Thompson Work Organisations A Critical Introduction (3rd ed)

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who have to carry the ‘culture burden’ (Thompson and Findlay, 1999). They are caught in the middle between selling the message to the troops and explaining why it is not working to the board. Their identity as effective change agents can only be secured by taking responsibility for redoubling efforts to ‘communicate effectively’, or alternatively becoming cynical about and partially disengaging from the change process itself.

Managerial misbehaviour

Strategic choices about organisational design are often reinforced by indoctrination into dominant organisational goals. This is a primary level of response to the attempts of members to secure a measure of autonomy and discretion within their work, and to create free areas where they can develop their own identities and capacities. Lynn (1966) argues that managerial prescriptions to maintain warm and friendly relations with subordinates go hand-in-hand with maintaining a social distance between managers themselves and the group.

We see here the dual role of the brainwasher: the aloofness corresponds to the threatener role, the friendliness to the protector role. The authoritarian leader is only playing the threatener role and misses out on the friendliness. Vice versa with the laissez-faire leader. It is the brainwashing, democratic leader who plays both roles who is the most effective. (Lynn, 1966: 270)

Such inauthentic relations are present within both formal and informal socialisation, functioning to reinforce self-control rather than self-management. Neither is indoctrination necessarily consonant with the stated aims of the organisation. The study of bakery salesmen by Ditton (1974) showed how the salesmen were trained to cheat their customers in order not to lose out when they ended up short in their takings. Supervisors both tacitly and overtly encouraged this activity as it short-circuited possible conflicts caused by the firm trying to recoup losses from the drivers’ pay. The socialisation process also worked to weed out salesmen who would not or could not collaborate in theft and legitimise it to others as a means for making out in the job. Hence there was no objection to them making a little for themselves on top of balancing their books. Comments from a sales manager such as ‘They’re not real salesmen if they can’t make a bob or two on the side, are they?’ (1974: 36) indicate that the ability to steal was linked to job competence, the same manager being noted for encouraging valued salesmen to ‘use fiddled cash personally’.

This socialisation into theft was, of course, only sanctioned by management to the extent that salesmen did not begin to steal from their employers as well as their customers. Mars (1983) has claimed that fiddling can increase job and group satisfaction, and raise work rates and productivity by making the process of work more interesting. Management can use it as a reward, as in Ditton’s example, as long as they ‘turn a blind eye’, or it can still be used as a method of ‘cracking the whip’.

The final irony for management is that they lose control of the fiddle that they themselves have started. The workforce then seize it, and use its unofficial and unsanctioned ability to increase their wages (especially in times of national restraint) as a basic condition of employment. (Ditton, 1974: 36)

I D E N T I T Y W O R K • 3 5 3

Managers, then, can misbehave in ways that serve their interests at the expense of the organisation. Ackroyd and Thompson (1999) present an analysis of how misbehaviour as a category produces managerial practice. They argue that social science has generally concentrated on aspects of organised non-compliance in industrial relations, class struggle, resistance to control and deviancy. They propose an integrated ‘map’ of ‘misbehaviour’ from which to begin an analysis. (See Figure 21.1.)

It is argued that OMB is not to be understood simply as the result of control (1999: 29) but as a reciprocal relationship that analyses directive and responsive behaviour by both management and workers. This is directly reflective of the way in which we have considered the various forms of identity work to operate and offers a neat way of conceptualising the identity projects carried out by all members of organisations.

Ackroyd and Thompson consider topics such as resistance, self-organisation, subcultures and sexual misconduct in detail, though here we only follow up on the relations of management to misbehaviour. They look at the factors influencing managerial decisions about and responses to misbehaviour (1999: 81) and the kinds of managerial strategy these are typically related to (1999: 88). Especially important here is the concept of ‘controlled autonomy’, which is what HRM policies pursue but seldom achieve because of the barriers placed on change, not least by managerial identity. Ackroyd and Thompson offer a useful account of how the dynamics of control act to produce and amplify misbehaviour, adding detail to classic concepts such as the ‘vicious spirals’ associated with McGregor’s Theory X and Y (see

	3 Appropriation	1 Appropriation	2 Appropriation 4 Appropriation
	of time	of work	of product	of identity
Commitment	Time perks		Perks	Goal
Engagement				identification
Co-operation		Work activity
	Time wasting			Joining rituals
		Effort	Pilferage
		bargaining
	Absence			Subcultures
Compliance		Soldiering	Fiddling
				Sex games
Withdrawal
Denial	Turnover	Destructiveness	Theft	Class or
Hostility		and sabotage		group solidarity
Dim e n s i o n s o f m i s b e h a v i o u r				F I G U R E	2 1 . 1

Source: reproduced with permission from S. Ackroyd and P. Thompson (1999) Organizational Misbehaviour, London: Sage.

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Chapter 19). Though this is schematic and stylised, it does offer insights into the process of control, rather than using control as an abstract determinant concept like authority or power. It also raises the notion of two effects that intensify the ‘impulse to control’ (1999: 95–6). The first, the measurement effect, is the area in which classic organisational psychology serves managerial strategy in producing technologies of regulation, and is resonant of our arguments on personality testing in Chapter 15. The second, the innovation effect, where ‘increased managerial attention will cause behavioural innovation’ (1999: 95), can be related to the idea of ‘engaging the intellect’ we raised in Chapter 20. Thus processes of surveillance, environmental scanning and self-monitoring produce new behaviours and practices to identify, subvert and constrain them. Ackroyd and Thompson thus provide linkages from managerial labour and identity work to specific psychological processes such as learning, group dynamics and attribution.

Conclusion

Identity work is conscious and unconscious, individual and collective, competitive and collaborative. It is the vehicle of self-expression and enactment, and at the same time binds us to systems of ideological self-legitimation through which we accede to systems of control, both internal and external. The networks we access and the roles we are expected to take on in the workplace provide the scripts, our interactions and negotiations with others the arena in which we act them out. It appears that what we strive towards in producing consistent role performances and in maintaining a secure identity is a situation where we do not have to negotiate who and what we are with others, where our concerns, actions and status are automatically legitimate. In this sense, identity work is the medium through which we express power over ourselves, others and situations.

We buy into systems of control in order to increase our situational power, and at the same time we resist pressures to make us completely controlled by our role and the demands of others. In many ways identity work is the primary work of organising, if not of organisations themselves. As such, it must also be the primary work of those who structure the processes of organising towards corporate ends. One appeal of management, beyond the extrinsic rewards, is that just being a manager automatically affirms and protects identity, at the expense of diminishing the manager’s capacity to resist the role demands the position confers. The manager as a communicator of role demands has in effect committed him or herself to controlling the identity work of others, which in turn commits him or her to one or another form of response to such pressures.

It is through identity work that the conditions of being a subject and of being subject gain substance for managers and workers alike. The negotiation and pursuit of identity concerns and projects make up the drama of everyday organisational experience. As we have seen, the psychological processes underwriting that drama cannot give an adequate account of it in purely mechanistic terms. Neither, though, can interpretative or structural accounts afford to ignore the influence those processes have on us in our journey to becoming fully-fledged participants in the modern work organisation.

Part III

Theorising

Organisations

Introduction: the story so far

In Chapter 1 we set out some broad principles or ways of seeing organisations and society that inform a critical approach, and that have guided our efforts in this book. These include the need to be reflexive in not taking organisational processes for granted, to locate theory and practice in their historical and comparative contexts, and for explanations to be multi-dimensional. We have tried to utilise an approach that can explain the embeddedness of organisational action. Throughout the book we have been highly resistant to any variety of deterministic, ‘one best way’, or single, over-arching explanations for complex processes. Yet clearly action is not random. The reciprocal interaction of different structures and agencies still produces specific patterns and these need to be theorised.

In earlier chapters we have, of course, discussed theory, whether that is Weber’s account of bureaucracy, a labour process analysis of control, or population ecology explanations of organisation–environment relations. So what is different here? Many of the theories we have looked at are specific to particular issues, such as the resource dependency theory of power. Others, such as institutional theories of convergence and diversity, have broader application but are still specific to the organisational sphere. The purpose here is to dig a little deeper and look at the resources provided by more general social science theories.

So what is the state of play? When concluding his entertaining ‘short and glorious history of organisation theory’, Perrow (1973) hit an optimistic note. The forces of light (human relations) and darkness (scientific management and other mechanistic perspectives) had fought each other to a standstill. Out of the debris, all schools of thought agreed that organisations should be understood as complex, open systems in which environmental variables, including technology, explained most of the variation within and between industries. Solutions based on better interpersonal relations, good leadership and job redesign had no scientific basis. Changing the structure of rewards or authority remained the most effective route to success: ‘after manipulating these variables, sit back and wait for two or three months for them to take

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hold. This is complicated and hardly as dramatic as many of the solutions being peddled, but I think the weight of organisational theory is in its favour’ (1973: 27).

Viewed from the beginning of the new millennium, this optimism looks decidedly odd. As Reed had earlier commented, ‘contemporary students of organisation find themselves at a historical juncture and in a social context where all the old ideological “certainties” and technical “fixes” that once underpinned their “discipline” are under attack and seemingly on the retreat’ (1997: 32). Nor is this new. The field had begun to fragment and become more contested within a decade of Perrow’s original musings, and such trends accelerated thereafter. We hope in previous chapters to have captured some of the ebb and flow of such debate. But as an introductory text, we could not let the shadow of grand theory fall too heavily across the pages. Part 3 pulls in the other direction, though nothing too ambitious is attempted. Instead, the emphasis is put on examining more of the theoretical resources that underpin organisational research and analysis, reflecting back on some of the substantive issues we have dealt with elsewhere.

Later in Part III we turn our attention to examining the relations between theories, and between theory and practice. In doing so, we evaluate the usefulness of treating general theories as competing paradigms, an approach pioneered by Burrell and Morgan (1979). A paradigm is a conceptual map that draws on basic differences in the philosophy of science and social theory to enable us to see the world (and the place of organisations within it) in a distinctive way. Particular groups of theorists develop common conceptual languages that are different from and hostile to other paradigms. Parker and G. McHugh comment that:

For Burrell and Morgan, paradigms are incommensurable belief systems that contain the core assumptions to which a research community adheres. Along with Kuhn (1962), they argue that these are not merely ‘opinions’on a particular matter but the ontological and epistemological grounds on which theorists build their particular conceptions of a discipline. (Parker and G. McHugh, 1991: 451)

Leaving aside the controversial ‘incommensurability’ question for the time being, ontology refers to the assumptions we make about what we know and the nature of reality, while epistemology concerns assumptions about how we know things, the grounds of knowledge that influence that often underpin the methodological choices researchers make.

22 Resources for Orthodoxy

If one were to examine the contents of some of the leading organisation theory journals, particularly in Europe, a quite different picture of orthodoxy would emerge from that described in this chapter. Such journals abound with postmodern and other critical perspectives. What, then, is the justification for regarding systems theory and its related ways of thinking as orthodoxy? It is in part historical: this was constructed as the mainstream. It is also geographic: North America remains dominated by what one of its leading defenders describes as a ‘functionalist-positivist’ approach (Donaldson, 1996). Most of all, it is about the unique relationships that organisational analysis has with a practitioner community. Mainstream approaches continue to provide theoretical resources that range from standard academic research to simple ‘how to do it’ manuals. If we were to take a narrower version of management theory, it would be accurate to say that practice has drawn unevenly on two basic traditions: a rational, mechanistic one that came to the fore with Taylor and scientific management, and a stream of more normative, organic thinking that is particularly associated with human relations (Barley and Kunda, 1992). But management thinking, on the surface at least, draws lightly on theory. What are the deeper roots and means of explanation?

Weber, bureaucracy and rationality

We outlined Weber’s views in some detail in Chapter 3, and his writings on bureaucracy reappear in a variety of contexts. Yet his intellectual legacy is, as we shall see, not straightforward, for it is claimed by both mainstream and critical traditions. The basis of the former claim is not difficult to identify. Donaldson affirms that ‘much of Organisation Theory derives from Weber’s (1968) work on authority and bureaucracy’ (1985: 6). If, as one of its advocates asserts, mainstream theory ‘has as its central problematic the design of efficient organisations’ (Hinings, 1988: 2), Weber’s model of bureaucracy remains the template. Donaldson goes on to argue that ‘Organisation Theory seems to be distinguishable as a body of thought by a concern for internal characteristics such as differentiation, standardisation, specialisation, integration, coordination and the like’ (1985: 118). Weber’s characterisations of functional specialisation, hierarchy, depersonalisation, formal rules and the like tend to be projected as general laws, though open systems ideas of transacting with the environment have added in arguments concerning the key contemporary and determinant variable: size, technology or any other factor.

Weber also provides orthodoxy with the theoretical sinew of rationality. Rationalisation was a theory of the transition from traditional to modern societies. For Weber, social stability was established through acceptance of authority as a form of control which people regarded as legitimate. Previous societies had been dominated by limited forms of authority based on charisma (personal qualities of leaders), or tradition (established rights and customs of dominant groups). Weber’s theory went beyond economic

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life. Rationalisation was held to encompass processes as diverse as law, politics, religion and scientific method itself. All were becoming governed by impersonal objectives, procedures and knowledge, embodied in structures and processes which confront ‘individuals as something external to them’ (Brubaker, 1984: 9). The modern world is thus characterised above all by the spread of this formal rationality. Its elements provide a framework for coping with uncertainty, In this sense, mainstream theory draws on the idea that rational calculation makes the world more purposeful and manageable (Clegg, 1990: 32–3).

More specifically we saw in Chapter 3 that Weber believed that the rational organisation of labour required its disciplined subordination to management and organisational goals. In this Taylor was a resource. Weber saw in his schemas for the potentially ‘scientific’ character of management, echoes of the themes of rationality and formal control. Paralleling Weber’s work, Taylor saw management by ‘scientific’ methods as a move away from traditional authority, where owners and managers attempted to control by inefficient, personal means. Orthodoxy also sustains its conservatism through Weber’s emphasis on the market embodying rationality because it was the classic example of a disenchanted, impersonal realm dominated by the calculation of advantage, without intrusion of moral considerations (Holton and Turner, 1989: 179). Alternatives were dismissed: ‘More and more the material fate of the masses depends upon the steady and correct functioning of the increasingly bureaucratic organisations of private capitalism. The idea of eliminating these organisations becomes more and more utopian’ (Weber, 1984: 36).

However, Donaldson and other mainstream writers fail adequately to acknowledge that for Weber rationalisation was a morally and politically problematic development. Weber makes important distinctions between types of rationality, notably formal and substantive. The former refers only to the constraining features of structure and the calculability of techniques and procedures: ‘What makes modern capitalism rational is not its ends but the unprecedented extent to which actions of its economic agents are calculated’ (Sayer, 1991: 96). In contrast, substantive rationality emphasises the dominance of norms and values in the choice of means to ends (Ritzer, 1996: 576). The key point is that while formal techniques are of a specific type, such values and ends inevitably differ. Thus space is opened up for recognition of contested rationalities between groups and individuals. Indeed Weber acknowledged that the formal and substantive were always potentially in conflict, frequently making pessimistic comments about human needs being subordinated to the former. The formally rational, such as the pursuit of profit by merging and ‘asset stripping’ companies, may be substantively irrational in terms of its social consequences. For example, downsized companies may improve short-run profitability but find that they have lost the tacit and organisational knowledge necessary for long-term efficiency and innovation. In this sense Weber does make some separation of rationality and efficiency, not only for the above reason, but because there could in principle be different views of what constitutes either category. For example, workers’ co-operatives and private ownership could both be regarded as efficient on the basis of different value criteria.

These kind of points form part of the basis of a defence of Weber by some writers (such as Albrow, 1992) against the normal way his ideas are used in mainstream theory. But though this has some validity, it is not clear how significant it is. Aside from the fact that Weber is not always clear about the separation and its consequences (see Storey, 1983: 26–34), from the viewpoint of evaluating mainstream perspectives as a whole,

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most theorists influenced by Weber have acted as if rationality and efficiency are the same thing. As a result they have tended to be rather uncritical of existing organisations. Reed notes:

The causal link which he is thought to have identified between rational bureaucracy and technical efficiency provided a substantive focus and theoretical bone of contention from which a general theory of organisations, based on a systems frame of reference, could be constructed in the course of the 1950s. (Reed, 1985: 17).

Weber’s model of bureaucracy has of course been endlessly refined and renewed. As we saw in Chapter 12, some neo-Weberians have sought to offset its simplicities by developing alternative designs within bureaucracy, such as those influenced by contingency models (Fischer and Sirriani, 1984: 9). Others, such as Blau and Gouldner, have built from the distinction between formal and substantive rationality in order to uncover the neglected aspects of the functioning of bureaucratic organisations, their empirical research revealing two key processes. First are the inefficiencies arising from the following of impersonal rules, such as the displacement of the original goals by obsession with narrow interest and ritual by the office holder. Second is the dependence of bureaucratic organisations on informal, innovative behaviour and consensual human relations. These writers have greater affinities with social action theory, which we will examine later. We will also return to examine the alternative, radical structuralist reading of Weber in the next chapter.

Durkheim, human relations and social needs

The other ‘founding father’ of sociology to have a significant impact on organisational analysis has been Durkheim, though there is a marked contrast to Weber. Durkheim’s contribution to understanding the transition to modernity centres on the significance of the division of labour in sustaining the social solidarity necessary for the survival of the ‘organism’ of society or enterprise. Writing in the late nineteenth century, he observed that the more complex division of labour in industrial, urban society was undermining traditional values and social order of a ‘mechanical’ kind held together by faith in a common morality. But at the same time it was laying the basis for a more effective integration of individuals in society, which was labelled ‘organic solidarity’. This advanced industrial, technological division of labour was inevitably based on specialisation, hierarchy and functional interdependence between tasks and occupations. Durkheim recognised that the new arrangements and formal structures contained sources of social disorganisation, conflict and harmful individualism; summed up in the term anomie. Any effective division of labour could therefore only take root and bind people together when it was sustained by new social values, by moral communities such as professional or occupational groups, and when workers had an understanding of their place within the overall scheme of production.

This kind of formulation was later interpreted through mainstream theory in terms of the permanent tension between the technical and formal needs of the organisation and the social needs of those who worked in it. It was therefore management’s role not just to organise the former, but to carry out running repairs on the latter. This necessitated paying specific attention to the informal side of the organisation, particularly to the primary groups to which people belonged, such as workgroups. In the 1920s and

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1930s this theme was taken up and popularised by Elton Mayo, who had identified problems arising from the breakdown of traditional skills and values associated with the rise of mass production. Researchers could help management to reintegrate the worker by identifying social needs and relating them to common values that led to identification with the company. Human relations analysis also drew from a Durkheimean framework, when it ‘defined the anomic consequences of capitalism as abnormal, as a deviation from the ideal circumstances of organic solidarity’ (Hamilton, 1980: 70).

Barnard (1938) extended the original analysis with emphasis on how large-scale organisations could become ’co-operative social systems’, based on specialised competencies and common goals. He more clearly defined the role of the executive and the specialised managerial function in terms of defining and communicating goals, and securing workforce effort. A key feature of the human relations approach is the social engineering role given to management through maintaining equilibrium and integrating the parts of the organisation. The vehicle is not formal structures of co-ordination and command, but values, informal practices and the ‘logic of sentiment’. Though a subordinate aspect of organisational analysis for considerable periods, as we saw in Chapter 15, it has recently reappeared within a new socio-economic context and new management writings on corporate culture such as Peters and Waterman’s In Search of Excellence (1982). Attention is being focused once again on employees’ social needs, the human side of the enterprise, and on creating and sustaining unity through common cultures.

Interestingly, the emphasis on corporate culture clashes with some central features of Durkheim’s perspective that depended on the existence of professions and other intermediary groups to generate moral communities. For Durkheim, the modern individual must be equipped to question moral systems, not just to need to identify with the collective or its symbols (Dahler-Larsen, 1994: 10). In addition, Durkheim provided a critique of market rationality, which tends to foster excessive egoism and acquisitive individualism. This is just one example of a growing trend in social theory to see a different, more critical legacy from Durkheim’s work (Pearce, 1989; Starkey, 1992). But, even more so than Weber, it remains the case that this is not how Durkheim has been used as a resource for orthodoxy.

Systems theory

The roots of systems thinking go back a very long way. As we saw in Chapter 2, engineering ‘systematisers’ were a driving force in the construction of early management theory and practice. Human and non-human entities were seen as interchangeable and manipulable (Shenhav, 1999: 19). While such thinking was limited as theory, its focus on organisations as purposeful, interdependent systems resembles the basic organic analogy used by Durkheim and others, in which all social systems have to adapt to the environment to survive. In such biological analogies, system parts (or sub-systems) are interconnected, and each is functional to the viability of the organisation, for example by generating binding social values. This became a theme of functionalist social theory (Parsons, 1951) which regards social systems as self-regulating bodies, tending towards a state of equilibrium and order. This has long had an influence in organisational theory. In their description and theorisation of the Hawthorne experiments, Roethlisberger and Dickson (1964) talked of industrial organisation in terms of functioning social systems striving for equilibrium under the influence of environmental factors (Reed, 1998: 37). Donaldson (1985: 29) argues that there is movement within equilibrium, but it is

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a process of internal adjustment between the sub-systems and to the environment over time, normally triggered by external change such as those in technologies or markets. Nevertheless any breakdown of order tends to be treated as pathological, and the nonrational elements confined to the informal organisation.

The classical theories, including scientific management and human relations, can be conceived as closed system perspectives, previously discussed in Chapter 3. By treating the organisation as a structure of manipulable parts that could be regulated internally, it appeared as if a rational means–ends relationship could be optimised. It was a question of re-balancing the human and technical, or formal and informal components, when one changed more rapidly than the other (Brown, 1992: 45). This can again be related to functionalist analysis, whose primary assumption is that the components of the structure must be integrated to ensure system survival. Change is likely to occur when ‘the functional contributions of a given structural arrangement are exceeded by dysfunctions associated with the arrangement’ (Tolbert and Zucker, 1996: 176).

The focus of manipulating the parts, as we know, shifted to an open systems approach – organisations coping with uncertainty through exchange and transaction – with contingency theory, with its emphasis on ‘designing organisations rationally so that their internal coherence and external match to their environments are both maximised’ (Tsoukas, 1994c: 4), the most popular variant. As Donaldson (1996: 63) notes, ‘Fit is the underlying key’. While, as we saw in Chapter 5, contingency theorists identify a range of factors that might couple structure and environment, the common theory is structural adaptation to regain fit. In other words, there is a positive performance outcome of a fit between each contingency and one or more aspect of organisational structure. If an organisation moves into misfit, a new phase of structural adaptation begins to regain the desired relationship. Despite such transactions, mainstream organisational analysis has increasingly presented itself as divorced from broader theory. One of Donaldson’s (1985) central arguments is that organisations can be studied as an independent realm. If the outside world comes into it, it is as the ‘environment’, a backcloth against which it is possible to specify relationships between contingencies, structure and performance. As Willmott observes, the various factors in this environment ‘must be registered and controlled if strategic adjustments are to be successfully achieved. There is minimal consideration of the relevance of social theory . . . for the study of organisations’ (1990: 45).

Woodward, one of the most noted contingency theorists, sums up the intellectual confidence felt by those pursuing this approach from the 1950s onwards:

Even more important from the point of view of ultimate theory building is the fact that various schools of thought are beginning to see themselves as concerned with the study of systems ... the starting point is the identification of a system and the subsequent questions asked are very much the same: what are the objectives and strategic parts of the system under review and how are these parts interrelated and interdependent? One result is that those concerned with the study of organisation are beginning to develop a common language, on whatever discipline their work is based. (Quoted in Eldridge and Crombie, 1974: 93)

Donaldson (1996) accurately observes that the systems-contingency approach became the dominant paradigm and there was a considerable period of doing ‘normal science’ (a term taken from Kuhn), and designating the testing of evidence and replication of