Social Organizations

Interaction Inside, Outside and Between Organizations

Göran Ahrne

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 1994
• Print ISBN: 9780803989214
• eBook ISBN: 9781446236666
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Organisational Behaviour
• Index: Business

In this lively and wide-ranging essay, Göran Ahrne sketches an organizational theory of society. Combining the insights of organization theory with the traditional concerns of social theory, he makes an innovative and creative contribution to both fields.

Using a broad definition of organizations, the author shows that what goes on inside, outside and among organizations is central to understanding social relations. Organizations provide people with resources and motives, and they set the frames for human action. Although organizations do not form societies or systems, society is shaped and changed through interaction between organizations.

Drawing on various schools of organization theory, including institutional, ecological and contingency theories, the book shows how their synthesis with social theory clarifies the nature and effects of organizational interactions.

1

ORGANIZED INDIVIDUALS

Why do you go home?

Everyday life is routine and repetitious. The coming and going of people in their everyday lives is far from arbitrary. People know where they are going and to where they have to return. Routines are patterned and organized. Nowadays, the two most important nodes of everyday life are the home and the job. After work people go home and next morning they go to their jobs again. Children go to school and come home again.

Many people like their jobs and also want to go home. And many children love to go to school. This is not enough, however, to explain the order of everyday life. If it relied merely on what people wanted to do, it would be rather chaotic. People go to their jobs, and children go to school and return home again even if they do not feel like it. Additional explanations could be the power of habits and norms, which certainly is important. Still, the answer to the mystery of the order of everyday life also has to be looked for in the organizational mechanisms of the nodal points.

First of all, people have commitments to come to their jobs and to come home at certain times. Children are usually obliged to attend school. This means that there are other people there who check on you, and they will be angry and chastise you if you do not turn up on time. And there are sanctions. After some time you may risk losing your job and your family if you do not keep your promises. There are others who may take your place. In their everyday lives people are very much aware of such preconditions.

Moreover, your home and your job are places where you have the right to enter, you are recognized and let in. You cannot go to any job or any home. In fact, there are not many places you can go to spend the day or the night. Furthermore, you need the income from your work and you need to go home to rest and sleep and to change clothes.

The power of attraction of the nodes of everyday life is generated through four conditions that characterize and determine forms of human interaction:

(a)	affiliation
(b)	collective resources
(c)	substitutability of individuals
(d)	recorded control.

A central argument will be that these nodal principles together constitute common features in basic social units such as families, enterprises, clubs or states. They are combinations of forces that make people part of social entities. We will call these entities organizations, a well-established term for some of them but not for all, although Chester Barnard (1968: 4–5), for instance, had no hesitation in regarding families as organizations.

The basic idea is that organizations in this sense are central to social analysis. The four features of organization constitute the most persistent and universal relations between individuals (see Bhaskar, 1989: 71), and organizations set the conditions for human action. Organizations are stronger and more persistent than either individuals or societies, and they constantly transcend borders of societies or systems. Organizations are the locus of the connection between individuals, and through them human actions are transformed into social processes. What has been discussed as the structuring of interaction (see Turner, 1988: 150) above all happens in the form of organization.

The relationship between individuals and organizations is inherently ambivalent. Organizations do not want anything, nor do they have any will of their own or any purpose; only human agents have. Only human beings can act. On the other hand, human purposes and wants cannot easily be understood without relating them to the organizational affiliation of an actor. Organizations are social mechanisms that connect a large number of human wishes and hopes into common consolidated actions.

Organization is a link between human beings that unites some people, while separating them from others. This link is not established by individuals themselves but precedes their relationships and will probably exist after they have gone. Organizations are independent of particular individuals, but without individuals an organization would not exist.

The term ‘organization’ does not seem to be popular among social theorists. Many prefer concepts such as groups, movements, teams or collectivities. Organization is associated with bureaucracy and hierarchy. Still, we think organization is the most appropriate term for the kind of social entity that is the subject of this book, although used in an extended sense.

Organizations can be seen as probably the most important example of a ‘figuration’, which makes it possible to think ‘of people as individuals at the same time as thinking of them as societies’ (Elias, 1978: 129; cf. Ahrne, 1990). Barnard put it simply when he saw ‘formal organization as the concrete social process by which social action is largely accomplished’ (1968: 3). The aim is to make an investigation into the fundamental and common bonds that make organizations into the primary ‘unified socio-individual field’ (Sztompka, 1991: 94) comprising both individualities and totalities.

There are examples of approaches that emphasize the importance of organized interaction, although they do not mention organizations. In his book The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959) Erving Goffman gives a description of ‘teams’. For Goffman teams are ‘any set of individuals who co-operate in staging a single routine’ (1959: 79). The familiarity among teammates need not be organic, but rather ‘a formal relationship that is automatically extended and received as soon as the individual takes a place on the team’ (1959: 83). Teams must not be confused with informal groups or cliques. As examples of teams he mentions ‘marriage teams’, the staff of a tourist hotel and a factory. Thus, Goffman’s discussion of teams lends support to our description of organizations, although Goffman’s treatment is vague (see also Goffman, 1968: 159; cf. Burns, 1992: 376–7).

Another sociologist who writes about organizations without admitting it is Michael Hechter in his book Principles of Group Solidarity (1987), where he defines groups as: ‘a collection of individuals who are engaged in a specific type of mutually oriented activity (or set of interconnected activities), entry to which occurs according to one or more criteria of membership’ (1987: 16). The condition of membership criteria is important. In Hechter’s book all examples in the four empirical chapters are from organizations such as political parties and large corporations. He also discusses families. We will return to Hechter’s book later in this chapter and to Goffman in chapter 2.

Sometimes sociologists use the term ‘institution’ or ‘the institutional order’ more or less as a synonym with organization, but usually not to denote only organizations (see Gerth and Mills, 1970: 24; Giddens, 1984: 17). In organization theory the term institution has had a renewed currency in what is called ‘the new institutionalism in organizational analysis’. In this approach institution represents ‘a social order or pattern that has attained a certain state or property’ (Jepperson, 1991: 145). Institutions are relative properties and depend on the purpose of the analysis. Thus they should not be specifically identified.

Generally, we will argue that it is essential to make a sharp distinction between institutions and organizations. Institutions are ideas about which social activities can be organized and how they should be organized. Thus, an institution is first of all a set of cultural rules that may regulate social activities in a patterned way (Meyer et al., 1987: 36). Organizations are materialized institutions. Every organization has a location and an address. Organizations have a quite different relation to human actors from institutions, and organizations have a more pronounced position in the ordering of everyday life.

Affiliation, recognition and exclusion

In the beginning there is organization. The basic human experience is belonging and dependence. We will argue that affiliation to organizations is a prerequisite for most human action. Some organizational bonds are virtually impossible to break. The idea of kinship has survived the twentieth century. The importance of citizenship becomes increasingly obvious in a rapidly globalizing world. Solidarity between people seems to be limited without organizational bonds.

To belong to an organization means to have a place to go, to have certain rights as well as commitments. Affiliation implies a promise or an obligation to come back. To be able or allowed to come back, the affiliates of an organization have to be recognized or they have to prove their affiliation. To be recognized you need some kind of identification, be it a name or a number. If you are not recognized you will not be let in. This is a basic human experience with important and far-reaching consequences although it is often neglected because it is taken for granted (see Aldrich, 1979: 2).

Gates of organizations are locked and guarded. Only affiliates have a key, but not always all of the affiliates. Those who are not affiliated have no right to enter. If you are not recognized you are not let in. All organizations are exclusive (see Barnard, 1968: 149).

As an affiliate of an organization the other affiliates give you an identity, they begin to recognize you and they care about what you do, when you come and when you leave. They depend on you and count on you. You mean something. Outside organizations, in the semi-organized field, you are anonymous and nobody demands anything from you.

The social individuality is mainly a combination and construction of previous and present organizational affiliations: family background, citizenship, grades from school, previous and present employments, marital status (see Meyer, 1987b: 250). Belonging and affiliation are necessary for individuality. To be an individual you have to be recognized. When you lose your job or when you divorce you lose part of your identity.

This is not to say that organizations are inherently just and that affiliates are always taken care of and treated fairly. On the contrary, organizations are often repressive and terribly unjust. The affiliates of an organization have diverging interests. Yet, they generally have one interest in common, the survival of the organization.

The reality of organization is as old as mankind. The roots of affiliational bonds stem from the earliest forms of families and tribal relations. Cooperation and solidarity were indispensable for security and survival (see Keesing, 1975).

In the course of time many forms of affiliation have been invented and practised, such as slavery and serfdom. More recent and sophisticated forms of affiliation have grown up in later centuries, such as citizenship and employment. In the future new forms of affiliation may develop. The most striking fact, however, is that organizational affiliation as such has been the fundamental bond between people throughout. Cooperation between individuals is not a puzzle but a fact. The question to be asked is rather how is individual action possible, or at least when, and under what conditions?

In the social science literature the problem is often the reverse, perhaps not so much in sociology as in other disciplines. In their well-known book The Social Construction of Reality, Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann (1967) describe the origin of institutions as a process that evolves from repeated interaction of a few individuals, which first becomes habitual and later is transformed, according to Berger and Luckmann, into an institution. Our argument, however, is that the process is the other way around; first comes affiliation then interaction, habits and routines. Generally, the organization is already there. When new organizations are created, as when a couple gets married or when people start a soccer club or a political party, the origin is generally institutional, which means that there are already rules and routines for how it all should take place. An entrepreneur already has an idea of how the organization should look.

One of the most important tasks in all organizations is to keep track of those who are affiliated with the organization. Each citizen, employee, owner, child, or member is carefully recorded and identified with a particular name or number or some other identification. The development of organization theory during the past years has caused the common misunderstanding that organizations are rather loose and nebulous entities. Concepts such as ‘loose coupling’ or ‘garbage can decision processes’ have contributed to this notion (see Powell, 1991: 189). The limited rationality of organizations is obvious, but still the boundary-maintaining activities in organizations are as important as ever. All organization implies that ‘a distinction has been made between members and non-members – some persons are admitted to participate in the organization, whereas others are excluded’ (Aldrich, 1979: 4; cf. Weber, 1968: 48). Forms of affiliation such as employment, citizenship or membership are decisive for such important organizational activities as paying wages, paying taxes or paying membership fees. The rules for marriages vary considerably in different parts of the world, but whatever the rules, independent of how many wives a husband may have, the family is always and everywhere strictly defined in terms of its actual members.

To become affiliated with an organization you are selected. It is not only your own choice. You can choose to apply for a certain job, or you can propose to get married, but the ultimate choice is not yours. You have to be admitted.

Affiliation cannot usually be bought. You cannot buy a job, a citizenship or kinship. To become a member of a voluntary association it is, generally, not enough to pay the membership fee. You must be accepted, and you can be excluded if you do not satisfy certain requirements. Ownership, however, is, in principle, for sale in the stockmarket. But ownership of a minor amount of the shares in a big company is not a genuine form of affiliation, although it gives rights to take part in shareholders’ meetings. Big powerful shareholders, however, do not sell their shares to anybody. They make special offers to those whom they want as owners, and there are various ways to control access to ownership rights. Thus, there is a moment for exclusion in ownership.

Affiliation implies a promise to come back. It is hardly meaningful to say that an affiliate chooses to return each time. Is it meaningful to say that you chose to go home after work or that you chose to go to your job this morning? The choices that make a difference are the decisions to join or leave an organization. Once someone has joined an organization the act of coming back is often rather a matter of routine.

Affiliates of an organization ‘give up the right to control certain of their actions’, as James Coleman (1990: 66) expressed it in his book Foundations of Social Theory. He denotes this as ‘vesting of authority’. He also adds, however, that not all authority is the result of a voluntary vesting (1990: 72). This is the case in the family or in the state (1990: 67–8). Still, it seems that Coleman does not really take these restrictions of the right to control one’s actions seriously, since his theory presupposes the assumption that individuals from the start have full control over their actions. For him the most fundamental question is how authority structures can exist at all (1990: 66).

There seems to be a prevailing notion in much of sociology and social sciences that with modernization ascribed status has been replaced by achieved status in determining human life-chances. The idea is that people in the modern world have greater possibilities to choose their own way of life irrespective of where they come from. This may be true to some extent, but it has been greatly overemphasized. Ascribed status is still of utmost importance. Much research has demonstrated the surviving importance of family background for education and class position. Even more overlooked, however, is the importance of ascribed citizenship. Citizenship determines to a large extent other living conditions and there are few possibilities of influencing or changing this status (see Walzer, 1983: 32). As long as citizenship determines where you can live, ascribed status dominates social life. The reason citizenship has been a neglected concept in sociology may be that sociological theory has been addressed to the analysis of separate societies (see Brubaker, 1992: 22). Thus the notion of citizenship is taken for granted. In a theory including the whole world, however, citizenship obviously becomes important.

Organizational affiliation can be either voluntary or compulsory (see Weber, 1968: 52–3; Gerth and Mills, 1970: 24–6). In states affiliation is compulsory. The only way to escape this form of affiliation is to get a citizenship in another state, which is a demanding procedure. As an organizational form the family is connected with kinship bonds. Kinship is compulsory and virtually impossible to escape. Marriage, on the other hand, is generally voluntary and in most parts of the world it is possible to get divorced. But nowhere are you allowed to denounce your children. Employment is a voluntary form of affiliation that can pertain to all kinds of organization. Generally, all affiliation to enterprises is voluntary as well as affiliation to voluntary associations such as parties, trade unions or sports clubs. Voluntary association, however, does not imply that all who want can become affiliates. Michael Walzer writes in a general discussion on ‘membership’: ‘so long as members and strangers are, as they are at present, two distinct groups, admissions decisions have to be made, men and women taken in or refused’ (1983: 34). Voluntary organizations, whether they be enterprises or voluntary associations, are generally strict about who is to be admitted as an affiliate, whereas organizations with compul sory membership cannot deny affiliation to those who are born into the organization. Organizations with compulsory affiliation also have few possibilities to get rid of their affiliates (one extreme way is killing them). In both enterprises and voluntary associations affiliates can be dismissed.

Everybody has at least two kinds of affiliation, kinship and citizenship. Most persons, though, have sev...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• 1 Organized Individuals
• 2 Organizational Centaurs
• 3 The Organized Transformation of Action into Process
• 4 Outside Organizations
• 5 Inside Organizations
• 6 Between Organizations
• 7 In The Thick of Organizations
• References
• Index