System, Actor, and Process

Keywords in Organization Studies

Roberto Albano, Ylenia Curzi, Tommaso Fabbri

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000174755
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Negocios y empresa
• Subtopic: Desarrollo organizacional

System, Actor and Process: Keywords in Organization Studies is intended as an epistemological 'compass' to navigate through the multifaceted key concepts typically used in organizational practice and research.

The book illustrates thirty-four keywords using a tripartite structure: each keyword is briefly discussed from three points of view, namely the system-centered, actor-centered and process-centered conception of organization, which reflects the options emerging from contemporary epistemological debate in organizational studies and, more generally, in social sciences, namely objectivism, subjectivism, and the Weberian "third way".

Primarily addressed to researchers and academics in organization studies, this book is also a useful resource for undergraduate or postgraduate students, for whom it may represent a thorough introduction to organizational concepts. It will also be a valuable tool for managers to apply in their everyday practice.

KEYWORDS

Action Research

In general terms, action research is a way of knowing that is indissolubly linked with the transformation of a social reality, however large or small in scale it may be. Action research is characteristic not only of organizational studies, but of many other areas of interest to the social sciences. Indeed, the first systematic attempt at action research was proposed by the social psychologist Kurt Lewin in the 1940s, as a method of resolving conflicts – interethnic conflicts, for example – within the community.

Though there is no lack of influential scholars who see action research as taking a single epistemological approach to organizational studies which runs counter to the positivist mainstream, the concurrence of the many epistemological postures – including the objectivist – that have always marked the social sciences is readily apparent from the long and varied debate on the topic, and even more so from the multitude of practices and methods that have been proposed. The term action research itself sheds light on what is (apparently) the point these approaches have in common: the fact of addressing the nature of the relationship between the meaning that actions hold for the subjects acting in the examined process, and the meaning that the researcher assigns to these actions. The different ways of resolving this tension between heterogeneous languages, experiences and points of view give rise to different ways of regarding learning from within processes and thus governing their transformation. Here, we can outline four ideal-types of action research. Two of these types, which we can call the naturalist solution and the double hermeneutic solution, have the “researcher-object” dualism in common.

The first type takes an objectivist outlook; it can be seen, albeit not in pure form, in the socio-technical approach, which is the most widespread at the international level, especially in English-speaking countries. Accord-ing to this view of action research, organizational knowledge is to be extracted from the practical activity in which it is produced, and then coded, rationalized, stored and distributed. To this end, it is considered essential to have a consultant who is external to the monitored activity: an expert capable of reformulating not only the solutions (which come later), but also the problems themselves, in a conceptual framework which is regarded as more highly developed, and superior because it is scientific, than the more “restricted” framework produced by the agents in the course of their everyday activities, before the researcher’s involvement.

The second type takes a subjectivist outlook and considers two distinct but coexisting interpretative registers: that of the object who also becomes the subject of research, and that of the researcher and/or outside consultant. The analyst-consultant’s task is to describe and interpret the real organization – largely informal – as opposed to the official organization, framing it in disciplinary knowledge. Rather than substituting the clients (or users), he puts himself at their service by providing an outside interpretation to be compared with their own, internal, interpretation. The meaning that the agents give to their own activities, described with the native language, is compared in a virtually endless dialog with the meaning given by the researcher, expressed in a language heterogeneous to the former, but to his scientific

Other approaches to action research are expressly antithetical to this dualism. One, again rooted in subjectivism and which we call synthetic recomposition, radicalizes the importance of the “internal” view of the organizational process and regards the agents, who are no longer in any way the object of research, as the sole source of knowledge for change. Any outside intervention by the researcher is not as an expert super partes con-sultant; rather, it is the entry of an activist co-researcher, who takes a stand for one of the parties in the organization, generally the one considered to be “weaker” or more “progressive”, and performs a maieutic role for that party.

Lastly, the analytical recomposition approach, which embraces a process-centered epistemology, proposes paths of analysis and intervention whose premises permit and encourage a rapprochement between theoretical knowledge and the competences that the agents build up in the course of a process. The agents, by acquiring the tools developed by the organizational disciplines, can enrich the language dealing with their work. In doing so, they can move away from the meanings normally ascribed to their activities and identify others situated at another (though not necessarily higher) level of abstraction. Here again, an external researcher is not required, but may be useful as a facilitator with methodological skills who contributes to establishing an environment for dialog and checking how the process is able to apply the analytical categories made available by disciplinary knowledge.

Recommended Reading for Action Research

Albano R., 2012, Action Research, TAO Digital Library, Bologna.

Albano R., Fabbri T.M., Curzi Y., 2012, Organizational Learning and Action Research: The Organization of Individuals, in Viscusi G., Campagnolo G.M., Curzi Y., eds., Phenomenology, Organizational Politics and IT Design: The Social Study of Information Systems, IGI Global.

Lewin K., 1946, “Action Research and Minority Problems”, Journal of Social Issues, 2, 4: 34–46.

Autonomy

Many theories of the organization discuss autonomy, but few offer a rigorous definition. The notion, moreover, is among those showing the greatest semantic discontinuities across the conceptions of organization underpinning the theory that employs it. It is thus difficult to provide a general definition, or even guideposts that can help us find a common denominator among the many meanings assigned to the term in organizational studies.

In the conception of the organization as a system predetermined for the actors participating in it, the latter’s autonomy is either denied or, when permitted, is chiefly linked to the expectation or requirement – often implicit – that individuals spontaneously and voluntarily engage in a series of behaviors that serve to optimize the organization’s economic performance. This idea of autonomy can already be found in certain theories that are chiefly oriented towards the logic of closed systems that do not accept uncertainty. For example, in his treatise on the principles of administration, Henry Fayol states that “when an employee is obliged to choose between the two practices, and it is impossible for him to take advice from his superior, he should be courageous enough and feel free enough to adopt the line dictated by the general interest.” The concept becomes more central in theories that chiefly address the logic of the system open to the influence of external forces that cannot be controlled and/or predicted. Couched in terms of responsible autonomy, and often used interchangeably with that of discretion, this notion is expressed in the principle of minimal critical specification propounded by the Socio-Technical Systems School. This principle states that in dealing with the variances to which the system is subject, managers should specify no more than is essential regarding the goals, the methods for achieving them, the tasks and how tasks are allocated to roles, and allow executive personnel to adapt these specifications to the actual circumstances.

Stemming from the conception of the organization as a process of actions and decisions, the Theory of Organizational Action developed by Bruno Maggi from the mid-1980s onwards, provides an original interpretation of autonomy, which clarifies how it differs from freedom and discretion. The term, true to its etymological roots, is here used to denote the ability to produce one’s own rules of action and decision-making so that the processes in which one is involved can be self-governed. These autonomous rules are produced both before the actions are actually carried out, and in progress. This is not the same thing as discretion, which in this theory denotes the scope for action and decision-making envisaged by a heteronomous rule that obliges the subject to choose between multiple alternatives. In real organizational processes, the rules always spring partly from heteronomy and partly from autonomy, to an extent depending on the intra-organiza-tional power relationships and relationships of domination that characterize the historical action system. In the search for satisfactory solutions guided by an intentional and bounded rationality, autonomy is expressed both in the choice of appropriate means for pursuing the desired ends, and in changing the goals or sub-goals, i.e., in reframing the problem to reflect the lessons learned with the means chosen earlier.

In the conception of the organization as an entity emerging unpredictably from human interactions and reified a posteriori, autonomy is the absence of impediments, constraints and limits to individuals’ opportunities for living according to their desires, wishes, values and affective state. By extension and in current usage, the term is used to mean the individual ac-tor’s independence and freedom to act and make decisions. Any actual constraint arises only from the relationship with others, and is always detrimental to the integrity/identity of the individual who, in the more extreme version of this conception, is viewed as a human being whose subjectivity is founded entirely on itself.

Recommended Reading for Autonomy

Alvesson M., Deetz S. A., 2006, Critical theory and postmodernism approaches to organizational studies, in Clegg S.R., Hardy C., Lawrence T.B., Nord W. R., eds., The Sage Handbook of Organization Studies, Sage, London 2nd ed. (1st ed. 1996).

Cherns A., 1987 “Principles of Sociotechnical Design Revised”, Human Relations, 40, 3: 153–162.

Fayol H., 1916, Administration industrielle et générale, Dunod, Paris, (English ed. General and industrial management, Pitman, London, 1988) in particular part II, chapter I.

Maggi B., 2011, Théorie de l’agir organisationnel, in Maggi B., s/d, Interpréter l’agir: un défi théorique, Presses Universitaires de France, Paris.

Classification

The term, which denotes a set of operations that are essential for any scientific inquiry, has three main meanings:

(a) Breaking down the intension of a concept into two or more subintensions, each corresponding to a concept at a lower level of generality.

(b) Grouping two or more subsets of objects or events on the basis of perceived similarities in the state of one (or more) of their properties,

(c) Assigning a case to a class of equivalent cases as previously identified.

The following discussion also applies to taxonomy, or in other words a combination of classifications considered in succession, and typology, a multidimensional classification produced by considering two or more classifications jointly.

The objectivist approach considers social reality as having its own intrinsic structure that the scientist must discover while staying absolutely impartial. Consequently, classification’s aim is to form classes that are as homogeneous as possible as regards the differences between each class. In any case, any remaining heterogeneity must be restricted to traits and characteristics that are considered less important from the scientific standpoint. If the classification is correct, we will find that the classes are also homogeneous as regards relevant characteristics that are not used explicitly for segmentation; if not, it will be necessary to reconsider the classification in a cumulative process of scientific discovery. In the past, scientific research carried out with this approach has preferred type a) partitions to type b) segmentations. This is also true for organizational studies, where numerous classifications of organizations have been proposed, generally by functionalist scholars: some have been local in nature, for the purposes of a specific study, while other have had more ambitious theoretical aims that have stood the test of time, such as the celebrated classification by Amitai Etzioni of coercive, utilitarian and normative (or voluntary) organizations. Starting in the mid-twentieth century, thanks to the major strides made in electronic computing, type b) operations carried out by means of automated techniques such as cluster analysis for classifying many sets of objects codified and represented in the data matrix have gained importance. Type c) assignments are exact, and made in accordance with the principles of exhaustiveness and mutual exclusion between equivalence classes.

For subjectivists, classification in social research, like all typification, deals with intersubjective relationships; the origin of the knowledge produced by the scientific community is always the prescientific experience. It consists of joining – creatively and reflexively – elements drawn from prior knowledge to necessarily unexplored situations, thus making the world familiar. For social phenomenology, constructing types is linked to the social actors’ practical purposes: consequently, classifications are always provisional, incomplete and fuzzy, open to inductive revision to reflect contingencies and based on an examination of concrete situations.

Up to now, we have discussed assigning concrete cases to classes, taxa and types. These operations are not to be confused with another tool specific to the social sciences, the ideal-type. Concerned that the word ideal might be misunderstood, Weber vacillated between this term and the alternative pure type. The ideal-type accentuates and exaggerates the essence of certain features of a historicizable social phenomenon – bureaucracy, for example – or of a general social phenomenon such as social action. These features are selected on the basis of criteria of relevance and rationality with respect to a particular standpoint from which the researcher conducts an analysis – which can always be revised – of an intensively and extensively infinite reality. An ideal-type, consequently, is not to be judged on the basis of whether it is true or false, but whether it is relevant, consistent and capable of stimulating further thought. As it is an abstract concept, the ideal-type cannot be associated with any concrete case (as in type b) classifications): unlike classifications of concrete cases, the extension it identifies is empty. The social sciences are sciences of reality rather than law-seeking sciences; nevertheless, concrete social phenomena cannot be grasped in their entirety. The ideal-type is a well-defined and relatively simple construct from the intensional standpoint, a yardstick that can be set against the social world (but not compared with it, as comparison is only possible between concrete cases) to measure its complexity, gauge the extent of departures from the pure type, and suggest hypotheses concerning the reasons for these departures and their consequences.

Recommended Reading for Classification

Blau P.M., Sco...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• The Polysemy of Keywords and the Plurality of Conceptions of Organization
• Keywords