Complexity in Organizations

A Research Overview

Stig O. Johannessen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000590838
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Organisational Behaviour
• Index: Business

Written with pace and clarity, this book is a comprehensive and compact overview and introduction to the research landscape of complexity in organizations.

In addition to conveying a gripping history of how complexity has influenced organizational ideas, theories, and practices throughout the 20th century and into our present age, the book sheds light on how ground-breaking ideas in chaos and complexity research have emerged and challenged the very foundations of science into a changed vision of nature, society, and human organizations. As well as being an exciting investigation into complexity research in organizations, the book shows how, in the past, researchers who were immersed in the power politics of their day grappled with the theme of complexity in their quest to understand the dynamics of organization in nature and society. By welding fundamental theoretical themes and practical implications into the political and social contexts in which they emerged, this overview provides both depth and breadth to the history, as well as the future, of studies of complexity in organized activity.

The book is a lucid and essential study of a topic that will be of interest to scholars, researchers, and students in the fields of business and management, especially those with an interest in the ways that complexity affects and transforms organizations.

Part 1 Foundations of Complexity in Organizational Theories

1 Early Attempts to Deal With Complexity in Organizations

DOI: 10.4324/9781003042501-2

Reducing Complexity: Organizations as Machines

Throughout the rise of industrialization in the 19th and early 20th centuries, a mechanical view of organizations became influential in the management of factories where people worked alongside machines to mass-produce products in a tightly disciplined production scheme, which the American engineer Frederick Winslow Taylor called scientific management (Taylor, 1911). The reference to management as being scientific was akin to treating people in the same way as if they were cogwheels in the machines that engineers had constructed for the purpose of speeding up the rate of standardized production.

In his book on scientific management, Taylor proposed a solution to the problem of motivating workers to maximize their performance: what if people were paid according to their productivity? The more efficient and faster the work was carried out, the more they would earn. This solution would motivate workers to work harder for extra income, while the capital owner would benefit from higher returns on capital because more products would be sold. Faced with some sense of complexity, which he called ‘complicated’, Taylor thought everyone would benefit from his idea:

In the case of a more complicated manufacturing establishment, it should also be perfectly clear that the greatest permanent prosperity for the workman, coupled with the greatest prosperity for the employer, can be brought about only when the work of the establishment is done with the smallest combined expenditure of human effort, plus nature’s resources, plus the cost for the use of capital in the shape of machines, buildings, etc. Or, to state the same thing in a different way: that the greatest prosperity can exist only as the result of the greatest possible productivity of the men and machines of the establishment – that is, when each man and machine is turning out the largest possible output.

(Taylor, 1911, p. 11)

Taylor provided evidence in support of his theory by referring to several companies in which his way of thinking about production had been implemented. The implementation had resulted in them ‘earning large dividends and at the same time paying from 30% to 100% higher wages to their men than are paid to similar men immediately around them, and with whose employers they are in competition’ (ibid., p. 11).

Taylor’s idea was implemented in the Ford factories and in many other industrial companies, and it became the preferred industrial management ideology in the first decades of the 20th century, to the extent that to this day it is known as Taylorism. The success of the ideology was based upon certain technologies and inventions such as the assembly line. Measurement and reduction of time spent on working tasks were introduced to enable precise calculations of the payment made to each worker. In an expanding consumer market, the main focus of factory managers was on maximizing production capacity through internal efficiency and productivity in order to meet the growing demands for their products.

Taylorism dealt with complexity by trying to remove or reduce it. Specifically, efforts were directed towards removing or reducing human complexity, organizational complexity, and technological complexity. Its instrumental essence (i.e. the division of work into the smallest operations and payment according to productivity) was about avoiding the natural flexibility and creativity of people by treating and ‘oiling’ them in the same way as machine parts. This raised the following problems: What about those workers who worked just as hard as others but were unable to produce the same results? What about those who became sick or were injured at the workplace? What about those who suffered psychological depression due to their monotonous work? Attention paid to the dehumanizing aspects of Taylorism slowly stirred some counterarguments towards the form of work that had become normal in factories, counterarguments that grew into a movement that became known as the human relations movement (Likert, 1947; Trist and Bamforth, 1951; Bruce, 2006).

Awareness of Complexity: The Importance of Human Relations

The human relations movement directed attention towards the psychological and social aspects of working life. Productivity and motivation seemed to be linked not only to the payment according to performance but also to the social working environment, as revealed by the well-known Hawthorne studies (Mayo, 1933, 1949; Roethlisberger and Dickson, 1939), a series of studies that were carried out in the second half of the 1920s at Western Electric’s plants, just outside Hawthorne, Illinois, USA. With the insight that people can be motivated and productive when given the opportunity to take responsibility in a work group, a new philosophy of leadership was also emerging, a philosophy that could be traced back to Mary Parker Follett’s ideas of democratic leadership (Follett, 1923, 1926). Although the early promoters of human relations in organizations did not explicitly introduce theories of complexity in organizations, an awareness of the theme of complexity as a positive aspect of life in organizations was emerging. However, before the humanistic ideology got the chance to take hold, the world was thrown into a different and more destructive route.

Destruction of Human Complexity: World War II

World War II represented a great paradox: on the one hand, it was the pinnacle of the implementation of ideas about removing human complexity and diversity, while, on the other hand, it took a great deal of mobilization of human cooperation and ingenuity to end it. The war demonstrated an unprecedented reduction and destruction of humanity first and foremost by the German Nazi state’s industrial-scale organization of mass murder during the Holocaust. Moreover, state-organized mass murder of civilians, justified by ideology, had also taken place just before the war – during the 1930s in Stalin’s Soviet Union. In Asia, the Japanese actively used mass murder as a way of implementing ethnic superiority and nationalistic ideology during their expansion into China and elsewhere from 1937. Also, on the side of allied countries fighting against Germany and Japan, mass killings of civilians were justified as a means to end the war. Hundreds of thousands of civilians were killed in the destruction of German cities such as Dresden by the Allied powers’ carpet bombings, the United States’ firebombing air raids of Tokyo, and the dropping of atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki during the final stages of the war. It all testified to the scale of the brutality exercised by military forces from democratic nations. By the end of the war, it had become painfully clear that the era of science, rationalism, and human enlightenment, which since the 17th century had influenced the Western world, had ended in a total collapse of humanity to the point of self-annihilation.

Dealing With Complexity: Unifying Science, Technology, and Politics

The world’s emergence from the ruins of World War II was accompanied by a widespread hope of building a more humane world, one with respect for individual rights and social coexistence. The establishment of the United Nations on 24 October 1945 testifies to that coherent hope for humanity and peace around the world. Rebuilding a world based on universal human values would mean not only a new notion of human complexity but also dealing with social, political, organizational, and technological complexity in new ways.

Thus, World War II was a crucial dividing period in history when it comes to organizational studies, in general, and for complexity as a theme in such studies, in particular. The time had come for organizations to learn not from the cold efficiency of machines, as Taylor had proposed, but from the synthesis of life itself – from biology and living nature, where higher levels of order are created in dynamic tension between stability and renewal. Synthesis and harmonic order, not reductionism and polarization, seemed to be the way forward. This new organizational ideology was to become important, as it blended into a new spirit in Western post–World War II societies.

However, the new approach had to take account of technology, which had progressed during the war and had laid the foundation for rocket science, computers, and electronics. The British mathematician Alan Turing’s first design for a stored-program computer was published in 1946 (Copeland, 2004), after he had worked on code-breaking machines during the war. The first programmable digital computer, Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer (ENIAC)), was ready in the United States in late 1945, while the transistor, which enabled the construction of smaller electronic devices, was invented in 1947. Technology was moving away from the early period of mechanical machines towards a new period of electronic and digital technology. The shift also required new ways of thinking about organizations.

In their effort to embrace and to control complexity and technology, researchers in the natural sciences, social sciences, engineering, economy, and philosophy took interest in cross-disciplinary themes and critiques of established views in science, society, and organizations. As researchers and leaders were trying to wrap their minds around the integrated dynamics and evolution of the new world of science, technology, politics, society, and work organizations, they started to embrace ideas of collaboration in multidisciplinary and cross-disciplinary work teams to solve complex problems.

In 1948, in an article titled ‘Science and complexity’, the American science administrator Warren Weaver wrote about the development. He thought science and society could progress to solve problems of complexity if science projects and production were organized in multidisciplinary teams supported by computers that could provide operational decision support, just like they did during the war:

In addition to the general growing evidence that problems of organized complexity can be successfully treated, there are at least two promising bits of special evidence. Out of the wickedness of war have come two new developments that may well be of major importance in helping science to solve these complex twentieth-century problems. The first piece of evidence is the wartime development of new types of electronic computing devices.… The second of the wartime advances is the ‘mixed-team’ approach of operations analysis.

(Weaver, 1948, p. 6)

However, at the time it was not only the harmonious chorus of humanity and collaboration that was heard. Another, much colder and disharmonious tune played in the background as the prospect of a different kind of war was threatening, a war that would be infinitely more terrifying and destructive than any previous wars. With the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the United States had introduced the possibility of a nuclear war. A new type of competition gave impetus to ideas in science and technology, one that at the same time was deeply integrated with global power politics: the nuclear arms race and its ‘Siamese twin’, the race for space.

In the context and associated atmosphere of the threat of nuclear war, it would seem impossible to base Western society and organizations on only one of the two contrasting and competing organizational management ideas: the technological instrumentalism of Taylorism or the psychological approach of the human relations movement. Technology without human ethics would lead the world to destruction. Humanity without technology, meaning the West not engaging in the technological competition with the Soviet Union, would risk the Western democracies becoming technologically and military inferior to an expanding totalitarian communist regime.

Understanding how organized complexity, as Weaver termed it, could be dealt with, stimulated a cross-disciplinary interest in research on the fusion of knowledge about living nature, technology, and organizations based on generalized frameworks of science and society. The idea of a unity of the natural sciences and the human sciences had a strong ideological flavour, and it was to frame organizational reality in terms of a biological metaphor of holistic systems combined with the idea of self-regulating technological systems.

Thus, the theme of complexity became visible in organizational research from the 1950s as part of the rise of a dualistic idea that organizations must be seen as systems: on the one hand, as complex, dynamic, and open to fluxes of energy and matter in the same way as living organisms (Bertalanffy, 1950a) and, on the other hand, as regulated and controlled, much like thermostats and other technological control systems (Wiener, 1948). On that basis, theories of organization and management synthesized human and technological ideas in the form of general systems theory ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Endorsements
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• About the Author
• Introduction – Complexity in Organizations
• Part 1 Foundations of Complexity in Organizational Theories
• Part 2 Philosophy, Science, and Organizational Practice
• Epilogue
• Index