Postmodern Management and Organization Theory

David Boje, Robert P. Gephart, Tojo Joseph Thatchenkery, David Boje, ROBERT P GEPHART, Tojo Joseph Thatchenkery

• Publisher: SAGE Publications, Inc
• Year: 1995
• Print ISBN: 9780803970052
• eBook ISBN: 9781506339733
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business Ethics
• Index: Business

This excellent, pioneering book is a must-read as we enter the new millennium. --David J. Farmer, State University of New York Comprehensive and timely, Postmodern Management and Organization Theory provides a critique of postmodern theory as it stands today. The text gives an overview of issues as they relate to management and organization theory and its history and assembles in one volume a variety of important works on postmodern philosophy--including feminist, cultural, and environmental philosophies. The contributors address the future of postmodern advancement in management and organization theory and method, establishing an agenda for future research. This thought-provoking book will be useful to scholars, researchers and upper-level students in organization theory, organization behavior and change, management, and industrial psychology.

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Postmodern Management and the Coming Crises of Organizational Analysis

ROBERT P. GEPHART, JR.

DAVID M. BOJE

TOJO JOSEPH THATCHENKERY

This book advances an agenda for postmodern scholarship in management, organization theory, and organizational analysis. The task is challenging. The relative success of the term postmodernism as a popularized, iconic representation of a “new age” (Jameson, 1991, p. xiii) and the multiplicity of meanings of postmodernism have made the range of phenomena to which the term attaches somewhat immense, suggesting the need for a lengthy best-seller on the concept of postmodernism itself. There are scholarly and political factions espousing both favorable (affirmative) and critical (skeptical) assessments of postmodernism (Rosenau, 1992, pp. 14-17), and different terms are used by different groups to depict the phenomenon. For example, the hyphenated term post-modernism is often used to indicate a “critical posture” toward the phenomenon, whereas postmodernism is often employed by those who are sympathetic to the phenomenon and recognize its legitimacy (Rosenau, 1992, p. 18). Thus, it is difficult to even describe or define the term without encountering competing and perhaps incommensurate opinions of what the term means, and without entering some political debate on the nature and merits of postmodernism.

In this introduction, we seek to outline the general purposes of the book and to provide some background on the emergence, nature, and implications of postmodernism for organization and management theory. Three themes guide our investigation of postmodernism here. First, we conceive postmodernism as the social era immediately after modernism (Rosenau, 1992). Postmodernism is a new and distinct social order (Giddens, 1990, p. 46) that involves something different, a break with the past. This is not necessarily “progress” nor a step forward. Even the chronological aspect of postmodernism as a period subsequent to modernism is suspect for Lyotard (1979/1984), who argues that “a work can only be modern if it is first postmodern” (p. 79). A second way we conceive postmodernism is that it is a cultural movement or worldview that is reconceptualizing how we experience and explain our world (Rosenau, 1992, p. 4). Third, postmodernism is an artistic or cultural style that provides an aesthetic reflection on the nature of modernism (Giddens, 1990, p. 45; Lyotard, 1979/1984, p. 81) and that emphasizes “an incredulity toward metanarratives” (Lyotard, 1979/ 1984, p. xxiv).

The relevance of postmodernism to management and organization theory is the specific concern of this chapter. We define management as the activities of social actors and their interventions into organized human processes, particularly actors with discrete formal statuses that provide the legitimate authority to direct and coordinate the behavior of other social actors. Organizations are generally conceived by social actors as relatively reified and concrete features of the social world—aggregations of social actors, meanings, and physical artifacts integrated for purposes of achieving some set of goals. For us, the meaning of organization is problematic. Rather than conceiving of organizations substantively as a concrete facticities embedded in artifacts such as policies and buildings, we regard organization relationally (Mauws, 1995; Morrow, 1994) as a concept of social actors that is produced in contextually embedded social discourse and used to interpret the social world (Bittner, 1974; Gephart, 1978). The meaning of organization thus resides in the contexts and occasions where it is created and used by members, rather than in a specific fixed substantive form. This is important because a paramount feature of postmodernism appears to be radically and rapidly changing conceptions of organizations and a movement away from substantive conceptions among social actors themselves. Finally, we regard organization theory as constituted in and by reflective and reflexive analyses (Pollner, 1991) of organizations and organizing and by the abstract descriptions and interpretations of these processes. Thus, we do not argue that there is a single or “best” form of theory or organization theory but, rather, that there are many possible theories of organization. We use the term organization theory in singular form for simplicity, but we envisage and seek to advance a field in which many theories and perspectives exist to inform our understanding of organized phenomena in contemporary society.

Societal Crises of Late Capitalism

The three general postmodern themes that we address here—era, movement, and style—direct our attention to three sets of crises of late modernity. Here, we discuss these crises and the forms and features of the crises as instantiated in managerial action and organizations. A key purpose of this volume is to develop insights into management and organization that can help us understand the ways in which postmodern management and organization theory can address these crises.

Habermas (1973) is a critic of postmodernism who provides a critical analysis of the crises of late modern society, addressing his analysis to the societal level. His analysis of the crises of capitalism presages the emergence of postmodernism and directs attention to key processes and challenges faced in the transition from modernism to postmodernism. Late capitalist society is conceived to be a contradictory, entropic system composed of four sectors or subsystems: the economic subsystem, the political or administrative subsystem, the sociocultural subsystem, and the legitimation system (Habermas, 1973, following Offe, 1984). The entropic or self-destructive contradictory tendencies arise from the very bases of the system. For example, in advanced capitalism, the inherently exploitative mode of production tends to destroy the very preconditions on which the system depends (Offe, 1984, p. 132; see also Gephart & Pitter, 1993). In particular, there is a desire to accumulate economic surplus and yet a tendency of profit to fall and thereby limit capital accumulation. In this context, a crisis cycle emerges as deficits in rationality in one sector accumulate and spill over into other sectors. Economic exploitation of Nature occurs as natural phenomena are commodified, and economic crises can emerge when increases of technical rationality fail to offset competitive economic forces in the market, and/or when real ecosystemic limits are encountered (Habermas, 1973, pp. 41-42). Where members of society lack the motivation to uphold societal values and roles, the most significant form of crisis—a legitimation crisis—can arise. Legitimation crises occur where the state apparatus fails to secure mass loyalty, and this can lead to disintegration of the state, changes in the basic organizing principles of the state, or social control through authoritarian repression. Economic and motivational crises that can lead to legitimation crises are prevented or delayed by government programs that seek to provide social welfare and thereby overcome the deficits in economic and government rationality that adversely affect social sectors. Yet in the long term, Habermas argues that legitimation crises can be avoided in advanced capitalism only by changing the class structures of societies or by removing the pressures for legitimation that are placed on the political administration.

Current trends in society and organization reflect these emerging potential crises. As the economy and capitalist organizations encounter limits to the growth of profits, there is a tendency for economic endeavors to seek to colonize new sectors of the state, in particular the government and sociocultural sectors. Thus, there is an erosion of the “welfare state” (Offe, 1984) principles basic to the modern state—that is, an erosion of institutions of social redistribution within the government (Peukert, 1987/1989). This occurs through the process of privatization—the transfer of services for citizens that the government provided free to the private or market sector and the transformation of these free services into commodities, that is, services for which one must pay a fee. Members of society are thereafter required to perform as consumers of these services, and the services are offered by corporations and businesses and are no longer provided by government. This erosion also occurs where the state retains production and distribution rights to these services but commodifies them by charging user fees. Therefore, previously noncommodified and decommodified (Offe, 1984) public goods and services become economic goods produced and administered by the economic sector.

Although other transformations of capital are occurring, privatization is noteworthy because it involves an erosion and extensive displacemerit of governmental and sociocultural sectors, and this extensive displacement undermines not only the benefits that members of society receive but also their sense of fairness of the distribution of these benefits. Commodification of social services and benefits clearly privileges the economically advantaged. Thus, the transfer of state functions to the market economy and the colonization of nonmarket sectors by market forces problematizes the legitimacy of the modern state because the state thereby abandons its role as a mediator of the interests of the various social sectors (Habermas, 1973; Weber, 1947), which ensured a just distribution of the resources of society. These crises arising from the displacement of the state by the economic sectors can be seen in the dissolution of social welfare agencies, threats to tenure and job security at universities, the erosion of access to health care, and other social trends that constitute the privatization and commodification of the public sector.

Legitimation crises may thus emerge and other crises are likely to escalate as we reap the benefits of years of concern over enhancing organizational productivity. The result of increased productivity in a constrained ecosystem is simply the production of greater volumes of goods using fewer inputs, including laborers and managers; hence the extensive downsizing, reengineering, and displacement of labor and managerial labor in recent years. We now have the potential for “human-free products” and an economy without labor. One fundamental contradiction of capitalism—the tendency to reduce wages to enhance profits simultaneous with the tendency of reduced wages to undermine markets and production—thus sets internal limits on the legitimatory apparatus of the state, limits that are currently being approached. These social crises emerge and are played out at the organizational level and involve management and managerial decision making. Thus, the societal crises of modernism are basic to challenges facing contemporary organizational and managerial crises.

Cultural Crises and Social Movements

The second set of crises facing organization and management theory relates to postmodernism as a social movement. The challenges, crises, and limits of modernism have led to the emergence of postmodernism as a cultural or social movement that critiques modernism and offers alternative institutional and aesthetic forms. These social movements can themselves produce crises by challenging the status quo of cultural processes and institutional forms and by seeking radical, disjunctive, social and organizational changes. The postmodern social movements are addressed by Hollinger (1994) in terms of three essentially modernist forms: antimodernist, balanced modernist, and promodernist. Antimodernists (Hollinger, 1994, pp. 31-32) are critical of industrialization, bureaucracy, and the privileging of technology—modernist forms. Antimodernists thus offer a critique of the inhuman aspects of modernity and articulate the shadow side of modernism. Essential to the antimodernist view is an “incredulity towards metanarratives” (Lyotard, 1979/1984, p. xxiv). Balanced modernists acknowledge both a shadow side and a hopeful side to modernism, thus embracing both anti- and promodern views. Promodernists, as the term suggests, are supportive of modernism, celebrate its potential and successes, and seek to preserve and reproduce modernism. As these three movements indicate, there is a potential basis for political conflict surrounding the nature and meaning of modernism and its moral and ethical propriety. This potential arises at the organizational level where supporters of different movements articulate their views in organizational policies.

One important issue central to the debates among these movements is the commodification of education and knowledge (Lyotard, 1979/ 1984). Science has been one of the major social or cultural movements of modernism. Science embraces a totalizing perspective on knowledge and accepts the metanarratives of the Enlightenment, which assume the universal progress of society. As late modernism implodes (Baudrillard, 1983), the world of the “grand narrative” becomes improbable; hence the legitimacy of science is eroded. Culture becomes composed of an indefinite number of relatively autonomous world-views and meaning-generating agencies. Science is then transformed from the master legitimation of modernism into yet another sector of commodified production, with knowledge becoming both a product to be sold and a good to be consumed. This commodification is resisted by antimodernists but supported by promodernists for whom “the market” is the driving and ultimately divine force for positive social change.

The Crises of Representation

The third set of crises involves crises of representation, that is, crises regarding the nature of images and the manner in which images are produced. The delegitimation of science as a totalizing knowledge or grand narrative has been associated with the emergence of views in which scientific methods are problematized. That is, there has been a loss of grand theory in all disciplines (Marcus & Fischer, 1986). For modernism, there is “a” scientific method, and this is arguably the best way to produce valid knowledge. The method leads, in organizational science, to forms of positivism that focus on the statistically quantifiable relationships among variables (Gephart, 1988a). Alternative views challenge not only the superiority of the scientific method but also the claim that there is a single scientific method (Gephart, 1988a). This produces a crisis in science, as it seeks new grounds to legitimate the validity of scientific knowledge. Crises emerge in society as science is displaced as a primary legitimatory force and as a monopoly producer of “true” or valid knowledge.

The emergence of alternatives to the totalizing views of science suspend rather than reject positivistic scientific frameworks (Marcus & Fischer, 1986, p. 10). The task of alternative frameworks is to use ironic modes of writing to produce realist descriptions of society (Marcus & Fischer, 1986, p. 14) and organizations (Gephart, 1993), which describe “at a microscopic level the process of change itself” (Marcus & Fischer, 1986, p. 15). Ethnographic genres of writing (Van Maanen, 1988) offer alternatives to modernist scientific modes of representation. A number of other alternative representational modes have been explored (Calas & Smircich, 1991; Jameson, 1991; Rosenau, 1992).

The emergence of representational alternatives in social and administrative sciences and studies commonly has been associated with various controversies regarding the dominance of positivist or quantitative methods and the validity of knowledge emerging from qualitative methods or modes of research, although this quantitative/qualitative dichotomy is currently viewed by many as problematic (Gephart, 1988a). We consider the persistence of representational controversies in organizational analysis as symptomatic of the broader ontological and methodological crisis potential of contemporary management studies. Scientific knowledge and its legitimacy are based in scientific modes of representing the world, and as traditional scientific representational modes are challenged, the managerial and social value of the scholarly field of management studies is itself brought into question. Where some might argue for restoration of scientific legitimacy by return or reversion to a more strictly articulated and regulated scientific positivism, the chapters in this volume argue for development of alternative representations that challenge the dehumanized representations that emerge from objectivist science (Gephart, 1988a). The stage is thus set for methodological, aesthetic, and political controversies and crises within the very field of management and organization theory.

Overview of the Book

The book contains new and original essays on topics in postmodern management and organization theory. The intent was to advance the field of postmodern management and organization studies by offering essays that developed ideas fully within the postmodern domain. We sought essays that review and explain postmodern perspectives and concepts, including ideas developed in the works of postmodern writers, such as Baudrillard and Foucault. The chapters seek to develop the relevance of postmodern ideas to management and organization theory issues by actually undertaking critical investigations and discussions of organizational issues, to demonstrate how postmodern perspectives and concepts can be used in management and organizational theorizing. Thus, we sought to distinguish the book from the first wave of postmodern intrusions into organizational analysis, which involved reflective essays on the potential of postmodernist thought for reconceptualizing management theory. In the current book, we try to advance the field by offering essays that not only review and explain postmodern perspectives and concepts but that also actually apply these postmodern concepts and ideas to emerging managerial and organizational issues that characterize the postmodern era. The chapters frame and illustrate the new and emerging field of postmodern management and organization studies. Thus the chapters summarize prior work in postmodernism and in management and organization theory, but the goal is not to offer comprehensive reviews of these concepts. The chapters selectively use the concepts and ideas directly relevant to the organizational and managerial topics at hand, operationalize them in the context of specific inquiries into important topics in the field, and then carry out these inquiries. We thus prefer to demonstrate postmodern management and organization theory by doing it, rather than limit our attention to reflections on possibilities for doing it. The consequence is that the key concepts and ideas from postmodernism are introduced in the context of topically focused chapters rather than in a general overview of the “great man” theorists of postmodernism.

The book is organized into several parts that reflect important topics and trends in postmodern management and organization theory. Part I, “Deconstructing Organizational Analysis: Critique, Reflections, and Alternatives,” offers broad-ranging essays on the state of postmodern management and organization theory. These chapters discuss the features of modernism, modern management and organizations, and modernist organizational scholarship. The challenges facing modernism are addressed, and the chapters seek to posit the features of distinctly postmodern management, organizations, and theories.

Chapter 2, “Management, Social Issues, and the Postmodern Era,” by Robert P. Gephart, Jr., provides a historical overview of the rise and decline of the modern bureaucratic state and its relationship to modern organizations. Gephart argues that the changing nature of the capitalist, bureaucratic ethic is basic to the transition from one historical era to another. Gephart uses postmodern concepts from Fredric Jameson and insights from the management scholars W. G. Scott, D. Hart, and Robert Jackall to develop a view of late modernist organizations as “fiefdoms” with a new, postbureaucratic ethic. Gephart then discusses potential future postmodern transformations in society and organizations, using postmodern science fiction to offer futuristic scenarios that represent such transformations. He concludes by arguing that management is being transformed as a fundamental cultural category and by discussing theoretical and methodological perspectives that may help us understand the nature and consequences of this transformation.

Chapter 3, “Exploring the Terrain of Modernism and Postmodernism in Organization Theory” by John Hassard, continues the exploration of postmodernism as an epoch and as a style. Hassard compares and contrasts modernist and postmodernist concepts and explains how these concepts can be used to provide insights into management and organization theory. Hassard is concerned with describing the state of the art of postmodern management theory and offering suggestions for future applications and extensions of the ...

Table of contents

• Cover page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• 1. Postmodern Management and the Coming Crises of Organizational Analysis
• Part I: Deconstructing Organizational Analysis: Critique, Reflections, and Alternatives
• Part II: Beyond MAN-AGE-ment: Gender, Discourse, and Organizational Voices
• Part III: From Techno-logy to Eco-logy: Epistemological Issues in Environmental Management
• Part IV: Postmodern Pedagogy
• Part V: Critical Issues in Global Organizational Studies
• Conclusion: Reconstructing Organizations for Future Survival
• References
• Index
• About the Editors
• About the Contributors