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of supervision whose sole function is labour control and discipline. Certain functions may be artificially expanded, and new ones absorbed by bureaucrats themselves as a form of self-preservation. But as Polan notes, bureaucratic forms are a necessary object of analysis in their own right: ‘Only as a result of conceding to the bureaucracy its genuine, legitimate and distinct functions can one begin to determine the boundaries of its powers and construct political control procedures that may successfully police those boundaries’ (1984: 71).

Part of this legitimacy, as du Gay (2000: 4) demonstrates, is to recognise that attributes of the ‘good bureaucrat’ – adherence to procedure, expertise, impersonality and hierarchy – constitute ‘a positive moral and ethical achievement in its own right’ with respect to the particular requirements of equitable treatment of citizens and workers by public administration. For these and other reasons, radical Weberian analysis can act as a corrective to some of the more utopian aspects of the Marxist tradition in which bureaucracy and efficiency are simply reduced to specific class interests. This utopianism is reinforced by giving alternative socialist production relations a utopian capacity to avoid bureaucratisation altogether in a model of ‘total democracy’, based on:

the election of everyone above the level of ordinary worker, with no fixed hierarchy and no-one having the right to give commands (except insofar as this right is temporarily delegated, with the commands always subject to the review of the group as a whole).Moreover,instead of a plethora of rules and an illusory focus on bureaucratically defined expertise . . . regulations are reduced to a minimum, freedom is maximised,and everyone becomes technically competent to do the work. (Clawson, 1980: 16–17)

More realistic radical models emphasise feasible levels of task-sharing, egalitarian reward systems, democratic controls and participation and co-operative cultures (see Sirriani, 1984; Rothschild and Allen Whitt, 1986; K. Ramsay and Parker, 1992). This would result in what might be described as a minimal bureaucracy. Only by recognising certain necessary and distinct functions for bureaucracy can we begin to control and transform them. Clegg and Higgins comment that such arrangements:

will neither eliminate rules nor the division of labour; in this sense it will not eliminate bureaucracy at all. To presume to do so would be chimerical. What we will achieve is a form of bureaucracy – administration by office and rules – which is not premised on hierarchy,but on collectivity;not on authoritarianism but on democracy; a new ideal type of a bureaucratic, democratic and collectivist organisation. (Clegg and Higgins, 1987: 217)

Radical Weberian perspectives are, however, divided on how much scope there is to modify and democratise hierarchical organisations. Orthodox Weberian analysis, by treating rationalisation and bureaucracy as independent, inexorable forces, risks losing sight of the specificity that location within particular modes of production or market systems creates. This insight is the central dividing line between one strand of radical Weberians and orthodox interpretations, for it brings with it a rejection of Weber’s fatalism about the relations between bureaucracy and industrial societies. Radical Weberians believe that bureaucracy is not necessarily universal or inevitable, but rather a pervasive tendency that takes specific forms and therefore can and must be countered.

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Like some contemporary labour process theorists, there is more emphasis on bureaucratic control as a management strategy (Edwards, 1979; Burawoy, 1979; Clawson, 1980). Though not unique to any system of production, bureaucracy has to be explained through its relations with that wider formation. Capitalist social relations are the primary influence on the imperative to appropriate the means of production from workers, though the outcomes are shaped by processes of bureaucratic rationalisation.

A second strand of radical Weberianism retains the traditional pessimism, but combines it with a powerful critique of the negative of rationalisation. This is particularly associated with the influential work of George Ritzer, discussed earlier, particularly in Chapter 13. In The McDonaldization of Society (1993), Ritzer attributes these insights solely to the modern application of Weber’s idea of formal rationality. Elsewhere, however, he notes that, ‘This discussion of the exploitation of customers (and workers) in McDonaldized settings serves to bring together the two great theories in the history of sociology – Weber’s theory of rationalisation and Marx’s theory of capitalist expansion and exploitation’ (Ritzer, 1998: 73). He also acknowledges that his descriptions of the growth of routinised, deskilled ‘McJobs’ parallels Braverman’s analysis of the degradation of labour, while adding an emphasis on service work, the involvement of customers and broader commercial trends not present in labour process theory.

This and other studies of the bureaucratisation of services are radical both as a powerful antidote to fashionable post-bureaucratic discourses, and as a critique of the irrational excesses that happen when formal rationality is taken to dehumanising extremes. Ritzer therefore reminds us of the distinction between formal and substantive rationality that is lost in mainstream readings of Weber. However, he also inherits and reproduces the weaknesses of a purely Weberian approach, notably its pessimistic fatalism. Rejecting the Marxian idea that there is a core of creative labour that can resist the rationalised and exploitative character of work, ‘McDonaldization becomes the kind of iron cage described by Weber from which there is no escape and, worse, not even any interest in escaping’ (Ritzer, 1998: 67). All we are allowed to do is ‘rage’ against the destructive, anti-social character of McDonaldized systems, mitigating their worst excesses through personal gestures in the sphere of consumption (1996: 304–5). This kind of dystopian radicalism brings to mind many of the contemporary applications of Foucault (see Chapter 8). This is not surprising because both frameworks remove labour as an active agency, or at least one that is capable of substantial dissent and resistance. Indeed, O’Neill (1986) argues that one can trace the idea of disciplinary society, with its imagery of loyal workers and committed citizens in prison, factories, hospitals and school, directly from Weber to Foucault. Whether this is accurate or not, as Smart (1999) and other essays in his edited collection make clear, Ritzer neglects and underestimates the varieties of consumer, worker and ecological resistance to McDonaldization.

This is merely one of the reasons why Ritzer’s claims for the supposed inexorability of rationalisation are one-sided and unconvincing. Much of the evidence for the ‘inevitable expansion’ of McDonaldization is other fast food operations. When it strays from that territory, we get fleeting and fragmentary examples from dumbed-down newspapers, assembly-line pornography, and bureaucratised birth and death (1996: 294–302). Yet, as he later admits, counter-examples, even within the same processes, can easily be identified. The central problem is twofold. First, while fast food is an important sector, it cannot be used as the template for economic development in a globalising economy. Paradoxically, while Ritzer does add useful insights, his thesis is at its strongest when it is describing classic labour process concerns such as fragmented work and the

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separation of conception and execution through scripted service interactions. When moving onto a broader terrain, he is constrained, by both his largely American focus of experience, and the separation of rationalisation and capitalism we identified earlier. Locating the former within the latter would reveal that fast food is only one template of rationalisation. Not only does labour act as a constraint to rationalisation, national and regional patterns of competition produce diverse market rationalities and competing models of production.

Smart suggests that Ritzer fails to make sufficient distinction between fast food and formal rationality on the one hand, and rationalisation and commodification on the other. Much of the expansion of standardised products and services can be explained predominantly by the ‘relentless pursuit of capital accumulation’ into new global markets (1999: 4). Kellner (1999) makes a similar warning against excessive dependence on Weber, and calls for a synthesis with Marxian analysis in order to comprehend the combined instrumental rational of production and consumption. A thesis with a bit more Marx and a little less Weber also has the additional benefit that economic rationalisation need not be presented as the ‘irrationality of rationality’, but as the normal pursuit of profit within the capitalist mode of production (Smart, 1999: 16).

These weaknesses should not detract from the achievements of even a pessimistic Weberian analysis. As we argued in Chapter 12, there is a strong case that a modified and updated Weberian analysis of bureaucracy and rationalisation remains indispensable for an understanding of contemporary work organisation. With the relevant elements derived from a Marxist tradition, they emphasise the continuity in social relations in and beyond large-scale organisations in a capitalist society. It is precisely this notion of continuity that has been under attack in the last decade.

The postmodern challenge to rationality

Postmodernism is the least cohesive of the general social theories we have examined in this part of the book, the term being loosely applied to an overlapping set of ideas about society and knowledge deriving from French social theorists such as Baudrillard, Lyotard and Derrida, which have become increasingly influential in organisation theory in recent years (Clegg, 1990; Parker, 1992; Hassard and Parker, 1993). It lays claim to be the most radical break from orthodoxy, but the orthodoxy is different from the systems and related ideas we have talked about so far. Anything with ‘post’ automatically specifies its opposite, so the orthodoxy must be modernism. This may appear puzzling: after all, existing social theories have not traditionally been defined by that label. But as we indicated in Chapter 12, for Clegg (1990: 2), now having shuffled off his Marxist coil, organisation theory is a ‘creature’ of modernity. Similarly, Gergen (1992, 211–12) includes almost the full range of organisational and behavioural theories in the ‘modernist’ camp.

So, what is modernity? In some usages, it designates a type of society or epoch (the ontological dimension); at its simplest, industrialism in which the dominant feature is the large-scale, hierarchical bureaucracy concerned with rationality and planning throughout social and economic life. Willmott sums up the argument thus: ‘Its ideal is the expertly designed, perfectly ordered and controlled world in which all ambivalence and indeterminacy are attenuated, if not wholly eliminated’ (1992: 70). But within such conceptions we see the seeds of another designation, modernism as a way of thinking, a way of representing knowledge about society and organisations (the epistemological

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dimension). Above all, it is held to be characterised by a concern for developing the ‘grand narrative’, a coherent story about the development of the social and natural world, revealed through the application of reason and science (Cooper and Burrell, 1988). Modernism is thus equated with positivism, the pursuit of objective truths through a ‘logico-scientific mode of knowing’ in which events are explained in terms of general laws and clear cause and effect relations (Czarniawska, 1999).

Postmodernists develop a dual challenge in both these dimensions of what society is (ontology) and how we should look at it (epistemology). We have already outlined the basis of the former in Chapter 11. Rapid social change, the shift from a society based on production to one based on information, the emergence of segmented markets dominated by more discerning consumers, and turbulent environments are said to be demanding diversity and flexibility from work organisations which are released from their bureaucratic iron cage. Though it is not their exclusive property, postmodernists concerned with the workplace embrace the notion of the post-bureaucratic organisation in which the old specialised division of labour and centralised control no longer holds sway. (See Palmer and Hardy, 2000.) In turn, social theorists with a broader societal remit use this tenuous evidence of ‘debureaucratisation’ and ‘reprofessionalisation’ to sustain a broader vision of postmodernisation (Crook, Paluski and Waters, 1992). We have made an extensive critique of such claims in Chapter 12, so for most of this section, we will concentrate on the other, epistemological, dimension of postmodernism. Arguably, this discussion is directed at the issues that postmodern thinking is having greatest influence on in organisation and management theory. For example, Fournier and Grey’s (2000) useful and influential account of postmodern influences on ‘critical management studies’ confirms the view that critical scholarship is moving away from challenging what society and organisations look like, towards alternative ways of seeing. (See Thompson, 2001 for a discussion of this.)

At the heart of this is the postmodern rejection of the grand narrative. The search for the coherent story (Braverman’s theory of the degradation of the labour process in the twentieth century), or the total picture (Weber’s account of the interrelated processes of rationalisation) is both pointless, because of the fragmentation of economic and cultural life, and dangerous, because it submerges diverse voices and the multiplicity of ‘local’ phenomena. Difference, incoherence and fluidity are preferable and more realistic because meaning cannot be fixed; it is what we make it through language that constructs, rather reflects, reality.

One variant of this kind of thinking can be seen in Baudrillard and his concept of hyperreality. In a media-saturated world which thrives on spectacle and encourages politicians to employ ‘spin doctors’ to put a twist on events before and after they happen, it becomes impossible to distinguish between the real and fictive. We cannot refer to distortion of reality, because there are too many realities for anything to be measured against. Similarly, Alvesson and Deetz (1996) argue that, as society becomes more fragmented and hyperreal, discourses multiply, reality becomes virtual and any forces that stabilise identity are lost. To return to Baudrillard, his most (in)famous claim was that during the Gulf conflict, it was impossible to know whether any events had taken place. This was literally a war of words in which all our information was second-hand, simulated and structured through media manipulation (for a critique see Norris, 1992).

While some postmodernists seek a softer version that ‘recognises the ontological existence of the social world, however precarious and fluid’ (Palmer and Hardy, 2000: 265), the core view remains that there is no way of distinguishing between

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representation and reality, with ‘truth’ becoming merely a product of language games. We have Derrida’s ‘nothing exists outside the text’, taken as the interplay of different discourses (Hassard, 1994: 9). In this context, the task of the social theorist is not to construct the authentic explanation, but to deconstruct texts in order to reveal the contradictions, origins, instabilities and gaps. For example, this process of rereading may uncover the silences on gender issues in the classics of ‘malestream’ organisation theory (Calás and Smircich, 1992). While such treatment is ‘exposed’ to public gaze, it may be regarded as inevitable, for discourse always bears the imprint of the social identity of its producers. This notion – labelled ‘perspectivism’ – adds a further layer to the conception of multiple viewpoints and realities. In one sense it is an absolute relativism, moving beyond a contingent explanation for being unable to access the real (because it is too fragmented) to an all-purpose one (‘truth’ is merely the will to power). The outcome is, nevertheless the same – truth claims cannot be adjudicated: ‘all knowledge is self-referential, coherent only in terms of its own discourse, since there exist no meta-justification agencies, no higher external authority, by reference to which claims to knowledge may be judged’ (Coleman, 1991: 26).

In our previous discussions in this book, an emphasis on the primacy of language and discourse emerged most strongly in Chapter 9, through an examination of the ideas of Foucault and poststructuralism on power. Here, power is not a thing possessed by sovereign agents, but operates through discourses that produce knowledge and disciplinary practices which define and constrain the identities of workers, consumers and citizens. As we argued there, the danger is that any subject of action is lost in the interplay of discourses (Newton, 1994). But perhaps the most famous illustration in organisation theory of the abandonment of the search for the truth lying beneath the surface of social relations is Morgan’s Images of Organisation (1986). Morgan does not just analyse organisational life in terms of a series of metaphors – the machine, the psychic prison, the tool of domination – but treats those images as of equal validity. Despite representing contradictory ‘claims’, they are all ‘true’ in their own terms; their ‘cognitive power and empirical veracity can only be assessed in terms of the purposes for which they are constructed and used . . . reality is what you make of it’ (Reed, 1990b: 36).

Also influential in applications of postmodern and poststructural epistemology is the shift of concern from analyses of control and rules to the construction of organisational life through cultural and symbolic resources, as we saw in Chapter 13. Alvesson and Deetz argue that as economic activity shifts from manufacturing to services, issues of corporate culture and identity rise up the managerial agenda, and that ‘Objects for management control are decreasingly labour power and behaviour and increasingly the mindpower and subjectivities of employees’ (1996: 192). In a period where lean production and downsizing have been the primary means of corporate rationalisation, this judgement looks particularly misplaced. But it also reveals the tension between postmodernism as epoch and epistemology. Logically, an approach that rejects narrative and totalising pictures should be hostile to or uninterested in an alternative conception of society. Alvesson and Deetz are sensitive to the problem of ‘proclaiming a new postmodern epoch’, given weak empirical indicators and the danger of relabelling old ideas. At the same time, and within two paragraphs, they cannot resist justifying their claims of shifting managerial practices by reference to ‘new social conditions’ (1996: 192). Such writing is unfortunately typical of a new form of cultural historicism in which the source of evolutionary development is no longer technological

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and economic imperatives, but the management of values and engineering of the soul (Reed: 1996). As Reed goes on to note, the appeal of cultural historicism is primarily ideological: it provides a new vocabulary of motive for organisational change in circumstances where old managerial and corporatist rationales lack legitimacy.

There is, admittedly, a difference between those theorists such as Clegg who have been quite happy to use conventional tools of rational enquiry to develop accounts of postmodernity, and those such as Cooper and Burrell (1988: 106) who, in their own words, prefer the discursive ‘production of organisation’ to the ‘organisation of production’. But the distinction is not as clear-cut as it seems. Continuities and commonalities arise in a variety of ways. In both dimensions there is a shared language of fragmentation and fracturing of the theoretical and practical order (Reed, 1991: 125). This imagery is taken from the origins of postmodernism as a perspective in art and culture, where eclecticism, stylistic promiscuity, paradox and mixing of modes replace hierarchical judgements of value and distinctions between high art and popular culture (Featherstone, 1988). They are also linked by a rejection of the ‘false promises’ of rational design, the idea that knowledge should offer methodologies for defining the most rational means of controlling complex, large-scale organisations (Hassard, 1994, 4). Finally and most importantly, there is the inconvenient and much observed fact that postmodernism is itself a meta-narrative (Boyne and Rattsani, 1990: 39–40). The need to create pictures of reality is inescapable in the illustrative and conceptual acts of theorising, and there is ample evidence that writers such as Lyotard, Morgan and Baudrillard draw on post-industrialism, information society and other models which take as their starting point some kind of epochal break. (For a critique, see Thompson, 1993.) Even those who have most resolutely avoided any engagement with the empirical cannot resist reference to ‘the changing conditions of modern life’, to justify their calls for conceptual shifts in the body of organisation theory, or in this case the theory of the organisational body (Dale and Burrell, 2000: 25).

In practice, then, the post-bureaucratic organisation located in the postmodern epoch is a rival narrative to those traditions deriving from Marx and Weber. As we saw in Chapter 14, the evidence for any substantial presence for such a mode of organising is either absent or misunderstood. Postmodern theorists appear to see little problem in sharing the agenda and language of popular management texts on such issues. (See Clegg and Hardy, 1996: 11.) Organisations may not be the ‘tightly-coupled’ rational machines beloved of systems theory, but when Hassard argues that ‘Above all, we should seek to explode the myth of robust structural relations through establishing the fragile character of organisational life’ (1994: 16), this is merely standing orthodoxy on its head, rather then a realistic picture of the modern firm.

Just as there is considerable continuity in capitalist relations of production and in rationalisation processes, large-scale organisations are considerably more durable and able to marshal powerful resources than postmodernists allow. In attacking the second edition of this book, along with the work of Salaman, Dale and Burrell (2000: 20–4) object to any reference to organisations as regular, patterned activities and corporate entities with powers over and above their members. It remains our view that power converts ambiguity into order, though the latter is not synonymous with the equilibrium of systems theory, because it is always contested and disrupted. New forms of theorising are in danger of moving so far away from rationality that they are unable to conceptualise organisation at all, particularly at a macro level. As Reed (1996: 42) notes, postmodernism, paradoxically reinforced by post-industrial images of decentred,

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fragmented economies, has retreated into local aspects and small pictures of organisational life. Willmott makes a similar point when observing that a focus on local diversities, for example in the work of Clegg, can distract from the broader ‘patterning of process of economic and organisational development’ (1995: 41).

This is not just a question of the nature of contemporary structure and agency, but of the equally flawed alternative ways of seeing. As Reed comments:

The theoretical glue once provided by an assumed epistemological commitment to rational analysis of ’organised rationality’ has given way under the pressure exerted by a cacophony of voices which celebrate the reality of multiple and contested organisational rationalities which cannot be assessed or evaluated in any coherent way. (Reed, 1993: 181)

It is true, as we have continually stressed in this book, that there are conflicting ends and means pursued by rival organisational actors, and a diversity of organising logics and institutional settings. But contested practical rationalities need to be understood on rational grounds. How can we debate the character of organisational life if we cannot compare and evaluate theoretical claims or Morgan’s ‘images’? If these remain selfcontained, self-referential discourses, as Reed notes elsewhere (1991: 38), organisation theory just becomes a supermarket where metaphors or other means of representation are purchased according to preference and power.

There is an increasing and dangerous tendency in organisation theory to treat management strategy, corporate culture, Taylorism, Fordism and so on, only or even primarily as discourses. When presented to us as texts, the subsequent deconstructions and rereadings are sometimes illuminating, but at the cost of confinement to the world of inter-textuality. The interplay of agency and structures has a real material existence. In his critique of postmodernism, Tsoukas persuasively illustrates the point:

It is because actions are not taken and voices not uttered, in a vacuum that not all accounts are equally valid. No matter how much I shout at my bank manager he is not likely to lend me money if I am unemployed.This is not a figment of my imagination. Others also tell me they have had similar experience. (Tsoukas, 1992: 644)

It is because we need to understand these similarities of experience and their institutional underpinnings that some form of theoretical narrative is necessary. What we know is inherently incomplete, but we require a capacity to generate generalisable knowledge and to identify trends, if not laws; and we need empirical work that can help distinguish between rhetorics of the powerful and the realities of power. We will return to the question of evidence and truth claims in the discussion of paradigm incommensurability.

A masculine logic?

There is a final challenge to rationality when postmodernism is combined with some perspectives within feminism to argue that the dominant Weberian conceptualisation of rationality is a male one. Explanations have overlapping emphases. Some (Martin, 1990; Bologh, 1990; Putnam and Mumby, 1993) refer to the stress on instrumentalism, logic and calculability in the public sphere and the exclusion of emotionality, intuitive

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experiences and the private realm. Others lean towards a version of perspectivism in which masculinity is the driving force. For example, Hearn (1992) argues that it is mostly men who manage the introduction of rational method and men and masculinities that will be affected by it; while Bologh (1990: xv) addresses the ghost of Weber thus: ‘Your vision, extensive and expansive as it is, is the vision from your body inscribed with your gender, your place, your time’. She shows that he had a patriarchal perspective based on ideas of mastery, control and impersonality.

The result is often projected as a distinction between male and female types of social action or rationality; the former embodied in authoritarian methods of control or hierarchical ways of decision-making, the latter in ways of organising dependent on emotional connection, nurturance, intimacy and co-operation (Ferguson, 1984; Grimshaw, 1986; Bologh, 1990). The glass ceiling is left intact in favour of constructing an entirely different kind of building – a ‘womanspace’ (Calás and Smircich, 1996: 227). That alternative, most forcefully put in Ferguson’s (1984) The Feminist Case Against Bureaucracy, is influenced by relationships developed in the private realm, or friendship relations in small-scale women’s movement structures such as rape crisis centres and bookstores which run on the basis of personal relations, skill sharing and egalitarianism, rather than formal rules and power games. Both attack liberal feminism (Kanter, 1993) for pursuing female interests within existing organisations.

Such distinctions can also be epistemological. Coleman invites us to ‘consider organisational thinking from a specifically woman-centred perspective’(1991: 6), which rejects ‘propositional knowledge’ and embraces the feeling element of the learning process. Such specific ‘feminist perspectives’ are held to be coherent with current developments in postmodern theory. She says that it is ‘ironic’ that all the postmodern philosophers who write in ways that develop feminist positions are men. Ironic or not, it is difficult to see how it is possible to hold both views at the same time. Modes of thinking are either gender-specific or they are not.

Though normally distinguished from biological determination, such arguments are flawed and dangerous. Witz and Savage (1992: 20) and Due Billing argue that Ferguson’s work is not established on any secure analytical basis. Due Billing observes that ‘There is a tendency in Ferguson’s text to operate with an ideal (essentialistic) notion of “woman” and to equate femaleness with an ideology about female values’ (1994: 177). Some of the mistaken outcomes of such thinking were seen in Chapter 11, in which a number of contemporary management writers were asserting the existence of specifically female ways of managing without any convincing evidence. Similar problems have been identified with essentialist and determinist perspectives that assert that technology is in its essence masculine. As Gill and Grint note, ‘it is not necessary to argue that technologies embody gender relations in order to highlight the relevance of the wider matrix of meanings ascribed to technologies for gender relations’ (1996: 7, original emphasis; and see Webster, 1996: 22–32). In principle, poststructuralist perspectives should be wary of such thinking, given their emphasis on the social construction of knowledge. However the strong pull of perspectivism and the desire to identify modernism with a particular conception of rationality mean that talk of masculine institutions (Hassard et al., 2000: 9) and reason (Dale and Burrell, 2000: 17) are commonplace.

To return to Weber: as a man of his times, he may well have been guilty of ‘masculinism’, though the stereotype of a lack of interest in the emotional may be more complicated (Albrow, 1992). More importantly, concepts and practice are distinguishable from context. The production of knowledge is an undoubtedly gendered one.

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Connections between masculinity, male privilege and the reproduction of organisation in the public sphere has been (Hearn, 1992) and still is strong (Roper, 1994). However, ideas of an essentially male rationality are static and deterministic, given that the overlay of rationality with masculinity is itself historically and socially produced. The fact that men have dominated women or had systematic advantages within the division of labour within bureaucracies does not make bureaucracies male. Some of the same objections can be made to previously-identified arguments that there is an alternative feminist mode of organising to an inherently male bureaucracy. A very effective critique of these views is developed by Due Billing (1994; see also Witz and Savage, 1992). Not only it is impossible to evade power, even in ‘friendship organisations’, women have been changing bureaucracies and successfully challenging their gender bias and male cultures. As we saw in Chapter 10, women as well as men can and do benefit from bureaucracy, and can pursue successful struggles within rule-governed, instrumental processes. This may not be as strange as it seems: ‘Weber regards the “formalistic impersonality” of bureaucratic administration – its instituted blindness to inherited differences in status and prestige – as a source of democratic equalisation’ (du Gay, 2000: 42). For this and other reasons, ‘Rules could also be viewed as an asset for the people working in the organisation’ (Due Billing, 1994: 183). For whatever the limits of formal equal opportunity policies or sexual harassment codes (Cockburn, 1991), it remains the case that they are an advance on the informal culture and rules of the game within which male power operates. As du Gay (2000: 55–7) notes, in this context, postmodern calls to ‘repersonalise’ the public realm are both naively romantic and practically dangerous.

Bureaucracy cannot just be set aside as alien practical and conceptual territory, because it is not just a discourse. Rationalisation was and is a fundamental principle of life in industrial societies and does not ‘belong’ to men. For example, calculable rules, whether applied to feelings, job specifications or financial reporting systems, can be initiated and operated by women as employers and managers, and experienced at the receiving end by men and women. The task of organisation theory, is surely, as Ramsay and Parker (1992) argue, to plot the intersection between patriarchy, rationality and bureaucracy, not to collapse each into the other.

A further ‘intersection’ that has been a central theme of the book is that between the sociological/structural and psychological dimensions of action. Our view has been that different modes of analysis are needed to deal with the complexities and levels of human behaviour. People are constituted as individual subjects at the level of their identities, emotions and self-directed actions. But that process is informed by the same ‘structural’ phenomena that shape managerial strategies or job design, such as the social relations of production between capital, labour or gender. The next chapter examines some of the theoretical resources we have engaged with, in a similar manner to the previous discussion.

24 Critical Social Psychologies

Mainstream theory has long included a psychological component, but has tended to treat people in organisations as ‘psychologically determined entities’ with abstractedly and individually defined needs. In addition the ‘sciences’ of organisational behaviour have managed to produce better ways of manipulating the identities and behaviour of employees, but have not succeeded in addressing the problems that make such manipulation necessary. A redefinition of the traditional agenda of organisational psychology requires that individual, group and organisational behaviour be placed in a wider context, particularly the social relations of production and gender relations. Specifically, this would account for subjective experience, while avoiding the over-utilisation of rationalcognitive explanations which focus on the individual determinants and constraints of purposive activity. Instead we seek to maintain a focus on how subjectivity is constructed and reproduced within organisational structures.

Given these requirements and the limitations of existing perspectives, it is understandable that over time we have seen the development of a variety of critical social psychologies. This label covers a multiplicity of radical viewpoints which have utilised concepts from mainstream western social psychology, Marxist and humanist perspectives and Freudian theory. The attempts to formulate ‘Marxist psychologies’ (Schneider, 1975; Seve, 1978; Volpert, Hacker and Von Cranach, 1982; Leonard, 1984) are of particular interest to us because the explanation of social behaviour is located specifically in an understanding of work organisations. This production of subjectivity and consciousness in the wider social world is also explored by Henriques et al. (1984) through an articulation with psychoanalysis and discourse theory that attempts to move beyond both individual and social determinisms. The more recent developments in poststructuralist and postmodern critique, heavily influenced by Potter and Wetherall’s (1987) Discourse and Social Psychology, are themselves as varied as anything that has gone before.

Internal critique

Social psychology has historically encompassed a wide variety of critical traditions differing mainly in their concerns for internal critique of methodology and content, as opposed to a broader critique of the sociocultural relations of the knowledge they produce (Wexler, 1983). From work such as that of Moscovici (1972), Gergen (1973) and Rosnow (1981), we gain a focus on the methodological limitations of social psychology and its lack of relevance to social issues. These are essentially calls for reform, which in their understanding of social relations in terms of relatively fixed characteristics and roles follows the liberal tradition of social emancipation through individual transformation. Alternatively we have the vein of critique characterised by Armistead (1974), Archibald (1978) and Larsen (1980), which focuses on examining radical alternatives within social psychology. Although not always consistent with each