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other, these critiques maintain a perspective on the repressive nature of sociallyorganised relationships. Appealing to both humanist and Marxist theory, they are concerned with social transformations leading towards human emancipation, and like the more conventional methodological critique, they also appeal to internal procedural reform. Being essentially theoretical critiques, their focus tends to enshrine critique as a principle in itself.

There have been specific developments in internal critique that are more recognisant than the mainstream previously was of the sociocultural relations of knowledge. Though still disparate in perspective, these approaches place an emphasis on factors such as social networks, cognition and identity, albeit with the more prosaic aims of reforming the discipline rather than the subject or the client. This is exemplified in Hollway’s (1991) proposals on a movement towards a work psychology reflexive of the relations of knowledge, power and practice, and also in Hosking and Morley’s (1991) cognitive/political psychology of organising. Hosking and Morley (1991) in their focus on entitative approaches to persons and organisations (see Chapters 14 and 19), implicitly recognised reification as impacting on attempts to study organisational behaviour. They are keen to articulate what they term the ‘skilful organising processes’ with which actors ‘mutually create’ the networks through which they pursue their personal projects.

Wider developments in social cognition are exemplified in Augoustinos and Walker’s (1995) attempts to integrate American individualism with the more ideological concerns for identity found in European social psychology. They emphasise linkages between individual and collective processes, and discuss at length the consequences of the ‘anticognitive rhetoric associated with discourse analysis and the antipathy of the mainstream’s response to the “turn to language”’ (1995: 285). This anti-cognitivist stance leads others such as Haslam (2000) largely to ignore the kinds of critique coming from postmodern and discourse analysis as discussed in Chapter 25. Their focus is instead on the extent to which paradigmatic conceptions of organisation, social context and psychological processes can be integrated through the social identity approach as summarised in Figure 26.1.

Though neither radical in comparison to Armistead and others, nor expressly critical, these approaches represent a shift in line with that from micro towards macro organisation behaviour, as identified by Nord and Fox (1996, see Chapter 15). It remains to be seen whether a coherent critical social and organisational psychology can be carved out at this meso level. However the willingness of such an approach to engage with essentialist theory and positivist data in a pragmatic fashion may make it a more solid foundation for a critical psychology than the Marxist and postmodern approaches we will discuss below.

Marxist psychology?

Marxist contributions to psychology, in their understanding of subjectivity at work, begin with the concept of alienation, the estrangement of creative capacities which means that ‘work is external to the worker, that it is not part of his nature, and that, consequently, he does not fulfil himself in his work but denies himself’ (Marx, 1963: 124–5). The reference to a ‘human nature’ is not to an eternal set of values or behaviours such as aggression or jealousy beloved of reactionary thinkers, but rather to certain characteristics which distinguish man’s species-being, such as the capacity for purposeful and reflective action.

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high

dimensions

Human

Social

Relations

Identity

Approach

Approach

contextualsocialthe

organisationalof life

Social

Cognition

Approach

of

Economic

Individual

Analysis

low

Approach

Differences

Approach

low

Analysis of psychological process

high

D i f f e r e n c e s b e t w e e n o r g a n i s a t i o n a l p a r a d i g m s i n t e r m s F I G U R E 2 4 . 1 o f t h e i r a t t e n t i o n t o s o c i a l a n d p s y c h o l o g i c a l

d i m e n s i o n s o f o r g a n i s a t i o n a l l i f e

Source: reproduced with permission from S. A. Haslam (2000) Psychology in Organizations: The Social Identity Approach, London: Sage.

Alienation is given specific and concrete form by its location in the capitalist labour process; individual needs and capacities are subordinated to the requirements of capital accumulation, with the psychological consequence that the worker feels a stranger in his or her work. Management, though, still needs to engage the subjectivity and tacit skills of the workforce at some level to ensure profitable production, for example through quality circles. Linked to the concept of alienation is that of commodity fetishism. The socially-constructed relations between labour and capital embodied in the organisation of production and exchange are experienced as an alien power and as the natural order of things. This is then reinforced by the dominant ideologies which proclaim, for example, that the operation of the market is determined by laws of supply and demand beyond human planning and control.

The problem with constructing a critical psychology from Marxism is that there are no adequate tools for understanding how alienated social relations are subjectively experienced and acted on by the individual. Marxism tends to deal with individuals only as bearers of economic categories such as labour and capital, and many social scientists influenced by Marxism have explicitly rejected any psychological explanation, as with Clegg and Dunkerley’s (1980) work. It is certainly necessary to have an account of the material structures which shape our experiences and personalities. But this does not mean that people are simply ‘bearers’ or that attitudes and behaviour can be ‘read off’ from material circumstances (Leonard, 1984: 25). A purely structural analysis, even where it

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allows for human action and resistance, fails to get sufficiently inside those routine everyday experiences in which people react, adapt, modify and consent to work relations.

Knights and Collinson (1987) recognise that Marxist and labour process literatures tend to produce critiques of social structures and institutions that take as given the behavioural practices reproducing our concerns with identity. Such structures are both consequences of, and give rise to, the behavioural routines through which we generate secure identities for ourselves. Without accounts of identity, then, analysis of structures and the power relations and strategies through which they are maintained will always be incomplete. ‘The absence of this social psychology from labour process theory means that it is unable to recognise how individuals . . . seek security either through controlling, and/or subordinating themselves to, others’, (Knights and Collinson, 1987: 171). In Marxist psychologies this often goes further, with the labelling of individuals who do not recognise their common class interests as manifesting false consciousness. This denies the validity of what people think or feel, merely because they do not correspond to a set of imputed interests they are supposed to have.

The dearth of an analysis of identity helps explain why Marxists have had a tendency to try a forced marriage with Freudianism. This led to the appropriation of ideas such as that of the unconscious and the dynamic model of personality (Schneider, 1975; Deleuze and Guattari, 1977), though for some this was always an attempt to reconcile the irreconcilable (O’Neill, 1985). More recently Ibanez and Ininguez’ (1997) Critical Social Psychology, a series of readings, has claimed to bring the diverse trends of poststructuralist and postmodern critique together with debates over the possibilities of a Marxist psychology. However what the contributors show us mainly is that the appropriation of identity by relativists has meant that debate has focused on more fundamental issues.

The more recent relativist fetish in social psychology simultaneously transforms and reproduces, celebrates and laments the impossibility of truth and the fragility of analysis. Relativism appears to be radical, but mirrors empiricism in traditional psychology (Parker, 1997: 164).

Parker, though willing to engage with postmodernism, is more concerned to promote a critical realism, but at the same time gets caught up in debates surrounding ego psychology and psychoanalysis. Others, such as Rosier (1997: 108) are suspicious of any attempts to produce compatibility between Marxism and postmodernism, while Reicher (1991) notes that the anti-essentialist stand of the relativists makes it difficult for them to admit the commonality of pluralism that they share with Marxists. The difficulty here is the lack of Marxism in the Marxist psychology, characterised by moves towards humanism rather than back to materialism. Any optimism in these readings over the possibility of real contributions to Marxist psychologies seems to stem from conceptions of collective identity and action. As Spears notes:

Collective identity thus evokes a potentially powerful social reality beyond the individual and prevents agency dissolving into individualistic idealism. In these terms political resistance and change transcend the agency/structure dualism,by demonstrating the social dimensions of self, and the agency of social structure. (Spears, 1997: 19)

Parker and Spears’ (1996) collection of readings gives a more comprehensive account of

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developments in radical and Marxist psychology. However, as indicated in the previous section, what may prove more fruitful in the long term would be a close consideration from Marxist perspectives of the social cognition/identity approach. For example Klandermans and Oegma’s (1992, in Haslam, 2000: 280–1) schematic of social identity in different phases of collective action gives indications of how this might be begun.

What Marxist psychologies teach us is that the search for a secure identity or sense of solid self can be self-defeating. This is either because the individual occupies a range of positions or has interests that pull identity in different directions (Henriques et al., 1984), or because identities, like commodities, become fetishised (Willmott, 1989), treated as a thing to which there is no alternative. This may lead individuals to a selfdefeating project of continual reinvestment in the search for security, which in turn reproduces the very institutions that constrained their experiences in the first place. But at the same time, such perspectives can over-state trends of this kind. Employees’ pursuit of identity, whether social, occupational, class or gender, has always been tied to formal and informal self-organisation in the labour process. Thus not only do we generate positive meaning and attachments in social and superordinate identities, the collective action and ‘misbehaviour’ generated becomes a continual problem for management, and the legitimation a problem for the continued development of technologies of regulation.

From critical theory to postmodernism

There is also a strand of critique which stems from the fact that psychological knowledge and technique continues to be an important operational element of organisational strategy regardless of the relative lack of success in generating intrinsic motivation and commitment. Psychological knowledge is assumed to provide both theoretical legitimacy and technical assistance to projects aimed at the control and utilisation of the ‘human resource’ in a rational-efficient manner. The ‘real’ psychology here is simply in the name: once you internalise the discourse constructing people as human resources, the rest is just window dressing.

Such a focus characterises much of the postmodern contribution to social psychology, drawing from the ‘anything goes’ methodology of Feyerabend (1975) and tradition of the Frankfurt School. The common theme in the latter, for example in the work of Horkheimer, Adorno, Marcuse and latterly Habermas, was the examination of the role of ideologies in the production of our knowledge of the social contexts in which we exist. This enabled a self-reflexive critique of how social psychology both operates to uphold the current social order, and at the same time works against the possibility of a socially-transforming discipline. The image produced (see Thompson and McHugh, 1995: 321–5, 385) is of an instrumentalised culture where psychology, in servicing and refining control procedures, acts to blind individuals to their capacities and lock them into dependence on commodity relations by presenting these as the inevitable ‘natural order’. However desirable and probably necessary, a psychology based on this variant of critical theory will probably not provide a great deal of competition to current practices in terms of their influence on and role in HRM strategies. Indeed Spears (1997: 4) notes that the putative ‘critical’ paradigm in social psychology could not, in its ‘isolated critique’, challenge the ‘paper mills of positivism’ in terms of the production of practices. Criticism, when elevated to an emancipatory practice in itself, cannot compete with the packaged solutions and prescriptions of the mainstream, reducing further the chance that alternative conceptual frameworks will lead to effective practices.

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This limitation is reproduced in more recent critiques influenced by postmodernism. In line with the project of reviewing and ‘reconnecting’ the current state of critical social psychology, the contributors to the Ibanez and Ininguez text discussed above raise questions and produce much in the way of methodological speculation, but in the end come no closer to any real integration. What we find is largely an iterative debate over realism versus relativism and their respective takes on social construction and political/ideological action.

Just as realism can be seen to buttress positivist science and all of the sins of certainty and reification, so can relativism be seen to signal an absence of any political commitment or critique, or at least a solid platform (a foundation) on which to ground action. (Spears, 1997: 9)

In the end it is the lack of engagement with the traditional topics of social psychology that is most disappointing here. There is more concern for metatheory and the ‘reflexively moderated criticism’ (Potter, 1997: 48) of pseudo-methodologies such as critical polytextualism, than for critical evaluation of what mainstream and radical approaches might have to offer. Critical social psychology is rightly reflective of the desire to democratise research and transform subjects into participants, but has taken this so far that it loses all relevance to everyday experience: ‘At best we can hope to have not helped to launch a textual chlorofluorocarbon – a compound that eats the very flux in which we live!’ (Stainton-Rogers and Stainton-Rogers, 1997: 51)

What we have here is a desire for critique that at best does no harm and indeed is not capable of doing any, in that it is indecipherable to any but its acolytes. Much of critical social psychology has lost the desire to be critical of anything but itself and its own roots, reducing both structural and cognitive accounts to mere objects of self-reflexive literary criticism. We might see this as a case of cutting off your nose to spite your face, except that it is more one of cutting off your body to spite your head.

While the mainstream agenda in organisational behaviour continues with its traditional concerns, labour process theory and critical organisational psychology have grasped the nettle of subjectivity with some enthusiasm. This has been boosted by the previously-discussed rise of postmodern challenge and its meta-spirals of reflexive discourse. This is not to say that the values inherent in ‘new thinking’ (Burrell, 1994) are not welcome, and indeed they provide a crucial route for the incorporation of issues of subjectivity into organisational behaviour.

The focus on management found almost everywhere today produces an appearance that the workforce is steadily becoming unreachable as a subject of study, except perhaps in case studies of organisational ‘success’. This is especially true of attempts to research what Corbett calls the ‘dark side’ of organisational behaviour in issues such as ‘drug use, unethical behaviour, the secret workings of organisational cabals and violent behaviour’ (1994: 5). Corporate discourses envision these as irrational and irrelevant to the construction of corporate harmony regardless of their role in the everyday experience and identity work of organisational participants. It remains the role of critical organisation theory to get beneath these surface appearances of organisational life.

In using identity as a linking concept, we are in no way claiming that it is the complete answer to understanding issues connected to the ‘subjective factor’. Rather, it is one means of taking our understanding further. Nor do we claim that it is possible at

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this stage to use identity or any other means to produce an integrated critical social psychology. Unfortunately in redefining the agenda there is no new and improved magical ingredient that will wash away all the contradictions between these perspectives and provide us with a realistic, emancipatory paradigm to proceed with. What we have tried to do in Part II of the book is use the discussion of identity and subjectivity to address issues that arise in and across mainstream and critical theories and research, reassessing and integrating material within some consistent focus. The approach taken, though focusing mainly on the experiential level, is, we believe, compatible with the structural framework deriving from the perspectives informed by labour process and Weberian concepts in Part I.

25 Theory, Knowledge and Practice

Paradigm diversity or closure?

In previous chapters we have tried to set out the main general resources available for theorising about work organisations. Our own prime resources have been labour process theory, radical Weberianism and elements of critical social psychology. It would be difficult to argue that these and other components of a critical approach could, or even should, be easily or adequately synthesised into a unified and coherent explanation of work organisations.

However, despite differences and sometimes flatly opposed explanations, they can be drawn on as a resource for understanding the complexity of issues involved. In part, this is because there is some common ground. Referring to action theory and the more radical structuralist perspectives, Dunkerley and Salaman observe: ‘Both seek to undermine the notion of inevitability in organisational structure; both seek to insert active human beings and groups and their values and interests into the complex processes which give rise to organisational structures’ (1986: 93). Complementarity is often more feasible than synthesis, for example when labour process and radical Weberian analyses illuminate power and control through the discussion of means of production and of administration.

This rather pragmatic view of theorising will be opposed by those who believe that theories can and must operate from within hermetically sealed boxes. For one of the assumptions made by Burrell and Morgan (1979) about the paradigms with which we began the chapter is that they are incommensurable. In other words, their differences about knowledge and the world are so basic that theory can only be developed within each framework, which would then do battle with the others. As paradigms frame and define relevant interpretation, ‘any observations that do not seem to fit in a particular approach belong in some other paradigm’ (Ackroyd, 1994: 278). Ackroyd is rightly sceptical about the origins and consequences of the mentality of paradigm closure. Yet it is difficult for paradigms to ‘speak’ to one another, when they not only make different ‘reality assumptions’, but develop highly distinctive ‘languages’ of their own. It is, in fact, one of life’s little ironies that many of those who believe most strongly in the constitutive power of language cannot write a sentence that can be understood without a dictionary, a gin and tonic and a great deal of patience. The problem of theoretical communication is compounded by the very different national traditions in organisation theory, as accounts of the past and present in North America (Aldrich, 1992) and Francophone analysis (Chanlat, 1994) reveal.

The paradigm wars have, however, moved on, with Clegg and Hardy observing that we now have a ‘three-cornered debate’ (1996: 5). The first position – incommensurability – is less popular than it was. This may be that the main defensive rationale for closure – that it would provide a space for alternative perspectives outside the

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functionalist-positivist orthodoxy – is less of an issue now that a variety of critical theories compete robustly in the lecture hall and through the pages of journals. Nevertheless, some paradigm warriors, notably Jackson and Carter (1991, 2000), continue to argue that communication is impossible because of the unique character of each paradigm, and dangerous given the ‘intellectual imperialism’ of the stillpowerful orthodox voices. Such fears have been fed by some of those on the opposite side of the (non-existent) bridge. Pfeffer (1993) reasserts the need for paradigm consensus. Though there is an obvious pre-existing belief that knowledge is produced in a cumulative, developmental manner, capable of leading to agreement on methods, research questions and outcomes, Pfeffer’s main worry is that organisational analysis will lose any influence it has unless it can demonstrate a degree of integration and unity that are the hallmarks of any ‘mature science’ (see also Donaldson, 1998).

Given the highly contested nature of organisational theory, such pleas will undoubtedly fall on deaf ears. Yet it is interesting to note that on both sides the arguments appear to be driven as much by expediency as by principle. A more positive pragmatism can be seen in a third and increasingly influential camp: those who assert the need for paradigm diversity, or multi-paradigm thinking. Gareth Morgan has certainly shifted his stance in this way and now talks about the need to ‘harness the possibilities which they offer’ (1990a: 27). A multi-paradigm perspective is primarily influenced by postmodernists trying to draw back from extreme relativism and seek greater dialogue. In part this may reflect the diverse and multi-faceted nature of reality which no single approach can grasp (Schultz and Hatch, 1996). Similarly, Kamoche argues that unless human resource management is analysed from within each paradigm, we may be ‘ignoring the insights that other perspectives have been shown to yield’ (1991: 13). A more concrete version of the same thing is offered by Hassard (1991), who interprets empirical data on the fire service in the UK through the paradigmatic ‘eyes’ of each of Burrell and Morgan’s original quartet.

Such arguments are superficially attractive. Who, after all, could be against dialogue, or resist the call for greater ‘democracy’ in organisation theory? (Hassard, 1991: 296). In addition, there is no doubt that such exercises are fruitful individual exercises in collective and individual learning. But, as Parker and McHugh (1991) observed of Hassard’s effort, the ability to hop between languages is not the same as demonstrating its analytical usefulness. The practice of multiple paradigm analysis tends to be closure by any other name, for each speaks from behind its own walls. Indeed, Hassard (1988) treats meta-theories as distinct language games in which we can be trained. The normal purpose of dialogue is to resolve issues or move beyond disagreements. This is difficult for postmodernists given their denial of any grounds against which to make judgements. It may be true, as Kamoche says, that paradigms generate different insights, but what if those insights are based on competing claims, for instance about the relative weight of hard and soft HRM in contemporary workplace practice? The relativist twist that everything is of equal value merely adds to the problem, and is open to the same objections that were raised by Reed of Morgan’s use of metaphors: that we end up taking products down from the shelf as uncritical consumers, rather than promoting rigorous debate and research.

With these observations in mind, it seems to us that multi-paradigm or perspective approaches do not fully address the limits of incommensurability. To express a concern for the limits of multi-paradigm thinking is not to say that it is impossible or unnecessary for theories and theorists to engage with one another. This may not be as

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difficult as it appears. It is possible to have reservations about the strategic exchange theory of Watson (1994) or the discourse analysis of Pringle (1989), but still find their books to be exciting and revealing accounts of managerial and secretarial work. Sometimes it is necessary to get behind the different languages and explore whether writers are saying substantively similar things. As Ackroyd (1992, 1994) reminds us, a lot of the best research is not led by a commitment to paradigms, or is stimulated by ‘boundary exchanges’ between them. Ritzer (1975) also refers to the capacity of the classical sociological theories to bridge paradigms. Some differences can be put down to the level of analysis.

It is perfectly legitimate to have a more structural or a more micro emphasis on management or some other aspect of organisational life, or to creatively combine micro and macro. The key is not to analytically close off the possibilities of ‘seeing’ the other dimension, and to ensure that observations made about action and structure at different levels – workgroup, organisational, societal – are compatible with one another (Ackroyd, 2000). A multi-dimensional approach was one of the principles of good analysis set out in Chapter 1. To go further, it is possible to argue that such dimensions are sometimes most effectively addressed by different perspectives. Kellner (1999: 194) says that ‘McDonaldization is a many-sided phenomenon and the more perspectives that we can bring to its analysis the better grasp of the phenomenon one will have’. This ‘more the better’ outlook may be overdoing it, but Kellner does persuasively argue that postmodern concepts can successfully be deployed to explain a later development of McDonaldization, when a modernist emphasis on mass production was complemented by a set of practices around consumption and management of global identities.

Our view is that there is an implicit fourth position in the paradigm wars: one that rejects incommensurability, but sees grounds, not only for dialogue, but for some kind of knowledge progression within a social-science framework. Reed (1993) notes that the pendulum has swung back from postmodern excesses towards recognition of historical continuities, narrative patterns and accumulated knowledge and procedures. Such a position admittedly leaves some of the most difficult problems unresolved. Theoretical pluralism is certainly here to stay, and that is welcome. However, the sharp theoretical disagreements will remain, not so much because of different paradigms, but because of rival claims being made about organisations and society. Ultimately the key problem is not paradigm, but reality incommensurability. For example, organisations, or at least particular types, cannot be at the same time becoming more and less bureaucratic. That might seem obvious, but the current fashion for relativism makes it difficult to take the issue any further. In other words, as we noted earlier, under the influence of postmodernism, a large number of scholars of organisation believe that it is impossible to either make truth claims or resolve them: ‘Any interpretation is temporary, and specific to the discourse within which it is produced . . . the postmodern argument liberates me: my discourse is as valid as any other’ (Coleman, 1991: 26–7).

In order to sustain this kind of thinking, postmodernism tends to treat science purely as ‘conversation’, whose logic of enquiry is rhetorical (Czarniawska, 1999: 10). Much of the force of this argument comes from a reading of the philosopher of science, Thomas Kuhn (1962, 1970 2nd edn), referred to at the start of this part of the book with reference to the idea of paradigms. He challenged the accepted, positivist view that science was based on the linear, patient, disinterested collection of facts, leading to hypotheses that were then tested or ‘falsified’ until the truth was discovered.

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In the process of discovery, the protagonists are not merely comparing findings to the real world, but making judgements about what is acceptable in their own professional domain. Science, then, is not wholly rational, and is shaped by ideologies and power.

Given the undeniably greater ideological influences on subjects such as management and organisation studies, postmodernists were now able to argue that ‘a plurality of legitimate and competing perspectives is to be expected in all sciences, but especially in the social ones’ (Burrell, 1996: 648). This reading of Kuhn is, however, debatable. Kuhn argued that though observation and experiment drastically restrict the range of admissible belief, progress takes place in the state of knowledge, and that the distinction between the scientific and non-scientific is real. In short, scientific judgements involve the comparison of paradigms both with nature and with each other. Science may not be wholly rational, but it has a rational core.

This does not mean that the ability to make definitive statements about the natural world transfers to the social. The difference between the two is, after all, the starting-point of a critique of positivism that is shared by most organisational theorists. But having misrepresented science, postmodernists go on to do the same thing with social explanation. This is done primarily by constructing stereotypical oppositions. As Ackroyd and Fleetwood note:

Here we arrive at the commonly held position that there are two basic perspectives on offer: either the world is objectively and unproblematically available and capable of being known by the systematic application of the empirical techniques common to positivism, or it is not knowable objectively at all; and in the place of claims to objectivity, we find that what is known is merely the product of discourses. (Ackroyd and Fleetwood, 2000: 3–4)

Our knowledge is inherently constrained and shaped by the social process of its production, but there is an alternative, middle ground between positivism and relativism. As a philosophy of science, critical realism accepts that social structures and the meanings actors attribute to their situation have to be recognised in the way we construct explanations. However, entities such as labour markets and gender relations exist independently of our perceptions and investigations of them (Bhaskar, 1989; Collier, 1994). As Ackroyd and Fleetwood (2000) argue, the ontological question, ‘what exists?’ is often confused with the epistemological one, ‘how can we know what exists?’ Hence, as our knowledge is bound up with our conceptions, the misleading conclusion is drawn that all that exists is our concepts or discourse. The difficulties of establishing absolute certainty should not be used to assert that we can make no ‘truth claims’. In his defence of postmodern epistemology, Newton asks, ‘How can we be sure that we have found “the real”?’ (1996: 22). The short answer is that we cannot be totally sure, but that is a far cry from not knowing anything: realists ‘want to hold that better and worse forms of knowledge exist and that there are reliable procedures for producing knowledge of things and events’ (Ackroyd and Fleetwood, 2000: 3–4).

There cannot be an exact correspondence between reality and our representations of it, but good research aims to grasp the real with as much accuracy and complexity as is feasible. For example, we know that the vast majority of studies of empowerment demonstrate, through a variety of quantitative and qualitative methodologies, a massive gap between managerial claims of delegated decision-making and workplace outcomes. Similarly, and to return to an issue raised earlier, while politicians and generals devise