Organizations Alike and Unlike (RLE: Organizations)

International and Inter-Institutional Studies in the Sociology of Organizations

Cornelis Lammers, David Hickson, Cornelis J. Lammers, David Hickson, Cornelis Lammers, Cornelis J. Lammers, David Hickson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9780415823326
• eBook ISBN:
  9781135938611
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

This volume contrasts the life and problems of organizations in many parts of the world and highlights the differences between those societies as reflected in their different institutional sectors such as manufacturing, commerce, social services and government administration. In so doing, the book contributes to the theoretical foundations of the sociology of organizations by revealing previously unseen relationships between societies and institutions, offering an original synthesis of available research.

Part one

INTRODUCTION

Chapter 1

TOWARDS A COMPARATIVE SOCIOLOGY OF ORGANIZATIONS

Cornelis J. Lammers and David J. Hickson

THE ART OF COMPARISON

The comparing of organizations is not only a sport of scholars; it is also regularly indulged in by the ordinary citizen. A jobseeker finds himself comparing organizations as to working conditions, career prospects, internal authority relations, and the like. The adherent of a ‘third’ political party in the USA, Great Britain, or Germany defends his somewhat divergent choice to family, friends, and colleagues by comparing the two giant parties dominating the political scene in his country, concluding on the basis of this comparison that because these parties differ so little with respect to their programmes, past records, and probable future achievements, there is a real need for a sound alternative. And a Scandinavian or Dutch tourist in southern France or Sicily who wants to order a boiled egg or reserve a room, make a telephone call or mail a letter, is also likely to engage in a ‘Comparative study’. Before and after he succeeds or fails to obtain the service he wants, he will inevitably compare the patterns of organizations in his fatherland with the ways these establishments are run in Latin countries.

The art of comparison consists of an effort to detect similarities and/or dissimilarities between the units under consideration. The aims, and consequently the results, of the comparative process can and do differ. Our job applicant may be just as motivated to learn about the ways in which prospective employing organizations are alike as he is eager to obtain information about their differences. The dedicated partisan of a ‘third’ party will, however, probably be less impartial. He will stress the similarities rather than the dissimilarities between Republicans and Democrats, Labour and Conservative, Christian Democrats and Socialists, in order to arrive at the (foregone) conclusion that the two major parties are really very much the same. Our tourist in the southern parts of Europe, finally, will more likely than not have the opposite bias in his comparative exercise. We may take it that he will be mainly intrigued – if not exasperated – by the glaring differences between the systems of service in northern and southern Europe and will pay rather less attention to what hotels and post offices have in common everywhere in Europe.

The researcher'2 method of comparison differs from the everyday art of comparison primarily by its systematic nature. The scholar who sets out to compare organizations takes much more care than our job-seeker, ‘third’-party member, or tourist to follow certain rules and procedures. Consequently, the scholar will be much more aware than the layman of various possibilities and problems in determining his sample of organizations, in deciding what kinds of data he will gather as indicators of what aspects of organizational life, in analysing his data, and in drawing his conclusions from this analysis. But in spite of all this the same types of ‘bias’ arise.

In some cases students of organizations want to show that apparently quite divergent organizations are in certain fundamental respects ‘brothers under the skin’. In other words, this kind of comparative analysis is directed at discerning ‘genotypical’ likeness in spite of ‘phenotypical’ unlikeness between two or more organizations. (1) The reverse emphasis comes to the fore in a type of comparison where the investigator is really on the lookout for genotypical unlikeness in spite of phenotypical likeness. In this instance several organizations are – in the view of the person comparing – superficially seen as birds of a feather, but when looked at more closely they turn out to be ‘birds of a different feather’.

As will become evident in this book, in general discussions of basic issues of organizational sociology and in reports on comparative organizational research, both angles of comparison are legitimate and valuable strategies for theory and research on organizations. (2) From the point of view of organizational sociology as a whole, a third, ‘unbiased’ type of comparison presenting a balanced overview of similarities and dissimilarities might be preferable. For the advancement of our knowledge, however – and certainly for the liveliness of the field – there is also much to be said in favour of the two more ‘partial’, one-sided types of comparison. Comparisons concentrating basically on similarities furnish the materials for generalization, i.e. knowledge valid for any and all organizations. The opposite type, directed towards detecting differences between organizations, aims at acquiring knowledge about the peculiarities of particular classes of organizations. On the whole, comparative organizational sociology has focused on similarities of organizational phenomena across institutional and societal environments rather more than on inter-institutional and inter-societal differences between organizations. Consequently, we have brought together in this volume not only studies in which organizations in divergent settings are put on a par as ‘brothers under the skin’, bat especially studies in which organizations resorting in different institutional or societal contexts are contrasted as ‘birds of a different feather’.

The term comparative has meant – and still means – different things to different social scientists. Let us therefore state at the outset that we conceive of organizational sociology as a comparative enterprise in the sense that it should focus on the similarities and differences between various kinds of organizations in diverse institutional and societal settings. In other words, sociological knowledge about organizations ought not to be confined to a particular type of organization found in only one institutional area, e.g. industry, but should cover a wide variety of organizations in all kinds of institutional realms, including industry, government, education, health care and so on. Furthermore, we should not be satisfied with a sociology of organizations that deals with only one kind of society, e.g. modern, Western society, but should strive for a sub-discipline that studies organizations all around the globe.

The former – broadening of the scope of organizational sociology to encompass diverse institutional areas – has already been accomplished to a considerable extent. The latter – shifting from studies within a given society to cross-societal studies of organizations – is only beginning to gain momentum. This book is intended to contribute to the latter trend, to the ‘internationalization’ of organizational sociology, by presenting original studies comparing organizations in countries all over the world.

A NEW LOOK FOR ‘COMPARATIVE’ ORGANIZATIONAL SOCIOLOGY

In the 1960s several advocates of ‘a big leap forward’ for the sociology of organizations took issue on the proper methods for such a thrust. Americans including Etzioni (1961, p. xii-xiv), Blau (1965), and Heydebrand (1967) felt that the case study and the emphasis on intra-organizational processes were somewhat dated: in their view sociologists ought to compare fairly large numbers of organizations to arrive at generalizations concerning the relationships between characteristics of the organizational whole.

Meanwhile, in the late 1950s and early 1960s several British social scientists had already started large-scale investigations on organizations (Woodward, 1958, 1965; Burns and Stalker, 1961; the so-called Aston group, see Pugh and Hickson, 1976). After that, the adjective ‘comparative’ was used to designate a research strategy whereby a substantial number of organizations are studied with the same methods and within the same theoretical perspective focused on properties of the organization as unit of analysis.

By now, however, such research projects have in their turn become the usual, run-of-the-mill type of organization study, so it no longer makes sense to stress this kind of research as being ‘comparative’. It might be more meaningful to reserve the term ‘comparative’ for investigations focused on the interplay between institutional and societal settings on the one hand, and organizational forms and processes on the other.

Mainstream research in organizational sociology during the 1960s was not ‘comparative’ in the latter sense. Even a cursory look at text-books (e.g. Silverman, 1970; Hall, 1972; Haas and Drabek, 1973) or readers (e.g. Heydebrand, 1973b) shows that most of the empirical studies underlying the present sociology of organizations are

1confined to one period in time,

2have been executed within one society, and

3cover organizations in only one institutional area.

Let us take up these points one by one.

1Diachronic v. synchronic studies

Organizations in diverse settings can be compared by assessing the values of variables at different times (keeping ‘locations’ constant) or in different places (keeping ‘time’ constant), or both. The first approach – the so-called longitudinal or diachronic design – is preferable for analysis of the interrelations between organizational and general social change.

Although some of the most prominent work is based on a diachronic approach (e.g. Bendix, 1956; Stinchcombe, 1965; Udy, 1970; Coleman, 1974, ch. 1; Van Doom, 1975, ch. 1), this strategy is the exception rather than the rule in organizational sociology. In the field preference has usually been given to the cross-sectional or synchronic design limited to one period in time.

2Cross-societal v. ‘mono-societal’ studies

Many readers will already have noticed that we consistently use the term cross-societal where others frequently apply the term cross-cultural. This has to do with the fact that in the social sciences ‘culture’ is a somewhat ambiguous concept. Many anthropologists use the terms ‘culture’ and ‘society’ as synonyms, whereas others prefer to reserve the concept ‘culture’ for patterns of roles and norms embedded in certain paramount values (see on this point Kroeber and Parsons, 1958). To avoid confusion, we will employ ‘culture’ only as defined in this latter, narrower sense.

Most studies in the field of organizational sociology are, however, not cross-societal but conducted in one society. Given the theoretical and methodological problems, not to speak of the costs and practical difficulties of cross-national research, there is nothing surprising about this state of affairs. Nevertheless, the ‘mono-societal’ character of the mass of empirical studies in this sub-discipline implies that our knowledge concerning the interpenetration of society and organization is limited indeed.

We do, of course, know something about the societal variations of organizational forms and processes. In the first place, the comparative study of organizations across societies has been practised for some time in such flourishing areas as comparative public administration (e.g. Heady, 1966; Arora, 1972) and comparative management (e.g. Boddewyn, 1969; Davis, 1971; Webber, 1969).

In the second place, various sociologists have also analysed cross-societal variations in organizational phenomena. Landsberger (1970) brought together a number of such studies in the first reader in the field of organizational sociology that can be called ‘comparative’ in the sense of attempting to demonstrate the impact of societal environments on organizational life. One can also point to other studies such as Richardson'2 (1956) comparison of the organization of British and American merchant ships, the analysis of data on a German firm by Ruedi and Lawrence (1970) to ‘replicate’ the investigation done in the USA by Lawrence and Lorsch (1967), and Dore'2 (1973) recent study of two British and two Japanese factories.

In this connection special mention should be made of the pioneer work of Udy and Crozier, two founding fathers of organizational sociology. Udy started as early as the late 1950s to compare organizations in ‘primitive’ societies, and systematically examined the impact of social setting on organizational forms (see e.g. Udy, 1959a; 1959b; 1962). Crozier (1963) rounded off his case studies of a clerical agency in Paris and three plants of the French tobacco monopoly by comparing ‘l'2 à la Française’ with organizational systems in the USA and Soviet Russia (Crozier, 1963, ch. VIII).

Although both Udy and Crozier left their traces on organizational theory, their insights and leads concerning the impact of society on organizational forms and processes have seldom been incorporated into later research. Organizational sociology in the 1960s did not accumulate much theoretical insight into the interrelations between organizations and society. Due to the mono-societal character of most studies, the macro-social variables were usually kept constant.

In the early 1970s, however, a new trend emerged. Several investigators who had developed a methodology for organization analysis and applied it in their own societies, started to undertake such studies abroad. British scholars belonging to the Aston group joined with colleagues in Canada and the USA to compare data on manufacturing organizations in different countries (McMillan et al., 1973; Hickson et al., 1974; see also chapter 2 in this book). Likewise, Tannenbaum'2 cross-societal research on organizations came into being as a more or less natural outgrowth of the development and application of a specific set of measures in one country, this time the USA (see Tannenbaum et al., 1974, and chapter 11 in this book) .

Although the earlier, exploratory Aston international research (as distinct from that current now) and Tannenbaum'2 five-country project were truly comparative in the sense that samples of organizations in diverse social settings were analysed, no attempt was made in these studies to relate systematically macro-level variables to variables (or relations b...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Contributors
• Preface
• Part one INTRODUCTION
• Part Two Salient Issues
• Part Three Comparing Organizations in Varying Institutional Settings
• Part Four Comparing Organizations in Varying Societal Settings
• Part Five Conclusions
• Name Index
• Subject Index