Abstract
Just as some plants bear fruit only if they don’t shoot up too high, so in the practical arts the leaves and flowers of theory must be pruned and the plant kept close to its proper soil—experience.
Not long ago, a call for essays appeared in Organization Studies inviting scholars to focus on “unexplored areas of inquiry” in the analysis of organizational life (the “X and Organization Studies” Editorial). “X,” it was proposed, would likely be something “overlooked,” “repressed,” or “concealed,” something which, in being rescued from its currently marginalized status, could perhaps become redefined as constitutive “of how we organize, or are organized.” To judge from the list of possible “X’s,” almost anything seemed to be grist for the mill, with the exception, it appeared, of perhaps the most overlooked concept in contemporary Organization Studies (OS): “formal organization” itself. While the focus on “X” was positioned as a new and enriching move, it was in fact one that had been made regularly in a host of disciplines for much of the last three decades. Moreover, it wasn’t a move exclusive to those enamored of a particular theoretical vernacular. Rather, it constituted what Van Fraasen (2002) terms “a stance”—an approach or attitude—that was shared by advocates or exponents of often highly rivalrous theory programs—in the field of organization and management studies, as elsewhere. In our book, we termed this shared comportment or outlook “the metaphysical stance.” Its effect within OS, is quite uniform: to “disappear” what had once been deemed to be the field’s “core object”—formal organization—by transmuting it into an epiphenomenon constituted and explained by other allegedly more “foundational” phenomena—“contracts,” “capabilities,” “discourses,” “processes,” “practices,” “flows” and such like (the list is long). This move can be traced in many different theory programs in management and organization studies. In embarking on such a shift, however, not only have scholars given themselves permission to focus on studying anything they fancy, they have also managed to strip the term “organization” of substantive meaning. Our book For Formal Organization therefore addresses itself to accounting for how and why the situation arose whereby much, though by no means all, of what self-identifies as organizational analysis isn’t at all organizational, and to exploring what follows from this. Somewhat in the manner described by Latour (2011), without endorsement, the specificity of “organizational analysis”—which requires its proponents to think and indeed act “organizationally”—has been returned to the amorphous world of “social explanation.” Blau and Scott (1963: 5) warned against this sort of temptation long ago.
In following this trajectory, the book attempts to commend an alternative stance toward organization that precisely eschews “talking about organizations” epiphenomenally. We termed this alternative “the classical stance.” This designation deliberately contains echoes of the well-known categorization “classic organization theory,” but is signally not reducible to or synonymous with it. Rather, our use of the term “classical stance” seeks to highlight key aspects of the practical disposition toward organization adopted by classic organization theory and other approaches throughout the history of OT, such as the early work of the Tavistock Institute. In approaching matters organizational in this way, we also attempt to upend the reflex accusation of naivety, rationalism and contemporary irrelevance directed toward OT’s “historical artefacts” from the present, and indeed to open up what we considered to be some important “lost highways” in organizational analysis (e.g. those provided by the work of Wilfred—not Alfred, as the reviewer has it- Brown). The “classical stance” we argue can be applied to pressing matters of contemporary organizational concern without any need to “update” it. Consider, for a moment, the struggles faced by Uber drivers today through the prism provided by Trist and Bamforth’s (1951) “long wall coal-getting” Tavistock study (check out the Talking About Organization Podcast, May, 2017) and maybe you’ll get the picture.
The latter picture, and indeed, the overall project of organizational analytic recovery we pursue in our book, is clearly not something that the reviewer “gets” or indeed recognizes as having anything to commend it. This, we suggest, may well be because they are already wedded to and indeed “performing” in their review the rival stance toward matters organizational we briefly sketched above—one thoroughly imbued with the tropes of “social explanation.” That this is a plausible claim seems clear enough when, having dismissed our text for its alleged objectivism, empiricism, anachronism and all-round “bad faith” (though without reference to any sentences actually written in it, or even page numbers to assist verification of the claims they make), the reviewer plays the following trump card: “organizations are social phenomena, and formal organization, just like law, is a social construct.” Surely by now, after so many years of this kind of stuff, we can concur with Fish (1995), Hacking (1999) and Latour (2004), for instance, when they argue, in their rather different ways, that not only has social (constructionist) explanation run out of steam, but that whatever puff it was deemed to possess ended up being expended on evacuating that which it set its gaze upon of any determinate or positive content. This is indeed the case, we argue in the book, in respect to formal organization.
Thus, the reviewer argues that a practical stance in organization theory is antithetical to understanding human and emotional aspects—the “social side”—of organizations: Du Gay and Vikkelsø fail to recognize that the stance that they passionately advocate is not suitable for or relevant to all organizational phenomena. After all organizations are social phenomena, and … We therefore cannot afford to ignore the human dimension in OT.
The underlying assumption here seems to be that formal organization as a concept and practice is antithetical to what McGregor famously termed “the human side of enterprise.” The reviewer—knowingly or inadvertently—hereby repeats one of the core assumptions that was rejected by practitioners of the “classical stance.” In a nutshell, formality for them (and us) is not the opposite of humanism, but means that organization is not based on random or vague criteria. To formally organize is to make explicit what the principles are for doing things together. In contrast, informal organization means organizing “under the radar”: deliberately or coincidentally leaving criteria unspecified, vague or missing. This may sound more “free” and “humane,” but it carries just as much—and often more—human distress and emotional turmoil than the former. Workplaces without realistic delineation of work, expectations, responsibilities and resources are stressful environments. In the book, we included the work of a number of early members of the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations under the rubric of “the classical stance.” Their gradual elaboration of the idea of the organization as a “socio-technical system” was precisely designed to avoid the traps associated with a priori distinctions between “production” and the “human factor” that pervaded approaches to organizational life in their own time, and ours. One of their core arguments was that realistic experimentation with and assessment of formal organization was the way to better, less chaotic, dangerous and anxiety-provoking workplaces. In contrast, the reviewer claims that “the solutions to social challenges” at work are “to be found above and beyond the realm of formal organization.” “Above and beyond,” indeed.
This brings us to a second area where the reviewer repeats the same move: our discussion of law. One of our primary reasons for comparing Law and OT in the book was to emphasize the similarity of (negative) effect produced by those deploying the social explanation card in both these distinct (and thus different and non-reducible) “modes of existence” (Latour, 2011). At the same time, we also sought to use the concept of legal personality to specifically highlight the manner in which the tropes of social explanation often reduce “organization” to the status of a social container. For instance, much interactionist work in contemporary OS/OT focuses on relations between people in organizations as if they were somehow disencumbered from formal organizational elements. But “individuals” do not exist in organizations as some sort of homo clausus. To disappear “formal organization” in this way is problematic for an organizational analysis precisely because, as Bourdieu (1987) argued in his critique of “the biographical illusion,” “who would dream of describing a journey without an idea of the landscape in which it was made?” (p. 302)
The reviewer also argues that “a more useful approach to the OT discipline is one in which different stances are like building blocks, imbricated with one another, and all relevant to the understanding of organizational phenomena.” The problem here as we argue throughout the book (though the reviewer does not mention it) is that different stances cannot be superimposed or neatly combined to create some sort of “bigger picture.” Stances are not like angles that can be artfully arranged to create a fuller picture of organizational reality—the sum of all angles. Rather they are rivals, engaged in battle and there is no innocent space above and beyond the fray. Stances are occupied with very different things—they each express a particular attitude, approach, and outlook– and just like baking a cake and riding a bike cannot simply “be combined.” Our point, then, is that Organization Theorists need to decide what the best use of their time might be.
We realize that outlining two rival stances in the manner we do in the book leaves us open to accusations of dualism. However, we insist on a pragmatic attitude: distinctions are only interesting in so far they entail practical differences. And in this case, we think it does make an important practical difference if you talk, analyze, and act organizationally, instead of approaching organization as a sign that can be shown to mean a whole lot of different things depending on the texts and subtexts it enters into. Is that then to say that the latter is not legitimate or valuable? No, not in some universal sense, obviously. However, that said, we do regret that its popularity has come at the expense of obscuring the former as a meaningful academic pursuit.