The Theory of Power and Organization (RLE: Organizations)

Stewart Clegg

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9780415822503
• eBook ISBN:
  9781135931407
• Topic: Negocios y empresa
• Subtopic: Negocios en general

In this book the author develops a theory of power and organization, derived from a critical consideration of a literature extending across sociology, political science, philosophy and organization theory. The book raises and answers some of the issues which are important in the construction of a theoretical apparatus for the analysis of power and at the same time it proposes an alternative concept of organization, centred around the themes of power and control.

Chapter 1

Method: critical enquiry into concepts?

The task with which I began this work was to conduct a critical analysis of recent European work on power in organization theory. The field seemed quite specific: ‘Europe’, ‘power’ and ‘organization theory’—three totalities among which one must constitute connections, ‘critically’. Yet to be ‘critical’ would immediately demand suspending one's reliance on such seemingly factitious entities as a socio-political and geographic area, a topic of discourse, and a means of organizing that discourse. By what criteria is one to isolate these phenomena? What is ‘European’? Is it the Europe of the Economic Community, NATO, the Cold War? Or is it an historical Europe, of the nineteenth century perhaps? And if so, does one include the Balkans and Russia? On geographical criteria, possibly. But what weight do we attach to geographical criteria when we are dealing with intellectual formations? Perhaps ‘Europe’ refers not to a geographical area at all, but to a political and cultural division of the universe. So we might be tempted to regard it as a metaphor for a definite social formation—the area of Europe not under Soviet hegemony. But this might be more accurately regarded, on closer inspection, as a social formation only by pressure of externally conceived forces; it may have no valid unity of its own in anything other than the most expedient and frail terms.

Possibly, then, our conception has to be less static: we must seek for a Europe embedded in something more fluid than a definite space and time—the development of European ‘thought’ perhaps? But how would we determine the boundaries of this? Once, when its parameters were staked in the Enlightenment, or in the progression of an idea of critical reason as it developed from Kant, this might have been possible. But no such harmony of dialogue unites knowledge now, if indeed it ever did. And European ‘thought’, in this sense, may now be equated with the entire rationalist project which conceives of science as the only valid knowledge. What, in this almost global project, is definitively European? In short, the task may be impossible to delineate in any valid way, other than through some exclusion rules whose function would only be admissible in constituting a framework that would function in either a purely chauvinist or ideological fashion. This would present a framework within which one might expect only a partial, distorted and uncritical enquiry could flourish.

Elsewhere, I have argued that ‘a distinctively European tradition is emergent’ (Clegg and Dunkerley, 1977, p. 2). Nor is this the only attempt to distinguish that which is specifically ‘European’ in organization theory. Kassem (1976b, p. 7) has attempted to formulate the ‘distinctiveness’ of European, as opposed to American, organization theory, as shown in figure 1.

Figure 1 A scheme for thinking about organization theory: European and American styles (from Kassem, 1976b)

Kassem (1976a) distinguishes the respective emphases in terms of an American stress on ‘people’ and ‘goals’, identified by the axis 2–4, and a European emphasis (axis 1–3) which stresses ‘structure’ and ‘technology’. He also notes that, on the whole, European scholars have been ‘more concerned with identity and power than their American colleagues’ (Kassem, 1976b, p. 12). Kassem maintains that ‘power is [an] issue of central concern to European theorists. It is a recurring theme in the writings of Crozier (U.S.A., 1973), Emery and Thorsrud (1969, 1975), Herbst (1962, 1974), Hjelholt (1972), Mayntz and Scharpf (1975), and Mulder (1971, 1974). Unlike most of their American counterparts, these writers hit the issue of power head on’ (Kassem, 1976a, p. 54). However, Kassem qualifies his remarks apropos American organization theory, in that the ‘“American sociological school”, which includes Merton, Gouldner, Dubin, Blau and Scott, and Etzioni, among others, offers a somewhat different picture; and much of the comparison between the United States and Europe applies less to them’ (Kassem, 1976b, p. 56). He summarizes what he states to be the main distinctions between the two traditions in terms of Table 1.

Table 1 American and European organization theory: a comparison

	American	European
Approach	Microscopic (behavioural)	Macroscopic (structural)
Field of study	Organizational psychology Man-in-organization	Organizational sociology Organization-in-society
Focus on	People: their needs and attitudes What goes on inside the system	The organization as a whole What is going on between the system and its environment
Emphasis	Functional (process-oriented approach)	Structural
Methodology	Laboratory experiments, surveys, observation, longitudinal, one-case studies	Comparative case studies
Ideology	Harmony-based; status-quo (conservative) Anti-Marxian	Conflict-based Marxian
Central orientation of influential writers	Practical theorists Associated with business schools Having close ties with the business community Know-how or technique-oriented, e.g. Human Resources Accounting, Transactional Analysis, MBO, T-Group, Control Graph Intent on discovering the ‘one-best way’	Abstract theorists Associated with departments of sociology Having casualties with the business community Know-why or theory-oriented Intent on demolishing the ‘one-best way’
Examples of approaches to: a job design	Job enrichment	Sociotechnical systems
	Informal participative management	Industrial democracy
b organization development	Human processual	Techno-structural

Source: Kassem (1976b)

In a loose and schematic manner it has been possible to distinguish, at least in caricature, a field which claims as its rule of functioning the discursive space of Europe, organizations and power.

Within this space, which is certainly not coherent throughout, we require some point of departure, or some compass with which to steer a course. We might be tempted to start with the concept of ‘power’ as our point of departure. While the notion of a distinctively European tradition of organization theory may exist only as an idealization, or even as something (a parochial discourse) that we might not wish to achieve, power itself would seem to be less problematic. It cannot only be mere caricature.

If the concept of power is ‘essentially contested’ (Lukes, 1974), this would seem to imply that it does have some substance. Our certainty on this score would begin to recede just as soon as we became aware that what ‘essentially contested’ might mean is itself open to question. The idea of ‘essentially contested’ concepts derives from Gallie (1955) and includes as one of its defining characteristics that a concept is essentially contested when it derives ‘from an original exemplar whose authority is acknowledged by all the contestant users of the concept’ (Gallie, 1955, p. 180). Lukes (1974, pp. 26–7) rejects the claim that there is in fact any one original exemplar which can be said to have once authoritatively defined ‘power’. He cites Parsons’ various uses of the concept of power (Parsons, 1957; 1963a; 1963b) and Arendt's (1970) as contrary exemplars to that which Dahl (1957) assumes to be ‘original’. One could compound this list of contradictory usage quite easily.

This implies that ‘power’ is not an ‘essentially contested’ concept in the way Lukes has suggested, after the manner of Gallie (1955). In addition, it implies, as MacDonald (1976, p. 381) stresses, that ‘if a concept is truly essentially contested, the proper ground for contest is the essence of the concept’, not value judgments about the use of the concept, as Lukes (1974, p. 26) maintains. It would seem that we can accept neither that power is an essentially contested concept in Gallie's terms nor that Lukes succeeds in substituting an alternative definition of an essentially contested concept which would enable it to be seen as such. Lukes is apparently as confused and confusing as MacDonald (1976, p. 381) argues.

This is not to suggest that Gallie's original definition is in itself ‘uncontestable’. One way of showing some of the problems with the idea of an uncontested original exemplar of definition would be to consider the work of a political philosopher who has attempted to argue that the ‘political’ (including ‘power’) is essentially contested, and that the essence which is contested is one which is rooted in an original usage. Wolin (1960) provides such an example. Wolin has faced issues similar to those which animate MacDonald's (1976) dispute with Lukes (1974), although he does not do so by reference to Gallie (1955). By posing the primacy of a tradition in the discourse of political philosophy as a unity cross-cutting time, place and substance, he presumes that ‘power’, as an element of the ‘political’, is essentially contested.

Wolin (1960, p. 3) indexes the existence of a tradition by ‘a sufficiently widespread consensus about the identity of the problems to warrant the belief that a continuity of preoccupations has existed’. He identifies this ‘continuity of preoccupations’ with the problem of order, arguing that this problem has functioned as the locus of political discourse, particularly when crisis and disruption have occurred in the conventional political order of the time. In relation to these political ‘disorders’, this continuity of preoccupations is seen as essentially ‘conservative’:

Of all the restraints upon the political philosopher's freedom to speculate, none has been so powerful as the tradition of political philosophy itself. In the act of philosophizing, the theorist enters into a debate the terms of which have largely been set beforehand. Many preceding philosophers have been at work collecting and systematizing the words and concepts of political discourse. In the course of time, this collection has been further refined and transmitted as a cultural legacy; these concepts have been taught and discussed; they have been pondered and frequently altered. They have become, in brief, an inherited body of knowledge. When they are handed down from one age to another, they act as conservatizing agencies within the theory of a particular philosopher, preserving the insights, experience and refinements of the past, and compelling those who would participate in the Western political dialogue to abide by certain rules and usage (Wolin, 1960, p. 22).

This idea of tradition is almost too appealing—certainly Wolin is not the only person to have been attracted to it (see Clegg, 1975). However, its appeal is somewhat suspect precisely on the grounds which Gellner (1967) uses to criticize Gallie For it presupposes ‘an historically invalid and logically irrelevant “point” of origin’, as MacDonald (1976, p. 381) puts it. In doing so it serves as a rhetorical way of silencing doubts and questions, and of proposing historical verities of temporality, succession, similarity, continuity and conservation. This conservatism is most manifest in its necessary insistence that the ‘tradition’ is not subject to much in the way of radical change. Such changes as do occur are attributed to theorists recoiling from the disorder of the world external to their discourse.

Just as history never exactly repeats itself, so the political experience of one age is never precisely the same as that of another. Hence, in the play between political concepts and changing political experience, there is bound to be a modification in the categories of political philosophy…. The result is that each important political philosophy has something of the unique about it as well as something of the traditional (Wolin, 1960, p. 25).

In this it shares with conservative and organic theories the belief that social change should, wherever possible, be attributed to factors exogenous to the system. Where change cannot be assimilated to such ‘realist’ assumptions, then it can be adduced to the causality of a residual category, such as ‘genius’:

Whatever the truth of Whitehead's dictum that ‘creativity is the principle of novelty’, in the history of political theory, genius has not always taken the form of unprecedented originality. Sometimes, it has consisted of a more systematic or sharpened emphasis of an existing idea. In this sense, genius is imaginative recovery. At other times, it has taken an existing idea and severed it from the connective thread that makes an aggregate of ideas an organic complex. A connective thread or unifying principle not only integrates particular ideas into a general theory, but also apportions emphasis among them. If the unifying principle should be displaced, propositions within the complex which theretofore were commonplace or innocuous suddenly become radical in their implications…. This is because a political theory consists of a set of concepts—such as order, peace, justice, power, law, etc.—bound together… by a fund of notational principle that assigns accents and modulations. Any displacement or significant alteration of the notational principle or any exaggerated emphasis on one or a few concepts results in a different kind of theory (Wolin, 1960, pp. 24–5).

To propose a category such as ‘genius’ as an explanation for a particular social theory as an artefact is to argue in terms of ‘creativity’ as opposed to ‘production’ (Zeraffa, 1976), in terms of individual irrationality as opposed to social explicability. Such issues dominate the sociology of literature. To pose ‘production’ against ‘creativity’ is to locate and situate a text as a practice, as an artefact, rather than as a creation ex nihilo. The writer, as a producer, is working with theory, with fiction, in creating theory, in creating fiction. Theorizing or fictionalizing is a method for re-forming ‘ideas, values, principles and theories which have seemingly some explanatory meaning for society as a whole’ (Zeraffa, 1976, p. 37), for showing them in some of their many possible ways, in those ways in which they have meaning for their producer. Thus, essentially, the production of theory, of fiction, becomes a way of showing possible modes of social being, as the exemplification of the ‘subjective consciousness’ of a ‘particular class’ as Zeraffa (ibid.) puts it.

In this sense, then, the theorizing of ‘tradition’ betrays a concern with origins, influences and schools, with ‘breeding’ and ‘pedigree’, much as those feudal remnants, the aristocracy, do in their cultivation and display of ‘taste’ and of ‘correct form’. This notion of tradition, with its progressive refinements, constantly seeks to re-create the mythology of the origin, the beginning, in its permanence as the way of classifying contemporary discourse. Contemporary discourse can only be judged by reference to an élite which rules because it survives; it survives through being treated as an elite. Like great families, the origin and its traces persist through ‘tradition’.

In more recent versions of the notion of ‘tradition’, emphasis has shifted from continuity to revolution, from the slow and stately progression to what Foucault (1972) has termed ‘interruptions’:

The epistemological acts and thresholds described by Bachelard: they suspend the continuous accumulation of knowledge, interrupt its slow development, and force it to enter a new time, cut it off from its empirical origin and its original motivations, cleanse it of its imaginary complicities: they direct historical analysis away from the search for silent beginnings, and the never-ending tracing back to the original precursors, towards the search for a new type of rationality and its various effects (F...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• 1 Method: critical enquiry into concepts?
• 2 Method and sociological discourse
• 3 Power, discourse, myth and fiction
• 4 Power, dimensions and dialectics
• 5 Structure and power
• 6 Marxist analyses of power and structure
• 7 Power, control, structure and organization
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index