Abstract
This article calls upon scholars of organizational studies to take more active roles in confronting and addressing the social, political, economic and environmental problems of today. The article begins with the observation that the birth of organizational studies was deeply concerned with changes, problems and opportunities in an increasingly ‘organized’ world and argues that our studies should not abstract organizing from the world but use our conceptual and practical tools to engage the world fully. We offer six contemporary challenges for (critical) organizational studies in a global society: abstraction and virtuality, diversity and homogeneity, distinctiveness and linkage, boundaries and limits, transformations of labour/work and trust and cynicism. The article urges readers to consider in more specific terms how their work can not only illuminate these issues but also offer something practical, at whatever location or level of analysis, to make a positive difference in pedagogy, scholarship and wider community involvement.
The 20 years spanned by Organization have witnessed enormous changes in organizations and, in fact, we might say also in the ways the world is organized—developments in scope perhaps rivaling those of the late 19th Century and early 20th Century when ‘globalization,’ although treated under different labels, was becoming a part of political, economic and social consciousness. That previous era gave rise to the academic study of organization, offering theoretical accounts of large formal organizations in all sectors as they grew in scope, power and sophistication.
With a clear yet humble appreciation of both modernity’s failures and successes, as academics we stand at a point when the major organizing concepts of these accounts of society demand renewed attention and perhaps revision. Consider, for instance, just a few contemporary pressures on our taken-for-granted perspectives on organizations. Markets and market-based rationalities have proven remarkably adaptive, resistant to and enabling of creative transformation, for good but often for ill as well. Received views of rationality have been challenged on many fronts, ranging from findings of neuropsychology to the experience of the implosive aspects of the information explosion. Messages of and about identity saturate the communication environment, yet identity remains as elusive as ever for the modern individual and organization. Social solidarity and its corresponding expressions have shifted in response to the multiple and often unpredictable roles played by rapid technological change. Certainty is both undermined by rapid change and other challenges to orderly narratives and still expressed in various types of ‘fundamentalist’ movements. Explaining such developments, let alone tracking them, is well beyond the scope of this brief reflection.
Instead, in this short article, we reflect on the capacity for organizational studies to make sense of such dramatic transformations in the organizational world and consider how critical organizational scholarship is poised not only to react to a changing world but also to effect positive change. The bulk of this article is structured around six reasonably distinct challenges or tensions faced by contemporary organizations and organizational society: (1) abstraction and virtuality, (2) distinctiveness and linkage, (3) homogeneity and diversity, (4) boundaries and limits, (5) transformations of labour/work and (6) trust and cynicism. We offer this list of key terms as neither typology nor a comprehensive overview of organizational trends and challenges but rather to highlight key challenges that are either new to organizations and organization studies or that organizations find themselves contending with in new ways. In the conclusion, we offer several ideas for the ways in which Organization’s writers and readers can address these challenges and confront the key problems of our time.
Six contemporary challenges
Abstraction and virtuality
The term ‘abstraction’ offers a variation on the more frequently used term ‘alienation’. We often experience organizational decisions as somehow distanced, removed or virtual. From this vantage, abstraction directs our attention to commonplace expressions of economy, the market, organization, institutions and metrics of progress, etc. Distance may be seen both literally and metaphorically as posing opportunities and challenges for markets, organizational structures and human relationships (compare Giddens, 1984). A provocative and not altogether fantastic metaphor for such distance can be found in drone warfare, where humans, operating at great remove and with seemingly diminished agency, direct machines to engage the enemy with deadly force. In this sense, we might think of contemporary global, consumerist capitalism as ‘drone capitalism’ to capture how we are increasingly distanced from the system’s ‘side effects’. The metaphor here is inspired in large part by Klein’s (2007) ‘disaster capitalism’, an evocative term capturing how the contemporary market often creates and then profits from crises.
Distance poses particular challenges to rationality for its tendency to obscure both the nature of problems and appropriate responses. Consider, for instance, the controversy around monologist Mike Daisey’s ‘The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs’ (see Carr, 2012). After conducting apparently extensive research at a Foxconn factory producing Apple products in China, Daisey staged a Broadway monologue that illuminated concerns that many Apple fans had feared but not confirmed. After the story aired on the radio show This American Life and went viral, it was discovered that Daisey fabricated or exaggerated significant segments of his monologue. Daisey argued that, distortions aside, he had dramatically captured a fundamental truth about labour conditions at Foxconn, but his credibility and argument had been irreparably damaged. This controversy illustrates well the challenge posed by abstraction and virtuality: when so much happens away from what we see, hear, touch and experience, questions of what is real—in even a contained and contingent sense—and how to respond to material and social conditions become exceedingly difficult to sort out.
In this sense, as we act through organizations (whether as members or consumers) and across time and space in increasingly novel forms, we are all, after a fashion, ‘absentee landlords’. This is not to say, however, that all such performances are practically or ethically equivalent. Careful analysis of abstraction and virtuality helps us to recognize the multiple ways beyond physical co-location in which ‘presence’ can be accomplished There are many instructive cases of organization and activism that makes a meaningful difference in the world, despite conditions that are largely experienced at a remove. Consider, for instance: Greenpeace International’s mid-2000s ‘Green My Apple’ campaign, the work of the micro-lending non-profit kiva.org, and the ‘open-collaborative production company’ hitRECord (www.hitrecord.org). These and similar cases deserve serious attention for their creative and socially inspired efforts. That said, we need to remind ourselves of the aspects of social solidarity that might be best achieved in face-to-face interaction, including how some intensive in-person group interaction may be essential for the kind of risk taking that fuels many social movements (Gladwell, 2010). Clearly, analyses and critiques of various forms of distance—as occurring through hierarchy, geography and technology—need to advance toward full consideration of the myriad and hybrid possibilities for the future.
Homogeneity and diversity
Demographic changes have prompted dramatic shifts in organizational approaches to diversity over the past several decades, upsetting received views of leadership, culture and participation in the process. At first, most business and governmental organizations approached diversity from a largely legalistic frame, operating from a compliance-driven opening to women and racial/ethnic minorities. As many organizations in the industrialized ‘West’ became more diverse in membership, the main rationale shifted to the business case for diversity, casting diversity in terms of organizational strategy. Contemporary scholarship, and to some extent practice, are moving beyond ‘diversity management’, reconsidering basic goals and objectives, developing guiding frameworks for understanding productivity and progress and sometimes embracing the vulnerability attendant to the revision of dominant understandings and ways of doing business (e.g. Mease and Terry, 2012). Furthermore, organization scholars are listening to and coming to understand new populations and organizational forms. For example, Imas and Weston (2012) conducted ethnographies of people working in impoverished areas in Brazil and Zimbabwe. The authors found that, though these areas and their residents are often represented as homogeneous only in terms of poverty by those in power, the study’s participants craft relatively solid organizational identities that provide dignity, resilience and the resources for cooperative organizing. Cruz’s (2012) doctoral study of Liberian ‘market women’ demonstrates how women’s creation of ‘hidden’ organizational structures creates resources for a disadvantaged group, promotes solidarity and is significant in light of the country’s recent history of civil war. These are but two examples of studies where diversity and what has become known as, for lack of a better term, ‘alternative organizing’ (Parker et al., in press) are both taken seriously.
Nevertheless, research on social cohesion or solidarity from the levels of group to nation and international networks remind us of the roles that value and knowledge ‘homophily’ can play in advancing both ad hoc projects and organizations (see e.g. Seashore, 1954). It is important to maintain some degree of balance or dialectical tension between homogeneity and diversity, as opposed to settling comfortably into a dismissal of group, team or organizational homogeneity as wholly outmoded and unenlightened. For example, we see in the inception and rise of many value-based organizations reliance on dense networks where interests and perhaps backgrounds are strongly shared; yet, it is tricky for such organizations to move over time to a more heterogeneous and inclusive membership and community reach (Dempsey, 2007).
Distinctiveness and linkage
As an inescapable point of reference, even from a post-foundational perspective, the drive for identity persists on every level from individual-group relations to formulations of local-global tensions. Harold Lasswell (1935) brilliantly observed the linkages between individual insecurities and identities and national and international events between the world wars. The fragility of identity, especially in a world that is both risk-conscious and aware of immediate local effects from distance events, is evident in economic, political and socio-cultural discourses, including the mainstream news. Within this presumably postmodern context, where various types of meta-narratives have been undermined, we nevertheless witness the appeals of narrow economic mythos, political fascism and religious fundamentalism. All of these guiding messages, with their corresponding organizational forms, may be viewed as excesses in what Amartya Sen (2006) has called unitary identities, wistful and often risky attempts to consolidate identities along single dimensions, with corresponding expressions of exclusivity.
Identity has taken on an added salience as an organizational imperative in all sectors and in many parts of the world, presenting itself simultaneously as fleeting and attainable (Cheney et al., in press). There is an important role for organizations and their representatives here, setting examples through dual-level communication about brands (which some already do by suggesting playfulness, even as they take their brands seriously), the active promotion of multiculturalism, the creation of multi-stakeholder dialogues on social issues and the expression of multiple identities and multi-faceted ones (e.g. in social marketing). At the same time, the challenges to corporate personhood in the US and elsewhere remind us to remain skeptical about some formations of organizational identity— particularly, when metaphors are reified to the point of absurdity and considerable harm. Organizational identities/identifications that feature cosmopolitanism (Appiah, 2007) yet honour distinctiveness and heavy investment in ‘the local’ have yet to be explored in depth by organization studies.
Boundaries and limits
A defining feature of late modernity is reflexivity—society is increasingly self-monitoring and self-aware (Beck et al., 1994). In this context, boundaries (delineations of difference, distinction or division) and limits (constraints on the extent of something) are central problematics. We argue that these two ideas are crucial for thinking about organizations and organizational discourses in an era where growth, innovation, change and speed remain largely unquestioned ‘god terms’.
On the matter of unending market expansion, economists (e.g. Daly, 1996) and other public intellectuals (e.g. Orr, 2009) have insisted that there are ecological limits to human and economic growth on a global scale. Our knowledge of resource limits and our awareness of the human capacity for total destruction ought to be reshaping what counts as ‘the environment’ in organization studies. Other examples of what we might call ‘boundary problems’ come from feminist critiques of the representation of specific rationalities and ‘difference[s as …] timeless, universal and politically neutral’—that is, as free of limits (Ashcraft, 2004). In fact, organizational affiliations and boundaries are in flux, and the material world is sometimes recalcitrant to discourse (Burke, 1984) despite the creative capacity for symbolic reinvention and the need for ‘translation’ of the material into the flow of discussion as well as consciousness. The upshot is that organizational efforts to stretch boundaries and redefine limits will inevitably run up against very real material restrictions, potentially with devastating consequences. The world of organizations may be positioned, like the economy, as having ever-expanding boundaries but it ultimately rests on a planet.
Organization scholars have yet to fully critique prevailing discourses that equate bigger with better and that treat expansion and maximization as the inherent goals of organizations. But, we can approach the examination of limits in other ways, too. To use a mathematical metaphor, one meaning of ‘limit’ is ‘the notion of tending to, or approaching, an ultimate value’ (Karush, 1989: 155). If we treat ‘value’ as a moral-ethical term, we can begin to imagine how the critique of limits might not strictly constrain action but instead coax organizations toward an ethical ideal.
Transformations of labour/work
We are also in a time of transformation in the cultural and material organization of work, where some economies reorganize around consumption and service, while others adopt old modes of manufacturing without the protections once afforded by those reorganizing. Images of labour and production, the cultural roles of work and the categories of work and careers themselves are in flux, presenting both threats and opportunities. In this regard, Richard Sennett’s (2006: 29) description of the ‘certain kind of human being [who] can prosper in unstable, fragmentary social conditions’ is profound and disturbing. According to Sennett, this person must be (a) skilled at developing and managing short-term relationships and navigating the process of continuous transitioning; (b) capable of constantly developing new talents and taking advantage of potential abilities and (c) able to forget the past and continually embrace the ever-present new.
Within this turbulent economic, institutional and work environment, cooperative networks—networks of cooperatives and other related organizations—have emerged as forums for addressing these changes in a proactive way and asserting control over diverse forms of labour in communities and regions. Alternative organizational practices, often explicitly tied to values of community, sustainability and economic justice, are being pursued in all three major sectors of the economy, although many of these efforts are ad hoc and may appear under a variety of labels ranging from social entrepreneurship and economic solidarity to transition towns. Such networks include worker-owned-and-governed co-ops, food hubs, local currencies, community supported agriculture, intergenerational service trades, economic justice-oriented small business incubators and socially-oriented funding institutions and associations. These networks value and support multiple forms of labour, as can be seen in cooperatives for domestic services, communal food production and distribution and many grassroots neighbourhood efforts to pool and share services. The network form is especially important here, offering both an umbrella for diverse forms of labour and a buffer from the larger market.
Trust and cynicism
A great many citizen-consumers of news suffer from what might be called ‘scandal fatigue’, especially insofar as commentaries seldom move beyond the spectacles of publicized episodes and the ‘bad apple’ perpetrators. In many organizations, we find people merely surviving the ‘next new thing’ from each wave of managerial change. More broadly, we have seen the erosion of trust in practically all the major institutions of society, in large part because institutional power has increasingly become concentrated in the hands of a distanced and unresponsive set of elites (Hayes, 2012). Ironically, we live in a time when trust is at low ebb and yet is pursued more vigorously than ever.
What to do about this? In the public discourse of most industrialized nations, ethical transgressions are treated as problems to address immediately through individual punishment—and then through some kind of targeted and limited fix. Recently, however, interest in promoting ethical cultures has grown. In popular media, this is evident in the highly publicized case of the former director at Goldman Sachs London who published a New York Times op-ed entitled ‘Why I’m Leaving Goldman Sachs’ (Smith, 2012). The author speaks not of individual breaches of trust or wrongdoing but of a culture encouraging malfeasance and a condescending view of clients and social responsibilities. The author’s critique highlights the shortcomings of atomistic approaches to ethics that are solely punitive, that are removed from everyday life and that assume people are inherently amoral or immoral in the absence of hard-and-fast rules. But even the op-ed we cite was (perhaps cynically) satirized on the Internet in an open letter by Darth Vader titled ‘Why I am Leaving the Empire’, which reminds us of the difficulty of being earnest in today’s communication universe.
The capacity for an ethical revival of sorts lies in the promotion of earned trust, overcoming unwarranted cynicism and a reintegration of ethics into everyday life in organizations. There is a great deal more to be written about the establishment and maintenance of ethical organizational cultures and the potential for individuals’ flourishing within them (Cheney et al., 2010).
Embracing multiple identities to engage social problems
Having briefly sketched six contemporary challenges for organizations, organizing and organizational studies, we now turn to a discussion of how together we—the readers, writers and editors of Organization—might engage more deeply and directly with the social, political, economic and environmental problems attendant to those challenges. We organize our discussion of engaging social problems around six identities or professional roles that those of us connected to this journal might adopt: (1) researcher-theorist, (2) teacher, (3) public intellectual or expert, (4) citizen and community member, (5) activist and (6) administrator. By thinking about how we might practically engage the world from these identities and roles, we can rethink organizational studies as a nexus of activities and interests in addition to being a vocabulary, an attendant body of theory and an associated set of professional commitments.
Researcher-theorist
For many of us, conducting research represents a primary professional responsibility. The research examples we have discussed in this article demonstrate several things. First, organizational scholars are reaching out to new groups of research participants and taking risks in new settings, all beyond the usual suspects and venues. Second, scholar-practitioners are beginning to reimagine ‘organization’ and ‘organizing’ in order to account for the sorts of challenges we detailed above. Third, future theory building and research can take even more seriously than it has our distinctive responsibility to use the understandings and tools of organizing to address the issues and problems of the world. This means placing front and centre practical engagements and outputs alongside theorizing about what practice means for organizational studies. As a forum for critical, creative and comparatively unbounded investigations of organization (including multiple genres of articles), this journal is especially well poised for such productively subversive and ultimately reconstructive work.
Educator
Most of us also engage in significant amounts of teaching as a central part of our professional lives. And while it is easy to adopt either romantic or cynical visions based on our experiences in the classroom, we recognize that our students are neither complete cultural dupes nor the great hope for the future. To promote curiosity, open-mindedness, critical reflection, skill development and ethical orientation, listening to students is the first step toward engagement and transformation. Open-ended discussions of work and life goals, productivity and success, ethical compliance versus ethical inspiration, can all help to move classroom thinking beyond treating organizing simply as a technical matter (Lair et al., 2008).
Organization can serve and be used, for example, to challenge the increasingly prevalent models of students-as-consumers and education-as-job training (see McMillan and Cheney, 1996). As ‘the critical journal of organization studies,’ teachers should look to Organization not only for ways to tackle students’ problematic assumptions about work and organizing but also for inspirational alternatives. Writers and editors of this Journal should consider how extant and forthcoming materials might be adapted for exploration in the classroom and students’ lives beyond it. To use Burke’s (1973) term, let us make our scholarship into ‘equipment for living’ for our own and others’ students.
Administrator
Still others of us bring our understandings of organization to bear in our capacity as administrators. As Deetz (1992) observed, contemporary organizations are frequently less democratic than the societies in which they are situated – an observation that applies to many academic institutions. A great number of contributors to and readers of this journal are administrators of some kind— university officials, journal editors and officers in professional associations. These people are stewards of their respective organizations and are in a position to promote human flourishing. How might you disrupt ‘business as usual’ and reorder incentives for members to address themselves to today’s most pressing social problems, as well as to make these organizations ‘better’ in themselves? To pose the question directly to readers: what might those of us with a stake and some power in this journal do to make its work and its contributors more relevant to important and intractable social problems?
Public intellectual or expert
Beyond the walls of the academy, there is a clear and pressing need for organizational scholarship to find a public voice. The fields of economics, psychology, sociology, anthropology, law and business, among others, all feature public intellectuals whose critical reflections reach audiences wider than communities of knowledge production within the academy. A brief walk through most organizations reveals that very little reflection makes its way into most venues of work and organizing. This is true both because of the sheer pace of activity and because of the barriers that remain between organizational studies, broadly speaking, and organizational practice. It is time to consider how our critical reflections can best make it into the light of day, through multiple media and venues, so as to contribute to public opinion and public policy formation.
Citizen and community member
We are all participants in our democratic systems, governments and local communities. These contexts provide forums for us to practice co-participation and exercise our knowledge and skill as one amongst many.
‘Change begins at home’. We believe that the practices of community membership—rather pedestrian things such engaging public officials, attending meetings and speaking at hearings—can develop crucial organizing competencies. Some of these may seem so rudimentary that they risk neglect: listening, identifying problems, developing alternatives, engaging constructive conflict. Your involvement in community and democratic processes is an opportunity to field test the knowledge represented in this journal, to make tangible the value of your accumulated understanding and to discover new problems in and amongst organizations that matter.
Activist
The explosion of new media and information-communication technologies offers scholars new genres of and venues for research, novel pathways to connect with audiences and creative means to show how research can address social problems (see Ganesh and Stohl, 2010). Nowhere is this clearer than in the domain of activism and social movements. The #Occupy and Arab Spring movements both had deep connections with intellectuals and professionals, for instance. Furthermore, the organizing of these movements required unique mixes of in-person communication and social media; local and global participation and the articulation of economic, political, social and organizational dynamics.
Our comments here are not meant to be a prescription for a particular kind of involvement in the world beyond academe. Recent events and movements make clear, first, that the organizational changes in the world often outpace our understandings and, second, that we ought to be more conscious of our own roles. Although the label ‘critical’ has many meanings and may easily be misunderstood, it points above all to the taking of a stance or at least consideration of what stances are possible in one’s work. With that in mind, we encourage you to revisit the many ways in which critical scholars of organization might become more ‘active’ and, yes, ‘effective’ in our work and the world at large.
Coda: contingency and hope
The changes we have described above and the potential responses to them are, to say the least, daunting. Doubt, uncertainty, anxiety, despair and paralysis are not unreasonable or ‘irrational’ responses to multiple global crises (compare Beck, 1992; Lyotard, 1984; Steuerman, 2000). We do not think, however, that obliviousness is an option. The consequences of today’s ‘risk society’ are increasingly borne by individuals and, in a sense, by society at large rather than by organizations. In this way, our call may seem beyond the scope of our interdicipline. Yet, engagement of organization studies with social problems must involve a reconsideration of both the field and orientation of inquiry, in addition to associated actions. Consider, for instance, how organization scholars, health researchers, psychologists, sociologists, economists, political scientists and geographers could collaborate on new cross-sector responses to both natural and human-created disasters (c.f. Doerfel et al., 2010). Enlarging and diversifying our audiences and collaborations—and perhaps fragmenting ‘organization studies’ itself—may be just what is needed to respond to our proposals.
The birth of organizational studies in the latter half of the 19th and the early 20th centuries was as much about practical action as it was a thoroughgoing historical and theoretical analysis. Today, we are more fully aware of the possibilities and dangers of different forms of organizing. There are multiple versions of critique, from suggestiveness to intervention. Non-engagement by organization studies in today’s problems remains an option, of course, but it is a narrow path that fails to acknowledge the context in which both organizations are produced and our careers proceed. Our intellectual community has the capacity to coopt and widen the currently popular notion of resilience and offer a realistic but still hopeful vision for responses to global and local problems. The journal Organization—with its dedication to issues such as power, democracy, justice and alternative forms of organizing—ought to be a loud and leading voice in realizing the full transformational potential of organization studies at this moment in history.