Abstract
A few years ago, when I was writing some things on amnesia and organization studies, I sent a draft of one piece to a friend for comment. He suggested that I read Mary Douglas’s (1987) How Institutions Think. I knew that I had read it sometime previously, but opened it again only to find my enthusiastic annotations in the margins of a chapter entitled ‘Institutions Remember and Forget’. My pieces on forgetting were echoing Douglas, only I had forgotten just where the ideas had some from in the first place. Well, sort of. ‘In the first place’ suggests that Douglas had been the first person to think about these issues, but her 12 pages of references would suggest that she had a little help too, though it is quite possible that she missed some citations, due to amnesia or carelessness. The same would be true of those who Douglas cited, and so on, back into the yellowing silence of the library, back to those works which have slipped from history, sometimes later to be rescued by an enthusiastic PhD student, or disposed of casually in a skip near the rear entrance. But we shouldn’t simply assume that forgetting is bad, because it often allows new things to be invented and for novelty to come into the world. Like the absent minded goldfish who is pleasantly surprised every time she sees the castle in the middle of her tank, academics need to forget things, in order that they can triumphantly remember them again.
Growing Business Schools have needed a labour force and a body of knowledge, and much of this has had to come from already existing academic areas. And so, in order to teach the ‘organizational behaviour’ elements of the US shaped curriculum, many sociologists were recruited, dragging their heavy baggage with them from other places (Parker 2000). But then, as the Business School has begun to grow its own PhDs, and the sociologists have begun to retire, their knowledge has begun be to forgotten, and become a background noise of increasingly ceremonial citations. Weber has been narrowed into a series of arguments about bureaucracy, Marx become a precursor to Braverman, and Durkheim dismissed as a silly old functionalist. Tönnies, Simmel, Michels, Tarde, Parsons, Merton, Gouldner, Blau, Mills, Elias, Goffman, Becker—merely whispers in graduate seminars. The latest papers in the Academy of Management Journal or Organization matter more for debates and publications than what some ancient dead white men with beards in another discipline said half a century ago or more. At the same time, sociology often seems to be giving up on work and organizations, leaving this to the Business School people whilst those in the Sociology building do theory, culture and society.
Paul Adler’s splendid edited volume seeks to address this problem by bringing together 28 chapters on various aspects of organizational sociology. A thoroughly international and impressive cast discuss people and themes with a seriousness which is commendable, and which justifies the idea of this ‘handbook’ being a reference work which should be useful for many years to come. All too often, ‘handbooks’ and ‘companions’ are hopeful titles invented by publishers, attempting to turn fat overpriced edited collections into an essential library purchases. This one really does justify the title, and will be extraordinarily useful both for its essays and (because of a good, but poorly proofread, index) as a reference work too. Titles matter of course, and it is no accident that the term ‘organization studies’ is used on the front of this book. For many readers, organizational ‘behaviour’ (or ‘behavior’) and ‘science’ represent the knowledge produced under the influence of the North American Business School, whilst words like ‘studies’, ‘theory’ and ‘analysis’ signify something about a commitment to theory development rather than control, to broadly social scientific aims rather than managerialist ones (Alvesson et al., 2009; Clegg et al., 1996). For Adler to attempt to bridge the gap between sociology and organization studies is hence a question of aiming at the closest point, and from my point of view I think that they have been largely successful.
Of course, as many of his contributors point out, the question of what counts as ‘classic’ is a controversial and fluid one, with Tarde getting a whole chapter but Pareto barely mentioned and Sorokin not even making the index. Merton, Gouldner and Blau get a joint chapter, but there is almost nothing on Garfinkel and nothing at all on Sacks. There is also a rather US bias in the coverage of the ‘newer’ classics, with French and British industrial sociology getting precious few mentions. These details don’t really matter though, because no book can cover everything, but they do show how a conception of what is a classic depends on who, when and where we are. In ancient Rome, the classicus were the highest of the five classes of citizen, whilst the rest were infra classem, or unclassed. By implication, if we have classics, then we must be deciding what doesn’t matter, and then perhaps gradually forgetting them too.
This can’t really be a handbook which merely attempts to correct amnesia, because as Mary Douglas knew, forgetting is not merely forgetfulness. Douglas’s insight is to make this an institutional matter too. Thinking happens through institutional structures, and is shaped by the boundaries between departments, hierarchies of power and divisions of labour. The university is a place where the departments divide knowledge into matters of ownership and coherence. What happens in this building, and in that one, are distinguished on the basis of an organizational arrangement of committees and offices that gradually solidifies into an assumed ontology, as if there was a line in the world that divided biology from physics, and sociology from organization studies. And the line travels far and wide, with journal editors policing ‘suitability and fit’, promotion committees adjudicating on ‘contribution’, and publishers marketing their lists to particular target segments. Usually, these sedimentations happen too slowly for any one generation to notice, but the rise of the Business School has been so rapid that an entire generation of academics are now having to reconsider where they started, and where they have ended up.
So the present state of affairs isn’t merely an unfortunate accident that can be corrected by an aide-mémoire (Parker, 2002; Wilkins 1978), and though I share Adler et al.’s worry about the fading influence of sociological thinking on organization studies, I doubt that this door stop will make much of a difference in itself because of the institutional set-up it arrives into. As Adler himself notes in the introduction, a modernist model of science would normally relegate founders to history books. A physics textbook would now have Galileo as a footnote, not a contributor to contemporary research questions. It should be unsurprising then that a Business School continually faced with demands from students, policy makers and funders to demonstrate relevance and impact should embrace this sort of year zero modernism even more enthusiastically. Citations should be to work published in the last ten years, gaps in the literature be recent and relevant, and work done with an efficiency that encourages people to read handbooks about classics rather than classics themselves (Dunne, 2010). All this operates against the sort of classicism that Adler wishes his readers to think about, and encourages a frenzied closeness to those who pay the bills, and who hence define the problems they wish to have answers to by Monday morning. (This temper even sometimes shapes work which announces that it is ‘critical’, as it rediscovers concepts such as identity, narrative and discourse like the absent minded goldfish.) It seems that ‘new stuff’ is generally more useful than ‘old stuff’ at the present moment in time.
Probably the most important contribution this book could make is its unstated assumption that all worthwhile work on organizations (and perhaps on anything else) is informed by a long view, both in terms of the maturation of ideas but also a certain distance from impact. The classics have been there for a while, and the elitist ivy now grows around them. But precisely because of the cultural capital that attaches to the word, and the very existence of this Oxford University Press book, it is difficult to argue that they aren’t classics without sounding boorish, or even to suggest that we should dispose of them in the skip behind the library. Best of all, it might be embarrassing for some B-School employees with high salaries and opinions of themselves to have to admit that they need to do some more reading and thinking. This big sober book stands as a rebuke to speed, to the assumption that we are the cleverest people ever, and to the idea that an academic study of organizing should be replaced by a profitable science for managers.