Critical Analysis of Organizations

Theory, Practice, Revitalization

Catherine Casey

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2002
• ISBN:
  9781446225622
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Negocios y empresa
• Subtopic: Ética empresarial

`Catherine Casey has written an excellent book that provides a lucid and comprehensive critical analysis of organizations.…[It] extends in reach and relevance beyond the specific field of organization studies and the sociology of organizations to encompass broader intellectual developments that have had a significant impact on contemporary sociology and cultural studies? - Barry Smart, Professor of Sociology, University of Portsmouth

`I anticipate that it will prove to be an attractive book in organization studies, industrial sociology and general sociology. I am sure that this will be a book that will make a major impact? - Mike Reed, Professor of Organization Theory, Lancaster University

In this comprehensive and scholarly book, the essential critical strands in organizational analysis are explained. It examines how central traditions have realigned in relation to the challenge of postmodernism and the new reflexive turn in organizational studies.

Judicious, innovative and written with the needs of students in mind, this book offers a renewed and revitalized critical accent in organization studies - one that focuses on existing and emerging social tendencies, contestations and struggles. It will be essential reading for senior students of organization studies and sociology.

1	Organizational Analysis Now

The analysis of production has been dominated by the idea of rationalization. Modern organizational analysis assumes that organizations, as sets of general principles operating in systems, are manifest agents of societal modernization. Critical views of organizations which emanated initially from workers’ movements implicitly protested against this view, seeing production organizations as sites of capitalist social relations and of class struggle – and not as inevitable, irrefutable, agents of a universal modernization. But these views were themselves rationalized – as much by intellectuals aligned with leftist political struggles as by the spread of management science notions in the workplace. Critical organizational analysts by and large came to share the view of modern industrialists, intellectuals and management scientists that rationalization characterized modernization. Most accepted a view that only reasoned disputation over its methods and distribution of material goods, rather than over substantive sociocultural ends, was possible. Rationalizing modernity, therefore, defines the context in which our discussion of organizational analysis is set.

The antecedents and the unfolding of the story of modern organizational analysis – a story which remains powerfully in effect today – are discussed in the following chapters. In this chapter I wish to overview the present state of the field and sketch out the main contours of the debates that follow. Scrutiny of the present and excavation of the past are necessary tasks in reflecting on a modernity reduced to rationalization, and in the imagination of a different future after that modernity.

The Social Practices of Organization

The social and cultural practices of organization include the discourses of organization which are most typically found in disciplines of sociology, and in fields of management and organization studies which draw on behavioural psychologies, and economics of the firm. All of these modern discourses share the rationalization thesis of modernity, even if there are many other differences and divisions between them. Very often analysts favouring one set of disciplinary orientations seldom take notice of the contributions from the others. Sociology, which for many non-sociologists is too grand, unyielding to economic models, and disruptive of the contexts economists and psychologists assume as given, is reduced, when it can be, to empiricism and functionalism, or otherwise disqualified and rejected. Sociologists view their task as seeking to understand the relationships between social institutions and social historical action. Therefore, the ideas and practices of the institutions of economics and management come under the sociological gaze, as much as does the phenomenon of people gathering themselves into formal, purposeful organizations to produce things.

Conceiving organization, as Weber did, as social relationship is a longstanding, though not prominent, view among theorists of organization. Another sociological view of organizations, one in which organizations are more usefully described, as for Durkheim, as social systems – as entities in which people and production are organized – has attracted wide adherence and established considerable practical appeal among organization theorists throughout most of the 20th century. It is the source of an enduringly appealing organization science and of a functionalist approach to organizations which underpins, notwithstanding protestation, much organizational analysis today. For very many organization analysts a practical analytical concern assuming a systems framework and focused on solving functional systems and management problems prevails. Some analysts invoke elements of a Weberian social action approach, and others pursue a neo-rational, strategic management approach to analysing organizations. Yet among these various approaches, a shared commitment to a singularly privileged managerialist gaze is readily apparent. A socially critical interest in analysing organizations practised as societal relations is for many organization academics and practitioners beyond the business of organization studies.

The managerial view in organizational analysis has a long history, and many institutions of knowledge established in its service. It clearly accords with, and asserts as legitimate, an intensified economic and instrumental rationality characteristic of modernity – even as limits to that rationality and its always partial achievement present heightened risk, unmanageable complexity and contradiction. But this point of view, and the imperatives of rationalizing modernity, dominant as they are, compete, increasingly, with others.

Critical approaches to analysing and understanding organizations refuse the singular legitimacy of the managerial mainstream and its imbrication with instrumental rationality. Even as critical analysis largely displays the hallmarks of rationalization, many critics raise concerns with the limits of technological and instrumental rationality, and defend social and cultural aspirations of organizational practice which differ from those of positive, or conventional, organizational analysis. Critical approaches are more generally concerned with the sociocultural interests of humans working in, or affected by, organizational activities in societies and communities, and with the planetary environment. They are interested in organizations as social practices which reflect dominant agendas as well as cultural contests occurring in society. Some of these concerns are acknowledged, even strongly valued, by some analysts and practitioners aligned with the managerial mainstream. But ultimately involved in intensifying instrumental rationalities and efficiency in the search for the highest possible profit, these sociocultural ends are subordinated and contradicted. A utilitarian and fragmented knowledge displaces those sociocultural and moral concerns in everyday practice. Among managers and employees the compartmentalization and dissociation of values is more or less rationally accepted, and privately or organizationally managed.

Despite the differences among the two streams, a number of assumptions, analytical methods and interpretations are widely shared. The extensive influence of both a systems framework and a managerial dominance of the discourses has embedded a raft of assumptions. Many organization analysts, whether they align with a mainstream or a critical counter-stream, and whether they stem from sociological, psychological, economic or management science traditions, receive these assumptions as discursive givens now setting the terms of debate. Importantly, the spectre of system theories and functionalism, which shadows all forms of contemporary organizational analysis, continues to shape assumptions. Even among critical social approaches and neo-rational managerial approaches which reject modern systems notions, there is a mix of theoretical assumptions and analytical methods derived from an inadequate scrutiny of this immensely influential heritage. The hybridization and strategic utilization of competing assumptions is a primary source of dissent in the critical stream of organizational analysis, even as a managerial mainstream adeptly incorporates or expels, according to their utility, the knowledge products of critical discourse.

Throughout most of the 20th century, under rationalizing modern conditions of functional utility, an expanding academy favoured a professional division of labour and differentiation of subject matter and privileged forms of knowledge which focus on discrete problems and their treatment. The institutionalization of policy-useful social science marginalized socially and politically critical approaches to social problems. Of course, critical and competing perspectives continued, but as occurred in other social science fields, critical approaches to organizational analysis were abstracted from a dominant managerial mainstream of inquiry. Over the years critical approaches to the practices of organization, production and work more generally found expression in sociologies of work, industrial relations and some social psychologies, in which sociocultural questions were more often retained. But, notwithstanding the immense social presence and effects of formal organizations, societal levels of analysis and sociological interpretations of these social practices declined. Organization studies as an academic field increasingly formed a managerial protectorate insulating itself from the interrogations of grand sociological inquiry, as well as from the sociocultural demands of a wider public. The effort characteristic of what we now call classical sociological and social theory toward more comprehensive analytical approaches to social practices and against ideological and functionalist tendencies to differentiate and to incorporate, decidedly lost favour. Organization theorists and analysts became, as in C. Wright Mills’ (1959) view, ‘servants of power’. If not entirely forgotten, grand sociological theory has become narrowly appropriated to legitimize particular notions in organization theory and to obscure ideological interests. For some contemporary organization theorists (e.g. Donaldson 1995) this is entirely as it should be; but still, organization theory’s vulnerability to ‘anti-management’ theories of organization demands reform of academic institutions to shore up a beleaguered tradition.

But recent developments in modernity more generally, and in philosophy and cultural and social theory in the academy, have brought about an irrevocable decline in modernity’s Promethean confidence in scientific and technical rationality, in progress, and in universal reasoned notions of social order and the good society. Among the waves of change are challenges to modern disciplinary differentiation and the relative stability of modern social science fields – including those of organization and management science. As stability gives way to greater fragmentation and diffusion, a plethora of interests and schools drawing unevenly from the sources of modern foundational disciplines now substitutes for former establishments of orthodoxy and legitimacy. Loosened from classical foundations, organization studies (like most of the social sciences) is now a highly contested arena, displaying the uncertainties, ambivalences and defences readily observable in modern social institutions more broadly.

At the same time many organizational analysts try to ignore the disruptive theoretical debates occurring more vigorously elsewhere in the academy. They continue to assert that the assumptions of business and management as applications of economic and technical rationality are unproblematically legitimate, and their rational goals achievable. But there are many cracks in that armour of assertions. Notwithstanding the prevalence in organization studies of an ideological managerialism pursuing particular sectoral interests at the expense of others, a disruption to modern knowledge practices, to classical notions of rationality, system, order and institutional legitimacy gains momentum. For many analysts, organization studies is in a state of unmanageable disarray and paradigm incommensurability. For some, the disarray, which simply presents in the diverse and conflicting advice organization analysts give to managers, is serious and chronic (e.g. Donaldson 1995, 1998, McKinley and Mone 1998, Scherer 1998). For others it is a creative condition encouraging new thinking about organizations in postindustrial conditions (e.g. Czarniawska 1998). For some analysts, paradigm incommensurability legitimizes an exclusive domain of task and value in which cross-domain criticism is invalidated. This view usefully defends an exclusive domain for managerial interests which, despite theoretical and methodological variations in approaches to those interests, excludes criticism from any other domain.

But a close look at the literature across the field of organization studies – which does show signs of an implicit recognition of the crisis in modernity, and plural solutions to the same practical problems – reveals a more effortful intent to recover and reinvigorate modern forms and legitimations of organizational practice and analysis. As well, there are some efforts to communicate across historically different orientations, from behavioural science to economic modelling of organizations. For most, discussions on paradigm incommensurability in the field rarely mean anything more than methodological differences in relation to implicitly agreed upon problems in the managerial mainstream. Even the range of cultural criticism which many claim indicates interests incommensurable with those of social analysis or management science and economic modelling of organizations finds publication in management journals. See, for example, the cultural theory intent in a ‘post-humanist feminism’ (Knights 2000, Journal of Management Inquiry) in which no traces of organizational or management analysis are found. While this is illustrative of much cultural criticism in organizational analysis which struggles to articulate its ends beyond a little reformism, it illustrates, too, the manner in which cultural criticism may be liberally, harmlessly published in management journals intent on eventual managerial utility. Alleged paradigm incommensurability poses no barrier to a liberal pluralist market ever ready to commodify new, potentially useful, critical knowledge. But on the other hand, despite the controversial ends to which cultural theory is put, the debate over paradigms indicates the contested terrain of organization and management studies. Divergent interests compete for attention and persuasion in a field which, in practice, is rife with uncertainty and always only tenuously monologically rational.

For critical analysts the terrain of organization studies is always a highly contested one. For critics, privileging sociocultural value ends of a substantive rationality (in Weber’s term) over those of a reduced instrumental rationality does not indicate incommensurability. Conversely, it indicates demands intended to counter and surpass the absurd singular privileging of modern instrumental rationality. Some critics, however, have accepted defeat in the contest with apparently pervasive, intractable rationalization. They believe that incorporation by agents of modern rationalization is inevitable. The intensification of now hyper-capitalist management agendas in organizational practice and analysis forecloses debate with the managerial stream. This stream, now entirely unable to raise questions over the ends of technological and economic rationalization, manifests a normalization of culturally non-correspondent rationality. In order to protect a ‘negative space’ – in which oppositional criticism may be at least articulated (and alternative sociocultural agendas might be formulated) – paradigm closure is defensively asserted. For some critics, exhausted with the incorporation of critical theory into managerial paradigms, there is little expectation of critical, practical difference (e.g. Burrell 1997).

The crisis of modernity shows up more and more as purely instrumental rationality intensifies. Without sociocultural ends to this form of reason, social systems, including organizations, become only technical apparatuses. This condition of postmodernity ultimately weakens instrumental rationality and action, even as it first intensifies it. We see this in the rise of various counter-rational movements now raising new demands of the sociocultural sphere. Critical theorists, therefore, simultaneously pose a critique of rationalizing modernity with their critique of rationalizing managerial organizational analysis. They seek signs of critical action and demand setting which contest, and strive to alter and reconstitute, the dominant rule-setting agendas of modern institutions and actors.

A critical social analysis of organizations rejects arguments for paradigm incommensurability. Against the desocialization and depoliticization of most current organizational analysis and the prevailing normativity of the managerialist gaze, a revitalized critical analysis restores a vision of reflexive social thought. A wider, historical vision enables sources of knowledge recently excluded from organization studies (and other social sciences) to be reconsidered. These knowledge sources contribute anew to our efforts to understand the relationship between social institutions and social-historical action. Organization analysis at the present time pays scant attention to these tasks, and much contemporary sociology is weakened by the rise of views of society as an agent-less system of total domination, or conversely, as a non-social realm of strategic behavioural interactions abstracted from social system altogether. The sociological task of retrieval and revitalization is immense. Let us briefly review the main currents of ideas in organizational analysis at the present time.

Complex Organizations

Approaching the practices of organized relationships with the assumption that they are matters of fact of complex systems is a now classic modern view. The sociology of organizations, even more so than many other branches of sociology, established its primary and dominant categories from the largely North American successors of Weber and Durkheim. The mid-20th century theories, analytic frameworks and methods of Parsons and Merton and others (discussed more fully in Chapter 3) by and large instituted the normative practice of organizational sociology. A Marxist interest in institutions and organizations produced, in particular, substantive critiques of bureaucracy, state and corporate power, as well as criticism of the institutionalization of particular professional interests in academic practices. This school of thought developed both macro-social criticisms of the role of organizations in capitalist society, and explanations of the relations of capitalism through the labour process, and organization and employment practices on the shop floor. Economists, too, addressed the meso level of organizational practice and contributed, for instance, theories of institutional economics, transaction cost analysis and legal-rational constraints in organizational practice. This work continues in the ‘new institutionalism’ (e.g. Eggertsson 1990, Powell and DiMaggio 1991, Rowlinson 1997) and extensive empirical investigations and modelling theories are favoured and framed toward policy and problem-solving recommendations.

Within this diversity and comprehensiveness of interest in the practices of complex organizations in modern society, a mid-20th century organizational sociology cast a definitive influence over all subsequent developments in the field. Modern sociology of organizations, whether oriented toward managerialism or Marxist-influenced critique, implicitly took its operational definition of organization from Parsons (1960) as referring to ‘social units devoted primarily to attainment of specific goals’. In this line of thought, organization stands, more or less, for ‘complex bureaucratic organization’. While recognizing the rational characteristics that Weber identified, Parsonian structural-functionalism ultimately privileged organic systems features of organization, assuming an overall evolutionary rationalization. Weber’s rational actors are seen as behaving within a greater societal complex of functional organization system processes.

Although structural functionalism has been well criticized in sociology generally, and in some organizational sociologies (as I discuss in Chapter 2), many of its categories, methods and imperatives toward order and stability remain more generally operative though unrecognized in organization studies than current cultural critics would admit. It comprises the substantive orientation of the academic tradition of ‘organization theory’ which, for some commentators, is an entirely separate field from sociology of organizations. Organization theory historically developed in schools of business and management studies in order to diminish the scientific abstraction and social and psychological criticism incumbent in more classical sociological approaches to social practices. Insistent on domain specificity and refusing meta-social and cultural criticism, organization theory seeks to enhance application to practical problems of organizational structure, design, efficiency and productivity. The traditions of organization theory variously retain functionalist views of complex system, structure, role, order and integration, while also emphasizing the role of management as decision-making actor, especially in regard to managing change and innovation.

Functionalist sociology of organizations described organizations, whether pursuing economic, administrative or social goals, as applications of instrumental rationality. Functional imperatives and rules could establish a correspondence, as Parsons and Merton elaborately argued, between organic system needs and individual and collective roles and behaviour – thus erecting a grand edifice of evolutionary rationalization. But in a disruption to that widely held view the work of theorists such as Herbert Simon, James March and Michel Crozier in the mid-20th century revealed, respectively, that any organization, far from exhibiting a central principle of rationality, which both functionalism and classical sociology assume, is really a fragile, unstable, weakly coherent ensemble of social relations. The organization is an ensemble of conflicts and adjustments between constantly challenging pressures and constraints. An efficient organization is not one in which stability and ordered functioning prevails, as functionalism holds, but one in which complexity, conflict, constant change and uncertainty are more or less managed or compromise reached. Simon’s notion of ‘bounded rationality’, and Crozier’s emphasis on power as the new central problem of organization analysis, launched a new emphasis on the management of uncertainty. These notions, which later became associate...