The New Boss

Niklas Luhmann

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781509517916
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Organisational Behaviour
• Index: Business

Any organization, no matter how stolid, may be unsettled by the news that a new boss is about to take over. Talk in the hallways increases, staff worry about their jobs, uncertainty grows. Even when the change has happened, problems emerge when the boss who was hired to manage "from above" has to learn about the organization "from below." In this book, Niklas Luhmann scrutinizes the relationship and shows how it is stretched to its limit by communication difficulties, demands for self-presentation, and disagreements concerning fundamental values. Many of the tensions crystallize around the question "who has the power?" It isn't necessarily the boss, provided the employees are well versed in the art of directing their superiors. "Subtervision" is Luhmann's term for this state of affairs, and tact is the most important means to this end. Yet caution is advised: whoever achieves mastery in subtervision may well become the new boss. This slim and thought-provoking book from one of the most influential sociologists of the twentieth century will be of great interest to anyone seeking to understand the dynamics and machinations of the workplace.

The Spontaneous Creation of Order
Man in Administration

The world of work: social and emotional privations. Every organization consists of actions. Yet nobody can act without himself being present. He brings himself, his personality, along to work. The organization, however, requires only particular forms of behavior from him. His feelings and interest in self-expression are barely touched upon in this process. During work they loiter functionless, and cause damage if they are not kept under control.

Work as such is organized rationally. Its consistency, however, is not the inner consistency of private life. For this reason, what a worker would like to accomplish often remains unheard, while expressions of his innermost being remain unseen. The worker comes to regard the cool indifference toward him as a unique being as a lack of opportunity and fulfillment. Under the keyword “alienation” one finds a vast literature within critical sociology that searches for symptoms of social and emotional deprivations in work organizations. True, more recent empirical research concerning job satisfaction paints a more agreeable picture overall than might have been expected, but it cannot be denied that habituation plays a role in this context and that many are content only because they own a television set and do not hope for anything better.

Individual versus organization? Theory loves contrasts. From the start, therefore, it assumed a direct opposition between individuals and organizations. This seems to throw some light on our dilemma. Influential trends in the intellectual history of the nineteenth century, especially its preference for the dialectic of simple concepts and its fascination with industrial conflict, supported and solidified this conceptual scheme.

Yet the heat of the quarrel between individualism and collectivism caused this formulation of the problem to evaporate. The onset of empirical social research also contributed to the increasing need for more careful and more differentiated ideas. Moreover, the more that research, which had started in production companies, began to encroach upon management companies, the more it became absolutely clear that a rigid theory of conflict would not do. For such a theory cannot give a sufficient account of either the elasticity of the organization or the plasticity of human attitudes.

The humanization of the organization. First of all came the call to change the organization. Today, it is widely accused of applying the “classical” organization model. In the motivational theory of classical organizational science, it was assumed that people were free to choose and in this sense were understood as rational beings. The underlying belief had been that people could be motivated to perform the prescribed work, if their own, indigenous motives were supplemented by alien ones that contradicted the behavior that they personally desired, so dragging people away from the course of action that seemed natural. The new theory was a success, although this success depended mainly on the strength of the new conflicting motives and on their proximity to actual behavior. Shrewd systems of wage payments and strict supervision were helpful in achieving these objectives.

What this approach could not see was the conflict itself. The classical theory of motivation implies mastery over people through implanting conflict within the person. It was only when the more recent, empirical, behavioral sciences paid more attention to actual people that it became recognized that this conflict creates too much stress. For this very reason, all of the more recent endeavors are directed toward relieving tensions. Nowadays, psychology and psychiatry, as well as anthropology, social psychology, and sociology, conceive of people as highly complex action systems that are guided through self-consciousness and anxiety and whose conscious and unconscious functional conditions require serious consideration on the part of the organization.

The new humaneness of the organization exists in its better technical adjustment to the human condition, not in a weakening of the organization’s objectives or its principle of rationality. It was expected that the organization would adjust its structural decisions to people’s limited rational capacities, so as not to overtax them; that it would provide, or at least tolerate sympathetically, compensatory benefits, such as frequent and friendly exchanges between employees; and that it would create a humane “work climate” through a correspondingly humane leadership ideology – a climate in which all can thrive and so work all the harder.

Administrators’ adaptation strategies. Whereas suggestions for the cultivation of “human relations” were developed with production organizations in mind, it seems that the current, still sparse, research on individuals’ adaptation strategies is likely to gain more valuable knowledge from the study of administrative bureaucracies. After all, those in administrations are predestined to become tacticians.

Administrations are, according to the real meaning of the term, enterprises for the production of binding decisions. Both the actions that take place internally and those directed at the outside world consist essentially of communications. To be sure, communications offer people better opportunities for self-presentation and self-assertion than strictly manual operations, the meaning of which is revealed at the end of the assembly line as an enormous quantity of identical products. It is not (yet) possible to program and specialize communications in such a way that their production could dispense with the human individual’s memory and skills in bringing things together. For this reason, even where communications have to be presented as factual statements, they are also still attributed to people.

Consequently, the human dilemma in industrial organization does not occur with the same urgency in administration. This is as true for public administration as it is for administration in industry and social organizations. Especially in the upper echelons and among the higher offices, there are more opportunities for the administrator’s personality to make an appearance and so also more incentives for him to adjust his personality to the requirements of a successful self-presentation within the system. He can, for instance, demonstrate the adroitness of his routines or stress the impersonal quality of his actions in order to make it appear that he, himself, becomes visible only after the end of the working day. For example, he may choose the path of gaining status and rising in the hierarchy. He may aim at being personally “irreplaceable” for the performance of certain services, or he may, as it were, produce his wine from the offshoots of great projects, so that his role as instigator will be recognized by those in the know. His own prospects do not lose their relevance, but they are structured by the organization in such a way that he has to perform only a minimal number of formal duties to achieve his personal goals.

Rationalization and self-discipline. Although the rationality of the organization and the inner logic of a person’s private world follow entirely different, unconnected system laws, there exists nonetheless – perhaps precisely because of this – a certain margin for mutual adjustment. This margin can be widened by means of increased awareness and a strategic understanding of the interplay of both sides. If from time to time organizations critically examine their principles and human beings do the same with their feelings, it may be possible to discover more abstract behavioral premises and novel behavioral alternatives that make mutual adjustment easier.

It is not improbable that something like this could happen. Comparing the administration of highly developed industrial states with that of developing countries makes it apparent that the most significant difference between them lies in the degree of personal immersion in an externally determined work role. It also lies in the degree to which an individual’s personal environment, especially his family, recognizes the adjustments that are necessary for these purposes and attaches normative expectations to them. “Progress,” then, consists in the institutionalization of those virtues that permit a personally acceptable existence without unnecessarily blocking out the organized system’s own rationality. Examples of such virtues are as follows: wariness as to how one expresses oneself, and tact; a wide time horizon; a feeling for the far-reaching, complex, and indirect consequences of one’s own actions and those of others; the evaluation of all events in terms of power, status implications, establishing precedents, opportunities for consensus, and gains by means of indirect paths; the ability to wait, and in particular the capacity to suspend one’s own feelings and need for self-presentation until the right moment; the ability to tolerate and relieve tensions; and the inner preparedness for accepting second-best solutions and for recognizing the facts as they are, especially when they have already been decided upon. Finally, what underlies all this as its presupposition is self-discipline. Incidentally, the “modernization” of citizenship in developing countries follows this same trajectory.

The Myth of the Small Group

The discovery of “informal organization.” Our portrayal of the integration of the person into an organization finds many points of reference in the more recent organizational sciences. Yet it is not representative of the full scope of this work. Many theories and research projects are based on the discovery of an “informal organization” or “informal groups” within the firm. This discovery was the result of a series of extensive experiments that were conducted from 1927 to 1932 by the Harvard Business School at the Hawthorne facilities of the Western Electric Company. Their analysis had enormous influence on the subsequent development of the sociology of firms and administration.

Briefly summarized, the findings from these studies reveal that, besides the official, prescribed organization, there exists another social regime that provides its own norms and institutions. Thus, autonomous leadership roles and informal sanctions make their appearance. There exist particular, preferred topics of communication, particular, reciprocal points of view, and a sort of emotional logic, clarifying the work situation, its operational factors, and its dangers. All of these satisfy the common interests of those who work together and articulate, socially manage, and defend these interests against the management.

Scientific output. These new insights destroyed the prevailing formula of an antithesis between the individual and the collective, on which the older organizational science had based a reward/sanction theory of motivation. It now became clear that the work organization could not be equated with the social system and that, in turn, an individual’s recalcitrant behavior within the enterprise did not arise exclusively from individual motives, but was rather, to some extent at least, socially codetermined. As a consequence, sociology was able to leave organizational objectives and the means for their optimum realization to management science and instead concentrate on the newly discovered, separate field of informal organization – a division of labor that persists today.

The first theoretical expression of all of this could be found in the concept of the group. It seemed that this concept could explain all those informal manifestations that could not be derived from the organization’s objective, and was able to link them to familiar general phenomena. Following this initial insight, but moving far beyond it, a comprehensive field of research dedicated to small groups developed in the United States. It includes a wide array of investigations, which is only loosely connected with organizational science, ranging from socio-psychological experiments through sociological models of role assignments all the way to the construction of variables that can be put in mathematical terms.

Socio-political hopes. The fertility of research into groups can hardly be challenged, given the skepticism of current judgments on the general socio-political hopes that the leader of the Hawthorne experiments, Elton Mayo, and some of his disciples and successors had placed in the nature of groups. Mayo thought that he had struck gold in the subterranean spontaneity of informal groups and hoped to reinvigorate industry’s sagging work morale. If only industry itself were to pay attention to this phenomenon and adjust its organization accordingly, so as to nourish and cherish emotionally stabilized groups, these groups might become the seeds of a restoration to a healthy society.

One basic idea within this conception is undoubtedly correct – namely, that groups are easier to influence than individuals with their complicated and, at the same time, hardened psychic constitutions. Al...