals sitting on technical committees. 5. Higgins (2005: 56–58). Many NSBs began to introduce conformance marking in the 1930s. The Swedish NSB introduced it in 1936, and bolstered it in 1947: SIS (1992: 36, 59). It was one of the most successful promoters of marking, and enligt svensk standard (complies with the Swedish standard) became an everyday concept in popular parlance. 6. See Higgins (2005: 77–86) for an expanded version of the following account. 7. Higgins (2005: chapters 3 and 4). The UNSCC was not the first initiatives in international standards coordination. Apart from imperial standards conferences held in the interwar period, we should note the formation in 1906 and robust survival to this day of the International Electrotechnical Commission, and the unluckier International Standards Association formed in 1926. The ISA exemplified the 1920s’ sanguine sense of an international standards movement, but soon ran into the less uplifting factors of the Depression, the protectionist climate that accompanied it, the divide between metric and non-metric countries, and the perception of it as a ‘European club’ (which for decades would also dog ISO). The ISA was mothballed on the outbreak of World War II, and never reactivated.


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8. For the Australian case and its international ramifications see Higgins (2005: chapter 11). 9. Power (1994, 1999). He describes audit society (1999: 122) as ‘a society which is increasingly committed to observing itself through various kinds of auditing practice’, and as ‘a distrusting society’ (1999: 136). 10. Power (1999: chapter 3) ‘[I]t is precisely this fuzziness in the idea of auditing that enables its migration and importation into a wide variety of organizational contexts,’ Power (1999: 6) comments. ‘The ambiguity of auditing is not a methodological problem but a substantive fact’. 11. Kristina Tamm Hallström’s (2004) problematic, how standards bodies acquire and claim authority to issue the rules they do and expect others to take them up, is highly relevant to the market in rules and how individual rule-makers pursue competitive advantage.

References Ahrne, Göran and Brunsson, Nils, eds. (2004) Regelexplosionen (The Rule Explosion). Stockholm: Stockholm School of Economics. Barry, Andrew (1996) ‘Lines of Communication and Spaces of Rule’, in Andrew Barry, Thomas Osborne and Nikolas Rose (eds) Foucault and Political Reason: Liberalism, Neo-liberalism and Rationalities of Government. London: UCL Press. Barry, Andrew, Osborne, Thomas and Rose, Nikolas, eds (1996) Foucault and Political Rea son: Liberalism, Neo-liberalism and Rationalities of Government. London: UCL Press. Boli, John (1999) ‘Conclusion: World Authority Structures and Legitimations’, in J. Boli and G. Thomas (eds) Constructing World Culture: International Non-governmental Organization Since 1875. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Brunsson, Nils (2000) ‘Organizations, Markets and Standardization’, in Nils Brunsson, Bengt Jacobsen and associates (eds) A World of Standards. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Brunsson, Nils, Jacobsson, Bengt and associates (2000) A World of Standards. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Burchall, Graham (1996) ‘Liberal Government and Techniques of the Self’, in Graham Burchall, Colin Gordon and Peter Miller (eds) The Foucault Effect: Studies in Govern mentality. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Burchall, Graham, Gordon, Colin and Miller, Peter, eds (1991) The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Clegg, Stewart, Kornberger, Martin and Pitsis, Tyrone (2005) Managing and Organizations: An Introduction to Theory and Practice. London: Sage. Dean, Mitchell (1999) Governmentality: Power and Rule in Modern Society. London: Sage. de Geer, Hans (1978) Rationaliseringsrörelsen i Sverige: effektivitsidéer och socialt ansvar under mellankrigstiden (The Rationalisation Movement in Sweden: Concepts of Efficiency and Social Responsibility in the Interwar period). Stockholm: SNS. Foley, Kevin, Barton, Richard, Busteed, Kerry, Hulbert, John and Sprouster, John (1997) Quality, Productivity and Competitiveness: The Role of Quality in Australia’s Social and Economic Development. Sydney: Wider Quality Movement. Foucault Michel (1977) Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. London: Allen Lane. Foucault, Michel (1991) ‘Governmentality’, in Graham Burchall, Colin Gordon and Peter Miller (eds) The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.



Furusten, Staffan (2000) ‘The Knowledge Base of Standards’, in Nils Brunsson, Bengt Jacobsen and associates (eds) A World of Standards. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gordon, Colin (1991) ‘Government Rationality: An Introduction’, in Graham Burchall, Colin Gordon and Peter Miller (eds) The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Haas, Ernst (1990) When Knowledge is Power: Three Models of Change in International Organizations. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Harriman, Norman (1928) Standards and Standardization. New York: McGraw-Hill. Higgins, Winton (2005) Engine of Change: Standards Australia Since 1922. Blackheath NSW: Brandl and Schlesinger. Higgins, Winton and Tamm Hallström, Kristina (2008) ‘Technical Standardization’, in Akira Iriye and Pierre-Yves Saunier (eds) The Palgrave Dictionary of Transnational History. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Hindess, Barry (1996) Discourses of Power: From Hobbes to Foucault. Oxford: Blackwell. Hoy, David Couzens (1986) ‘Power, Repression, Progress: Foucault, Lukes and the Frankfurt School’, in D. C. Hoy (ed.) Foucault: A Critical Reader. Oxford: Blackwell. Jacobsson, Bengt (2000) ‘Standardization and Expert Knowledge’, in Nils Brunsson, Bengt Jacobsen and associates (eds) A World of Standards. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Latour, Bruno (1986) ‘Visualisation and Cognition: Thinking with Hands and Eyes’, Knowl edge and Society: Studies in the Sociology of Culture, Past and Present 6: 1–40. Pasquino, Pasquale (1991) ‘Theatricum Politicum: The Genealogy of Capital – Police and the State of Prosperity’, in Graham Burchall, Colin Gordon and Peter Miller (eds) The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Polanyi, Karl (1944) The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of our Time. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Power, Michael (1994) The Audit Explosion. London: Demos. Power, Michael (1999) The Audit Society: Rituals of Verification. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Procacci, Giovanna (1991) ‘Social Economy and the Government of Poverty’, in Graham Burchall, Colin Gordon and Peter Miller (eds) The Foucault Effect: Studies in Govern mentality. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Quist, Johan (2003) Att översätta TQM: en longitudinell studie kring reflekterande aktörer (Translating TQM: A Longitudinal Study of Reflexive Actors). Karlstad: Karlstad University Studies. Rose, Nikolas (1996) ‘Governing “Advanced” Liberal Democracies’, in Andrew Barry, Thomas Osborne and Nikolas Rose (eds) Foucault and Political Reason: Liberalism, Neo-liberalism and Rationalities of Government. London: UCL Press. Rose, Nikolas and Peter Miller (1992) ‘Political Power Beyond the State: Problematics of Government’, British Journal of Sociology 43(2): 173–205. Shenhav, Yehouda (2002) Manufacturing Rationality: The Engineering Foundations of the Managerial Revolution. Oxford: Oxford University Press. SIS (1992) Standardiseringen i Sverige 1922–1992 (Standardization in Sweden 1922– 1992). Stockholm: Standardiseringskommissionen i Sverige. Tamm Hallström, Kristina (2000) ‘Organizing the Process of Standardization’, in Nils Brunsson, Bengt Jacobsen and associates (eds) A World of Standards. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Tamm Hallström, Kristina (2004) Organizing International Standardization: ISO and the IASC in Quest of Authority. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar. Tamm Hallström, Kristina (2006) ‘ISO Enters the Field of Social Responsibility (SR): Construction and Tension of Global Governance’, in Folke Schuppert (ed.) Contribu tions to Governance: Global Governance and the Role of Non-State Actors, Volume 5. Baden Baden: Nomos Publishers.



32 Discourse Analysis in Organization Studies: The Case for Critical Realism Norman Fairclough

I

am grateful to the editors of Organization Studies for this opportunity to comment as a relative outsider on developments in the study of organiza tional discourse. Not perhaps entirely an outsider, in that I have written on organizational discourse (e.g. Fairclough 1993; Fairclough and Thomas 2004), and contributed to conferences, but the discourse of organizations as such has not been a major focus of my work. Yet there are certainly overlaps. My central interest in discourse as an element in processes of social change, especially in my current work on ‘transition’ in Central and Eastern Europe, necessarily raises issues to do with organizations and organizational change; and critical discourse analysis (henceforth CDA), including my own work, has been influential within research on organizational discourse. Let me sum up my argument in this paper. First, studies of organiza tion need to include analysis of discourse. Second, however, its commitment to postmodernism and extreme versions of social constructivism limits the value of one prominent tendency within current research on organizational discourse for organizational studies. Third, a version of CDA based on a criti cal realist social ontology is potentially of particular value to organization studies. I refer especially to its value in researching organizational change. I agree with those whose specific concern is research into organizational discourse that analysis of organizational discourse should be seen as an



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important part of organization studies. This follows from certain ontological assumptions about the nature of social (and therefore also organizational) life, namely, that social phenomena are socially constructed, i.e. people’s concepts of the world they live and act within contribute to its reproduction and transformation; and that social phenomena are socially constructed in discourse. As I have implied above, however, certain extreme forms of social constructivism should be rejected (I return to this issue below). Like others, I use the term ‘discourse’ for linguistic and other semiotic elements (such as visual images and ‘body language’) of the social, but I use it in a relational way, with a focus on relations between linguistic/semiotic elements of the social and other (including material) elements. ‘Discourse analysis’ is gener ally taken to be the analysis of ‘texts’ in a broad sense – written texts, spo ken interaction, the multimedia texts of television and the Internet, etc. As I shall explain in more detail later, I take ‘texts’ to be the linguistic/semiotic elements of social events, analytically isolable parts of the social process.1 But some versions of discourse analysis (which are typically Foucaultian in inspiration) limit themselves to identifying the presence and forms of com bination of recurrent and relatively stable and durable ‘discourses’ in texts, whereas others carry our various forms of detailed linguistic analysis (e.g. analysis of grammar, semantics, vocabulary, metaphor, forms of argumen tation or narrative, and so forth) and/or detailed analysis of other semi otic features of texts such as their visual aspects. Some versions of discourse analysis do both, and that is the position I adopt. More specifically, I adopt a position of ‘analytical dualism’ (see note 1, and Sayer 2000) which applies to discourse as well as to other elements of the social, which regards ‘dis course’ as subsuming both linguistic/semiotic elements of social events and linguistic/semiotic facets of social structures, as well as of the ‘social prac tices’ which, as I explain below, I see as mediating the relationship between events and structures. ‘Discourses’ in a Foucaultian sense are for me elements of social practices. ‘Discourse analysis’ correspondingly has a doubly rela tional character: it analyses relations between discourse and other elements of the social, and it analyses relations between linguistic/semiotic elements of social events and linguistic/semiotic facets of social structures and social practices, including ‘discourses’. I shall take a critical stance towards one prominent tendency within the work which has been carried out in the study of organizational discourse, on the grounds that it equates a shift in focus towards discourse in organization studies with the adoption of postmodernist and extreme social constructivist positions. My position is that commitment to such positions does not in any way follow from a commitment to giving discourse analysis its proper place within organization studies. I shall argue instead for a critical realist posi tion which is moderately socially constructivist but rejects the tendency for the study of organization to be reduced to the study of discourse, locating


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the analysis of discourse instead within an analytically dualist epistemology which gives primacy to researching relations between agency (process, and events – see note 1) and structure on the basis of a realist social ontology. I shall argue that this form of critical discourse analysis has more to offer organization studies than broadly postmodernist work on organizational dis course. In the final section of the paper, I shall justify this argument through a discussion of organizational change. So, in sum, this paper is simultane ously an argument that the analysis of discourse is an essential and unavoid able part of organization studies, and an argument against certain prominent forms of discourse analysis which are currently carried out within organiza tion studies.

Organizing, Organization and Organizational Discourse Research on organizational discourse encompasses various theoretical and methodological positions. Putnam and Fairhurst (2001) distinguish eight approaches, and Kieser and Müller (2003) note that a number of distinct research networks have emerged. I shall not attempt to address or character ize this substantial and complex body of work as a whole. I want to focus on a particular tendency within this research, which has been highly influential without being universal, to distance itself from more conventional work in organization studies by rejecting conceptions of organization as organiza tional structures in favour of conceptions of organization as an interactive accomplishment in organizational discourse, as ‘organizing’ (e.g. Grant et al. 2004; Mumby and Clair 1997; Tsoukas and Chia 2002; Weick 1979). The theoretical bases for this tendency have come from ethnomethodology (Boden 1994), actor-network theory (Law 1994) and Foucaultian post-struc turalism (Reed 2000). Ackroyd and Fleetwood (2000) suggest that it is asso ciated with a reductive opposition which researchers have set up between positivist and postmodern research – since positivism is unacceptable for well-known reasons, postmodernism is seen as the only viable possibility. As these authors argue, it is not: there is a strong tradition of realism in orga nization studies which is equally adamant in rejecting positivism without embracing postmodernism. Mumby and Stohl, for instance, argue that researchers in organizational communication most centrally differ from those in other areas of organiza tion studies in that the former problematize ‘organization’ whereas the latter do not. ‘For us, organization – or organizing, to use Weick’s (1979) term – is a precarious, ambiguous, uncertain process that is continually being made and remade. In Weick’s sense, organizations are only seen as stable, ratio nal structures when viewed retrospectively. Communication, then, is the


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substance of organizing in the sense that through discursive practices or ganization members engage in the construction of a complex and diverse system of meanings’. (Mumby and Stohl 1996: 58)

Another formulation of this shift in emphasis from organizations as struc tures to ‘organizing’ (or ‘organizational becoming’; Tsoukas and Chia 2002) as a process is that of Mumby and Clair (1997): ‘. . . we suggest that organizations exist only in so far as their members create them through discourse. This is not to claim that organizations are “nothing but” discourse, but rather that discourse is the principal means by which organization members create a coherent social reality that frames their sense of who they are.’ (1997: 181)

Reed (2004) argues that, despite the disclaimer at the beginning of the second sentence, this formulation can be seen as collapsing ontology into epistemology, and undermining the ontological reality of organizational structures as constraints on organizational action and communication. From the perspective of critical realism and the realist view of discourse which I outline below, it makes little sense to see organizing and organiza tion, or more generally process/agency and structure, as alternatives one has to choose between. With respect to organizational change, both organi zational structures and the agency of members of organizations in organiza tional action and communication have causal effects on how organizations change. Organizational communication does indeed organize, produce orga nizational effects and may contribute to the transformation of organizations, but organizing is subject to conditions of possibility which include organiza tional structures. Organizational discourse studies have been associated with postmod ernist positions (Chia 1995; Grant et al. 2001; Grant et al. 2004), though the field as a whole is too diverse to be seen as simply postmodernist. Chia identifies a postmodern ‘style of thinking’ in organizational studies which ‘accentuates the significance, ontological priority and analysis of the micrologics of social organizing practices over and above their stabilized “effects” such as “individuals”, (1995: 581). As this indicates, the focus on organizing rather than organization is strongly associated with this ‘style of thinking’. Like the dialectical-relational ontology I advocate below, this ‘style of think ing’ sees objects and entities as emergent products of processes. The key dif ference is that this ‘style of thinking’ tends towards a one-sided emphasis on process, whereas the realist view of discourse analysis I advocate centres on the tension between process and pre-structured (discoursal as well as nondiscoursal – see below) objects. Both Mumby and Stohl (1991) and Mumby and Clair (1997) set up the contrast between ‘organizing’ and ‘organization’ as a contrast between dis course (or ‘communication’) and organizational structures. I would argue



that the relationship (or, for some, the choice) is not between organizational discourse and organizational structures, because organizational structures themselves have a partly linguistic/semiotic character. So too do the ‘social practices’ which I shall argue mediate the relationship between structures and processes (and events). It is productive to see organizations at one level of analysis as networks of social practices. In the version of CDA I sketch out below, a network of social practices includes an ‘order of dis course’, a relatively stabilized and durable configuration of discourses (as well as other elements, ‘genres’ and ‘styles’, which I explain below) which is a facet of a relatively stabilized and durable network of social practices. CDA is concerned with the relationship and tensions between the relative ‘permanences’ of organizational orders of discourse as moments of networks of social practices (and, more indirectly, the languages and other semiotic systems of whose potentials they are a selective social ordering), and orga nizational texts conceived as processes of texturing and organizing and as the semiotic elements of social events. Thus the relations between discourse and non-discursive elements of the social should not be confused with the relationship between social process (and isolable social events), and social (practices and) structures. Viewing what I shall later call, in broad terms, discourse as a facet of prac tices and structures as well as of processes/events is in my view important for achieving coherent theories which can extend our knowledge of organiza tions and organizational change. Grant and Hardy (2004: 6) in the Intro duction to a recent special issue of Organization Studies on organizational discourse state that: ‘The term “discourse” has been defined as sets of statements that bring social objects into being (Parker 1992). In using the term “organizational discourse”, we refer to the structured collections of texts embodied in the practices of talking and writing . . . that bring organizationally related objects into being as those texts are produced, disseminated, and con sumed . . . Consequently, texts can be considered to be a manifestation of discourse and the distinctive unit . . . on which the researcher focuses. Accordingly, discourse analysis is the systematic study of texts.’

The papers in the special issue ‘identify and analyse specific, micro-level instances of discursive action and then locate them in the context of other macro-level, “meta” or “grand” discourses’. One problem I have with this formulation is that contingent effects of texts (‘bringing organizationally related objects into being’) are collapsed into the theoretical categories of ‘discourse’ and ‘text’, leaving us no way of analysing the contingency of these effects: I would argue that texts may have such effects, depending on certain conditions. Another problem is with the categories of ‘discourse’ and ‘text’. I assume that ‘discursive action’ is equiva lent to ‘texts’, though this is not made clear. I also assume that ‘other’ in the


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last sentence implies that ‘discursive action’ (and ‘texts’) are themselves ‘dis courses’; this would also resolve the unclarity of what a particular ‘structured collection of texts’ is – a discourse? – and the apparent redundancy of (orga nizational) ‘texts’ both being (organizational) ‘discourse’ and being ‘a mani festation of, (organizational?) ‘discourse’. If this is the case, it would appear that ‘texts’ are (micro-level?) discourses and are located ‘in the context of’ (‘macro-level’) ‘discourses’. I am not sure that the authors would go along with this attempt to spell out relations between the categories; my point is rather to suggest that the relations are opaque in a way which undermines theoretical coherence, and that this opacity is at least in part due to a failure to explicitly and clearly differentiate levels (processes/events, practices, and structures). The other editors of the special issue refer in a concluding paper (Keenoy and Oswick 2004) to some papers focusing on ‘big “D” discourse (that is a Grand Discourse or Mega-Discourse approach)’ whereas others focus on ‘small “d” discourse (that is, a micro- or meso-discourse approach)’. This is inconsistent with the claim of Grant and Hardy that all of the articles ‘identify and analyse specific, micro-level instances of discursive action and then locate them in the context of other macro-level, “meta” or “grand” discourses’. In fact neither seems to be accurate: there are articles which include detailed textual analysis which also identify ‘big ‘D’ discourses’ (e.g. Iedema et al. 2004 show how the ‘doctor-manager’ their analysis is focused on weaves three ‘big “D” ‘ discourses together), there are also articles (e.g. Maguire 2004) which discuss ‘big “D”’ discourses without any detailed textual analysis. In terms of the version of CDA I shall describe below, one cannot chose between ‘big “D”’ and ‘small “d”’ approaches in discourse analysis: dis course analysis is concerned with the relationship between processes/events and practices (as well as structures), texts and discourses (as well as genres and styles), and therefore in the terms of the distinction used by Keenoy and Oswick the relationship between ‘big “D”’ and ‘small “d”’ discourses. This entails the claim which I shall elaborate below, that analysis of organi zational discourse should include detailed analysis of texts, both analysis of linguistic and other semiotic features of texts, and the ‘interdiscursive’ analy sis of texts which I discuss next. Grant et al. (2004) emphasize the increasing importance of the category of ‘intertextuality’ in research on organizational discourse, and this is the particular focus of Keenoy and Oswick (2004). They propose the notion of ‘textscape’ to ‘refer to the multiplex intertextualities which inform and underpin the meaning(s) of any given piece of discourse’. They see intertex tuality as supporting their ‘preference to approach the social phenomenon of “organization” as a (discursive) process – “organizing”’, again privileging of processes over structures. Does it? I think not. The general concept of ‘inter textuality’ includes relations between actual texts (and events), one obvi ous example of which is ‘reported speech’, which are indeed complex and This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.


‘multiplex’. But it also includes what I call ‘interdiscursivity’: one important way in which (types of) texts are different from one another and distinctive is in how they draw on and combine together relatively stable and durable dis courses (as well as ‘genres’ and ‘styles’, as I explain later), and this feature of texts can only be investigated in terms of relations between processes (and events) and the networks of practices and associated orders of discourse which mediate the relation between process and structure (as I argued in, for instance, Fairclough 1992, 1995, 2003). This entails an ‘interdiscursive’ as well as linguistic/semiotic analysis texts, i.e. an analysis of how they artic ulate different discourses (as well as genres and styles) together, which I explain further in the next section. Intertextuality is indeed an important aspect of any research on discourse, but this does not provide support for an overemphasis on process at the expense of structure. Let me close this section by referring to one particularly good and theo retically sophisticated paper in the special issue of Organizational Studies (Iedema et al. 2004) to elaborate what I have been saying about the relation ship between organization and ‘organizing’. It is an analysis of how a ‘doctormanager’ in a teaching hospital in Australia manages ‘the incommensurable dimensions’ of his ‘boundary position between profession and organization’ by positioning himself across different discourses, sometimes in a single utterance (Iedema et al. 2004: 15). The authors identify a heteroglossia ‘that is too context-regarding to be reducible to personal idiosyncracy, and too complex and dynamic to be the calculated outcome of conscious manipula tion’. They see the doctor-manager’s talk as a ‘feat’ of ‘bricolage’, not as a display of ‘behaviours that are pre-programmed’. Nor is it an instantiation of a ‘strategy’, for ‘strategies are, they assume, ‘conscious’. Although the authors recognize that organizations can ‘set limits’ on what workers can say and do, impose ‘closure’, they see the doctor-manager as successfully ‘deferring closure on his own identity and on the discourses that realize it’ (2004: 29). One can take this as an interesting and nuanced study of organization as the ‘organizing’ that is achieved in interaction (nuanced in that it does not exclude organizational structures, though it does suggest that they are more ‘fluid’ and less ‘categorical’ than they have been taken to be, and in that it does recognize their capacity to impose ‘closure’). I would like to make a number of connected observations on this paper. First, one might see the doctor-manager’s ‘feat’ in this case as a particular form of a more general organizational process, the management of contra dictions. Second, discourse figures differently in different types of organization (Borzeix 2003, referring to Girin 2001). The type of organization in this case seems to be in Girin’s terms a ‘cognitive’ (or ‘learning’, or ‘intelligent’) orga nization, in which the normative force of (written) texts (rules, procedures) is limited, and there is an emphasis on learning in spoken interaction. There seems to be, in other terms, a relatively ‘network’ type of structure rather


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than a simple hierarchy, where management involves a strong element of participatory and consultative interaction with stakeholders. Third, connecting the first two points, spoken interaction in this type of organization accomplishes an ongoing management of contradictions which contrasts with the management of contradictions through suppressing them by imposing rules and procedures, which one finds in certain sorts of orga nization, and one might perhaps find in this sort of organization in certain situations. Fourth, the doctor-manager’s ‘feat’ can be seen as a performance of a strategy as long as we abandon the (somewhat implausible) claim that all aspects and levels of strategic action are conscious – the doctor-manager would one imagines be conscious of the need to sustain a balancing act between professional and managerial perspectives and priorities, and of cer tain specific means to do so, but that does not entail him being conscious of all the complex interactive means he uses to do it. Fifth, while particular performances of this strategy (or, indeed, any strategy) are not ‘pre-programmed’, the strategy is institutionalized, dissemi nated, learnt, and constitutes one might say a facet of the networks of social practices which characterize this type of organization, i.e. a facet of organi zational structure. Sixth, it strikes me that bringing off a sense of creative bricolage is perhaps itself a part of the managerial style of this type of orga nization, i.e. part of the strategy, the network of social practices, the order of discourse. My conclusion is that, even given the nuanced position taken on the relationship between organizing and organization in this paper, there may be undue emphasis on organizing rather organization, performance rather than practice, ‘feat’ rather than strategy.2

A Critical Realist Approach to Discourse Analysis I shall begin this section with a brief sketch of certain central features of criti cal realism, and then move on to outline, still briefly but more fully, a critical realist approach to discourse analysis.

Critical Realism Realism is minimally the claim that there is a real world, including a real social world, which exists independently of our knowledge about it. Criti cal realism is a particular version of realism which is particularly associated with the work of Bhaskar (Bhaskar 1986; Archer 1995; Sayer 2000). Critical realists argue that the natural and social worlds differ in that the latter but not the former is dependent on human action for its existence – it is socially constructed. The social world is pre-constructed for any human being, and



its socially constructed nature does not preclude there being aspects of it which human beings have no or limited or mistaken knowledge of. So for critical realists ontology must be distinguished from epistemology, and we must avoid the ‘epistemic fallacy’ of confusing the nature of reality with our knowledge of reality. This does not at all imply that reliable knowledge about reality is easy to come by, but it does mean a rejection of ‘judgemental rela tivism’ – of the view that all representations of the world are equally good – and a search for grounds for determining whether some representations con stitute better knowledge of the world than others. Critical realists assume a ‘stratified ontology’, which sees processes/events and structures as different strata of social reality with different properties. A distinction is drawn between the ‘real’, the ‘actual’, and the ‘empirical’: the ‘real’ is the domain of structures with their associated ‘causal powers’; the ‘actual’ is the domain of events and processes; the ‘empirical’ is the part of the real and the actual that is experienced by social actors. The ‘actual’ does not in any simple or straightforward way reflect the ‘real’: the extent to which and ways in which the particular causal powers are activated to affect actual events is contingent on the complex interaction of different structures and causal powers in the causing of events. Causal powers moreover are not exclusively the properties of structures: social agents also have causal pow ers which affect the actual. The view of causality therefore is not a (Humean) ‘constant conjunction’ view according to which a causal relation between x and y entails a regular (and in principle predictable) relation such that where x appears, y will appear. On the contrary, the production of such ‘constant conjunctions’ require human intervention, notably in the form of experiments (which are generally more possible in natural than in social sciences). As I have already indicated, critical realism claims that mediating enti ties are necessary to account for the relationship between structures and processes/events. These mediating entities are ‘social practices’, more or less durable and stable articulations of diverse social elements, including dis course, which constitute social selections and orderings of the allowances of social structures as actualizable allowances in particular areas of social life in a certain time and place. Social practices are networked together in distinctive and shifting ways. Social fields, institutions and organizations can be regarded as networks of social practices.3 Critical realist ontology is also ‘transformational’: human agency produces effects through drawing on existing structures and practices which are reproduced and/or transformed in action. Critical realism aims at explanation: at explaining social processes and events in terms of the causal powers of both structures and human agency and the contingency of their effects. Social research proceeds through abstraction from the concrete events of social life aimed at understanding the pre-structured nature of social life, and returns to analysis of concrete events, actions and processes in the light of this knowledge. Thus, for instance, it is through investigation of sets of


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concrete events and texts in contemporary ‘marketized’ universities that one arrives at a knowledge of the pre-structured networks of social practices which constitute them as ‘marketized’ organizations, which have discoursal facets which I shall refer to as ‘orders of discourse’ (see below). Analysis of concrete events and texts then centres on the relationship between them as occasioned and situated events and texts and pre-structured networks of social practices and orders of discourse, which both constitute precondi tions for them and are open to transformation by them (Fairclough 1995). This form of realism is not subject to the tendency within modernist social research which is criticized by Woolgar (1988) to take the objects it arrives at through abstraction (which would include in the case of CDA orders of dis course, as well as languages and other semiotic systems) to be exhaustive of the social reality it researches. The key difference in this case is whereas this form of modernist research moves from the concrete to the abstract and then ‘forgets’ the concrete, the dialectic-relational form of realism I advocate cru cially makes the move back to analysis of the concrete. Thus a critical realis tic discourse analysis is not merely concerned with languages and orders of discourse; it is equally concerned with texts as (elements of) processes, and with the relations of tension between the two. Realist discourse analysis on this view is based in a dialectical-relational social ontology which sees objects, entities, persons, discourses, organiza tions and so on as socially produced ‘permanences’ which arise out of pro cesses and relations (Harvey 1996) and which constitute a pre-structured reality with which we are confronted, and sets of affordances and limitations on processes. The concern in research is with the relationship and tension between pre-constructed social structures, practices, identities, orders of dis course, organizations on the one hand, and processes, actions, events on the other. People with their capacities for agency are seen as socially produced, contingent and subject to change, yet real, and possessing real causal pow ers which, in their tension with the causal powers of social structures and practices, are a focus for analysis. Discourse analysis focuses on this tension specifically in textual elements of social events.

Critical Discourse Analysis4 This version of discourse analysis has been developed in connection with trans disciplinary research on social change. Transdisciplinary research is more than a short-term collaboration of disciplines around particular research projects; it is a long-term dialogue between disciplines and theories with each drawing on the concepts, categories and ‘logics’ of the others in pursuing its own theo retical and methodological development (Fairclough 2003, forthcoming b). Critical discourse analysis specifically contributes to such research a focus on



how discourse figures in relation to other social elements in processes of social change. This includes the integration of detailed analysis of texts into research on social change.5 This version of CDA views discourse as an element of social processes and social events, and also an element of relatively durable social practices, though neither are reducible to discourse: they are articulations of discourse with non-discoursal elements. ‘Discourse’ subsumes language as well as other forms of semiosis such as visual images and ‘body language’, and texts (the discoursal elements of social events) often combine different semiotic forms (e.g. the texts of television characteristically combine language and visual images, and in many cases music or various ‘sound effects’). But the use of the ‘term ‘discourse’6 rather than ‘language’ is not purely or even pri marily motivated by the diversity of forms of semiosis; it primarily registers a relational way of seeing linguistic/semiotic elements of social events and practices as interconnected with other elements. The objective of discourse analysis, on this view, is not simply analysis of discourse per se, but analy sis of the relations between discourse and non-discoursal elements of the social, in order to reach a better understanding of these complex relations (including how changes in discourse can cause changes in other elements). But if we are to analyse relations between discourse and non-discoursal ele ments, we must obviously see them as different elements of social reality – as ontologically (and not just epistemologically, analytically) different. They are different, but we might say that they are not discrete, in the sense that other elements of the social (e.g. the social relations and material division and structuring of space in organizations), in being socially constructed through discourse, come to incorporate or ‘internalize’ particular discursive elements (including particular discourses) without being reducible to them. The relations between them are dialectical, in Harvey’s sense (Harvey 1996; see also Chouliaraki and Fairclough 1999; Fairclough 2003; Fairclough et al. 2004b). As I have indicated, I adopt the ‘stratified’ view of ontology characteristic of critical realism, along with the claim that the relationship between struc tures and events is mediated by social practices. This means that discourse analysis has a doubly relational character: it is concerned with relations between discourse and other social elements, and relations between texts as discoursal elements of events and ‘orders of discourse’ as discoursal ele ments of networks of social practices (and, ultimately, languages and other semiotic systems as social structures). Networks of social practices include specifically discoursal selections and orderings from languages and other semiotic systems which I call ‘orders of discourse’, appropriating but redefin ing Foucault’s term (Foucault 1984; Fairclough 1992). Orders of discourse are social structurings of linguistic/semiotic variation or difference. That is to say, linguistic and semiotic systems make possible


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(can ‘generate’) texts which differ without limit, but the actual range of vari ation is socially delimited and structured, i.e. through the ways in which linguistic and semiotic systems interact with other social structures and sys tems. An order of discourse can more specifically be seen as a particular com bination of different discourses, different genres and different styles, which are articulated together in a distinctive way. A discourse is a particular way of representing certain parts or aspects of the (physical, social, psychological) world; for instance, there are different political discourses (liberal, conservative, social-democratic, etc.) which rep resent social groups and relations between social groups in a society in dif ferent ways. A genre is a particular way of acting socially, which means acting together, i.e. interacting; for instance, there are different genres for consult ing, discussing or interviewing. A style is a particular way of being, i.e. a particular identity; for instance, there are distinguishable ways of managing or ‘leading’ in organizations which can be characterized as different styles. Whereas one can see ways of representing as having a purely dis coursal or semiotic character, ways of acting and ways of being have only a partially discursive character, and entail relations between discoursal and non-discoursal social elements. In some forms of social action (e.g. certain commodity production processes) discourse is secondary to material action, in others (e.g. meetings) action consists almost entirely of discourse; and particular ways of managing include bodily habits and dispositions as well as ways of communicating. An order of discourse is not adequately specified simply in terms of the sets of discourses, genres and styles it comprises; the relations between them – how they are articulated together – are crucial. So the order of discourse of a particular organization will include discourses, genres and styles whose distribution is complementary, corresponding to different parts and facets of the organization, but also discourses, genres and styles which are potentially conflicting alternatives, whose relations are defined in terms of dominance, resistance, marginalization, innovation, and so forth. If an order of discourse constitutes a system, it is a system which may be more or less stable and durable, or stable in some parts and unstable in others, more or less resistant to change or open to change.7 I shall use the term ‘text’,8 in a generalized sense (not just written text but also spoken interaction, multi-semiotic televisual text, etc.) for the discoursal element of social events. Texts are doubly contextualized, first in their rela tion to other elements of social events, second in their relation to social practices, which is ‘internal’ to texts in the sense that they necessarily draw on orders of discourse, i.e. social practices in their discoursal aspect, and the discourses, genres and styles associated with them. However, events (and therefore texts) are points of articulation and tension between two causal forces: social practices and, through their mediation, social structures; and



the agency of the social actors who speak, write, compose, read, listen to, interpret them. The social ‘resource’ of discourses, genres and styles is sub ject to the transformative potential of social agency, so that texts do not simply instantiate discourses, genres and styles; they actively rework them, articulate them together in distinctive and potentially novel ways, hybridize them, transform them. The ‘interdiscursive’ analysis of texts (Fairclough 1992; Chouliaraki and Fairclough 1999) in this version of CDA shows how texts articulate differ ent discourses, genres and styles together, potentially drawing from diverse orders of discourse, and potentially showing the capacity of social agents to use existing social resources in innovative ways which, subject to certain con ditions, may contribute to changing the character of and relations between social practices. The causal powers of social agents in social events are thus conditional on pre-structured properties of social life, knowledge of which can only be pro duced by abstraction, and knowledge of which is necessary for analyses of concrete events which can show the socially transformative and constructive powers of social agents. Interdiscursive analysis allows the analyst to assess the relationship and tension between the causal effects of agency in the con crete event and the causal effects of practices and structures, and to detect shifts in the relationship between orders of discourse and networks of social practices as these are registered in the interdiscursivity (mixing of genres, discourses, styles) of texts. The interdiscursive properties of texts can be seen as ‘realized’ in their linguistic and semiotic features.9 Analysis of texts com prises both interdiscursive analysis and linguistic/semiotic analysis. Texts can be seen as product and as process. Texts as products can be stored, retrieved, bought and sold, cited and summarized and so forth. Texts as processes can be grasped through regarding what we might call ‘texturing’ (Fairclough 2003), the making of texts, as a specific modality of social action, of social production or ‘making’ (of meanings, understandings, knowledge, beliefs, attitudes, feelings, social relations, social and personal identities). Halliday (1994) has used the term ‘logogenesis’, seeing the text itself as a time-frame within which entities (objects, persons, spaces) can be constructed or ‘textured’. For instance, an important logogenetic process in the texts of organizations is ‘nominalization’, which is linguistically a shift from verbs (and the subjects, objects, tense and modal operators and so forth which are co-constructed with verbs in sentences) to a particular class of nouns in the representation of actions and processes (for instance, from ‘I commenced work’ to ‘job commencement’). Nominalization is associated with a shift from the representation of actions and processes situated in the ‘here and now’, involving specific per sons in specific places at specific times, a disembedding, dedifferentiation and time-space distantiation of actions and processes from concrete and


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particular situations to an abstract representation of them as applicable ‘wherever, whenever and involving whoever’ (Iedema 2003: 73). Iedema argues that ‘organization is contingent upon people being able to produce and reproduce these kinds of “distanced meanings”’ (2003: 79). Nominalization transforms processes and actions into a type of pseudo-entities, but at the same time has potentially (re)constructive effects on organizational identi ties and social relations. Analysis of nominalization in organizational texts constitutes one case where a specific and focused form of linguistic analysis can be connected to questions about social construction in organizations. From the perspective of this version of CDA, the general case for incorpo rating discourse analysis into social and organizational research includes the claim that such research should include detailed analysis of texts. The argument is a rather obvious one: one cannot research relations between discourse and other social elements, including the constructive effects of discourse, in the absence of methods for analysing linguistic, semi otic and interdiscursive features of texts in some detail. This of course is widely recognized as a problem for many social researchers who wish to undertake discourse analysis without a background in linguistics or language studies, and it is one good reason for developing transdisciplinary collabora tion in social and organizational research. The approach to research methodology associated with this version of discourse analysis sees methodology as the process through which one con structs ‘objects of research’ (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992) from research topics. One should not assume that the research topic is transparent in yielding up coherent objects of research. The process of constructing them involves selecting theoretical frameworks, perspectives and categories to bring to bear on the research topic. It is only on the basis of such theoriza tion of the research topic and the delineation of ‘objects of research’ that one can settle on appropriate methods of data selection, collection and analysis. In certain cases, this would be the work of an interdisciplinary research team; in others it may be a matter of a discourse analyst drawing on literature from other disciplines and theories. This means that discourse analysis on this view involves working in dialogue with particular bodies of social theory and approaches to social research, identifying specific research questions for dis course analysis within the object of research, and seeking to ensure that rela tions between discourse and other social elements are properly addressed. For example, Fairclough (2000) addressed the political phenomenon of ‘New Labour’ from a discourse analytical perspective, formulating research ques tions in dialogue with objects of research constructed by political research ers. Critical realism is a philosophy of (social) science, not a (social) theory, and a critical realist approach is consistent with diverse social scientific theo ries which CDA might productively enter dialogue with (see for instance the dialogue with Jessop (2002) in Fairclough forthcoming b).



Discourse Analysis in a Critical Realist Approach to Organizational Studies and Organizational Change I shall begin this section with a brief discussion of critical realist approaches to organizational studies, and then focus on how the version of discourse analysis I have set out above can contribute to research on organizational change which is consistent with a critical realist position.

Critical Realist Approaches to Organizational Studies Ackroyd and Fleetwood (2000) address the tendency within organization and management studies towards a polarization between positivist and post modernist research. The objection of the authors in this collection is that this polarization of positions has ignored both the claims of realism (and particu larly critical realism) to be an alternative to both positivism and postmod ernism in organization and management studies, and the substantive body of existing research which is based on realist principles. The critical realist critique of postmodernist research in organizational studies focuses on two interconnected issues which have already featured in my discussion above: the view of organizations as consisting of only discourse, and a ‘flat ontology’ which makes no ontological distinction between process (and agency) and structure. These features of postmodernist positions are held to cause vari ous problems for organization and management studies which critical realist positions can overcome. Without a dualist ontology, methodological examination of conditions for organizational stability or organizational change becomes impossible. Collapsing the distinction between agency and structure, far from leaving researchers free to account for neglected aspects of agency, makes the causal powers of agents and their actualization impossible to analyse: the capac ity of social agents to radically transform organizational structures, and the conditions under which that capacity can be actualized; differences between agents, according to their positions within the social relations of organiza tions, to effect changes; and so forth. Furthermore, texts may have disorga nizing as well as organizing effects on organizations (Ackroyd 2000), but one cannot assess the effects of texts on organizations, or indeed whether changes in texts have any wider effects at all, unless one can look at relations between discourse and other social elements and between process (and agency) and structure. One limitation of critical realism with respect to the incorporation of discourse analysis into organizational studies is that it has tended to give little systematic attention to language and discourse. However, a recent paper by Fairclough et al. (2004b) has tried to go some way towards redressing this neglect, and has argued that certain work in CDA (particularly the sort of approach I have described above) is consistent with critical realism.


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CDA and Organizational Change The tendency within research on organizational discourse which I have criti cized above, privileging ‘organizing’ over organization, is also evident in a recent paper on organizational change by Tsoukas and Chia. The authors argue that: ‘Change must not be thought of as a property of organization. Rather, organization must be understood as an emergent property of change. Change is ontologically prior to organization – it is the condition of pos sibility for organization . . . we argue that change is the reweaving of ac tors’ webs of beliefs and habits of action as a result of new experiences obtained through interactions . . . Organization is an attempt to order the intrinsic flux of human action, to channel it towards certain ends, to give it a particular shape, through generalizing and institutionalizing particu lar meanings and rules. At the same time, organization is a pattern that is constituted, shaped, emerging from change.’ (Tsoukas and Chia 2002: 567)

The view that organizations, like all objects or ‘permanences’, are emer gent effects of social process, and that change is inherent in social process, is consistent with the dialectical-relational version of critical realist ontology I have been advocating. But once constituted, such objects as organizations become durable entities with their own causal powers to shape processes and events, though always in contingent ways which are conditional among other things on the causal powers of social agents and the unpredictable character of events. Tsoukas and Chia recognize this. Part of their argument, however, is that the categories and practices which are institutionalized in organizations are inevitably subject to adaptation and change as organiza tional agents engage in a range of processes and events which is inherently too complex and fluid to be anticipated or pre-programmed. This is clearly the case. My first problem with their account of organizational change, however, is that it does not address the relationship between ‘organizational becoming’ (change as ongoing in organizational interaction) and change in organiza tional structures. They do acknowledge that much of the change in orga nizational interaction does not become ‘institutionalized’, but this is in the context of a discussion of organizational resistance and inertia. But it is not just a matter of organizations sometimes failing to change when there are good reasons for arguing that they need to. One can argue rather that it is a property of organizational structures – and not merely a fault – that they can remain relatively stable despite the change and variation which orga nizational processes routinely produce, even despite radically disorganiz ing processes (Ackroyd 2000). From the perspective of analytical dualism, structures and processes (and agency) have different properties, including



different properties of continuity and change, and a theory of organizational change needs to clarify these differences, and in so doing clarify the rela tionship between change as an inherent feature of organizational processes and change in organizational structures. The authors’ view that ‘organization scientists need to give theoretical priority to microscopic change’ (Tsoukas and Chia 2002: 572) strikes me as an obstacle in this respect: neither ‘micro scopic’ change nor structural change should be given theoretical priority; what theory needs to address is the relationship between them. I would argue that research on organizational change benefits not only from adopting analytical dualism, but also from a clear and coherent account of the difference and relations between discourse and other elements of the social. This brings me to my second problem with Tsoukas and Chia’s paper. It strikes me that they merge together (for instance in the quotation above) aspects of change which need to be analytically teased apart: change in dis course (which they do not explicitly distinguish or address as such), ‘new’ experiences, change in beliefs, change in habits of action, and change in organization. The metaphor of ‘reweaving’ is a congenial one for the ver sion of discourse analysis I have set out above. But I was suggesting there specifically that change in discourse is a matter of novel interdiscursive rela tions, the ‘reweaving’ of relations between different discourses, genres and styles. One can certainly relate this to new experiences. But it is necessary to distinguish such change in discourse from change in beliefs, change in habits of action and (as I have already indicated) change in organization. Whether or not change in discourse leads to change in beliefs or habits of action, as well as change in organizations, is a contingent matter. Change in discourse may for instance be rhetorically motivated, to do with persuading others without necessarily implying change in one’s own beliefs. Or even if it is not rhetorically motivated it can be ephemeral, without durable effects on beliefs or habits of action. Whether it does or does not have such effects is contingent on other factors, including long-term (‘habitus’) and short-term characteristics of social actors, and the latitude available within the ‘pattern’ of organization for variation in habits of action. Changes in discourse cer tainly can and do contribute to change in beliefs, habits of action, and indeed organizations, but it is only by consistently regarding the difference between such social elements that one can investigate the relations between them. The issues can be formulated in terms of evolutionary theory, which Jessop (2002) has integrated into a theoretical framework for researching changes in governance and the state which is consistent with critical real ism and a dialectical-relational ontology. Social interaction inherently pro duces changes in discourse which add to social variation. But to account for the relationship between such change and change in pre-constructed objects such as persons (with their beliefs and habits of action) and organizations, one needs to address the factors and conditions which determine how par ticular variants are selected and retained, whereas others are not. This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.

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I have argued above that the version of discourse analysis I am advocat ing is best deployed within transdisciplinary research on social change, pro viding a specifically discourse analytical perspective in researching ‘objects of research’ which are constituted on a transdisciplinary basis. This entails working as a discourse analyst in dialogue with the particular theoretical resources and frameworks drawn on in constituting objects of research for research topics. Let me refer to three examples in my own work. I have already mentioned the study of ‘New Labour’, in which the particular research questions formulated for a discourse analytical approach to New Labour were established through dialogue with social and political theories of which related change in the political field to economic globalization and the associated political project of neo-liberalism. Chiapello and Fairclough (2002) was an attempt to set up a dialogue between the ‘new sociology of capitalism’ (Boltanski and Chiapello 1999) and CDA, interpreting what Boltanski and Chiapello identify as the ‘new spirit of capitalism’ in discourse analytical terms as being in part a change in orders of discourse within busi ness organizations, including for instance changes in the styles of managers and ‘leaders’. Fairclough (forthcoming a) is a study of ‘transition’ in postcommunist countries focusing on Romanian strategies for building an ‘infor mation society’ and ‘knowledge economy’, which formulated specific objects of research and specific research questions for discourse analysis on the basis of a theorization of ‘transition’ in terms of ‘new’ or ‘cultural’ political econ omy. None of these studies has addressed change in particular organizations, but they do I think begin to set out an approach to incorporating discourse analysis into transdisciplinary research on change which can be productively extended to organizational change. From what I have said so far, two central principles for such research have emerged: (1) that while change in discourse is a part of organizational change, and organizational change can often be understood partly in terms of the constructive effects of discourse on organizations, organizational change is not simply change in discourse, and relations between change in discourse and change in other elements of organizations are matters for investigation, which entails a clear and consistent analytical distinction between discourse and other social elements; (2) that while ongoing change in social process, in social interaction, can contribute to organizational change, the relationship between change in social interaction and change in organizational structures is complex and subject to conditions of possibility which need to be investi gated, which entails a clear and consistent distinction between social process (including texts), social practices (including orders of discourse) and social structures. One cannot proceed without theoretical assumptions about organiza tional change. Proposing a general theory of organizational change is clearly beyond the scope of this paper (not to mention my own capabilities), but I do need to make a number of assumptions about organizational structures and This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.


organizational change in order to consider them from a discourse analytical perspective. These assumptions draw from the version of cultural political economy I used in Fairclough (forthcoming a), and especially from Jessop (2002).10 1. Organizational structures are hegemonic structures, structures which are based in and reproduce particular power relations between groups of social agents, which constitute ‘fixes’ with enduring capacity to manage the contradictions of organizations in ways which allow them to get on with their main business more or less successfully. 2. Organizational structures may come into crisis, generally as a result of a combination of both external and internal changes and pressures, when the ‘fix’ is perceived as no longer viable. 3. In situations of crisis, groups of social agents develop their own particular (and opposing) strategies for achieving a new ‘fix’, and through a process of hegemonic struggle a new hegemonic ‘fix’ may emerge. 4. Strategies have a partly discoursal character, including particular dis courses and narratives11 which represent in particular ways what has happened and is happening, and construct imaginaries for what could happen. Discourses and narratives may be ‘recontextualized’ from other organizations. 5. Change in the social process, including change in texts, may have trans formative effects on organizational structures in so far as it becomes incorporated within successful strategies. 6. The implementation of a successful strategy is a matter of the operation alization of new representations and imaginaries (new discourses and narratives) in new ways of acting and being and new material arrange ments. An important part of these assumptions is that the category of ‘strategies’ is seen as mediating the relationship between the change which is inher ent in social interaction and texts, and change in organizational structures. With respect to my reference to evolutionary theory above, the selection and retention of variants is a matter of their being incorporated into successful strategies. Strategies constitute imaginaries for changes in the networks of social practices of organizations, changes in organizational structure, includ ing changes in the orders of discourse of organizations; and in so far as strat egies are successful, such imaginaries may be realized in actual changes. In connection with these assumptions, I would suggest that there are four broad sets of research issues which can productively be addressed specifi cally by discourse analysts in transdisciplinary research on organizational change: the problems of emergence, hegemony, recontextualization and operationalization:


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• Emergence: the processes of emergence of new discourses, their constitu tion as new articulations of elements of existing discourses. • Hegemony: the processes of particular emergent discourses (and not oth ers) and associated narratives becoming hegemonic in particular organi zations. • Recontextualization: the dissemination of emergently hegemonic dis courses across structural boundaries (e.g. between organizations) and scalar boundaries (e.g. from local to national or international scale, or vice versa). • Operationalization: the operationalization of such discourses, their enact ment in new ways of (inter)acting, including genres, their inculcation in new ways of being or identities, including styles, their materialization as objects and properties of the physical world. Emergence. The problem of emergence is approached on the principle that nothing comes out of nothing – new discourses emerge through ‘reweav ing’ relations between existing discourses. These may include ‘external’ discourses existing elsewhere which become recontextualized in an orga nization – recontextualization (see further below) involves questions of reception and appropriation, working ‘external’ discourses into relations with internal discourses. These processes of ‘reweaving’ can be identified in analysis of texts as processes (as ‘texturing’). There is an analysis of a specific example in Fairclough et al. (2004b: 35–36). And Iedema et al. (2004) show how the doctor-manager ‘reweaves’ relations between different discourses (a process of ‘bricolage’, as they describe it). An emergent new discourse may be ‘institutionalized’ within a changed order of discourse, a process which is conditional on it being incorporated into a successful strategy (see the discussion of ‘hegemony’ below). What ‘reweaving’ goes on, which new dis courses emerge, are not dependent on internal properties of social process and text alone – they are not socially arbitrary, not merely an effect of the normal flux or ‘play’ of interaction. As Iedema et al. point out, the doctormanager’s ‘feat’ (as they see it) is conditional on the particular contradictions thrown up by organizational restructuring in public services such as medi cine, and the marketization and managerialization of organizations such as hospitals. In other words, new discourses which may contribute to changes in organizational structures have their own conditions of possibility in the structures of organizations, the strategies of social agents, the habitus of social agents, and so forth.12 Therefore, while problems of emergence can be researched through analysing change in social processes, social interaction and text, including chains and series of interconnected texts over time and across organizational space, they also require reference to these structural, strategic and other factors. Hegemony. The effect (or lack of effect) of emergent phenomena in social process and text depends on whether they are selected for incorporation into



the strategies of social groups, and the success or failure of competing strate gies in processes of hegemonic struggle. Researching the hegemony problem entails carrying out discourse analytical research in dialogue with social sci entists who investigate relations between social groups in organizations and the strategies of social groups. This is a matter both of textual analysis, and of seeking to identify what distinctive discourses and narratives are associated with particular strategies (which shifts the focus towards emerging social practices and associated orders of discourse), as well as analysing texts with a focus on contradictions and struggles between competing discourses and strategies. This entails what one might call strategic critique (as opposed to the ideological and rhetorical critique which are also familiar within CDA), focusing on how discourse figures within the strategies pursued by groups of social agents to change organizations in particular directions (Fairclough forthcoming c). Strategies effect distinctive articulations of discourses, often organized around a dominant ‘nodal discourse’ (the discourse of ‘new pub lic management’, or ‘total quality management’ might be examples) which organizes relations between other constituent discourses (Jessop 2002, Fair clough forthcoming a). The success or failure of strategies depends on various conditions, some of which have a discoursal character: for instance, some discourses are more ‘resonant’ than others (Fairclough et al. 2004b), better able to capture and encapsulate the experiences of social agents, better able to complement or organize existing discourses. The success or failure of strat egies also depends on the resilience, resistance or inertia of existing organiza tional structures, including how well embedded existing discourses are. Recontextualization. The concept of recontextualization is taken from Bernstein’s sociology of pedagogy and has been operationalized as a cat egory in CDA (Bernstein 1990; Chouliaraki and Fairclough 1999), a case of internal theoretical development through transdisciplinary dialogue. Recontextualization identifies the (‘recontextualizing’) principles according to which ‘external’ discourses (and practices) are internalized within par ticular organizations – particular organizations (schools, businesses, media organizations) constituted in particular ways have their own distinctive ways of internalizing ‘external’ discourses. Chouliaraki and Fairclough see recon textualization as a colonization-appropriation dialectic: organizations may be seen as colonized by external discourses, but they actively appropriate them (setting the new in relation with the old) in ways which may lead to unpredictable transformations and outcomes. Given that contemporary orga nizations are characteristically embedded within complex networks of orga nizations which render them subject to powerful external pressures which affect trajectories of internal change, and given that these inter-organizational processes are often ‘discourse-led’, researching the recontextualization of discourses is an important part of discourse analytical research on organiza tional change. For instance, research on ‘transition’ in the post-communist countries involves questions about how the neo-liberal discourses which


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were so salient in the interventions of external agencies in the early years of ‘transition’ have been recontextualized within post-communist countries and within particular organizations and institutions. Linking the problem of recontextualization with the problem of hegemony, one might argue that such external discourses have substantive internal effects only on condition that they are incorporated within successful strategies, i.e. that the effectivity of the ‘flow’ of discourses across structural boundaries between organiza tions and across scalar boundaries between ‘global’, ‘macro-regional’ (e.g. EU), national and local boundaries (specific organizations would be ‘local’ in this sense) is conditional on how they enter into internal social relations and social struggles. Operationalization. I have referred so far only to discourses, without men tioning the other categories which constitute orders of discourse (genres, styles), or how discourses are dialectically transformed into other social ele ments. These are interconnected. Successful strategies may be operational ized, i.e. cease to be merely imaginaries for change, and effect real change. Operationalization includes enactment: discourses may be dialectically trans formed into new ways of acting and interacting. For instance, the discourse of ‘appraisal’ entered higher educational organizations in Britain as a discourse, an imaginary for change, which was then enacted as universities negotiated and adopted procedures for appraising staff. And, as this example indicates, enactment includes the dialectical transformation of discourses into genres: these procedures included new genres, including the ‘appraisal interview’, which was designed to regulate interaction between appraiser and appraisee in particular ways (see Fairclough 2003 for analysis of a particular organiza tion). Operationalization also includes inculcation – the dialectical transfor mation of discourses into new ways of being, new identities, which includes new styles. For instance, the emergent hegemony of the discourse of ‘new public management’ in such organizations as local government authorities includes changes in the identities of public service managers and workers, including changes in their communicative styles. Finally, operationalization includes materialization: a new management system in an organization may include changes in the structuring of organizational space, e.g. in the design of office space. Through these forms of operationalization, networks of social practices and the orders of discourse which are parts of them may be trans formed. I have formulated these four problems in general terms to give a general view of the sort of contribution CDA can make to research on organizational change. They are, of course, not alternatives. For any particular research project, discourse analysts can contribute in dialogue with other researchers to the constitution of objects of research for research topics, and the likeli hood is that the particular research questions it contributes will involve a combination of versions of some or all of the problems. For instance, my research on New Labour (Fairclough 2000) addressed the emergence of the



discourse of the ‘third way’, its incorporation within a hegemonic strategy for change, its recontextualization (e.g. from UK domestic politics to inter national politics), and to some extent its operationalization through the for mulation and implementation of policies.

Conclusion I have argued that a commitment to discourse analysis in organizational studies entails neither a reduction of organizations to organizational dis course, nor a reduction of organizational analysis to the ‘organizing’ that goes on in organizational processes. Discourse analysis is consistent with a real ist approach to organizational research which distinguishes organizational process and agency from organizational structures, and focuses research on the relations and tensions between them. Incorporating discourse analysis into a realist approach both ensures that questions of discourse are properly attended to in organizational studies, and avoids these forms of reduction ism. Within such a realist approach, discourse analysis can make a significant contribution to researching organizational change, and addressing such gen eral concerns as the following: when organizations change, what is it that changes? What makes organizations resilient in the face of change, resistant to change, or open to change? How are external pressures for organizational change internalized in organizations, how may organizational members respond to them, and what outcomes are possible? Such questions cannot of course be addressed by discourse analysts alone, but my argument is that effectively researching them does depend on a substantive element of dis course analysis in transdisciplinary research on organizational change.

Notes 1. I take an analytically dualist position, as I explain later in the paper, which distin guishes ‘social process’ and ‘social structure’ as ontologically distinct though inter connected facets of the social, and focuses research on the relationship between them. Analysis of social process includes analysis of agency, so another way of formulating the fundamental ontological distinction is ‘agency v structure’. As Fair clough et al. (2004b) argue, the analytical isolation of distinct events and chains of events in the social process is itself an interpretative accomplishment which involves and depends on discourse, even where the events concerned do not have a mainly discursive character (e.g. a football match, as opposed to a lecture, which does have a mainly discursive character). 2. The authors state that ‘the portrait painted’ in the paper ‘celebrates this one person’s talk as a performativity’. As conversation analysts have shown, there is a sense in which any talk is a performativity or feat to be celebrated, and that surely applies to the more-or-less skilled performances of managers in any form of organization. I suspect the authors are confusing novelty with performativity – yet there are no doubt already managers for whom performances of this sort are rather routine.


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3. Or perhaps more adequately, social fields can be regarded as configurations of institu tions, and organizations can be regarded as institutions of a distinctive type, where organizations and other types of institution are configurations of social practices (Ack royd 2000). 4. Together with a broad consensus which is sufficient to identify CDA as a distinct re search tradition, there are substantial differences on certain issues within the field (Fairclough and Wodak 1997), as well as shifts over time in the positions of individual researchers, including my own. If we bring into the picture the rapidly expanding applications of CDA in a great many disciplines and fields in social science (see Fair clough et al. 2004a), then the positions and approaches which count as, or claim to be, CDA expand considerably. Since I believe that research in CDA is most fruitfully carried out in transdisciplinary dialogue with other disciplines, theories and forms of research, this proliferation of CDA within various areas of social scientific research is a welcome advance on the earlier situation of CDA often camping precariously on their borders. But it does pose some problems in making what counts as CDA. See note 5. 5. Critical discourse analysis has been one of a number of methodological influences within research on organizational discourse (others include conversation analysis, lin guistic pragmatics, sociolinguistics, and systemic functional linguistics). What counts as ‘critical discourse’ analysis is subject to the same diversity in this area of research as in others. It should be clear from what I have said that my position does not constitute a blanket endorsement of all the research on organisational discourse which has iden tified itself as critical discourse analysis. 6. There are arguments for using the term ‘semiosis’ rather than ‘discourse’ in the abstract sense as an element of the social in relation to other non-discoursal elements of the social, given the widespread confusion between ‘discourse’ in this sense and (particu lar) ‘discourses’, and the widespread reduction of ‘discourse’ to ‘discourses’ which I discuss later (Fairclough et al. 2004b). However, I shall use the more familiar term ‘discourse’. 7. Languages and other semiotic systems as social structures, and orders of discourse as facets of networks of social practices, are in critical realist terms both objects with particular generative mechanisms or causal powers. Languages have the causal power to contribute to the production of a limitless set of semiotic (elements of) events, far beyond the actual. Orders of discourse can in part be seen as constructs which account for the gap between the causal powers of languages (and other semiotic systems) and the semiotic actual. But a distinction must still be drawn between the causal powers of an order of discourse and the semiotic actual – the latter is in a sense both less than and more than the former, for the extent to which the former are actualized is con ditional on contingencies, and the fact that texts are effects of the causal powers of objects other than orders of discourse (or languages) means that may exceed the pos sibilities defined by orders of discourse. 8. The term ‘text’ is not really felicitous for the general sense of the discoursal element of events, because it is so strongly associated with written language. However, I have not found a more satisfactory alternative. 9. I subsume a variety of particular forms of analysis under ‘linguistic’ analysis, including grammatical analysis, semantic analysis, analysis of vocabulary and metaphor, analysis of argumentation and other forms of rhetorical analysis, narrative analysis, pragmatic analysis, conversational analysis and other forms of interactional analysis. See Fair clough 2003. 10. Jessop’s concern is with change in political economies (interconnected changes in eco nomic systems and systems of governance), not with change in organizations. There are clearly difficulties in simply extrapolating from the one to the other, but I think that nevertheless this set of (tentative) assumptions will allow me to indicate schematically



how I envisage the contribution of discourse analysis to research on organizational change. 11. Narratives are distinctive both with respect to discourses and with respect to genres – they involve particular ways of representing the social and organizational world (dis courses) and particular ways of telling stories about them (genres). For my present purposes, the focus is on the discourses associated with particular narratives rather than questions of genre. 12. In Fairclough and Thomas (2004) we argue for instance that structural factors as well as the strategies of groups of social agents are germane to explaining the emergence of the discourse of ‘globalization’ in the past few decades, especially given that globaliza tion is widely regarded as a process which is centuries old. ‘Why here, why now?’ are pertinent questions to ask.

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33 Embedded Ethics: Discourse and Power in the New South Wales Police Service Ray Gordon, Stewart Clegg and Martin Kornberger

Introduction

I

n this paper we ask, ‘How do relations of power shape organizational members’ ethical practices?2 We address the question through both theoretical and empirical work. Theoretically, we review and question the argument that ethics are embedded in micro-organizational power relations and are subject to shaping by macro-institutional forms of power. We do so by looking at an ethical change initiative in the New South Wales (NSW) Police Service as a situated practice in which the macro and the micro were mutually constitutive. As researchers, we were intrigued by the NSW Police Service’s attempts to reform their ethical practices; also, we were puzzled by the fact that, despite the public pressure and the considerable amount of resources committed to the reform, the concept of ‘ethical policing’ seemed to be an elusive reform objective. Hence, we decided to research the question of how power relations shape organizational members’ ethical practices. Our analysis advances current theorizing in ethics and organization theory. To date, most approaches to how power shapes ethics in organizations propose either a micro-approach, derived from an ethnographic tradition (such as Jackall 1988), or a macroapproach, derived from a more institutional perspective (such as Crank and Langworthy 1992). We supplement this theorizing by introducing analysis in which micro- and macro-power relations interact in situated practices to shape ethics. Source: Organization Studies, 30(1) (2009): 73–98.


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The NSW Police Service represented a most interesting research subject: the Service was rife with corruption and unethical behaviour. In order to introduce more ‘efficient and ethical policing’ (Ryan 2002) a macroorganizational reform programme designed to expunge ethically corrupt behaviour was instigated. The main thrust of the reforms was to shift formal power relations from a coercive bureaucracy into more democratic and team-based forms. The idea behind these changes was that more democracy at the base of the organization would create space in which officers could resist corrupt tendencies and act more ethically rather than be subject to overbearing and corrupt authority. Power relations were addressed in the change programme by reforming the formal rules, relations and protocols of the organization, in particular through the introduction of new routine situated practices within the existing bureaucracy. Notably, these were the Operations Control and Review (OCR) meeting and the Employee Management System (EMS). The boundaries of the OCR and the EMS were coextensive with a particular style of speaking, characteristic of the new style of reformed policing to which police were expected to conform. As our analysis of the OCR and the EMS will show, these practices were pivotal in the constitution of ethics. We will argue that power is neither institutionally external to ethics nor is ethics somehow separated from institutional effects. In order to discuss our research question, we have structured our paper as follows: first, we prepare the theoretical context of our argument; second, we introduce the research framework and provide an account of our methodology; third, we report the findings of the study. We were able to identify a number of lenses that were situationally constructed and institutionalized within the Police Service. These culturally situated practices were complex, subtle and distinctive (Philipsen, 1989/1990). Hence our contribution focuses on what happened in specific situational contexts in the Service and why it happened, rather than judging the observed practices. Finally, we discuss the implications of our findings for future theoretical work and management practice.

Theoretical Framework Police organizations are a particular type of organization: they are essentially, bureaucratic and militaristic in character (Dandeker 1992; Battistelli 2008). However, this does not mean that their officers are tightly scripted and framed in their enactment of official roles. As Manning (2008: 678) notes, ‘performing in the interests of order is not the same as what the organization requires in formal bureaucratic terms’. Because so much police work takes place in improvised contexts that are subsequently and post-hoc tightly framed in terms of bureaucratic accountability, much of what is interesting about police organizational work is how police ‘rationalize or explain the


Gordon et al. • Embedded Ethics 303

whys and wherefores of that work’ (Manning 2008: 684). Thus, their work is highly situational and contextually specific, often taking place at a distance from the formal organization (Bittner 1967; Jermier et al. 1991). Not surprisingly, because of the fluid nature of policing as a practice, situated in many varied locales, much of the organizational research that has been done is processual and ethnographic, including Manning and Van Maanen (1978), Punch (1979), Van Maanen (1988), Finnane (1987, 1996) and Chan (1997). Seminal studies from symbolic interactionism and ethnomethodology, such as Bittner (1967) and Cicourel (1976), demonstrate that, while being subjected to strict bureaucratic controls, police have considerable discretion because they need to be able to read the streets to understand the moral frameworks of street players. Hence, ethics will be played out in practice in local scenes of action. An emerging school of thought around the notion of ethics as practice (see Clegg et al. 2007; Carter et al. 2008) suggests that ethics are embedded in organizational power relations. Their theoretical proposition is that, in order to theorize embedded ethics, it is pivotal to study power relations. There are two distinct bodies of knowledge that are relevant, yet not discussed jointly. From a micro-organizational perspective, scholars such as Knights and McCabe (1999) see a clear link between power and discourse, using Foucault (1977) to do so. Foucault’s core argument is that power and knowledge are mutually implicated in framing those truths that are held as self-evident and thus shape reality. In organization studies, early contributions by Townley (e.g. 1993) as well as more recent contributions by Halford and Leonard (2007) and Barratt (2008) make productive use of Foucault’s overall oeuvre of power-related work. The relation of rules to practice has long been considered analytically problematic. For instance, Gouldner (1954) argued that the meanings of rules are not inscribed in what they say but vary with the context of enactment. In his Patterns of Industrial Bureaucracy, Gouldner (1954) defined three types of norms (including a punishment-centred bureaucracy) that operate simultaneously and create clashes in an organization’s norm system. From a philosophical standpoint, Wittgenstein (1968) stressed that rules are always interpreted and enacted situationally. Consequently, there is ample opportunity for unscripted norms to override formal rules in action, which is precisely when we would expect ethics to come into play – when rules and norms clash (Munro, 1992). Given the situational nature of rules and their interpretation, it is more likely to be rule use, rather than rule existence, which will shape ethical conduct. Reforming power relations and rewriting the rules does not necessarily reform power practices or their ethicality. Jackall’s (1988) empirical research into the ‘moral rules-in-use that managers construct to guide their behaviour’ found that ‘actual organizational moralities are . . . contextual, situational, This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.

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highly specific, and, most often, unarticulated’ (Jackall 1988: 4,6). Research suggests that, in practice, ethics cannot be conceptualized as coterminous with rule-based codes (e.g. Clegg et al. 2007). Kjonstad and Willmott (1995: 446) are especially critical about the relation between codification and conduct: ‘the provision of codes of conduct is an insufficient, and possibly a perverse, means of recognizing the significance, and promoting the development, of ethical corporate behaviour’. Such codes of conduct do not necessarily produce ethically sound practices (Munro 1992; Barker 1993). Organizational rules and practices are framed discursively, a central contribution of discourse analysis (Clegg 1975; Astley and Zammuto 1992; Alvesson and Karreman 2000a,b; Boden 1994; Ford and Ford 1995; Czarniawaksa 1997; Deetz 1982; Iedema and Wodak 1999; Wodak and Meyer 2001; Titscher et al. 2000 Fairclough 1989; Fairclough et al. 2004). What rules are constituted as being is made up in and, on occasions of, everyday organizational sensemaking, as Weick (1995), adapting freely from Garfinkel (1967), argues. Weick et al. (2005) portray organizing in terms of members working out the local stories in which they find themselves. Hence, bringing action off as more or less legitimate will always be an effect of local discursive construct; thus, from the perspective of micro-practices, we are encouraged to see the moral universe in every piece of action and its accounting. Against the focus on the micro, close observers of the police as an organiza tion maintain that we also need to view scenes of action institutionally. For instance, Crank and Langworthy (1992: 342) argue that organizational practices and structures in a police organization ‘have a great deal to do with institutional values in its environment’. They suggest that: ‘incorporation of powerful myths into the structure and activities of police departments enables them to attain legitimacy; with legitimacy comes stability and protection from outside interference by powerful sovereign actors who are present in the enveloping institutional environment.’ (Crank and Langworthy 1992: 338)

The linkages between research into everyday discourse and more macroorganizational issues of legitimacy (Crank and Langworthy 1992) remain under-explored. Organizations adapt to external pressure ceremonially, and implement policies that show their commitments, as institutional theory has stressed (Meyer and Rowan 1977). Institutional theory shares some resemblances with mundane theorizing in this respect: organizational actors often assume that those rules that an organization adopts will determine its members’ behaviour in what insitutionalists would see as a form of normative isomorphism. However, while such rules may sociologically frame the accounts that organization members make of their action they do not necessarily frame the action itself. Actions are always situated practices – sometimes far away from the formal rule-shaping policies. Policies are always played out in scenes of everyday working life, where events and local realities This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.


frame policy effects as they are articulated in practice, in quite unanticipated ways. Hence, if ethics are always situated in practices they cannot be seen apart from the power relations that frame and constitute those relations in specifically local situations, and these practices may not simply be an anticipated effect of formal, institutionalized rules, as is evident from Foucauldian-inspired micro-perspectives on power in the recent literature (Hardy and Phillips 2004; Barratt 2008). In asking how relations of power shape organizational members’ ethical practices we are, of necessity, enquiring into the link between institutionalized myths and situated practices. The main myth recounted by police in NSW about who they are is that the Service is a ‘thin blue line’ between anarchy and order, criminality and law. When the reality of policing in NSW was revealed by a series of media reports and commissions of inquiry to be far from the ‘truth’ depicted in this myth, another myth was drawn into play by the new Police Commissioner appointed to clear up the corrupt mess. The alternate myth was one of change occurring through the process of a rational reorganization. When two institutionalized myths collide, the resulting contradiction will tend to be resolved ceremonially and ritualistically (Meyer and Rowan 1977). The collision of two institutionalized myths derived from separate institutional universes, from police lore and management theory, is something that can only be reconciled in practice. The practices that sought to reconcile the myths of policing as the custodian of the moral order and the myth of rational organizational redesign were situated in a number of specific organizational innovations. It was in the situated practices of the OCR and the EMS that the collision of the two myths occurred and ethics were shaped. Here also could be seen a collision and dissolution of the myths that there is, on the one hand, an institutional frame and, on the other, a local discourse, as the macro and the micro respectively.

The Research and Methodological Framework Background to the NSW Police Service The Service is one of the largest police organizations in the world. More than 17,000 employees serve a population of 7 million in the state of New South Wales, an area of over 800,000 square kilometres, equivalent in size to the US state of Texas. However, they also frequently served a less public interest. In 1997 the results of a Royal Commission, a statutory enquiry authorized by the state government with all the powers of a judicial body, revealed policing in NSW to be very different from the ethical values formally espoused by the Service: the Service was rife with unethical and corrupt behaviour, including the abuse of authority, the taking of bribes, providing false evidence, drug dealing, commissioning criminals to commit crimes, fixing internal promotions so that This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.

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corrupted members were promoted, and the use of intimidation and stand-over tactics, as well as murder (Wood 1997). The extent of corruption that occurred in the Service as highlighted by the Wood Report was a source of embarrassment to major stakeholders, especially the NSW Government, the Minister of Police, the media and the electorate. Indeed, politically, it was imperative that the Service be seen to be freeing itself of corruption. The Premier and the Minister wanted stories of corrupt police off the front pages of the newspapers well before the next state election. A ‘clean pair of hands’, untainted by any extant corruption, was recruited from the UK Police Academy in the person of a little-known British Police Officer, a Mr Peter Ryan. Commissioner Ryan initiated a reform programme aimed at achieving ‘ethical and cost efficient policing’ (Ryan 2002). He regarded modern management concepts (empowerment, teams and flatter structures) to be the solution to the problems highlighted by Wood (1997). He initiated a departure from the traditional hierarchical and military structure and, over the next five years, diligently implemented a reform process employing contemporary theories of organizational design to combat unethical behaviour. There were two practices that were specifically designed to ensure ethical policing – the Employment Management System (EMS) and the Operations Control and Review Meeting (OCR). These two change practices were pivotal in transforming the ethics of the Service. After five years, Commissioner Ryan announced that the eradication of unethical and corrupt behaviour from the Service was in its final stage. It was front page news; so, unfortunately, shortly after his announcement, was the revelation of more secret tape recordings and other evidence that demonstrated the unethicality of the Service. Contrary to the Commissioner’s claims, ‘police were not just taking bribes but actively organizing crime, introducing one [drug] dealer to another and encouraging them to work harder . . . [which demonstrated that] corrupt police continued to operate without fear of or hindrance from anti-corruption measures introduced in the past five years’ (Divine 2001:16). Clearly, Commissioner Ryan failed to achieve the objective of ‘ethical and cost efficient policing’ (Ryan 2002).

The Research Setting The NSW Police Service underwent a programme of structural redesign and behavioural reform introduced by Commissioner Ryan. In 2001, following a chance encounter with a colleague well connected to the NSW Police Service, we were introduced to the Service’s Behavioural Change Team, which was seeking to implement the reform proposal foreshadowed by the Wood Royal Commission Report. We were introduced as members of a university seeking a requisite field setting for a major research project. We explained that we were ethnographers looking for insight into not just what is happening but



also how and why it happens (Van Maanen 1988; Manning 1988; Silverman 2005). Following the successful introduction, the first-named author entered the field to conduct a two-year ethnographic research project in a Local Area Command (LAC), termed here the Wallaroo Local Area Command. The Wallaroo LAC was identified by one of the Service’s senior officers as the most advanced and successful in regard to the reform programme’s aims and objectives. The Behavioural Change Team (the group’s name was later changed to the Crime Management Support Unit (CMSU)) had been working with the LAC’s Commander and management team for more than two years, implementing new codes of conduct and introducing flatter structures and cross-functional teams.

Data Collection Over a period of two years the command’s officers and other employees were observed in everyday work activities. The first three months at the LAC were spent talking with members of the command, whose roles spread across man agement, intelligence gathering, operational (patrol officers), traffic control and criminal investigations (detectives). The objective at this early stage was to identify key players and activities in the transformation process. A schedule was established for visiting the LAC one to two days (6–8 hours) a week. After six months, the data-gathering process was extended, primarily through informal interviews, observations of naturally occurring interactions, and conversations with key players as well as from sources such as organizational memos, flyers, newsletters and public documents. The officers who were interviewed came from a variety of teams, positions and ethnicities, and from both genders. The interviews ranged from 10 minutes to 3 hours. The shorter interviews were conducted on the job: here the questions and answers were informal and mostly reflected the situation and task at hand. The longer interviews were more formal and began with open-ended questions and an invitation for participants to tell their story in regard to the reform programme. When the data collection ended, we had accumulated more than 250 research hours of data, including 34 interviews, which, along with field notes and other data sources, amounted to a dataset comprising 68 documents and 14,840 paragraphs of text data.

Data Analysis When working with large datasets it is important to gain access to the data most relevant to the study’s theoretical focus (Eisenhardt 1989). To do this, we used the Nvivo qualitative software package, which enables a researcher, while reading through transcripts of the data, to attach labels or codes to any portion of the text. A portion of text can be labelled with multiple codes. This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.

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Code datawith withrespect respect to power themes, Code the the data to power themes, structures, forms, and effects structures, forms,practices paractices and effects

Group like-coded data to form databases: Group like-coded data to form databases: 1) Power Power themes; Structures; 3) Forms; 1) themes;2)2) Structures; 3) Forms; 4) Practices; Practices; 5) 4) 5)Effects Effects

See Table Table 11 See

Run occurrence measure for Run frequency frequency ofof occurrence measure for each code code within within each database each each database

See forfrequency frequency counts See Table Table 11for counts

For database,aggregate aggregate those text For each each database, those text examples examples represented byaahigh code with a of represented by a code with frequency occurrence high frequency of occurrence

Discard all a low frequency of Discard alldata datawith with a low occurrence of occurrence frequency

Use MatrixIntersection Intersection operation to UseNvivo Nvivo Matrix operation to ascertain atwhich whichtext text examples ascertainthe thefrequency frequency at examples are witha apower power theme arecoded coded with theme codecode and aand code a from codethefrom the aggregated aggregated Structures, Structures, Forms, Practices and Effects databases Forms, Practices and Effects databases

Aggregate thosetext text examples Aggregate those examples with with a higha high frequency ofofoccurrence frequency occurrence

A single single saturated remains thatthat contains A saturateddataset dataset remains text examples information about how contains text providing examples providing informapower is embedded in the structures, forms tion about how power is embedded in the practices and effects that constitute social life in structures, forms practices and effects that the research setting constitute social life in the research setting

Discard alldata data with a low Discard all with a low frequency of frequency occurrence of occurrence

Apply qualitativeanalytical analytical Apply qualitative schema to schema saturated database saturatedto database

Figure 1: Data processing procedure

The researcher can then perform software searches on these codes and group like-coded data into categories for further analysis. We used this software to code and categorize each paragraph of data on the basis of both our a priori theoretical interest and grounded analysis. Wallaroo LAC’s change initiative sought to introduce a practical dedifferentiation of the social boundaries formulated by the existing highly bureaucratized organization structure. The rationale was to transform an essentially authoritarian organization into one that was more participative and democratic. In these terms, we understood the change process to represent a movement from differentiation to de-differentiation, and from domination to democracy. We drew on the work of Clegg (1990) and Lash (1990) to construct an operational frame indicative of our theoretical interests. In brief, differentiation refers to phenomena or action that establishes vertical power differentials between people, and de-differentiation is phenomena or action that reduces power differentials between people. Accordingly, we



allocated the code ‘differentiation’ to text examples from the data in which officers referred to their power relations in terms of clearly defined differential boundaries. For example, an officer might say something like, ‘I cannot question her because she out-ranks me’ or ‘I just do what he says because he is a detective’. We allocated the code ‘domination’ to those text examples that represented an unquestioned acceptance of a particular individual’s or group’s right to power. An example here might be characterized by officers saying, ‘I have learnt not to speak up, the consequences are too great’, or ‘I didn’t want to take it, but I was forced’. We allocated the code ‘de-differentiation’ to text examples that referred to established differential boundaries of power being blurred, usurped or challenged in some way. Instances might include an officer openly challenging a superior in a work setting, or a memo announcing a structure and policy change that requires a usually autonomous group (such as detectives) to now report to an operational team leader. We allocated the code ‘democracy’ to text examples that represented power in more democratic terms. An example here might be a superior officer encouraging a subordinate officer to challenge his judgements, or a detective openly accepting a general duties officer questioning his investigation techniques. The major instrument of ethical change was to be organizational redesign. Accordingly, we also labelled text examples from the data with sub-codes representative of ‘structures’, ‘constraining forms’, ‘practices’ and/or ‘effects’. Portions of text that were allocated a sub-code indicative of ‘structures’ provided examples of overt architectures that constrained people’s behaviour, such as rank, hierarchy and functional divisions. Those allocated a sub-code indicative of ‘forms’ gave us examples of subtle and less readily observable forms of structural constraint such as ‘deference to seniority’ and a ‘code of silence’. The sub-code indicative of ‘practices’ provided examples of actual behaviours, while those allocated the sub-code of ‘effects’ gave us examples related to the effect that the events and behaviours referred to in the text had on the reform objectives. We categorized the data by aggregating like-coded data together, which resulted in the formation of five separate databases: 1) power themes; 2) structures; 3) forms; 4) practices; 5) effects. We then drew on Strauss and Corbin’s (1990) theoretical sampling process and Gephart’s (1993) data saturation procedures to extract the data most theoretically relevant to our interests. The first step was to identify the frequency of occurrence of each sub-code in each database (see Table 1 for frequency counts). Data represented by frequently occurring sub-codes was aggregated while data represented by codes with a low frequency of occurrence was discarded. We used Nvivo software search tools to identify text examples coded with both a power theme sub-code and sub-codes from the structures forms,


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Table 1: Databases, respective codes and frequency of occurrence measures Database Power themes

Structures

Forms

Practices

Effects

Code Differentiation Domination De-differentiation Democracy Functional division Hierarchy Rank Geography Policies and rules Technological Relationships Seniority Routine Experience Code of silence Career Managerial dominance Work schedule Team Surrender Discipline Blowing the whistle Exercising voice Resistance Surveillance Obedience/compliance Payback Reward Collaboration Authority Punishment Protection Deception Seeking legitimacy Undermines reform Reinforces reform Constraint Conflict Reactive policing Proactive policing Fear Frustration Motivation De-motivation

Frequency of occurrence 362 166 107 19 144 142 130 3 67 10 19 39 213 65 6 48 164 13 137 42 54 7 27 117 101 130 12 2 27 60 84 177 40 180 349 113 161 33 124 24 79 74 6 58

High (H) or Low (L) frequency of occurrence H H H L H H H L H L L H H H L H H L H H H L L H H H L L L H H H H H H H H L H L H H L H

Aggregate (A) or discard (D) A A A D A A A D A D D A A A D A A D A A A D D A A A D D D A A A A A A A A D A D A A D A

practices or effects databases. In short, we used the software systematically to trace theoretical links across the databases, utilizing, as per our research question, the power theme sub-codes as moderating variables. Once again, we aggregated the frequently occurring text examples to form a separate database, and discarded all other text examples. The result was a single dataset containing the most frequently occurring text examples coded with sub-codes from the power themes, structures forms, practices and effects


Gordon et al. • Embedded Ethics 311 Table 2: Frequency at which codes for aggregated databases intersected with power theme codes

Database Structures

Forms

Practices

Effects

Code Functional division Hierarchy Rank Policies and rules Seniority Routine Experience Career Managerial dominance Team Surrender Discipline Exercising voice Resistance Surveillance Obedience/compliance Authority Punishment Protection Deception Seeking legitimacy Undermines reform Reinforces reform Constraint Reactive policing Fear Frustration De-motivation

Frequency of intersection with a power theme code 54 99 73 29 24 100 27 24 104 50 28 42 18 34 71 96 34 41 84 20 79 161 34 91 76 56 39 38

High (H) or Low (L) frequency of occurrence

Aggregate (A) or Discard (D)

H H H L L H L L H H L H L L H H L H H L H H L H H H L L

A A A D D A D D A A D A D D A A D A A D A A D A A A D D

databases – in short, the remaining dataset contained the data most relevant to our theoretical interests, which we analysed qualitatively. Having extracted the text examples illustrating how power relations shape the behaviour of officers, we focused subsequent analysis on ethics. Accordingly, we analysed each paragraph of text in this dataset to establish whether these text examples were more or less reproductive or transformative of the old and corrupt Service ethics.

The Findings We divide the data analysis into a narrative in three sections to elucidate the story that unfolds. First, we explore the ways in which power relations are constituted historically; second, we show how these relations shape ethics in practice; and third, we demonstrate how these power relations shape discourse, which, in turn, enacts ethics in practice. Pulling the themes together, we shed light on our overall research question: ‘How do power relations shape organizational members’ ethical practices?’


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The Historical Constitution of Forms of Power The Royal Commission’s findings illustrated how strong discipline and a strict adherence to authoritarian principles of management constituted a culture of obedience and fear in the Service: even if one was not corrupt, one did not question the authority of superiors. As one officer appearing before the Royal Commission said: ‘You weren’t there to lose. You were there to win. If that meant bending the rules, so be it . . . we didn’t see ourselves as criminals by assaulting someone or trying to put criminals behind bars. That was – you know the morality that we saw . . . My view of it is – and it’s somewhat cynical – it’s a big game and the criminals tell lies, the police tell lies, or did tell lies, and if you, shall we say, played it by the rules the whole time, you’d lose.’ (Wood 1997: 186)

Rather than recent reform initiatives, past experience provided the most salient contemporary point of reference for the behaviours and attitudes of the police officers participating in our study. Our data shows that historically developed and legitimized practices shaped ethicality in practice. Chief among these practices were numerous examples where officers made reference to the significance of obeying orders relayed by hierarchy. While one might expect this in a police organization, it had consequences for the reform objectives. For instance, while the researcher was travelling in a patrol vehicle, a General Duties Senior Constable explained that the ‘usual reaction’ of officers in supervising positions drew heavily on their past experience in the Service: ‘[it] is just [a reflection of] all the people in that sort of era. They would say, “Who is the boss there?” They would then, to justify their position, say “I don’t necessarily agree with this but the boss said so and we’ve got to do it.” . . . I knew full well that . . . these people could have a voice and could have a say, but they chose not to because they felt they had to obey the boss.’ (Ddt040400r, Section 0, Paragraphs 77–81)1

The reform process had introduced flattened and team-based working structures in place of the old hierarchies. However, the relationship between team leaders and detectives was especially problematic because, traditionally, supervising officers naturally obey superiors. Despite being formally allocated to teams and expected to report to a team leader, detectives continued to act autonomously and to exercise their traditional discretionary power. Team leaders, despite their post-reform formal authority, continued to act deferentially when interacting with detectives. For instance, when asked by the researcher how he felt about having detectives reporting to him, a team leader said, I haven’t had a problem with them, because really, on our shift, I don’t see any of them’ (Dbatlii1, Section 0, Paragraphs 242–268). The



detectives in his team did not bother to report to him. They just went about their business and he never followed them up. The fit between organizational members and the historical order of things is paramount. Without this fit, officers lose social acceptance and are marginalized. A NSW Police Service senior officer, who was a member of the Crime Management Support Unit, provides some historical insight into how cultural fit between people and the Service contributes to behaviour and attitudes: ‘The need to fit in, in a police service, is higher than the need to fit in a University, and therefore, fitting in demands self-censorship from a very early age . . . because, too much lateral thought leads to challenge, leads to isolation. You have to demonstrate your credibility to fit in to a network.’ (Drj24, Section 0, Paragraphs 34–42)

The officer is suggesting that the need to socially ‘fit in’ to an already established discourse is such that it constrains the innovative capacity of officers, who learn to think and act within a very clear set of social boundaries. Our data indicates that not only do officers act within the boundaries but the nature and relative position of the boundaries is controlled by political action. The boundaries and the power relations they establish are maintained through discipline and punishment, as explained in the following quote from a Team Leader: ‘When I first started in the job, when the Senior Sergeant called out, you said, “Shit, what have I been called for, Christ I am in trouble here.” When an Inspector called, you would tremble in your boots. When a Superintendent called you, you would get your badge, because, you know, I am going to get my badge taken.’ (Dbgt23Section 0, Paragraph 34)

The Team Leader’s view that a superior would only call an officer to punish him or her was widespread. Note that he frames the exercise of punishment within a hierarchical frame, evident in his reference to increasing severity of the punishment that officers would expect from higher levels of the hierarchy. Commissioner Ryan acknowledged the problematic consequences of the Service’s punitive system, which his reform plan sought to change, as we have outlined. Despite this, officers continued to exercise forms of punishment. As numerous officers commented independently, ‘punishment still pervades the organization’ (Dddoopf, Section 0, Paragraphs 1–6). Although the reformed system espoused the need to empower officers, those who exercised their ‘voice’ (Hirschman 1970) were routinely put on insubordination charges for ‘speaking their mind’ (Dtgt30, Section 0, Paragraphs 309–357), especially when criticizing decisions made by higher-ranking officers. The possibility of an insubordination charge, let alone it being carried out, does little to encourage lower-level officers to move outside the This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.

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historical boundaries of power and exercise their voice, although it does discourage conflict. Ethically speaking, it facilitates compliance, in which the first priority is to avoid a clash of values with those perceived to be in positions of power. In summary, our data indicates that a historically constituted, yet clearly understood, ‘rule of anticipated reaction’ (Friedrich 1937) existed in the Service, whereby officers would not do certain things in anticipation of the probable results. Over time, the enforcement of this unwritten rule resulted in a ‘mobilization of bias’ (Schattschneider 1962) that privileged some officers with positions of dominance while marginalizing others, thus undermining the reform agenda of the Service and implementation of ethical change initiatives.

How Forms of Power Shape Ethics in Practice Goffman’s (1959) conception of social grammars helps us to understand interaction in the Service. Goffman argues that while social grammars are similar to norms, people are unaware of how they constrain them. Ethics are enacted through these grammars which are used to decide whether behaviour is acceptable or not. The key to understanding the research question is that historically shaped power relations frame ethics in practice. As we have seen, historically, power relations in the Service were hierarchical and disciplining. Important outcomes for ethics in the Service followed; these power relations silenced critical voices and made ethics a matter of compliance. Facilitating a plurality of voices was a central objective of the Service’s reform agenda. One of the key initiatives for achieving this objective was the introduction of the Employee Management System (EMS). The EMS was a software management system designed to help change the Service’s culture by, among other things, providing all officers with an official channel for exercising their voice. In theory, any officer could, at any time, sit at a computer, initialize the EMS and report anything to do with internal operations that they believed to be ‘good’, ‘bad’, ‘unjust’ or ‘unethical’, including the practices of superior officers. They could officially challenge inappropriate behaviour on behalf of their superiors and peers. At the time of its implementation, Commissioner Ryan said that the EMS would be the practice to bring about cultural change and ultimately instil ethically sound practices in the Service (Ryan 1996, 1998, 2002). Instead, the EMS became another mechanism through which management could exercise punishment and domination. While the EMS provided an opportunity to enhance the Service’s institutional legitimacy, in reality use of it remained within the nar row confines of the old social grammar of punishment and discipline. Participants provided numerous examples of how the EMS was used as a tool by officers in positions of power to coerce other officers into compliance.



Senior officers also used it strategically to position themselves for promotion. Several lower-level officers and recruits on probation provided examples of their names being entered into the EMS for minor issues of perceived malfeasance by senior officers. Those in management or supervisory positions had increased their use of the EMS because using it had recently become a criterion on which they would be judged for promotion. A Team Leader provides an excellent example that describes how the EMS was being used in practice: ‘Do you want to know something that is really interesting at the moment? Very interesting, and it happens here, I’ve noticed. All of our complaints, or not all of them, but 90% of them, are coming from internal. It’s no longer the public that rings up and says, I want to whinge about Constable so and so. It’s, oh, you haven’t got your nametag on, that’s the third time in a row. I am going to put you on the EMS system . . . Unless there is some thing I really deserve, but nine times out of 10, these are little shit things that can be solved with a straight conversation . . . “Look, you’ve done this mate, what is going on, what’s the story, what’s your side of things? Oh, look, I am sorry, it won’t happen again . . . blah, blah, blah . . . all right then, well, then consider yourself counselled and that’s the end of the session, isn’t it?” . . . What they put on the system, what you’re saying to them is, that’s going to be used against you when you apply for a job. [The selection panel will say] “Hang on, you are on the bloody EMS system three times and you are saying you are the best Supervisor in the world?” And they can use it, because they know it exists . . . so, suddenly my career path goes further down that way [pointing her finger to the ground], while his goes further that way [points her finger to the ceiling].’ (Dbatlii2, Section 0, Paragraphs 477–500).

Fairclough (1989) suggests that language does not merely represent reality but rather constitutes it. Language frames reality, and by doing so it generates meaning and influences action. In our case, the informal language used to describe the EMS constituted its meaning in the Service. Moreover, the informal language used to describe a conversation contrasts with the much more formal style required by the EMS. The typicality of this quote was supported by many other data examples, such as the one that follows, which was an informal conversation between the field researcher (RES) a new recruit (NR) and an experienced general duties officer (GD); it shows how it was largely being used with a supervisory gaze downwards, as a disciplinary mechanism for the lower ranks: RES: Tell me about the reform process here. GD: Everybody is out for themselves . . . like this EMS system [sic]. We know they put us on it so they can write down that they have counselled us [and hence used the EMS as they are now required]. It’s about promotion. It’s not about doing good policing. There is no trust in [working] relationships.


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RES: [Asked new recruit] Would you question a superior? NR: NO! RES: Why? NR: I don’t know. RES: Where did you learn not to question – at the academy? NR: NO. It’s like this. I was reprimanded for a report that I put in about break and enter by the crime manager and I said to her I was given different information, I spoke back to her. Since then she’s been all over me for the minute things – I know her eyes are on me. GD: Yeah, it’s about getting somebody, if you speak out you can expect to be got. RES: You mean, punished? GD: EXACTLY! NR: Like, I asked George [GD, pseudonym] how to do something and he told me, I did it that way and the Duty Officer got stuck into me, telling me I did it wrong. I went back to George [the GD] and the other guys and they said well, you’ve done it right, they didn’t know what the Duty Officer was on about. I was sort of stuck in between – I did it the way the Duty Officer said. RES: Why? NR: He is more higher [sic]. RES: Did you question him? NR: No way! I have learnt very quickly not to do that. GD: The reason he wanted it changed was so his stats [on the use of the EMS] looked good. But that’s not the job, them looking good is more important than doing the job. RES: Why don’t you question them? GD: Because we end up on the EMS system. RES: Can’t you put them on the EMS system? GD: Technically, yes. Yes, [laughed] . . . But I can tell you that if I put a D.O. [Duty Officer] on the EMS he’d get me, my life would be hell. It is just something you don’t do. RES: It sounds like you fear them? GD: EXACTLY! I DO! (Dgoemsf, Section 0, Paragraphs 3–65)

Taken as a whole, the data examples that refer to the EMS tell the story of how the EMS constituted a new discursive resource that organizational members drew upon to make sense of and negotiate their reality. Furthermore, the designers of the EMS neglected the political complexities of its specific social context. While, technically, lower-level officers could report on their superiors, the unwritten ‘rule of anticipated reaction’ (Friedrich 1973) was very much on their minds. In short, they were aware that if they made such a report their careers were at risk. This finding is particularly relevant for our research question. Rather than giving lower-level officers the voice they need to check the ethics of superior officers, the EMS facilitated their ongoing silence. It achieved the opposite



of what was intended: it reinforced practices of discipline, punishment and domination. Paradoxically, since pre-existing organizational power relations undermined and ultimately perverted the EMS, the EMS ensured that the ethics of the Service remained vulnerable. The EMS initiative that was meant to improve ethics in the Service did not so much change ethics as reinforce the practices it was designed to eradicate.

How Power Relations are Constituted by, and Constitute, Discourse that Shapes Ethics in Practice One of the many ways that power operates is through discourse (Fairclough 1989). Language is not merely a way of expressing ethics; rather, language is performative and actively enacts and shapes reality, including ethical reality. For instance, the Royal Commission revealed, prior to our study, that many police officers referred to their wrongdoing as ‘noble cause corruption’ (Wood 1997). The term was widely understood in the Service to involve practices such as fabricating and planting evidence to obtain a conviction against a person they believed deserved to be found guilty. Ultimately, the ends justified the means because such behaviour produced ostensibly ‘good’ convictions. Officers maintained that it was in the best interests of the public that they acted as they did. For them, collaborating with criminals and ‘green lighting’ certain acts of crime prevented worse crime occurring. Green lighting – another frequently used term to explain noble cause corruption – involved giving criminals who supplied information that led to the conviction of other criminals the green light (permission to go forward) to commit acts of crime, including armed robberies, drug trafficking and illegal gaming. Ostensibly, for many officers, unethical behaviour actually made sense in terms of discourse of the Service. An organizational ideology existed, in Fairclough’s (1989) terms: the sentiment that one has to do some evil in order to do good discursively framed their action. New employees gained an implicit understanding of what police actually do from such embedded discourse. More importantly, the Service’s use of terms such as ‘green lighting’ and ‘noble cause corruption’ provided a language with which to legitimize unethical behaviour. Our data shows that it was not only organizational discourse that shaped ethics but one of the Service’s most important nodal points of power – through which an ‘ordering of statements’ (Kendall and Wickham 1999) flowed. The Operations Control and Review (OCR) meeting was situated as such a nodal point. The OCR was a formal meeting within which the Service’s senior management team coordinated and discussed the operational performance of each LAC. It was video recorded and televised in LACs throughout the state. The meeting was a form of Electronic Panopticon in reverse: it did not exercise surveillance over all members but all members exercised


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surveillance over it as they watched the recording of OCR meetings in police stations throughout the State. The meeting unequivocally framed the dominant modes of discourse prescribed by the highest level of the Service. It televised the most senior officers using the new rhetoric of reform, being publicly judged in its terms, while also having to provide accounts of crime and clear-up statistics in their command. In the OCR meetings the effect of power relations on the discursive construction of ethics could be most clearly seen. An officer gave testament to the OCR’s pervasive impact and infamous notoriety throughout the Service: ‘we are OCR driven; because, the OCRs are every four [or] five months. But even on the way home . . . from that OCR, you are thinking about how you can make sure that [in] the next one you’re going to cover all your bases. And you really . . . you are trying to put into place short-term strategies to cater for long-term problems.’ (Dwst05 Section 0, Paragraphs 101–119)

As a Team Leader said, the enactment of the OCR, even in terms of its spatial arrangements, sent strong messages to all who saw it in action: ‘Look at the structure of it . . . The place has two tables along the front, they [Commanders waiting to be questioned on their performance] are the heads on the block, you’ve got the Chiefs [Commissioner and his executive team] are out at the front and facing them [the Commanders with their head on the block], the rest of it is all audience and on the fringes, there are people around the edges, this guy is putting these huge big bloody graphs up on the walls saying ah, what have you done about your robberies in this area? And the guy just sits there; it is just a big magnifying glass.’ (Djtt23’, Section 0, Paragraphs 161–211)

While the OCR was designed to coordinate the operational performance of LACs, according to the comments of numerous officers, it appeared to be an arena in which senior executives reinforced their superiority by attacking and punishing Local Area Commanders, as attested to a Crime Manager: ‘Inspectors and Superintendents go into these OCRs and being belittled by higher rank and they come back and it’s embarrassing and belittling . . . and comments that I’ve heard is that, if we as police spoke to members of the public, the same way senior officers spoke to other officers, we would have a complaint brought against us.’ (NB_tltm, Section 0, Paragraph 65)

The focus on individuals rather than operations is also reflected in the previous officer’s use of the metaphor ‘heads on the block’, portraying the OCR as a setting for an execution (also see Van Dijk 1997). And the officer’s comment that ‘it is just a big magnifying glass’ indicates that the OCR was seen as a very public normalizing mechanism.



These broadcasts and the subsequent ordering of statements framed the formation of a legitimate discourse of public attribution of individual responsibility for error. The scripts that were presented were evidently formally legitimated and approved. We found that the way things were said and done in the OCR, particularly orders, commands and instructions, were being mirrored at lower levels of the organization. For instance, the field researcher witnessed one senior officer, while acting in the role of Commander at the Wallaroo LAC, make the following statement during a supervisor briefing session: ‘it is time for courageous leadership and that courageous leadership means letting them [members of the command] know that if they don’t want to do it our way then they are on their way [meaning fired or transferred to another command].’ (Dm&dmf, Section 1.1.1.1, Paragraphs 258–263)

The researcher noted that this statement had been used in a recent Senior Management meeting. Furthermore, in the week or two that followed, the researcher witnessed conversations between officers in the command that indicated that supervising officers had delivered very similar statements to them. What facilitated the creation of this ordering of statements was the televising of the proceedings; officers were seen being ‘grilled’ – that is, ridiculed and abused. The OCR meeting was a prime medium through which officers in management positions throughout the Service were made aware of how to manage. Rather than leave space for dialogue, the OCR enforced an unambiguous and fact-driven question-and-answer session that did not allow for ethically charged situations to be discussed. Responsibilities were attributed in a way that could not be evaded by qualified answers; in the absence of qualification of accounts a crude empiricism of management only informed by quantitative facts prevailed. The facts were increasingly being represented in statistical terms as ‘clear-up’ rates and throughput of apprehensions. The creation of an OCR-driven organization that enacted itself within a discursive framework defined by the limited language of the OCR was not so much a solution to existing ethical issues but a further contribution to them. Viewing the OCR provided a temporal, spatial, personal and authoritative context that introduced a strict procedure for distributing responsibilities (Brunsson 1994) in a uniquely public way in the Service. Consequently, the OCR served as a constraint on the discursive practices of officers in the Service that largely limited the sense that members were able to make of the non-routine situations they experienced every day (Bittner 1967). The OCR marginalized the interpretive problems that officers might experience on an everyday basis with ethics in practice and installed a ‘fact-driven’ discourse that, in its focus on results, did not allow for discussion of how these results were ethically achieved. Importantly, rather than being a catalyst for learning, the discursive practices of the OCR meetings were a mechanism This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.

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for fixing blame, which reinforced power relations and magnified potential problems that learning had not resolved into a public televisual space. Thus, on-screen, officers were able to make a judgement of the relative importance of the new ethical commitment of the Service and the facts-driven discourse, which stressed managing by the numbers. The data discussed in this section significantly advances our understanding of how power relations were enacted in and through prevailing discourses, shaping ethics. Our data reveals that ethics were embedded in what had been the traditional power relationships in the Service rather than in the newly reformed relations of team-based authority. These ethics were enacted in a discourse in which unethical and corrupt behaviour was seen as a means justified by its efficiency in achieving legitimate ends. The OCR meetings and the EMS were introduced as strategies and practices through which the Commissioner intended the Service to change. However, in practice, traditional power relations discursively continued to frame the boundaries of what was perceived as ethical and unethical behaviour (Fairclough 1989). What was regarded as ethical was what superiors tolerated in pursuit of a ‘good look’ in the OCR, rather than that which the objectives of the reform agenda encouraged. The EMS and the OCR contributed to an ordering of statements that orga nized what was taken to be social reality within the Service. Even in the reformed Service, breaching the normalcy presumed in the ordering of state ments established boundaries of discursive action that drew forth retaliation and punishment. The mechanisms for embedding reform as a new discourse through the EMS and the OCR did not reform the traditional, hierarchical power relations of dominance and differentiation but merely allowed them to reassert themselves in the new arenas.

Discussion From an institutional perspective one could argue that it was no surprise that there was a gap between the reform rhetoric and organizational action. As Crank and Langworthy (1992) point out, external factors influence organizational activities and structures. In our case, there were important external forces at play. For instance, the reform programme was mandated by the Royal Commission’s report, which, in turn, was instigated by media, public and political pressure on government. The reform programme responded to external pressures questioning the legitimacy of NSW Police Service practices. The reform programme achieved its ceremonial purposes: government looked to be doing something about a widely perceived problem. The concept of ‘ethical and cost efficient policing’ (Ryan 2002) was a means of establishing legitimacy in the eyes of external stakeholders. It came about through the Police Commissioner’s reform response to the recommendations



of the Wood Royal Commission. However, newly introduced practices such as the OCR and the EMS reinforced the very practices they were designed to diminish. The status quo and modus operandi were tacitly reinforced even as they were explicitly changed. In other words, highly visible initiatives like the EMS or the OCR were examples of legitimizing actions. What ultimately drove organizational members was not functional improvement of policing but maintaining the internal status quo and enhancing legitimacy vis-à-vis important stakeholders. The new practices that were introduced became the vehicle both for ceremonial adjustment internally and resistance to change – simultaneously. For instance, the OCR meeting meant that those officers watching it on police video and television interpreted the gaze (Foucault 1977) of Commissioner Ryan’s executive team. The practices through which the senior officials chose to exercise authority were more remarked upon than the senior officers’ role in implementing the reform agenda. The researchers interpreted the OCR broadcasts to mean that failure to conform was more punishable than the ability to reform. The EMS reinforced this conformance with perceived power relations: among junior officers, speaking out against the old ways of corrupt practice was not encouraged by the new emphasis on ethical and efficient policing. ‘Old hands’ could produce praiseworthy results through what were implicitly known in their local context to be unethical means. The ends justified the means. Officers saw an elective affinity between deeply embedded, local and unethical practices and the official versions of the rational, right and just way to manage that they interpreted in the OCR and the EMS. Although the reform programme emphasized ethical decision making, it did not provide the Service’s members with a language with which to engage in ethical sensemaking. Even after the reform agenda was introduced, the languages in use remained those of the old military model and the thin blue line of police lore. Consequently, police officers did not have an available organizational forum in which they could discuss ambiguous experiences in terms of ethically charged situations. The new practices, including the EMS and the OCR, did not allow organizational members to articulate the uncertainties and messiness of these everyday organizational practices and their ‘bounded morality’ (Donaldson and Dunfee 1994). For instance, should one ‘green light’ a small dealer to catch the ‘big fish’ supplying the dealer? Is any collaboration with a dealer unethical, no matter what are the benefits of such an unethical alliance? From this perspective, one had to do some ‘evil’ in order to do ‘good’ (to catch the big fish and meet performance management targets). We argue that the Service’s management and its change strategies, especially the EMS and the OCR, did not address the complexity of these ethical issues, or the ethical dilemmas. Instead it maintained a black-and-white world in which there ‘should’ be only ‘good’ cops and ‘bad’ criminals. No


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formal contexts in which the more complex stories of right and wrong could be told were available other than those that were a part of the new reforms – the OCR and the EMS – and these were flawed by the ways in which they did what they said. Acting ethically in a complex world requires an adequately complex discursive repertoire. In contrast, the language of the NSW Police Service created a world of ‘good’ cops, ‘bad’ criminals and ‘clear’ rules for ‘good’ ethics. An unambiguous language of reform met a reality of ambiguous practices on the streets, in the bars and in the cells. The reform language did not frame the working police officers’ milieu and sense of their selves as subjects up against tough people, in a tough job. The scripts of the street ran counter to those of the reform sheets. Speaking more generally, we can learn from our study that organizational micro-practices powerfully shape the embedded ethical context. Organizational ethics is constructed in and through those micro-practices that shape conduct. As local actors make sense of events, their language frames their capacity to reflect on behaviour as ethical. From our case, it follows that although it might be tempting for ethical theory and practice to develop clear principles and guidelines, it will often not help organizational actors to make decisions in situ. Practice is complex: this will apply to a police organization as much as to any other organization. Ethics that try to manage morally correct behaviour will have to provide a language that is capable of mapping this complexity. Otherwise, as happened in the NSW Police Service, ethicality will disappear between the spaces; in this case, between the scripts of the street and those of the reform sheets. Hence we can partly answer our research question: it is organizational micro-practices, enacted in discourse and embedded in power relations, that shape ethics in practice. But we need to complement this finding theoretically further by looking at its relation with institutional power effects. Our discussion demonstrates that what was framed as a desirable and ambitious change project (‘ethical and efficient policing’) was defined institutionally; how these changes were appropriated and made sense of occurred in situated practices. Institutionally, the reform agenda was a response to a crisis of confidence in the Service. Revelations flowing from the Wood Commission were a public relations disaster for the Service and its overseers in government.2 Even in moments of crisis instigated by public relations disasters and pressure, the system remained stuck in the old, default ways of doing things as change initiatives were quickly integrated into ‘the dark side’ (Vaughan 1999). Research into resistance to change suggests such behaviour as normal (Collinson 1994; Tilly 1991; Sewell 1998). The new practices such as the EMS and the OCR were ostensibly neutral and technical means to achieve reform by instituting new routines. Feldman and Pentland (2003) have argued that routines can be both a source of change as well as stability. According to their theory, routines have ostensive



aspects which represent structure but they also have a performative aspect that brings routines to life. They argue that: ‘the ostensive aspect enables people to guide, account for, and refer to specific performances of a routine, and the performative aspect creates, maintains, and modifies the ostensive aspect of the routine. We argue that the relationship between ostensive and performative aspects of routines creates an on-going opportunity for variation, selection, and retention of new practices.’ (Feldman and Pentland 2003: 94)

In our case study, new practices such as the OCR and the EMS were quickly absorbed into old routines. The ostensive dimension of routines dominated; the performative dimension was kept under control by the limited discursive repertoire that young employees, especially, had to make sense of, or modify routines. As Feldman and Pentland suggest, performative variation and change only occur when members of the organization describe these variations as legitimate instances of the ostensive aspect of the routine. However, legitimacy was framed by the historically constituted power relations that dominated the Service. Thus, one extension of Feldman and Pentland’s work (2003) is to take into account how power shapes people’s ability and willingness to perform routines creatively; any theory of (ethical) change must take such power relations into account. Here we find the complementary answer to our research question: old practices moulded new initiatives such as the EMS and the OCR in ways that, rather than achieving ethically accountable and transparent policing, paradoxically reinforced prior power relations. Hence our story could be interpreted as one of failed planned change . . . up to a point. From an institutional perspective, it wasn’t: rather the change programme did legitimate the Police Service and its management in the eyes of the immediate external environment. The reforms allowed Commissioner Ryan and his team to argue that they were doing what was possible to change the Service.3 Internally, the reform necessarily allowed subordinates and superiors room to interpret vaguely formulated objectives such as ‘efficient and ethical policing’. As we have shown, the interpretations of the reform as implemented in the OCR and the EMS reinforced the status quo. Paradoxically, the Service achieved both ceremonial adaptation to environmental pressure as well as maintenance of the status quo internally. The ethics of the Service were shaped through both micro- and macro-power relations that are, in reality, inseparable. Institutionalized practices such as the OCR and the EMS act as relays that translate the realities of everyday policing and external pressures to change. In conclusion, these are the forms of power that shape ethics in practice. Focus on either of them – as practised in most contemporary theorizing on ethics in organizations – will not do justice to the complexities and ambiguities of ethics.


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Conclusion Before we draw some conclusions from our research it is important to point out the limitations of our study. First, it is a study of just one police organization. However, it is research into a highly significant organization. The NSW Police Service is the world’s third-largest police force, and it is not unrepresentative. There is little evidence to suggest that the NSW Police Service was an aberration because it was corrupt. Other forces in Australia (in Victoria, most recently in 2007, and Queensland in the 1980s) have been revealed as equally corrupt, as have the Metropolitan Police in the UK, the Hong Kong Police, the NYPD and the LAPD at various stages in their histories (Gordon 2007). Police organizations are not the only type of coercive organization that state governments use to maintain order. As Victor and Cullen (1988) have shown, organizational form is a major determinant of ethical climate. There are many military-style organizations, including customs and immigration services, firefighters and coast guards. Such organizations often struggle with the legacy of their quasi-militaristic past, and seek to change to flatter, more empowered organization forms as they adopt technologies that demand change. Although we acknowledge the limitations of the Service’s particulars, such as its Australian identity, its being a police organization and a solitary case study, our findings can be used to understand other organizational contexts in different industries and countries. The processes high lighted are not confined to coercive organizations, since discursive power is at play in all organizations. Hence, we propose that ethics in other corporate and public organizations will also be framed by discursive power. Ethics will always be shaped by power relations that are deeply embedded in organization practices, even when the rhetoric of the discourses shifts. The NSW Police Service’s introduction of reform initiatives such as the EMS had the unintended consequence of reinforcing established power relations even as it changed the apparent structures of authority. Similarly, the strong power effects of the discourse promoted by and through the OCR undermined the objective of a more ethically sound organization. Both examples show how language and practice are inextricably intertwined – changing the formal rhetoric but implementing it through practices that are less critically reflexive has powerful effects on an organization and its members. Furthermore, our study highlights the importance of institutional pressures on organizations, and how external legitimacy and survival can be sustained by ceremonial performances. While ethics might be associated with contractual arrangements or principles such as the ‘Good’ and the ‘Just’, we argue that ethics will be forged in the midst of power relations, embedded in practice and enacted in members’ discourses (Nietzsche 1969). Future research might focus on how



organizational members discursively construct the ethicality of situations, for example how a problem becomes initially framed as an ethical issue. Many organizational members did not see ‘green lighting’ petty criminals as a potentially ethically dubious practice if it helped them to catch other criminals. However, after the Royal Commission, pressure from the external environment questioned the practice as unethical. Once this happened, organizational members had to make sense of ‘green lighting’ through a new language. The new language created tensions in the organization with past power relations and historical patterns of rationality. Research should start with the tensions that a new language of change introduces, rather than judging changing practices normatively as ethical or unethical (Margolis and Walsh 2002; Philipsen 1989/1990). Moreover, future research should focus not only on institutional pressures to behave more ethically, expressed in formal reform programmes, but also on how these expectations become appropriated in practice. Based on our analysis, we would suggest that such change and reform programmes can, paradoxically, support old practices while still creating new legitimacies. In the case of the NSW Police Service, it was necessary to gain re-legitimization from the external environment. However, the way in which the policies associated with re-legitimization were implemented in practice meant that the Service appropriated the reform in ways that failed to reconcile the contradictions that reform produced. Our study has important implications for the practice of managing ethics. In response to ethical challenges, new rules are often proposed to manage ethics. However, every change programme has to deal with the gaps between structural innovations, the use of these innovations, and organizational members’ sensemaking. Organizations should place more emphasis on peer dynamics and culture than on trying to prescribe law-like codes of conduct. Looking at codes of conduct, while important, may not be sufficient. Attempts to change ethics need to build on an understanding of power prac tices at work as well as the power effects of the institutional environment. Compliance perspectives on ethics take power relations for granted rather than understanding them as crucial to the process of making sense of rules and situated contexts. Typically, official organizational rhetoric defines the status quo as ethical practice. Our study offers an interesting and important counterfactual – here the status quo was the informal corrupt organization embedded in practice rather than that represented by the formal ethics of the Service. From this per spective an approach that locates ethical responsibility only in the individual organizational member’s character is limited. Rather, ethics are at stake in day-to-day practices and in the learned and routine ways of doing things. Our study has shown how ethics are re- and de-contextualized through organizational practices. These practices not only embed and enact ethics but also form the framework for their institutionalization, politicization and


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contestation. Ethics imply power as much as power implies ethics. An ethics innocent of power is an ethics of ignorance: power is always implicated with ethical discourse and practices. On a discursive level, ethics are a mechanism to name, categorize and solve human problems; from a practice perspective, ethics do not exist as entities or things but only exist when they are enacted in language. Indeed, we might as well speak of power/discourse/ethics for they are indissoluble.

Notes 1. These codes are used to disguise the identity of the respondents and enable the researcher to locate the data in the overall dataset. 2. The starting points for disasters are often embedded in culturally and institutionally accepted norms (see Turner 1978; Beamish 2000; Vaughan 1981/1982; 1990, 1999). As Vaughan (1999: 274) argues, drawing on Durkheim, deviance is a routine nonconformity and a predictable product of all organizations (see also Canguilhem 1968). In Vaughan’s words, ‘the same characteristics of a system that produce the bright side will regularly provoke the dark side’ (1999: 274). 3. For a while it seemed as if the Commissioner had pulled off the ceremonial institutional side of myth-making. It was the reforms that were making the front pages, and the ‘roll-overs’ of the Royal Commission, where corrupt police who had been caught through detailed surveillance were encouraged to give evidence against other corrupt officers, were receding in public memory. Unfortunately, however, this was before the television career of one of Commissioner Ryan’s officers, chief of detectives, Graham ‘Chook’ Fowler, became public. Chook Fowler was a big man of few words. Many of them, to judge from the video evidence obtained from the hidden camera in his car, started with ‘f’ and ended in ‘k’. Few people knew him before his unanticipated appearance on the newscasts, apart from his colleagues in the New South Wales (NSW) Police Service, his family, neighbours and friends. Among the latter were members of Sydney’s criminal fraternity. Indeed, many of these were such good friends that they allegedly regularly paid him off, through one of his mates, Trevor Haken, an officer junior to Chook. Everyday organizational life in the NSW Police Service in which Chook and Trevor were players resembled a Hollywood script. In his own words, Trevor Haken, who ‘rolled over’ to present evidence against his erstwhile mates, said: ‘The corrupt were really my heroes and – as they were with everybody because the corrupt were the working detectives and . . . they say that the police force is the thin blue line – really what they mean is the line between criminals and society is the thin blue line.’ (Four Corners, ABC Television, Training Day, Reporter: Chris Masters, Broadcast, 26 July 2004)

Not long after these events became public, the Commissioner resigned his commission and a new Commissioner was appointed by the Government with an explicit brief to keep negative stories about policing off the front pages and television. This has not proved to be the case, as a summary article from 2007 (http://www.smh.com.au/ news/national/holding-judgement/2007/06/08/ 1181089328815.html) suggests.



References Alvesson, Mats, and Dan Karreman 2000a ‘Taking the linguistic turn in organizational research: challenges, responses, consequences’. The Journal of Applied Behavioral Science 36/2: 136–158. Alvesson, Mats, and Dan Karreman 2000b ‘Varieties of discourse: On the study of organizations through discourse analysis’. Human Relations 53/9: 1125–1149. Astley, Graham, and Ray Zammuto 1992 ‘Organization science, managers, and language games’. Organization Science 3/4: 443–467. Barker, Richard 1993 ‘An evaluation of The Ethics Program at General Dynamics’. Journal of Business Ethics 12/3: 165–177. Barratt, Edward 2008 ‘The later Foucault in organization and management studies’. Human Relations 61/4: 515–537. Battistelli, Fabrizio 2008 ‘Military organization’ in The international encyclopaedia of organization studies. S. R. Clegg and J. R. Bailey (eds), 902–907. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Beamish, Thomas 2000 ‘Accumulating trouble: Complex organizations, a culture of silence, and a secret spill’. Social Problems 47/4: 473–498. Bittner Egon 1967 ‘The police on skid-row: A study of peace-keeping’. American Sociological Review 32: 699–715. Boden, Deirdre 1994 The business of talk: organizations in action. Polity Press: Cambridge. Brunson Nils 1994 The organization of hypocrisy: Talk, decisions and actions. Chichester: Wiley. Canguilhem, Georges 1968 The normal and the pathological, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Carter C., S. Clegg, and M. Kornberger 2008 A very short, fairly interesting and reasonably cheap book about strategy. Sage: London. Chan, Janet B. 1997 Changing police culture: Policing in a multicultural society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cicourel, Aaron V. 1976 The social organization of juvenile justice. London: Heinemann. Clegg, Stewart R. 1975 Power, rule and domination. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Clegg, Stewart R. 1990 Modern organizations: Organizations in the post modern world. London: Sage. Clegg, Stewart, Martin Kornberger, and Carl Rhodes 2007 ‘Business ethics as practice’. British Journal of Management 18: 107–122. Collinson, David 1994 ‘Strategies as resistance: Power, knowledge and subjectivity’ in Resistance and power in organizations: Agency, subjectivity and the labour process. J. M. Jermier, W. R. Nord, and D. Knights (eds), 25–28. London: Routledge. Crank, John P., and Robert Langworthy 1992 ‘An institutional perspective of policing’. The Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology 83/2: 338–363. Czarniawska, Barbara 1997 Narrating the organization: Dramas of institutional identity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Dandeker, Chris 1992 Surveillance, power and modernity: Bureaucracy and discipline from 1700 to the present day. Cambridge: Polity. Deetz, S. 1982 ‘Critical interpretive research in organizational communication’. Western Journal of Speech Communication 46: 131–149. Divine, Miranda 2001 Sydney Morning Herald, 11 October, p. 16. Donaldson, T., and T. W. Dunfee 1994 ‘Towards a unified conception of business ethics: Integrative social contracts theory’. Academy of Management Review 19: 252–275. Eisenhardt, Katherine 1989 ‘Building theory from case study research’. Academy of Management Review 14/4: 532–550. Fairclough, Norman 1989 Language and power. London: Longman.


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Fairclough, N., P. Graham, J. Lemke, and R. Wodak 2004 ‘Introduction’. Critical Discourse Studies 1/1: 1–7. Feldman, Martha, and Brian Pentland 2003 ‘Reconceptualizing organizational routines as a source of flexibility and change’. Administrative Science Quarterly 24: 94–118. Finnane, Michael 1987 Policing in Australia: Historical perspectives. Kensington, NSW: New South Wales University Press. Finnane, Michael 1996 Police and government: Histories of policing in Australia. Melbourne: Oxford University Press. Ford, J., and L. Ford 1995 ‘The role of conversations in producing intentional change in organizations’. Academy of Management Review 20: 541–570. Foucault, Michel 1977 Discipline and punish. Allen Lane: London. Friedrich, Charles 1937 An introduction to political theory. New York: Harper. Garfinkel, Harold 1967 Studies in ethnomenthodology, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. Gephart R. P. 1993 ‘The textual approach: Risk and blame in disaster sensemaking’. Academy of Management Journal 36: 1465–1514. Goffman, Erving 1959 The presentation of self in everyday life. New York: Doubleday Anchor. Gordon, Raymond D. 2007 Power, knowledge and domination. Abington: Liber and Copenhagen Business School Press. Gouldner, Alvin W. 1954 Patterns of industrial bureaucracy. New York: Free Press. Halford, Susan, and Pauline Leonard 2006 ‘Place, space and time: Contextualizing workplace subjectivities’. Organization Studies 275: 657–676. Hardy, Cynthia, and Nelson Phillips 2004 ‘Discourse and power’ in Handbook of organizational discourse. D. Grant, C. Hardy, C. Oswick, and L. Putnam (eds), 299–316. London: Sage. Hirschman, A. O. 1970 Exit, voice, and loyalty: Responses to decline in firms, organizations, and states. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Iedema, Rick, and Ruth Wodak 1999 ‘Introduction: Organizational discourses and practices’. Discourse and Society 10: 5–19. Jackall, Robert 1988 Moral mazes: The world of corporate managers. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Jermier, John M. John W. Slocum, Louis W. Fry, and Jeannie Gaines 1991 ‘Organizational subcultures in a soft bureaucracy: Resistance behind the myth and façade of an official culture’. Organization Science 2: 170–194. Kendall, Gavin, and Gary Wickham 1999 Using Foucault’s method. London: Sage. Kjonstad, Bjorn, and Hugh Willmott 1995 ‘Business ethics: Restrictive or empowering?’ Journal of Business Ethics 14: 445–464. Knights, David, and Darren McCabe 1999 ‘Are there no limits to authority?: TQM and Organizational Power’. Organization Studies 20: 197–224. Lash, Scott 1990 The sociology of Post-modernism. London: Routledge. Manning, Peter K. 1988 Symbolic communication: Signifying calls and the police response. Cambridge: MIT Press. Manning, Peter K. 2008 ‘Goffman on organizations’. Organization Studies 29/5: 677–700. Manning, Peter, and John van Maanen 1978 Policing: A view from the street. Santa Monica: Goodyear. Margolis, Joshua D., and James P. Walsh 2002 ‘Misery loves company: Rethinking social initiatives by business’. Administrative Science Quarterly 48: 268–305. Meyer, J. W., and B. Rowan 1977 ‘Institutionalized organizations: Formal structure as myth and ceremony’. American Journal of Sociology 83: 340–363. Munro, Iain 1992 ‘Codes of ethics: Some uses and abuses’ in Current issues in business ethics. P. Davies (ed.), 97–106. London: Routledge.



Nietzsche, Friedrich 1969 On the genealogy of morals. New York: Random House. Philipsen, G. 1989/1990 ‘Some initial thoughts on the perils of “critique” in the ethnographic study of communication practices’. Research on Language and Social Interaction 23: 251–260. Philipsen, G. 1992 Speaking culturally: Explorations in social communication. Albany: State University of New York Press. Punch, Maurice 1979 Policing the inner city. London: Macmillan. Ryan, Peter J. 1996 Reform of the NSW Police Service phase 1. Parliamentary report prepared for the Hon. Paul Whelan, MP Minister for Police. Ryan, Peter J. 1998 Reform of the New South Wales Police Service – The next phase. Parliamentary report prepared for the Hon. Paul Whelan, MP Minister for Police. Ryan, Peter J. 2002 Peter Ryan: The inside story. Sydney: Viking. Schattschneider, E. E. 1962 The semi-sovereign people: A realist’s view of democracy in America’. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Sewell, Graham 1998 ‘The discipline of teams: The control of team-based industrial work through electronic and peer surveillance’. Administrative Science Quarterly 43: 397– 428. Silverman, David 2005 Doing qualitative analysis: A practical handbook. London: Sage. Strauss, Anselm L., and Juliet Corbin 1990 Basics of qualitative research: Grounded theory procedures and techniques. Newbury Park, CA: Sage. The Bulletin, 2001 ‘Dark side of the force’, 24 October 2001, http://bulletin.ninemsn.com. au/Bulletin/EdDesk.nsf/All/F6943296D841DF92CA256AEA001DAC48, accessed on 31 January 2006. Tilly, Charles 1991 ‘Domination, resistance, compliance . . . discourse’. Sociological Forum 6/3: 593–602. Titscher, S., M. Meyer, R. Wodak, and E. Vetter 2000 Methods of text and discourse analysis. Sage: London. Townley, B. 1993 ‘Foucault, power/knowledge, and its relevance for human resource management’. Academy of Management Review 18: 518–545. Turner, B. A. 1978 Man made disasters. London: Wykeham. Van Dijk, T. A. 1997 Discourse as structure and process. Sage: London. Van Maanen, John 1988 Tales of the field. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Vaughan, Diane 1981/1982 ‘Toward understanding unlawful organizational behavior’. Michigan Law Review 80/7: 1377–1402. Vaughan, Diane 1990 ‘Autonomy, interdependence, and social control: NASA and the Space Shuttle Challenger’. Administrative Science Quarterly 35: 225–257. Vaughan, Diane 1999 ‘The dark side of organizations: Mistake, misconduct, and disaster’. Annual Review of Sociology, 25: 271–305. Victor, Bart, and John Cullen 1988 ‘The organizational bases of ethical work climate’. Administrative Science Quarterly 33: 101–125. Weick, Karl E. 1995 Sensemaking in organizations. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Weick, Karl E., Kathleen M. Sutcliffe, and David Obstfeld 2005 ‘Organizing and the process of sensemaking’. Organization Science 16/4: 409–421. Wittgenstein, Ludwig 1968 Philosophical investigations. Oxford: Blackwell. Wodak, R., and M. Meyer, editors 2001 Methods of critical discourse analysis. London: Sage. Wood, James R. T. 1997 Royal Commission into corruption in the New South Wales police service. Sydney: The Government of the State of New South Wales.



34 On the Multi-Modality, Materiality and Contingency of Organizational Discourse Rick Iedema

Introduction

T

his paper considers how the concept ‘discourse’ has been deployed in organizational studies to describe, understand and change organizations. This concept and its associated method ‘discourse analysis’ have recently been the focus of a host of special journal issues including The Academy of Management Review (Boje et al. 2004), Organization (Keenoy et al. 1997b), Journal of Applied Behavioral Science (Keenoy et al. 2000), International Studies of Management and Organization (Grant et al. 2001), Human Relations (Oswick et al. 2000) and Organization Studies (Hardy et al. 2004); chapters in overview publications (Putnam and Fairhurst 2001) and volumes such as Grant et al. (1998) and Phillips and Hardy (2002). The popularity of discourse as an analytical lens has now culminated in the recently published Sage Handbook of Organizational Discourse (Grant et al. 2004), which presents a wide range of accounts about organizational discourse (analysis) by scholars from around the globe. The need for an examination of how this literature deploys discourse and discourse analysis centres on three reasons. First, there is ambiguity about the status of discourse and its relation to social (and organizational) life. The



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source of this ambiguity lies in the fact that, in many instances, discourse is equated with language, while the term ‘language’ potentially references a range of phenomena. It can refer to ‘the linguistic’, that is, words and sentences. It can also function as the more general notion of ‘system of communication’, encompassing talk, writing, gesture and perhaps even dress and other visualized kinds of behaviour. And it can play the role of an abstraction that describes the ‘general grammar’ of social (and organizational) order, referring to rituals, routines, and practices generally. Second, this (uncertain) definitional relationship between discourse and language intersects with another: that between discourse and materiality. Warning is often sounded against ‘collapsing the material into discourse’. But rarely are clear solutions offered for where to locate the cut-off point(s) between discourse and materiality. Third, while there are instances of work where the conceptual-analytical and ethnographic dimensions of discourse analysis are integrated, tensions remain between discourse research defined as the application of a conceptual-analytical procedure to ‘a text’, and discourse research defined as a way of engaging with a workplace, its politics and its (dis)organization. I use my critical review of these issues as a springboard for advocating a perspective that regards materiality (here, material reality) and discourse not as separate and separable, but as co-emergent. I will argue that this perspective of the relationship between materiality and discourse is a prerequisite for moving beyond both realism and anti-realism (Hildebrand 2003), and for situating ‘discourse’ and ‘discourse analysis’ theoretically, methodologically and politically, as well as historically. The etymology of discourse, ‘discursus’ or ‘to-ing and fro-ing’ (Chia 2000: 517),1 underscores the constant coming and going of regimes and fashions of meaning-making typical of contemporary life. ‘Dis-cursus’ has the additional sense of ‘veering off-course’, which chimes in with the potential of discourse to project and construct emergent worlds. The noun ‘discourse’ appeared in European linguistic usage around the 14th century, coinciding with new forms of exploration, burgeoning trade, and dramatic increases in wealth in some parts of the world. I capitalize on this connection to define discourse as the intensification in socio-cultural (re)production that typifies (late) modernity (Sloterdijk 2004). To flesh out this perspective and the arguments that support it, the essay is structured as follows. First, using the concerns and issues, just raised, as signposts, I will review works prominent in the literature on organizational discourse (analysis). Second, I will outline an alternative view of discourse and argue for the importance of relocating discourse (analysis) not just theoretically, methodologically and politically, but also historically. In the conclusion, I tie the main points of my argument together before taking on some potential criticisms.


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Definitional Issues Just What Is Discourse? I suggested above that there are three reasons why it is timely to review the ways in which the notion ‘discourse’ has been deployed in the organizational studies literature. The first centres on ambiguity about the status of discourse and its relation to other facets of social (and organizational) life. In Keenoy et al.’s (1997a) introductory overview to the themed section of Organization on organizational discourse research, for example, discourse is presented as encompassing stories and novels, text, narrative, metaphors, conversations and language games (Keenoy et al. 1997a: 148). A year later, in their introduction to the volume Discourse and Organization (Grant et al. 1998), the authors cite a number of well-known definitions from the linguistics literature, emphasizing that discourse is understood as usually referring to forms of language; that is, words and sentences. The authors also acknowledge a strand of research that interweaves the analysis of language with that of ‘artifacts such as music, art and architecture’ (Grant et al. 1998: 2), and reference is made to social semiotics (Kress and van Leeuwen 2001; Hodge and Kress 1988). It is intriguing that this broader definition of discourse and its implications for discourse research remain under-explored in the remainder of the book’s introduction and in the other chapters. For contributors to the Grant et al. (1998) volume, such as Hardy and colleagues, Marshak, Gabriel and others, organizational discourse references talk (Marshak 1998; Hardy et al. 1998), stories (Gabriel 1998) and linguistically realized metaphors (Cazal and Inns 1998). The tension between views of discourse as language-based cognition in contrast to multi-semiotic social practice reappears in more recent work (Hardy and Phillips 2004; Phillips and Hardy 2002; Phillips et al. 2004). The authors state that ‘we use discourse analysis to examine the process of institutionalization. We argue that language is fundamental to institutionalization’ (Phillips et al. 2004: 635). The meaning of ‘language’ and its role in the kind of discourse analysis promoted here need to be read in the context of a statement that is made one page on: ‘[discourse] may take a variety of forms, including written documents, verbal reports, artwork, spoken words, pictures, symbols, buildings, and other artifacts’ (Phillips et al. 2004: 636). This last statement affords two different readings: 1) language is an abstract principle of organization that instantiates as tangible, empirical discourse (cf. Hjelmslev 1961), such as ‘written documents [and] spoken words’; or 2) language and discourse are commensurate in that they both mean ‘abstract organizing principle’, and are equally realized across ‘a variety of forms’. This ambiguity about how language and discourse relate and what the terms mean is exacerbated when the authors introduce a diachronic dimension into their argument,2 in effect calling both readings 1) and 2) into


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question. Reading 1) becomes problematic when the authors say, five pages on, ‘action affects discourse through the production of texts’ (Phillips et al. 2004: 640; cf. Hardy and Phillips 2004: 312). This claim contravenes reading 1) because now it is not discourse (the ‘written documents . . . spoken words’) that instantiates ‘language’ (the abstract ordering principle); it is ‘action’ that ‘affects’ discourse (presumably as a more general or abstract category of phenomena) by individuating discourse into ‘texts’. But if action instantiates discourse, what does it mean to suggest that discourse instantiates language (reading 1)? For its part, reading 2) raises questions about why both the terms ‘language’ and ‘discourse’ are necessary and what particular terminological leverage ‘discourse’ offers in these authors’ exposition. Even though the claim ‘action affects discourse through the production of texts’ does not directly clash with reading 2), it introduces ambiguities of a different order: are ‘spoken words’ actions or texts, or both? If ‘texts’ are analysts’ constructions, how can they be understood to be produced by ‘actions’? Ambiguities about the definition of discourse reappear in another body of work that is prominent in organizational discourse research: critical discourse analysis or CDA (Fairclough 1995; 2005). In their ‘Introduction’ to the first issue of Critical Discourse Studies, Fairclough and colleagues state that: ‘As a medium for the social construction of meaning, discourse is never solely linguistic. It operates conjointly with vocal or visual elements (depiction, gesture, graphics, typography), in the context of meaningladen architectures, with the semiotics of action itself, and with music or other extra-linguistic auditory signs.’ (Fairclough et al. 2004: 5)

In this citation, the juxtaposition of ‘discourse is never solely linguistic’ (sug gesting discourse is multi-semiotic) with ‘[discourse] operates conjointly with [other semiotic forms]’ portrays discourse as both encompassing multiple semiotic modes and as operating separate from these modes. In the section that follows, this ambiguity is argued to be closely connected to another problem: the claim that discourse is separable from other ‘moments’ of social life, such as materiality, or beliefs.

Discourse as Autonomous ‘Moments’ of Social Life My second concern with the organizational discourse literature is that it sets up problematic a priori separations between discourse and other ‘moments of social life’. These separations construct discourse as autonomous conduit (Reddy 1979) that regulates exchanges between interiorities (beliefs, values, feelings) and exteriorities (materiality, rituals, institutions). ‘Discourse is one moment among several that comprise social processes, events and practices, the others being power, beliefs/values/desires, institutions/rituals, material practices and social relations . . . All human This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.


activity is made up of these moments, involving representation through discourse, the playing out of power relations, the possession or giving up of beliefs, the building of institutions, the transformation and movement of materials and the engagement of social relations with others.’ (Fairclough and Thomas 2004: 382)3

The argument that is used to justify the distinction between interiority and discourse is that ‘beliefs have a partially discursive character without being reducible to discourse’ (Fairclough and Thomas 2004: 382). The statement ‘the holding of beliefs within our minds has a discursive aspect to it as our thoughts are internal but contextually influenced expressions of discourse’ (Fairclough and Thomas 2004: 382) trades on the assumption that boundaries between discourse and non-discourse can be drawn not just in principle but also in practice. Having invoked these ‘in principle/in practice’ boundaries, such claims raise two questions. First, what does non-discourse entail and how can it be known (other than as hypothesis) if it is discourse-independent? Second, how and in what instances does non-discourse become discourse, and what criteria are applied to determine when and how that happens? Parallel to the concern to differentiate interiority and discourse are warnings against ‘collapsing materiality into discursivity’ (Putnam and Cooren 2004; Reed 2004). Drawing on philosophies for which ‘knowledge is . . . of a mind-independent reality’ (Searle 1992, cited in Rorty 1998: 67),4 some discourse theorists define discourse as ‘opposed to [the] bodily/material’ (Fairclough et al. 2002: 7; Fairclough 2003: 25). In my view, these warnings, like the above-mentioned claims about irreducibility, are offered not to sensitize the researcher to the complexity and indeterminacy of what is involved here, but to manage the very apprehensions that these boundary-creations occasion. One such fear is that ‘reality’ becomes that which dictates the content and structure of discourse. Regarding discourse as a mere reflection of an exteriority (or an interiority) reduces discourse to mere labelling (cf. Taylor’s 1985 ‘representationism’ and Žižek’s 1989 ‘descriptivism’); a view that, since Saussure (1983), has become untenable. Another fear is that exteriority (or interiority) becomes no more than what is said or talked into existence, enslaving it to the logic of discourse (cf. Žižek’s 1989 ‘antidescriptivism’). The popular version of this second concern is that conduct (including emotion) entails little more than the language used to describe it. Ironically, these two apprehensions flow forth from one and the same totalizing injunction: discourse is opposed to what it ‘represents’. As principle, this opposition precludes discourse enacting what it represents, burying its performative aspect. As perspective on practice, this opposition comes up against the hybrid, dynamic, complex, political and historical ways in which meanings, feelings and materialities interact – or rather, intra-act, to use Barad’s terms, to which I will turn in a moment. Before outlining what an intra-active view of discourse entails, let us consider how the relationship between discourse and ‘the real’ is dealt with in Michael Reed’s work (Reed 2000; 1998; 2004). Reed’s case will serve to put This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.

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into relief the dilemmas that ensue when a priori irreducibilities are kept in play, whether by discourse analysts or by their detractors. The main point of Reed’s critique is that discourse analysis lacks the resources to deal with the structuring effects of material reality. He offers five reasons why ‘Foucauldian discourse analysis’5 – the focus of his concerns – falls short: constructivism (which ‘idealizes meaning’ and loses grip on material reality), nominalism (which instils relativity across discourses and fails to recognize different structural effects), determinism (which subordinates human agency fully to discourse), localism (which privileges local discourse tactics and ignores global structures and [pre]conditions), and reductionism (which reduces the social to language). Reed concludes his argument as follows: ‘the radical social constructivism on which Foucauldian discourse analysis rests can be seen to deny itself the very opportunity and resources to understand and explain the generative properties that make social practices and forms – such as discursive formations – what they are and equip them to do what they do. This is a very complex and difficult task to achieve, but there is absolutely no chance whatsoever of bringing it off if discourse analysis remains wedded to an ontology in which discourse is treated as nothing more than a social construction and an epistemology that cannot recognize, much less incorporate, its non-discursive conditions and qualities.’ (Reed 2000: 527)

What is intriguing about Reed’s stance is that he critiques discourse analysts for defining discourse such that it is ‘nothing more than a social construction’, but then resists following through the consequences of his own critique. On the one hand, Reed argues that the definition of discourse should afford investigation of ‘the political economy of discursive formation and its long-term institutional effects’. On the other hand, Reed denies discourse material ontology by accepting David Harvey’s view that discourse is exterior to material reality, charging discourse per definition with insufficient explanatory reach (cf. Harvey 1996). But in divorcing discourse (for Reed, language) from ‘long-term institutional effects’, Reed understates not just the multi-semiotic complexity of how ‘institutional effects’ are played out in the here-and-now; he also reifies those effects as independent of the multisemiotic discourse practices through which they are nevertheless and inevitably realized and perturbed.

Bringing ‘the Real’ Back in My third concern with the organizational discourse literature is that it pays limited attention to in situ interaction and the practical, political and historical complexities that constitute it (cf. Barley 1996; Barley and Kunda 2001), in favour of concentrating on ‘texts’. Too often, textual analysis takes place at one or more removes from these complexities, predisposing it to This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.


unifying kinds of explanation. Those forms of discourse research that intensify the dialogue between scholarship, organizations and organizing (cf. Grant and Iedema 2005) do not reduce work and organization to representations that reflect an ‘out there’, but seek to become a forum where researchers and researchees can discursify or semiotize issues they consider important (Latour 2004). As forum of engagement, such research promotes discussion of the ‘continuous disassembly and reassembly of new forms and patterns’ (Cooper and Law 1995: 268; cited in Chia and Kallinikos 1998: 139) that are at the heart of contemporary work as well as of academic scholarship. In this approach, ‘what counts as methodology in [organizational discourse analysis] is not “settled’’’ (Prichard et al. 2004: 231), because neither models nor data escape being tenuous, contested, political and temporal. As the remaining sections of this paper make clear, its concern with in situ performativity (Garfinkel 1967; Butler 1996) puts discourse research in a unique position from where it becomes possible not just to describe, but also to engage with and intervene in, the practice of organizing (Iedema et al. 2006b, 2006a).

An Alternative View of Discourse as (Research) Practice In this section I will elaborate three features that are central to discourse as it is conceived here: 1. discourse is not just linguistic but multi-modal; 2. the discursive and the material co-emerge (as ‘intra-act’); 3. discourse is a contingent, historical phenomenon.

Discourse Is Multi-Modal To come to terms with the dynamic complexity that is organizing we need to move beyond regarding discourse as simply language (i.e. ‘the linguistic’). Whether we conceive of language as interactive practice, as cognitive process, or as textual agent, we cannot claim that these are the principal means through which humans ‘organize’. We do so by numerous other means as well, and each embodies different principles and intentionalities: embodiment, visualization, architecture, technology and so on. In privileging the linguistic as the source of organization, we render invisible not just the role but also the primacy of alternative modes of meaning-making (Rossi-Landi 1979). It is with this concern in mind, that Schatzki comments: ‘the formidability of the linguistic turn in recent decades has led some theorists to overvalue the significance of [language] in social life. One form this overvaluation assumes is that of conceptualizing practices as collections of sayings alone . . . Another, considerably more subtle form, is


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slipping from a conception of discourse, or of discursivity, as articulated intelligibility to formulations that both privilege language in this articulation and neglect the role that non-linguistic, non-saying doings play therein.’ (Schatzki 2002: 77)

At first glance, Schatzki’s concern here points to the risk of bypassing nonlinguistic ways in which actors act and through which agency becomes manifest. Closer reading suggests his point may be more far-reaching; namely, intelligibility exceeds linguistic capability. This point is central to the argument pursued here: social–organizational becoming does not depend solely on the linguistic in terms of its organization and communication, but on the ongoing negotiation of intelligibility in virtually any domain: gesture, posture, software design, tool manipulation, spatial placing and so forth. While I do not want to downplay the central role of the linguistic in the formation of human consciousness, modern sociality and ‘organized worlds’ generally (Deacon 1997; Halliday 1995; Chia 1998), it is clear that socializing and organizing are not reducible to the linguistic or linguistic logic. Since time immemorial, we have ‘delegated’ much of what we do to technological tools and apparatuses. That delegation has not always been mediated through language or depended on language, but has also involved imagery, numbers, three-dimensional design and construction, and so forth (Rossi-Landi 1979; Van Leeuwen 2005). For these reasons, discourse cannot be ‘a synonym for language’ (Barad 2003: 819).6

Discourse and Materiality Co-Emerge Having argued for the multi-modal nature of discourse, the second component of the redefinition proposed here is to show that discourse and the material co-emerge. One way of achieving this is by thinking through the manifestation of ‘matter’ (as Barad does), leading us to acknowledge that matter cannot register in and for itself alone, or un-discursively. ‘Matter is not little bits of nature, or a blank slate, surface, or site passively awaiting signification’ (Barad 2003: 821). This, in turn, means that ‘[m]atter, like meaning, is not an individually articulated . . . entity’ (Barad 2003: 821). Just as matter is not a blank slate, discourse is not an internally cohesive set of immaterial differentiations competing with an unruly, exterior real. Barad’s work shows that matter and discourse are mutually constituting. Having come from theoretical physics, Barad formulates her position on discourse and materiality with reference to Niels Bohr’s experiments in the field of atomic physics. She describes how these experiments made Bohr realize that neither ‘things’ nor ‘language’ were transparent, independent phenomena. ‘For Bohr, things do not have inherently determinate boundaries or properties, and words do not have inherently determinate meanings’ (Barad 2003: 813). Instead, there is the ‘phenomenon’ where the observed This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.


object and the observing agency converge and diverge in dynamic, local and possibly contradictory ways. This is so because these practices render available different and, at times parallel, multiple realities: in the case of atomic physics, a particular phenomenon can be a particle and a wave. Barad’s work is of particular interest here in so far that she articulates the ‘dilemma’ that the relations between things and people are dynamically and locally negotiated and determined. If Latour’s work centred on showing that scientific knowledge accrues in ways that call the opposition between realism and constructionism into question (Latour 1996), Barad’s argument homes in on the individual act of meaning-making, emphasizing that things and people constitute one another in the here-and-now through what she terms ‘intra-action’. Intra-action co-articulates meanings and materialities. Put differently, the intra-act shapes both subject and object on the strength of a locally achieved and mutually implicating ‘agential cut’: ‘A specific intra-action (involving a specific material configuration of the “apparatus of observation”) enacts an agential cut (in contrast to the Cartesian cut – an inherent distinction – between subject and object) effecting a separation between “subject” and “object”. That is, the agential cut enacts a local resolution within the phenomenon of the inherent ontological indeterminacy . . . Intra-actions enact agential separability.’ (Barad 2003: 815)

The significance of Barad’s way of talking about how subject and object are dynamically, agentially and iteratively co-articulated in ‘intra-action’ produces a notion of discourse that neither constructs ‘reality’ nor simply functions as its mirroring effect. Equally, expressing belief in the impossibility of apprehending matter ‘as is’ does not equate with saying that matter is an effect brought about by linguistic or semiotic meaning. The upshot of ‘intraact’ is that ‘the traditional opposition between epistemology and ontology should be left behind’ (Žižek 2004: 56).7 Barad coins the term ‘epistemontology’ (Barad 1998: 109) to ‘[make] it possible to take account of the material dimensions of constraints and exclusions without presuming matter to be fixed ground existing outside of time, history or culture’ (Barad 1998: 109). Barad’s ‘intra-action’ obviates a priori oppositions between knowledge and reality that downplay or erase their dynamic, shifting and mutual constitution. As notion, intra-action confirms that it is unwise to regard discourse and matter as independent, (pre-)given moments. Thus far, intra-act has been presented in quite abstract terms. A simpler way of explaining it is to say that the reality or the ‘weight’ of things is ‘a construction that comes about as part of the relation that we have with them’ (Sloterdijk 2004: 736). Put thus, intra-act emphasizes that the ‘weight of things’ is technically speaking ‘modifiable’, and ‘we therefore have to favour the conclusion that humankind, with regard to everything


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which it comes into contact with, finds itself faced with contingent decisions’ (Sloterdijk 2004: 736).8 Reality is neither given nor an effect of the meanings that humans entertain, but comes about at the interstice where subject and object ‘intra-act’: ‘the reality principle . . . is not just modelled on experiences that [we] have of the hardness, resistance and unavailability of objects. Equally determining of our experience of entering into the real is the relief that we experience as we begin to manipulate things: the possibility of overcoming resistance through subterfuge, scaling obstacles, postponing difficult tasks, reinterpreting losses, contesting attributions of guilt, reformulating reproaches, manipulating criteria, escaping from responsibilities, replacing absences, palliating pains and avoiding frontal collisions with that against which one can’t prevail.’ (Sloterdijk 2004:740)9

Within organization studies, Cooper and Chia have elaborated related ideas. For his part, Cooper emphasizes the mutuality of discourse (he uses the word ‘information’) and materiality by pointing to the undecidability inherent in matter: ‘information derives its value from the inherent undecidability of matter’ (Cooper 1993: 172). Similarly, for Chia, ‘the apparent solidity of social phenomena such as “the organization” derives from the stabilizing effects of generic discursive processes rather than from the presence of independently existing concrete entities’ (Chia 2000: 517). For both Cooper and Chia, real phenomena are implicated in processes of ‘becoming’ through which their identities are materially negotiated and (re)confirmed (Chia 2003: 106).

Discourse Is Contingent Seen from within an historical context, becoming does not affect phenomena in the same way and at the same pace (Lee 1998). Becoming particularly registers in how we configure and experience late modernity where social and organizational phenomena resemble ‘interlocking and intertwining associations that are continually on the move’ (Chia and Kallinikos 1998: 136). This serves to foreground the contingent dimension of discourse foreshadowed in the introduction to this paper. I regard discourse as a contingent and historically situated modality of human existence: discourse defines (late) modernity. More specifically, humankind has, particularly since the 15th century and thanks to growing economic wealth (in Europe), invented powerful means with which to articulate and intervene in its own ontological conditions. Traditional explanations and ontologies that prevailed for centuries have begun to give way under the pressure of emergent articulations and technologies (Sloterdijk 2004). Bringing new realities into being, some of these articulations and technologies realize what might initially have appeared improbable: buildings that float in the air,10 modes of transportation that can take us This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.


into space, and technologies that can keep people alive beyond their death.11 At the centre of these productions of new realities is the intra-act or, if you like, the dynamic reconfiguration of possibility and constraint, of substance and boundary, of creativity and disciplinarity. The space of ongoing reconfiguration, discourse is the syndrome of discovering, creating and (re)producing emergent kinds of existence. This perspective has implications for the analysis of discourse. One is that the object(s) of our analysis and the outcomes of our analysis cannot be considered to be ‘objective’: there is no baseline reality to which discourse refers and belongs, or about which an analysis makes claims. Analysis involves a construction of social-organizational data as discourse, and therefore analysis does not take place outside of discourse. Indeed, analysis contributes to the intensification of discourse, reconfirming existing realities and/or opening up alternative ones. The above point invites the short-circuiting in research practice of sources of discourse with analyses of discourse. That is, we take what we as researchers construe as discourse and our discourse analytical ‘findings’ back into the organization from where discourse data were derived. This places the discourse researcher face-to-face with the consequences of their choices, analyses and judgments, this time not in terms of their academic discipline’s standards and criteria, but in terms of organizational members’ interests, understandings and concerns. This approach to discourse analysis is not just about investing academic authority in analytical generalizations and critical judgments, but also about engaging with the people, the practices and the organizations that we have chosen to study.

Conclusion This paper began with an overview of a number of approaches to organizational discourse (analysis). The approaches reviewed proposed models of discourse and ‘reality’, each in their own way unsettling understandings of language, meaning and communication that centre on labelling ‘the real’. Nevertheless, these approaches revealed ambiguities in how they defined and deployed discourse, and harboured limitations by subjecting the complexity of organizing within abstract models and relationships. The paper proposed an alternative view of discourse that centres on privileging and analytically engaging with the semiotic, material and contingent character of social–organizational processes. This alternative view of discourse underscores the historically situated nature of meaning-making, sharpening discourse’s definition from encompassing material semiosis to embodying the intensities and excesses of late modern socio-cultural and organizational life. This perspective counters the potential objection that adopting a material view of discourse reduces everything to discourse. Discourse embodies


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a specific ontological modality that came to particular prominence and was greatly intensified with the advent of the Enlightenment, and the concern to (re-) represent human existence. But even without historicizing discourse, emphasizing the multi-modal nature of discourse does not equate with infinitely extending discourse’s scope. In fact, and ironically, the concern that a multi-modal perspective extends the scope of discourse to include ‘everything’ inverts the critic’s own rule of judgment. Critical concern should arise about approaches that locate discourse in the domain of abstract meanings, and thereby unleash it into the infinity of cognitive space (Boje 2001; but see Eco 1990). Second, the point of levelling discourse and materiality and of mobilizing the concept of the intra-act is to underscore that as humans we are not confronted with a fully completed world out there (or in the head) waiting to be labelled.12 Discourse-material worlds and agencies are rarely iterative: they are more often emergent, in excess of what was. The notion ‘intra-action’ converges these arguments into a single concept. Intra-action reminds us ‘that “concepts” . . . and “things” do not have determinate boundaries, properties or meanings apart from their mutual intra-actions’ (Barad 2003: 819–820), and that meaning, function, materiality or use are not distinct moments, but emerge in an ongoing materializing performance of the world. This is where experimental physics and social– organizational research are similarly implicated: meanings, apparatuses, techniques and models lack finality because they are, to use Barad’s terms, ‘material (re)configurings/discursive practices that produce material phenomena in their discursively differentiated becoming’ (Barad 2003: 820). One noteworthy consequence of the present argument pertains to discourse analysis as research politics. The way we define discourse determines whether and how our own research becomes visible as social practice. Depending on how we define discourse, research questions like How do actors organize and make meaning? are complemented with questions like What are the ways in which we as researchers position ourselves in relation to organizational actors and processes? Who do we share our data and analyses with? What level of engagement with the organization about data and analyses is desirable, ethical, productive, risk-able? Risk here is not just a matter of producing ‘risky accounts’ from our fieldwork that may unsettle or upset organizational actors (Latour 2005: 121 ff.). Risk accrues from any research that problematizes rather than naturalizes ‘the social practices that are conducted in its name’ (Rorty 1998: 70). Besides exacerbating such risks, there are also opportunities associated with the present perspective, as it invites new sites and spaces of engagement between researchers and researched. These sites and spaces enable both parties to capitalize on their different (academic, organizational, historical) backgrounds and explore knowledges, positionings, viewpoints and practices from ‘under a different aspect’ (Wittgenstein 1953: 193e). Here,



‘[t]he critic is not the one who debunks, but the one who assembles. The critic is not the one who lifts the rugs from under the feet of naïve believers, but the one who offers the participants arenas in which to gather’ (Latour 2004: 246). The present perspective on discourse and discourse analysis renders such arenas not just possible, but also inevitable.

Notes I thank Robert Chia and three anonymous reviewers for their forgiving, patient and constructive suggestions. I also thank Robert de Beaugrande, Debbi Long, Hermine Scheeres and particularly Suzanne Eggins for their help in structuring this paper. All the remaining imperfections are the things that I was in the end unable to improve on. 1. ‘Dis-cursus – originally the action of running here and there, comings and goings, measures taken, “plots and plans”’ (Barthes 1978: 3; cited in Czarniawska 2004: 399). 2. A diachronic perspective looks at the development of a linguistic–discursive phenomenon over time. 3. Following Harvey (1996: 78), Fairclough situates these moments in a process dialectic, defining the analytical challenge as describing how these moments blend into what Harvey calls (after Whitehead) ‘permanences’. 4. Compare Searle’s claim with Deleuze’s: ‘Everything is knowledge, and this is the first reason why there is no “savage experience”: there is nothing beneath or prior to knowledge’ (Deleuze 1988: 109). Cooper puts it this way: ‘In the discourse of the social and cultural sciences this art of elision which suppresses the fundamental operation of the medium of communication leads us to assume that socio-cultural artifacts can be grasped in themselves and independently of the forms of human communication that actually constitute them’ (Cooper 1993: 169). 5. For Reed, ‘Foucauldian discourse analysis’ focuses on language. 6. ‘Discursive practices are not speech acts, linguistic representations, or even linguistic performances, bearing some unspecified relationship to material practices. Discursive practices are not anthropomorphic placeholders for the projected agency of individual subjects, culture, or language. Indeed, they are not human-based practices’ (Barad 2003: 821). 7. Deacon articulates this insight from a neuroscientific perspective: ‘For example, the patterns of electromagnetic waves reflecting off an object and entering the retina and the pattern of neural signals ramifying through circuits of the visual areas of the brain are both part of the causal chain on which experiences . . . are based . . . There is no jump from material stuff to mental stuff in this process. The material and cognitive perspectives both recount relationships in form between successive and simultaneous points in a process’ (Deacon 1997: 448–449). 8. The original German reads as follows: ‘Das Gewicht der Dinge ist eine Konstrukt, das sich im Umgang mit ihnen formt; als solchers ist es taktisch modifizierbar. Also ist an der Erkenntnis festzuhalten, daß der Mensch bei allem, was er anfaßt, seinen Vorentscheidungen begegnet.’ 9. ‘daß das seit Freud so-genannte Realitätsprinzip nicht nu durch die Erfahrungen geformt wird, die Heranwachsende im Umgang mit der Härte, Widerständigkeit und Unverfügbarkeit der Objekte gewinnen. Für den Eingang des Realen ins Leben der Intelligenz sind ebenso die Erleichterungen verantwortlich, die beim Hantieren mit dem Dingen zu Entdecken sind: die Überlistbarkeit von Widerständen, die


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Umgehbarkeit von Hindernissen, die Vertagbarkeit von Schwierigkeiten, die Umdeutbarkeit von Mängeln, die Bestreitbarkeit von Schuldzuweisungen, die Umformulierbarkeit von Vorwürfen, die Manipulierbarkeit von Maßstäben, die Unterwanderbarkeit von Aufgaben, die Ersetzbarkeit von Verlusten, die Betäubbarkeit von Schmerz und die Vermeidbarkeit von Frontalbegegnungen mit dem, wogegen man nur verlieren kann.’ 10. The ING Bank building in Amsterdam (shaped like a high-speed train engine) and the Bank of China building in Hong Kong are both structures built on stilts, giving the appearance that they float in space. 11. New medical technologies ‘have begun not only to deny or at least hold death at bay, but also to redefine and manage the meaning of death itself (Brown and Webster 2004: 134). 12. Žižek echoes this idea when he writes: ‘the order of Being is never simply given . . . as a positive ontologically consistent Whole’ (Žižek 1999: 238).

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35 Organizational Context and the Discursive Construction of Organizing John A.A. Sillince

I

n the present article, I argue that the ability to shift context increases the freedom to act. Management is about increasing one’s freedom of action. Most discourse analyses in organizations focus on single contexts, which reduces their relevance to managers. Let us suppose there are four separate studies, one of rumor, one of a company report about an industry’s prospects, one of executive responsibility, and one of internal accounting controls. These are all, let us suppose, separate discourse analyses by different scholars. Now let us suppose they are about the same issue and the same organization. Despite this, they remain locked into their contexts, reporting the micromanagement of language in an isolated niche. Most of us, though, can make a start at relating separate discourse studies. We use “common sense” and experience. Yet the task is formidable. These scholars’ disciplines may be different; their readings of the “story” may be irreconcilable; they may be trying to prove a pet theory. Some of the scholars may overlook the existence of strategic ambiguity or hypocrisy, or they may allege it exists when it does not. What is needed is a framework for reorienting the studies, for classifying the studies’ main points, for putting them into perspective, and for relating them together. What I mean, of course, is that we need a context framework. In the present article, I seek to resolve a dilemma. On one hand, discourse analysis fails to serve the needs of organization theory in two ways. First, discourse analysts do not satisfy theorists’ need to know how the influence of talk on outcomes is observable outside language. Second, discourse

Source: Management Communication Quarterly, 20(4) (2007): 363–394.


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analysts do not show what causal factors, lying outside language in the form of events, actions, or structures, influence talk. Discourse analysts ignore actions that are observable outside language or infer them from what is said by participants. The researcher remains imprisoned in the conversation and its participants and finds it difficult to tease out contextual references from talk because often such references are not explicit. On the other hand, realist researchers assume the context is self-evident. Causes and effects are all in events that can be observable independently of language. This leads to explanations that reify structure and that provide unconvincing portrayals of actors. As a result, there are two domains of understanding that are separate: talk without context on one side and context without talk on the other. Inferring context from talk requires a context framework. That is what this article offers. The propositions that I will introduce have powerful implications for organization theory. They suggest that although context influences their early choice of structure-as-context from which to frame participation in a discourse, actors will have limited freedom of action if they remain within that single contextual frame. For example, overemphasizing a justificatory discourse that insists on consistency leads to a reduction in flexibility. Because of this, I argue that organizations are more effective when they enable reframing across contexts and that a collective and persistent context bias will significantly increase pressure for more management control. That argument is put forward within a structuration frame: Context may constitute a constraining structure for discourse, and yet it also provides space for agency. I argue that agency exists because structure-as-context can also be modified by one discourse’s recursively acting on, appropriating, reframing, or inserting itself into another discourse. In this way the article will build a contextually sophisticated structurational model of discourse. A context framework helps us understand the link between change in a context (e.g., market analysts becoming suspicious about how a company reports its results) and institutional change (e.g., delegitimation of the institutionalized, epic quest of the company’s narrative). Such an understanding of context change enables me to argue for a definition of the sort of discourse incoherence that delegitimates institutions. I then develop an understanding of how discontinuities in context generate incoherencies that delegitimate institutions. Contexts are woven together coherently, for example, in organizational epic narratives. Events occur that change for all time the meaning of one of these contexts, which has a knock-on effect on discourse in other contexts. The context framework also has methodological implications for discourse analysis. I will use the framework to suggest the streaming of a research agenda into four textual dimensions, which create the possibility for studying larger theoretical issues in small steps that combine to a larger result.


Sillince • Organizational Context 351

The need for a context framework for discourse is presently being discussed in the literature. That discussion has taken different forms depending partly on the subdisciplinary interest of scholars and their links to macro theory located in, more generally, sociology and organization studies and, more particularly, the theory of the discursive constitution of organizing.

Discourse and Context An extensive theoretical literature already exists on the discursive constitution of organizing (Boden, 1994; Cooren, 2000; Cooren & Taylor, 1997; Deetz, 1992; Fairhurst & Putnam, 2004; Ford & Ford, 1995; Kuhn & Ashcraft, 2003; McPhee, 2004; McPhee & Zaug, 2000, 2001; Robichaud, Giroux, & Taylor, 2004; Sillince, 1999a; Sillince, 1999b; J. R. Taylor, 1993; J. R. Taylor, Cooren, Giroux, & Robichaud, 1996; J. R. Taylor & Van Every, 2000). Following this work, I define discourse as “structured collections of text embodied in the practices of talking and writing” (Grant, Hardy, Oswick, & Putnam, 2004, p. 3). Context is the part of a text or statement that surrounds a particular word or passage and influences its meaning, or the circumstances or setting in which an event occurs. Context therefore requires knowing how to situate meanings and consequently is a problem not only for the organization member but also for us as investigators. According to Goffman’s (1974) frame theory, when people interact they make definitional claims about how they see the situation and also seek agreement as to what meanings to include and exclude. However, frame theory does not say how discourse relates to the use of frames. Discourse theory has focused on the indexicality of discourse and thus on the situated and specific nature of empirical inquiry into how discourse is used. Persistent structures that predate each interaction are therefore neglected in current literature (Reed, 1998). The neglect has led to difficulties in explaining agency (McPhee, 2004, p. 366) and to misgivings by several organizational scholars (reviewed in Boje, Oswick, & Ford, 2005) about the adequacy of discourse approaches. Thus, an account of organizational context is currently lacking, and yet such an account is essential for understanding how organizational discourse works. Organizational discourse theory is caught in a dilemma of its own making. On one hand, the impact of context on organizational behavior is not sufficiently appreciated (Johns, 2006, p. 386). Yet the meaning of organizational discourse is rightly regarded as being situated (Hardy, Palmer, & Phillips, 2000; Heracleous, 2002; Sillince, 2002) because discourse gains meaning within the interaction context of its use. The dilemma thus resides both in deferring to context and in simultaneously not referring to context


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in theoretical terms. The notion of context stands as a talisman of analytical rectitude for argument that is overly fixed on the form and content of the words on which it focuses and insufficiently alert to the formal properties of the contexts in which these words are generated and sustained. We currently lack a theory of discourse context that can explain how discourse in one organizational setting has a broader meaning. A consequence of the inability of discourse analysis to explain large-scale phenomena is that it has contributed very little to organizational theory. Indeed, many researchers in organization studies use discourse analysis merely as a methodology or as an interpretive lens rather than as a theoretical building block. Several scholars have argued that this leads to a difficulty both in making discourse analysis relevant to organization theory (Alvesson & Karreman, 2000, p. 1146; Fairhurst & Putnam, 2004, p. 8; Heracleous, 2004; Sillince, 2005) and in explaining how an organization is constructed “from the circumstances of a local interaction” (Cooren & Taylor, 1997, p. 220). Equally, it leads to an inability to understand how actors use discourse to achieve cross-contextual organizing. Discourse analysis contains a wide variety of approaches including rhetoric, critical discourse analysis, and ethnography. Although they all lack a general context framework, problems of context arise particularly with regard to two other discourse approaches. One of these, speech act theory, developed detailed rules about the meaning of utterances dependent on particular contexts. But speech acts apply only at the level of talk-as-interaction and cannot be used to understand the way in which “grand” or “global” discourses (Alvesson & Karreman, 2000) provide context. Another approach to discourse, conversation analysis, has been criticized for its lack of engagement with a context of broader issues and outcomes (Iedema, 2003) and for its focus on the purely mechanical aspects of conversational work. These “language-in-use” studies are often criticized for their focus on the detailed aspects of discursive interaction that neglect relevant aspects of wider context (Grant et al., 2004; Heracleous, 2002). To move forward from this previous work into a more nuanced understanding of context, I next develop an introduction to and justification of four dimensions that form a contextual framework. Next, I argue that these four dimensions underlie discourse structures for supporting the construction and invocation of context. Then I show that organizing of contextual dimensions is effected by means of contestation involving a discourse from one context being inserted, reframed, appropriated, and recursively placed into a discourse from another context. Last, I suggest theoretical implications and a research agenda. For purposes of illustration, I have organized my subsequent analysis around examples of discourses about Enron. The firm, although infamous now, began as an energy company that became a pacesetter in developing new markets for trading energy risks. Many of its gambles on energy prices This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.


lost money, and its executives hid these losses from investors and market analysts. Eventually, market confidence in the company, and with that its share price, collapsed. Its top executives were convicted of hiding the company’s losses from investors and were given prison sentences. I consider how discourses situated in distinct contexts within Enron addressed each other. I investigate the case from several viewpoints, including alarmed rumors, industry forecasts, attributions of blame, and causal explanations. But such viewpoints do not provide a satisfactory explanation for how actors rooted in distinct contexts use discourse to address and intermesh with each other. Enron has been chosen because of several reasons. Its notoriety has led to the generation of a large amount of information that is usually unavailable for companies. That information is from a variety of sources, including court testimony, members’ memoirs, and journalism. Also, Enron is large enough to present many contrasting internal settings and roles, including leaders and communicators, deal makers, strategists, and auditors. I thus use the Enron case as an example to argue a theory of context as significant to organizations, as a persistent structure, as a field of discursive contestation, as having implications for management control, and as providing a methodology for researchers.

Context Framework I show in this section some general examples of how knowledge of context influences how we – both as organization members and as investigators – interpret discourse. Johns (2006) uses the genre of journalists’ stories to argue that general context comprises “who . . . when, where and why” (p. 391). This section shows how these four context dimensions provide a framework for understanding context. Context constructed as the “why” of discourse. To inquire into why something is said is to address the reasoning process and its implications as those implications are embedded in the discourse. Behind any idea we are considering lie all sorts of assumptions, previous agreements, and arguments that have already become accepted. The assumptions are the more powerful for being taken for granted (Fairclough, 1992). Context constructed as the “when” of discourse. Discourse becomes understandable in the light of other concurrent, succeeding, or preceding events. However, “when” discourse also addresses novelty (discourse after which things are irrevocably altered) creating precedence relations between discourse elements. For example, any prediction must be made before rather than after the event predicted. Motive also has a temporal logic. Criminal courts give great weight to discourses of intention that are uttered just before a crime and that therefore reveal a motive (Torry, 2001, p. 309).


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Context constructed as the “who” of discourse. A person writes and says things from a personal point of view. An organizational spokesperson puts forth an organizational view. Understanding how we relate to people or organizations – friends or foes – tells us much about how to take their argument. Something may be said “for our own good,” or “just out of interest,” or “politically motivated,” or even as the result of a desire to do us harm. Therefore working out who has said something changes its meaning according to grades of speaker self-interest, of friendliness of intentions, and of worthiness of our attention. A promise or a threat has different meanings spoken by someone who can carry it out compared with someone who cannot (Bar-Gill & Ben-Shahar, 2005, p. 717). Context constructed as the “where” of discourse. The “where” dimension of discourse takes meaning from its geographical, social, or organizational setting. Saying “I love the company” in front of one’s superior puts the supervisor in the position of having to regard the statement as potentially insincere whereas the same discourse uttered privately will be received as more sincere. Discourse in a large meeting may have a very different meaning from the same discourse spoken in a one-to-one conversation. Organizations create special contexts, such as “budget” or “audit,” which immediately distinguish the range of meanings available. Alvesson and Karreman (2000) have suggested a context framework that uses the contrast between local discourses and global discourses (Figure 1, vertical axis) and between discourse that is loosely coupled and tightly coupled to meaning (Figure 1, horizontal axis). Discourse Contexts and Enron LOCAL LOCAL DISCOURSE DISCOURSE

‘when’ ‘when’

‘where’ ‘where’

e.g. Employees’ Employees’ e.g. rumours about rumours about audit malpractice. malpractice. audit

DISCOURSE DISCOURSE UNCOUPLED UNCOUPLED TO MEANING TO MEANING

e.g. Enron e.g. Enronreport report about broadband about broadband industry. industry.

DISCOURSE DISCOURSE COUPLED TO COUPLED TO MEANING MEANING

‘who’ ‘who’

e.g. Responsibility e.g. Responsibility for bending bending the for the rules. rules.

‘why’ ‘why’

e.g. Internal Internal controls e.g. controls didnot not work. work. did

GLOBAL GLOBAL DISCOURSE DISCOURSE

Figure 1: Discourse contexts and Enron This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.


Alvesson and Karreman (2000) did not fully explain their axes. I shall therefore suggest a more fully developed definition of the two axes. When discourse is tightly coupled to meaning, I interpret it to possess the following components. The discourse appears linked to and assertive of the importance of decisions and an identifiable individual or group decision maker (Deetz, 2003, p. 43; March & Simon, 1958); it asserts a single, substantiated, noncontested interpretation (extreme examples are books of CEO heroes); it adopts a “plain style” of rhetoric that affects directness, informality, and preparedness to act (Linstead, 2001); and it claims consensus. Against this, when discourse is loosely coupled to meaning, I interpret it to possess the following components. It appears not to lead to decisions and to deny the existence of decisions (Olsen, 1976); it asserts hypocritical, multiple, contested, negotiable or unsubstantiated interpretations (Brunsson, 1989; Deetz, 2003, p. 48); and it affects a rhetorical style that is indirect and strategically ambiguous (Davenport & Leitch, 2005; Donnellon, Gray, & Bougon, 1986; Eisenberg, 1984). When discourse is local, I will assume that it adopts the position of the insider, with a subjective viewpoint focused on the self and its motives and argumentation repertoires; it privileges introspective evidence; and it relates to the specific circumstances of a unique time and place. Global discourse, I will assume, adopts the position of the outsider, with an objective and realist viewpoint; its argumentative positions are expressed as broad “vocabularies of motive” (Mills, 1940) and “interpretive repertoires” (Potter & Wetherell, 1987); it uses external, “objective” evidence; and it generalizes across time and space. I use this context framework as a means of exploring how discourses about Enron that take their meaning from distinct contexts engage with each other. Enron employees were sources of early rumors and official resistance to them. For example, claims about rumors came from employees who had been fired: Margaret Ceconi, an EES [a division of Enron] employee who was laid off from the division in August [1998], later fired off an angry letter to Ken Lay describing the poor business practices in the operation. . . . “This is common knowledge among all EES employees and is actually joked about.” She claimed that EES sat on a total of $500 million in losses, but hid them in the complex trading books of Enron Wholesale Services. (Fox, 2003, pp. 238–239)

At the time, this “common knowledge among all EES employees” had been unsubstantiated and not directed through legal processes, and therefore such rumors involved discourse that was only loosely coupled to meaning. The rumors emanated from employees as specific allegations drawing on local experiences rather than on global concepts. The most significant aspect of these rumors was that they were contemporaneous with the events they This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.

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were describing (“when”), because that was how they got their veracity and persuasive force (Figure 1, “employees’ rumors about audit malpractice”). Employees were further alarmed by obviously false public claims made by company executives. The worsening position of the company led to attempts by spokespersons to explain away poor financial results and rumor of malpractices. These public statements became, for employees, further evidence of impending catastrophe. Skilling [one of the later convicted Enron executives] put his best spin on the broadband situation as a potential opportunity for Enron, telling analysts in a March conference call: “This marketplace is going through a very tough time. I look at this as the natural gas business in the mid80s over again. There is a meltdown in prices. There is way too much supply . . . so I think that is going to accelerate the opening of the markets.” Even as Skilling gave these reassurances, many employees in Enron Broadband knew that the company had quietly been trying to sell the entire 18,000-mile fiber network. (Fox, 2003, p. 240)

The focus was on the problems of a specific company and its product and so involved local discourse. The share price, the financial losses, and the broadband industry situation were all numerically assessable, and thus discourse was tightly coupled to meaning. The context was chiefly characterized by the economic conditions of a particular industry (“where”; Figure 1, “company report about broadband industry”). Another perspective on Enron is the “who” discourse of accountability. This varies from a focus on individual accountability (e.g., “Richard Kinder”), to the concept of managerial duty (“conscience”), to portraying the organization as a whole as an accountable individual (e.g., “over-confident”). Sometime around 1996–1997, Enron crossed the line. Richard Kinder’s departure as the financial conscience of the company seemed to be a critical step in this transformation. So Enron, which until then had been a successful energy trading and logistics company, became an over-confident hedge fund that believed it was entitled to bend the rules to finance its trade-everything ambition. (Fox, 2003, p. 308)

Another, slightly different view is the “systemic” view of accountability, attributing malpractice to culture and control systems: What Middleton dumped on me that day was the systemic reality of the magnificent Enron – that if the people in the units wanted to survive the [Peer Review Committee] process and meet their personal bonus targets, then they often needed to inflate the deal-value (which was the estimated value of future cash flows from a deal). With inflated deal value they could deliver inflated earnings. More specifically, they could deliver bigger earnings to senior management – who in turn would deliver them to Wall Street and investors. (Cruver, 2003, p. 79)



This discourse focused on who had responsibility, who bent the rules, and who should have prevented that happening. Central to such discourse was the concept of rules, such as those enacted by an internal auditor of integrity or by a reward system that encouraged misleading the financial markets. Such rules were part of a global discourse shared by the business community as a whole. The fact that the rules were actually bent suggests that discourse was only loosely coupled with meaning (Figure 1, “responsibility for bending the rules”). One answer to the question of why the internal accounting controls did not work is as follows: Causey’s position enabled him to exercise control over the use and potential abuse of accounting rules. But within Enron, managers viewed him as loyal to Skilling (Causey became chief accounting officer in 1997 after spending five years at Skilling’s ECT division). And Skilling, either through backing Fastow or through his own generalised knowledge of the LJM and Raptor deals, seemed to support aggressive accounting. . . . Causey was sharp enough to understand Fastow’s deals: indeed, Fastow couldn’t have conducted his special purpose entity deals without Causey’s approvals, according to one former Enron vice-president, Allan Sommer. . . . The result was that Enron’s two most powerful accounting police were essentially loyal to Skilling and therefore, by association, inclined to favour Skilling protégé Fastow. (Fox, 2003, p. 213)

The reasons why include global discourse, such as “abuse of accounting rules” and “aggressive accounting,” and discourse tightly coupled to meaning, such as “Causey became chief accounting officer in 1997” and “Fastow couldn’t have conducted his special purpose entity deals without Causey’s approvals” (Figure 1, “internal controls did not work”). Although the four context dimensions seem to fit neatly into the four quadrants of Figure 1, it is important to remember that there may be other examples in which there is not a neat fit. After all, when, where, who, and why are contextual dimensions rather than contexts per se. However, there are reasons to suggest that under some circumstances, the four contextual dimensions do have a one-to-one relation to the quadrants as shown in Figure 1. Both “when” and “who” are contexts that are often only loosely coupled to meaning. The interpretation of “when” requires a narrator to turn a meaningless chronicle into a narrative. The interpretation of “who” is strategic (whose vested interests, who is responsible, who is legitimate) is an issue that is subject to rhetorical manipulation, insincere positioning of multiple identities, denial, hypocrisy, and strategic ambiguity and so is only loosely coupled to any empirically validated meaning. Although all four contexts are socially constructed, “who” is such a strategic question (as when refuting a charge of personal bias) that it requires special rhetorical attention in any discursive construction and so enables only a loose coupling of discourse to meaning. On the other hand, “where” This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.

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is identified by physical boundaries that have specific meanings in terms of ownership and identity and symbolic boundaries that protect symbolic space by constraining the meaning of talk. Again, the question “why” is tightly coupled to specific meanings by implications of a logical or empirically researchable nature. These dimensions of context are so important that they give rise to structures that protect symbolic space and guide behavior. The next section addresses the issue of discourse structures. These support the construction and invocation of why, when, who, and where discourse is enacted. The Enron case shows that there were several distinct contexts within which Enron-related discourse took on distinct meanings. These contexts are therefore structures that have the effect of segregating discourses.

Discourse Structures I define discourse structure to denote institutionalized and textualized meanings of discourse. This agrees with Davies and Harre’s (1991) definition of discourse as “the institutionalized use of language” (p. 45). The meanings of discourse are reified and institutionalized and so become taken for granted (Berger & Luckmann, 1967). The meanings of discourse are also textualized and so become permanent (McPhee, 2004, p. 358; J. R. Taylor, 1993; J. R. Taylor & Van Every, 2000). Discourse then becomes mainly synonymous with text, so that context is largely provided by other texts that are related to the current text. Intertextuality – the property of texts by which they comment on and quote from other texts (Fairclough, 1992) – means that context may itself be composed of other embedded texts (Phillips, Lawrence, & Hardy, 2004). Hardy (2001) showed how context at several levels relates to and penetrates into the discourse as text. Discourse as text can explain the persistence of discourse, can overcome problems of its abstractness, and can explain how discourse is represented. Text also has the important function that it serves as a storage place for meanings and so enables shared understandings of context. On one hand, agents use discourse to construct or reproduce some rules and resources and to undermine others, so that agents have an effect on structures. On the other hand, the rules and resources contained in those structures constrain or enable what agents can say. This “structurational” influence is therefore mutual (Giddens, 1984). It has been argued that this agency-structure relation is mirrored by reuse of old claims as premises in new arguments: “Premises can include several previously established claims, so that argumentation is recursive. This mirrors the recursive character of structuration” (Sillince, 1999a, p. 822). Similar recursivity and potential for structurational dynamics have been observed in



organizations-as-narratives (Cooren, 2000), organizations-as-conversations (Robichaud, Giroux, & Taylor, 2004), and structure-as-identity and agencyas-identification (Scott, Corman, & Cheney, 1998). Four types of structures extend from the previous discussion. Reasoning structures constituted by discourse processes that address the “why” of discourse. Members construct and draw on the reasoning structures that have become accepted within a particular organization and that comprise organization-specific types of argument or “argumentation repertoires” (Sillince, 1999a). For example, reasoning within a human resource department may involve the typical discourse strategy of connective relations of implication between equality of opportunity and fairness. Global discourse is most often used in reasoning structures. This involves objective indicators such as comparable wage rates for men and women and may present a mixture of loose and tight coupling of discourse. For example, human resource departments keep loosely coupled raw data on individual employees that have uncertain meanings as well as tightly coupled data that have been constructed to justify a particular decision. Reasoning structures contain organizational mechanisms for facilitating and routinizing connective relation links. Means-ends assumptions underlie “rational” planning processes in which goals are constrained and where these goals then justify intermediate steps. Reasoning structures also contain mechanisms for constructing explicit textual links. Strategy documents cross-reference other compatible strategies and decisions to avoid inconsistency. Consistency may be viewed as of functional or of ceremonial value. Or strategy documents cross-reference incompatible strategies and decisions that construct inconsistency to enable deniability, to obtain legitimacy from conflicting constituencies, or to minimize strategic commitment. Another example of a reasoning structure is a sequence of committees that considers issues in a process that generates increasing commitment. Auditing processes are reasoning structures whose logic is to seek illegitimate links between conflicting interests. Reasoning structures may also contain ritualized links, such as sales award ceremonies to link perceptions of “individualistic effort” with perceptions of “organizational rewards.” Temporal structures constituted by discourse processes that address the “when” of discourse. Temporal structures are the institutionalized and textualized meanings of persistent and recognizable features of organizations that vary rhythmically and that enable sense making and focused action (Lawrence, Winn, & Jennings, 2001). These meanings are influenced both by temporal enactments, such as flexibility and linearity, and by temporal perceptions (Ballard & Seibold, 2003). Perceptions of time include expectations, for example, about the appropriateness of speed and punctuality. Such perceptions are very context dependent and are influenced by coordination methods (e.g., degree of interdependence), workplace technologies


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(e.g., the speed of the production line), and feedback cycles (e.g., immediate or 5-yearly) (Ballard & Seibold, 2003, 2004; McPhee & Zaug, 2000). Members construct and draw on temporal structures that rationalize these expectations. These temporal structures are detected emotionally (e.g., urgent expectation of a crisis, nostalgic recall of a reunion). Temporal structures inform members about changes of rhythm, pace, and importance of activity, enabling organization members to judge how much effort and commitment to expend (Lawrence et al., 2001, p. 626). Temporal structure fixes, unfixes, and refixes future rights and obligations (J. R. Taylor, 1993, p. 122) and future constructions of what is urgent, threatening, or opportune and redefines or cancels those structures fixed in the past. Individuals draw on global discourses about cultural institutions to make sense of and socially construct temporal structures. Where a discourse comes from and how far back researchers should go in tracing the origin of a discourse are issues for which that temporal structure accounts. A recent family argument is local and, outside the family, uncoupled to meaning. However, in a long-running Mafia vendetta, its penetration over time into global discourse and to tight coupling to meaning is profound. Temporal structures contain quasi-narratological elements, such as roles, plots, and closure, that provide credibility and continuity (Cooren, 2000; Greimas, 1987). Credibility and continuity are enhanced by similarity between the unfolding of a discourse and “master narratives” (Fisher, 1987) or argument structure (Perelman & Olbrechts-Tyteca, 1969). Companies threatened by hostile takeovers do essentially the same thing as when the takeover victim is given a “damsel-in-distress” story line, and buyers rescuing failing companies are often portrayed as “white knights” (Schneider & Dunbar, 1992). Temporal structures also contain mechanisms such as adjacency pairs, discourse markers, and conversational schemes for recategorizing and marking the progression of time. Organizational members often seek to create structures to support sequential steps, to ensure issues do not slip backward, to focus debate, to build “policy momentum,” and to make the decision funnel more legitimate (e.g. Terry, 1987). Political structures constituted by discourse processes that address the “who” of discourse. Political structures are institutionalized and textualized meanings that link patterns of opinions and interests with individuals and their membership and loyalty to groups. Although organizational constituencies are local in the sense of being self-interested, the size of the audience and thus the support is larger the more global the discourse that it is drawn from. Because political statements are often addressed to large and unknown constituencies within organizations, the discourse tends to be uncoupled from meaning because concrete promises are avoided in favor of intangible, promissory gestures (Edelman, 1966). Members construct and draw on political structures that “capture the context-dependent features of group



membership” (Hogg & Terry, 2000, p. 123). Such structures provide “maps” inscribed in texts (J. R. Taylor & Van Every, 2000, pp. 287–290) that enable members to make sense of individual political power and influence within their organizational environment (e.g., Krackhardt, 1990). Clegg (1989) has suggested three nested context levels or “circuits” of political structure. The episodic circuit is constituted by local discourses about social relations between specific individuals. The other two circuits are constituted by global discourses. The dispositional circuit relies on taken-for-granted assumptions about rules of practice and membership. The facilitative circuit draws on institutions that guide the selection of collective goals. The three contexts are drawn on by agents simultaneously in their discursive interactions (Giddens, 1984). Territorial structures constituted by discourse processes that address the “where” of discourse. Territorial structures determine how physical or symbolic space influences meaning. Territorial structures are manifested as physical boundaries or symbolic boundaries. These boundaries are actual or symbolic markers of territorial (“turf”) rights and obligations. Although territorial structures draw on global discourses about “boundary,” “autonomy,” and “relationship,” these terms become tightly coupled to meanings only when they are applied to territories by means of local discourses tied to specific decisions about, for example, jurisdiction disputes and breaches of contract. Weick (1995, pp. 135–145) and Sillince (2002) have argued that argumentation is a context-based sense-making process that varies territorially according to (socially constructed) rules and (social) groups. A weak boundary may lead to inappropriately unqualified openness (Eisenberg & Witten, 1987). Strong team identities and identification with values such as “build the best customer’s order first” (Barker, 1999, p. 123) are means by which organizations constitute boundaries between team members and outsiders. Weick (1993) has argued convincingly that the fact that Salley and Rumsey stuck together as a two-person group was the reason they survived the Mann Gulch fire. Agendas are an example of territorial structures that create a symbolic boundary around a protected time zone in which specified business must be discussed. The symbolic boundaries of groups are also powerful tools for action. Another example of a territorial structure is etiquette. Etiquette is a system of context-specific rules that prescribes behavior (e.g., formality in a meeting). Etiquette supports existing symbolic boundaries, and hence it is a way for the powerful to protect the status quo. Symbolic boundaries help to preserve cultural differences (Hatch, 1997, p. 275) and establish contrasting identities such as those between managers and workers (Collinson, 1994). This section started by posing the problem of understanding how segregated discourses engage with each other. This section has shown that discourse structures increase this segregation problem. This means that actors


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are in danger of becoming imprisoned within a particular context. The next section shows that situated actors also struggle with this problem of overcoming the effects of preferred context by relating one context to another.

Structuration of Context In this section I introduce propositions that draw on retrospective accounting for action and the interpretation of evidence generated in and through the emergent properties of the action under review. These propositions reflect how actors’ contexts provide structures that influence the early framing of their participation immediately following a new event. However, subsequently there are advantages to actors in exercising agency in shifting or redefining their contexts. The theoretical position is therefore structurational. An important early contextual influence will be who the actor is, and what is his or her role. Of course, role distance reduces the structural effect of role and identity on behavior (Goffman, 1961). It represents a deliberate attempt by the individual to create space for greater agency in a way analogous to the use of temporal distance (Emirbayer & Mische, 1998). Hochschild (1983, p. 34) observed how false selves perform an important, self-preserving function by preserving the “real self.” Also, Leidner (1993, pp. 184–185) defined a person’s “situational identity” as the self-involvement he or she is required to have in an organizational performance. Nevertheless, I shall assume that individuals can distinguish between the multiple and sometimes conflicting roles and identities associated with the self, and those associated with others, and so it is likely that actors’ roles influence their contextual perspective. Early contextual influence may be from contextual dimensions other than “who.” My argument is that initially, response to a new event will be rooted in one contextual dimension. For example, a senior executive concerned with enhancing the image of the company with market analysts will focus on where the company is located in terms of industry sectors and their growth prospects. Also, it may not be desirable to focus on “who.” The question of who was culpable of malpractice was, at the time of the malpractice, ambiguous and hidden behind global discourses that provided legitimacy. Accounts of why Enron’s accounting controls did not work invoked tightly coupled discourse such as Causey authorizing Fastow’s deals and invoked global discourses about business ethics and organizational culture. Those who spread rumors were rooted in the present and always acted when a malpractice was occurring. The previous discussion suggests the following proposition: Proposition 1: Organization members’ context structurally influences their early framing of their participation in a discourse.

Choosing to remain within the frame provided by one context is very limiting. Consider, for example, the viewpoint of “why.” Considering Enron



as a case of corporate arrogance misses the issue of who was responsible and when Lay became aware of Fastow’s malpractices. This might be supplemented by evidence of Lay’s malpractices where Fastow was not involved (e.g., Fox, 2003, p. 238). But it will also be very hard to switch frames; for example, good auditors are not necessarily persuasive communicators with market analysts. This is where organizations have advantages – they put together teams and individuals that span several roles and networks, thus facilitating context switching. Therefore there are advantages in organizations’ and groups’ discursively switching contexts and getting the advantages of each context. Such moves reassert agency by revising the structural influence of context. There is some evidence that being able to discursively switch contexts also helps achieve organizational change. Finstad (1998) divided his organizational change cases on two context dimensions: top down versus bottom up and institutionally isomorphic versus independent. Top-down initiatives had top team commitment and strategic significance but generated local resistance. Bottom-up initiatives had local buy-in but lacked top team support. Institutionally isomorphic projects were easy to implement but achieved little, whereas independent projects lacked professional legitimacy. Finstad showed that each of the four contexts constituted by the two dimensions were traps where actors settled for “change rhetoric” that provided only an appearance of change: “A pressure toward choosing between different rationalities to approach consensus or a monocultural change process, may jeopardize the change process and/or bring it to a ‘deadlock’” (Finstad, 1998, p. 738). Change was most successful when actors negotiated across contexts. This has also been argued by Pettigrew, Ferlie, and McKee (1992, p. 195), who suggested that developing “mixed roles” such as hybrid professionals-managers and networks helped to prevent “segmentation and incoherence” (Pettigrew et al., 1992, pp. 283, 285, 291–292). Organizations are therefore most effective in attracting multistakeholder support and in achieving change when they officially promote several roles and thus seek to negotiate across contexts. The above discussion suggests the next proposition: Proposition 2: Organizations whose members’ discourse remains within the frame of one context have limited freedom of action. Organizations are more effective in achieving change when they enable switching across contexts than when they do not.

Context is socially negotiated and co-constructed during the course of interactions (Auer, 1992, p. 24). In the process, contextual dimensions are manipulable as discursive resources (Hardy et al., 2000). But for an individual to have an effect on a contested discourse, I argue that he or she must disturb prevailing assumptions to redefine context and thus “reproblematize the obvious” (Deetz, 1992, p. 289). This is done by means of four discursive means: insertion, reframing, appropriation, and recursion. This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.

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Insertion of discourse from Context A into discourse from Context B makes discourse from Context A support the point made by discourse from Context B. Here is an example of supportive insertion of discourse from Context A (prediction about energy retailing) into discourse from Context B (attribution of an ulterior motive for making the prediction). The text changes its meaning from simply a “where” discourse (Where is energy retailing heading?) to a “who” discourse (Who benefits from making this prediction?). “The retail side will be telemarketing,” Jeff Skilling told a newspaper. “It will be 800 numbers and sophisticated billing and huge paper-processing and marketing capabilities.” By the time Skilling made this prediction, Enron employed 200 power marketers in two trading rooms in Houston. (Fox, 2003, p. 70)

Reframing involves changing the point of a discourse. Here is an example of reframing of a discourse from its original point (Enron’s real interest in energy supply to households by direct marketing to persuade them to switch from existing suppliers to Enron) to a new point (offering politicians an easy way of becoming popular) about politicians’ self-interest and thus away from Enron’s own self-interest. Enron also began arguing for competition on the retail side of electricity. What the company really wanted was to be able to market power directly to home-owners and businesses. . . . So Ken Lay was soon giving speeches about the benefits of deregulating the retail power market. He audaciously testified to Congress that retail competition in electricity would save homes and businesses a total of $60 billion to $80 billion (an estimate that was unrealistically gigantic), which would be “equivalent to one of the largest tax cuts in US history.” (Fox, 2003, p. 70)

Appropriation involves changing the meaning of a discourse so that the balance of advantage and disadvantage is shifted in one’s favor. Boden (1994) has shown how discourse about “when” involved in expectations of the regulation of discourse by means of turn taking can be appropriated to increase an individual’s influence (a move that is more usually associated with discourse about “who” rather than with “when”). Similar comments can be made about the appropriation of meeting agendas (that prescribe where an item in a list of items is discussed) for political ends (who benefits from that agenda). Here is an example of how the meaning can be shifted in one’s favor. In October 2001, as Enron was spiraling downward, Lay could simply have argued that Fastow’s involvement with a financial instrument called a “special purpose entity” was a malpractice. But he avoided doing this, because he might have become implicated as Fastow was his subordinate. He did not want to say that the special purpose entity was crooked. So instead, he questioned Fastow’s commitment to Enron. The shift was from a



“who” discourse – Who was responsible for the special purpose entity malpractice? – to a “why” discourse – Why was Fastow not committed to his fiduciary duty to Enron? Fastow told directors that over the lives of the partnerships, he had [personally] made roughly $45 million from them. . . . Lay described himself as “shocked.” As he understood it, Fastow spent only three hours a week on [special purpose entity] matters, and he believed Fastow had created [a special purpose entity] out of an obligation to the company. But Fastow made more from his involvement with [the special purpose entity] than from his position as CFO of Enron. Lay questioned whether Fastow lived up to his fiduciary duty to Enron. (Fox, 2003, p. 262)

Recursion occurs when local or loosely coupled discourses are strengthened and redefined by linking them to global or tightly coupled discourses. Here is an example of a discourse which is local (a personal e-mail) and loosely coupled (a backstage, unsupported allegation). It is strengthened and redefined by being linked to a discourse (the Fortune 500 index) that is global (of global interest) and tightly coupled (it has tightly coupled effects on investors’ decisions). The text changes its meaning from simply “when” (an event that was “remembered . . . when I first joined Enron”) to “why” (why the Number 7 spot was false). I remembered an e-mail I had been sent back when I first joined Enron. The writer had discovered some analysis on Enron’s accounting procedures. According to the e-mail, if Enron had recorded trading profits as revenue (like brokerage forms do), instead of recording the entire transaction amount, then Enron would have only $6.3 billion on the revenue line in 2000. That amount of revenue was slightly less that the $100 billion that put Enron in its current #7 spot in the Fortune 500 – between Citygroup and IBM. Instead, the revised revenue number would put

Enron at #287, right next to Campbell’s Soup. (Cruver, 2003, p. 140) Closure inhibits or prevents these discursive actions. Closure of a discourse deems it complete or in some way inappropriate for further revision. Here is an example of a discourse that constructs closure. It is commentary on the jury verdict finding Lay and Skilling guilty of hiding Enron’s financial health. It is definitive in closing off any further discussion of whether the men merely made “mistakes” of “omission” or were unwittingly subject to “events beyond their control.” The text changes the meaning of Enron discourse from being more loosely coupled (uncertainty about what the verdict might be) to being more tightly coupled. It integrates both local discourse (a decision to convict two specific individuals) and global discourse (it refers to economic markets and the discourses about them as “forces”).


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The jury of eight women and four men rejected the pair’s insistence that their mistakes were ones of omission and that Enron’s failure was a freakish event wrought by forces beyond their control. (“Enron Bosses,” 2006)

These discursive actions can be captured by intertextual analysis (Broadfoot, Deetz, & Andreson, 2004). Changes to the meaning of discourse about “who” occur as when moral accounts of responsibility and motive are contested (J. R. Taylor, 1993, p. 120; Vaara, 2002). These contested and interlinked accounts exist as supporting and contesting networks of texts whose authority is fixed, undermined, and eventually refixed. Who decides how this is done depends on the organizational hierarchy (McPhee & Zaug, 2001, p. 587) and wider institutional influences. The next section considers the implications for structuration theory and for institutional theory. The structural constraint represented by context and the advantages of switching context raise issues for structuration theory. The effect of discontinuities of context and how these relate to discourses about institutions have important implications for processes of delegitimation and for institutional theory.

Implications Management control. The four contextual dimensions may need to be used one at a time; for example, “who” is speaking may on occasion be the only context dimension that is important. But also it is possible to swing too much to just one context dimension. Therefore, organization members are naturally ambivalent about treating just one context dimension as all-important. The existence of organizational inertia suggests that organizations acquire a tendency to discursive imbalance in terms of overemphasis on particular contextual dimensions. Fast-moving entrepreneurs focus on taking opportunities and thus overemphasize “when” discourse and underemphasize “why.” A concern for being first into the market, foregrounding “when” discourse, with novel ways of managing risk neglects taking proper account of internal controls. A high level of interpersonal conflict and thus concern with “who” discourse detracts from a focus on “why” and task-related issues. Too much attention to “turf,” foregrounding “where” discourse, reduces the ability to be impartial. For example, highly bureaucratic structures with slow-moving processes will emphasize the importance of “why” and will inhibit the importance of “when.” When imbalance has gone beyond a critical point, there are likely to be strong efforts to reassert control if discursive imbalance is sustained over a long time and if control is seen as a managerial prerogative. It is likely that increasing divergence of meanings will increase pressures to reassert control by organizations seeking to change priority between contextual dimensions.



This suggests the following proposition: Proposition 3: If organization members are unable to balance the four (sometimes conflicting) contextual dimensions so that imbalance becomes collective and persistent, and if control is seen as a managerial prerogative, then pressure will increase significantly for greater management control.

Of most relevance to the enabling effect of organizational structure on the reconstitution of context are the particular types of discourse structures that managerial controls encourage. An optimistic scenario would argue that the debilitating effects of highly bureaucratic structures can be mitigated by organizational encouragement of discourse genres that emphasize “when” as an important contextual dimension. Similarly, crises – by definition, events that are construed as surprising – promote “when” because they require people to reinterpret the past to understand why they have been surprised. Scenarios promote “when” by containing vivid images that show how different the future could be from what exists now. However, there are also pathological implications of managerial control of contextual dimensions. The context framework can be used to explore systematic distortion of communication by management. One example of distortion is systemic closure. Closure can become systemic (Deetz, 1992, p. 187), for example, by means of proscribing “loose talk,” keeping discourse tightly coupled to senior management’s reading of meaning. Although dissent was supposedly encouraged within the company, employees who did dissent were often dismissed as people who “just didn’t get it” [didn’t believe the hype that Enron was great]. (Fox, 2003, p. 92)

The systemic closure at Enron was also tied to local discourses and rejected intrusion by global discourses such as those that would have been introduced by an outside law firm. Even misgivings aired up the hierarchy were viewed as disloyal, so the meaning of discourse was tightly coupled to fit in with a command-and-control definition of communication: Watkins, seeking a way out for Enron, recommended [in 1999] to Lay to hire an outside law firm to investigate Raptor and Condor. . . . Months later, Watkins’ warnings would cause her to be looked on as a whistleblower. (Fox, 2003, p. 250)

Institutional theory. There are also implications for our understanding of institutionalization within organizations. Phillips et al. (2004, p. 641) have argued that the extent to which texts are compatible and coherent is a large factor in their acceptance and institutionalization. However, they left open the question of what constitutes coherence of a text.


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The model of context introduced here provides an answer to that question. It suggests an account of coherence of a text in terms of the maintenance of an ambivalent and flexible appreciation of different contextual dimensions and therefore evidence of a balanced response to contextual influences in relation to relevant claims and narratives. Global discourses coexist and may conflict. For example, the “why” discourse of reengineering that argues that simplicity reduces costs may conflict with the “who” discourse of total quality that says that those who create simple, thoughtless designs reduce quality and raise costs. Again, discourse seeking to discover who was behind the malpractices at Enron led to changes in other contextual dimensions such as discourse about “when.” At Enron, “when” changed its meaning from when the organization’s ambitions would yet again be increased to when the next bombshell would appear about Enron’s misreporting of results. This helped to undermine the institutionalization of the epic organizational narrative by rendering its ambitious quest incoherent. The model of context introduced here suggests a more detailed view than existing accounts of delegitimation and provides a plausible account of how discourse strategies and their organizing effects bring about the rise or decline of institutions. Structuration theory. There are also implications for the further development of structuration theory. These include three aspects of structuration that merit empirical investigation. First, one criticism of structuration theory is that it gives more weight to structure than to agency (Sewell, 1992, p. 6). Yet this article suggests that the actions on a discourse from one context by a discourse from another context provide a way in which agents may wield powerful manipulations of structures. Second, this article takes seriously those who have argued that structuration theory is too abstract to operationalize (Barley & Tolbert, 1997, p. 93). Structuration theory argues at a general level that agents construct or remove their own constraints and enablements. Yet contrary to Barley & Tolbert’s critique, this article suggests four specific contextual dimensions along which that constraining or enabling structure is constituted and along which researchers can operationalize structuration theory. Third, this article engages with the criticism that structuration theory conflates structure with action (Archer, 1982). This article offers ways that agency and structure can be distinguished. First, the four discourse structures (where, who, why, when) are separate from the agent actions of insertion, appropriation, recursion, and reframing. Second, comparative and longitudinal research can reveal organizational discourse (agents’ actions) that leads to greater or lesser constraining effects (structure). In this article, I argue that agents’ actions, through bias toward some aspects of structure and thus the overuse of particular contexts, change structure by rendering it overconstraining. This article also suggests that managerial agency can then be reasserted via an eventual reaction in the form of increased management control. I now turn to the agenda for future research that is raised by these issues.



Research Agenda An empirical research program would include investigation of the discourse strategies that organization members use. I define discourse strategies as individuals’ means of enacting organizing processes. By using discourse strategies, individuals constitute the contextual dimensions of where, why, who, and when. These discourse strategies enact organization by achieving shifts between loose and tight coupling to meaning and between local and global discourse. They also suggest ways that the investigation of context can be carried out by researchers.

Research Agenda for Discourse Strategies That Address the “Why” of Discourse Researchers have a number of options for investigating the “why” dimension of context. (a) Research agenda for discourse strategies as connective relation links. Researchers could identify connective relations such as problem-solution, conflict-resolution, theory-test, or means-end links. For example, meansends relations include both holistic understanding and situated problem solving. During emergencies, discourse may background sense making as holistic understanding to focus on practical problem solving (Alby & Zucchermaglio, 2006). (b) Research agenda for discourse strategies as explicit textual links. Researchers could identify cross-referencing to other texts by means of common vocabulary, repetition, and pronouns. In the linguistic coherence theory literature, these links are termed binding (Bamberg & Marchman, 1991). A related approach is taken by centering theory (summarized in McPhee, Corman, & Dooley, 2002), which focuses on backward and forward links between noun phrases. (c) Research agenda for discourse strategies as associational links. Researchers could identify associative and dissociative rhetorics (Perelman & OlbrechtsTyteca, 1969) that link employee and organization (Cheney, 1983). For example, associating nature and technology in the rhetorical phrase harnessing nature suggests harmonious synergy, and the phrase unstoppable scientific advance associates inevitability with desirability (advance). In terms of other approaches consistent with my arguments here, Borum (2004) has proposed the use of means-end frames as a way of studying how the meaning of organizational fields evolves. Means-end frames are cognitive schemas that provide the focus for shared understanding of causal chains. By constructing and interpreting a means-end frame, participants reproduce


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and evolve an organizational field. Another example is how people use temporal spans as discursive resources. Fairness is constructed by linking actions across time to establish the social significance of actions’ being consistent (Forray & Woodilla, 2002).

Research Agenda for Discourse Strategies That Address the “When” of Discourse The “when” of discourse involves “functional” links with previous discourses. Within an organization, “previous” may imply a gap of years. How previous a discourse is or should be will also be judged relative to organizational objectives and time scales. For example, many organizational procedures prescribe a lengthy sequence of actions. Researchers have a number of options for studying the “when” dimension of context. (a) Research agenda for discourse strategies as plot familiarity. Researchers could seek to establish a metaphorical alignment between the current discourse (e.g., lawyers in court relating their client’s story) and a familiar argument, story, or myth (e.g., the lawyer’s client as victim). Such stereotyped narratives ensure that stories demonstrate fidelity to socially probable events (Fisher, 1987), draw support from an established archetype (Perelman & Olbrechts-Tyteca, 1969), or fit into social dramas (Turner, 1974). Furthermore, the sociology of interaction (Goffman, 1961, 1974) suggests that microrituals form sequences that fit into social dramas (MacFarland, 2004). (b) Research agenda for discourse strategies as sequential movement forward. Researchers could seek transitions from one stage of an interaction to the next as in, for example, adjacency pairs (Schegloff & Sacks, 1974) and conversational schemes (Ford & Ford, 1995). Although such sequential movement is observable in conversation, it is also observable in fashion waves, social movements, and debates that span potentially long durations. (c) Research agenda for discourse strategies as moves toward conflict resolution. Reduction of conflict provides a socially legitimated sense of direction that may be achieved by several possible discourse strategies. Researchers could seek evidence of increasing similarity of beliefs, goals, or methods between disputants (Perelman & Olbrechts-Tyteca, 1969) or evidence of foregrounding what is most consensual (Ice, 1991). An example of an approach consistent with my approach is the analysis of narratives in terms of familiar plots. Analysis involves looking for repeated patterns such as similarities between stories and myths that emphasize organizational omnipotence and managers’ capacity to control (Brown, 2004).



Other possible approaches include relating several texts together as “contemporary” or “linked in time” such as pertaining to the same story, conversational scheme, policy cycle, or issue.

Research Agenda for Discourse Strategies that Address the “Who” of Discourse Researchers have a number of options for investigating the “who” context of discourse. (a) R esearch agenda for discourse strategies as challenges. Researchers need ways of characterizing different contributors (“who”) in terms of their points of view rather than their personal attributes. They could seek contradictory narratives and accounts, or alternative versions of a story, or differences between an official and an unofficial story (Neilsen & Rao, 1987, p. 527), or different readings of the same text (Boje, 1995, p. 1008). An indicator of constructive criticism would be if any criticisms were retained and added into subsequent texts. An example, consistent with this approach, of researching the “who” of discourse is how workers and managers appropriate discursive frames from one another. Employees’ accounts of their activities usually align with managerial frames, but there are occasions where employees’ accounts contest managerial frames (Chreim, 2006).

Research Agenda for Discourse Strategies that Address the “Where” of Discourse Options for researchers to operationalize the “where” aspect of context include the following. (a) R esearch agenda for discourse strategies as crossing boundaries. Researchers could identify how actors negotiate moves such as translation, homogenization, comparison, accusation, and satirizing. Translation eases the passage from one part of the organization to another, for example, from the technical to the customer-oriented part, by providing nontechnical product descriptions. Homogenization hides difference, for example, by deliberately and inaccurately giving foreign locations characteristics of one’s own culture. Comparison points out where the main adaptive actions are required, as when warning Westerners of the Eastern reluctance to say no. Accusations cross boundaries in an aggressive way. Less extreme is crossing of the symbolic boundaries that generate


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interfunctional rivalry and distrust, as when fast-paced salespersons accuse slow-paced research and development people that they “do not live in the real world.” There is also satirizing of the boundary. For example, “The dress code changes and we were told: ‘you have to wear a shirt and tie.’ So we got word around ‘Tomorrow, wear shirts and ties that make us look as unprofessional as possible’” (quoted in P. Taylor & Bain, 2003, p. 1502). Symbolic boundaries are often indicated by self-justification (Sillince, 2000). Defensiveness at a boundary may also give rise to smoke screens as a reaction to a powerful speaker’s influence attempt (Drake & Moberg, 1986, p. 574). (b) Research agenda for discourse strategies as constructing boundaries. Researchers could seek examples of discursive behavior intended to maintain group identity, such as reference to who we are as a group or self-reference to “we” and “us.” Such behavior is guided by rules inscribed as texts such as “team codes of conduct” that have symbolic properties (Barker, 1999, p. 110). Examples, consistent with this approach, of researching the “where” of discourse include identifying the existence of distinct discourses on either side of physical boundaries (e.g., split sites, separate dining areas for managers and employees) or symbolic boundaries (e.g., between success and failure of projects, between smart and casual dress), or by reference to discourse aimed at crossing or constructing boundaries. A fertile source is anthropology, where many qualitative analyses of the existence and significance of boundaries have originated (e.g., Douglas, 1973). Physical boundaries might be measured as membership of a department (McPhee & Zaug, 2000). Symbolic boundaries might be measured by “ownership” of a dispersed activity (J. R. Taylor & Van Every, 2000, p. 287) or by the limits of acceptable behavior (Ray, 1986).

Conclusion I argue by means of invoking four contextual dimensions – when, where, why, and who – that it is possible to demonstrate how discourse and discourse strategies constitute organization. As an illustrative device, I have first shown how these four contextual dimensions provide distinct ways of seeing events about Enron and shown that to fully understand some of the issues involved a contextual framework is needed. The context framework suggested in this article contains two dimensions. These dimensions are tight-loose coupling of discourse to meaning and local-global discourse. This article defines and illustrates these two dimensions more clearly and fully than was hitherto the case. These contextual dimensions provide a structure that influences discourse. But also, the agent is capable of changing this structure by means of



reframing, appropriating, recursion, and insertion of one discourse intertextually into another discourse. The article considers how distinct discourses engage intertextually with each other and thus achieve cross-contextual organizing. The article therefore describes a way of linking partial, contextspecific discourses into a general framework. This article makes several contributions. First, it enables us to link distinct discourses together by means of a context framework. Second, it shows how context may constitute a constraining structure for discourse and yet how it also provides space for agency because context can also be modified by one discourse’s recursively acting on, or inserting, reframing or appropriating itself into another discourse. In this way the article builds a contextually sophisticated structurational model of discourse. Third, it enables us to understand how discontinuities in context generate incoherencies that delegitimate institutions. Fourth, it shows the advantage of an organization’s enabling members to recontextualize their discourse. Last, it sets out a research agenda for investigating the discourse strategies that actors use to construct context.

Author’s Note: The author would like to thank Ianna Contardo, Ben Golant, Virpi Hamalainen, Saku Mantere, Stewart Clegg, and Rosalind Wilson, colleagues at Aston Business School and at Bordeaux School of Management; James Barker, MCQ editor; and three anonymous MCQ reviewers.

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Krackhardt, D. (1990). Assessing the political landscape: Structure, cognition, and power in organizations. Administrative Science Quarterly, 35, 340–360. Kuhn, T., & Ashcraft, K. L. (2003). Corporate scandal and the theory of the firm: Formulating the contributions of organizational communication studies. Management Communication Quarterly, 17(1), 20–57. Lawrence, T. B., Winn, M. I., & Jennings, P. D. (2001). The temporal dynamics of institutionalization. Academy of Management Review, 26(4), 624–644. Leidner, R. (1993). Fast food, fast talk. Berkeley: University of California Press. Linstead, S. (2001). Rhetoric and organizational control: A framework for analysis. In R. Westwood & S. Linstead (Eds.), The language of organization (pp. 217–240). London: Sage. MacFarland, D. A. (2004). Resistance as social drama: A study of change-oriented encounters. American Journal of Sociology, 109(6), 1249–1319. March, J. G., & Simon, H. A. (1958). Organizations. New York: Wiley. McPhee, R. D. (2004). Text, agency, and organization in the light of structuration theory. Organization, 11(3), 355–371. McPhee, R. D., Corman, S. R., & Dooley, K. (2002). Organizational knowledge expression and management: Centering resonance analysis of organizational discourse. Management Communication Quarterly, 16(2), 274–281. McPhee, R. D., & Zaug, P. (2000, February). The communicative constitution of organizations: A framework for explanation. Paper presented at the Western States Communication Association convention, Sacramento, CA. McPhee, R. D., & Zaug, P. (2001). Organizational theory, organizational communication, organizational knowledge, and problematic integration. Working paper, Arizona State University, Hugh Downs School of Human Communication. Mills, C. W. (1940). Situated actions and vocabularies of motives. American Sociological Review, 5, 904–913. Neilsen, E. H., & Rao, M. V. H. (1987). The strategy-legitimacy nexus: A thick description. Academy of Management Review, 12(3), 523–533. Olsen, J. P. (1976). Choice in an organized anarchy. In J. March & J. P. Olsen (Eds.), Ambiguity and choice in organizations (pp. 82–139). Bergen, Norway: Universitetsforlaget. Perelman, C., & Olbrechts-Tyteca, M. L. (1969). The new rhetoric: A treatise on argumentation. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame. Pettigrew, A., Ferlie, E., & McKee, L. (1992). Shaping strategic change: Making change in large organizations. The case of the National Health Service. London: Sage. Phillips, N., Lawrence, T. B., & Hardy, C. (2004). Discourse and institutions. Academy of Management Review, 29(4), 635–652. Potter, J., & Wetherell, M. (1987). Discourse and social psychology: Beyond attitudes and behaviour. Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Ray, C. A. (1986). Corporate culture: The last frontier of control. Journal of Management Studies, 23, 287–297. Reed, M. (1998). Organizational analysis as discourse analysis: A critique. In D. Grant, T. Keenoy, & C. Oswick (Eds.), Discourse + organization (pp. 214–222). London: Sage. Robichaud, D., Giroux, H., & Taylor, J. R. (2004). The metaconversation: The recursive property of language as a key to organizing. Academy of Management Review, 29(4), 617–635. Schegloff, E., & Sacks, H. (1974). Opening up closings. In R. Turner (Ed.), Ethnomethodology (pp. 233–264). Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin. Schneider, S. C., & Dunbar, R. L. M. (1992). A psychoanalytic reading of hostile takeover events. Academy of Management Review, 17(3), 537–567.



Scott, C. R., Corman, S. R., & Cheney, G. (1998). Development of a structurational model of identification in the organization. Communication Theory, 8(3), 298–336. Sewell, G. H., Jr. (1992). The theory of structure: Duality, agency, and transformation. American Journal of Sociology, 98(1), 1–29. Sillince, J. A. A. (1999a). The organizational setting, use, and institutionalization of argumentation repertoires. Journal of Management Studies, 36(6), 795–831. Sillince, J. A. A. (1999b). The role of political language forms and language coherence in the organizational change process. Organization Studies, 20(3), 485–518. Sillince, J. A. A. (2000). Rhetorical power, accountability, and conflict in committees: An argumentation approach. Journal of Management Studies, 37(8), 1101–1124. Sillince, J. A. A. (2002). A model of the strength and appropriateness of argumentation and rhetoric in organizational contexts. Journal of Management Studies, 39(5), 585–618. Sillince, J. A. A. (2005). A contingency theory of rhetorical congruence. Academy of Management Review, 30(3), 608–621. Taylor, J. R. (1993). Rethinking the theory of organization communication: How to read an organization. Norwood, NJ: Ablex. Taylor, J. R., Cooren, F., Giroux, N., & Robichaud, D. (1996). The communicational basis of organization: Between the conversation and the text. Communication Theory, 6, 1–39. Taylor, J. R., & Van Every, E. J. (2000). The emergent organization: Communication as its site and surface. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Taylor, P., & Bain, P. (2003). Subterranean worksick blues: Humour as subversion in two call centres. Organization Studies, 24(9), 1487–1511. Terry, L. (1987, Spring). The conference as an administrative strategy for building organizational commitment: The CWA experience. Labour Studies Journal, 26, 48–61. Torry, W. I. (2001). Social change, crime, and culture: The defense of provocation. Crime, Law, and Social Change, 36(3), 309–335. Turner, V. (1974). Dramas, fields, and metaphors. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Vaara, E. (2002). On the discursive construction of success/failure in narratives of post merger integration. Organization Studies, 23(2), 211–249. Weick, K. E. (1993). The collapse of sensemaking in organizations: The Mann Gulch Disaster. Administrative Science Quarterly, 38, 628–652. Weick, K. E. (1995). Sensemaking in organizations. London: Sage.



36 The Application of Rhetorical Theory in Managerial Research: A Literature Review E. Johanna Hartelius and Larry D. Browning

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ecent work by management and organizational researchers draws heavily on rhetorical scholarship. It imports well-established ideas such as persuasion, power, ideology, argument, and manipulation into the study of organizations. Although these uses of the rhetorical discipline are heuristically promising, they present several complications. Translating theory and methodology from one scholarly enterprise to another creates challenges; it is no simple matter transferring theories from one discipline to another – specifically, the examination of speaking and writing to the study of how managers organize and lead. One important problem is that managerial journals frequently neglect to theorize their use of rhetorical concepts. The vocabulary is divorced from its original and requisite context. This separa tion leads to reliance on a theoretical framework that does not fulfill its interpretive potential. The initiative of interdisciplinarity is good; fine-tuning its practice would be even better. Rhetorical scholarship’s gravitational pull on management comes from language.1 Specifically, rhetorical studies and management are concerned with power as it relates to language. There is an important tension within management’s approaches to language and control. Many management scholars who use rhetorical terminology seem to be torn between different understandings of the rhetoric. On one hand, some scholars draw on rhetoric’s centrality in organizational language writ large and treat it as a Source: Management Communication Quarterly, 22(1) (2008): 13–38.


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source of influence. On the other, many management scholars relegate it to a marginal position in human interactions and theorize it as being superficial or supplementary to substance (Goldberg & Markóczy, 2000; Hunt, 1994). For example, Kamoche (1995) distinguishes between rhetoric and plain speaking and thus creates a rift between language that is straightforward and perfunctory – with pure content being transferred from sender to receiver in line with the traditional conduit model of communication – and language that is used to control and possibly deceive. This recurring distinction classifies rhetoric as being separable from content, thus rendering it superfluous and even “impoverished” (Hunt, 1994, p. 222). Our purpose in this article is to analyze and critique management’s use of rhetoric.2 As a point of departure for this literature review, we use the mere rhetoric position. Specifically, we begin by explaining the attitude that rhetoric is primarily manipulation and control. We respond to this view by contrasting it with communication studies. We spend most of the article surveying research in management that features alternative approaches to rhetoric – that is, those that use it heuristically to analyze organizations. To focus the scope of our inquiry, we do not include communication researchers or communication journals that use rhetoric to examine organizational communication. Such authors and journals are typically rooted in the history of rhetorical theory (Meisenbach & McMillan, 2006). Simply put, our main research question is, when management scholars observe the potential of rhetoric, rather than discard it as deception, how do they conceptualize and operationalize it? And what accounts for recent trends in these literatures that use a rhetorical approach to organizational communication? In our responses to these questions, we contend that a literature review is well warranted to trace emergent trends and to show how rhetoric is interpreted in managerial journals. To pursue these questions, we organize the article along five themes extracted from the relevant literature in management and administrative policy journals. Following this logic, we invoke the assumptions of grounded theory and apply them to the management literature on rhetoric. Grounded theory analysis moves sequentially toward increasingly abstract representations of texts. Its aim is integration, which involves searching for the underlying uniformities in a set of themes produced by the analysis and formulating an idea with a smaller set of high-level concepts. This step “elaborates upon the category system by abstracting from it” (Glaser & Strauss, 1967, p. 110). It identifies core categories that account for most of the variation while maximizing the parsimony and scope of the theory (Strauss & Corbin, 1990). Each theme comprises a recurring way in which rhetoric is approached, theorized, and/ or operationalized. Note that the themes are descriptive rather than prescriptive: They identify and explicate an existing trend.3 Integrated into each theme are references to relevant theorists and ideas in rhetorical studies. These references establish a contextual framework for


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those ideas that have most attracted management researchers. Their occa sionally pedagogical tone comes from our conviction that management and communication scholars can be mutually productive allies, provided they are receptive to each other’s theoretical foundations. The interdisciplinary form of our coauthorship facilitates a productive dialectical analysis: By drawing on our respective areas of expertise, we review the most common practices in organizational and management research and relate them to classical and contemporary rhetorical scholarship. The article turns now to the most important tie between rhetoric and organizations – the preoccupation with the language of control.

Rhetoric as Control and Manipulation Management and administration scholars frequently express a concern that supervisors use rhetoric to control employees (Barley & Kunda, 1992; David & Strang 2006; Oakes, Townley, & Cooper, 1998). Rhetoric is treated as a means of manipulation. This concern is not always explicitly stated; in studies that focus on managers’ strategic language, rhetoric is simply conceptualized as a powerful tool. It is up to the reader to infer the tool’s primary uses. Furthermore, rhetoric is integral to self-control and self-realization. For example, Fine’s analysis (1996) of occupational rhetoric among chefs identifies a “large rhetorical ‘toolkit’” with which the participants construct their identities. A common way of establishing those identities is by “continually justifying and legitimating their work through analogies” (p. 95). As such, rhetoric is used to make symbolic and indirect connections through powerful language. Fine’s tool metaphor suggests deliberate practice; the indictment of rhetoric’s being manipulative is clear. Another example is Markel’s investigation (2005) of rhetoric as a kind of misdirection in privacy–policy statements. His approach to the concept of rhetoric, more so than his explicit definition of the term, implies a view of rhetoric closely akin to deception. This indictment of rhetoric as manipulation has a long history in writings on the topic. Ever since Plato (1987) and other classical philosophers, rhetoric has been haunted by a disciplinary anxiety.4 Plato, who was one of the first philosophers to use the concept, frequently pitted it against his preferred philosophical practice, dialectic, which is a form of communication directed toward knowledge and insight. He insisted that only dialectic could arrive at absolute truth. In contrast, rhetoric could produce only conviction without knowledge. The Gorgias, one of Plato’s more scathing critiques of rhetoric, depicts Socrates and the Sophist Gorgias arguing over rhetoric’s definition and scope. Plato uses Socrates as his mouthpiece to claim analogically that rhetoric is to justice as cosmetics is to gymnastics or pastry baking is to medicine. Sham arts such as rhetoric and baking, he states, create only the appearance of beauty and knowledge. This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.

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They are pleasurable simulations, mimicking on the surface what they lack in substance (Hamilton, 1998; Molina & Spicer, 2004). Plato’s argument (1987) soon moves into a discussion of false manipula tion. His accusation, which has resonated in rhetorical studies, is that the artful use of language poses the threat of deception. It can manipulate an audience (or members of an organization). To Plato, an orator who can pro duce conviction and pleasure without substantial knowledge and experience is dangerous. Says Socrates, “When an orator is more persuasive than a doctor, a non-knower will be more persuasive than a knower among non-knowers” (quoted in Plato, 1987, p. 18). The ancient charge against rhetoric is that its powerful potential conceals its own shortcoming. Some users of language are knowledgeable and wise; some are not. Some users of language are morally sound; some are not. The thrust of Platonic skepticism is that persuasion, by definition, renders onto its user immense power and control. Management scholars who characterize rhetoric as being supplemental to theory building and research preserve the Platonic assumption that it is either deceptive or superfluous. Not only do they imply that unambiguous communication exists, but they suggest that it is possible to achieve it by stripping away the rhetoric. This argument commonly arises in discussions of manager–employee communication; that is, there is an underlying fantasy of creating pure dialogue, a moment in which the risk of miscommunication is eliminated (Goldberg & Markóczy, 2000). At other times, scholars are concerned with critiquing one another. They accuse each other of using rhetoric in research for which something else (data? values?) would be more legitimate. For example, Goldberg and Markóczy (2000), who apply complexity theory to management, write, Our critique of complexity/chaos has been concerned with the rhetoric and with incorrect claims about what they entail. Once the rhetoric has been removed and the real tools are seen for what they are, we see true value in applying them to the study of management. (pp. 93–94)

There are a few exceptions to the manipulation view of rhetoric in man agement research. For instance, Feldman and Sköldberg (2002) employ the term’s theoretical, rather than pejorative, meaning. They use rhetorical theory to demonstrate how special features of communicative practice, such as the enthymeme, function in a narrative sequence. Lawrence and Suddaby (2006) treat rhetoric as the persuasive dimension of language in discourse analysis.5 Sillince (1999) offers a position close to this article’s thesis. He argues that rhetoric has frequently been used in managerial research to rep resent something unreal or manipulative and that it deserves to be used in the classical sense, as a stylistic resource. According to Sillince, human communication cannot avoid being rhetorical. One way to approach management’s seemingly conflicted use of rhetoric is to note a terminological confusion. Terms such as ideology, discourse, and This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.


rhetoric appear interchangeable at times and incommensurate at others. Barley and Kunda (1992) set the tone in the most widely recognized rhetorical analysis of management: Although managerial theories can be assessed as a set of propositions, they may also be treated as rhetorics or ideologies. By ideology we mean a stream of discourse that promulgates, however unwittingly, a set of assumptions about the nature of the objects with which it deals. In this sense, all theories have an ideological component, since all theories must adopt some ontological stance in order to proceed with their work. The objects of rhetorical construction in managerial theories have typically been corporations, employees, managers, and the means by which the later can direct the other two. (p. 363)

In other words, rhetoric is conceptualized as the spoken dimension of management’s ideological practices. Rhetorical studies in management typically follow Barley and Kunda’s lead (1992). The three terms are defined in certain ways: Discourse focuses on the words spoken or written, with special attention to the content of the communication. Rhetoric is a kind of discourse, the speaking arm of ideology (Lawrence & Suddaby, 2006). The data from managerial research on rhetoric are frequently taken from interview transcripts of leaders’ espoused values (Cliff, Langton, & Aldrich, 2005), from speeches (Emrich, Brower, Feldman & Garland, 2001), and from documents such as training manuals and value statements (Grint & Case, 1998). Rhetoric is seen as the attempt to purposefully communicate the values of the organization and the preferences of leaders. For example, Zbaracki (1998) defines rhetoric as “a stream of discourse used to construct, spread, or sustain a set of assumptions” (p. 609). Ideology is seen as the larger collection of beliefs, offered as values, paradigms, codes, and other sets of ideas and rule structures that make up the guide for how to act (Amernic & Craig, 2004; Heracleous & Barrett, 2001; Holt, 2006). As Clifford (1988) defines the term, discourse is the overall communication scheme. There is some consistency among these terms: Ideology represents values; discourse serves as the overarching term for communication; and rhetoric is the tool for persuading others to take up ideas and practices. Rhetoric is manipulative and nonsubstantive. In rhetorical scholarship, there are a variety of definitions to choose from regarding such complex terms as rhetoric, discourse, and ideology. Some definitions concur more or less with the discussion cited above. For the purposes of this article, we align ourselves with the following: A discourse is the set of rules, understandings, and practices for how language constitutes a human activity (Brummett, 2000). For example, running a fine-dining restaurant is highly complex human activity in which language plays an important role. There are certain rules for how the head chef interacts and communicates with fellow employees and the patrons; all the participants – the hosts,


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waitstaff, and delivery personnel – have parts to play in the restaurant organization. Participating in those rules and practices is what constitutes the restaurant as discourse. Similarly, an ideology comprises the conditions for a society’s material and social reproduction (Althusser, 1960/1984). It emanates from established institutions such as churches, schools, media, and popular culture. Rhetoric itself has a multitude of definitions, from the pre-Socratics into modern times. Even though some of the Platonic legacy still lingers, a variety of other approaches have taken hold. Modern theorists do not dismiss rhetoric as a sham art, as Plato did. For the most part, they do not subscribe to the mere rhetoric view. Contemporary theorists emphasize rhetoric’s good and bad qualities, its potential to be used for productive and destructive ends. Moreover, instead of approaching rhetoric as a deceptive tactic that only elites use, contemporary rhetoricians expand the notion. Rhetoric is a symbolic inducement that everyone participates in – managers and employees alike (Ehninger, 1968). Everyone uses language persuasively as a means of “inducing cooperation in beings that by nature respond to symbols” (Burke, 1969, p. 43). In other words, it is not just that rhetoric can be good or bad; it is that rhetoric permeates human interaction as long as language is used deliberately. Thus defined, rhetoric is persuasion that is in some way available to every symbolic being – every human being. As such, it is a practical art and the faculty of theorizing.

Theme 1: Rhetoric Is Theoretical and Practical This first theme draws attention to management scholars’ stated motiva tion for using the framework of rhetorical studies. It indicates what makes rhetoric a versatile scholarly method. The payoff is that rhetoric is at once a lens for interpreting the world and a concrete strategy for intervening in it. Rhetoric, in short, has hermeneutic and pragmatic potential (Heracleous & Barrett, 2001). Those management scholars who espouse a postmodern worldview subscribe to the constructivist view of rhetoric, acknowledging the extent to which language creates reality (Phillips & Brown, 1993; Sköldberg, 1994). Heracleous and Barrett (2001) summarize this shift from the modernist scientific paradigm: The linguistic turn in the social sciences prompted calls for more complex understandings of organizations that would emphasize language not only as an enabling information exchange but also as constructing social and organizational reality. (p. 755)

Holt (2006) likewise emphasizes that rhetoric is particularly useful for capturing the “mystery, fluidity, habit, tradition, and other atmospheric annoyances of everyday life” (p. 1662). An examination of rhetoric’s role in



communicating change illustrates such reality construction but sometimes places rhetoric as the opposite of reality. In those cases, rhetoric is described as “expansive” and “unmet by the reality” of what actually happens (Zbaracki, 1998, p. 603). In a likewise meta-analytical publication, Gergen and Thatchenkery (2004) survey the major tenets of a modernist organizational science and so posit alternatives. They preview organizational science after the postmod ern turn, specifically considering how it might become productive rather than exclusively critical. The postmodern context, they claim, expands the concept of research because it allows for critical self-reflection. Organizational scientists cannot extricate themselves from moral and political debate because they themselves are implicated. Gergen and Thatchenkery argue that such scientists ought to “participate actively within a set of subcultural relationships” (p. 236). According to these scholars, scientists compose a subculture of their own. To produce scientific data is to participate in a type of discourse. For these and likeminded scholars, language is inseparable from inquiry and knowledge; as such, rhetoric as a discipline is a theoretical framework for such inquiry.6 There is also a practical side to rhetoric that management science imports – particularly, its intervention in human affairs that cause or facilitate change. The analysis of reengineering by Grint and Case (1998) characterizes rhetoric as the language used to promote managerial change. For example, when a manager persuasively leads her or his team through a challenging task, her or his rhetorical strategies are a major aspect of the activity. The manager uses symbols to generate material change. Thus, the symbols that managers and employees use in their institutional language games (Rindova, Becerra, & Contardo, 2004; Sköldberg, 1994) are integral to the life of an organization. Managerial rhetorical analyses typically feature one person or a group of persons working as an organizational agent; as such, they are more concrete than analyses conducted in rhetorical studies. For example, Cliff et al. (2005) examined the espoused values versus the real values of male and female leaders and found no significant gender differences. In their study, the notion of rhetoric has a methodological focus, oscillating between theory and practice. The term symbol is a central tenet of traditional rhetorical studies; it straddles the line between the practical and the theoretical. Its position in rhetorical theory acknowledges the realization that there are things influ encing human beings beyond traditional rhetorical phenomena such as arguments and tropes. In rhetorical studies, the symbol can arise from a variety of things: A word is a symbol, as is a speech, a film, a building, or any culturally significant artifact. To unpack this argument, consider the example of a banking operation that has been established by the government to provide financing to farmers. To attract investors, the bank might emphasize its business identity and refer to the local community as a resource of social capital.


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Yet when the bank needs to advertise, it might refer to the business as a resource for farmers who can be assured of the operation’s permanence and stability (Sillince & Mueller, 2007). Furthermore, a word such as investment is symbolic for business organizations worldwide. It stands for and constitutes an identity, a way of life, a relationship between those who provide resources and those who use them. An overview of the symbol’s place in rhetorical theory notes two trends: Either the concept is attributed to a theorist – most commonly, Kenneth Burke – or it is analyzed in terms of its cultural effects (Sköldberg, 1994). In the latter case, the symbol is associated with comparable concepts, such as archetype and icon. For example, scholars of visual rhetoric may argue that the Macintosh apple symbolizes a new generation of high-tech industry and IT use. Another set of rhetoricians identify the power of rhetorical symbols in the political rhetoric of social movements (Goodnow, 2006; Kaufer & Carley, 1993; Zompetti, 2006). A review of conceptualizations of the symbol suggests that it plays a central but contested role in rhetorical studies of organizations. In A Rhetoric of Motives, Burke (1969) defines rhetoric as “the use of language as a symbolic means of inducing cooperation in beings that by nature respond to symbols” (p. 43). In Counter-Statement (1968), he characterizes the symbol as “the verbal parallel to a pattern of experience” (p. 152). To bring these pieces of Burkean language philosophy together, we ought first inquire about a pattern of experience that the speaker and audience share. If one seeks to induce cooperation among human beings, how might one use symbols to attain the greatest amount of success? The appeal of the symbol, Burke explains, is that it can bring order and clarity to a situation by revealing the social experiences that humans share. This social space is the scene of persuasion. More important, we all select certain symbols over others. As Burke notes, “a pattern of experience is an interpretation of life. Life being open to many interpretations, the reader is open to many interpretations” (p. 176). The artist’s or rhetor’s challenge lies in persuading the audience to accept his or her interpretation, as defined by Burke’s strategic use of symbols.7 The symbol is important to managerial studies because it is efficient. It captures and communicates a culture or an idea to an audience with a few words that have significant consequences. The first theme that we have identified in management’s use of rhetori cal studies is that of a dialectic – the theoretical and the practical. In short, the idea that it is a theoretical ability and a practical mode of action makes rhetoric quite useful. Management research is well served by using a rhetorical framework because of this versatility. On one hand, rhetoric affords a meta-analytical opportunity to reflect on organizational scholarship and the language that sustains it. On the other, rhetoric as an interpretive lens allows management scholars to study how organizational members use language – particularly, powerful symbols – in concrete ways. Organizational



rhetoric as a concept is about theory building and interpersonal activity in the workplace. Both dimensions, the theoretical and the practical, are integral to institutional order.

Theme 2: Rhetoric Creates, Sustains, and Challenges Organizational Orders To this point, our discussion of rhetoric’s social constructivist function suggests that language creates reality. In management literature, rhetoric is regularly approached as a form of organizational culture (Barley, 1983), order (Gal, 1989), and social construction (Heracleous & Barrett, 2001). It is an organization’s way of being; without language, no organization can succeed or even operate. Wittgenstein’s theory of the language game is a popular template for analyzing organizational practices. According to language game theory, Words derive their meaning not from the actions or objects that they denote, but from the historical context of discourse, or language game, in which they are used. . . . The notion of a language game draws attention to the importance of specialized forms of discourse engaged in by members of a particular community. (Astley & Zammuto, 1992, p. 444)

Astley and Zammuto argue that the primary objective of the managerial language game is to facilitate practical action. They characterize leadership as a language game aimed largely at preserving organizational coherence. Gardner and Avolio (1998) similarly claim that charisma is a language game in which leaders use rhetorical tropes such as “rhythm, repetition, balance, and alliteration” (p. 42) to influence their followers. These tropes become part of the organization’s language and culture. In rhetorical studies, the relationship between language and reality or that between language and order has been long contested. At stake is the extent to which order is preestablished, or the result of larger-than-human forces. For instance, those of a religious faith may believe that God prefers a certain order in the universe and that human beings are inevitably subject to his plan. Conversely, Marxists may insist that material means of produc tion generate a social order that organizes society and that workers and cit izens are constrained by this order. According to Plato, order belongs to the world of ideal forms beyond human creation; it is inseparable from other superior things, such as truth and knowledge. Platonic order is both a means and an end; it is the dialectician’s method of accessing wisdom and the dis covery that the dialectician makes in that perfect realm. Both in the case of means and ends, order is static in its disciplinary principles and absoluteness. Finally, order is that which the dialectician may be able to implement in this imperfect world of lesser beings. This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.

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In contrast, the Sophists were much more aligned with the contemporary view of social order. Their philosophy posited rhetoric as the interactive way in which humans create their order. The Sophists argued that the dynamic negotiation of socially constructed truths governs civic community. Language is a means of manipulating the polis; it is the creative process by which we enable shared grounds for action. Order is the fusion of discursive strategies – poetry, logic, and narrative – used deliberatively by the skilled persuader. Power is negotiated in the public spaces. According to the Sophists, this order is the one with which we ought to concern ourselves. This second theme in management research reflects the realization that an organization’s discourse provides its institutional logic. Put differently, management scholars emphasize the role of language in organizational cul ture. Rhetoric is what sustains the rituals that characterize organizations and distinguish their identities. Language draws on and perpetuates a view of reality, even when such reality includes violence (Grint & Case, 1998) and when language and reality diverge (Zbaracki, 1998). In short, rhetoric entails the values and sense of self that permeate an organization, provide praxis, and give purpose (Deforest Molina & Spicer, 2004). One way to study the rhetoric of institutional logic is to examine its effects. By focusing on indirect communication, for example, some manage ment scholars have discovered the strategy of using obliqueness to achieve their goals. Indirect communication is a way of relying on the unspoken as much as the spoken. It is the considerable amount of communication void of visual or auditory cue that takes place in an organizational context. Along these lines, Sillince (1999) claims that implicit arguments are often the most persuasive. Within any organization, familiarity with the established culture allows participants to communicate effectively, even when some messages remain unstated. It makes them proficient members of a unique culture. The rhetorical term for this type of indirect communication is enthymeme. In classical rhetorical theory, an enthymeme is a truncated syllogism (a set of premises and a conclusion, used in formal logic); that is, it is a syllogism with a missing premise. The audience participates by supplying the missing premise via its cultural identification with the rhetor (McAdon, 2003; Walton, 2001; Walton & Macagno, 2006). For example, imagine a conversation between two managers. One says, “I just got a recent Harvard graduate on my team. So I guess we know who the team of the month is going to be!” The other manager supplies the missing premise on the basis of a shared experience of supervising teams and having familiarity with college reputations: Harvard graduates equal success. Note, however, that the missing premise is not always positive. Because missing premises remain unstated, biases and negative stereotypes go unquestioned in an enthymematic form. For instance, consider a manager who says, “I have an immigrant in my unit this year, so I guess she’ll be having language problems.” This premise can clearly be misconceived and objectionable. The point is that a common



experience facilitates mutual understanding between communicants; it is what allows communication to take place even when speakers do not make all premises of a statement explicit. Literally, the word enthymeme means “something in the mind” (Aristotle, 1991, p. 33).8 When the audience and the rhetor share a cultural identity, they can communicate without making every assumption explicit. For example, Amernic and Craig (2004) argue that September 11 has become an ideograph in American culture. Specifically, they demonstrate how this ideograph was used enthymematically by Southwest Airlines to serve an organizational ideology – in this case, directing a message to the airline’s shareholders. Through enthymemes, the organization persuades the audience by drawing on its cultural beliefs and attitudes. It invites the audience to complete the argument based on identification with the rhetor’s background. In its simplest form, the enthymeme is an inside joke between rhetor and audience. In its most powerful conceptualization, it is the basis for persuasion. This form of persuasion is compatible with Green’s treatment (2004) of the manager as rhetor who uses the organization’s taken-for-granteds to justify new practices. Enthymemes are a powerful tool of persuasion because they allow audience members to draw on their preexisting beliefs – those that are integral to the institutional order. Many management scholars who posit rhetoric as an integral force to institutional order note that changing this order requires a persuasive effort (Finstad, 1998; Heracleous & Barrett, 2001; Zbaracki, 1998). Suddaby and Greenwood (2005) write, Profound institutional change, such as that necessary to create a new form of organizing, is accompanied by a shift in the dominant institutional logic. Shifts in logic, however, are highly contested, and because logics are abstractions, such contestations are often a function of rhetoric in which the legitimacy of competing logics is openly debated. (p. 41)

The authors surveyed theories of institutional change focusing on “the argu ments and language used to connect competing conceptions of the new organizational form to broader templates about the nature of professions and their role in society” (p. 36). In connecting organizational change with theories of social change, management scholars attribute remarkable influence to rhetorical practice (Rude, 2004; Sköldberg, 1994). The enthymeme informs managerial practice because it is one type of organizational partici pation that involves the speaker and the audience (Weick & Browning, 1986). When the speaker leaves space for the audience to fill in missing information, she or he draws the audience into the argument and creates ownership for the communication. This second theme in management research’s use of rhetoric focuses on institutional order. It reflects the idea that every organization houses its own culture; that is, every organizational culture has a sense of order and logic,


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and language is what sustains and negotiates that order. When members perpetuate institutional logic and when they challenge it, rhetorical strategies are inevitably present. To connect this theme in the management literature with the rhetorical tradition, we use the notion of an enthymeme, which denotes a rhetorical interaction between rhetors and audiences – managers and employees – that draws on organizational order. In such interactions, rhetoric becomes constructive of an identity that is grounded in organiza tional membership.

Theme 3: Rhetoric Is Constructive and Constitutive of Identity As the two aforementioned themes suggest, rhetoric is fundamental to the construction of identity (Heracleous & Barrett, 2001). A recurring insight in management scholarship is that this rhetorical construction happens individ ually and collectively. Moreover, it “has an inherently contextual and prag matic orientation” (p. 760). Just as individuals garner a sense of self through language and social interaction, organizations acquire an identity via discur sive practices. By participating in such practices, participants engage in sense-making “identity work” (Musson & Duberly, 2007, p. 147). As Brown (2006) explains, organizational collective identities are “multi-voiced, quasifictional, plurivocal and reflexive constructions that unfold over time and are embedded in broader discursive (cultural) practices” (p. 732). According to Brown, this gradual unfolding primarily takes place in narrative. Human beings belong to a variety of collectives, most of which are held together by shared experiences mediated in language. Some of those identities operate and contend within the context of professional and organizational member ships (Sillince & Jarzabkowski, 2004). At times, professional and personal identities interact: Actors are simultaneously bosses and coworkers, sisters and brothers, sons and daughters, friends and teachers. Burke (1969) notes that identity formation is about individuality and sameness: “In being identified with B, A is ‘substantially one’ with an indi vidual other than one’s self” (p. 21). Burke further states that a person “remains unique, an individual locus of motives,” and for that reason a person “is both joined and separate, at once a distinct substance and consubstantial with another” (p. 21). Consider the kinds of internal tension that can arise within a workplace team. Every member ideally experiences a sense of shared identity, or sameness, with the other team members. All members want the team to be successful and rewarded. From management’s perspec tive, it is beneficial to emphasize this collective identity. When the team’s cooperative identity is more salient than competing identities, such as the socioemotional bonds that facilitate community among members, the organization earns a competitive advantage. At the This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.


same time, individual motives remain as long as each employee protects his or her interests. After all, salary and benefits are individual rewards that the employee evaluates in light of other collectives, such as family. Every membership is a function of rhetorical practices that delineate social connections and divisions. Ashforth and Humphrey (1997) address this significant concern in orga nizational literature. They claim that organizations are interpretive struc tures in which identity is socially constructed and symbolically mediated. Having reviewed the basic tenets of categorization theory, semiotics, and labeling theory, Ashforth and Humphrey present a labeling framework for analyzing various interactions at the individual, group, and organizational levels. A label, they explain, is a “signifier of a given object, and typically activates a set of cognitions (and related affect) about the object” (p. 43). It is a way of facilitating individuals’ interpretation and communication of different experiences. According to Ashforth and Humphrey’s model, the labeling framework can be applied to the organizational level of analysis because organizations per se can be viewed as social categories. . . . Labels such as “innovative manufacturer,” “fiscally responsible,” “fair employer,” and “good corporate citizen” succinctly embody what the organization means – or is hoped or intended to mean – to individuals and groups. (p. 53)

In short, labels are a rhetorically constructed way of sorting organiza tional members into groups by assigning identity. In addition to ourselves, other scholars have explored the relationship between identity and professionalization (Covaleski, Dirsmith, & Rittenberg, 2003), the tension between autonomy and conformity in organizational identity (Covaleski, Dirsmith, Heian, & Samuel, 1998), and the process by which occupational identity is rhetorically ascribed (Fine, 1996). A number of rhetorical scholars following Burke have explored notions of identity and identification. Notably, much of this work comes from the areas of political rhetoric (Beasley, 2004; Stuckey, 2005), the rhetoric of gender and sexuality (Sloop, 2004), and rhetorics of race (Gordon, 2003; Ogbar, 2004). As our discussion of this third theme demonstrates, identity is a rhetorical construct: It is a continual negotiation and performance that take place in a social context. For rhetorical and management researchers alike, the role of language in understanding individual identity (“This is who I am”) and membership (“This is the group I belong to”) is crucial because different identities are easily at odds. Rhetoric resolves and retains the tension between these forces. To explore this tension, it is important to understand when and how managers become rhetors; that is, it serves scholars of management to approach the manager as strategic, self-reflective communicator and speaker.


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Theme 4: Managers Are Rhetors Studying managers’ identity and practices by approaching them as rhetors is yet another recurring tendency in management’s use of the rhetorical discipline. In short, this theme concerns a way to analyze how managers strategically communicate with members of an organization. The notion of a rhetor that has been imported into management research extends beyond the conventional speaker because the word rhetor does not merely refer to an orator or public performer; rather, it denotes a complex set of meanings that have to do with audience analysis, contextual sensitivity, and message structure. The rhetor is a protagonist; she or he is the primary vehicle for rhetorical and material transformation. A rhetor’s task encompasses all dimensions of the rhetorical canon: invention, arrangement, style, memory, and delivery (Hamilton, 1998). Classifying a person in a management position as a rhetor draws attention to the ways in which she or he faces many of the same challenges as does the classical orator. It emphasizes one’s ability and need to master language in context (Gardner & Avolio, 1998).9 The manager-as-rhetor notion is a way of understanding how persuasion is part of an organizational leader’s role. Any leader – political, spiritual, entrepreneurial – uses language to communicate ideas and direct followers. Just as an effective public speaker uses rhetorical tactics, a manager must construct a persuasive message that reflects the organization’s need and goals (Abrahamson, 1997). In doing so, he or she assesses and draws on an array of available tropes, argument, and imageries (Emrich et al., 2001; Gardner & Avolio, 1998; Pinder & Bourgeois, 1982). Recall that Aristotle (1991) defines rhetoric as the ability to discern, in any given situation, the available means of persuasion.10 Green (2004) illustrates this rhetorical approach to studying managers as innovators while calling for cross-pollination between organizational studies and the rhetorical discipline: Rhetorical theory has been underutilized in organizational studies, and, thus, may contribute to this field of inquiry. . . . A rhetorical perspective suggests that managers play an active role in the diffusion process, because what managers say and how they say it matter a great deal. (p. 654)

According to Green, part of the manager’s rhetorical task is to propagate new ideas throughout an organization. A manager’s communicative practices determine how, for example, organizational change and innovation reverberate. Managers deliberately legitimate and delegitimate organizational practices via their linguistic choices (Suddaby & Greenwood, 2005). The application of rhetorical theory focuses on the power of the communicator.



Green claims, “A rhetorical theory of diffusion highlights the causal potency of language in shaping organizational life and behavior. . . . Moreover, rhetorical theory portrays the manager as rhetor and suggests that his or her most influential tool is language” (p. 665). As Green and others suggest, rhetorical strategies are integral to organizational management. Specifically, the classical notions of ethos, pathos, and logos are the most fundamental concepts in rhetorical theory (Haskins, 2004; Hyde, 2004; Wisse, 1989). According to Aristotle, Isocrates, and many later theorists, these are functions of the rhetor’s personal credibility, one’s capacity for activating the audience’s emotions, and one’s use of logical appeals. Green (2004) draws on this familiar triad from the rhetorical tradition and concludes his analysis by noting that “a managerial practice for which the diffusion process follows a rhetorical sequence that starts with pathos, moves to logos, and ends with ethos will have a rapid rate of initial adoption, a broad diffusion, and a slow abandonment” (p. 661). Although Green’s insight is significant in explaining the diffusion of innovations, its implications might have extended further if the concepts themselves were thoroughly examined. For example, the manager–rhetor is indeed subject to ethical – or ethos-based – concerns. His or her ethos is a function of an adaptive performance of character in any rhetorical moment. Ethos invites the audience members to grant credibility and trustworthiness to a speaker – or, in this case, a manager. Ethos also asks the audience to confer some measure of authority to the speaker on the basis of one’s perceived competence, virtue, and goodwill – phronesis, arete, and eunoia, in the classical Greek terminology (McCroskey & Teven, 1999; Noel, 1999). If a rhetor’s or manager’s ethical appeals are successful, so are her or his substantive claims and initiatives. If, however, her or his personal credibility fails to persuade the audience or the followers, she or he will have limited impact as a leader. One of the challenges that managers face in the processes of diffusion lies in dealing with ambiguity. Organizational scholars who approach this issue from a communication standpoint examine how such ambiguity is negotiated in language (Hamilton, 2000; Lascarides, Copestake, & Briscoe, 1996). Entrepreneurs are representative individuals who operate in the context of conceptual ambiguity. Their visions begin with intuitive and affectively loaded ideas that are difficult to communicate and realize. For example, while hearing a funding pitch, it is not unusual for a venture capitalist to simply reach over, close the entrepreneur’s laptop presentation, and say, “Tell me your idea in simple terms!” Hill and Levenhagen (1995) write, “An entrepre neur could have a valid and workable concept or mental model and not be able to fully implement it due to the lack of an adequate means of articulat ing it in evocative terms” (p. 1058). In other words, it is difficult to commu nicate novel ideas in the absence of an established vocabulary. As the manager-as-rhetor theme suggests, this problem is rhetorical.


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To manage ambiguity and conceptual novelty, managers turn to tropes and metaphors that concretize and communicate ineffable ideas. Metaphors, Hill and Levenhagen (1995) argue, facilitate the entrepreneur’s sense making (the construction of a formal model in the entrepreneur’s mind) and sense giving (one’s ability to communicate the idea within an organization). The authors state that “metaphors provide helpful interpretive schemes to aid in the reduction of equivocality” (p. 1058). They further explain that “metaphors are useful in coping with ambiguity and in interpreting large amounts of data. More importantly, perhaps, metaphors are an effective and evocative means of articulation and premise setting within an organization” (p. 1058). Metaphors are but one dimension of a manager’s rhetorical strategies. Another dimension involves the rhetor’s use of enargeia. This idea from rhetorical theory fits with entrepreneurs’ challenge to convey innovation insofar as it serves to concretize the ineffable. Enargeia is a sensory aspect of rhetoric that buttresses rhetoric’s persuasive influence. It is “the power of language to create a vivid presence of that which is set forth in words” (Lunde, 2004, p. 49). The rhetor uses compelling imagery, inviting the audience to visualize something so realistically that it becomes moved by the description. For example, a study by Emrich et al. (2001) regarding the relationship between charisma and evocative words exemplifies this research in management. The researchers focused on how the use of evocative words (“I have a dream” versus “I have an idea”) makes a speech more real, thus more appealing to followers. This connection between the ephemeral or the abstract and the concretely compelling serves managers well. As another illustration, consider a highly graphical description of a completely new production operation called a greenfield site. Given adequate skills, a rhetor can make audiences feel the power of action, visualize the new production plant, and imagine the promise and the problem of bringing the new plant to fruition. This rhetorical experience mimics or simulates being a part of the described action. As a trope, enargeia belongs in theories of invention and visual rhetoric. Visual rhetoric is a related term that has become increasingly fashionable in rhetorical studies (Evans & Hall, 1999; Faigley, George, Palchik, & Selfe, 2004; Farmer, 2002; Sturken & Cartwright, 2001). It refers to a function of nonverbal and nonliteral symbols, such as the World Trade Center (Farmer, 2002). When we notice an appealing presentation graphic or are seduced by a photograph, we respond to visual rhetoric. We engage the creator of the imagery much the same way as we would the creator of a text. Simply put, visual rhetoric is persuasion beyond the word. Enargeia, however, is the creation of visual experiences. The imagery exists as a result of the rhetor’s speech, not of any visual representations that are physically present (Sharpling, 2002). Thus, enargeia is as grand in its persuasive influence as the size of the audience’s imagination and the rhetor’s ability to produce compelling figurative language.



The fourth theme in management’s use of rhetorical studies characterizes managers as rhetors. It entails the realization that managers, when faced with organizational challenges such as innovation or a new production site, negotiate much of the same conditions as does the classical orator. Managers use tropes and figures, arguments and persuasive appeals, in a strategic manner to achieve goals. By analyzing managers as rhetors, management researchers discover new dimensions of organizational leadership. One of these dimensions centers on a manager–rhetor’s reliance on rational and narrative forms of communication.

Theme 5: Rhetoric Is Inextricably Linked to Both Rationality and Narrative Form Organizational scholars have long recognized the importance of rational and narrative language. They have studied the ways in which language practices facilitate coherence and change within organizations (Feldman & Sköldberg, 2002). Weick and Browning (1986) examined how different types of communication produce different organizational forms. For example, the argumentative paradigm matches criteria for classical argumentation and its assumptions about rationality: goal clarity, means and ends consistency, hierarchical integration, and so on. In contrast, the narrative paradigm “connects facts, [stores] complex summaries in retrievable form, and [helps] people comprehend complex environments” (p. 255). Stories and storytelling are not merely entertainment or diversion; they are ways of interpreting and evaluating ontological experience in an organizational setting. Management and administration scholars study the narrative structure of organizational communication (Barry, 1997; Boje, 1995; Hopkinson, 2003). They theorize that rhetoric is at once a means of participating in rational discourse and organizational myth and an underlying structure supporting both practices. In short, rationality and myth are language games, modes of participating in and making sense of cultural life (Gergen & Thatchenkery, 2004; Patriotta, 2003). The relationship between myth and rationality is theoretically complex. On one level, it is generally recognized that a good storyteller is likely to make a good boss; by drawing on a shared past and by outlining a future, a leader is able to tell compelling stories that motivate followers (Boje, 1995). At another level, a shared narrative provides the fundamental social cohesion within any organizational environment. It is a rhetorical form of identification and collective purpose. The relationship between narrative and rationality, or argument, is as contested in rhetorical studies as it is in management science (Weick & Browning, 1986). The classical rhetoricians framed this dialectical tension in terms of popular belief and formal logic. They used the term endoxa, which is a


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Greek word meaning “commonly held opinions.” Endoxa is central to a variety of theoretical concerns, including the rhetorics of politics, memory, science, and argument. According to Plato’s worldview, commonly held opinions were as good as the people who embraced them; that is, most people forego the trouble that proper philosophical inquiry requires – therefore, opinions are flawed at best. In other words, Plato had little regard for popular belief. However, Aristotle, who developed his teacher’s position (i.e., Plato’s), noted that dialectic and rhetoric draw on commonly held beliefs, dealing only in probabilities that sense making requires. Neither operates with scientific certainty. The distinction, he explained, lies in the practitioner’s agenda. For rhetoric, popular belief is a resource. Contemporary rhetorical scholars analyze the tension between rational ity and narrative in terms of functionality and motives (Beck, 1994; Fisher, 1978, 1984). They theorize that discursive practices serve as hermeneutics, or logics of interpretation. For example, some theorists assert that some arguments are more effective in a narrative form, depending on the audience and the types of appeals being advanced. For organizational members, experiences such as discrimination and workplace marginalization may be communicable only in narrative form. Other theorists maintain that narrative and argumentation – a form of rationality – are different and incommensurate mental activities (Gronbeck, 1983; Warnick, 1987). It is important for our purposes to note the conceptual relationships among common sense, narrative communication, endoxa, and social con structionism. Endoxa is a measure of cultural assumptions; it denotes col lective identity and social collaboration. These are notions that without which the study of organizations would be moot. By addressing this notion from a rhetorical standpoint, we identify its continued centrality to human interactions, including those that take place in an organizational context. In other words, every organization has its own endoxa. It comprises that organization’s history, interpersonal dynamics, hierarchies, goals, successes, and failures. As Green (2004) suggests, a manager must be able to draw on employees’ collective beliefs and attitudes in coordinating the group. The manager must relate “persuasive justifications” for new practices to the staff’s “taken-for-granted’s” (p. 655). The manager as rhetor treated earlier obligates a certain familiarity with endoxa. The fifth and final theme in this review of management research concerns rhetorical forms. Because of the considerable effort that rhetorical studies have devoted to the issue, management scholars draw on rhetorical theories of common sense versus logical reasoning. Broadly defined, rhetorical theory addresses and encompasses narrative and rational discourses as the giving of good reasons (Wallace, 1963). Within this basic but productive definition is the important insight that organizational rhetoric includes the presentation of sound argument as well as the telling of good stories.



Conclusion In this concluding section, we revisit the framing questions that provide the point of departure for our article: how rhetoric is conceptualized, why it is currently popular in organizational research, and what useful intersections exist between rhetoric and organizational research. Considering the five themes laid out in our literature review, we suggest that management research conceptualize rhetoric as a theoretical lens focused on organiza tional interactions, as well as a practical mode of intervening in those interactions; the substance that maintains organizational order and institutional logic, as well as the means of challenging that order; a producer and facilitator of individual and organizational identity; the manager’s major strategy for persuading followers to enact management philosophies; and a framework for understanding the role of narrative and rational organizational discourses. In sum, rhetoric is a strategy of the powerful, a form of control. The power of managers’ words accounts for the increasing interest of organizational scholars in rhetoric. At the same time, rhetoric is used to designate linguistic indirectness and other symbolic processes. Rhetoric is a deliberate means of participating in organizational interactions for all members. Our review shows that the combination of rhetorical theory and the prac tical topics of organizational research are natural allies. The articles that follow illustrate this alliance by demonstrating its critical potential. The scholars exemplify the use of rhetorical theories and concepts in the study of management and administration. Their impressive work is particularly applicable when one considers the ideas of two prominent organizational theorists: James G. March and Karl Weick. March and Olsen (1998) assert that because environments are ever changing, they are essentially sites of interpretation. Weick’s theory (1996) has as its basic assumption the law of requisite variety, which states that when organizational conditions are uncertain and equivocal, the response to those conditions must be likewise equivocal. Rhetoric, with its artful and changing qualities, is often the proper response to those environments. In the end, this article demonstrates that the possibility is high for fruitful cross-pollination between rhetoric and management science. When the best of both epistemologies is employed, interdisciplinary scholarship reaches its full potential.

Authors’ Note: We wish to acknowledge the considerable improvements to this article made possible by Jim Barker and the thoughtful reviewers.


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Notes 1. In this article, we consider language and rhetoric to be intimately connected concepts, though not synonymous. All language is to some extent rhetorical, but not all rhetoric is language. There is, for example, a large area of rhetorical studies devoted to visual rhetoric. A photograph or a memorial site can be rhetorical beyond its linguistic elements. As such, we provide a functional definition of rhetoric by coming at the notion from different angles. Because the objective of the article is to compare and contrast management research’s use of rhetoric with communication studies, including organizational communication and rhetorical studies, a single definition would be ill-advised; it would preclude insights about the concepts’ different meanings and implications, depending on context. 2. Note that the term rhetoric here refers to a variety of practices: rhetorical analysis, rhetorical theory, rhetorical vocabulary, rhetorical performance. We are casting a broad net to include all the dimensions of rhetoric that management research imports. The trend in management is not only to use rhetorical theories to analyze organizations but also to analyze rhetorical practices within organizations using traditional methods of management scholarship. Thus, our scope deliberately encompasses the various meanings of the term rhetoric. 3. This point is noted to distinguish the article from, for example, a prescriptive project that might have outlined six ways in which management research ought to employ rhetorical theories and concepts. 4. As a discipline, rhetoric is still profoundly influenced by its roots in classical antiquity. Greek and Roman thought continue to shape the ways in which rhetoric is used to interpret symbolic interactions. For this reason, a fair amount of the rhetorical theory that is used to contrast with management research comes from classical thinkers. 5. Our discussion later returns to this concept in further treatment. 6. The academic conversation about the role of rhetoric in shaping knowledge and schol arly practices is usually referred to as the rhetoric of inquiry. It originated with a 1984 conference held at the University of Iowa and attended by humanists and social scientists. Analyses of this discussion as well as its implications are found in the work of Hikins and Zagacki, (1988), Lyne (1985), Nelson and Megill (1986), and a special issue of Southern Communication Journal (Keith, 1993) on the topic of rhetoric in the rhetoric of science. 7. For recent Burkean analyses of organizational communication, see Mangham (2005) and Walker and Monin (2001). 8. Note in this case, however, that the classical conception of mind is not synonymous with cognition. The mind that Aristotle references encompasses affect and emotion. Thus, enthymemes are appeals to faculties both intellectual and emotional (Miller & Bee, 1972). 9. It is worth noting that the participants for management science research studies are frequently individuals and groups in powerful positions. Textual artifacts (commission reports, interviews, pamphlets, training manuals, newspaper articles, etc.) are selected precisely because of the power of their authors. This line of work partly fulfills the urge from ethnographers, discussed in a methods review edition of the Journal of Contemporary Ethnography in 1987 (volume 16, number 1), to avoid settling for the study of the powerless and to focus more on those who make decisions and allocate resources. 10. The manager-as-rhetor theme recalls the anxiety discussed earlier regarding rhetoric’s potentially manipulative tendencies. In other words, management scholars who are skeptical toward rhetoric are concerned that managers might use their powers for ill rather than for good (Kieser, 1997). If one concedes that managers are influential in



organizations and that their rhetorical strategies are powerful, then it is not a far leap to recognize that they may abuse this power. As rhetorical theorists have long attested, rhetoric can be used just as effectively by those with bad intentions as it can by those with good ones.

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37 Meaning in Organizational Communication: Why Metaphor Is the Cake, Not the Icing Raymond Hogler, Michael A. Gross, Jackie L. Hartman and Ann L. Cunliffe

M

ost scholars of organizational studies agree that managerial rhetoric plays an important role in organizational effectiveness. A substan tial body of literature describes the power of metaphors and other figures of speech to influence behaviors, shape attitudes, and create posi tive or negative images about organizations (e.g., Grant, Keenoy, & Oswick, 1998; Grant & Oswick, 1996; Oswick, Putnam, & Keenoy, 2004), but there is no accepted understanding about the way metaphors work (Cazal & Inns, 1998; Cornelissen, 2005, 2006; Oswick & Jones, 2006). One perspective adopts a representational and positivist stance, which argues that the world exists objectively “out there” and that figurative language is a distraction from literal meaning (e.g., Pinder & Bourgeois, 1982). Other scholars reject the objectivist “mythology” and insist that metaphors are a human capability to comprehend and shape experience “like seeing or touching or hearing, with metaphors providing the only ways to perceive and experience much of the world” (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980/2003, p. 239). From this perspec tive, metaphors are seen as illustrative devices to aid our understanding of social and organizational processes (Goffman, 1959; Morgan, 1986) or as embedded within our everyday communication (Cunliffe, 2002; Lakoff & Johnson, 1999). Similar to the approach of Lakoff and Johnson (1980/2003),

Source: Management Communication Quarterly, 21(3) (2008): 393–411.


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we examine in greater depth the notion that metaphorical language is nei ther objective nor subjective in meaning but something categorically distinct from the division between the “self” and the “world.” That bifurcation poses the ontological dilemma that postmodernism resolves through a linguistic turn. Postmodernism, however, simply reproduces the dilemma by denying the objective meaning of language. In our article, we propose that metaphor, presented as an aesthetic form, results in an active and unified apprehension of knowledge. Such knowledge is made up of more than facts and information; it is an affective state that simultaneously invokes cognition and produces a crucial sensory response. Thus, metaphor as an apprehension of knowledge induces a state of con sciousness that produces a physical reaction that creates feeling. Metaphor translates an experienced reality into a perceptible object that has emotive import as well as discursive content, and neither quality is separable from the creative imagination and affective response that produced the object. Both the objectivity of physical phenomena and the subjectivity of human sentience are fused through an act of immanent apprehension. In short, met aphor has meaning that goes beyond, and is not reducible to, either rational discourse or emotive utterance. The metaphorical use of language is essentially poetic in quality and has its roots in the nature of language itself (Langer, 1942). Metaphor drives creativity, leading to a communal recognition of the “way things are” in the world. Properly understood, then, metaphor can be a powerful tool for expressing a particular and unique kind of meaning that is essentially poetic in nature. In terms of theory, our conceptual framework goes beyond present notions about communication and organization and proposes an alternative mode of analyzing managerial rhetoric. That theory incorporates insights from emerging theories in physics. It is popularly articulated in such works as the film What the Bleep Do We Know? (Arntz, Chasse, & Vicente, 2004). Succinctly, the argument is that aside from infinitesimal pulsations of energy, no material world exists independent of the human mind. This starting point formed the groundwork for early analyses of language and metaphor, which date from the inception of linguistic positivism in the 1920s, and those early analyses remain the superior explanation of how language means. We turn first to the shortcomings of the postmodern view currently in vogue in com munication theory.

Metaphor and Organizations Over the past several years, organization scholars have increasingly argued for a recasting of our images of organizations to adhere to a linguistic model in social sciences or language-based conceptualizations of organizations (Boje, 1995; Pondy & Mitroff, 1979; Putnam, 1999; Putnam, Phillips, & Chapman,


Hogler et al. • Organizational Communication 407

1996). This progression toward conceptualization of organization grounded in discourse is consistent with changes occurring in organizations and with the challenges organizational researchers may face in the future (Putnam, 1999). In this section, we provide a brief summary of the literature dealing with the use of metaphor in organizational studies (for a more exhaustive review of metaphor, see the work of Putnam, 1999, and Putnam et al., 1996). Then, we examine the basis of these ideas and show how our approach goes beyond previous theoretical speculations on metaphor in organizations and offers a contribution to the analysis of meaning in communication. In an important contribution to the field, Lakoff and Johnson (1980/2003) argued that metaphors are embedded in the way we act, interact, and think about our world; they influence the way we experi ence and understand our world from both commonsense and conceptual perspectives. Lakoff and Johnson (1980/2003) suggest that “the essence of metaphor is understanding and experiencing one kind of thing in terms of another” (p. 5) and that by studying the use of metaphors, we begin to understand our physical and cultural experiences. The metaphorical form “A is B” represents the perception, conceptualization, and understanding of one object or event in terms of another. The form “A is B” is not arbi trary because metaphors display directionality: A less clearly delineated object or event, A, is structured by the more clearly delineated experience of a second object or event, B. The conceptual power of metaphor comes from this directionality. The use of a metaphorical expression is made pos sible and has its power by a nonostensive reference to the main metaphor (Koch & Deetz, 1981). A common example in the literature for this expres sion is found in the metaphor “work is a game.” The particular experien tial aspects of life are highlighted by the more clearly conceptualized and widely shared understanding of the game. (Thus, metaphor represents one way of seeing as is possible.) In the “work is a game” metaphor, work comes to be seen as a game, with players, losers, good moves, and strate gies (Koch & Deetz, 1981; Putnam et al., 1996). In organizational studies, metaphors contribute to theory construction, help to structure beliefs and guide behavior in organizations, express abstract ideas, convey vivid images that orient our perceptions and conceptualizations, transfer information, legitimate actions, set goals, and structure coherent systems (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980/2003; Ortony, 1979; Putnam et al., 1996). Because metaphors are enacted and surface through everyday language use, they can be used as tools to illuminate organizational practices, including capturing perceptions and reactions to ambiguity with organizational goals (Feldman, 1991); norms, motives, and meaning in studying organizational culture (Pondy, 1983; Trice & Beyer, 1984); the nature of struggles between competing ideologies (Hirsch & Andrews, 1983; Smith & Eisenberg, 1987); and covert practices that mask power relationships by highlighting certain features while suppressing others (Deetz & Mumby, 1985). This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.

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Lakoff and Johnson (1980/2003) showed how systems of metaphors develop out of the most clearly delineated and shared life experiences and how systems of overlapping metaphors connect experience with abstract concepts. Experience and concepts can be structured through such illustra tive typologies as the following: orientational metaphors, which appear to organize a whole system of concepts with one another and are typically spa tial in nature (e.g., control is up: “I have control over him”); ontological metaphors, which allow us to understand experiences through objects and substances and typically quantify, group, and categorize experience to the extent that they appear to us now as straightforward, literal description (e.g., mind is a machine: “We’re turning out new ideas every day”); and structural metaphors, which go beyond naming and quantifying concepts and allow us to build meaning of one concept in terms of another (e.g., understanding is seeing: “I see what you’re saying”). The most basic of these metaphors has become sedimented through habit ual use. Lakoff and Johnson (1999) called them “literal metaphors” to stress the point that although they seem to be ordinary speech, they depend on a comparison that initially sparked a “shock of recognition” in the listener (e.g., “she is the head of the company”). This literalness is the everyday derivative mode in which seeing as, and the entire system of meaning that makes that possible, is covered up and forgotten (Koch & Deetz, 1981). In addition, all metaphors are grounded in sensorimotor and cultural experiences with the relationship between physical experience and metaphor being the stronger (Lakoff & Johnson, 1999, 1980/2003). Lakoff and Johnson (1980/2003) further demonstrated that metaphori cal phrases are reduced to the metaphors they display. Their description of structural, ontological, and orientational metaphors provides a guide for this, although these categories tend to be more heuristic than prescriptive (Koch & Deetz, 1981). The work of Lakoff and Johnson has greatly influenced the work of Morgan, whose research may be considered the theoretical pedigree of the use of metaphor by modern organizational scholars. Morgan (1980) analyzed the ways in which traditional metaphors (e.g., organizations as machines or organisms) have influenced theoretical discussion of organiza tions. Morgan’s (1997) perspective has been useful in conceptualizing para digms for organizational research by using metaphor as a systematic way of thinking about how we should act in a given situation. Metaphor from a perspective of communication has aimed at under standing social reality (Putnam et al., 1996). Weick (1979) demonstrated the weaknesses of linear models of social reality in organizations that focus solely on either the effects of social structure on interaction in the organi zation or the manner in which social structure is developed from commu nication practices. Most recently, Putnam and her colleagues (Oswick et al., 2004; Putnam, 1999; Putnam et al., 1996) have demonstrated the use



of metaphor in examining the domains of and orientations to research in the communication-organization relationship. From a more interpretive perspective, metaphors are studied as taken-for-granted aspects of every day interaction that are constitutive of social and organizational realities (Cunliffe, 2002). Taken together, most of these works show a history and predication of scholarship employing an instrumental use of metaphor in organizational studies. For example, instrumental goals and needs include the use of meta phor as an instrument that socializes newcomers (Brown, 1985); legitimizes power relationships (Mumby, 1987); enhances identification processes (Kreps, 1989); performs managerial roles (Trujillo, 1985); and acts as an implicit mechanism of control (Kunda, 1992). Often, an instrumental view of metaphor in the communication-organization relationship includes research on the uses of communication technology in organizations, the functions of communication in conflict management, and the development of bridges and networks not only focusing on the skill or system within the organiza tion but representing an ontological stance about communication in organi zations (Putnam, 1999). As the foregoing discussion suggests, the use of metaphor in organization studies frequently has been focused on its instrumentality toward serving an organization’s ends (Putnam, 1999). The point is emphasized in the follow ing generalization from a leading review of the scholarship (Putnam et al., 1996): “Metaphor is probably best understood as a system of beliefs about figure and ground relationships which serve to highlight certain features while suppressing others” (p. 377). From this perspective, metaphor involves “beliefs” that are presented in the separable components of a “figure” and a “ground,” one of which denotes the desired meaning and a secondary ele ment that develops an illuminating context. It follows, then, that metaphor can be deconstructed for purposes of analyzing its constitutive elements and reassembling those elements into theories of organizational behavior, and scholars using the approach have produced original and influential works (e.g., Mumby, 1987). We suggest that a different philosophical approach yields more productive insights for communication studies.

Getting Past Postmodernism One of the hallmarks of modern philosophy is its effort to overcome the Cartesian duality between the individual self and the physical world (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980/2003). The asserted disjunction between objective and verifiable kinds of knowledge and subjective beliefs leads to contested domains where some forms of knowledge are deemed superior to or more trustworthy than others. That bifurcation has given rise to preferred methods


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of conducting social sciences research, in particular the dominance of quan titative and empirical techniques. In an influential work, Bernstein (1976) traced the restructuring of theory in the social sciences, a development that had its intellectual roots in the encroachment of the “positivist temper” in academia in the 1950s and 1960s. As Bernstein summarizes the point, “Basi cally, the positivist temper recognizes only two models for legitimate knowl edge: the empirical or natural sciences, and the formal disciplines such as logic or mathematics” (p. 5). Consistent with that focus, scholars deployed new methodologies more closely related to the quantitative techniques in the scientific models. The goal of such research was to produce knowledge free from normative val ues and based on systematic, deductive, and objective criteria; it tended to discount theorizing based on rhetorical analysis (e.g., Pinder & Bourgeois, 1982). The affinity for empiricism eventually dominated many social science disciplines, such as economics, and generated sharp debates about the posi tivist claims (e.g., Dugger, 1992). Similar developments occurred in organi zation studies with the rise of postmodernism. In response to the main tenets of positivist philosophy, postmodernists deal with the problem of dualism by repudiating all forms of “foundationalism” based on the scientific method of the physical sciences (Best & Kellner, 1997). Much of the current linguistic organizational analysis derives from critical or postmodern theory (e.g., Cunliffe, 2002; Putnam, 1999). That the ory also plays a central role in other business disciplines, such as accounting (Tinker, 2002). In the area of management studies, Alvesson and Willmott (1996) articulated one of the basic premises of the critical approach in their assertion, The idea of value-free knowledge is questionable because it deflects at tention from how, in practice, what counts as “scientific knowledge” is the product of value judgments (e.g. about ontology and epistemology) that are conditioned by the specific, historical and cultural contexts of their production. (p. 43)

For postmodern and critical theorists, the positivist claims about human knowledge remain suspect and subject to attack as social constructions. According to the recent study by Best and Kellner (2001), post-positivist philosophers do not accept the “naïve realism that informs modern science. They regard all perception and knowing as value-laden and socially condi tioned, and they seek self-reflexive clarity regarding the origins and structure of scientific knowledge itself” (p. 110). One of the limitations of the postmodern approach, however, is that it questions the possibility of any unified conception of meaning in language. A key doctrine of postmodern thought “turns on a rejection of the notion of [linguistic] representation – in fact, a rejection of an empiricist model of



representation, in which the representational baby has been slung out with the empiricist bathwater” (Eagleton, 2001, p. 79). As a result, statements about important social institutions such as the legal system and its ideals of justice are seen simply as discourses that promote dominant interests (Derrida, 1990). Postmodernists thus surmount the problem of representa tionalism by contesting empiricist claims about the nature of meaning in language. As a consequence, postmodern linguistic productions are only a text to be interrogated and deconstructed as articulations of power, such as Arrington and Francis’s (1989) skillful dismantling of the well-known arti cle by Jensen (1983) purporting to establish a positivist method of organi zational behavior through an agency conception of firms. To summarize the point in the words of well-known scholars in the field (Clegg, Hardy, & Nord, 1996), “Postmodernism announced the death of meaning by showing the meaning of ‘non-meaning’” (p. 701). The asserted “death of meaning” leads into a particular kind of nonfoundational space for a totalitarian appreciation of the visible: “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” (p. 701). We propose that, to the contrary, meta phor is the birth of meaning, and a unitary world in which subjectivity and objectivity remain an indivisible whole lies beneath the everyday linguistic patina of human interaction. Some current research, such as the aesthetic perspective, appears to adopt this approach, arguing that lived experience should be viewed as “expressive activity” (Clair, 1998, p. 40). The link between an aesthetic perspective and communication theory rests on a narrative approach to metaphor (Buie, 1996; Clair, 1998; Ramirez, 1996), where narratives are a principal symbolic form through which organizational practices and patterns are reproduced and resisted (Mumby, 1987). According to Clair (1998), aesthetic theory holds that discourses are creative experiences and that metaphor creates realities through the symbolic and poetic expression of meaning that “acknowledges the realistic renderings as well as the sur realistic experiences of social relations” (p. 186). More recently, Cornelis sen (2005) suggested that an adequate theory of metaphor would recognize “the generation and creation of new meaning beyond a previously existing similarity.” The process proceeds through a “conjunction of whole seman tic domains,” whereby corresponding qualities are “constructed rather than deciphered” and meaning is emergent and creative (p. 751). Problematically, though, Cornelissen limits his explanation to individual cognitive processes, which opens the theory to attack from a sociological point of view (Oswick & Jones, 2006). As conceived nearly eight decades ago, a deeper examination of metaphor and meaning renders distinctions between the individual and the social irrelevant.


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Philosophical Foundations Writing some half a century before the postmodern fashion, Owen Barfield (1928/1973) set forth remarkably prescient insights about the nature of language, poetry, and cognition. His ideas ran counter to the philosophi cal trend of linguistic analysis, which marked the early positivist foray into epistemology dominated by philosophers such as A. J. Ayer (1946). Barfield (1928/1973) begins with a description of the aesthetic imagination, which he said induces “a felt change of consciousness” (p. 48). The experience entails the immediate and concrete apprehension of an individual’s surroundings, and it is felt because it produces a change in sensory activity that is “attended to.” Poetry creates the aesthetic moment by the physical effect of progress ing from one plane of consciousness to another. It invokes a movement of feeling across levels of perception and is sparked by a process of integration. In Barfield’s words, “This ability to recognize significant resemblances and analogies, considered as in action, I shall call knowledge; considered as a state, and apart from the effort by which it is imparted and acquired, I shall call it wisdom” (p. 55). The most fundamental type of recognition of similarities and differences is metaphor, which is the vehicle of meaning in language. By exploring the roots of language, Barfield concluded that metaphor reveals something inherent and real about the natural world that unifies perception, emotion, and under standing. In his view, the origins of language reveal the process of cognition itself. Meaning, that is, inheres in objects, which we know by the names we give them. In Barfield’s (1928/1973) description, we may suppose that the earliest words in use were “the names of sensible, material objects” and nothing more – only, in that case, you must suppose the sensible objects themselves to have been something more; you must suppose that they were not, as they appear to be at present, isolated, or detached, from thinking and feeling. (p. 85)

The splitting up of meaning into objective and subjective involved a process of separating the abstract from the concrete and the referential from the emo tive. Metaphorical meaning, the fusion of self and other through language, lies at the core of human experience. According to Barfield (1928/1973), the “mysterious relations” (p. 86) we have with external objects are in fact cre ated for human apprehension by the action of language, and “these relations exist independently, not indeed of Thought, but of any individual thinker” (p. 86). Deprived of the immediate sensory perception of reality, modern humans experience that reality through metaphorical language. Mythology is the systematic reflection of the earliest apprehensions of the world (Barfield, 1928/1973). Writing at the same time in the mid-1920s, the German



philosopher Ernst Cassirer reached nearly identical conclusions about mythi cal thinking. Cassirer (1946) speculated that mythology articulated in lan guage embodied a religious experience that occurs when external reality overcomes a man in sheer immediacy, with emotions of fear or hope, terror or wish fulfillment: then the spark jumps somehow across, the ten sion finds release, as the subjective excitement becomes objectified, and confronts the mind as a god or a daemon. (p. 33)

Humans explained their relationship to the world through powerful images and symbols that captured the emotional resonance of physical nature. Building on those aesthetic insights, Susanne Langer developed an inte grated theory of aesthetics, philosophy, and psychology in her books Philos ophy in a New Key (1942), Feeling and Form (1953), Philosophical Sketches (1962), and Mind: An Essay on Human Feeling (1967–1982). Her core argu ment, based on the ideas of Barfield and Cassirer, derives from the origins of language as a symbolic form articulated through successive physiological events or feelings that present an abstracted image comprehensible to other humans. Indeed, Langer (1962) says that art “may be defined as the prac tice of creating perceptible forms expressive of human feeling” (p. 76). She considers many versions of artistic expression, including music, dance, painting, and drama, as symbolic communication. Literature, however, poses special problems because it employs a medium used in nonartistic activities, that is, language. Her solution to the problem of kinds of linguis tic meaning is a radical one similar to Barfield’s explanation of metaphorical language. Langer (1953) says that poets use words “to create an illusion, a pure appearance, which is a non-discursive symbolic form” (p. 211). The artistic form is a symbolic presentation of feeling, which is a physiologi cal state rather than an emotional condition. She continues, “It may take us some time to perceive it, but the symbol expresses it at all times, and in this sense the poem ‘exists’ objectively whenever it is presented to us” (p. 211). The artistic use of language, in short, resists decomposition into bits of information, ideology, and manipulation. Neither the writer nor the reader “privileges” the meaning of the artistic creation because the expres sive form transcends both. To ask what poetic language is “trying to say” is the wrong question. Rather, we ask, “What has the poet made, and how did he make it?” (p. 211). Differentiating discursive from poetic meaning involves a theory of cog nition as well as a theory of aesthetics. Langer’s approach begins with the process of feeling. As Langer uses the term, feeling is not a description of emotional states but of actual physical activities of the body. Sensory appre hensions provide the very foundations of human intellect, which Langer (1967–1982) demonstrates in her multivolume work titled Mind: An Essay on Human Feeling. Artistic creations communicate by setting forth an object that is symbolic of feeling; the object has a rhythm and movement embodied This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.

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in, and inseparable from, its form. Thus, poetry is always something other than “a factual statement” dressed up in verse. Langer (1953) writes, A poem always creates the symbol of a feeling, not by recalling objects which would elicit the feeling itself, by weaving a pattern of words – words charged with meaning, and colored by literary associations akin to the dynamic pattern of the feeling (the word feeling here covers more than a state; for feeling is a process, and may have not only successive phases, but several simultaneous developments; it is complex and its ar ticulations are elusive). (p. 230)

The philosophical insights developed by Barfield and Langer with respect to language, meaning, cognition, and feeling were validated by an excep tionally skilled practitioner of poetic creation. Dylan Thomas, one of the greatest 20th-century poets writing in English, devoted himself to the cre ation of literal meaning, which Barfield described as “poetic diction.” What Thomas understood by the term was precisely the power of metaphor to create previously unapprehended relationships. In a 1933 letter to another poet, Thomas explained the difference between true and false poetry as a function of metaphor (Fitzgibbon, 1966). He criticized her efforts at imagery with the following comment: A rhyming dictionary, a little selection of natural objects, and a halfpen ny gift for stringing pretty words together, and one can write like [your verse] all day. “My blood is drawn from the veins of roses” is on an alto gether different plane; here you have added to the by-now meaningless repetition of association, and have contributed something quite lovely both to yourself and to the rose. (p. 97)

The difference between true and false, Thomas went on, was the produc tion of poetic meaning. He concluded his artistic credo with a statement concerning the effect of metaphor on the poem’s reader (Fitzgibbon, 1966): “By the magic of words and images you must make it clear to him that the relationships are real” (p. 97). His most accomplished work, such as Poem on His Birthday, stands as an exemplar of metaphorical truth about the natural world. The insights from philosophy, aesthetics, and poetry suggest important propositions about language, metaphor, and meaning. Human mental activ ity creates the physical world, to the extent that the world has meaning, because we know the world through appearance. Near the end of his career, Barfield (1965) incisively captured the relation between physical reality and humans’ knowledge of it by pointing out that “if the particles, or the unrep resented, are in fact all that is independently there, then the world we all accept as real is in fact a system of collective representation” (p. 20). The closest we can approach to the real, true, or literal meaning in the world is through the creation of metaphorical relationships, which offer the felt proof



of unified reality, just as What the Bleep Do We Know? instructs us. Metaphors are powerful, but they are not simply tools to be recruited for manipulation. Indeed, the more effective the metaphor, the less likely it will have an avail able discursive content. Poetic language generates a complex emotional and aesthetic state that speaks to the human condition generally, and not specifi cally to the intentions of the speaker (Cunliffe, 2002). We suggest that the current focus of organizational studies and meta phor can be enriched by further theoretical expansion of the “aesthetic side of organizational life” (Clair, 1998; Gagliardi, 1996). We argue that it is important to move beyond the postmodern (and still objectivist) notion of metaphor as a rhetorical strategy used intentionally or otherwise to manip ulate and dominate organizational members. Although this perspective may be suitable for deconstructing communication as a vehicle of power and influence, it does not consider that meaning exists outside discursive reproduction. If we think of metaphor as aesthetic and poetic, situated within the expe riential nature of organizational life, then our understanding of organiza tions draws on an apprehension of knowledge that is not purely intellectual but also sensory. The objective, as Johnson (1987) states, is “to explore how the body is in the mind – how it is possible, and necessary, after all, for abstract meanings, and for reason and imagination, to have a bodily basis” (p. xvi). Whereas Lakoff and Johnson draw attention to the mind-body relationship, they emphasize the cognitive aspect by focusing on the systematicity and coherence of metaphorical schema. In the following section, we further explore the relationship between mind, body, and metaphor through the lens of organizational aesthetics and propose that our approach offers a way of embodying the sense-making process. Aesthetics emphasizes the sen sory nature of knowledge. Toward this end, we claim that metaphors not only are conceptual, analytical, or linguistic tools but are embodied and embedded ways of orienting ourselves in the world and involve cognitive, social, and lin guistic processes. We situate our argument within organization studies.

Aesthetics, Metaphor, and Organizational Life The importance of language and metaphor has long been recognized in orga nization studies. Gowler and Legge (1983) argued that management is an oral tradition involving the management of meaning. Rhetoric is both the means by which culture is created and passed on to organizational mem bers and a form of social control. This notion has been expounded by many researchers, in particular in studying organization culture and leadership. Metaphors are commonly used in organizational analysis (CzarniawskaJoerges, 1992; Morgan, 1986; Tousoukas, 1991). Scholars have analyzed met aphors that explore organizations as living systems, political systems, brains,


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and instruments of domination (Morgan, 1986). Moreover, metaphors are fre quently used when communicating organizational change to inform and inspire (Keizer & Post, 1996), rouse followers (Akin & Schultheiss, 1990; Burke, 1992; Inns, 2002), facilitate knowledge production (Morgan & Ramirez, 1984), and create shared experiences (Zurawski, 2004). They are used to enhance organi zational design, manage conflict, and understand organization culture. Gayle and Preiss (1998), for example, described various metaphors that are com monplace in an environment of interpersonal conflict. One common metaphor is that of Goffman’s (1959) theater, where organizations are studied through the lens of performance and drama or where organizing is seen to be theater (Boje, Luhman, & Cunliffe, 2003). As an example of the first approach, Rosen (1985) used dramaturgy to analyze the cultural rituals of an American adver tising agency’s annual corporate breakfast. An example of organizing as the ater is Czarniawska’s (1998) study of how organization members create their identities through playing roles and constructing an image. In terms of leadership, metaphors are often seen as discursive tools to enhance organizational performance. They offer common ground for dia logue while simultaneously opening new paths for consideration by offering direction through compelling visions. Deetz, Tracy, and Simpson (2000), for example, suggest that leaders shape and frame meaning through discursive instruments including stories, slogans, artifacts, and metaphors, the latter being the most important. Leadership, from this view, involves building com mitment to organizational goals through the sensitive linguistic construc tion of vision and mission statements. Metaphors will influence followers, promote change, and enhance the retention of powerful images (Katz, 1996; Ortony, 1975). Charismatic leaders have long been known for their use of language that contains verbal imagery (Willner, 1984), symbolic references (Shamir, House, & Arthur, 1993; Shamir, Zakay, Breinin, & Popper, 1998), and metaphors (Conger, 1991). Yet, within this work, metaphors are viewed as conceptual, analytical, or discursive tools and do not necessarily speak to human experience and emo tions: The mind-body-metaphor connection is often viewed as an instrumental one. For example, leaders employ emotional expressiveness or the ability to depict nonverbal behaviors via facial expressions, gestures, posture, and tone of voice (Friedman, Prince, Riggio, & DiMatteo, 1980; Friedman, Riggio, & Casella, 1988), and effective leaders communicate and regulate emotional communication (Riggio, 1987, 1998). Watson’s (2001) ethnographic study of managers in a telecommunications company perhaps comes closest to situat ing mind-body-metaphor in human experience. Watson not only emphasized the importance of talk in persuading others and in making sense but also drew attention to the relationship between language and emotion, arguing that talk and stories allow us to “confront and come to terms with the threats and dangers of the world around us. Laughter allows us to cope emotionally with that which could frighten us into madness” (p. 188). So, how can we build



on this work to develop an embedded and embodied notion of metaphor? We suggest that aesthetics can offer such possibilities because situating metaphor within the sensory realm helps us to make sense of our everyday experience, to figure out who we are, and to deal with the emotion of organizations. Within the field of organization studies, Antonio Strati (1999) has been influential in drawing attention to an aesthetic understanding based on an artistic rather than scientific understanding. He suggests that aesthetic expe rience relates to physical perceptions, sensory faculties, emotions (joy, fear, anxiety, passion), and aesthetic categories such as beauty, the comic, and the tragic (Strati, 2000). Aesthetics is not just about the symbolic aspects of organizational life – physical spaces, symbols, images, and artifacts – but also about the experiential and practical aspects: the human senses, tacit knowledge, and aesthetic judgment (Strati & de Montoux, 2002). In terms of the latter, we emphasize that metaphor is integral to the aesthetics of organizational life, not purely in an instrumental way, but also as a poetic (embodied, imaginative) orientation to our world, as an implicit part of the mundane routine of ordinary talk and of bodily and perceptual experience. This experiential aspect of aesthetics brings with it sensible (perceived through the senses) knowledge rather than ratiocinative cognitive knowledge (Strati, 2007) that is immanent to organizational life. Ewenstein and Whyte (2007), for example, based on a study of an architectural practice, suggest that design work involves “an improvised engagement with an emerging design” (p. 700) that incorporates a feel for the site and the relationship between shapes, spaces, and materials. In much the same way, organizational members feel their way around their organizations, shaping and being shaped in their everyday actions, interactions, and relationships. To summarize with Langer’s (1967) powerful insight, an “intimate and expert knowledge” of human feel ing abounds in the people who create its image. “In the hands of a natural artist – professional or not, called ‘artist’ or ‘artisan’ or whatever else – almost anything may become a work of art: a bed, a doll, a scientific drawing, a photograph. Haydn wrote the bugle calls for the Austrian army, and they are music” (p. 64). It is hardly surprising, then, that organizations would rely on objects and practices expressive of feeling to create shared experience. As the foregoing review suggests, language is the glue holding together organization, with metaphor and aesthetic knowledge as its foundation. Our theoretical framework explains how the cake of metaphor nourishes the orga nization’s members and allows them to flourish – metaphor is an appealing concoction of intellect, perception, emotion, and physical sensation. The act of apprehending metaphor is an act of consumption: unique, immediate, inimitable, and experiential. Any description of the way metaphor works is simply icing that attempts to embellish the cake. Without an adequate conception of meaning, metaphor may appear to be a distraction to the process of comprehension. With an appreciation of the poetic qualities of organizational language, metaphors bring alive the power of language.


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Conclusion The contending intellectual paradigms in organization studies can be described as the empirical and the critical (Gagliardi, 1996). The first rests on the assumption that meaningful knowledge in social science derives from empirical models, with their quantitative apparatus and presumption of objectivity as a working agenda. The critical approach, to the contrary, rejects empiricism as a suspect species of intellectual hegemony. For critical theorists, the foundationalist assumptions of empiricism are insufficient as a path to understanding human behavior. Those intellectual constructs both lay claims to a legitimating, but categorically exclusive, epistemology. As a consequence, they tend to carve out discrete domains for the study of organizations. Our theory offers an alternative view of metaphor in organizational stud ies. It is neither ontological – which aims to uncover reality – nor epistemological – which aims to analyze how we know reality – but a perspective from which such a distinction is entirely beside the point. This view avoids the Cartesian dualism that sustains the competing visions. It relies on the unifica tion of feeling and intellect. Our approach is based on literary dimensions of motivation, action, and communication. Accordingly, our article adds to our understanding of the role of metaphor, myth, and language as it can guide communication and organizational studies. It emerges from a literary tradi tion that takes metaphor as the highest form of cognitive activity. The animat ing idea is that organizational rhetoric may sometimes be neither persuasive, informative, manipulative, ideological, nor intentional, but more than all of them. Skillful communication is a hallmark of effective leadership, and we have set forth some theoretical considerations in support of that assertion.

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Mumby, D. K. (1987). The political function of narrative in organizations. Communication Monographs, 54, 113–127. Ortony, A. (1975). Why metaphors are necessary and not just nice. Educational Theory, 25, 45–53. Ortony, A. (1979). Metaphor and thought. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Oswick, C., & Jones, P. (2006). Beyond compare? Metaphor in organization theory. Acad emy of Management Review, 31, 483–485. Oswick, C., Putnam, L. L., & Keenoy, T. (2004). Tropes, discourse and organizing. In D. Grant, C. Hardy, C. Oswick, & L. Putnam (Eds.), The Sage handbook of organiza tional discourse (pp. 105–127). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Pinder, C., & Bourgeois, V. (1982). Controlling tropes in administrative science. Adminis trative Science Quarterly, 27, 641–652. Pondy, L. R. (1983). The role of metaphors and myths in organizations and the facilitation of change. In L. R. Pondy, P. J. Frost, G. Morgan, & T. D. Dandridge (Eds.), Organiza tional symbolism (pp. 157–166). Greenwich, CT: JAI Press. Pondy, L., & Mitroff, I. I. (1979). Beyond open system models of organization. In L. L. Cummings & B. M. Staw (Eds.), Research in organizational behavior (Vol. 1, pp. 3–29). Greenwich, CT: JAI Press. Putnam, L. L. (1999). Shifting metaphors of organizational communication: The rise of discourse perspectives. In P. Salem (Ed.), Organizational communication and change (pp. 45–65). Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press. Putnam, L. L., Phillips, N., & Chapman, P. (1996). Metaphors of communication and orga nization. In S. Clegg, C. Hardy, & W. Nord (Eds.), Handbook of organizational studies (pp. 375–408). London: Sage. Ramirez, R. (1996). Wrapping form and organizational beauty. Organization, 3, 233– 242. Riggio, R. E. (1987). The charisma quotient. New York: Dodd, Mead. Riggio, R. E. (1998). Charisma. In H. S. Friedman (Ed.), Encyclopedia of mental health (pp. 387–396). San Diego, CA: Academic Press. Rosen, M. (1985). Breakfast at Spiros: Dramaturgy and dominance. Journal of Manage ment, 11, 31–48. Shamir, B., House, R. J., & Arthur, M. B. (1993). The motivational effects of charismatic leadership: A self-concept theory. Organization Science, 4, 1–17. Shamir, B., Zakay, E., Breinin, E., & Popper, M. (1998). Correlates of charismatic leader behavior in military units: Subordinates’ attitudes, unit characteristics, and superiors’ appraisals of leader performance. Academy of Management Journal, 41, 387–409. Smith, R. R., & Eisenberg, E. M. (1987). Conflict at Disneyland: A root metaphor analysis. Communication Monographs, 54, 367–380. Strati, A. (1999). Organization and aesthetics. London: Sage. Strati, A. (2000). The aesthetic approach in organization studies. In S. Linstead & H. Höpfl (Eds.), The aesthetics of organization (pp. 13–34). London: Sage. Strati, A. (2007). Sensible knowledge and practice-based learning. Management Learning, 38, 61–77. Strati, A., & de Montoux, P. G. (2002). Introduction: Organizing aesthetics. Human Rela tions, 55, 755–766. Tinker, T. (2002). Critical accounting research: A socio-historical review. Journal of Busi ness and Management, 8(8), 1–18. Tousoukas, H. (1991). The missing link: A transformational view of metaphor in organiza tion science. Academy of Management Review, 16, 566–585. Trice, H. M., & Beyer, J. M. (1984). Using six organizational rites to change culture. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.


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Trujillo, N. (1985). Organizational communication as cultural performance: Some mana gerial considerations. Southern Speech Communication Journal, 50, 201–224. Watson, T. J. (2001). In search of management: Culture, chaos and control in managerial work (Rev. ed.). London: Thomson Learning. Weick, K. E. (1979). The social psychology of organizing. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley. Willner, A. R. (1984). The spellbinders: Charismatic political leadership. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Zurawski, C. (2004). In praise of small talk. Communication World, 21(6), 22–25.










SAGE DIRECTIONS IN ORGANIZATION STUDIES VOLUME III

Edited by

Stewart R. Clegg




Contents Volume III Organizing Time, Space and Embodiment 38. On Time, Space, and Action Nets Barbara Czarniawska 39. Organizational Time: A Dialectical View Miguel Pina e Cunha 40. The Temporalization of Financial Markets: From Network to Flow Karin Knorr Cetina and Alex Preda 41. The Night of the Bug: Technology, Risk and (dis)Organization at the fin de siècle David Knights, Theo Vurdubakis and Hugh Willmott 42. Place, Space and Time: Contextualizing Workplace Subjectivities Susan Halford and Pauline Leonard 43. Stretching Out and Expanding Work Practices in Time and Space: The Case of Telemedicine Davide Nicolini 44. Knowing Bodies at Work: Embodiment and Ephemeral Teamwork in Anaesthesia Jon Hindmarsh and Alison Pilnick 45. Dance-Work: Images of Organization in Irish Dance Donncha Kavanagh, Carmen Kuhling and Kieran Keohane

3 21 47 71 93 115 145 169

Organizing Identity 46. Identities and Insecurities: Selves at Work David L. Collinson 47. The Tyranny of the Epochal: Change, Epochalism and Organizational Reform Paul du Gay 48. Theorizing the Micro-Politics of Resistance: New Public Management and Managerial Identities in the UK Public Services Robyn Thomas and Annette Davies 49. Cages in Tandem: Management Control, Social Identity, and Identification in a Knowledge-Intensive Firm Dan Kärreman and Mats Alvesson 50. Double Agents: Gendered Organizational Culture, Control and Resistance Beverley Hawkins 51. Sexuality, Power and Resistance in the Workplace Peter Fleming This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.

187 209 231 255 283 303

vi Contents

52. The Importance of Being ‘Indian’: Identity Centrality and Work Outcomes in an Off-Shored Call Center in India Diya Das, Ravi Dharwadkar and Pamela Brandes 53. Albert and Whetten Revisited: Strengthening the Concept of Organizational Identity David A. Whetten 54. Mobilizing Identities: Uncertainty and Control in Strategy Harrison C. White, Frédéric C. Godart and Victor P. Corona 55. Desperately Seeking Legitimacy: Organizational Identity and Emerging Industries Stewart R. Clegg, Carl Rhodes and Martin Kornberger


325 355 379 401

Organizing Time, Space and Embodiment



38 On Time, Space, and Action Nets Barbara Czarniawska

T

he topics I address in this paper are the contest between chronological and kairotic time in contemporary organizing and the emergence of dispersed calculation (as opposed to ‘calculation centers’ postulated by Callon, 1998, and Latour, 1999a). Constant time measurement and centers of calculation exist primarily as sediments of bygone institutional orders, and they play central roles only in laboratory-like or factory-like aspects of organizing. At the center of contemporary organizing are kairotic time and dispersed calculation. But if students of organizing are to account for this reality, their approach to their study objects must be changed. Studies of science and technology have much to offer here. In the first place, the time perspective must be changed: ‘organization’ needs to be seen as a type of a final product, and not as a starting point. Second, traditional ethnography, bounded as it is to one place, misses the mobility inherent in contemporary organizing. Focusing on action nets and mobile ethnology are possible ways of escaping the iron cage of research tradition.

Chronological and Kairotic Time My study of the introduction of sub-municipal committees in Sweden (Czarniawska-Joerges, 1988)1 started with a semi-structured interview beginning with the following innocent questions: ‘Can you tell me something about the history of the reform? When did it all begin, in your view?’ I received




the following types of answer: • • • • • • • •

in ancient Greece in Viking villages in the 1940s in 1962 (the year of a centralizing administrative reform) in 1971 (the middle of the centralizing reform) in 1977 in 1979 in 1985 (seriously)

I was somewhat taken aback by the variety of responses, chose a middle way (early beginnings in the mid-1970s, culmination in the present), and comforted myself that, as everybody knows, respondents’ memories are never reliable. But my unease with this explanation returned when a colleague told me that he had asked people about the origins of an ongoing reorganization in a similar study conducted later, and was informed that it had started with the participation of several persons in a Brussels conference. Interested in this conference, my colleague tried to locate it in existing documents, and came to the conclusion that, to the best of his knowledge and that of EU officials, no such conference had ever taken place. He confronted his interlocutors with this piece of news and heard in response, ‘Well, perhaps it was not in Brussels, but it was somewhere, and around that time.’ Later I realized that looking as we both were for ‘the beginning’, we had failed to notice that it is the ending that chooses its beginning, not the other way around. Different endings require different beginnings – this is how the construction of a story proceeds (on ending-embedded stories, see Mandler, 1984). A seminar on ‘Historical Fulfillment’ by Hayden White (2000) helped me to make some sense of these confusing experiences. White claims that it is impossible to speak about history as the study object for the discipline: the proper subject of history should be historiographies, different ways of writing history. The traditional discipline of history dedicates little attention to the form this writing takes – hence a title of one of White’s books, The Content of the Form (1987). Studying western historiography, he came to the conclusion that it underwent a dramatic paradigm change from chronological to kairotic time ordering. Chronos (chrónos) was the Greek god (or at least an impersonation) of time and Kairos was the god of right time, of proper time. Kairós in Greek means ‘time, place, circumstances of a subject’ (Lanham 1991; see also Rämö in this issue). Whereas Chronos measures time in mechanical intervals, Kairos jumps and slows down, omits long periods and dwells on others. According to White, the switch from chronological to kairotic time in western historiographies is best symbolized by the conversion of Saul: time started anew for him after he became Paul. In European history, one can trace the change from ‘annals’ to ‘chronicles’ and to a ‘proper history.’ White quotes This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.

Czarniawska • On Time, Space, and Action Nets

the ‘History of France’ by Richerus of Rheims (circa 998) as being halfway between a purely chronological account (such as annals) and a kairotic narrative (‘proper history’). It has a central subject, a geographical center, a social center and a beginning in time. But the work fails as proper history, at least according to the opinion of later commentators, by virtue of two considerations. First, the order of the discourse follows the order of chronology; it presents events in the order of their occurrence and cannot, therefore, offer the kind of meaning that a narratologically governed account can be said to provide. Second, probably owing to the ‘annalistic’ order of discourse, the account does not so much conclude as simply terminate. (White, 1987: 17)

I was struck by the similarity of these transformations in historiography to the transformation of events into a story (history) at the City Office in Stockholm during my study there (Czarniawska, 2004). The main event attracting everyone’s attention, time and effort at that time was the district reform (a variation on sub-municipal reform that Stockholm decided to introduce 10 years later than most other municipalities). I observed the introduction of the new structures; I interviewed the project leader; and I was later given a historical perspective on the event. The boxed text is a short excerpt from my field notes. Not much of a story, right? And yet it is a chronologically structured account of how the reform was proceeding. In many contexts such a logbook could be an accepted form of history – probably in settings organized around machines, such as boats, planes, laboratories – but not in the organizations I visited, where technologies were soft and often invisible (that is, forgotten or not recognized as technologies). The project leader, as it turned out, used a MasterPlan program (another chronological device) to run her project, but she did not tell the story according to the MasterPlan. Her account resembled a chronicle: there were characters, a context and a beginning. But the end was only the end of the account. The plot and the point were still missing. The plot and the point were, however, highly visible in the subsequent interviews, which commented on the district reform (for a fuller account, see Czarniawska, 2003) and where Chronos yielded almost completely to Kairos. In organizations I have visited, chronological accounts were raw material for kairotically organized narratives, just as they were for me in my research. Most likely, kairotic time cannot be directly experienced, not even in laboratories; it must be created. As John Law (1994) pointed out, nothing ever happens right where and when the researcher is observing. All important events happen at some other time, in some other place. In the beginning the researchers tend to panic and try to chase ‘the action,’ but in time they learn that ‘important events’ become such in accounts. Nobody is aware that an important event is happening when it takes place, although in most cases people are aware of the time of day and the day of the month. Events must be made important or unimportant. Chronology organizes the This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.


One Day at a City Office (shadowing a Manager) 08.00 Moving into the new office. People move up and down the corridor, carry boxes, arrange the coffee room 08.30 Conversation (about district reform) with the researcher in a car on the way to the training & development center 09.00 Coffee chat (an emergency stop in the subway system prevented most of the course participants from arriving on time) 09.45 Introduction to the course (dedicated to the presentation of the consequences of district reform to the City Office) 10.30 Return to the office. A tour around new offices, chats about the reform 10.45

Manager works at his computer

11.10 A ventilation specialist comes in (new offices have faulty ventilation) . . . and so on . . .

present (extended to the immediate future). The past and the distant future are governed by kairotic time. One could say that chronological time dominates actual organizing and that kairotic time rules organizing accounts (including plans – that is, accounts – projected into the future). Niklas Luhmann offered an interesting insight on this topic in his systems vocabulary. Kairotic time, ‘the right time,’ is that which creates a temporal autonomy for the system. Knorr Cetina (1999: 27) pointed out that laboratories need not deal with the events when they happen; they can record them and postpone their resolution until a ‘better time,’ when there are more resources, better machines, or researchers with time on their hands. Most contemporary organizations are expected to react to what happens when it happens. But, says Luhmann, ‘[if] a system always had to react to the environmental events that befall it the minute they happen, it would have little chance to select its mode of reacting’ (1995: 186). Kairotic time permits ‘individual’ timing: ‘It is too early to do something about it now.’ If, however, organizations ran on kairotic time only, no train would ever leave on time. ‘Thus temporal autonomy creates its own problems for the system, which require their own solutions’ (1995: 186). These are solutions intent on chronology: MasterPlans, Filofaxes, innumerable clocks and alarms. It is this interplay of kairotic and chronological timing that needs to be studied in organizing. Organizing dependent on hard technology could force



chronological time to be a priority, whereas organizing that is dependent on soft technologies could have more opportunities to create kairotic time. The chronology itself is not as neutral as it may seem: the Gregorian calendar needed politics – and calculation – to achieve its present hegemony in the western world (Joerges, 2003). Time is constantly calculated in organizing, in many and often conflicting ways. Time calculations, however, are only one type of calculation necessary for organizing.

Dispersed Calculation CENTER OF CALCULATION: Any site where inscriptions are combined and make possible a type of calculation. It can be a laboratory, a statistical institution, files of a geographer, a data bank and so forth. This expression locates in specific sites an ability to calculate that is too often placed in the mind. (Latour, 1999a: 304; emphasis added)

Equipped with this definition, I looked for an economic calculation center (or centers) in a Stockholm utility company where I had been shadowing one of the executives (Czarniawska, 2000b). Common sense guided me first to the Finance Department – which was the correct direction, but with some interesting complications. The Finance Department collected and calculated all the relevant data – but so did almost everybody else. The results of these calculations did not always tally, which provoked a new round of calculations (everywhere), but also activated non-calculative modes of negotiation. I have therefore assumed that there were not one but many centers of calculation. First, there were several versions of the ‘Finance Department’: the present one and the old one, which, as it turned out, was guilty of making a mistake in the long-term financial plan, causing much havoc in the present process. Second, each department had its own finance unit that calculated costs and produced budgets. These calculations were not even made according to the same code. Attending a budget meeting at the Department of Environment, I was struck by the lively interest of everyone present in understanding the economic calculations and their not-so-joking suggestions that their department could do it much better. At that point, I was still prone to seeing it as a matter of interdepartmental competition (our calculation center is better than yours!). But the following developments convinced me that there is more to it than that. The Head of Environment, looking for ways to accommodate the new financial adjustments (a need for savings), decided to use the famous Swedish instrument, the ‘cheese slicer,’ or rather, as she put it, a ‘half-cheese slicer’: everyone was going to have to make cuts, although not equally. She went around her department and spoke to all the managers. They had pocket calculators with them, or they would turn to their computers to check the figures. I realized that, quite apart from the Finance Department, practically



everybody in management calculated and was prepared to defend her or his calculations against everybody else’s. Calculation was not placed in the mind, but neither was it placed on a specific site; it was moving around. This custom could be specific to this utility, which was run by the engineers,2 and it differed significantly from similar units I studied in Warsaw, where engineers steered clear of economic calculations and expressed opinions only on the outcomes, not on the procedures (Czarniawska, 2000a). What I witnessed in Stockholm was a clear symptom of the ‘audit society’ (Power, 1997), in which everybody has a duty – and a privilege – to do economic calculations.3 An interesting case in point is described by Ann-Christine Frandsen: a nurse empowered with a responsibility account employed a researcher as an informal consultant to support her calculations against the traditional ‘center’ (Frandsen, 2000). Thus, although calculation centers still do exist, the activity of calculation has been dispersed in economic organizations. Multiplication of centers of calculation led to a situation in which it is pointless to speak of ‘centers’ or ‘specific sites.’ No doubt the intense education of ‘calculating actors’ (Callon, 1998) supports this process, although not exactly in the sense intended by neoclassical economics. They may or may not be calculating their own gains and losses, but it is their duty to take an active part in the collective calculation process. It would be comforting to say that, at least, ‘correct calculation beats an incorrect one,’ as one of the reviewers suggested. This is so in the sense that calculations made with the method presently considered correct beat others (Jansson, 1992). An interesting situation arises when everybody is using correct calculations, but for opposite purposes, as the fascinated observers of the public quarrel about building a military plane in Sweden could witness. The highest calculating authorities in Sweden calculated the feasibility of this plane – and arrived at different results, depending on their political stance (while claiming that their stance depended on calculations). The ‘politically correct’ calculation won, of course. The correctness of a calculation is a situated construction, as MacKenzie (1993) and Shulman (1996) have convincingly shown. How well prepared are organization students to capture these modes of organizing in the contemporary economy?

Action Nets, Not Organizations What is called ‘organization studies’ usually denotes research focused on one or more of the following study objects: • Places (‘organizations’). The aim is rarely to study a place, but the result is often just that. To study ‘Volvo’ is to study its headquarters in Gothenburg, its plant in Kalmar and perhaps its Polish branch in Wroclaw. This move is dictated by the common sense of fieldwork: practices are situated, and This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.


so are their students. One has to be somewhere in order to study something. An unintended consequence is, however, an ontologization of an epistemology. Ways of doing things become places and objects; this is best seen in the example of ‘levels of analysis,’ where ‘micro’ and ‘macro’ seem to be two different planets ‘influencing’ one another. The same fate met ‘cases’: far from being ‘cases of something’ (a phenomenon, a process), they are given proper names and become ‘a case of Volvo.’ The point is not, however, that of methodological purity, but of missing what is important in practice: contemporary organizing moves quickly from one place to another and happens in several places at once. I will return to this in the last section of this paper. • People (individuals or groups). Studying individual persons and their life worlds is a very appropriate task for psychologists, in the same way as studying the anatomy of interactions is the task of ethnomethodologists. Students of organizing should be fortified by this kind of knowledge, but cannot limit themselves to it. ‘Floor taking’ and ‘repair’ happen in all conversations, but not all conversations constitute organizing practices. • Issues. Such a focus promises a better grasp of the practice of organizing, but it contains a difficulty – issues as defined by whom and at what time? One of the central aspects of organizing consists in defining and redefining the issues at stake, so that they undergo a constant process of transformation. This transformation, however, does not follow anybody’s will and does not happen by itself; it involves multiple acts of translation, often contradictory, that are in themselves of great interest for organization scholars. • Events. This is perhaps the most promising study focus because it combines the perception of the researcher with that of the actors in the field: something has happened, and yet it is not necessary immediately to decide what it was. The difficulty here is that, in order to grasp the practice of organizing, it is not enough to study single events. The whole point is to know how they are related to other events, to study chains of events. Again, events do not chain spontaneously: the actors or the observers tie them to one another, usually in the activity of story making. Karl Weick’s introduction of the term ‘organizing’ (1979) was a leap towards avoiding the ‘organizations’ trap. The difficulty in espousing his postulate in practice lies in the fact that, when studying ‘organizing,’ researchers mostly encounter processes that have already come to a happy end of a kind; that is, they have become reified into ‘organizations.’ Nevertheless, to study ‘organizing’ is to point out that ‘organizations’ are but temporary reifications, because organizing never ceases; to study ‘organizations’ is to deny this fact. An action net is a compromise devised to embrace both the anti-essentialist aspect of all organizing (organizing never stops) and its apparently solid effects (for a moment things seem unchangeable and ‘organized-for-good’). This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.

10 Organizing Time, Space and Embodiment

The concept of action nets originated in a combination of new institutional theory and the sociology of translation, but it is tailored specifically to organization studies (Czarniawska, 1997). It is founded on the idea that in each time and place it is possible to speak of an ‘institutional order,’ a set (not a system) of institutions (not necessarily coherent) prevalent right then and there. Such institutions shape organizing inasmuch as they dictate which actions, conventionally, should be tied together. In our present institutional order, people who produce are supposed to try to sell their products, those with money are supposed to save or invest it. The concept of an action net has no analytical ambitions; its introduction is an attempt to minimize that which is taken for granted prior to the analysis. A standard analysis begins with ‘actors’ or ‘organizations’; an action net approach permits us to notice that these are the products rather than the sources of the organizing – taking place within, enabled by and constitutive of an action net. Identities are produced by and in an action net, not vice versa. ‘Organizations’ become actors owing to a repeated type of action legitimized by a ‘legal person’ certificate. If we take a closer look, we might consider it opportune to go back to the classical definition of Perrow (1986): organizations are tools, they are machines that closely resemble robots. An organization is a combination of a dispatcher (Latour, 1998a) and a translator, a machine that is given a legal personality, thus acquiring the right to an identity, a will, an image. Humans are not ‘cogs’ in this machine, any more than they are chips in their computers (although a poetically minded writer might choose to metaphorize them thus); they constructed this machine but, once constructed, the machine continues to construct them. The two main parts, a dispatcher and a translator, are dependent on one another. To be able to send objects and humans to the right places at the right time, the dispatcher must know how to contact them; the dispatcher depends on translator services. The translator is needed because there is a movement of people and objects: had they stayed in the same place, there would be no need for translation, as (supposedly) was the case in the tower of Babel before its fall. The organizational boundaries are drawn – arbitrarily at the moment of its legal construction – around a portion of an action net produced by the combined work of dispatcher and translator mechanisms. What is the relation of the notion of action nets to concepts such as ‘organizational field,’ ‘network’ or ‘Actor-Network’? Let me start with organizational field. When DiMaggio and Powell (1991) compared the ‘old’ institutionalism (Selznick, 1949) with the ‘new’ one, they pointed out that when Selznick talked about ‘an interorganizational field’ he included all actual interactions that the TVA had with other organizations. DiMaggio and Powell’s concept, borrowed from Bourdieu, has become slightly more symbolic, almost virtual as it were, since IT plays an important part in contemporary organization fields. The new institutionalists no longer talk about organizations actually


Czarniawska • On Time, Space, and Action Nets 11

interacting, but talk about their participating in a kind of network dealing directly or indirectly (as, for instance, consultants) with the same type of activities. The different actors need not know one another or meet, but they may serve one another as role models, competitors, dream figures. The DiMaggio and Powell’s enterprise deserves praise, because it is important to understand that organizing is accomplished with the assistance of such ideal, imaginary images. Nevertheless, they have lost what Selznick was capable of capturing: actual interactions taking place in time and space. University buildings need cleaning, even though cleaning firms do not belong to the organization field of higher education. Yet a cleaning firm on strike may seriously obstruct the ‘real’ work of the university. Such an entanglement can be captured in an action net. There is no reason to distinguish between virtual and actual contacts there, although the fact that both exist makes the study more difficult (see the last section). The same thing goes for ‘networks,’ although the problem with this concept relates not to space, as in the case of an organization field, but to time. A network assumes actors who make contacts, whereas action nets assume that connections between actions produce actors: one becomes ‘a publisher’ because one publishes books, but, for books to be published, there must be somebody writing them; a ‘writer’ is somebody who writes books, not someone who has a business card with this word printed on it. An action net is close to the concept of ‘actor-network,’ because they both originate in the sociology of translation, but it attempts to avoid the difficulties of the latter, pointed out best by its creators (see Law, 1999; Latour 1999b). Had Latour written ‘Follow the actants’ instead of ‘Follow the actors’ in 1987, much trouble could have been avoided.4 Also, the French version of actor-network theory (ANT) spoke of réseaux – nets, not networks. As it is, the standard interpretation of ANT is ‘actors and their networks.’ To no avail, Callon (1998) attempted to change it into an ‘agent-network’; now it is ‘agents and their network,’ and the actors-structures connotation is further burdened by the traces of agent-principal theory. Bruno Latour (1999b) spoke only half in jest when he said that there were four things wrong with ANT: the term actor, the term network, the term theory, and the hyphen. The novelty of the approach suggested by ANT, the way of showing how actants form networks and in consequence pose as macro-actors, became almost lost. Not that ANT needs rescuers. My intentions are much more modest, and are limited to the demands of my field – organization theory. Action net, like ANT, proposes a major reversal in the time under study: it suggests that actions – connected by translation – might produce actors, networks and macro actors, i.e. actor-networks. Actor-networks are, however, only one possible product of translation, and one that takes more time and effort than an action net. Callon’s researchers were able to mobilize scallops (Callon, 1986) because much earlier an innovative translation had taken place, and a new action net had been established – if you can no longer fish for scallops,



you might think of cultivating them. If this translation had gone smoothly from the start, no actor-network might have emerged. Action nets need therefore to be observed as they are being established and re-established, which can be done progressively, deduced speculatively or, in Foucault’s terms, studied genealogically. An action, however, is also a term heavy with connotations, as pointed out by Latour (1998a). I understand action as a movement or an event, to which an intention can be attributed by relating the event to the social order in which it takes place (Harré, 1982). The intentions are not a priori states but a posteriori interpretative attributions; indeed, it is appropriate to talk about the grammar and the rhetoric of motives, i.e. the scripts underlying such attributions (Burke, 1945, 1962). Such attributions can be made about any type of actant: a human, a machine, a tree.5 Similarly, the intentions can be taken away – disattributed – even from human actants (who then no longer act but ‘behave,’ ‘react,’ ‘move instinctively,’ etc.). What is more, a non-human equipped with a proper grammar and vocabulary of motives can make attributions of intention (for instance, a computer evaluating claims or applications). Neither is the term ‘net’ devoid of connotations: what is a net and what just a couple of knots? Is a broken net still a net? Opportunities for reification abound. I am fully aware that there are no innocent terms, unless they are incomprehensible neologisms. A term is useful in probing the taken for granted as long as its use is still fresh and unexpected: paradoxically, successful use tends to reify the concepts, as happened with ‘organizations.’ Thus, my pledge to study action nets needs to be seen as highly temporary, and its main aim is to attract attention to knotting (Lindberg, 2002), or connecting, as a central activity in all organizing. In my studies of city management (Czarniawska, 2002b) I have tried to follow and describe such action nets, that is, the ways (some institutionalized, some innovative) in which certain actions were connected to one another. Such action nets usually transcended any given organization. Public marketing of a city company requires connections to advertisement production, to finances, to street administration, to publicity regulation, etc. Such connections can assume a variety of forms: formal contracts, hierarchical subordination, but also friendship. Because actions thus connected are different, they require translation, which happens at connecting points. A given unit, with its own internal actors and artifacts, may be considered an entity unto itself in a legal sense, but many other actors and artifacts, including whole networks, are usually involved in an action net. Taking entire action nets as objects of study (constructed also by the study as such), rather than mere interorganizational contacts, unveils a more comprehensive picture of how organizations are formed, stabilized, dissolved or relocated. In other words, it is easier to study organizations as products of organizing when they are not the study object in themselves. This also improves the ability to see how actants try to stabilize ‘their’ segments of a net in order to form powerful



actor-networks (Callon, 1986). An example of the latter would be an entire set of relationships and actants representing themselves as a single actor: ‘the Marketing Department,’ ‘the Green Movement,’ etc. Although actants access existing action nets, thus recreating and stabilizing these connections, they must also continually form new connections. Such connections are forged during the process of translation, in which words, numbers, objects and people are translated into one another. Like calculation, translation is dispersed: everybody translates, although some translations, like some calculations, have more currency than others. Because not only economics, accounting and marketing but also organization studies participate in performing the economy (Callon, 1998; Cochoy, 1998), the practitioners also believe in ‘actors and networks’ rather than action nets. An interesting example has been found by Tatiana Pipan, who studied the preparations for the Third Millennium of Christianity Jubilee in Rome (Pipan and Porsander, 2000). City administrators decided to call a meeting that would initiate the preparatory work. The list of participants comprised the most important institutional actors in the city and the province; nobody of importance was missing. They all arrived, and immediately became engaged in establishing a pecking order – who was more important and for what reason? The meeting ended in a fiasco. The organizers had second thoughts and decided that first they must make a list of actions that they thought had to be undertaken; after that, it was easy to call in people who might possibly be able to do what was seen as needed. The second meeting went very well, although in time the action plans changed, different couplings were developed, etc. This situation can be seen as analogous to a research project: action nets must be the starting point, not the result of a study. Latour (1998b) once compared ANT to a shoebox: it is somewhere to put your findings until you know where to file them. In the same vein, I see action nets as ‘empty concepts,’ to be filled with contents until it is clear what label might be put on them. Action nets are, for me, a way of looking at things, not another ontological element of social reality, at least not yet. Studying action nets means answering a dual question: what is being done, and how does this connect to other things that are being done in the same context? It is a way of questioning that aims at capturing the traces of the past but not permitting them to decide the future; action nets, even strongly institutionalized ones, are constantly remade and renewed. Digging a hole in the street requires covering it up again; as technologies change, however, many things can be done underground without digging a hole, hole-diggers and hole-coverers change from public servants to private entrepreneurs so that a new action, that of public tender, becomes connected, and so on. Traditional approaches to organization studies, intent as they are on capturing ‘the essence of an organization,’ are not best equipped to seize this kind of process. They need rethinking.



A Time and a Space for Which Traditional Ethnography Is Not Enough The growing interest in cultural approaches to the economy produced, in organization studies, an advancement of what at first seemed to be deviant studies, such as those of Dalton (1959), Burawoy (1979) and Van Maanen (1982). Even markets can now be seen as cultures (Abolafia, 1998). Consequently, there is also much debate about how to conduct studies of organizing in an anthropological mode. There is a growing group, represented most loquaciously by S. Paul Bate (1997), who considers most organization studies ‘quick and dirty jobs,’ done on an ‘in and out’ basis, and who urges a return to the traditional work ethnography: On closer examination ‘thick description’ invariably turns out to be ‘quick description’, yet another business case study or company history, a pale reflection of the experientially rich social science envisaged by early writers like Agar. ‘Prolonged contact with the field’ means a series of flying visits rather than a long-term stay (jet plane ethnography). Organizational anthropologists rarely take a toothbrush with them these days. A journey into the organizational bush is often little more than a safe and closely chaperoned form of anthropological tourism. (Bate, 1997: 1150)

I am in full sympathy with Bate’s critique of organization studies on the ground of their frequent cursoriness. A great many studies reach profound conclusions about humanity on the basis of answers to abstract questions in interviews, which are assumed to be windows onto the depths of reality. But this problem does not have an easy solution. Too much material might be as problematic as too little, as David Silverman (1993) points out. As to the cardinal rule of ethnography – the necessity for a prolonged period of participant observation – it encounters four problems in research on organizing: of participation, of time, of space, and of invisibility. In the case of organization research, participant observation means that the researcher assumes the role of an organizational member (or the other way around – an employee becomes a researcher). This was the method adopted by Melville Dalton, who worked as a manager, Michael Burawoy, who was a machine-tool operator, John Van Maanen, who was a police trainee, and Robin Leidner, who was a McDonald’s worker and a Combined Insurance trainee (Leidner, 1993). These examples indicate that it is possible to carry out such studies – which are undoubtedly superior to all other types – either through exceptional luck in obtaining access or because a given workplace does not require specific qualifications. But even the latter requires some luck or special talents. I could try to act the role of personnel manager but with such an effort that it would in effect prevent me from observing. It would take me years to obtain the state of ‘detached involvement’ that Bruyn (1966) declared to



be the ideal state for a participant observer dropped in the midst of an alien culture. Participation in a dance differs from participation in a top management emergency meeting. It is necessary to emphasize, however, that I use the term ‘participant observation’ literally, which does not include cases of direct observation (Schwartzman, 1993), i.e. a situation where the researcher is present as an observer, not as a participant, as was the case with Gideon Kunda (1992) and Mitchel Abolafia (1996). Direct observation is an obvious possibility for organization students and it is enhanced if the period of observation is prolonged. This is not to say that the longer, the better. The issue of time is problematic in organization studies in more than one sense (Czarniawska, 1998). Consider, for example, the advice that Sharon Traweek gave to her colleagues (science researchers) in her ironic and informative article on narrative strategies in science studies: Our first field work should last a minimum of one year, preferably two; subsequent field trips can last as little as three months and as long as they occur at least every three or four years. The questions and theories change, but we study the same people if they survive as a community, and maybe later on we also study some of their neighbors. (Traweek, 1992: 438)

My study of the management of the city of Warsaw (Czarniawska, 2000a) took me about 14 months, 4 of which were directly in the field. During that time a new city council was elected, which meant that I lost half of my interlocutors. Moreover, ‘the neighbors’ also changed as a result of an administrative reform. The point is that I was studying not a community of city managers but an action net of city management – interconnected acts of organizing. Traweek has studied her Japanese physicists for something like 20 years and she feels that she is beginning to get the gist of their lives and activities. Suppose that I studied Warsaw management for 20 more years. It would no doubt be a fascinating study, but I wonder whether there will be much in the management of Warsaw in 2015 that was of crucial importance for understanding the management of that city in 1995. Particular people might retire or be replaced as a result of the next political coup, but the actions that constitute management will remain; on the other hand, the actions’ form and content might change drastically even if the same people remain, as a result of, say, a new information technology or a new fashion in big city management. There is no essence that I might reveal in time. ‘Japanese physicists’ might be producing an impression of stability quite incidentally, by remaining in the same space. Time and space are irreversibly intertwined in practice, but they become separated in theory. This separation facilitates particular theoretical biases. Fabian (1983) says that anthropology counts the time of the Other-in a different way than ‘our time.’ I will simplify Fabian’s complex argument by mentioning two such differences: the Other’s time goes slowly, and it is not coeval (the Other is perceived as living in another era). Now, time in contemporary complex organizations is This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.


condensed and it is counted in many places concurrently; it is not only coeval but also multiple. One solution to this problem is not to prolong the fieldwork but to study the same object in different places at the same time. Such a move, however, reveals another difficulty resulting from an attempt to follow the anthropological tradition: dealing with space. An observer is usually situated – in one room, one corridor, one branch – although some excursions may happen, especially when a shadowing technique is used. Modern organizing, on the other hand, takes place in a net of fragmented, multiple contexts, through multitudes of kaleidoscopic movements. Organizing happens in many places at once, and organizers move around quickly and frequently. As Lars Strannegård put it aptly in the title of his fascinating study of an IT company (supported and complemented by the artwork of Maria Friberg), the people he studied were constantly ‘already elsewhere’ (Strannegård and Friberg, 2001). Additionally, interactions often do not require a physical presence – Knorr Cetina and Bruegger (2002) speak about embodied presence and response presence, where the latter might not be visible to an observer. As Barley and Kunda (2001: 85) point out, traditional observation is usually inadequate to capture any kind of computer work, and they recommend a more sophisticated use of technical aids in observation. One of the ways I tried to tackle some of these difficulties was by shadowing – a technique compiled from such disparate sources as Truman Capote (put to use in the social sciences by Marianella Sclavi, 1989) and Henry Mintzberg (1979). I followed selected people in their everyday work for a period of about 10 working days (I am not sure they could tolerate more).6 This allowed me to move with them and also to move from one point in an action net to another, because what I was after was not individual experience but a collective construction. This technique, however, does not tackle the issues of simultaneity and invisibility, and so additional techniques must be considered. One of them is what I call observant participation (Czarniawska, 1998), a method I proposed and introduced in a study of a consumer goods management system in Poland. The study was carried out in several stages. In each stage, managers (10–25 at a time) in chosen organizations and under researchers’ guidance collected systematic observations of events (thus producing chronological accounts) over a period of 18 months. It must be pointed out that it would have been impossible to insert up to 25 researchers as observers into organizations in the same branch. And, were it possible, they would have had to wait some time to become acculturated enough to be able to start their observations. This would defy the aim of the research, which must be as condensed as the time of the actors is. Nine years later, these organizations actually ceased to exist. Organizations are but framed pieces of institutionalized action nets, not groups of people and not communities, although for periods of time they might behave as such.



I still use this approach whenever I can because it has proved fruitful. It is a variation of what Spradley (1979) called an ethnographic interview, i.e. repetitive, open and extensive interviews aimed at achieving an account of organizing efforts. Another variation is what I would call narrative interviews (Czarniawska, 2002a): chronological relations of events that occurred during a specified period of time. This is a way to resolve the tension between chronological timing (required by a researcher) and kairotic timing (introduced by the interlocutor). In this way, I can get some chronological frame in my material (another shoe-box), even if my interlocutors switch to kairotic timing.7 Thus narrative interviews come near to an everyday account, and therefore to direct observation. Not that direct observation gives the researcher a key to reality that indirect observation (via other people’s accounts) cannot give. Direct observation produces just one more account – that of the researcher. Its main advantage is that it is what Marjorie DeVault (1990) called a novel reading – an account from a person who is not socialized into the same interpretative tradition but is familiar enough with it to recognize it as such. It may thus differ from a standard account of the same event and because of this bring in new insights – a ‘meaning added.’ I do not claim to have found the right approach to studies of organizing. I am groping in the dark like everybody else. The attractiveness of any approach needs to be measured against the degree to which it permits one to tackle the peculiarities of modern organizing: the coeval and multiple time, the simultaneity of events taking place in different settings, and the invisibility of a growing part of operations. It might happen that traditional observation will be impossible in cyberspace or, to the contrary, that it will be possible to the extent that no other techniques will ever be needed. Whichever is the case, I believe that studies of organizing need to invent their own mobile ethnology – means of studying the ways of work of people who move rapidly from one place to another.

Notes I would like to thank Karin Knorr Cetina, two anonymous reviewers, and members of the research program ‘Organizing in Action Nets’ at Gothenburg Research Institute for their comments. The program is sponsored by the West Sweden Research Foundation and my chair is funded by the Swedish Research Council and Malmsten Foundation. Many thanks go to all the sponsors. 1. It was an important reform because local governments are crucial to public administration in Sweden, in contrast to most European countries, where public administration equals state administration. 2. For a comparison of the approaches of engineers and economists to the issue of cost, see Hausman and Neufeld (1989).



3. According to Power (1997: 42), the ‘audit society’ was enabled and aided by three programs: the New Public Management, a shift in a regulatory style, and the rise of quality assurance. 4. An actant is ‘that which accomplishes or undergoes an act’ (Greimas and Courtés, 1982). This semiological term is highly suitable for social science analysis because it allows the same entity to be a subject or an object of an act. 5. As I see it, my argument runs along lines parallel to those taken by Callon and Law (1995). 6. Following a moving object or practice is another alternative. 7. Which is very likely. Thompson (1978) pointed out that, framing life-story interviews chronologically, the researchers already impose a western, modern ‘life as a project’ scheme. A more spontaneous way of accounting for one’s life (including work life) is to plot it against a circular line: work weeks, tourist seasons, budget years are the contemporary equivalents of lunar months, solar seasons, etc.

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Latour, Bruno and Woolgar, Steve (1979/1986) Laboratory Life. The Construction of Scientific Facts. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Law, John (1994) Organizing Modernity. Oxford: Blackwell. Law, John (1999) ‘After ANT: Complexity, Naming and Topology’, in J. Law and J. Hassard (eds) Actor Network Theory and After, pp. 1–14. Oxford: Blackwell. Leidner, Robin (1993) Fast Food, Fast Talk. Service Work and the Routinization of Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of California Press. Lindberg, Kajsa (2002) Kopplandets kraft: Om organisering mellan organisationer (The Power of Connecting, or Organizing Between Organizations). Göteborg: BAS. Luhmann, Niklas (1995) Social Systems. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. MacKenzie, Donald (1993) ‘Negotiating Arithmetic, Constructing Proof: The Sociology of Mathematics and Information Technology’, Social Studies of Science 23: 37–65. Mandler Matter, Jean (1984) Stories, Scripts and Scenes: Aspects of Schema Theory. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Mintzberg, Henry (1979) The Structuring of Organizations. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. Perrow, Charles (1986) Complex Organizations. New York: Random House. Pipan, Tatiana and Porsander, Lena (2000) ‘Imitating Uniqueness: How Big Cities Organize Big Events’, Organization Studies 21:1–28. Power, Michael (1997) The Audit Society. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Schwartzman, Helen B. (1993) Ethnography in Organizations. Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Sclavi, Marianella (1989) Ad una spanna da terra (Close to the Ground). Milan: Feltrinelli. Selznick, Philip (1949) TVA and the Grass Roots. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Shulman, Bonnie (1996) ‘What If We Change Our Axiom? A Feminist Inquiry into the Foundations of Mathematics’, Configurations 3: 427–51. Silverman, David (1993) Interpreting Qualitative Data. London: Sage. Spradley, James P. (1979) The Ethnographic Interview. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston. Strannegård, Lars and Friberg, Maria (2001) Already Elsewhere – Play, Identity and Speed in the Business World. Stockholm: Raster. Thompson, Paul (1978) The Voice of the Past. Oral History. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Traweek, Sharon (1992) ‘Border Crossings: Narrative Strategies in Science Studies and among Physicists in Tsukuba Science City, Japan’, in A. Pickering (ed.) Science as Practice and Culture, pp. 429–66. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Van Maanen, John (1982) ‘Fieldwork on the Beat’, in J. Van Maanen, J. Dabber and R. Faulkner (eds) Varieties of Qualitative Research, pp.103–51. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage. Weick, Karl E. (1979) The Social Psychology of Organizing. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley. White, Hayden (1987) The Content of the Form. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. White, Hayden (2000) ‘Historical Fulfillment: Cosmos, Chaos and Sequence in Historiological Representation’, seminar at Stanford University, Department of Comparative Literature, February 24.


39 Organizational Time: A Dialectical View Miguel Pina e Cunha

T

ime has been dealt with in the organizational literature more as a boundary condition than as an ontologically central construct (e.g. George and Jones, 2000). As such, it is not easy to find many explicit debates in the organizational literature on time, despite several noteworthy exceptions (e.g. Clark, 2000; Burrell, 1997; Goodman et al., 2001). This tranquillity, however, is only apparent. If we look at the ongoing debates in the strategy literature, we can link some of the most important of them to time-related issues. The debate between the so-called ‘design’ and ‘learning’ schools (Ansoff, 1991, 1994; Mintzberg, 1990, 1991, 1994) echoes the difference between cyclic and linear perspectives of time. The ‘design’ school, which contends that the best-performing organizations are those that plan their future, often assumes that the past is a good guide to the future, an assertion shared by those who see time as a cyclic phenomenon in which the past is often a template for the future. The ‘learning’ school, which contends that the best-performing organizations are those that act out their future, often asserts that relying on the past is a threat to the future, mimicking, in a way, the unimportance of the past shared by those who see time as a linear phenomenon, never travelling the same path twice. Time has also been used explicitly to address other debates in the field of organization studies. One such attempt was Brown and Eisenhardt’s (1997) use of the concept of ‘even time’ to strengthen the case in favour of incremental strategies. These authors demonstrated that successful new product



22


development processes were those that were time-paced and not those that were event-paced. This means that, instead of relying on discrete external events (event time), such as a new product launch by a competitor, companies should act according to the rhythm it set for itself (even time), launching a new product every six months, for example. Finally, time was also used to highlight previously less visible practices. Ancona and Chong’s (1996) concept of entrainment draws on biology to show how organizations often adapt to some relevant timings in their environment. In this manner, they use time to provide an alternative to the longstanding assumption that firms are mostly responsible for what happens in an industry. Regular cycles such as the fiscal year and irregular ones such as technologies’ life spans can greatly shape the action of industry incumbents. Taken as a whole, these three instances reflect the realized and poten tial contribution that research on time has in store for those concerned with the strategy process. However, research on strategy may also hold a potential contribution to research on time. It is contended that this potential can be detected in recent attempts to integrate the opposing arguments that constitute the more visible debates in modern strategic thinking. If the ‘design’ and ‘learning’ schools can be integrated (Brews and Hunt, 1999), if there is a possible synthesis between incremental and punctuated strategies (Orlikowski, 1996) and if external demands can be integrated with internal wills (as research on improvisation suggests – see Hutchins, 1991; Johnson and Rice, 1984; Weick, 1999), then a synthesis between linear and cyclic time, even and event time, and internal and external pacing may be possible. To make this point, this paper draws on the literatures on strategy and time to illustrate how the three major time-related issues in organizations – scheduling, synchronization and allocation – may be addressed by a synthesis in each of these three pairs of apparently opposite views of time. This paper, then, shares the view of those authors who consider time to be a more complex phenomenon than that suggested by the proponents of objective, clock-based, models of time (for a critique of these, see Whipp, 1994). To accomplish this, I start by relating different strategic orientations to different perspectives of the environment, in order to contribute to the foundation of a contingency approach to time-based organizational issues. I posit that, when organizations have a dependent approach to their environment, they are likely to favour action over reflection. Conversely, if they have an independent approach to their environment, they will probably favour reflection and planning over action. Finally, if they have an interdependent relationship with their environment, they will mostly rely on a synthesis between planning and action. I continue by relating an organization’s dominant orientation towards strategy (acting, planning or both) to its approach to the problems of scheduling, synchronization and time allocation. Organizations that favour action


Cunha • Organizational Time 23

over reflection tend to rely on event time to handle scheduling issues and to use entrainment to synchronize with their environment and mostly hold a linear view of time. Organizations that privilege reflection tend to rely on even time to handle scheduling issues, to impose their internal pacing upon the environment and to hold a cyclic view of time. Organizations that attempt to find a synthesis between planning and action tend to solve scheduling issues via ‘even event’ time, synchronize via ‘internal and external’ pacing and hold a spiral (cyclic and linear) view of time. For the purpose of this discussion, I rely on a definition of time as a symbol for a triadic relationship between two or more continua and a third dimension of consciousness, connecting the two continua (Kavanagh and Araujo, 1995: 109), because it is broad enough to contain the perspectives on time under discussion. The major contribution of this article is to expand the few attempts to forge syntheses between two apparently opposite views of time (e.g. Burrell, 1992) in order to encompass the three time-related issues organizations face. Additionally, by using the dominant strategic orientation to provide a link between the approach to the environment and the choices regarding time-based decisions, I aim to contribute to a contingency view of this phenomenon. Finally, this research strengthens the argument that most apparently opposite phenomena in organization studies may be integrated through syntheses. To this end, I start by linking the organization’s relationship with its environment and its dominant strategic orientation. I continue by linking the dominant strategic orientation with the organizational solution to scheduling, synchronization and time allocation issues. I finish by discussing the main contributions and shortcomings of the argument and by providing directions for practice and research.

Time, Environment and Strategy The relationship between a firm’s approach to its environment and its strategic options has been extensively researched (e.g. Lawrence and Lorsch, 1967; Dill, 1962; Aldrich, 1979). The relationship between a firm’s strategic options and its options regarding time-related issues has often been addressed only implicitly, but has quickly moved to the foreground of researchers’ concerns (e.g. Brown and Eisenhardt, 1997; Moorman and Miner, 1998a, 1998b). However, as suggested by Whipp (1994), the strategic process may be more time rich than is usually assumed. One way of looking at the relationship between the organization’s options in time-related issues and its approach to its environment is, thus, to use its strategic options as a link between these two aspects. In order to do so, the possible approaches an organization can have towards its environments are divided into three groups using Roberts’ (1994) typology: the dependent orientation, the independent orientation and the interdependent orientation (see also Campbell, 1949). Although not This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.

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derived empirically, and thus losing some robustness, this typology has the merit of articulating an orientation – the interdependent one – that is mostly absent from texts on strategy and organization (for an exception see Machin and Carrithers, 1996). Additionally, to encompass the spirit of the major debates in the strategy literature, strategic orientations are divided into three categories: an action orientation, a reflection orientation and an improvisational orientation (a synthesis between the two). The ‘dependent’ strategic orientation posits the rule of the environment. It claims that the major role of managers is to adapt organizations to their environments. This approach assumes that there is such a thing as an independent set of external conditions that can be misperceived or not, and over which the organization has little power to act (Lawrence and Lorsch, 1967). Porter’s (1982) five forces model, which allows a company to analyse its industry and select a position in it in order to maximize performance, constitutes an example of this approach. The relevance of this view has allegedly increased with the mapping of the new competitive landscapes in most industries (Bettis and Hitt, 1995), where quick radical changes are commonplace. In these circumstances, planning makes no sense because the environment changes at a faster pace than that at which the organization can turn out new plans and because the complexity of those changes is such that an organization seldom has the capacity to comprehend them (Mintzberg, 1994; Stacey, 1991). Thus companies can choose only to act as quickly as possible, hoping that the few actions that are successful enhance the firm’s fit with its environment until new changes emerge. Indeed, this has been the rhetoric underlying most business bestsellers, which call on managers to create ‘the necessary disorganization for the nanosecond nineties’ (Peters, 1992). This focus on action to the detriment of planning has also been framed as a challenge to current strategic processes and, more broadly, current organizations. Authors of this school argue that, in fast-paced environments, organizations must abandon command-and-control structures composed of specialized roles and should rely instead on nimbler informal, cooperation- based forms such as the network (Powell, 1990) or the clan (Ouchi, 1980). This argument is grounded in the importance that effectiveness has in guaranteeing the organization’s survival in ever-changing contexts. Turbulent environments do not stay in the same state long enough for companies to be able to find a favourable competitive position and exploit it until, it is hoped, it becomes a ‘cash cow’ (Emery and Trist, 1965; Hax and Majluf, 1983). Thus, the most important skill an organization can possess in this type of context is the ability to jump from one opportunity to the next, going with the flow of the market. Firms enjoying such a skill put a premium on flexibility. Their managers’ most important roles are those relating to the collection and distribution of information (Mintzberg, 1975). Beyond that, their responsibility is limited to allowing employees to take the necessary actions This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.


to respond to the current state of the environment (Greenleaf, 1977). This action is coordinated by an informal structure where no control mechanisms, visible (Mintzberg, 1995) or invisible (Ezzamel and Willmott, 1998), are present to thwart employees’ creativity (Amabile, 1998). The organization also seeks to be attuned to market cycles, attempting to streamline its internal processes in order to be able to cope quickly with changes in demand (Ancona and Chong, 1996). However, this alignment with market cycles is more concerned with exploration (finding new opportunities and dealing with new challenges) than with exploitation (benefiting from the present markets and products). Thus, the purpose of entrainment with the market is not so much to plan the production of current products more efficiently as to be better prepared to substitute products or take advantage of emergent technologies or shifts in the demand pattern. Finally, this focus on action also means that the company seldom uses the past, at least deliberately, as a guide to the future. Instead, one of the more important skills that such an organization attempts to cultivate is that of ‘unlearning’ (Argyris, 1993) in order to avoid the negative impact that experience may have on managing novel challenges and opportunities. Overall: Proposition 1: When an organization has a ‘dependent’ approach to its environment, it favours action over reflection. The independent strategic orientation regards the organization as the major driving force of its fate. It claims that the major role of managers is to alter the competitive environment in favour of their organization. Those proposing this view, which contends that there is no such thing as an objective and independent environment, are mostly concerned with market structure. They link success to the firm’s ability to attain privileged competitive states such as monopoly or concerted oligopoly (e.g. Chandler, 1962). Those advancing this view, which sees the environment as a social construction among industry incumbents, seek to alter the value proposal of the sector in order to get a considerable share of the market for themselves (Hamel and Prahalad, 1994). Under this view, the emergence of hyper-competition (D’Aveni, 1995) does not necessarily bring increased pressures for speedier action, because companies are now at the ‘giving’ end of change. Instead, the new competitive challenges brought about by shortening product life-cycles and the rapid evolution of technology call for more careful planning. It is harder to identify profitable niches, and entering a new market can be done only by stepping out of the dominant frame of reference (Prahalad and Hamel, 1990). Planning thus becomes a much more difficult, but also a more important, endeavour. The challenge firms face is to be able to analyse the industry and plan action that alters its present conditions in order to achieve a dominant position in the market and then defend it. This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.

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This focus on a more demanding form of planning has been framed as an extension of the challenges facing current strategic processes and, more broadly, current organizations. Authors in this camp argue that, in fast-paced environments, organizations must implement visible command-and-control structures such as process standardization and direct supervision, which allow for a more thorough implementation of planning (Ansoff et al., 1970). The reasoning behind this argument is related to the role that efficiency plays in assuring the organization’s success in rapidly changing markets. The distinguishing characteristic of turbulent environments is that change comes not only from the environment itself but also from its players (Emery and Trist, 1965). Thus, those companies that are not busy planning to create change will be left struggling with it as best they can. Moreover, customers in these markets have the same price concerns as in other markets. Therefore, firms need to exploit their market positions in order to sell at a price at which the customer can buy (Iansiti, 1995). Organizations that thrive in these contexts are those that are able to exploit the opportunities they create and are, in that way, able to succeed in securing a dominant position in the industry, so that they can have a say in its direction. In this sense, the roles of managers are essentially related to planning the future and optimizing the present (Mintzberg, 1994). It is their responsibility to set up the necessary formal structure to control and integrate employees’ efforts toward the overall goals of the organization (Barnard, 1938). This type of firm also seeks to mould market cycles according to its internal pacing, in order to adjust demand to the technological constraints of the company’s production process. The goal is thus to optimize the use of the production capacity of the company in order to increase efficiency and minimize the waste of resources. Additionally, this type of strategic process views its history as a recurrent pattern where either it repeats, with different products, the ‘question mark, star, cow, dog’ cycle (Hedley, 1976) or it periodically has to alter its frame of reference and shift the basis of competition of its current industry in the process (Hamel and Prahalad, 1994). Taking all of this into account, it can be contended that: Proposition 2: When an organization has an ‘independent’ approach to its environment, it favours reflection over action. The ‘interdependent’ strategic orientation approaches the organization and its environment as two elements of the same system, where they affect each other. It claims that the major role of managers is to take advantage of the emergent opportunities and challenges resulting from the interaction between the environment and the organization deliberately to carry forward the goals of the organization and to adapt those goals as the market changes (Eisenhardt and Tabrizi, 1995). This perspective is not wedded to any particular view of reality. When the environment is seen as ‘objective’, the interdependent



orientation is concerned with managing the challenges and opportunities in the environment to modify its strategy as it is implemented (Johnson and Rice, 1987). When the environment is assumed to be a social construction, this orientation is concerned with enacting a favourable environment that it will then treat as a given external factor for its strategy (Weick, 1979). Although no formal model of this approach has been formulated, the wellknown case of Honda’s entry into the American motorcycle industry can be said to illustrate the latter variation of the interdependent orientation (Pascale, 1995). The increased complexity resulting from the new competitive conditions of most industries has accentuated the need for this orientation inasmuch as complex systems, such as markets and organizations under this new competitive paradigm, become adaptive and thrive only if they have a minimal set of rules (Stacey, 1996; Weick, 1996). These rules constitute a minimal structure that allows the organization to remain at ‘the edge of chaos’, accomplishing its goals because (and not in spite) of emergent and unpredictable events (Kamoche and Cunha, 2001). This focus on action and on planning is a challenge to the traditional approaches to strategy and, more broadly, to traditional organizing. Authors espousing this view contend that, in turbulent environments, organizations that either choose the heavy control structures imposed by specialization and supervision or favour ‘lighter’, cooperation-based forms, may be jeopardizing their future (Hedberg et al., 1976). This argument draws on the importance that both effectiveness and efficiency have in a company’s sustained success. Organizations that favour efficiency may quickly fall prey to marketing myopia and produce at the lowest cost a product that no one wants any more (Levitt, 1960). Those that favour effectiveness may succumb to the lure of opportunity traps and spread themselves and their resources ‘too thinly’ over a wide range of opportunities. By so doing, they will ultimately fail to exploit any of these adequately, thus producing a number of excellent products that no one is able to afford (Miner et al., 2001). Because of this, turbulent environments call for organizations to be able to detect and create new opportunities and then select those that are worthy of actual resource allocation in order to be exploited for the firm’s benefit. Companies that are able to integrate effectiveness and efficiency in such a way are often skilled in planning as action unfolds, i.e. in improvising. When improvising, firms rely on a preconceived plan to coordinate their members’ efforts and to increase their ability to address new challenges with current resources (Weick, 1993). Their managers’ most important roles are those related to the initiation of action and the allocation of resources (Mintzberg, 1975). Apart from that, they often join the team/organization in making sense of its strategy as action unfolds and in using that post hoc strategy to achieve its goals (Crossan, 1998). This action is coordinated by a minimal structure, in which control mechanisms are often limited to goals and deadlines (Orlikowski and Hofman, 1997).


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Market cycles are important to organizations following an interdependent orientation because their occurrence may trigger improvisational activity if these cycles are at odds with the organization’s internal pacing. Additionally, by improvising on external cycles to construct its internal ones as action unfolds, the organization is able to integrate its own cycles into the environment, eventually modifying the pace of the latter (Eisenhardt and Brown, 1998). Finally, this synthesis between planning and action also means that the company has a ‘spiral’ perception of time, akin to complexity’s use of structure. The minimal set of rules composing a complex adaptive system, such as an organization, is enacted again and again, but always producing different outcomes and resulting from different inputs. It is this linear and cyclic progression that allows systems to grow in both complexity and adaptivity, always using the same (‘minimal’) structure to create futures that are always novel (Burrell, 1992; Weick, 1995). Thus: Proposition 3: When an organization has an ‘interdependent’ approach to its environment, it favours both reflection and action.

Scheduling, Synchronization, Allocation Organizations face three major time-related issues: scheduling, synchro nization and allocation (Hassard, 1996). Each of these issues can be handled via two different orientations towards time. Scheduling problems may be solved by relying on an ‘event’ or ‘even’ perception of time. Synchronization issues may be addressed through internal or external pacing. Allocation decisions may be approached via a linear or a circular perception of time. In addition, it is contended that each of these three pairs of opposite approaches may be integrated into a synthesis that best fits those instances when reflection and action are both favoured.

Scheduling Scheduling issues can be approached either from a perception of time as resulting from the occurrence of important events (event time) or from a perception of time as resulting from the passage of standard temporal units (even time). Turning to event time, one could define it as time whose passage is perceived through the occurrence of ‘meaningful events, including those that are related to seasonal variations’ (Bluedorn and Dernhardt, 1988: 304). An ‘event’ approach to time is thus more visible in organizations focused on flexibility, where action results from the response to internal or external changes



or occurrences (events) in order to sustain the organization’s competitive position. This type of management is thus essentially reactive because of its high responsiveness to changes in its environment. In this light, it is not surprising that ‘event time’ underlies most of the major concerns shared by practitioners and researchers because of the expanding perception that the new competitive realities (Bettis and Hitt, 1995) force organizations into constant change and adaptation. Moreover, event time is a more robust framework for managing organ izations in turbulent environments because it constitutes a heterogeneous perception of time, which means that its passage ‘rel[ies] on events whose occurrence is more like the irregular formation of clouds than the regular mechanism of the clock’ (Clark, 1990: 141). Therefore, this perception allows the organization to produce the requisite variety that complex and changing environments often demand (Weick, 1979). In fact, when comparing a group whose members shared a heterogeneous time-reckoning with one whose members shared a homogeneous perception of time, Clark (1985) found that the former outperformed the latter because the turbulent environment both faced favoured the first group’s ability to respond adequately to unexpected events. Following this line of reasoning, it is argued that ‘event time’ is more popular in those organizations that favour action over reflection because of the intrinsic unpredictability of the events that are used to determine the passage of time under this approach. More formally, it is contended that: Proposition 4: When an organization favours action over reflection, most of its members hold an ‘event’ perception of time.1 Turning now to consider ‘even time’, it can be defined as time whose passage is perceived through the flow of ‘equalized, accumulated units [with] non-evaluative acceptance by large geographically dispersed populations, open[ed] to unlimited extension and with no particular concern for the past, present and future’ (Bluedorn and Dernhardt, 1988: 305). Managing on even time is managing with a focus on shaping the competitive environment. As the research of Brown and Eisenhardt (1997) shows, regular transitions and calendar-based deadlines (e.g. launch a new product every two years) led to a higher number of successful and timely innovations than did event-based deadlines (e.g. launch a new product when a new technology is available). Additionally, and to make the point concerning shaping the environment, this research showed that these calendar-based deadlines were often adopted by the whole industry. Thus, the scheduling choices planned by an organization emerged as the scheduling choices of its whole sector (Eisenhardt and Brown, 1998). Even-time-based management also builds on the research that shows that deliberate change is most often triggered by temporal shifts and not by actual


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problems (Tyre et al., 1996). These shifts may be intentional (e.g. a mandatory break during a project to allow the team to reflect) or accidental (e.g. a breakdown in an assembly line that gives employees an empty time to reflect purposively on their action). Additionally, several studies on group behaviour (Gersick, 1991; Gersick and Hackman, 1990; Okhuysen and Eisenhardt, 2002) have shown that the passage of clock time and attention to time limits may be responsible for changes in action patterns, via the introduction of a parallel, time-based agenda. In this light, even time appears to play two different roles in planned change efforts. First, it influences the behaviour of those implementing these changes so that planned deadlines are met. Second, it is a resource for this type of change because it provides organizational members with the time they need to reflect and conceive that change. However, even time is a less robust tool in turbulent environments than it is in more placid ones. Its nature as a homogeneous time-reckoning system (temporal units are all equal and there are no gaps between them) prevents it from holding the requisite variety that more complex environments often demand from their members. All of the above characteristics of even time make it more popular in those organizations that favour reflection over action, because of the role that this approach to time plays as a resource for planning. Moreover, because the passage of even time is shared by most members of the organization, and those of the larger community for that matter, the perception of time can be used as an additional coordination mechanism that integrates the efforts of individuals into organizational goals. Then: Proposition 5: When an organization favours reflection over action, most of its members hold an ‘even’ perception of time. From the argument above, a synthesis between ‘even’ and ‘event’ time would seem difficult to achieve. Nonetheless, it may be argued that an even–event approach to the issue of scheduling is possible. Even–event time-based management is defined as being focused on restricted flexibility, which is perceived as responding to changes in the environment – being flexible – in order to shape that same environment. This argument is based on a closer look at descriptions of industry revolutions, which shows that these are less often the result of acts of creative genius than of a mixture of serendipity and good fortune and hard work. Canon’s creation of the personal copier is one example (Prahalad and Hamel, 1990). This amounts to a view of change and adaptation as incrementally punctuated phenomena, where local adaptations often result in long-term discontinuities, a mode of change characteristic of organizations that simultaneously favour action and reflection. In fact, Brown and Eisenhardt’s (1997) research on this type of organization in fast-paced industries shows that many changes in these firms’ strategy



and organization occur in a process likened to the gradual heating of water (incremental change) that eventually evaporates (punctuated change). Additionally, Johnson and Rice’s (1984) and Orlikowski’s (1996) research into computer-mediated work and its implementation shows that discontinuous changes in organizational processes and practices often arise because of a stream of improvisations (planning while acting) in this technology’s implementation process. In practice, even–event management can be realized in two ways. The first one is through use of even-time management to respond to unanticipated events. As argued by Eisenhardt (1989, 1997), the ‘realtime’ feature of planning in action may be, in organizational settings, somewhat overstated because of the relative inertia of markets and organizations. Thus, a ‘real-time’ improvisational response in this type of setting often allows enough room for interim calendar-based deadlines (even time) to be put in place in order to enact the necessary flexibility for a speedy and timely reaction (event time). The second way in which a synthesis between even and event time may be reached is through the use of improvisation to respond to the unexpected events that may arise in order to ensure that a calendar- based deadline is met. In fact, research on new product development has shown that execution rarely follows the path traced by planning and that, as a result, deadlines are seldom met without some sacrifices as far as product quality is concerned (Cooper, 1979). Nonetheless, meeting a deadline may be one of the most important features of a new product launch, especially as far as profitability goes (Craig and Hart, 1992; Deschamps and Nayak, 1995). However, recent studies on this process espousing an improvisational view, in which action and reflection converge (Miner et al., 2001; Moorman and Miner, 1998b), have shown that this practice can be used effectively to ensure that unforeseen events are handled (event-time management) in order for deadlines to be met (even-time management) and profitability assured. The practice of organizational improvisation in either of these two ways, as a possibility for reaching a synthesis between even and event time-based management, also ensures that organizations attain the highest level of resilience from a temporal standpoint. In truth, the two alternatives for integration between these two approaches to time allow the presence of ‘a repertoire of chronological codes which blends homogeneous chronological codes . . . with heterogeneous chronological codes . . . [which is] essential to long-term survival, especially to efficient innovation’ (Clark, 1990: 137). The features of this synthesis between even and event time make it more popular in those organizations that favour reflection and action, because of the role that this approach to time may play in allowing plans to be created as action unfolds. Moreover, this view of time allows the organization to settle for a compatible (instead of common) time-reckoning system that


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fosters flexibility without jeopardizing coordination. This allows us to argue that: Proposition 6: When an organization favours both reflection and action, most of its members hold an ‘even–event’ perception of time.

Synchronization The problem of synchronization is related to the choice of reference to align the rhythms of the elements constituting the organization. These elements may either follow the organization’s internal pacing or follow the dominant rhythms in the environment. The rhetoric of constant change, turbulent markets and increased competition has been increasing the legitimization of the solution that supports the synchronization of the elements of the organization to its own internal pacing. In fact, both the academic and the popular business press have been urging organizations to streamline their internal processes in order to maximize the speed with which they survive in these contexts (e.g. Eisenhardt, 1989; Stalk and Hout, 1990). The goal is not to set the company’s pace by that of the environment but, instead, to attempt to outpace the environment in order to enhance the firm’s competitive position. Thus, the constraints on the pace of the organization are mainly internal and mostly independent of the environment. This view is based on the assumption that an organization can deliberately coordinate the different paces of each of its constituent parts and integrate them into an overall concern for increased speed. The approach that grants the organization the legitimacy to set its own internal paces in order to thrive in fast-changing markets is therefore more viable in a ‘creative’ orientation, where the firm assumes that it is able to set its own rhythm. This approach is thus more likely to be espoused by those firms that favour reflection over action, because they attempt to quicken its functioning deliberately (e.g. via re-engineering – Hammer, 1990) in order to be able to shape the industry in which they operate. Thus: Proposition 7: When an organization favours reflection over action, internal rhythms are its major source of synchronization. Research on time-based organizational phenomena has challenged the view that organizations can set their own pace without paying much attention to the inherent rhythms of their environments. The use of the ‘entrainment’ concept has allowed researchers to uncover chronological interdependencies between organizations and their environments (e.g. Clark, 1978). ‘When’ was added to the ‘what’, ‘how’, ‘who’ and ‘why’ of change. Pacing emerged as a determinating element in organizational change as research by Ancona



and Chong (1996) and by Orlikowski (1996) showed that more important than planning to speed up the organization was acting to attune its pace to that of relevant environmental rhythms. In fact, this research showed that administrative innovations that were implemented in such a way that action could be taken in order to respect relevant external and internal rhythms were more successful than those that were not so implemented. Thus the constraints on the pace of the organization are mainly external and set by its environment. This perspective assumes that an organization can use action in order to enact the pace of its environment internally, integrating its internal rhythms in order to be attuned to the pace of several timings of its industry. This approach is thus more viable in a ‘reactive’ orientation, in which the company looks to its environment for guidance in setting its own rhythm. It is thus more likely to be espoused by those firms that favour action over reflection, because they attempt to enact the pace of some of the relevant elements of their environment internally in order to be able to respond to changes in the industry in which they operate. Thus: Proposition 8: When an organization favours action over reflection, its environment’s rhythms are its major source of synchronization. A synthesis between these two apparently contradictory perspectives is, again, hard to achieve. However, this is only so if the internal and external rhythms are considered as objective realities, in addition to the need for speedier action. If reality and time are perceived as socially constructed (Berger and Luckmann, 1967; Maturana and Varela, 1980) and these rhythms as enacted phenomena (Weick, 1979; Smircich and Stubbart, 1985), then an integration between the ‘faster is better’ and the ‘entrainment’ approaches seems feasible. In fact, drawing on the definition of time presented above (a symbol for a triadic relationship between two or more continua and a third dimension of consciousness that connects the two continua), one could argue that the nature of time depends on the interpretative ability of the connecting consciousness. Thus, if one fails to make sense (Weick, 1995) of patterns in the changes occurring in the relevant environment, the latter will appear to be chaotic and entrainment will be close to impossible (Bluedorn and Denhardt, 1988), which the research performed by Clark (1985) in a large hosiery firm clearly illustrates. Moreover, although the ‘when’ of change seems decisive for its outcome (Tyre et al., 1996; Ancona and Chong, 1996), there are indeed trends pointing to a need for increasing speed of action, such as declining product and technology life cycles, higher rates of innovation introduction, and faster competitive action (Bettis and Hitt, 1995; D’Aveni, 1995). In this light, integration between the two conceptions of synchronization appears to be not only possible but also desirable. It may be proposed that favouring both action and reflection may contribute toward this end.


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Integrating action and reflection allows, on the one hand, the pace of relevant stakeholders and environmental rhythms to be respected without disrupting the internal pace of the organization. The underlying process that makes this feasible is conceiving a response in real time (improvising) whenever a difference in pace, cycle and/or rhythm between the organization and its environment would call for a resetting of the organization’s enacted time structure (Orlikowski and Yates, 1998). In fact, Brown and Eisenhardt’s research shows how companies in the fast-changing computer industry are able to maintain their internal rhythms of product development in a very turbulent market through ‘multiple product innovation [which] involves improvisation of current projects through limited structures and a realtime communication . . . form[ing] a core capability for creating frequent, relentless and endemic change that is associated with the success of firms in high-velocity, competitive settings’ (Brown and Eisenhardt, 1997: 32). On the other hand, when relying on a synthesis between reflection and action, organizations can, purposefully or not, shape their own rhythms to those of the environment they face. This results from the formalization to which recurrent planning (as action unfolds) is prone (Moorman and Miner, 1998b; Cunha et al., 1999). In truth, since perceptions, sense-making and social construction of internal and external rhythms and pacing occur mostly at the onset of a project (McGrath and O’Connor, 1996; Dill, 1962), where most planning is done through action (Greiner, 1972), one can easily see that entrainment is a process that occurs not throughout the life of an organization but mainly at its outset, where the probability of improvisation is higher. In both cases, improvisation seems to allow organizations to achieve high levels of speed either by taking advantage of external rhythms or by shaping these rhythms themselves. In this setting, the role of the manager shifts from either speeding up the organization or entraining it to its environment, in order to foster a selective social construction of the relationship between the signifiers of time and its passage (McGrath and Rochfort, 1983). Through the convergence of action and reflection, external and internal rhythms are both integrated to the benefit of the organization. In this light, an ‘interdependent’ orientation may be fertile ground for achieving this synthesis between the need to speed up the organization and the need to attune it to relevant external rhythms. This approach is thus more likely to be espoused by those firms that favour both action and reflection, because they attempt to be flexible in relation to external speed without disrupting the pace in the organization. In sum, it is contended that: Proposition 9: When an organization favours both action and reflection, its own rhythms are integrated with those of the environment to form its major source of synchronization.



Allocation The debate between those advocating that time is a linear phenomenon and those advocating that it is cyclic is perhaps one of the most discussed topics of time-based organizational research (Das, 1993). The focal point of this debate has been the demonstration that the linear perception of time is dominant in the so-called ‘Western’ countries and that pervasiveness is responsible for fundamental assumptions about work and life (Katz, 1980). I choose to position my discussion of these two categories of time at a lower level of abstraction, relating it not to social paradigms but to organizational practice. In this arena, this debate mostly concerns the issue of time allocation: each of these competing views of time has important effects for the corporate planning process, which essentially maps out the allocation choices to be made by the organization regarding time, money and people (Ansoff et al., 1970). The stream of research advocating that the environments most com panies are and will be facing are significantly different from those they have faced in the past is highly congruent with a linear perception of time. Under this perception, the present and the future have little resemblance to the past, and thus the knowledge of what has gone before may be of little help to acting in the present or the future (Hassard, 1996). This view is likely to develop in organizations having an orientation towards action, because these tend to see planning as a ritual of little importance and with few results (Mintzberg, 1994). Moreover, these firms also fear that the pervasiveness of the past hampers their ability correctly to perceive and address the challenges the environment poses, and they are thus more interested in unlearning that past than in using it to chart their future (Miller and Chen, 1994). In this approach, managers are called upon to ‘fold the future into the present’ (Kavanagh and Araujo, 1995) by relying on action to handle current issues and by looking back into that action in order to make sense of the direction of their organization. In this vein, a view of time that finds little place for the past is more likely to appear in those organizations that favour action over reflection, because these organizations see the changes in their environments as so pervasive and relevant that they seek constant adaptation. This behaviour has one of its most potent enemies in the past because the past may blind the firm to its present – let alone its future – and may bind it to its habitual routines, leaving it powerless in the face of an ever-threatening context (Hannan and Freeman, 1977; Miller, 1993). Considering this, it is proposed that: Proposition 10: When an organization favours action over reflection, it mostly perceives time as a linear phenomenon.


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Under a cyclic view of time, the past is seen as a template that moulds the present and the future. In this approach, organizations are concerned with using planning for two tasks. The first is to extrapolate the future from the past. The second is to detect which past actions and routines are necessary to handle present and future circumstances. The environment is thus perceived as revolving around a set of stages (e.g. the seasons of the year) and the organization is deemed (one is tempted to say doomed) to perform very similar actions as the similar stages repeat, cycle after cycle (Clark, 1978). This perspective fits the arguments of those who claim that organizational processes can be planned because every instance of these processes is similar to past ones. In fact, Cooper (1979) has shown that, if organizations stick to a standard procedure when developing new products, these are more likely to be successful than those developed in less structured circumstances. In this light, a cyclic perception of time is more likely to be popular in organizations having an orientation towards planning, because these tend to see this process as a way of successfully handling future and present challenges by drawing on knowledge about the past. Therefore, these companies’ managers are mostly busy with ‘folding the past into the present’ (Kavanagh and Araujo, 1995) by formulating plans that use routines that worked in the past to handle the issues the organization is facing in the present. In this vein, a view of time where the past plays an important role is more commonplace in those firms that prefer reflection over action, because they see the changes in their environment as a re-enactment of what has happened in the past. Therefore, they attempt to plan courses of action to handle these changes inspired by the ways they handled similar challenges before. This approach sees the past as one of its most important assets because it illuminates current events in a way that helps the organization to decide what to do, since the present is mostly the result of the past emerging again (Cavendish, 1982). In conclusion, it is posited that: Proposition 11: When an organization favours reflection over action, it mostly perceives time as a cyclic phenomenon. A few authors have already sketched a synthesis between these two perceptions of time (e.g. Filipcove and Filipec, 1986; Burrell, 1992). However, as Burrell contends concerning Filipcove and Filipec’s discussion on ‘spiral time’, explained by the representation of a snake biting its tail and a body in foetal position, ‘how one would illuminate a course on the management of change solely with a picture of the body in foetal position or the coiled serpent is not immediately apparent’ (Burrell, 1992: 169). Burrell’s (1992) own discussion is also not completely helpful as far as management implications are concerned because his discussion treats either very macro phenomena (post-modernism and anarchy) or very micro ones (absenteeism and sabotage), making the task of understanding the enactment of these phenomena



at the organizational level a difficult one to tackle. A starting point would be to juxtapose the prior conceptualizations of linear and cyclical time. This would result in the following statement: linear–cyclical time-based management consists of folding the past and the future into the present. Based on this statement, a synthesis between cyclic and linear time would have the present as its main stage, as organizational improvisation (favouring both action and reflection) does (Ciborra, 1999). In fact, the two major underlying elements of improvisation, be it in organizational settings or not, are an underlying plan (which folds the future into the present) and bricolage, i.e. the reworking of pre-composed material, routines and resources to handle present challenges (which folds the past into the present) (Crossan, 1997; Hatch, 1997; Weick, 1999). Thus, when action converges with reflection, cyclic and linear perspectives of time also seem to converge. In this vein, planning under a ‘synthetic’ view of time would mean building ‘minimal plans’ that, instead of prescribing courses of action, would give organizational members the minimal structure (Hedberg et al., 1976; Weick, 1995) they need for coordination, while fostering action and flexibility. This is close to Pentland and Reuter’s (1994) concept of an organizational grammar that, like its conversational and linguistic counterpart, defines the set of rules needed for variety to emerge, assuming a role close to that of the ‘strange attractors’ in complexity theory, which are the structures necessary to foster adaptivity (Stacey, 1996). In this sense, plans would amount to what Gearing (1958) called a structural pose, a set of behaviours and routines that is enacted again and again, providing the structure necessary for an organization to evolve. Accordingly, when privileging both action and reflection, organizations are using past routines in novel ways, revisiting the past while progressing on a path of evolution (Crossan et al., 1996; Hatch, 1999; Moorman and Miner, 1998a), moving ahead in circles – riding a spiral. Summing up: Proposition 12: When an organization favours both reflection and action, it mostly perceives time as a linear and a cyclic phenomenon.

Discussion Taken together, these 12 propositions constitute a model that contributes toward a contingency view of time in organizations (Table 1), providing three contributions to the research on temporal issues in organizations. First, they expand the few attempts to forge syntheses between two apparently opposite views of time in order to encompass the three time-related issues organizations face: scheduling, synchronization and allocation. In this vein, it is argued that, when reflection and action converge, so do event and even time, internal and external pacing, and linear and cyclic time. The convergence between even and event time is achieved by planning as action unfolds This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.

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Table 1: Time and Strategic Orientations Action Time allocation

Linear

Planning Cyclic

Improvisation Spiral

Environment

Dependent

Independent

Interdependent

Scheduling

Event time

Even time

Even–event time

Synchronization

Entrainment

Internal pacing

Internal–external pacing

in order to handle unforeseen events to keep ‘even’ deadlines and to use this type of deadline to respond to unexpected events. The convergence between external and internal pacing is achieved by planning as action unfolds in order to handle differences in pace between the organization and its environment, without fully ‘entraining’ one to the other. The convergence between linear and cyclic views of time is then accomplished by seeing past routines as grammars upon which the organization may build when adapting to discontinuous changes. Secondly, the use of the firm’s strategic orientation to provide a link between the approach to the environment and the choices regarding scheduling, synchronization and time-allocation decisions contributes to a contingency perspective of time in organizations. An ‘independent’ approach to the environment often appears together with ‘event’ time-reckoning, where scheduling is determined by occurrences in the organization’s context; with internal pacing, where synchronization is based on the organization’s choice of rhythm; and with a linear approach to time, where the future is allocated to the present. An independent approach to the environment is more favourable to an ‘even’ time-reckoning system, where scheduling is determined by calendarbased deadlines; to external pacing, where synchronization is based on the environment’s rhythms; and to a linear approach to time, where the past is allocated into the present. An ‘interdependent’ approach to the environment goes together with an even–event time-reckoning, where scheduling is determined both by events in the environment and by calendar-based deadlines. The organization is externally and internally paced, being synchronized according to its own needs and to the rhythms of the environment. Time is seen as linear and cyclic, with both past and future allocated to the present. Thirdly, by presenting a possible integration between two approaches to the environment (the interdependent view), two approaches to strategy (favouring both reflection and action) and three pairs of approaches to time (even–event time, internal–external pacing and linear–cyclic time), this paper strengthens the case for a dialectical approach to organizations. This approach, already suggested in topics such as change (Orlikowski, 1996), communication (Yates and Orlikowski, 1999), leadership (Follett, 1940; Thayer, 1988) and strategy (Brews and Hunt, 1999), argues that most phenomena that are assumed to be opposites may in fact be thought of as two different elements of a single phenomenon. By providing the three sets of syntheses presented here, this research joins that of those who argue that this approach may be extendible to many domains of organizational enquiry and social science in general. This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.


There are three shortcomings in the argument that must be mentioned. The first concerns the order of the relationships presented in the 12 propositions set forth. It is implicit in the statement of the relationships between strategic inclination and time that the former precedes the latter. This is debatable because one could argue that it is a linear perception of time that supports an action-based strategy, instead of the opposite, as I suggest. Although there is some merit to this argument, earlier research on time in organizations shows that organizations can have an important role in moulding their members’ approach towards time, thus supporting my contention. The second shortcoming is related to the theoretical nature of the argument. The propositions result from the literature and, although this includes several empirical studies, these are nonetheless secondary data that were not collected with the purpose of serving as a basis for the propositions. Further research is thus needed to assess the quality and relevance of the model. Finally, there is no well-known criticism of the dialectical approach in the terms suggested (by enacting syntheses between apparently opposite phenomena) in the literature on organizations. This fact may have contributed to ignorance of the limitations of this approach, thus limiting the descriptive power of the outlined propositions. Again, further research is needed to assess the importance of this shortcoming. As far as implications for practice go, the propositions that have been presented first and foremost join those highlighting the benefits that can be obtained from a more deliberate management of time. Indeed, strategy and time appear to be closely linked. This means that the organization’s fit with its environment may be jeopardized if the strategy is capable of tackling the major challenges put forth by its context but the firm’s view of time-based decision fails to support that strategy. When seasonal variations account for a significant part of the changes in consumer behaviour, it is dangerous for a company to hold a dominant perception of time as a linear phenomenon. Secondly, and more broadly, the integration between action and reflection and the syntheses between the three pairs of suggested approaches to time point out that managers may not be dealing with as many paradoxes as the popular business press often assumes (e.g. Peters, 1987). Instead, they may be choosing between two aspects of the same phenomenon. If this is indeed the case, then managers may be doing more harm than good by attempting to find a compromise or a ‘winner’ between two options that appear to be contradictory, when in fact they are not.

Conclusion The 12 propositions articulated here contribute to a view of time in organizations that attempts to find a set of syntheses between apparently opposite perspectives on this phenomenon. Overall, the paper tries to contribute to the literature that evidences the limitations of linear views of time. If, as claimed by Burrell in his retro-organization theory manifesto, ‘linearity kills’ (1997: 8), This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.

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then it may not be wise to ignore non-linear facets of temporality. Linear, clock-based, ‘best-practice’ views of time (e.g. Stalk, 1988), however, have not been rejected. Rather, in line with Clark’s (2000) reading of temporality, it is suggested that the human experience amalgamates many temporal frames and horizons, sometimes in a paradoxical way. More than viewing time according to calendar-based forms of periodization, it was suggested that attention to forms of periodization embedded in events is also required. There is thus some common ground between the syntheses proposed above and Gurvitch’s spectrum of social time, as indicated by Clark (2000: 118). A further exploration of the relationship between this paper’s propositions and Gurvitch’s time types (namely, the alternating type, where the future and the past compete in the present in a way that resembles the idea of improvisation) may be worthwhile. In arriving at the propositions presented above, different strategic orientations were linked to different perspectives of the environment. It has been argued that when organizations have a dependent approach to their environment they prefer action to reflection. The opposite occurs if they have an independent approach to their environment. In this instance, they prefer reflection and planning to action. Finally, if they have an interdependent relationship with their environment, they will mostly rely on a synthesis between planning and action. These strategic orientations were then related to organizational approaches to the problems of scheduling, synchronization and time allocation. By doing this, it was suggested that organizations that favour action over reflection tend to rely on event time to handle scheduling issues, to use entrainment to synchronize with their environment and to hold a linear view of time. Organizations that privilege reflection tend to rely on even time to handle scheduling issues, to impose their internal pacing on the environment and to hold a cyclic view of time. Organizations that attempt to find a synthesis between planning and action tend to solve scheduling issues via ‘even–event’ time, synchronize via ‘internal and external’ pacing and hold a spiral (cyclic and linear) view of time. In the end, it was possible to derive several syntheses between two apparently opposite views of time and, through the dominant strategic orientation, to provide a link between approach to the environment and choices regarding time-based decisions, thus contributing to a dialectical view of this phenomenon. As such, in line with a long stream of organizational research (e.g. Benson, 1977; Clegg et al., 2002), the model has strengthened the argument for a dialectical view of organizations, in which opposites are perceived as two elements of the same phenomenon and paradoxes turned into syntheses.

Notes I thank João Vieira da Cunha for his significant contribution to the ideas in this paper. I also express my gratitude to the anonymous reviewers for their helpful suggestions. Support from the Instituto Nova Forum is gratefully acknowledged.



1. Assuming that ‘most members’ of an organization share a particular assumption about time does not mean that alternative assumptions are not available. Rather, it means that, regarding time, an assumption better represents the dominant logic (Prahalad and Bettis, 1986) of the firm. An equivalence with the case of organizational culture can easily be established, with some authors inserting time in the fundamental dimensions of the organizational culture concept (e.g. Schein, 1985). (I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer for providing this reminder.)

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40 The Temporalization of Financial Markets: From Network to Flow Karin Knorr Cetina and Alex Preda

W

e analyze here several market configurations and argue that, in the course of their development, at least some markets moved from a network-based architecture to one based on a scopic mode of coordination. In networks, the mechanism of coordination is relational and selective; coordination emerges from passing things through the pipes that link the network nodes. A scopic mechanism, in contrast, works through collecting and ‘appresenting’ things simultaneously to a large audience of observers. The transformation from relation-seeking actors to data and narratives beamed to observers enabled a flow market to emerge that moves across time zones with the sun. The notion flow points to the streaming character of market reality and some of its consequences. The specialized life-world of flow markets is ‘metastable’ in physicists’ sense: it is stable only long enough to enable transactions to occur and changes with transactions. Trading media and technologies have been significant components of these architecture changes – and these media and technologies also display this architecture to the public in iconic representations of financial markets. In the 18th and early 19th centuries, market ‘technology’ consisted of human processing, and human and even animal transmission: brokers received and noted trading interests, couriers dispatched orders and messages, pigeons carried news, dealers traded in back alleys, and all parties gossiped information. In the 21st century, a historically unprecedented, integrated system of new institutional components, electronic circuits, software, hardware and

Source: Theory, Culture & Society, 24(7–8) (2007): 116–138.



systematic information processes make up global financial markets. The ticker is somewhat of a transitional object in these architectural changes. On the one hand, it sustained and continued earlier network configurations built into its operation. At the same time, it temporalized the complexity of earlier market transactions by providing running price- and volume-histories from which new trades could take their lead. The ticker thus sequentialized and displayed past market activities and can be seen as a first step toward market mediatization. Computer-based scopic systems (see the section on ‘Sequencing and Temporalization’, p. 130) imply full mediatization – by which we mean the replacement of embodied transaction and transmission capabilities by a set of technological and behaviorally enhancing components that, together, serve as a medium for the globally temporalized performance of these markets. These systems added to the ticker’s record of market transactions the capability to perform transactions onscreen, sequentialized current market activities and enabled the referential whole of the market to become interiorized within them – they created a market that is now its own standalone world, complete with its own vernacular sociology of this world – all within the scopic medium. In contrast to the material and embodied lifeworld, however, this market is a collective system generated entirely in a symbolic space – the market world is informational. This implies another change: today, markets are also knowledge systems. The technologies discussed here are not simply facilitating tools, but means of articulating, exhibiting and ordering the properties of these markets. They enable and include epistemic functions. With the ticker, markets begin to be texted systematically in the form of price recording. When this is combined with archiving and analysis, market knowledge becomes decoupled from personal experience, diary keeping, and the like. Today, scoping media include a multitude of epistemic functions, and they make available unprecedented data streams processed by divisions of analysts, model builders and strategists located on the trading floors of major banks – in an informational world, all relevant matter is pre-coded and recorded in a textual or mathematical language and in this sense is ‘ready-to-hand’ for analysis. Exchanges, too, attract young computer- and analysis-savvy professionals who push out earlier and older open outcry brokers and traders (Zaloom, 2006). In short, markets of this sort have become financial systems qua streaming epistemic systems. What follows is not a straightforward history. We say only little about preticker stock markets (see Preda, 2001a, 2001b), discuss the ticker mainly in relation to stock exchanges, and then move on to currency markets – for one particular reason: it is the currency market that is today the technologically most advanced market. Though stock exchanges have made rapid technological advances in the last years, they are not (yet) globally integrated platforms of trading. Comprehensive computer-based systems developed originally not in stock exchanges, but in over-the-counter markets, notably the foreign exchange market, from the early 1970s. These systems became This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.

Knorr and Preda • The Temporalization of Financial Markets 49

fully operational there already in 1981 and began to dominate exchanges only 20 years later, at the beginning of the 21st century. One consequence of early adoption and internal development of computer-based trading in the foreign exchange market is that the latter is now also today’s most genuinely global market – and the largest market world-wide, with an average daily turnover of US $1.8 trillion when it was last surveyed (Bank for International Settlement, 2005). Most stock exchanges were originally national financial centers, insulated from other countries by national regulatory codes, linguistic and geographical communication barriers, and traders’ monopolizing strategies. The creation of transcontinental exchanges is something that is taking place in the stock market only as this article is written.1

The Pre-Ticker Execution Network Market Consider trading at the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) during the time before the late 1860s/early 1870s. During this time, two exchanges coexisted in the same building: the Regular Board (which operated on the first floor of the Broad Street building in New York), and the Open Board, which was located on the ground floor of the same building and spilled out into the street. Transactions also took place in the street and throughout the neighborhood. While the Regular Board practiced ritualized trading in sequential form (members traded securities one by one), the Open Board practiced continuous trading. In sequential trading, transactions in one stock had to be closed before transactions in the next stock could begin. The price for a given stock at closing could serve as a point of orientation for the opening price when the next sequence of trading this stock began, usually on the next day of trading. In continuous trading, transactions in several stocks took place simultaneously, and prices changed several times during the trading day. One and the same security might be traded by groups on the Open Board, and on the Regular Board (e.g. Eames, 1894: 51–7; Medbery, 1870: 39; Smith, 1871: 76–7). The Regular Board recorded ‘indicative’ prices on a blackboard. The Open Board paid agents to listen at the boardroom’s keyhole and to go and tell the prices and transactions they overheard to market actors on the ground floor and in the street (Clews, 1888: 8). Brokerage houses employed courier boys to transmit price information and orders to and from the brokerage office and its brokers on the floor of the Open Board (Downey, 2000: 132–3). Price information and orders were written down on paper slips by brokers on the floor and handed over to courier boys, who ran to the brokerage house and brought back transaction orders, also written on paper slips. Price data recorded on some paper slips represented past real transactions, but this information was not accessible to outsiders. It remained private, circulating only between floor-brokers and their headquarters. Observable (to all members of the Regular Board) were only the indicative prices established by the Board, which acted as the central node of a networked system. This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.


The system was marred by high degrees of uncertainty on several levels. For example, questions of ‘Who?’, ‘What?’ and ‘How much?’ occurred frequently in relation to who the transacting parties were and what they were trading. But the answer to these questions depended on the answer to further questions such as: ‘Where is the slip of paper?’ ‘Where is the courier boy?’ ‘What happened with security A in various groups on the Open Board when the Regular Board ceased trading it for the day?’ In other words, transaction-related uncertainties could not be processed if one did not first deal with the uncertainties associated with the embodied recording and transmission technology of the time. The transatlantic telegraph was inaugurated in 1865 but, due to its costs, among other reasons, was only sparingly used and did not reduce all technological uncertainties. Some of these resulted from the repeated coding and decoding of messages that the telegraph necessitated. At the transmitting end, a Morse operator coded the message; at the receiving end, another Morse operator decoded it. This took time and required two skilled, wellpaid mediators between the machine and its observers. It also included the risk of misinterpretation: one or two dots missed by the decoding operator, and the message could become a completely different one. The boundary between the Regular Board and the Open Board also increased uncertainties, since information on the Open Board was based on eavesdropping and rumor about Regular Board transactions. The persistent uncertainties about prices and the identity of traded securities made it difficult to produce itemized and continuous price data sequences – to our knowledge, there is no record of such data sequences from the pre-ticker period. The whole configuration was a networked system focused on the execution of exchange. The network managed the information and order transfer, as well the uncertainties mentioned, by cultivating, maintaining and reinforcing relationships between brokerage houses and floor traders within the internal boundaries between the Regular and the Open Boards. We distinguish such execution networks from transaction networks which existed in pre-computer over-the-counter trading (see the section ‘From Networks to Scopes’, p. 131). Transaction networks link agents who trade with one another across space without the service of exchanges. Such networks were characteristic of the foreign exchange market before the 1980s; in this area, market makers went through relational ties to solve the problem of identifying buyers and sellers and of finding prices. Exchangebased markets, in contrast, solve this problem through the exchange itself – by bringing buyers and sellers (or their representatives) together in a physical place where diverse interests can find their match (see Knorr Cetina, 2005). Yet such systems of representing interests and brokering matches create their own execution problems, as indicated before. And some of the uncertainties of such systems depend on the properties of the network – on who occupies the nodes and how well transmission lines work.



Ticker Transactions and the Temporalization of Information The stock ticker was introduced on the NYSE in 1867 and was later supplemented by the telephone (in 1878), cinema-like screens (in the 1920s) and other devices. The ticker worked as an electromagnetic telegraph that printed out letters and figures rather than Morse signs. It was thus cheaper to operate, requiring just one Morse operator. Data could be read directly from the tape, whereas the Morse telegraph required decoding, transcription and transfer of the message. The sending end (on the floor of the NYSE) of the ticker was manned by the operator who sent messages using Morse signals. These signals were automatically transformed at the receiving end into letters and numbers (Calahan, 1901). The receiving side had two options: it could either just observe the flow of data, or respond to them by sending orders back to the floor brokers. A customer walking into a brokerage house wanting to send an order went to the order desk and placed the order with a clerk, who could (a) send a courier, or (b) place a phone call, or (c) telegraph back to the floor. Couriers could be bribed and phone lines tapped, so that coded telegrams2 seemed the best alternative. Figure 1 illustrates this system of communication.

Observer’s Observer’s standpoint: standpoint: uncertainties uncertainties related to related to execution and execution and feedback feedback

Official brokerage Official brokerage houses: observation houses: observation of of sequence trading sequence ofoftrading prices with prices withthe the possibility ofofresponse; possibility response; response adds new response adds new elements to the sequence elements to the sequence

Bucket Bucket shops shops

Other New Other New York York exchanges exchanges

Curb Curb market market

Floor of the New York Stock FloorExchange: of the New York differentiation and Stock Exchange: specialization differentiation and

specialization

Conflictual Conflictual boundary with boundary with market-definitional market-definitional consequences consequences

Technocentric and altercentric Technocentric and altercentric uncertainties uncertainties

Figure 1: The externalizing network system: uncertainties are transformed within the system and transferred to its external boundary



The new system gave stability to the network channels or ‘pipes’ (Podolny, 2001) through which data traveled. The ticker also allowed for a redrawing of boundaries that determined access to price data. This helped externalize some earlier uncertainties; yet other uncertainties continued to haunt participants. Consider first the new institutional boundaries that were established between the NYSE and other Manhattan-based exchanges (e.g. the Consol idated Stock and Petroleum Exchange) with respect to accessing stock ticker price data. After the introduction of the stock ticker, the Regular and Open Board merged. As this internal boundary disappeared, external ones were created. Observers of financial transactions became restricted to the visitors’ gallery, from which the exchange activities appeared only as a rumble and jumble of people. Controls over the networking system were imposed and access from the outside was made difficult. The NYSE systematically attempted to control price data and to forbid other stock exchanges from installing tickers. These tried to circumvent the restrictions, or abstained from using ticker data (e.g. Pratt, 1903: 134; Selden, 1917: 158; Wyckoff, 1930: 23). The London Stock Exchange implemented similar measures in its handling of ticker-generated data – it supplied only incomplete data as a way of maintaining a monopoly over its business (e.g. Eames, 1894: 65, 91; Gibson, 1889: 83). Status boundaries also mattered. There were long and acrimonious fights between official brokerage houses and bucket shops with regard to access to price data. Bucket shops3 were decidedly less respectable than official brokerage houses. They tried to gain access to ticker prices either by exploiting the telegraph companies’ drive to acquire new customers or, when stock exchanges concluded exclusive contracts with telegraph companies, by tapping into the wires of the stock exchange. Some brokerages also chose to install false tickers in order to signal respectability and to attract new clients (Cowing, 1965: 103; Fabian, 1990: 191). The fights diminished only after a Supreme Court Decision in 1905 in the case of Chicago Board of Trade (CBOT) v. Christie Grain & Co. (198 US 236), the latter being a bucket shop that had tapped into the telegraph wires of CBOT. The Court recognized the data as being owned by the CBOT, but it also recognized them as being fraught with public use, a definition which, in time, gave regulators access to price data and opened new legal possibilities for regulatory intervention into financial transactions.4 The limits on access thus externalized some uncertainties – actors outside the network now had less or no access to the system’s price information and relationships. This once again reinforced the network character of the market. The system continued to suffer from other uncertainties, most importantly those related to execution time and feedback. The ticker recorded all transactions,5 but this did not mean that all transactions could be executed immediately after being placed, or that they were immediately recorded –



there remained a significant difference between private communication (the broker being told that his order had been filled) and formal confirmation (the executed order appearing on the ticker tape), as a broker from an NYSE member firm suggests: Well, this was 1959, actually. So I went up and I went to Boston and I got a job as a, as a broker. Going back to, to show you the illustration of what happens – how, how did we put orders in that, those days, uh, you would speak to somebody. They would say, well, let’s buy 300 shares of Boeing Aircraft. It – they only had tr – traded then like 5 million shares or 2 million or 3 million shares during the course of the day. You would go to the back, there was no electronic means, go back, and give it to a telegraph operator and he would type it in to the telegraph in the New York office and then it would go, then go down to the floor of the exchange, and they would walk over to the posts where the order was being executed. So it took a long time. There were no instantaneous kinds of things. Then you had to wait quite a while till they got that information back to you. Again, they would telegraph it back, get [it] up to you and so, you would never know. In 1962 [sic], when, uh, John F. Kennedy was assassinated, I had a client who wanted to sell 500 shares of Boeing at that time. [. . .] And so we placed the order in about 2 o’clock in the afternoon [. . .] before the market had closed down, and I waited. Three o’clock, four o’clock, five o’clock, I st – continued to wait. And at 8:15, I saw 500 shares – at night, pm – same day – I saw 500 shares of Boeing trade at the price that, uh, I had been told it was sold at. And so, here I was, 6 hours after the order was placed . . . (Interview B1, May 2006)

This situation continued until orders began to be transmitted by computer in the 1990s, as the same broker (talking to another broker on the phone about how trading was done in the earlier days) describes: In the ‘90s we went to the computer, right, but was there any time in the ‘80s that you can remember that you placed orders through a computer or did it yourself, or did you always call it in or write it out and give it to somebody? [. . .] Mmhmm, that’s . . . you give, you gave it to – you gave it to the order room, and the order room typed it in, or telegraphed it, or something like that. So, the first time you can remember actually placing it on the computer was in, in Europe? In Shields, when you went, switched over in the early ‘90s . . . right. [. . .] Even at Shields, you didn’t do it? [. . .] Yeah, but a big order like that . . . well, you would wa – yeah, and block-wise, you still did by phone, but, but then you started doing, maybe smaller orders . . . right. [. . .] [talking to the interviewer AP now] So, he, uh, he had a client, a very big client who, uh, was involved with the, one of the research, uh, services, and then he went and started his own hedge fund, or he started his own, uh, managed fund, and, and he would have 20,000 share orders and 8,000, and we used to call those in. He did it by phone. Uh, otherwise, we, he continued to give it to the, the telegraph kind of, uh, some means of, of transmitting it by print to the trader. Now, it would come in, the orders would come into the floor



of the exchange so that . . . we had a booth down there and we would have, uh, the orders came to our booth right on the floor of the exchange, and they would write it up and give it to one of our, uh, floor traders who would then run over to the post and then, and he would hand them the order. So it was very labor-intensive, from that standpoint. (Interview B1, May 2006)

This execution network implied time lags between placing transactions and their visual confirmation. It also prompted a differentiation in terms of trust, corresponding to the heterogeneity of communication technologies; for example, technologies of personal communication (phone calls for bigger orders) may have been preferred over the impersonality of the telegraph. With their different labor intensity (e.g. sending messengers across the floor), uncoordinated rhythms, bodily requirements and trust indexes, these technologies further enhanced networking needs.

Sequencing and Temporalization: A Running System and Its Epistemic Payoff With extensions, modifications and upgradings6 this networked system remained in place in securities markets into the 1980s and 1990s (e.g. Zaloom, 2006: 8–9). Structural change only came with what we shall call the scopic form of coordination and onscreen trading. The ticker initiated a trend that pre-cast some aspects of scopic systems: it sequentialized the market, initiating a price-and-volume flow that became at the same time an information flow. An investor active on the NYSE since the 1960s describes here the running ticker data: AP: How could you then see the tape in the broker’s office? I1: If we were sitting here in the office and the desk was here – [points toward corner of the office] It would be off – there would be a lot of – the whole room, right? And usually across one wall you’d have, uh, electronic tape. It wouldn’t be, you know – I never was in the market where you had the old, you know, machine things. But from the very beginning technology you did have – AP: These electronic tapes. [. . .] On one wall. I1: Yeah, yeah, like Times Square. The big thing. Okay, running across. Two lines, right? Uh, prices. And you could get the speed idea. And it was live. It was a live tape, you know, going through, and you could watch it . . . and that was important, because you did get a good rhythm, you know, even better than now in some ways. The running tape, people often used to get upset when it disappeared into the computer screens, because you knew, for example, when the volume would pick up because they would go shorthand on the tape, and the volume figure’s a nice drop down. I mean, you got a great flow. Okay, and you could see how often, if you were looking let’s say, at IBM, and you want to see how often it This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.


came up, right? You get a flavor also of the price differentials, who is keeping tight markets. Uh, you could see shorts, which was very important. (Interview, January 2006)

The ticker recorded price data that represented real, past transactions – though not necessarily immediate past transaction. For any securities A, B, C . . . N, with the price x and quantity y, at t = 1, 2, 3 . . . n, the price data sequence looked as follows: A1 x1y1

B1 x1y1

B2 x2y2

A2 x2y2

C1 x1y1

A3 x3y3

C2 x2y2

B3 . . . Nn x3y3 . . . xnyn

First, the sequence provided a material and itemized market memory. In fact, since sequences started afresh each day, at the end of a trading day the ticker tape in its full length was the market day’s memory. The tape differed from previous price lists that had provided only opening and closing prices (and some lows and highs) in that it itemized all past transaction prices and volumes.7 Second, the tape was an information source: it could be scrolled through, prices at different times could be compared and inferences about market movements could be made. Thus, the sequences formed the basis for epistemic practices focused upon ticker information. Third, brokerage houses produced new data sequences from the tapes. They employed specialized clerks who sat by the machine picking out prices of individual securities and tabulating their prices and transaction volumes at different times. In other words, they created security-specific data sequences of the form N1x1y1, N2x2y2 . . . Nnxnyn – meaning security N was transacted at price x and quantity y at time 1, then at price 2 and quantity 2 at time 2, and so on. Such sequences could then be further tabulated in the form of daily, weekly and monthly charts of price variations.8 A running record emerged that visualized the market continuously. When the record was rearranged into analytical, security-specific price and volume sequences, the market for a particular security could be made visible as an abstract aggregate tied to, and yet different from, the multitude of market actors trading the respective security. Re-arrangements suggested new interpretations, comparisons and classifications. In other words, they suggested new epistemic functions. The running ticker data began to turn into a streaming epistemic system. An indication of this that we cannot pursue within the limits of this article (but see Preda, 2007) is the emergence of a specialized group of analysts who began to control these functions. Relatively shortly after the introduction of the stock ticker, around 1900, several brokers from the East Coast (who knew each other) switched from trading securities to interpreting price charts, claiming that this special knowledge could not be properly had from brokers. While it would take some time until technical analysis emerged as a fully fledged profession, its beginnings can be seen in the profession of tape-reading clerks who helped chart prices into systematic information. This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.


From Networks to Scopes: The Foreign Exchange Market How do these features fare in contemporary market configurations?9 First, instead of the ticker we find scopic media and modes of coordination (see p. 133). Institutional traders still draw on small networks of relationships for information and other purposes, but these are not central to trading execution or transactions. Price and volume uncertainties, as well as delays in execution and coordination problems between technologies, have been virtually eliminated with computerized scopic systems. When buying and selling can be done onscreen and at the click of the mouse, the input (previously the order) and output (previously the execution and its documentation) become identical and nearly simultaneous occurrences. There are still sharp distinctions between the inside and the outside of the market based on access to trading and information systems. Up to now, access to the most developed Reuters trading systems and global intranets in over-the-counter trading has been limited to certain banks, and inter-bank trading is limited to accredited banks. Though these boundaries begin to blur (e.g. more electronic systems have become available to private investors and day-traders), there are still crucial informational and other advantages for the ‘insiders’ to these systems. Information is streamed as live or near-live coverage of the social world on traders’ screens, where it becomes visually attached to the main stream of dealing prices and transactions which, for participants, also are information. We claim that the new features associated with the scopic mode of coordination account for a paradigm shift in market architecture. Imagine the trading floor of a large-investment bank in one of the world’s global financial cities. You may see between 200 (Zurich) and 800 (New York) traders engaged in stock, bond and currency trading involving various trading techniques and instruments. Up to 20 percent of the traders may deal in the foreign exchange market, at desks grouped together on the floor (see also Abolafia, 1996; Hertz, 1998; Smith, 1999; Swedberg, 2003; White, 2002; Zaloom, 2006). The traders on these desks in inter-bank currency markets are market makers. They take their own ‘positions’ in the market in trying to gain from price differences while also offering trades to other market participants, thereby bringing liquidity to the market and sustaining it – if necessary, by trading against their own position. Foreign exchange deals through these channels start in the order of several hundred thousand dollars per transaction, going up to a hundred million dollars and more. The deals are made by investors, speculators, financial managers, central bankers and others who want to profit from expected currency moves, or who need currencies to help them enter or exit transnational investments (e.g. in mergers and acquisitions). In doing deals, all traders on the floors have a technological set at their disposal; most conspicuously, the up to five and more computer screens that display the market and serve to conduct trading. In the morning, traders strap themselves This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.


Buy/sell request Buy/sell request FX FXdesk, desk, New New York York

Response Response

FX desk, desk, FX London London

Reporting Reporting Analysts, Analysts, Information Information provider

provider

Distribution ofof Distribution information information

Figure 2: Schematic rendering of inter-bank currency market: traders on trading floors of global cities trade with one another on screen, with the results becoming integrated into charts and market reports available to traders

to their seats, figuratively speaking, they bring up their screens, and from then on their eyes will be glued to these screens, their regard captured by it even when they talk or shout to each other, their bodies and the screen world melting together in what appears to be a total immersion in the action in which they are taking part. The market composes itself in these produced-and-analyzed displays to which traders are attached (see Figure 2; for further ethnographic detail, see Bruegger, 1999; Knorr Cetina and Bruegger, 2002). The assemblage of hardware, software and information feeds that traders work with challenges concepts of contemporary information technologies as implying network structures and network society notions (e.g. Castells, 1996): the systems involved are scoping rather than networking systems (Knorr Cetina, 2003), a term that foregrounds the presentational and reflexive capacities of some media that the relational vocabulary does not capture. In networks, coordination works relationship-by-relationship and node-by-node: relationships need to be established and maintained, information passes through relationships and is limited to them – hence the time lags, trust-needs and opacity of networks. There is no superordinate mechanism that reflects all the information in a network and makes it avail able simultaneously to all concerned.10 A scoping system, in contrast, can be defined as a system of observation and projection that assembles on one



surface dispersed and diverse activities, interpretations and representations which in turn orient and constrain the response of an audience. A scope, derived from the Greek ‘scopein’, to see, when combined with a qualifying notion, is an instrument for seeing or observing, as in ‘periscope’. Like an array of crystals acting as lenses that collect light, focusing it on one point, such mechanisms collect and focus activities, interests and events on one surface, from whence the result may then be projected again in different directions. When such a mechanism is in place, coordination and activities respond to the projected reality to which participants become oriented. The system acts as a centering and mediating device through which things pass and from which they flow forward. In the present case, the reflexive mech anism and ‘projection plane’ is the computer screen; along with the screen come software and hardware systems that offer a vast range of observation, presentation and interaction capabilities sustained by information and service provider firms. Given these affordances, the pre-reflexive reality is cut off and replaced; some of the mechanisms that we take for granted in a life-world, for example its performative transaction possibilities, have been integrated into the systems, while others have been replaced by specialized processes that feed the screen. The technical systems gather up a life-world while simultaneously projecting it. In the case of the foreign exchange market, they also ‘appresent’ (Schutz and Luckmann, 1973: 11) and project layers of context and horizons that are out of reach in ordinary life-worlds – they deliver not only transnational situations, but a global world spanning all major time zones (see also Leyshon and Thrift, 1997; Sassen, 2001: ch. 7). The configuration of screens, capabilities and contents, and their supplying actors, make up a global scoping medium that allows participants to simultaneously confront the market and to be part of it – to be financially positioned in the market, to contribute to it and to feed it with information.

How Did the Market Get Onscreen? The Move Away from Transaction Networks In the 1970s, first the USA (1971), then major European countries, including Britain by 1979, and finally Japan in the early 1980s, abolished exchange controls, effectively eliminating the Bretton Woods Agreement in place since 1944 and allowing foreign exchange trading for purposes of speculation. At the time, the most important trading technologies were the telephone, the ticker, which churned out ‘50 meters a day’ (German in original) of news headlines and price pointers and calculators. Activities on the floor centered around ‘finding the market’, that is finding out what the price of a currency was and who wanted to deal. The market lay hidden in geographical space, and traders relied on networks of relationships in finding and negotiating



the market. In the following quote, a former chief of trading recalls how he continually chased after the market: P: [. . .] So you had to constantly find out what the rates were in countries. KK: And you did this by calling up banks? P: By, yes. And there were also calls on the telex by other banks who either wanted to trade or wanted to know, simply wanted to know where dollar–Swiss was. The prices were written down by hand on big sheets of paper which were displayed on wall boards.

In a very real sense, then, dealing was a matter of establishing and using network connections. The networks involved were, however, transaction rather than execution networks – dealing took place between the nodes of these networks, and network connections were maintained through participants trading and sharing information. In contrast, dealing remained extraneous to the execution networks that characterized pre-ticker and ticker trading in exchanges (see earlier section ‘Ticker Transactions and the Temporalization of Information’, p. 126) At the root of our notion of a market arguably lies the idea that the market is a mechanism that solves the problem of bringing together the diverse and dispersed interests of buyers and sellers, of those who dispose of a good and those who need or want it (Knorr Cetina, 2005). With exchanges, this mechanism is that of a specified place in which buyers and sellers of a security can find each other and engage in price adjustments until deals are made. The situation needs to be distinguished from dealing outside central places that widened already during the 16th century in the expanded space of international trade. This generalized and more private trade is also what lay at the core of pre-electronic currency markets discussed here. As ‘over-the-counter’ markets, they were not based in exchanges – and trading relied on networks of relationships for price- and interest-finding. This situation changed when the market moved onscreen and the scopic form of coordination emerged. A partial attempt at making markets present in a scopic fashion occurred before the introduction of screens: the prices written down by hand on the ‘big sheets’ to which P. refers in the earlier quote were displayed on wall boards. When screens appeared, they were at first no more than substitutes for the ‘big sheets’: displays on which the handwritten price sheets put together by female clerks were projected on the basis of pictures taken of the sheets on the floor. This form of presentation rested upon a chain of activities that was, in important respects, indistinguishable from the one that led to prices in pre-screen times: it involved narrowing down where the market was by calling up or telexing banks, writing down the responses by hand (and perhaps recalculating prices in national currencies), and making this



information available for internal purposes through a form of central, scopic presentation. All this changed when Reuters developed ‘Monitor’, a computerized foreign exchange system which became the basis for this electronic market (Read, 1992: ch. 12). Reuters had perceived the uptake in volumes of trading as an opportunity to expand more strongly into the financial service area and take advantage of the large international infrastructure it had put together for the purpose of transmitting news between continents and countries.11 In 1964, Reuters teamed up with the Ultronic Systems Corporation of New Jersey, which had developed a computerized stock-quoting system called Stockmaster. The idea behind Stockmaster illustrates not only what the first electronic scoping technologies after the ‘big sheets’ implied, but also how the ticker became replaced in stock exchanges: Ultronic ‘absorbed’ ticker-tape signals from all major stock exchanges and other markets by feeding them into master computers that processed the material and relayed it to subsidiary computers and finally to the offices of brokers. As a step towards global scoping,12 the system made over 10,000 stock and commodity prices available to brokers on small desk-units (originally teleprinters, later displays on screen) at the push of a button (Muniesa, 2000; Read, 1992: 296–7). Monitor’s design was based on the notion of installing computer terminals in the trading units of banks, on which traders were able to insert their foreign exchange rates into the system directly, thus making them available at the push of a button instantaneously to everyone connected to the system. It was a reflexive system that relied on the contribution of participants in constructing a central market and in allowing it to operate at instantaneous speed. Initially, Monitor only provided ‘indicative’ prices, upon which one could not trade directly. It did, however, from the beginning, augment and contextualize market prices by including news. Actual dealing remained extraneous to screen activities and was conducted over the phone and telex until 1981, when a new Reuters system (including dealing services) went live to 145 institutional customers in nine countries. Within a year, it was extended to Hong Kong, Singapore and the Middle East, resulting in a market with a world-wide presence (Read, 1992: 283ff., 310–11). Reuters knew of course that for any system to be effective in the forex (foreign exchange) market it had to be available transnationally to all major players and, if it was to make dealers’ contributed data available and be used for actual trading, it had to link these players. Its project of becoming a financial service provider for this market was based on the awareness that a well-established news agency that had access to exclusive (not publicly available) information transmission lines might be well positioned to stitch together this market and sell to it the political and other information it routinely collected. Contemporary foreign exchange trading systems (e.g. ‘Reuters 3000’) are now based on a much further developed version of the original Monitor that includes other subsystems.13 With the inclusion of dealing services and



the more recent development of electronic broker systems (Reuters provides its own), these markets appear fully scoped, that is presented and contextualized onscreen to such a degree that dealing can now proceed without extraneous means. With the help of the deliberate deregulation of these markets by relevant nation-states, they also became disembedded from national political and economic variables and concerns.

The Market as Flow The notion of flow as used here is not to be understood metaphorically. Though we cannot provide a detailed analysis of the concept within the space of this article (see Knorr Cetina, 2003 and 2007 for a fuller argument), we can at least point to some characteristics and subprocesses. The defining characteristic is that flow refers to the level of reality itself, which we claim has been temporalized and streamed. To explain this further we start out with the distinctions between the flow reality and everyday reality, as well as other notions of flow. We then address aspects of the structure of experience relevant to flow; we suggest how the ontological fluidity of such a reality is matched by modes of coping and affectivity that ground the reflex-like performances of market action. Third, we ask how flows are organized on the level of institutional interaction in the markets studied. Fourth, we discuss the market in the aggregate as another level of flow: its movement across time zones with the sun, that is, with the working hours of traders. Consider first the ontological fluidity of market reality that contrasts with our notion of an everyday reality. The latter is a spatial concept. We see reality as a spatial environment that exists independently of us and in which we dwell and perform our activities. The notion of a world onscreen also suggest spatiality; it suggests that the idea of a spatial environment can be extended to electronic domains as these become – for some of us – a place to work and live. The problem with these notions in regard to time is that they imply that time is something that passes in these spatial environments but is extraneous to the environment itself. We relate the existence of a life-world, of an environment, or of everyday reality more to the physical materiality of a spatial world than to any temporal dimension. We also express, one assumes, the durability of the physical world through spatial concepts. The point is that the screen reality discussed is inherently in flux and has none of this durability. Traders perform their activities in a moving field constituted by changing dealing prices, shifting trading interests (the indicative prices), scrolling records of the immediate past that are continually updated, incoming conversational requests, newly projected market trends, and emerging and disappearing headline news, commentaries and economic analyses. They perform their activities in a streaming, temporal world; as the information scrolls down the screens and is replaced by new information, a new market This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.


reality continually projects itself. The constantly emerging lines of text at times repeat the disappearing ones, but they also add to them and replace them, updating the reality in which traders move. The flow of the market reflects the corresponding stream of activities and things: a dispersed mass of market participants continues to act, events continue to occur, politicians decide and decisions have effects. Markets are objects of observation and analysis because they change continually; and while they are clearly defined in terms of prices, news, relevant economic indicators and so on at any given moment, they are ill-defined with respect to the direction they will take at the next moment and in the less immediate future. It is this ontological fluidity of market reality that we want to capture with the notion of flow. The screen reality, in these markets, is like a carpet of which small sections are woven and at the same time rolled out in front of us. The carpet grounds experience; we can step on it, and change our positioning on it. But this carpet only composes itself as it is rolled out; the spatial illusions it affords hide the intrinsic temporality of the fact that its threads (the lines of text appearing on screen) are woven into the carpet only as we step on it and unravel again behind our back (the lines are updated and disappear). As the carpet is woven it assumes different patterns; the weave provides specific response slots to which traders react, taking the patterns in different directions. In other words, the screen reality – the carpet – is a process, but it is not simply like a river that flows in the sense of an identical mass of water transferring itself from one location to another. Rather, it is processual in the sense of an infinite succession of non-identical matter projecting itself forward as changing screen. Common notions of flow in the social sciences emphasize traveling (Urry, 2000: 15–16, 36–7). The notion allows that it may not just be people that commute, travel and migrate in increasing numbers, but that messages and information also move. In currency trading, financial transactions do not involve physical transfers of money; payments are made through adjust ments of accounts. What ‘travels’ are communications (payment requests) and financial power as an abstract capacity. Another meaning of flow in the literature is that of fluidity; it draws on the distinction between liquids and solids. Social scientists who emphasize fluidity conceptualize the current stage of modernity as marked by a transition from more solid forms of order and tradition to structures that are more liquid and fluid, or that are melting, as in Marx’s famous phrase that ‘all that is solid melts into air’ (e.g. Bauman, 2000; Berman, 1982). This comes close to the notion of flow used in this article, but the point about the screen reality as a flow is not that it is nomadic (without itinerary) and unmarked by the traces of social and economic structure. The point is the projection and reconstitution of this reality as one that is composite and continually emerging in a piecemeal fashion. To return to the previous metaphor, it is the emergence of the carpet in episodic pieces contemporaneously with the agent’s activity and the short reach of the



weave that the notion of a flow as used here captures. The screen that rolls out the life-world in which traders move nonetheless constitutes a complex environment composed of ‘walkable’ regions and of horizons that ground activities. The ground may be shifting continually and the life-world is ‘in flight’. But traders are able to deal with this flux; their ways of ‘inhabiting’ it are adapted to the time-world they confront. Let us ask, then, how traders deal with the flux; this allows us to move from the level of market reality to that of the structure of experience. Traders expectedly are well aware of the fluidity of markets and define it accordingly as a life-form (native term) that continuously changes shape, as the following proprietary trader suggests: KK: I want to come back to the market, what the market is for you. Does it have a particular shape? LG: No, it changes ‘shape’ all the time.

Awareness implies adaptation: recall how the running ticker tape changed participants’ behavior (see earlier section on ‘Ticker Transactions and the Temporalization of Information’, p. 126). The tape was experienced as ‘live’; its itemized visualization of market transactions required observation and the new clerical tasks of tape watching and data tabulation. The data streams delivered by scopic systems are equally alive; but now the tickers’ bare pricevolume record of past transactions has evolved into a Bergsonian multiplicity of ‘everything’ relevant to the market,14 as indicated before. Observing the screen has become a core activity that defines traders’ expert work – it is a full-time task in which everyone present on trading floors (supervisors and analysts included) is engaged. Watching the market involves modes of affectivity that we want to call intensity and preparedness. Intensity is defined here as the physical connectedness traders feel with the market. Though traders are not able to slip through the screen and walk into the ‘life-form’ of the market, they stand within its intimate space – close enough to feel every ‘tick’ of its movements, and to tremble and shake whenever it trembles and shakes. Observation is often seen as a distanced and distantiating activity, but intensity points in the opposite direction.15 Watching the market intensely (and analyzing what one watches) is also an analytically distinct stream of activities that results in preparedness – the readiness to respond reflex-like to trading challenges that appear onscreen. Traders’ translation of their way of responding to the market is to say that they trade ‘by the seat of their pants’ and based on a ‘feeling for the market’. The simultaneous progress of two distinct streams of activities, trading and observing the market, enables a mode of coping specifically adapted to fluidity and rapid changes. Observing the market means preparation and tuning in: the trader can spring into action fast and ‘unthinkingly’ when prompted. Trading then conforms more to Mead’s model of a conversation of gestures than to models of



deliberation and calculation. Understanding speculative behavior requires, we claim, that we move away from the decision-making frameworks that dominate the economic and some of the sociological literature on market behavior. In currency spot transactions, trading tends to be a form of informed tracing – a form of following and anticipating the flow, grounded more in a structure of feeling than in modes of calculation. The third consequence we want to point out refers to the institutional formats within which trading proceeds. So far we have characterized a flow reality in terms of its ontological fluidity and multiplicity. This multiplicity is not chaotic or marked by an undefined heterogeneity. Rather, flows are composed of streams and sub-streams of transactional episodes within which unfolds the multiplicity of events. A characteristic feature of these streams is their sequential presentation and interaction formats. Scoping systems include sequencing automats such as electronic broker systems that press incoming demands of dispersed geographical origin into a temporal, sequential order. They include conversation capabilities that offer the sequential format of everyday talk for the purpose of dealing and information conversations. They offer many forms of sequential records, bulletin boards, etc. Traders also construct their own sequences as they move from one screen section to another, taking into account different transaction streams and records. Sequencing, then, is the main mechanism that turns a spatial networkscape into a temporal world. Wide-range sequencing is both enabled and required by scoping media. Instead of leaving things where they originate, nested and hidden in vast geographical space, they collect and project them on small globally shared surfaces (traders’ screens). Streaming things one after the other would appear to be a major tool in accomplishing the task. At the center of trading is the electronic broker (EBS), a sequence generator for the market flow. The system sorts incoming orders automatically according to best buy and sell prices, which it displays, while keeping the sequentially next-to-best orders on internal record (see Knorr Cetina, 2007 for details). The advent of the stock ticker sequentialized the parallel transaction activities of previous exchanges. It reduced the complexity of previous entangled and parallel trading systems by instituting at the center of trading a running price list that presented the market through its previous deals. Electronic broker systems combine the transaction-recording capacities of the ticker with parts of what live brokers do in open-outcry exchanges – the system presents trading interests at the globally best price, to which traders respond by buying or selling according to their interests. What results is a global series of trades and price changes that forms the core of the foreign exchange market (approximately 80 percent of deals are part of this stream according to participants). A second trading stream runs through the ‘conversational dealing’, a system that allows participants to buy and sell within electronically mediated conversations they conduct with one another. As exchanges of texted questions and answers, trading conversations add This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.


more strings to the flow – strings of conversations that float in the electronic medium of the market. A third stream consists of information conversations and personal talk – also conducted through conversational dealing windows, but distinct from dealing sequences in terms of conversational structure and institutional restrictions.16 There are more streams – for example, bulletin boards allow sequential postings of insider observations. On the level of the interaction system involved, the market consist of swarms of forwardrunning conversations that include main dealing streams visible to all participants and various side sequences focused on information and personal exchanges. These clearly demarcated streams are embedded in the serial flow of contextual information and analysis delivered by Reuters and other firms that also scrolls down the screen. Markets as continually composed, sequentially structured life-worlds can also be viewed in the aggregate; they appear as time-envelopes that move across time zones. This becomes relevant when a financial market is genuinely global, like the one for currencies – when the market covers the world by covering the clock. Globality here means time zone coverage of the developed world and its trading centers, rather than the geographical penetration of the earth’s continents or the social penetration of its populations. Such a market flows in yet another sense: it moves in and out of time zones continually, and, as it does, it updates its features and positions. Many of these features have to do with time and temporal coordination. For example, this market follows its own time, Greenwich Mean Time (see Zerubavel, 1982: 12–13). Since the market has no central location, time is fixed to a particular coordinate of the globe to assure global identification of the correct transaction date. A further aspect is that global markets have their own calendars and schedules: dates and hours set for important economic announcements and for the release of periodically calculated economic indicators and data. These schedules structure participants’ awareness and anticipation. The schedules ‘anchor’ market developments in national or regional economies’ fundamental characteristics. Yet, as globally scheduled time points that punctuate and dramatize the ordinary temporal flow of events and observations, they also belong to the parallel time-world of global markets. The market arrives ‘whole’ at every new time zone and takes off ‘whole’ to the next one. When traders arrive at their desks in the morning in Tokyo and open their screens, they will find summary accounts of what happened before in the New York time zone – these accounts are encapsulated in closing rates, index values, volume statistics, intraday trading trends, etc. They will also find more qualitative summaries relayed to them by their contacts in the earlier time zone in their conversational dealing screens. Traders themselves make efforts to find out more about market developments in the earlier time zone: they listen to relevant news services at home, call friends, or contact them via the conversational dealing screens before and while they begin dealing. Most major institutional trading floors also



have morning meetings where such information is reported, analysts’ summaries prepared in another time zone are transmitted over intercoms, and on-floor analysts and economists relate their assessment of the situation. The European (London, Zurich, Frankfurt) and American (New York) time zones overlap by several hours (New York institutional trading starts at 8 am, which is 2 pm Central European Time), during which the markets will not ‘move on’ immediately but will trade simultaneously until Europe closes – the markets tend to get ‘hectic’ at these times just as they will be ‘silent’ when Tokyo is not yet very active and New York has closed. When the European closing time approaches, the same sort of summarizing and forwarding described earlier will take place. Traders in the same institution dealing in the same instrument may cooperate across time zones when longer-term contracts are involved (e.g. currency options) and positions cannot be closed at the end of a trading day. In this case the market’s move to the next time zone may involve the transfer of a ‘global book’ – an electronic record of all contracts entered, including those added and structured in the forwarding time zone. Global books incorporate particular philosophies of trading whose content and adaptation to time-zone-specific circumstances will be discussed in similar beginning- and end-of-day global conversations between traders in different zones. The market as aggregate ‘flow’ refers to these forwarding activities and to the aggregate positions and accounts that circle the globe. A flow ‘archi tecture’ refers to the support systems of these flows: the scopic systems which, through their performative and appresentational capabilities, enable a streaming market; the sequencing formats and automats that supplant network links, the structures of experience that develop and match flow. Flow architectures bring forth a level of integration in global fields that is based on the temporal intimacy of traders – they bring forth communities of time, as argued elsewhere (Knorr Cetina and Bruegger, 2002). Flow architectures are, presumably, not limited to financial markets; the temporalization of cultural diversity they imply, and their emergence in a global world, makes it likely that other areas (global terrorism, global science) will also develop similar characteristics.

Notes 1. The New York Stock Exchange Group merged with Euronext, the Paris-based European exchange in spring 2006, creating the first (!) transatlantic exchange; it has since also formed alliances with the National Stock Exchange of India and, as of January 2007, with the Tokyo Stock Exchange. 2. Messages were sometimes doubly coded – in Morse signals, and in a common language code in which words meant something different from everyday life – to safeguard and speed up communication. 3. Bucket shops were non-official brokerage houses, with varying financial power and reputation. This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.


4. The Securities Exchange Act of 1933–34 introduces the mandatory recording of all regular lot transactions. In the case of the City of Chicago Board of Trade v. Christie Grain & Co., Justice Holmes wrote in his opinion that:

. . . the admitted fact that the quotations of prices from the market are of outmost importance to the business world, and not least to the farmers; so important, indeed, that it is argued here and has been held in Illinois that the quotations are clothed with a public use. (198 US 236)

5. The ticker recorded all regular lot transactions (i.e. in 100 shares or in multiples thereof) on the New York Stock Exchange. Odd lot transactions were not recorded until well into the 1960s (Securities Exchange Commission, 1963: ch. 6, part E, p. 91). 6. The introduction of cinema-like screens in the 1920s and the switch to electronic tickers in the 1960s can be counted among the upgradings undergone by this system. 7. Even after the introduction of the stock ticker, better price lists included only opening, closing, highest and lowest prices during a trading day. The tabulation of these prices required the kind of scrolling memory provided by the tape: while it was relatively easy to find out the opening and closing prices (situated at the ends of the tape), highest and lowest prices could be identified only by scrolling down the tape and comparing prices at different times of the day. 8. Charts of securities prices had existed since the early 19th century, but visualized at best monthly variations. Chart production was a specialized activity, requiring statistical knowledge, drawing accuracy, as well as data gathering skills (e.g. through archival research). 9. The study is based on ethnographic research conducted since 1997 on the trading floor of a major global investment bank in Zurich, New York and London, and in several others, for example, private and second-tier banks. Unlike other financial markets, the foreign exchange market is not organized mainly in centralized exchanges but derives from inter-dealer transactions in a global banking network of institutions; it is what is called an ‘over-the-counter’ market. See Knorr Cetina and Bruegger (2002) as well as Bruegger (1999) for a description of this research and of currency trading. For other trading rooms see Beunza and Stark (2005). 10. Networks are often contrasted with hierarchies in terms of their lack of a central coordinating power. Scopic media are not hierarchies and hence scoping must be seen as a third mechanism of coordination. 11. The general manager of Reuters at the time, Gerald Long, was able to claim by the early 1970s that the firm ‘was operating the largest and most technically advanced news and information network in the world’ (Read, 1992: 290). This network had two main arteries: one crossed the Atlantic and Pacific (Tatpac), joining London to Singapore and Tokyo through Montreal, Sydney and Hong Kong; the other, Europlex, linked the main cities of the continent (London, Paris, Geneva, Frankfurt, The Hague and Brussels) in an 88-channel ring fed by dataspurs and leased teleprinter lines from other European cities. Reuters also leased 18 channels in a new round-the-world Commonwealth cable to Sydney via Canada in 1964. Europlex became operational in 1967. A great deal of the history of Reuter’s transformation into a financial service firm has yet to be written. 12. Reuters proudly pronounced at the time that it was now operating a global stock exchange, since material was being fed into the system from all the main exchanges (Read, 1992: 298). 13. Reuters, Bloomberg and Telerate are the main providers of such systems. In 2001, Reuters had more than 300,000 terminals installed world-wide in all markets and facilities, and Bloomberg more than 150,000. Revenue from leases of their systems amounted to approximately $2.5 billion each at the end of 2001. These This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.


figures were reported in the New York Times on 8 September 2002 (Barringer, 2002). 14. For Bergson, the immediate data of consciousness are a qualitative multiplicity – a heterogeneity of things (e.g. feelings) that are also temporal (Deleuze, 1991: 115–18). 15. This may explain why traders resort to notions of ‘discipline’ to try and recover some distance from market activities, which enables them to act in accordance with pre-established plans. 16. Dealing conversations are subject to institutional restrictions concerning language, response time, confirmation sequences, etc. that are not relevant to other conversations.

References Abolafia, M. (1996) Making Markets: Opportunism and Restraint on Wall Street. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Bank for International Settlement (2005) Triennial Central Bank Survey: Foreign Exchange and Derivatives – Market Activity in March 2004. Basel: BIS. Barringer, F. (2002) ‘Bloomberg, Without Bloomberg; Faces in an Industry in Retreat’, New York Times 8 September: BU5. Bauman, Z. (2000) Liquid Modernity. Cambridge: Polity Press. Berman, M. (1982) All That is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernity. London: Verso. Beunza, D. and D. Stark (2005) ‘How to Recognize Opportunities: Heterarchical Search in a Trading Room’, pp. 84–101 in K. Knorr Cetina and A. Preda (eds) The Sociology of Financial Markets. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bruegger, U. (1999) ‘Wie handeln Devisenhändler? Eine ethnographische Studie über Akteure in einem globalen Markt’, unpublished dissertation, University of St Gallen, Switzerland. Calahan, E.A. (1901) ‘The Evolution of the Stock Ticker’, The Electrical World and Engineer 37(6): 236–8. Castells, M. (1996) The Rise of the Network Society. New York: Harper and Row. Clews, H. (1888) Twenty-eight Years in Wall Street. New York: Irving Publishing Co. Cowing, C. (1965) Populists, Plungers, and Progressives: A Social History of Stock and Commodity Speculation. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Deleuze, G. (1991) Bergsonism, H. Tomlinson and B. Habberjam trans. New York: Zone Books. Downey, G. (2000) ‘Running Somewhere between Men and Women: Gender in the Construction of the Telegraph Messenger Boy’, Knowledge and Society 12: 129–52. Eames, F. (1894) The New York Stock Exchange. New York: Thomas G. Hall. Fabian, A. (1990) Card Sharps, Dream Books, and Bucket Shops: Gambling in 19th-century America. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Gibson, G.R. (1889) The Stock Exchanges of London, Paris, and New York: A Comparison. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons. Hertz, E. (1998) The Trading Crowd: An Ethnography of the Shanghai Stock Market. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Knorr Cetina, K. (2003) ‘From Pipes to Scopes’, Journal Distinktion, Special Issue on Economic Sociology 7: 7–23. Knorr Cetina, K. (2005) ‘What are Financial Markets? Evidence from the Field of Global Currency Trading’, paper presented at the 2004–5 Harvard Colloquium Series, Department of Sociology, Harvard University, 25 February. Knorr Cetina, K. (2007) ‘Global Markets as Global Conversations’, Text and Talk 27(5): 689–718. This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.


Knorr Cetina, K. and U. Bruegger (2002) ‘Global Microstructures: The Virtual Societies of Financial Markets’, American Journal of Sociology 107(4): 905–50. Leyshon, A. and N. Thrift (1997) Money-Space: Geographies of Monetary Transformation. London: Routledge. Medbery, J. (1870) Men and Mysteries of Wall Street. Boston: Fields, Osgood and Co. Muniesa, F. (2000) ‘Performing Prices: The Case of Price Discovery Automation in the Financial Markets’, pp. 289–312 in H. Kalthoff, R. Rottenburg and H.-J. Wagener (eds) Ökonomie und Gesellschaft. Marburg: Metropolis Verlag. Podolny, J. (2001) ‘Networks as the Pipes and Prisms of the Market’, American Journal of Sociology 107(1): 33–60. Pratt, S. (1903) The Work of Wall Street. New York: D. Appleton and Co. Preda, A. (2001a) ‘The Rise of the Popular Investor: Financial Knowledge and Investing in England and France, 1840–1880’, Sociological Quarterly 42(2): 205–32. Preda, A. (2001b) ‘The Enchanted Grove: Financial Conversations and the Marketplace in England and France in the 18th Century’, Journal of Historical Sociology 14(3): 276–307. Preda, A. (2007) ‘Where Do Analysts Come From? The Case of Financial Chartism’, pp. 40–64 in M. Callon, F. Muniesa and Y. Millo (eds) Market Devices, Sociological Review vol. 55, monograph 2. Oxford: Blackwell. Read, D. (1992) The Power of News: The History of Reuters. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sassen, S. (2001) The Global City. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Schutz, A. and T. Luckmann (1973) The Structures of the Life-World. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Securities Exchange Commission (1963) Report of the Special Study of Securities Markets of the Securities and Exchange Commission. Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office. Selden, G.C. (1917) The Machinery of Wall Street. New York: The Magazine of Wall Street. Smith, M.H. (1871) Twenty Years Among the Bulls and Bears of Wall Street. Hartford, CT: J.B. Burr and Hyde. Smith, C. (1999) Success and Survival on Wall Street: Understanding the Mind of the Market. New York: Rowman and Littlefield. Swedberg, R. (2003) Principles of Economic Sociology. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Urry, J. (2000) Sociology Beyond Societies: Mobilities for the Twenty-first Century. London: Routledge. White, H. (2002) Markets from Networks: Socioeconomic Models of Production. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Wyckoff, R. (1930) Wall Street Ventures and Adventures. New York: Harper and Brothers. Zaloom, C. (2006) Out of the Pits: Traders and Technology from Chicago to London. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Zerubavel, E. (1982) ‘The Standardization of Time: A Sociohistorical Perspective’, American Journal of Sociology 88: 1–23.



41 The Night of the Bug: Technology, Risk and (dis)Organization at the fin de siècle David Knights, Theo Vurdubakis and Hugh Willmott

An Age of Smart Machines?

I

n his Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, Durkheim (1912) famously argued that the powers of a totem have little to do with the totemic entity itself, but rather flow from its status as a symbolic representation of the social group that worships it. Similarly, Levi-Strauss (1962) in his account of totemism, argued against the functionalist view that certain species acquire totemic status because they are economically valuable. Instead he described totem-taboos as essentially meaning-fixing rituals. Totemic species and their various associated food taboos are, he claimed, ‘good to think’ with (bonnes a penser). As Douglas and Isherwood (1980, 61) comment, ‘[a]nimals which are tabooed are chosen . . . because they are good to think, not because they are good to eat’. Clearly every social collectivity can be said to generate its own, historically specific, totems and practices for worshiping them. The present article focuses on what we might call (and not altogether frivolously) a class of contemporary totemic objects: information technology (IT) applications. The artifacts and devices with which we furnish our world, as Douglas and Isherwood suggest, are more than merely functional objects. Notably, they constitute the means for rendering the categories of a culture stable and visible. Work carried out in anthropology, sociology, cultural studies and the social study of technology has sought to demonstrate the status of

Source: Management & Organizational History, 3(3–4) (2008): 289–308.


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technological artifacts as ‘community performances’ (Cooper and Woolgar 1994) and – at the same time – the means for the performance of communities (e.g. Munn 1986; Law 1994). Whatever their many differences, these perspectives share an interest in the ways in which artifacts and their associated forms of practice can be understood as historically and culturally situated enactments of order and organization. Here we re-examine a specific episode from the recent history of organizational engagements with IT: the so-called ‘Millennium Bug’ and the efforts that were dedicated to its extermination. The ‘Bug’ episode, we argue, is illustrative of the complex ways in which IT applications have been used to ‘think’ and enact social organization. Visions of organization in mainstream texts tend to go hand in hand with a view of computer technologies as agents of order, co-ordination, power and control. Perhaps not unlike Durkheim’s (1912) Aborigines, management practitioners – or for that matter consultants, journalists and politicians – worship and fear in computer technologies a projection of their own mode of organizing. In the closing years of the twentieth century both IT worship and fear were very much in evidence. At the height of the first phase of Internet euphoria, politicians, information technology experts and corporate executives were becoming increasingly concerned with the possibility that computer systems upon which their organizations and institutions were dependent, constituted a mode of entrapment. At the stroke of midnight of December 31 1999, experts argued, computer mediated order and organization could be dramatically usurped by disorder and disorganization as a result of the failure to fix the monstrous and unpredictable ‘Millennium Bug’ – or more dramatically ‘Millennium Bomb’ (Yourdon and Yourdon 1997). The dawn of the new century failed to dispel the uncertainty as to whether the monumental Bug-busting operation that was carried out at such a heavy cost was indeed a prudent and effective application of the ‘precautionary principle’ that had averted disaster, as Philimore and Davinson (2002, 147) among others claim, or alternatively a hysterical response to hype fuelled by IT consultants, ERP vendors and assorted fellow travelers whose earnings and importance it so dramatically improved, as Booker and North (2007) argue. It could be argued that this very ambiguity – the inability to provide ‘closure’ – has contributed to a sort of organizational ‘Y2K amnesia’. What is more certain is how the ephemerality of the (on-line) media by means of which much of the Y2K debate was conducted has both facilitated and exacerbated this forgetfulness. For instance, corporate web pages dealing with the issue were often taken down – seemingly with alacrity – soon after the (non)event. Social science also seems to have been afflicted by this condition since – bar a few exceptions (e.g. Philimore and Davinson 2002; Quigley 2004; 2005; Booker and North 2007) – the Y2K episode continues to remain largely unaccounted for. This article is therefore an attempt to recover this incident in the belief that the history of the Great Millennial Bug Hunt


Knights et al. • The Night of the Bug 73

provides us with a useful illustration of the ways in which IT applications have been used to ‘think’ and enact particular (historically and culturally situated), notions of management and organization. The origins of the article1 lie in a two-year (1998–2000) qualitative research investigation on the social conditions and consequences of the takeup of new technologies of electronic networking and delivery in the financial services sector carried out by the authors in the UK and the US (see for instance, Knights et al. 2002; 2007 for accounts of this work). During this time preparations for, and post-mortems in the wake of, ‘Y2K’ figured prominently among the preoccupations of our informants. (One organization, for instance, had just issued card-swipe machines to thousands of UK retailers that were unable to read post-2000 card expiration dates).2 Intrigued by observations drawn from our fieldwork and by accounts offered by our interlocutors, we collected and examined over 500 articles that appeared in the popular and business media during the run-up to, and in the immediate aftermath of, the Night of the Bug. In line with Douglas and Isherwood’s (1980) suggestions, our analysis keeps open the question of whether a definitive answer can be given to the issue of the Bug’s role or impact, the order of risk presented by it, and the success or otherwise of the efforts dedicated to its extermination can be given. Rather, we set out to explore contemporary accounts for evidence of the processes by means of which the technological, economic and social threats represented by the ‘Bug’ were made sense of, articulated and enacted. The Great Millennial Bug Hunt provides, we argue, an important historical example of how ‘success’ and ‘failure’, and their associated ascriptions of (human and machine) agency and responsibility, were performed in relation to information technology applications. The remainder of this article is organized as follows. Sections two and three provide a brief account of the entry of the Bug into public consciousness, and of the efforts dedicated to its extermination. Section four discusses the ways corporate and government actions have been interpreted, re-interpreted and inscribed in institutional memory. Finally we conclude with some reflections on the relevance of ‘Y2K’ for attempts to make sense of the complex entanglements of technology, organization, manageability and expertize.

The Ghost in the Machines During the ‘roaring nineties’ (Stiglitz 2003), it became something akin to an article of faith that Euro-American societies were witnessing the microelectronically assisted birth of a ‘New Economy’ characterized by, among other things, a revolution in the way goods and services are created distributed and consumed. This conviction found its clearest expression in the dotcom


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mania of the late 90s. In one of the more surreal moments from that era, a 26-year-old former human resources manager named Mitch Maddox changed his name by deed poll into DotCom Guy and declared that on January 1 2000 he would take up residence in an empty house in Dallas, Texas, and for a whole year fulfil his every need (whether for food, entertainment, furniture or companionship) solely via the Internet. The curious, or those with a high boredom threshold, could view DotCom Guy, consumer of the future, in the course of his mission via webcams (Delio 2001).3 However peculiar DotCom Guy’s mission might appear, it was certainly in tune with the cyberutopianism of the 1990s. It is also oddly reminiscent of the future world conjured by E. M. Forster (1977) in his 1909 tale The Machine Stops. The story describes a technologically advanced world where humanity inhabits the Machine, a vast technological apparatus, which caters to every human need and desire. Whenever (what we might term today), consumers want food, food is provided by the Machine. Whenever they desire entertainment, the Machine provides stimulation. Whenever they want to go to sleep, a bed is made to appear. Whenever they desire human interaction that is also provided via a screen. The inhabitants are thus totally dependent on the Machine and can imagine no other way of life. For no apparent reason, however, gradually the Machine comes to a stop. One by one its operations malfunction: the flow of consumer goods ceases; the lights go out. The inhabitants of the Machine-world who believed that they lived that way by choice are now condemned prisoners awaiting the end. Those who lived off the Machine were about to die with it. Even as DotCom Guy was signing his deed poll papers and finalizing his sponsorship agreements,4 anxiety was building up among managers, shareholders, politicians and IT experts that the Machine might indeed be about to stop. The same technology hailed by dotcom apostles as the liberator of organizational and social potential from the bounds formerly imposed by space and time, threatened to bring the self-proclaimed ‘network society’ (Castells 1996; 1997) crashing down. In the voluminous literature and folklore that grew around the ‘Millennium’ problem the ‘Bug’ came to represent the disruptive other of the Information Society – an unwelcome reminder of the continuing inability of techne to conquer tyche. The Bug was born out of the standard assumption built into many electronic and computer systems that all years start with 19, and that only the last two digits will ever change. At the dawn of 2000, (or as it came to be called, exhibiting remarkable persistence in the habits that had caused the problem in the first instance, ‘Y2K’), expert opinion had it, such systems could come to ‘believe’ it was January 1900. This ‘confusion’ would render computer behaviour dangerously erratic. In the words of The Economist (4/10/1997, 25): The new century could dawn with police, hospitals, and other emergency services paralysed, with the banking system locked up and governments (to say nothing of nuclear reactors) melting down, as the machines they all This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.


depend upon stop working, puzzled over having gone 100 years without maintenance. The cover of a news magazine asked recently “Could two measly digits really halt civilization?” and answered “Yes, yes – 2000 times yes.”

Pauchant and Mitroff (1992), among others, had been alarmed by the ‘dangerous invisibility’ of familiar technologies, which typically ‘disappear’ into the background of organizational life, thus making the crucial and continuing dependence of organizations upon them easy to ‘forget’. Forget that is, until things go wrong. In the shadow of the Bug, the nature of dependence on IT applications was painfully re-discovered and made explicit. Self-appointed computer soothsayers spun apocalyptic scenarios involving the switching off of 400 billion embedded microchips leading to failures in business and transportation; power outages; cash, food and petrol shortages; spreading panic and riots in urban areas; unleashing anarchy and disorder everywhere or even bringing about The End Of The World As We Know It (TEOTWAWKI) from the accidental firing of nuclear missiles (e.g. Perez 1998; Ahmed et al. 1999). By providing the mechanism for everything to fall apart simultaneously, the Bug presented a highly appropriate fable for the self-proclaimed ‘Risk Society’ (Beck 1992). Bug anxiety found its most dramatic (and wellpublicized) expressions in the actions of those (including reputed computer experts) who sought to survive the expected meltdown by stockpiling food and bottled water; by withdrawing large sums of money from their savings accounts and converting it into gold, or buying their own power generators and taking refuge in specially constructed bunkers in the wilderness in a bid to escape the predicted mayhem. In the UK and US, it was the sheer unknowability of the threat posed by the Bug that rattled computer experts and those whom they advised. Among other things, the original computer code in which programs were compiled had often been ‘overwritten’ so many times that the date locations had long been lost. No insurance company would provide Y2K insurance cover – except under near impossible conditions. Throughout the developed world therefore, governments, institutions and corporations committed massive resources in an immense operation to urgently identify and solve their various Y2K related problems thus diverting organizations from the path to oblivion.5 ‘Crises’, argues Ciborra (2002, 14), tend to be ‘somehow connected to forgetting’. Origin stories tend to describe the creation of the Bug as a legacy of the sloppy documentation and programming habits of the 1960s and 70s – habits which, looking back with the hindsight of an era that prizes standardization so highly (Ritzer 2000), appear particularly risible. In those faroff days, so-called ‘COBOL Cowboys’ are reputed to have ‘worked according to whim, sometimes deliberately hiding dates (behind names of girlfriends, cars and Star Trek characters), either as a kind of signature or because they found it amusing or they believed that it could guarantee their continued (re)employment (Anson 1999, 66). Thus, as late as 1997, the Department This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.

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of Social and Health Services in Washington State is said to have discovered to its horror ‘that many of its computer functions, were being governed by one word: ‘Bob’ (Anson 1999, 122). Furthermore 9/9/99 had been routinely used as the code for terminating programs thus raising the spectre that September 9 1999 might provide the ‘Bug’ with its first bite. In the Cowboys’ defence, it has been argued that they were confident that by 1999 the product of their pioneering efforts would have been long superseded.6 Be that as it may, time and technological progress had clearly failed to fulfil the Cowboys’ expectations by bringing deliverance from the Bug(s). Instead, folly has compounded folly. In many cases the original COBOL code has been rejiggered so many times that the date locations have been lost. And even when programmers find their quarry, they aren’t sure which fixes will work. The amount of code that needs to be checked has grown to a staggering 1.2 trillion lines. Estimates for the cost of the fix in the US alone range from $50 billion to $600 billion . . . Whether we’ll be glad we panicked into action or we’ll disown the doomsayers depends on how diligently the programmers do their job in the next 50 weeks (Taylor 1999, 50–1)

‘Y2K’ entered public consciousness in 1995 and 1996. This followed the publication of Peter De Jager’s (1993) ‘Doomsday 2000’ article in ComputerWorld magazine and hearings held on the Year 2000 problem by the US House Government Oversight and Reform Subcommittee (De Jager 1996). The 1993 article begins: Have you ever been in a car accident? . . . The information systems community is heading toward an event more devastating than a car crash . . . we’re accelerating toward disaster.7

De Jager’s argument was elaborated in a rapidly proliferating series of commentaries8 and endorsed by other experts: ‘No one who examined the problem in those early days doubted its reality. No one asserted that there was no risk and that action was unnecessary’ (Guenier 2000, 3). From then on, the managerial classes became avid consumers of Bug-related literature. In January 1997, the Yourdons’ apocalyptic Time Bomb 2000 appeared. Co-written by a software engineering expert who had previously authored a number of influential books on the subject, Time Bomb 2000 remained in the New York Times’ business bestseller list for more than five months, and was subsequently translated into Spanish, Portuguese and Japanese. In 1998, the UN convened a Y2K summit while Cap Gemini conducted a survey of the business world which indicated that a majority of the largest US corporations were already experiencing Millennium Bug-related failures. The chief executive of research firm Triaxsys was reported in Wired (January 11 1999) to have said that ‘You’ll see for the first time some highly visible failures that companies are not able to keep quiet’. This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.


Set against this backdrop, the concept of the ‘Bug’ deserves some further elaboration. In his exploration of the language of computing, Bloomfield (1989, 415) notes that ‘[a]s well as meaning a defect, ‘bug’ is also synonymous with the idea of something small or unimportant . . . a bug can be thought of as an intrusion or corruption in an otherwise flawless piece of program logic’. If that is indeed the case, then the story of the Millennium Bug is strongly reminiscent of those 1950s films in which normally innocuous insects are suddenly transformed into voracious monsters.9 One implication that can be drawn from Bloomfield’s account is that stories about software Bugs are ultimately fables about (human and machine) agency, social organization, trust and the allocation of blame (see Douglas 1992). A pertinent question to ask then, is how were these stories told, by whom and for what purpose. According to IT lore, the word ‘bug’ alludes to the times when computers still had valves. Apparently inexplicable faults would often be traced to short circuits created by moths (‘bugs’) flying among the valves. The term has since become shorthand for any inexplicable malfunction. The causes of the Bug were, of course, well known. The adoption of the term points at a broadening of its meaning to allude to properties of the software that exist, as it were, by accident and not by design. This is similar to the use of the term ‘bug’ by vendors to gloss the faults discovered by consumers in their software. The term ‘bug’ (with its associations of external pollution of the workings of the computer) has come to be part-and-parcel of re-negotiations of responsibility between vendors and users.10 Following this logic, it is plausible to suggest that in the context of the ‘Millennium Bug’ the ‘official’ adoption of the term – (the UK’s logo for instance is shown in Figure 1) – was not unrelated to fears concerning a possible tidal wave of litigation (against IT designers, vendors or consultants) in the wake of year 2000-related computer failures. The notion of a ‘Millennium Bug’ provided a useful rhetorical device for bringing together diverse interests by suggesting a common enemy. Thompson (1967, 159) has described uncertainty as the fundamental problem of organization, and identified coping with uncertainty as being ‘the essence of the administrative process’. Occidental management practitioners have long employed computer technology as a key weapon in their prosecution of what Bauman (1991, 3) calls, a ‘relentless war’ against uncertainty and ambivalence. Under the shadow of the Bug, however, management could no longer rely upon its information technologies, which now had themselves become irredeemably ensnared in undecidability and ambivalence. Not unlike Plato’s pharmakon in Derrida’s (1981) analysis of Phaedrus, computer code was being simultaneously hailed as the ultimate ‘cure’ for all organizational ills and feared as a poison ‘a slow accumulation of arsenic’ as Jones (1998, 19) describes it, active at the very ‘heart’ of contemporary organization.11 This poison was all the more sinister for being colourless and odourless: Millennium Bug narratives often represented modern technology as almost


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Figure 1: The ‘Millennium Bug’

beyond human comprehension and control. A striking feature of the way the Millennium Bug debate was conducted from the mid- to late-1990s is the compromised status of relevant knowledge and expertise. Historically, decision makers such as managers and politicians have been consumers of advice purveyed by IT specialists. Those endowed with expert knowledge of the mysterious workings of the machine would frame problems and solutions for consideration and adoption by their less ‘computer literate’ managerial and political clients. In the era of ‘Y2K’, however, many experts reported their own bafflement. Their advice and predictions appeared mired in uncertainty and ambiguity. In the face of such uncertainty and disillusionment with established sources of expertise, the late 1990s witnessed much jockeying for claims to Y2K expertise. This included the emergence of a bewildering variety of (self-help) experts in Y2K survival. Ironically, the Internet became the premium channel for the dissemination of advice on everything from how to secure your assets by purchasing gold, to how to survive the ravages of the coming Apocalypse on a diet of earthworms: ‘I know [earthworms] may not sound appetizing now, but if you are starving they will taste wonderful. And they will save your life’.12



Premonitions of the End of the World as We Know It I bought this book [Anderson 1999] about a month ago and followed everything the book said. It will take awhile but I believe I will be prepared for Y2K. I took all of my husband’s money to buy a power generator. I have been burying food in the backyard. I bought 30 sf freezer and have filled it with Bird Pies. I plan on going out and buying 6 months supply of drinking water next week. I know we are facing armaggedon but with the help of this great book, I think we will be one of the few survivors. (Reader review at amazon.com, November 18, 1999)13

It is arguably the very imagery associated with information technology as a privileged instrument of reason and organization that makes the corrosive specter of failure stand out more starkly than in other domains. In the attribution of failure to computer technologies, the expectation of efficiency, mastery and control is disappointed. Computer failures are, so to speak, the revenge of Information Society’s repressed, the (re-)occurrence of what has been denied. As titles like ‘Powerless’, ‘Doomsday 2000’ or How to Survive Y2K Chaos in the City (e.g. De Jager 1993; Eirich and Eirich 1998; Leslie 1999) indicate, underpinning many narrations of the significance of ‘Y2K’ was an anxiety that at the stroke of midnight, the magic of the information society might fail and the world could descend into chaos. Social organization, the message was, existed in the shadow of the Bug, thus making Y2K a leading contender for the title of risk society’s (Beck 1995) greatest nightmare. All information technology applications, from the safety-critical systems running power plants and military installations, to everyday consumer appliances such as toasters, kettles or VCRs, were now under suspicion. With machines rejecting human control, panic and civil unrest could ensue as basic goods such as food and water became scarce: ‘The economy worldwide would stop . . . you would not have hot water. You would not have power’ (De Jager 1993). Relatively few with any real influence could afford to listen to dissenting voices that were questioning the received wisdom (cf Gutteling and Kuttschreuter 2002).14 As the UK’s TaskForce 2000 chief Robin Guenier put it in a 1997 conference, The side effects will be horrifying – from social security payments to power system failures to payroll problems to food-retailing to bank accounts; very many files will be inaccessible and therefore effectively lost . . . It is the most expensive single technical and professional problem facing humanity (The Guardian, 1997).

Y2K was viewed as an acute problem of manageability and governability.15 In the US, every state governor ordered the activation of emergency operations in readiness for the Night of the Bug, even though 49 out of 50 state authorities answered ‘No’ when asked if they were concerned that they


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had any computer systems that would not operate after December 31. The spokesperson for the one exception – Pennsylvania – defended the expression of continuing concern simply by noting that ‘any program could fail’ even though, like elsewhere, technology experts hired by the state had laboured for three years to fix the anticipated problems and no critical system could be identified that was liable to fail.16 Or take banking. Gary North has compiled a list of hundreds of articles that broadly supported his contention, prior to the Night of the Bug, that sometime before June or July 2000, ‘depositors may see how their money may disappear in the scrambling of the bank’s computers’. They will then demand payment in cash, resulting in ‘the mother of all bank runs. It will spread to every bank on earth’ (Steven Hock, Chief Executive of research firm Triaxsys).17 A survey of US financial institutions conducted in 1997 by the Hart-Riehle-Hartwig Research Group found 66 percent of respondents indicating that they expected the problem to hit their PC Networks, while 55 percent said that the compliance issues would affect most of their software survey (see Business Wire, 1997). In January 1999 Wired ran an article titled ‘Are You On the Leper List?’ (Ante, 1999). This reports the requirement upon federally insured banks by the US Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council (FFIEC) to evaluate borrowers on the basis of Y2K compliance. The information contained in these reports was often not made publicly available, however, ‘leper lists’ were compiled by other interested parties. For example, Weiss Ratings released its own survey of banks and savings and loans companies in which 127 out of 1,500 institutions scored ‘below average’ (Weiss Ratings, 2000). A key aspect of the manageability problems posed by Y2K concerned the management of public expectations and anxieties. In September 1997 the incoming UK Labour government addressed the Y2K issue by setting up and funding a private company – Action 2000 – on the understanding that ‘the business community was more likely to act on the advice of a high-profile independent spokesperson with experience of the private sector’ (Modernising Government in Action: Appendix ii). The outgoing Conservative administration had provided funding to the Computing Services and Software Association to support its TaskForce 2000 which had been an industry initiative. The extensive UK government publicity campaign conducted over the next three years echoed the approach which had been adopted in the earlier ‘AIDS awareness’ campaign: ‘Don’t Die Of Ignorance’. The campaign thus aimed to persuade a potentially apathetic public that the Bug was everywhere and thus everybody’s problem. In January 1998 Prime Minister Blair raised the ‘100-week Millennium Bug Alarm’. A series of booklets were produced ranging from Home Check issued in October 1998 to all UK householders, to a Last Chance guide issued in September 1999 to 1.3 million businesses. Quigley (2005, 269) argues that the UK and US governments devised their



Bug awareness campaigns ‘so that people and organizations would fix their systems and the government would thereby secure stability in the face of uncertainty’. But the governments’ ‘approach to raising awareness helped to generate uncertainty in its own right . . . the US government, in particular, was worried that it had done too good a job, and that public overreaction became a distinct possibility’. In light ‘of the potential consequences of public panic’ the two governments ‘therefore embarked on a strategy of bringing public anxiety down’ (Quigley 2005, 269). However, even if individual systems in the US or the UK could be rendered Y2K compliant in time, they and the organizations that housed them were still vulnerable to failures elsewhere in the global network. Manuel Castells, author-laureate of the Network Society, had argued at (great) length (1996; 1997; 2000) that in the information age, network space has superceded physical space. The various ‘flows of capital, flows of information, flows of technology, flows of organizational interactions, flows of images, sounds and symbols’ (Castells 1996, 412) that constitute the ‘network society’ are accomplished via a multitude of computer enacted interconnections and interdependencies, each of them liable to failure on the night. On that particular night in December then, there was going to be no such thing as a ‘safe place’ in a ‘tightly coupled’ networked world. Narratives of the Bug were therefore narratives of boundary breakdown. Among the Great and the Good in the US, the UK and elsewhere in the ‘First World’ there was very great anxiety about the (in)ability of other, ‘less advanced’ countries to prepare themselves in time for the night of the two zeros.18 For the ‘well organized’, such as the US, and the disorganized such as Russia and Italy (the usual suspects), or for that matter Japan (which had by then fallen out of favour with business commentators) – to say nothing of ‘Third World’ countries – were all inextricably networked with one another. Nowhere did the Millennium Bug problem appear more pressing than in the case of the computers controlling the world’s nuclear arsenals (see Ahmed et. al. 1999). Doomsday scenarios were even circulated in which Russia’s military computers, being out of date and unable to deal with the Bug, might launch their missiles automatically. Once the [Russian] system collapses including the computers connecting the silos to the main system, the missile silos in Russia will assume that Moscow has been vaporized and automatically retarget their missiles at the United States. After this occurs, launching would commence. The result would be a full scale nuclear attack. (Perez 1998, 4).

In accordance with the Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) doctrine, the United States would in turn launch its own missiles and the world as we know it would be at an end. ‘Smart Machines’ it was feared, might indeed start exercising agency by themselves and with disastrous consequences.


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The Great Millennial Bug Hunt [On the night of December 31st] U.S. and Russian military officers . . . who were there to make sure no nukes accidentally went off, labored to keep busy, channel surfing . . . and showing one another Russian Internet fare . . . When the clocks changed in Moscow and no Bugs were reported, the Russian team applauded and U.S. Major General Thomas Goslin Jr. congratulated Russian group leader Colonel Sergey Kaplin. He may have deserved even more congratulations. Russia spent $4 million on Y2K military preparations while the U.S. spent nearly $4 billion. In fact, Americans spent an estimated $100 billion to be ready on all fronts, from telecommunications to sewage treatment (Stein 2000).

Whilst there were various Y2K-related problems throughout the world both before and after the night of the Bug, these tended to be minor annoyances rather than calamities (e.g. Manion and Evan 2000). None matched the expectations stoked up by the doomsayers and therefore received little media coverage. The absence of significant ‘Bug damage’ stories is significant, as tales of Y2K-related failures among the unready would have provided important discursive support for the efficacy of, and justification for, the scare and expense of Bug-busting efforts. How, then, was this lack of evidence of mayhem and disaster interpreted? Governments and corporations that spent millions of dollars on this mission mainly responded by confirming the wisdom of their actions. A Report issued by the UK government in April 2000 detailed the elaborate lengths (and associated costs) to which it went to support the Bug busters in their search and destroy mission. Subtitled ‘Realizing the Benefits of Y2K’ the report was unremittingly self-congratulatory. The Foreword, jointly authored by the Minister (Margaret Beckett) responsible for addressing ‘the year 2000 problem’ and the Secretary of the Cabinet and the Head of the Civil Service (Sir Richard Wilson) celebrates the high priority placed by the Government on squashing the Bug, claiming that the ‘UK became an acknowledged global leader and influence in addressing this issue’. The foreword also stressed the ‘enormous amount of work [that] was put into identifying, fixing and testing Bug problems’. Across the government, more than 300,000 critical systems were checked. In the Ministry of Defense alone the effort to eliminate the Bug involved 1350 staff at its peak and cost about £150 million. The Inland Revenue spent £30 million in tackling the Bug, a figure that is justified in the Report by suggesting that the cost of dealing with a systems failure could have been 10 times this amount (Modernising Government in Action: 10).19 It is the writers of histories that get to name the winners. According to the UK Government’s brief history of the conquest of the Bug, it was defeated because the Government, together with business, which it galvanized into action, committed sufficient resources to its elimination. The Report acknowledges that some fears of the Bug may have been exaggerated, but



argues that the Government played a central role in allaying anxieties as well as educating its citizens about how to avoid or minimize its anticipated effects. The verdict of the Report was that ‘the hard work paid off. The UK passed into the year 2000 without any significant problems’ (Modernising Government in Action: 10). The Y2K project was ‘one project which could not – and did not – come in late’ (Modernising Government in Action, 3). Evidence offered in support of the claim that the project was a success consisted in pointing out that the Night of the Bug came and went without incident. In 77 pages there is hardly a hint of any lessons learned about whether the exercise was cost-effective. This contrasted with the many pages devoted to the lessons allegedly learned about the value of public/private partnerships20 and a multitude of other benefits relating to how the government ‘manages its business’, such as its ‘promotion of a wider understanding of the role and importance of IT in service delivery and more fully integrated IT into senior managers’ thinking’ (Modernising Government in Action, 5). In this respect, the Report was not unequivocal. Whilst the Bug extermination mission was declared an unqualified success the objective of the mission was subtly redefined in a way that justified the resources it consumed in terms other than (merely) zapping the Bug. The responsible Minister, Margaret Beckett, stated in a press release issued by the Cabinet Office on the day of the Report’s publication that: The work that was done, in both private and public sectors has had benefits that go far beyond simply beating the Bug . . . Increasing the focus on the business role of IT means that many organizations are now better placed than they would otherwise have been to meet the challenges of e-commerce.21

The ‘Foreword’ to the Report also redefined the terrain by claiming that ‘the Bug was not an IT issue’. The real objective of the Government was not, as the Prime Minister himself had put it in his January 1998 ‘Bug Alarm’ speech, to ensure that the national infrastructure was as ready as it could on the Night, that specific problems in the public sector were dealt with, and that awareness and that action was promoted in the private sector. Instead, post the Night of the Bug, the objective was redefined, as ‘a business issue’ and not an IT one. Why was it a business issue? It was an issue because a focus upon the Bug had, according to the foreword to the Report ‘forced IT out of the back room and into the boardroom’ (ibid, 3). According to the report then, the Great Bug Hunt was essentially an expensive ‘cure’ for the institu tional forgetfulness of the technological identified for example by Pauchant and Mitroff (1992). As a consequence, it was claimed, ‘both business and Government are now better equipped for the technological and management challenges of this century’ (ibid, 3). The defense of Y2K spending was being conducted in the face of a perception that, spurred on by Government, business may had committed massive This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.

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resources to zapping a Bug that had been readily dealt with in countries that had not sponsored elaborate and costly Bug hunts. Those of a skeptical disposition might see here an example of the ways that social collectivities deal with ‘cognitive dissonance’ (Festinger et al. 1964). Festinger and his associates studied the reaction of the disciples of a certain Marian Keetch who sat, awaiting, while December 21, 1955 passed without the cataclysm predicted by her contact on planet Clarion. ‘The key for them’, Festinger et al. (op. cit) notes, ‘was to come up with a good reason to explain [this absence] . . . . In this case, Mrs. Keetch declared that the faith of her group had caused God to cancel the destruction of the world’. In fact, the remaining Keetch adherents became more active proselytizers following this compelling demonstration of the power of their faith. Likewise, to doubters, the news that, in the euphoria of the post Y2K triumph, Ministers ‘were considering whether to continue the model of Action 2000, a private limited company that advised businesses free on Y2K, to promote other technology issues such as e-commerce, particularly among small businesses’ (Grande 2000, 6) might bring to mind parallels with the Keetch sect’s post-cataclysm proselytizing enterprise.

On the Construction of Pests, Problems and Potions One approach to the ‘what happened’ question is to consider some reflections of Robin Guenier, Executive Director of Taskforce 2000. In an article titled ‘Y2K – What Really Happened?’ he noted that ‘as little seems to have happened’, commentators have been suggesting that much of the worldwide spending of an estimated £300–400 billion was unjustified. Yet, he went on to observe, ‘there is little sign of a serious review of what happened’. His own assessment was that there had been no unexceptional overspending given the size of the projects involved; that there was no fraud; and that there was no hype, only some ignorance and misinformation and exaggeration by journalists. He echoed the Government’s message that ‘dedicated and hardworking people did a huge amount of work’.22 Concerning the sensitive question of why the world did not come to an end in countries where equivalent precautionary spending had not been incurred, such as Russia and Italy, his explanations can be summarized as follows: • Developing countries are less technologically dependent, are more used to things going wrong and better able to cope when they do – an interesting reversal in which technological ‘backwardness’ becomes a source of strength rather than the root cause of instability, risk and danger. • The Y2K problem was essentially a problem for bigger, more complex organizations. • In Spain and Italy, insofar as large corporations are global not national in nature, they did not ignore the Y2K problem.



Guenier concedes that ‘it is difficult to believe that every organization got it right, that every programme was finished on time, that nothing of significance was missed – throughout the entire developed world’. His is then a rather heavily qualified justification for the massive spending, given the absence of hard evidence to support the apocalyptic claims made in relation to the Bug. To his credit, the person most closely linked to Bug fever, Peter De Jager (2000, 1) also addressed the question of ‘why were places like Italy not impacted by Y2K?’ noting how his ‘view of the problem is contradicted by a fact I cannot refute, and make no attempt to’ (ibid). After a close examination of his understanding of the technical nature of the problem, De Jager repeated his view, shared by many others, that ‘there would be enough 99/00 boundary crossings ‘to make a decision to do little or nothing about the risk’ an example of gross negligence. ‘I could not in good conscience advise anyone to ignore this problem and only worry about the problem when it occurs’ (ibid, 5). Anyone who accused him, or others like him, of scare-mongering or preying upon public fears, De Jager concluded, ‘should have the decency to admit that the only reason we can be judged harshly at this point is with the impunity of 20/20 hindsight. We chose the safer, but more expensive, path into the future’ (ibid). Those who failed to take such precautions are regarded as gamblers or reckless decision-makers who ‘did not choose that path after careful consideration of the issues’. They ignored the problem entirely and were lucky that our considered and carefully weighed risk avoidance strategy was, with 20/20 hindsight, faulty (ibid, 5).

Another possible interpretation was afforded by those who believed as fervently as the doom merchants that Y2K was not a threat but rather, a hoax or scam of monumental proportions. Notably, David Loblaw established a website in 1997 entitled Year 2000 Computer Bug Hoax that explicated this view of Y2K and provided extensive links to skeptical commentaries.23 The message of this site is summed up in the claim that ‘No one who is making money on it or whose reputation is on the line is going to drop their poker face until 01/01/00’. To such skeptics, opinion leaders in America and the UK, at least, had been victims of a mass hysteria comparable to the Dutch tulip fever of the mid-sixteenth century. With the added frisson of the various ‘end of the world’ scenarios, it aroused a level of excitement and dramatic tension unmatched by the mundanities of everyday life.24 Whether or not the hysteria extended to the general population is a moot point. Certainly, by mid-1999, and despite the dire warnings issued by providers of Y2K solutions and vocal pundits, 78 percent of adults who participated in a national US survey in June of that year were reported as expecting computer glitches to produce either ‘no problems at all’ or only ‘minor inconveniences’ (cf Gutteling and Kuttschreuter 2002).25 But, of course, this response could


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equally be interpreted as evidence of the reassurance and confidence instilled by government and industry through the extensive spending on Y2K. Our concern here has not been to pronounce judgement over whether or not the historical ‘facts’ support this or that claim about the threat posed by the Bug or the efforts of Bug-busters to defuse this threat. We have endeavoured to suspend (dis)belief in contemporary accounts of success or failure. We have suggested that failure and success and the ways they come to be inscribed in institutional memory, are not readily disentangled or abstracted from the complex moral and political processes, beliefs and practices within which they are named as such.26 ‘Success’ and ‘failure’ are themselves products of specific social performances of agency, knowledge, competence, moral responsibility and the like. For those interested in the forms by which technological systems and artefacts participate in the making and unmaking of human affairs, the Bug represents an example of the ‘technological dramas’ (Pfaffenberger 1992) through which ‘the categories of culture’ are performed (Douglas and Isherwood 1980).

Concluding Remarks In fin de siècle IT discourses, technology appears Janus-faced, as both the liberator and destroyer of organization. At the close of the twentieth century, the ‘Millennium Bug’ and the ‘Internet revolution’ provided commentators on social and business affairs with two related fables of organization and disorganization (Cooper 1986). Both became occasions for ‘panic spending’ on IT applications and the associated expert labour in most (self-styled) ‘First World’ countries (Knights et al. 2002). In the years following ‘Y2K’ however, the event appears to have quickly receded from (official) corporate memory. This is not entirely surprising. In Euro-American organizations, a success ethic has arguably spawned an institutionalized disinclination to acknowledge, let alone learn from, costineffective decision-making combined with low tolerance of ambivalence. The Bug Hunt absorbed massive resources whilst its outcomes have remained shrouded in uncertainty and ambiguity. In line with Douglas and Isherwood’s (1980) argument, our focus in this article has not been on questions of, for instance, the ‘truth’ of narratives concerning the extent of the problem, or whether the Bug’s timely extermination best accounts for the (non-)events of January 1st 2000. Our analysis has kept open the question of the true magnitude of the Y2K problem, the order of risk represented by it, or the effectiveness of the Bug-hunters in removing the projected risk. Definitive answers to such questions would seem to depend upon the plausibility or weight given to the stories of the merchants of doom, exposers of scam or the believers in sheer luck. Whatever we might mean by ‘complexity’, it certainly entails that a range of different, even contradictory, accounts can be constructed and made to fit the available ‘facts’. This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.


The Bug and the efforts devoted to its extermination are an interesting historical example of how engagements with seemingly straightforward technical problems are at the same time morally and politically loaded processes for the allocation of agency and responsibility (see Douglas 1966; 1992). Y2K was in many ways the vehicle for long-held anxieties concerning the nature of organization in an increasingly (technologically) interconnected social world. This dimension was perhaps more readily apparent in the often vociferous debate sparked by the so-called dotcom bubble (see Knights et al. 2002) but can also, to some degree, be glimpsed in the post hoc relabelling of the Millennium Bug as a ‘business’, not an IT issue. The Bug, it will be recalled, was said to have finally ‘forced IT out of the back room’ (where until then it had languished in obscurity), ‘and into the boardroom’, (where, presumably, the serious thinking gets done). Not unlike LeviStrauss’ (1962) totems then, computer technology, was identified as ‘good to think’ with, rather than merely as a collection of functional objects. Throughout this discussion we have endeavoured to keep in sight the ways in which routine deliberations about technological malfunctions (what/who went wrong and how to fix it) also entailed the rehearsal of broader cultural anxieties and preoccupations. In the run-up to the night of the Bug, (late/ high/post) modern society, a society that described itself (boastfully) as a ‘network society’ and (anxiously) as a ‘risk society’ was able to simultaneously perform both descriptions.

Acknowledgements We would like to thank Faith Noble and Brian Bloomfield for their helpful comments on an earlier draft of this article and also the anonymous referees for their constructive criticisms and helpful suggestions. We acknowledge the ESRC Virtual Society Programme (Award L132251046) for funding relating to this article and also the ESRC Evolution of Business Knowledge research programme (Award RES-334250012).

Notes 1. Of course, our analysis does not, as it were, ‘step outside’ of the particular intellectual context that frames our study and renders our interpretation intelligible. Our sensemaking is historically situated. In offering a way of making sense of ‘what happened’, of making the Bug episode accountable, we are enabled but also constrained by the grammar of interpretation at our disposal. Even empirically, an analysis of the Bug undertaken tomorrow would lack access to web-based information that informs and adds credibility as well as colour to our account, for much of it has been removed. More critically, continuous developments and shifts in the intellectual context, and in associated analytical orientations, mean that our sense of the Bug is historically contingent. 2. See also note xxvi. 3. At DotComGuy.com. This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.

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4. Alas 365 days later DotCom Guy emerged into much reduced circumstances. Rumour has it, that the intervening bankruptcy of his dotcom sponsors meant ‘that poor DotCom Guy was left in the lurch without his promised $98,280 paycheck’ (Delio 2001). 5. Robin Guenier, Director of the UK’s TaskForce 2000, has estimated the total worldwide spending as being in the region £400 billion (Guenier 2000). 6. It is interesting that the millennium Bug panic having given the coup de grace to so-called legacy systems’ also facilitated their replacement with off the shelf standardized packages such as Enterprise Resource Planning Systems (ERP), prompting many in the late 1990s to talk of an ‘ERP revolution’ (e.g. Kumar and Van Hillegersberg 2000). 7. See for instance www.year2000.com/archive/cw-article.html 8. See especially Gary North’s Y2K Links and Forums that provides comprehensive coverage of the Y2K literature at www.garynorth.com/Y2K 9. See for instance Them! (Dir. Gordon Douglas, 1954) in which the world is under threat from giant ants, the product of human carelessness with radioactivity. 10. The case brought by Andersen Consulting against retailer J. Baker Inc. at the Massachusetts State Superior Court is instructive in this respect. Between 1989–91 Andersen had advised J. Baker Inc on the acquisition and installation of a merchandizing and inventory system. The system it turned out was not year-2000 compliant and to make it so would cost an extra $3 million which Baker was trying to recoup from Andersen. Andersen Consulting was asking the court for a declaratory judgment that it had fulfilled its contractual obligations and that it is not responsible for ‘upgrades’ to that system. The fact that Andersen Consulting would adopt this course of action in spite of the inevitable bad publicity was widely perceived as an attempt (e.g. Zerega 1998) to send a signal to other potential claimants. In other words it was done so that ‘other companies would take notice of the seriousness with which the consultancy intends to litigate claims’. The message having been sent, the case was settled through mediation in 2000 (see Baldwin 2000). 11. Is information not routinely described as the ‘lifeblood’ of modern organization? 12. Quoted in Grossman 1998, 8 13. Available at http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0965497410/qid= 1118064744/ sr=8–1/ref=sr_8_xs_ap_i1_xgl14/104–3822950–1444707?v=glance &s=books&n=507846 (accessed April 7, 2005). 14. For an extensive listing of such commentaries, see http://www.garynorth.com/Y2K/ results_.cfm/No_Big_Problem (accessed March 23, 2001). 15. Fears were even voiced that terrorists, criminals and neo-fascists might launch attacks under the cover of Y2K failures (US Naval War College 1999). 16. See www.Y2K-news/Bugs/alert.html 17. At www.garynorth.com/Y2K/results_cfm/Banking (accessed January 23, 2000). 18. See for instance the ‘Y2K Global Guide’ in Business 2.0, January 1999, especially pp. 54–5. 19. What we might call the ‘textual construction’ of failure (Bloomfield and Vurdubakis 1994). As Pinch observes failure – like success – needs to be ‘accomplished’ (Pinch 1993). 20. E.g. Action 2000. 21. See www.citu.gov.uk/2000/press_rel/cabinet_office/17–00.html 22. See www.year2000.com/archive/really.html 23. See www.angelfire.com/oh/justanumber/ (originally accessed November 16, 1999). 24. See www.Y2K-news.com/readyornot/people/hysteria.shtml 25. See Y2Knews.com/readyornot/people/hyp.shtml



26. We can further illustrate the vagaries of corporate memory by reference to findings drawn from our research carried out during that time in a major UK clothing and fashion accessories retailer (here pseudonymously called) Xtra. The company’s heavy dependence on its IT systems (in the UK January 1st is the first day of winter sales) meant that it spared no expense in putting together a top-notch Bug-busting team and in rendering its systems Y2K compliant. This emphasis ensured that the IT department(s) as a whole, and the database group in particular, were spared the full rigors of the recurrent waves of staff layoffs which swept through the organization. The crossover into 2000, closely supervised by the full compliance team, went without a hitch. In January, when the ‘critical date’ was well past, the organization threw a champagne party to celebrate its success in squashing the Bug, and to thank the staff responsible for their efforts. Barely a week later, most of the Bug-busters were laid off. The company shareholders, or so the story went, fired by stories of the Bug not wreaking havoc among the non-compliant at home and (especially) abroad, had demanded immediate and deep cuts among IT staff. Thus the same set of ‘facts’ proved capable of supporting two antithetical assessments of what constitutes success and failure. Xtra’s smooth passage into the new millennium is inscribed both as a success (‘management’) and as a failure (‘share holders’) in swift succession, reward being followed by punishment.

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42 Place, Space and Time: Contextualizing Workplace Subjectivities Susan Halford and Pauline Leonard

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ecent sociological analyses of organizational restructuring have emphasized that change may be accomplished through the relationship between management discourse and employee subjectivity (Rose 1989; Knights 1990; Kerfoot and Knights 1993; Casey 1995; Ezzy 1997; Halford et al. 1997; Newton 1999). Taking a broadly Foucauldian approach, discursive practices are shown as powerful in shaping subjectivities, such that workers come to embody and enact organizationally privileged modes of thought and behaviour, in turn achieving organizationally desired outcomes. In particular, recent research has highlighted organizational discourses which construct employees as ‘enterprising’ individuals, embodying values of efficiency, rationalization and cost (Burrows and Curran 1991; du Gay 1996). As this approach to organizational change has developed, the conceptualization of relations between discourse and agency has shifted. Initial claims that organizational discourses could impose identities and guarantee outcomes (Grey 1994; Strangleman and Roberts 1999) have been widely criticized for downplaying the agential subject (Benhabib 1992) and failing to address the ways that people resist, manoeuvre and play with discursive practices (Iedema and Wodak 1999; Newton 1999, Halford 2003; Leonard 2003). Indeed, it has been shown that in responding to entrepreneurial discourse, individuals actively draw on competing discourses to construct a range of subject positions in relation to change, including acceptance, modification or resistance to the entrepreneurial self. Empirical research has Source: Organization Studies, 27(5) (2005): 657–676.


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shown that individuals mobilize profession (Doolin 2002), gender (Whitehead 2001; Alexiadou 2001; Thomas and Davies 2002) and age (Strangleman and Roberts 1999) to construct these subject positions. This attention to agency and differentiation in the subjective experience and practice of change suggests a move beyond attention to these generic discourses towards the specific contexts of employees’ everyday lives, within which the practice of discursive change is experienced. This is to recognize more fully the situated interdependence of life (Pile and Thrift 1995): that the subject is derived primarily in practice, ‘dependant to some degree on the immediate resources available to them at the moment they show up in time and space’ (Pile and Thrift 1995: 29). While generic discourses of enterprise, profession, gender or age may be important, they are received and interpreted in the particular and complex contexts that individuals move through in their everyday lives. Only through attention to these contexts can we fully explore the relations between managerial discourse, worker subjectivities and organizational outcomes. This paper draws on new empirical research in the British National Health Service (NHS), where the reconstitution of the working subject has been central to recent change initiatives. Through this study we explore the contextual – the where, when and how of discursive change – for two groups of doctors and nurses. We ask two specific questions. First, how does organizational context shape the construction of workplace subjectivities? Here we explore differences both between and within organizations. We show that even under the shared cultural umbrella of the NHS, different organizations and different parts of the same organization offer distinctive experiences, resources and subjectivities to employees. These shape the embodied and lived experience of managed change in complex ways (Fairclough 1995; Cohen and Musson 2000). Second, we ask how the shifting contexts of individuals’ everyday lives – across their workplaces and between work and home – shape the subjective effects of organizational discourse. This focuses our attention on the question of power, so central to earlier accounts of managed change which emphasize the power of organizational discourse to define subjectivity. In contradistinction to this, we draw attention to the complexity and fluidity of the power relationship between organization and employees, suggesting that individual relationships to discourses of change may shift and slip across the times and spaces of everyday lives as the contextual resources of subjectivity change. In the following section we offer a brief overview of the changing NHS environment within which doctors and nurses are working. From this we develop our claims about the importance of context. In particular we argue that the concepts of space (the where) and time (the when) are important in unpacking the part that context plays in subjective manoeuvres around managed change (the how). Following a brief description of our research methodology, we present our research findings. In our conclusion we suggest that an appreciation of context contributes to both practical and theoretical debates about organizational change.


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Managing Subjectivities in the NHS Recent change in the NHS is rooted in successive attempts to introduce new forms of managerialism. In 1983 the Griffiths Report on NHS management noted ‘a lack of direction, drive, speed and responsibility in decision making’ (Hadley and Forster 1993: 7), and recommended that management through professional hierarchies be replaced by the introduction of general managers at district and hospital levels. While these managers were to take a new, proactive, goal-setting and strategic role (Packwood 1997), the expert professional foundations of health care also required clinicians to participate in the new entrepreneurially led management. Indeed, only through ‘the actions of senior doctors [could] . . . the aims of management be realised’ (Ackroyd 1996: 613). Thus the ‘vehicle for control’ was the incorporation of professionals into managerial roles and their subjection to ‘managerial parameters’ (Harrison and Pollit 1994: 93). While the election of a Labour government in 1997 saw a shift in the focus of NHS managerialism from ‘competition’ to ‘quality’, the exercise of managerialist intervention continues through the introduction of ‘clinical governance’, making senior clinicians responsible to chief executives for quality improvement, leadership and clinical risk assessment (Allen 2001). However, the medical profession is not autonomous in this system, which involves multidisciplinary teams of clinicians in both professional and managerial roles, all of whom have different stakes in the process of change (Mueller et al. 2004). These reforms have fundamental implications for definitions of ‘good practice’ for both doctors and nurses. These pressures are added to by parallel reforms within health-care professions. For example, in nursing there has been a continuing process of credentialization (Davies 1995) and growth in the managerial responsibilities of nurses at ward level, to include extensive paperwork and computerized record keeping, as well as personnel management, performance monitoring and budgeting. For both nurses and doctors these reforms make new claims on their working subjectivities. Discourses of health care now emphasize the need to become more managerial, not only in the tasks performed but also in the working subjectivities that they embody and enact. Empirical accounts of these processes of managed change within the health service have centred on the clash between managerial and professional discourse. These emphasize the different value systems and priorities of each, and show that individuals are active agents in using these discourses to produce subjective outcomes across a range from conflict, to compromise and collaboration between managerial and professional discourse (Harrison 1999; Doolin 2002; Dent 2003; Iedema et al. 2004; Bolton 2004).


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Context: Space and Time This emphasis on the importance of agency and differentiation suggests that we examine the resources open to individuals as they negotiate subjectivities in the context of their everyday working lives more closely. Here we make two claims about the importance of context in the subjective interpretation and experience of change. First, while the discourse of enterprise that is emblematic of the new public managerialism is widely understood in Foucauldian terms, as a ‘general and prevalent system for the formation and articulation of ideas in a particular period of time’ (Alvesson and Karreman 2000: 1126), it is not being applied on a blank canvas, but in organizational contexts that are already constituted and reconstituting through a range of material and discursive practices. Within the NHS this means that national policies are imposed across a highly differentiated system, both between and within organizations: from prestigious university teaching hospitals to low-status and geographically remote community facilities; from heart surgery to care of the elderly or mentally infirm. As Keenoy and Oswick argue, ‘these contexts are not simply backdrop to the text, they are actually embedded with in it: the text actually forms part of the context and vice versa’ (Keenoy and Oswick 2004: 140). Individual organizations present distinctive contexts for the reception and interpretation of managerialist discourse. Particular organizations are embedded in specific times and places. They have complex histories, spatialities and associated meanings. These different contexts offer multiple, fragmented and distinctive discourses on which individuals may also draw in the production of subjectivity (Hardy et al. 2000). Second, the multiple nature of these contexts means that outcomes will not be singular or fixed at either an organizational or individual level. Hospitals themselves are complex organizations, constructed through competing and contested resources and in internally differentiated ways across organizational times and spaces. Furthermore, as individuals move through the times and spaces of everyday life, at work and beyond, so will the contextual resources of subjectivity open to them constantly change. As such, individual relationships to discourses of change may be dynamic, shifting as the particular context they are in changes. This attention to context – the where and when of subjectivities – raises important questions about the power of managerialist discourse, and its relationship with the embedded practice of subjectivity. A focus on context responds to Foucault’s (1977) call to investigate local scenarios, ‘mapping the lineage of power/knowledge relations at different spatio-temporal nodes . . . constituting analytics for particular sites’ (Ball and Wilson 2000: 541). This involves looking at sites both between and within organizations, and between and within the spaces of individuals’ everyday lives.



The concept of recontextualization is useful here (Bernstein 1990; Iedema and Wodak 1999). Recontextualization involves ‘shifts of meaning away from their previous instantiations’ (Iedema and Wodak 1999: 13). This is achieved through ‘technologies’, such as the textual, but also through aspects of design and the built environment. These, it is argued, also have the semiotic potential to turn and reframe discursive and structuring relations. Recontextualization thus enables a ‘multimodal’ approach to be taken to analysing organizational power, involving a consideration of spatial, temporal and technological formations (Iedema 1997). It encourages a move away from fixed representations of subjectivity and response in relation to discourses of change to appreciate the ways in which these may be renegotiated through the dynamic relationship between identity, time and space. In sum, our approach here is to suggest that different times and spaces form the active contexts for discourses of change, and it is in the detail of these active contexts that we can trace the distinctive opportunities and constraints that are offered for making different kinds of working lives and subjectivities (Hacking 1986; Knowles 2000). To pay attention to context is to recognize how different organizational spaces and times are invested with particular meanings – meanings which are not unitary, fixed or even necessarily stable, but which, nonetheless, affect identity construction and performance and the interplay with the discursive. As Lefebvre (1991) argues, space ‘is thus not merely a “frame” or “container” for lived experiences, but is rather a tool of thought and action’ (1991: 26) through which individuals ‘may give expression to themselves’ (1991: 33). In organizations, space and time offer different and distinctive resources, which may be drawn on in relation to discourses of change and in the construction and performance of subjectivities. These may operate at a range of scales. Organizations are themselves configurations of multiple, distinctive and differentiated spaces offering different potentials for subjectivities. Organizational spaces are often them selves appropriated in the process of change, as architecture and decor are used to communicate messages about status or service. Meanings are represented in new-builds but also in the refurbishment or extension of existing buildings, which enable semiotic readings of phases in the life of an organization. Spaces are often physical representations of discursive constructions. Organizations are also located within particular locales, themselves carrying embedded meanings, opportunities and practices. These are interconnected across space to other places, regionally, internationally and even globally, offering other resources for constructing meaning and subjectivity. Similarly, organizations organize, and are subjected to, temporal demands and routines which can create multiple timescales and differing dimensions for employees. The ways in which personal timesheets, production and delivery times, seasonal rhythms and global market demands are constructed


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may intensify or collapse any linearity or similarity of working time and experience (Whipp et al. 2002). The reorganization of time is often central to the organizational change, whether in changes to working practices or timescales for organizational or personal goals. Adam (1995) also reminds us that different understandings of time bear on our lives simultaneously: the clock time of work schedules is constantly challenged and undermined by non-commodified times such as memory, or expressive or caring time (Adam 1995). Time too is thus a resource, which may be performed, used and understood in different ways. Furthermore, time and space are interwoven: specific times are constructed in certain spaces; spaces are rich in the texture of ‘accumulated times’ (De Certeau 1984: 108). Particular configurations of organizational space may be seen to carry snapshots of these processes, with embedded memories and meanings sitting alongside newer spatial forms and meanings. In the empirical sections below we turn to explore the ways that organizations as well as selves are embedded in context – constructed and accomplished in and through specific times and spaces. We show how, as individuals negotiate and manoeuvre around imposed managerialist discourses of the entrepreneurial subject, these are in turn recontextualized, drawing not only on the intertextuality of other generic discourses such as profession or gender, but also upon context-specific resources found in the organizational times and spaces of individuals’ everyday lives. First, however, we describe our research methodology.

Research Methodology Our research adopted a comparative case-study methodology, including two very different hospitals to allow an in-depth analysis of doctors and nurses working in distinctive contexts. We employed several methods, aiming to develop a detailed knowledge of each context and to explore the subjective times and spaces of individual lives in relation to this. We used archival research (organizational documents, local newspapers and local histories) to gain an impression of the organizations in place. We conducted observations in the immediate locale of the hospitals and the hospitals themselves. In each hospital we carried out two phases of intensive observation focusing on different spaces (including staff room, ward, corridor, casualty assessment and reception). Observations were conducted over a 24-hour period, paying particular attention to the spatial and temporal nuances. These were supple mented with less structured observations as we conducted 50 semi-structured interviews with doctors and nurses in different parts of the hospitals, over a period of 12 months – 33 in the larger District General Hospital (DGH), and 17 in the smaller Community Hospital. Interviewees were selected from staff



records to include women and men equally (as far as possible); to include staff across the hierarchy; and to include doctors and nurses from different ethnic groups. The interviews were loosely structured around three topics: early life and choice of career, the organization and self-identity. Analysing the material from interviews, we began from the premise that these were texts of identity, that they were ontological. We recognize, of course, that material generated in interviews is specific and partial, produced under certain conditions and may be subject to distortions related to memory, privacy and articulacy (Knowles 2000; Hollway and Jefferson 2000; Plummer 2001). However, interview narratives are not free-floating, constructed in ‘any old way’ (Cameron 2001: 174), they are not fabricated at will (Somers and Gibson 1994) but are ‘cut from the same kinds of cloth as the lives they tell about’ (Denzin 1989: 86). In other words, interviews are ‘talk and text in context’ (van Dijk 1997a: 3), influenced by both the broad and specific contexts in which they are set. We began our analysis by listening to each original tape as we read its transcript. Listening to individuals’ intonation and voice level produced a far more engaged and vivid analytical process than our previous experiences of reading text alone. We were able to picture our interviewees in context, calling to mind the staff rooms, stores cupboards or doctors messes in which we had talked. This was crucial to our analysis which, following Hardy et al. (2000), concentrated on the ways that individuals talked about themselves within the larger discursive contexts in which they were situated. Central to our analysis were the ways in which contexts are ‘interpreted or constructed and strategically and continually made relevant by and for participants’ (van Dijk 1997b: 16). How are the contexts of work interpreted vis-à-vis identity? What is the impact of organizational change on working identities? How are working identities represented across space and time? To answer these questions our methodology involved close attention to the talk of our participants. In particular we explored the kinds of narratives drawn upon in constructing identities (Boje 1995; Halford 2003), and how these revealed the ways that individuals were made subject through organizational and other discourses (Foucault 1972; Boje 1995; Leonard 2003). Individual and organizational identities are constructed both in the stories people tell about themselves (Lieblich et al. 1998; Ainsworth and Hardy 2004) and the ways that they position themselves within the relations and identities constructed in the discourses within which they are confronted (Ainsworth and Hardy 2004). Clearly, ‘most contexts – including organizations – consist of multiple and fragmented discourses that provide actors with choices concerning the discourses on which they draw’ (Hardy et al. 2000: 1232). They also provide familiar metaphors and dominant cultural stories, which may be drawn upon to increase the power of a narrative and identity construction (Cobb 1993). Choices in the construction


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of personal narratives are thus constrained by the cultural context, and ‘actors can only choose from the broader cultural repertoire of discursive resources’ (Ainsworth and Hardy 2004: 163). Throughout the analysis of each interview we interrogated the texts for the discursive and rhetorical strategies people used to construct and account for their working selves. Through these different organizational and professional resources we were able to explore the opportunities and limitations provided by context in individual accounts of working selves. Our interest in the specificities of context means that we begin our empirical section with a detailed description of these two organizations, Seaside and Lakeside, to sketch the places, spaces and times within which entrepreneurial discourse was received and made meaningful. We follow this with an examination of the ways that doctors and nurses use these specific resources to recount their positions in relation to recent discourses of managerialist subjectivity in the NHS. We show that even within individual organizations, individual subjectivities are shaped by varied discursive interpretations between the spaces and times of hospital life. The second empirical section below examines the significance of these, and other, contexts as individuals move through the spaces and times of their everyday working lives.

Organizational Contexts Managerialist discourses of change are not received in isolated or abstracted space, but embedded in the vivid and sometimes dramatic particularities of the spaces and times in which the lives of our doctors and nurses are lived. Hospitals are distinctive spatial and temporal configurations, each associated with and evoking particular uses, meanings and practices. ‘Seaside Memorial Hospital’ is a small (60-bed) community hospital situated on the south coast of England. Its main activity is rehabilitation and medium-term care of the elderly, although it has a small ‘minor injuries unit’ and a number of specialist outpatient services for the local community. ‘Lakeside’ is a large (700-bed) DGH on the edge of London, widely recognized for its specialties in surgery and emergency medicine. At Seaside, nurses and auxiliaries provide patient care in the hospital, while consultants from a nearby DGH provide much of the medical input on a clinic or ward round basis. While Lakeside has embraced the discursive practices of recent NHS reform, Seaside is a latecomer to change and, while a general manager is in post, staff frequently recounted the recent past when a formidable matron managed the hospital’s routines. Now staff describe Seaside as small and friendly or, more critically, as ‘a substantial piece of NHS property run like a cottage hospital from the 1950s’. By contrast, Lakeside has a complex managerial and clinical structure. Several of the senior doctors



and nurses have international standing and the hospital has a reputation as a ‘trailblazer’ for cutting-edge management. It was awarded the maximum of three stars in recent NHS performance ratings and expects to become an NHS Foundation Trust. The two hospitals offer markedly different senses of spatiality and temporality. They are situated in space and time in very different ways, but they are also organizations of space and time, and the ways that they differ both between each other, but also within themselves, offer us an understanding of the situatedness of social action and identity construction and performance. To put it very simply, Lakeside is large and fast, while Seaside is small and slow. While Seaside Hospital is located on the periphery of a quiet coastal town, Lakeside is near the motorway, situated among business parks and out-of-town shopping developments. Seaside’s place in its landscape of 1930s housing and residential care homes provides a contrast to that of Lakeside, which is distinguishable from the other modern, flat, grey, windowless buildings only by its more run-down appearance and its busy car park. Parts of Lakeside have been dramatically changed in recent years, offering physical support to its claims to dynamism. The large new entrance and management suite epitomize modern interior design – opaque glass, pale beech veneer and chrome finishes. Beyond this, however, the architecture evokes an earlier time. The wards are marked by drab uniformity and conformity – reflecting a 1970s attempt at ‘brightening things up’ with floral borders and pink paint. The ward thoroughfares do not even have this distinction; they are un-refurbished, and littered with objects on trolleys. The hospital is always busy, night and day. Nurses, doctors, patients and relatives form ceaseless paths, to and fro. At Seaside, spaces within the hospital are less sharply differentiated. Like Lakeside, energy and effort has been put into the entrance – a new space which suggests an attempt at a certain status and dynamism. The hospital is smart, well maintained, newly painted and highly polished, although there is an overwhelming sense of an earlier ‘heyday’. This constructs itself through symbols (De Certeau 1988; Lefebvre 1991): portraits of benefactors and other corporate memorabilia hang alongside the displays of leaflets and reproduction works of art. Highly polished corridors lead to self-contained wards that are orderly and calm: no major events will take place, many beds are unoccupied as the ‘patients’ sit in the day room or shuffle up and down the corridors. One ward, ‘Nightingale’, is markedly different from the others: larger and more old-fashioned, it gives off a Victorian air. There is also a clear demarcation at Seaside between night and day. At night, everything shuts down. Patients are put to bed and all the wards become dark and quiet. The nurses retreat into the office, close the door, and settle down for a quiet, companionable night. Interactions with patients all but cease; this is the nurses’ time; and time to put the hospital to rights.


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Different Places, Different Subjectivities? Seaside and Lakeside are different and distinct organizations, offering particular resources for the construction of subjectivities in a climate of change. At Lakeside, a key attraction is its active and engaged response to the discursive practices of entrepreneurialism. The hospital has targeted certain areas to be ‘spaces of excellence’, and the strategy is proving successful, not least in attracting and retaining staff. Certain health specialties, clinicians and managers, as well as new physical environments, have been picked out to gain a national, and in some cases international reputation for enabling high standards of quality and expertise; often exemplifying government targets and guidelines. The place was seen to ‘have a buzz’, and this was used in a variety of ways in the articulation of workplace identities. For example, Mark, a male nurse in his 50s, has recently returned to full-time nursing after a long spell away. Mark is highly resentful, and embarrassed, about the low level of nursing salaries. Justifying his return to nursing, he cites quality of the hospital he has very particularly chosen to work for: ‘5-10 years ago they used to call it “Grimside” . . . there was no leadership, there was no direction there was no, the place was crumbling . . . but then something happened . . . suddenly the corridors – millions of pounds spent on redecoration and new wards, a new A&E department, a new front entrance . . . the charter mark . . . so far from being Grimside I think it is a very proactive place . . . I mean I live in the shadow of [another well-known DGH] . . . I’d rather travel here . . . you can see when you talk to them [nurses from other hospitals] that they all want to know what’s going on at Lakeside. Because it just seems to be getting a reputation as a place of excellence.’ [emphasis added]

Andrew, a surgeon, has a burgeoning national and international reputation, but chooses to stay at Lakeside rather than move to a more prestigious hospital. Being a surgeon is central to his identity – ‘I am a [specialist] surgeon: that is who I am’ – and Lakeside offered the chance to build his own unit, to make ‘his’ space of excellence rather than compete or compromise in a bigger, more specialist, context: ‘Being a [specialty] surgeon is a highly tradable commodity, and in essence I could go anywhere . . . but being here is particularly where I want to be . . . I’ve had, I should think, in the last eight years, half a dozen offers to go somewhere else.’

Similarly, Dawn, a nurse in emergency medicine, explained: ‘I like the pace of it, and the not knowing and the speed and things like that . . . being a skilled nurse as opposed to somebody carrying out your daily activities of living and stuff like that in a cottage hospital . . .



I suppose it gives more to your identity and with Lakeside [using] more up and coming techniques. It is nice to be associated with that.’

This contrasts sharply with representations of Seaside hospital, by doctors, nurses and managers, as a traditional place, where ‘old-fashioned’ values of patient care distant from new managerialism are core discourses. Anna described how she chose to move from an acute setting to Seaside shortly after qualifying as a nurse: ‘I’d trained for three years to actually give physical care to the patients that I was looking after. Then to be confronted with being removed from physical care, more and more into paperwork and the managerial side of things . . . I feel most comfortable in my role as a nurse . . . working at [acute hospital], the role that I was being forced into was trying to make me into a worse nurse than I knew I could be . . . so I removed myself to an environment which I felt was more conducive to me being able to fulfil my potential as nurse.’

For Anna the acute hospital, with its new managerialist discourses of efficiency and excellence, was experienced as a constraint on the expression and development of her identity. By contrast, ‘Seaside allows me more scope to [pause] maintain the person and to build on the person that I am.’ Sustaining this traditional model of nursing is also reflected in the use that Molly makes of Seaside’s links with the local community. As a place, Seaside is heavily rooted in its local area and many are proud of the way that the hospital has maintained these links in a rapidly changing NHS: Molly: ‘I’d say that the culture of Seaside compared with other areas is far and away superior.’ Interviewer: ‘In what way superior?’ Molly: ‘I value its ability to supply the community with what they want . . . and [I] also value that we are all local and that we all want to give the best possible service to the community. Because it is them who actually kept this open, I think it was about 20 years ago – I think that we owe the community a lot.’ (nurse, Seaside)

Clearly, then, the negotiation of entrepreneurial discourse takes place unevenly across the spaces of the NHS. Far from being merely subject to these discursive practices, doctors and nurses are creative in seeking and using contextual resources to construct and perform working subjectivities. However, these spaces of difference within the NHS are also fragmented by finer spatial and temporal distinctions within hospitals. At both Lakeside and Seaside, nurses and doctors observed that there were sharp differences between spaces within the hospital, and commonly identified with particular spaces, rather than the organization as a whole. This suggests attention to context may offer us yet more nuanced understandings of subjectivity.


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At Seaside, individual wards offered competing contexts for the inter pretation of entrepreneurial discourse. As Sarah, a ward sister, explains: ‘Things have changed a great deal for us, but not for Nightingale ward . . . they are desperate to hang onto things the way they are.’

This is embodied by Brenda, who has worked on Nightingale for many years and positions herself unambiguously as an old-fashioned nurse. She is deeply unhappy with organizational changes that have occurred recently but still identifies closely with Nightingale where she and her peers endeavour to practise traditional nursing and management, constructing Nightingale ward as the ‘true bearer’ of nursing standards in a changing world. Here Brenda has found a space that offers her the subjective resources to deal with the entrepreneurial NHS and continue as the nurse she aspires to be. Hospital spaces were also interpreted differently in time. At both hospitals, nurses worked on a rotating three-shift pattern of earlies, lates and nights, although at Seaside some nurses worked nights only. For some, the differences in the quality and character of time, offered by different shifts, gives the opportunity to perform distinctive professional identities and to reject much of the entrepreneurial discourse: ‘Later nights really are an easy option from the day work for me. I mean the day job is [laughs] you’ve got to deal with patients and their relatives, whereas at night we work together more. It is a much pleasanter job which is what I really like – if I was wanting something more dynamic I’d just get up and go somewhere else and do it.’ (Deirdre, nurse, Seaside)

At Lakeside there was unrest among the night nurses in A&E when they were asked to do administrative work set up by the Trust’s new managerial routines, in their (supposed) ‘quiet times’. This they felt to be unacceptable, and to be the job of day staff, who were regarded as more ‘in to’ the managerialist culture than night staff, who were there ‘purely’ to nurse. In other ‘more dynamic’ wards such as surgery, however, paperwork was seen by night staff to be a useful way to while away the long night shift.

Mobile Subjectivities: Negotiating Time and Space Some doctors and nurses are able to draw very specifically on the differences in spaces and times to locate themselves within particular configurations of subjectivity. However, not everyone had found spaces and/or times that enabled the coherent performance of identity. To the contrary, some doctors and nurses were acutely aware of the different contexts on offer within their organizations and had to negotiate their subjective performances through these. For the nurse managers at Lakeside, there was a conscious recognition that identity performance should be managed differently between the ward,



the management offices and the boardroom, all of which had a ‘different take on new managerialism. A senior nurse manager explained the specifically gendered dimension to this: ‘If Julie is going to be faced with a board or some quite difficult meeting, she wears a trouser suit. And we all tease her about it. And she says “Oh, I’m power dressing” . . . I think that we try to give a masculine image of being very organized . . . rather than “let’s just sit down together as a load of girls and decide how we’re going to do things”.’ (Amy, Lakeside)

While Lakeside nurses are increasingly accustomed to complex managerial tasks, a sense of being ‘out of place’, and perhaps of inadequacy, emerges in the ‘pure’ management contexts at the very top of the organization. But if the nurses feel out of place in the boardroom, some managers feel out of place on the wards, their outsider status emblematic of the uneven impact of entrepreneurial discourse across NHS contexts. At Seaside, one nurse described his manager being at a loss as to how perform on the ward: ‘You can see it in his body language. He’s like a little boy, he stands with his hands behind his back, you know. And they [manager and ward sister] sort of sit side-to-side. And you think, “Come on man, now you are in control of this building, get a grip.” ’ (Douglas)

This manager’s attempts to establish a dialogue with his staff have hinged on asking them to come to his space, an invitation that is rarely accepted: ‘nobody goes, because it’s up those stairs up into his lair where it’s nice and comfortable for him to be’ (Douglas). In contrast to both ward and managerial spaces, operating theatres were marked as ‘pure’ spaces, where surgeons could relax, free from the demands of managerial culture, and concentrate on their ‘real’ business. A nurse from Seaside explained: ‘The doctors used to treat that as a time when they could be themselves, and say completely irreverent things about everything, whereas when they were in front of patients they’ve got to be in their position of authority.’ (Deidre)

A Lakeside surgeon agreed, ‘you feel slightly buffered from the rest of the hospital’ (Vicky, registrar). Similarly, Seaside offered a ‘pure space’ for its consultants. Here they could relax from the pressures of new managerialism, and play a ‘traditional’ consultant role in an NHS where this is disappearing. Jenny, a senior Trust manager, suggested: ‘I think what they see Seaside as is buns [a bonus or treat] actually . . . nobody else has got it. I mean [they think] “We’ve got this and nobody else can get it.” They’re the [ones] that hold the gate . . . they’ve got these 48


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beds which are absolutely protected and they can have their names above the beds whereas at [the acute hospital] they can’t get that . . . here they can be the old-fashioned consultant again.’

Seaside offers the consultants a ‘place to breathe’ away from the more urgent and arduous demands of the acute sector, where they are ‘so busy’ and ‘everything is so stressful and completely different’. The consultants themselves endorse this, describing Seaside in traditional terms as friendly, ‘a great little facility’. It also offers them opportunities to present a caring self, and to confirm their rejection of managerial identities, as Bernard explains: ‘I’m very proud to work in Seaside hospital . . . the consultants are more hands-on with the patients and in dealing with the nurses than in a bigger hospital.’ The multiplicity of organizational spaces, and the shifting nature of their relation to subjectivity, become more obvious once we add the dimension of temporality. The significance of time appears across different scales. Sarah, for example, describes how people may change over the course of their careers. Thus while the resources on offer at Seaside do not appeal to newly qualified nurses, especially those training now, in the new managerialist era: ‘they’re just biding their time, they hate community hospitals’, she notes that ‘they’re exactly as [we] were a few years ago . . . they all want to be out there making a difference, but over the years, you change.’ The impact of time is also experienced in more fleeting and localized ways. Maria describes subjective shifts from one day to the next: ‘I do I think, on a good day, I can have a day where you go to work and I know that I can really look after those people who are sick. And then I go home with a nice feeling and I think, “Oh yeah, I’m a nurse today!” And then I can sadly have a day when I rarely see a patient, and then I go home and think, “I’m being a secretary, I’m being a manager” . . . because there’s such a high turnover that you detach yourself from the patients . . . other wards . . . it’s not quite as bad as us. But we are – we are very fast.’ (Maria, nurse, Lakeside)

Many doctors and nurses also spoke of their hospitals as different places between day and night, places that constituted them differently as subjects around the 24-hour clock: ‘There is something about being here at night. It almost feels like you are coming in for the night and are surplus to demand . . . almost like walking round an empty hospital. There isn’t the same buzz. So there is something really nice, you can sit down and chat. Nights seem more sociable . . . people seem more relaxed . . . they should be at home if they were normal, but they are here . . . you get to know people better.’ (Colette, nurse, Lakeside)



On a more localized timescale still, relations to professional and organizational subjectivities sometimes shifted over minutes. Greg, a surgical registrar at Lakeside, is ambivalent about the performance of the new managerially led identities: ‘I mind when I can’t be bothered to put the performance on and I know that I’m not . . . performing how I should be performing because I can’t be arsed, because I’m tired, overworked, stressed or whatever. And it annoys me then that I have to perform, I don’t really want to, I just want to crawl into my hole and do my own thing.’

These subjective shifts are also evident as our doctors and nurses move between the spaces and times of their working life and their lives outside work. Indeed, most expressed varying degrees of disjuncture between work ing and other subjectivities across the spaces and times of work, leisure and home, rejecting the entrepreneurial subjectivity in favour of alternative ways being offered in different contexts, for instance the times and spaces of domesticity and leisure: ‘It’s nice to be just the ordinary person, for instance, people I sit next to at the football match every week, who don’t know I’m a doctor, which is great, and we just talk about the football and other aspects of life in general.’ (Bernard, consultant, Seaside)

The pressure for efficient and rational performance is explicitly rejected by some managers outside work, articulated through a shifting relationship with time between the spaces of home and work: ‘I think you do change. I have a two-minute journey, and when I get home it leaves me in five minutes. And the first thing I do is change my clothes . . . and I relax, and take my watch off. I never wear a watch at home.’ (Jude, nurse manager, Lakeside)

Such disjunctions between competing subjectivities are enacted as embodied performances in time and space, as Amanda describes so well: ‘I put this uniform on; I’m a completely different person . . . It’s bizarre, it comes out in even the way I walk . . . I never walk the way I walk in this ridiculous dress. I don’t do that at home. If I’m walking down the road . . . I’m dragging my feet. I’m constantly in trainers, I just wander. Here, head up, and I walk straight, like a determined walk. You walk as if you’re going somewhere, even if you’re not, even if you’re popping to the kitchen to make a drink, you’ll walk in that manner.’ (nurse, Seaside)


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Concluding Discussion In a recent paper in this journal, Keenoy and Oswick have called for greater reflexivity and indecisiveness in organizational discourse analysis, specifying this as the ‘consideration of the ways in which multiple constructions of temporality and locale are embedded in both the content and the context of particular discursive events’ (Keenoy and Oswick 2004: 140). Our own paper demonstrates how such consideration enables a deepened understanding of the nature of organizational change, employee subjectivity and organizational power. Specifically, we have argued that a focus on context offers a crucial contribution to our understanding of the nature of the relationship between organization, discourse and individual subjectivity. We have seen how context shapes the construction of workplace subjectivities in complex, multiple and dynamic ways; and how the shifting contexts of individuals’ everyday lives provide alternative and competing resources for the construction of self. Drawing on empirical research from the NHS we have shown how different organizational/hospital contexts are key sites through which performances of professional, new managerial and other identities are mediated and differentiated. Using the key concepts of time and space, we have examined the ways that managerialist discourses are embodied in practice – between different hospitals, within the same hospital, and across everyday life. We have shown how discourse becomes multiply recontextualized by and through spatiality and temporality. These spaces and times themselves provide important and sometimes competing resources upon which employees may draw, either to augment or resist the discursive constructions of their professional subjectivities. Following Iedema and Wodak (1999), discourse may be seen as not only about spoken dialogue and written text, but also to include the spatial and temporal – cultural artefacts (Oswick et al. 2000) such as built form, decor, style, as well as forms of embodiment – movement, and comportment. All of these compete and contribute in the construction and reconstruction of subjectivities. This acknowledgement and recognition of context is important in three different ways. First, it offers practical input to policy debates in the NHS, specifically in terms of staff retention and the implementation of change. We have shown how in some contexts, such as Lakeside, new managerialism may be a ‘pull’ factor for nurses and doctors seeking to work in a specialized and high-performing context. In other contexts, such as Seaside, the ability to retreat from the performative pressures of the new managerialism is also seen as attractive by other doctors and nurses. Our doctors and nurses revealed that they chose to work in their hospitals for quite specific and individualized reasons, many of which are to do with the specific organizational context. This may mean taking into account the hospital context as a whole; for example Lakeside is represented as a space of excellence, which is up-to-date and fast-paced, while Seaside is represented as a place where This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.


nurses can nurse, particularly where they can take the time to care. However, it may also mean representation of specific spaces and times within the hospital, linked to specialties (surgery at Lakeside), to histories (Nightingale ward at Seaside) and to different times of the day or night (where night shifts in particular are represented distinctively). Acknowledgement of context enables us to be more ‘sensitive to difference as it is displayed and enacted on the ground’ (Iedema and Wodak 1999: 14). It shows how, if organizational discourses of change are to be successful, they may need to be differentiated by the very specific ‘landscapes’ and ‘timescapes’ (Keenoy and Oswick 2004) which exist within particular organizations. For the health service, this shows the importance of recognizing and building upon what its employees may gain from the particularity of the organization they work for. Through an appreciation of the diversity of different organizations and different employees, cultural change may be made more acceptable. If it is sensitively step-changed in different organizational spaces and times, a full range of professional performances may be allowed and provided for, perhaps thus retaining doctors and nurses who already work as well as attracting new and returning members. This may not sit so comfortably with the centralizing and controlling forces of NHS policy and strategic management (Le Grand 2002), although the designation of a limited number of foundation hospitals, with greater operational freedom (HMSO 2003) may allow the flexibility to address these matters. Second, context contributes to a deepening of our understanding of the nature of work subjectivities. Our paper contributes to the move away from more muscular interpretations of managerialist discourse (Reed 2000,2004), via accounts of subjectivity that emphasize the importance of particular alternative discourses such as profession, gender and age, to a focus on the doing of discourse in time and space. By looking more closely at context, at the spatialities and temporalities of change as it is embodied at the level of the individual, we can see the ways in which agency is animated in practice through the times and spaces of individual lives. Discourse analysis therefore requires us to pay attention to the temporalities and spatialities within which discourse is constructed (Keenoy and Oswick 2004). This discourse analytic approach also requires us to recognize that agency may be displayed in diverse, complex and multiple ways. It may be exercised through talk but this talk may contain different and competing subject positions across micro timescales (Iedema et al. 2004) as well as over longer periods. Agency is also exercised in unspoken ways. As Knowles (2000) argues, there may be a gap between talk and practice, between what people say in an interview setting and what they do in the times and spaces of their everyday working lives. Our attention to the spoken and the unspoken – artefacts and embodiment – enables a close exploration of context which allows for a subtle grasp of the ways in which discourse may be recontextualized and agency exercised. Organizational landscapes and timescapes


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are both used as resources in the construction of subject positions but are also themselves produced through these practices. There is nothing essential about the meanings of organizational spaces and times. Rather they too are produced in practice. Thinking about space, time and subjectivity, we are not seeing relations between pre-given actants but, rather, relationalities that are inter-relational and performative (Rose 1999: 247; Gregson and Rose 2000). Attention to the ways that organizational temporalities and locales are multiply constructed and transformed through decoration, comportment, use and behaviour all offer rich additional narratives and stories about the lived experiences of change and the ways in which employees may reframe it. Third, and in turn, this contextual offers a contribution to sociological understandings of organizational power. While organizations may seek fixity of shifting subjectivities in order to outflank resistance (Clegg 1990), the extent to which employees resist this has been well documented. Attention to context demonstrates the multiplicity and complexity of the ways in which this resistance may be achieved. Our discussion of the ways in which organizational spaces and times are differently constructed and constituted, and ever mobile and changing, reveals the uneven and shifting natures both of the relationship between organization and subject, and the power of discourse to change all aspects of worker subjectivities. Individual relationships to discourses of change may shift and slip across the times and spaces of everyday lives, such that managerial attempts to impose subjective change are only ever partial and contingent. That individuals are active in using the specific temporal and spatial resources of their workplaces to construct and perform distinctive subjectivities in relation to discourses of organizational change means the power of organizational and professional discourses may be substantially mitigated or rearranged. The actual context in which discourses are received offers rich opportunities for employees to recontextualize discursive attempts at change and in the process to reconfigure the power relations between organization and employee.

Note We are grateful to the ESRC for their support, grant number R000221951.

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43 Stretching Out and Expanding Work Practices in Time and Space: The Case of Telemedicine Davide Nicolini

Introduction

O

ne of the often mentioned characteristics of the so-called ‘New Economy’ is the emergence and increasing diffusion of new distributed temporal and spatial working arrangements (DeSanctis & Monge, 1999; Hardill & Green, 2003). While there is convincing evidence that historically distributed work has always existed side by side with co-located forms of organized activity (O’Leary et al., 2002), a growing number of authors argue that the ability to support complex patterns of distributed working and innovation is fast becoming a critical success factor for organizations and firms (Hinds & Kiesler, 2002). Research in this area has been often connoted by three main characteristics. First, it focuses on inter-organizational or intra-organizational connections through computer-mediated tools and technologies (DeSanctis & Monge, 1999; Turner et al., 2003). The objects of inquiry are often ‘glamorous’ high-tech workplaces that attract our attention especially for the apparent innovativeness of the technological arrangements put in place. Second, attention is mostly directed towards the challenges of managing distant relationships and coping with new emerging communication and

Source: Human Relations, 60(6) (2007): 889–920.



coordination patterns (DeSanctis & Fulk, 1999; Hinds & Kiesler, 2002). The focus is thus exclusively on how communication technologies reconfigure access to information, how they affect access to people, and how they modify the way they conduct their business and interact with suppliers and customers (Dutton, 1999). Third, and strictly related to the former, is the fact that many of the available studies of distant work and virtual organizations adopt a normative stance and make little reference to ‘actual circumstances and experience’ (Woolgar, 2002: 4). The result is a prevalence of studies based on normative approaches which are driven by previous theory rather than based on the analysis of the actual conduct of work (Sarker & Sahay, 2004). In this article, I shall offer a different view of what happens when working arrangements are temporally and spatially re-distributed. I will do so by deviating from the mainstream directions discussed above in three main ways. In the first place, I will address the somewhat ‘non-heroic’ ambit of telemedicine, studying what happens when health care work becomes distributed and disconnected in time and space. Telemedicine, understood broadly as the delivery of health care services to persons who are at some distance from the provider (Grigsby et al., 1995), is in fact one of the fastest growing areas of distributed and distant work (Roine et al., 2001). While in itself a very old phenomenon (the first experiments of the transmission of electrocardiograms through wires and long-distance transmission of X-ray images dates back around the First World War), the use of tele-medicine has experienced a significant acceleration in recent years in concomitance with the wider availability and reduced costs of information and communication technologies. As we shall see in the study, telemedicine can be very innovative even when there are no high-tech devices involved. Second, I will refrain from focusing ‘ex-ante’ on some specific phenomenon (be it communication, collaboration, trust, or other) and focus instead on the conduct of daily activities. My aim is not observing the influence of some supposed variables as much as understanding how the practical problems introduced by the alteration of the spatial and temporal conditions of work were addressed and resolved in the site I observed. As I shall show, in fact, medical work is still mostly organized around the convention of the physical co-presence of the two parties and spatial co-location has a practical, cultural, and legal importance. For example, direct observation and apperception of nuances constitute two fundamental resources of diagnostic practice (Cicourel, 1990, 1999; Sinclair, 1997). Analogously, proximity is a cornerstone of nursing, the practice being historically based on the assumption that direct human interaction has a therapeutic effect (May & Ellis, 2001). It follows that introducing distance between provider and client in medical encounters is bound to problematize certain conventional assumptions and upset some deeply entrenched practices.


Nicolini • Expanding Work Practices in Time and Space 117

In order to describe this break in the traditional way of conceiving medical encounters, in the article I shall use the imagery of ‘stretching out’ and expansion of existing medical practices in space and time. The metaphor of ‘stretching out’ captures the idea that when extended in space and time, medical practices are put under pressure in that some of the existing taken for granted assumptions and practical arrangements become unsuitable for the new conditions of work. The idea of expansion, which I borrow from Cultural Historical Activity Theory (to be discussed in the next section) refers to the fact that this new of way of conducting medical work requires redistributing, reframing, and reconfiguring the existing activities. The notion of expansion spotlights some of the practical consequences and repair work which follow the stretching out. Last, but certainly not least, in studying this stretching out and expansion I shall adopt an interpretive, articulative, and practice-based research stance (Gubrium, 1988; Nicolini, 2006; Nicolini et al., 2003). I shall thus endorse a type of social science which focuses on observing daily practices and understanding how members of situations assemble a reasonable understanding of the things and events that concern them. Instead of focusing on the mutual influence between technology and people (as in the traditional approach), I shall investigate in which sense telemedicine constitutes a new way of accomplishing medical activities, as well as the consequences of this upon the identity and positioning of the different elements which enter into the carrying out of the activity (for a similar approach see also Lehoux et al., 2002; May & Ellis, 2001; Mort et al., 2003). The results will be a view of telemedicine in which the stretching out and expansion of medical practices is made possible by the overall redistribution of the work performed by human and non-human elements. As I shall show, the stretching out and expansion implies both a reconstitution of the object, the nature and content of the activity, and the reframing of the ways in which the activity is made accountable. The effort at reconfiguring health practices produces thus both a new set of activities and identities, as well as a modified geography of power positions. The article is organized as follows: in the next session I will review some contemporary practice theories and derive from them some sensitizing concepts which will guide my description and discussion of the practice of telemonitoring. Thereafter, I shall introduce the site of my research and discuss three major concerns which practitioners had to face in coping with the stretching out of their activity, that is, the redistribution of the work and tasks, mending the process for ensuring the accountability of actions and interactions, and the modification of the relationships between all those involved. Finally, I will put forward some reflections on the more general implications of my findings.



How to Theorize the Stretching Out and Expansion of Practices In order to conceptualize the stretching out and expansion of medical practices and its implications, I will draw on some of the tenets of contemporary practice theory. By this label, I refer to the work of scholars from different disciplines who have developed explanations of social, cultural, and material phenomena based on the notion of social practices (Ortner, 1984; Reckwitz, 2002; Schatzki, 2001, 2005). Although practice theory does not constitute a unified corpus, most of these scholars are joined in the belief that practical regimes constitute the horizon within which un-reflexive reactions, actions, utterances, linguistic acts, behaviours, and routine conduct acquire meaning. Practice consists of all these elements but cannot be reduced to any of them. Practices and the complex nexuses of local and global interdependencies which they tend to form (Dopson, 2005; Schatzki, 2002) constitute therefore a phenomenon that needs to be studied in its own right. Most contemporary practice theorists generally agree that practices are always materially mediated and that practice takes place through and amid a variety of artefacts and objects (Engeström, 2000, 2001; Law, 1992; Schatzki, 2002, 2005). Accordingly, although practices depend on reflexive human carriers (Weber’s Traegers) to be accomplished and perpetuated, agency is always the emergent property of a heterogeneous arrangement of people, things, symbolic artefacts, and other practices (Reckwitz, 2002). Finally, many practice theorists concur that practices perform meaning and support identity, so that the question of what people and things are depends upon the practices in which they are involved (Wittgenstein, 1953). At the same time, practices perform by definition different and unequal social and material positions. To speak about practice is to speak about empowerment or disempowerment or about power in the making (Ortner, 1984). Different traditions attract our attention to particular aspects of practice. Cultural Historical Activity Theory (CHAT), the practice theory stemming from the work of the school of cultural-historical Soviet psychology, directs our attention towards the mediated, object-oriented, and developmental nature of practices (Blackler, 1995; Blackler et al., 2000; Engeström, 2000, 2001). In this theory, practices are organized around an object, either material or ideational, that can be shared for manipulation and transformation by the participants. The attainement of the activity’s object is pursued through the mediation of a variety of elements (people, artefacts, rules, division of labour, ways of relating) which embody a multiplicity of points of view, traditions and interests. For this reason, activity systems, that is, practices, are by definition internally fragmented and inconsistent. Practising is thus bound to produce contradictions and conflict (Blackler, 1995; Engeström, 2000). CHAT authors use the metaphor of ‘expansion’ for describing the resolution of these contradictions and the transformative process in which activity systems are by This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.


definition constantly involved. An expansive transformation is accomplished when the object and motive of the activity are re-conceptualized to embrace a radically wider horizon of possibilities than in the previous mode of the activity. Although the transformation is necessarily achieved by the emergence and institutionalization of new forms of mediation (i.e. new artefacts, rules, conducts, divisions of labour), the object of expansive learning is the entire activity system (Blackler et al., 2000; Engeström, 2001). The notion of expansion thus underscores that it is the subject-less effort of producing the same object of work in the presence of innovations, variations, or contradiction which results necessarily in a shift in the nature and identity of all the elements involved – including the object of the activity. In this theory then, pursuing the same thing necessarily produces something different. As we shall see, this is very much the case of telemedicine. Other authors draw our attention to the fact that participation in a practice is connoted in normative and moral terms, and that practitioners perceive practice both as a normative drive and a commitment (Boltanski & Thévenot, 2006; Garfinkel, 1967; Lave & Wenger, 1991; Macintyre, 1981; Thévenot, 2001). Ethnomethodologically oriented scholars, for example, emphasize that to be involved in a practice means to be routinely expected to perform doings and sayings competently, and to contribute to the production of orderly and accountable scenes of action (Garfinkel, 1967; Lynch, 2001). This normative expectation is reflected in the ubiquity of accountability concerns in human activity and in the fact that all social activities are produced in view of the possibility of their linguistic description (Lynch, 1993). Actions and interactions are customarily performed in such a way that they are recognizable and reportable to others. Any breach in the existing fabric of accountability makes the activity illegitimate and untenable and needs therefore to be quickly mended. In our context, this translates into an invitation to observe how accountability is obtained anew when medical practices are stretched in space and time and new artefacts are introduced into the caring process. Finally, a further group of theorists underscore that practices embody particular configurations of interests and perform identifiable power regimes. Most of these authors build on the idea that the most fundamental social inequalities stem from the position which agents occupy within life sustaining practical activities. According to authors such as Bourdieu (1980), Foucault (1970, 1979) and Laclau and Mouffe (2001), practices necessarily perform unequally empowered social positions and sustain the relation of power between them. The positioning and the power that goes with it is defined both materially (e.g. in terms of a specific range of material possibilites and contraints), discursively (e.g. in terms of the possibilities of discourse associated with the position), and subjectively (e.g. in terms of the way the world is perceived and experienced). Discursive practices become especially important in this perspective, because discursivity (one of the dimensions of practice) is often both the locus of power struggles and the object of such struggles.



In sum, contemporary practice theories suggest that in making sense of the stretching out and expansion brought to bear by telemedicine we should examine the phenomenon from three specific angles: the redistribution of work between the human and non-human elements implicated in the practice, the effort of restoring the accountability of actions and interactions, and the reconfiguration of power relationships. This, in turn requires that we focus on the changes in the nature and components of the practice, the reconstitution of the object of the activity, the reconfiguration of the mutual relationships between different practices, the establishment of ways of making the practice accountable, and what consequences these changes had for the identity and power position of the actors involved. In the rest of the article I shall use this framework for charting the slippages and reconfigurations consequent to the introduction of distant working in the practice of caring for serious chronic heart failure patients.

Research Methods and Setting The data discussed in the present article derive from a three-year research project conducted in northern Italy in which I observed three instances of telemedicine: a telecardiology consultation service and two major services of telemonitoring serious heart failure patients (‘tele triage’). These sites were chosen for a number of theoretical and practical reasons. First, previous research indicates that telecardiology is among the most common initiatives of telemedicine (Nicolini et al., 2004). Second, all these sites were recognized as national and international centres of excellence. Third, these telemedicine initiatives had been in place long enough for organizational and professional issues to emerge. Last but not least, I was granted access to all the sites.

Data Collection Methods Data were collected through participant observation (several weeks over a period of three years), semi-structured and ethnographic interviews, discussion groups and document analysis. The observation at the telecardiology call centre focused especially on the work of operators while in the other two sites I observed the telemonitoring activity in the context of the daily ward’s routine. In all these sites I conducted several semi-structured and ethnographic interviews with all the actors involved (managers, cardiologists, nurses, technicians, general practitioners of monitored patients). Interviews were transcribed verbatim and analysed for emergent patterns and recurrent themes. They are referenced with ‘int.’ and a reference to the occupation of the interviewee in the text. Finally, I analysed a variety of project documents and scientific papers produced during the initiative.



Research Settings The first site where I conducted the research was a telemedicine centre anonymized for this article as ‘Telemed’. The centre, one of most advanced in the country, has been operating since 1997 and is privately run. It comprises a state-of-the-art call centre staffed on a 24/7 basis and provides telecardiology consultation to about 1500 participating general practitioners (GP). Once enrolled, GPs are given an easy-to-use portable electrocardiogram recorder which can transfer data through the normal telephone line (land or mobile). In case of necessity, they can send the electrocardiogram (ECG) to a call centre where an operator connects them with the first available cardiologist on duty who has been forwarded the ECG through a web-based system. The cardiologists, who work from remote locations, use the ECG for carrying out a remote ‘second opinion’ consultation, advising the GPs on the results and the meaning of the ECG, as well as on suitable courses of action. At the end of the call, the cardiologists summarize the outcome of the consultation to the centre’s operators, who file the data for future reference. An example of a teleconsultation is provided in Table 1. The other two sites of the research are centres which provide distant telemonitoring and tele-assistance to serious chronic heart failure (CHF) patients. Serious heart failure is a highly debilitating condition affecting a growing number of patients, most of them aged 60 and over. In very simple terms, heart failure means that the heart doesn’t work properly. People cannot Table 1: Vignette 1: An example of teleconsultation Cardiologist «Hi . . .» GP «Hi doctor, how are you? I am sending you this ECG because . . . I have here . . . an 87-year-old lady . . . she has a history of diabetes, ischemia, she had also a stroke, she is in therapy with (lists several medicines) . . . I don’t know . . . tell me . . .» Cardiologist «How is she? How does she look? Is she there? Is she in the waiting room . . . an atrial fibrillation . . .» GP «What ? (alarmed) atrial fibrillation . . . is she fibrillating?» Cardiologist «no! . . . no! I was just wondering . . . I see here . . . she is on a sinusoid rhythm . . . more or less . . . but is she in pain or something?» GP «no, not really, she said she even ate lunch . . .» Cardiologist «Look, let me check the old ECGs . . . let me see . . . if she has had something before» GP «Was there a dyspnoea last time?» Cardiologist «no, that is because she was moving while you were using the ECG recorder (while talking the old ECG comes out of the fax) . . . How’s the pressure?» GP «Uh . . . good you reminded me . . . the pressure is below 90» Cardiologist «Hum . . . and how’s usually?» GP «she is hypertensive . . . so . . .» Cardiologist «. . . aha! . . . so she gets an ACE inhibitor!?!» GP «yes . . . yes, she takes half of this medicine and half of this other one. She also takes a diuretic . . .» Cardiologist «. . . I understand now . . . look, there is nothing . . . in these cases . . . let’s cut the ACE inhibitor in half . . . if the pressure gets better we also diminish the diuretic. Make her do a blood test and we’ll see how it goes» GP «Thanks a lot»



carry out their daily activity, feel out of breath and get deep chest and other pains doing even the most light activity (e.g. even combing their hair). Acute crises are not uncommon, especially in more seriously ill patients. When such crises occur, patients need to be rushed to the hospital, put under intensive care, and ‘stabilized’ with an appropriate cocktail of medicines. One cannot really be healed of heart failure unless one goes through a (successful) heart transplant. Otherwise, like with all other chronic illnesses, all one can do is survive, with or in spite of, the illness. Until a few years ago this condition was typically treated through a recurrent pattern of hospitalization, intensive therapy, discharge, deterioration of conditions and subsequent new hospitalization. Hospitals intervened on acute crises and then ‘discharged’ their patients who were then either left to their destiny or taken up by their general practitioners. This cycle, however, contrasted with the emerging evidence that unless the disease was properly ‘managed’, patients’ conditions could seriously deteriorate over time. In order to guarantee ‘continuity of care’, some cardiology departments started to set up ‘day hospitals’, that is, a halfway solution between being at the hospital and being at home. Patients attended on a regular basis the ‘day hospital’ where they were seen by a specialist and could get access to specialized know-how without using precious ‘ward’ space. After carrying out most of the procedures that would have previously required hospitalization, patients returned home, often using an ambulance. ‘Day hospitals’, however, still required these very sick patients to travel significant distances so that the cycle of successive encounter and the effectiveness of monitoring is still necessarily limited. They are also very expensive to run. In this context, a medical foundation with several branches all over Italy, which specialized in the care of chronic cardiopathies, started to use telemedicine as a way of assisting these patients at home. Two different ways of addressing the issue were pursued by two distinct centres of the Foundation. In the first one, which I will call ‘Triage’, patients were given a portable ECG recorder and were trained on how to use it to send their data over the phone using the telemedicine centre described above as a relay. These were patients with chronic conditions that ranged from serious to very serious (some were on a waiting list for a heart transplant). At regular intervals specialized personnel contacted the patients, checked the ECG together with a number of other parameters (some of which require lab tests to be carried out prior to the scheduled contact) and adjusted the dosage of medicines accordingly. Patients called if an emergency ensued, and returned to the centre for a general check-up about twice a year. Only when diagnostic parameters suggested a serious deterioration would medical doctors be involved. Otherwise the nursing personnel took care of everything (this happened in about 90% of cases), hence the word ‘triage’, from the French ‘trier’, which means selecting after making an informed evaluation. The nurses were qualified but did not have a specialist or consultant status, in that this position had not been yet introduced in Italy at the time of the This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.


research. They were all quite senior and they all had a professional track record in cardiology (most of them had worked in the local sub-intensive emergency cardiology unit). An extract of a telemonitoring phone call from the ‘triage’ centre is provided in Table 2.

Table 2: Vignette 2: A telemonitoring call [The nurse arranges the agenda on her desk in the little room she has been given at the end of the corridor and opens up the ring-binding folder which contains the ECG plot received from the call centre by fax, copies of old tests and a log piece of paper made up of about three pieces of A4 side by side. Then she takes up the phone and dials.] Nurse «Good morning, how are you?» Patient «Not too bad, thank God . . . however, you know . . . my triglyceridesa» Nurse «I know . . . I’ve seen your tests . . .» Patient «Yeah . . . my triglycerides!» Nurse «They are not exactly where they should be . . .» «(mumble) . . . well, you know, I cannot resist. . .» Patient Nurse «I know . . . some crisps here . . . some cheese there . . . and your triglycerides stay high. Can you tell me your pressure please?» Patient «90 over 130» Nurse «Seems fine to me . . . Did you measure it in the morning?» (while speaking she writes down the data on her log book) Patient «Oh yes . . .» Nurse «How about your weight?» Patient «Well eighty . . . eighty two kilos . . .» Nurse «(smiling) Eighty or eighty-two kilos?» Patient «Eighty-two (in a low voice) but it variesb. . .» Nurse «You’ll have to check your diuresis . . . two kilos are quite a lot. . . remember how to do it, right? When you go to the toilet you . . .» Patient «Yeah, I remember . . .» Nurse «But you’ll have to be more strict with your diet. . . no crisps . . . too much salt, and no cheese either, or at the most a little bit. . .» Patient «. . . But my brother brought me some mozzarella . . .» Nurse «Next time tell your brother to bring you one mozzarella only . . . not a whole crate, as he usually does! Let’s see your tests . . . did you do the usual battery of test?» Patient «Yeah . . . (patient reads tests)» Nurse «Not too bad, apart from what we said . . . everything seems stationary. How about your therapy?» Patient «(Patient starts to spell out what medicines he takes at what hour of the day) Epotem . . . half , and it doesn’t really bother me, you know . . .» Nurse «Good! We can try to raise it» Patient «I know . . . we need to get to one pill . . . then I take Luviom (list continues with other 7 items)» Nurse «That seem fine to me . . . have you had any other tummy problems?» Patient «No, no . . .» Nurse «OK then, please repeat your tests in 15 days . . . then we’ll see if you behaved with your diet. . . I insist. . . check out what you eat. . .» Patient «Yeah, yeah . . . thank you . . . Oh, by the way, have you heard from signor Oloni . . .» Nurse «Yes .. .I talked to him recently . . . he is due for a check up here next month . . .» Patient «Well then, I’ll have to call him and find out when he’s coming . . . I may pop in at the ward to greet him . . .» Nurse «That’s fine . . . bye» Patient «Bye» a b

Level of fat in the blood. Patients with serious heart failure can retain water at an outstanding rate. During crises it is not unusual for them to gain as much as 5–7 kilos of weight in one day. For this reason diuretics constitute one of the main medications in this condition and control of urination is critical. This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.


The second project, nicknamed here ‘answering machine’, was instead centred on an interactive voice recording system which allowed the centre to detect variations in the conditions of the patients. After being discharged from the specialized centres, patients were asked to call the hospital at regular intervals and record into an interactive automatic answering machine the measures of a dozen vital signs, both instrumental (pressure) and noninstrumental (out of breath: yes/no; etc.). The data were automatically transferred into the electronic patient record and checked every morning by a nurse. If the data exceeded the established parameters, the nurse informed the doctor who would then call the patient, check his or her situation, and then decide on which course of action to take. In the following sections I shall use the data gathered in all three sites for illustrating some of the consequences arising from these new arrangements.

Stretching as Re-Distributing Medical Work If one observes the two vignettes in Tables 1 and 2, one will notice that a first notable effect brought to bear by ‘telemedicine’ is the significant redistribution of tasks and competencies between all the actors involved, both human and non-human. This is recognizable in both examples. Let’s start with the case of telemonitoring (Table 2). In this case, the whole exchange is conducted by a nurse. The nurse is checking some general health indicators and the overall well-being of the patient, which is what one would expect from a good nurse. However, she is also discussing symptoms, reading diagnostic clues, setting the dosage of medicines, which is something one would not expect from an Italian nurse.1 While this is not totally unexpected, given that the service had been structured according to the idea of nursing triage, one can note that the emerging new division of labour involves much more than a simple redistribution of what was already there. In fact, the redistribution follows a more complex pattern dictated by the practical concerns associated with this new specific activity, and involves the creation of new arrangements, a new mastery, and a new instrumentality. Let’s examine these aspects in some detail. Nurses already routinely deal with medicines and diagnostic indicators on hospital wards. Over time they learn how to handle specific drugs and what the effects of different dosages are on patients; they are also officially and unofficially asked to read tests and act in consequence. In intensive care units, they are expected to know which medicine to give to patients in case of emergencies. But because of the proximity to doctors and the frequent planned (and above all unplanned) interaction between health professionals on the ward, their individual clinical knowledge rarely takes centre stage. Hospital wards, and especially intensive or sub-intensive units such as those dealing with the pathologies discussed here, thrive in fact on forms of This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.


distributed cognition as the one discussed by Hutchins (1995a, 1995b). In these settings knowing is distributed between a complex array of people (including the patients), artefacts and representations. As noted by Hutchins, at least for what concerns humans, ‘there is a substantial sharing of knowledge between individuals with the task knowledge of more expert performers completely subsuming the knowledge of those who are less experienced’ (Hutchins, 1995a: 49). The knowledge collectively ‘possessed’ by the members of the medical team is both highly variable and redundant. Individuals working together on a collaborative task engage in interactions that will allow them to pool the various resources to accomplish their tasks. These interactions are only in part planned and ordered. In the hospital ward I observed, programmed and legitimized forms of interaction and coordination (e.g. formal meetings) and informal gatherings (e.g. taking a coffee together) coexisted with a further layer of interaction based on random encounters (or failed encounters). In the wards people run and bump into each other all the time, get in each other’s way, hold each other up, or miss each other when they should meet. The result of this planned chaos is not only effective team performance but also high reliability. All medical personnel have ‘war stories’ to tell about when they were just ‘passing by’ and noted some mistake made by another colleague, and how their intervention saved the day and prevented a catastrophic consequence. Not only mastery, but also memory is distributed in this way. Patients’ medical trajectories both within one medical institution and between them are only minimally recorded in the patient record: most of the time, such trajectories are distributed between several disconnected actors, as shown by Engeström (2000). Within a ward, a critical activity that sustains this collective remembering is for example the mainly discursive practice of ‘handing over cases’ to the personnel on the next shift. This is a critical passage that determines whether a patient’s local trajectory is constructed or not, and the practice is only partially substituted by the use of supporting devices such as written or electronic records. It is important to note that co-presence, proximity and mutual visibility are all key features of this form of organization of knowing and remembering. For example, all cases discussed by Hutchins describe co-located people (quartermaster on a deck, pilots in a cockpit), who cannot avoid running literally into each other. Distance therefore interferes with these processes and requires remedial strategies.2 In the case described in Table 2, distance is repaired using a well-known approach, that is, through task decomposition and the introduction of standard procedures (see Kielser & Cummings, 2002, for a discussion of this approach to distributed work). The work previously carried out in collaboration between doctors and nurses is split into two unequal portions. The nurse is granted an agreed space of discretionality (interpreting the tests and managing the patient’s therapy within the interval set by the national guidance)



defined by a precise remit. Within such space, she can move with a high level of autonomy and, in fact, only major changes of medication regimes are discussed with doctors. For example, in Table 2 she agrees on a variation of the dosage without interacting with a doctor. As one of the nurses put it in one of the interviews: I call the doctor only if the matter is really urgent and I warn him/her if the patient is not collaborating.

(int. with a nurse) The image of decomposition and distribution, however, only captures part of what happens here. The objective is in fact reproducing at individual level as much as possible of the redundancy and variety collectively sustained in the ward. This is achieved by training (that is, by ‘filling up’ some of the gaps) and by the development of a new division of labour and new instruments. For example, each case is allocated to a specific nurse, who follows the patient for months after they leave the hospital. As it emerges from the vignette, a central role is also played by a tool developed by the nurses and that acts as a proxy for the loss of collective memory – the patient log the nurse is handling and observing during the call. The log (Figure 1) is very similar to the one already in use in the ward with a few notable differences. In the telemonitoring log, most of the space is used for registering the evolution of critical vital parameters (pressure, weight, blood test, etc.). Moreover, the ‘note’ space, an unstructured section where actions taken are noted, becomes prominent. The form of the log, which keeps side by side the One field is used for each telephone contact

Space for registering the evolution of critical vital parameters (pressure, weight, blood test, etc)

Figure 1: The patient log


The unstructured ‘notes’ space


results of several calls, allows the nurse to get an instantaneous appreciation of the history of the condition with a single glance. The log at the same time represents and creates the patient history.3 The effort of repairing the effect of distance is distributed between human and non-human elements. In order for this to happen, however, all these elements need to change. The redistribution of work performed here is thus more complex and more subtle than a simple mechanical task decomposition. The redistribution follows a hologrammatic logic, that is, it attempts to mimic in practice the resources used in the collective process of distributed knowing and remembering within the microcosm of the individual work. In the process, however, both the nature of the work and of the workers, as well as the tools used in the process, undergo modification and realignment. While the establishment of the telemonitoring service tends to rely on the individualization of what was traditionally a collectively sustained competence, an almost opposite phenomenon is recognizable in the situation illustrated in Table 1. In this case, we observe the splitting between two people of the task and mastery usually enacted by one individual. The GP sees the patients, while the cardiologist, who has the task of understanding and interpreting the symptoms, is far away. In this case, the expansion of a medical and health care practice produces a split and a breakdown which reveals the visual and tactile nature of cardiology (an aspect that is less than obvious given that cardiology belongs to internal medicine). Several aspects of the verbal interaction in Table 1 indicate that the cardiologist’s effort is directed at understanding and comprehending the person he is not ‘facing’, literally an effort of ‘figuring out’ a distant patient. The understanding the cardiologist seeks is sensuous and emotional in character, not a cold cognitive representation only. This is especially visible in the search for information about the state of the patient; especially the line when the cardiologist explicitly asks the revealing question: ‘How is she? How does she look?’ ‘Looking’, the articulated, apperceptive and highly refined expert way of seeing is a fundamental resource for diagnosis. Cardiologists who work at a distance become painfully aware of how much they rely on this tacit and often un-noticed skill. They discover, as one of them put it, that seeing the patient tells you a thousand things: When people enter my studio I already understand . . . whether they’re out of breath, whether they’re chronic, whether they have swollen jugular veins . . . (int. with a cardiologist)

Diagnosing patients is in fact a complex operation of signification in which each element is both context and content. Take away any aspect and the whole process can run into trouble. Accordingly, distant cardiologists need to



develop interactional strategies and competencies to operate and investigate via the senses of the colleague who is co-present with the patient. As one of the informants put it: Cardiologists practically make their visit with the hand, eyes and gestures of the other doctor, and it is almost as if they can see the patient, because they speak between professionals and they understand each other. (int. with a cardiologist)

The strategy is quite straightforward: I ask my colleague about the jugular veins, pulse, whether eye pupils are widened, because I miss these data to evaluate and interpret the numerical data of the ECG . . . (int. with a cardiologist)

Because each cardiologist has her own way and style, the process is not a mere mechanical form of ‘collecting information at a distance’ as much as a form of mutual adaptation and, in the long term, learning. Consider, for example, the central section of vignette 1 in Table 1: «and how is the pressure?» «Uh . . . good you reminded me . . . the pressure is below 90». Here the cardiologist is helping the GP to proceed in the very practical endeavour of constructing a diagnosis by searching for elements that make sense when taken together. The word ‘reminded’ means that the GP has already encountered this situation. As I have discussed elsewhere (Gherardi & Nicolini, 2002) the words ‘remind’ and ‘remember’ uttered loudly in an a learning situation are often verbal markers for something that needs to be kept in mind, a sign of the relevance of the piece of information or event under consideration and its accountable nature. The interaction continues with the cardiologist using exclamations to mark the practical process of attributing meaning to diagnostic signs: «. . . aha . . . so she gets an ACE inhibitor!?!» The exchange is different from the retrieval of information from a database both because there is an expectation from the cardiologist that the doctor will actively try to complete the story he is sketching and because in this way the relationship allows the doctor to be socialized in the cardiologist practice and to learn the ropes, and more, of diagnosing heart disease symptoms. As one of the GPs put it: By now I have grown professionally . . . when I call a cardiologist at the centre . . . I know already on the basis of which cardiology clinical element they respond . . . so I know in advance what I have to do, and if I have a question I ask. (int. with a GP)

On the one hand the cardiologist learns how and what to ask for. On the other the GPs learn what to look for and how to see.



Finally, returning to Table 2, one notes that the redistribution of knowing and tasks associated with the introduction of telemedicine involves a further character, which is the patient. The patient does and knows many things. From the verbal interaction we gather that the patient weighs herself, measures her pressure, carries out and reads tests, takes the ECG, transmits it to the centre, etc. Most of these actions would not be carried out if she was lying in a hospital bed. The introduction of telemedicine achieves a result similar to that obtained with the introduction of ‘self-service’ in catering and purchasing: it transfers aspects of the task and the knowledge necessary to perform it to the client. By doing so, it renders the patient more proactive and independent and it saves money for the system (Anderson, 1996; O’Cathain et al., 2005). In sum, in all three cases of telemedicine the stretching out and expansion of medical practices implies the redistribution of work and tasks among human actors and between them and non-human elements, the creation of new instrumentality, the emergence of new ways of doing and saying, the constitution of a new interactional order and, more broadly, a whole new way of knowing in practice. This new way of practising, moreover, bestows a new identity to all the elements involved in the practice, so that the meaning of what it means to be a nurse (or a doctor, patient, diagnosis, ECG, etc.) ends up being stretched just as the practice in which they are involved in. As one of the nurses aptly put it: I would say that this new way of working changes significantly the nurse’s role . . . this is a new professional role in the making. (int. with a nurse)

Maintaining and Restoring Accountability In the previous paragraph I have described the active re-distribution of tasks, mastery, and agency brought to bear by the introduction of distance into the practice of caring for cardiac patients. As I have shown, the redistribution is all but mechanical and affects both humans and non-humans, and follows a logic that is all but mechanical. Some interesting practical implications of telemedicine become evident if we also pause to observe which aspects were not redistributed. This dimension was well captured during the research by an experienced nurse: when asked whether she thought her job had significantly changed since the introduction of telemedicine, she answered that, in fact, ‘everything is the same, only different’. Her statement is consistent with my observation that the intense activity of redistribution, realignment, and redefinition (i.e. change) described above, was accompanied by another, more subtle and silent type of work, that is, repairing the breaches (or potential breaches) in the overall fabric of accountability caused by the stretching out.



This aspect becomes clearer if we consider that one of the central organizing principles of accountability of modern medicine is the primacy of doctors and their diagnostic decisions. According to Berg (1997), in western medical establishments practices are set up in such a way to support the institutionalized myth that ‘it is always the doctor who decides’. Berg (1997) calls this a myth because all medical decisions depend on prior substantive work and the alignment of long and complex chains of people, information, tests, and machines. As institutionalist scholars have convincingly argued, however, it is exactly upon such myths that institutions are built (Scott, 1995). This ‘a doctor is always in charge’ accountability regime is however partially disrupted by the introduction of distance between the different actors involved in the medical practice. As mentioned previously, for example, one of the characteristics of ward care is the presence of a high degree of operational ambiguity. In the ward this ambiguity is nearly always positive, in that it generates a series of overlaps that allow pooled knowledge resources to be distributed among all the staff present, thereby minimizing chances of omissions or mistakes. This arrangement, however, also produces another notable effect, that is, it supports a sort of ‘circulating accountability’. Although in (most) western cultures accountability is strictly individual, in many teamwork situations informal and tacit arrangements apply so that distribution of tasks follows the contour of experience and competence instead of the rigid profiles of bureaucratic accountability. For example, in a ward, because of the intense regime of interaction, it is not unusual for non-medical personnel to carry out medical duties. This, however, presupposes a regime of proximity in which there is always a doctor nearby so that in case of necessity accountability trails can be brought back to the person in charge. All this changes, however, when distance is introduced in the equation. The distance between health care professionals interferes with both these processes and thus requires some remedial strategies to be put in place. Several were observed in my case studies. First, telepractitioners (both nurses and doctors) developed a shared repertoire of discursive practices which tended to ‘formally’ downplay what nurses did. Even when they were clearly interpreting clinical data (such as electrocardiograms), nurses refrained from using terms such as ‘diagnosis’, which were reserved for doctors – even though in most cases physicians simply endorsed what the nurses had told them. Consider the quote below: In theory these tests are read by the doctors, but in practice we read them. I print them off, pointing out what seems to be pathological and describing what I see. Then I make a diagnosis which, however, needs to be rendered official by a doctor. (int. with a nurse)

As in Os Guinness’s story of the three umpires,4 the nurse here skilfully exploits the socially legitimated nature of medical knowledge, operating on the basis that ‘they ain’t diagnoses until a doctor calls ‘em’.



A similar approach was taken at the Telemed centre. Specialist cardiologists went to great length to make clear prior to and during the consultation that they did not make diagnosis and that they only provided ‘support’ to the GP. The latter remained therefore formally accountable for the course of action pursued after the interaction, even though no cases were reported in which the GP did something different than he was recommended. As one of the e-cardiologists put it: At the end of the day, the final decision is always with the GP who is responsible for the patient. He/she is the one who makes the diagnosis . . . I am only here to provide a consultation. (int. with a cardiologist)

A second way of supporting this myth required nurses to maintain, both symbolically and materially, accountability trails which would link their acts to some previous, recognizable, and legitimate medical decision. One of the skills developed by the nurses was therefore figuring out at what point it was necessary to report to the doctor (which often meant working hard to obtain his or her attention) so that the trail would not become too thin. At this juncture, the nurse would fill in the doctor with just enough details to allow him or her to make a decision that would act as a sort of accountability milestone, should something happen and the need to reconstruct what happened ensue. I have known these doctors for a long time. I learned which are the ones you need to ask everything and who instead are those who will give you more freedom. (int. with a nurse)

Third and final, the effect of ‘the doctor is always in charge’ was achieved by enlisting a variety of symbolic artefacts such as flow charts and protocols, which, although very seldom used by the nurses, were often mentioned and visibly posted in their room. Protocols and flowcharts allowed the nurses to follow a particular course of action without having to formally decide. To the extent that they could attribute the decision to the protocol, they established an accountability trail which led directly to the professional institution that had issued it, a sort of institutional ‘super doctor’ invested with all the power of the institution that enacted these regulations and that few would dare to argue with. In this case, one of the new skills developed by nurses entailed knowing how much they could ‘push’ the protocol. As one of them put it: If we use the protocol and something happens it is easier to get away with it . . . however, this can be done within a limit: one has to show capability of being able to carry out her duties, otherwise you’re in trouble, with or without the protocol. (int. with a nurse)



In sum, the stretching out of medical practices introduced some potential breaches in the overall fabric of accountability. The expansion affected in particular the principle that responsibility trails need to be ascribed (or ascribable) to one, and only one legitimate doctor. This required all those involved to put in place a variety of remedial strategies: the principle, and the regime of accountability that it generated, was in fact a key factor in making activities comprehensible, meaningful, rational, and thus orderly. The breach would therefore jeopardize the very possibility of sustaining the practice itself as a legitimate endeavour. In this specific case, practitioners used the ancient strategy of the larvatus prodeo5 (‘masked, I go forth’): instead of embarking on the lengthy (and risky) process of seeking to legitimize the new ways of working, they opted for extending the existing ways of making things accountable to the new practices, connoting them as a plain extension of the existing ones.

Reconfiguring (Power) Relationships In the last two sections I have depicted the process through which medical practices are reconfigured in order to cope with distance in the process of caring for serious CHF patients. Such reconfiguration affects all the elements involved and requires the re-constitution of the texture of accountability which sustains the sense and orderly production of the caring practices. As several authors have convincingly argued, however, the process of stabilization of any heterogeneous networks (be it a socio-technical system or a complex practice like telemedicine) implies by definition a silencing of some voices, the elimination of alternative configurations, and the establishment of a specific regime of empowerment and disempowerment (Star, 1991). A critical question that needs to be asked of both teleconsultation and telemonitoring is thus what are the power dynamics and the politics behind them, and what are the hidden human costs, if any, implicit in these new ways of practising medicine? This issue has been tackled before in the literature, but only at a very high level of generality (and according to a polarized logic). For example, the introduction of telemedicine has been often heralded as a way of introducing a more even distribution of health care services, therefore improving the access of remote communities and patients (Brauer, 1992). This optimistic vision is matched by a contrary view that highlights how telemedicine might in fact deepen the existing inequalities. Cartwright (2000), for example, argues that besides deepening the so-called digital divide, telemedicine can be used as an excuse to reduce investments in local services, dividing the world into those who have access to ‘real doctors’ and face-to-face care, and others who will have to be content with electronically mediated and sensorially anesthetized relationships. This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.


My observations suggest, however, that although telemedicine is bound to trigger some shift in the power geography of health care proviso, gains and losses are much less clear-cut, and the situation is much more complex than this polarized debate may suggest. Moreover, it is impossible to discuss the effects of telemedicine in general, for each telemedical regime performs its own power arrangement (Hanlon et al., 2005). This emerges well if we consider for example the redistribution pattern performed by the ‘triage’ and the ‘answering machine’ way of caring for CHF patients at a distance. As I noted above, both these ways of translating telemedicine in practice imply an enrichment of the nurse’s work and a redistribution of skills and responsibilities. In the words of one of the nurses: . . . our responsibility has increased and hence our training and skills need to be different and updated. The issues we are asked to address are different and more challenging than those we used to face in the ward . . . the response needs to be given right away and in many cases there are no cardiologists at hand who can solve the problem for you . . . this is a much more challenging and in many ways rewarding job. (int. with a nurse)

In fact, both projects have raised polemical responses from the cardiology establishment,6 which is used to seeing nurses as carriers out of orders with only a shallow understanding of what is going on. The extent of this process is however different in the two cases. The ‘triage’ model articulates agency so that the role of the nurse is enhanced, its status raised and its self-esteem increased. The ‘answering machine’ arrangement, on the contrary, only requires nurses to download and compare data, and to communicate significant variations to the doctor who will then decide. The former has in fact demanded a long local negotiation and corresponds to the embodiment in the machine of the struggle of a women cardiologist to raise the profile of nurses often relegated to an implementer’s role by the majority of male doctors. The latter corresponds to a translation into the arrangement of artefacts and humans of the existing power relations to be found in the ‘day hospital’.7 The political implications of the redistribution performed by these two types of telemedicine extend, moreover, well beyond the relationship between nurses and cardiologists, and include other actors as well, such as the GP and the patients. For what concerns the former, one can note that the three different forms of telemedicine perform almost opposite power effects. While the teleconsultation brings GPs and specialists necessarily closer, to the point that they have to learn to work together in order to recombine in a meaningful whole different diagnostic signals, both telemonitoring systems have the counterintuitive effect of potentially cutting out GPs from the caring process. In both telemonitoring centres, in fact, the nature of the process is such that over time there is the risk of establishing direct and preferential relationships



between patients and specialized centres. This in spite of the fact that the original intention was exactly the opposite, and the project was heralded as an opportunity for breaking down the barrier between GP and hospital consultants. At least two factors concur at producing this effect. First, chronic patients, whose well-being and survival depend on rapid access to medical attention, quickly elect to rely on the specialized centre’s support instead of other health agencies such as their GPs. After all, this is a very complex pathology and, unless family doctors have a special interest in deepening the understanding of this specific illness, it is not rare that patients are more knowledgeable than their GPs. Second, GPs – who in Italy, just as in many other countries, are under constant pressure and stretched to their limit – are usually happy to delegate the management of these patients to a trustworthy specialized centre. The result is that the centre and patients establish a fiduciary relationship that leads to a progressive bypass of other actors, starting with GPs. GPs are thus disempowered by the new arrangement and flow of decision-making. This in turn might trigger a potential shift in the existing geography of relationships (and funding) within the health care environment. In spite of the fact that appearances are saved by official statements that the services are organized ‘in collaboration with GPs’, there is a real risk that the telemonitoring service becomes a ‘closed environment’, as clearly stated by one of my informants: There is a risk that this becomes a ‘closed environment’ because the relationship is between the patients and providers that might be far away from their communities. This would cut out the general practice from the loop. (int. with a cardiologist)

Finally, the reconfiguration of the caring practice affects also the positioning and empowerment of the patients (and their families). At first, telemedicine seems to have an obvious and exclusive positive effect: not only can patients remain in their familiar milieu and conduct an almost normal life, but through telemedicine they are also actively involved in their own care process. At a closer scrutiny, however, things turn out to be slightly more complex and somewhat ambivalent. Telemedicine constitutes in fact a specific disciplinary regime that both empowers and dis-empowers the patients and their families, and the two effects are inextricably linked together. Consider the following. In modern western hospitals proximity plays a fundamental disciplinary function, sustaining the professional dominance of health care practitioners over patients. Critical hospital medical practices such as monitoring parameters, controlling the evolution of symptoms, prescribing conducts (‘you need to rest’), and disciplining the assumption of drugs all depend on some level of compulsion supported by an appropriately engineered interactional order and spaces (Foucault, 1975; Turner, 1987). By changing all this telemedicine raises



the issue of how to perform the same control at a distance and how to produce a strict adherence to the prescribed therapy, what doctors call ‘obtaining a high level of compliance’. To reach these effects the practice of telemonitoring cannot rely on the physical presence of the hospital ward and the compulsion it can guarantee. There is no nurse in the patient’s home who will stand in front of the patient’s bed urging her to take the prescribed medications, or who will ensure she eats only certain foods. To ensure patient compliance, the two centres reverted thus to a very well-known principle for controlling people at a distance: producing and enlisting disciplined bodies and minds (Law, 1987). In both telemonitoring centres much effort is dedicated to socializing the patients so that they know about their disease and above all become accustomed to self-managing their condition. This educational aspect includes distributing leaflets, constant work to make clear to patients the symptoms and the effects of the drugs they will have to take and more generally the dynamics of CHF itself. Patients are taught the names and composition of different medicines, how they work, what dosage is necessary, and what their side effects are. Through this process, the patients and their families are thus socialized into the discourse of active involvement in the process of care but also enrolled in a specific disciplinary regime which sustains a specific hierarchy of positions and knowledges. This emerges, for example, from the reaction of one of the cardiologists when one of the patients took her therapy in her own hands: Nurse: Well, today Mrs.*** called . . . she discussed Lasix with her doctor . . . she has decided to take it at 5am and ALL together because the doctor told her that the main thing is the dosage . . . she said this makes her feel better. Dr: What?!? Absolutely not, never !!! Nurse: Well, I told her . . . but she is insisting (opening her arms) . . . she also said to me that she is not applying the medicated sticking plaster because it makes her dizzy . . . Dr: . . . no she can’t be dizzy! . . . the therapy must not change and get her to put on the plaster . . . (reconstructed from observation notes)

The professional dominance is revealed here in the practitioner’s delegitimization of the knowledge and experience of the patients. The patient is required to be competent, but what counts as legitimate knowledge is strictly controlled by the professionals. Although individuals with chronic illness can develop a sophisticated awareness of their body’s patterns, professionals are sometimes reluctant to acknowledge this expertise as credible. Research has found thus that people with chronic illness are often scolded when they told the doctor of a decision they had made in their self-care management (Paterson, 2001).



The complex and often ambivalent status of the empowerment made possible by this type of telemedicine becomes even clearer if we pause to observe that the stretching out and expansion described here have indeed a precise direction, that is, it amounts in effect to bringing the ‘hospital outside of the hospital’. While this movement has the beneficial effects mentioned above, there are also some more subtle unsettling implications for patients which clearly emerge as soon as we shift our position from that of the dominant health care discourse to some of the silenced voices (Star, 1991). As I mentioned above, the logic of action of modern scientific medicine is still centred on attacking acute illnesses by all available means, often dehumanizing individuals in order to save their lives (Wiener et al., 1984). This logic of action and the related conducts are however mostly associated with the specialized scientific medical establishment: it exists side by side with other health care logics of action, such as the more care-oriented approach usually adopted by community services and family doctors and the so-called alternative medicines. Bringing the hospital outside of the hospital has therefore the literal effect of breaking down barriers and extending one specific logic of medical action in a territory already occupied by other ways of caring. As one of the GPs clearly stated: When a doctor embraces a methodology like electrocardiography or hemodynamics he/she starts to see the patients as a series of numerical indexes . . . when I worked in the hospital there were colleagues who would refer to a patient as ‘the person with 18 in the right atrium’. This sent me

ballistic because that was not ‘Mr or Mrs with 18 in the right atrium’ but someone who had a condition, a personal history . . . [That’s why I quit the hospital and became a GP].

(int. with a GP)

The result of bringing the hospital outside of the hospital is not only the sidelining of the GPs described above, but also the marginalization and silencing of alternative, more practical, and often more caring approaches. Participating in the telemedicine regime described here means in fact that patients adhere to a type of personal and existential regime that is acceptable for a limited time while at the hospital, but may become less acceptable as a daily way of living. When stretched out of its original boundaries, the hospital tends to occupy the life of patients. As one of our informants put it: Specialist cardiologists are very aggressive about hemodynamic and clinical parameters . . . in order to reduce your overall body pressure of the ventricular diameter to their standards, they often go beyond what is an improvement for the patient. Very often patients are happier with two kilos of retained water and a little bit of dyspnoea,8 but maybe they still manage to get to the bathroom, comb their hair, even walk to the bar and



buy a magazine . . . I am thinking of a patient whose life was prolonged by two months, but who had her last year so completely disrupted and such a very low quality of life. (int. with a GP)

The doctor’s words remind us that aligning networks comes at a cost. What looks like order and progress from one perspective might look and feel very different from another. In sum, for the patients, just as for all the other actors involved in telemedicine, empowerment is a process and not an end state, and the process of empowerment does not mean an unequivocal accrual of discretion and capability. While it is customary for the idea of empowerment to have positive association, my description suggests here that it is more productive to critically interrogate empowerment as a change in the overall geography of the material and the discursive constraints and possibilities granted to the different positions which compose such geography (see also Anderson, 1996). My research suggests, in particular, that because of its heavy reliance on the proactive competent contribution of patients, telemedicine brings fully to the fore the ambivalence and tension implicit in the notion of patient empowerment (Mitcheson & Cowley, 2003; O’Cathain et al., 2005). If on the one hand, telemedicine offers the professionals a new opportunity for exposing the rhetoric of empowerment without actually fully enacting it in practice, it also sets the conditions for the patients to become active agents in the management of their condition. The fact that most of the process takes place away from the controlling gaze of the health care professionals offers in fact a host of new strategies and tactics through which the patients can actually take control of their therapy, from playing the system as in the case above, to ‘making experiments with my medicines that are my life’ (as another patient put it), to simply withdrawing information when it does not comply with what the doctor or the nurse expects to hear. While providing new means of distant control, telemedicine also opens a variety of tactics of resistance that in the long term might deeply modify the relationship between health care practitioners and patients.

Concluding Remarks In the previous sections I have used an articulative and practice-based approach for examining some of the work and organizational implications associated with the stretching out of existing health care practices. The starting point of my discussion has been that practices in general, and medical practices in particular, take place in and transpire through material arrangements of people, artefacts, and other objects. While several authors have emphasized



the critical and active role of material and symbolic artefacts in human practices (Engeström, 2000; Latour, 2005; Law, 1992; Pickering, 1993; Schatzki, 2005), the interest here has been on their spatial relationships and the effects that the stretching out in time and space of material arrangement of artefacts and people bring to bear on human practices. The discussion showed in particular that western contemporary health care practices carry deeply embedded some very specific spatial assumptions. By altering them, and by affecting in particular the fundamental spatial relationships of proximity and distance, telemedicine produces significant misalignments, tensions, and contradictions which necessarily determine a shift in the way the activity is carried out, as well as in the nature and identity of many of its components. My observation highlighted first that the stretching out of medical practices brought to bear by telemedicine implies much more than the simple redistribution of the existing work. Because the spatial relationship played a critical and active constitutive role in sustaining the practicing, the stretching out represented an expansion of the fabric and object of the activity. The alteration of the spatial arrangement introduced in fact a variety of tensions and contradictions which, in turn, required the development of new artefacts, a novel division of labour, new ways of interacting, new discursive strategies, and the negotiation of a new form of distributed mastery between all the elements involved. The result was an expansion of the prior notion of what it means to care for distant patients, working with distant colleaguedoctors, and, more broadly, ‘doing cardiology’. As I have shown, within a regime of activity all elements depend on each other and hence a slippage in any of them requires a generalized readjustment. Far from a simple activity of patchwork, it was the whole fabric of the practice that required to be reconstituted. In the process, all elements, both human and non-human, became different and acquired a new identity. Such identity depended very much on the specific regime of practice: what it means to be a nurse at the ‘triage’ centre is different from the ‘day hospital’ one. In this sense, one sees that a generalized discussion on whether telemedicine enhances or reduces the nurses’ or the patients’ autonomy is analytically misdirected in that different telemedicines generate different practical identities and power positions (Collin-Jacques & Smith, 2005). As demonstrated by this study, it is much more productive to address the issue from the perspective of how and in which direction telemedicine modifies the existing medical practices, asking therefore the value laden question of whether we like, or subscribe, or agree with the type of doctor, nurse, GP, and patient performed by a particular telemedical practice. Second, the observation also brought to the fore the critical importance of institutional and personal accountability in the process of practice expansion and reconstitution. As I have shown in the article, one can hardly understand the process of resolution of tensions and the practical concerns introduced by the stretching out if accountability is not brought into the equation. Although



this aspect is of paramount importance in a highly institutionalized environment such as health care, it is my contention that this equally applies to all other organizational circumstances. From a practice-based perspective, the expansion and reconstitution of a practice are always carried out also in view of sustaining the trails of accountability. The work for making any practice effective includes not only developing new artefacts, rules, forms of sociality and identities, but also ensuring that all of this is rationally describable and therefore accountable. Two interesting considerations arise from this. On the one hand one may notice that from the articulative perspective adopted here, the traditional dualism between stability and change of a practice is of limited analytic value. While practices are by definition shifting all the time, not all aspects change at the same pace and not all the local adaptations are discursively recognized as change. Practice, in fact, requires a continuous production of difference in order to address the slippages, misalignments, and contradictions brought into a practice by different elements. At the same time, competent practice requires that most of these slippages are not construed as change, in order not to upset the existing accountability regime all the time. As it emerges in the case study, the effort of the practitioners is aimed both at producing change and at creating a semblance of stability. Continuity and discontinuities co-exist in all practical endeavours, and they do not constitute an ontological dualism; the artful, strategic, and mostly discursive construction of continuity and change is one of the vulgar competences that practitioners need to master in order to produce organized activity. Naming change is already doing organizational politics. At the same time, accountability concerns are one of the ways through which local practices constitute and participate in broader phenomena. While practice is by definition a local phenomenon, complex activities such as telemedicine can only be sustained to the extent that they are part of larger discursively and materially supported nexuses – what authors such as Foucault (1979) and Laclau and Mouffe (2001) call ‘discourses’. In this sense, we need to abandon the ontological distinction between local and global phenomena, in that all practices are, by definition, both local and translocal. Third, and finally, one might note that power issues and micro-political processes are an inherent aspect of practices and therefore need to be taken into account in their description. As I have shown, in fact, all activities constitute and sustain by definition a specific regime of power. Describing the micro-politics of the three systems is just another way to describe the stretching out of the practice. To use Sherry Ortner’s (1984) words, telemedicine, like all other practices, is a relatively seamless whole in which however not all dimensions have the same significance: ‘at the core of the system are the specific realities of asymmetry, inequality and domination’ (Ortner, 1984: 148). Practices always have political implications and the study of practice is the study of human action, ‘from a particular – political – angle’ (p. 148).



As in the previous discussion of the ambivalent status of empowerment, the critical contribution of the articulative approach to describing the stretching out and expansion of practice does not lie, in my view, in taking one or the other side as much as bringing to the fore the fact that there is no change in practice without empowerment and disempowerment. One of the main critical tasks and contributions of social scientists is thus preventing the premature closure of possibilities – a manoeuvre that can only be performed by the voices speaking on behalf of the status quo and which tends to reinforce the latter. By showing how empowerment and disempowerment work, practicebased approaches offer the truly revolutionary possibility of demonstrating that all things could be different and therefore can be acted upon.

Acknowledgement The research was conducted while the author worked at the Department of Sociology and Social Research of the University of Trento (Italy). Financial support for this research was provided in part by the Provincia Autonoma of Trento (Italy), Progetto Scientifico No. 6-2001. I wish to thank Silvia Gherardi and Harry Scarbrough for their comments on a previous version of this article. I am also in debt to K.M. Gilbert and D. Coton for their precious editorial support.

Notes 1. As I mentioned above, these were not specialist or consultant nurses, in that this position had not been yet introduced in Italy at the time of the research. What nurses do varies by country and evolves overtime and my discussion needs to be understood against the specific historical background at the time of the research. 2. One could note in passing that the increasing use of temp and agency nurses in several western countries might have the same destabilizing effect and with significant effects on the safety of patients. For a discussion on the relationship between team stability, expertise, and safety see, for example, Finn and Waring (2006). I would like to thank one of the anonymous reviewers for pointing this out. 3. The nurses were later given an electronic patient record that, however, was strongly resisted. This was because the system presented the contacts one at a time on screen and didn’t allow the nurses to ‘see’ the recent history of the condition by comparing the results of different calls. The patient record, which was designed without talking to or observing the nurses’ activity, thus failed in the most important function. For a discussion on the importance of spatial arrangement of patient records, see Bang and Timka (2003). 4. In the story three umpires, each representing a different contemporary take on the philosophical status of reality, discuss how they make a call. The realist asserts that ‘there’s no-balls and there’s wides, and I call them the way they are’. The second umpire, a relativist, accuses his colleague of being arrogant and states that ‘there’s no-balls and there’s wides, and I call them the way I see it’. Finally, the third constructionist umpire says ‘They ain’t nothin’ until I call ‘em’ (see Guinness, 2000). 5. The phrase was made famous by Descartes who used it for referring to the precautions he took not to offend the authorities with his new philosophical system.



6. Both projects were criticized for this during a presentation at the Italian Cardiology association. 7. In fact, both the doctor and the technologist were male. 8. Lack of breath.

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44 Knowing Bodies at Work: Embodiment and Ephemeral Teamwork in Anaesthesia Jon Hindmarsh and Alison Pilnick

The study of the body has tended to become estranged from the study of work just as analysis of work organization has been abstracted from the body. (Hassard et al. 2000: 2)

T

hroughout the social sciences there has been a growing concern with re-emphasizing, reintroducing and reconsidering the role of the body in our analyses of social action. While these developments have been most widespread within mainstream sociology, the past few years have witnessed a number of studies within management concerned with relationships between the body and organization (e.g. Dale 2000; Hassard et al. 2000; McKie and Watson 2000; Trethewey 1999). These contributions have sought to overcome a ‘marginalization of the realm of employment and work organization within contemporary analyses of the body’ (Hassard et al. 2000: 2). While such developments have been heralded as ‘long overdue’ (Munro 2003), Casey (2000) has noted that the recent focus on the body in organization studies ‘lacks bodiliness’, in that although ‘the body’ is treated as a subject for scrutiny the approach to organizational analysis remains the same. This paper aims to illustrate an approach that places the body at the heart of our analyses of organizational conduct. Rather than considering the body as a metaphor for organization, or the body as a topic for study, we aim to focus on the ways in which the body and embodied conduct is a critical resource for organizational members themselves. Drawing on




ethnomethodology and conversation analysis, we wish to consider how organizational members make sense of and orient to the bodies, or rather the embodied conduct, of others in ordering and organizing work and collaboration. Such an approach is absent from the literature on the body in organization studies and yet resonates strongly with other developments within the field, such as the emergence of studies of organizational discourse and the concern with practice-based perspectives on work and organizing. To explore these themes and issues, the paper centres on the analysis of data from a video-based field study of work in preoperative anaesthesia in a UK teaching hospital. In particular it considers the fine-grained, closely organized practices of teamwork among personnel involved in administering and managing anaesthetic procedures. In doing so, the analysis explicates some of the informal and tacit practices that underpin the production of teamwork and demonstrates how the body forms a critical resource for the effective coordination of a team’s work. In exploring an alternative way of examining the body in organization studies, the paper considers the utility of such an approach by unpacking some of the embodied practices of anaesthetic teamwork and by showing how competent organizational members display intercorporeal knowing, that is practical knowledge of the dynamic bodies of others in the local ecology. In so doing, the paper aims to present a distinctive contribution to the literature on teamwork and coordination.

‘The Body’ and Embodiment at Work At the heart of the contemporary concern with the body in organization studies is the recognition of the ‘absent presence’ (see Shilling 1993) of the body in accounts of work, organizing and organization. That is to say, that accounts of organization take the body for granted and yet in taking the body for granted these accounts make (implicit) assumptions about the body. Most notable in this regard is the predominantly unquestioned separation of mind from body that derives from Descartes. This separation is evident in foundational work in management, such as F. W. Taylor’s concern to identify bodily knowledge of workers and transform it into cognitive, systematized knowledge for managers: concerns that developed into broader interests in controlling workers’ bodies (Dale 2000). The recent literature on the body and organization aims to identify and explore these assumptions and, moreover, to flesh out the potential implications for organization studies of a serious and explicit treatment of the body. It is a wide-ranging and diverse literature. For example, within the Hassard et al. (2000) collection alone, contributors consider the utility of ‘the body’ and various bodily ‘functions’ as metaphors for understanding organizations; explore the relevance of gender, sexuality, age and disability for organization studies; and examine management control of body modification, dress and demeanour in the workplace. This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.

Hindmarsh and Pilnick • Knowing Bodies at Work 147

Unfortunately these studies, much like parallel developments within sociology, often fail to engage with the body in radically different ways – ways that truly develop alternatives to the traditional Cartesian dualism of mind and body. Instead the body is simply treated as a new topic or site for the classical study of social or organizational relations. While (sometimes) about the body, studies of gender, sexuality, age and disability in organizations tend to elude an embodied understanding of organization and, however important and insightful in their own right, they do not contribute to a distinctive form of study; they simply provide the kinds of analyses with which the social sciences are familiar. Similarly, analyses of the potential use of bodily metaphors such as ‘the body’ or ‘the female orgasm’ (see Hassard et al. 2000) to characterize organizations seem more at home within the field of organizational discourse, with its roots in the study of metaphor, rather than in a programme concerned to bring the body firmly into analyses of organization. So the recent ‘embodied turn’ in organization studies, and indeed in the social sciences more generally, has tended to produce sociologies about the body, rather than what has variously been termed an ‘embodied sociology’ (Williams and Bendelow 1998) or a ‘carnal sociology of the body’ (Crossley 1995). Casey (2000) characterizes the problem thus: ‘. . . paradoxically, for all the promise of this new scholarly interest in the body there is not much bodiliness in it. To date, sociologists of the body have largely continued modern science’s dissociated detachment from the body . . . The objectification and disembodiment of the body is retained and an embodied experiential interest continues to be rare.’ (Casey 2000: 58)

More far-reaching attempts to bring the body into our analyses of sociality, work and organizations highlight the need to focus on embodiment. Drawing on primarily phenomenological literatures, they aim to retrieve the body from its position as an object of scientific inquiry, and the concomitant concern with anatomizing, fixating and normalizing the body (see Dale 2000), to focus instead on the lived body and the multifarious character of bodily experience. Thus the drive is towards lived experience rather than objective anatomization. This development is yet to be fully explored by organization studies, but seems critical to the initial motivations of re-emphasizing the body in understanding and exploring social and organizational relations. Therefore, in this paper we aim to demonstrate how one approach in the social sciences provides a way of taking seriously organization as embodied practice. The approach prioritizes some of the ways in which participants see and orient to bodies in organizations. Indeed, it seems surprising that few have considered seeing bodies as a practical concern for participants themselves (although see Heath et al. 2002 on how London Underground staff survey the bodies of passengers). While Dale (2000) is right to note that in Western academia our knowledge of the body has traditionally been This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.


constructed by the biological and medical sciences, we should also recognize that our organizations are full of individuals who know in rich but tacit ways the body as expressed in different working contexts. The empirical sections of this paper aim to explore elements of such knowing within the context of one kind of workplace: preoperative anaesthetic rooms.

Analysing Bodies in Anaesthetic Rooms The data that form the basis for our empirical work were collected in a number of anaesthetic rooms (see Figure 1) within a large UK teaching hospital. Immediately prior to surgery, patients are brought from the ward to the anaesthetic room which adjoins an operating theatre. During the 15 minutes or so that the patient is in the anaesthetic room, they are connected to various forms of monitoring equipment (to monitor blood pressure, oxygenation of the blood, and so on), anaesthetized, hooked up to an automatic ventilating machine, their bodies are physically arranged for surgery, and then they are wheeled into the main operating theatre. Preoperative anaesthesia provides an intriguing case for the study of bodies at work, as numerous personnel are gathered in close proximity and engaged in tightly organized, life-critical activities. Furthermore, the work site is the body of another, namely the patient. The work is usually undertaken by

Figure 1: An anaesthetic room. The anaesthetist is at the head of the patient. To his right is the ODA. To his left is a trainee ODA



an anaesthetist and an operating department assistant (ODA; now widely known as an operating department practitioner) who assists the anaesthetist. As this was a teaching hospital, there were often medical students and trainee ODAs also in attendance. Moreover, during complex procedures, qualified anaesthetists were regularly supported by even more experienced personnel. Thus, while many studies of anaesthesia focus primarily on the activities, decision-making and ‘errors’ made by a lone anaesthetist, work within anaesthetic rooms is most certainly teamwork. While there are numerous types of collaborative work in organizations, most academic studies have focused on ‘stable teams with well-defined static tasks’ (Edmondson 2003: 1419). Preoperative anaesthesia, and indeed surgery more generally, provide examples of what we might call ephemeral teamwork (Hindmarsh and Pilnick 2002), in which interdisciplinary groups of medical professionals work together maybe only for the duration of an operation and also they may have only met moments before greeting the patient; nevertheless they must coordinate their contributions in situ and in real-time. This local ordering and organization of collaborative work is critical, as the ability to successfully collaborate can significantly affect the quality of patient care. Indeed, they are often undertaking work that is life critical – and demands seamless collaboration at just those moments that are most precarious. So the organization of work in these ephemeral teams places some practical problems on the personnel. However, as we will argue, participants become expert in knowing the bodily conduct of others in the anaesthetic room as one resource to coordinate their contributions to the team’s work. Data collection consisted of a mixture of traditional field observation, informal interview and, most critically, the capture of naturalistic audiovisual recordings of everyday anaesthetic work. The recordings were made on 14 days over a period of several months and they feature action in both anaesthetic rooms and operating theatres. When the patients and relevant medical personnel agreed to the recordings, we filmed operations in their entirety. So we would begin with the patient being wheeled into the anaesthetic room, move with the medical team through to the operating theatre and then end when the patient was being wheeled out of theatre. Any one day of recording could involve the collection of materials relating to between one and four distinct operations, depending on levels of consent, the length of surgical procedures and the time available. The data were collected by the authors from a variety of different types of operation and from a variety of different teams of medical professionals, in order to reveal how more generic features of work are accomplished with different combinations of individuals, across different settings and in different circumstances. We consider such recordings to be a powerful analytic resource. For example, given the tacit and fleeting nature of the kinds of phenomena under scrutiny, recorded materials provide the analyst with repeated access



to the details and contingencies of their production. In this way, although video provides only one version of (or perspective on) events, it provides a continuously available resource. Moreover, video allows us to draw together a concern with both the verbal and the non-vocal elements of collaborative work and to analyse the ways in which these different elements of conduct are interwoven in action and interaction. We gained local research ethics committee approval prior to the onset of fieldwork. In addition, consent for filming was gained from all the patients involved while they were still on the wards and also from staff at the beginning of each session. Moreover, we have attempted to anonymise the data as much as possible while retaining the sense of video images for illustrative purposes. Therefore the faces that appear in the video images in this paper are purposefully somewhat blurred. There is often a concern with recorded materials that the presence of the camera can alter normal working practices. However, when we have shown these materials to experienced anaesthetists they find no reason to question their validity – they are for them recognizably the ordinary everyday affairs of the anaesthetic room. Of course, comments are made onscreen about the presence of the camera by patients and by medical staff at significant junctures, such as at the start of filming. However, and as we hope you will recognize when reading the empirical sections, the kinds of phenomena and details that we are interested in would be extraordinarly difficult to transform without making a topic of the transformation or rendering action unintelligible to colleagues. Nevertheless, to minimize the intrusiveness of the camera, it sat stationary on a tripod for the duration of filming. The camera angle was only adjusted when the participants significantly altered their positions within the room, which would happen maybe three times at most within the anaesthetic room. We choose not to follow participants or objects with the camera as it is far more distracting for participants and also the researcher has to make real-time judgements about the most analytically interesting features of the emerging scene, which is extraordinarily difficult. A wider, single and static angle on a scene works much better for our kind of analytic work. To augment the video materials, we undertook observational fieldwork in anaesthetic rooms and operating theatres and conducted informal interviews both with anaesthetists and ODAs. This work was more traditionally ethnographic in character. The activities in anaesthetic rooms and operating theatres are extremely complex, so observation and interview furnished us with a more thorough knowledge of the activities in which the participants were engaged. Within the operating theatres especially there are significant quiet periods for the anaesthetist, which provide wonderful opportunities to interrogate them about the nature of the case at hand, about the procedures in which they are engaged, about the drugs that are being administered, about the tools and technologies that are used, about the micro-politics of the profession and the setting, about interesting events observed by the This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.


researcher, about technical jargon that has been overheard and so on and so forth. Furthermore, on occasion we were able to show video recordings back to the anaesthetists involved to ask them about features of the procedure that we were unable to fully understand. Thus the video data could be analysed against a richer background knowledge of the individual aspects of each operation, aspects of medical and practical reasoning in anaesthesia and so forth. The analytic approach that we adopt is drawn from ethnomethodology and conversation analysis (Garfinkel 1967; Sacks 1992). There is not space here to provide a full account of the analytic orientation(s) of ethnomethodology and conversation analysis and their (potential) contributions to organization studies more generally (for which see Boden 1994, Silverman 1997 and Harper et al. 2000, among others). However, we should be clear about the character of our approach and how the approach can be seen as furnishing at least one possible ‘carnal’ sociological analysis. Rather than prioritizing subjective experiences of the body-as-lived, the writings of Garfinkel and later Sacks encourage a fundamentally intersubjective and interactional treatment of the body. To this end, our paper draws on audio-visual recordings of everyday action to view and re-view sequences of conduct in fine-grained detail and to unpack how organizational members’ bodies treat, and are treated by, others. In so doing, this paper contributes to a growing corpus of studies that analyse naturalistic audio-visual recordings to explicate organizational practices, collaborative work and face-to-face interaction more generally (e.g. Goodwin 1994, 1995; Heath and Luff 2000; Whalen et al. 2002; for a recent methodological discussion, see Heath and Hindmarsh 2002). The analysis progressed with a systematic review of all our recordings. In developing the analysis for this paper, we became interested in a significant activity in the anaesthetic room that seemed to have some fairly routine elements. This activity is known as ‘intubation’ and is described in detail a little later. We collected together all useable instances of intubation from our corpus on a single tape and began to analyse each instance in turn. From our detailed analysis of single instances we began to identify patterns of action and common practices of coordination. Our work takes as a fundamental principle that every action in interaction is both context shaped and context renewing, both organized in the light of the prior action and framing the next (Heritage 1984). This concern places the focus on the interactional and sequential organization of conduct and the ways in which conduct is both retrospectively and prospectively organized. Therefore the analysis of each instance began with the production of a detailed transcript of the talk of all participants, using transcription conventions common to conversation analysis (see Heath and Hindmarsh 2002). In addition, as analysis progressed we identified significant moments of closely coordinated embodied conduct, which we transcribed further by



marking the onset, development and withdrawal of significant gestures and glances in temporal relation to the talk. This facilitated a consideration of the sequential organization of the activity – that is, how each participant’s conduct emerges in relation to the actions of others. This concern with sequence provides the analyst a resource with which to consider members’ own displayed orientations to prior conduct. This is one way of engaging the ethnomethodological commitment to prioritizing the participants’ displayed orientations to action rather than the analysts’. While the following quote refers exclusively to talk, we would argue that it is readily broadened to encompass embodied conduct more generally: ‘. . . it is a systematic consequence of the turn-taking organization of conversation that it obliges its participants to display to each other, in a turn’s talk, their understanding of the other turn’s talk. More generally, a turn’s talk will be heard as directed to a prior turn’s talk, unless special techniques are used to locate some other talk to which it is directed. Regularly, then, a turn’s talk will display its speaker’s understanding of a prior turn’s talk, and whatever other talk it makes itself as directed to’ (Sacks et al. 1974: 35)

So, the approach that we adopt encourages a concern with real-time organization in action: the interactional practices of organizing. In many cases the call to examine embodiment is coupled with a concern to explore the lived experience(s) of embodiment. Our interest in real-time organizing pushes this towards an interactional focus where our analytic resources facilitate a consideration of real-time displays of orientation to the bodies of others. We would argue that this provides a means through which the analyst can explore lived experience and, more specifically, participants’ displayed orientations to the bodies of others. To illustrate and explore these issues in further detail, we turn to our empirical case of preoperative anaesthesia.

Introducing Tracheal Intubation The anaesthetic room is intriguing at least in part because of the very noticeable shift in the patient’s consciousness from fully aware to fully unconscious. Indeed, in other papers we have considered both practices of communicating with the patient (Pilnick and Hindmarsh 1999) and the distinctive practical problems of organizing teamwork over and around the conscious and variously involved object of work, namely the patient (Hindmarsh and Pilnick 2002). Here, however, we focus on a routine procedure that takes place when the patient has already been anaesthetized. It is a critical activity in the anaesthetic room and is known as ‘intubation’ or ‘tracheal intubation’. In order to provide a background to the data that will be presented, it may be worth briefly describing this procedure.



Intubation involves the anaesthetist inserting a tube in the patient’s trachea in order to secure an unobstructed airway for the duration of the operation. The anaesthetist uses a laryngoscope to part the mouth and identify the vocal cords, between which the tube will be slipped. The patient is paralysed so that the body does not reject the tube. This in turn means that she is not breathing for herself, and is not getting any oxygen while the anaesthetist is inserting the tracheal tube. Thus, it is important that the patient’s body is prepared for a period without oxygen, by oxygen-enriching the patient’s blood prior to intubation. Furthermore, it is critical that the process of intubation, from removing the oxygen gas mask to connecting the tracheal tube to an anaesthetic ventilator, is undertaken as swiftly as possible. Problems can and do arise during intubation because of a patient having a difficult airway due to a variety of factors, such as that the patient is elderly, obese, suffers severe neck or spinal problems, or the like. In addition, if mishandled, the metal laryngoscope can break the patient’s teeth, which is not an unusual problem, especially for inexperienced anaesthetists.

Seeing Bodies at Work Activities in the anaesthetic rooms involve dynamic sets of actions, including movements around the patient’s bed and from one domain of activity to another, the (re)arrangement of medical equipment and even furniture, the assembly of medical tools, the manipulation of the patient’s body, and so forth. However within this range of activities, there are identifiable recurrent orderings of action. Of course, they are not identical on each occasion, but there are some clear similarities across cases. Part of the work for colleagues, and maybe most especially ODAs, can be glossed as anticipation; anticipating what comes next in order to successfully contribute to that work. More experienced personnel display their orientation to the recurrent ordering of these activities in and through their own contributions. To illustrate, consider the first fragment (see Figure 2). The anaesthetist stands at the head of the patient and the ODA is in a position to the side of the patient. The monitor displaying various patient readings is visible in the top right-hand corner of the images and there is a trolley with a set of medical instruments in the bottom right-hand corner of the images. Within this short sequence, 15 seconds or so, the activities of the anaesthetist and/or ODA include: checking the readings on the monitor; removing the gas mask from the patient’s face; picking up the laryngoscope from the trolley; handing over the laryngoscope; repositioning the patient’s head using the laryngoscope; picking up the tracheal tube from the trolley; handing over the tracheal tube; inserting the tracheal tube in the patient’s trachea; attaching an extension to the tracheal tube; disconnecting the anaesthetic ventilator from the mask; connecting the anaesthetic ventilator to the extension of the



Figure 2: Images for Fragment 1



tracheal tube; and securing the position of the tracheal tube in the patient’s mouth. Aside from a quiet ‘okay’ from the anaesthetist at one point, this is all completed without talk. Therefore the resources that the participants have to coordinate this range of actions are related to each other’s embodied conduct, coupled with their experience of work in anaesthetic rooms. Our particular interest here is in the delicacy with which the two colleagues coordinate their activities. For example, despite the lack of talk, they smoothly and unproblematically exchange both the laryngoscope and the tracheal tube and coordinate their conduct such that the patient is quickly intubated. To discuss this in more depth, it may be worth briefly describing how this is done, focusing primarily on the exchange of the two instruments. As the sequence begins, a loud beep can be heard which signals the display of the latest blood pressure reading on the monitor. The anaesthetist turns to look at the monitor and then turns back towards the patient and removes the gas mask from her face. Often prior to intubation, anaesthetists use the display of a new blood pressure reading as a moment to initiate intubation as it marks the most recent measurement on which to base a decision to proceed. As the mask is taken from the face of the patient, the ODA immediately turns towards the trolley to retrieve the laryngoscope. He is already turning and has his hand reaching towards the instrument before the anaesthetist quietly says ‘okay’. Thus the ‘okay’ is not necessary for the ODA to recognize the initiation of the intubation sequence nor to begin to retrieve the laryngoscope. Indeed, even if the ODA had only begun turning after the ‘okay’, he would still have had to have made sense of that utterance as a request by recognizing the character of the ongoing action as prefiguring the onset of intubation. So, the ODA displays a sensitivity to the upcoming intubation procedure. Knowing the scene rests on understanding the character and sequence of action in the anaesthetic room and recognizing a ‘trajectory of action’ that he can contribute to (see also Heath and Luff 2000). In addition, as he does not explicitly request the instrument, the anaesthetist can be seen to expect or rely on the ODA knowing what comes next and that he will pass the instrument at just the appropriate moment. However, the timing of the instrument being passed is not all that is relevant here. Indeed the way in which the ODA presents and positions the different instruments to the anaesthetist displays understanding of the other’s prospective embodied conduct as well; that is to say, through the manner of the passing of the instrument the ODA displays a sensitivity to what it takes to use a laryngoscope and later to insert a tracheal tube. When passing the laryngoscope (see Figure 3i), the ODA opens out the ‘blade’ so that it is perpendicular to the patient and he also holds the very end of the main shaft. This allows the anaesthetist to take it and place it inside the mouth of the patient using one hand and in one movement. Indeed, he does not even have to alter his initial grip on the laryngoscope before slipping it inside her mouth. His other hand is free to hold the patient’s head in This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.


(i)

(ii)

Figure 3: (i) Passing the laryngoscope (the outline of the tool has been marked). (ii) Passing the tracheal tube

order to gently tilt or extend the head, which opens the patient’s mouth and straightens her trachea to facilitate the insertion of the tracheal tube. This is managed in one smooth movement and facilitated by the way in which the instrument is passed to him by the ODA. Similarly, if we consider the way in which the tracheal tube is exchanged (see Figure 3ii), it is again delivered with regard to the character of the prospective task. A syringe is attached to enable the inflation of a cuff on the tracheal tube (to prevent respiratory gas leakage). If the ODA was to hold only the syringe or the tube, the other component would dangle down from it. Therefore, as he moves the tube and syringe towards the anaesthetist, he holds both components but points the syringe end generally towards the anaesthetist with its inherent bend towards the patient’s head. As the anaesthetist grasps the tube, the ODA continues to support the syringe until he is in a position to be able to rest it on the patient’s chest without pulling on the tube. Their hands descend in unison. Again the organization of this exchange reveals the sensitivity of the ODA to the prospective embodied conduct of the anaesthetist and delicately supports, indeed facilitates, the smooth insertion of the tube. The seemingly simple presentation and exchange of instruments reveals an orientation to the current and prospective embodied conduct of a colleague both in terms of when an instrument is required and how it should best be delivered. The timing and positioning of the passing of the instrument are critical to the smooth organization of this anaesthetic work. If the teamwork were more clumsy, it raises further difficulties for the anaesthetist in the rapid (so that the patient is only without oxygen for a short period) and smooth (without breaking the patient’s teeth) insertion of the tube. Such anticipation of the future embodied actions and activities of colleagues displayed in seamless contributions to emerging conduct are common within teamwork in anaesthetic rooms. Nevertheless these routines are not somehow ‘fixed’, but rather they are ongoingly and interactionally This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.


accomplished (see also Whalen et al. 2002). The smooth production of these identifiable ‘routine’ collaborative sequences rests in part on the abilities of participants to make sense of, to recognize, the emerging conduct of colleagues and the relevance of that conduct for their own work. In orienting to and acting on the trajectory of colleagues’ actions, the participants (re-)produce the routine or normative character of activities in anaesthetic rooms. This kind of conduct is critical because the participants themselves orient to the relevance of the body in and through their work and because these seemingly trivial moments underpin the abilities of two participants to efficiently organize the intubation.

Assisting Bodies The previous example is a very common illustration of the unproblematic ways in which a patient is intubated. The distinct lack of talk and the swift preparation and insertion of the tracheal tube occurs in the vast majority of cases in our data. However, due to various minor differences in the anatomy between individuals, complications do arise, and some types of patient (e.g. the elderly and the obese) can present more problems than others. To resolve slight complications, anaesthetists can draw colleagues more explicitly into providing hands-on assistance. For example, in Fragment 2, the anaesthetist encourages her colleague to apply pressure to the patient’s larynx in order to improve the visibility of the vocal cords and to facilitate her ability to insert the tube. The verbal transcript in Figure 4 draws on the standard orthographies used in conversation analysis. The numbers in brackets indicate pauses in talk measured in seconds; (.) indicates a mini-pause of less than 0.2 of a second; the parallel square brackets mark overlapping utterances; and utterances in brackets indicate transcriber uncertainty. At the beginning of the fragment the latest blood pressure reading is signalled, the anaesthetist checks it, makes a slight alteration to the gas flow and then says ‘Right. Okay.’ She does not remove the patient’s mask, but simply leans her body back slightly while still holding on to the mask. The ODA treats this as marking a shift towards intubating the patient and begins to turn during the word ‘right’ to pick up the laryngoscope. As the ODA opens the blade, the anaesthetist removes the mask, prepares the patient’s head for intubation and then takes the laryngoscope. While she tilts the patient’s head to get a clear view of the vocal cords, the anaesthetist and ODA discuss matters relating to the necessary physical presentation of the patient’s body for surgery. Throughout this brief discussion the anaesthetist moves the patient’s head to enhance visibility of the vocal cords. She comments on her difficulties when she says ‘Oh gosh. (.) hhh (.) (do you know what.) hhh (.) I can’t see much in here.’ As she says the latter part of this utterance, she reaches around to the neck of the patient to apply pressure to the trachea to try to render the vocal cords more visible This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.


An: Right. Okay.

NL Y

(4.0)

An: What sort of position are they going in there? (.) ODA: Er[mm. An: [(lateral?) ODA: Probably lateral I would have thought.

FO

(.) ODA: And C5 for the next two. (0.5)

An: Oh gosh. (.) hhh (.) (do you know what.) hhh (.) I can’t see much in here.

PR OO

(4.0)

An: Jus:t. (.) If you push just there. ODA: mm-hmm.

(8.0)

An: Okay. (.) hrghmm. I wondered if she was going to be (.) ODA: diffi[cult. [difficult. An:

Figure 4: Images and transcript for Fragment 2



(i)

(ii)

Figure 5: (i) The anaesthetist pointing out where the ODA should apply pressure. (ii) The anaesthetist placing her hands on the ODA’s to encourage an appropriate level of pressure

(a standard technique). There has been no request for assistance, yet at this moment the ODA retracts the tracheal tube and places the extension onto the bed. At the moment the extension is put down, the anaesthetist says ‘Just.’ and the ODA moves his hand immediately to help. The ODA’s action of retracting the tube and freeing up a hand by putting down the extension are treated by the anaesthetist as making himself available to assist. Little is said and yet these two colleagues who have only met for the first time minutes earlier delicately move into hands-on collaboration. The encouragement for and offer of assistance are unspoken and yet expert assistance is swiftly provided. This division of labour is contingently and interactionally organized. The anaesthetist then more explicitly instructs the ODA how he can help. This instruction is made available through a range of embodied conduct – verbal, visual and tactile. Firstly the utterance ‘if you just push there’ is coupled with ‘pointed’ single finger pressure on the patient’s neck. The anaesthetist had previously placed various fingers on the neck of the patient to find the relevant place to press, but as soon as she moves to show her colleague where to press she discriminates the point by retracting her other fingers to leave one on show, which she further rocks to animate the point. As the ODA’s fingers slip into position, the anaesthetist rests her fingers atop his to encourage him to apply appropriate pressure to make the vocal cords visible. Of course the ODA cannot see the impact of his action on the visible field of the anaesthetist. He cannot see directly whether his finger pressure is making the vocal cords more visible as he is not able to look down the throat of the patient. However, the anaesthetist’s touch to his fingers encourages a degree of pressure necessary to assist her. Then the anaesthetist takes the tube and inserts it swiftly into the patient. The tight coordination of action among the anaesthetic team of anaesthetist and ODA rests on an intimate understanding of the possible trajectories of delicate shifts in bodily conduct by both anaesthetist and ODA – treated This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.


as indicating the need for assistance and the availability of help. Moreover, the resources for the two colleagues to assist are not simply verbal, or even a combination of the verbal and the visual, but rather bring together verbal, visual and tactile resources. The import of tactile knowing in the production, and moreover the interactional organization, of work practice is often overlooked and yet this fragment highlights the critical resource that touch, in the form of finger pressure on a colleague’s hand, provides for the anaesthetist in organizing and coordinating the conduct of her colleague.

Embodying Perspective While the fragments presented thus far have dealt with experienced members of anaesthetic teams, within many major UK hospitals the work of healthcare is interwoven with the work of teaching and learning. Thus some members of the team are often inexperienced in anaesthetic rooms and this can raise practical problems for the coordination of work. The next fragment provides an example of one instance in which a medical student is encouraged to intubate a patient and how that work is overseen and coordinated by a senior anaesthetist. The fragment reveals distinctive resources that the tutor can bring to bear in assessing the emerging participation of the inexperienced student. It also reveals difficulties that arise for the ODA in presenting instruments to the student. In the images from the fragment (Figure 6), the senior An: Okay?

(12.3) ((Beep)) (3.5)

An: Nar: See anything? (1.0) MS: I thin::k so

Figure 6: Images and transcript for Fragment 3


Hindmarsh and Pilnick • Knowing Bodies at Work 161 (3.0) An: I think you’re probably looking at the oesophagus. MS: Right.

An: That’s a- a bit far down. MS: Right.

(3.5)

An: What’s that? (2.4) An: [Is it different to what MS:[Right. An: you were looking [at. Yes? Right. [(That. Yes. Hmm.) MS: (0.8) An: Got the tube? (.) Stick the tube between these (.) cords.

(6.4)

An: (Okay.) (.) Right. Happy with that? MS: Yes.

Figure 6: (Continued) This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.


anaesthetist (An) begins at the head of the patient, the medical student (MS) to his right and the ODA to his left. There is an inherent tension in this activity in that the anaesthetist is eager to ensure that the patient is intubated as quickly and as safely as possible and yet keen to provide the student with an opportunity to get handson experience of intubating a patient. It may be worth noting that the opening to the trachea, through which the tube will be slipped, can be identified by two white vocal cords which form a triangle on each side; behind this there is a darkened recess, the trachea. The time required for a novice to identify the vocal cords by manipulating the patient’s head is usually (and quite naturally) somewhat longer than required by an expert practitioner. In his study of surgical training, Bosk (1979) describes how the superordinate must allow room for the trainee to make what he calls ‘the honest errors of the inexperienced’. So, superordinates must restrain themselves from taking charge too quickly, in order to avoid damaging the confidence and the learning experience of the trainee. At the same time superordinates must ensure the patient’s well-being. These can be, and in this case are, conflicting concerns. Even the moment that the student takes the laryngoscope from the ODA seems to foreshadow subsequent difficulties. He clasps the instrument slightly higher up the shaft than expert anaesthetists tend to and this may well contribute to the problems he faces in organizing the patient’s head for intubation. Indeed, he spends some moments moving the patient’s head around and shifting his posture to secure sight of the vocal cords. During this period, the ODA has been standing with the tracheal tube in position for the student to grasp. However, when the anaesthetist moves forward to question what the student can see, the ODA retracts the tube, turns away and busies himself at the instrument table. Later in the fragment the anaesthetist has to explicitly request the tracheal tube from the ODA, which is a relatively rare occurrence. The disruption to standard trajectories of action makes the process more clumsy and unpredictable. Aside from issues surrounding tube exchange, the fragment reveals various resources that the anaesthetist can bring to bear in assessing the conduct of the student. After ten seconds or more watching the student readjusting his position, the head of the patient and the position of the laryngoscope, the anaesthetist asks ‘See anything?’ to which the student replies ‘I think so’. The student tentatively ‘claims’ to have identified the vocal cords, but more importantly does not ‘demonstrate’ success as he continues quite markedly to reposition the patient’s head (see Sacks 1992 (Vol.2): 252, on the distinction between claiming and demonstrating). The difficulty for the anaesthetist is of course that he cannot see what the student is looking at. In Goodwin’s (1994) insightful analysis of ‘professional vision’ he describes the ways in which experts demonstrate to others how to see various scenes with respect to the practical standpoint of



occupational concerns. In his examples, the experts share a common visible field with the ‘learners’ which they can talk and gesture over and around. However, in this case, while the student is in the process of learning how to see the vocal cords, the anaesthetist cannot readily share his visual standpoint; he cannot look into the throat at the same time. To overcome this practical problem and assess what the student might be looking at and why he might be struggling, the anaesthetist draws on alternative resources. He places his hand on the neck of the patient at the point where the blade of the laryngoscope is pushing the skin out and says ‘I think you’re probably looking at the oesophagus’. He steps slightly forward to grasp the laryngoscope from the hands of the student and then he presents the throat of the patient to the student, such that the light on the end of the laryngoscope highlights the vocal cords. Critical to the ways in which the anaesthetist can tailor his instructions and information about how to identify the vocal cords to intubate a patient are his abilities to assess the standpoint, the perspective, of the student. His practical knowledge of anatomy, laryngoscopes and of the embodied work of intubation provides him with the resources to suggest that the student is looking too far towards the back of the throat – at the oesophagus rather than the trachea. Therefore, he cannot only recognize that the student is having difficulty but also give a sense as to where those difficulties might lie – that he is looking at the wrong hole. The anaesthetist’s expertise is in making sense of the embodied conduct of the student in order to make available the seemingly ‘hidden’ and subjective perspective of the student. So the anaesthetist is able to achieve a sense of what the student might be looking at, in part from feeling the position of the laryngoscope coupled with his practical knowledge of the embodied work of looking at the vocal cords.

Embedding the Body in Organization Studies ‘Most discussions of postbureaucratic organizing routinely highlight an increasing reliance on teams. Yet, how work teams organize and operate, whether on factory floors or in R & D laboratories, is poorly understood, in part because mainstream organizational theory continues to draw inspiration from images of teamwork rooted in laboratory studies of group dynamics and decision-making.’ (Barley and Kunda 2001: 88)

While there has been an emerging concern to draw the body more centrally into our analyses of work and organizations, there has been widespread recognition that existing studies fail to fully deliver in this regard. We hope to have demonstrated how organization studies might engage with the burgeoning interest in the body not simply through studies about organizational bodies but through analytic work that places embodiment at the heart of its



concerns. We have tried to show how a respecification of the concern with the body can contribute to our understanding of the dynamics of organizing and the types of tacit or informal practices that participants bring to bear in coordinating work with others. Indeed, we feel that this approach delivers a rather distinctive contribution to our understanding of coordination in organization studies. In particular, the approach emphasizes the real-time coordination of work in and through interaction between colleagues and demonstrates how the body or embodied conduct is a critical resource that organizational members use in accomplishing real-time coordination. The majority of studies of coordination, and indeed of teamwork, adopt a model of a work group that is substantially at odds with the kind of team that we have described in this paper. The team is normatively treated as stable and often distributed rather than in this case, ephemeral and co-present. Maybe due to the focus on these normative notions of a team, the standard concepts or models of coordination seem somewhat awkward in the face of the locally situated and real-time character of the team’s work in preoperative anaesthesia. While there are a number of accounts of coordination in organization studies that could be used to explicate the work of ephemeral teams (e.g. Weick and Roberts 1993; Vera and Crossan 2004), they tend to gloss the moment-to-moment practices in and through which members of a work group organize contributions to the activity at hand. Our data powerfully demonstrate the central and critical role of the body as a resource for realtime coordination. This reveals not only an analytic orientation to the importance of organizational bodies but also an orientation by organizational members themselves to bodies as significant for coordinating work. The sights, sounds and feel of colleagues are used to sense, anticipate, appreciate and respond to emerging tasks and activities. Furthermore, the import of the body is not stable, but ongoingly and contingently treated with intimate regard to moment-to-moment changes in interactional and embodied contexts. So in contrast to many studies of coordination, even those concerned with improvisation, our study reveals how the teams featured in our data are intimately sensitive to delicate and subtle shifts in the embodied conduct of colleagues. This sensitivity, what we term intercorporeal knowing, underpins the team’s abilities to seamlessly coordinate emerging activities. Participants’ own displayed orientations to, and perceptions of, organizational bodies have an extremely practical quality. While the body is central to real-time coordination it also remains somehow ‘unnoticed’ by participants – body parts and movements are not noticed, but rather colleagues recognize activities emerging and opportunities to assist and support others. Maurice Merleau-Ponty once used a sporting analogy to indicate the pragmatic character of perception. He indicated how footballers do not notice blades of grass, white paint or pieces of netting and wood – rather they see openings, passes, off-sides and goals. Similarly, within the anaesthetic room,



participants do not notice the bodies of their colleagues in terms of an arm moving from left to right, or a head turning this way or that – rather they see the offer of help, the beginning of an intubation sequence or whatever. In this way the body remains ‘seen but unnoticed’ (Garfinkel 1967). These data also contribute to notions of routine within our understanding of coordination. One gloss on what we have described would be that work is coordinated with respect to the individual’s experience of the known routines of the anaesthetic rooms. Indeed, we have discussed how experts display an orientation to routine orderings of activities in and through their embodied contributions to the work. However, this cannot be seen simply as the ability to recount a list of the order in which activities arise – these embodied and embedded skills are not so readily extractable and transferable. Rather the expertise being brought to bear concerns abilities to anticipate action, to be able to see in current embodied conduct the trajectory of action such that a timely contribution can be made. Actions are ‘projectable’, just as turns at talk are (see Sacks 1992), in that experts see trajectories of actions as they unfold. This is highly situated and highly contingent professional vision. These skills and abilities are brought to bear in coordinating each new and unique situation. So members do not slavishly follow simple norms that are somehow fixed over time, but rather they (re)produce the routine or normative character of activities for the first time again. The routine is an achievement. Thus real-time organization in preoperative anaesthesia demands a flexible and contingent notion of a team’s work. These data reveal the extremely subtle interplay of collaborative conduct. Any contribution is progressively shaped and designed with regard to the emerging and ongoing actions and orientations of others. So, for example, the character of assistance (described in Fragment 2) is ordered and reordered on a moment-to-moment basis as the demands of the situation ongoingly emerge. If we are concerned with the practical accomplishment of work, attention to this level of detail is surely critical as it reveals the very resources that organizational members rely on in coordinating work. The ephemeral teamwork that is a feature of these anaesthetic rooms rests on members’ embodied (and thereby displayed) understandings of the dynamic, emergent, moment-by-moment conduct of others. Moreover, the relationships between intercorporeal knowing and expertise are starkly illuminated by difficulties that arise when more inexperienced members are involved (as in Fragment 3). When less experienced or uninitiated members of the anaesthetic room are involved, the smooth teamwork that incorporeal knowing underpins can be disrupted. For example, a trainee ODA is less able to see the onset of intubation, which will lead to more explicit forms of coordination (e.g. the anaesthetist must directly request a laryngoscope). So, to display intercorporeal knowing, to know bodies at work, is simultaneously to display competence in the anaesthetic room’s ‘community of practice’ (Lave and Wenger 1991). These abilities are displayed in the close coupling and coordination of contributions to the tasks at hand.



In conclusion, we wish to contribute to organization studies in three ways. First, by illustrating an approach that can place the body at the heart of the analysis of work and organization. Second, our analytic approach has been illustrated with regard to the study of coordination in anaesthesia. Our data reveal practices that underpin the artful, interactional and dynamic accomplishment of a team’s work and highlight the contingent (re)production of routine sequences of action for the first time again. The significance of this does not simply reside in our attempts at understanding work in this setting, but points to the inadequacy of existing models of coordination for other similar ad hoc or ephemeral organizational ‘teams’. Third, as our analysis presents the body as a central ‘site’ for organizing work, it encourages others interested in social interaction and work practice to fully acknowledge the import of the body. For example, proponents of the field of organizational discourse often note that the practices of managing, organizing, motivating and the like are routinely built on, delivered through and exist in talk (e.g. Grant et al. 1998). While we are very supportive of this ‘linguistic turn’ in organization studies, we are concerned that, among these texts on talk, the body is lost. Indeed, it has been argued that studies of work often ‘privilege action at the expense of talk; effective collaboration has been associated with “getting things done” while avoiding “talk-fests”’ (Hardy et al. 2005: 72) and the same authors stress that talk ‘establishes the foundations for action’ (Hardy et al. 2005). The fragments presented here, some of which feature very few utterances, encourage us not only to focus on talk in organizations but to take seriously the import of the bodily conduct that stands alone or mutually elaborates the talk of organizational members and is equally critical to the production of organizational activities. Furthermore, we should not be tempted to construct a perimeter around the body, but rather recognize how participants see bodies; that is within, and with regard to, material contexts of tools, technologies and the like. So, there is a complex of interconnected embodied resources – verbal, visual, tactile and material – brought to bear in coordinating the team’s work. To return to the earlier claim that talk ‘establishes the foundations for action’, our data reveal how talk and the body mutually constitute the action, the work, of preoperative anaesthesia.

Note We gratefully acknowledge the cooperation of the staff, students and patients who allowed us to film and report on their work and interaction. Furthermore, we would like to acknowledge the academic contributions and comments of Alan Aitkenhead, Barry Brown, Robert Dingwall, Martin Edwards, Gerard Hanlon, Christian Heath, Aug Nishizaka and Dirk vom Lehn, as well as the insightful and supportive comments of the editors and anonymous reviewers.



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45 Dance-Work: Images of Organization in Irish Dance Donncha Kavanagh, Carmen Kuhling and Kieran Keohane

’Round the House and Mind the Dresser!’

‘I

am of Ireland; come dance with me in Ireland’. With these words, Mary Robinson ended her Presidential inaugural address in 1990. In subsequent years Ireland underwent a period of accelerated economic, social and cultural transformation so dramatic and unprecedented that it earned the moniker ‘Celtic Tiger’. This term describes dramatic changes in macroeconomic data, but it also captures shifts in individual working lives and in the production and consumption of culture. As such, the Irish case provides an interesting and unique opportunity to explore the relationships between work, the economy and popular culture. Here, we confine our inquiry into the relationship with one aspect of popular culture, namely dance, focusing on the phenomenon of Riverdance which emerged contemporaneously with the Celtic Tiger. As we will see, both are deeply immersed in larger organizing discourses, historical narratives about national identity and civilizing attempts to control the body. The transformation of Celtic Tiger Ireland is most starkly seen through the prism of economic data. Between 1991 and 2003 the Irish economy grew by an average of 6.8% per annum, peaking at 11.1% in 1999 (GNP grew by 7% in 2006). Unemployment fell from 18% in the late 1980s to 4.4% in 2006, while the Irish Debt/GDP ratio fell from 92% in 1993 to 25% in 2006.1

Source: Organization, 15(5) (2008) : 725–742.



Throughout the 1990s Irish living standards rose dramatically to the point where the country is now, at least by some measures, one of the richest in the world. At the same time Ireland experienced major social and cultural change which in some ways have liberalized, cosmopolitanized and secularized Ireland: emigration was reversed which facilitated a ‘new multiculturalism’; divorce and homosexuality were legalized, and the shift from rural to urban patterns of living accelerated. Ireland was effectively transformed from a pre-modern, peasant society to a postmodern, high-technology economy. Accounts of Ireland’s transformation (e.g. MacSharry and White, 2000) are usually rooted in a modernizationist or neo-classical economic paradigm that attributes the economic success to efficient markets, which have created high productivity and low costs, fuelled by a government that has re-imagined its role as primarily about ensuring that markets operate efficiently, rather than as a player in the market, buying and providing services for its citizens. This neo-liberal ideology is operationalized – in Ireland as elsewhere – in fiscal policy: reducing government expenditure and taxation (the top marginal rate of individual taxation dropped from 65% in the 1985 to 42% in 2006).2 Other commentators emphasize the ‘political’ more than simply the ‘economy’ in Ireland’s political economy (e.g. O’Donnell, 2000) highlighting the role of the state in facilitating the economic boom by securing social partnership agreements and global economic investment. What is notable about these dominant accounts is that they accord a minimal role to culture in the transformation of organized work, and instead construct it primarily as emerging in a causally out of the political economy.

Culture and Economy: A Two-Hand Reel The Irish economic transformation of the 1990s was accompanied by equally radical changes to the Irish cultural landscape, popularly known as the ‘Irish Cultural Renaissance’. The decade produced a steady flow of international culture industry exports, in music, film, theatre, literature and the arts.3 Ireland won the Eurovision Song Contest five times during the 1990s, most notably in 1994 when Riverdance was first performed as an exuberant interval act, the same year that the term ‘Celtic Tiger’ appeared in a report by economic consultants Morgan-Stanley. What then is the relationship between the cultural renaissance and the economic transformation? Within Irish political and academic debate, culture is routinely posited as a direct product of the economic boom, whereby the liberalization of internal markets and low tax policies changed values, beliefs and identity. In turn, these are reflected in artistic endeavours. This is the historical materialist thesis, shared by both Marxist and liberal political economists, whereby the economic base determines the cultural superstructure. Other arguments are more nuanced, such as that of FitzGerald (2000) who


Kavanagh et al. • Images of Organization in Irish Dance 171

argues that the Celtic Tiger economic boom emerged out of a new selfconfidence and a ‘positive, outward-looking attitude that affects business, the educational system, and politics’. In this particular and uncharacteristic instance, FitzGerald, a senior economist with Ireland’s Economic and Social Research Institute, usually the strongest proponent of the materialist-empiricist and economic determinist thesis, claims that cultural change ‘is probably the single most important fact underlying the current Irish economic renaissance’ (FitzGerald, 2000: 55). In this brief moment, perhaps inadvertently, the ESRI articulates a position analogous to the Hegelian idealist tradition, that history (or in this case the material reality of the ‘economic miracle’) is the materialization of a broader, intangible but nonetheless real ‘Spirit’ or ‘Geist’. A third position, more dialectical and more willing and capable of embracing the complexity and ambivalence of processes of modernization and notions of progress, a position characteristic of the communicative or reflexive turn in social theory, emphasizes the multiplicity of interactions amongst the different domains of economy, society, politics and culture (DuGay and Pryke, 2001; Ray and Sayer 1999). For instance, Kirby et al. (2002) argue that the Celtic Tiger has been inextricably bound up with a cultural discourse prioritizing individualism, entrepreneurship, mobility, flexibility, innovation, competitiveness both as personal attributes and as dominant cultural values, displacing earlier discourses prioritizing national development, cultural identity, family, self-sacrifice, self-sufficiency and nationalism. In turn, this displacement can itself produce new critiques, dissentions and subversions that are routinely articulated through art and the creative industries. The conventional argument is that the economic ‘base’ determines cultural ‘superstructure’. This is the historical materialist and realist/empiricist epistemology shared by both Marxism and classical and neo-liberalism. Our own research is informed by Weberian sociological interpretivism and is broadly in sympathy with the third, dialectical position. We approach historically particular social phenomena as representing a spirit that unites seemingly disparate and unrelated forms of action – economic and cultural – in terms of the affinities between them. Such phenomena – dance in this instance – express the zeitgeist, the unifying ‘spirit of the times.’ Just as inner-worldly Protestant ascetic pietism and outer-worldy political-economic liberalism, instrumentalism and rationalized acquisitiveness find their affinities and harmonic convergence in forming the spirit of capitalism, we approach the seemingly unrelated realms of work and organization on the one hand and dance on the other to draw out the affinities and correspondences between culture and economy in the spirit of Celtic Tiger Ireland. Following Weber, we seek to clarify ‘a complex of elements associated in historical reality which we unite into a conceptual whole from the standpoint of their cultural significance’ ([1921] 1968, 47). In other words the relationships between seemingly discrete and disparate social realms and forms of collective action are relations of affinity, or what Walter Benjamin calls ‘correspondences’ rather than



causalities, and it is the analyst’s task to draw out and interpret these correspondences so as to understand the practices of our society, to illuminate ideals, to critically appraise our practices in the light of ideals and, where necessary, to try to reform them. And again with Weber and against the hegemonic economic determinists’ accounts of the Celtic Tiger, we do not claim a totalizing monopoly on explanation and understanding. As Weber says of the object of his study: ‘it is by no means necessary to understand by the spirit of capitalism what it will come to mean to us for the purposes of our analysis. This is a necessary result of the nature of sociological concepts which attempt for their methodological purposes not to grasp historical reality in abstract general formulae, but in concrete genetic sets of relations which are inevitably of a specifically unique and individual character’ (Weber, [1921] 1968:48). To highlight this perspective, we focus on a particular cultural phenomenon, namely Riverdance, and explore how it corresponds with the economic and social transformations of our time. We chose Riverdance because it is a paradigmatic instance of the de-differentiation of ‘culture’ and ‘economy’, an example of the impoverishment of culture that critical theorists perceive in late capitalism, and, as postmodernists and liberals might have it, an illustration of the creativity that drives and is produced by the cultural economy (Ray and Sayer, 1999). Riverdance is well known. It was first performed as a seven-minute interval act at the Eurovision Song Contest in 1994 which was so widely acclaimed that the producers developed the act into a full-length stage show, premiering in Dublin in February 1995, subsequently opening in London and New York, breaking box office records and becoming an international phenomenon. By 2006 it had played to a global audience of over 1.5 billion people. Riverdance’s global success corresponds with Ireland’s successful globalization. At one level, the level of cultural signs, meanings and ideas, Riverdance is an aesthetic representation celebrating Ireland’s globalization; and at another level, in the realm of economic ‘realities’, Riverdance exemplifies forms of organization and work under conditions of postmodern globalization. And the correspondence between aesthetic image and organizational form doesn’t end there. We can also find in the history of Riverdance – that is, in the history of Irish dance before Riverdance – representations of organization relations that are pre-global; cultural representations and images that correspond to forms of organization in mid-20th century modern Ireland characterized by moribund economic stagnation, chronic unemployment and mass-emigration. And prior to that again, if we examine the deeper history of modern Irish dance, we can identify images corresponding to pre-modern, traditional forms of economic organization and work relations. We frame our discussion below around three distinct ‘moments’ in the development of Irish dance, moments wherein aesthetic representations (in this case dance) correspond with powers, influences and ideologies circulating in the wider social field. The distinct historical categories we use to discuss



the relationship between dance/culture and various stages of Irish political economy and state formation are perhaps not as easily distinguished from one another as we suggest here. We are imposing analytic distinctions where substantial boundaries of historical periodization, forms of organization and corresponding aesthetic forms are blurred and overlapping. Nonetheless, these categories open up some interesting correspondences between culture and economy. We argue that transformations in dance can be seen as a microcosm of the transformations in Irish culture and economy in the 19th and 20th centuries. For us, the (sometimes subtle) changes in dance reflect, represent and dramatize but also subvert and creatively reinvent contemporaneous changes in political and philosophical ideas and corresponding organizational forms. These three moments in the development of Irish dance we identify as: pre-national, ‘Traditional’ Ireland; national, ‘Modern’, Parochial Ireland; and global ‘post-modern’ Ireland. Looking at these three moments we will use Irish dance – and Riverdance in particular – as a dramatization of transformations of working relations, and thus as a lens through which we can take a bead on some problems in the social relations of work, organizations and management in the context of globalization. The development of Irish dance that we will trace is characterized by a gradual and progressive ‘refinement’; from the traditional community – where work and dance are organized as constituent elements of a unified whole; through a modern, rational, differentiation of the spheres of work and aesthetics – where the realms of ‘work’ and ‘dance’ are constituted as separate and even opposed activities that are re-combined and unified through state-approved ‘invented tradition’, the organizing practices of modern national society; to the current, post-modern form represented by Riverdance wherein dance, which previously was confined to the world of leisure and popular recreation, becomes highly specialized professional work – workdance – organized as a simulacrum of ‘Tradition’.

Dancing at Lughnasa: Heteroclite Idiom and Organizational Holism in Irish Traditional Dance We begin with ‘Traditional’ Ireland (i.e. prior to independence in 1922). In this section, we will see that dance is characterized by two essential features: on the one hand by a wide variety and diversity of styles, idiolects, influences and local traditions; and on the other hand, by a holistic unity at the level of organizational form where there is little or no substantive or normative distinction between the realms of economy and culture, work and recreation. One account of what is taken to be Traditional Irish dance – step-dancing – is that as it was typically performed in the confined spaces of kitchens, which required dancing in place – vertical floor tapping – fostering the rigid and restrictive posture we now associate with Irish dance (O’Connor, 1998: 54). However, as we shall



see, this stiff and formal style is in fact a modern invented tradition. A better lead is a dance form called the ‘sean nós’ meaning the ‘old’ (sean) ‘form’ or ‘way’ (nós – knowledge, a way of doing something) a seemingly more wild and unstructured style of solo dancing that involved vigorous arm movements and finger clicking, combining stylized movement and individual performative improvization. In the mid-20th century when the tradition of Irish dance was being invented, ‘sean nós’ was a vestigial living tradition in rural areas of the North and West such as Connemara, where four centuries previously the native Irish, reduced to a population of less than one million, had been forced by successive campaigns of conquest and plantation (Ó Cinnéide, 2002: 33). But this is not to say that ‘sean nós’ was somehow an original nativist form, because in fact there are no natives or pure traditions. The history of Irish tradition is rich and varied, and its aesthetic expressions are diverse and polymorphic. Let us take ‘as read’ a variety of influences from Celtic, Pagan, early Christian and Viking eras, and their influences in turn – Moorish and Iberian, Roman, Germanic, Norse and Anglo-Saxon – all refracted, melded and reciprocally intermingled to constitute an inheritance from which the repertoire of traditional Irish dance is derived. In addition to this deep history of tradition, the more recent – ’pre-modern’ or early modern – history of Irish dance is also replete with diverse influences. Anglo-Norman culture, including dance, arrived with the Normans in 1169 and was popular in Irish towns. A variety of dances were performed in Irish towns in the 1500s but it is not clear what the direction of influence was between French, Irish and English dances (Brennan, 1999). The Irish ‘set dances’ (as distinct from céilí dances and sean-nós step dancing) are the evolutionary descendants of the Quadrilles danced at the French court in the late 18th and early 19th century and other related dances from Scotland, and elsewhere. The Irish words for dance, damhsa and rince, derive from the French danse and the English rink (to skate on ice), respectively. The Statute of Kilkenny (1366, enforced in the 1500s) and the Penal Laws of the late 1600s all worked to suppress Irish culture and commerce. In addition to the English colonial authorities clamping down on Irish dancing, dancing of all forms was attacked by the Church from the 1600s. Curtis (1994: 71) quotes a parish priest from 1670: ‘dancing . . . is a thing that leads to bad thoughts and evil actions. It is dancing that excites the desires of the body. In the dance are seen frenzy and woe, and with dancing thousands go to the black hell’. Here we can detect a Puritan influence from the Reformation and the emergence of the modern Protestant Ethic: the rationalization of consciousness, the separation of realms of action, the repudiation of hedonism and its aesthetic representations, the sublimation of all into working hard within one’s vocation. This combined in the Irish case with the inheritance of monastic asceticism to produce the unique organizational form of the modern Irish Catholic Church and its characteristic puritanical stamp on modern Irish culture, including, as we shall see, its role in the development of the modern invented tradition of Irish dance.



But given this wide and deep range of influences, styles and idiolects of Irish traditional dance, where is the point at which they converge – the point at which we can speak meaningfully of ‘Traditional Irish dance’ as a singular, unified organizational form? The point of unity is not to be found in an aesthetic principle internal to dance, of course, but in the structuring and organizing principles of the forms of the wider traditional community: a relatively undifferentiated division of labour and a strong and cohesive conscience collective. The structuring principle of pre-modern traditional community is that there is relatively little differentiation or division of labour. In the agrarian work of peasant subsistence, divisions of activity are made on the basis of seasonal (natural) calendars and religious criteria of sacred and profane, obligation and taboo. There are few occupational specializations, and by extension, there are few strong spatial-temporal boundaries between one type of activity and another; between, say, work from 9 and 5, and recreation in the evenings between 8 and 10; or between a certain group of people who are performers and others who are spectators. Instead, members of a traditional community are workers and dancers: the toil of work gives way to recreation, and those who work are active participants in dance and recreation rather than passive spectators. This is evident in the characteristic commercial institution of pre-modern community, namely the market or fair. The fair involves the exacting work of buying and selling, trade and negotiation; but equally, and intrinsically, the fair is about cultural recreation – gaming, sport and competition, often involving violence (‘donnybrook’ entered the lexicon from fighting and brawling at Dublin’s Donnybrook fair), drinking and carousing, courting and matchmaking, bawdry and carnivalesque license and, of course, centrally, music and dancing. Work and dance are not alien forms of action. They find their unity in the holism of pre-modern community. A classical formulation of this view of the holism of agrarian traditional community can be found in Marx’s theory of ‘species being’ and the emergence of the characteristic form of alienation that is associated with the division of labour in the capitalist mode of production (Marx 1961: 1-9). Relations of work and organization in a pre-capitalist pastoral idyll were such that the unalienated human being may live a fully rounded existence – a fisherman in the morning, a philosopher in the afternoon and a dancer in the evening; a form of life that Marx contrasted to the modern one-dimensional specialist, whether a mere appendage to the machine in the case of the industrial proletariat, or the professional as ‘autistic savant;’ highly skilled, but in one narrow field only. These themes are illustrated in Brian Friel’s (1990) play Dancing at Lughnasa, (Dublin premier, 1990; a Tony award winning run on Broadway, subsequently a film starring Meryl Streep). Friel’s title refers to dancing associated with the pagan festival of the Celtic god, Lugh. The play, set in Donegal in the 1930s, depicts the scattered and fragmented lives of an illegitimate son, his mother and her four sisters, and their returned African Missionary brother.



Friel depicts the complexity of identity due to the collision of worlds: past and present, local and global – a harsh rural existence of restricted cultural and economic opportunities juxtaposed with stormy horizons of economic migration and globalization.4 Where language fails to articulate unity, the sisters’ wild, atavistic dance derived from Celtic pagan and African traditions represents an (unsuccessful) attempt to aesthetically reconcile the alienating social forces shaping their lives.

Dancing at the Crossroads: Dance, Work, and the Invented Tradition of Dance in Modern Parochial Ireland Dance has long been a marker of ethnic/national identity for the Irish (Cullinane, 1997; O’Connor, 2003), and as the quintessential example of ‘authentic’ Irish traditional culture. Ironically, however, this ‘authenticity’ or ‘tradition’ was in fact invented (Hobsbawn and Ranger 1983), or at the very least, was selectively constructed, for the selection of certain dance repertoires and styles considered to be ‘authentically Irish’ in the 20th century were historically in keeping with the needs of the emerging nation-state. We use the term ‘parochial’ to characterize the modern Irish nation state not only to highlight the narrowness of the outlook (it is noteworthy that Sinn Féin, a political party that was very much of this era, means ‘ourselves alone’) but also because the parish, the administrative ecclesiastical division reflects the profound influence of the Roman Catholic Church during the formative period of ‘Modern’ Ireland. Upon achieving independence in 1922, the emerging Irish nation-state set about consolidating a nationalist cultural identity. ‘Parochial Ireland’ was hence a product of this cultural/political endeavour. An important part of this project was the promotion of Irish music and dance competitions, as Irish musicians and dancers became a national resource for constructing the bases of Irish collective and national identity. By 1927, competition dancing become institutionalized and was sponsored by the Irish Dance Commission (Ó Cinnéide, 2002: 33). Like folklorists, the Commissioners were ‘nationbuilders who “map” the nation through the project of intensive folklore’ (Ó Giolláin, 2000: 63). Specifically this meant the cultivation of forms of art consistent with nationalist discourses prioritizing national development, cultural identity, moral (religious) integrity, family, self-sacrifice, and patriotic nationalism, which were predominant in Irish political rhetoric and popular ideology. Modern Ireland was conceived of by the ‘Father of the Nation,’ Eamonn deValera – as ‘a parish writ large:’ a community of self-sufficient small homesteaders, an agrarian economy providing for the immediate subsistence needs of smallholders and supplying tariff-protected small brewing and agribusiness dedicated to insular import substitution. This political economy



was legitimated by an official ideology, articulated most famously in deValera’s broadcast to the Nation on St Patrick’s Day 1943: That Ireland which we dreamed of would be the home of a people who valued material wealth only as a basis of right living; of a people who were satisfied with frugal comfort and devoted their leisure to the things of the spirit – a land whose countryside would be bright with cosy homesteads, whose fields and villages would be joyous with the sounds of industry, with the romping of sturdy children, the contests of athletic youths and the laughter of comely maidens, whose firesides would be forums for the wisdom of serene old age.

This aesthetic image of the ideal Irish character was also cultivated by the particular type of dancing that became socially sanctioned. The Gaelic League, founded in 1893 to promote Irish language and culture, actually banned set dancing because it was perceived as being of foreign origins (Breathnach, 1983), compared to céilí dances which were seen as authentically Gaelic. Set dancing, as performed at local crossroads and in homes, was also attacked by the Catholic Church up to the mid-20th century who used the Public Dance Hall Act of 1935 to try to stamp it out (Austin, 1993). The irony is that of the nearly 150 céilí and set dances danced today, only four have been continuously used as social dance forms for the past century. Both the institutionalization of competitive dance and the Public Dance Halls Act of 1935, which prohibited small unlicensed céilí dancing, served to promote a much more restricted version of Irish dancing than ever before. Suspicious both of the license associated with heteroclite unregulated tradition and the license of the modern public sphere, the new Irish nation responded by proscribing sean nós, set dancing and contemporary ‘foreign’ dancing, and laying down strict rules in relation to teaching practices and standards. The Catholic Church played an important role, with bishops explicitly pointing out the moral dangers that modern commercial dance halls represented and valorizing ‘traditional’ Irish dance (i.e. céilí dancing). The rationale for this was largely because dancing was, as George Bernard Shaw dryly observed, ‘the vertical expression of a horizontal desire’. An unintended consequence was that the newly built commercial dance halls gave young people, who routinely travelled many miles to dances, an anonymity and some escape from the narrow parochial ‘valley of the squinting windows’.5 In contrast to the dancing associated with the dance halls, Irish céilí dancing was ‘a social event imprimatured by the Catholic Church where boys and girls met each other under close sacerdotal supervision and practiced minimal-contact dancing’ [as described by Ciarán Carson, quoted in O’Toole (2003b: 147)]. O’ Toole continues: ‘In that sense, all Irish Dancing was liturgical. It was an act of piety, a homage to the holy trinity of Catholicism, Irish nationalism and sexual continence’ (O’Toole, 2003b).



In this way, the increasing regulation of dance can be seen as one index of the cultivation of a ‘civilised’ coherent and particularly Irish national populace that was central to the church and state in the early 20th century (O’Toole, 1996, 2003b; Peillon, 2003). The discourse of nationalism converged with the discourse of Catholicism in colonizing the Irish body and cultivating a particular kind of Irish dance. Despite the shift from rigid, stiff restrictive postures required for vertical floor tapping in cottage kitchens to more use of horizontal space movements in stage competitions, 20th century Irish dance came to be characterized for the most part by rigid bodily posture and sobriety of movement, mockingly described as ‘strictly from the ankles down’. In this transition from local to national setting, costumes shifted from ordinary clothes to bright, ornate costumes with Celtic motifs, lace collars, brooches and medals with a strong emphasis on decoration and embellishment. The presence of a stage also allowed for a greater use of horizontal space which judges actively encouraged. Though this shift towards a distinctly ‘Irish’ costume could be interpreted as an attempt to create and construct a coherent Irish collective identity, it promoted a rigid group identity at the expense of any assertions of individual style. For instance, Breathnach (1983) has argued that the dress codes of competitive step dancing display ‘an Irishness which eludes any association with a particular locality or period’ (Breathnach, 1983: 49). To O’Connor, these costumes connote an ‘abstract and anodyne Irishness which have the effect of hiding the body by attracting the eye to the interlaced Celtic motifs, Tara brooches, lace collars, and medals on the dancer’s costumes’ (O’Connor, 1998: 57). In a sense the semiotics of this dance costume illustrate the way in which the Parochial Irish body was de-sexualized and de-individualized in order for it to be subsumed or incorporated into the nationalist cause; for this form of dance was more regimented than in Traditional Ireland, but all forms of embodiment and agency were still under the scrutiny of the regulatory apparatus of the Catholic-nationalist state. As such, particular styles of dance both reflect and reproduce the social and cultural environments in which dance events occur (O’Connor, 1998: 53). The competitive dance dress code also had the effect of hiding and, in effect, de-sexualizing the body in a way that was consistent with the repressive, puritanical and patriarchal Catholic ethos of the time. This was also central to the particular way in which reproduction was curtailed in Ireland in order to achieve a particular standard of living. As many commentators have noted, Ireland in the 19th and early 20th century had a unique demographic pattern, one of postponed marriages, high rates of fertility within marriage, high rates of celibacy and low rates of extramarital births. According to Inglis (1998), this control of reproduction, achieved through the repressive moral regulation of sexuality by the Catholic Church, was crucial to maintaining a decent standard of living in the post-Famine context, but it also left a strong legacy of sexual repression at the core of Irish culture and identity. Working within a Foucauldian framework which stresses the historicity of sexual morality and the way



in which the disciplining and governance of human sexuality is constructed in specific social and historical contexts, Inglis (1998) shows us very precisely the swarming disciplinary mechanisms that have acted historically in the construction of Irish sexuality and the Irish body. According to him, the most fateful force has been the agency of the institutional apparatus of the Irish Catholic Church, its privileged relationship with the state in shaping legislation, education and health. Despite evidence that contemporary sexual practices and mores have changed since the time when classic ethnographic studies equating Irish sexuality with sexual Puritanism (e.g. Arensberg and Kimball (1968/2001) Inglis shows how the legacy of Irish Catholic sexual morality persists in contemporary Irish culture even today. The modern history of ‘traditional’ Irish dance can be interpreted as a progressive process of rationalization of spheres of action and values: from a traditional community wherein realms of work and dance are unified and integrally linked; to an increasing separation of realms, wherein work and dance become spatio-temporally distanciated from one another, accompanied by a reduction in the variety and diversity of dance to a regulated uniform style, and the realms of work and dance artificially reunited in space and time and in the officially sanctioned aesthetic codes of the invented tradition of the modern nation state. The variety and complexity of dance forms and vernacular idiolects characteristic of the pre-modern moment, through a’civilizing process’ (Elias, [1939] 1978) of cultural rationalization (Weber, [1921] 1968) becomes the object of formal organization and codification. The modern nation state ‘gets to work,’ as it were, on dance: dance is objectified; mapped, catalogued, analysed and measured; critically evaluated and judged deficient in pedigree and provenance or genuine and authentic. Specialists emerge: dancing masters, dancing experts. Dancing for fun and informal recreation now becomes ‘amateur’, categorically differentiated from the stage performances of dancing ‘champions’ who hold medals and awards achieved though systematic and hierarchical competitions – local, regional and national championships, adjudicated at every stage of performance by a panel of official judges. On the basis of this system of power/knowledge dancing can be taught. Schools emerge, producing individuals and troupes who dance in a uniform and precise style. The production of modern Irish dance mirrors precisely the classical organizational form of modern economy and administration: standardized, efficient and quality controlled mass-production after the form dictated by the prevailing fashion. In this ‘labour of division’, dance becomes but a component part of recreation, categorically distinguished from work. And time itself is restructured in this project: ‘9 to 5’ is worktime; ‘5 to 9’ is play-time, which may include some time for dance. Modern ‘traditional’ Irish dance was politically and ideologically legitimated in terms of modern nation-building, whereby the ‘tradition’ of Irish dance was ‘invented’, that is, it became codified, categorized, ‘fixed’, as part of the official modern Irish state project. The rigidities of the invented tradition are an index



of the wider modern Irish political economy, of an agrarian economy of ‘cosy homesteads’ and autarkic self-sufficiency. Modern ‘traditional’ Irish dance, the dance that is popularly taken to be ‘traditional’ Irish dance, is, ironically, an ideological misrecognition. Far from representing the holistic integrity of community underpinning and providing moral anchorage to modern Irish society, ‘traditional’ Irish dance is in fact the aesthetic representation of that particular experience of alienation associated specifically with modern organization.

Postmodern Global Ireland: Riverdance as Workdance We now move to discuss the third moment of our triptych, post-modern global Ireland, while being mindful that both traditional Ireland and modern parochial Ireland are continually being re-cycled and re-formed. On the dancefloor, we focus on Riverdance, an iconic cultural product of the period. By 1960, the flaws in the economic policies of parochial Ireland had been exposed and a policy shift sought to create an open economy. The rejection of protectionism and the disillusionment with deValera’s romantic dream is usually identified with T. K. Whitaker’s (1958) seminal paper Economic Development, the blueprint for the move from protectionism to free trade and the modernization of the economy through the incentivizing of multinational companies to establish manufacturing operations in Ireland. This policy change had an impact. Between 1963 and 1973 the growth rate of manufacturing employment in the south was exceeded by only four other countries in the world (Kennedy and McHugh, 1984: 246), and by the 1970s there was net immigration into Ireland for the first time. In 1980, the numbers employed in agriculture had declined to 19%. By the 1970s, Parochial Ireland had run its course, though Irish society found it difficult to unburden itself of its long tradition of pessimism, inferiority and patriarchal social control. Reflecting on the period, Riverdance producer Moya Doherty, whom we interviewed for this paper, begins by identifying herself with ‘people like U2 and Enya who, age-wise, would have grown up in the gloom of the 1970s in Ireland, where it was so grey; my memory of the seventies was so grey – there was so little colour on the landscape and little confidence and little optimism’. If Parochial Ireland was grey, then Global Ireland, as epitomized by Riverdance, would be colourful. In this sense, Riverdance was a symbolic and exuberant rejection of Parochial Ireland: ‘we went back before competitive dancing; we took our cue from when dance was much more celebratory than when it had developed in the 20s and 30s’ [MD]. Part of the symbolism of Riverdance Moya Doherty says [was] stripping away the embroidery of the competitive style of dance – both the embroidery of how the dance was approached and the embroidery of how they were dressed – and actually it was stripped way, way down to



black, simple. But in another way it was built up in a sort of a much more elaborate theatrical fashion; it was almost like an S-shaped development; we went back to go forward to almost go back again. [MD]

But for all of its success, Riverdance seems to have become unsustainable. There are spin-offs and knock offs of varying quality, but these are no more than variations on a theme. If Riverdance is a postmodern ‘original’, it seems that, unfortunately, the formula for originality is not transferable. This is true even, it seems, for the original creator, Doherty herself. Her new show, ‘Pirate Queen,’ opened on Broadway in 2007, but failed critically and commercially. What might explain this? Riverdance is purported to be a postmodern phenomenon, an aesthetic representation of the creative culture of globalization, a fluidity that promises the transcendence of the limitations of global capitalism as a mode of production. An essential tenet of global neo-liberalism is not just the ‘liberation’ of market forces, but equally the ‘promotion’ of entrepreneurship and innovation, which, like fossil fuels, are felt to be nearing exhaustion. Resources previously expended on balancing market forces are now poured into ‘startups:’ ‘priming’ encouraging and educating businesses to be more enterprising all of which, of course, tacitly acknowledges that the spirit of free enterprise is in need of priming and pumping. If the spirit of capitalism hasn’t moved entirely from the West to China, then at least it is seen to be flagging and in need of rejuvenation. This is the real anxiety animating the discourse of sustainable development: how can we sustain our pattern of economic development? Postmodernism, as a belief in the creative potential of cultural hybridity accompanying economic globalization, seems to promise rejuvenation. The critical and commercial success of Riverdance is that it seemed to promise and to herald precisely such rejuvenation. But how post-modern is Riverdance? Central to Moya Doherty’s account of the creation of Riverdance is the movement and spatial-temporal bi-location – from Ireland to England and back to Ireland; from rural to urban; from village life to metropolitan London, and back again; from the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s in Ireland, to London in the 1980s, back to Ireland in the 1990s (which was still like the 1970s and 1980s!). Riverdance emerges from this spatial-temporal flux as a hybridized form that incorporates dramatic horizontal movement (associated with nonIrish dance) with the classical vertical movement of Irish dance. Riverdance also seems to illustrate a shift towards a more liberated approach to the body, body-hugging materials, short skirts, and tight shirts designed to subtly sexualize the bodies of the dancers and subject them to the audience’s gaze (O’Connor, 1998: 57). Thus, what made Riverdance more than another creative product ‘was the way it liberated locked-up elements of Irish tradition, the way it became, quite self-consciously, a parable of the modernization of Irish culture’ (O’Toole, 2003b: 153). For Brown (1998: 156), Riverdance is ‘a wellnigh perfect example of a postmodern marketing “product’”’, with its eclectic



juxtaposition of different ethnic traditions, its overt playing with symbols to weave a particular narrative within and without the dance, and ‘its evocative postmodern fusion of old and new, past and present, myth and history, east and west, north and south, here and there, us and them, rural and urban, birth and death, war and peace, feast and famine, earth and water, sea and sky, home and away’. But despite the gushing hyperbole of postmodern hybridity, Riverdance owes much more to the drab schematicism of the invented tradition of modern Irish dance than Doherty and the Riverdance commentators acknowledge. Riverdance, while it has the appearance of postmodern hybridity and intercultural improvisation, rests on restricted cultural foundations. The spatialtemp oral flux moves really no further than between mid-20th century Irish diaspora communities in the UK and America. Where exactly are the AfroCaribbean and Oriental influences that any meaningful claim to globality should be able to identify and encompass? Riverdance relies absolutely on a disciplined corps of uniformly precise specialized dancers, trained in the modern Irish tradition, by schools and dancing masters, whether in Ireland or in Irish diaspora communities in English and American cities; Riverdance consists of professional dancers put through their paces since childhood in hierarchically organized and officially adjudicated competitions; Riverdancers’ bodies appear liberated, eroticized, but these are disciplined bodies, subjectified, transformed, improved and put to work as surely as the bodies of the patient, the prisoner or the proletariat forensically described by Foucault. Riverdancers are workdancers, cut from a pattern, rigorously quality controlled. The biographies of all of the leads and stars – Michael Flatley being the exemplary figure – attest to this thoroughly modern – not post-modern – genealogy. The globalization of the Irish economy, a process commencing some 30 years ago, but accelerated and intensified within the past 10, is marked by a decisive and systematic rejection of the older model and a declared willingness and openness to the ‘new.’ In the realm of the political economy the ‘new’ means both the EU, and foreign direct investment by US multinationals. The new dance form corresponding with this appears to break with official tradition and find renewed energy from several sources – the ‘original’ tradition, the ‘invented tradition’ and the ‘post-modern tradition’ of kitsch, of showbiz, of global polyphonic hybridity. In contrast to the sterile, modern invented tradition, the ‘post-modern tradition’ of the Cultural Renaissance seems to be lively, vibrant and multiple, and thus capable of renewing and sustaining itself, a contemporary approximation of the conditions of possibility for cultural creativity in the pre-modern vernacular tradition – a lively culture ‘rescued’ as it were from the straitjacket of modern rationality and bureaucratic organizational forms. But the hyper-rationalized forms of organization and work relations characteristic of global late-capitalism (McRobbie, 2001) maybe the sources of its exhaustion and depletion of its own energies. This is because precisely the same organizational forms and relations are at the centre of the aesthetic representations of globalization. Just as global capitalism exhausts This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.


itself by alienating its human resources and consuming its natural resources, the postmodern global culture industry consumes its deep-seated ‘fossil’ cultural resources – the vestigial remnants of pre-modern community – which are then repackaged and sold back to the original owners (MacCannell and MacCannell, 1993). Far from representing a cultural renaissance, the emergence of a rejuvenated spirit of creative enterprise animating new forms of global organization and work, Riverdance may in fact be an Irish wake – exuberant, but as a defence against death.

Last Dance Please! The history of Irish dance (and Irish culture in general) has always expressed a tension between dominant accounts and counter-discourses which provide a potential for creativity and innovation in both economy and culture. Riverdance and its derivatives provide interesting contemporary manifestations of these tensions. For instance, Riverdance and (especially) Michael Flatley’s Celtic Tiger draw deeply on the oppositional discourse of traditional Irish nationalism, which privileges and celebrates local Irishness over global otherness, while at the same time these dance shows are icons of, and embedded in, a late-capitalist system where ‘Irishness’ is but a commodified sign traded in a global ‘alterity industry’ (Huggan, 2001). And while Flatley’s use of 1960s nationalist ballads may be anachronistic in a post-Peace Process rapprochement in Anglo-Irish relations, it does remind us that reworked histories constantly intrude on the present and that cultures always transgress and transform one another. Likewise, while the encores and standing ovations (an integral part of the Riverdance phenomenon) may be a spontaneous celebration of the moment, they may also be a catharsis of nostalgia seeking to fill the gap between the simulacrum that is Riverdance and its unattainable yet real origins. We have inquired into the relationship between the organization of working life and the production and consumption of culture within the context of the Celtic Tiger phenomenon. Our study of Riverdance has shown that this relationship is deeply immersed in larger organizing discourses, historical narratives about national identity and civilizing attempts to control the body. As a hybridized and consumable global product, Riverdance reflects and reproduces dominant accounts of Ireland’s economic success consistent with a neo-liberal ideology, while at the same time it expresses moments of culture that are pre-global, having affinities with ‘tradition,’ however reinvented. Its very status as both pre- and postmodern, as a condensation of contradictory forces and tendencies, means that Riverdance contains moments that are potentially transgressive and creative, generative of potentials for further cultural and economic development. Like dance forms before it, Riverdance challenges dominant accounts of ‘Irishness’ – and potentially the role of the Irish state in global political economy – but it also opens up for debate our understandings of work and organization and the relationship between economy and culture. This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.


Notes The authors would like to thank Sebastian Green, James Fairhead, Grace Neville, Clodagh O’Brien and Barbara O’Connor for their assistance on this paper. In particular, we would like to thank Moya Doherty, the producer of Riverdance, for her time and thoughts. We thank the editors of this special issue for their diligence, professionalism and good cheer, while the four anonymous reviewers are due a special word of thanks for their generosity and insights. 1. Data sourced from ESRI website (http://www.esri.ie/irish_economy/), European Economy, Statistical Annex (various issues), the Irish Central Statistics Office website (http://www.cso.ie) and EU economic data pocketbook – No. 3/2007 available at http://epp.eurostat.ec.europa.eu. 2. Economic statistics mask the reality of a multinational corporation availing itself of Ireland’s low corporate tax environment to post high ‘profits’ earned by ‘buying’ and ‘selling’ goods from and to its own corporate subsidiaries. Thus, high growth rate indicators mask a weak indigenous sector providing low-paid service jobs, a growing disparity between rich and poor, and the unwillingness of government to address social and economic inequities (O’Toole, 2003a). 3. In music, U2, The Corrs, Cranberries, Enya; in film, a cadre of internationally acclaimed and award-winning actors, producers, directors, and scriptwriters –between 1989 and 1993 Irish actors were nominated for six and won two Academy Awards; Irish artists, poets and novelists achieved world-wide acclaim in the 1990s, far exceeding what might be expected based on population – Seamus Heaney won the Nobel prize for literature in 1995, while two Irish authors won the Booker prize and fifteen were short-listed between 1989 and 2005. In sport, Irish competitors achieved unprecedented success in motor racing, golf, soccer, and horse racing. 4. It was hardly accurate to even speak of an Irish economy in the 1930s. Ireland never experienced the industrial revolution and, after centuries of colonialism, had been effectively turned into a ‘granary’ for the United Kingdom which accounted for 90% of exports at that time (MacSharry and White, 2000). 5. The title of a novel by Brinsley MacNamara (1918) depicting a typical Irish village where individuals are severely morally constrained by the normalizing gaze of their neighbours.

References Arensberg, Conrad M. and Kimball, Solon T. (1968/2001) Family and Community in Ireland. Ennis, Co. Clare: CLASP Press. Austin, Valerie A. (1993) ‘The Céilí and the Public Dance Halls Act, 1935’, Éire-Ireland: A Journal of Irish Studies (Fall): 7–16. Breathnach, Breandán (1983) Folk Music and Dances of Ireland. Cork: Mercier. Brennan, Helen (1999) The Story of Irish Dance. Dingle, Co. Kerry: Brandon. Brown, Stephen (1998) Postmodern Marketing Two: Telling Tales. London: International Thomson Business Press. Cullinane, John P. (1997) ‘Irish Dancers World-Wide: Irish Migrants and the Shaping of Traditional Irish Dance’, in P. O’Sullivan (ed.) The Creative Migrant: Vol. 3. The Irish World-Wide: History, Heritage, Identity Series. Leicester: Leicester University Press. Curtis, P. J. (1994) Notes from the Heart a Celebration of Traditional Irish Music. Dublin: Torc. DuGay, Paul and Pryke, Michael (2001) Cultural Economy: Cultural Analysis and Commercial Life. London: Sage.



Elias, Norbert ([1939] 1978) The Civilizing Process: State Formation and Civilization.Oxford: Basil Blackwell. FitzGerald, John (2000) ‘The Story of Ireland’s Failure – and Belated Success’, in B. Nolan, P. J. O’Connell and C. T. Whelan (eds) Bust to Boom? The Irish Experience of Growth and Inequality. Dublin: IPA. Friel, Brian (1990) Dancing at Lughnasa: A Play. London: S. French. Hobsbawm, Eric J. and Ranger, Terence, eds (1983) The Invention of Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Huggan, Graham (2001) The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins. London: Routledge. Inglis, Tom (1998) Lessons in Irish Sexuality. Dublin: University College Dublin Press. Kennedy, Kieran and McHugh, Deirdre (1984) ‘Employment’, in J. W. Hagan (ed.) The Economy of Ireland. Dublin: IMI. Kirby, Peadar, Gibbons, Luke and Cronin, Michael (2002) ‘Introduction’, in P. Kirby, L. Gibbons and M. Cronin (eds) Reinventing Ireland: Culture, Society, and the Global Economy. London: Pluto Press. MacCannell, Dean and MacCannell, Juliet Flower (1993) ‘Social Class in Postmodernity: Simulacrum or Return of the Real?’ in C. Rojek and B. S. Turner (eds) Forget Baudrillard? London: Routledge. MacNamara, Brinsley (1918) The Valley of the Squinting Windows. Dublin: Maunsel and Company, Limited. MacSharry, Ray and White, Pádraic (2000) The Making of the Celtic Tiger: The inside Story of Ireland’s Boom Economy. Cork, Ireland: Mercier. McRobbie, Angela (2001) ‘From Holloway to Hollywood: Happiness at Work in the New Cultural Economy?’ in P. DuGay and M. Pryke (eds) Cultural Economy: Cultural Analysis and Commercial Life. London: Sage. Marx, Karl (1961) Selected Writings in Sociology and Social Philosophy. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Ó Cinnéide, Barra (2002) Riverdance: The Phenomenon. Dublin: Blackhall. O’Connor, Barbara (1998) ‘Riverdance’, in M. Peillon and E. Slater (eds) Encounters with Modern Ireland. Dublin: IPA. O’Connor, Barbara (2003) ‘‘‘Come and Dance with Me in Irlande”; Tourism, Dance and Globalisation’, in M. Cronin and B. O’Connor (eds) Irish Tourism: Image, Culture and Identity. Clevedon: Channel View Press. O’Donnell, Rory (2000) ‘The New Ireland in the New Europe’ in R. O’Donnell (ed.) Europe: The Irish Experience. Dublin: IPA. Ó Giolláin, Diarmuid (2000) Locating Irish Folklore: Tradition, Modernity, Identity. Cork: Cork University Press. O’Toole, Fintan (1996) The Ex-Isle of Erin. Dublin: New Island Books. O’Toole, Fintan (2003a) After the Ball. Dublin: New Island. O’Toole, Fintan (2003b) ‘Interview’, in D. Theodores (ed.) Dancing on the Edge of Europe: Irish Choreographers in Conversation. Cork: Institute for Choreography and Dance. Peillon, Michel (2003) ‘Agency, Flows and Post-Colonial Structure in Ireland’, The Irish Review 30: 71–81. Ray, Larry and Sayer, Andrew (1999) Culture and Economy: After the Cultural Turn. London: Sage. Weber, Max ([1921] 1968) Economy and Society. Totowa, NJ: Bedminister Press. Whitaker, T. K. (1958) ‘Economic Development’. Dublin: Department of Finance/Stationery Office.



Organizing Identity



46 Identities and Insecurities: Selves at Work David L. Collinson

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estern thinking has traditionally viewed human beings as unitary, coherent and autonomous individuals who are separate and separable from social relations and organizations. Post-structuralist approaches have criticized this perspective for its dualistic tendency artificially to separate individual from society, mind from body, rationality from emotion (e.g. Henriques et al., 1984). Rejecting such dichotomies and the essentialist notions of personality that tend to underpin them, poststructuralist perspectives suggest that people’s lives are inextricably interwoven with the social world around them (Layder, 1994). Since people are embedded in social relations from birth and throughout their lives, ‘society’ and ‘individual’ cannot be separated (Giddens, 1979). Accordingly, individuals are best understood as ‘social selves’ (Burkitt, 1991) whose actions have to be understood within their complex conditions, processes and consequences. Demonstrating how subjectivity is a specific historical product embedded within particular conditions and consequences, post-structuralist studies provide new ways of looking at subjectivity, highlighting in particular its discursive, non-rational, gendered and multiple nature (WOBS, 2000). This perspective has been heavily influenced by Foucault’s emphasis on the social, organizational and historical contingency of subjectivity and its important inter-relationships with power and knowledge. Questioning traditional conceptions that treat power as a solely negative and repressive property possessed by a ‘higher’ authority and exercised in a ‘top down’ fashion, Foucault (1977, 1979) suggests that power is also creative and productive. He argues Source: Organization, 10(3) (2003): 527–547.


190 Organizing Identity

that practices of power produce subjects, for example, through ‘normalization’, a process by which the eccentricities of human beings in their behaviour, appearance and beliefs are measured and if necessary corrected. As a form of power that disciplines the self, normalization constructs identity and knowledge by comparing, differentiating, hierarchizing, homogenizing and excluding. Others have drawn on these ideas to illustrate how different social and organizational practices can produce ‘normalized’ and ‘disciplined’ selves (e.g. Hollway, 1984; Rose, 1989). Insisting on the need to combine subject and object, structure and action and power and subjectivity, post-structuralist analyses challenge the prevailing functionalist paradigm and the economic and gender reductionism that frequently characterizes conventional organization studies. The latter typically takes subjectivity for granted, understanding it in the very narrow terms of ‘rational, coherent, economic man’. Historically, studies of organization have tended to examine key issues like ‘leadership’, ‘structure’ and ‘culture’ as if their meaning were self-evident, and as if workplace processes were largely determined by an abstract logic irrespective of human volition and thought. Encouraged by post-structuralist analysis, there has been increasing dissatisfaction with such objectivist accounts. Indeed the emergence of this journal and its considerable impact over a relatively short period of time is testament to the development of new, alternative modes of analysing ‘organization’, many of which appreciate the importance of subjectivity as part of a more critical approach. Within social theory, the examination of ‘subjectivity’, ‘self’ and ‘identity’ has a long history. Indeed the literature is vast (Jenkins, 1996). A great number of writers drawing on a variety of theoretical traditions have examined the complex ways that individuals seek to construct subjective meaning for their actions, relationships and identities. Some of the most important contributions include the philosophical approaches of existentialism (Sartre, 1958) and phenomenology (Schutz, 1972), the more sociological perspectives of symbolic interactionism (Mead, 1934), ‘interpretative sociology’ (Weber, 1947) and social anthropology (Becker, 1971; Cohen, 1994), as well as the social psychological orientations of developmental psychology (Kelly, 1955; Allport, 1955) and psycho-analysis (Freud, 1930, Jung, 1964). While there are significant points of difference between these perspectives, one of the important concerns that many of them share is an emphasis on human self-consciousness. As reflexively monitoring and purposive creatures, we human beings have the capacity to reflect upon ourselves and to see ourselves as separate from the natural and social world around us. This sense of separation in turn facilitates our consciousness of time, our awareness of past processes and future possibilities. We thus have a capacity to envisage alternative realities and to re-construct and change our world. This creative potential enables us to reflect upon and exercise some discretion and control over our actions. It also enables us not only to ‘see’ ourselves,


Collinson • Identities and Insecurities 191

but also to try to view ourselves as others may see us and to compare and contrast ourselves with others. However, some of the foregoing approaches have produced overly voluntaristic accounts of subjectivity that exaggerate autonomy and under-emphasize the significance of its conditions, processes and consequences.1 Moreover, studies of subjectivity have sometimes neglected the extent to which human self-consciousness may be the medium and outcome of uncertainties, insecurities and anxieties about who we are, how we should live, what ‘significant others’ think of us etc. For example, temporal awareness can render us anxious about our mortality and about the meaning of our lives (Becker, 1973). Durkheim (1948) argued that culture and social institutions shield individuals from the inherent meaninglessness of life overshadowed by the certainty of death. He was concerned that the specialized division of labour in industrialized societies intensified social fragmentation which reinforced the possibility of individuals becoming increasingly detached from social institutions. Without the ‘distraction’ of society, this self-conscious awareness of our own existential impermanence might result in an overwhelming sense of ‘anomie’, which in turn could result in suicide. This article argues that the growing interest in selves and subjects within the workplace has not always fully appreciated the analytical importance of insecurity for understanding the subjective power relations, practices and survival strategies of organization. Insecurity in organizations can take many different, sometimes overlapping forms. It may, for example, be existential, social, economic and/or psychological. These multiple insecurities can intersect and operate simultaneously, thus reinforcing their impact on the construction of workplace selves and the reproduction of organizational power relations. Attempts to overcome these insecurities can also have unintended and contradictory outcomes. The first half of this article discusses various forms of insecurity that can impact on the construction of subjectivity. The second half considers how these insecurities, ambiguities and simultaneities may inform everyday organizational selves and practices.

Subjectivity and Its Insecurities Various writers have examined the impact of wider social and economic forces on the changing nature of subjectivities (e.g. Gergen, 1991). In his history of the rise of manners, etiquette and polite society in Europe from the Middle Ages onwards, Elias (1978) focused on the construction of ‘civilized selves’. He described the way that these cultural shifts fundamentally impacted on the structure of personality, resulting in a progressive intensification of self-restraint. In his critique of the historical development of capitalism, Marx argued that the commodification of labour resulted in the alienation of workers, not only from production, but also from themselves.



When separated from the products of their labour, workers were alienated from themselves and their species being. Of particular historical importance is the shift in social values from ‘ascription’ in feudalistic societies to ‘achievement’ in modern, so-called meritocratic, capitalist societies (Zijderveld, 1973). In more collectivist cultures with relatively simple divisions of labour, identities tend(ed) to be ascribed by birth and legitimized through religion and family status. As a consequence, selves were relatively stable and unambiguous. By contrast, especially in western societies, self-confirmation is no longer secured through family status and religion but is shaped by the much more individualistic values of ‘the success ethic’ (Luckmann and Berger, 1963) and the ‘achievement principle’ (Offe, 1976). As the influence of the church has declined, conventional notions of a valued identity have been redefined in terms of upward mobility and material accumulation. Accordingly, the validation of self through career success, material accumulation and the confirmation of ‘significant others’ can become a new and highly influential religion (Walter, 1979). It is argued that this broad-sweeping shift from ascription to achievement has resulted in identities that are much more ‘open’, no longer fixed at birth by, for example, religion, class and/or gender.2 While these changes have produced greater ‘freedom’ and choice for human beings, they have also resulted in increasingly precarious, insecure and uncertain subjectivities. Within US society where the ideology of meritocracy is most influential, this openness of identity is enshrined in the ‘American Dream’. Here individuals are encouraged to believe that ‘you can be who you want to be’. Rather than being ascribed by birth, selves are now achieved through practice. Choice is simply a matter of ‘character’. On the one hand, this openness can provide individuals with increased ‘freedom’ since they may now exercise much more discretion over what they do, how they do it and ‘who they want to be’. Yet on the other hand, this much greater openness of identity can be highly threatening. It can significantly increase individuals’ sense of insecurity and vulnerability. In so far as individuals may develop a ‘fear of freedom’ (Fromm, 1977), they might try to shelter in the perceived security of being told what to do and what to think, viewing this as a less threatening alternative to the responsibility of making decisions and choices for themselves (Berger, 1963). Meritocratic ideologies are typically espoused in societies that are also characterized by deep-seated class and status inequalities. How does this impact on the construction of more insecure, ‘achieved selves’? Luckmann and Berger (1963: 343–4) argued that class inequalities contain ‘a built-in frustration mechanism’ of ‘status anxiety’ which can result in a continuing crisis of identity. They suggested that deeply stratified and class-ridden societies tend both to reflect and reinforce recurrent insecurities about self and status. In meritocracies, dignity and respect are no longer an automatic birthright. They are conditional and have to be earned and achieved. Accordingly,



insecurities about self can become a permanent feature of everyday experience as identities are pursued through competition in all aspects of life. The ‘success ethic’ reinforces the significance of paid employment as a potential source of valued identity. For men especially, paid work throughout the 20th century has been a crucial source of (masculine) identity, status and power (Hearn, 1992). Yet, this workplace competition to acquire material security and dignity can further intensify subjective insecurity. For example, when competition in paid employment becomes the primary means of valuing self, what are the implications for those who are ‘less successful’? Miller’s (1949) ‘Death of A Salesman’ poignantly describes the painful psychological collapse of Willy Loman, as his sales performance starts to decline in the later years of his career. It illustrates how the disciplinary ideology of ‘achieved selves’, which insists that salespeople ‘are only as good as their last sale’, can have a corrosive impact on employees’ sense of identity and well-being. Moreover, if respect and dignity in so-called meritocratic societies are to be conferred only on those who do middle-class ‘mental’ work, how do those who are trapped in low status manual jobs construct a positive meaning for their lives? Sennett and Cobb (1977) examined American manual workers’ search for human dignity in a class society where respect is conditional upon ‘success’ and where individuals feel compelled to validate themselves as objects in comparison with others. They found that the combination of class society and meritocratic ideology creates a debilitating self-doubt for workingclass people. Feeling compelled to create ‘badges of ability’, some respondents viewed their work life as an heroic sacrifice for their children. Rejecting any possibility of upward progress, they treated manual work simply as a means of ensuring that their children would not be like them. Sennett and Cobb graphically describe how class societies that espouse meritocratic ideals can generate in subordinated workers a preoccupation with constructing a dignified self in conditions of its routine erosion. There are important economic insecurities surrounding paid employment (Burchell et al., 1999). For many workers, a fundamental source of insecurity is the material and economic realities of selling one’s labour power in return for a wage. In capitalist organizations hiring labour as a purchasable and disposable commodity is not only the means for creating value and expanding capital, but is also a central feature of workplace discipline. Job insecurity can create material and symbolic anxieties for workers. The fear of losing one’s economic independence can be interwoven with more symbolic anxieties. To lose one’s job or even to feel compelled to conform to others’ demands because of the fear of job loss can erode one’s sense of autonomy and self respect (Palm, 1977). Many studies of the workplace continue to demonstrate that subordinated employees often recognize that they are viewed by managers as anonymous and disposable functionaries (Collinson, 2002a). Furthermore, contemporary practices in ‘post-bureaucratic’ organizations that utilize new technologies to render work more flexible, contract-based,



casualized and ‘nomadic’ can also intensify employee insecurities (Sennett, 2000). By reinforcing individualism, these workplace changes further corrode social relations while increasing material and symbolic insecurity (Kallinikos, 2003). Hence, these interwoven material and symbolic insecurities crucially impact on the selves and subjectivities that currently shape modern workplace practices. Knights and Willmott (e.g. 1989, 1990) argue that in addition to the way that social and economic change can significantly exacerbate anxieties surrounding subjectivity, there is another element of insecurity that lies at the very heart of identity formation itself. They contend that insecurities can also be reinforced by individuals’ attachment to particular notions of self. In so far as subjectivity is characterized by a dual experience of self, as both subject (active agent in the world) and object (individuals can reflect back on themselves and on the way others see them), they point to an irreducible ambiguity at the heart of identity construction. As self-conscious human beings we are both separate from, but also interdependent with others in the world. This separation and interdependence is a key source of ambiguity (Collinson, 1992). Knights and Willmott contend that individuals typically seek to deny or overcome this ambiguity through attempts to secure a stable identity, either as separate subjects (domination or indifference) or dependent objects (subordination). They argue that this pursuit of material and/or symbolic security through the search for a stable identity is inherently contradictory and is likely to produce unintended and counterproductive consequences. Their analyses emphasize not only the insecurities of modern identities, but also the various counterproductive outcomes of individuals’ attempts to overcome, resolve or deny this insecurity. Since in their view identity can never be fully secured or rendered entirely stable, individuals may become entrapped in an illusory goal, a ‘search for the holy grail’ of (re-)securing self as either subject or object. They contend that in modern competitive and unequal societies subjectivities are often characterized by this narcissistic preoccupation with attempts to secure identity. Knights and Willmott draw on Foucauldian ideas to locate subjectivity within organizational power relations. But they go further by focusing on the processes through which subjectivity comes to be fetishized in identity. They also draw on Giddens’s (1991) view that self-identity is a reflexively organized endeavour designed to sustain coherent biographical narratives in the search for ontological security. But again they go further by arguing that insecurity is an existential condition that cannot be avoided and attempts to do so are likely to be self-defeating. Similarly, Knights and Willmott reinterpret Berger et al.’s (1973) assumption that human beings have a fundamental concern for order (see also Berger and Luckmann, 1967). They question the inevitability of this subjective preoccupation with order, highlighting its roots in the ego’s illusory search to secure itself. Knights and Willmott suggest that



individuals’ attempts to provide a sense of order, meaning and identity for themselves by ‘naturalizing’ the world are likely to be counterproductive. The more we prioritize order, the more we are likely to be threatened by change. These arguments suggest that while subjectivity is crucially shaped by organization, individuals can also become the victims of their own identity-seeking preoccupations. The more individuals become preoccupied/obsessed with the (illusory) search for a stable and solid sense of identity, the more likely it is that subjectivity will indeed become a ‘psychic prison’ (Morgan, 1997). Knights has extended this analysis by suggesting that the search for power and identity in the workplace frequently takes highly masculine forms (Kerfoot and Knights, 1996, 1998).3 Indeed a number of studies highlight the way that men in organizations often seem preoccupied with maintaining a particularly masculine identity (Craib, 1998; Hodgson, 2003). Many men seem to place the highest value on their identity in the eyes of other men. Their search to construct and maintain masculine identity appears to be an ongoing project, frequently characterized by ambiguity, tension and contradiction (Morgan, 1992). Like all identities, masculine selves constantly have to be constructed, negotiated and achieved both in the workplace and elsewhere. Typically, this is through processes of identification and differentiation (Collinson and Hearn, 1994). Yet, this preoccupation with securing clearly defined and coherent gender identities may further reinforce, rather than resolve, the very insecurity these strategies were intended to overcome (Collinson, 1992). The attachment to identity can be especially problematic given that in practice, we simultaneously occupy many subjective positions, identities and allegiances (Nkomo and Cox, 1996). Rarely, if ever, do we experience a singular or unitary sense of self. There also appears to be an almost unlimited number of possible sources of identity. Human beings seem able to construct coexisting identities from many different aspects of our lives (e.g. one’s body, ethnicity, religion, possessions, family status, gender, age, class, occupation, nationality, sexuality, language, political beliefs, clothing, etc.). While some of these coexisting identities are mutually reinforcing, others may be in tension, mutually contradictory and even incompatible. The multiple nature of selves can thus reinforce ambiguity and insecurity. For example, we can experience discomfort and awkwardness when previously discrete ‘life worlds’ (Berger et al., 1973) come together, say when friends meet parents, or when work meets home. Yet, many studies of subjectivity tend to examine identity as a singular phenomenon, concentrating narrowly on just one primary feature of self, such as class, nationality, gender or ethnicity. By privileging one aspect of identity, such approaches neglect other, potentially important features of self that may intersect in complex ways. In deconstructing or de-centering the subject, post-structuralist feminist analysis has been particularly important in emphasizing the significance of the multiplicity of subjectivity as well as its ambiguous, fragmented,



discontinuous, non-rational character within asymmetrical power relations (Henriques et al., 1984). Recognizing men’s and women’s fragmented and contradictory lives in and around organizations, Kondo’s (1990) work has been especially influential. She contends that actors should be seen as ‘multiple selves whose lives are shot through with contradictions and creative tensions’. In her account of a family-owned Japanese firm she argues that identities are open, negotiable, shifting and ambiguous. Kondo suggests that selves are never fixed, coherent, seamless, bounded or whole; they are ‘crafted selves’ not least through contradiction and irony. She explores the construction of multiple, gendered selves in workplace relations characterized by ambiguity, paradox and power relations. Kondo insists that the analysis of gender has to be interwoven with other social categories such as class, ethnicity, nationality and age. This appreciation of the significance of multiple identities can also be seen in the recent interest in multiple masculinities in the workplace (Martin, 2001).4 Such accounts contend that masculinities are by no means homogenous, unified or fixed categories but diverse, differentiated and shifting across time, space and culture (Connell, 1995). Specific and different masculinities may be constructed and persist in relation both to femininity/ies and to other forms of masculinity shaped by, for example, class, ethnicity and age (Collinson and Hearn, 1994). Masculine subjectivities may also be shifting, internally contradictory and in tension. Barrett (2001) found that US male navy officers were particularly concerned to define themselves in terms of masculine identity. Aviators emphasized their autonomy and risk-taking, surface warfare officers prioritized their perseverance and endurance, while supply officers prided themselves on their technical rationality. Barrett’s study graphically demonstrates how the Navy reproduces a dominant masculinity taking multiple forms that values physical toughness, endurance, aggressiveness, a rugged heterosexuality, unemotional logic and a stoic refusal to complain. By contrast, women and gay men serve as the differentiated others, against which heterosexual men construct, project and display a gendered identity. He argues that masculine identities in the US Navy are constructed by differentiating and elevating self through outperforming, discounting and negating others. Yet, underpinning these concerns, he suggests, is an ‘enduring sense of subjective insecurity’ (2001: 97) that is not resolved, but reinforced by these processes. He concludes that masculine identity strategies often reproduce insecurity and competition which in turn reinforces the perceived need for identity-protection strategies. So far, the discussion suggests that a considerable number of intersecting material and symbolic insecurities can shape the construction and reproduction of selves and subjects. Social change, workplace power relations and their shifting nature and the ambiguities and multiplicities of subjectivity itself can all exacerbate insecurity and anxiety. Given the socially constructed,



multiple and shifting character of identities and power asymmetries, attempts to construct and sustain particular identities may actually reinforce the very insecurity they are intended to overcome. In what follows, I now consider how various selves can be expressed within and through the asymmetrical power relations of organization. By exploring the workplace construction of selves, I argue that a greater appreciation of subjectivity and its insecurities can enhance our understanding of the ways that organizational power relations are reproduced, rationalized, resisted and, just occasionally, even transformed.

Subjectivity in Practice As the foregoing discussion intimated, workplace power asymmetries can reinforce material and symbolic insecurities, especially for those in subordinated positions. Within critical organizational analysis, power has typically been examined in terms of management control (Braverman, 1974). Poststructuralist writers have focused on the ways that specific power/knowledge regimes are inscribed on individual subjectivities. Foucault argued that social control is now produced by exposure to ‘the gaze’. Through measurement and assessment, surveillance systems render individuals ‘calculable’ and even ‘confessional’ selves who collude in their own subordination. Within contemporary UK organizations employee performance is increasingly monitored through, for example, productivity targets, appraisal systems, performance-related-pay, league tables, customer feedback, outsourcing and casualization. What is the impact of this intensified visibility? On the basis of my own research in organizations over the past 20 years, I now consider in turn a number of subjectivities that routinely seem to emerge, especially in surveillance-based organizations. These selves can also be viewed as ‘survival practices’ adopted by individuals, especially in surveillance-based organizations. While the notion of ‘survival’ might seem a little melodramatic (Noon and Blyton, 1997), it is intended to address the complex ways that individuals may try to protect and secure themselves in a physical, economic and/or symbolic sense within disciplinary regimes. Often these concerns will overlap. For example, in manual employment, problems of dangerous work, low pay and degraded identities may not only be inextricably interwoven, but also mutually implicated in shaping particular employee responses. Noon and Blyton (1997) demonstrate how, even in tightly monitored organizations, employees can find creative responses such as making out, fiddling, joking, sabotage and escaping. The following discussion seeks to link more explicitly their focus on survival strategies with the construction of selves in the workplace. In particular, it considers ‘conformist’, ‘dramaturgical’ and ‘resistant’ selves.



Conformist Selves Foucault pointed to the way that workplace surveillance systems produce disciplined and ‘conformist selves’. His ideas have inspired many workplace studies (McKinlay and Starkey, 1998) that highlight the self-disciplining impact of workplace surveillance systems which tie individuals to their identities. Studies have explored, for example, corporate culture initiatives (Kunda, 1992; Willmott, 1993; Casey, 1995), performance assessment systems (Rippin, 1993; Townley, 1992, 1993, 1994), teamworking (Sewell and Wilkinson, 1992; Barker, 1993) and new technologies/information gathering systems (Zuboff, 1988). As Alvesson and Willmott (2002) recently argued, ‘identity regulation’ is a central feature of organizational control in contemporary ‘post-bureaucratic’ organizations. Illustrating how power and discipline actively construct conformist selves, these studies show how forms of power exert control over people, not least by shaping their identities and relationships.5 In conformity, individuals tend to be preoccupied with themselves as valued objects in the eyes of those in authority, subordinating their own subjectivity in the process. The pursuit of a ‘successful’ career is one example of a conformist self within surveillance-based organizations. Grey (1994) explores the disciplinary impact of career as a meaningful project of the self. Emphasizing the totalizing influence of identity preoccupations as they are expressed in careerism, he reveals how identity construction and protection are often significant concerns for managers as well as for more subordinated employees (see also Watson, 1994). The corrosive impact of careerism can be seen in the way that aspiring individuals come to treat all organizational, social and even personal relations as instrumental to career progress. Equally, this manipulative approach frequently involves attempts to construct workplace reputation through the extensive use of impression management skills, described by Goffman (1959) and prescribed by others (Giacalone and Rosenfeld, 1991; Rosenfeld et al., 1995). Careerism intensifies the highly competitive nature of workplace cultures. For those who are promoted, such identities are reinforced by the remuneration, status and perks of more senior positions. A ‘successful’ career may also be an important medium through which men seek to establish masculine identities in the workplace. Upward mobility can be a key objective in the search to secure and embellish the male ego. Yet, particularly in conditions of ‘delayering’, career bottlenecks and the demise of lifetime employment, there are considerable contradictions associated with such aspirations. Committed to upward progress, men often feel compelled to work longer hours, meet tight deadlines, travel extensively and be geographically mobile at the behest of the company (Collinson and Collinson, 1997). Such corporate requirements may be incompatible with domestic responsibilities and can even contribute to the breakdown of marriages. Equally, as men grow older they are likely to be less able to compete



effectively with their younger, ‘hungrier’ and more aggressive male colleagues. Hence, in the short and/or long term, career competitiveness is unlikely to achieve the kind of security for which men often strive. For many employees in subordinated work who see little opportunity for personal development, an alternative conformist survival practice is to ‘distance’ themselves from the organization and escape into a private world outside work (Cohen and Taylor, 1992). Employees may seek to distance themselves either physically, through, for example, absenteeism and resignation, or psychologically, by ‘splitting self’. Ascribing primary significance to life outside work, employees can begin to divide their identity between the ‘instrumental and indifferent me at work’ and the ‘real me’ outside. They try to build a psychological wall between ‘public’ and ‘private’ selves, privileging the latter and (trying to) de-emphasize the former. Yet, the precarious nature of this splitting process can be literally ‘brought home’ when markets deteriorate and companies announce lay-offs. Such processes underline the inextricable links between ‘public’ and ‘private’ selves, between paid work and family (Burrell, 1988). Hence, this pursuit of material and symbolic security through conformity may itself have counterproductive outcomes. The production of conformist selves is certainly an important outcome of surveillance-based organizations. Yet is conformity inevitable? Do surveillance systems invariably construct conformist, even ‘capitulated selves’ (e.g. Casey, 1995) in the ways often assumed?

Dramaturgical Selves Surveillance systems tend to make individuals increasingly aware of themselves as visible objects, under the gaze of those in authority. While this experience might produce ‘conformist selves’, this is by no means inevitable. It is possible that individuals might find alternative ways of expressing themselves as subjects in the workplace. As a result of their heightened self- consciousness, individuals in surveillance-based organizations might become increasingly skilled manipulators of self, reputation and image in the eyes of ‘significant others’. This dramaturgical notion of self draws on Goffman’s ideas of impression management. Goffman focused on individuals’ tendency to present self in a favourable light, using information politically to conceal, mystify, overstate and/or understate. In the workplace, dramaturgical selves are more likely to emerge where employees feel highly visible, threatened, defensive, subordinated and/or insecure. Various studies document the emergence of dramaturgical selves as an employee survival strategy within intensified monitoring (e.g. Bowles and Coates, 1993; Miller and Morgan, 1993; Collinson, 1993). Equally, there are frequent stories in the UK media concerning the manipulation of performance



data in public sector organizations, especially those that are subject to league table assessment (such as hospitals and schools). Dramaturgical selves may also emerge in private sector organizations. My own research on North Sea oil rigs found that offshore workers frequently restricted the reporting of accident-related information (Collinson, 1999). In the context of a performance assessment system that prioritized safety above all other considerations, and as a means of coping with the contradictory performance indicators introduced by senior management, oil rig workers felt compelled to conceal information about safety and/or downplay the definition of accidents and near misses. They resisted the prescriptions of the safety culture and its monitoring system by withholding information about accidents, injuries and near misses as a defensive survival strategy in the face of the platform blame culture. Precisely because such practices constituted a sacking offence, workers also disguised their oppositional concealment strategies. In this sense performance assessment systems can be seen to create employee ‘performances’. Workers’ dramaturgical selves and practices were also contradictory in the sense that safe practices are paramount for offshore security. By withholding accident-related information, workers’ practices could jeopardize platform safety. Paradoxically, in their concern to survive within asymmetrical power relations, blame cultures and institutionalized inequalities, workers’ defensive practices could thereby threaten their own physical survival. Hence, in so far as monitoring tends to intensify individuals’ self- consciousness, employees can develop alternative dramaturgical selves and survival strategies. Employees can become skilled at choreographing their own practices and managing their reactions to the ways they are monitored. They can learn over time to be more self-consciously skilled and strategic in response to ‘the gaze’. Similarly, while new technologies may be used to intensify surveillance (Lyon, 2001), they can also enable dramaturgical selves. By reconfiguring time and space, technologies like email and mobile phones can facilitate dramaturgical claims by employees about where they are, what they have been doing and indeed, even who they are. Hence, when located in their wider conditions and consequences, dramaturgical selves can be seen as informing important survival strategies for those under ‘the gaze’. Tending to be neither a passive accommodation nor a total resistance to surveillance, dramaturgical selves are more likely to be characterized by an ambiguous and shifting amalgam compliance and opposition.

Resistant Selves Resistant selves constitute a primary means by which employees express their discontent about workplace processes. They may help subordinates in ‘surviving’ organizational regimes of tight control, surveillance and commodification. By engaging in resistance, employees often begin to construct



an alternative, more positive sense of self to that provided, prescribed or circumscribed by the organization (Goffman, 1968). Recent studies demonstrate the diverse, shifting and multiple character of oppositional subjectivities and practices (Jermier et al., 1994). They suggest that many resistance practices are frequently covert and subterranean (Gabriel, 1999; Knights and McCabe, 2000). These may include indifference and ‘foot dragging’ (Scott, 1985, 1990), ‘whistleblowing’ (Rothschild and Miethe, 1994) and even irony and satire (Ackroyd and Thompson, 1999). While such processes have received far less attention than more visible resistance like strikes, their disruptive effects should not be underestimated. Recent studies also suggest that worker discontent may be expressed in terms of ‘cynical selves’ in the context of ‘corporate culturism’ within call centre work (Fleming, 2002; Fleming and Spicer, 2003) and may also be targeted at customers (e.g. Leidner, 1993). Van Mannen (1991) shows how, in conditions of tight surveillance, Disney employees still found ways of resisting ‘difficult’ or abusive ‘guests’. Pointing to the importance of subjectivity, he argues that workers’ actions were motivated by the need to restore self-respect. By introducing gender into the analysis of employee resistance and by focusing on the possible contradictory consequences of opposition, studies of ‘resistant selves’ have also helped to demystify and deromanticize workplace dissent. For example, Willis (1977) shows how highly masculine, workingclass oppositional forms can unwittingly reproduce the very forms of domination they intend to resist. Central to the lads’ counterculture was a highly explicit preoccupation with validating working-class masculine identity. Similarly, my own study of ’Slavs’ focused on the contradictory dynamics of shopfloor culture and subjectivity (Collinson, 1992). It describes how, within an organization where they are treated as ‘second-class citizens’, workingclass men may (re)produce a shopfloor culture that celebrates manual work and redefines their sense of self, dignity and respect. Negating management, office workers and women, shopfloor workers elevated themselves through specifically masculine values of being a family breadwinner, ‘honest’, ‘practical’, ‘productive’ and ‘having commonsense’. For many men, highly aggressive, sexist and derogatory humour also played an important part in constructing identity and meaning. While workers symbolically inverted the values and meanings of class society, they did so in ways that ultimately and paradoxically celebrated the status quo. The transformative potential of this oppositional shopfloor culture was thereby dissipated by the preoccupation with the construction of masculine identity in conditions of its continual erosion. Such studies have also highlighted the blurred and ambiguous boundaries between opposition and control. For example, feminist analyses of the exclusionary and segregating practices of organized male-dominated labour (e.g. Cockburn, 1983; Walby, 1986) reveal how male worker resistance against the employer (e.g. over the ‘breadwinner wage’) can simultaneously constitute a form of control and domination (e.g. through the exclusion of female



labour). Similarly, members of shopfloor counter-cultures who are highly suspicious and critical of managerial motives and practices can simultaneously express a deep-seated commitment to ‘management’s right to manage’ (Collinson, 1992). By distancing themselves from organizational decisionmaking, they thereby tend to reinforce managerial prerogative and increase their own vulnerability to managerial discretion. Elaborating her conception of the multiple and ambiguous nature of selves, Kondo (1990) questions much of the literature on resistance. She describes how the countercultures of Japanese shopfloor workers that frequently highlight managerial inconsistencies, can themselves be caught in contradictions, simultaneously legitimizing as they challenge dominant organizational and gendered discourses. While workers criticize management and question the dominant notion of ‘the company as family’, they simultaneously take pride in belonging to the organization. Similarly, women part-time workers asserted their gendered identities (often as surrogate mothers to the younger male artisans) in ways that creatively challenged the masculine celebration of prowess on the job. Yet, by relying on conventional discourses about women, these identities had the effect of reinforcing their marginality as workers. By casting themselves as mothers, women claimed power over the younger men but simultaneously reproduced their exclusion. Paradoxically, they asserted and marginalized themselves simultaneously. Rather than deny or reinterpret these highly ambivalent worker subjectivities, Kondo seeks to draw on them explicitly and theoretically. Criticizing both romanticized and overly determined conceptions of workplace behaviour, she argues that much of the literature tends to see resistance as too neat, closed, monolithic and internally coherent. Kondo develops a more complex view of power and subjectivity which recognizes how people consent, cope and resist at different levels of consciousness at a single point in time. She rejects the notion of a ‘pristine space of authentic resistance’ and of a fixed, static and singular identity such as a ‘true resister’ or ‘class warrior’. Kondo concludes that ‘words like “resistance” and “accommodation” truly seem inadequate, for apparent resistance is constantly mitigated by collusion and compromise at different levels of consciousness, just as accommodation may have unexpectedly subversive effects’ (1990: 299). In sum, recent studies of resistant selves in the workplace highlight their multiplicity, inherent ambiguity and potentially contradictory outcomes. They suggest that countercultures may enable employees simply to accommodate and adjust to their subordinated position (Watson, 1995), reproduce new forms of coercion and domination (Walby, 1986) and might also constitute a visible target for the intensification of discipline and control (Burrell, 1988). Equally, rather than achieve the security and stability they often seek, resistant selves may actually reinforce and intensify employee insecurity (Collinson, 1992). Accordingly, it would be ill advised to assume that resistance in and of itself will lead to ‘progress’, ‘emancipation’ and/or positive



organizational change (WOBS, 2000). Having said that, resistance can also represent a challenge to dominant interests and values and may even become a catalyst for social and organizational change. Especially where resistance is not primarily concerned with identity-securing strategies and is informed by concern to render managerial practices more visible and accountable, it can produce significant organizational change (e.g. Ezzamel, 1994; Collinson, 2000).

Conclusion This article has explored the growing interest in selves and subjects at work. Highlighting the insecurities, ambiguities and multiplicities of workplace selves, the foregoing discussion has sought to illustrate how organizations not only produce products and services, but, in important symbolic and material ways, also produce people. Corporations provide economic remuneration and they also confer identities and meanings. Equally, they can generate considerable employee insecurity and anxiety, particularly through disciplinary regimes that erode trust relations. Workplace monitoring and motivation systems are frequently informed by a concern not merely with work intensification but also with the intensification of workers’ material and symbolic insecurity. This seems to be a predominant mode of ‘motivating’ employees in contemporary organizations. Especially in surveillance-based organizations, employees may seek to survive ‘the gaze’ through the construction of a variety of conformist, dramaturgical and/or resistant selves. In so far as these selves are designed to secure material and/or symbolic security, they may in turn also produce unintended and paradoxical effects. The growth of post-structuralist interest in subjectivity has in some respects paralleled the development of the journal Organization. This interest in selves at work is likely to grow in the future. Within the workplace, employee subjectivity could become an increasingly ‘contested terrain’. In recent times employers have extended their control strategies ever deeper into employee subjectivities with their concern ‘to win hearts and minds’ and to shape employee attitudes, emotions, sexualities, values, thoughts, bodies, appearance, demeanour, gestures and even humour and laughter (Burrell, 1992; Fleming, 2002; Collinson, 2002b). This corporate pressure on employees simultaneously to suppress and to deploy particular emotions in performing their organizational tasks is likely to intensify (Hochschild, 1983; Fineman, 1993). Equally, future managerial control strategies targeting subjectivity may be facilitated by new technologies (Lyon, 2001). For example, we can already see how ‘virtual selves’ are being artificially constructed to suit corporate purposes. In India, call centre workers employed by transnational corporations



are employed to answer telephone enquiries from callers living in the US and Europe. Yet, management has stipulated that callers must not discover that their query is being answered by an Indian worker based in Asia. Consequently, these workers are required to convey the impression that they are English or American and that they are working in these countries. They are trained in the appropriate accents, have to read ‘local’ papers (so they can chat about the news and the weather) and also have their Indian names changed to English equivalents. In short, they are required to deny their sense of self and take on a whole new identity defined by the corporation. This growing interest in selves, subjects and subjectivities presents a challenge for organization theorists to reconcile two somewhat opposing conceptions of human agency and organization. Are people best understood as the subjects or objects of the organizational worlds they inhabit? On the one hand, we live in complex, globalized organizations and societies that are not of our making or choosing. In many cases, the asymmetrical power relations of contemporary organizations, leave employees feeling powerless and subordinated to such an extent that they seem to become ‘capitulated selves’. Yet, on the other hand, it is also important to remember that organizations and societies are socially constructed and that individuals are not passive entities who are totally determined by external forces. Individuals are knowledgable and creative agents who, in forging relationships and constructing various selves, significantly shape the societies and organizations they inhabit. In so far as people are best viewed as simultaneously both subjects and objects of their societies, organizations and relations, the challenge for critical organizational analysts is to develop new ways of examining and representing these complex and sometimes contradictory simultaneities as they are reproduced within the multiple asymmetries and insecurities of the contemporary workplace.

Notes 1. Having said that, symbolic interactionism can be criticized for constructing an oversocialized conception of human beings. 2. While this broad-ranging focus on the shift from ascription to achievement is instructive for understanding contemporary subjectivities, it should not be oversimplified. Inevitably, this is to some extent an ideal-typical distinction. In many societies, including the so-called ‘meritocracies’ of North America, Western Europe and Australasia, ascription continues to have a significant impact in shaping identities, and the ‘accident of birth’ maintains an important influence on life opportunities. This can be seen for example in the reproduction of family dynasties in professional politics (e.g. Bush, Kennedy), in the familial leadership succession and inheritance of many businesses (especially in small businesses that comprise by far the largest section of the UK economy) and also in the ways that professional families often reproduce themselves through the next generation of same-occupation, middle-class professionals (e.g. doctors, lawyers and professional sports players). Equally, while these societies are



nominally secular, they also retain significant vestiges of religious influence that can crucially inform ascribed identities. Conversely, it would be misleading to exaggerate the stability and security of selves in medieval societies. Threats of disease/illness, war/invasion and childbirth are just three illustrations of the extensive insecurities that typically characterized medieval society. 3. Indeed, a recognition of the gendered and non-rational nature of subjectivities has important implications for the analysis of power and subjectivity in the workplace (Feree et al., 1999). Gendered notions of identity have been shown to be a vital aspect of gendered power, culture and meaning (Pierce, 1995). Feminist studies have problematized men’s attachment to family breadwinner identities (Walby, 1986) and demonstrated how concerns to protect gendered identities often inform the dominance of men’s workplace sexuality and practices of sexual harassment (Hearn et al., 1989). 4. To date there has been less focus on feminine subjectivities in organizations. 5. Domination is not just an imperative of capitalist, patriarchal or imperialist society. As Roberts (2001) has recently argued, it can also be informed by the narcissistic concern to confirm self through the exercise of power. As feminists have also argued, men’s exercise of gendered control (over women and other men) is one means by which men try to validate masculine identity.

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Cohen, A. P. (1994) Self Consciousness: An Alternative Anthropology of Identity. London: Routledge. Cohen, S. and Taylor, L. (1992) Escape Attempts. London: Routledge. Collinson, D. L. (1992) Managing The Shopfloor: Subjectivity, Masculinity and Workplace Culture. Berlin: De Gruyter. Collinson, D. L. (1993) ‘Introducing On-Line Processing: Conflicting Human Resource Policies in Insurance’, in J. Clark (ed.) Human Resource Management and Technical Change, pp. 155–74. London: Sage. Collinson, D. L. (1999) ‘Surviving the Rigs: Safety and Surveillance on North Sea Oil Installations’, Organization Studies 20(4): 579–600. Collinson, D. L. (2000) ‘Strategies of Resistance: Power, Knowledge and Subjectivity in the Workplace’, in K. Grint (ed.) Work and Society: A Reader, pp. 163–98. Cambridge: Polity. Collinson, D. L. (2002a) ‘A Response to Wray-Bliss: Revisiting the Shopfloor’, Organization 9(1): 41–50. Collinson, D. L. (2002b) ‘Managing Humour’, Journal of Management Studies 39(3): 269–88. Collinson, D. L. and Collinson, M. (1997) ‘Delayering Managers, Time-Space Surveillance and its Gendered Effects’, Organization 4(3): 373–405. Collinson, D. L. and Hearn. J. (1994) ‘Naming Men as Men: Implications for Work, Organization and Management’, Gender, Work and Organization 1(1): 2–22. Connell, R. W. (1995) Masculinities. Cambridge: Polity. Craib, I. (1988) Experiencing Identity. London: Sage. Durkheim, E. (1948) The Division of Labour in Society. London: Macmillan. Elias, N. (1978) The History of Manners: The Civilising Process, Vol. 1. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Ezzamel, M. (1994) ‘Organizational Change and Accounting: Understanding the Budgetary System in its Organizational Context’, Organization Studies 15(2): 213–40. Feree, M. M., Lorber, J. and Hess, B. B., eds (1999) Revisioning Gender. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Fineman, S., ed. (1993) Emotions in Organizations. London: Sage. Fleming, P. (2002) ‘Diogenes Goes to Work: Culture, Cynicism and Resistance in the Contemporary Workplace’, unpublished doctoral thesis, Department of Management, University of Melbourne. Fleming, P. and Spicer, A. (2003) ‘Working At a Cynical Distance: Implications for Power, Subjectivity and Resistance’, Organization 10(1): 157–79. Foucault, M. (1977) Discipline and Punish. London: Allen and Unwin. Foucault, M. (1979) The History of Sexuality Vol 1. London: Allen Lane. Freud, S. (1930) Civilization and its Discontents. London: Hogarth. Fromm, E. (1977) The Fear of Freedom. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Gabriel, Y. (1999) ‘Beyond Happy Families: A Critical Reevaluation of the Control– Resistance–Identity Triangle’, Human Relations 52(2): 315–42. Gergen, K. (1991) The Saturated Self: Dilemmas of Identity in Contemporary Life. New York: Basic Books. Giacalone, Robert and Rosenfeld, Paul, eds (1991) Applied Impression Management. London: Sage. Giddens, A. (1979) Central Problems in Social Theory. London: Macmillan. Giddens, A. (1991) Modernity and Self-Identity. Cambridge: Polity. Goffman, E. (1959) The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Goffman, E. (1968) Asylums. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Grey, C. (1994) ‘Career as a Project of the Self and Labour Process Discipline’, Sociology 28(2): 479–97. Hearn, J. (1992) Men in the Public Eye. The Construction and Deconstruction of Public Men and Public Patriarchies. London: Routledge.



Hearn, J., Sheppard, D. L., Tancred-Sheriff, P. and Burrell, G., eds (1989) The Sexuality of Organization. London: Sage. Henriques, J., Hollway, W., Urwin, C., Venn, C. and Walkerdine, V. (1984) Changing The Subject. London: Metheun. Hochschild, A. R. (1983) The Managed Heart. Commercialization of Human Feeling. Berkeley: University of California Press. Hodgson, D. (2003) ‘Taking it Like a Man: Masculinity, Subjection and Resistance in the Selling of Life Assurance’, Gender, Work and Organization 10(1): 1–21. Hollway, W. (1984) ‘Gender Difference and the Production of Subjectivity’, in J. Henriques, W. Hollway, C. Urwin, C. Venn and V. Walkerdine (eds) Changing the Subject, pp. 227–63. London: Methuen. Jenkins, R. (1996) Social Identity. London: Routledge. Jermier, J., Knights, D. and Nord, W., eds (1994) Resistance and Power in Organizations. London: Sage. Jung, C. (1964) Man and His Symbols. London: Aldus Books. Kallinikos, J. (2003) ‘Work, Human Agency and Organizational Forms: An Anatomy of Fragmentation’, Organization Studies 24(4):595–618. Kelly, G. A. (1955) The Psychology of Personal Constructs. New York: Norton. Kerfoot, D. and Knights, D. (1996) ‘The Best Is Yet To Come? The Quest for Embodiment in Managerial Work’, in D. L. Collinson and J. Hearn (eds) Men as Managers, Managers as Men, pp. 78–98. London: Sage. Kerfoot, D. and Knights, D. (1998) ‘Managing Masculinity in Contemporary Organizational Life: A “Man”agerial Project’, Organization 5(1): 7–26. Knights, D. and McCabe, D. (2000) ‘ “Ain’t Misbehavin”? Opportunities for Resistance under New Forms of “Quality” Management’, Sociology 34(3): 421–36. Knights, D. and Willmott, H. (1989) ‘Power and Subjectivity at Work: From Degradation to Subjugation in Social Relations’, Sociology 23(4): 535–58. Knights, D. and Willmott, H. (1990) Labour Process Theory. London: Macmillan. Kondo, D. K. (1990) Crafting Selves: Power, Gender and Discourses of Identity in a Japanese Workplace. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Kunda, G. (1992) Engineering Culture: Control and Commitment in a High-Tech Corporation. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Layder, D. (1994) Understanding Social Theory. London: Sage. Leidner, R. (1993) Fast Food, Fast Talk. Berkeley: University of California Press. Luckmann, R. and Berger, P. (1964) ‘Social Mobility and Personal Identity’, Archiv. Europ. Sociology 5: 331–43. Lyon, D. (2001) Surveillance Society. Buckingham: Open University Press. Martin, P. Y. (2001) ‘Mobilizing Masculinities: Women’s Experience of Men at Work’, Organization 8(4): 587–618. Mead G. H (1934) Mind, Self and Society: From the Standpoint of a Social Behaviourist. Chicago: Chicago University Press. McKinlay, A, and Starkey, K., eds (1998) Foucault, Management and Organization Theory. London: Sage. Miller, A. (1949) Death of a Salesman. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Miller, N. and Morgan, D. (1993) ‘Called to Account: the CV as an Autobiographical Practice’, Sociology 27(1): 133–43. Morgan, D. H. J. (1992) Discovering Men. London and New York: Unwin Hyman/ Routledge. Morgan, G. (1997) Images of Organization London: Sage. Nkomo, S. M. and Cox, T., Jr (1996) ‘Diverse Identities in Organizations’, in S. R. Clegg, C. Hardy and W. Nord (eds) Handbook of Organization Studies, pp. 338–56. London: Sage.



Noon, M. and Blyton, P (1997) The Realities of Work. London: Macmillan. Offe, C. (1976) Industry and Inequality. London: Edward Arnold. Palm, G. (1977) The Flight From Work. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pierce, J. (1995) Gender Trials: Emotional Lives in Contemporary Law Firms. Berkeley: University of California Press. Rippin, A. (1993) ‘From Factory Floor to Corporate Confessional: the New Meaning of Total Quality Management’, SCOS Newsletter 12(1): 22–30. Roberts, J. (2001) ‘Corporate Governance and the Ethics of Narcissus’, Business Ethics Quarterly 11(1): 109–27. Rose, N. (1989) Governing The Soul. London: Routledge. Rosenfeld, P., Giacalone, R. and Riordan C., eds (1995) Impression Management in Organizations. London: Routledge. Rothschild, J. and Miethe, T. D. (1994) ‘Whistleblowing as Resistance in Modern Work Organizations’, in J. Jermier et al. (eds) Resistance and Power in Organizations, pp. 252–73. London: Routledge. Sartre, J. P. (1958) Being and Nothingness. London: Methuen. Schutz, A. (1972) The Phenomenology of the Social World. London: Heinemann. Scott, J. C. (1985) Weapons of The Weak. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Scott, J. C. (1990) Domination and the Arts of Resistance. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Sennett, R. (2000) The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism. New York: Norton. Sennett, R. and Cobb, J. (1977) The Hidden Injuries of Class. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sewell, G. and Wilkinson, B. (1992) ‘“Someone to watch over me”: Surveillance, Discipline and the Just-In-Time Labour Process’, Sociology 26(2): 271–89. Townley, B. (1992) ‘In the Eye of the Gaze’, in P. Barrar and C. Cooper (eds) Managing Organizations in 1992, pp. 185–202. London: Routledge. Townley, B. (1993) ‘Foucault, Power/Knowledge, and its Relevance for Human Resource Management’, Academy of Management Review 18(3): 519–45. Townley, B. (1994) Reframing Human Resource Management: Power, Ethics and the Subject at Work. London: Sage. Van Maanen, J. (1991) ‘The Smile Factory’, in P. Frost et al. (eds) Reframing Organizational Culture, pp. 58–76. Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Walby, S. (1986) Patriarchy at Work. Cambridge: Polity. Walter, J. A. (1979) A Long Way From Home. Exeter: Paternoster Press. Watson, T. (1994) In Search of Management. London: Routledge. Watson, T. (1995) Sociology, Work and Industry. London: Routledge. Weber, M. (1947) The Theory of Social and Economic Organization. New York: Oxford University Press. Willis, P. (1977) Learning to Labour. London: Saxon House. Willmott, H. (1993) ‘“Strength is Ignorance, Slavery is Freedom”: Managing Culture in Modern Organizations’, Journal of Management Studies 30(4): 515–52. WOBS (Warwick Organizational Behaviour Staff), eds (2000) Organizational Studies: Critical Perspectives on Business and Management. London: Routledge. Zijderveld, A. (1973) The Abstract Society. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Zuboff, S. (1988) In the Age of the Smart Machine. Oxford: Heinemann.


47 The Tyranny of the Epochal: Change, Epochalism and Organizational Reform Paul du Gay

‘The romantics transform . . . every instant into a historical moment. . . . But they do even more than this. Every moment is transformed into a point in a structure . . . so every point is a circle at the same time, and every circle a point. The community is an extended individual, the individual a concentrated community. Every historical moment is an elastic point in the vast fantasy of the philosophy of history with which we dispose over peoples and eons.’ (Carl Schmitt, Political Romanticism) ‘The one thing that does not change is that at each and any time it appears there have been “great changes”.’ (Marcel Proust, Within a Budding Grove)

‘C

hange’, in today’s management terminology, is frequently represented as an unalloyed good. Indeed, it has become a matter of serious criticism to accuse an institution or an individual of being incapable of adjusting to – or, better still, ‘thriving on’ – change, or of failing to grasp its multitudinous ‘opportunities’. Change here means transformation, not piecemeal reform but radical transmutation: those who cannot or will not accede to its demands are ‘history’. In this article I focus on a particular discourse of organizational ‘change’ as it has appeared in a specific context, the contemporary field of public



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administration, and, in particular, I explore its role as a rhetorical device in reshaping the identity of public service. I do so, first, by seeking to indicate the epochalist bent of much theorizing about contemporary economic and organizational change – in both its academic and more managerial manifestations. I highlight its reliance on a logic of over–dramatic dichotomization that establishes the available terms of debate and critique in advance, in highly simplified terms, either for or against, and offers no escape from its own categorical imperatives. Second, I show how this discourse of organizational change mobilizes support for attempts to ‘re-invent’ or ‘modernize’ the public administration as an institution of government. Finally, I seek to offer a few words in support of the seemingly unfashionable art of ‘piecemeal reform’, as Popper (1985) famously put it, or what I refer to as case-based organizational reasoning or ‘organizational casuistry’.1

All or Nothing at All: The Extremism of ‘Change’ What is striking about much contemporary organizational theorizing – whether critical or more commercially purposeful – is the epochalist terms in which it is framed. By ‘epochalist’ I refer to the use of a periodizing schema in which a logic of dichotomization establishes the available terms of debate in advance, either for or against. As Tom Osborne (1998:17) has indicated with reference to contemporary social theories, epochal accounts ‘are those which seek to encapsulate the Zeitgeist in some kind of overarching societal designation; that we live in a postmodern society, a modern society, an information society, a rationalised society, a risk society . . . Such epochal . . . theories tend to set up their co-ordinates in advance, leaving no “way out” from their terms of reference.’ Whether the theorizing in question is being conducted by Zygmunt Bauman (2000 – ‘Liquid Modernity’), Scott Lash and John Urry (1994 – ‘Economies of Signs’), Manuel Castells (2000 – ‘the network society’), Tom Peters (1992 – ‘Chaos’ or ‘Crazy Times’) or Charles Leadbeater (1999 – ‘the knowledge driven economy’), the interpretation proffered bitterly pessimistic or dizzyingly optimistic, the common denominator is an epochalist emphasis. A couple of examples should suffice to illustrate this argument. In recent years, certain arguments have been advanced within the realm of social theory – often associated with terms such as ‘economies of signs’, ‘the network society’ and ‘the knowledge economy’ – that we are living in an era in which economic and organizational life has become thoroughly ‘culturalized’. One of the most sustained attempts to make this argument is contained in Lash and Urry’s Economies of Signs and Space. Here, it is argued that Economic and symbolic processes are more than ever interlaced and interarticulated; that is . . . the economy is increasingly culturally inflected and . . . culture is more and more economically inflected. Thus, the


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boundaries between the two become more and more blurred and the economy and culture no longer function in regard to one another as system and environment. (1994: 64)

In attempting to back up this claim that the economy is now more than ever ‘culturalized’, Lash and Urry point to a number of developments. For instance, they claim that organizations whose business involves the production and distribution of cultural hardware and software have become the most innovative and creative economic actors in the world today. The ‘creative’ or ‘culture’ industries broadly defined and other ‘soft’ knowledgeintensive industries not only represent the most important economic growth sectors but also offer paradigmatic instances of the generalized process of the ‘de-differentiation’ of economy/culture relations (1994: 108–9). At the same time, Lash and Urry argue that a fundamental shift has taken place in the extent to which meaning is attached to products and services. They argue that more and more of the goods and services produced for consumers across a range of sectors can be conceived of as ‘cultural goods’. In a conscious attempt to generate desire among end-users, these goods are deliberately and instrumentally inscribed with particular meanings and associations as they are produced and circulated. As such, ‘what is increasingly produced is not material objects but signs’ (1994: 4). Lash and Urry assert that there is a growing aestheticization or fashioning of (often seemingly banal) products, which are marketed to consumers in terms of particular clusters of meaning, often linked to ‘lifestyles’; this is taken as an indication of the radically increased importance of ‘culture’ to the production and circulation of a multitude of goods and services. This process, they argue, has been accompanied by the increased influence of what are often termed the ‘cultural intermediary’ occupations of advertising, design and marketing. Lash and Urry’s account of contemporary economic and organizational change can be described as epochalist in that it both is founded on and sustains a dualism that is also a periodization. A dualism is posited – between ‘use value’ and ‘sign value’, for instance – that is then used to frame two loosely periodized epochs: the less culturally inflected past (Fordism, as they have it) and the thoroughly culturalized present (aesthetically reflexive postFordism/postmodernism). In so doing, they reduce a range of economic, social and organizational changes to one or two ‘overarching’ and fundamental characteristics. Clearly reductionism is necessary to any periodization; otherwise we are in danger of reproducing the ‘one damn thing after another’ approach to historical explanation. However, it is important to note that the empirical significance of these epochal claims does need careful consideration. After all, authors working in fields as diverse as organization studies, the social anthropology of economic life and the history of advertising, for example, have indicated just how empirically unsubstantiated are the exemplary


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oppositions – between a more ‘use-value’ centred past and a more ‘signvalue’ centred present – that run through epochalist accounts such as this (Douglas and Isherwood, 1979; McFall and du Gay, 2002; McFall, 2002; Miller, 1995). Perhaps much of the hyperbole surrounding epochal claims of ‘increased culturalization’ can be explained by the fact that those taking the ‘cultural turn’ in the field of economic and organizational analysis are busy finding culture where none was thought to exist. However, they also tend, perhaps, to work against the grain of ‘cultural economic’ analysis, an emergent form of enquiry concerned with the practical material-cultural ways in which ‘economic’ and ‘organizational’ objects and persons are put together by, as Osborne (1998: 19) has it, setting up their coordinates too far in advance and thus leaving ‘no way out’ from their terms of reference.2 This has the effect of rendering certain potentially significant, if (seen from the heights of the epochal mindset) often seemingly banal, contextual details unimportant or invisible (Law, 2002; McFall and du Gay, 2002). After all, techniques of economic and organizational management rarely come readymade. They have to be invented, implanted, stabilized and reproduced. This involves much hard, frequently tedious work, whose success and effects cannot be taken for granted ‘in advance’. Thus the emergence of such techniques is probably not best explicated in terms of large-scale transformative processes – transitions from Fordism to post-Fordism or from organized to dis-organized capitalism, and so on – beloved of epochal theorizing, but rather cries out for the ‘grey, meticulous and patiently documentary’ forms of analysis recommended by (the rather more straight-laced and thus perhaps somewhat under-appreciated) Foucault (1986: 76), among many others (Callon, 1998; Law, 1994, 2002). This should not be taken to imply an out-and-out rejection of all claims of ‘increased culturalization’. Clearly, there are any number of substantive developments in organizational life – such as the recent obsession with ‘culture’ amongst the senior managers of many enterprises – that might conceivably be explicable in terms of some suitably situated ‘culturalization’ hypothesis. However, it is important that such claims be assessed with care and on more of a case-by-case basis – through a more casuistic form of organizational analysis – rather than simply being assumed or asserted. As Paul DiMaggio (1994: 27), for example, has argued, in relationship to the upsurge of interest in all things ‘cultural’ in the field of economic and organizational analysis, ‘the price of the insights and explanatory power that a cultural perspective can generate is an enduring scepticism towards “culturalist” accounts that claim too much or generalize too broadly’. If Lash and Urry’s account is epochalist – tending towards an overdramatic dichotomization that not only renders important contextual details insignificant, if not entirely invisible, but also makes the changes they outline appear largely inevitable and hence incontrovertible – then the work of Tom



Peters (1987, 1992, 1994) is the same, but much more so. Clearly Peters is not involved in the same practice as Lash and Urry. His work is not primarily academic but explicitly hortatory. It is attempting to mobilize practising managers around a new image of their role and how they should conduct themselves at work (and outside work too). It pursues its distinct purpose in a profoundly evangelical manner, one designed to challenge and subvert the ‘established church’ (now fallen, in Peters’ eyes) of what is described as ‘traditional’ management (Hopfl, 1992; Pattison, 1997). The key dichotomy is between the ossified ‘old’, which is in need of urgent ‘re-invention’, and the ‘visionary’ new, whose demands must be heeded or disaster will result. The dominant metaphors are ‘discontinuity’, ‘instability’, ‘fluidity’ and ‘chaos’. Radical transformation is seen as inevitable and as potentially disturbing, as it is in Lash and Urry’s epochal schema, but with an added twist (as befits the difference in purpose and hence narrative style): transformation is ultimately good for everyone, even if not everyone can see that, yet. The basic narrative informing all of Peters’ many works is that organ izations and their management are operating in an increasingly chaotic environment. This chaos has the capacity to destroy businesses and managers if left unconfronted. The ‘threat’, in the form of global competition, is at the gates and threatens to lay waste the promised land, which has been betrayed by inflexible, complacent and ‘amoral’ bureaucracy. If managements and organizations are to survive and flourish in a world turned upside down, they need to alter their modes of conduct completely. For the old order is passing away, the old ways cannot work and there is a need for total transformation and, through that, regeneration. However, salvation is at hand if, and only if, the old ways are abandoned and the prophet’s commandments obeyed to the letter and with total commitment – hence the call to develop ‘a public and passionate hatred of bureaucracy’. You must receive the spirit whereby you too ‘face up to the need for revolution’ and ‘achieve extraordinary responsiveness’ (Peters, 1987: 3–4). If you do this, then the future might just be yours. You, too, will be in tune with ultimate reality and will be able to manipulate the creative/destructive forces of chaos – which are a bottom-line inevitability – to your own advantage. You’ll be ‘liberated’, ‘emancipated’, ‘free’, because you’ve learnt to ‘thrive on chaos’. The alternative, which doesn’t bear thinking about, is sure-fire death. So choose life, choose ‘maximum businessing’.3 Deploying this evangelical strategy, Peters sets up a dynamic of fear, anxiety and discontent amongst his would-be followers. An atmosphere of total but non-specific threat is evoked: what could be more threatening and unspecific than ‘chaos’? This threat is then blamed on and used to problematize the authority of the present order – the ‘rational’ bureaucratic culture (Pattison, 1997). Recasting specific circumstances into polarities that construct polemical comparisons out of non-comparable terms is a favoured ‘technique of negation’ deployed by Peters. He conjures up an aggressively polarized world


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in which businesses are either conspicuously successful – entrepreneurial organizations thriving on chaos – or total failures – formal, hierarchical bureaucratic dinosaurs. There is nothing in between. Peters then reveals his simple message of salvation, which people must follow if they are to avoid annihilation and, more positively, become fully developed human beings able to turn the unavoidable chaos to their own advantage. Damnation/ irrelevance is not inevitable, but it will be if you don’t become that which you have a duty to be – a ‘businessed’ person. As Stephen Pattison (1997: 137) has indicated, this constitutes something like Peters’ basic ‘religious system’, within which the underlying metaphor for contemporary managerial reality is that of ‘chaos’. This understanding is total and unquestionable, as was, Pattison argues, the Old Testament prophets’ understanding of God. As Pattison (1997: 137) continues, ‘to depersonify the transcendent by getting rid of any overt deity, as Peters does, is not to dispose of its transcendent nature, though it may make it less obvious’. The statement that the world is ‘chaotic’ is a remarkably religious assertion, one whose veracity cannot be questioned or tested; it can be only accepted or rejected. Acceptance of this basic reality is acceptance of an overarching moral order within which all events, meanings and experiences can be situated and explained. It is the gateway into Peters’ unified view of the world. Indeed, Peters acts as the channel or voice for the transcendent chaos, which communicates its essence through him. Like a prophet, he issues a number of commandments that will guide his followers to organizational and personal salvation. These culminate, as Pattison (1997: 138) indicates, in an injunction to intensive and ceaseless effort on the part of every individual member of an organization, no matter what their status or standing. But this wilful and continuous change and transformation on the part of organizations and persons is not represented as a painful burden or tedious obligation, nor is it to be undertaken simply for instrumental purposes. Above all, it is a means to self-fulfilment and complete development. The wholeness that the bad old bureaucratic past rent asunder is to be recovered, the disenchantment it brought in its wake reversed, through ‘maximum businessing’, through living life like a business of one. As Peters (1992: 755) puts it, ‘life on the job is looking more like life off the job for a change. (“For a change?” For the first time in a couple of hundred years is more like it.)’ The tone of his commands is direct, didactic and highly moral. Peters is a charismatic leader, in Weber’s terms, attempting to organize life ‘on the basis of ultimate principles’ (Weber, 1978: I, 467). Indeed, Peters (1987: 149) is quite explicit that adopting his epochal worldview is akin to a ‘religious conversion’. In this way, the ‘management revolutionary’ as charismatic religious prophet enthrones himself as moral judiciary. His claim is to unify, through the strategy of ‘maximum businessing’, that which ‘bad old bureaucracy’ is held to have set apart as separate spheres of existence: work and leisure, reason and emotion, public and private. For the epochalist prophet, this ‘vision’ or unified view of the world offers the route to salvation. This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.


As Charles Turner (1992: 12) has argued, epochal accounts such as those offered by Peters and by Lash and Urry depend upon ‘the extrapolation from one set of predicates to the set of all possible predicates, upon the globalization of a local phenomenon, in which the one-sidedness of a specific problematic becomes the universality of a general problem’. The more they seek to offer a systematic or ‘totalizing’ account of the epoch, the more abstract that account becomes: the systematicity promised by the epochal formulation (Fordism/post-Fordism; bureaucracy/enterprise; modern/postmodern) is bought at the cost of a denial of locatedness and of specificity. In other words, rather than offering an account rooted in an empirical analysis, they deploy an abstract hermeneutics whose formulation of the character of ‘the epoch’ has the necessary effect of drowning out or making invisible the specificity of empirical history. In so doing, they express what Weber (1948: 357) termed ‘the speculative view of life’ and Schmitt (1986: 74–5) the romantic attitude of ‘fanciful construction’. Schmitt’s acerbic comment suggests that epochal diagnoses should not be taken seriously. Yet, from the point of view of developments in many contemporary organizational domains, it is Schmitt’s perspective that appears ‘fanciful’. In the life-order of government across the liberal democratic world, for instance, regimes of many different political hues are home to prestigious exponents of the ‘epochal arts’. Epochal theorists such as Anthony Giddens, Geoff Mulgan and Charles Leadbeater, for example, have all been involved, either implicitly or explicitly, with the development of public policy in Britain’s New Labour government, and the epochal formulations and designations they or their compatriots are associated with (the Third Way; connexity; the knowledge-driven economy; and so on) can be seen to structure reforms in many areas of governance – not least in the field of public administration.4 It is to developments in this latter field that I now turn.

Epochalism in Administrative Reform The epochalist schemas briefly sketched above are established in large part through sets of dualities and oppositions in which the discontinuity between past and future is highlighted.5 Although the narratives proffered are meant to be taken as empirical descriptions of reality, the oppositions they rely upon and through which they are framed are highly prescriptive in orientation (this is true of academic as well as managerialist epochalisms). In epochalist discourse, ‘change’ is presented as homogeneous and unilinear, making objects and persons that may be different in quality and kind seem all bound up in the same global process. In the field of public administration, for instance, such representations make change appear the inevitable outcome of abstract, nonlocatable impulses and imperatives (the information and communication revolution, the changing consumer, globalization) rather than the result of specific (and traceable) political choices (Clarke and Newman, 1997). This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.

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In the highly influential tract Re-Inventing Government, for example, Osborne and Gaebler (1992) founded their demand for a complete trans formation in the ways in which government conducts itself, and in which people conduct themselves within government, on just such a loose agglomeration of abstract imperatives. Amongst many other things, a generalized crisis in governmental authority, the dislocatory effects of an increased deployment of new information and communication technologies and the logics of ‘globalization’ are all lumped together to constitute what the authors term ‘an environment characterized by uncertainty’. It is this environment that is allocated agency when it comes to public administrative reform, rather than the choices of politicians or, heaven forbid, the management consultants from whom they frequently seek advice. Today’s environment demands institutions that are extremely flexible and adaptable. It demands institutions that deliver high-quality goods and services, squeezing every more bang out of every buck. It demands institu tions that are responsive to the needs of their customers, offering choices of non-standardized services; that lead by persuasion and incentives rather than commands; that give their employees a sense of meaning and control, even ownership. It demands institutions that empower citizens rather than simply serving them. (Osborne and Gaebler, 1992: 15)

What this ‘environment demands’ then, when it comes to public administration, is ‘entrepreneurial government’. It is the latter, and the latter alone, that is held to offer the only viable means through which a ‘broken’ public administration can be effectively ‘re-invented’. Unsurprisingly, the key tenets of this ‘new entrepreneurialism’ are the absolute opposite of those bad old bureaucratic practices held to have got government into such trouble in the first place. Entrepreneurial governments promote competition between service pro viders. They empower citizens by pushing control out of the bureaucracy, into the community. They measure the performance of their agencies, focusing not on inputs but on outcomes. They are driven by their goals – their missions – not by their rules and regulations. They redefine their clients as customers and offer them choices – between schools, between training programs, between housing options. They prevent problems before they emerge, rather than simply offering services afterward. They put their energies into earning money, not simply spending it. They decentralize authority, embracing participatory management. They prefer market mechanisms to bureaucratic mechanisms. And they focus not simply on providing public services but on catalysing all sectors – public, private and voluntary – into action to solve their community’s problems. (Osborne and Gaebler, 1992: 19–20)

Although such epochalist narratives and oppositions provide a simple and easily digestible set of slogans through which to catalyse the demand for ‘change’, problems invariably arise when it comes to the nitty-gritty of



actually effecting practical changes within governmental institutions based on such gestural categories. After all, I would suggest, judgements about the wisdom of certain forms of organizational change, arrived at in the concrete circumstances of a practical case, can no more be abstracted from their detailed circumstances than can medical judgements about the present condition of individual patients. As Amelie Rorty (1988: 8) has argued in this regard, since judgements and contexts are particular, all the way up and all the way down, judgements are given their sense and direction by the particular context within which they arise. Yet it is precisely the individual circumstances that epochal approaches make invisible or render insignificant, and herein lies their practical danger. Insofar as they neglect the specificity of circumstances, attempts such as Osborne and Gaebler’s to generalize ‘entrepreneurial principles’ to all forms of organizational conduct may well end up serving to incapacitate a particular organization’s ability to pursue its specific purposes by redefining its organizational identity and hence its purposes (du Gay, 2000a). A brief examination of the Clinton administration’s National Performance Review in the USA and subsequent report – From Red Tape to Results: Creating a Government That Works Better and Costs Less (Executive Office of the President, 1993) – and the Blair government’s Modernising Government White paper (Cabinet Office, 1999) and subsequent initiatives in the UK give a flavour of just how such a slippage can occur when epochal diagnoses form the basis of practical organizational interventions in the area of public administration. Although these are by no means the only examples of epochally framed administrative reform that could have been chosen (developments in New Zealand and Australia offer clear parallels), they are often represented as ‘exemplars’ that other governments should emulate if they are to stay at the ‘leading edge’ (Pollitt and Bouckaert, 2000: 59).

Re-Inventing Government: The National Performance Review The centre-piece of public administrative reform under the Clinton presidency in the USA was the National Performance Review (NPR) chaired by then Vice-President Al Gore. In launching the NPR in April 1993, Gore indicated that ‘our long term goal is to change the very culture of the federal government’. This was to be achieved through a process coined ‘ReInventing’. The origins of this phrase are not hard to trace. Osborne and Gaebler’s bestseller is entitled Re-Inventing Government and their epochal pronouncements and diagnoses clearly inform the philosophical premise and practical goals of the NPR. Indeed, David Osborne played a major part in drafting the NPR’s final report, From Red Tape to Results (Executive Office of the President, 1993). As we have seen, Osborne and Gaebler’s text picks and mixes ideas from a number of different discursive locales – from the voluminous privatization


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literature of the 1970s and 1980s, to the populist business motivation literature of the 1980s and early 1990s. The result is a heady brew that could appear acceptable to liberals and democrats who wanted to save government from the worst excesses of the New Right but who also wanted a more ‘responsive’ government that catalysed all sectors of society and, importantly, cost less to run. Such a government was realizable, Osborne and Gaebler argued, if there was a cultural shift away from what they call ‘bureaucratic government’ and towards what they term ‘entrepreneurial government’. This epochal opposition was taken up by the NPR and constitutes something like its basic organizing framework. The NPR indicates that ‘re-inventing government’ rests upon ‘four bedrock principles’ of entrepreneurial management (Executive Office of the President, 1993: 6–7). These are remarkably similar (indeed, pretty much a distillation of) Osborne and Gaebler’s ‘ten principles for entrepreneurial government’ (1992: 19). So, first, effective entrepreneurial managements cast aside red tape and move away from systems in which people are accountable for following rules to ones in which people are accountable for achieving results. Second, entrepreneurial managements are customer focused and insist on customer satisfaction. Third, entrepreneurial managements transform their cultures by decentralizing authority. They empower those working on the frontline to make more of their own decisions and to take responsibility for solving their own problems. Finally, entrepreneurial managements constantly seek to do more for less, through ‘re-engineering’ their work systems and processes. ‘These are the bedrock principles on which the federal bureaucracy must build’ (Executive Office of the President, 1993: 7). These ‘principles’ are not presented as propositions subject to disproof but are simply asserted. Objections and questions concerning the wisdom of these assertions – is being against red tape (e.g. bureaucratic regulation) really a useful organizing principle for the administration of government, given its politico-legal role? – are suppressed in advance through the continuous invocation of the impossibility of the status quo. ‘Change’ is the given. It is simply not able to be challenged within the terms of reference of the Gore report. In this sense, it has acquired, as Moe (1994: 113) indicates, ‘a theological aura’. The NPR rejects [t]he traditional language of administrative discourse which attempts, not always with success, to employ terms with precise meanings. Instead, a new highly value-laden lexicon is employed by entrepreneurial management enthusiasts to disarm would-be questioners. Thus, the term ‘customer’ largely replaces ‘citizen’ and there is heavy reliance upon active verbs – reinventing, reengineering, empowering – to maximize the emotive content of what otherwise has been a largely nonemotive subject matter. (Moe, 1994: 114)



This epochal schema in which ‘bureaucracy’ or ‘administration’ is reduced to a simple and abstract set of negativities contrasted with an equally simple and abstracted, but positively coded, set of ‘entrepreneurial’ principles systematically evacuates the field of public administration of any of its characteristic content. How could anyone be for bureaucracy if it is defined simply as a dysfunctional, outdated and inefficient form of organization? Who could not be supportive of a form of organization that shares none of those deficiencies and guarantees a better future? However, when attention is focused on the specific purposes of public administration and its particular political and constitutional embeddedness, the generalized articulation of bureaucracy with the outmoded and dysfunctional is less obvious and the generalized superiority of’entrepreneurial principles’ much more problematic. As a number of commentators in the USA have argued, the implementation of the NPR’s proposals raises a host of constitutional issues, and yet the Gore report is characterized by an almost complete absence of the language of constitutionalism (Moe, 1994; Rohr, 1998). At one level, this seems shocking, given the role of the public bureaucracy as an institution of government, yet it is not that surprising when one remembers the epochalist manner in which the NPR reduces the field of public administration to a conflict zone between the abstractions of bureaucratic and entrepreneurial management, thus evacuating the constitutional and the political from view. Because the NPR is adamant that the status quo cannot hold, that wholesale re-invention is the only way forward, then it follows that everything that is currently done should be problematized and that implicitly includes contemporary constitutional practice. Because the government is broken and ‘entrepreneurial management’ is the only way to fix it, then redefining, for example, the roles and authorities of the institutional presidency and the central management agencies in accordance with these ‘entrepreneurial principles’ is an unquestionable necessity. Thus, the NPR seeks to institute a highly pluralistic organizational and management structure upon the executive branch of government in keeping with its model of best ‘entrepreneurial’ practice. Congress is represented here as a relatively unimportant and, indeed, largely negative factor in this new paradigm. The President, in turn, is seen more as a catalytic policy entrepreneur than as the legal agent of sovereign power. Thus the entrepreneurial management paradigm seeks to reverse the thrust of prior constitutionally based organizational management initiatives in government, in which the institutional presidency was considered central to the management of the executive branch of government, and to devolve management responsibility to the lowest practicable levels (Moe, 1994: 117). As a consequence, primary accountability will no longer be to the President through departmental lines and central management agencies, but will be to the customer. This is a shift of remarkable constitutional importance


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and yet its merit is taken for granted simply because it conforms to ‘good’ entrepreneurial management. Working toward a quality government means reducing the power of headquarters vis-à-vis field operations. As our reinvented government begins to liberate agencies from over-regulation . . . all federal agencies will delegate, decentralize, and empower employees to make decisions. This will let front-line and front-office workers use their creative judgement as they offer service to customers to solve problems. (Executive Office of the President, 1993: 70–1)

The central discourse of the NPR is thus an ‘entrepreneurial’ managerialist one rather than a political or constitutional one. As such, it reinterprets the latter through its own epochal prism, or cluster of concerns, altering the rationales of the field of public administration in the process. There are clear and present dangers here. For, if the key terms of an institutional or professional enterprise are no longer defined specifically by reference to one another but are fundamentally redefined in terms of the concerns of some other enterprise, then that institution or profession will begin to lose the distinctiveness of its purpose or project. Moe (1994: 117) argues that, in reinterpreting the role of the institutional presidency, for instance, with its traditional ‘reliance upon public law and the President as Chief Manager’ exclusively through the prism of ‘entrepreneurial principles’, the NPR ‘constitutes a major attack’ on a key aspect of the constitutional practice of public administration in the USA. The constitutional and political dangers of epochally oriented programmes of organizational ‘change’ are not restricted to reforms of the public administration in the USA; they are also discernible in recent and ongoing attempts to modernize the civil service in New Zealand and the UK, for instance. It is to developments in Britain, most particularly the New Labour government’s ‘Modernising Government’ programme that we now, briefly, turn.

Modernizing Government As Nikolas Rose (1999: 476), for example, has argued, one key organizing presupposition linking programmes and strategies for the reformulation of social governance under the Thatcher and Major administrations with those currently being developed and espoused by the Blair administration is a widespread scepticism concerning the powers of ‘political government’ to know, plan, calculate and steer from the centre. The state is no longer to be required to answer all of society’s needs for health, security, order or productivity. Individuals, firms, organizations, ‘communities’, schools, parents and housing estates must themselves take on – as ‘partners’ – a greater proportion of the responsibility for resolving these issues. This involves a



double movement of ‘responsibilization and autonomization’. Organizations and other agents that were once enmeshed in what are represented as the ‘bureaucratic’ lines of force of the ‘social’ state are to be made more responsible for securing their own future survival and well-being. Yet, at one and the same time, they are to be steered politically from the centre ‘at a distance’ through the invention and deployment of a host of techniques that can shape their actions while simultaneously attesting to their independence – techniques such as audits, devolved budgets, relational contracts and performance-related pay. Embedded in these contemporary programmes and strategies for the reformulation of social governance is a particular ethic of personhood – a view of what persons are and what they should be allowed to be. Thus, a certain ‘ethic of personhood’ that stresses autonomy, responsibility and the freedom/obligation of individuals actively to make choices for themselves can be seen to infuse New Labour’s attempts to ‘modernize’ the British civil service as much as it permeated successive Conservative attempts to ‘re-invent’ that same institution (Cabinet Office, 1999). Indeed, the similarities are perhaps even more striking than that. As Tony Blair put it, New Labour’s ‘Modernising Government’ programme is fundamentally concerned with ‘stimulating more entrepreneurship’ within the British civil service (The Guardian, 1999) through, for instance, making civil servants more individually responsible for achieving specific policy outcomes. Such a shift would be accomplished, it was further observed, only through instilling more of a ‘private sector work culture’ (The Observer, 1999) within Whitehall. The political stripe of the government may have changed, but the ‘mentality of governance’ appears to exhibit considerable continuity. So, although commentators frequently point to New Labour’s preoccupation with ‘community’, ‘partnership’, ‘participation’ and ‘stakeholding’ in order to highlight the present government’s distinction from the Conservative’s entrepreneurial ethos of public sector reform (Elcock, 2000), they often do so without indicating how key elements of that latter ethos – the modes of authority and subjectification they idealize, for example – are held in place within New Labour’s project of governmental ‘modernization’. ‘Modernization’, just like ‘Re-Invention’, relies on a series of epochal oppositions and dualities in which the discontinuity between past and future is highlighted. A White Paper, Our Competitive Future: Building the Knowledge Driven Economy (Department of Trade and Industry, 1998), highlights the inevitability of change and the important role of ‘enterprise’ in managing its effects and securing a ‘modernized’ future: The modern world is swept by change . . . In Government, in business, in our universities and throughout society we must do much more to foster a new entrepreneurial spirit: equipping ourselves for the long-term, prepared to seize opportunities, committed to constant innovation and improved performance. (Blair, foreword to Department of Trade and Industry, 1998: 5)


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A crucial feature of this discourse of ‘modernization’ is the assumption that no organizational context is immune from the uncertainties of unrelenting change and that, as a result, all organizations – public, private and voluntary – need to develop similar norms and techniques of conduct; if they do not do so, they will not survive (du Gay, 2000b: 78). Thus all organizations need to look to current ‘best practice’ so they can equip themselves accordingly to meet the challenge of change head-on. For the public administration, the first place it is encouraged to look is a familiar one. As the White Paper, Modernising Government, puts it, ‘we need to make sure that government services are brought forward using the best and most modern techniques, to match the best of the private sector’ (Cabinet Office, 1999: 5). So, although the government points out that it, unlike successive Conservative administrations, ‘will value public service, not denigrate it’ (1999: 6), this certainly does not mean ‘an unchanging public service, a public service at any price’ (1999: 55). What it means is a public service that must move away from a ‘risk averse culture’ and ‘unnecessary bureaucracy’ towards inculcating and stimulating the qualities of innovation, responsiveness, creativity and enterprise, which are represented as essential to meeting ‘the challenges of the 21st century’ (1999: 61). These ‘entrepreneurial’ dispositions and capacities are positively con trasted with current practices and forms of conduct, which, as we have seen, are represented – bizarrely, given the constant ‘re-inventions’ of the past two decades – as ‘deeply resistant to change’ and hence as preventing ‘public servants from experimenting, innovating and delivering a better product’ (Cabinet Office, 1999: 55). Consequently, in order to ensure that the sorts of capacities and dispositions the government regards as essential to ‘modernization’ will flourish, ‘there has to be a change of culture. This needs to be led from the top and driven throughout the organisation’ (1999: 60). It will involve revising ‘the core competencies for staff and appraisal systems to reflect the qualities we seek’ (1999: 56). Overall, everything possible will be done to ‘encourage the public sector to test new ways of working by suspending rules that stifle innovation. It will encourage public servants to take risks, which, if successful, will make a difference’ (1999: 61). Although the White Paper continually draws implicit distinctions between pro-private-sector, anti-public-service, market-mad Tories and the more public-service-oriented, ‘what matters is what works’, New Labour ‘vision’, one could nonetheless be forgiven for thinking that many of the tropes of ‘modernization’ sound remarkably familiar. Consider the particular example of what the White Paper refers to as ‘risk aversion’. The White Paper says that ‘the cultures of Parliament, Ministers and the civil service create a situation in which the rewards for success are limited and penalties for failure can be severe. The system is too often risk averse. As a result, Ministers and public servants can be slow to take advantage of new opportunities’ (Cabinet Office, 1999: 11). The government therefore proposes removing



‘unnecessary bureaucracy’ in order to encourage public servants to ‘experiment with new ways of working’ so that they might become ‘as innovative and entrepreneurial as anyone outside government’ (1999: 11). These sentiments echo those expressed by the authors of the Next Steps report (Efficiency Unit, 1988), which paved the way for the agencification of the civil service under the last Thatcher government. For example, the Next Steps report said there was in government ‘a lack of clear and accountable management responsibility’ (para. 14); and that senior managers must be prepared ‘to show real qualities of leadership and to take and defend unpopular decisions’ (para. 35). When the Next Steps report was published, questions were asked about what exactly these sentiments mean and about their degree of fit with constitutional practice – with the convention of ministerial responsibility, for example (Chapman, 1988; Bogdanor, 1996). In the event, these serious questions received no satisfactory answers, but they acted as markers for what became real problems associated with agencification.6 Some enthusiasts, not only from the major political parties but also amongst civil servants themselves, seemed somewhat muted or changed their views when the main difficulty that emerged from the creation of the Next Steps agencies was precisely this point about risk and accountability in the context of British constitutional ‘regime values’ (Chapman, 1999: 15). Like the Conservatives before them, and in the manner commended by the premier advocates of ‘entrepreneurial governance’, Osborne and Gaebler, New Labour want ‘to foster a new entrepreneurial spirit’ amongst public servants. The Modernising Government White Paper says that, ‘through bureaucracy and an attachment to existing practices for their own sake’, public servants have had their creativity, initiative and enterprise stifled. The assumption here is that ‘red tape and established procedure’ should be suspended and public servants given the opportunity to experiment to see what works best. These sentiments echo Osborne and Gaebler’s (1992: 136) cri de coeur for a legitimate permission to fail on the part of ‘entrepreneurial public servants’. New Labour, just like Osborne and Gaebler, come perilously close here to opening up the door to corruption. And they do so precisely because the oppositions they set up between ‘bureaucracy’ and ‘enterprise’ – a bad old past and a bright innovative future – have the effect of evacuating public administration of its determinate content. New Labour rail against the alleged ‘inefficiency’ and ‘red tape’ of bureaucratic regulations in government from the perspective of ‘entrepreneurial’ principles but without seeing what politically and constitutionally productive role those very regulations are performing. Although ‘red tape’ is not their only target in this regard, their criticisms of it are often associated with financial controls in government. The point is, though, that the public administration as an institution of government operates within a political context in which principles governing the use of public money are minutely detailed and where the use of such funds is rigorously monitored. And for very good reasons. Public funds possess a


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unique status: in large part they have such a special status because abusing them is held to eat away at the foundations of representative government. Rigid criteria for the deployment and use of public funds – the ‘excessive’ red tape and bureaucracy beloved of critics – is a price that the political system is prepared to pay to safeguard its own integrity. For instance, exceedingly tight and ‘bureaucratic’ controls are in place to keep the political system from turning into an instrumentality of private profit for those in its employ. After all, the temptations facing officials can be enormous. Through the use of elaborate procedural safeguards – as well as formal training and learning by example – corruption and other forms of malpractice have gradually been squeezed out of the system. For years, though, the cry has been heard that prevention costs more than the ailment itself. And yet, as I indicated above, the governmental domain does not conform to the same ‘regime values’ or ethos of other life-orders. Businesses may be tempted to ditch costly bureaucratic procedures whose benefits are not easily weighted, but government and hence public administration is different. Here, as Herbert Kaufman (1977: 53) put it, it is no contradiction at all to argue that governments should ‘spend $20 to prevent the theft of $1’. In the political environment within which public administration operates, highly value-laden matters of process – concerned with qualitative issues about the manner in which results are achieved – will always intermingle and frequently compete with the so-called ‘bottom-line’ issues of costs and quantities of outputs. Consequently, accountability and efficiency in public administration may be more nuanced and intricate in practice than accountability and efficiency in other sectors, where the management and organizational challenges may be no less demanding but are less complex, more easily graspable and, most importantly for our argument, less bureaucratic.

Concluding Comments As we have seen, epochal schemas have considerable intuitive appeal. The stark disjunctures and oppositions they deploy offer an easily graspable narrative that can act as a catalyst for ‘transformation’. However, in their belief in a managerial algorithm – a universal and invariable recipe of managerial procedures and techniques providing answers to all organizational problems – they tend towards an approach to management that has proven, historically, at best questionable and at worst disastrous. For, even if one accepts that there may be some generic management principles that are ‘universally’ applicable (and that is a big ‘if’), they are always applied in a specific context, including a value context. The nature of the management task, and the appropriateness of the management method deployed, can be defined only in relation to the particular objectives of the organization being



managed, the values to be upheld by its managers as determined by its constitution or ‘mission’ and the status of its relationships with its users, whether as citizens, clients, consumers or customers. In this sense, as Rohr (1989: 167) indicates, management is best understood as a ‘function of regime’ and not as a universal panacea. As the NPR and Modernising Government examples indicate, epochal approaches to organizational and managerial reform can engender proposals for sweeping solutions that are ill suited to the environment within which they are meant to take place. The NPR exhibited just such a tendency when advocating its reform measures, by, for instance, failing to pay adequate attention to the characteristics of the political and constitutional environment within which public administrative activity takes place (Moe, 1994; Pollitt and Bouckaert, 2000; Rohr, 1998). Ongoing attempts to ‘modernize’ the British civil service by the New Labour government suffer from similar lacunae (Chapman, 1999; du Gay, 2000b), as do many of the experiments in public sector reform gathered together under the umbrella heading of ‘governance’ (Peters, 2000).7 This does not mean to say that all of the techniques associated with such reform agendas should be ruled out of court. Rather, as Rohr (1998: 104) has argued, instead of renouncing ‘entrepreneurial government’, for example, and all its works and pomp in its entirety (thus replicating the very absolutism one seeks to criticize), we would do well to ‘tame its excesses by subjecting it to the discipline of constitutional scrutiny’. Some carefully targeted ‘entrepreneurial’ interventions may then still prove useful in crafting better public administration; others may not.8 Therefore, I would suggest (following Rohr’s lead), casuistry, not epochal absolutism, would prove a more appropriate reform mentality. Some of the debates about organizational change in general, and public administrative reform in particular, become intractable when the concerns of one context are imported into another, in the premature interest of constructing a unified theory or as a rhetorical move in a political polemic. When there are seemingly irresolvable debates about the primacy of competing concepts of ‘change’ – as there are, for instance, in the debates about the manner in which state bureaux should be managerially reformed – the first move should be to formulate, in casuistic or case-based fashion, the issues that lie behind the dispute, specifying the distinctive sources and conflicts of competing representations of an organization’s purpose and modus operandi. As Amelie Rorty (1988: 7–8) has indicated, ‘apparently irreconcilable opponents are often interested in different issues, asking different questions, each assuming that the answer to one question determines the answer to the others’. In assuming a congruence between public administration and all other organizational domains, epochal theories ignore the milieu-specific character of organizational arrangements in state bureaux. As I have attempted to indicate in this article, ethical and constitutional problems can and do arise from misguided attempts to drive through ‘change’ in organs of the state based on an


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epochally framed (and illicitly de-contextualized) concept of organizational ‘best practice’. When it comes to ‘change’, the differences between organizations – their distinctive purposes, varying social and political obligations, and typical ways of specifying and addressing ethical concerns, for instance – are as vital as their similarities. As I indicated earlier (note 1), it is casuistic rule of thumb that similar cases be treated alike while dissimilar cases are treated differently. Casuistry – or case-based reasoning – is not currently popular, either in philosophical or in organizational analysis.9 In the latter field, rather more prestige and standing seem to flow to the theoretically grand and the managerially visionary than to practitioners of the art of ‘piecemeal social engineering’, to use Popper’s (1985: 304) phrase. This is a pity. For it appears clear from the cases outlined earlier that whereas casuists would approach an organizational problem with a relatively open mind as to the scope of the reforms that might be necessary – in what Rorty (1988: 8) would describe as a context-specific fashion – epochalists cannot do this; for they have decided, in advance, that a complete reinvention and reconstruction is necessary and possible. The coordinates are set up in advance and there is no escape from their terms of reference. As a result we are faced with a set of forced options. And forced options usually prove to be false options.

Notes I thank Jessica Evans, the editors and three anonymous referees for their comments and advice throughout the successive rounds of revisions and amendments. 1. ‘Casuistry’, or case-based reasoning, has been much abused. It is frequently regarded as synonymous with ‘sophistry’ and carries a range of sinister connotations. However, when seen for what it is – a practical art, concerned with the analysis of moral, ethical and legal (and, we might add, organizational) issues and dilemmas in terms of cases and circumstances – such negative coding becomes difficult to maintain. After all, not only is the common law system the product of a prolonged exercise in casuistry, in that the study of cases has been the principal means through which a person has come to rank as a learned lawyer and indoctrinated into the ‘artificial reason of the law’, but people confront many of the practical quandaries of everyday life through the implicit use of ‘case analysis’. Friends and colleagues, parents and children, ‘agony aunts’ and psychotherapists; anyone who has occasion to consider moral questions in practical detail knows that morally significant differences between cases can be as vital as their similarities. Respect for general principles that require similar cases to be treated alike also necessitates that dissimilar cases be treated differently. One crucial instrument for helping to resolve moral questions in practice, therefore, is a detailed and methodical mapping of morally significant likenesses and differences: a moral taxonomy. Such taxonomic mapping is an essential element of the casuist’s art. For a complete statement, see Jonsen and Toulmin (1988). 2. For an introduction to this emergent form of ‘cultural economic’ enquiry, see the contributions to du Gay and Pryke (2002). 3. ‘Businessing’ represents individuals and groups as ‘units of management’ and requires that they adopt a certain ‘entrepreneurial’ form of relationship to themselves as a This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.


condition of their effectiveness and of the effectiveness of this sort of strategy. As Peters (1994: 73) explains, to be businessed is to be given responsibility and to be held accountable for ‘running one’s own show inside the organization’. 4. Anthony Giddens is an internationally renowned sociologist and, at the time of writing, Director of the London School of Economics. His epochalist political tracts Beyond Left and Right (1994) and The Third Way (1998) have led him to be labelled the ‘intellectual guru’ of the British ‘New’ Labour government. Geoff Mulgan and Charles Leadbeater came to prominence through their involvement in the ‘New Times’ project of the influential but now defunct magazine Marxism Today. Mulgan went on to help found and then direct the think tank Demos before becoming a political adviser to the New Labour government in 1997. He is currently a senior civil servant in the Cabinet Office and Director of the Performance and Innovation and Forward Strategy Units. His characterization of the current ‘epoch’ is contained in his Connexity (1998). Charles Leadbeater is perhaps best known for his populist epochal tome Living on Thin Air (1999), in which he argues for ‘knowledge’ as the driving force of contemporary economy and society. The book cover contains an enthusiastic endorsement by the British prime minister, Tony Blair, and Leadbeater’s influence on New Labour policy formulation can be detected in a number of areas, most notably, perhaps, in the Department of Trade and Industry’s policy document Our Competitive Future: Building the Knowledge Driven Economy (1998). 5. Similar arguments to mine have been deployed – without recourse to the notion of ‘epochalism’ – by writers from a range of different theoretical perspectives. See, for instance, the social constructionist analysis deployed by Clarke and Newman (1997, esp. chapter 3), those advanced from a psychoanalytic perspective by Levine (2001), and Munro’s arguments (1998), which are broadly inspired by Actor Network Theory. 6. As Mark Freedland (1996: 28) has indicated, the Next Steps programme transmuted and fragmented the integrality of the political-administrative process within departments of state. In place of the doctrine of political ministerial responsibility for all aspects of departmental decision-making, there arise instead two ‘distinct accountabilities each of which is primarily a financial accountability’.

The agency will have a primary decision-making role – and will often play this role within a central policy area of the parent department – and will in that sense be responsible for the decision-taking. But its responsibility in the sense of answerability is conceived of and expressed in terms primarily of financial accountability, that is to say in terms of a liability to show that there has been efficient financial management and adherence to targets and budgets. . . . The parent department retains . . . a kind of responsibility for the decision-making which occurs at agency level. But the separation of the agency as a distinct centre of decision-making means that the departmental responsibility has been turned into a secondary and essentially supervisory one. . . . Moreover, that departmental accountability is in a way that mirrors that of the agency, increasingly conceived of in financial terms – the primary role of the parent department tends to become that of accounting to the Cabinet and to Parliament for the efficiency and good financial management of the departmental operation as conducted through the subsidiary agencies. As if by a conjuring trick, the spell of financial accountability has enabled ministerial responsibility not only to be sawn in half but actually to be spirited off the stage. (Freedland, 1996: 28)

The anti-bureaucratic logic of the Next Steps reforms therefore tends towards a situation in which, if the relationship between the executive agency and the parent department of state is working in the way it is meant to work, the decision-makers and decision-making at agency level cannot be seen as part of an integrated bureaucratic This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.

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institutional structure, an indivisible unity, such as the constitutional convention of ministerial responsibility to Parliament has traditionally been seen to require. 7. It is sometimes suggested that the current craze for evidence-based practice (EPB) marks a shift away from a belief in such algorithms to the sort of context- and casebased reasoning I am advocating. This does not seem likely. For an interesting argument about the pragmatic limits to evidence-based medicine, for instance, see Black (1998). 8. This is not the same thing as a (New Labour) belief in ‘what’s best is what works’, for ‘what works’ cannot be simply a question of performance and outcomes but is equally one of process, procedure and constitutionality. 9. That is not to say that there are not excellent examples of casuistry to be found in either subject area – the work of Sissela Bok (1978, 1982), Amelie Rorty (1988) and Michael Walzer (1980) in philosophy, and of John Rohr (1989, 1998) in the area of public management, for instance.

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Executive Office of the President, National Performance Review (1993) From Red Tape to Results: Creating a Government That Works Better and Costs Less. Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office. Foucault, M. (1986) ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’, in P. Rabinow (ed.) The Foucault Reader. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Freedland, M. (1996) ‘The Rule against Delegation and the Carltona Doctrine in an Agency Context’, Public Law, Summer: 19–30. Giddens, A. (1994) Beyond Left and Right. Cambridge: Polity Press. Giddens, A. (1998) The Third Way. Cambridge: Polity Press. The Guardian (1999) ‘Blair Berates Old Labour “Snobs”’, 7 July, p. 2. Hopfl, H. (1992) ‘The Making of the Corporate Acolyte: Some Thoughts on Corporate Leadership and the Reality of Organizational Commitment’, Journal of Management Studies 29(13): 23–34. Jonsen, A. and Toulmin, S. (1988) The Abuse of Casuistry. Los Angeles: University of California Press. Kaufman, H. (1977) Red Tape: Its Origins, Uses and Abuses. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution. Lash, S. and Urry, J. (1994) Economies of Signs and Space. London: Sage. Law, J. (1994) Organizing Modernity. Oxford: Blackwell. Law, J. (2002) ‘Economics as Interference’, in P. du Gay and M. Pryke (eds) Cultural Economy. London: Sage. Leadbeater, C. (1999) Living on Thin Air. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Levine, D. (2001) Know No Limits: The Destruction of Self-Knowledge in Organizations, Psychoanalytic Studies 3(2): 237–46. McFall, E. (2002) ‘Advertising, Persuasion and the Culture/Economy Dualism’, in P. du Gay and M. Pryke (eds) Cultural Economy. London: Sage. McFall, E. and du Gay, P. (2002) ‘Consuming Advertising, Consuming Cultural History’, in S. Miles et al. (eds) The Changing Consumer. London: Taylor Francis Routledge. Miller, D. (1995) ‘Consumption as the Vanguard of History’, in D. Miller (ed.) Acknowledging Consumption. London: Routledge. Moe, R. (1994) ‘The “Re-Inventing Government” Exercise: Misinterpreting the Problem, Misjudging the Consequences’, Public Administration Review 54(2): 111–22. Mulgan, G. (1998) Connexity. London: Vintage. Munro, R. (1998) ‘Belonging on the Move: Market Rhetoric and the Future as Obligatory Passage’, Sociological Review 46(2): 208–43. The Observer (1999) ‘Blair Poised for Whitehall Purge’, 1 August, p. 2. Osborne, D. and Gaebler, T. (1992) Re-Inventing Government. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley. Osborne, T. (1998) Aspects of Enlightenment. London: UCL Press. Pattison, S. (1997) The Faith of the Managers. London: Cassell. Peters, B.G. (2000) ‘Governance and Comparative Politics’, in J. Pierre (ed.) Debating Governance. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Peters, T. (1987) Thriving on Chaos. London: Macmillan. Peters, T. (1992) Liberation Management. London: Macmillan. Peters, T. (1994) The Pursuit of Wow! New York: Random House. Pollitt, C. and Bouckaert, G. (2000) Public Management Reform. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Popper, K. ([1944]1985) ‘Piecemeal Social Engineering’, in D. Miller (ed.) Popper Selections. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Rohr, J. (1989) Ethics for Bureaucrats, 2nd edn. New York: Marcel Dekker. Rohr, J. (1998) Public Service, Ethics and Constitutional Practice. Lawrence, KS: University of Kansas Press. Rorty, A.-O. (1988) Mind in Action. Boston, MA: Beacon Press.


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48 Theorizing the Micro-Politics of Resistance: New Public Management and Managerial Identities in the UK Public Services Robyn Thomas and Annette Davies

A

lthough there are a few important exceptions, the literature on New Public Management (NPM) lacks a nuanced and empirically informed understanding of its daily enactment in specific organizational settings. Insufficient attention has been paid to the lived experiences of public service professionals, despite a central tenet of the NPM discourse being the promotion of new professional and managerial subjectivities (Pollitt 1993; du Gay 1996; Halford and Leonard 1999). Theorizing has tended to present a deterministic account of NPM, which portrays individuals as passive recipients of the discourses of change, reacting to a ‘given’ NPM imposed upon them (Davies and Thomas 2000, 2002; Barry et al. 2001). This paper intends to address some of the shortcomings in analyses of NPM and, theoretically, offers a more sophisticated understanding of the micro-politics of resistance. We aim to break out of the dualistic debate of ‘compliance with’ versus ‘resistance to’, to offer a more generative understanding of resistance at the micro-level. The paper takes a discursive approach to understanding organizations, to explore the production of meanings and subjectivities within NPM, and how individuals come to know and challenge the ways in which their identities are constituted. It is at this level of identities and




subjectivities that we conceptualize resistance, arguing that it is at this micro-level of experience that the effects of power are felt (Foucault 1986). The paper therefore aims to offer an understanding of resistance at the level of meanings that can account for the differing ways in which individuals struggle to create, appropriate and transform discourse of NPM. To illustrate our argument, we draw on four social texts generated from interviews with a middle-ranking police officer, a police civilian manager, a social service manager and a head teacher. We focus on the processes of identity construction within the interview, which we offer as a critical reflex ive engagement, to explore two main areas: firstly, the meanings ascribed to NPM by these individuals, and secondly their own positioning within these meanings. Therefore, the paper offers a contribution to knowledge at two levels. Theoretically, we propose a more generative theorizing of the micropolitics of resistance, moving from a linear conception of resistance to one that is multidirectional, emphasizing both challenge as well as reinscription and reproduction of the discourses of change. Empirically, we provide an illustration of the ways in which individuals respond when confronted with feelings of difference and discomfort between the subject positions offered within the NPM discourse and their own preferred interest. The paper is located in the context of the UK public services. These professional-bureaucratic organizations have been identified as sites of transformative change over the past two decades. This arises from the introduction of wide-ranging changes to the structures and management processes. Not unique to the UK, NPM has been identified in a number of countries, including the USA, Sweden, Australia and New Zealand (Pollitt and Bouckaert 1997; Hood et al. 1999; Brunsson and Sahlin-Andersson 2000). At the macro-level, the character and conduct of NPM has stimulated much debate within the literature. Within this debate, it is generally accepted that increased political attention given to the management of public service professional organizations has been marked by the ascendancy of the managerial prerogative and the legitimacy of management. Common themes underpin the changes, namely, greater financial accountability, the development of a range of measures of efficiency by which individuals, units and organizations are judged, marketization between service providers and within organizations, and the changing relationship between service providers and customers (Hood 1991; Osbourne and Gaebler 1992; Pollitt 1993, 1995; Kirkpatrick and Martinez Lucio 1995; Hoggett 1996; Farnham and Horton 1996; Hood et al. 1999). Fundamental to the restructuring of the public services has been the process of redefining the workforce, with du Gay (1996) suggesting that NPM is an identity project. This is particularly pertinent for public service professionals, where the vocational orientation of the public service and the ‘public service ethic’ provides a significant source of identification (Flynn 1990). The paper focuses on public service managers who have professional backgrounds. There is a detailed debate in the literature on the changing


Thomas and Davies • Theorizing the Micro-Politics of Resistance 233

professional-managerial dynamics in the public services (see Exworthy and Halford 1999). A strong focus of NPM has been the desire to introduce new disciplinary technologies (Townley 1994) designed to inculcate new attitudes, values, priorities and self-understandings among these professionals (du Gay 1996; Clarke and Newman 1997). However, how this NPM discourse is played out in organizational settings has been under-explored. There is a need to understand the many, complex and often creative ways in which individuals respond to the dominant discourses of the organization. Public service managers are not a homogenous social group that experience NPM in the same way. The paper explores how, and in what ways, NPM has been responded to and received, supported and subverted, translated and created, by individual managers in the UK public services. The paper is structured in four sections. The next section will outline our approach to resistance and then detail the methods adopted. Following this, four social texts are presented, to illustrate how individuals have received, and responded to, the discourse of NPM. Finally, we discuss the implications of the study for theorizing on NPM and for the conceptualizing of the micropolitics of resistance.

Conceptualizing Resistance Research on resistance within the field of organization studies has, in the main, concentrated on the collective, conscious, and organized responses of blue-collar, male (or ‘genderless’) workers, in factory settings (see, for example, Hyman 1972; Beynon 1973; Brown 1977; Edwards 1979; Knights and Collinson 1987). Analysis of resistance has tended to focus on reactions by a homogenous and genderless body to forms of control imposed upon it, thus reducing individuals to empirically and structurally, or discursively, determined phenomena (Scarbrough 1998; Knights and McCabe 2000). Largely inspired by labour process theory, such studies draw on a ‘Newtonian’ conceptualization of resistance as the outcome of structural relations of antagonism between capital and labour (Knights and McCabe 2000). As Fleming (2002:194) comments, resistance has rested upon ‘the nomenclature of dialectics, true interests and overt antagonism’. Thus resistance is constructed within a negative paradigm, a worker corps kicking back against management control. While research has drawn attention to the ways in which worker dissent and resistance is manifest in organizations, the definition of resistance used results in the neglect of other forms of more subtle or hidden disruption. Consequently, some forms of resistance may remain under-researched and certain groups of actors neglected in analysis. Moreover, such studies fail to capture the complexities and nuances of resistance at the level of the individual, and the motivations of individuals to resist. This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.


More recently, interest in resistance has been stimulated by Foucault’s (1982) conceptualization of power and the subject. Research taking a ‘Foucauldian turn’ in organization studies has shifted analysis to the level of subjectivities, focusing on the subjectivizing forces of disciplinary technologies. The impression from many of these studies is that workplace resistance has been effectively eradicated. Here it is argued that, in the postmodern era, feelings of vulnerability and insecurity are heightened, stimulating greater identity work and therefore increased hunger for securing a sense of self (Alvesson and Willmott 2002), which ‘new wave management practices’ satisfy. Thus, in the modern workplace, sophisticated disciplinary technologies work to ensure that management discourses colonize worker subjectivities, such that they participate in their own subjugation, effectively removing worker opposition (Sewell and Wilkinson 1992; du Gay 1993; Townley 1993; Willmott 1993; Grey 1994). Some Foucauldian-influenced studies have been criticized for being too deterministic and totalizing, focusing on subjectification as subjection. This has led to an ‘anti-Foucault lobby’, which has argued that Foucault can offer only a pessimistic and nihilistic view of resistance and a highly deterministic and unidirectional view of worker identity. This is because, such critics argue, the subject is presented as passive and discursively constructed. Therefore, individuals are portrayed as little more than ‘docile bodies’, mere throughputs of various discourses, and the product of power relations and institutions (Thompson and Ackroyd 1995; Ackroyd and Thompson 1999). Thus, there is a suggestion of a bifurcation of approaches to resistance studies: essentialist notions on the one hand, emphasizing workers’ authentic experiences, versus discursively deterministic accounts on the other hand. However, there are studies that have drawn on Foucauldian notions of power and the subject that avoid the more totalizing ‘manufacturing of subjectivities’ (Alvesson and Willmott 2002) thesis. A number of studies have illustrated how workers’ understandings of their self-identities provides an arena for resistance where management practices work to challenge workers’ preferred interests (Kondo 1990; Edwards et al. 1995; Ezzamel and Willmott 1998; Ezzamel et al. 2003; Knights and McCabe 2000). In addition, there has been a widening of the focus and definition of resistance to include more routinized, informal and often inconspicuous forms of resistance in everyday practice (Kondo 1990; Edwards et al. 1995; Ezzamel and Willmott 1998; Ezzamel et al. 2003; Knights and McCabe 2000; Prasad and Prasad 1998, 2000; Fleming and Sewell 2002). These studies highlight the omnipresent nature of everyday forms of opposition, focusing on workers’ conscious, ‘clandestine’ behaviour and emphasizing forms of low-level misbehaviour. Thus, over recent years, we see a widening of both the scope and level of the definition of resistance to produce empirical accounts that focus on the more subtle and contextualized aspects of resistance. Ultimately, however, there are two limitations to these studies. Firstly, studies have focused This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.


on manifest acts and behaviours. There are studies that draw attention to the role of identities as part of resistance; however, the level of analysis is still focused mainly on resistance behaviours. Secondly, studies still present workers pitched against management and, inevitably, resistance is framed as oppositional. Although, in recent years, there has been sophisticated analysis of shopfloor resistance, appreciating the role of identities as well as more overt actions and behaviours, such studies do not fully illustrate the processes of resistance that draw on a more generative theorizing of power and the subject. Despite avoiding the overly deterministic understandings of resistance found in some research drawing on Foucault, therefore, the workers in studies such as those of Knight and McCabe (2000) and Ezzamel et al. (1998, 2003) are still seen to be reacting to that which is imposed upon them. Resistance is largely conceived of in a linear fashion, reduced to a dualism of control versus resistance, thereby failing to appreciate the ambiguity and complexity surrounding resistance (Kondo 1990). Resistance is locked within a negative paradigm, seen as a response to repressive power (McNay 2000). In addition, resistance studies are still framed within a workersmanagement dialectic. Other writers have commented on the relatively few studies on resistance by managerial and professional employees (Gottfried 1994; LaNuez and Jermier 1994; Alvesson and Willmott 1996; Willmott 1997; Thomas and Linstead 2002). In this paper, by focusing on managerial identities, we develop a more complex and multidirectional view of resistance. We draw from the work of Foucauldian feminist theorists, where there is a well established literature on how power relations are exercised within organizations, and the impact of power and knowledge on self-identity, within specific historical contexts (Weedon 1987; Butler 1990; Hekman 1990; Sawicki 1991, 1994; McNay 1992, 2000). We offer an understanding of resistance that accounts for the differing motivations in which individuals undertake critical reflection, arising from a self-conscious relation with ‘self as other’ and with the subject positions offered in discourse. We build on studies that have focused on the discursive production of resistance, to offer a more fluid and generative understanding of power and agency. Furthermore, we illustrate the process of individual resistance at the level of meanings and identities. Resistance is understood as a constant process of adaptation, subversion and reinscription of dominant discourses. This takes place as individuals confront, and reflect on, their own identity performance, recognizing contradictions and tensions and, in so doing, pervert and subtly shift meanings and understandings. This is an ongoing process arising from the desire to gain the security and comfort that reside in knowing ourselves, and dealing with the tensions and discord that arise from these contradictions. Resistance is, therefore, stimulated by the contradictions, weaknesses and gaps between alternative subject positions. Where there is a This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.


space between the position of subject offered by a discourse and individual interest, a resistance to that subject position is produced (Weedon 1987:11213). Our conceptualization of resistance also involves recognizing its ambiguity and contradictions. To resist something also means to reify it, by privileging it as a meaningful area for political contest.

The Research Interview as Empirical Setting The paper draws from a two-year project that examines the differing effects of NPM for public sector professional identities. The research takes a multisector approach and efforts have been made to focus on areas of the public services (police, secondary education and social services), which, although having been exposed to NPM, have not previously been the focus of extensive research. The empirical material presented in this paper derives from semistructured interviews, carried out in 2000 and 2001. In the main research project, 105 interviews were conducted, with male and female professional managers in seven case organizations, drawn from the three case sectors (three police constabularies, two social services departments and two local education authorities). The interviews were carried out by three different researchers (all female), lasted on average one and a half hours and were tape-recorded. Interviewees were self-selecting for interview, having already indicated a willingness to discuss issues of restructuring and change in their organizations when completing a questionnaire survey as part of pilot work in the study. The empirical material in this paper is drawn mainly from four texts taken from the larger study. However, these are not seen as being representative of the wider sample or in any way as ‘ideal types’. The focus of the interviews was to explore issues of change, professional performance expectations and feelings of ‘comfort’ and ‘fit’ with new managerial subjectivities promoted within the NPM discourse. In the spirit of a social constructionist-influenced methodology, we present here ‘living social texts’, recognizing the fluidity of the meanings ascribed to NPM and identities, constructed collectively by the researcher and the researched (Alvesson and Deetz 2000). We treat the interview setting, not as an arena for finding out facts, opinions and perceptions, but more as a social event. This means that the interview is privileged as an empirical situation in itself (Alvesson 2003), rather than being a medium to collect information on something beyond the interview. Thus we emphasize the situated, partial, localized and self-referential nature of knowledge (Foucault 1980) arising from these interviews. Given that we are also public service professionals, this presents us with a particular configuration of the interview setting. This influences the talk and social interaction that takes place, feeding into the type of questions we ask, the reactions we give, and the information given. This has meant greater



empathy and mutual understanding in many of the interview encounters, with individuals assuming shared experiences, language and vocabulary, political and work orientation and, in half of the cases, shared gender. We are socially constructed within the interview setting as ‘one of them’. Thus the generation of the social text is a shared and complicit task, coloured by the actors involved in the process. Recognizing that meaning is constituted in language and social action, our interpretations are constructions of these meanings and therefore a construction of the construction made by the actors studied (Thomas and Linstead 2002).

New Public Management as an Identity Project The study focused on the enactment and character of NPM and how this was received at the localized level. Focusing on the normalizing discourse of NPM, we sought to understand its strength and unity, and the promotion of particular new managerial subjectivities. There has been a tendency in the literature to portray NPM as a ‘blanket discourse’, colonizing the public services. This study took as its starting point the argument that the strength, cohesion and normalizing effects of NPM are highly context dependent. We therefore move away from images of NPM as a ‘given’, stamping its authority on the hapless professional in a highly deterministic and unidirectional way.

Incoherence of NPM Within the research engagement, an image of NPM is presented that can be recognized from our own experiences as public service professionals, and from its portrayal in the literature. NPM, clearly, is not a totally fluid concept, having some sense of meaning. However, the social texts from the interviews illustrate how the enactment of NPM is far from clear-cut and cohesive, mediated by the context of different public services and individual agency. From our readings of the texts, we can see a number of different subject positions, as individuals in the study reflect on their experience of NPM. Drawing from wider literature, these correspond with our understandings of a managerial subjectivity, a competitive-masculine subjectivity, a disempowered and unquestioning subjectivity, and a feminized management subjectivity. For example, within the police we can see the promotion of a new managerial police subjectivity, with the setting down of core managerial and leadership competencies. These emphasize the codifying of a set of ‘leadership’ attributes; being strategic and having ‘leadership skills’. This can also be seen in the texts of secondary head teachers. The effective head and deputy head teachers are reconstituted as the financially astute and market-oriented



leaders. Here the promotion of a new managerial subjectivity centres on the small business entrepreneurial leader: ‘just a manager of, it could be anything, Oxo cubes or something’. Within the texts there is also the suggestion of a more competitivemasculine subject position. This is characterized by an image of the aggressive and ‘pushy’ individual, who identifies with being competitive, ruthless and target-oriented. Within the police case, the competitive-masculine subject is bound up with time–space commitment, evidenced by visibility, ‘being available’, working long hours as a ‘badge of pride’ and ‘living on the job’. In education we see the ‘repackaging’ of education as part of the market economy: an effective head teacher will be one who gets the best results and engages in ruthless competition for resources, pupils and the best public profile. Similarly, in social services, we can see the promotion of a strong performance culture: ‘it is seen to be very ruthless’; ‘you have to comply with the bottom line’; ‘sink or swim’; ‘it’s everyone for themselves’; ‘dog eat dog’; ‘zero defects’; ‘they will crucify you if something goes wrong’. A further subject position is the disempowered and unquestioning self, emphasizing loyal acceptance to the ‘new regime’. In secondary education, while recent changes have been seen as offering greater autonomy and responsibility, we can also see that ‘what a head teacher is’ or ‘what that person is expected to do’ is very clearly specified. Within social services, through the introduction of a range of disciplinary technologies, such as external bureaucratic controls, social work managers emphasize the loss of professional discretion and the privileging of compliance procedures over a more intuitive and flexible approach: ‘I feel a lot more disempowered . . . there’s far less creative thinking because I don’t have time, and I think it’s not actually encouraged much either.’ A final subject position that we wish to present here is that of the ‘feminized’ management self. This is most notable in the police, contrasting with its highly masculinist and homophobic occupational culture (Burke 1993; Praat and Tuffin 1996; Brown and Heidensohn 2000). We see within this context the promotion of so-called feminine leadership skills, such as counselling, coaching and support (Fondas 1997; Maddock 1999). This means being more ‘tolerant’, showing mutual respect and valuing equal opportunities, rather than the traditional authoritarian, command and control approach: ‘It’s a much more feeling organization than perhaps it was.’ These subject positions emerge as individuals reflect on their ‘self’ in conjunction with the subjectivizing forces of NPM. What is apparent is that these subject positions work sometimes in collusion with each other, sometimes as complementary and sometimes contradictory. It is the ambiguity and tensions that arise from this incoherence, together with an individual’s self-reflexive understandings, that provide both the stimulus and space for political contest over meanings and identities.



Resistance as Politics of Meaning In this section, four illustrative texts are presented to show how an individual’s motivation to resist comes from the presentation of ‘self as other’: as a woman, as a civilian, as a member of a profession, as a business leader and so on. The focus here is on how individuals respond when confronted with difference and discomfort. Within the texts, we see how individuals draw on alternative subject positions in asserting their identities in the organization, motivated by the difference between the subject positions offered within NPM and individual interest. By drawing on one subject position, an individual may be denying another within NPM, exploiting the looseness and contradictions within the discourse. In the process of identity construction, other discourses within the organization and wider society also feed into an individual’s identity make-up and these may also act as a resource to construct a position of ‘self as other’. Therefore NPM is only one of a matrix of discourses vying for attention in the process of identity make-up.

Kate: Civilian Manager, Police Kate is a personnel manager in the police service. An experienced public service professional, Kate has spent six years as a civilian manager, having come from a personnel background within the health service. Kate’s text presents a highly positive self-identity: ‘Work is an important part of me that makes me feel that I am somebody.’ Kate sees herself as an effective and empowered manager, and she is keen to emphasize the importance of her managerial role within the organization. Corresponding with the personnel management model of the ‘changemaker’ (Storey 1992), Kate emphasizes her strategic function within the service. She is supportive of the way that the police service and police management have been restructured, talking of how devolvement of responsibility has given her discretion and professional autonomy in the management of her local area. Kate feels very much in control of her own situation: ‘I am definitely manipulating my job to suit me.’ When Kate first joined the police she was working at a very intensive pace, effectively doing two jobs (the outcome of stages of restructuring within the service). She talks of the huge pressures but also of the ‘buzz’ she had from carrying out this dual role, made possible by the fact that she had no other demands on her time. Taking the pressure and proving to herself that she can cope feeds into Kate’s construction as an effective manager: ‘It made me a better personnel manager.’ However, Kate explains how having a family has resulted in a fundamental rethinking of ‘self and organization’: ‘I’ve got two little girls and I’m fairly strong-minded about it and I’ll not compromise my role as a parent.’



For Kate, having a family has created tensions between the competitive masculine subject position within NPM and her own understandings of self as a parent and a female civilian personnel professional. In Kate’s text we see a challenging of the long hours’ culture, where understandings of commitment are based on time-space visibility and the privileging of work life over home (Collinson and Collinson 1997). Within the police, this involves macho endurance tests of working gruelling hours, together with unquestioning loyalty to your boss and the organization: ‘If you’re seen to be in the office late at night, then you’re doing a good job and there is still that culture here that how late you’re here is a measure of how good you are.’ We see how Kate draws on a discourse of parenting that constructs how a ‘good mother’ should be, emphasizing caring for her children and spending ‘quality time’ at home with them: ‘Last year when they decided to start a meeting at three o’clock in the afternoon I wasn’t scheduled to deliver my paper on it until half past five and this was with the senior, very senior people in the Force. And I thought this isn’t on! I’m quite happy to stay late if something urgent happens and it’s essential, you know I’ll say “OK fine”. But this was planned, and there’s no reason for this, there’s just no reason for this at all and I’m just not doing it. And it was the first time anybody had turned round and basically told the senior management that they don’t do evenings, they have children to look after.’

Kate goes on to state that a senior uniformed officer had been ‘desperate to leave at five’ as his child was ill and he was a single parent, ‘but he didn’t have the guts to say “I’m not doing that” because he was part of the system’ and it was easier for a female and a civilian – an outsider – to challenge. Kate comments on the difficulties of male officers to speak out in the way that she does: ‘He didn’t quite have the nerve to say, “I’m not doing that evening meeting because I’ve got childcare responsibilities.” He was relieved when I made the stance.’ Kate presents herself here as a champion of a better way of being, not only for herself but for others in the organization. In doing so, she constructs the image of the ‘trail blazer’, able to think and act differently because of her position as other: ‘If people like me don’t do it, then who will?’ Her motivation and ability to challenge comes from her marginalized status within the organization. This construction of ‘other’ is not, however, as a silenced and powerless individual, but as someone who is epistemologically advantaged. Her ‘difference’ enables her to think, say and do what others cannot, she argues. She presents herself as maverick: ‘I mean, I am quite a strong character. I think other people find it more difficult [to be different].’ Likewise, she comments about having ‘broken the mould’: ‘In fact, I think I’ve broken a lot of moulds in this place.’



In challenging the competitive masculine self, Kate constructs a self based on discourses of public service professionalism and the human resource professional, to present a more ethical way of being. The public sector has traditionally had a role as a setter of standards of good employment practices (Fredman and Morris 1989). We see her using this subject position as a ‘discursive resource’ (Parker 1997) to resist the demands for competitive presenteeism and to recognize and respect a home/work life balance. In her identity construction, we see her presenting a ‘self as maverick’, as a champion of good employment practices. Again we see echoes of the ‘trail blazer’ in her text: ‘I think because I’m in the public sector and the government is making a very strong push at the moment for home/work balance and for families to be able to work, for women to be able to have careers. So I feel that I’m in an organization that should be playing ball with it and I’m a personnel manager so of all the people I think personnel managers in the public sector probably can lead the way.’

We can see in the text how Kate draws on a particular configuration of a feminized management self, which in the police emphasizes a more tolerant, less autocratic subjectivity. This is seen to be an increasingly legitimate subject position within NPM and an integral part of progressive policing. So, whereas her challenging of the competitive masculine subjectivity comes from her ‘otherness’, at the same time, by emphasizing the more tolerant feminized subject position within NPM, Kate also emphasizes her ‘sameness’ as one of the ‘new policing professionals’, so securing a sense of self within the organization. Thus, in emphasizing both sameness and difference, Kate is both resisting and locating herself within the NPM discourse: ‘I get the feeling from the top, the very top, that that’s how they want things to go. I feel more confident about doing it, a lot more confident about doing it. And also the Force has a statement on this, about valuing diversity and whether it’s ethnic or childcare or being homosexual, or whatever, that everybody contributes at work and if you value diversity you can allow everybody to contribute in the way that they can, rather than by trying to put round pegs in square holes.’

We see in Kate’s talk, how challenging one subject position involves constructing alternatives and thus her resistance is not only ‘oppositional’ but also ‘generative’. In her construction of ‘self as other’, therefore, we see how Kate draws on a number of subject positions in her critical reflection on self. This presents a complex interweaving of self as other: as a parent and a mother, as a public service professional, as a personnel manager, as a woman in a macho masculine organization, as a female manager, and as a civilian. However, this positioning as ‘other’ also serves to heighten and emphasize her gendered status and thus contributes to, and reinforces, her marginalized



position in the masculinist policing organization. For Kate, her gendered status presents the double bind of otherness. By drawing on certain feminine discourses emphasizing home/life balance, tolerance and diversity, she presents an epistemologically privileged position. However, in doing so, she also confirms her female status, which, she notes, is constructed as subservient by many: ‘I think that for a lot of these men I work with, particularly the older ones, the longer in the tooth ones, having a female young civilian manager who’s in a position of authority, they do not like it at all.’

Thus, in emphasizing that gendered status has implications, which may serve to reinforce the asymmetrical power relations within the organization, as Kondo (1990: 46) observes: ‘Invocations of gender [by women] inevitably occur within a field in which gender possesses a particular sedimented history, which presents possibilities for the construction of satisfying identities and for the subversion of those identities, just as it enforces and disciplines the production of gender.’

Kate’s challenging of the competitive masculine subject position within the organization also serves to reify it, reproducing and legitimizing it in the act of critical reflection. In Kate’s text there is a conscious effort to put boundaries around understandings of effective performance and we see her refusal to identify with the ‘ideal professional self’ embedded in this competitive masculine subject (Acker 1990; Meriläinen et al. 2004). In naming this ‘ideal’ she legitimizes and feeds the discourse even though she retains a positive sense of self in being ‘mediocre’ and in refusing to feel guilty concerning her neglect of certain performance tasks or her refusal to apply for promotion: ‘I think the biggest cost for me is accepting that I’m probably mediocre at my job and I’m mediocre as a parent . . . I think you can’t give it your all, I think you’ve got divided loyalties.’

We see how Kate pays a ‘professional price’, which she accepts, but, in doing so, she reinforces the dominant subjectivity of competitive masculinity.

Brian, Uniformed Police Brian has been an operational inspector for the past nine years and has 20 years’ experience as a police officer. Brian’s text draws attention to the difficult and complicated nature of his identity work within the conflicting discursive arena of NPM as enacted within contemporary police organizations. We see, in his text, competing pressures between the need, on the one hand, to be strategic and target-focused and, on the other, to be tolerant, loyal and This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.


unquestioning: ‘the feeling that sometimes you are fighting with two hands tied behind your back’. Brian’s text distinguishes between two distinct periods in his under standings of self, separated by an episode of personal trauma occurring two years ago: ‘ . . . that has had a bigger influence, or life impact, than anything over the last few years . . . I suddenly thought now is the time for a change.’ Prior to this, Brian identified with a competitive masculine subject position: ‘working all the hours that god sends’. The personal trauma in his life resulted in a catharsis and heightened identity work: ‘You suddenly think – hang on, we give so much but in the end the thing that breaks is your own personal relationship, your family, your health.’

So, as with Kate, it is a major change in personal life that has been the motivation behind a rethinking of self and organization. This has resulted in increased tensions surrounding the competitive masculine subject position. Again, we see in the police this pressure to work long hours as a measure of commitment and performance. Brian, in constructing a positive and sustaining identity, draws on a managerial subject position, identifying with the effective and strategic leader: ‘I get the feeling from colleagues, well they say it’s in me, that I am what they want as a manager. I have always got the job done.’ We see in Brian’s text the contradictory nature of NPM, where the empowered strategic leadership subjectivity cannot be sustained with the disempowered and unquestioning self. The police service has traditionally had a strong reputation as a highly disciplined organization, based on a quasi-military structure (Johnston 1988). The committed police officer is a disciplined and obedient subject where challenging behaviour, criticism or questioning is neither welcome not encouraged. We see the continuation of this under NPM: ‘They [senior managers] say “My door is always open, come and talk to me, tell me what’s wrong.” You do and they don’t like it.’ In drawing on this managerial subject position, Brian constructs his ‘self as maverick’, describing himself as ‘too interesting, too outspoken and too friendly for the organization’. He speaks of the selection of ‘clones’ into senior management: ‘I think what they want is an android who is totally and utterly without voice, without any potential to go into anything . . . somebody who is not really human, just somebody who is totally correct, mechanical, follows every policy document, every strategic vision to the letter, with no disaffection, no criticism and totally loyal to the head of the organization, and a bit boring really.’

In Brian’s critique of how individuals ‘hide behind equal opportunities’, we see a strongly asserted managerial subjectivity, with the prioritizing of the



managerial prerogative and the need to focus on the ‘real task of policing’. Brian challenges the feminized subjectivity (emphasizing tolerance and diversity) as well as the disempowered subjectivity. This is seen in Brian’s expressions of frustration over his inability to discipline individuals who are not performing: ‘The way the organization expects me to operate has changed. Now the one and only major focus is that I operate in a style that complies with equal opportunities . . . There is now such a fear that if you actually challenge anybody about their behaviour, their work rate or anything else, what you are actually going to do is open yourself up to a grievance procedure or you are going to be accused of being a bully . . . Nowadays the impression you get from the top is that the emphasis is certainly on equal opportunities, not dropping the force in it by having litigation taken against them by EO [equal opportunities] trials and anything like that.’

Brian’s identity work, in dealing with contrasting and conflicting subject positions offered within NPM, is an untidy and complex process that is full of tension. We see evidence of resistance and accommodation between different subject positions as well as within the same subject position at different periods of time. In reflecting on the implications of ‘being the other’, Brian’s talk also emphasizes the possibility of being marginalized within the organization: ‘It is difficult if you put your family and outside interests first to actually maintain an impression within the organization to colleagues that you are ambitious, worthy of promotion.’

His talk, in emphasizing how prioritizing family life will negatively affect his career, also reifies and privileges the competitive masculine subject position that he is at the same time denying. However, in naming this subjectivity as the ‘ideal’ and the route to success (‘those who are quite high rank in the organization, live, breathe, sleep and eat the job’), Brian’s construction of self draws on a more privileged ‘way of being’: ‘At the end of the day you have got to live with yourself. They either take me as I am, or they don’t have me, and if they don’t want me, then okay.’

Dave, Social Worker Manager Dave is the manager of a residential unit for young offenders that forms part of the residential division within a social services department. He is a professional social worker who has spent his whole career working in residential services for children. He has been the manager of the unit since 1990. Dave draws attention to his powerful position, partly due to his control of a large budget and



partly due to the discretion he is given by his seniors, who are nervous about the potentially disruptive nature of high security work: ‘It’s like a ticking time bomb waiting to go off in their faces.’ Dave is critical over the constant restructuring of social services and, linked with this, the high levels of bureaucracy. He comments on the time wasted in ‘just chasing paper’ and questions its impact on performance: ‘You look at it and you think well it just doesn’t make sense, you know, this isn’t going to create a better service.’ However, we see within Dave’s text how his constructions of self and his ‘resistance’, when faced with the subjectivizing elements of NPM, cannot be viewed simply as ‘oppositional’. His text illustrates the multidirectional nature of resistance, which is not only oppositional but also generative, nuanced by the paradox and contradiction within NPM and his identity work, and incorporates reinscription as well as denial in a web of contested meanings. We see in Dave’s text this incoherence of meanings within NPM, with different subject positions within the discourse conflicting within the context of social work practice. Within Dave’s text this incoherence is apparent in the promotion of a strategic problem-solving and empowered social work manager (with a strategic orientation involving crafting the future service) clashing with a disempowered and dispassionate subject position (where social work practice is codified into standardized compliance procedures and where individuals are expected to stick to routinized tasks). In Dave’s text we see how he appropriates aspects of a managerial subjectivity together with a public service professional subjectivity to challenge this disempowered and dispassionate subject position. His identity performance can be understood as a reasserting of his identity as a skilled and knowledgeable professionalmanager. Within his text we see a detailed critique of the emphasis that is placed on quantitative measures of performance: ‘They’ve just given us a draft, a new set of draft inspection standards that are going to be implemented in 2002. It has thirty-two sections that have to be met and for each of those thirty-two sections it has criteria that have to be satisfied. So they can have, each of those standards can have, up to thirty-two criteria that have to be satisfied, [and] if you don’t meet one of those you fail that section . . . And the problem with that is that if somebody who doesn’t bother asking a qualified question looks at it they’ll say “Oh failed all thirty-two.” Now I know we’re not failing, our standard of care is quite good.’

Dave’s text can be viewed as a persuasive attempt to show an epistemologically advantaged position. In his presentation of self, Dave reinscribes the meanings around effective service, moving from what he sees as the irrelevance of many performance measures to a better understanding of the complexity and quality of care:



‘If everything, if every box was ticked they’d be very happy but if you then said to them “Now what about the quality of care?” And I suppose that’s the problem for me that the change that we’ve got or the culture that we’re in now is about making sure that you can show that you’ve followed the procedures so that if something goes wrong you won’t be criticized. But actually we can be pretty average at what you do and actually get away with it quite well.’

We see in the text how Dave challenges and rewrites the meanings around effective performance to incorporate a more empowered subjectivity, drawing on both managerial and professional positions. Here we see Dave ‘as maverick’, championing the ethical public service professional emotionally and intellectually connected with the client. He is thus highly critical of standardized procedures which he argues are more about proving a system is being adhered to (‘people making sure that if something goes wrong they’ve exonerated themselves’) rather than an actual concern over the quality of the service provided: ‘If you say “look this isn’t good enough, we shouldn’t be doing this or we should be doing that”, it’s almost as if you know they really wish you wouldn’t keep rocking this particular boat.’ Dave cannot be understood as being simply in opposition to the new regime. His talk shows how he does not wish to be seen as a ‘dinosaur’ or ‘lazy’ and he does not reminisce to the ‘halcyon days’ of the sovereign profession (Macdonald 1995), when ‘nobody hardly bothered with this place’ and ‘standards could probably be written down on the back of a packet of fags’. Drawing on elements of the managerial self, Dave emphasizes the importance of strategic knowledge and innovative thinking among senior managers within the service. His text suggests that this knowledge should be used to curb professional autonomy and discretion: ‘. . . [what] it actually displayed to me was they didn’t actually know what they wanted, so I come up with an idea which isn’t a bad idea even though I say so myself . . . What actually happened was the people who were being restructured actually hijacked it . . . So what you actually had was the restructuring being led by the people who were supposed to be restructured. Now what that told me was they really hadn’t got a clue what they wanted to do, we were being restructured for the sake of it.’

Therefore we see how Dave, in drawing on the managerial self, reinforces and reifies a disempowered position by highlighting the potential problems of professional autonomy and power. However, in the text we see how other elements of the managerial self, especially links with competitive masculinity and the emphasis on quantitative targets and measures, are challenged: ‘I enjoy working with kids, but a lot of the management stuff I would leave tomorrow.’ Within this discursive construction we see Dave drawing on an empowered professional discourse in reinscribing the meanings around service to emphasize quality of care. This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.


Susan: Head Teacher Susan is the head teacher of a small community college and has been in her current post for three years. Susan’s text draws attention to the significant changes in the professional roles and identities of head teachers over recent years. Head teachers are now expected to take on a more commercial identity to, as Susan suggests, ‘sell your school, to deliver a commodity and to meet demands’. Although she states she is keen to maintain her values of ‘people before paper’, Susan draws attention to the tensions she experiences over a number of conflicting subject positions within the NPM discourse. These tensions centre on what she terms ‘the dichotomy between the professional and the leader’. As Susan reflects on herself within the interview, we see a complex negotiation around discourses of gender, professionalism, and leadership. Susan draws on a managerial subject position in constructing a positive and dynamic self, at the forefront of thinking in schools leadership: ‘You’ve got to know what trends in leadership there are . . . you must read at least one or two books per term on something or other on your subject matter.’ We get the impression in Susan’s text of the entrepreneurial small business leader. She is keen to point out to us her financial and strategic prowess: ‘. . . through this process of talking to the right people and being proactive I’ve actually achieved £300,000 worth of new building work. I would never have done that if I’d just sat here and said “Gosh I need some new buildings, hope somebody’s going to come along and do that very shortly.” ’

Susan’s construction of self is a positive image of someone in control but not overly controlling, someone who cares but is also efficient, someone who is businesslike but not at the expense of professional quality and pedagogy. While Susan draws on the language of NPM to locate her self as one of the new managerial educational leaders, this subject position, especially in the way it is linked with a competitive-masculine subject position within education, creates contradictions and discomfort. We see this in her talk, as she describes the ‘repackaging’ of education as part of the market economy and how the effective head teacher is now someone who gets the best results and engages in ruthless competition for resources, pupils and the best public profile: ‘This is not about providing a service for the district, it’s not about the children and their educational needs, this is a market economy and they’re the commodity . . . and you want to grow bigger sunflowers than the man next door to you.’

In challenging and resisting this competitive, masculine subjectivity, Susan positions herself as ‘other’ in the discourse. Susan constructs a professional



subjectivity, emphasizing educational leadership and values. She talks of the importance of professional vision and strength of purpose. She draws on this professional discourse to challenge or ignore requests from the education authority or government. We can see this clearly when Susan says: ‘As an intelligent and caring person you make your decision on how far or not you are going to, how much lip service you’re going to give to it and whether you’re going to go in to it wholeheartedly . . . I understand the context within which my school works and therefore I understand the context in which I apply all the things that come down from above. I’m quite a good girl really but I am naughty at times!’

Therefore, what the government constructs as a key performance indicator in measuring the effectiveness of the school and its leadership, is reinscribed by Susan as ‘petty bureaucracy’ that constrains her autonomy. However, resisting the competitive masculine subject position presents tensions and ironies in Susan’s identity work. Constructing a managerial subjectivity also requires internalizing elements of competitive masculinity, as these two subject positions have a symbiotic relationship in the education context. How you know yourself as an effective educational leader is intricately bound up with quantitative performance indicators based on targets and competition: ‘Every head teacher knows that in the end unless they manage to move the exam results along they’re regarded as a poor head teacher.’ Susan’s construction of an effective professional leader is also bound up in discourses of femininity, being available to students and being caring and supportive. Work identities are infused with gendered meanings, and part of an individual’s work identity involves the act of becoming either a woman or a man. Susan’s own sense of self as a professional educator relates to being a woman, with gender providing a strong underpinning and differentiation between male and female professional career narratives. We see how Susan draws on gendered scripts of femininity in constructing herself as a profes sional educational leader. The weaving of these strands of otherness presents images of the feminized management subjectivity within Susan’s text. This she contrasts with her male colleagues: ‘Male heads are much more hard-headed. They have less emotion than I do. They are probably less caught up with the children than I am. And I doubt if there are many heads that teach as much as I do. And I doubt that there are as many heads who know their children as well as I do . . . They don’t see it as part of their role.’

As part of this gendered self, we see how Susan draws on the privileged position of being a mother. Thus we see how Susan invokes a gender-appropriate identity to claim status and legitimacy. She uses the discursive resource of motherhood in constructing herself as ‘naturally’ different, and better



(Holmer-Nadesan 1996): ‘But there’s something about being a mum, isn’t there? And then relating to other mums. It’s very sad they [male head teachers] can’t do that.’ However, privileging this gendered position also feeds into the pressures to overwork and increased responsibilities and further reinforces the competitive masculine position. As she comments, there is a pressure to be ‘the superwoman’ and to be constantly ‘juggling balls . . . in managing to do it all’.

Discussion This paper contributes to the development of a more sophisticated conceptualization of resistance in the study of organizations in three respects. Firstly, it presents a generative and multidirectional theorizing of the micropolitics of resistance, focusing on how individuals exploit the looseness around meanings in a constant and simultaneous process of resistance, reproduction and reinscription. Secondly, by drawing on specific cases of individuals engaged in the act of critical reflection, the paper illustrates the process of this resistance, to illustrate how and in what ways individuals respond when confronted with feelings of difference and discomfort between the subject positions offered within the NPM discourse and their own preferred interest. Thirdly, by focusing on the lived experiences of individual public service professionals, it offers an empirically grounded understanding of the character and conduct of NPM with greater nuance than that currently offered in the literature. The paper builds on more recent studies of resistance found in the critical organizational and Foucauldian literature. It offers an alternative concep tualization of resistance that focuses on the political contest over meanings, and provides a detailed illustration of the dynamics of identity work. In recent years, a number of studies have contributed to our understanding of the micro-politics of resistance, at the level of both behaviour and identities (Prasad and Prasad 1998, 2000; Knights and McCabe 2000; Fleming and Sewell 2002; Ezzamel et al. 1998, 2003). However, there is still a feeling in these studies, that workers are responding to what is imposed upon them, due to the framing of research in terms of the worker–management dialectic. Furthermore, while these studies highlight the importance of identity in mediating or negotiating the effects of power, they fail to illustrate the process of the micro-politics of resistance, thus necessitating an empirical and theoretical leap between the ‘being of difference’ and the resistance behaviour. Viewing resistance as taking place within a field of power and meanings, this paper differs from previous research in two important respects. Firstly, it draws attention to the creative or generative dimensions of resistance, as individuals critically engage with ‘self as other’. Secondly, it illustrates how the process of resistance also involves the reification and reproduction of that which is being resisted, by legitimizing and privileging it as an arena for



political contest. Thus resistance is reconceptualized, moving from a reaction to repressive power, to a multidimensional, fluid and generative understanding of power and agency. From the texts generated within the research engagement, it seems that there is no single uniform and coherent meaning to NPM. While acknowledging the strength of new disciplinary technologies (Townley 1994) and the crusade throughout the 1990s to inculcate in public sector professionals new attitudes, values and identities, the paper illustrates how individuals are not passive recipients of discourses. Rather, NPM is highly dynamic, with individuals appropriating different meanings in reflections on self in conjunction with NPM. This throws into question the portrayal of NPM as a hegemonic discourse, sweeping across the public services, deprofessionalizing all in its wake. Taking a micro-politics approach, the paper illustrates the contest of meanings within NPM, with individuals exploiting the contradictions within and between discourses and subject positions. The paper illustrates how these public service professionals are active in their engagement with the discourse of NPM and exercise power in the way they position themselves and find their own location (Kerfoot and Knights 1993). NPM as an identity project is seen to be full of paradoxical twists and mixed meanings and we see individuals drawing on these different meanings at different times and in different ways in their identity construction. We can see in the texts how individuals draw on alternative subject positions to assert, deny and rewrite the subject positions offered. We see how this often results in individuals presenting their ‘self as maverick’, offering themselves a position that is epistemologically privileged. When facing the subjectivizing effects of NPM, individuals may choose to draw on some aspects as a ‘discursive resource’ (Parker 1997) in asserting an identity, while attempting to subvert and ‘wriggle out’ of the other ways that NPM attempts to classify, determine and categorize them. However, we also see how this results in the reification, legitimization and reproduction of the very subject positions that they are denying. The four illustrative texts examined in this paper therefore show clearly the multiplicities of self, brought into relief in the critical reflexive act. They also show how the incoherence of NPM stimulates tension and the need for extra identity work among these managers. It is these tensions between different subject positions within the texts of all four managers that illustrate how resistance, accommodation and reification may happen concurrently. This draws attention to the contradictory processes of identity construction as individuals negotiate the complexity of ‘being’. Thus both NPM and the self work in a matrix of power relations (Foucault 1982) where meanings are highly contradictory and dynamic. These processes of identity construction and resistance, located within a web of meanings, are open to interpretation and reinterpretation. The study also suggests the need to move away from a meta-theory of resistance. This has two implications for our theorizing on resistance. Firstly,



we recognize that the nature and form of resistance are discursively produced within specific contexts and will take different forms and emphases for different social groups. Within this context, the normative orientation of NPM operates in conjunction with the professional identities of public service managers. Here, an appreciation of resistance at the level of meanings and subjectivities draws attention to forms of disruption that might be overlooked with a focus on a more overt, collective and monolithic definition. Furthermore, within the context of NPM and its emphasis as an identity project, resistance at the micro-political level is heightened. Thus, it is argued that different focuses of power require different focuses of resistance. Secondly, our conceptualization of resistance may be more appropriate when studying managerial and professional groups, given that their access to the challenging and rewriting of organizational discourse might be greater than that of shopfloor workers. In other words, our conceptualizing of resistance here may not be so appropriate in settings where there is a less apparent political contestation over meanings and in situations where there is less agency for actors in contesting meanings. It may be suggested that our conception of resistance, which reinforces as well as challenges meanings and subjectivities, is politically naïve and nihilistic. However, we would argue that by emphasizing the micro-level of experience, we offer a ‘broad-based political resistance’ (Hekman 1990:186), focusing on struggle and tension and on the everyday forms of maintenance and control, without recourse to meta-narratives of emancipation. Thus we can conceptualize resistance as an exploiting of the ‘tactical polyvalence of discourses’ (Sawicki 1994) through the chipping away at the micro-politics of power, at the minutiae of disciplinary technologies that constitute individual subjectivity. The effects of such resistance are low levels of disturbance, leading to the destabilizing, weakening and greater incoherence of dominant discourses, such as NPM, and in turn creating greater looseness and oppor tunity to exploit spaces. It is these spaces that enable the construction of alternative identities and meanings within forms of domination. This paper, in focusing on the discursive and multidirectional nature of resistance, provides empirical illustrations of the way that contestation over meanings can quietly challenge power relations. We question the need for a utopian narrative of emancipation, valuing the small pockets of resistance that sound a liberatory note (Bartky 1988) and make a difference to how people live their lives and live with themselves.

Note The research upon which this paper is based is funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (award number R000223078). We would like to acknowledge the constructive advice given by Mahmoud Ezzamel and the two anonymous reviewers for Organization Studies.



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49 Cages in Tandem: Management Control, Social Identity, and Identification in a Knowledge-Intensive Firm Dan Kärreman and Mats Alvesson

V

ocabularies and research practices in organization theory have long suggested that organizations are best understood if viewed as objectlike. Conventional wisdom typically pictures organizations as entities (e.g. machines, organisms, and political systems) with given properties (structures, strategies, technologies) (Barley and Kunda, 2001). Much intellectual effort has been spent developing an understanding of organizations as systemic wholes, an understanding mainly driven by mechanistic and/or biological metaphors (Morgan, 1986). These images have been productive. Judging from contemporary research publications they still are, at least in the sense that they are used by researchers to produce knowledge on and about organizations. However, recent developments in organizational analysis indicate a shift from an entity understanding of organizational activity into something different. The current interest in organizational culture (Kunda, 1992; Martin, 1992; Czarniawska-Joerges, 1992; Alvesson, 1995), identity, image, and reputation (Asforth and Mael, 1989; Dutton et al., 1994; Czarniawska, 1997; Academy of Management Review special issue, 2000), and organizational discourse (Keenoy et al., 1997; Grant et al., 1998; Fournier, 1998; Alvesson and Kärreman, 2000) hints at a shift from understanding organizational activity in material and

Source: Organization, 11(1) (2004) : 149–175.



substantive ways to constructing organizational activitity as increasingly occuring in the imaginary realm (Alvesson, 1990; Deetz, 1992; Barley and Kunda, 2001). This development can be understood as a reflection of empirical changes in contemporary organizations. Socio-economic changes – such as the expansion of the service sector, the rise and expansion of so-called knowledge work, the shift towards a consumer economy – have contributed to create a situation where society, the context of all organizational activity, is claimed to have changed fundamentally. These changes have allowed new organizational forms and new organizational practices to emerge. Management practices, in particular, are likely to have been transformed. In the bureaucratic, industrial mode managerial activity is typically focused on designing and supervising work processes that minimize the (intellectual) effort and skill necessary for the worker to carry out his or her work. In this sense, Taylorism summarizes the managerial ethos, in its focus on constructing work procedures constrained to the point where workers can do only the correct thing in an economic way. It can be argued that the idea of management is closely connected with the rise and ubiquity of the bureaucratic phenomenon (McIntyre, 1984; Jackall, 1988). In other words, it draws upon phenomena such as vertical division of labor, hierarchy, and the formalization and standardization of work processes (Mintzberg, 1983; Wright, 1996). Management and bureaucracy rest on the idea that work can be divided between those who work and those who plan, organize, coordinate, and control work. Managerial activities typically focus on designing and supervising work processes that minimize the effort and skill necessary for the worker to carry out his or her work. However, as traditional industrial work diminishes in organizations, and other forms of work rise in frequency and importance, managerial intervention employs other modes of operation. Consider for example the professional organization – in Etzioni’s (1964) terminology – which operates under circumstances where it might be difficult or even counterproductive to organize and control behavior. According to Etzioni, among others, management targets behavior indirectly, through norms and values, in such organizations. This is accomplished through managerial practices that Etzioni labels, and Kunda elaborates, as normative control: ‘the attempt to elicit and direct the required efforts of members by controlling the underlying experience, thoughts, and feelings that guide their actions’ (Kunda, 1992: 11). Most work situations contain elements of worker autonomy, which management ceaselessly attempts to coopt and colonize in the name of the corporate good. As Bendix (1956) put it: ‘beyond what commands can effect and supervision can control, beyond what incentives can induce and penalties prevent, there exists an exercise of discretion . . . which managers of


Kärreman and Alvesson • Cages in Tandem 257

economic enterprises seek to enlist for the achievement of managerial ends’ (cited in Kunda, 1992: 12). Research suggests that new forms of control rarely substitute existing forms. Rather, they emerge as a complementary control structure that is added to and supplements existing forms (cf. Van Maanen and Kunda, 1989). The recent interest in identity, and social identity in particular, in organizational theory is thus, among other things, motivated from a control point of view. Identity, it is claimed, provides a means for the integration and orchestration of work. Knowledge-intensive firms, which typically draw heavily upon cultural-ideological modes of control, are specifically singled out as organizational forms that use social identity and the corporatization of the self as a mode for managerial control (cf. Alvesson, 1995, Kunda, 1992). This paper, drawing on an empirical study of a large IT/management consultancy firm, points at the dynamics between management control, aiming at social closure through structural means, and normative control, with an emphasis on the articulation and development of social identities. In this paper we will explore and discuss the relationship between ‘substantive’ – socio-structural or bureaucratic – forms of control and cultural-ideological or normative control in the firm studied. HRM systems and practices interact with (other) forms of normative control in producing powerful and coherent forms of inputs to identity formation. Structural forms of control – standardized work methodologies, division of labour, formal HRM procedures – will then be considered in relation to normative control. In particular, we will identify and discuss organizational and individual consequences of social identity and identification in a context of social, structural, and cultural ‘closures’ and contradictions, including tendencies to create an ‘iron cage of subjectivity’. We also examine variation and deviation from the normalization and compliance of such an iron cage.

On Modes of Managerial Control Management is heavily associated with the exercise of control. Although managers do other things, the exercise of control is a dominant part of the manager’s job (Mintzberg, 1989). Management control typically includes an apparatus for specifying, monitoring, and evaluating individual and collective action. Management control is predominantly an activity carried out by a powerful social group that orchestrates and exercises definitional and executive authority over other social groups within an organization. This mode of management claims a particular and scarce form of expertise. It is fundamentally self-contained, socially cohesive, and managerialist (Alvesson and Willmott, 1996; Deetz, 1992).



In this article we will use the label socio-ideological control for attempts to control worker beliefs and technocratic control for attempts to directly control worker behavior (cf. Alvesson and Kärreman, 2001b). In the technocratic type, management works primarily with plans, arrangements, and systems focusing behavior and/or measurable outputs. Consider for example Mintzberg’s (1983) attempt to synthesize the various coordination mechanisms (as he labeled them) identified in research on organizational structure. The five mechanisms, as described by Mintzberg, explicitly target behavior: by various forms of standardization of work (procedures, outputs, skills), by direct supervision, or by mutual adjustment. It is clear, however, that the limits of organizational control hardly rest with ‘behavioral’ means. Mintzberg’s classification appears to be exhaustive, but only because it introduces mechanisms or types of control that can account for control that transgresses standardization and direct supervision. The locus of control is moved from the outside of the worker to the inside: to consensual approval (mutual adjustment). However, since consent is achieved through social processes, this understanding leaves out – and mystifies – the extent of managerial attempts to influence and control the production of consent. In particular, this understanding of control leaves out the fact that much managerial work is geared towards enacting a particular form of organizational experience (Alvesson, 1995; Deetz, 1992; Mumby, 1988; Smircich and Morgan, 1982). As noted above, we will label managerial efforts to manage such experiences and accounts – beliefs, meaning, norms, and interpretations – as socioideological forms of control. This form of control targets social relations, emotions, identity formation, and ideology. It is especially significant in complex and uncertain organizational situations that demand a high degree of decentralization. Here bureaucracy, almost by definition, fails. The fact that management cannot control behavior or output does not mean, however, that it gives up the intention to control. Several concepts have, as noted above, been suggested in the literature to analyse and understand how such control is exercised: clan (Ouchi, 1979), normative control (Etzioni, 1964; Kunda, 1992), concertive control (Barker, 1993), ideology (CzarniawskaJoerges, 1988; Mumby, 1988), and identity regulation (Alvesson and Willmott, 2002). In this article we will take an particular interest in the relationship between management control, social identity, and identification. Since both social identity and identification are socially produced, it is also possible to influence and manage them. In this respect they do not differ from organizational identities, which – as Pratt and Foreman (2000) have pointed out – may be considered as legitimate objects for managerial intervention and control. Although social identities might not be equally legitimate targets for managerial control, as the sense of self is not necessarily seen as a socially acceptable concern of managers, it is clear that social identities function in a way that makes them interesting for management to exploit.



Exploring the Imaginary: Social Identity and Identification Identity is a concept that has many meanings and applications in organizational analysis. It may, for example, refer to the organizational level: to organizational identity (e.g. Albert and Whetten, 1985; Christensen, 1995; Czarniawska-Joerges, 1994, Academy of Management special issue, 2000). It may, on the other hand, refer to individuals or groups of individuals: on forms of identification and subjectivity (Knights and Willmott, 1985, 1989; Ashforth and Mael, 1989; Deetz, 1992). Sometimes the two levels are connected to each other: organizational identity informs personal identity or vice versa in these cases (Dutton et al., 1994). In this paper, we will use identity as a bridging concept between individual, group, professional, and organizational levels. In particular we will focus on social identity on the individual level, in contrast to organizational and individual identity. Social identity as a concept can be traced back to the early 1970s. The coining of the concept is attributed to the French-British social psychologist Henri Tajfel (Hogg and Terry, 2000). The concept of social identity is similar to the concept of role, as it indicates affiliation to a particular social group. However, in contrast to the concept of role, social identities must have personal meaning for the individual. As Tajfel puts it: ‘[Social identity is] the individual’s knowledge that he belongs to a certain social group together with some emotional and value significance to him of this group membership’ (Tajfel, 1972: 292 in Hogg and Terry, 2000: 122). In the modern world individuals have several social identites. We are parents, children, students, teachers, workers, managers, professionals, and so on, depending on occasion and context. Social identities make expectations and interactions more manageable and less dependent on ongoing negotiation. They provide instruction and direction, and counteract uncertainty and fragmentation (Hogg and Terry, 2000; Kärreman and Alvesson, 2001). In addition to being motivated by self-enhancement, social identity processes are also motivated by a need to reduce subjective uncertainty about one’s perceptions, attitudes, feelings, and behaviors, and ultimately, one’s self-concept and place within the social world. (Hogg and Terry, 2000: 124)

Social identities are acquired through various processes of identification. Identification draws heavily on people’s tendency to classify themselves and others into various social categories (Pratt, 2000). These categories serve two functions: (a) as cognitive tools for ordering the social environment, and (b) as a means of reflexive identification. Social categories are thus devices for making sense of both the social environment and the self’s location in it – one’s identity in relation to the social environment at hand. Processes of identification are a key theme in our analysis, and we return to and develop the issue later in the paper.



The concept of social identity and identification demonstrates and underscores the importance of social categorization. It points out that we as human beings use socially available distinctions – categories – to define our identities, and that our self-definitions vary depending on the categorizations available. It suggests that we, peculiar as it might seem, distinguish ourselves and connect to other people through sharing the same categories for self-identification and, thus, simultaneously express distinctiveness and sameness. To sum up: a social identity points at an affiliation with a social group. It confirms the affiliation, and also charges the affiliation with emotional significance and personal meaning. Social identity is acquired through processes of identification that, due to their social nature, it is possible to influence and affect. Social identity has particular relevance for organizational activities due to the fact that it provides clues for action, interpretation, and conduct. In this capacity, social identity may provide guidelines for organizational action, that is, potentially operate as a device for the exercise of managerial control. We will proceed by exploring the world of work in a global consultancy firm. First, we will focus on structural and material conditions. Second, we will outline the imaginary aspects of work and its significance. Third, we will discuss the interplay between the material and imaginary dimension. Allow us to start with a note on method and a brief introduction of the firm.

Method The field work aimed to arrive at a rich, in-depth illumination of the case company. Essentially, the study had an ethnographic approach. It consisted of interviews as well as observations of a variety of organizational gatherings. These included participating in a project group at work during two full days (including half a night), observations of training sessions, competence group meetings and the annual meeting for managers, and externally, at a presention of the company to students. We also studied manuals for giving feedback, project methodology, and so on. To sum up, the study draws upon the three modes of data generation available for qualitative research: ‘asking questions’, ‘hanging around’, and ‘reading texts’ (Dingwall, 1997). We conducted 52 interviews with 45 individuals. People from all parts of the organization were interviewed: the CEO, partners, consultants at various levels of seniority, support staff, newly recruited organizational members, and so on. Our interviewees ranged from job applicants to ex-employees, although most of the interviewees were working in the company. Participant observation, contact with ex-students from our department working in the



company, and repeat interviews with people who appeared distanced from the company, were tactics used in order to get a rich and nuanced picture of the organization. Fieldwork was conducted through an open and emergent approach (Alvesson and Deetz, 2000). Specific research questions were formulated and reformulated throughout the fieldwork, giving space for empirical material to affect the research process and results. Analytically, the paper sets out from an interpretivist perspective. A central assumption is that data are unable to speak alone and must be spoken for. Data presentation thus cannot be separated from interpretation. In this sense the empirical material has not been codified, but viewed as text. Thus, we have tried to go beyond the ‘surface’ and look for the less obvious in our interpretations, with a particular sensitivity towards the possibility of variation and contradiction, and its meanings and consequences (cf. Alvesson and Sköldberg, 2000). The fairly open approach means that we were not restricted to a rigid interview protocol. Instead, we based interview questions on common themes, which were consequently adapted to the stage in the research process and the particular developments of each interview, related to the interviewee’s specific work situation, seniority, and experiences. The development of our understanding of the field thus affected our lines of inquiry. After an exploratory phase, findings and understandings from our first 15 – 20 interviews were organized in emergent themes that were used as input in new interviews, both in terms of questions asked and whom to talk to. In this way we were able to refine our gradually developing understanding of the themes that emerged, without providing excessive a priori closure to fieldwork practices.

The Two Cages of Work: The Case of Big Consulting Big Consulting is a multinational consulting company. Financially, Big Consulting is a success story. It is has grown rapidly, is highly profitable, and is consequently perceived as an attractive employer, capable of recruiting bright and ambitious people. Big Consulting essentially operates as a partnership. Organizational activity at Big is regulated by a highly peculiar mix of standard operating procedures and seemingly organic improvisation. On one hand, work is often carried out on an industrial scale, where projects may occupy hundreds of consultants working with fairly standard problems and providing fairly standardized services. On the other hand, some work is almost exclusively carried out in teams, which typically organize their work in a highly fluid, organic, and improvisational manner. The company seemingly relies heavily on bureaucratic modes of organizing: division of labor, hierarchy, and standardization. However, efforts to



coordinate and regulate work is not restricted to the behavioral dimension. Organizational members often refer to ‘the strong and intense culture’ which is viewed as a valuable organizational resource, in particular for facilitating coordination and cooperation. Thus, organizational activity is significantly regulated and shaped by ideational and normative elements. Below, we will proceed with an analysis of the minutes of behavioral as well as ideational pressures towards uniformity and conformity.

The Structural Cage: Pressures towards Behavioral Uniformity In this section we will focus on regulations, mechanisms and procedures that target behavior, rather than mental and ideational aspects of work. The structural dimension – the technocratic forms of control – at Big is characterized by hierarchy, continuous evaluation, standardized work procedures, and career paths.

Hierarchy Hierarchy is highly visible at Big. The hierarchical steps express not only status and power, but are also assumed to express competence and experience. The steps include analysts, consultants, managers, and partners. The hierarchy is further elaborated by the practice of designating total number of years at the position as a marker of seniority. Consequently, a consultant is not only a consultant: he or she is also a C2 or C3, meaning consultant with two or three years’ experience as a consultant, respectively. The exact position is frequently taken very seriously within the company. All work activities in connection with external customers are organized around the concept of the team. This means that junior consultants always work in constellations with more senior consultants, and also that a fairly clear-cut division of labor, both vertically and horizontally, is put in play. Organizational member roles are typically explicit, particularly in project teams. Teams are constructed in a way that makes each member’s part in the division of labor clear. Although activity in the teams is fluid and organic, even vague, responsibilities, duties, and expectations are not: ‘You typically have a clearly defined role when you enter a project. Your tasks are described, deliverables defined, and you pretty much administer your own work based on this relatively tightly specified package.’ (Consultant)

Role expectation follows one’s status in the hierarchy. There are deliberate efforts to match overall hierarchical status with status in particular projects. Seniors treat their location as strong indicators of their competence. A person who has been on a particular level for two years is generally viewed as more



competent than one who has been there one year. Informants report that junior people carefully monitor their position in the company’s promotion/ differentiation system. Hierarchy is carefully fine-tuned from above as well as below. Organizational members at the lower levels typically describe the hierarchical differences between themselves and the partners as an abyss: ‘We have a well defined hierarchy. And you are extremely small to partners. They are at the top and you have no idea of what they are doing – perhaps they are selling or cashing in the profit or whatever, I don’t know. I don’t have the faintest clue about what they do in their everyday business.’ (Consultant)

This may sound like the relationship between the junior clerk and the CEO of a very large company, but as there is one partner for every 30 – 40 employees, there is no difference in education, and the time-span between most juniors and partners is only 10 – 15 years’ service, the experience of hierarchy is worth noting. More senior organizational members claim that hierarchy loosens its grip as one gets promoted. However, among experienced people, who have learnt the ropes and therefore may exercise more discretion and degrees of freedom, the hierarchy is still perceived as strong.

HRM Procedures: Continuous Evaluation The employees at Big are under constant performance evaluation. Evaluation and feedback are fairly strictly formalized. Evaluation is organized in two main processes. First, employees are evaluated in relation to their individual development. This process is labelled c-mapping (c stands for career) and is carried out three to four times every year. The employee’s nearest boss, usually the leader of the project on which the employee currently works, primarily evaluates the employee. Employees are expected to drive this process to a high degree themselves. They are expected to articulate new targets for development after they have received feedback from the project leader. The feedback, on the other hand, is expected to be constructive and to help the employee to identify strengths and weaknesses. The general idea is that everybody should be evaluated in similar ways and according to similar criteria. Thus, there are several tools available – policy documents, forms, and standardized software – to ensure that everybody is treated in a fair and unbiased way. ‘You have the c-maps, which is our tool for formal feedback. Ideally you start by determining the criteria, together with your project leader. And there are five common criteria, such as creating trust, adding value, and so on. And then you typically have more specific criteria. Am I a better



programmer than expected? Am I better on communicating than expected? There are standard levels. And that’s well-defined in the instrument, how an analyst is expected to perform, a consultant and so on. And then you pick three or four criteria and then you set the expectations: in three months you should have done this and this. And then the project leader writes a brief summary after the three months, with your contribution. Typically it also includes comments on your strengths and weaknesses. This is put together into a file that is sent to HR and stored there. And then you have the annual review, counselling, where your development plan is developed and evaluated.’ (Consultant)

Second, employees are ranked by their superiors in a process labelled banding. Banding occurs once a year. The employee is ranked in category 1, 2 or 3. Band 1 is reserved for top performers. Category 2 is regarded as acceptable performance. Band 3 is a warning signal. Banding is important because it directly influences compensation: salary influences, career development, and perks.

Standardized Work Procedures Work is standardized in a variety of ways at Big. First, financial control is tight and elaborate. Project managers put much effort into economic plans and budgets. Budgets are monitored and reviewed in a systematic fashion. Second, work processes are standardized in work methodologies. There exists a unified package of methods that consultants are expected to use in projects. The use of standardized methodology is perceived as a competitive advantage within Big Consulting. However, as will be explicated below, the methodology itself is hardly what confers the advantage; it is rather the way it organizes the effort, and, in particular, the way standardized methodologies enforce the task orientation, with a strong focus on delivery on time. Since the company mainly employs graduates from business schools and technical universities, it usually starts with highly adaptable employees who have no difficulty in adopting a uniform way of doing things. Due to the variation of projects, the methodology is not expected to be used as a prescription. It is rather viewed as a resource, but as a resource that is prescribed to be used, one way or another, in projects. ‘As a manager you learn how to manage projects: to get an idea, a task, and slice it in manageable portions that make it workable, and to proceed regardless, although there are uncertainties.’ (Senior manager)

Third, Big has invested heavily in systems for knowledge management. Knowledge management is primarily seen as a way of taking advantage of the scale and scope of the accumulated experiences generated within the



firm. Another key aspect is to diminish the importance of the individual and of personal experience. The idea is that ideas and experience developed in one project can be recycled and reused with minimal adaptation in other projects. The premise is that experience can be codified and rationalized in a way that suits database storage and retrieval.

Career Paths The firm is a career company. Initial advancement is expected to be swift for the individual. As mentioned above, there are four basic levels: analyst, consultant, manager, and partner. New personnel typically start as analysts. Employees are expected to advance within 12 – 18 months as analysts and within two to four years as consultants. After the consultant level, advancement becomes more difficult, and only a carefully chosen few ever make it to the partner level. The partner-to-employee ratio was 1 – 50 for a fairly long time, but has recently been adjusted to 1 – 20, making the partner level a somewhat more realistic option for employees. Advancement in the career softens the impact of the tight grip by hierarchy often perceived by newcomers. There are several techniques and tactics available for making hierarchy a resource, rather than a constraint: ‘As a manager you pretty much define your own roles. You have a rich network, you take part in selling the tasks, and you have influence on a completely different level. But as a consultant and an analyst, you are pretty much placed on particular projects. And certain people are much better than others at navigating such structures, and have it their way anyway.’ (Manager)

The career path in the company is sometimes perceived as a trap: ‘I have three years left to partner and it is starting to feel real. On the other hand, when you have made it to the partner level, then it’s all about staying here for life. We’ll see how things develop. Three years is simply too long a planning horizon. The company needs to work to retain its personnel every year. You can’t lock yourself in and suffer for three years. If you just make people stay on the promise of a lot of money in three years, the only thing you do is promote bad behaviour . . . It’s enough to stay three years to make it look good on the CV. That’s why I don’t believe in long-term lock-up mechanisms. You need to reward your personnel. Continuously.’ (Manager)

In general the career path is explicit and accepted. However, there is a widely shared feeling that the way the career structure is constructed may be obsolete and out of touch with the realities of working life, as indicated by the excerpt above.



The Mental Cage: Identification and Pressures towards Ideational Conformity Structural arrangements at Big for regulating organizational activity may appear both elaborate and tight. However, organizational structures never operate on their own, according to a mechanical logic. They are put in operation and produce effects through the meanings, orientations, and actions of participants. The cultural context is always significant. Sometimes it is in harmony and close affiliation with the structural level, sometimes it is not (Fombrun, 1986). Discrepancies and cracks are not uncommon. The operation of formal structures is frequently open and can lead to a variety of different impacts: strict formal procedures may be followed using loose actions. Sometimes they are even decoupled from practice (Meyer and Rowan, 1977). In order to understand the ‘structural cage’, it is necessary to investigate how it is reinforced with a particular, shared and elaborate belief, meaning, and value system. In the sense that this system exercises strong control, it may be perceived as a mental cage, made up by cultural material. In a way, the belief system is a part – and perhaps a subset – of the organizational culture at Big. However, we wish to refrain from a complete and detailed description of the culture, partly due to space limitations and partly because many aspects, however interesting they may be, are not necessary for the present argument. In this section we will take a closer look at the composition of the belief system and the ideational elements that feed and support it. We will argue that these elements consist of ideas about the comfort of ‘we’, of self-descriptions as ‘anonymous suits’, of loyalty and commitment, and of subordination and obedience.

The Comfort of ’We’ Consultants who work on the clients’ premises often face problems in their particular work identity as external, temporary, and (sometimes) questioned. Specifically, they are not really affiliated to the particular place where they work, and are thus unable fully to express their social identity. Hence, sources of identification are fewer, and as a consequence more important, and possibly more intense. Sometimes identification becomes covert and suppressed. Since consultants sometimes work in environments where the Big identity and image is perceived as provocative, they have to acquire the capacity to hide their affiliation from co-workers in other companies, the client company in particular. ‘I think about it a lot because I had some trouble at the beginning of my career. I started in a project, feeling happy and thinking that ‘here I am consulting’ and it misfired. I am very cautious nowadays in a new



company. I am cautious even in an old client company if there are people I haven’t met. It’s about dress code. No uniforms and that stuff. It’s all about blending with the crowd. Sometimes I don’t even tell people that I am from Big. I tell them what project I am working on, but not more than that, because there is so much prejudice and it is just too much to handle. I remember a project a year ago on commuters; a guy from the project sat down beside me and started to bullshit about the Big consultants. Eventually I told him that I also belonged to Big. That put an end to that conversation. Sometimes it is a bit hard that the client’s people are suspicious, which happens fairly often, and you don’t know why.’ (Manager)

Thus, the ‘we-feeling’ of social identity in belonging to Big has two sides: one provide the comfort and security of belonging to an elite corporation with members that are just like you, and another potentially provokes co-workers. As a consequence, the Big belief system demands that individuals are capable of relaxing and rejoicing in their Big identity and simultaneously capable of effortlessly hiding it from the external world. One prominent feature in social identities and processes of identification is their capacity to provide comfort and security. Social identity connects the individual to an imaginary collective. This is of course an important feature when working on the client’s premises, or, as our informant puts it, when entering the battle zone: ‘Sometimes I feel that one wants to be different [from the client’s personnel]. It’s striking that when I eat lunch, I nearly always do it with other Big Consulting consultants. We keep together and it is tacitly understood that it feels safe and comforting out there in the battle zone. One can breathe and perhaps bullshit a bit. In a way, it maintains the we-and-them spirit and makes one stick with the Big Consulting identity.’ (Manager)

Such interaction is important since it both enhances and elaborates the ‘we-ness’ of a particular social identity. Social identities are normally subtly stated, worked upon, and elaborated in the context of doing work (Kärreman and Alvesson, 2001).

Homogenization Interestingly, the base for identity work at Big is not only communal but also collective. There is a strong tendency for people to conform and develop similar appearences. In the company individuality and creativity are downplayed. Instead, there is an emphasis on cooperation and conformity, collective and routine: ‘We are sometimes called “undertakers” because we all have dark suits. Dark suits, briefcases and a bit stiff . . . And we enter as a group. We are not that individually oriented. We behave as a group because that’s the



way we work. We always work in teams but it is not because there is no individual excellence. It’s a necessary ingredient, but it is like a football team. You can have many good individuals but if they don’t cooperate nothing good will happen. And that’s how it becomes a winning team. That’s another characteristic, or part of our image.’ (Partner)

As a consequence of the heavy emphasis on group work and standardization of methodologies, the individual is typically rather insignificant, at least as an organizational resource. The project team is emphasized. On one level the individual is highly visible in the organization: it is the individual who is evaluated, rewarded and punished. But on another level, the individual is hardly visible at all. Instead, the individual is viewed as expendable: ‘There is a tradition at Big of viewing individuals as perfectly interchangeable. If there is a project where a resource is needed, and a resource exists, then you will move the free resource to the project and you are expected to work there. As a consequence, you may end up working with things that you have explicitly requested to not work with because you don’t see any potential for development there, as has happened to me a couple of times.’ (Consultant)

Conformity and homogeneity are widely observed and part of the image of the firm. As such they underscore the serious, competent, and reliable aspects of the organizational identity. They also underscore the image of dullness, group-think, low creativity, and low innovation capacity. Sometimes people in the company refer to themselves ironically as ‘mormons’, referring to their dark suits and homogeneous appearence.

On Identification Identification seems to happen fast and with little or no resistance. Newly recruited members, for example, are keen to suggest friends who could make a contribution to Big. Perhaps the most interesting feature is the attractiveness of the identity as an employee: ‘They are instantly loyal to the firm. They really want to work here and when they enter the firm they instantly start to recommend people. I think that people identify tremendously with the firm. They shop at NK [an upmarket Swedish shopping mall] just to get the right look. And they love it. God, how they love it, being a Big consultant and being part of the firm. And I think that sometimes it is shallow and just about the external attributes . . . But this identity of being young and very successful – God, identification is very fast in comparison to other places . . . They’ll even take their mobile phones on their vacations. And they ring and ask if they can do an [recruitment] interview. And they think it is great if I ring them and ask them to do an interview, even if they are on vacation.’ (Administrative assistant)



Part of the attraction lies in the fact that the elite status of membership is enforced and underscored in most Big contexts. The idea of an elite is justified and reinforced through up-market recruitment, relatively long periods of training, good opportunities to develop competence, cooperation with bright people, high wages, and career prospects (either within or outside the company). As one of our informants noted, since everybody is part of what is perceived as the elite, striving for being best of the best may be testing, difficult and exhausting. In particular, it is difficult to prove in a satisfying manner: ‘It is very hard to be the best in an organization like ours. You have to work a lot. That means that you are probably not the best. You are good, but not the best. That’s a problem. Because if everybody knows that I work very hard, then I get a lot of money, and that will push people until they get tired and quit.’ (Manager)

As indicated in the excerpt, quality (being best) is substituted for – or, perhaps better, operationalized into – quantity (working longest hours). Instant loyalty, identification, presumed elite status, and ambition thus provide the Big belief system with a tolerance, even inclination, for long working hours. In this context, working long hours is understood as demonstrating one’s capacity. It is typically not defined or understood as exploitation.

Subordination and Obedience Most organization members work as underlings, with narrowly defined individual responsibility and limited discretion. Big mainly recruits young and inexperienced people, who form the bulk of the large-scale projects. They are typically willing to subordinate themselves to the systems and structures of the work methodology. This high degree of compliance is related to the initial uncertainty felt by newcomers. Additionally, junior employees are more likely to be excited by their relative exposure to top management, rather than concerned over how little impact they actually have. Eventually, as the career progresses, members develop more degrees of freedom: ‘In my first project I had no idea what made this [client] company tick. At that time I was more enrolled as a soldier to do my tasks and report when finished. It’s different now, because I know more about the client, its history and our history together. I know them.’ (Manager)

However, subordination and obedience are not mainly accomplished through intense symbolic bombardment and an elaborate dramaturgy of the powerful. They are not even primarily secured by recruiting young, similar-minded and receptive people directly from universities. Such elements may facilitate



subordination and obedience, but they are not sufficient to directly secure it. Subordination is rather accomplished by the combination of being explicitly voluntary, and mentally perceived and interpreted as temporary. Since the belief system at work at Big is constructed to interpret career advancement as self-evident and natural, all members are invited to take the partner’s point of view. In fact, the career system creates a situation where all hierarchical positions except the partner position are temporary. In fact, within the partner category there is also careful social differentiation and a variety of career levels.

Discussion: Soft Iron Cage and Hard Mental Cage? For a long time, organizations were stereotypically understood as bureaucracies, with very slightly refined and tightened structural cages. For the last 30 years, this stereotype has been complemented and to a certain extent substituted with another cliché – that organizations are becoming increasingly network based, organic, and flexible, and mainly knit together through bonds in the imaginary realm: values, ideas, mutual adjustment, community feelings or identity. However, our case points in a third direction: organizations where both structural and imaginary aspects are elaborate and consequential. This phenomenon/kind of organization is not entirely new to organizational analysis. For example, Van Maanen and Kunda (1989) observed that the managed organizational culture they investigated did not substitute other forms of control, as suggested by most of the early literature on organizational culture. Rather, in their case normative – socio-ideological – control operated as an additional and complementary layer of control. However, drawing on our empirical findings, we will suggest that technocratic and socio-ideological forms of control have a more complex relationship, in particular in knowledge-intensive firms/professional service organizations. In this sense, our argument has similarities to Courpasson’s (2000) concept of soft bureaucracy. Our argument does however differ somewhat from Courpasson, who claims that certain seemingly post-bureaucratic organizational practices, such as decentralization, are better understood as confirming the bureaucratic logic, rather than breaking away from it. We argue that in our case the bureacratic logic is also affected in the interplay between the control forms. Rather than viewing the imaginary, such as organizational and social identities and organizational cultures, as additional or a separate extension to the substantive/structural/material dimension, socio-ideological and technocratic forms of control build upon and feed each other in these kinds of companies (Alvesson and Kärreman, 2001b). Big is in many respects not dissimilar from the machine bureaucracy ideal-type (Mintzberg, 1983). There are elaborated systems, structures, and



procedures for everything from the recycling of knowledge to assessments and feedback provision. Technocratic control is highly elaborate. The iron cage metaphor has its benefits in understanding Big. However, the nature of the task calls for much flexibility and the exercise of professional judgement. Bureaucracy has its limits and leaves only partial imprints on behaviour. Work procedures are standardized but are generally loosely coupled to tasks. Several standardized work procedures are typically suggested for the same task, and individual consultants are expected to exercise their judgement in actual implementation, giving them plenty of discretion. The intangible and interactive nature of advanced service production, for example, makes it necessary to include the client in the selection of work procedures, which inevitably introduces uncertainties beyond the company’s control, thus limiting the space for tightly coupled standardization. There are thus elements of adhocracy in the organization. Although organizational members acknowledge the bureaucratic ‘nature’ of many aspects of work at Big, it is clear that structural features are typically viewed as dispositional, rather than deterministic. The iron cage is thus rather soft, or perhaps a mix of strict and flexible elements. It provides support and guidelines that consultants apply according to individual judgement. They do not determine action, at least not in any straightforward manner. Ultimately, the fact that core work processes in the team are exercised in a organic and flexible fashion puts an effective limit on the influence of structural modes of operations, from a production point of view.

The Obsession to Deliver: Task Orientation and Subordination Big may be understood as a large and effective production machine in the sense that people are well synchronized, hardworking, reliable, and accomplish predictable results. The capacity to deliver is very high. Elements of machine bureaucracy are instrumental here, but we are not talking of companies offering mass-market services or manufacturing standard components. The orientations of people are crucial here and the consequences of bureaucracy are contingent upon the work orientations and judgements of employees. As a high degree of homogeneity and compliance attunes the orientations of the workforce with the machine elements in the structures, we may here talk of a mental cage, supplementing the iron cage. The close interplay between the cages is clearly visible in the phenomenon of a very strict work ethic, in particular in relation to the delivery of results. Work is a serious business at Big and the task at hand is always in focus. Work procedures and management styles are typically geared towards giving the task top priority. The company is known for its delivery culture and commitment to keeping deadlines at all costs. This focus on the task is



typically viewed as a strength, since it contributes to Big’s reputation as a reliable and trustworthy business partner that delivers what is promised: ‘Irrespective of what kind of internal issues have been planned and booked for a long time – if we are needed at the client’s place this is what guides us. And this may create internal hell, to put it frankly, but this priority is very strong.’ (Associate partner)

This delivery orientation is to some extent produced through facilitating arrangements such as standardized work procedures, and controlling means such as careful monitoring of budgets and progress, but this is far from sufficient to explain the persistence, coherence, and level of penetration of this orientation, suggesting the metaphor of a mental cage. This collective mentality means focus and discipline but also a somewhat narrow competence, reflecting the downside of a tight system: ‘Customers see us as providers of competence but also as resources in pushing for change. They know that we go in there with high motivation, a willingness to work hard. They also expect us to contribute with new thoughts and ideas. But somehow it feels as if not many of them expect us to come as the real experts and contribute with the fantastic, brilliant ideas that will revolutionize the world . . . This is more a matter of working hard and producing sufficiently good ideas and drive and seeing that things change for the client. It is increasingly a matter of getting things straight.’ (Partner)

Subordination and obedience are, of course, partly effects of structural relations such as the partnership system and the formal structure, but are further facilitated by the sheer intensity of the symbolic and ideational influence to which organizational members are exposed. In general, employees experience the company as demanding, involving the entire person: ‘The strong culture is one of our advantages. It’s intense. It’s the intensity that makes it special. And that’s very positive if you like to live in an intense environment and very negative if you dislike it. You are forced to participate. Yes, forced is the word. You are forced to participate in projects and a lot of other formations. Everything is extremely intense. If you can’t stand it, it’s very stressful. And that stress isn’t positive, it’s negative. It can lead to burnout.’ (Analyst)

There is thus a variety of demands on behaviour as well as mental involvement and a high degree of responsiveness to the corporate environment. Hierarchy, particularly the way it is dramatized and presented, further advances the importance of subordination and obedience: ‘The career pyramid is absolutely central. It expresses the logic for precisely how everything works. You know this almost before you enter the firm. In the recruitment process there is a lot of talk about “we are a pyramid,



we work that way, we are hierarchical for sure, but that’s the way we operate”, and that creates a sense of security because you know exactly where you are, and that everybody has the opportunity to move up in the pyramid.’ (Senior manager)

This experience is not a direct effect of formal hierarchy, or pure competence, or behavioural issues, but reflects the ideas and beliefs about career steps and progress in human development, and the strong symbolism of being a partner. The relationship between seniors and juniors is not a simple result of how the company is built, but is as much a matter of people constructing corporate reality in a ladder-like fashion, mentally producing and reinforcing hierarchy in ways that are fairly uncommon these days, at least in professional organizations and among organizations with a limited age span – in Big, there are few people over 45 years old. Having demonstrated the partial powers of bureaucracy and technocratic controls, and the social constructions leading to the mental cage, let us now explore how this is produced. We then examine the role of identity and how bureaucracy – in particular hierarchy and career steps – regulates it. Finally, we provide a preliminary explanation of the emergence of the interplay between control forms as observed in our case study.

Framing Identification through Behavioral Control Systems Perhaps the most interesting aspect of how structural control feeds into the imaginary domain, at least in the context of this paper, is how technocratic systems of control contribute to and facilitate identification. According to Pratt, identification, defined as when ‘an individual’s belief about his or her organization becomes self-referential or self-defining’ (Pratt, 2000: 457), is created through consecutive processes of sensebreaking and sensegiving. Sensebreaking processes actively create void/deficit of meaning. In this sense, sensebreaking is the reversal of sensemaking. Whereas sensemaking – the processes of meaning creation – is grounded in identity construction (Weick, 1995), sensebreaking is, according to Pratt, grounded in identity destruction: [S]ensebreaking involves a fundamental questioning of who one is when one’s sense of self is challenged. Sensebreaking is similar but more specific than other terms used in describing human change, such as dissonance reduction . . . or unfreezing . . . in that the main purpose of sensebreaking is to disrupt an individual’s sense of self to create a meaning void that must be filled. (Pratt, 2000: 464)

Pratt identified one primary sensebreaking practice in the organization he studied, a practice labelled dream building. Dream building involves the articulation of and commitment to personal and sales goals. According to This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.


Pratt, dream building creates a meaning void by linking identity to (lack of) possessions, motivating by encouraging comparisons between current and ideal identities, and through perpetuating the tension between current and ideal identities. It can be argued, in a similar vein, that at least two structural control practices operate as sensebreaking processes at Big. However, the meaning void is not constructed by linking identity to material possessions in this context. At Big, identity is strongly related to success. The meaning void is not constructed by stimulating fantasies about luxury lifestyles, although this element may play an indirect role, as pay increases are significant at Big. It is rather constructed by actively choosing organization members already motivated by and used to relative success, acknowledging their elite potential and then putting them in at the minimum level in terms of status, prestige, and acknowledged success. The organizational bureaucracy, with strong hierarchical differentiation, emphasis on titles, formal career steps, and a wealth of HRM procedures, underlines social positioning and its dependence on how formal structures and procedures work. Identity is, then, tightly related to social position. Individuals in Big are carefully placing themselves and others in terms of formal positions. The career system at Big operates in a manner that provides some instant gratification for hard, routine, and repetitive work typically carried out in a highly formatted way and with few degrees of freedom. However, it effectively puts most rewards on hold, with a promise that eventually, if you as a member work hard enough, are smart enough, and don’t make peers and superiors uncomfortable, you will be rewarded lavishly later on, in terms of both material compensation and personal autonomy. The elite image, the campus atmosphere, and the relatively high salaries are some important ways in which Big furnishes instant gratification and offers a taste of what might be to come. The relatively transparent career structure provides a predictable path for the individual, which makes it possible for him or her to create checks and balances: hard work and subordination now, bonuses, status, and autonomy later. Future rewards and anticipated identities thus form a joint career/self-project: people define themselves partly through their expected trajectories and forthcoming success (Grey, 1994). Sensebreaking is further maintained and sustained through the way hierarchy and career paths operate in this context. The hierarchy may say something about the power structure. It might even say something about levels of competence, as claimed by organizational members (Alvesson and Kärreman, 2001a). However, without a doubt, it says something about organizational success as defined locally (culturally). Since virtually all organizational members seem to take part in organizational activities on the premise that they are potential partners, and are actively encouraged to think so, hierarchical position becomes important as a gauge of one’s relative success. Thus, when organizational members pull rank through what



the outsider perceives as mindless and hair-splitting comparisons of relative seniority, it is very much about evidence of superior organizational success. Hierarchical differences maintain the motivation through designating role models for underlings to use to channel their aspirations. The motivation is further maintained through establishing prescribed career paths that provide points of entry for evaluating current development status, that is, whether the individual is on his or her way towards his or her ideal self or if corrective action is necessary. The elaborate character of hierarchical differences, and the career paths thus constructed, maintain the void over time. Each hierarchical step is but a temporary success, which until the partnership level is reached will always be transformed into new aspirations and identity deficits, since partnership is the ultimate goal. Thus, hierarchical differentiation operates, in this context, as a perpetuator of motivation: a rather perplexing fact, considering that hierarchical differences generally are expected to produce alienation rather than motivation. In the case of Big, we certainly see signs of frustration among juniors, and senior actors also bemoan the lack of flexibility and creativity, but the motivation effect of hierarchy and promotion is stronger. Sensebreaking is an important part of managed identification, since it creates a demand for identity work and identity material. However, sensebreaking can, according to Pratt, only initialize identification. It cannot bring it to an end. Identification is put to an end by various processes of sensemaking (Weick, 1995; Pratt, 2000). Following Pratt, we will focus on processes where sense is provided rather than spontaneously created. Such processes are typically labelled sensegiving (Gioia and Chittipeddi, 1991; Gioia et al., 1994; Pratt, 2000). Sensegiving occurs when certain groups or individuals are ‘attempting to influence the sensemaking process . . . toward a preferred redefinition of organizational reality’ (Gioia and Chittipeddi, 1991: 442). Pratt (2000) identified one primary practice of sensegiving in his case study: positive programming. The practice is basically an elaborated version of positive thinking, where organizational members are trained in filling their minds with positive and uplifting thoughts. In concrete terms, the practice included creating a relationship with a mentor (positive role model), creating relationship barriers to people who might be critical or sceptical, and enacting and perpetuating such barriers. The dominant sensegiving practices at Big cannot be boiled down to one dominant practice, as in Pratt’s study. Rather, there are at least three practices and elements that in combination provide sensegiving in a way similar to Pratt’s example. Again, it is key parts of the structural systems of control that operate as sensegiving practices. Perhaps the most important part is played by the systems for continuous evaluation. These systems operate as sensegiving practices in two significant ways. First, they are designed to evaluate not only how individuals perform, but also how they are as people (have drive and ambition, create trust, want to develop, and so on). Thus, the feedback



system provides cues not only on how to behave but also on how to be, and, perhaps even more significantly, what to become. In this way the feedback system both provides identity material and gauges the relative development. Second, the feedback system operates in a fashion that is in many ways similar to the practice of positive programming. This is partly because it is designed in a way that plays up positive and constructive feedback and plays down negative and potentially destructive feedback. Perhaps more significantly, the feedback system provides an officially appointed mentor, the so-called counsellor: an officially sanctioned role model, ally, career supervisor, and organizational therapist in one neat package. Pratt argues that there are four possible outcomes of identification: positive identification, non-identification, dis-identification, and ambivalent identification. Positive identification means that identification is achieved and hence successful. The other form outcomes are to some extent identification failures, with ambivalent identification standing halfway between success and failure. The way things are at Big, only two outcomes are possible, at least over time: positive and ambivalent identification. The combined effect of the structural and mental cages makes non- and dis-identification implausible. The way the career paths, teamwork and feedback systems work and link together will virtually guarantee that non-identification and dis-identification will eventually lead to poor performance evaluations, sanctions from project team members, lack of promotion and, in the end, to being nicely but firmly asked to leave the firm. Although these structural means for producing at least a behavior and a manifested attitude that exhibit a strong commitment to work are powerful, they also are dependent on a strong support for this. Working hours and performances perceived as below average will be driven out through bureaucratic means of control, but the average is partly produced through work identities and cultural norms that the majority of the employees share and voluntarily act upon.

The Hybridization of Control Forms as a Cultural Process We do not think that there is any clearcut, simple, and mechanical explanation for the way control forms interact and interplay in our case study. The interplay between – or hybridization of – the control forms is a social process, and not an algorithm or a program. Social processes are typically over-determined; social phenomena can usually be explained as caused by many things, independent of each other. However, we will attempt a preliminary explanation which accounts for what we think are the most important elements behind the hybridization. The emergence of the interaction between the control forms has significant historical roots. Big started out as a division within an organization that operated as an accountancy firm. Accountancy is a highly regulated This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.


area, thus providing external pressures towards bureaucratization. In this sense, technocratic forms of control at Big can be understood as a heritage: as something that it inherited from its parent company and that has become an institutionalized and taken-for-granted practice. However, over time Big has entered business areas where bureaucratic practices have been perceived as problematic. In particular, the speed of technological development and the complexity of products in the IT sector have made total reliance on bureaucratic protocol unviable. In the management consulting field, the emergence of the perception of the bureaucratic form as inefficient and outdated is likely to have exercised pressure towards the incorporation of post-bureaucratic control forms. As Big has entered new business areas, and old business areas have changed, new and old control forms have continually been tried and tested. Since technocratic forms of control are part of the heritage, they have been able to persist, as long as they do not prove too much of a disadvantage. To put it briefly, the emergence of interaction between the control forms is an ironic reversal of justification: bureaucratic practices are kept because of their links to the organizational culture – to heritage and tradition – and socio-ideological forms of control are introduced because of external pressures and their perceived efficiencies. However, as our analysis shows, technocratic forms of control have not been completely ritualized. Instead, some have been re-interpreted and re-enacted in ways that produce control effects partly in the behavioural domain (as one would expect), and partly in the normative domain, as demonstrated above. It is important to point out the role of history in understanding how the hybridization has emerged. The intricate relationship between the control forms is a product of taken-for-granted practices (culture), environmental changes and pressures (external contingencies), processes of imagination, trial and error, and, above all, time. In this sense, the hybridization of control forms at Big is an example of ‘true’ cultural change – aspect-rich and inert but yet dynamic – and thus a sharp contrast to the shallow engineered efforts towards cultural change frequently initiated in contemporary organizations. The Big change is anchored in specific social practices more than in symbolic leadership behaviour (vision statements, explicit references to values, and workshops communicating these on a fairly abstract level, too easily detached from everyday life).

Conclusion In this article we have explored two layers of control in a knowledge-intensive firm: technocratic and socio-ideological layers. While technocratic control mainly circles around the use of bureaucracy and performance measures, socio-ideological control addresses values, meanings, and ideas, including identities. In exploring the technocratic layer of control we have analysed This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.


structural arrangements: in our case hierarchy, regulated career paths, feedback procedures, and work methodologies. In exploring the socio-ideological layer of control, we have focused on social identity and identification, which for our particular case study has been analysed as consisting of ideas of social positioning, career orientations, subordination and obedience, loyalty and commitment, the comfort of ‘we’, and homogenization of selves. We have emphasized the interplay of forms of control. Technocratic control focuses the behavioral level, but bureaucracy also exercises a socio-ideological influence (Alvesson and Kärreman, 2001b). We interpret the bureaucratic structures of Big partly as a means to provide meaning and identification – a vehicle for creating and maintaining shared understanding and shared identities. Structural similarities – the same manuals, work methodologies, career steps, and hierarchies throughout the entire corporate group – facilitate the development of a shared universe and stimulate a shared identity. HRM practices and hierarchical structures are important for the definition of the temporary identities of individuals and reinforce their identity projects. Thus, the technocratic and socio-ideological layers of control do not so much complement or supplement, as feed upon and inform each other. It could be argued that the limits to the technocratic forms of control indicate a softening of the ‘iron cage of bureaucracy’, as flexibility and degrees of freedom for organizational members are called for in this kind of organization. We contend that the structural cage, so to speak, at least appears to be less fixed and rigid at Big than is commonly associated with bureaucracy, thus avoiding some of the well-known pitfalls of the organizational form. However, more significantly, we claim that the interplay between technocratic and socio-ideological control at Big in reality also tightens the cage. Big’s iron cage might be softer and less restrictive, but it interacts with a mental cage of subjectivity, and the combined effects cover greater terrain, thus regulating and influencing a broad spectrum of organizational members’ activities, feelings, thinking, and self-understandings. The real test of whether the cage is tightened or loosened seems to depend on to what extent organizational members actually identify with the belief system. A crucial element in the mental cage is thus the degree of identification with the company and its career options. It may seem hard to accept that people are so easily influenced that they quickly and seemingly wholeheartedly accept a quite specific belief system and tie their identities so strongly with corporate membership and career steps. It should be borne in mind that the organizational members perceive the image of the company as positive and prestigious, which increases the inclination to identification (Dutton et al., 1994). However, it is more important to distinguish between the psychological and the sociological dimensions of a particular identification: respectively, internalization, and temporary identification with a group or a company. Social forces are continuously in operation and are very



important. They reinforce the encouragement and monitoring of a particular identity orientation and positioning. Technocratic control arrangements, and group orientations and expectations, provide strong pressures for people to adopt a social identity in a particular context. As so much of the work is group based, and there are intensive HRM arrangements for monitoring and evaluating people, the social pressure on identity is strong – even though identity is only indirectly accessible for regulation (Alvesson and Willmott, 2002). This is particularly significant as people work very long hours and the space for non-work related sources of identity confirmation is limited. The long working week is an effect of technocratic control, in particular careful monitoring of work progress, margins, and deadlines, but perhaps especially an expression of the work mentality that characterizes the company. (We recognize an element of tautology here: embryonic work identities bring with them an inclination to work long hours, which in turn maintains and reinforces fixed work identities.) In the case of Big, technocratic and socioideological control collaborates to saturate work contexts with specific identity material, thus achieving social penetration. As long as organizational members operate within the constraints of Big’s technocratic forms of control, monitored by superiors, peers and formal evaluation procedures, the psychological penetration of identification, although important for the individual, is less important from the organization’s point of view. To conclude, we have proposed an understanding of control in ‘modern bureaucracies’ or ‘post-bureaucracies’ as an interplay between a loosened form of structural iron cage and a fairly strict mental cage of subjectivity. Bureaucracy steps back from its strict, behavior-directive capacities and widens the space for behavioral discretion. At the same time, its loosened behavioral grip is redirected to involving stronger claims on people’s subjectivity: loosened behavioral control is compensated by tightened control of subjectivity. The nature and relative significance of the iron cage in at least some contemporary organizations need to be reconsidered. More attention needs to be paid to the interplay with a mental cage, tightening people’s orientations and allowing for a particular form of bureaucratically governed flexibility and conditional discretion. As with all identity production, everyday cultural processes influence the orientations that are crucial for these organizational features where slightly senior peers and superiors communicate a particular mentality to newcomers. However, our case study suggests – in contrast to much of the literature on corporate culture which views culture and bureaucracy as a different, alternative form of control (e.g. Ouchi, 1979) – that the mental cage is partly produced by organizational and HRM systems and procedures, and is thus to some extent an outcome of bureaucracy. The close interplay between two cages of control is thus an important subject of further study – at least in companies similar to the one we have studied, possibly also more generally.



Note The authors would like to thank David Courpasson, Jannis Kallinikos, Mike Reed, Maxine Robertson and EGOS 2001: ‘The odyssey of bureaucracy’ sub-theme participants for comments on earlier drafts of the article.

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50 Double Agents: Gendered Organizational Culture, Control and Resistance Beverley Hawkins

Introduction

I

n this article I explore the work experiences of employees working in a UK branch of ‘Spotlight Recruitment’, an international recruitment agency, to argue that employees can (mis)use corporate culture artefacts (symbols, rituals, myths and so on) as resources in their own cultural production. Individuals do not passively absorb managerial cultural control techniques; they actively interpret, reproduce and alter the meanings of such practices in ways that might not necessarily be in line with managerial goals, but which may be based upon the same, in this case gendered, cultural frame of reference as those goals. I present evidence to suggest that the corporate culture imposed by Spotlight’s management contains implicit and explicit gendered assumptions, but argue that consultants enact similar assumptions about men and women during resistant practices. I draw attention to the ambiguities and ambivalent outcomes that might result from the idea that corporate culture and resistance practices employ overlapping cultural resources. The article draws on literature within the sociology of work, organization theory and gender studies to explore gendered organizational cultures and the possibility for resisting corporate culture techniques. I then explore the research techniques used in the study and follow this with the ethnographic findings and analysis. This section examines the gendered corporate culture at Spotlight, and outlines three key ways in which the consultants engage Source: Sociology, 42(3) (2008): 418–435.



with this culture: defiance, parody and ritual. In the conclusion I make tentative suggestions about the implications of these practices for men and women, and draw briefly upon De Certeau (1984) to suggest how resistance to corporate culture might be theorized.

The Corporate Culture Critique: Effectiveness, Morality and Anthropology The use of symbols, rituals, language and myth (see Pettigrew, 1979) in so-called corporate culture initiatives was brought to mainstream attention by certain management ‘gurus’ in the 1980s, two of the most notable perhaps being Peters and Waterman (1982) and Deal and Kennedy (1982). Critical organization theorists have countered these efforts on moral grounds, regarding them as an attempt to remove alternative norms or ‘guiding values’ from organizational culture (Strangleman and Roberts, 1999; Willmott, 1993). Some have suggested that corporate culture serves to regulate workers’ sense of self, trapping them in a normative framework for thinking and feeling about work that borders on ‘nascent totalitarianism’ (Alvesson and Willmott, 2002; Ray, 1986; Willmott, 1993: 523). In response, anthropologists have suggested that exponents and critics of corporate culture initiatives make false assumptions in implying that culture can be successfully imposed upon members of a group. Instead, culture ‘emerges from the collective social interaction of groups and communities’ (Meek, 1988: 459) and does not necessarily focus on a shared value system (Smircich, 1983). In contrast, ‘corporate culture’ theories employ a narrow definition of culture which assumes that members of a culture share norms and beliefs that shape their behaviour, thereby placing individuals with conflicting value systems ‘outside culture’ (Meek, 1988: 458). An anthropologically sensitive perspective on culture allows for values and beliefs to be ‘incompletely shared’ by different sub-cultures within a ‘common frame of reference’ (Martin, 2002: 58). Whilst management has more control over cultural artefacts such as organizational symbols, logos and official mission statements than employees do themselves (Meek, 1988), culture is not static: it relies on the sensemaking activity of its members and is reproduced and renegotiated during their social interactions. This opens up the possibility that cultural resources and assumptions, traditions, stories and myths can be tools used by management and by workers, who might resist managers by subverting the values contained within their imposed corporate culture. Cultural artefacts can therefore be used by workers to express their affinity with an organization, but also to differentiate themselves as individuals (Munro, 1999).


Hawkins • Gendered Organizational Culture 285

On Gendering Organizational Culture Emerging from the interactions and power relationships performed by its members, then, a culture reflects, transforms and reproduces the symbolic orders and ways of thinking and doing invested in by these individuals. Such a perspective reflects theorizations of the masculinities inscribed in organizational cultures, where masculinity or masculine discourse, as argued by Kerfoot and Knights (1993), consists of a web of socially constructed assumptions and associations about the relative characteristics and practices of men and women. These organizational cultures may reflect a hierarchical gender binary where organizational processes and managerial styles often prioritize masculine discourses over feminine ones (Kerfoot and Knights, 1998; Knights and McCabe, 2001).1 Academic research has identified formalized attempts to impose a masculinist corporate culture on employees. For example, Hochschild’s (1983) work is an implicit consideration of the masculine discourses embedded in Delta Airline’s imposed corporate culture, as reflected in the uniforms worn by pilots and flight attendants, and in her concept of the emotional labour performed by female flight attendants. Also within the airline industry, Mills (1998) explores how British Airways developed a corporate culture infused with notions of mas culinity through corporate branding, recruitment practices and internal memo randa, which reinforced heterosexist notions of men and women. However, research has identified only very limited opportunities to resist hetero-normative corporate culture: Adkins (1992) and Casey (1995), for example, found that, in their respective case study organizations, women who refused to accept the culture either chose to leave or were removed from the organization. Yet an anthropological view of culture, explored above, suggests that culture can never be maintained in the way management intends.

The Possibility for and Ambiguity within Resistance of Corporate Culture Strangleman and Roberts (1999) express concerns that the more polemical arguments made by authors such as Willmott (1993) and Ray (1986), emphasizing the ‘totalizing’ nature of cultural control, have contributed to notions of workers as responding passively to organizational control processes, reflecting arguments (Ackroyd and Thompson, 1995) that recent organizational theorizing neglects the potential for workplace resistance. Yet this seeming absence of resistance to corporate culture might simply be a reflection of the ambiguities found within those more covert, vague practices which may not be experienced as a conscious attempt to overthrow



capitalism (Kondo, 1990; Strangleman and Roberts, 1999), but through which workers exercise an ambivalent (Casey, 1995), cynical (Fleming and Sewell, 2002,) or parodic (Hodgson, 2005; Hopfl, 2002) relationship with the organization and its values, or through which they vent their frustration and overcome the monotony of work (Burawoy, 1982). Tensions exist within sociology and cultural studies as to whether such vague practices constitute resistance: given that they appear not to be overtly or intentionally transformational, authors wonder whether these practices are better conceptualized as a survival strategy (Ortner, 1995: 175) than resistance, and question the theoretical value of ‘the discovery of resistance everywhere’ (Brown, 1996: 733). In response to this critique, I draw upon recent efforts to reconceptualize the notion of workplace resistance by post-structuralist feminists, who use Foucauldian theory to explore the possibility that resistance might encompass not only visible challenges and changes to an established social order, but also the efforts of individuals as they struggle to cope within an existing narrative (Thomas and Davies, 2005; see also Knights and McCabe, 2000). Indeed, this perspective puts forward a view shared by De Certeau (1984) that there is no pure place where resistance can occur outside such narratives. The disciplinary mechanism through which corporate culture operates must invoke the same fractured framework of assumptions that informs the ways in which individuals negotiate the possibilities for challenging this mechanism. Following Ortner (1995) then, a sanitized site for resistance remains elusive, but I retain the concept of resistance here because it highlights ‘the presence and play of power’ in social activities and relationships (1995: 175). This understanding of resistance problematizes the long-accepted control–resistance dualism by suggesting that what orthodox labour process analysts term control and resistance are both the effects of ‘power in action’ (Thomas and Davies, 2005: 733). In this sense, control and resistance are not necessarily fundamentally opposed, but both conditioned by the existing discourses forming the truth regimes which frame individuals’ lives and delimit the possible ways of thinking and doing (Foucault, 1990). The practices of individuals are shot through with these discourses so that they act as a mechanism for regulating conduct, but also contain the potential for resignifying meanings associated with performances (Butler, 1999). The potential for resignification, Thomas and Davies argue (2005), occurs as individuals negotiate the fractures and tensions which occur at the intersections of discourses such as those relating to organizations and gender. In this way, the practice of control and resistance occurs not just through the contextualized acts and behaviours of individuals as they engage with each other socially, but also, relatedly, within the conceptualizations of, and meanings given to, ‘work’ and ‘gender’, in which this conduct is steeped (Thomas and Davies, 2005).



Empirical research reveals that the social interactions that constitute resistance practices are as equally as informed by discourses about men and women as are certain corporate cultures imposed on workers by management. For example, Pollert (1981) shows how women factory workers engaged in feminine rituals, such as discussions about their love lives and fantasies about up-coming weddings, which helped them to cope with their boring work. However, they were equally capable of indulging in sexualized, ‘masculine’ banter, employed subversively to ridicule their managers in a way similar to the resistance or coping strategies Collinson (1992) found amongst male shopfloor workers. To conclude this section, I should make clear that by exploring the gender in resistance practices I do not suggest that men always enact a ‘male’ form of resistance, and that women perform a separate ‘female’ form. When referring to the gender in resistance, I intend simply to point out how certain behaviours are more often associated in our society with one gender or another. The interactions I explore in my analysis therefore contain comments made by men and women consultants, and my aim is simply to point out how these practices are associated more often in our society with one gender or another, rather than to reify commonsense assumptions about how men and women ‘do gender’.

Methodology I draw my argument from an ethnographic investigation into the lived experi ences of recruitment consultants working in a branch of ‘Spotlight Recruitment’, an international recruitment agency. Two teams of consultants, DriveTeam and AdminTeam, recruited permanent and temporary staff for the transport (haulage) and commercial (office-based) industries respectively. In 2004 I was employed as a member of DriveTeam on a full-time, temporary basis. Since all the consultants were often seen writing at their desks, I was able to write brief fieldnotes in the office without attracting undue attention. These I extended at lunch breaks and then fully wrote up at home in the evenings, organizing them into emergent themes (Eisenhardt, 1989), including, inter alia, acts of resistant or ‘committed’ behaviour, instances which drew upon notions of gender or sexuality, examples of workplace humour and gossip, and references to Spotlight’s ‘imposed’ corporate culture. I also noted in detail the consultants’ work processes, drawing data from my involvement in team meetings, informal team talk and discussions with organizational clients or candidates looking for work. Consent for the research was granted by all participants and out of respect for the identity of all these individuals, their names have been substituted by pseudonyms and all efforts made to prevent the identification of the organization, its location and its employees, in line with British Sociological Association (2002) guidelines.



Although I was officially employed at Spotlight for several weeks, my contact with the branch for research purposes continued until 2007, during which time I conducted in-depth, semi-structured recorded interviews on site with both team leaders and with almost all the employees working at the branch. Additional informal meetings with the participants continued throughout the analysis and writing process and offered opportunities for countless informal discussions, ranging from the passing-on of office gossip to discussion over themes covered in taped interviews, such as sales targets. My intention has been to attempt an on-going dialogue concerning the participants’ consent (see Sin, 2005) and the fieldwork analysis (Bartunek, 1994). In this article I aim to build on existing theory (Eisenhardt, 1989) on cultural control and resistance. I make no claims about the objectivity, reliability or validity of ethnography or of case study research following Van Maanen’s (1979) suggestion that fiction is a vital part of ethnographic texts, and that this story-telling is crucial to the ability of ethnographic texts to convince (Gibb Dyer Jr and Wilkins, 1991). The data I present here are drawn from my perspective as a female ‘temp’ in a team dominated by male consultants amongst whom I often felt uncomfortable, and where I was acutely aware of the pressures to conform to certain gendered organizational values. Indeed, perhaps writing fieldnotes was my own attempt to resist, as well as cope within, a corporate culture that challenged my sense of self. I have tried to reflect on this in the field and during the interwoven processes of analysing data and writing this paper, in line with notions of ethnography as a quest to understand my own experiences as well as those of others in the field (Humphreys et al., 2003), and following widespread, repeated calls for more profound reflexivity in ethnographic research (Clifford and Marcus, 1986). Indeed, it would perhaps be appropriate here to point out that the writing of this paper was interspersed (and perhaps supported) by actions on my part that in the field I would recognize as drawing upon assumptions about gender and femininity (time-wasting by shopping online for a pretty dress or pair of shoes, for example).

Spotlight Recruitment: The Context of Cultural Control In this section I provide some contextual details about Spotlight. I then continue by exploring the values which the organization wished its employees to embody, and demonstrate how they contain implicit discourses that relate to how individuals think about men and masculinity in everyday life (see Collinson and Hearn, 1994; Kerfoot and Knights, 1993). The gendered division of labour between recruitment teams was marked. AdminTeam, who recruited administrative staff for the commercial industries, was an all-female team consisting of five consultants and a team leader. This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.


DriveTeam outsourced drivers to transport industry clients and distribution organizations, and, in common with transport industry norms, the majority of consultants were male. The only female members were the team leader and me, a temp. In interviews the consultants impressed on me that they also perceived a vertical gendered segregation of the workforce in that the majority of Spotlight’s consultants and most team leaders were women, yet senior positions such as area/division manager were overwhelmingly occupied by men. Working at Spotlight was considered by all to be frenetic and stressful. As well as tending to the ever-changing staffing requirements of their existing clients, all Spotlight consultants were expected to actively seek out new business by hunting for new clients. These demands were objectified in the form of a multitude of monthly and weekly sales targets, including the number of new clients on the branch’s books and, crucially, new ‘numbers out’ – the numbers of new staff which Spotlight had sent out to work for their clients. Individual performance targets were linked to team-based bonuses, so that we experienced significant moral pressure to live up to the organization’s sales-making goals, in order to avoid letting down our colleagues.

Spotlight’s Corporate Culture Statements The sales-related aspect of the consultants’ work, which was the focus of the battery of targets mentioned above, was emphasized in the company’s vision statement, which senior management forced all branches to display on prominent notice boards throughout the offices: Our SALES culture: When everyone in Spotlight has a passion for growth through understanding and engaging in actions and behaviours that continuously generate profitable growth for our business.

This vision statement was accompanied by a list of eight questions designed to remind consultants exactly which ‘actions and behaviours’ were required. The questions included ‘have you made Spotlight money today?’ and ‘have you made all your sales calls today?’ and were printed onto a small laminated card, and pinned to each consultant’s computer monitor. The questions prioritize ‘actions and behaviours’ which are related to meeting targets, hunting down and generating new business. None of the reminders considers the teambased, participative process by which the consultants go about their work. Spotlight’s corporate culture is a results-oriented ‘sales culture’, demanding ‘actions’ which focus on the bottom line. Other aspects of the consultants’ work, which might be related to commonsense descriptions of femininity, and which might represent an alternative way of interpreting the ‘sales culture’ statement, are marginalized by the reminder questions. The processes of nurturing existing client relationships and providing good customer



service to both those looking for work and those looking for staff appear to be less relevant to Spotlight’s corporate culture. Such an attempt to determine which values belong to Spotlight’s work culture, and which do not, recalls Willmott’s (1993) argument that corporate culture aims to provide employees with a single acceptable normative framework around which they can construct their identity in line with the goals of the organization. I suggest here that the focus on sales, profits and results is steeped in the masculine discourses that typify the sales industry (Hodgson, 2003; Leidner, 1991), characterized by a heroic, pro-active desire to hunt down new leads. This discourse has much in common with the discourse of entrepreneurialism (Collinson and Hearn, 1994; Gherardi, 1995), which is argued to be masculinist because it relates to commonsense ways of thinking about men and men’s practices as being proactive, results-focused and individualistic. Although women can and do invest in such discourses, they are often not perceived to do so because these behaviours do not fit with everyday perceptions of femininity (see Kerfoot and Knights, 1993). The competition for ‘results’ between sales teams, specifically linked to dis courses of masculinity by others (Hodgson, 2003; Leidner, 1991), was harnessed by Spotlight in one of their most forceful corporate culture initiatives, an event known as the Sales Day, which forms the focus of the coming section.

Organizational Bond-Age? James Bond/Miss Moneypenny Templates Designed by Management, Embodied by Workers On the Sales Day, coordinated four times a year (now more often) in every Spotlight branch worldwide, teams compete to make as many sales (fill as many vacancies and attract as many new clients) as possible. The sales figures for each team are relayed to branches globally via Spotlight’s intranet. The Sales Days have acquired a legendary status, and in the case study branch are the subject of much competitive planning and discussion amongst and between AdminTeam and DriveTeam, in which I was often involved. For the Sales Day occurring during my third week at Spotlight, a fancydress theme was chosen by senior management, which, Nicki suggests, is intended to reflect the purpose of the Sales Day: . . . [the theme is intended] to make people think a little bit more about what they have to achieve . . . the costumes, what they’re wearing, how they act, the day itself, just to give it a bit more of an edge . . . (Nicki, team leader, AdminTeam, in interview)

Senior managers chose the theme of ‘James Bond and Miss Moneypenny’, thereby forcing limited, stereotypical gender identities on Spotlight’s employees. These characters are taken from Ian Fleming’s series of novels about fictional spy James Bond, and became iconic figures through the



21 internationally screened films in the James Bond film franchise. All the male consultants at Spotlight were expected to adopt the role of secret agent James Bond: active, autonomous, ruthlessly masculine and irresistible hero, always present at the centre of the action, and ‘representative of the virtues of Western Capitalism triumphing over . . . Eastern Communism’ (Bennett and Woollacott, 2003: 16). By living out this template during the Sales Day, male teamworkers could demonstrate core team values of autonomy, proactive behaviour and heroism. However, Spotlight’s management expected female teamworkers, including Nicki and Anna, the team leaders, to dress and act in the character of Miss Moneypenny, whose more ambiguous, marginal role in the Bond narrative (Brabazon, 2003), performing low status back-office work to facilitate Bond’s heroic actions, hardly reflects the values prioritized by Spotlight in their ‘sales culture’. These mythical templates impact on the gendered power relations in three ways. First, they reify the intended team values as masculine attributes, with which women might find it hard to comply, should they adopt the espoused feminine role. Miss Moneypenny’s marginal role contradicts the heroic, salesfocused organizational values which all consultants are expected to embody. Second, the hierarchical gender binary is reified (see Knights and Kerfoot, 2004) through the conferment of one primary (male) and one secondary (female) gender stereotype onto Spotlight employees. Miss Moneypenny’s static, desk-bound character emphasizes the masculine-ness of Bond: her supportive capacity reinforces his role as ‘agent’; her marginal presence highlights his centrality. The contrast between Moneypenny and Bond is significant because it accentuates the supposed ability of men – and inability of women – to uphold core values. Third, the Bond/Moneypenny theme redivided the workforce along gender, rather than team lines, and legitimized and rationalized a hierarchical gendered division of labour. The social norm of male-dominated organization was reasserted in that the female team leaders also had to enact the subordinate Moneypenny role. Teams were inspired to translate the theme into objectified dress and behaviour codes and the fortnight preceding the Sales Day was taken up with discussions about what each employee should wear. Many male and female consultants trawled the town centre enthusiastically together during their lunch hours, hunting for accessories, which they paid for out of their own pockets. They bought male consultants replica guns and knives to match their ‘Bond’ dinner suits, and female consultants (including myself) were adorned with tortoiseshell sunglasses and a pink scarf tied in a ‘pussycat’ bow. Presenting our new uniform in the form of a gift made it very difficult for us to decline to wear it, and again called upon a sense of duty to enact imported identities for the sake of the team. The Bond/Moneypenny theme was not common to every Sales Day. My emphasis on the theme in this section does not imply that it was an overwhelming feature of Spotlight’s imposed corporate culture (although



significantly it does reflect masculinist values within that culture), but is justified by the emphasis given to the Bond/Moneypenny roles by the consultants themselves, on the Sales Day and for many weeks afterwards. In what follows I highlight two ways in which this theme was harnessed, negotiated and perpetuated by consultants in their attempts to position themselves in relation to the gender in corporate culture.

Outright Defiance: ‘Wimping Out’ on the Team The Bond/Moneypenny theme tries to locate men’s and women’s bodies as resources for demonstrating commitment to corporate values. Certainly, not all Spotlight consultants were willing to enact these stereotypical identities. Yet individual attempts to counter the gender stereotypes in the corporate culture were often opposed by other consultants. The following extract reveals how one consultant’s attempt to resist gendered corporate culture was thwarted by a team member. The interaction starts with Louise quietly voicing her reluctance to wear the fishnet tights which her team-mates deem suitable Moneypenny attire: Louise: [whispering] oh God, you’d never catch me in fishnet tights . . . it’s just not me . . . Kate: you aren’t going to wimp out on us are you? Come on, do it for us . . . everyone else is going to [wear them]! (AdminTeam consultants, recorded in fieldnotes)

The extract demonstrates that social interactions were crucial to ensuring that all workers conformed to the designated gender roles. Kate calls on Louise’s sense of moral responsibility to her team (‘do it for us’), to comply with the rules about embodying the Spotlight sales culture. By refusing to wear fishnet tights, Louise is perceived as letting the team down. Ironically, she is accused of ‘wimping out’, of not being ‘man’ enough to perform the required feminine stereotype. In the face of this opposition, Louise agreed to wear the tights, but travelled to work on a much earlier bus to avoid meeting anyone she knew. As well as revealing Louise’s negotiations with team members over how to embody corporate culture, Louise’s confrontation with, and attempt to resist, the corporate culture might also demonstrate an internalized negotiation in which she reaches a compromise by altering her bus route, to avoid presenting to others a self-image with which she is uncomfortable. The ambiguity in Louise’s subtle resistance reveals itself in that her early arrival at work ironically chimes with the masculinist need to ‘put in the hours’ (the words used by several consultants during interviews) to show commitment to Spotlight. While Nicki’s quote above suggests she considers that the Bond/Moneypenny theme reflects Spotlight’s organizational values and goals, consultants



also used it to inform instances where they deviated from Spotlight’s insistence on ‘generating profitable growth for our business’. For example, some employees left the office during work time to hunt down appropriate costume accessories. Yet these instances of resistance were not countered by other team members: they were seen as legitimate because they helped the consultants portray the roles set out for them by senior management, and served to heighten the parodic intensity of their performances. This means of negotiating gender identities and corporate culture was embraced by all the consultants.

Embracing Bond-Age? The Pleasure of Parody While Louise’s outright rejection of her Moneypenny role was unacceptable to the team, negotiation of these templates through parody and exaggerated shock at the enactment of Bond/Moneypenny by others was enthusiastically adopted. On the morning of the Sales Day, I watched the following exchange: Jackie: [watches Mike enter the office] Aaaghh! Ha ha ha, look it’s Mike! Everyone look! Mike, you look ridiculous! Mike: [walks sheepishly to his desk, sits down on his swivel chair, and then swivels around, pulling a fake gun out of the waistband of his trousers, and says drily] Bang. (Interaction between consultants, recorded in fieldnotes)

The Bond films have sparked ‘spoof’ or comedy versions of the spy/agent nar rative, notably the ‘Austin Powers’ films. Butler points out that parodic versions of masculinity and femininity have the potential to reveal the groundlessness of socially constructed gender norms, placing the ‘reality’ of gender ‘into crisis’ (1999: xxiii). In the above interaction, Jackie’s hoots of laughter at Mike’s entrance, and Mike’s ironic re-enactment of the iconic starting sequence to the Bond movies are expressions of disbelief at the ‘ridiculous’-ness of the very idea of being told to wear fancy dress by senior management. Whilst there is not space here for a fuller discussion of the resignifying potential of parody, Hodgson (2005) and Hopfl (2002) have explored the pos sibility for parody to subvert other normative processes (project management and emotional labour, respectively) within organizations. Suffice to say here that the camp, outrageous performances of Bond and Moneypenny may have allowed consultants to articulate a (not necessarily conscious) rejection of the more subtle heteronormative processes which made this choice of theme, both with its depiction of Bond as an ‘agent’ of capitalism, and its explicitly stereotypical gendered characters, acceptable in Spotlight’s corporate culture. The consultants’ continuing use of the theme to punctuate office life, long after the Sales Day was over, often harnessed the potential they saw for parody and subversion within the narrative. Several weeks after the event, the



consultants continued to use the Bond narrative as a means of acting out at work. They wasted time by poring over the photos of Spotlight’s Bonds and Moneypennys posted on the intranet: cue laughter and innumerable references to ‘is that a gun in your pocket?’ and ‘Pussy Galore’ (one of the female characters in the Bond book and film Goldfinger). The consultants stashed their plastic guns and knives in desk drawers, and several times a week these were whipped out and brandished in front of team-mates (and the occasional unsuspecting candidate who arrived looking for work), to appreciative whistles of the ‘Bond’ theme tune. The above vignettes highlight the ways in which negotiating culture is a collaborative process in which group loyalty plays a part. Overt attempts to defy gender stereotypes failed because they were rejected by team-mates, but ironic parodies of the gender templates were embraced and perpetuated long after the Sales Day was over. In the following section I highlight two examples of collaborative rituals, also imbued with gendered assumptions, which helped consultants escape the monotony of work. These instances serve to highlight further ambiguities within the efforts of consultants to embody and resist corporate culture messages, which arise from the gendered assumptions common to corporate culture and ‘time-wasting’ at work.

Gendered Rituals: A Resource for Resistance and Ambiguity The consultants intersperse periods of frantic work with rituals or ‘games’ (Burawoy, 1982), which alleviate the pressure of work, and through which workplace friendships and bonds are articulated. Many such rituals focus around fashion and clothes. New dresses, shoes, shirts and so on are brought into the office for colleagues’ appraisal, and the consultants gather in clusters around these items, touching them, rating them on their quality or value for money, and pondering the likelihood of their appealing to potential admirers. In the following conversation which took place in work time, Anna and Nicki, the two team leaders, and Kate, Phil and I, three consultants, are discussing Anna’s proposed outfit for an up-coming Spotlight dinner dance which senior managers are also attending: Anna: Do you like my shoes [author’s name]? [Extends her feet one by one] Do you think they’ll match my dress? Hey everyone, look at my dress, do you think it’ll be ok for the do on Thursday? [Holds an ankle-length, black, strapless dress against herself and twirls around, walking up and down the office] Nicki: Ohh, yeah, it looks lovely . . . Phil: [wolf whistles at Anna] Wow! Anna: How smart do you think we have to be? Nicki: Well, it’s black tie for the men. Ben [Area Manager] says be as smart as you can be, we’ve got to make an impression! Louise: That’s a proper ‘show your boobs off’ dress!



Anna: No, they’ll be covered; look . . . [she re-adjusts the dress and lifts up her chin to show off her neck] I’ve got a diamante choker to match. (Interaction between consultants, recorded in fieldnotes)

Rituals like this remind me of similar work avoidance tactics noted by Pollert (1981) and Kondo (1990) in that they harness what are considered to be ‘feminine rituals’ to interrupt the monotony of the consultants’ working day. They may actually improve performance by acting as team-building exercises which help the consultants to bond and form more effective working groups. Yet consultants also see interactions like this as part of their job because they are aligned with the masculinism within Spotlight’s corporate culture. The extract reveals how the consultants invest in discourses which objectify women’s appearance. Anna is concerned to ‘make an impression’ by appearing ‘smart’ but regulates her performance of femininity by not revealing too much of her body. The consultants are ‘resisting’ in that they are not chasing sales targets or enacting any of the other behaviours specified by Spotlight’s senior managers as being part of the sales culture. Nonetheless this ritual demonstrates how the consultants are keen to impress managers in other ways; specifically, by embodying the gendered assumptions in which the corporate culture is steeped. In comparison, the following extract shows how female consultants can participate in collaborative ‘resistance’ whilst holding stereotypical gendered assumptions at a distance. Many consultants pass the time at work by looking out of the first floor office windows onto the High Street below, and commenting on the relative attractiveness of passing shoppers. In the following extract, consultants are discussing the physical merits of a female police officer they have seen outside: Phil: [looking out of the window] Oi Rob, have you seen that policewoman down there? She’s tasty! Rob: [looks out of his window] Phwoarr . . . cor, look at that . . .very tidy . . . [stands up and walks over to the window where Phil is standing] Kate: [joins Rob and Phil at the window] ooh and look she’s pushing out her boobs for you! Rob: Mmmmm! That’s part of the recruitment game! You’ve gotta be a lech . . . (Interaction between consultants, recorded in fieldnotes)

This interaction continues for some 20 minutes before the consultants return to their desks. Clearly, they are not engaging in ‘actions and behaviours that continuously generate profitable growth for our business’ as defined by the reminder questions accompanying the Sales Culture statement. They are, however, investing once again in the same assumptions about men being conquering and aggressive which equally apply to the image of the proactive,



breadwinning salesman. This, to the extent that Rob articulates about objectifying women in this way, is, for him, ‘part of the recruitment game’. Rob’s comments demonstrate how the consultants are able to negotiate space for resistance within their imposed corporate culture by applying its values to their own ends. For the women consultants, however, the implications of the gendered rituals described above are of course not without their own ambiguities. Such practices may mean that corporate culture is not a totalitarian regime, but one that employees can negotiate and in which the possibility for resistance remains. However, these interactions may also have the effect of reinforcing women’s subordinate position at Spotlight (at least in the informal social hierarchy) and perhaps in a wider societal context, because they prioritize values which are considered to be ‘masculine’. Interestingly though, Kate’s remark (‘ooh and look, she’s pushing out her boobs for you!’) suggests a knowing irony and awareness of the male gaze. By participating in this discussion about another woman, Kate engages in a col laborative process of ‘resisting’ the tedium of work, but distances herself (for this moment) from the gaze of her fellow consultants. By using the words ‘pushing out her boobs for you’, Kate actively dissociates herself from the position of gazing participant, leaving her momentarily in an ambiguous alternative space, in which she acts as observer of the male gaze, rather than object. Subtle acts of resistance like Kate’s are not separate from Spotlight’s corporate culture messages – indeed perhaps the seeds of such resistant practices may also be found within the ‘Bond theme’ chosen by Spotlight’s senior management. Certainly, a similar sense of irony and knowing is manifest in Miss Moneypenny’s later guises (Brabazon, 2003). While Miss Moneypenny contradicts the values espoused in Spotlight’s corporate culture messages, her role in later films as unattainable female ‘other’, and as wry commentator on Bond’s sexual shenanigans with interchangeable Bond ‘girls’, might characterize the opportunities which women like Kate take up to distance themselves from the subject/object dyad. Such possibilities for ‘distance’ (Collinson, 1992) offered by the Bond/Moneypenny templates offer a further reason why the consultants took up this narrative so enthusiastically and repeatedly.

Concluding Discussion: Playing the Recruitment Game This article has sought to articulate how Spotlight consultants negotiate their management-imposed corporate culture through outright defiance, parody and ritual, to varying effect. I highlight some of the nuances and subtleties within these practices which are hidden by the term ‘resistance’. In particular, workplace relationships and loyalties can affect the tactics chosen by



individuals and groups at work. The resistant activities of groups and individuals can stand in opposition to each other, as well as to the aims of management. The most overt and individual form of resistance shown here, defiance, is demonstrated by Louise’s attempt to avoid wearing fishnet tights as ‘Miss Moneypenny’. Her intention is thwarted, not by senior managers, but by her team-mates because it runs counter to their efforts to pursue an alternative tactic: collaboratively enacting parodic versions of Bond/Moneypenny. These gender templates, intended for a one-day sales event, are harnessed repeatedly by consultants as a means of ridiculing both gender stereotyping and the absurdity of management attempts at identity regulation. While Spotlight’s corporate culture is steeped in gendered assumptions, I also argue that the consultants often draw on everyday ways of thinking about masculinity and femininity during collective rituals which could be classed as resistance, given that they contravene the focus on ‘actions and behaviours which continuously generate growth for our business’ intended by Spotlight’s sales culture statement and specified by the accompanying reminder questions. Consistently used to enliven the working day, the rituals invoke the gendered assumptions so entrenched in the corporate culture that Rob, a consultant, suggests that they are intrinsic to ‘the recruitment game’. I argue that one further source of ambiguity within resistance and control stems from the common assumptions about ‘ways of being’ upon which both these practices draw. The masculinist assumptions within Spotlight’s corporate culture may act as a resource for the consultants to draw upon during their ‘recruitment games’, but, for women at least, gendered rituals offer at best limited possibilities for countering an organizational culture that is itself sexist. However, within these rituals women can distance themselves from the gendered assumptions common to corporate culture and resistance: Kate’s remarks during the people-watching ritual place her briefly in an alternative role of ‘knowing observer’ and reflect Miss Moneypenny’s ironic remarks in later Bond films. This position offers Kate a reprieve from the passive feminine stereotype implicated by the time-wasting ritual about objectifying women, in which she participates. Rob’s comment about ‘the recruitment game’ recalls Burawoy’s (1982) exploration of how factory workers’ ambiguous ‘games’ enabled the continua tion of exploitative capitalist employment relations. Similarly, the Spotlight consultants’ activities are not organized, conscious efforts to overthrow an oppressive management regime or gendered power relations, and may simply serve to make life more bearable in a hectic, customer-facing sales role. They also re-establish team building processes which ultimately support the ‘sales culture’ but which are neglected by Spotlight’s senior management in the corporate culture reminder questions, which focus on the outcomes (making sales, achieving targets), rather than the process of doing recruitment



consultancy. The rituals and games reveal that the consultants can find ways to subvert the pressure to continuously perform Spotlight’s core values, by re-appropriating these values and incorporating them into a frame of reference for their own ends. As De Certeau (1984) suggests, games, and accounts and stories about particular games, have the effect of outlining the possible alternative moves and tactics within an imposed set of circumstances. Through these games, perhaps, the consultants mobilize their responses to a corporate brand which they are expected to ‘live’, in a way which does not necessarily reflect the response which Spotlight management expects or intends. This game- playing does not have to involve overturning ‘the rules of the game’, the web of normative assumptions around which perceptions of masculinity and femininity, or capitalist work organization, are embodied and enacted. However, the notion of game-playing demonstrates the availability of different creative ‘moves’ which do not deliberately contravene this framework, but which offer the potential for resistance within it. It follows that the use in corporate culturism of assumptions, symbols, images and narratives from everyday life and popular culture to evoke senti ments in employees might also be its downfall. As Knights and McCabe (2001) have argued, masculine discourses are not fully controllable at work because they also exist outside the organization. At Spotlight, narratives used for cultural control are not fully the property of the organization and therefore can never be entirely controlled within it, because they also have meanings outside of it. When the consultants negotiate corporate culture initiatives, they do so in a context which expands beyond the confines of organizational walls. The spaces exist, I suggest in conclusion, for both men and women to negotiate corporate culture by drawing on its cultural (in this case, gendered) resources in alternative ways. The danger remains, though, that when they continue to reproduce existing gender hierarchies, such resources used in resistant practices may equally reinforce existing power relations between men and women at work and beyond.

Acknowledgements The author is indebted to Matthew Brannan, Mihaela Keleman, Darren McCabe, Nick Rumens and the Sociology editors and referees for their thoughts on previous drafts of this article.

Notes 1. Recently the value of ‘masculinity’ conceptualizations been problematized by claims (see Fournier and Smith, 2006) that the separation of beliefs, values and behaviours into ‘masculinities’ and ‘femininities’ reverts to essentialist notions of doing gender. This critique deserves more attention than can be given space here, but whilst I acknowledge



these tensions, I suggest that there might be political grounds within feminist research for retaining a concept which allows us to discuss actions and behaviours from which women have historically been marginalized, whilst keeping these actions separate from the category of ‘men’. This is important because not all men, and many women, also participate in such practices.

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51 Sexuality, Power and Resistance in the Workplace Peter Fleming

W

orkplace sexuality has been the focus of some lively discussion in organization studies over the last 20 years or so. While some workplaces are devoted explicitly to the commodification of sex via prostitution, pornography, adult entertainment, marketing, and so forth (Brewis and Linstead 2000), mainstream workplaces too are now recognized to have an important sexual component (Burrell 1984; Mills and Tancred 1992; Kakabadse and Kakabadse 2004). Much of the literature suggests that sexuality, like gender and power, widely imbues organizational life, as Pringle (1990) vividly argues: ‘Far from being marginal to the workplace, sexuality is everywhere. It is alluded to in dress and self-presentation, in jokes and gossip, looks and flirtations, secret affairs and dalliances, in fantasy, and in the range of coercive behaviours that we now call sexual harassment.’ (Pringle 1990: 162)

The hyperbole here is understandable, given the dearth of research on sex and work that has characterized mainstream organization theory (Brewis and Linstead 2000; Brewis 2005). Following Burrell’s (1984) landmark analysis of sex and organization, a good deal of the discussion has been couched in terms of power, control and resistance. And it is here that ambivalence persists regarding the political significance of workplace sexuality. On the one hand, organizations are considered formally desexualized spheres in which




management have historically attempted to expunge erotic and romantic relations (Weber 1948; Beynon 1980; Burrell 1984, 1992). This is evident with the continuing citation of sexual misconduct in dismissal cases in the US, UK and elsewhere (Kakabadse and Kakabadse 2004). Wal-Mart’s recent attempt to legally ban office romances in Germany is indicative of this trend. In this context, sexuality becomes a refreshingly radical gesture, since it ‘forever grants the possibility of breaking a host of rules of organizational life: to not remain in organizational role, to be public in private, to be personal, and so on’ (Hearn and Parkin 1995: 7). On the other hand, a counter-argument is evident. It suggests that there is little guarantee re-eroticization will result in new workplace freedoms. Commenting on Burrell’s (1992) discussion of de Sade, Brewis and Grey (1994) maintain that the call to emancipate organizational sexuality may actually rereinforce pre-existing power relations apropos chauvinism, sexual harassment and even sadistic attacks. Supporting this argument is a small but promising line of scholarship that examines how certain expressions of sexuality are sanctioned and utilized by management in nominally non-sexual employment situations (Hall 1993; Abbott and Tyler 1998). It indicates that organizations are not the ascetic forums they appeared to be and certain types of sexuality might facilitate masculine hierarchy, the consumption experience and control. This paper engages with this conceptual tension by proposing that organizational sexuality is neither strictly resistance nor control, but a complex and multi-levelled admixture of both. It reports on an empirical study of a call centre that sanctioned the expression of sexuality among employees. Under the auspices of a ‘culture of fun’ that celebrated lifestyle and ‘being yourself’, sexuality was part of a general discourse aiming to engender a more industrious climate. While sex was clearly a control mechanism, the concomitant acceptance of gay identities allowed some to challenge the heterosexism found in other workplaces (Cockburn 1991; Parker 2002; Raeburn 2004). Moreover, a number of employees resisted the sexualized culture via a cynical attitude, part of which involved homophobic views dismissing gay males as distastefully conformist. Given this complex confluence in which sexuality is simultaneously an aspect of control (management), an expression of empowerment (gay males) and an object of derision (homophobic employees), where exactly does power end and resistance begin? To untangle this nexus, the paper proposes a multilevelled understanding of power and resistance in which struggles around sexuality have manifold consequences. Just as power is capillary and de-centred, defiance too has multi-dimensional effects. Resistance might undermine the regulation of sexuality on one level, but reproduce the capitalist wage-labour relation on another. Or, successful resistance to an imposed sexuality might sustain the subordination of yet another type of sexual identity, and so on. It is argued that Nancy Fraser’s (1995, 1996) analysis of the politics of recognition and


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redistribution is particularly helpful for mapping the multilevelled effects of organizational sexuality. In developing this approach, the paper aims to contribute to research by clarifying how organizational sex, power and resistance intersect today. The paper is ordered in the following way. First, I discuss the aforementioned tension in the literature concerning sexuality as control and resistance. Then the empirical study is introduced. The ensuing discussion develops a framework for interpreting the complex and overlapping power/resistance relationships that characterize this organization. The paper concludes by discussing the normative alliances of the critical researcher and the difficulties that arise when sexuality and resistance are de-romanticized.

Sexuality, Power and Resistance in Organizations According to Hearn and Parkin (2001), a major catalyst that raised the profile of workplace sexuality in organization studies was the naming of sexual harassment in the mid-1970s. This sparked some important research highlighting the latent presence of sex in ostensibly formal organizations (see Korda 1972; Quinn 1977; Gutek and Morasch 1982; Gutek 1985). Feminist criticism then underscored the dominance of masculinity and the subordination of women’s sexualities in paid and unpaid labour (Cockburn 1983; Waring 1989). This concern resonated with studies of chauvinist masculinity in working-class counter-cultures (Willis 1979; Collinson 1988). In the mid1980s and the 1990s the growing popularity of Foucault’s (1979, 1980) analysis of bio-power and sexuality gave impetus to the topic in organization studies (Burrell 1984; Brewis and Grey 1994; Hassard et al. 2000). This line of inquiry emphasized the important connections between sex and everyday power relations at work. Positioning organizational sexuality and eroticism within a political frame redefines them as socially and historically constituted experiences. Broader trends in social theory have been useful for establishing this claim. Deleuze and Guattari (1977), Foucault (1979) and Butler (1990, 1993) among others de-naturalized sexuality, eschewing both conservative and radical approaches that view it as a fixed biological fact. Just as gender (what makes us ‘man’ or ‘woman’) is enacted rather than pre-given (Butler 1993), sexuality is sensed, expressed and interpreted within very specific socio-political conditions. Burrell and Hearn (1990) rightly argue that there is still much to be contested about this reading of sexuality, the body and desire (also see Casey 2000). For sure, post-modern theory has been criticized for its blasé dismissal of ‘strategic’ essentialisms (Spivak 1996; Eagleton 1996). But irrespective of the ontology of sexuality, important for us is the contention that sex and gender are closely implicated in the political networks of the employment relationship (Trethewey 1999). As Hearn and Parkin (1995) have pointed



out, sexuality and gender are entwined through the sexualization of bodies in broader cultural flows (also see Tyler 2004). Thus it is difficult to speak of gender today without reference to sexuality and vice versa. This political understanding of sexuality implies that it is inter alia a site of control and resistance. Our conceptualizations of the control/resistance couplet will determine how we observe it unfolding at the level of sexuality in organizational settings. Burrell (1984) argued that orthodox Marxism is limiting here because it tends to analytically privilege dramatic and confrontational forms of struggle that coalesce around the labour – capital divide (c.f. Edwards 1979). Some aspects of organizational sexuality can certainly be understood from this perspective; but it relies on a Newtonian metaphor of primary action and reaction that downplays the often contradictory and ambiguous status of power/resistance relations (also see Kondo 1990; Ackroyd and Thompson 1999; Thomas and Davies 2005). With some tentativeness, Burrell (1984) draws on Foucault (1979, 1980) to argue that if power relations are diffuse and corporeal, then resistance too must imply ‘fluidity, interpenetration and reversals. It is a processual notion suggesting ambiguity and flux’ (Burrell 1984: 102). Here resistance is always contaminated by the very power it is contesting and cannot be reduced to a single motivating force. One interesting implication of this stance is that it often makes for tricky empirical observation because ‘when looking at power relationships in organizational contexts it is difficult to recognize who is resisting what control emanating from what direction’ (Burrell 1984: 100, also see Collinson 1992). Relevant for us is the conceptual tension evident in this research area regarding how sexuality is managed and the kinds of resistance it may engender.

Organizations as Desexualized Spheres A significant avenue of research concludes that organizations have generally suppressed sexuality because it interferes with the axioms of modern work. The proposition here is that capitalist organizations have historically privileged instrumental rationality as a dominant discourse. With the creation of a spatial and symbolic boundary between work and home, labour and leisure, and the public and private in industrialized economies, sex was increasingly marginalized as an inappropriate activity. It still obviously persisted in the form of flirtation, humour, affairs, harassment and games, but from management’s point of view sex is treated as a serious misuse of company time. This argument carries considerable weight, given the historical data presented by Weber (1948) and E. P. Thompson (1967) regarding rationalization more generally. Weber’s classic dissection of administrative bureaucracy identified a process of ‘eliminating from official business love, hatred and all purely personal, irrational, and emotional elements’ (Weber, 1948: 216). Thompson



(1967) too argued that pre-industrial concupiscence was antithetical to the sober time discipline of the capitalist enterprise (also see Pollard 1965; Pena 1996). Burrell’s (1984) excellent article on sexuality extended this line of argument in organization studies and raised the problem of resistance. For Burrell, sexuality is not just genital pleasure or orgasm. It encompasses the full gamut of libidinal excitations, including sensuality and erotic play (Burrell 1984, 1992). Through a colourful array of historical examples including the church, factory and public institutions, Burrell demonstrates how legal – rational authority has attempted to eradicate sex at work.1 It is maintained, ‘human feelings including sexuality have gradually been repulsed from bureaucratic structures and have been relocated in the non-organizational sphere – the world of civil society’ (Burrell 1984: 99). A number of historical forces have driven this purge: the ‘civilizing process’ (Elias 1978), the development of religious morality, the spread of calculative rationality and the increased demand to control time and the body. Each of these interrelated forces led to a steady desexualization of organizations. Resistance to this punitive sublimation of the sexual impulses, according to Burrell (1984), consists of a re-eroticized experience of labour: ‘it becomes possible to say that sexual relations at work may be expressive of a demand not to be controlled’ (Burrell 1984: 102, emphasis in original). In an over-rationalized organizational sphere, insignificant sexual liaisons can be reinterpreted as resistance to managerial control. Burrell thus explores what Ackroyd and Thompson (1999) after him referred to as ‘sexual misbehaviour’, those practices that defy bodily rationalization and recast organizations as theatres of desire. Sodomy in the navy, concentration camp love affairs and prison dalliances are flagged as some exemplars. The underlying message here is that such practices are not merely an inevitable consequence of repressed biological urges, but a political engagement of sorts.

Re-Eroticization as Control Burrell’s (1984, 1992) argument carefully avoids romanticizing sexual resistance and thus carries an interesting conceptual undecidablilty. Because resexualization might be used to enact tyranny rather than defy it (e.g., homosexual rape, sexual harassment), we must only champion sexual relations that evince ‘clear expressions of human feelings of love and affection’ (Burrell 1984). However, does this not run the risk of overly sentimentalizing sex? Freud (1920/1961), Bataille (1962) and Foucault (1963) all recognized something cruel and morbid in sex that cannot be fully contained by bourgeois notions of love. Brewis and Grey (1994) worry that a truly radical re-eroticization would unleash the full panoply of sexual practices including



some of the more nefarious types that we may not welcome at the next office party (also see Halford and Leonard 2001). In other words, when translated into practice a re-eroticized organization would ironically require more policing because once sexual licence was granted it is not only the caring kind that might be aroused. These reservations are perhaps confirmed by Burrell’s (1992) subsequent arguments about the deconstructive possibilities of a de Sadeian organizational politics (Brewis and Grey 1994; Brewis and Linstead 2000) The emancipatory potential of sex is severely compromised if the libido is simply desublimated within pre-existing structures of rule and domination. This is what Marcuse (1968) suspected when confronted with the iconic promiscuity of the free-love hippy movement. In typical sardonic style, he underlined the repressive desublimation of sexuality by demonstrating its compatibility with corporate life: ‘Without ceasing to be an instrument of labour, the body is allowed to exhibit its sexual features in the everyday work world and in work relations . . . The sexy office and sales girl, the handsome, virile junior executive and floor worker are highly marketable commodities . . . Sex is integrated into the work and public relations and is thus made susceptible to controlled satisfaction . . . but no matter how controlled . . . it is gratifying to the managed individual.’ (Marcuse 1968: 70–21, quoted in Pringle 1990: 163)

Thus our image changes from an Orwellian nightmare of prohibited sex to the equally unwelcoming world of Huxleyian pleasure control. The quote suggests that sexuality is, in some forms at least, functional in contemporary organizations. We can unpack this proposition in two ways. First, a tolerated sexuality at work may actually be useful in terms of morale, as a kind of libidinal ‘indulgency pattern’ (Goulder 1955). Ackroyd and Thompson (1999) and Ross (2004) maintain that it is an overstatement to claim that managerialism is completely anathema to sexuality. Changing values and cultural trends have meant that pleasure and work are not as incongruous as they might have once been. With more women entering the paid workforce in the post-war period and the boundaries between work and home increasingly blurred of late, management are just as likely to turn a blind eye to the office romance as pounce upon it, as long as it does not interfere with work (Quinn 1977). Second, and perhaps closer to Marcuse’s position, sexuality may be implicitly encouraged so as to extend instrumental control. Rationality and eroticism in this sense are not mutually exclusive. Feminist investigations conducted by Gutek (1990), Collinson and Collinson (1990) and Bradley (1999) show how masculine sexuality is a basic feature of strategy and formal hierarchy. We often do not see it because it is so reified (Ferguson 1984). This institutionalized masculinity reproduces inequality when it induces subordinate expressions of feminine desire, as Pringle (1989) noted in secretarial work. Filby (1992) and Abbott and Tyler (1998) have identified how



feminized sexualities are organized among customer service workers. Just as Hochschild’s (1983) airline attendants were tacitly obliged to sexually excite male passengers in order to enhance the consumption experience, many other sales and service roles also utilize sex appeal. Waitressing provides another good example (Guerrier and Adib 2000). These findings are consistent with observations by Gherardi (1995) and Fondas (1997) that we are witnessing the advent of general feminized service economy that entails a significant sexualized component. To recap, the indeterminacy of workplace sex engenders some ambivalence about its political significance in relation to power, resistance and control. This uncertainty is no more evident than in the forthcoming case study. Unlike other research that has concentrated on the promotion of sexuality in the worker/customer relationship, the case study demonstrates how sexuality is encouraged among workers as a lifestyle statement. Guiding the presentation of the data is the question of how we make sense of the contradictory and ambivalent politics of sexuality in organizations. More specifically, is the expression of sexuality at work liberating, controlling or both and how can we tell?

Managing and Resisting Sex at ‘Sunray’ An eight-month study was conducted at ‘Sunray Customer Service’ (a pseudonym), an American-owned call centre with around 1,000 employees based in an Australian city. Sunray deals with communication functions outsourced by banks, airlines, insurance firms, mobile phone companies and the like and thus puts much emphasis on the customer service skills of employees. The company was founded by James Carr (another pseudonym) in the early 1990s and he remains the CEO and cultural figurehead. Sunray was selected for this research project because of its broader reputation in the business community as a high-commitment organization that was staffed by very motivated employees. This is especially interesting, given that many call centres tend to employ rather draconian and Tayloristic methods to organize and motivate workers. The initial objective of the research project was to gain an in-depth understanding of how Sunray manipulates the culture in accordance with the customer service demands of the call centre and analyse the different ways employees respond to these initiatives. In accordance with other studies of this type (Kunda 1992; Barker 1993; Casey 1995 etc.), qualitative data collection methods were chosen in order to gain an intensive situational understanding of the meaning systems in play (Van Maanen 1998). These included one-on-one interviews, focus group interviews, shadowing, observation and document analysis. A sample of three human resource managers and 30 employees was selected and interviewed at various intervals over the eight months. The size of the sample was



limited to 30 employees because of the in-depth nature of the interviews. The sample consisted of 18 females and 15 males. The average age of telephone agents interviewed was 23 (which had significance for the research findings, as will be discussed shortly). The human resource managers were in their mid- to late 30s. The initial selection process was randomly taken from a sampling frame of 10 projects and 40 teams provided by the organization. However, one interviewee introduced me to his ‘cohort’ consisting of three other informants, which then became a focus in the project. This nonprobability sample was not representative in a quantitative sense, but nor did it intend to be given the qualitative nature of the study (Silverman 2001). Document analysis focused on discourse pertaining to the culture programme found in a training handbook for new recruits (called ‘The Rainbow Book’), specific project manuals, recruitment advertisements, extensive newspaper and magazine reports from the business press and booklets from training sessions. Observation and shadowing were used at the beginning of the project to give the researcher a more grounded feel for the job-task and environment before the interviews began. Human resource managers were interviewed on-site for periods ranging from 45 minutes to one and a half hours. Telephone agents were interviewed about the culture programme both on-site (at their desks and in a conference room provided by the company) and outside the firm (homes, cafes, etc.), the latter yielding opinions that would not have been as evident had the interviews been conducted only on-site. Data from the aforementioned cohort of four employees were gathered from semi-structured focus group interviews outside of working hours, which were conducted in an informal and conversational manner. Following Spradley (1979), the interview schedule consisted of background questions, framing questions, and focus questions, but a high degree of flexibility was retained in order to allow the conversation to flow in unpredictable directions. The interview schedule was derived from speculative assumptions regarding possible interpretations of the culture, and later modified to target some of the concerns discussed in this paper. All transcripts were manually coded and analysed along a variety of criteria that aimed to discern dominant or significant themes in relation to how the managed culture was received by employees (subscription, paternalism, resistance, cynicism, etc.). The theme of sexuality emerged as a factor after further analysis of the data. It is important to raise this as a limitation of the study because the empirical project was not explicitly designed to investigate sexuality. As with other empirical studies on this topic (e.g., Collinson and Collinson 1990) it was only after the project was well underway and then finished that the theme of sexuality was recognized as a noteworthy feature of the organization. This is frustrating because it meant that I did not specifically hone in on the issue in order to attain more data. Moreover, ethical considerations led me to tread cautiously around sexuality during the study. For example, when I was interviewing someone I presumed was gay I felt it would be an intrusion to ask



about his sexuality (especially given the formidable ethics approval process in Australian universities). Upon later reflection, I realized that this lost opportunity might have been more a projective anxiety on my part. Having said this, the data gathered is revealing, and does help us address the question being discussed in this paper.

The Sunray Culture The normal shift of a Sunray telephone agent requires them to receive calls from customers for eight hours, with one 15-minute rest period in the morning and afternoon and a half-hour lunch break. Management consider the company’s culture an integral part of the labour process as market competitiveness is said to largely depend upon the ability of workers to deliver quality customer service. Workers’ attitudes and demeanours are therefore integral to the firm’s success. The culture programme at Sunray focuses on the nature of call centre work and is primarily directed at telephone agents. It is openly accepted by the organization that call-centre work is very mundane and monotonous. The culture is not designed to necessarily hide this fact but help employees better cope with this kind of work. Janis, a human resource manager overseeing the culture programme, explains: ‘ . . . work in a call centre can be extremely mundane and monotonous, so we have to make it a rewarding experience in order to be successful.’

And, again, call-centre work: ‘ . . . could be one of the most repetitively boring jobs you could ever do if you choose to view it that way, but we don’t.’

Janis and her team therefore attempt to make working at Sunray a fun and joyous experience that is intrinsically fulfilling. Perhaps the most ubiquitous artefact of Sunray’s ‘culture of fun’ is the slogan, ‘Remember the 3Fs: Focus, Fun, Fulfilment.’ This phrase encourages telephone agents to perceive callcentre work as a playful and good-humoured adventure. Indeed, the belief that call-centre work ought to be fun is an integral part of the cultural discourse and is seen to distinguish Sunray from other organizations. In the colourful training booklet called ‘The Rainbow Book’, new employees are advised: ‘At Sunray we try to make work fun – in fact we try to make it fun instead of work. How do we deliver our promise? Forget lone rangers – at Sunray we have free-rangers! It’s hard to have fun when you’re confined to a workstation like a battery hen, so we encourage you to enjoy the freedom and latitude you need in order to fulfil your obligations to Sunray. This includes freedom of movement. You will be encouraged to decorate your workstation with personal mementoes.’



According to Janis, employees embody the 3Fs and incorporate it as an important part of their identities: She explains: ‘Without the culture the place would be drab, and in most workplaces people can’t wait to leave. But at Sunray they love to work and really get into it. You know, just the other day I heard someone say “I can’t believe they pay me to have fun!” and that is exactly what happens.’

It is interesting to note the prominence of younger people working as telephone agents at Sunray. This recruitment rationale aims to support and maintain a fun and energetic environment (also see Alvesson and Billing 1997). Janis said: ‘ . . . young people find our culture very, very attractive because they can be themselves and know how to have fun.’

One way Sunray endeavours to inject fun into the call centre labour process is to symbolically blur the boundary between home and work so that what are perceived to be enjoyable non-work activities are replicated in the organization. In this way, employees can relax and ‘be themselves’. For example, recruitment advertisements promote the organization as a party-like space. This theme is also evoked in training and motivation exercises. During one session in the summer, various teams competed in a relay race in a nearby park. At the end of their sprint team, members quickly drank a large glass of beer. As a human resource manager said: ‘It all comes down to our environment – the culture, the freedom to enjoy being themselves and to enjoy being at work.’

Another way in which workers can have fun and be themselves is through the relaxed dress code, which centred on fashion labels and slacker cool.2 Young men and women make an effort to look attractive when they arrive to work. This may involve expensive clothing, in which the ritual of consumption and shopping is implicitly celebrated (also see du Gay 1996). Or it may involve alternative clothing styles, including grunge or gothic motifs. On a number of occasions during the interviews I felt decidedly unfashionable and drab because of the care employees had put on their physical appearance. According to one employee, ‘ . . . the idea is to get away from the boring office look and make things fun and happy like we are going out for the night.’

This dress code extends to embrace lifestyle signifiers such as ‘punk’ orange hair, visible tattoos and facial piercing; the comparison to parties, raves and clubbing is justified in this sense. Difference and diversity are particularly accentuated in the induction process. One exercise asks employees to tick a form entitled ‘10 Things I Have Learnt Before Lunch’, one of which is ‘Promote Diversity in the Workplace’.



Sexuality at Sunray A fascinating aspect of this culture of youth, partying and fun is the sometimes overt, sometimes covert, theme of sexuality. According to some informants (and confirmed by my own observations), the expression of sexuality and flirting among employees is openly condoned at Sunray. For example, I heard from a number of informants that the work environment is considered a fruitful space to proposition the opposite sex for a date. Relationships on the call-centre floor were sexually charged as liaisons were planned and casual affairs ensued. Sexuality at Sunray was spatially sequenced (Giddens 1992). It was expressed inside the main building in terms of dress and banter, as well as in nominally external spheres such as the annual Away Day and the nearby pub (called the ‘Sunray Pub’ because of the high proportion of employees that patronized it). Although these latter spaces are probably highly sexualized in most organizations (the obligatory Christmas party fling, for example), Sunray acknowledges them as a positive feature of company life. The managers interviewed never explicitly espoused sexuality as a culture management policy to me. Nor was their evidence that sexuality was considered a formal aspect of the customer service function for telephone agents. But its importance to the overall cultural discourse of ‘being yourself is easily identifiable from the observational and interview data (especially as the latter were unprompted). Joanne, a representative for a health insurance firm said, ‘You can wear what you want – people are allowed to wear low-cut tops and short skirts.’

And a team leader said, ‘We like to think of ourselves as fun, sexy and dedicated.’

The sexual dimension of the Sunray culture was not only heterosexual but also had a strong gay focus, which again resonated with the ‘being yourself theme. The CEO, James Carr said in the local business press: ‘We’ve tried to create a workplace in which people of either sex, gay people and people from other places can come and really enjoy the time they spend with each other and their managers in the environment . . . ‘

This makes Sunray quite different to the heterosexist organizations that Gabriel et al. (2000) suggest are the current norm. Because of the qualitative nature of this research it was difficult to judge the exact proportion of gay men employed at Sunray. Perhaps what matters more is the prominence of gay themes in the everyday discourse I recorded among informants. Rather than concealing their homosexual identities at work, as Hall (1990) argued



happens with lesbian workers, Sunray is a space in which gay sexuality can be openly disclosed. Joanne said, ‘ . . . there are lots of gay guys here who are very out . . . they don’t have to hide the fact that they are gay.’

Notwithstanding the homophobic attitudes of the national government towards gay rights, the Australian city in which the call centre is located is known for its pro-gay culture. Sunray reflects this progressive trend by making the work environment gay-friendly. For example, one project had a ‘fashion day’ in which workers dressed as fashion models. Leanne, an airline agent said, ‘It was amazing the different costumes people wore . . . they really got into it. Many of the gay guys dressed in drag, in tiny mini skirts . . . and one of them won.’

Here is another interesting reference to the prominence of gay males in the organization, especially as it pertains to their contribution to the fun and effervescent atmosphere at Sunray: Interviewer: What are the Christmas parties like? Jules: They are really just big booze-ups like any other. Although you get lots of gay boys prancing around in their Speedos and being very flamboyant.

The gay-friendly atmosphere of the organization worked well with the general cultural message of being yourself, fun, ebullience and outgoingness. Rob, a telephone operator for a major bank, identifies with this atmosphere. Without prompting, he raised the topic of gay sexuality in the context of Sunray’s celebration of difference and diversity: ‘Sunray definitely promote it [open homosexuality] . . . well, not promote it but say, you are what you are and you are allowed to be that way, which is a good thing.’

Negotiating Sexuality at Sunray As Filby (1992) points out, although organizations may endorse sexuality with certain ends in mind, its inherent instability renders it somewhat unpredictable. Indeed, employees negotiated Sunray’s culture of sexuality in diverse ways. Some heterosexual males implied that they enjoyed the sexually charged atmosphere. Daryl, a 19-year-old telephone agent, said for example: ‘It’s good how we are free to walk around and talk to each other . . . chat to the ladies [laughs knowingly] . . . y’know and have a good time . . . just as long as we do a good job for the team.’



I have little firm data indicating how gay men felt about the homosexual focus of the culture. My observations of the pro-gay environment and the prominence of gay motifs (e.g. the dress-up ‘fashion days’) would seem to imply that gay men received this facet of the organization favourably. Rob’s discourse mentioned above appears to support this claim. It is possible, however, that the kind of gay sexuality celebrated at Sunray would not appeal to all gay men. Some of the women I spoke to felt uncomfortable with such a strong sexualization of the workplace. For example, a customer service operator told me she avoided the Sunray Pub on Friday nights because it was ‘too sleazy’ and lecherous. In this forum, relationships had to be policed more than usual by female workers. Inside the organization, the derogatory term ‘meat market’ (a bar or nightclub where people come to specifically pick up dates) was used to describe some aspects of organizational life. This term is interesting because it gives a very different meaning to the ‘Sunray party’ discourse, one that was perhaps unintended by management. Leanne said: There are some very sleazy guys at Sunray and you walk past them and they look you up and down and that is very uncomfortable . . . but it’s a boring job and most who work here want to do something else . . . sex is less boring.’

One of the most fascinating reactions to Sunray sexuality was by the aforementioned cohort I regularly interviewed. This group consisted of three employees living together in a house of four (the fourth person being the girlfriend of one of the workers). Two of the housemates (a male and female) were telephone agents and the third (male) held an IT position. The girlfriend worked in another call centre but participated in the cynical banter as much as the Sunray employees themselves. Ironically, she would later become a Sunray employee. The group resisted the culture management programme by cynically distancing their sense of self from the organization. They found the message and delivery of the culture patronizing and dishonest because it obscured Sunray’s exploitative side. When explaining the 3Fs, Kim said: ‘I can’t believe a lot of this stuff. I feel like saying, ‘How dare you stand up there and pretend to be something you are not.’ They pretend to be different but they aren’t and in some ways are worse than other companies because they are not real.’

This type of cynical engagement is relatively well theorized in the literature (Gabriel 1999; Fleming and Sewell 2002; Fleming and Spicer 2003). What is significant in the Sunray case is how this resistance entailed pejorative comments about fellow workers. There was frequent mention of ‘sluts’ and ‘sleazy guys’. Gay men in the organization were especially targeted. The cohort frequently referred to the firm as ‘Gayray’.3 Moreover, they colourfully



rephrased the 3Fs slogan to read ‘Fuckwits, Faggots and Freaks’. Kim explains the rationale behind this bawdy slogan: ‘Well, to “succeed” at Sunray you are basically gay, have to be really “alternative” and Sunray likes people who have different coloured hair and who are into [in a sarcastic tone] “being themselves” or you’re just a complete loser. Now I’m not too sure which one we fitted into, but basically we are plebs. Just plebs.’

Kim expresses a feeling of injustice regarding the patrimonial hierarchy and favouritism at Sunray. One has to be part of the cool crowd in order to be promoted or treated well. In this context, gay men are considered synonymous with the scripted Sunray personality – someone bubbly, extroverted and exaggeratingly supportive of management. Kim told me that Sunray actually wants people to adopt fake and shallow personalities because that is the only way they can perpetuate a culture of fun. The informal dress code is considered especially pretentious. The dialogue below illustrates homosexuality being evoked in the context of anti-management discourse: Mark: People supposedly look at Sunray and see this hip, young, cool crowd. Jackie: They don’t, they see a bunch of pretentious fashion victims. Mark: You don’t even work there. Jackie: Thank fucking god. [To me] When I go to meet Mark I wait a block down the road because if I wait outside I get looked at by the Sunray people to see what I’m wearing. I hate it; it’s like being back at high school. They all must wear stylish clothes to [sarcastically and impersonating a subscriber] ‘fit in’. Mark: But I don’t wear them. Jackie: But you’re a guy, it’s different. Mark: There are plenty of guys that get fully dressed up. Jackie: But they’re all gay, Mark [Laughs uncontrollably]. Mark: That’s discrimination! [Laughs] Well, yes there are a number of gay individuals there.

Sexualized Resistance or Resisting Sexuality? The Sunray study provides a good opportunity to unpack the political effects of organizational sexuality. As we can recall, ambivalence underlies the literature in this regard. On the one hand, re-eroticization is said to be a radical gesture that creates spaces of freedom, given the historical desexualization of work. On the other, management may actually use sexuality to control workers,



enhance productivity and reinforce masculinist norms. Three aspects of the Sunray case are significant here. First, rather than banishing sexuality from the realm of work, we see management condone a particular expression of it. Second, both straight and gay identities are encouraged. And third, some workers resist the sexualization of work because it involves harassment or is perceived to be part of an increasingly intrusive control system. Underlining some of this resistance is a disturbing homophobia. So is the expression of sexuality at Sunray liberating, controlling or both and how can we tell? An obvious interpretation of re-eroticization at Sunray would emphasize the control side of the tension, highlighting how sexuality enhances the established wage-relation. By allowing people to ‘be themselves’ in ways that facilitate the customer service function (e.g., positive sentiments, flexibility, discretion, creativity), the 3Fs philosophy enlists the private dimensions of the individual as a corporate resource. This aspect of control utilizes authenticity, difference, diversity and lifestyle rather than the bland conformity recorded in earlier studies of culture management. The themes of fun, partying and sex, usually associated with the private sphere, are discursively integrated into Sunray’s team rituals, social events and everyday interactions. Under the rubric of openness and empowerment a form of bio-power (Foucault 1979; Agamben 1998) is achieved as the labour process absorbs sex and lifestyle. Perhaps this renders redundant Burrell’s (1984) insight that workplace sexuality subverts relations of power because it ‘would look remarkably like play or joy’ (Burrell 1984: 107). This line of analysis would lead us to suspect that resistance at Sunray will be enacted against the re-eroticization of work relations. This can be noted among the female workers who felt harassed. For example, some refused to patronize the sexualized Sunray Pub and complained of sleaziness at work. However, Sunray’s management of sexuality did not only create new opportunities for masculine domination. It also voiced an otherwise marginalized gay identity. Is this too part of the control system aiming to make workers more amenable to the production process? It would be difficult to sustain this argument without sounding somewhat condescending. Imagine informing a gay employee that Sunray’s celebration of their sexuality is merely a power play implicating them more profoundly with their own subordination. Or worse still, that theirs is not an authentic re-eroticization of labour because it plays into the hands of management rather than undermining capitalism. A more nuanced understanding of power and resistance is clearly required. One way forward is to tease out the multilevelled effects of Sunray’s power/resistance networks by differentiating between the politics of recognition (redressing marginalized identities) and redistribution (redressing economic inequalities). In a number of influential essays, Nancy Fraser (1995, 1998) argues that struggles for recognition and redistribution



represent interrelated yet different types of political activity. For example, gay struggles are not simply reducible to economic grievances since the former flow from a concern with social recognition. And while the capitalist labour process is not inherently anti-gay (as the Sunray case illustrates), it does invariably ply an exploitive redistributive politics. The two levels interpenetrate, but they can be conceptually decoupled in order to clarify some of the complexities underpinning resistance and struggle (also see Fraser and Honneth 2003).4 At Sunray it is possible to distinguish between management’s progressive, if somewhat opportunistic recognition politics and its more customary redistributive politics. While on the level of sexual identity, some Sunray employees enjoy an enabling work environment; at another level they (and others) are still part of an exploited workforce, Re-eroticization at Sunray therefore includes both liberation and control, but along different dimensions. Can we understand the cynical cohort by using the same multilevelled approach to power and resistance? Kim’s description of herself and other telephone agents as plebs is indicative of their redistributive concerns. While the organization apparently champions difference in which agents can ‘be themselves’, she feels they all are ultimately plebs. The culture of fun (with its references to sex, play and good times) is considered disingenuous because it masks the proletarianized nature of the work. The cohort’s cynicism influences material redistribution in so far as positive attitudes are considered a competitive resource by management. However, this economic orientated resistance simultaneously enters the politics of recognition in a regressive form when anti-management feeling is expressed in the idiom of homophobia. The cohort was probably already homophobic, but such sentiments were amplified when they became a vehicle for engaging in redistributive politics. Sexuality is thus ‘over-determined’ by both identity and economics.

Conclusions In addressing the question of whether sexuality is a site of resistance or control in contemporary organizations, the paper has suggested that it is a multilevelled combination of both. The tension around this issue can be partially resolved if struggles over sexuality and re-eroticization are embedded in a variegated political field. The Sunray case usefully illustrates this approach because it presents us with a complex scenario in which sexuality is an aspect of managerial control, a site of empowerment and an object of resistance. Using the social theory of Nancy Fraser (1995, 1998), it has been possible to note how both recognition and redistribution struggles unfold. This distinction serves as a heuristic for untangling the confusing and contradictory politics of sexuality and work in organizations.



Reference to Fraser’s framework emphasizes the political significance of organizational resistance. Critical organization studies ought to move beyond simply classifying acts of misbehaviour and study the multiple political outcomes of resistance in relation to social justice issues. In this respect, the Sunray case demonstrates how the messy realities of organizational politics can put the critical researcher him/herself in an ambivalent position. As critical scholars, we tend to sympathize with those subordinated in uneven power relations and thus side with those who resist (Fournier and Grey 2000). But empirical research often confounds these normative alliances. The homophobic cohort at Sunray, for example, reminds us that resistance is seldom pure or uncontaminated by its own will-to-dominate. The analytical approach developed in this paper disabuses us of the notion that employee resistance is either politically progressive or regressive in toto. To put it crudely, not all resistance is good. And not all good resistance is only good. Is the solution a withdrawal to a position of objectivity that simply describes what we observe with cold detachment? I think not. We must side with the subordinated, but also remain sensitized to the over-determined and contradictory nature of political struggle in contemporary organizations.

Notes The author would like to acknowledge the extremely helpful comments on earlier drafts by Jana Costas, Stephanie Schreven, Steffen Böhm, Melissa Tyler, Christian de Cock, Nelson Phillips, staff at the School of Business and Economics, Exeter University, and three anonymous reviewers. 1. Burrell (1984) uses the term ‘repression’ in order to explain this eradication process. But he accepts Foucault’s (1979) critique of the repression hypothesis. The eradication of sexuality from the workplace is not a denial of human nature, but a political manoeuvre that seeks to close down the ever-present potential for sex. This potential does not stem from a universal libido, but the explosion of discourse about sex in the West. 2. The term ‘slacker cool’ has positive connotations within youth culture, meaning someone who is capable, yet wry and underground. 3. I have phrased this re-wording using the pseudonym, which does not quite capture the creative wordplay intended by informants. 4. Fraser’s ideas were developed via a critical dialogue with Butler (1997). Fraser (1995) argued that struggles for recognition and redistribution could be conceptually positioned at different ends of the political continuum. Butler (1997) responded by arguing that marginalized gay identities, for example, are not ‘merely cultural’ but have material effects that are both economic and non-economic. They cannot be separated. Fraser (1998) rejoined by agreeing that marginalized identities often do suffer redistribution inequalities but this is more an effect of the cultural discrimination guiding material distribution. Indeed, as the Sunray case illustrates, capitalism is not inherently anti-gay. In her latest work, Fraser (2005) adds the third dimension of political representation in order to map claims for social justice in a globalized world.



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52 The Importance of Being ‘Indian’: Identity Centrality and Work Outcomes in an Off-Shored Call Center in India Diya Das, Ravi Dharwadkar and Pamela Brandes

Introduction

E

xtant studies have shown that employee identification is an extremely complex and multilayered process due to the intersection of a large number of different social and individual identities, and their varying salience in organizational settings (Brickson, 2000; Pratt, 2001). Research, however, has predominantly focused on understanding the implications of the interactions of different social groups (such as ethnicity and gender) for organizational identification at work. According to Roberts (2005) and other scholars (Carbado & Gulati, 2000; Chattopadhyay et al., 2004; Ellemers et al., 2002) individuals in diverse workplaces have to negotiate the stereotypes associated with their embodied identities (like gender, race) within organizations. It is important to conceptualize this dynamic especially because identities such as that of gender, race, ethnicity and nationality serve as primary bases of categorization and remain salient across situations (Moreland & Levine, 1989; Stangor et al., 1992). Within the organizations they become more salient when they interact with other different identities within similar social categories, for example, minority groups in racially diverse organizations, or women in male-dominated professions.

Source: Human Relations, 61(11) (2008): 1499–1530.



One major area, however, where the complexities of identity dynamics have been notably understudied is in the context of globalized work. Eminent sociologist Anthony Giddens has described this experience of contemporary globalization as one of ‘intersection of presence and absence, the interlacing of social events and social relations “at distance” with local contextualities’ (1991: 21). Though unevenly experienced in different social and geographical locations, globalization is a form of an intrusion of distance into local, everyday lives. These processes of globalization have also immensely affected the world of business. However, with some significant exceptions (Aihlon-Souday & Kunda, 2003; Reade, 2001), most studies on identity dynamics in organizations have remained focused on interactions between different social groups within a single national context. Aihlon- Souday and Kunda (2003) in their exemplary study of an international merger, and other scholars (like Herriot & Scott-Jackson, 2002; Reade, 2001) have already pointed out the increasing significance of such identity negotiations with respect to national and religious identities at work. All of these studies, however, deal with more traditional, face-to-face forms of work. Non-traditional work arrangements can bring in an additional dimension (Wiesenfield et al., 2001) that would create new forms of identity dynamics in globalizing workplaces. In this article, we re-examine the implications of organizational identification, consider the multiplicity of social identities, and explore the possible contradictory implications of identification in transnational workplaces that may not be relevant in local service work contexts. In so doing, we shed light on how the implications of organizational identification are often complicated by the centrality or the salience of other social identities (Sellers et al., 1998). Examples of emergent transnational work include: 1) radiology medical services provided by doctors in India and Israel to patients and doctors in the US; 2) tutoring/coaching and teaching services provided by Indian teachers to students in advanced economies; and 3) inbound and outbound call centers in India providing a host of services to citizens and organizations in advanced economies (Friedman, 2005). We argue that while the new, communication technology-mediated forms of work may lack face-to-face communication, nonetheless, they lead to the resurfacing of certain social categories that have implications for global work, but may be irrelevant in local work contexts. In general, identity centrality can be defined as the extent to which a person defines himself or herself as a member of a particular social category or the subjective importance of one set of identities (Ashforth, 2001). By situating our exploratory study at the intersection of global and nontraditional forms of work, namely that of transnational service work; we are able to interrogate the issue of centrality of one’s national identity, religious identity and occupational identity, along with organizational identity, studying their relative contributions to work outcomes. What is interesting about


Das et al. • The Importance of Being ‘Indian’ 327

studying this industry is that unlike local customer service or other local firms, transnational service work has implications for one’s national and religious identities. In this industry, in order to ensure smooth customer service from across the globe, employees are required to conceal their national and religious memberships by assuming different names. This act of masking thus provides us with an interesting context where we can situate an investigation of both nested and cross-cutting identities at work. Thus, we believe that identity starts to matter more in this context than if the employees were servicing inbound or outbound domestic calls. Hence, we set out to answer two inter-related questions: 1) under conditions of contemporary globalization, how does identity centrality – of a variety of relevant social identities – affect work-related outcomes such as performance, intention to leave, stress and burnout, over and above the contribution of organizational identification? 2) How does the relative centrality of these different social identities moderate the relationship between organizational identification and its related outcomes? We answer these questions by carrying out a study in an international call center in India. We test our theoretical model using a survey in a third-party, mid-size, outbound call center in India. Started in the form of a partnership between a couple of Indian entrepreneurs in 2004, within a span of four years this call center emerged as one of the most renowned centers in Calcutta. Like many other mid-sized call centers in India, its strategic focus since its inception has been on international markets and not the domestic Indian market. In the following section we will elaborate on the idea of transnational service work especially the international call center industry in India. Next, we provide a literature review and the argument for our hypotheses. We then describe our method, analysis and results. In the end we conclude with a discussion of the findings, their implications for research, the limitations of the current article and some future directions.

Literature Review and Hypotheses Globalization and the Call Center Industry Call centers are a relatively new industry that has been growing at a very fast pace in the last few years around the world (Deery & Kinnie, 2004). They have become a cornerstone of the service industry in the developed world with about two-thirds of customer interactions of all organizations now occurring from call centers (Barker, 1998). The employees in this industry are required to provide high quality service to customers through the use of voice-based emotional labor, and also focus on speed and efficiency in each of these interactions (Deery & Kinnie, 2004). Debates on the nature of call center work have ranged from calling them ‘electronic sweatshops’



(Garson, 1988), to ‘twentieth century panopticons’ (Fernie & Metcalf, 1998) to a typical instance of a job with challenge, interest, skill variety and a clear recognition of the value of frontline personnel (Batt & Moynihan, 2002, 2004; Frenkel et al., 1998). The biggest trend in this industry in recent times has been a move to off-shore work to countries like India and the Philippines where there is a large availability of cheap, but high quality English-speaking labor – the key ingredient for running call centers (Dossani & Kenney, 2003). This off- shoring of service work has become one of the greatest instances of the process of contemporary economic globalization enabled by new communication technologies (Friedman, 2005; Venkatraman, 2004). In fact about 80 percent of the call center industry in India caters to international markets (Holman et al., 2007) namely those of the US, UK and Australia. It is also interesting to note that this industry in India was entirely a product of globalization since there was no domestic call center industry catering to the Indian market at the time when the international call centers started (Sitt, 1997). From its humble beginnings around the mid to late 1990s, the Indian call center industry experienced a meteoric growth and is now projected to employ 1.2 million people by 2008 (Nasscom estimates). These call centers provide a variety of services ranging from inbound customer service and support, outbound sales, collections and credit approvals. The Indian call center industry at the present moment is an important context for understanding issues of identification at work under conditions of contemporary globalization for two interrelated reasons. First, this is an industry that is wholly a product of globalization and developments in communication technology, and hence an ideal place to study the impact of globalization. With a continuous work practice of interacting with customers living in a different country it also becomes a compelling case of transnational service work. Second, it has given rise to new identity-dynamics with unique job related modifications. While it can be argued that this is probably an example of an intense/extreme form of ‘identity work’ (Snow & Anderson, 1993), it is a site that has tremendous potential for yielding interesting insights into global workplaces and the identity dynamics therein. In fact, Kreiner et al. (2006) have argued that much of identity research in organization studies has followed unique contexts of ‘identity work’ like the case of the Port Authority (Dutton & Dukerich, 1991), Amway distributors (Pratt, 2000), Episcopal priests (Kreiner et al., 2006), and business schools (Elsbach & Kramer, 1996) and have provided very important insights into processes and outcomes of identifications that have implications for other contexts. For example, while Elsbach and Kramer’s (1996) study was primarily focused on business schools’ reactions to identity threats emerging from change in rankings, the findings could be generalized to study any organizational or managerial reactions to an identity threat. Following them, we attempt to identify several different social categories that are central to employees in the off-shored call center This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.


Occupational identity centrality H2 H5 Organizational identification

H1 H5

National/ religious identity centrality

Work outcomes • Performance • Intention to leave • Stress • Burnout

H3 & H4

Figure 1: Predicted model for identity centrality

industry and focus on their dynamics while trying to glean findings that can have implications for globalizing organizations. Here we focus on identification with the organization and the centrality of several other social identities, namely nationality, religion and occupation, and find out their repercussions on work outcomes (see Figure 1 for theoretical model) in the case of such transnational service work.

Organizational Identification Organizational identification (OI) refers to the process by which the membership in an organization becomes a defining aspect of an individual’s selfconcept. For the individual entering the organization, identification helps to cater to several needs like needs for safety, self-enhancement, affiliation and to achieve a holistic purpose in life (Pratt, 1998). This form of identification is something that organizations desire and therefore actively foster and many studies have shown it to be strongly related to positive work outcomes (Pratt, 1998). Mael and Ashforth (1992, 1995) found that higher OI leads to lower attrition, higher interest, greater financial contributions (when identified with one’s school) and greater involvement in general (also in Riketta, 2002). Since then, several studies have shown the relationship between OI and turnover intentions (Abrams & Randsley De Moura, 2001; Cole & Bruch, 2006; van Knippenberg & van Schie, 2000). Other studies have also shown that OI is very strongly associated with external group commitment for managers (Rotondi, 1975), organizational citizenship behaviors (Feather & Rauter, 2004) and co-operative behavior (Dukerich This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.


et al., 2002). According to the meta-analyses by Riketta (2002), the strongest work outcome that is linked with OI is that of intention to leave. In general, the literature suggests that OI has positive implications, with strong and positive correlations with job satisfaction and organizational commitment (Riketta, 2002). Following this and other findings in the literature, we start our research with a base hypothesis where we expect a positive association of OI with in-role performance, and negative association with intention to leave. We also predict a negative relationship with stress and burnout. Stress and burnout are considered to be generally negative outcomes at work even though their relationship with in-role behavior has been contentious (for a review see Brandes & Das, 2005). Within the literature of burnout, Carmona et al. (2006) argue that OI can act as a coping mechanism for burnout though it helps only for positive and not negative identification. Again, Haslem and Reicher (2006) found that higher levels of identification with a group lead to lower stress. Importantly, in line with previous work on identity and work outcomes, our baseline hypothesis recalls previously substantiated relationships between OI with: 1) lower levels of undesirable work outcomes (intent to leave, stress, burnout), and 2) greater employee performance. Studies on OI in the context of India have shown how managers engage in processes that foster employee identification with the firm and with the client firms (Ravishankar & Pan, 2008) just like their US counterparts. Other studies on identification in India have also highlighted the importance of OI in the context of India (Reade, 2001). Hence, we expect that the process by which their organizational membership becomes a defining aspect of an employee’s self-concept would remain the same in the context of Indian call center employment. Hypothesis 1. Organizational identification will be positively related to employee performance and negatively related to intention to leave, stress and burnout.

Occupational Identity Centrality Occupational or professional identity, within organization studies, has been defined as the ‘relatively stable and enduring constellation of attributes, beliefs, values, motives and experiences in terms of which people define themselves’ (Ibarra, 1999; Schein, 1978) in their work roles. Others have used the concept of occupational identities as an important form of identification at work (Krenier et al., 2006). Several studies have shown how occupational identities are inculcated, learned and modified over the time that an individual spends either in training or in the industry. Some studies also find that employees often identify more with their occupation than with the organization they work in (Johnson et al., 2006). In fact, there are image This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.


consulting firms that help people develop images that conform to the prototypes of their occupations (Wellington & Bryson, 2001). In this article, we interrogate the association of this centrality of occupational identity with work outcomes. We believe that the call center industry is creating a new occupational identity within the Indian subcontinent. As evidence, increasing labor market demands for articulate English-speakers have led to the creation of several institutes and learning centers which cater exclusively to international call centers by providing lessons on voice and accent, conversational skills and cultural sensitization training (Sitt, 1997; The Economic Times, 2006). Moreover, there is a greater level of job-specific training in this industry in India when compared to their counterparts in the US (Batt et al., 2005). This training is also valuable since employees who have received the initial call center training are often offered higher salaries by other firms in the industry. Again, the call center industry with its unique work practices (e.g. working at night, pick up and drop back services for all employees, etc.) has attracted a lot of attention from the popular media. For example, there have been extensive newspaper reports on the uniqueness of the life in call centers and also the importance of this industry in the Indian economy. Some works of fiction and films have also been produced on the workers in this industry and their lifestyles. The industry’s meteoric growth rate (due to the increased number of firms moving their call center operations to India) has also given rise to an increased demand for call center workers leading to a very high intra-industry, inter-firm employee turnover. This creates a context where the potential importance of occupational identification may supersede that of organizational identification. In view of the above points, we argue that employees in this industry would have a strong context to develop an occupational identity as a call center employee. However, given that the average age of the employees in this industry is in the mid-20s, some employees would tend to develop a stronger attachment for this occupation and, therefore, take this up as their long-term profession, while others may see this as just a short-term job (Ramesh, 2004). Hence, there would be a difference as to how central or important their occupational identities would be to them. We expect that the centrality of their occupational identity would result in different outcomes. We believe that individuals with higher occupational identity centrality as a call center employee would have a greater need for recognition of their work in the industry and therefore be positively associated with performance. We also expect that they would experience less stress and burnout from the jobs since they would derive greater pleasure from doing the work, and have relatively lower levels of turnover intentions. We therefore hypothesize: Hypothesis 2. Higher occupational identity centrality will be positively related to employee performance and negatively related to intention to leave, stress and burnout.



National Identity Centrality National identity, like religious, ethnic and racial identity, can be considered as a primary basis for identification that can be potentially salient across situations (Moreland & Levine, 1989; Stangor et al., 1992). However, studies have shown that people exhibit varying degrees of national identification. We define national identity centrality to be the extent to which individuals define themselves by their citizenship or the subjective importance of one’s national identity in the hierarchy of different social identities. For example, Devos and Banaji (2005) show that being ‘American’ is more or less important to different groups of people. The strength of one’s national identity also affects people’s attitudes and behavior – for example, they affect the consumers’ choice of international websites (Singh et al., 2006) and the ways people negotiate any threats to their identity (Ethier & Deaux, 1994). Other studies on national identity have shown that under conditions of contemporary globalization, the consciousness of national identity among employees, consumers and other stakeholders is emerging as an important factor that organizations have to deal with (Herriot & Scott-Jackson, 2002; Reade, 2001). For example, Aihlon-Souday and Kunda (2003) found how national stereotypes are socially constructed and employed in negotiating cross-border mergers. They show, in the context of a merger between a high-tech Israeli firm and an American firm, how the employees are consciously engaging in producing a national rhetoric to their actions to emphasize their distinctiveness from their global counterparts thereby highlighting the role of individuals in the construction of a national identity in the face of global challenges. Our exploration focuses on how the relative centrality of one’s national identity can act as a precursor for various organizational outcomes in the context of transnational service work. In general, identity theories suggest that if any one identity is central, then individuals perceive threats to that identity if work roles result in a severe discontinuity with that central identity (Breakwell, 1986). For example, Ashforth and Humphrey (1993) found that when employees in service roles are asked to perform emotional labor that is inconsistent with one’s central identity, they experience a sense of dissonance. Such emotive and cognitive dissonances are often associated with several work related outcomes (Ashforth & Humphrey, 1993; Michener & DeLameter, 1994) such as higher experiences of stress and burnout (Baumeister, 1986). For example, Roberts (2002) finds that African American doctors who have high racial identity centrality are less comfortable in employing any re-categorization strategy that would require them to dis-identify with their own racial stereotypes. Similarly, working mothers with high career identity tend to experience greater work–family conflict than those for whom career is not a defining part of their selves (Raskin, 2006).



The call centers in India have been argued to be substantially different from those in the US in their HR practices, with the former being characterized by higher education levels of employees, higher levels of training, significantly lower employee discretion and problem-solving, and very high levels of surveillance (Holman et al., 2007). It is precisely here that we note some other important and interesting identity demands that Indian firms are making on their employees to ensure smooth global transactions over the phone calls. These organizational demands become a significant part of the employee’s work and is something that distinguishes the off-shored, transnational call centers from their counterparts in the US, UK and Australia that deal with domestic clients. To begin with, the Indian employees receive intensive voice and accent training, through which they are required to eliminate or at least significantly reduce their Mother Tongue Influence (MTI), that is, their Indian accent(s), and are encouraged to adopt the accents of the customers’ country (Raina, 2004). They are also provided with cultural training where they are educated to understand and even imitate the lifestyle of their clients in the US, UK, or Australia. This voice, accent and cultural training is the first stage of the training process for new employees. Only after they are successful in this part would they be put through training for the particular product or process.1 The second such interesting variation in the job is that these employees usually undergo a ‘naming ceremony’ (Sitt, 1997) where they adopt a presumably familiar ‘Western’ name or an ‘alias’ that they use in their interactions with their clients. In fact, in most call centers in India, the employees are known exclusively by their ‘aliases’. They are sometimes also asked to ‘pretend’ to be living in the client country when they speak to their customers. Again, they work mainly at night – times that correspond to the day time business hours of the client country (Taylor & Bain, 2005). In this way, the international call centers in India provide a unique experience for the employees whereby within the organization, every night, they live with a different name and pretend to live somewhere that they are not actually physically located in. Such an experience of the employees has been recently described as virtual migration (Aneesh, 2006). Such identity demands, we argue, would make national identity an extremely crucial social category in these workplaces. According to some of the qualitative studies on Indian call centers and popular press articles (Das & Dharwadkar, 2006; McMillin, 2006; Mirchandani, 2004) employees often experience a surge of consciousness about their national identities as they may often be subject to hostility by customers who suspect the ‘real’ nationality of the callers and abuse them on their national identities. This phenomenon of abusing Indian call center workers received a lot of media attention in India (The Hindu, 2006; Verma, 2006) and they report on how employees feel a surge of nationalism in the face of such abuse. These experiences of rising national identification in global contexts are in sync with theories of



globalization that show a trend of the local being evoked as an unintended consequence of the rhetoric of the global (Aihlon-Souday & Kunda, 2003; Giddens, 1991). Hence, the more firms try to suppress the local and highlight the global, the local/national can become critical in a variety of different ways. In the off-shored call center industry, we argue that such a process of masking and concealing of the local would have different implications for employees who have a strong national identity centrality as compared to those with low national identity centrality. Employees who have a stronger national identity centrality would be more uncomfortable in the act of masking and enactment that is required (where they are expected to hide their national identities by default) and therefore experience dissonance. They will also react more when abused on their national identities than those for whom the national identity is not that central. We expect that such a dissonance would have several work related repercussions. The literature of identity conflict says that when people are asked to perform incompatible roles they experience stress and reduced psychological well-being (Baumeister, 1986; Carbado & Gulati, 2000; Roberts, 2002). Following this, we argue that employees with high national identity centrality would have higher experience of stress and burnout in such transnational service work than those with lower national identity centrality. Again, they would also find it difficult to carry out the enactment of different identities that is required (Ashforth & Humphrey, 1993). This difficulty in enactment and the dissonance caused therein may influence both their motivation and their ability to be good salespeople, and hence be associated with lower inrole performance. Extant literature shows how in high-contact service professions, feeling of dissonance in one’s role influences customer service, job satisfaction, stress and burnout (for a review, see Brendan et al., 2006). We also expect that under such dissonance these employees with high national identity centrality would want to leave the organization. Thus we hypothesize: Hypothesis 3. Higher national identity centrality will be negatively related to employee performance and positively related to intention to leave, stress and burnout.

Religious Identity Centrality In spite of vigorous claims made by economists and social scientists regarding the increasing secularization of life with the advent of modernity, religion has re-emerged as one of the most prominent social movements that have increasing significance for contemporary global business (Herriot & ScottJackson, 2002). In fact, religion is said to provide a strong sense of identity that offers a direct opposition to consumerism and materialism (Castells,



1997). The impact of religion or religious identity on business and organizations is not new. It had started with the Weberian framework of Calvinistic principles being the precursor to the birth of capitalistic, entrepreneurial behavior (1930). In recent times, there has been a newly developing interest in the role of religion in organizational life (Agle & van Buren, 1999; Weaver & Agle, 2002). According to Weaver and Agle (2002), it is not the membership of any one religion, but religiosity or centrality of one’s religious identity that is associated with different kinds of attitudes and behaviors. Religious people have been shown to behave differently in social, political and economic arenas (Layman, 1997; Lehrer & Chiswick, 1993; Maltby, 1999; Pargament, 2002). Within organizations, Senger (1970) has shown that religious managers are less economically motivated and more socially and humanistically motivated. Similarly, Weaver and Agle (2002) argue that individuals with greater religious identity centrality are more likely to engage in ethical behavior and decision-making at work that reflect their specific religious orientation. Day (2006) also shows how religious identity can become salient within the workplace. She argues that for employees with greater religious identity centrality or greater subjective importance of religion, there is a greater ‘probability of invocation’ (Stryker, 1980) of their religious identities and thereby affecting their perceptions or actions within the organization. In the context of India, religion has been an important social category around which people define their identities (Nandy, 2002). There are also specific stereotypes associated with various religious groups, causing employees to also deal with these identities at work (Chattopadhyay et al., 2004). We expect that in this industry people with high religious identity centrality would react differently to the identity modifications that are required by the work. For example, by assuming a different name, these employees not only signify a different nationality but also a different religious membership. We expect, that for employees who would have higher religious identity centrality, such a masking and concealing of subjectively important social identities would lead to a greater experience of dissonance. The relationship between such dissonance and work outcomes would follow a similar trend that was argued for the case of dissonance emerging from high national identity centrality in the section above. Thus, we expect that higher religious identity centrality will be associated with lower performance. We also argue that such dissonance caused by one acting in a ‘way that is inconsistent with one’s beliefs’ (Michener & DeLameter, 1994: 157), would lead to greater stress and burnout amongst the employees (Baumeister, 1986). They would also have higher turnover intentions than employees with lower religious identity centrality. We, therefore, hypothesize: Hypothesis 4. Higher religious identity centrality will be negatively related to employee performance and positively related to intention to leave, stress and burnout.



Organizational Identification and Social Identity Centrality Apart from the impact that each of the different types of social identity centrality has on work outcomes, we also expect them to moderate the relationship between OI and the relevant outcomes. Several studies have shown how OI and other work related identifications such as occupational/professional identification or work-group identification are separate constructs and have different impact on attitudes and behaviors at work (Johnson et al., 2006; van Dick et al., 2004; van Knippenberg & van Schie, 2000). However, Riketta (2002) in his meta-analyses finds that the attachment to one’s profession or occupation is highly correlated with OI. Hence, these identities can be seen as nested identities that reinforce each other in the workplace (Ellemers & Rink, 2005; Meyer et al., 2006). We therefore expect that the relationship between OI and work related outcomes will be moderated by professional identity centrality in a way that it will strengthen the impact of OI. In other words, we would expect identification processes that do not cause cognitive dissonance or role conflict to reinforce each other. In contrast, we expect that the cross-cutting identities of national and religious identity centrality to moderate the relationship in a different way. Specifically, higher levels of national identification or religious identification, in the call center context, should be associated with more cognitive dissonance and role conflicts owing to the inconsistency arising from organizational demands and social identification imperatives. Hence, we expect that higher levels of national and religious identification would weaken the relationship between OI and other work outcomes. Thus we hypothesize: Hypothesis 5. Identity centralities of different social identities will moderate the relationship between organizational identification and the work outcomes of in-role performance, intention to leave, stress and burnout. Specifically, occupational identity centrality will positively moderate, and national and religious identity centralities will negatively moderate, this relationship.

Method Sample and Procedure We tested our hypotheses in a mid-size, international call center in Calcutta in the eastern part of India, which is emerging as the new call center hub with areas like Bangalore in the south and Gurgaon in the north now moving up the value chain of providing off-shored services. Also, a crucial labor supply crisis is pushing the newly off-shoring firms away from the original business process outsourcing (BPO) centers. Calcutta was also the city with



the earliest British contact in India and had one of the first colonial education set ups. It continues to have a tradition of English language education and therefore has a strong resident population that can cater to the call centers. Again, being the biggest city in eastern India, it also has a large hinterland from where employees can be generated, like from the economically less developed states of the northeastern part of the country. The survey was conducted in a mid-size firm in the city that has made a name for its rapid growth. Based on the Holman report (Holman et al., 2007), a typical Indian call center has about 500 employees, is about four-years-old, services the international market (80% international customers), and focuses on outbound calling (60% revenue from outbound sales). Our call center at the time of the survey employed about 470 people. It is essentially a third-party telemarketing center, with more than 50 percent of its revenue being generated from telemarketing. While the firm started as a pure telemarketing provider, it eventually diversified into other contact center processes such as collections, customer support and credit approvals though its primary services remain in telemarketing. The organization caters to international clients only and has no domestic clientele. The surveys were given to all the employees in an on-site conference room for four days of one week. The employees were asked to fill in the surveys in that conference room. They came in groups of 12–15 during shift times. One of the researchers who personally conducted the survey explained the purpose of the survey, and assured them of complete confidentiality before the surveys were handed out. The researcher also informed them that participation was voluntary and they could not participate or not answer some questions if they did not feel comfortable. A cover letter attached to the surveys also restated the same information. The survey was anonymous but was identified by a code number known only to the researchers. This number was utilized for matching the survey data with the employee performance data. The researcher also ensured that the employees sat at some distance from each other in the conference room in order to ensure absolute confidentiality. The data collection yielded 268 usable surveys and an overall participation rate of 57 percent. We tested the sample with the non-respondents and found no significant differences in terms of their performance and hence believe that there is no inherent non-response bias. Given the nature of the industry – characterized by extremely high turnover and absenteeism (Batt et al., 2005), this is a good response rate. In this study we use the full sample to validate our scales but only 132 of the surveys for which we had objective performance data for the regressions. These were also the employees involved in the telemarketing campaign and hence by focusing on them we were able to address any concerns that can emerge from bundling together data for employees involved in very different kinds of jobs.2



Measures Dependent Variables Performance We measured performance by the average net sales per month for the months of May and June 2006, which is when the survey was conducted. Essentially, performance measures the number of sales made by a particular call center employee and approved by the quality department of the firm. We summed daily sales over the two-month period and arrived at the average monthly sales performance for each employee and standardized it by campaign.

Intention to Leave This construct was measured using the scale used by Rosin and Korabik (1991). This four-item scale measures whether and how much an employee is actively seeking to move out of the organization. The items of the scale are scored on a three-point scale of ‘yes’, ‘not sure’ and ‘no’; and one item is scored on ‘frequently’, ‘occasionally’ and ‘never’. The scale had an alpha reliability of 0.71.

Stress This construct was measured using the stress scale of Keller (1984). The items in this scale measured the level of tension and stress experienced by an employee at work. High values indicated higher levels of stress experienced. Each of the three items was scored on a five-point scale ranging from ‘never’ to ‘always’. The scale had an alpha reliability of 0.78.

Burnout This construct was measured by using the Maslach scale of emotional exhaustion (Maslach et al., 1996). Six out of the original eight items were used and they were scored on a five-point scale ranging from ‘strongly disagree’ to ‘strongly agree’. The higher the score, the greater was the experience of burnout. The scale had an alpha reliability of 0.83.

Independent Variables Organizational Identification This construct was adopted to measure the specific form of social identification where employees define themselves by their organizational memberships. It was measured by adapting Mael and Ashforth’s (1992) scale of OI, This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.

Das et al. • The Importance of Being ‘Indian’ 339 Table 1: Factor analysis of identity scales Religious identity centrality

Identity scale items 1. In general, being Indian is an important part of my self-image. 2. I have a strong sense of belonging to India. 3. I have a strong attachment to all other Indians. 4. Being Indian is an important reflection of who I am. 5. In general, being a call center employee is an important part of my self-image. 6. I have a strong sense of belonging to the call center industry. 7. I have a strong attachment to other call center employees. 8. Being a call center employee is an important reflection of who I am. 9. In general, being a member of my religious group is an important part of my self-image. 10. I have a strong sense of belonging to my religious group. 11. I have a strong sense of attachment to other people of my religious group. 12. Being a member of my religious group is an important reflection of who I am. 13. When someone criticizes X, it feels like a personal insult. 14. X’s successes are my successes. 15. When someone praises X it feels like a personal compliment. 16. If a story in the media criticized X, I would feel embarrassed. Eigenvalues Cumulative percentage of variance Explained

Occupational identity centrality

National identity centrality

Organizational identification

.02

.15

.80

–.01

.00

.08

.84

.08

.10

.16

.64

.12

.10

.07

.80

.07

.06

.85

.06

.16

.02

.83

.16

.08

.01

.58

.20

.16

.14

.84

.08

.17

.87

.11

.05

.02

.89

–.02

.04

.04

.85

.09

.08

.11

.88

.05

.07

.07

.10 .00

.20 .35

.04 .13

.82 .66

.00

.19

–.01

.88

.11 4.50 28.16

–.03 2.70 45.25

.13 2.05 58.10

.67 1.52 67.60

N = 249.

which measures identification with one’s school. We changed the wording of the questions and put the name of the organization instead of the school. Such modifications are seen for this scale in various other studies, for example in George and Chattopadhyay (2005). In this context we use four items of the scale and measure it on a five-point scale ranging from ‘strongly disagree’ to ‘strongly agree’. The higher the value, the greater is the individual’s identification as a member of the organization. The reliability of the scale was 0.81. Items of this and other identification scales appear in Table 1.

Occupational Identity Centrality This construct was measured by modifying the professional identity scale from Roberts (2002). We adapted four of the original five items and each item was measured on a five-point scale ranging from ‘strongly disagree’ to This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.


‘strongly agree’. Specifically, we replaced the profession of a medical doctor to that of a call center employee. A higher score indicates greater importance of being a call center employee to the individual. Examples of the items are ‘In general, being a call center employee is an important part of my selfimage’, and ‘I have a strong sense of belonging to the call center industry.’ The reliability of the scale was 0.78. The construct of identity centrality was used to measure the relative salience of one’s social identities. Given the context in India and that of the specific industry, we measure the relative importance of one’s national identity, religious identity and occupational identity. We measure all three from the modified Multidimensional Inventory of Black Identity (Sellers et al., 1998) that was originally adapted by Roberts (2002) to measure the importance of racial and professional identities. We changed the wording of the items of racial identity to measure national and religious identity.

National Identity Centrality This construct was measured by modifying the racial identity scale from Roberts (2002). We adapted four of the original five items and each item was measured on a five-point scale ranging from ‘strongly disagree’ to ‘strongly agree’. A higher score indicates greater importance of being ‘Indian’ for the employees. Examples of the items are ‘In general, being Indian is an important part of my self-image’, and ‘I have a strong sense of belonging to India.’ The reliability of the scale was 0.76.

Religious Identity Centrality This construct was measured by modifying the racial identity scale from Roberts (2002). We adapted four of the original five items and each item was measured on a five-point scale ranging from ‘strongly disagree’ to ‘strongly agree’. A higher score indicates greater importance of being a part of one’s religious group for the employees. Examples of the items are ‘In general, being a member of my religious group is an important part of my self-image’, and ‘I have a strong sense of belonging to my religious group.’ The reliability of the scale was 0.91. We used a sample of 249 employees (the entire sample less people in administration and support – who are not associated with the actual work of call centers) and ran a factor analysis with varimax rotation to check whether the four identity measures were distinct constructs based on the factor loadings (results in Table 1). All the items in employee identification with organization, national identity centrality, religious identity centrality and occupational identity centrality loaded at 0.53 or higher on their respective factor and no items cross-loaded (defined as 0.40 or higher). Each of the four factor’s eigenvalues was greater than one, and the four factors accounted for This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.


67.6 percent of the variance in responses. This analysis led us to conclude that we had four distinct identity scales.3

Controls Information was also collected regarding employees’ gender, tenure with the organization and age. We controlled for these variables since they have been important controls for predicting employee outcomes at work in most studies (Deluga, 1998). For the equations predicting stress, burnout and intention to leave, we also control for performance. We wanted to be sure that low performance was not the predictor of stress, burnout, and intention to leave as performance has been shown in extant literature to be a predictor of these outcomes (Brandes & Das, 2005). Also, as all our other data were provided by the employee and objective performance data were provided by the organization, we control for performance to see if our identification variables have explanatory power over and above that of performance and address problems of common method variance (Podsakoff & Organ, 1986).

Results Means and Correlations Table 2 shows the means, standard deviations, correlations and the scale reliabilities. All the scales have reliabilities over the acceptable mark of .70 (Nunnally, 1970). The age (mean = 23), sex composition (70% men, 30% women) and tenure (mean = 0.6 years) of our sample is similar to other studies of Indian call centers with the exception of gender (typically 60% men, 40% women) (Batt et al., 2005; Ramesh, 2004). The correlations with the dependent variables show that both organizational identification (OI) and occupational identification were negatively related to intention to leave, stress and burnout in the direction predicted.

Hypotheses Tests We test the hypotheses by using hierarchical linear regression. For the results of predicting in-role performance (see Table 3), we find that sex (coded as male = 1, female = 0) and tenure are positively associated with employee performance. Amongst the explanatory variables, the biggest predictor of performance was national identity centrality (b = – 0.20, p < 0.05). Here we see that people with higher national identity centrality have significantly lower performance. We also conducted supplementary analyses wherein we dropped professional and religious identity centrality as they were not


Performance Intention to leave Stress Burnout Organizational identification National identity centrality Religious identity centrality Occupational identity centrality Sex Age Tenure

N = 132; ** significant at the .01 level; * significant at the .05 level. a Scale reliabilities are in parenthesis.

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11.

15.1 1.6 2.7 2.6 4.1 4.5 3.7 3.4 0.7 23.3 0.7

Mean

Table 2: Means, correlations and reliabilities SD 13.1 0.5 1.0 0.8 0.8 0.6 1.2 0.9 0.5 5.2 0.4 –.12 .01 –.03 .05 –.09 –.01 .04 .15 .08 .28**

1 (.71) .42** .52** –.30** –.03 –.07 –.42** .15 –.04 .03

2

(.78) .76** –.19* –.04 .04 –.29** .08 .02 .09

3

(.83) –.20* .04 .01 –.22* .15 –.04 .14

4

(.81) .12 .24** .25** –.24** –.04 .18

5

(.76) .17 .35** .01 .06 .21*

6

7

(.91) .20* –.17 –.34** .14

Means, standard deviations, correlations and reliabilitiesa

(.78) –.11 .02 .08

8

.12 .00

9

.12

10



Das et al. • The Importance of Being ‘Indian’ 343 Table 3: Hierarchical regression results for employee sales performance Sales performance Model with all variables Sex Age Tenure National identity centrality Religious identity centrality Occupational identity centrality Organizational identification Organizational identification* national identity centrality Organizational identification* religious identity centrality Organizational Identification* occupational identity centrality R2 Change in R2 F-value

1

2

3

.20* .09 .29**

.21* .11 .31** –.18+ .02 .04 .03

.22* .08 .30** –.20* –.07 .06 .05

Model with OI and national identity centrality 1 .20* .09 .29**

2

3

.16 .10 .30** –.16+

.18+ .09 .28** –.18*

.04

.07

–.21*

–.22**

–.02

.13 .13** 4.5**

.17 .03 2.27*

.09 .20 .03 2.0*

.13 .13** 4.5**

.13 .00 2.7*

.18 .05* 3.2**

N = 132; * significant at the .05 level; + significant at the .10 level. ** significant at the .01 level;

significant in Table 3. National identity centrality was negatively related to performance (b = – 0.18, p < 0.05) and the interaction of organizational identification and national identity centrality was negatively related to performance (b = – 0.22, p < 0.01) with R2 change of 0.05 (p < 0.05) for the final step, consistent with our results in Table 3. Thus we find support for hypothesis 3 for performance. We also find partial support for hypothesis 5, since the interaction between OI and national identity centrality is also significant (b = – 0.21, p < 0.05). Using the Aiken and West procedure to analyze interactions, in Figure 2, we find that people with high OI are low performers if they have high national identity centrality. We also find that the employees with high OI and low national identity centrality are significantly better performers than all other groups. Thus, we can conclude that there is a strong interaction effect of OI and national identity centrality for workplace performance. From Table 4, we find that national identity is positively related to intention to leave (b = 0.23, p < 0.05) and both occupational identity centrality (b = – 0.46, p < 0.01) and OI (b = – 0.31, p < 0.01) are negatively associated with it. However, we find that religious identity centrality is marginally related to intention to leave in the opposite direction. Thus for intention to leave we find support in the predicted direction for three of the four main hypotheses. We also find some support for hypothesis 5, since the interaction of OI with both religious identity centrality (b = – 0.14, p < 0.1) and occupational identity centrality (b = 0.13, p < 0.1) is marginally significant.



Interaction for for performance performance Interaction

Employee performance Employee performance

High High

Low Low Low

Organizational identification Organizational identification

High High

Low national national identity identity centrality centrality High national national identity identitycentrality centrality High

Figure 2: Interaction graph for employee performance

We find that OI is negatively associated with both stress and burnout (b = – 0.22, p < 0.05; b = –0.26, p < 0.05) in line with conventional theorizing (Haslem & Reicher, 2006). We also find that occupational identity centrality is negatively associated with both stress and burnout (b = – 0.30, p < 0.01; b = – 0.20, p < 0.05) but does not interact with OI in the predicted directions. Though national and religious identity centralities do not have any main effects for stress or burnout, national identity centrality interacts with OI significantly (b = – 0.20; p < 0.05). By analyzing the relationship in this interaction, we find (as shown in Figure 3) that people with high national identity centrality and low OI experience the highest level of burnout. For employees with low national identity centrality, high OI is associated with lower levels of burnout.

Discussion and Conclusion This article is an exploratory study that tries to understand the impact of the centrality of one’s national, religious and occupational identities over and above the effect of organizational identification on work outcomes. It exam-


N = 132. * significant at the .05 level, + significant at the .10 level. ** significant at the .01 level,

Sex Age Tenure Performance National identity centrality Religious identity centrality Occupational identity centrality Organizational identification Organizational identification*national identity centrality Organizational identification*religious identity centrality Organizational identification*occupational identity centrality R2 Change in R2 F–value .36 .31** 5.7**

.05 1.1

.04 –.13+ .03 .00 .23* –.09 –.46** –.31**

2

3 .05 –.17* .04 –.03 .22* –.14+ –.44** –.34** –.03 –.14+ .13+ .39 .03 4.5**

Intention to leave .17+ –.08 –.02 –.04

1

Table 4: Hierarchical regression results for intention to leave, stress and burnout

.50

.03

.16+ –.05 .09 –.06

1

.18 .15** 2.3*

.08 –.03 .14+ –.05 .03 .00 –.30** –.22*

2

Stress .10 –.06 .14 –.08 .01 –.02 –.28** –.20* –.14 –.03 .08 .20 .02 1.8+

3

1.3

.05

.19* –.07 .11 .02

1

.17 .13* 2.0+

.10 –.14 .16+ .05 .15 –.09 –.20* –.26*

2

Burnout 3 .12 –.21* .17+ .00 .13 –.14 –.17+ –.28** –.20* –.09 .13 .22 .04 1.9+




Interaction for for burnout Interaction burnout

Burnout Burnout

High High

Low Low Low Low

Organizational identification Organizational identification

High High

Low Lownational national identity identity centrality centrality High High national national identity centrality

Figure 3: Interaction graph for burnout

ines these relations for transnational service work in Indian international call centers, and thereby tries to understand the identity dynamics at the intersection of the globalization of non-traditional, non-face-to-face work arrangements. Our findings have important implications for organizational studies in general and the literature on identity in particular. To start with, from our results, we find the greatest support for our predictions related to national identity centrality, followed by occupational identity centrality and OI, and the least support for religious identity centrality. Our main contribution here lies in trying to bring in the cross-cutting identities of national and religious identity centralities as possible predictors of workplace outcomes. We believed that both national and religious identification may become more salient in the context of transnational service work where these identities need to be masked at work. In fact, our findings reflect similar conclusions drawn about processes of globalization of work (in a variety of different contexts) that show how national identity can have implications for work outcomes in transnational workplaces (Aihlon-Souday & Kunda, 2003; Reade, 2001). This is important since we show that it has significant associations with employee work outcomes. If these identities are important or central to the employees, then their devaluation would lead to lowered job satisfaction and commitment, thereby leading to negative work outcomes.



In our specific context, we find that national identity centrality is associated with poor performance and increased intent to leave. The global nature of this particular industry makes national identity more salient as the organizations within this industry have to constantly strive to mask the national origin of the call center employees. Moreover, several popular media articles show how employees in this industry are often abused by the customers for their suspected national origins. This kind of abuse has been explained as a form of back lash against off-shoring of white-collar jobs along with the politicization of the issue of off-shoring jobs (Sitt, 1997). In an additional qualitative study on Indian call centers, we also found through several interviews similar narratives of how, when customers abuse the employees on their ‘suspected’ Indian nationality, they are often disturbed and find it difficult to negotiate. Such customer actions give rise to greater levels of dissonance when an employee’s national identity is central to his/her self-definition. This dissonance in turn would have its own impact on different kinds of work outcomes of the employee. Consistent with other OI research, we also show how the Mael and Ashforth (1995) scale has a similar impact on work outcomes for an entirely different work context and thereby contribute to the literature on the significance of OI for businesses (Pratt, 2000). Similar to the meta-analysis on OI by Riketta (2002), we find that OI is strongly related to intention to leave. There is also a strong negative association between OI and stress and burnout. This finding reinforces the importance of OI within the firms for favorable employee outcomes. Again, we also find out the importance of occupational identity as a form of nested identity of OI (Ellemers & Rink, 2005; Meyer et al., 2006) whereby one strengthens the impact of the other, thereby contributing to the literature on multiple foci of OI (van Knippenberg & van Schie, 2000). In contrast to previous OI findings we also found that the impact of OI on performance was contingent on the national identity centrality of the employees. High OI was indeed beneficial when national identity centrality was low. However, the high OI and high national centrality combination was associated with the worst performance, indicating the importance of considering multiple identification processes in understanding implications of OI. This can be explained because of the context of this work. In general the process of masking and concealing of one’s national identity would be devaluing this identity and would affect people for whom the national identity is important. Again, for employees who are high on OI and high on national identity centrality, despite the best intentions of performing on the job, the challenge posed in the form of customer abuse on their national identities leads to high levels of dissonance which affect their performance. We also do not find strong significant support for our hypothesis on religious identity centrality. This can be attributed to the fact that although their religious identities are being concealed, however, unlike their national identities, they are not being directly challenged by the customers, and are therefore less likely to become salient.



Our results have important implications for human resource practices, particularly as they related to employee performance, turnover, stress, and burnout. Call center employees who make hundreds of calls every day are susceptible to stress and burnout leading to greater intentions to leave and high turnover. Our article provides the managers with a different approach towards the possible causes of specific work outcomes. By showing how organizational identification positively affects work outcomes, we reinforce the importance of OI as a process that can be employed to increase employee performance outcomes and reduce the experience of stress and burnout. Moreover, by showing the role of occupational identity and national identity centralities we also show how the impact of such OI can be strengthened or even reduced. In this way, our study brings into attention a number of identity related variables that need to be addressed in this industry. As call centers experience high turnover, understanding how identity centralities interact to influence performance, stress, burnout, and intention to leave can provide managers with valuable insights to reduce it. Our exploratory study is not without limitations. First, one of the key limitations of this study is the small sample size. Due to the lack of performance data we had to confine our results to the smaller sample. Second, we conducted the survey in one outbound call center. Identification notions may differ significantly between outbound sales centers and inbound service centers. Given the size and diversity of India and the variety of processes that are carried out by call centers, there may be both operational and regional differences. As our study focused on outbound services, we expect that there is more pressure on these employees to adopt foreign ways as they have to convince foreign customers to buy their products. The pressure to adopt foreign ways may be less in inbound call centers as they tend to simply serve foreigners and not persuade them to buy their products. Third, we consider a moderately simple model of the transnational worker. S/he is not conceived of as an actor trained or encouraged to play roles in particular ways, for example, by faking (surface acting) or deep identification (method acting). The extent to which workers are able to do this, and are trained informally or formally to adopt acting strategies, is likely to mediate the relationship between identity and outcomes. In spite of some of these limitations, the sample is similar in its characteristics (age, gender, tenure, etc.) with other studies on the industry (Holman et al., 2007; Ramesh, 2004) thereby showing some generalizability of these results across the industry. This article expands on a set of social identities unique to transnational service work. The study can also be extended to other global identity contexts like mergers, joint ventures, immigrant workers, expatriates and so on. Specifically, it can be used to compare the relative impact of national, religious and occupational identity centralities within the above contexts. It can also be used to examine differences across national contexts. We conclude that this study is an important step in understanding



and extending the identity literature in organization studies to globalizing work places. It explores the intersection of relevant social identities under conditions of globalization with the new forms of work arrangements that require discontinuous, non-face-to-face customer interaction. It shows how national identity centrality is a crucial concept that predicts several different outcomes at work, and also moderates the relationship between OI and work outcomes.

Acknowledgements A previous version of the article was the recipient of the Best International Paper Award from the Academy of Management’s Organizational Behavior Division. The authors also acknowledge partial support from the Kiebach Center and Whitman Research Committee for this research.

Notes 1. The process or product training is where employees receive training on the specific services they provide or products they are expected to sell. This is similar to their counterparts in the US. The voice and accent, and cultural training and the assuming of different names are the additional elements in the off-shored call centers in India. 2. The other 136 employees were involved in other forms of call center processes such as collections, credit approvals, customer support services and other organizational support functions like training, administration and quality. For this group we could not obtain comparable objective performance data (i.e. the performance criteria were different) from those of the telemarketing group (which forms the largest group of employees). 3. Similar loadings and rotated factor patterns were achieved from oblique rotation. Similar results were also obtained from the sample of 132 that we use for the regressions.

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53 Albert and Whetten Revisited: Strengthening the Concept of Organizational Identity David A. Whetten

It is not clear why weak conceptions of ‘identity’ are conceptions of identity. — Brubaker and Cooper (2000, p. 11)

I

am writing in response to a growing concern that the concept of organizational identity is suffering an identity crisis, in the sense that, absent a demonstrated central, enduring, and distinctive (CED) meaning, it has failed to measure up to its own definitional standard. Although there are numerous expressions of this concern in print, Mike Pratt’s (2003) lament, “a concept that means everything means nothing” is typical (p. 162; see also Albert, Ashforth, & Dutton, 2000; Haslam, Postmes, & Ellemers, 2003; Hatch & Schultz, 2000; Whetten & Mackey, 2002). I find this to be a particularly troubling characterization given that Albert and Whetten (1985) introduced organizational identity as a defined construct. My recent reading of Olof Brunninge’s (2005) dissertation helped me better understand the challenges facing scholars interested in studying this subject. In his extensive literature review, Brunninge points out that, beginning with Albert and Whetten (1985), scholarship on organizational identity has invoked inconsistent treatments of the concept’s distinguishing properties. For example, he observes that in some cases, organizational identity is portrayed as a subjective property of observers, whereas in other cases, it is described

Source: Journal of Management Inquiry, 15(3) (2006): 219–234.



as a verifiable property of organizations. Also, although organizational identity is depicted by some authors as a highly stable property of organizations, others characterize it as a relatively malleable property, readily and routinely altered to reflect shifting environmental circumstances. And although some authors propose that an organization’s identity consists of fragmented, often incompatible elements, others challenge this characterization, underscoring its essential contribution to coherent, consistent organizational action. Playing off the opening Brubaker and Cooper quote, my objective is to propose a strong version of organization identity capable of passing two related tests of construct validity. First, operationally, it should specify how scholars can reliably distinguish bona fide organizational identity claims from a larger set of claims about an organization, as well as bona fide organizational identity-referencing discourse from a larger set of organizationreferencing discourse. Second, analytically, its specified conceptual domain should be distinguishable from related concepts, especially organizational culture, image, and identification. As suggested by the article’s title, my proposal builds on a 20-year-old formulation. The Albert and Whetten (1985) description of organizational identity contained three principle components. Although we didn’t use these terms, the ideational component equated organizational identity with members’ shared beliefs regarding the question “Who are we as an organization?”; the definitional component proposed a specific conceptual domain for organizational identity, characterized as the CED features of an organization; and finally, the phenomenological component posited that identity-related discourse was most likely to be observed in conjunction with profound organizational experiences. Looking back, it is my sense that the present lack of conceptual clarity in the literature citing this foundational article is largely due to the increasingly common practice of treating the ideational part of our tripartite formulation as if it were the whole, and thus treating the whole as if it were its leastdiscriminating part. As a countermeasure, I will emphasize the merits of using the complete Albert and Whetten formulation and treating organizational identity as a defined construct (Ashforth & Mael, 1996; Baron, 2004). Although I agree with Gioia, Schultz, and Corley (2002) that the metaphorical treatment of organizational identity has to date yielded important insights, other forms of scholarship, involving model building, hypothesis testing, and measurement have not been well-served by this ideational-dominant treatment (Haslam, Postmes, & Ellemers, 2002). My principle interest is in fostering greater use of organizational identity in conjunction with other organizational studies constructs. So that the core of my proposal doesn’t get lost in the details of my presentation, I’ll summarize it up front. The concept of organizational identity is specified as the central and enduring attributes of an organization that distinguish it from other organizations. I refer to these as organizational identity claims, or referents, signifying an organization’s self-determined


Whetten • Concept of Organizational Identity 357

(and “self”-defining) unique social space and reflected in its unique pattern of binding commitments. In practice, CED attributes function as organizational identity referents for members when they are acting or speaking on behalf of their organization, and they are most likely to be invoked in organizational discourse when member agents are grappling with profound, fork-in-the-road, choices – those that have the potential to alter the collective understanding of “who we are as an organization.” In these settings and for these purposes, identity claims are likely to be represented as categorical imperatives – what the organization must do to avoid acting out of character. This conception of organizational identity rests on two core assumptions, extracted from organizational theory and identity theory (Whetten, in press; Whetten & Mackey, 2002). First, organizations are more than social collectives, in that modern society treats organizations in many respects as if they were individuals – granting them analogous powers to act and assigning them analogous responsibilities as collective social actors (Bauman, 1990; Coleman, 1974; Scott, 2003; Zuckerman, 1999). This view of organizations suggests a distinction between organizational identity (the identity of a collective actor) and collective identity (the identity of a collection of actors). It also highlights important functional and structural parallels between the identity of organizational actors and individual actors (Czarniawska, 1997). Second, I equate identity with an actor’s subjective sense of uniqueness, referred to as the self-view or self-definition and reflected in notions such as self-governance and self-actualization. Framed in this manner, the identity of individuals and organizations is an unobservable subjective state – a causal attribution that is inferred from its posited effects or consequences, especially an actor’s “identifying commitments” or “distinctive behavioral signature” (Baumeister, 1998; Baumeister & Vohs, 2003; Leary & Tangney, 2003; Mischel & Morf, 2003). As a guide for theorizing about the identity of organizations in this manner, I have relied heavily on Morgeson and Hofman’s (1999) approach to cross-level theorizing in organizational studies. A distinctive feature of this approach is its systematic use of structural and functional analogues and its accompanying proposition that organizational constructs borrowed from the individual level of analysis need not have the same structures, only the same functions (i.e., comparable effects or consequences). For example, although the functions associated with memory can be observed in both individuals and organizations, the form it takes is quite different (Walsh & Ungson, 1991). Morgeson and Hoffman also propose that once the analogous functions of an individual-level construct have been identified at the organizational level of analysis, their supporting organizational structures or forms need to be identified. I use as my models for this approach to cross-level theorizing Selznick’s (1957) treatment of identity as organizational/individual character (irreversible commitments) and Czarniawska’s (1997) efforts to demonstrate comparable roles for individual and organizational identity, with regards to an actor’s social accountability standards and self-governance requirements.



Operational Validity Standard My presentation is organized around the twin standards I proposed in the beginning as suitable tests of construct validity. This first section focuses on the operational utility of the CED definition as a set of specifications for organizational identity claims (conceptual domain; what) and associated identityreferencing and revealing discourse (phenomenological domain; how, when, why). In the following section, the proposed formulation’s ability to analytically distinguish organizational identity from related constructs will be tested. Throughout, the posited functions of organizational identity and the structural characteristics of the organizational attributes capable of serving those functions will be highlighted. To underscore this distinction, in this section I divide the CED definition into a functional standard (distinctive) and a structural standard (central and enduring).1 In the course of discussing each of these as operational guides, specific validity standards are proposed and illustrations are drawn from the literature. A summary of these standards and associated guiding questions is shown in Table 1.

Functional Definitional Standard: Distinguishing Organizational Attributes Legitimate identity claims. The functional component of the CED definition stipulates that the subset of an organization’s attributes that are germane to the study of its identity are those that have repeatedly demonstrated their value as distinguishing organizational features. In essence, these identity referents effectively specify to whom an organizational actor is similar and in what ways it is different from all others (Greenwood & Hinings, 1993; Lounsbury & Glynn, 2001; Mohr & Guerra-Pearson, in press; Scott, 2001). This treatment of the core, relational meaning of identity is consistent with the Latin suffix -id used for nouns, denoting a member of a specific family, class, or category, as well as a related meaning of character as “all those qualities that make a person, group or thing what he or it is and different from others” (Oxford American Dictionary, 1980, p. 104). It is also reflected in the conception of identity as a “unique social space” found in individual identity scholarship (Brewer, 1991; Ashforth & Mael, 1989; Hogg & Terry, 2000, 2001; Pratt, 1998, 2001) and related sociological treatments of organizational identity (Baron, 2004; Hsu & Hannan, 2004; Polos, Hannan, & Carroll, 2002; Zuckerman, 1999). This characterization is captured nicely in Rao, Davis, and Ward’s (2000) statement: “Organizations acquire a social identity from the industry to which they belong, the organizational form they use, and through membership in accrediting bodies” (p. 270).


Illustrative Guiding Questions

Is there an imperative tone to the discourse? Are positions presented as truth claims, comparable to moral obligations? Are emotions running high?

Does this attribute reflect the organization’s distinctive set of preferences/commitments? Would it be considered an organization-specific attribute? Is it a positive distinction? Is it an essential distinction?


Invoked by member-agents “when nothing else will do,” as decision guides/justifications, in conjunction with profoundly difficult situations. The dominating topic of conversation when seemingly “nothing else matters,” in the face of a credible identity threat.

Phenomenological Domain: IdentityReferencing Discourse (When, Why)

Illustrative Guiding Questions

Have “lesser” decision guides been tried and discarded? Is this the “court of last appeal” for resolving conflicting proposals pertaining to a fork-in-the-road decision?

If this attribute were removed, would the character/history of the organization be significantly altered? Would it be a different kind of organization? Does this attribute reflect the organization’s highest priorities and deepest commitments? Is it a “higher level” organizational attribute, or directly linked to one (i.e., an important extension or expression)? Is it considered a sacrosanct element? Is it celebrated in organizational lore?

a. Characteristics of legitimate organizational identity claims (identity referents) and organizational-identity referencing discourse.

Attributes that are manifested as an organization’s core programs, policies and procedures, and that reflect its highest values. Attributes that have passed the test of time or on some other basis operate as “irreversible” commitments.

Validity Standards

Structural Definitional Standard: Central and Enduring Organizational Attributes

Conceptual Domain: Identity Claims (What)

Focus

Represented as categorical imperatives, drawing attention to what must be done to avoid acting out of character, both comparatively and historically.

Phenomenological Domain: IdentityReferencing Discourse (How)

Validity Standards

Attributes used by an organization to positively distinguish itself from others. Attributes spanning what is required and what is ideal for a particular kind of organization.

Conceptual Domain: Identity Claims (What)

Focus

Functional Definitional Standard: Distinguishing Organizational Attributes

Table 1: Using the CED definition to enhance the construct validity of organizational identity, within a functional / structural perspective



Albert and Whetten’s (1985) focus on distinctive identity claims foreshadowed Brewer’s (2003) principle of optimal distinctiveness, drawing attention to the tension between humans’ equally compelling needs for assimilation and uniqueness. Within the organizational studies field, this tension is reflected in the notion of “strategic balance,” characterized by Deephouse (1999) as “organizations should be as different as legitimately possible.” It also underscores the logical affinity between organizational identity and contemporary views of sustainable competitive advantage (Barney & Stewart, 2000). In summary, the distinguishing validity standard stipulates that if specific organizational attributes are not considered essential for distinguishing the focal organization from others, there is no theoretical value in referring to them as identity referents.2 According to identity theory, distinguishing has a second, equally important, meaning stemming from the need for positive self-regard or high selfesteem (Abrams & Hogg, 1988). Thus, in addition to distinguishing the focal organization from similar organizations, it is posited that bona fide identity referents must portray it as a distinguished social actor (a point convincingly argued by Czarniawska, 1997, p. 52, and closely related to Podolny’s 1993 treatment of organizational status). Thus, it is posited that an organization’s identity claims encompass the attributes required of all organizations of a particular type as well as the ideal attributes associated with that type (the ideal hospital, museum, or grocery store). It follows that although widely shared negative characterizations of an organization (e.g., highly bureaucratic) may explain member turnover, they do not constitute an organizational-identity explanation of member turnover. The use of this dual meaning is nicely portrayed in a study of stock exchange listings by Rao et al. (2000). A distinguishing feature of a publicly traded corporation is which stock exchange their stock is listed on. In the United States, rapidly growing technology firms typically list their stock with the NASDAQ stock market, whereas established, more mainstream firms prefer the New York Stock Market. The authors of this study note that firms seek to enhance their prestige by switching from the NASDAQ and offer insights into the details of these moves. Legitimate identity-referencing discourse. Embedded in Czarniawska’s (1997) comparison of individual and organizational identity is a provocative proposition: Proper identification is especially critical for the survival of organizations, because unlike individuals, “an organization can not legitimately claim to be autistic or boast of defective ‘other perception’ (‘nobody understands us,’ Bruss, 1976)” (p. 52). Said differently, although chronic mistaken identity is troublesome for individuals, it is a fatal flaw for organizations. Given that the key to an organization being properly recognized is being properly classified (White,1992; Zuckerman, 1999) and that the primary threat to proper classification is uncharacteristic action (“acting out of character”), we can expect to see identity referents invoked in organizational discourse as categorical imperatives. They are categorical in the sense that



they reference distinctive social categories (we are a credit union, not a bank) and/or they are stated as implied categorical distinctions (we are a decentralized bank). The imperative form of organizational identity claims stems from their link to adopted social forms and associated accountability standards. It follows that identity-referencing directives signify the boundaries of appropriate action for a particular organization – what it means for this actor to act-in-character (Douglas, 1987). Logically, there are two bases for determining appropriate organizational actions: comparative and historical. The comparative frame of reference (“We must do X because it is consistent with what’s expected of X-type organizations, like us”) can be roughly equated with an organization’s legitimacy requirements (Suchman, 1995) or accountability requirements (Czarniawska, 1997; Polos et al., 2002). The equally important historical frame of reference (“We must do Y because it is consistent with our organization’s history of strategic choices, like this”) highlights the logical interface between organizational identity and organizational integrity (Goodstein & Potter, 1999; Paine, 1994; Selznick, 1957), stewardship theory (Donaldson & Davis, 1991), and normative conceptions of organizational character (Wilkins, 1989). What these integrity-evoking arguments share in common is a temporal conception of acting in-character, commonly expressed as “honoring the past” or “doing what’s right for the organization.” The categorical-argument validity standard stipulates that the practical meaning of identity referents must be sufficiently understood among organizational decision makers that their use as decision aids prevents an organization from being misclassified as a social actor or misused as a social tool. The principal value of identity referents as shared decision premises lies in their generally accepted meaning within an encompassing social-cultural milieu (Kogut & Zander, 1996; Porac, Ventresca, & Mishina, 2002). As a point of emphasis, although the meaning of some kinds of identity referents, especially organizational traits and competencies, is inherently ambiguous and susceptible to change with time, the penalties for incoherent, inconsistent, organizational practice are so severe that they in effect place an upper limit on the level of ambiguity that can be tolerated within identity-referencing organizational discourse (Czarniawska, 1997). The corollary imperative-argument validity standard stipulates that identity-based directives are obligatory, not advisory (Brickson & Brewer, 2001; Polos et al., 2002). A distinguishing characteristic of identity-based discourse is the inference that this is what the organization must do to avoid becoming indistinguishable, unrecognizable, unknown. A subtext of these discussions is that if an organization fails to honor its distinguishing commitments, it risks becoming unpredictable and untrustworthy. It is thus likely that identity-referencing organizational discussions are noted for their emotional charge, especially when they pertain to consequential, strategic choices, as described more fully in the next section.



In conclusion, with regard to the distinctive “hows” of bona fide identityreferencing discourse, it is posited that identity-based arguments are characterized by an imperative tone, associated with commonly understood categorical standards, and put forth as truth claims, on a par with moral obligations.

Structural Definitional Standard: Central and Enduring Organizational Attributes Legitimate identity claims. The structural component of the CED definition specifies that central and enduring organizational attributes are most capable of satisfying an actor’s identity requirement of being readily recognized by all interested parties (Ashforth & Mael, 1996; Lounsbury & Glynn, 2001). Said differently, if something isn’t a central and enduring feature of an organization, then practically speaking, it isn’t likely to be invoked as a distinguishing feature, and thus it falls outside the domain specified for this concept. The core point here is that organizations are best known by their deepest commitments – what they repeatedly commit to be, through time and across circumstances. Thus, in line with path-dependent conceptions of organizational evolution (Aldrich, 1999; Baum, 1996; Stinchcombe, 1965), organizing and identifying can be thought of as parallel, if not identical projects.3 This parallelism can be expressed as a postulate: An organization’s identity denotes the kind of organization that has to this point been formed; organizing is the process by which organizations make themselves known as a particular type of social actor. Thus, organizational identity referents can be thought of as the institutionalized reminders of significant organizing choices (Baron, 2004; Friedland & Alford, 1991; Powell & Dimaggio, 1991; Whetten & Mackey, 2002). As a point of emphasis, this postulate argues against inferences in the literature that organizational identity claims are the product of image management initiatives – after-the-fact efforts to formulate an attractive appearance. The central definitional standard directs our attention to what members consider to be essential knowledge about their organization (van Rekom & Whetten, 2005). The research convention of “causal mapping” helps us visualize an organization’s central attributes. Using data collected from members, this methodology produces an ordered array of organizational features, such that the relative centrality of a feature reflects its presumed role in “causing” (explaining; accounting for) less central features (Reger & Huff, 1993). In a classic application of this research tool, Porac, Thomas, and Baden-Fuller (1989) examined 17 Scottish manufacturers of wool sweaters. This group of firms was selected for study because they constituted a distinctive niche in the knitwear industry, organized around the following shared, core, consistently expressed preferences: high quality, classic design, fully fashioned cashmere. These firms further expressed their shared identity as a “generic



recipe”: “purchase yarn from local spinners, sell sweaters that will appeal to classically minded, high-income consumers, create a flexible production system that can manufacture garments in small lots, hire exclusive agents around the world to market these products, and temper the aggressiveness of one’s approach to pricing” (p. 414). According to the enduring definitional standard, legitimate identity claims are, generally speaking, those organizational elements that have withstood the test of time. Feldman (2002) has observed that we commit to our deepest memory the things we dare not forget. In analogous fashion, organizations intentionally perpetuate their central and distinguishing features, preserving for tomorrow what has made them what and/or who they are today. With time, these acts of preservation are likely to take on mythical proportions, endowing them with a sacrosanct quality, manifested as “trumping rights” over lesser commitments and priorities. Retrospectively, it is likely that identity claims will be depicted as morals embedded in well-told stories of the defining moments in an organization’s history (Kimberly, 1987), as the central themes highlighted in an organization’s autobiographical accounts (Czarniawska, 1997), or as a distinctive set of organizing principles authored by formative organizational leaders (Buenstorf & Murmann, 2005). Along these lines, Whetten and Mackey (2005) found that for a group of S&P 500 firms, the best predictor of consistently high corporate social performance ratings during the 1990s decade was information obtained from corporate autobiographical accounts. Specifically, the histories of firms with consistently high ratings reported that comparable social practices were first initiated during the tenure of the organization’s founder. Of particular note, there was no significant difference between the ratings of firms reporting that these practices started after the founder’s departure and firms whose histories never mentioned these practices. These results underscore Stinchcombe’s (1965) observations regarding the long term, path-defining imprint of a founder’s initial commitments. They are also in line with Baron’s (2004) observation from his extended study of technology firms that “authentic” identities are most likely to be adopted early in the history of an enterprise. It is important to note that the enduring definitional standard does not stipulate that only very old organizational features will be experienced by current members as central and distinguishing features. Rather than waiting for the verdict of natural selection, organizations are capable of signaling their intent to make recent commitments endure. As noted by Selznick (1957), an organization’s commitments are made “irreversible” by the degree to which they are made central to an organization’s policies, procedures, and practices. For example, in 1994, when the Jonkoping International Business School in Sweden was formed, 1st-year students reported that the school’s enduring commitment to international education was reflected in its degree requirements, the makeup of its faculty, exchange program agreements involving universities in other countries, and so forth (Brunninge, 2005). In line with



this example, we can posit that today’s central organizational characteristics are likely to be viewed, retrospectively, as enduring organizational characteristics in the future (van Rekom & Whetten, 2005). One way to visualize the central and enduring structural standard is to think in terms of a hierarchically ordered set of CED organizational attributes, roughly paralleling the social, relational, and personal attribute-sets constituting an individual’s composite identity (Ashforth & Johnson, 2001; Brewer & Gardner, 1996; Brickson, 2000; Mischel & Morf, 2003; Stets & Burke, 2003). The highest level of this nested array includes adopted social forms, social categories, and comparable group memberships; the middle level includes established ties with organizations and institutions; and the lower level includes distinguishing organizational practices, competencies, and traits, including organization-specific attributes of members, products, and services. We might also think of these three types or levels of identities as broad categories on a “menu of available organizational forms” embedded in cultural knowledge (Aldrich, 1999; Haveman & Rao, 1997; Lounsbury & Ventresca, 2002; Porac et al., 2002; Rao, Monin, & Durand, 2003). Recalling the parallel between organizing and identifying introduced earlier, we can posit that a properly organized/identified organization includes selections from all three parts of this menu and that the logical structure of the menu guides the formation of a coherent organization/organizational identity. In particular, the menu specifies both what is possible (“venture capitalist” was not on the menu in Romania in the 1980s) and what is appropriate, given previous choices (“all you can eat” or “take out” would be considered inappropriate organizing choices for a five-star French restaurant). As illustrated by these examples, according to taxonomy theory, higher level choices constrain and give meaning to lower level choices (i.e., subsequent choices must be backwards compatible), and lower level choices elaborate, extend, and clarify higher level choices – in line with Baron’s 2004 treatment of identity sharpness.4 Thus we see that higher level identities can be thought of as logically prior choices (more central) and as temporally antecedent choices (more enduring). This observation suggests that efforts to understand a particular organization’s identity claims should begin at the top of an organization’s nested arrangement of CED attributes. In contrast, the task of identifying legitimate identity claims is made more difficult when we focus on lower level traits, practices, or competencies, in isolation. For example, following a merger, suppose that key employees complain, “This organization doesn’t value our minds anymore,” or “We’ve lost our customer focus.” Without the benefit of a top-to-bottom examination of the premerger organization’s attributes, it is difficult to judge whether this apparent postmerger shift in focus constitutes a loss of bona fide organizational identity claims. This depiction of hierarchically ordered identity claims draws attention to a critical component of my cross-level theory. Higher level organizational



attributes, including adopted social forms and organizing logics, can be considered structural analogues of “inherent” individual attributes, such as gender and ethnicity, on the grounds that the perceived switching costs associated with the replacement of these core identifying features are so high that the prospect of doing so is, practically speaking, unthinkable. For example, consider the implications of an organization switching from being a sporting goods retailer to a school, from being a bakery to a software firm, or from being a bank to a welfare agency. It is only slightly less difficult to imagine the mass disorientation that would result from Harvard University adopting the University of Phoenix model of education, from Notre Dame or Boston College renouncing their affiliation with the Catholic Church, from 3M rescinding its commitment to innovative products, or State Farm reversing its longstanding commitment to being a mutual insurance company. Legitimate identity-referencing discourse. At the heart of Albert and Whetten’s (1985) phenomenological treatment of organizational identity practice is the notion of profound organizational circumstances. Their examples focused on organizational life-cycle transitions, such as the retirement of an organization’s founder. Their core argument was that bona fide identity-referencing discourse is most readily observable during periods of organizational upheaval. What, in retrospect, was missing from their discussion was a systematic characterization of profound organizational experience. I will attempt to correct this oversight by explicitly positing a link between the central and enduring definitional elements and their associated phenomenological markers – what I refer to as the “when” and “why” of identity-referencing discourse. As a beginning reference point, there is widespread evidence that decision makers tend to match their choice of decision premises with the perceived requirements of their decisions (March & Simon, 1958; Simon, 1997). For example, core personal values are likely to be invoked when deciding to marry but not when selecting the wedding date or caterer. In similar manner, it is posited that decision makers in organizations are most likely to invoke organizational identity referents when lesser decision premises (e.g., price comparisons, customer preferences, maintenance, and support implications) are deemed to be insufficient, and they are unlikely to invoke them when lesser decision premises are judged to be sufficient. Organizational identity is, thus, a blunt decision aid – it is of little value in making routine or incremental decisions, but it is indispensable for most fork-in-the-road choices, especially when a contemplated course of action might be considered out-of-character by a legitimating audience. This characterization of profound organizational experience suggests three organizational settings where identity-referencing discourse will be especially visible. First, identity referent applications. I have in mind exceptionally difficult strategic challenges and opportunities, including life-cycle transitions. These are cases in which decision makers conclude that nothing else but relevant



identity referents will do as decision guides. The widely cited study of the New York City Port Authority’s response to a homeless person’s crisis (Dutton & Dukerich, 1991) is a good example, in the sense that the underlying premise guiding their selection of appropriate responses was that they were a transportation organization, not a social welfare agency. As a second example, in a recently published study, Ravasi and Schultz (2006) report that during the span of two decades, Bang and Olafson, a Danish high-end audio electronics firm, faced three major operational crises. For example, in 1972, the company’s principle distributors pressured the firm to develop a more diversified product mix, pointing to the success of SONY and other Japanese audio firms. In each instance, senior management commissioned an internal task force to conduct a historical analysis of the firm’s core organizing principles and values. The results of their reports were used to formulate Bang and Olafson-appropriate responses. Second, identity-referent threats. These typically involve the threatened loss of high-level identity referents, for example, proposed changes in the qualifying requirements for not-for-profit organizations or minority-owned government contractors, or the threatened loss of mission-central relationships, such as sole-source provider or distributor agreements. In these cases, the need to resolve a real or potential identity crisis dominates the attention of decision makers, often to the point where seemingly nothing else matters (Bouchikhi & Kimberly, 2003; Fiol, 2002). An in-depth identity-threat case study was recently reported by Corley and Gioia (2004). They describe the challenges facing a divested business unit as it struggled to establish an independent identity. They carefully document how the emerging organization was required to change both their identity labels and the meanings associated with them. Of particular note, they describe how organizational leaders selfconsciously modeled the appropriate use of the new identity claims as decision guides. Another instructive example is reported in Brunninge’s (2005) study of Handlesbanken, a Swedish bank distinguished by its emphasis on decentralized branch banking operations. When their competitors began offering Internet banking services as a way to economize and centralize core banking functions, Handlesbanken found themselves torn between their customers’ demands for these services and their identity claims. Following extensive deliberations, a creative, identity-consistent approach was adopted, featuring a seamless network of branch bank Web sites, personalized with local pictures, announcements, and news. Third, identity referent incongruence. There are some organizations that, by design, violate the coherent identity prerequisite for effective selfgovernance. This is the distinguishing characteristic of hybrid identity organizations (e.g., family-businesses, church-universities, professional arts organizations). Meyer and Scott (1983) aptly describe the predicament facing these organizations: “The legitimacy of a given organization is negatively affected by the number of different authorities sovereign over it and by the



diversity or inconsistency of their accounts as how it is to function” (p. 202). Albert, Godfrey, and Whetten (1999) expanded Albert and Whetten’s (1985) description of organizational hybrids by adding three distinguishing characteristics: incompatible, inviolate, and indispensable identity claims (Albert & Adams, 2002). Anecdotal examples suggest that these organizations are, as one observer put it, “perpetually one major decision away from provoking a massive identity crisis – tantamount to civil war” (Glynn, 2000; GoldenBiddle & Rao, 1997; Pratt & Foreman, 2000). Whereas most organizations facing difficult choices can rely on their core commitments to adjudicate conflicting proposals, hybrids must actively prevent decisions from becoming test cases of their allegiance to incompatible identity claims. In conclusion, for the typical organization identity-referencing discourse is most likely to be observed in conjunction with novel, controversial, consequential strategic choices, and/or threatened changes in the organization’s self-defining social classification. In the latter situation, the massivelydestabilizing possibility of becoming a different kind of organization rivets decision makers’ attention on what they would otherwise take for granted. The premise underlying this phenomenological treatment of organizational identity-referencing discourse is that too often what organizations claim to be when nothing is on the line is not how they act when everything is on the line. Coming at this from a different angle, although the mention of distinctive organizational features in a single official publication is surely not enough to qualify them as legitimate identity claims, given their role as guides for appropriate organizational action, it is inconceivable that legitimate identity claims would not appear in multiple publications.5

Analytical Validity Standard Thus far, the practical value of a stronger, more discriminating, conception of organizational identity has been examined in light of the operational challenges researchers face in determining what constitute bona fide organizational identity claims and associated identity-referencing accounts. In this section, the analytical utility of the proposal will be tested, as a guide for distinguishing organizational identity from related concepts. Despite the publication of several treatises on this subject (Hatch & Schultz, 1997, 2000; Schultz, Hatch, & Larsen, 2000; Whetten & Mackey, 2002), readers of the organizational identity literature continue asking for help locating the conceptual boundaries between organizational identity and related concepts, notably, organizational culture and image. (For a related treatment of organizational identification, see Dyer & Whetten, in press; Foreman & Whetten, 2002; Whetten, in press.) In the case of organizational culture, it is important to highlight two different meanings of culture used in organizational identity scholarship (Barney & Stewart, 2000; Fiol, Hatch, & Golden-Biddle, 1998; Hatch &



Schultz, 2000). On one hand, scholars who view the world through a cultural lens tend to characterize organizations as cultures and organizational identity as the self-referencing aspect of organizational culture. On the other hand, when culture is treated as one of many comparable properties of organizations, it is typically portrayed as a particularly distinguishing property (e.g., IBM’s culture). The proposed treatment of organizational identity is more compatible with the second treatment of organizational culture and offers the following distinction between identity and culture. When member agents invoke elements of their organization’s culture in ways, for purposes and at times that are consistent with the specified uses of legitimate identity claims, then these cultural elements are functioning as part of the organization’s identity. In other words, according to the CED definition, members are most likely to invoke specific cultural elements of their organization as distinguishing features when they are experienced as central and enduring organizational attributes. This treatment of organization-specific cultural features echoes Burton Clark’s (1972) classic treatment of “organizational sagas” as a form of differentiation among elite private colleges (e.g., the “Swarthmore saga”). Within the organizational identity literature, the concept of organizational image generally refers to shared cognitive representations or views of an organization. Notably, image is sometimes equated with organizational identity and sometimes held outside identity (Dutton, Dukerich, & Harquail, 1994; Elsbach & Kramer, 1996; Gioia, Schultz, & Corley, 2000; Gioia & Thomas, 1996; Schultz et al., 2000; Soenen & Moingeon, 2002). Paralleling the analogous treatment of organizational culture, scholars who view the social world through an ideational lens tend to characterize organizational identity as a particular image or set of images having to do with “who we are as an organization,” for example, current versus future or ideal views of “who we are.” In contrast, when identity and image are formulated as comparable organizational properties, image is typically characterized as either a projected representation of an organization targeting outsiders, or as a reflected representation of the organization expressed by outsiders, akin to reputation (Brown, Dacin, Pratt, & Whetten, 2005; Whetten & Mackey, 2002). Thus, it is common for studies of identity and image formulated in this manner to examine the congruence between insider and outsider views of an organization. The proposed treatment of organizational identity suggests that to avoid advancing a low-discriminating, ideational-dominant, conception of organizational identity, identity should not be equated with image, and the comparisons among insider and outsider views of an organization that are most germane to one’s understanding of organizational identity are those involving bona fide CED organizational attributes. In addition, it is important to note that the conventional view of identity as a subjective, retrospective explanation of past actions suggests that discrepant other-views



seldom change self-views, and when they do, the mediating link is altered behavior (Baumeister, 1998). (Were it otherwise, identity’s essential role in self-governance would be severely compromised.) Here’s a simple illustration. Upon learning that their relations with customers are very poor, a company might put in place superior customer-relations practices. With time, this sustained initiative might lead to “customer focused” becoming a CED attribute. Thus, we see that the proposed conception of organizational identity unequivocally distinguishes between attributes and attributions, and it makes no provision for a direct causal link from attributions to attributes.6

Summary and Conclusion My endeavor to expand, clarify, and above all, strengthen the Albert and Whetten (1985) formulation of organizational identity has three core features. First, I have attempted to formulate a level-free conception of identity, in the sense that I’ve used the CED definition to specify the essential properties of individual and organizational identity. In addition, to demonstrate its practical implications for organizational studies, I used the definition to derive validity standards for qualifying legitimate organizational identity claims and associated organizational-identity referencing discourse. Stated as a maxim, the CED definition stipulates that claims of organizational distinction must pass the additional test of being expressions of central and enduring organizational attributes, or alternatively, central and enduring organizational attributes must be considered useful reference points for distinguishing the focal organization from similar others. By implication, we can say that not all institutionalized organizational features qualify as identity referents, but all identity referents must be institutionalized features of an organization. Second, I have focused on the identity of organizations, as compared with identity in organizations, in an attempt to side-step reductionist treatments of this subject (for a related discussion of identity in organizations, see Whetten, in press). This is part of a larger project to better understand the unique properties of organizations (Heath and Sitkin, 2001), particularly those stemming from the observation that organizations are constituted as social artifacts but function as commissioned social actors in modern society (Whetten & Mackey, 2002, 2005; Whetten, in press). One of the most difficult aspects of framing organizational identity from the perspective of an organizational actor is properly accounting for the subjective (“I”) frame of reference, at the core of identity theory and suggested by persistent questions such as “Who speaks for an organization?” and “Who gets to specify an organization’s identity?” The response offered here directs our attention away from the “who” to the “when” “how” and “why” of identity-revealing organizational discourse. In



addition, it is posited that the perspective-taking process member-agents engage in when called upon to speak or act on behalf of their organization is not that different from role-related shifts in perspective – from “my views” to “the VP of Marketing’s views.” Third, I have attempted to draw a thick boundary between what organizational identity is and what it is not. Specifically, with the aid of the CED definition I have argued that identity referents are known by the distinctive functions they perform, the distinctive way in which they are structured, and the distinctive organizational circumstances that provoke their use. As a consequence, the proposed conception of organizational identity lends itself to model building, hypothesis testing, and empirical measurement. In addition, it should also enhance the concept’s utility as an interpretive perspective by fostering more consistent and distinctive “organizational identity” representations. In conclusion, I wish to draw to the foreground an important implication of this initiative – namely, strong concepts dictate conservative applications. Consistent with a posited pattern of exceptional identity-claim use in organizations, it follows that organizational identity is most appropriately invoked in organizational scholarship as an exceptional explanation. For example, although we don’t require the notion of organizational identity to explain multiple, conflicting views of organizations, it is indispensable for explaining multiple, conflicting identity claims in hybrid organizations. And although we don’t generally need organizational identity to explain employee resistance to change, it sheds important insights into the disorienting effects of losing a CED organizational attribute. Also, although many strategic decisions can be adequately explained using standard economic models, some appear to be intentional expressions of the organization’s distinctive character. As a point of emphasis, let me place this proposition in an historical perspective. Erikson (1968) reported that he formulated the concept of identity because he needed the therapeutic category identity crisis to fully explain the profound sense of disorientation observed in the war-altered soldiers he was treating as a therapist. These men were more than homesick or battle fatigued. War had made them strangers to themselves. Individuals who had years ago left the farm, the printer’s shop, or the classroom to fight for freedom didn’t recognize the person returning from battle. On a less grand scale, Albert and Whetten (1985) needed the concept of organizational identity to explain what we perceived to be irrational responses to a seemingly insignificant budget cut at our university (Whetten, 1998). When we framed our observations as indicators of an organizational identity threat, what we were observing began to make sense. The lesson suggested by these parallel accounts is this: Under girding a strong portrayal of organizational identity is the notion that it is used, by organizational members and scholars alike, when other explanations simply won’t do.



Author’s Note This article is based on my Organizational Management and Theory Division Distinguished Speaker address at the 2004 Academy of Management Conference in New Orleans, Louisiana. Central to both the address and this article is the argument that organizational studies scholarship should systematically account for the unique properties of organizations-as-social actors, as evidenced by the wide spread confusion regarding the meaning of organizational identity. I wish to thank the following people for their feedback on previous drafts: Mike Pratt, Kevin Corley, Denny Gioia, C. V. Harquail, Dick Scott, Amy Wrzesniewski, Shelly Brickson, Joe Galaskiewicz, Mary Jo Hatch, Majken Schultz, Peter Foreman, Johan von Rekom, Marlena Fiol, David Ravasi, Teppo Felin, Bruce Bingham, and Brayden King.

Notes 1. Let me clarify my use of Albert and Whetten’s (1985) central, enduring, and distinctive (CED) terminology. First, I tend to use the term distinguishing, rather than distinctive, to capitalize on its dual meaning: different from; better than. Second, with regards to enduring, although some organizational identity scholars have expressed a preference for the term continuous, I find no substantial difference in their definitions. The same can be said for core and central. Thus, in the end, I have elected to follow the Albert and Whetten practice of using these terms interchangeably, while giving preference to the more common use of central and enduring in the literature citing the CED definition. Third, I will continue Albert and Whetten’s treatment of central attributes constituting essential knowledge about an organization (see Brubaker and Cooper, 2000, p. 6, including footnote 29). 2. As an extension of Whetten and Mackey’s (2002) effort to distinguish between identity and reputation, I propose centering the domain of organizational identity in organizational attributes, and the domain of organizational reputation in organizational attributions (Elsbach & Kramer, 1996; Fombrun, 1996; Fombrun & van Riel, 2003; Porac, Wade, & Pollock, 1999). Thus, whereas an organization’s reputation may affect members’ perceptions of the organization and their associated levels of satisfaction, only legitimate organizational attributes serve as appropriate guides for member-agents’ actions. 3. These parallel processes share several key assumptions, including the following: (a) initial conditions, especially founders’ selection of social forms, have long-term developmental consequences (Buenstorf & Murmann, 2005; Stinchcombe, 1965), (b) radical departures from an organization’s developmental trajectory are uncommon occurrences, most likely provoked by environmental discontinuities (Baum, 1996) and (c) successful “core changes” in organizations are rare (Barnett & Carroll, 1995). It is also worth noting that this postulate suggests a limited role for concepts such as “provisional self” (Ibarra, 1999) and “possible self” (Markus & Nurius, 1986) in the conceptualization of organizational identity (see Baumeister, 1998: 682). Absent any inherent material attributes, organizational actors are constituted as social artifacts, identifiable by the persistent consequences of their self-defining commitments. It follows that whereas an organization’s identity can be used to predict an organization’s choice of future plans, schemes, and dreams, it is inappropriate to equate organizational identity with statements of aspiration or intention. 4. Representing an organization’s identity as a hierarchically ordered composite helps us reconcile the fact that organizations, like individuals, possess multiple identities, with a core assumption in identity theory that actors strongly prefer a coherent, internally



consistent self-view (Baumeister, 1998: 682; Ryan & Deci, 2003). Hence, I view discussions of how organizations manage conflicting identities (e.g., Pratt & Foreman, 2000; Balmer & Greyser, 2002) as applying to hybrid identity organizations, introduced later, rather than to organizations generally. 5. An alternative to organizational scholars actually chasing ambulances to the scenes of major organizational crises is to provoke the feeling that an ambulance is on its way. This might involve the detailed retelling of a recent crisis or the use of realistic, fork-in-the-road, decision-making scenarios. In addition, after a top management team has brainstormed a list of likely CED organizational attributes, it might involve requiring them to go through some type of forced choice exercise, challenging them to prove to a skeptic’s satisfaction that each nomination satisfies the CED standard and corresponding phenomenological indicators. The point here is that our collection of organizational identity data should mirror the defined attributes and predicted distinctive uses of bona fide identity claims. 6. Before closing I need to acknowledge the “chicken and egg” question lurking in the shadows: Which comes first, organizational practices or organizational identity claims? Broadly viewed, this issue pervades the whole of organizational studies, as reflected in microlevel behavioral consistency theory (Salancik, 1977; Weick, 1995) and macrolevel structuration theory (Giddens, 1984). Within the organizational identity literature, it is picked up in the distinction between sensemaking (constructing shared views of an organization from members’ experiences) and sensegiving (making members’ experiences sensible through the application of extant shared views) (Fiol, 2001; Gioia & Chittipedi, 1991; Hatch & Schultz, 2000). As noted earlier, identity theory tends to treat extant identity referents as subjective, retrospective, explanations of a person’s distinctive pattern of life-shaping commitments (chicken à egg). On the other hand, I am arguing that extant identity referents provide guidance for member-agents when they are expected to prospectively act on behalf of their organization (egg à chicken). As reflected in these seemingly contradictory but arguably complementary perspectives, one of the advantages I see in the identifying = organizing” postulate is that it encourages an ongoing dialogue about how the chicken and the egg of identity claim usage are related, both generally and specifically.

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54 Mobilizing Identities: Uncertainty and Control in Strategy Harrison C. White, Frédéric C. Godart and Victor P. Corona

I

N 2007, with the imminent commercial launch of the A380 and the 787 Dreamliner by Airbus and Boeing respectively, the two aircraft manufactur ers were caught up in a dance seen by newspapers as a contest of strategy, but which was also experienced by each as exigencies of sustaining a suitable identity. Each identity emerged in the struggle for some footing amidst chaos, struggles for control that settled out over time into locations within networks of ties – cross-stream with other plane makers, up-stream with endless sup pliers and down-stream with as many airlines as possible. These networks and the accompanying disciplines of actual production get encrusted into institutions, here an aircraft industry that marshals producer firms – ones that have survived thus far – within rhetorics, variously of delivery, service and innovation, along with tax-paying and subsidy-receiving. Strategy and rhetoric are figure and ground for one another, here as in all social life, their fadings and emergences correlative with slidings into and out of unchartable turbulence, true uncertainty, against manageable, insur able risk. Airbus, like Boeing, uses turbulence strategically for reenergizing its identity, while it re-crafts some network ties and production disciplines. Thus each firm can regenerate meanings – the sets of stories and narratives marking networks and disciplines that also get eroded in the endless postur ings that implement rhetorics. In the present article we explore some aspects of these problematics. We make theoretical hay out of the common-sense truism that organizations

Source: Theory, Culture & Society, 24(7–8) (2007): 181–201.



have identities. Our focus is how identities reshape as they take up strat egies. We work on how network and institutional infrastructures impact the viabilities of strategic stances, along with rhetorics, and point out nestings of levels. We will bracket discussion of industries with two special realms, military and fashion.

Contexts and Histories Any industry is shaped by context in technology and so on, but also through the history of shifts in strategy and rhetorics; and yet each firm, in order to survive, needs current agreement on distinctive terms for its transaction flows. Uncertainty in this can be mitigated by keying its niche relative to other pro ducers in an ordering on quality: such a signaling mechanism has been mod eled explicitly as profile of prices by volume (White, 2002a; White and Godart, 2007), describing a market institution for that industry. The present dance of Airbus and Boeing, however, concerns a deeply uncertain future of contingent and competitive sales of hypothesized aircraft yet to be produced. To sustain an acceptable identity is not only to gain market share but also to sustain local production and thus relations with more dispersed supply sources. Each iden tity thus in fact depends on the other’s sustaining acceptable identity, which indeed acts as envelope for own identity, within their interwoven networks. Partial analogues are offered by chess (Leifer, 1991) and by the Asian board game Go (Boorman, 1969). Chess pieces are distinctive, much like firms subsidiary to the two giants. Yet the identical Go pieces (black or white) acquire enormously different influence in capturing, depending on the evolv ing configuration of all pieces across the 19 × 19-square board, which apes the great importance of tactical moves by the numerous players of the air craft industry (e.g. Brazilian and Canadian medium-distance planes can have ricochet impacts on this long-haul industry). The military offers a more tangible analogue to this dance. Like Boeing and Airbus, armies in combat are locked into a polarized regime where each is controlled by its necessity to counter and thus adapt its rhythm to moves of the other (White, forthcoming). In fashion, strategies such as brand exten sion, designed to reduce risk and cope with uncertainty, generate unintended consequences and new stochastic disturbances. Anticipating deviations from established routine is the basis of any lead ership, whose principal raw material is deviation from merely extrapolated social process. Aspiring leaders in complex settings thereby are garner ing some control. We label this overall process mobilizing, which requires attending both to how actors anticipate, report or conceal changes, as well as large-scale exigencies. Mobilizing therefore consists of disciplining ties and mobilizing identities, in seeking the effective implementation of a strategy. An overall identity, however, can only subsist out of interactions among


White et al. • Mobilizing Identities 381

many identities and then only as triggered by the erratic and unexpected – an organization in calm seas is no organization. Mobilizing invokes some change in identities, which becomes therefore a signal of mobilizing and an indicator of strategy. Rhetorical deployments may be sited both in local contexts (e.g. for busi ness a factional division on a board of directors) and in a more global sense

(e.g. a niche in a national product market). But these rhetorics may prove to be of little use to organizational leaders if subordinate personnel are not rewarded for at least taking heed of their currency. So, some mechanism must exist for disciplining ties among identities. Indeed, business and pub lic administration schools, weekend management seminars, leadership selfhelp books and other media are filled with advice on how to discipline what appear to be unruly and chaotic organizational processes. Based on a broader view of social action, strategy may be viewed as an attempt to subsume other identities’ control efforts within a strategist’s mobilization. Anticipations can, but need not, stand for ‘intentions’ elicited from particular actors or attributed by them to others. Anticipation can be construed for any actors from patterns in social intercourse and structure. Figure 1 displays the overall framework presented here. First, several aspects of theory are specified. Then come applications to business contexts. Our first extended example will be the military, fol lowed by fashion, but mobilizing and rhetorical deployments are processes common to all the examples. The special realms of the military and fashion introduce extensions that highlight particular aspects of theory. Status quo ante in network operating environment

Decoupling (non-purposive or purposive)

Strategy for mobilizing identities from loosened network operating environment

Organizational strategies encountering disturbances, followed by new decoupling

Organization

Shared meanings Organization

Rhetorics Disciplines

Strategy Execution

Identities

Event i

Event n

True uncertainty as context

Figure 1: Organizational strategy in a context of true uncertainty


New network operating environment


Theory We begin by contrasting our usage of terms like ‘strategy’ and ‘rhetoric’ with that in other literatures, particularly in business and social studies. This requires expanding on our views of network process.

Paradoxes of Strategic ‘Planning’ Organizations often initiate elaborate rhetorics for the development and execution of plans, which they call strategies, assumed to guide organiza tional activity, in business contexts and beyond (Porter, 1985, 1987). Strate gic development then appears to be guided by the primacy of the executives’ ‘view from the top’ (De Kluyver and Pearce, 2005). Such accounts of strategy neglect the complex relationship between, on the one hand, goal formula tion by top authorities and, on the other, organization members’ cognitive features and idiosyncratic objectives (March and Simon, 1958). Even with this assumption, stochastic disturbances and unintended consequences of organizational practices commonly derail efforts at strategy implementation, as in dealing with a product launch or advertising campaigns, for example. This remains true even for military contexts in which ‘battleplans do not survive first contact with the enemy’, as well as for government scientific agencies (Vaughan, 1996, 1999). A huge normative literature imputes to strategy formation elaborate and stately planning necessarily assisted by many agents. Most usually, strategy is portrayed as themes of planning by some great executive, themes which characterize subsequent efforts of subordinate agents. In standard accounts of business, for example, an executive is seen as responsive to shifts in and among its markets, as well as being responsible for actions by the firm’s management, so that executives reflect on and plan for the ‘big picture.’ An example would be the case of Jack Welch as chairman of General Electric (GE) and successful moves of this firm in finance, electronics and entertain ment in the last decades of the 20th century. The smooth, familiar account of strategy framed in terms of rational choice is not only attributed to, but often also claimed by, top authorities in organiza tions. The strategic plan may therefore be understood as the mobilization of network resources, both formal and informal, according to projected events. These network resources may include identities, for example, particular per sonnel assigned to a given project or who have special expertise, or material resources such as budgets, patents, logos or specialized equipment. We instead emphasize clashes as well as convergences among strategies as they contribute to subsequent reshapings of social formations. These reshapings are interpretive and can stabilize in terms of specific sitings, both cultural and social, for discourse. The mobilization of resources is triggered



by a perturbation of a status quo ante and the organization’s decision to decouple from this state of affairs. We have pointed to analysis of strategy deployment in concrete market settings (White, 1992, 1995, 2002a, 2002b), in which strategies must manage decoupling from a status quo ante as well as match resources to posited ends. Coordinators of planning exercises cannot avoid accounting for the frictions inherent in interactions among identities in organizational networks. Relevant timeframes for the organizational strategist label events of vari ous sorts, each of which may result in further unexpected events. So strategic planning also requires a look at the distribution of alternative futures that may, or may not, be realized, as well as a priori positing of a goal considered necessary or beneficial to an organization. Defining a goal is often character ized by the mobilization of a rhetoric deemed salient for a given social con text. This rhetoric will often include appeals to a larger set of meanings that justifies the organization’s existence. A firm, for example, may emphasize the maintenance of a long tradition of quality. A political strategist, especially during a campaign season, will argue for the candidate’s commitment to certain values resonant with a targeted voter population.

Managing Risk and Coping with Uncertainty The central assertion is that social process is in fact a tissue of constant switchings of settings, which is to say of network locales as to both actor and domain. This is why any network exists and is perceived, and thus can extend itself further transitively, only in flashes. Sets of stories are thus req uisite to rescue meaning from oblivion, although strategy must also thread from such stories a bank of plausible narratives. Along with commentators and aides, general managers do speak of their strategic planning, yet obser vational studies of managements (Mintzberg et al., 1976) find that even the chief executive officers are immersed in very staccato interactions across large networks of diverse persons on topics of immediacy. What should be emphasized in organizational process are the actual inter sections of multiple sets of ties and bases for attributing meaning, what has been called a network-domain, or netdom (see White, 1992, forthcoming) and the dramatic capacity for these framings to change over time. Along with these shifts in netdoms and identities, risk (and its corollary, insurance) exists when the exact outcome is unknown but the distribution of possible outcomes is known, whereas with true uncertainty even the set of possible outcomes is unknown (Knight, 1921). Practitioners have recognized that some situations are characterized by a ‘true ambiguity’ where there is no basis to forecast the future (Courtney et al., 1997), but they have insisted on the ‘transitory nature’ of this true ambiguity and fail to recognize this as the rule rather than the exception. While analytic tools can be used to tackle risk



(e.g. McAfee, 2002), true uncertainty (sometimes called ‘Knightian uncer tainty’) requires more complex approaches. This is why strategy attempts to go beyond general rhetorical devices such as ‘company vision and mis sion’. Strategies are sustained by routinized agency that deals with shortterm issues. Organizations’ planning as control efforts assert rhetorics that attempt to actualize long-term visions in short-term actions. But strategy is both being prepared for the expected and being ready for the unexpected.

Forms of Identity Seeking Control Distinct identities are triggered by disjunctions in social interactions or dis ruptions in the environment. Identities generate social action as they thereby seek control. Organization is a process that comes from clashes among iden tities as they seek control in an environment suffused with uncertainty. Iden tity relates insides to a whole, the whole to its insides, and both to the out side context, but all such parts and boundaries remain involved in further control processes. Identities can in turn be compounded onto higher levels. Identities may be interpreted in four different manners: 1. Identity emerges from persistent efforts to seek control in immediate sur roundings. This search for some stability is the expression in a social con text of the same urge for a secure footing which also leads to habits of pos ture in physical settings. Individual and collective identities emerge and evolve according to positions and movements among networks of social ties, which imply access to different sets of meanings, earlier labeled as netdoms. Identities become impregnated with meaning in their networks; they are continually generating and modifying ties by attaching mean ings to other identities and objects. Human identity and behavior, both in everyday life and in highly bounded organizations, are thus fundamen tally social phenomena. Strategies can therefore be viewed as attempts to secure a lasting footing in an organization’s operating environment while simultaneously reconfiguring organizational identities in line with strategic ends. 2. A second, quite distinct sense of identity is as ‘face’. This is identity achieved and expressed or operationalized as part of a distinct social discipline, which is aimed at accomplishing concrete tasks. In this array of ties, each member has face just because it is a social face, one of a set of faces together making up that discipline. It follows that identity always implies levels and induces distinct levels of activity. One’s own identity is achieved only as dual to, as part of and induction to a larger identity of which it is a reflection. Identity in this second sense is sufficient base for acting a role, which stipulates stable preferences. This second sense of identity locks one into a discipline. Strategists need to achieve tasks by



coordinating roles in an organization thus constituting that organization’s ‘face’ as presented to the world amidst competing and alternative organi zations. 3. An additional, third, sense of identity, comes from frictions and errors across different social settings and disciplines. This third sense of identity, arises exactly from contradictions across disciplines and, at larger scales, takes the form of regimes that attempt to ease and neutralize tensions and conflicts. The mistakes, errors and social noise in life are what open up identity in this third sense, achieved even as a child, and which subsumes the first two senses. Burt (1992) develops this Simmelian inheritance. This third sense of identity is beyond any specific role that guides an actor toward particular goals and strategic action. As conscious efforts to couple and integrate mismatches in new developments, strategies neces sarily manage deviations from posited ends. 4. One can speak of a fourth layer of identity, a rhetoric, a sense which is close to what is usually meant by identity in ordinary talk. This is iden tity as more-or-less coherent accounts, like biographies such as résumés examined by corporate recruiters. This is identity after the fact, as pre sented in an account as some unique set of narratives. Organizations are replete with often competing rhetorics, sited according to functional subgroups, for example, but also emerging especially in times of crisis. Rhetorics become the veneer for control efforts among rivals deploy ing strategies to assume further control over each other’s organizational activity, or in reaction to what becomes perceived as failed organizational strategies. Such identity is built from and stored in sets of stories held in common, thus recording the social ties that are constitutive of networks. Each story is internally sensible while those sets are mutually intelligible across networks. Strategists are concerned with developing or changing a distinct vision and mission for a firm, a ‘strategic plan’ that is aimed at organizational identities and external stakeholders alike.

Levels as Contexts We also claim that emergence of further levels can be viewed as fabric of net work construction and rhetorical deployment. Such ostensibly higher levels can be embedded down within perceptions of actors previously mobilized. It follows that paradoxes are built in, and thus decoupling invoked on a par with attention. It also follows that culture is not some separate reification but instead is collation by observers of tangible social process and the interpreta tions that fuel them. Organization, whether codified or customary, grows through deposits from repetitive and interlocking solutions by and among leaders. Individual



anecdotes express colloquial understanding of organizational complexity. Depending on the sorts of organization, some sets of actors are referred to as officers, committees, departments and so on. Each such actor is held together and embodied as an identity on a further level by some discipline, which comes out of mutual efforts at control of local scope. These actors settle into relations of middle scope with one another. In so doing they are maintaining ties in net works which reflect the balance of control.

Business Applications Attending to concerns of identity is important to any manager, not in its own right but because of its connection to strategy. In the context of an organiz ation’s mobilization of strategic resources, observed topological properties may result from the cumulation of continued strategic initiatives by upper managers. But such conjectures about impacts from strategic initiatives depend upon their consistency with how control is sought at middle scope by managers below each executive. Identities and their structures constrain strategy – and constrain how managers view it. Any statement about an executive ‘strategy’ becomes itself part of the interacting processes. This public stance explains the ritualistic, elaborate nature of most statements of strategy. Inferences of strategy depend upon the institutional context and nuances of timing. Generality can get lost in a maze of subtleties and specificities, exacerbated by the slipperiness of strategy itself as an outcome. An executive does have a hand in managing any overall identity of his or her organization through constraining others’ independent actions and enabling some related actions. This shows some of why the executive or the officer focuses on the erratic and idiosyncratic, not despite but because of concerns with a ‘big picture’. Barnard (1938) early underlined identity espe cially for a large, long-lived organization, but failed to note its dependence upon erratic happenstance, and he confounded it with goals. Strategies are current introjections to contend with detritus from past strategy. Strategy in the upper reaches of organizations may and should depend on the larger social context, including other institutional realms. In busi ness, this includes market networks, the organization of competitors, cultural definitions of justice or fairness, and regulation. When large companies face slow-growing markets and have few options for consolidation in their exist ing businesses, opportunities for changing the growth trajectory are limited (Smit et al., 2005). Disciplining identities through rhetorics, similar to execu tion, is therefore only one side of strategy. Its other side is the relation of the company to a set of markets, a positioning on these markets. Strategy is thus about choosing where to compete (corporate strategy) and how to compete (business strategy) (Porter, 1987). A firm’s selection of where to compete



contributes to its identity, along with other elements like the original vision of its founders or past successes and failures. How the firm competes in its oper ating environment is defined by its mobilization of identities and resources.

Strategic Action and Organizational Unit Structure A contrast can be drawn, in a given organization, between parallel depart ments and functionally specialized departments, as ideal-typical and alter native organizational partitions just below the chief executive. Parallel departments are similar yet dispersed, while specialized departments are characterized by a distinctive competence related to either the coverage of a specific product or the mastery of a set of technical skills. As a first approx imation, parallel sub-units furnish more control to the upper level of the organization, or the corporate center, whereas specialized sub-units tend to keep more control lower down. The issue centers on how various strategic anticipations, from and near the top, are likely to interact and cumulate dif ferently according to the larger context of that unit as a whole. A parallel internal structure may be found within a weaker and smaller unit or within an interacting network of such units. For example, in a produc tion economy represented as input–output network, only within a weaker or smaller industry are agreed market shares and reputations enforced, whereas stronger industries are oligopolistic and prone to exploration of opportunities. Within a larger system, the most active leaders of a weaker unit are likely to use the strategic claim that they are constrained in negotiations by their rigidly balanced internal partition. In larger or stronger units within such a system, specialization is observed as a partition into units which are comple mentary and coordinated. Distinct strategies held by various upper managers of a unit yield here a different concrete outcome. Strength translates into advantageous positions in system process for that unit, and one might think it could be exploited best by conceding central control, that is, by parallel rather than specialist sub-units. However, other top managers of the strong unit wish to more vigorously guard autonomy from greater threat. In other words, stronger units tend to perceive opportunities where weaker units only perceive threats.

Marriage Contexts and Multidivisional Firms A look at overall patterns of interaction can reveal tracks of strategic action. An important early formulation of network in a context of strategic choices is by Bott (1957). She considers a married couple as a unit but one in which each has separate ties and thus may embed into quite distinct networks. Bott distinguished marriages of companionship, in which couples relate to couples, from more traditional marriages, common in the working class, This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.


Companionate

Segregate

Source: Bott (1957)

Figure 2: Two network configurations, illustrated by ties to other marital couples. Code: solid line from couple to couple; dotted line from one spouse to one spouse. Companionate ties go from a couple’s juncture to other junctures; segregate ties go from a spouse to another

in which husband and wife relate separately in a segregated way. Figure 2 represents these two marriage contexts. Bott’s companionate and segregate types of network topology can be translated to general social organization, for example to an economy where firms are in the ‘group marriage’ of a production market. What is the minimal degree of conjugal-parallelism in partners’ networks (here for multiple part ners) that is needed to sustain an input–output system of product markets on the basis of firms’ (i.e. partners’) transactions? Then turn to the opposite extreme of conjugal independence among partners’ networks, which induces random interconnections among markets of pure exchange, bazaars that do not fit as segregate units into a definitely structured larger field. This latter avenue brings us to the ‘multidivisional’ giant firm which has not one but many independent major products, so that the firm can be seen as having multiple ‘marriages’, each with its regularized ties to suppliers and buyers who do not, however, transpose to the other markets in which the firm’s other divisions are active. The familiar input–output networks obtain only among product markets, which form a segregate-marriage network only among corresponding divisions from such multidivisional firms. For exam ple, the American conglomerate GE competes against the Dutch conglomer ate Philips in the medical systems business, but not in the financial services market because Philips does not operate in this industry whereas GE does. The big firms as wholes interrelate in networks on another level, networks which are not segregate input–output ones. Suitable rhetorics are adduced to overcome confusion among units, such as the use of a common manage ment tool across the different divisions, for example the Six Sigma quality management approach during the Jack Welch years at GE. This distinction between companionate and segregate topologies of net work context resonates with the insights of business practitioners. Bossidy et al. (2002) explain why a perfectly crafted strategy can fail if it is not



supported by a good execution. They define execution as the ‘discipline of getting things done’. Getting things done implies that an organization must mobilize all its relevant resources in order to deal with a turbulent business world. This mobilization process requires an understanding of the relation ship between corporate centers and business units. While corporate centers depend on the business units’ market knowledge to achieve their higherlevel corporate goals, business units benefit from the higher perspective offered by corporate centers. Therefore, on the one hand, a corporate center, through its different business units, is in a companionate relationship with the different markets in which the firm is competing. Its role is to share com mon resources among business units. On the other hand, each business unit develops specific relationships with its market, thus generating a segregate topology. This idea of several interconnected organizational contexts impact ing strategies and their execution is the frame of a theory of generalized exchange (White, 2002a). Strategy is an art that relies on quick decisions to achieve its long-term rational goals.

Extensions: Strategy, Organizational Units and the Operating Environment We now turn to the military and fashion cases characterized by peculiar and extreme conditions of uncertainty emerging from organizations’ interactions with their operating environments. In these terrains claims of discernment must be made by organizational strategists. Mobilizing internal organizational identities and meanings is made even more complex as these claims of discern ment compete for resources and a role, or ‘face’, in strategy development.

Military – Defense ‘Transformation’ as Mirroring Rhetorics and Disciplines Consider a case in the US defense community regarding the need to restruc ture in response to perceived threats – in a sense, to ‘mirror’ such threats in order to overcome them. Since its creation in 1947, the US Department of Defense has been the site for centralized efforts to analyze and plan secu rity strategy writ large and organizational mechanisms for deployments around the world. Defense operations require the coordination of a complex set of distinct personnel, logistical and procurement-related tasks alongside internal coordination of relationships among often rivalrous organizational identities, that is, each respective military service (Army, Navy, Air Force and Marine Corps), each of which is subject to its own internally contentious processes. Strategic planning, including considerable resources devoted to research and development, increased in importance throughout the 20th



century and became a persistent preoccupation of military managers. Such planning has been guided by both battle-tested command expertise and seminal tomes in strategy, for example Von Clausewitz’s (1976) work on the relationship between political objectives and a nation’s mobilization of resources for war. Organizational leadership, in this case a civilian defense secretary and military advisors from each service, faces competing pressures on its exe cution of internally oriented restructuring efforts, comparable to those of executives balancing demands of directors, shareholders, immediate staff and subordinate personnel. Defense secretaries must carefully manage staff relationships with individual service chiefs and in some cases restrain their prerogatives. These chiefs, in turn, must balance the individual needs of their respective services with the organizational imperative of ‘jointness’, that is, acting in concert to achieve what the military establishment as a whole deems necessary. One early historian described the department’s set of management challenges as follows: As with any organization, control of the Defense Department is deter mined by how tightly the Secretary is able to control three things: the money, the people, and the communications. The first is the fuel that runs the second, the third the steering seat that gives direction to the other two. (Borklund, 1966: 6)

Military managers must therefore build strategies to mitigate differences among potentially competing identities and instead orient them toward ends considered valuable, such as grand strategic aims. As with our other cases, mobilizing both within organizational boundaries and within broader oper ating environments necessitates rhetorical deployments to guide identities in their pursuit of alignments with these newly posited ends. A recent broad-reaching and ongoing change in defense strategy, orig inating in the early 1990s, deals with re-aligning matchings of resources within combat units as made possible by newly available technologies and newly perceived threats. Senior military officers and strategic analysts began to identify a status quo in US defense capabilities that they perceived as inadequate to meet projected needs. During the Cold War, the US and Euro pean allies had prepared primarily for a large-scale land-based confrontation with Warsaw Pact forces, yielding a military that was able to quickly and decisively defeat Iraqi conventional forces in the first and second Gulf Wars. Some, however, believed these forces to be ill-matched for ‘low-intensity’ or counter-insurgency missions like the 1992 intervention in Somalia and asymmetric threats from decentralized terrorist networks. From this identification of an unsatisfactory status quo emerged a series of organizational reforms, tied to technological innovations, known commonly as ‘Transformation’. Since then, significant defense community research has been conducted on how network-based concepts and interactive This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.


technologies can be brought to bear on warfare, resulting in the formulation of so-called ‘network-centric’ theories of warfare. The desired end-state is posited as lighter forces whose battlespace advantage is predicated on an increase in inter-unit connectivity, better sharing and accessibility of infor mation, and more authority devolved to subordinate units. Given the emphasis on connectivity, the current expression of Transforma tion-associated organizational change is often referred to as ‘network-centric warfare’ or ‘network-enabled operations.’ Theorists emphasize connectivity as an enabler of desired kinds of social action, stating: [Network-centric warfare] is built around the concept of sharing infor mation and assets. Networking enables this. . . . Nodes do things (sense, decide, act) and information, both as inputs to decisions and in the form of decisions themselves, is passed over links from one battlespace entity, or node, to another. (Alberts et al., 2000: 94)

Strategy here consists of reconfiguring relationships among and capacities of identities in order to anticipate and respond to perceived enemy threats, which involves transition to a distinct set of rhetorics emphasizing ‘connec tivity’ and ‘distributed’ operations. Figure 3 sketches the contours of this Transformation effort. The Transformation case is but a more recent instance where defense leaders have posited the need to decouple routine from policies and

From Cold War...

Cold War defense posture

...to anti-terrorism campaigns Similarly organized enemy force, e.g. Warsaw Pact

Conventional ‘Stovepipe’ Organization - Limited inter-unit connectivity - Limited lateral interaction - Limited information-sharing - Centralized decision-making

Transformation Era operations

Network-Enabled Combat - Greater inter-unit connectivity - Increase in lateral interaction - More decentralized information-sharing - More decentralized decision-making

Dissimilarly organized enemy force, e.g. al-Qaeda

Fully Decentralized Cells - Sustained inter-cell connectivity - Sustained lateral interaction - Decentralized decision-making - Decentralized information-sharing

Figure 3: Mirroring rhetorics and disciplines in defense



structures no longer considered viable. This required a decoupling through shifting of budgetary priorities, surveys of enlisted soldiers and officers, numerous ongoing research efforts, conferences and consultations with NATO allies, and briefings to various segments of the defense community, including contractors and academics. Clearly, these changes implied a dra matic realignment of assets, personnel, training programs and research pri orities. Although Donald Rumsfeld, as the 21st US Secretary of Defense from 2001 to 2006, is considered to have been a driving force behind several ongoing Transformation programs, it should be noted that the initiative is generally considered non-partisan in its formulation and found early support in the Clinton administration (1992–2000). Defense leaders were willing to match considerable resources to the strate gic ends they posited for the organization, including ‘enhanced information sys tems and space-based assets for force networking’, ‘interoperable allied forces for multilateral operations’ and ‘decisive close combat operations and deep maneuver for ground assets’ (Binnendijk, 2002: 84). Nonetheless, unintended consequences emerged from these coupling efforts as organizational leaders struggled to reconfigure identities in line with their efforts. As one US Army engineer in Afghanistan, stated: ‘As our Army becomes more technologically advanced, I see more individuals who are incredibly adept at these systems but struggle with basic soldier and people skills. The leadership challenge is to bridge the gap’ (Personal correspondence, May 2006). Other potential issues involved in these transformative rhetorics and reshaped identities involve the creation of trust in social relationships increasingly mediated by digital tech nologies, the reliability of electronic networks as means of exchanging highly sensitive information and, paradoxically, the possibilities for even further com mand centralization afforded by interactive technologies. But the ultimate adequacy of this attempted ‘mirroring’ of an enemy threat may founder on asymmetry like that in our initial example. Airbus strat egy must stabilize network formations of identity that sustain multinational identity. Boeing faces no such constraint. The strategic positioning and ori entation of guerrillas in military confrontation plays a role analogous to that of Boeing in the arena of aircraft manufacturing, whereas the US Army side must sustain singular national identity with its network formations.

Fashion – Brand Extension and the ‘Fog of Fashion’ No overriding polarization into sides characterizes the fashion realm. Con stant changes in fashion trends, triggered by both fashion designers’ inno vations and the evolution of customers’ tastes, are a source of true uncer tainty for fashion houses, obliged to reinterpret their brand identity twice a year for spring/summer and fall/winter collections around the contradiction of a continuity of style and changing tastes. Despite this ‘fog of fashion’,



fashion houses seek to expand their customer base in order to increase their resilience to adverse events. Most strategies, such as expansion to new geo graphic markets, are not specific to fashion and are deployed by producers in different markets. Some strategies are more specific to fashion and raise industry-specific issues. The brand – or the label, the ‘griffe’ of the designer – is the origin site of premium market value of a fashion house (Bourdieu and Delsaut, 1975). Therefore any branding strategy in fashion is very perilous because it can threaten the symbolic capital accumulated in the brand. This is particularly true for brand extension strategies, in which the meaning of a brand is will ingly manipulated to enter new markets or access new customers in existing markets, not by introducing a new brand, but by using an established brand (Aaker and Keller, 1990). Brand extension is considered by marketing scholars and practitioners as being less expensive and less risky than the introduction of a new brand and is therefore widespread (Aaker, 1997, 2004). There are two main approaches to brand extension. The first approach is to reposition the whole brand in upscale or downscale segments of the same market, or to enter new markets with the established brand. The second approach is centered on the development of subbrands and is sometimes called ‘line extension’ or ‘multibranding’. The power of the sub-brands created in order to reach out to new niches of customers is based on the customers’ ability to relate the new brands to the main fashion house. However, the addition of new brands can destabilize the overall mean ing of the established (or ‘parent’) brand and trigger complex and unexpected perturbations in different netdoms, threatening the main asset of the fashion house. In sum, while brand extension strategies are considered less risky than alternative strategies such as brand creation, they can have unexpected rico chet impacts on parent brands and are therefore very risky. Moreover, factors of success for a brand extension remain unclear and research about how to conduct a brand extension struggles with statistical intricacies and the ‘failing of adequate theoretical development’ (Echambadi et al., 2006). Considering the different forms of identity at play in brand dynamics can offer fresh theoretical ground. Strategies in fashion are mainly concerned with the fourth form of identity, rhetorics, because designs are official state ments that signal an organizational identity and seek consumers’ attachment to related lifestyle narratives, in sartorial forms or in journalistic accounts. But other forms of identity are also relevant, such as the first form, since each new collection is a renewed attempt at finding footing in the fashion system, and the third form because the creative side of fashion is always conflicting with its ‘business’ side. Conflicts need to be resolved for a fashion house to survive. Finally, the second form, about achieving tasks, is present in fashion like in any other realm. The importance of the ‘griffe’ in fashion makes it difficult for fashion houses to adopt a multidivisional structure. They might themselves become



divisions of a luxury group such as the French groups PPR or LVMH, but at a house level the creation of new affiliated brands highlights the necessity in fashion to sustain a structure that is at the same time ‘companionate’ and ‘segregate’. The case of the Italian fashion house Giorgio Armani will illus trate this assertion. Giorgio Armani designed his first menswear collection under his own label in 1974, expanding to women’s wear in 1975. Armani was in its early days a single brand targeting high-end fashion customers and has devel oped several sub-brands over the years. The corporate rhetoric tells a story of increasing customer base and reduced uncertainty: ‘we effectively closed the circle on our unique multi-brand approach, so that we are now able to reach all levels of the marketplace with carefully differentiated lifestyle fashion collections under the Armani master brand’ (Armani Group, 2006: 2). But a closer look at the past tells a different story – a story of failed subbrands (Mani, Borgonuovo 21) that disappeared from the official Armani corporate history (Vergani, 2003) and very messy beginnings, notably for A|X Armani Exchange (Aaker, 1997). The brand extension was both vertical and horizontal. Vertically, the haute couture Armani Privé label is aimed at a very exclusive clientele, while the ready-to-wear collections spread from the high-end Giorgio Armani to the lower-end A|X Armani Exchange (designed for ‘young urban’ consumers) and Armani Jeans, with Emporio Armani as an intermediary. Horizontally, Armani has expanded into home furnishing through Armani Casa. Each sub-brand has its own pricing and distribution strategies, but the label Armani is heavily used, especially for A|X Armani Exchange, the less expensive sub-brand, in order to recall the affiliation with the prestigious designer and extract a price premium from customers. Figure 4 illustrates the transition of the Armani fashion house from a sin gle brand to a family of eight brands (including the original Giorgio Armani brand). The Armani family of brands is simultaneously companionate and segregate since it relates to its customers both as a whole and at a sub-brand level. However, it remains unclear whether the different sub-brands are par allel or specialized sub-units. There is a tendency for them to be parallel because their customer bases are rarely clearly delineated, such as in the case of A|X Armani Exchange vs. Armani Jeans. Nevertheless, the Armani example also demonstrates the attempt by fashion houses to create special ized sub-brands, each targeting a specific ‘socio-style’ (Crane, 2000). In any case, while brand extension strategies are designed to reduce risk by using established brands and to cope with uncertainty by making fashion houses more resilient through the enlargement of their customer base, they create new risks and novel uncertainty. In fashion, there seems to be a convergence around the multi-brand strat egy. Fashion houses tend to create hybrids of existing brands rather than new brands – the creation of Old Navy by Gap being an exception (Aaker, 1997) – whereas car manufacturers, for example, tend to create new brands



From one brand in 1975...

...to a companionate/segregate family of brands in 2006

The Armani fashion house

The Armani fashion house

Dynamic stochastic networks of customers

Dynamic stochastic stochastic Dynamic networks of of customers customers networks

Armani Junior Armani Prive Armani Casa Armani Collezioni Giorgio Armani

Giorgio Armani Armani Exchange Emporio Armani Armani Jeans

Sources: Armani corporate website and annual reports; newspapers

Figure 4: The evolution of the Armani fashion house from a single brand to a family of brands. Solid arrows between the fashion house and the customers represent companionate relationships while dotted arrows represent segregate relationships of a single sub-brand

(e.g. Toyota’s Lexus brand). This may appear to be in line with the central intuition of the neo-institutionalist school in economic sociology for which organizational forms and practices tend to converge (Meyer and Rowan, 1977; Powell and DiMaggio, 1991). However, this perspective cannot fully account for the continuous development of new strategies trying to deal with shifting consumer preferences or other environmental changes. With the cre ation of sub-brands, the original identity of the fashion house is partially preserved, even if irremediably transformed. This suggests another form of identity. Deeper understanding of this present world fashion industry requires us to reconstrue it as an ongoing process that somehow continues its rhythm and harmony despite stochastic variance in particular notes and phrases. It plays a crucial but unrecognized role in social dynamics, and in fact we label this generic stochastic process by ‘style’ (White, forthcoming). A style may be labeled as a fifth, more sophisticated, sort of identity. For either an individual or an organization, style may be conceived of as either a sensibility or interpretive tone that ties together disparate identities at other levels. It is a dynamic and self-reproducing amalgam of profiles of switchings among distinct network-domains. Persons as constructs are realized through this type of identity. Organizational style may become robust and even inert This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.


over the course of time, so strategists may choose to either match elements of this style to their posited ends or instead seek to decouple from such a style if it is deemed detrimental to new strategies. In fashion, rhetorics hold only if they fit with styles. Styles define the array of design possibilities for a given fashion house. In the development process of Armani sub-brands, Armani remains Armani and a rhetoric that would be too far from the Armani style would create uncontrollable disruptions in this fashion house’s environ ment. This can lead us back to a deeper understanding also of Airbus vis-à-vis Boeing: there too identity is in play, is labile.

Discussion The challenge is estimating how contending strategies and efforts at control guide each other and interpenetrate, thereby laying down tracks of deter minate sorts of socio-political organization. In emerging economic contexts characterized by dramatic change, for example, research has uncovered how organizations recombine diverse kinds of resources and incorporate poten tially rivalrous rhetorics in order to benefit from ambiguity in their operating environments, as in post-socialist Eastern Europe (Stark, 1996; Stark and Bruszt, 1998) or in the Internet design firms of the digital era (Girard and Stark, 2003). In addition, the logics at play in the strategy of assembling and binding together distinct organizational identities has also been explored in the context of ‘business groups’, such as those operating in France, Japan and South Korea (Granovetter, 2005; Smångs, 2006). In the current eco nomic context, exchange markets are on a different and dominating level of strategic action from ordinary production markets and provide the proper basis for the General Equilibrium Theory sought by economics. The multidivisional, or multinational, firms exhibit companionate net work topology in which there are no neat nestings. In the context of a national economy, production markets are very much specialized mutually, whereas exchange markets are parallel divisions, so that, for example, a national financial elite of bankers should prefer the latter. This suggests a macro-level explanation for the shift to big multinational firms as replac ing mere production markets (each with specific product) as the nexus of investment activity, a conjecture on a new level of strategy. Adding a new layer of parallel units – as with multidivisional firms cross-cutting input–output networks of production markets – enhances potential control and mobilization of that economy by some smaller set of financial and/or government actors. Multidivisional firms are the crux to understand strate gic moves in complex operating environments. There is a need to model the relationship between the different divisions of this type of firms and their surroundings.



Environmental contingency is the solution for, not the problem of, strategy – as is shown by the mid-20th century switch to multidivisional firms, and thereafter by recurrent waves of mergers and takeovers. Pertur bations can be catalysts for effective and positive decoupling if adequate strategic matching of resources to ends is achieved. Only the specific but as yet unaccountable is promising material for getting action above and beyond the ongoing and self-reproducing. The latter is what routine organization is about. Yet the legacies of fresh strategies are ultimately limited topologies of overall organization. All organizations are embedded and energized as products of tangible actings toward control by identities, with all identities facing reshapings. Disciplines of identities come from the enormous energies of actors living their own situations, which engender laws of social perspective as stringent and cogent as the behavioral laws implicit in human cognition. ‘Strategy’ as conventionally formulated in staff terms is caught up in these necessary per ceptual constructions, thereby becoming subject to their myopia. Devising strategy is most difficult for top managers when there is the least environmental contingency. Stable environments engender little struc tural complexity and little energy in the social processes embedding work. So uncertainty and others’ commitments to their own local concerns are unquestionably the two prime groundings of effective maneuvering by top managers. What may seem generally palatable in a certain timeframe and sociocultural environment may become gradually less important, for example in business as consumer bases and available technologies change. Consider the demise of the AT&T ‘Ma Bell’ system in 1984 and its state-mandated fragmen tation into seven regional companies plus a smaller AT&T. Over the course of the next decade and a half, the eight companies gradually began merging with one another, such that, as of 2007, the old Bell system companies have virtually reintegrated themselves, forming three telecommunications giants: AT&T, Verizon and Qwest. Similarly, in a European context, the deregulation of national telecommunications markets led, first, to a multiplication of national firms that eventually became, or were integrated into, Europe-wide players (such as Vodafone, Orange or T-Mobile for the mobile market) as customerbases evolved from a national to European scope (Berhin et al., 2005). A further complexity barely touched on here is allowing for different impetuses from the quite distinct institutional realms which are being sum marized in networks across a population. For example, when are military tactics reframed because of religious infrastructure of opponents? And when are international trade pressures offset by security considerations? When do copyright-patent infringements control intra-market relations? And given human memories, several and joint, other timeframes intrude, for instance career considerations may be prominent in what seem to be immediate mat ters of control and strategy.



Conclusion We have discussed organizations as not merely arrays of individual actors within some homogeneous social space, but rather as non-homogeneous collations of levels across embedded identities. Furthermore, organizations can themselves be embedded in still-larger contexts in diverse ways. ‘Orga nization’ as depicted in scholarly or industry documents should instead be thought of as the trace left behind by strategies of identities for mobilizing among other identities, at any level. Managerial strategy in an organization begins to make sense as exactly a second-order process and at a level where ‘goals’ can be a rhetorical distraction from the actual kinds of strategic action under way. Our focus has been how identity and strategy interpenetrate and inform each other in contexts of true uncertainty. We began with a vivid confronta tion of air giants presented at first as a sort of duel – and we showed how a duel is mirrored in a new form of American military tactics vis-à-vis guerrilla and insurgent opposition. But our main thrust has been uncovering levels and depth in network process among identities amidst uncertain contexts generated in part by their own actions. One theme was induction of different overlays of network structuring of organizational units generated around compound identities as foci – be they marriages or rank orderings. Multidivisional firms were analogized to net work contexts of marriages. The contemporary fashion industry revealed fur ther depth of influence dynamic between identity and strategy. Institutional forms and rhetorics do get deposited in this dynamic, but the master trope is the ongoing regeneration of a dance, a stochastic style, which points to inter twined dependences of identity with strategy dynamics. This is the paradigm we perceive as the best guide to the Airbus–Boeing encounter with which we began.

Acknowledgements We thank Jakob Arnoldi, Larissa Buchholz, Michel Grossetti, Haiko Lietz, Anna Mitschele, Millie Su, Matthias Thiemann, Sabine Würkner and the anonymous Theory, Culture & Society reviewers for insightful comments.

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55 Desperately Seeking Legitimacy: Organizational Identity and Emerging Industries Stewart R. Clegg, Carl Rhodes and Martin Kornberger

Introduction

I

n his essay on 17th century cryptographer John Wilkins, Borges (2000/ 1964) alerts us to a ‘certain Chinese encyclopaedia’ called the Celestial empire of benevolent knowledge. In this encyclopaedia,

‘it is written that the animals are divided into: (a) belonging to the em peror, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) sucking pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in the present classification, (i) frenzied, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, (l) et cetera, (m) having just broken the water pitcher, (n) that from a long way off look like flies’. (p. 103)

In terms of any contemporary understanding of animals, John Wilkins’ distinc tions appear quite odd – irrational even. As Foucault (1982) argues, each of the strange categories, taken alone, makes sense but it is the way that they are linked together that appears illogical because they do not conform to the ‘grid of identities, similitudes, analogies’ (p. xix) through which we conven tionally establish order. That is not to say that such sets of distinctions might not make sense in another culture and in another time. Indeed, the whole point here is that particular orders are taken as ‘rational’ because they have been naturalized in particular spatio-temporal contexts. Source: Organization Studies, 28(4) (2007): 495–512.



Just as the animals in the encyclopaedia were arranged, organizations operate according to an established order of things; otherwise the identity that they espouse would not make sense. Where no such order is established, such as in emerging industries, they must construct one for themselves – they ‘must learn new roles without having old models, and they must establish ties in an environment that does not acknowledge their existence’ (Aldrich and Fiol 1994: 648). In this article we examine the way that organizations, through their leaders, work to construct a legitimate identity in such states of ‘non-existence’. We argue that organizational identity is best understood in terms of the relationship between temporal difference (i.e. the perfor mance of a stable identity over time) and spatial difference (i.e. by locating organizational identity in relation to other firms, both similar and different). It is the relationship between these two forms of difference, we argue, that enables the construction of a legitimate sense of organizational identity. In making this argument, the article brings together those theories of orga nizational identity that see it as both dynamic (e.g. Gioia et al. 2000) and temporal (e.g. Clegg et al. 2005) with those that construe identity in terms of inter-organizational and intra-industry comparison (e.g. Porac et al. 1995; DiMaggio and Powell 1983). To illustrate this process of organizational ‘identity work’ we turn to an empirical study of the business coaching industry in Australia. Business coaching is an embryonic industry – as a newcomer to the world of business it lacks any firmly established order with which to define itself and indi vidual firms lack well-established industry-based role models. In practice, the emergent order is not unlike the Chinese encyclopaedia. We uncovered coaches whose definition of their organizational selves included (a) execu tive coaches, (b) therapists who use Buddhist philosophy, (c) just a web site, (d) facilitators, (e) entrepreneurs with franchising systems, (f) mixed forms, (g) public speakers, (h) emotional therapists, (i) institutionalized schools, (j) global corporations, (k) business planners, (l) and many more, (m) with money back guarantees. Despite these differences, they also share the view that ‘business coaching’ does exist, as an industry in its own right, albeit tentatively. We are interested in how organizations account for, and can con struct, their own identity in such contexts of dis-order. The article starts by reviewing the literature on organization identity in relation to debates over whether it is stable and enduring, or dynamic and multiple. From there we examine relational approaches to organizational identity in terms of the way that firms are defined in relation to one another. To locate our concerns with organizational identity in practice we then turn to the case of business coaching in Australia to illustrate and develop our discussion. We begin by explaining the methodology we employed in our study and then discuss how the firms that we researched worked to define their identities. In the discussion section we draw on the findings to illustrate how organizations work to construct their identities among a complex set of


Clegg et al. • Organizational Identity and Emerging Industries 403

temporal and spatial differences. We conclude with a discussion of how these differences enable the construction of a legitimate sense of organizational identity.

Conceptualizing Organizational Identity From the outset (Albert and Whetten 1985; Foreman and Whetten 2002; special issue Academy of Management Review 2000), discussions of organi zational identity have been framed by certain questions of whether identity is central, distinctive and enduring (e.g. Albert and Whetten 1985; Elsbach and Kramer 1996; Scott and Lane 2000); whether it is shifting, precarious, dynamic and unstable (e.g. Gioia et al. 2000; Harrison 2000), or whether it has multiple facets such that there is no singular unity (e.g. Brickson 2000; Pratt and Foreman 2000). The desire for organizations to see themselves as having an enduring essence, it has been argued, is a means of avoiding ‘psychic pain and discomfort, [to] allay or prevent anxiety, resolve conflicts, and generally support and increase self-esteem’ (Brown and Starkey 2000: 104). Under these circumstances when ‘organizational members perceive that their organization’s identity is threatened, they [will] try to protect both personal and external perceptions’ (Elsbach and Kramer 1996). While the desire for order and stability might support the maintenance of stable characterizations of organizational identity, it cannot stop the possible existence of and conflict between the pluralities of organizational identity that might be constructed when the question ‘who are we?’ elicits different responses from actors ostensibly in the same industry (Pratt and Foreman 2000). Thus, Gioia et al. (2000) argue that the concept of identity is not static but dynamic. They go on to show that identity, being closely linked to image, is open to frequent revision and redefinition (p. 64). Identity becomes an inter-subjective reality constituted through agreement and sharing of meaning among organizational members. However, rather than being some thing that can be settled a priori it may well be that these are essentially empirical issues. Indeed, important empirical work has been done in the field of image and identity relations (e.g. Dutton and Dukerich 1991; Gioia and Thomas; 1996; Hatch and Schultz 2002) that suggests that industry spe cific image management practices are used as a metaphorical mirror through which individual firms can develop an identity that is legitimate within that industry. Identities emerge out of interaction, negotiation and shared processes of sensemaking, according to Weick (1995). Seidl (2000) calls this ‘reflec tive identity’ since interpretation of the identity potentially changes over time as provisionally negotiated orders. The means through which such interpretations occur will be contextualized within, and influenced by, the organization’s environment, such that interactions with outsiders, as well as



with insiders, contribute to the formation of identities (Gioia et al. 2000: 65). Such an approach avoids the danger of making a particular organizational identity appear to be essential, to be the ‘true self’ of an organization, and instead it seeks to examine how ‘identity is achieved through performances’ (Czarniawska-Joerges 1996: 158). The focus on identity as performance extends the theorization of identity as a process of ‘becoming’ (Chia 1996; Tsoukas and Chia 2002), which sug gests that, rather than being ontologically secure, identity emerges from the process of organizing. Such a process both defies stasis as well as attests to the unpredictable and emergent character of identity, even when manage ment is about action that attempts to arrest or fix identity change (Clegg et al. 2005). From this perspective, identity is enacted and played out through interactions with other multiple identities, through different defi nitions enacted in various ‘situated actions’ (cf. Mills 1940). To develop a sense of stable identity the process of becoming that occurs in situated action must be fixed and directed, suggesting that the process of identity formation works in-between those forces that seek to define stable identity and those that work to defy the possibility of such firm and enduring definitions. The argument that identity is accomplished when processes are inter rupted and brought to a stopping point, however temporary (see Chia 1996), suggests that identities form round dialectics of being and becoming (Chia 1996; Tsoukas and Chia 2002; Clegg et al. 2005), which are always in flux. Emerging industries are an especially salient environment in which to study organizational identity because relatively nascent institutionalization makes the process of identity formation of particular organizations particularly vis ible. In this context, organizational identity can be considered in terms of the ‘identity work’ that managers use to establish a sense of identity for their organizations.

Organizational Identity and Industry Relations The construction of organizational identity occurs in the wider context of the industry in which an organization is located. Here identity is considered in relation to the common sense of competition that informs firms’ definitions of their reference group of rivals and non-rivals (Porac et al. 1995). Thus, it is in reference to others that organizations define their own identity position vis-à-vis their own putatively unique characteristics and those characteristics that they have in common with other firms in their industry. In this view, an industry is defined by identifying the knowledge structures shared among key stakeholders (Rosa et al. 1996) that provide the inter-organizational dimension of identity against which individual firms can define themselves. These knowledge structures are developed through relational networks



(White 2000) that provide the context for the achievement of individual organizational identities. In emerging industries such a process is particularly salient because at the beginning of their life cycle organizational fields pro vide high levels of diversity in terms of the available forms and approaches to organizing, while they tend to become more homogeneous once they are established (DiMaggio and Powell 1983). The industry boundaries within which organizational identities are located can be regarded as social constructions such that ‘market structures are con straints only because managers believe they exist. Rather than being an exoge nous force acting on managerial minds, market structure is an endogenous product of managerial minds’ (Porac et al. 1995: 224). To this we add that, in a more micro sense, individual organizational identities are also social constructions that are constrained by the market structure with which man agers collectively produce and individually identify. Hence, neither industries nor organizations are given ‘objects’ but rather products of how their various constituents (including managers, employees, clients, partners, regulatory bodies and the media) conceive and enact them as being. Identity is thus located in the ‘belief systems’ of companies that allow them to define bound aries and maintain their identities (Porac et al. 1995). As Porac et al. (1995) argue, ‘belief systems’ characterize how organizational members understand their competitors, their internal capacities, market development and future demand, the boundaries of their environment and their role within the larger value chain. Importantly, these belief systems are shared assumptions that are socially constructed: they do not exist objectively in reality but are cultur ally, socially and cognitively developed assumptions about reality. Where an industry is defined by the ways that firms identify compara ble sets of other firms considered to be rivals in the same industry (Porac and Rosa 1996), the identity of individual organizations can be expected to involve an attempt to establish a unique position (identity) within that industry, while at the same time being similar enough to other firms in the industry so as to still be able to define themselves in relation to it. The devel opment and maturation of an industry is a process by which the industry moves from conditions of unstable, incomplete and disjointed conceptual systems to conditions of coherent inter-member sensemaking (Rosa et al. 1996). In such a process, identity can never be thought of as being accom plished at one point in time. It is the ongoing interaction between multiple identities that creates the dynamic and dialectic struggle between being and becoming. To illustrate how organizations, through their managers, engage in such processes of identity formation, we now turn to an empirical analysis of data drawn from the business coaching industry in Australia. This will serve to demonstrate how a group of managers attempted, discursively, to secure a sense of organizational identity in an ambiguously defined industry environment.



Studying Business Coaching Our discussion of organizational identity in this article draws on, and is illustrated by, findings from an empirical study of the industry of business coaching in Australia. This is a growth industry that provides learning inter ventions for corporate and other clients. These interventions usually consist of one-to-one and group activities designed to assist clients in developing priorities, business objectives and plans. The research started by identifying the organizations comprising the business coaching industry. We compre hensively searched the World Wide Web for companies in Australia that used the descriptor ‘business coaching’ to define their activities. We conducted a telephone survey of these firms to establish their basic characteristics: date of foundation, number of staff, location, products and services offered, and target market. We also asked each firm who they believed were their major competitors. On the basis that industry boundaries can be defined in terms of those whom individual firms define as their competitors (Porac and Rosa 1996), each competitor identified was added to the sample. A total of 53 firms were surveyed. For the purposes of qualitative data gathering 11 representative firms were selected from this group based on the distribu tion of size and age of the firms We interviewed the principals of the coaching firms in order to understand the ‘belief systems’ (Porac et al. 1995) they used to define organization-alidentity – given their primacy in strategy formation, they were the people who best understood their own organizations and their sense of competition and inter-firm rivalry (see Porac and Rosa 1996). We sought to understand how they account for and construct identity interacting with others and framed by common belief systems. In so doing, we did not seek to privilege the beliefs of the people interviewed over other constituents, but rather to focus our attention on this particular group. The interviews were conducted either in person or over the telephone and followed a semistructured format – each interview lasted for between 45 and 75 minutes and they were audio-recorded. The main areas of focus for the interviews were the characteristics of the founder/principal of the firms, the history and description of the firm, the position of the firm within the industry and the future strategy of the firm. Following the interviews the tape recordings were transcribed. The tran scripts were coded with the aim of discerning the organizational identity cate gories that emerged in the business coaches’ self-reports (see Strauss and Corbin 1990) in terms of how the person interviewed positioned their firm either in relation to its unique position/proposition or in terms of its rela tionship with its competitors (Porac et al. 1995). Our analysis focussed its unit of analysis on the utterance rather than the person – that is, on the ways that the different people, in and through their talk, used and defined particular categories in order to discursively enact their own sense of This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.


identity. We perused the transcripts to isolate those instances of talk where the person was actively describing the identity of their own firms. Each of these instances was highlighted and then coded according the main con struct that they were using to describe themselves. The constructs identi fied across all of the interviews were then compared and cross-referenced in order to identify common patterns. On this basis the core constructs of selfcategorization that the coaches collectively deployed were identified. By com paring these dimensions across the different people interviewed, we were able to discover the main features of the identity discourse used by the coaches.

Identity Work While the analytical approach that we used was based on grounded theory (Glaser and Strauss 1967; Strauss and Corbin 1990) we did not use it to gener ate an internally consistent theory (cf. Strauss and Corbin 1990). Instead our claims are less positivistic and more constructivist (Charmaz 2002). Using the methods described above, and following Foucault (1972), we were thus able to isolate the taken-for-granted ways that the business coaches made sense of their experience in relation to their sense of identity. What emerged from this was an appreciation of the ‘reflexive categories, principles of clas sification, normative rules, [and] institutionalized types’ (Foucault, 1972: 22) that discursively construct the identity of business coaches. It is such dis cursive frameworks, as instantiated in the interviews, that we take to be con stitutive of the business coaches’ sense of identity (see Putnam et al. 1996; Keenoy et al. 1997), and to be the means through which their experience might be ordered and made sense of (Grant et al. 2004; Weick 1995). By providing an account of their actions, those interviewed were also ‘creating’ themselves (Albrow 1997) through a ‘reflexive interaction with the research engagement’ (Linstead and Thomas 2002: 17) whereby they told the story of their firm so as reflexively to co-construct their own sense of organizational identity (Gudmundsdottir 1996). Further, they engaged in a sensemaking of their past, as well as wishful thinking about the future. One of the most salient features of how the coaches described themselves, how ever, was a sense of insecurity in relation to how others (especially potential clients) understood their identity. One participant responded when asked if consulting firms were competitors: ‘A little and I think that’s only because the people at the market don’t know the difference . . . we’ve got to clarify the perceptions of what kind of coaching we do’ (John). When asked to define business coaching another coach, Nathan, said: ‘there’s a lot of mis understanding in these areas between the common expression of life coach ing, or executive coaching, business coaching, mentoring, consulting, [and] training’. Mary suggested the same sense of a lack of common understanding and requirement for consensus when she said that ‘The public are a little



bit confused. So I think that if more of a uniform acceptance of coaching is achieved, that would help people in accepting it’. We also found that the lack of a clear industry identity influenced the way that the coaches considered the identity of their organizations. One coach, Leslie, said: ‘Initially we called ourselves Business Planners, but very quickly we realized we were coaching people through the process, because we did not come in as a trainer, that was the no-no . . . It could be anything else but not training’. Some saw the sense of nascency and ambiguity in rela tion to business coaching as problematic. As Nathan explained, ‘We’ve got a new service industry that’s very fragmented . . . lots of people running their own organizations in niches’. This fragmentation was seen by another coach, Kate, as being related to a lack of common standards and barriers to entry in the market; ‘anybody can call themselves a coach’, she told us. Given the lack of an established sense of industry identity, the coaches com monly defined what they did and who they were in relation to their differ ence from more established industries – most commonly consulting, therapy or training. Within this, the difference between consultants and coaches was a recurring theme. Toni suggested that ‘Coaches and consultants are very differ ent . . . I have no interest in being a consultant . . . I think people have heard of coaches now, but I don’t think they have a good awareness yet of what they are doing’ (Toni). More extremely, John said that ‘nobody [i.e. potential clients] knows what coaching is . . . their expectation is that you are a solution provider, it is very early that you have to work to change that’ (John). For Bob, however, this distinction was muddied by what he saw as problems caused by consultants using the term ‘coaching’: ‘there is a challenge to get a full clear understanding of what coaching actually is compared with consulting. There are a lot of management consultants out there who are adopting the term coach, but quite frankly, couldn’t articulate what the distinction is between coaching and consulting’. While these comments suggest an important discur sive move to individuate coaching from the more general notion of consult ing, Toni also suggested a more reflexive awareness of the differentiation: ‘But it’s semantic. We’re consultants, I mean, that’s what we do. So it’s semanti cal (sic), but it is our point of differentiation’ (Toni). Such differences were often expressed in terms of quite crude and oppositional ways, for example by George who simply said that while consultants approach a business ‘from the outside’, business coaches look from the ‘inside’.

The Self and the Other of Organizational Identity In general terms, coaching might be regarded as a form of management con sulting in that coaches are specialists who are employed by organizations to realign elements of an organizational system (Clark and Salaman 1996). As we have begun to see, however, in terms of how the coaches account for



their own identity, they do not see themselves as belonging to the category of ‘consultant’. Indeed they are differentiated from consulting on account of the forms of identity that the coaches seek to establish for themselves – that is, where the coaches see consultants as the ‘other’ against which they defend their own identity position. Although beyond the scope of the research here, it is noteworthy that business coaches do not seek any formal connection with the consulting industry – choosing instead to form their own industry associations such as the International Coaching Federation (ICF) and the Worldwide Association of Business Coaches (WABC). As indicated above, the coaches note some confusion among their cli ents about the differentiation between consulting and coaching, a distinc tion that is the very stuff of their identity. In analysing the dimensions of self-categorization that the coaches deployed in their talk, we found that five main discursive constructs were used to identify and individuate busi ness coaching. As summarized in the table below, these constructs were each developed in terms of a self–other relation that sought primarily to define coaching in opposition to consulting. Indeed, if managers construct and reconstruct their identities through an engagement with the ‘other’ (Thomas and Linstead 2002), then the discursive identity work of business coaches focussed on projecting their own notion of organizational self through that of the imagined other of the consultant. This was a means of constructing their own precarious identity in relation to one that they regarded as being more established. As we will see, in order to become (or at least develop a sense of being) legitimate players in a poorly defined market, the coaches had to employ discursive categories associated with this imagined other in order to construct a sense of self.

Facilitator vs. Expert Business coaches do not see themselves as bringing expert knowledge about particular business or industries but rather see their strengths as working with others to facilitate their achievement. As Kyle suggested: ‘Consulting is very much where an expert has been brought in to solve a problem or provide advice as a basis of their technical expertise . . . with coaching . . . I help the coachee (sic) come up with his or her own solutions’. The idea of supporting the client’s own problem solving was seen by George as a matter of being able to ‘guide them into alternate ways, let them see it . . . Give them support . . . get them motivated into going in a positive direction’. The coaches saw their uniqueness in terms of not only enabling the person and business being coached to achieve business results in ways that would not have otherwise occurred, but also being able to do this without explicitly telling them what to do. Thus, we were told that ‘coaching is about observa tion and encouragement . . . it can seem to take a little bit longer to take the



Table 1: Self–other categories used by coaches to construct identity The projected self of the business coach Facilitator Process orientation Business AND personal focus Embraces emotional side of business Customized and flexible

The imagined other of the consultant ←→ ←→ ←→ ←→ ←→

Expert ‘Answer’ orientation Business OR personal focus Avoids emotional side of business Standardized and rigid

time to coach and draw out strengths and abilities in people rather than to say, this is the way we do it’ (Nathan). This attention to coaching as a form of ‘helping’ was re-iterated by Leslie who said that ‘Coaching . . . facilitate[s] the process of helping them do what ever it is they do better by them doing a self-discovery process . . . it has never been about introducing new material, new ideas, rather facilitating the ideas already there in the organization’. When asked to explain the reasoning behind adopting the facilitator role as opposed to the expert role, responses suggested that facilitation was designed to ensure more sustainable change that enhanced the capabilities of the person being coached rather than making the client reliant on the coach’s expertise. It was thus said that coaching would: ‘Give us a much more lasting change rather than someone coming in and saying, well here’s a set of tips and techniques and here’s how you can do it differently’ (Nathan). Coaching was said to involve ‘learning [which] is much more richer than show and tell’ (William) such that ‘we try to access their own wisdom’ (Alan). In sum, this suggested that business coaches tend to classify themselves as ‘facilitators’ or ‘helpers’ who work with clients to help them define and achieve their goals, as opposed to being ‘experts’, a notion conflated with their imagined other of the ‘consultant’ as a solution provider.

Process Orientation vs. ‘Answer’ Orientation In describing the nature of her work as a coach, Toni suggested that her role was one of ‘broadening their horizons from . . . how they look at their business, look at themselves, look at how they’re positioned within the busi ness, and opening up their whole view of what the future could possibly hold’ (Toni). Such future orientation was also reflected in Mary’s comment that ‘we basically work with someone to establish a goal with a strong pur pose, a meaningful purpose, otherwise there’s no going further, and once this is established, we work together on a plan and on taking some action’. As part of this idea that coaching is about helping clients through a process of self-discovery and achievement, Mary contrasted her identity with that of the expert consultant who provides their clients with the ‘answer’. She said ‘Consulting is where someone comes into your business and basically tells you what you need to do and then they leave, and then it’s up to you whether you do it or not . . . a coach comes in and assumes that you have the This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.


answers and will work with you to take the necessary action that you want to take’ (Mary). It is this idea that Mary called ‘working with you’ that emphasized the identity of business coaching as being ‘process’ rather than ‘answer’ oriented. As Kyle put it, coaching is about ‘helping someone to understand in more detail where they are now by way of strengths and weaknesses and where they want to get to, and to help them remove the blockages in the way of get ting there’ (Kyle). Of the eleven people interviewed, only one had a view that opposed the role of the coach as a facilitator and process driver. In this case, he suggested: ‘We’re not consultative in our approach, we are very direct in our approach and very much advise people what their options are, and say, this is where we believe you should go’ (Toni). The analysis of the interviews tends to confirm the common orienta tion around coaching as a facilitative process designed to improve busi ness results. More generally, when describing the nature of their work, the coaches identified with how they provide a process to help people solve their own problems.

Business and Personal Focus vs. Business or Personal Focus While notions of facilitation and process were central to the coaches’ projec tion of their self-identity, this was tempered by clear statements that their work was primarily designed to achieve tangible business results of various kinds. ‘I am about organization and efficiency’, said Kate, ‘I am not a life coach which is more spiritual, you know, intangible’ (Kate). Other outcomes that were seen as ‘business’ oriented were enumerated by Leslie as: ‘money, being an organization, improved quality control, improved efficiency, improved staff development, meeting programs, better focus, better morale, profit, lower cost’. Notably, however, this business focus was augmented by Leslie in relation to other less tangible outcomes: ‘the majority of our feedback will talk about relationships, the way people work together rather than dollars’. The combination of the assumed duality between quantitative busi ness results and qualitative organizational outcomes was also suggested by Nathan who put forward that: ‘handling hard issues in a hard business way isn’t working in today’s corporate world and so there is an understanding and acceptance . . . [of] . . . what you’d call softer issues’. What is notable in Nathan’s comments is that his attention is not turned away from what he calls the ‘hard issues’, but rather that he expressed a need to find new ways of addressing such issues. This again was contrasted with consultants, who coaches often refer to as being too ‘hard nosed’ in their approach. As John put it: ‘Coaching is a much more friendly word [than consulting] . . . it is a two way street’. Within this ‘two-way street’ coaches position themselves as drawing new and more productive relationships between the person and their business goals. For Nathan, ‘true business coaching puts the context of This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.


how you perform as an individual within a business environment . . . so that you can start to look at the business as a whole, and look at the strengths of that business . . . to make it perform better’. Notably, not all coaches believed that coaching was necessarily achiev ing business results for clients. As William suggested: ‘the business coaches understand business, but don’t know much about behaviour’ (William). Despite such reservations, however, in terms of the imagined identity of the coaches, what the interviews did confirm was a common discernment that business coaches should be focussed on business results.

Embracing the Emotional Side of Business vs. Avoiding the Emotional Side of Business Even though the coaches privileged the achievement of quantitative busi ness outcomes, the means through which they were achieved also privileged the relationship between what they described as ‘emotion’ and work. Most commonly this was done using the term ‘emotional intelligence’. As well as suggesting that the focus ‘helping people grow their emotional intelligence skills’, is an odd conflation of rational and emotional terminology, Nathan also described coaching as ‘emotion process re-engineering’. Emotional intelligence surfaced frequently in our conversations with coaches – all but four of them mentioned it: coaching, said Nathan, is ‘an achievement of outcomes, specific outcomes, measurable outcomes with an organization through the development of the emotional intelligence of the people within the company . . . that is tied to very specific business outcomes’. Again, we can see the focus on relating emotionality to business and suggest ing that a focus on the emotions is directly related to business success. Alan put it this way: ‘it is my core belief that you just can’t work cognitively with someone that you often have to work at a deeper level’. More generally there appeared to be a shared sense of identification among the coaches with a marrying of what they saw as the traditional commercial focus of business with their understanding of a newer concern with the relationship between emotional and rational processes – a relationship they believed could be developed in order to yield benefits for their clients.

Being Customized and Flexible vs. Being Standardized and Rigid The four identity characteristics discussed above appeared relatively consistently across the people interviewed. There was a fifth category, however, over which there was less consistency – whether standards should be developed and enforced across the industry. In seeking to determine why his firm was different from other business coaching enterprises, John said



‘We’re streets away from a lot of other people when it comes to our intel lectual property and the way that we do stick to those programs, and those agendas that are set’. As well as this stated need for standardization, John’s approach was also concerned with a type of flexible standardization. He said that: ‘Yes it’s flexible depending on the participant . . . but there are certain agendas that we still have to touch on. That’s all been standardized. Without being too rigid’. Nathan expressed a similar concern with ‘off the shelf’ coaching processes. ‘I don’t want someone being reliant on a particular set of methods . . . that’s not going to help at all. The whole aspect is to help people find their own voice’. Mary expressed similar concerns when she said ‘sometimes people [in business] get a bit too excited that they have to go down this path and there is only one path . . . to business success. And there is not, there are a lot of different ways’. Despite a commitment to flexibility, it was also evident that in order to grow many firms believe that some forms of standardization and replicabil ity are needed. For example, when asked where she saw her business being in five years’ time, one respondent suggested that her organization needed to develop ‘a more regimented process . . . a more structured approach, a more modularized approach’ (Toni). On a more general level, Alan argued for the need for industry standards. ‘People [i.e. clients] will look for the qualification and look for the accreditation’, he said. In contrast, others, such as Bob, argued that ‘we don’t want to turn out coaching clones – we want . . . each individual to find their own coaching strength’. Kyle summed it up as follows: ‘I have struggled with some things with standards and accredita tion and I don’t have a universal answer for that’.

Discussion: Organizational Identity Work As the examples above illustrate, while the business coaches felt that others understood their identity inadequately, they themselves were able to articu late quite clearly who they were, what they were doing and where they saw themselves going. Further, the sense of identity that each of them projected on to their organizations through their talk had many similarities and consis tencies with the other business coaches. The coaches’ talk in the interviews can be understood as an attempt to construct and justify a sense of organi zational and industry identity in the context of a commercial environment where that identity was still very much ambiguous and poorly understood. It is in this

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