Organization and Organizing

Materiality, Agency and Discourse

Daniel Robichaud, Francois Cooren, Daniel Robichaud, Francois Cooren

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136207327
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Gestione
• Index: Business

Recipient of the '2013 Top Edited Book Award', by the Organizational Communication Division of the National Communication Association (USA)
This timely collection addresses central issues in organizational communication theory on the nature of organizing and organization. The unique strength of this volume is its contribution to the conception of materiality, agency, and discourse in current theorizing and research on the constitution of organizations. It addresses such questions as:

• 
  
  

• To what extent should the materiality of texts and artifacts be accounted for in a process view of organization?

• 
  
  

• What part does materiality play in the process by which organizations achieve continuity in time and space?

• 
  
  

• In what sense do artifacts perform a role in human communication and interaction and in the constitution of organization?

• 
  
  

• What are the voices and entities participating in the emergence and stabilization of organizational reality?

The work represents scholarship going on in various parts of the world, and features contributions that overcome traditional conceptions of the nature of organizing by addressing in specific ways the difficult issues of the performative character of agency; materiality as the basis of the iterability of communication and continuity of organizations; and discourse as both textuality and interaction. The contributions laid out in this book also pay tribute to the work of the organizational communication theorist James R. Taylor, who developed a view of organization as deeply rooted in communication and language. Contributors extend and challenge Taylor's communicative view by tackling issues and assumptions left implicit in his work.

Part I

Theoretical Developments

1 Organizations as Obstacles to Organizing

Barbara Czarniawska

“What Is a Necessary Step in the Construction of Knowledge at One Moment Becomes an Impediment at Another”

In this introductory section, I wish to return to a statement that I have made on various occasions (e.g., Czarniawska, 2006; but see also Shenhav, 2003): in the late 1960s, organization theorists changed the dominant meaning of the term organization so as to be able to import systems theory. Here, I repeat my argument in brief.

In 1961 Dwight Waldo, then a central figure in administration theory, wrote a review essay titled “Organization Theory: An Elephantine Problem.” It was published in Public Administration Review, at the time a leading journal in the field. Waldo’s review encompassed six books, most of which were edited volumes. Among the most frequent contributors were Herbert Simon, James G. March, Richard Cyert, Chris Argyris, Mason Haire, Anatol Rappaport, Jacob Marshak, Rensis Likert, Peter Blau, William Foote Whyte, James Thompson, and Kurt Lewin. Waldo noted:

[N] early all the pieces printed or reprinted are the product of the past ten years; and … a high proportion of the authors are in their early professional years. In short, … there is no doubt that organization theory and research are in a boom period. (1961, p. 212)

In his review, Waldo discussed what he saw as the main trends in this boom. One was a transition from administration theory to organization theory. This shift resulted from an emergent paradigm in social science methodology—behaviorism (which we now include under a broader label of positivism)—introduced under the banner of an emulation of the natural sciences. Such an approach did not sit well with the notion of administration, which was “an applied science—if it is not indeed a profession, an art, or something less. Administrative theory’ suggests an engagement with the world, a striving after values” (Waldo, 1961, p. 217). Organization theory was, on the other hand, a theory not of action, but of a unit existing “out there.”

What, then, was the object of “organization theory”? In his thorough etymological investigation of the meaning of the word, William Starbuck (2003) discovered that:

The word “organization” derives from an ancient Indo-European root that also spawn[ed] the words “organ” and “work.” The Roman verb “organizare” meant initially “to furnish with organs so as to create a complete human being,” but later Romans gave it the broader meaning “to endow with a coordinated structure.” Organizare migrated from Latin into Old French. In 1488, the French language included the word “organization,” which an ancient dictionary defined self-reflectively as “the state of an organized body.” … Although dictionaries published between 1750 and 1840 do not mention this usage explicitly, around 1800 some writers began to use “organization” to describe a property of societies. (p. 156)

This last usage persisted for another 150 years; organization was employed as a noun denoting a state of being organized and was used in the plural only to denote voluntary associations, as distinct from firms and public service offices. Thus Weber spoke about “the modern organization of the civil service,” which was “monocratic” (Weber, 1920, p. 656). This interpretation of the term—as a label for a state achieved by actions of organizing—was of no use for joining the major research fashion of the 1950s: systems theory (von Bertalanffy, 1950, 1951). The application of systems theory required a creation of “organizations”—separate units divided by “boundaries” from their “environments” and related to them by “adaptation.”

One can construct a strong counterargument to my thesis, or at least to my dating, in the form of one of the classics of organization theory, The Functions of the Executive by Chester I. Barnard (1938/1968). Barnard clearly spoke of “organizations,” sometimes adding the adjective formal or business. But he had obviously also read Talcott Parson’s The Structure of Social Action (1937/1968), in which Parsons had already applied systems theory, translating into its terms the classic works of sociology by Durkheim, Weber, and Pareto. Also, as Parson himself wrote in an introduction to the paperback edition of his book, “just under 1200 hard cover copies were sold in the year 1966, some eighty per cent of the number in the original McGraw-Hill edition, which was exhausted only after approximately 10 years” (1937/1968, p. v). Clearly, the time for this idea has come.

This conceptual move must have seemed appealing in the 1960s, as it provided a kind of middle ground between mechanistic Taylorism and idealist administration theory, and permitted close bonds with the most attractive branch of science at the time—cybernetics (Wiener, 1948). It must also have been a relatively easy conceptual move, because it imitated a much earlier step made by Darwin. Lewontin (1995) pointed out that by introducing “organism,” “environment,” and “adaptation,” Darwin sought to mechanize biology, which was still all too prone to mystification and idealism. Alas, as suggested in the quote that became the heading of this section, this loan has become a burden both for organization theory and for biology.

Indeed, at the present time, in the second decade of the 21st century, this set of metaphors is not providing good service to either human biology or organization theory. The environment is not a preexisting set of problems to which an organism, or an organization, must find solutions: these organisms or organizations created the problems in the first place. The environment of organisms consists largely of other organisms, and the environment of organizations consists almost entirely of other organizations (Perrow, 1991). By the same token, the notion of adaptation is misleading as a tool for understanding the relationship between an organism and its environment. And although it can be claimed that organisms have boundaries separating them from their environments, it is much more difficult to apply the notion of preexisting boundaries to organizations; mergers, acquisitions, transnationals, and networks make such an idea appear highly tenuous. New concepts and metaphors are constantly being sought, and administration theory has been revisited, together with many other forgotten ancestors. After all, as Waldo (1961) pointed out, while dutifully noting the triumphant entry of “the scientific study of the American business organization,” the beginnings of organization theory could be found in Plato and Aristotle, and could be traced through Machiavelli and Hobbes to Fayol and Urwick.

I do not wish to imply that the presence of systems theory was a 50-year mistake, a hiatus in the development of the body of organizational knowledge. On the contrary, systems theory, and cybernetics in general, has been and remains the main inspiration for organization theory. But if organization theory itself was shaped to fit systems theory 50 years ago, at present it is systems theory that is adapted and selectively used by organization theoreticians. And returning to forgotten roots takes place on another, more sophisticated plane, and adduces more interesting results. It could be that after a half-century foray into systems theory, organization theory may return to administration theory (now called “management,” however), not so much contrite as wiser.

By the 1990s, the idea of an organization/environment dichotomy was one of the many received dichotomies to collapse, due (among other reasons) to the observation that the environment of organizations primarily comprises organizations (Perrow, 1991). “Internal and external factors” were revealed as the epiphenomena of the activity of border making, and “macro- and microsystems” as products of scientific epistemologies. The new economy turned out to be one in which workers own the means of production (through their pension funds) but do not control them (O’Barr & Conley, 1992), one in which organizations are born and die at the rate of the banana fly, and the Web is the market. New questions have been posed, two of them especially pertinent and provocative. If organizations are rational tools for the realization of collective interests, why are there so many different types of organizations? Michael Hannah and John Freeman (Hannah & Freeman, 1989) drew freely on evolution theory, taking populations of organizations as their unit of analysis. Walter W. Powell and Paul J. DiMaggio, and many other new institutionalists represented in the edited volume, The New Institutionalism in Organizational Analysis (Powell & DiMaggio, 1991), asked the opposite question: if organizations are rational tools for realization of collective interests, why are there so few kinds of organizations? Why are organizations increasingly similar?

Perhaps, said James G. March and Johan P. Olsen in Rediscovering Institutions (1989), organizations are best considered neither as “rational tools” for the realization of collective interests nor as “natural and organic systems,” but as modern institutions. Their conceptualization changes, as do the practices and normative justifications of their existence change.

In what follows, I first ask if the changes in organization theory influenced the practice of organizing; that is, I try to evaluate the performativity of organization theory. Then I present a brief overview of theories that maintain a focus on organizing rather than on reified “organizations.” Within this frame, I formulate two provocations vis-à-vis traditional organization theory, claiming that artifacts can liberate and discourses can imprison. In the end, I review several ways in which organizations can be obstacles to organizing.

Building a Golem: How Organization Theorists Helped to Reify Organizations

The readers will easily recognize in this heading an allusion to the by-now classic 1981 article of Michel Callon and Bruno Latour, “Unscrewing the Big Leviathan.” Their claim was, in short, that the difference between micro-actors and macro-actors is due not to their “nature,” but to the negotiations (including wars) and associations that built them. However, the process of creating the alliances that eventually form macro-actors is poorly understood because macro-actors obliterate any traces of their construction, presenting themselves through their spokespersons as being indivisible and solid. Social scientists contribute, often unwillingly, to this construction process, by increasing this solidity and consistency in their descriptions.

McKenzie, Muniesa, and Siu (2007) expanded this thought, claiming a strong performativity of economics. In their view, it is the science of economics that creates markets. Do organization theorists create organizations? Perhaps they do create (certain types) of organizations, but no doubt in association with some macro-actor: industry or the state.

This phenomenon can be seen in Philip Selznick’s book on the Tennessee Valley Authority, published in 1949—before the boom of systems theory—but already preparing a transfer from administration theory to organization theory. This “scholarly study of a complex organization” represents, on the one hand, everything from which the natural science-oriented researchers attempted to cut themselves free: a value-laden theory of (democratic) administration and an inductive methodology. On the other hand, it announces all the major trends to come: structural functionalism, behaviorism, and reification of organizing.

The TVA—the complex organization under study—was conceived as a rational tool, implanted in the midst of institutional fields: a revolutionary, planned intervention against an evolutionary tradition of the place. In order to survive, said Selznick, the TVA had to co-opt local forces and adapt itself to them. Selznick’s study remained unique for a long time, in its simultaneous focus on an “organization” and its “environment,” and its interest in both intra- and interorganizational processes. At the same time, it became a marketing device for TVA, leading, as Albert Hirschman (1967) pointed out, to a situation in which, for a number of years after World War II, any country that had a river valley had to have a copy of TVA.

In Great Britain after the war, the government promised expert support to any company that needed help in restructuring. The Tavistock Institute of Human Relations was given the task of collaborating “with Management and workers in an attempt to solve the social and psychological problems which faced them through changes in methods of work or of management” (Rice, 1958/1987, p. 6). A large team of researchers would approach the company in question, study it, and deliver an exhaustive report, diagnosing its problems and suggesting solutions (thus the idea of “company doctors,” which additionally strengthened the conceptualization of a company as an “organism,” a natural system). The leading names were Eric Trist, Albert K. Rice, Elliot Jaques, and Wilfred R. Bion.

The Tavistock Institute continued the Elton Mayo tradition (the Human Relations School) and combined it with an open system theory as represented by Von Bertalanffy. The concept of sociotechnical systems assumed that every production system contained a technological organization (equipment and process layout) and a work organization (people and their tasks). The two must fit together to fulfill their function, as judged by the economic viability of the production system. “Each system or subsystem has … at any given time, one task which may be defined as its primary task—the task which it is created to perform. Thus the primary task of private enterprise in a Western economy is to make profits, while that of public utility is to give services” (Rice, 1958/1987, p. 32). Consequently, the environment blurred into a generic provider of energy in return for fulfillment of the primary tasks, defined by the same environment. Yet within this frame, “organization” is still a state of a system or a subsystem, such as “enterprise” or “utility.”

In 1958, James G. March and Herbert Simon published Organizations. The first edition of the book begins as follows:

This book is about the theory of formal organizations. It is easier, and probably more useful, to give examples of formal organizations than to define the term. The United States Steel Corporation is a formal organization; so is the Red Cross, the corner grocery store, the New York State Highway Department. The latter organization is, of course, part of a larger one—the New York State government. But for the present purposes we need not trouble ourselves about the precise boundaries to be drawn around an organization or the exact distinction between an “organization” and “nonorganization.” We are dealing with empirical phenomena, and the world has an uncomfortable way of not permitting itself to be fitted into clean classifications. (1958/1993, p. 20)

By the second edition, they changed their minds about definitions: “Organizations are systems of coordinated action among individuals and groups whose preferences, information, interests, or knowledge differ” (1993, p. 2).

By that time it was too late. The “coordinated action” part has been omitted by most of their followers, with the exception of J. R. Taylor and Van Every (2000). Organizations were seen as systems of mechanical or organic parts, in which people were either cogs or body parts (heads and hands). March and Simon were primarily interested in brains, and reached out to the growing wealth of artificial intelligence studies to create a theory of decision making as attention allocation; the conceptualization of an organization as a computer (an information processing machine) came close.

Then and later (see e.g. W. R. Scott, 1987), there was a lively debate between the two schools as to whether organizations were more like machines (technical systems) or more like organisms (natural systems); but nobody seemed to question the proposition that organizations had to be seen as systems. The idea of “sociotechnical systems” mentioned above was a compromise, as was Tom Burns and G. M. Stalker’s The Management of Innovation (1961), a book that reviewed 20 cases of postwar Scottish and English firms (15 in the growing electronics industry), and arrived at the conclusion that “mechanistic” organizational structures were appropriate and effective in stable, simple environments, whereas dynamic and complex environments call for “organic” structures, flexible and self-adaptive. A work that strongly supported Burns and Stalker’s thesis, although it had been developed independently, was Joan Woodward’s Industrial Organization (1965).

By the 1960s, the idea launched by Burns and Stalker had developed into what was later called a contingency theory. By then it had been forgotten that Burns and Stalker’s notion of a sociotechnical system was grounded in the observation that “the social structure of the factory interlocked with, and often mirrored, that of the small isolated town in which it was situated” (1961, p. 1).

Contingency theory, in all its variations, matched some attributes of the internal organization with those of the environment. Paul R. Lawrence and Jay W. Lorsch (1967) took up this thread in the United States; and because it was easy to operationalize, it lent itself readily to empirical studies and intellectual cooperation. The British Aston Group became a paragon for collective research on organizational structures. It is noteworthy that, having reified “organizations” into “objects” with “attributes,” they needed new terms for the activity of organizing. Thus the Aston Group studied the “organizational functioning” (Pugh & Hickson, 1964/1996) and “the way in which an organization is set up and run” (p. 11).

Contingency theory ran out of power by the end of the 1970s, however, for at least three reasons. First, all environments seemed to be “turbulent,” demanding innovation and experiencing rapid change. “Mechanistic” organizations and “stable environments” became counterfactuals, or remnants of the past. Second, the oil c...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Introduction: The Need for New Materials in the Constitution of Organization
• About the Authors
• Part I Theoretical Developments
• Part II Empirical Explorations
• Bibliography
• Index