Management, Organizations and Contemporary Social Theory

Stewart Clegg, Miguel Pina e Cunha, Stewart Clegg, Miguel Pina e Cunha

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781000011876
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Social theorists speculate about large-scale social questions, asking of any phenomenon, how is it possible? This book addresses how various social theories contribute key insights into the nature of organizations and management.

The cast of characters to be found in this book have had a transcendental impact, including on the practices of the management and organization disciplines. For students, however, engaging with social theory in a conversation that is much broader and potentially richer than those that may have been previously encountered is not at first easy. The question is where to begin: this book provides answers.

Drawing on research from international contributors, this valuable textbook is an essential resource for students and introduces key social theories and theorists making them accessible to a management audience. The chapters include objectives and end-of-chapter reflective questions, as well as a glossary for readers grappling with new terms.

1 Management, organizations and contemporary social theory^1,2

Stewart Clegg and Miguel Pina e Cunha

Exploring social theory

Social theorists speculate about large-scale social questions. A key focus is to ask of any phenomenon, how is it possible? The phenomena to which this question may be addressed include not only those that we may encounter in everyday life and practice, such as organizations and management; they also include explanation of these as a phenomenon. In this sense, what social theory addresses is how any social order or practices of ordering are possible. These practices thus include those constructing and those and that are constructed through these processes. For example, social theory is concerned with how prior theories of the social, in their explanations of important questions, such as the nature of power and social structure, gender and ethnicity, modernity and postmodernity, civilizations and their discontents, have been formulated in the past and require contemporary reformulating in analytic terms for present knowledges and times. Contemporary social theory laces through all the concerns of contemporary management and organization theory: it offers not so much theory for management or theory for organizations, but theory that is addressed not only to the social practices that constitute these theories but that also has implications for what these theories take for granted.

Management and organization theory are relatively recent areas of evolution in the social sciences; indeed, for the most part they evolved from earlier periods of embeddedness in broader social science areas such as sociology, history, economics or from engineering. The founders of these areas were people such as Adam Smith (1950; lived 1723–1790), a political economist and moral philosopher; Karl Marx (1976; lived 1818–1883), also a political economist as well as a philosopher; Max Weber (1978; lived 1864–1920), a legal scholar, economic historian and latterly a sociologist; and Frederick Taylor (1911; lived 1856–1915), not a scholar but a self-taught engineer.

As the fields of management and organization theory have subsequently developed, these disciplinary areas have become ever more specialized and those founders of the fields have largely faded from memory. Nonetheless, the big picture and large-scale theorizing that some of these figures engaged in (Taylor hardly counts in this calculus) has not faded away; there are many contemporary figures who approach larger questions of social, political, cultural and economic life, the power of whose thought has influenced broader theorizing about more specialized areas, including management and organization theory. Broadly speaking, those figures are recognized as social theorists because they have developed narrative and analytical frameworks that critically examine social phenomena. To say they do so ‘critically’ is the key: what they do not do is take for granted either how the field of knowledge has been constructed before them or accept the common-sense definitions of those phenomena that they are interested in.

What qualified a scholar to be considered a social theorist? Essentially, they are figures whose influence extends well beyond their home disciplines into the public sphere, combining the role of social theorist with that of being a public intellectual, someone that the educated non-specialist might come across, people whose ideas about the way that aspects of the world work have made a broad critical conceptual impact on that world: they make a difference as to how we see and think about our world. Making a difference is what great teachers do and we may say that the figures we have selected are all, through their books (and it is largely through books), figures who have made a significant difference to the way many others and we see the world. In this respect, they are heirs to the traditions that figures such as Marx, Smith or Weber initiated.

Let us consider Weber for a moment because he is an illustrative case of what makes a social theorist a social theorist. In management and organization theory, if he is remembered at all, it will most often be as classical theorist, concerned with bureaucracy. While this is not false it is hardly adequate: Weber was a major intellectual figure in debates about methodology, the origins of capitalism, the comparative study of major world religions, the ethics of vocation, economic history, the conditions of industrial workers, public administration and much else besides. What most management and organization theory know of him is very little. Consequently, what most students in these areas learn is even less. We may take from this founding example of Max Weber that social theorists are wide-ranging in their concerns; concerned with major intellectual debates that have contemporary relevance; concerned with delineating elaborated and coherent theory about the matters that debate encompasses and that they do so in such a way that they offer potential guidance to many substantive fields of knowledge.

Management and organization studies constitute a flow of knowledge fed by many streams, not all of them deemed social theory but nonetheless significant. Cybernetics, for instance, especially the contributions of Herbert Simon (1996; 2013) (a scholar awarded the Sveriges Riksbank prize in honour of Alfred Nobel), has played an important role. It is appropriate to state that the reason for the exclusion of Simon (and of other important intellectual figures who greatly contributed to the development of organization theory, such as Gregory Bateson [2000]) is not due to idiosyncratic preferences but rather to the decision to focus on social theory-informed contributions.

Social theory, as distinct from management or organization theory, is a continent of possibilities composed of many fields, with distinct but different topographical features. Social theory is concerned with the continent, with the overarching embeddedness of the distinct topographies of the different regions, or disciplinary areas. The effects of considerable evolution, erosion and accretion will have shaped some aspects of these disciplinary areas; other areas may be more recent, less sedimented, still being shaped. Social theory has been a major factor in the shaping, forming and evolving of these more recent substantive disciplinary areas, such as management and organization studies. The role of social theory produces very different inflections. Consider the ranking of Weber and Foucault, for instance.³ Comparing leading European production of disciplinary knowledge in the journal Organization Studies with that of the American journal Administrative Science Quarterly, Üsdiken and Pasadeos (1995) demonstrated that while Weber and Foucault loomed large in citations in the European consciousness, Foucault did not receive citation and Weber barely registered in America in the top 100 citations. The findings in this work are updated in Üsdiken (2014), which finds that differences between North American and European scholarship are still evident, looking at a broader range of journals and a longer period of time. Üsdiken (2010), in a related article, notes that perhaps as a result of national education systems’ evaluation exercises that tend to privilege US-based journals, ‘wholesale adoption of US-based theories and research practices has also been expanding’ (Üsdiken, 2010, p. 732). At the earlier stage there was a big difference but now American work is increasingly prevailing, re-framing European work through a combination of demographic density and intellectual hegemony through overwhelming command of the circuits of power – editorial and review functions in the key journals – that define legitimacy. Nonetheless, discernible differences remain. For the future, one should not think that building only on European intellectual traditions is the best way. Similar advances could (and should) be achieved by building also on other philosophical and social traditions developed outside of Europe, for instance from Chinese scholarship (Fei, 1939), from the critical pedagogy of Brazilian Paulo Freire (2018) or from indigenous perspectives such as Mbigi (2005; see Seremani & Clegg, 2015, on epistemological third spaces).

The disciplines, by convention, are textually composed networks: who gets cited where, when and how often defines the disciplinary field. One of the things that social theory can do is address how the texts of disciplinary scholarship and more everyday practices have been formed, shaped and used. Any such engagement is inherently critical in its questioning of existing institutions constituting the management and the organization of ourselves and those things with which we live and work, the norms and practices established, their constitution of and by power and other disciplinary practices, such as writing, culture, politics, selfhood and technology.

The focus on social theories is not to deny the existence or significance of more organization or management-oriented writers such as those who regularly appear in the pages of the leading journals in these fields. Such figures are clearly significant. However, their significance remains largely specific to the management and organizations field: Karl Weick (1995) or Kathleen Eisenhardt (1989), for instance, are clearly major figures in management and organizations but they are of less influence in terms of the development of broader social theories. While these figures are important, they are not the focus here.

Our cast of characters have had a more transcendental impact, including on the practices of the management and organization disciplines, yet they will rarely be encountered in the undergraduate curriculum. The more advanced curriculum, however, is another matter: here the concerns, at best, are less with techniques and their application and more with what these techniques and applications do as practices. To ask these questions is to, necessarily, engage with social theory, and in so doing the student is engaging in a conversation that is much broader and potentially richer than those that may have been previously encountered. Such conversations are not easy at first; one is entering into the domains of scholarship that are well established, legitimate but contested, broad reaching and widely engaged. The question is where to begin: this book provides answers.

There is a considerable gap between what is typically taught in undergraduate business subjects and what is expected from research students. While the former courses are oriented towards producing technically competent managers, accountants, etc., the latter is more concerned to contribute original knowledge to the disciplinary corpus. An obstacle in this respect is the absence of a bridging text that covers aspects of contemporary social theory relevant to the world of business and organizations. Without grounding in social theory, research students are unlikely to gain the knowledge, skills and sophistication that will see them publish in the top-tier journals. The intent of this book is to help students and their teachers in bridging this gap.

The cast of characters

As we have said, social theory is a rich and encyclopaedic domain. One must be selective. What guided the selectivity in this instance? The personal knowledge, particular enthusiasms and social networks of the editors framed a large part of it. We all have our favourites and those theorists that are represented here are some personal favourites, drawn from the stocks of knowledge that we use and deploy. Obviously, our knowledge is a form of ‘bounded rationality’; it is framed by preferences, habits and theoretical orientations. We make no apologies for having these and being candid about them, for it is impossible to be exhaustive. No one can claim perfect knowledge or disinterest; hence our interests and our bounded knowledge frame the choices made. We had one implicit rule in making our choices, which was that the social theorists chosen should be ones with a relatively contemporary relevance and output. In practice, this means that they should have been writing in the period from the contemporary flowering of social theory from the 1960s to the present day.

The first chapter, written by Andrea Whittle and Frank Mueller, on ‘ethnomethodology’, explores the influence of Harold Garfinkel and the approach to studying social action known as ethnomethodology. The chapter explores the distinct approach to studying organizing ‘as it happens’ developed by ethnomethodologists. Ethnomethodology was regarded as a quite radical approach when it was first encountered in Garfinkel’s work because of its very evident difference from the dominant social theory of mainstream structural-functionalism. Its opposition to much embedded intellectual capital did not endear it those whose capital it was. The dominant theory, with its stress on systems, their functional prerequisites and pattern variables, on the centrality of socialization and social order within the frame of a central value system, could not have been more antithetical to the social theory that ethnomethodology established. Where the former was top-down and emphasized social order, the latter was very much a theory that worked from the intricacies of how order was established provisionally and capable of being easily breached in scenes drawn from everyday life: from decision-making by jurors, presentations of self in critical performances of transgender identity, scenes drawn from shopping, counselling and so on. Order, instead of being a monolith that is obeyed by the many and disobeyed by the few who are deviant, is instead something that is co-constructed on the basis of many tacit assumptions, cues and conventions.

Garfinkel’s ethnomethodology has been indirectly influential in an important strand of management and organization theory. Karl Weick’s (1995) approach to sensemaking, developed from his earlier concern with The Social Psychology of Organizing (1969 edition, especially), clearly learnt a lot from ethnomethodology. Indeed, one of us on occasion has been known to refer to the sensemaking literature as ethnomethodology translated into management. That translation was not the extent of the use to which ethnomethodology was put.

Far from the Californian campuses where ethnomethodology first flourished, its influence was felt in Europe, especially in the École Nationale Supérieure des Mines in Paris, where, as Damian O’Doherty writes in the chapter on ‘Actor-network theory: Michel Callon, Bruno Latour, John Law’, the three main protagonists of the approach translated, in part, ideas from ethnomethodology into actor-network theory. Actor-network theory (ANT) has become one of the most popular reference points across many regions of the social sciences and beyond. Moreover, it has become one of the most important approaches to management and organization, being ‘applied’ or extended by many well-known figures in the field, such as John Hassard (Alcadipani & Hassard, 2010; Law and Hassard, 1999), Barbara Czarniawska and Tor Hernes (2005). Elements of the ANT approach have also been cited as an influence and synthesized by other branches of social theory. As with ethnomethodology, ANT starts from the actors and their doings rather than seeing them as ‘cultural dopes’ dominated by social systems that constrain them. One of the major innovations of ANT is to extend the notion of the actor, however. It is not only people that can exert social agency, that can act: actants, things that are non-human, such as technologies, as well as devices humble and smart and non-human beings, such as scallops, also have agency in ANT. In a nutshell, ANT’s main contribution is to regard the ‘social’ as the partial and contingent outcome of specific actor-networks’ construction and understanding of the things of everyday practices. These practices are situated: they take place in field trips, in laboratories, in the accounts that scientists write of their practices (which does not always coincide with what these scientists are observed as doing by ANT observers) and they involve not only many other actors in networks of action but also actants. The test tube must be sterile, the acid pure, the vacuum chamber pristine, for science to work. These humble material things are all actants. As it is in science so it is elsewhere: the lecturer depends on material actants such as computers, software such as PowerPoint, video projectors and even simpler things such as electric cables and connections. The agency that emerges is a collective and relational phenomenon in which the properties of both actants and actors form assemblages that are responsible for what is done.

Garfinkel’s ideas not only influenced 1970s Parisian intellectuals such as Bruno Latour and Michel Callon, as well as the Englishman who worked closely with them, John Law; they also made headway in the hallowed halls of Cambridge, where a prolific social theorist, Anthony Giddens, had made a name for himself through numerous publications as the foremost interpreter of the sociological trinity of founding fathers, Karl Marx, Max Weber and Emile Durkheim (Giddens, 1973). Having done this, in 1976 he turned his imagination to establishing some New Rules of Sociological Method, in which a rich mix of philosophical and sociological resources were drawn on to produce what became known as structuration theory, a mix in which a little ethnomethodology was clearly discernible.

New Rules of Sociological Method marked a shift in direction in Giddens’ preoccupations from classical to contemporary social theory. Ira Chatterjee, Jagat ...