Organizations

A Systems Approach

Stefan Kühl

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351913300
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Negocios y empresa
• Subtopic: Liderazgo

From businesses, public administrations, universities and schools, to hospitals, prisons, political parties, or the military, peoples' lives are inextricably bound up with organizations from cradle to grave. Yet we receive little training in how - as members, customers, voters, or patients - to deal with them. In Organizations Stefan Kühl asks and answers many questions. What are these entities that wield such strong influence in our society? What makes them tick? What are our options for intervening, either from within or without? This book explains how organizations function by examining their three central features: their purposes or goals, their hierarchies, and their memberships. The author presents the three aspects of organizations - the display, formal, and informal aspects, explaining them in metaphorical terms as façades, machines, and games. Acknowledging that the seminal systems theory developed by sociologist Niklas Luhmann is not easily accessible, Professor Kühl presents Luhmann's organizational concept in a succinct and user-friendly form that will be readily grasped by a practitioner audience and provides new insights in this ambitious theory.

CHAPTER 1

ORGANIZATIONS: WHAT ARE THEY, ACTUALLY?

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Although organizations define our lives to a significant degree, we never receive any training in how to deal with them. After all, no school curriculum in the world offers a course in “organizationology.” Most courses of study prepare people for specific activities in companies, public administration, hospitals, or churches, while only peripherally touching on how to conduct oneself in such organizations. Even in disciplines such as sociology, economics, or psychology, frequently only the specialized course offerings provide information about the way organizations actually function. As a result, knowledge of the workings of organizations and how to behave in them is acquired only incidentally.

A person’s first contact with an organization generally takes place immediately upon seeing the light of day. In the Western world, at least, people are born in hospitals. Homebirth is the exception, so that parents who elect this organizationally disassociated alternative generally have to justify the decision to their circle of acquaintances. Yet even parents who would like to spare their newborns an early encounter with an institution figure that, in an emergency, a hospital is able to provide a greater range of services than a midwife practicing on an outpatient basis. For that reason, they keep the telephone number of the nearest hospital close at hand.

Whereas the first two or three years of a child’s life are by and large free of organizations, an intense contact lies ahead and is experienced as a distinct break. In kindergarten or elementary school, a child may initially perceive its teachers as individuals, but it quickly realizes that they are merely parts of a larger whole and are people who can be replaced. Children’s behavior and expectations also clearly reflect that they have no question about the difference between a family setting and an organizational one. In the same sense, secondary schooling confronts us not only with the mathematical rule of three, the correct way to form a genitive, and the conditions that create terminal moraines, but simultaneously socializes us to proper behavior within organizations. Here, one can no longer rely on being treated as something special and receiving love regardless of performance, as one would in the parental home. Instead, students must learn that they are viewed from a very specific perspective and constantly compared with others. They learn that they are viewed primarily in the role of a pupil and realize that if they do not conform to certain rules, they face the threat of being expelled from the organization called “school” (Dreeben, 1980: 59ff.).

We gather our initial experiences with organizations in an “audience role,” for example, as a kindergartner who needs to be amused, a pupil who requires instruction, or an adolescent who has been picked up by the police. Yet as we transition to adulthood, we increasingly find ourselves playing “achievement roles” in organizations. We become involved in school or university student unions, are compelled (in some countries, at least) to enter the military or perform civilian service and, last but not least, we begin our working lives in organizations. It is not unreasonable to suspect that in our times the transition from adolescence to adulthood is more clearly delineated by the assumption of an achievement role in an organization than by leaving home or founding a family of one’s own.

Pursuing vocational activities in a business, government agency, church, school, or research facility seems such a matter of course to us that launching an independent career immediately after school or college appears to be a special path. People strike off on their own because they don’t get along with superiors (which often means with organizations), because no organization is willing to pay them a satisfactory salary, or because they want to “do their own thing,” without being controlled by managers or administrators. But even the self-employed, who often choose this path because they intuitively reject organizations or have been rejected by organizations, must later come to terms with small organizations of their own if their activities have brought them success.

As organizational scientist Chester Barnard (1938: 4) remarked in the 1930s, however, not only our work lives but also our leisure time is structured to a large extent by organizations. Bridge clubs, crochet groups, brotherhoods and student fraternities, extracurricular educational activities like continuing education programs or dance clubs, athletic associations, prayer circles, parent groups, citizens’ initiatives and political parties offer further opportunities to join specific forms of organizations with pleasures and pathologies all their own. Glancing at a monthly bank statement is often enough to determine just how many dues-paying (although perhaps passive) memberships one holds.

Even at the end of life, abundant experience with organizations can still be gathered. Long before physical death occurs, people are generally removed from their achievement roles within organizations through retirement, termination or an unsuccessful bid at re-election. Oftentimes, they do not experience their removal as liberating but just the opposite, namely, as separation from key social reference points and social death. Yet early removal offers organizations the advantage that they can avoid having to cope with the all-too-abrupt personnel changes that physical death brings about. Naturally, it occasionally happens that people die while performing their achievement roles: a forester might be crushed by a falling tree, a manager could suffer a heart attack, or a soldier could be killed during a maneuver or in combat. But such events are classified as accidents which represent somewhat out-of-the-ordinary situations. In contrast to retirements or dismissals, organizations respond to them as crises. This explains why people normally experience the end of their lives—and this is strikingly reminiscent of early childhood—once again as more or less helpless members of the audience in terms of organizations. This extends from the care they receive in hospitals and the processing of their insurance claims, to having their bodies tactfully removed by a funeral company.

ORGANIZATIONAL DISASSOCIATION AS AN EXPRESSION OF EXCLUSION

Organizations dominate modern society to such a degree that being away from them even for short periods is considered unusual. A one-year trip around the world entails not only taking leave of family and friends, but also temporarily waiving contact with organizations. Indeed, that type of travel is often motivated by having received an “overdose” of organization during military service or the initial years of professional life. When the job title of “stay-at-home mother” or, in extremely rare cases, “stay-at-home father” comes up, say, on a quiz show or at a party, it is generally put forward with a mixture of defiance and embarrassment, which is an indication that organizationally disassociated roles of this kind require an explanation. As well, the isolation that these women and the small number of men report when they are reduced to this role can be explained through their lack of contact with organizations.

People who spend their entire lives—not just a period of time—without ever joining an organization may well be said to be living on “the margins of society.” The person who never went to school, performed military service, or held a job, and still does not belong to any associations can justifiably be viewed as “excluded,” to use a favored sociological term. If one examines the development of exclusion in the homeless, it generally begins with a loss of employment and then progresses to withdrawal from associations or resignation from a political party. At that point, contacts with organizations occur only very sporadically and generally under coercion, as might occur in connection with the police, and are perceived by the excluded individuals with growing irritation.

The modern welfare state, however, is geared to discouraging and preventing organizationally disassociated lives. While it might still be possible to “protect” the very young from organizations, it becomes difficult as soon as they reach the age of compulsory education. In most countries, avoiding compulsory education would require a substantial criminal effort on the part of the child’s parents because, if necessary, compliance can be enforced by the police. Frequently, the parents’ only alternative is to enroll their child in one of the “free” schools which are supposed to shun the typical features of organizations such as discipline and hierarchy. But as experiments at alternative schools like Summerhill in England and the Odenwaldschule in Germany have shown, the outcome is not an organization-free form of learning—the so-called de-schooling of society—but merely a different form of organization which is in part equally emotionally and physically stressful.

People who in the later phases of their life do not pursue professional activities in organizations are not by any means left entirely in peace. Instead, in that situation they are serviced by government employment offices that are sometimes caricatures of bureaucratic mechanisms. For these offices, reintegration into the workforce frequently means nothing more than the resumption of work activity in an organization. Making regular attempts to obtain a salaried position in an organization becomes the precondition for receiving financial support.

The prominence of organizations in modern society and the degree to which they define our lives raise the question of what these entities actually are.

Organizations: An Initial Approach

We are quick to use the word organization. In everyday speech we often use organize or organization simply to describe goal-directed, systematically regulated processes. We speak of organizing or organization when various, initially independent acts are put into a purposeful sequence, thereby achieving “rational results” (Weick, 1985: 11). It goes without saying that the organization of a children’s birthday party falls under the bailiwick of the mothers and fathers concerned. We learn from our parents, grandparents, or great grandparents that during difficult times people occasionally had to organize things on the black market in order to survive. Meanwhile, all that lifts our spirits today is when a colleague organizes a round of drinks in a crowded bar in the blink of an eye. If too many goals are scored against an international soccer team, commentators begin to complain that the team’s defense needs to be re-organized.

This broad understanding of organization underlies almost all forms of organizing wherever it is found. Societies organize their ways of living together communally, as do families. Groups organize evening card games, companies organize the most profitable way to manage their businesses, protest movements their demonstrations, and those who attempt suicide—with greater or lesser success—their “long way down” (Hornby, 2005). According to this view, even laws, traffic regulations, house rules, user manuals, restaurant menus, game rules and sheet music all appear to be an expression of organization.

Yet this understanding is poorly suited for more detailed analyses; ultimately, it denotes nothing more than an order which is utilized to accomplish something. The concept is formulated so broadly that in the end it encompasses everything that is in any way structured, regular, or goal directed.

In Support of a Narrow Definition of Organization

In contradistinction to this inflationary usage, it has become generally accepted in scientific circles—and especially in the system theory— to use the word organization to designate a particular form of social system which can be differentiated from other social systems like families, groups, networks, protest movements, or nation-states. Some of these specific systems even feature the “organization” label in their names as a means of denoting their particular nature. One need only think of the “O” in the World Health Organization (WHO), the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), and the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). Others do not use the word organization but rather synonyms such as the word institution, which now sounds somewhat dated but is still found in names like the Brookings Institution or the Smithsonian Institution. Today, self-respecting organizations tend to adorn themselves with the trendy concept of an “agency.” As an illustration, in 2002 the US Ballistic Missile Defense Organization was renamed the Missile Defense Agency.

Other organizations use their names to designate the specific type of organization they represent, for instance, a business enterprise, public administration, church, association, political party, or army. In the case of the Church of Scientology, the Irish Republican Army or a Major League Baseball Club in the US, observers may find it debatable whether the organizations are justified in describing themselves as a church, a sports club, or an army, or whether they are actually businesses or criminal outfits. Nevertheless, it is virtually impossible to deny them their status as organizations. Many organizations do not explicitly mention the word in their names. General Electric, Daimler-Benz and France Télécom have every reason to believe that they can be unequivocally identified as organizations even though their names make no indication of it.

Naturally, cases repeatedly arise where we are not entirely certain whether we are dealing with an organization or not. Does a one-person company that bills itself as a marketing agency qualify as an organization? When nations assemble on an occasional basis to coordinate climate policies, does that warrant the use of the term organization in the narrower sense? Does a branch of a state university system represent an organization in itself, or is it only a geographically defined sub-division of the department of education? Of course, such borderline cases actually only sharpen our understanding of organizations.

The Development of Organizations in Modern Society

When we apply the narrower system theoretical definition of organizations, we see that they are a phenomenon that has only emerged over the last few centuries. To be sure, the construction of the Egyptian pyramids or the development of an extensive water-based economy in the Nile delta are impressive cases of “organization,” but only in the broader sense of the term. At first glance, the initiation rites, hierarchies, and precise sets of regulations found in cloisters make them appear to be precursors to organizations, and yet they were more an expression of pre-modern societies. The affiliation of craftsmen into guilds and leagues in medieval cities might remind us of modern organizations, but these also tend to fall under the definition of an organization in the broader sense.

It is correct that rudimentary forms of membership in exchange for compensation have existed since ancient times. One need only think of the day workers who offered their labor in exchange for wages, or mercenaries who made their combat abilities available to the highest-paying military commander. However, until the emergence of the Modern Age, other forms of aggregating people predominated. Slave owners held their slaves as physical property. Feudal lords levied taxes on their serfs and exacted unpaid labor, imposing their demands through force if necessary. In the case of the guilds, one was born a member, so to speak. It went without saying that a son would follow in his father’s trade and thereby also assume his membership in the guild. Membership did not involve an independent decision, but rested instead on birth.

One central characteristic of all these pre-modern forms of order is that they encompassed a person in his or her entirety. In highly simplified terms, the slaves who were used to build the pyramids or dig canals couldn’t simply go home after work or quit their jobs at the Egyptian construction sites. Entering a cloister was a fundamental life decision with the effect that all of one’s activities transpired within the framework of a communal Christian life. Guilds and leagues were not primarily institutions aimed at safeguarding monopolies, but additionally regulated their members’ cultural, political, and legal relationships.

Organizations in the narrow sense of the word appear for the first time during the Modern Age with the development of bureaucratic administrations, the formation of standing armies consisting of professional soldiers, the rise of education in schools and universities, treatment of the sick in clinics or hospitals, the creation of penal institutions, the transfer of production to factories and manufacturing plants, and the founding of associations, federations, unions, and political parties. It was only after such organizations had formed that it increasingly became the norm for membership to be the result of a conscious decision by both the member and the organization itself, while at the same time the integration of members into the organization no longer extended to the sum of their role relationships.

The process established itself slowly in such diverse areas as religion, business, and politics. As an example, beginning in the sixteenth century compulsory membership in a religious denomination became increasingly delegitimized. Prior to that, subjects were forced to share the religious denomination of their sovereigns. Consider the Anabaptist movement, which originated in Zürich. It called for a community of believers that was independent of the government and where members were not forced into a religion based on their birth, but were able to confess their faith freely as adults. A similar development took hold in the field of commerce. As the capitalist system evolved, the freedom of trade and economic pursuit established itself in a growing number of nations, thereby allowing citizens to engage in different kinds of work. The suspension of mandatory guild membership and the abolition of feudal subjection created the opportunity—and the necessity—for workers to offer their labor in the emerging “labor markets” (Marx, 1962: 183). In a largely parallel development, increasing opportunities arose to join special interest organizations, for instance, associations, political parties, or labor unions.

What are the special characteristics of organizations such as businesses, public administrations, universities, schools, churches, or the military? Which specific features make them different from spontaneous interactions in a supermarket, or ...