Abstract
You may or may not be aware, but Organization Theory (OT), as a discipline, has made a turn for the worst and is now running to ruin. Over the last century, OT has gone from a promising practical science with lead thinkers who were well-versed in management and organization to a hermetic and intellectualizing discipline where prominent authors are entangled in metaphysical mumbo jumbo that is unbeknownst to practitioners. That, in a nutshell, is Paul Du Gay and Signe Vikkelsø’s premise in their recent offering, For Formal Organization: The Past in the Present and Future of Organization Theory.
As the title suggests, Du Gay and Vikkelsø plead for a return to the past, that is, to what they term the ‘classical stance’ in OT, revisiting in the process the work of foundational OT thinkers such as Mary Parker Follett, Chester Barnard, and Alfred Brown. The authors’ objective is twofold: first, to show that the present metaphysical stance will never be as significant as the works of classical thinkers; second, to rehabilitate, as per the classical stance, the formal organization as main anchor of OT. To illustrate their premise, Du Gay and Vikkelsø expand on how change and exploration are undeservedly promoted by the metaphysical stance, thus contributing to the hollowing out, or ‘disappearance’, of formal organizations. In contrast, the classical stance reinforces exploitation, task and purpose, and authority and authorization as the foundational concepts of OT, bringing back to the forefront the formal essence of the discipline. This pragmatic call for a reversion to a ‘practico-organizational discipline’, albeit interesting and insightful, proves to be repetitive. Moreover, the analysis occasionally lacks nuance, displaying an unnecessary vindictiveness. The antagonistic tone is counterproductive, as the reader, initially receptive to the authors’ arguments, is quickly forced into rebuttal.
Du Gay and Vikkelsø’s argument rests on a questionable comparison between OT and law, whereby organizational understanding, like legal understanding, is immanent, that is, within the object of study, and without external action; therefore, only an organizational analysis may reveal organizational phenomena. Formal organization has, after all, a legal personality, and this is what the metaphysical stance fails to take into consideration. It follows for the authors that the metaphysical stance, a very wide and eclectic basket of concepts, ranging from Czarniawska’s action nets and neo-institutionalism’s rationalized myths to Osborne and Gaebler’s reinventing government and other similar management fads, does not contribute to the understanding of formal organization because it adopts an extrinsic point of view.
Two points raise concern. First, it is not clear on which grounds OT and law can be compared. The argument of their supposedly common immanence requires a serious leap of faith. Nobody would think appropriate to compare sociology to mathematics, or history to physics. Second, it seems nowadays that OT has many enemies, coming from all directions. Without much discernment, popular management gurus are thus put in the same basket as established scholars from diverse horizons, who do not have much in common. What is left of OT once it is reformed as a practico-organizational discipline as per Du Gay and Vikkelsø’s approach? A few foundational thinkers, such as Parker Follett, Fayol, and Taylor; classical theorists, such as Barnard, Brown, and other members of the Tavistock Institute; and contingency theorists like Lawrence and Lorsch. The rest of the OT theorists are at best superfluous, at worst, detrimental to OT. In some aspects, even Simon is problematic, since he strays from the ‘situation at hand’ and is primarily interested in decision-making processes. In the Manichean and dogmatic perspective proposed by Du Gay and Vikkelsø, you are either a proponent of the task-and-purpose stance, or you are against it, and therefore you are contributing to OT’s decay.
By default, Du Gay and Vikkelsø’s focus on formal organization also favors a certain methodological disposition toward empiricism. Like Taylor and Barnard, Du Gay and Vikkelsø argue that we should only interest ourselves in visible, tangible, or quantifiable phenomena. The organizational ‘situation at hand’ calls for a hands-on, no-nonsense, objective science. A return to practicality is, however, not ontologically and epistemologically inconsequential; unfortunately, the authors do not venture into the implications of a reformed OT. By imposing a very narrow definition of reality and accompanying modes of knowledge production, the authors significantly reduce the scope of OT, and logically, its ability to explain the diverse phenomena which formal organization may foster, engender, or trigger, but which the classical stance cannot explain. 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 formal organization, just like law, is a social construct. We therefore cannot afford to ignore the human dimension in OT. By now, we know that emotions are an inescapable dimension of social cognition, thanks to Damasio’s 1994 book Descartes’ Error. Issues of well-being and mental health, perception and belief, sense-making and interpretation can make or break teams, units, projects, and organizations. In other words, informal considerations are powerful factors, either disruptive or constructive, of organizational success or performance. It is not possible to fall back on classical preoccupations and too late to ignore everything that the so-called metaphysicians of OT have contributed in the last 40 years. Humans consciously and unconsciously participate in the complexity and chaos of the world and are also fervent contributors to it being organized. Discarding abstract thinking and knowledge from a social science like OT amounts to renouncing its ability to apprehend social and human phenomena. There needs to be a place, in a discipline like OT, for both practical and abstract, formal and informal considerations and knowledge, and a plurality of ontological and epistemological postures. Moreover, scientific researchers must have the freedom to establish their own relationship to reality, being, and knowledge.
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. Despite what the authors imply, the history of thought in OT is not a succession of disjointed intellectual enterprises. Simon wrote Administrative Behavior in response to authors who maintained that there was one best way; Waldo objected in The Administrative State to Simon’s focus on efficiency and distinction between fact and value. Likewise, contemporary OT thinkers may have shifted their interest away from formal organization and toward other phenomena because the classical stance did not address, or perhaps even recognize, them. It is unlikely that this shift is motivated by a negation of formal organization. Perhaps contemporary thinkers wish to explore and understand other aspects of organizational phenomena which do not fall under the umbrella of formality or do not stem from an organization’s formal features. The thorniest issues often don’t; it is the essentially social nature of organizations that brings the most challenges. The solutions to social challenges are therefore to be found above and beyond the realm of formal organization.
Du Gay and Vikkelsø’s book had an opportunity to be a nuanced expose of OT’s current status as a discipline, with its strengths, challenges and ways forward; an exploratory study of the supposed decline of academic interest in the study of formal organization and a tentative explanation for this decline. In its current state, unfortunately, it reads as if the authors simply put together a few articles they previously published together or separately, with the inevitable consequence that some arguments and analyses are redundant (e.g. the same quote from Alfred Brown is used twice in this short book). While this certainly helps drive their point home (one virtue of repetition), it reveals the lack of breadth and depth of this essentially binary proposition, sometimes resulting in simplistic and fallacious arguments. For instance, the contrast between the Ranger Handbook and the SAGE Handbook of Organizational Institutionalism, which the authors use to demonstrate how inept the metaphysical stance is when compared to the classical stance, said to be both empirically relevant and ‘to the point’, exemplifies the authors’ recourse to unsubtle, sophistic argumentative device. Rather than blindly returning to form in OT, we should ask ourselves, ‘What can we (not) learn when sticking to a classical stance?’, ‘What kind of knowledge do we thereby produce?’, and ‘To what extent does the classical stance address contemporary organizational issues, as lived by practitioners, and/or observed by academic researchers?’ These are important questions that the authors fail to substantially address.
Du Gay’s interest in organizational formality could already be seen in a previous effort, In Praise of Bureaucracy, which displays a dispassionate refinement and subtlety that are nowhere to be found in For Formal Organization. Looking beyond the complacent intellectual shortcuts, the us-against-the-world, Black-or-White posturing, and the simplistic arguments, one question remains: How constructive is Du Gay and Vikkelsø’s discourse for the OT community? In a time where mainstream academic publications in social sciences are dominated by a dogmatic positivistic diktat, it is, strangely, both ironic and unsurprising to read such cry for more objective science, as if intersubjectivity and interpretive approaches in OT enjoyed hegemony. The book does not enrich any debate over OT, but rather polarizes it, both preaching to the choir and irking the rest of the flock. This gospel of formal organization is for classical exegetes and zealots alike, certainly not for practitioners … and perhaps for metaphysical pagans in search of intellectual bad faith.