Organization Studies

Positive power (induction), as an ability to initiate activity, and negative power (resis tance), as an ability to stop some activity, are treated in this paper as two closely related poles of the same power cycle. The paper further demonstrates how existing theoretical treatments of power phenomena have been reduced to an analysis of positive power and have consequently been unable to treat the contradictory interdependency of positive and negative power.

Leadership as a power-implementing practice cannot avoid resistance. However, suc cessful leadership can provoke greater induction than resistance. Attempts to avoid resistance completely would provoke secondary effects which would lead towards the deterioration of powerless as well as powerful entities.

Authority is treated in this paper as a specific state of equilibrium between conditionally tolerated positive power and conditionally tolerated negative power. Authority can, therefore, be treated as a unity of contradictions.

A dramatic case description of events in a Dutch company which is put under pressure to change its policy illustrates how managerial behaviour is subject to the prevailing climate of opinion in society. The clash of interests both inside and outside the organiza tion and the mobilization of consumer opinion by external pressure groups compelled management to revise its policy position. The case is analysed from the point of view of the value systems of various actors inside and outside the company, and of the cultural specificity of the Dutch environment in which it took place. It is also considered as an example of 'garbage can' decision-making. Its consequences are explored for the management of both business corporations and civic action groups.

Albert Hirschman's contribution in Exit, voice, and loyalty provided a framework within which investigators could simultaneously examine people's responses to deteriorating organizational performance and administrators' responses to members' or customers' responses. Traditional analyses focussed on exits — people ceasing to buy a firm's products or leaving the organization — and on competition between organizations as remedies for declining performance. Hirschman added the concept of voice — people expressing dissatisfaction through some form of overt protest. Underlying his model was an implicit assumption of administrators' responsiveness to exit and voice, whereas we posit that there are many conditions under which managers and leaders are highly unresponsive. These conditions are highlighted in nonmarket economies, and we draw illustrative material from Poland to support our arguments.

The literature has largely tended to consider organizations as distinct from societal processes and institutions, and to emphasize convergent and 'culture-free' elements of organization. By cross-national comparisons of closely matched factories in France, West Germany, and Great Britain, this paper shows that more pervasive differences exist than are usually recognized. Organizational processes of differentiation and inte gration can be seen to consistently interact with processes of educating, training, recruiting, and promoting manpower, so that both develop within an institutional logic that is particular to a society, and bring about nationally different shapes of organiza tion. Organizational differences can thus be considered as linked to different extents and dimensions of professionalty. Comparisons show that a multidimensional concept of professionality is called for, in contrast to the one-sided emphasis on the social status and formal knowledge dimension usually found in the literature.