A City Reframed

Managing Warsaw in the 1990's

Barbara Czarniawska

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9789058230652
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134433810
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Urban Planning & Landscaping

Management of big cities is a relatively unresearched area, as compared to city planning and city governance. A study of Warsaw city management reveals the transformation process typically found in European countries in political and economic transition. In A City Reframed, Czarniawska conceptualises city management as an "action-net" under transformation, where three types of action are in focus: "muddling through", or coping with daily problems; "reframing", or changing the frame of interpretation of the world in order to take successful action; and "anchoring", the testing of new ideas on potentially involved parties in order to secure cooperation or minimize resistance. "Muddling through" is central to management in Warsaw, as it no doubt has always been: it is this "muddling through" that makes cities function. The specificity of the Warsaw picture is its demand for "reframing" and numerous and varied attempts have been made to achieve a "change of frame". They were sometimes successful, sometimes not, the skill of anchoring only slowly emerging from the most recent past, with the sediments of the old regimes an obvious obstacle. The study pinpoints the phenomena central to the construction of the action-net of city management, and traces its further connections (or lack of such), both temporally and spatially.

Chapter 1
Warsaw — A Chronotope

A Short Introduction to the Study

I propose to explore the theme of city management, understood as an action net. An action net of this sort can include various organizations — municipal, state, private, voluntary — and non-organized individuals. The task of a researcher who undertakes such an exploration in the field is to follow connections between actions, not contacts between people (although sometimes it is difficult to tell one from the other). The two main techniques of collecting the material I used were observation and interview, complemented and enriched by document analysis, mostly press analysis. These have a bearing upon the form of the book, that strives to preserve the voices from the field in a collage fashion. It contains excerpts from interviews, my fieldnotes, newspapers, official documents, opinions of my fellows-researchers and my running commentary, which provides an interpretative frame for the whole.

Observations were conducted applying a technique of shadowing: for ten to fourteen days, I accompanied managers of the units involved in the managerial action net and observed them as they went about their business. From the researcher's point of view, this technique is invaluable, for it enabled me to approach practice much more closely than any type of interview, while avoiding certain problems entailed by participant observation, where the researchers become employed by a given organization and spend much of their time and energy on learning the ropes and coping with their own adjustment problems.

The technique might be seen as demanding from the point of view of the managers' involvement, but many other experiences, including those from studies of general managers in the United States (Mintzberg, 1979), show that in reality it is quite painless. The shadowed managers became used to my presence, and I took no initiative of my own but was asked for help and cooperation in some situations. The main burden of the person who was shadowed was to explain my presence to all other actors (I refrained from interfering in these explanations as a rule) and, as much as possible, to explain to me the meaning of the scenes evolving in front of my eyes. This said, I hasten to add that although not all people I shadowed were delighted to have me around all the time, all tolerated me well enough.

I also hope that this approach helped me to avoid the fallacy of seeing the big city as one big organization. By following events rather than attempting to impose structure, I intended to come closer to the multiorganizational realities of the big city. The city should be conceived as a particularly complex and disorderly action net, a seamless web of interorganizational networks, where the city administration proper constitutes just one point of entry and by no means provides a map of the entire terrain.

I conducted two series of interviews with actors considered central to the process of city management, regardless of whether they were the part of the city administration. The first series aimed at a reconstruction of the state of affairs and a selection of organizational projects that were considered central for the city of Warsaw at that point in time and that subsequently became the object of observation. The second series aimed at a reconstruction of a metaproject, the change of the governance system of the city, reported separately in Czarniawska (1998).

This kind of research design requires special caution to protect the persons who had agreed to cooperate. Full anonymity is impossible because the name of the city and the specificity of various functions communicated clearly enough what group of people was concerned, even if the surnames of the interlocutors are never mentioned. Instead, I put extra efforts in guaranteeing confidentiality, especially of shadowed persons. The complete text of the analysis is accessible in Polish and has been presented for comments to the cooperating persons. The commentators did not have to agree with my analysis: the check aimed at avoiding false or harmful information.

As for documents, lack of many communication technologies, due to Warsaw's financial straits, meant that relatively few written documents were in circulation. This made the press even more important than in other big cities. On the one hand, it fulfilled a crucial role in shaping the image of city management to the public. The role of mass media is well-known to all students of complex organizations. But while this communication channel is usually paralleled by many internal webs of communication, and while the information provided to and by mass media is mostly of importance for the executive group, mass media in Warsaw were also the internal communication medium within the administration. A special section within a given unit was collecting all relevant clippings, which then would be discussed everyday — in official context, by the management group, and informally, by all organization members.

The developments taking place in the city were systematically depicted in Gazeta Stoleczna, a local addition to Warsaw's Gazeta Wyborcza, the country's most read daily newspaper. Interesting in this context is that Gazeta Wyborcza, which propagates the ideas of civic society, in principle dislikes everything that has to do with public administration and favors private business and citizens' initiatives, both in terms of volume and the tone of comments. Business initiatives are applauded, whereas municipal ones are reported in a neutral tone, varying between critique and lack of comments. As pointed out by one of my interlocutors, the tone resembles the audits conducted during the old regime,¹ which used to end with a sentence 'As for now, no serious defects have been found (but give us time)'. In spite of this ambiguous attitude to its reporting object, Gazeta Wyborcza seemed to reflect as well as shape the public perception of the municipal sector in the eyes of the readers from Warsaw.

The study of the management of Warsaw was the first in a series of big city studies. What kind of comparisons should and can be made? I have no trust in 'cross-cultural comparisons' of artificially created units taken out of their context. I wish to explore organizing processes in their local context while following the connections between such contexts. What kind of results can be expected from such a study? A picture of an action-net situated among many other action-nets operating in the same terrain, but also in an organization field dispersed all over the world, and yet connected by the same kind of activity — managing big cities. Insofar as this picture is different from those produced by the actors themselves, it can become a source of insight that might enrich actors' reflection over the processes which they create and which create them in turn. This difference depends on my ability to set up a conversation between different voices which in practice rarely converse, one of them being the voice of theory.

This aim has resulted in the text using scholarly literature in a particular way, in the parts dedicated to the fieldwork (chapters 2–5). In accordance with Latour's plea (1996), I aimed at achieving a polyphony of voices, where no voice is given a superior status. The utterances of my colleagues and myself are thus put on the same level as those of city managers, councilors or journalists. True, I do have the last word — in the chapters and in the book as a whole — but I consider it my duty, not my privilege. By doing so, I am assuming responsibility for the text, not trying to silence the competitors. The interpretation remains always open.

Before such polyphonic conversation can begin, a stage must be set.

Devices for Stage Construction

A text of stage instructions might well begin with the designer displaying the tools of her trade. In my case the devices in use are words — concepts and metaphors. And as the researcher is only one of the stage designers trying to emphasize some props and hide the others, competitive devices must be mentioned.

Different Fields, Different Vocabularies

One of the most important elements of a chronotope, that is, a literary description of the connected temporal and spatial relationships (Bakhtin, 1994) is the language used to describe the events and formulate interpretations. This language may well differ from the language used in the field. In a research project with a cross-cultural dimension, linguistic differences play a fundamental role, and translation takes place on many different levels. Expressions that are indicated as synonymous by a dictionary may not occupy a similar semantic space in different language communities.

In the held of city management, for example, two central groups of actors are mentioned in Sweden: politicians (politiker) and civil servants (tjänstemän). This terminology is misleading in Polish. For many years the word 'politicians' had a critical, negative meaning as synonym of 'careerist'. The word has now started a certain recovery, but not without a dose of difficulties. Most interlocutors prefer to use this word to mean 'big politics' or, as expressed in Polish, for 'politics with a capital P'. City politicians are called radni (a word approximating the English term councilors, and the Swedish kommunalråd). The functions of these people are perceived as social, not political. Thus, there is 'politics with a capital P', carried out by the political parties and the ruling government, 'politics with a small p', or personal aspirations to power, and 'the social function' which consists of representing the city inhabitants. There is no morally neutral expression for pursuing politics inside an organization. Actions that cannot be classified as 'officially political' are tinted gray by a suspicion of the personal motives and benefits involved.

The word urzędnik refers to nonmanagerial positions (clerk in English, handläggare in Swedish) or to 'government employees'. The managerial positions in the City Government (officials in British English, officers in American English) are called menadżerskie (a neologism), thus avoiding the unpleasant hint of bureaucracy hidden in words like administrator (administrator) or zarządca (dated expression for administrator).

It is quite usual to find linguistic differences in vocabularies of practice, especially in cross-cultural studies. It is somewhat less usual to speak about differences in vocabularies of theory, although I believe they are as frequent, if unacknowledged. It took me sometime to discover that my interlocutors (the practitioners) and I (the theorist) differed in the understanding of terms denoting the objects of my study. These must be therefore defined for the purposes of this text. I begin with the term central to me, that is, organizing.

Organizing

Organizing can be defined as an ordering activity, consisting in assuring that appropriate people and objects arrive at an appropriate place at an appropriate time (Latour, 1993b). It is easy to find negative examples: a King Kong dummy was to climb the Culture Palace (in aid of a damsel in distress known by the name of PepsiCo), but as the result of bad organization it did not, until 22.00 when all the young spectators had already gone to bed, sorely disappointed. The Warsaw newspapers frequently reported various 'organizational troubles'.

Within what can be called a 'humanist' perspective, such definition sounds reductionist. How can one abridge the complex symbolic, social, and cultural process to a simple placement of people and objects in time and space? It sounds like a simplistic version of Taylorism. By contrast, in what could be called a 'technocratic' perspective, such a definition is an axiomatic premise which necessarily leads to a conclusion that all organizing problems can be solved by a proper application of graph theory in programming human action.

These perspectives are obviously caricatures, and the distance between them exaggerated. Even the most superficial insight into actual practices reveals that only in a computer simulation is it enough to push a key in order for people and objects (or, rather, their icons) to go where needed. In everyday reality, programming is a useful skill, but only a skill, or a technique, relevant in certain situations but not in others. Actual organizing means starting — and sustaining — the complex process of persuading people to go where they are needed, fitting objects into spaces, transporting them and, above all, negotiating what a proper time and a proper place is, and how they should be measured or described. Organizing requires actions that are social and political, material and symbolic, cognitively and emotionally oriented.

Neither theory nor the reflection about organizational practice devote much attention to the complexity of organizing, giving priority to 'organizations'. And yet organizations are nothing more or less than societal fictions (Knorr Cetina, 1994), legal persons called to life in order to facilitate accountability, this foundation of modern society (Douglas, 1987). The fiction of organization requires supporting fictions: norms and rules — legal, economic, and technical. 'Organizational structure' is such a fiction of lesser caliber, one that helps introduce accountability in society and that supports the organizing process without replacing it. Perfecting organizational structure might, but need not, influence the outcome of organizing. Structures and practices are, as Weick (1976) called it, loosely coupled. The principle of loose coupling is considered functional insofar it prevents the transfer of perturbations from one part of the net to another.

Why, then, has so much attention been dedicated to structures and little to processes; to products and not to production; to organizations and not to organizing, of which management is a particular case? Why has so much reflection been focused on 'a proper governance system of the city' or on 'a transparent authority structure' rather than on actual activities? In technology, the structure determines the machine's functioning — up to a point. For example, the effects of putting sugar into petrol outweigh the subtleties of engine design. In human action, structure is but a trope attracting attention to the fact that actions can be repeated in a more or less unchanged form.

Maybe it is easier to design and study organizational structures than to form and grasp the complexity of organizing, where random events are as important as human intentions and where human intentions are many and often contradictory. Organizing is an attempt at ordering, a never-ending battle against chaos. Speaking about 'organizations' is actually a way of complementing somebody who has visibly succeeded in introducing and maintaining order. Focusing on the short moment that has a semblance of order is therefore misleading, especially in the Polish context, where in a way it is truly a matter of 'organizing' from scratch, with all the ambiguity conveyed by this verb, as Luttwak (1995) argues in his provocative article.²

The Warsaw City office functioned for four years without an organization chart, a fact shameful to my interlocutors and fully understandable to me, I assume, after Weick (1979), that organizational structures can help or hamper the process, but they can be easily changed, redesigned, constructed anew. Processes are loosely coupled to structures, and they are dynamic, complex, and often invisible, not because they are hidden but because they are taken for granted. What is, then, organizing, if not only planning and controlling, these pillars of traditional organization theory?

There are many possible ways of describing such process, none of them necessarily 'truer' than any other. In my opinion, three aspects are especially worth pointing out:

• Reframing (Goffman, 1974). This element of organizing stresses the need to change the frame of interpretation as soon as the old one stops providing the picture of the world needed for successful action. Actions described in this report will evidence both the introduction of 'new frames', such as 'capitalism', 'local democracy' and the fact that the old way of looking at the world frequently predominates over the new one because it is taken for granted. The necessity of change will be particularly clear at the Metro, where the employees were confronted with a necessity to move from a 'construction' to an 'operations' frame and the population of Warsaw from 'the-metro-as-speculation' to 'the-metro-as-means-of-transportation'. All in all, the activity of reframing denoted the most typical aspect of managing Warsaw at the time of the study — therefore the title of the book.
• Anchoring always converges with the change of frame. This political co...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction to the Series
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Key to Transcripts and Quotations
• 1 Warsaw — A Chronotope
• 2 Metro Carries You to the Past and into the Future
• 3 Pure, Live Water
• 4 Rich, Parsimonious and Thrifty
• 5 An Intense Translating Program
• 6 On Oblivion and Hybrid Organizing
• References
• Index