The Poetic Logic of Administration

Styles and Changes of Style in the Art of Organizing

Kaj Skoldberg

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• Topic: Business
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134490660
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

The Poetic Logic of Administration is an investigation of the most important organizational forms of our time, theoretically as well as practically. Central to the presentation are four main trends: the rational bureaucracy, the human network, the harmonious system and the strong culture.
The book provides a new and challenging picture of these organizational forms. Difficult to capture in common logical terms, they appear to follow a certain pattern: a 'poetic logic'. They are, for example, enacted as various literary dramas: comedy, tragedy etc. They are also marked by different conceptions of the world - such as the metaphorical and the ironic - and by different explanatory ideals.
Kaj Skoldberg's book contains a rhetorical analysis of the styles of modern administration and the changes they have undergone. This is a groundbreaking work, offering new interpretations and critical re-evaluations of the individual approaches to organization, including their 'gurus' and current importance, within the framework of a highly-original, overarching analysis. No previous book has tried to capture the major forms of organizing, and their dynamics, in terms of their rhetorical master tropes, main narrative genres, and explanatory ideals, and also uses this as an interpretive scheme for understanding individual organizational theories and practices within those main approaches. Examples are given from both the private and the public sectors and various forms of efficiency and effectiveness are also discussed.

1 Introduction

In modem society, pervaded by organizations and organizational networks, powerful trends in administration and management will by necessity come to exert a crucial influence. Over time, a limited number of such “grand” organizational approaches have appeared, setting the tone for organizational theorists and organizational designers alike: the rational classics, Human Relations, the systems view, and the culture perspective. Later approaches have not replaced previous ones, but have rather been superimposed on them; as a consequence, all four are still very much with us today, both in theory and practice. Studying such important processes should be highly relevant, not only to organization and management theory but also to social science in general. How do these approaches emerge, and how do they take on their varying characteristics? Previous research has largely abstained from answering this question in an integrated way. The present book contends that the approaches emerge and take their shape, following a specific pattern – a “poetic logic”.¹⁾ In other words, there is a logic to the processes; this logic, however, is not one of formal rationality, empty of meaning, but rather that encountered in poetics and dramaturgy.

Such an inquiry can be placed within a broader current of ideas. Poetics – i.e. literary theory or discourse on literature – as applied to texts other than those of fictional literature has drawn increasing interest during the last two decades.² Postmodernism and poststructuralism have drawn our attention to strongly textual and narrative aspects of seemingly rational conceptions and theories3 (although at the price of often exaggerating these, even to the point of textual reductionism).⁴⁾ It is possible to make a rough distinction between the poetics of metaphor and the poetics of narrative, even though these two are often combined in practice.⁵ In the study of organizations and management the poetics of metaphor saw a breakthrough in 1986, with Gareth Morgan's highly influential book, Images of Organization. Metaphors in organizational cultures have been a popular focus of interest, as have stories and narratives in organizations.⁶ The poetics of organizations and organization theories as narratives has also evoked interest,⁷ as has the aesthetics of organizations.⁸

The present work aims at integrating the poetics of rhetorical figures, or tropes (of which metaphor represents one), and the poetics of narrative, in discussing the various organizational vogues mentioned above. In what follows, not only the general characteristics, but also the inner structure of each of the four approaches – including its inner contradictions and incoherencies – is explained from the same poetic logic. Further, the texture of individual organization theories and practices within the particular approaches – including the tensions and inconsistencies of these theories and practices – are similarly explained from the influence of the overarching pattern of the poetic logic, together with their belonging to a certain approach. In addition, a discussion of organizational performance in the same 'poetic' mode serves to complement the investigation.

Organizational styles: a poetic logic

More particularly, this book purports to show that, rather than being the products of rational, scientific, or scholarly deliberations, the major organizational approaches constitute variants of different organizational styles. An organizational style consists of a particular style of thought, a corresponding organizational drama, and a corresponding method (see Figure 1.1). This triad is inspired by – and freely adapted from – Hayden White's book Metahistory, in which he traces the poetics of eighteenth- century historiography.

The style of thought is the dominating element in the triad; that is, it colours the method as well as the organizational drama. In the figure, this is symbolized by the top position in the triangle of the style of thought. This also provides an additional explanation of the term, style of thought. As to the two remaining elements of the triad, since they constitute aspects of organizational styles, we should, to be more exact, also have used the terms “style of organizational drama” and “style of method”. For the sake of simplicity we speak instead of these as organizational drama and method.

The styles of thought can be identified as the main rhetoric figures, or master tropes. Research has shown that these are not mere superficial

Figure 1.1 Organizational styles: a poetic logic.

Figure 1.2 The order of the tropes for the organizational approaches.	Figure 1.3 The general order of the poetic logic.

ornaments of language, but that they mould our very way of thinking. There are four master tropes, or styles of thought. Metonymy expresses the relation of contiguity between external elements. Metaphor is the trope of similarity between two items, and, since the similarity is essential rather than superficial, captures the inner meaning of things. Synecdoche focuses on the relation between whole and part. Irony expresses opposite meaning. The main organizational approaches are imbued by these styles of thought in turn (see (Figure 1.2).

In course of time, the 'scientific' Metonymic style of thought becomes dissatisfying for those researchers or practitioners in the tradition of the rational classics, who have discovered that there is also an inner meaning; the Metaphoric approach is a natural result, in this case manifested in Human Relations. As the drawbacks with this individual-centred approach become apparent, a perspective with a more Synecdochic orientation towards the whole organization makes its appearance, as the systems view of organizations. Finally, there is a relativistically Ironic and anti-rationalistic backlash against all the earlier approaches – the culture perspective.

With one interesting difference, this process coincides with the general order of the poetic logic (Figure 1.3), which Vico – the eighteenth century Neapolitan philosopher – had proposed as the general, cyclical development of human societies. In our time, White discovered the same poetics both in nineteenth century historiography and in Foucault's theory of the transformations of the humanities.⁹⁾

This general order is a natural consequence, as knowledge might reasonably be supposed to start with naive symbols based on similarity; move on via criticism to external differences; proceed through insight into the inadequacies of these to integrated wholes; and end up in scepticism towards previous phases. (Then it is time for a new cycle….)

It is the contention of this book that external impulses, whether they be of ideational or material character, are not the prime movers behind the different organizational approaches. On the other hand, they may very well overdetermine them: i.e. have an impact on the form in which the tropes find concrete expression (see Figure 1.4). In this book I have concentrated on the deep structure – the tropes – rather than the overdetermining factors, since the former constitutes what is fundamental and primary. A discussion of the influence of the ideas of natural science has been the only extra element incorporated, for this explains not only the reversal of the tropological order relative to the normal sequence of poetic logic (see Chapter 2) but also certain other phenomena which are hard to understand within the various organizational approaches.

Now let us look a little closer at the other aspects of organizational styles – dramas and methods. The styles of thought (master tropes) constitute basic pictures of reality (ontological conceptions). A particular style of thought can find expression in two ways in an (organizational) text: both through what is said – i.e. the form of presentation, kind of story; and through how this is/should be arrived at – i.e. the working procedure. In the former case, we speak of organizational drama, in the latter of method. Thus, an organizational drama is a narrative about something. The organizational drama provides a characteristic course of events. The method is a way of investigating this “something”. The method argues for a certain specific selection of facts and a certain way of interpreting these facts (a model of interpretation). Note in particular that both organizational drama and method are employed by theorists and practitioners alike: Whether they speak of, or act within, organizations, on the one hand they create narratives, in theory or in practice;¹⁰⁾ on the other, they select facts and interpret these in specific manners.

Our style of thought, our fundamental perspective on reality, sets its stamp on the way in which we present organizations, the drama within which

Figure 1.4 Deep structure, surface manifestations, and external over-determination.

we enact their world. If there is a story to be told, be it of organizations, personal computers, or the Court of King Arthur, it must be structured in some way. Over the ages, a number of fixed narrative structures have crystallized, and any potential narrators will have imbibed these since birth, in both writing and speech. When they then set about doing a presentation of their own, these structures will be used, either consciously or unconsciously. These are the ones that are readily at hand; and, above all, they are the ones that have proved to be effective. Even the teller of an organizational tale has to make use of them, and it is this that is captured by the term, organizational drama.

In the present text, we use four basic organizational dramas.¹¹⁾ The first is Tragedy, which does not necessarily need to be sad, but which basically tells a story of the regulation of a rule-less state. The second is Romance, which revolves around the quest of the single hero. The third is Comedy, which – contrary to Tragedy – tells the story of the dissolution of a regulated state; a dissolution which expresses the happy end of this drama. The fourth is Satire, which obviously satirizes all the rest. As each organizational drama narrates a characteristic course of events, various genres can be discerned within the dramas, according to which phase in the process is most prominent – beginning, middle, or end.¹²⁾ These genres will not be presented here, but are described as they occur in the different approaches.

The method includes both the interpretive model used and the particular types of facts selected. These two elements are intimately related. The interpretive model always seeks to track down a special type of relation, which is regarded as essential. We call this the basic relationship, for two reasons. First, it is basic to the method in question. Second, it expresses a relation between, on the one hand, that which is studied (that which is to be grounded) and, on the other, the ground on which it is maintained that the phenomenon under study rests.¹³⁾ In other words, the interpretation in each model – e.g. causal explanation or understanding – is designed to reveal the ground sought behind the immediate object of study. In turn, the latter – the immediate object of study – determines which types of facts will be picked out. Positivists, for example, adhering to the Scientistic style described below, prefer to select quantifiable and analyzable facts; hermeneuticians, on the other hand, embracing an Idiographic style below, favour those that are qualitatively meaningful.

Among the four methods,¹⁴⁾ the first, Idiographic, typically deals with qualitative in-depth studies of single cases. It is often contrasted to the quantitative, measuring Scientistic style, which distills laws from isolated data. The third method is the Fun...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• A note on footnotes
• Preface
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Poetics: styles of organizing
• 3 The tragic power machine of the rational classics
• 4 Romance with Human Relations
• 5 The Comedy of the self-regulating system
• 6 Satire: the contrary culture
• 7 Da capo: organizing performance
• Notes
• References
• Subject index
• Name index