Thompson Work Organisations A Critical Introduction (3rd ed)

1 Studying Organisations: An Introduction

Organisations and organisation society

The British government spent a huge amount of time and money on the Millennium Dome. On the night it was a disaster: tickets failed to arrive, transport routes were blocked, and over-zealous security led to long queues in the cold and rain. This led to a lead story in one newspaper headlined ‘We’re just lousy organisers, however much we spend’ (Guardian, 10 January 2000). Linking problems at the Dome to a litany of other failures in schools, railways and health, Peter Preston observed that ‘The alleged culprits, in short, aren’t the usual suspects. They are disorganisation, profligacy, botched planning and absence of vision.’

This should be a happy, or at least pertinent, judgement for those of us who make a living from analysing organisations. Yet, as citizens of society we tend to have a love–hate relationship with large-scale organisations. We frequently berate them for being bureaucratic, wasteful and placing us under the shadow of big brother. Yet we take them for granted as providers of employment, public welfare, private services, and even charity or other voluntary activities. In the not so distant past, information, leisure, economic needs and other basic life processes were more likely to be directly and locally produced or consumed. Now, complex economic, social and political organisations provide a network of individual and social relationships through which we participate in society at local, national and global levels (Morgan, 1990).

Such organisations have therefore become a focus for academic analysis, often under the heading of ‘organisation studies’. This is not a discipline with clear sources and boundaries in the manner of economics or political science. Rather it is constructed from a variety of disciplines and sub-disciplines including industrial sociology, management theory, organisational sociology and psychology, and industrial relations. This is not the place to provide detailed descriptions or historical explanations of such disciplines (see M. Rose, 1975; Hyman, 1981). What we can observe is that a common field of study around organisations has facilitated a welcome overlap in subject matter and conceptual frameworks. Though different strands will have their own more specific interests such as motivation or skill and work satisfaction, there are a growing number of common interests and frameworks. If we take management strategy, for example, it is clear that a considerable amount of research has been done from an industrial sociology perspective, within an industrial relations framework and by management studies. Similar points could be made with respect to job design, labour markets and a range of other issues. We welcome this interdisciplinary framework and its effect on organisation studies and hope that this book reflects and encourages it.

However, it would be misleading to give the impression that all is sweetness and light in this field of study. For a start, the same paradox that affects public attitudes is often reproduced intellectually. Those very ‘efficiencies’ that derive from the scale

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and structure of organisations, create conditions of domination over human liberty and democratic institutions. But even as trenchant a critic as Perrow, who notes that organisations are tools that can mobilise immense ideological and practical resources for those who control them, argues: ‘If we want our material civilisation to continue as it is . . . we will have to have large-scale bureaucratic enterprises in the economic, social and governmental areas. The development of industrialisation has made this the most efficient way to get the routine work of a society done’ (Perrow, 1979: 56). All commentators do not necessarily share this view today. Indeed, from popular management writers to post-modernists, organisation – at least in the sense of action to create order – has become something of a dirty word. The fashion instead is for decentralisation, disorganisation and even chaos (Peters, 1989). Big and bureaucratic is bad; but we are running ahead of the story.

The theory and practice of organisation has developed around bureaucracies, deriving partly from the work of Max Weber, who, at the turn of the last century, was most responsible for drawing our attention to the significance of large-scale organisations. As the division of labour in society and at work became more complex and difficult to manage, the responsibility and means of co-ordination of core activities became focused on specialised units. The essence of organisation is the creation of regular, standardised behaviour and orderly structure. For Weber the characteristic feature of society would be complex and highly developed administrative structures governed by rules, hierarchy and experts. Most people would work for or become clients of such bureaucracies. In current discourse, such developments are linked to the wider growth of modernism, in which planning, calculation and a hierarchy of authority spread to most areas of social and cultural life.

The past fifty or a hundred years have seen a remarkable growth in the number, size, and power of organizations of many kinds, ranging through all areas of life.The extent of this change in the character and atmosphere of society can be visualized if we contrast the situation of 1952 with, say, that of 1852. In 1852 labour unions were practically nonexistent. There were practically no employers’ associations or trade associations. There were practically no professional associations. There were no farm organizations of any importance. National governments absorbed – by present standards – an almost infinitesimal part of the total national product.There was no Department of Agriculture, no Department of Labour, in Washington. There were few corporations and few large businesses. Organizations outside government itself were largely confined to the churches, a few local philanthropic societies, and the political parties. There were, of course, many sporadic attempts at large-scale organizations, in almost all fields, in the first half of the nineteenth century. None of these attempts, however, resulted in the establishment of stable, continuing organizations such as we see today.

(Kenneth Boulding, The Organizational Revolution, 1953)

As the extract above indicates, some modern writers came to believe that such an organisation society reached fruition in the post-1945 period (Kerr et al., 1960; Bell, 1960; Prethus, 1962). The dominant themes were that private and public corporations had helped to usher in a new era where politics, ideology and conflict had been superseded by rational, scientific decision-making, guided by a new enlightened, though powerful,

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administrative élite. Standardised mass production and consumption went hand-in- hand with central direction of the economy and state by professional managers and politicians. A special sort of person – organisation man – was even evoked, who could be relied on to be one of the vehicles of such techniques, given that his personality and commitment was subordinated to the corporation (Whyte, 1956). As Biggart comments, Whyte was describing ‘a generation of organisational workers who had been moulded by the needs of the corporation . . . conservative, impassive little grey men. Their lives in the organisation were routine and largely unemotional’ (Biggart, 1989: 4). The emphasis on ‘man’ is not accidental. An organisation society was predicated on the assumption of male corporate warriors, sustained by women at home providing the practical and emotional support.

It was pointless to desire significantly different arrangements, as all industrial societies were destined to converge into a single, similar type. The hierarchical and bureaucratic large-scale organisation, with its particular form of technology, was placed at the centre of mature industrial society. In retrospect this kind of perspective is more of an ideology masquerading as science than an accurate description of social trends. Organisation society and ‘man’ are part of an imagery where:

all the major institutional landmarks of modern industrial society – the factory, the welfare state, the business corporation, representative democracy, an independent civil service, universal education and medical care – were firmly set in place and equipped to manage any new problems which were likely to emerge in the foreseeable future. Institutional fine-tuning and technical adjustment were all that was necessary to maintain social stability and economic development. (Reed, 1986: 99–100)

At a time when there is considerable public scepticism about corporations, government and, indeed, science, this all now seems over-optimistic. It was always misguided. Grouping developments under a catch-all label of organisation society or ‘complex organisations’ became a means, however unintended, of stopping questions being asked about how such arrangements had come into being, how they were maintained, and whether they were necessary. In particular it obliterated real differences between organisational experiences such as being a worker and consumer of public or private services, organisations in a capitalist or non-capitalist society, and the origins and effects of different types of technology in varied cultural settings. In other words, such frameworks obscured the social contexts and social choices made about the nature of organisations – how they are structured, managed and experienced.

Defining the scope and purpose of organisations

Whether existing organisational structures and practices are necessary and efficient and regardless of which forms are dominant, it is demonstrably the case that greater power over our lives is exerted through such processes. Organisations mediate between the wider society and the individual, and joining an organisation as an employee exposes the individual to substantial direction and control. Despite the self-activity of their members, organisations as corporate bodies do have economic and political powers above and beyond those of the particular individuals that comprise them. In fact, there is every indication of a concentration of those powers in a small number of organisations, which is

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far from enlightened in its effects on us as workers or citizens. This was a perspective raised decades ago by C. Wright Mills (1959), who dubbed those who commanded major organisations the ‘power élite’. Today, takeovers and mergers continue unabated, whether the beneficiaries are tycoons such as Rupert Murdoch or faceless financial institutions.

So, despite the limits to the idea of an organisation society, there is a case for studying organisations. But, there remain a number of unanswered questions as to how? The orthodox approach is to define organisations as purposeful systems characterised by co-ordinated action towards an objective. By defining organisations in this way, Donaldson (1985: 7) can link together corporations, schools, families or neighbours fixing a fence. But though work may take place within a charity or a political party, its nature and purposes are different from those that operate under market discipline. Organisation may be necessary to ensure that co-ordinated action of any kind takes place, but actions vary enormously with the type of objective. Take Buford’s account of his time among extremely well-organised football hooligans:

Extensive preparations had gone into Manchester United’s last meeting with West Ham – coaches had been hired,with complex routes into the city to evade the police, the arrival times staggered so that everyone did not appear en masse. . . . Problems of leadership, organisation, and ‘big numbers’, and a hierarchical command structure:the technocrat phrasing did not obscure that what Steve was describing was a civil disturbance involving several thousand people. (Buford, 1991: 119–20)

The problem is that only by operating at an excessive level of generality and abstraction is it possible to treat things as diverse as hooligans, scout troops and transnational companies within the same analytical framework. As Nelson and Winter note, ‘There are a great many different sorts of organisations, and it is implausible that a given collection of concepts and propositions would apply uniformly, or even usefully, to all of them’ (quoted in Rowlinson, 1997: 70). Salaman makes a similar point:

a genuine sociology of organisations is not assisted by the efforts of some organisation analysts to develop hypotheses about organisations in general, lumping together such diverse examples as voluntary organisations,charities and political organisations. . . . It also obstructs the analysis of those structural elements which are dramatically revealed in employing organisations, but not necessarily in all forms of organisation. (Salaman, 1979: 33)

We agree with Salaman here, that organisations as such are not a coherent category of objects capable of being studied in a distinctive way. This is implicitly recognised in orthodox writing, which, most of the time, is not about organisations per se. Though comprehensive formal definitions may be retained, the overwhelming amount of writing and research is about business. Why then even refer to work organisations? Work organisations remain a crucial meeting place of contending social forces – owners, managers, professions, and workers – which generate and reflect contradiction and change. It is also the case that it is the profit-seeking nature of business organisations that creates their distinctive forms of management, control or other social relations. Such forms of organisation remain the structural core of advanced societies, even allowing for the decline in the proportion of those engaged in manufacturing activities. It is primarily for these reasons that the bulk of this book is geared towards those events and experiences.

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But in the end it is neither possible nor desirable to maintain a complete distinction between business and other forms of work organisation. Parts of the public sector have always operated in a market environment, and this tendency has rapidly increased in parts of the health service, local government and other public spheres in recent years. In addition, management methods or technologies may arise in a specific sector, but are frequently applied in modified forms in others. Finally, as Weber recognised, there are continuities of structure and practice deriving from the bureaucratic forms present within all large-scale organisations. For these reasons, while recognising the limitations, we prefer to retain work organisations as a broad framework. However, this does not mean that they are studied in isolation. Families and state structures are just two of the forces that interact with work organisations and whose links need to be examined.

Organisational analysis: problems and problematics

Even if we can settle some of the issues of the scope of organisational analysis, many unresolved problems remain which are essentially theoretical in nature. Since the 1950s, a particular approach, normally labelled organisation behaviour (OB), or sometimes organisation theory (OT), has become dominant. It is drawn mainly from management writings and organisational psychology, but enthusiastically borrows from sociology, economics, anthropology and other areas; thus laying claim to be genuinely interdisciplinary. While the borrowing of concepts may be eclectic, it is not random. Rather it is structured by specific problematics (a network of concepts oriented towards a core idea). OB focuses on social behaviour in the enterprise, directed chiefly towards problems of motivation and the performance of individuals and groups in relation to different structures and practices. OT is, according to Donaldson, primarily concerned with the trivariate relationship between structure, contingency and performance; or put another way it is ‘mainly about the analysis of different designs, and their contingencies and their outcomes’ (1985: 121). When both are taken into account, the result is that, ‘These writers have attempted to draw together and distil theories of how organisations function and how they should be managed. Their writings have been theoretical in the sense that they have tried to discover generalisations applicable to all organisations’ (Pugh, 1971: 9).

This approach is found in most American and some British textbooks and business schools. Therefore, though organisation studies has always been by its very nature interdisciplinary, this has often been on a narrow, management plus psychology basis. One of the limiting factors has been the gradual split from sociology. Organisational sociology has had a less than peaceful coexistence with orthodox approaches. In the last 25 years there has been a shift in the study of organisations from sociology departments to business and management schools (Hinings, 1988). The orientations of OB and OT have become narrower and more prescriptive. Donaldson (1985: 71–2, 119–20) defends this by reference to different levels of analysis. Issues of class and power, ideology and social stratification, and economic contradictions are the province of sociology. OT concentrates on the problems of people working inside organisations. Advocates of this approach thus seek to deflect criticism of neglect of wider concerns by moving the analytical goalposts. It is impossible satisfactorily to study something like the division of labour or hierarchy of groups in a business without an understanding of the broader social division of labour and power structure.

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This is not the only or main problem with ‘organisation theory’ that Donaldson (1985) attributes to North American business and management schools. Despite his spirited defence, this literature continues to reproduce a largely taken-for-granted view of organisations with respect to both their structures and processes, and notions of effectiveness and rationality. The rest of this chapter seeks to open up this discussion by examining some of the basic theoretical assumptions of orthodox or mainstream approaches, before going on to outline some alternatives that inform the way we have attempted to understand work organisations in this book. So as to avoid the discussion getting too complex at this stage, we have not dealt with the theoretical resources that mainstream or critical approaches draw from. These are outlined in Part III.

Goals, diversity and interests

If organisations are consciously created instruments, then their purpose tends to be defined in terms of goal seeking. This is unexceptional and, in fact, provides a means of distinguishing organisations from social institutions (for example, families) or movements (such as feminism), which do not manifest systematic structures and processes for controlling relations between means and ends. But further definition is more controversial. Goals are seen as preferred states which organisations and their members attempt to achieve through collective and co-ordinated action: ‘the planned co-ordina- tion of the activities of a number of people for the achievement of some common, explicit purpose or goal’ (Schein, quoted in Mullins, 1985: 2). In this ‘goal model’, action and values are seen in consensual terms. Goals are formulated, policies and objectives flow from them, inputs in the form of activities are created, which, in turn produce outputs that allow for realisation of goals and organisational success.

Though there may be vague reference to ‘environmental influences’, the starting point tends to be located within, rather than outside, the organisation: ‘there is an assumption that the organisation has some capacity to resist environmental constraints and set its own pattern’ (Benson, 1977: 5). Obstacles and variations in these processes are acknowledged. Members of organisations may have goals that are contradictory to senior management, creating gaps between formal and informal, official and operative, goals and actual policies (Perrow, 1961). For example, scientific and technical workers tend to be much more committed to their job than to their company, and tensions arise between employees’ desire to pursue research for its intrinsic value and pressure on employers to monitor and even close down those projects (Randle and Rainnie, 1994). Furthermore, sub-units of the organisation develop a life of their own, a partial devolution of responsibility resulting in goal displacement. It is management’s job to ensure the best possible fit between the goals of different ‘stakeholders’. This type of thinking is reflected in standard business mission statements, such as the one in Table 1.1.

Despite some progress towards acknowledging goal diversity and uncertainty, there are huge limitations to this way of thinking about organisations and goals. Oppositional goals cannot be confined to the ‘personal’. As Clegg and Dunkerley observe, ‘There is no notion of rational structural sources of opposition being generated in the normal processes of organisation’ (1980: 317). A sense of reification is still present, in which the organisation is treated as a thing, and the only legitimate goal-seeking collective. Problems cannot be wholly avoided by the use of the ‘stakeholder’ model (Donaldson, 1985: 24). While stakeholding does help us recognise a variety of interests inside organisations, in some variants it postulates a misleading pluralism in which

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The group exists for the benefit of:

•Its shareholders – by giving them annual dividend growth and long term capital appreciation from the consistent achievement of increased profits.

•Its customers and consumers – by providing products which delight them and represent excellent value in terms of quality, design, performance, reliability and price, together with a first class service.

•Its employees – by giving them secure long term employment, a fair and equitable reward system (including performance-related bonuses, share incentives and share options for senior executives), personal career development and safe and pleasant working conditions.

•The community – by acting as a good corporate citizen by giving support to the less fortunate in society and by adopting environmentally sound policies both within the company and outside.

goals are held to be the result of a relatively equal trade-off between the preferences of competing but co-operative groups (employees, managers, owners, customers). Nor is it enough for Donaldson to assert that the higher levels of management simply ‘edit and select’ from competing claims. Take the Pifco mission statement set out in Table 1.1. It all sounds good: shareholders can have increased profits, consumers get first-class service, employees get secure employment, and communities get a healthy environment. Regardless of whether corporate management really means it, they may find it much harder to deliver. Value for shareholders, dictated by financial institutions, may mean ‘downsizing’ and job losses. Efficiency drives to increase the quantity of queries dealt with in a call centre may result in poorer-quality service for those on the other end of the phone line.

The notion that formal organisations, made up of different members, are constituted to co-ordinate wider goals as if this is a form of social contract (Albrow, 1973: 408), underestimates the extent to which dominant power groupings have set those goals and shaped the appropriate structures. In practice co-ordination or cooperation may reflect pressure, constraint or acquiescence to power as much as shared goals. Let’s take an example to illustrate the problem: the Wapping dispute. In the mid-1980s, Rupert Murdoch announced plans to move production of his press titles from Fleet Street to a new site. This was planned in secret and sprung on the workforce. The subsequent strike was used as an excuse to dismiss over 5000 workers, most of whom never got their jobs back. Not much sign of a trade-off among stakeholders here. The power accruing from ownership gave Murdoch and his associates the means to enforce their objectives. Even those – notably journalists – who voted to accept the move, did so in a context of bribes (£2000 and BUPA membership) or threats (the sack). As one Sunday Times journalist wrote at the time, ‘In a propertyowning democracy, the price of the average citizen’s soul is a little less than the cost of his or her mortgage’. But in one sense there is a pluralism in work organisations, albeit different from ‘stakeholders’. The array of interests and interest groups that exist goes beyond a conventional management and labour dichotomy. One of the

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reasons that Murdoch won is that he was able to exploit divisions between journalists, mainly male printers and largely female semi-skilled workers, and white collar employees – all of whom had a history of sectional antagonism over wages, jobs and working conditions. So there is a sense in which we can refer to ‘organisations’ having policies or goals, but they have to be clearly recognised as frequently being the property of particular individuals or groups.

All this leads to a need to modify the orthodox definition of organisations as means of delivering collective goals. A more realistic definition would see organisations as consciously created arrangements to achieve goals by collective means. This recognises the inter-connected character of organisational practices, without any assumptions about harmonious goals and interests. A final broader point on this issue is important. As we saw earlier, to define or classify organisations in terms of goal seeking distorts the difference between them. We need to differentiate between different types of goals and the wider economic and political influences upon them; how they are constructed and in whose benefit they operate. With this in mind, it is better to think in terms of a variety of organising logics that arise out of those contexts and preferences. These may not all resemble the conventional bureaucratic way of doing things. For example, direct selling organisations (DSOs) such as Amway or Avon have been among the fastest-growing commercial organisations.

Compared with traditional firms,DSOs appear loose and out of control.They represent an apparent management nightmare that only a thick rule book and a platoon of managers could keep together.In fact,DSOs have almost no rules and,compared with most firms, few managers. Home Interiors and Gifts, for example, with 30 000 distributors, has only 35 managers. . . . Direct selling has a logic too, but is radically different from the logic of bureaucratic organisations: a conscious alternative to firms as a way to organise economic activity to make a profit, as a technique for managing labour, and as a means of earning income. (Biggart, 1989: 5–7)

Different logic leads to the choice of particular managerial mechanisms. The scientific workers referred to earlier are subject to normative controls that attempt to mobilise commitment to the work, combined with a large degree of operational autonomy. Many other white-collar workers in conventional bureaucratic hierarchies are being managed through much more economistic methods such as performancerelated pay.

Rationality, efficiency and choice

The mainstream emphasis on collective goal seeking is also sustained by a vision of organisations as rational instruments or tools; indeed this was a prime theme of ‘classical management theory’ that formed the basis of modern organisational analysis (see Chapter 8). When we talk of rationality, it normally refers to the logical nature of beliefs or actions. This is an aspect of mainstream perspectives, but the basic feature concerns the development of suitable means to reach specific ends. It therefore becomes inseparable from a notion of efficiency. The emphasis is on rationally designed structures and practices resting on processes of calculated planning that will maximise organisational effectiveness. Some traditional theorists have described this in terms of the ‘one best way’ to run organisations. A more acceptable version of the rational

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model recognises the contingent nature of the process: ‘Organisational arrangements are viewed as the outcomes of means–end decisions to bring situational circumstances and structures into alignment in order to enhance efficiency’ (Bryman, 1984: 392). Most mainstream texts continue to deny that there is one formula to fit every situation, but any serious examination of popular management writing and the associated business fads shows that the search for blueprints and formulas has not been forgotten (Pascale, 1990; Huczynski, 1993).

This can be seen by the rash of books imitating the American best-seller In Search of Excellence (Peters and Waterman, 1982). They all examine the activities of companies in an attempt to find the winning formula. At the level of the individual, the equivalent is the endless exhortation to become the ‘successful manager’, the ‘oneminute manager’ and so on. Interestingly Peters and Waterman attack the ‘rational model’ embodied in the classical theorists such as Weber and F. W. Taylor. But their objection is actually to a particular type of rational action that is based on following rules, techniques and structural devices. They approvingly quote Selznick: ‘It [the organisation] refers to an expendable tool, a rational instrument engineered to do a job . . .

the transformation of an engineered, technical arrangement of building blocks into a social organism’ (Peters and Waterman, 1982: 98). For them, the key role is played by the distinctive values or culture of an organisation, for this has the effect of binding the various participants together. This is what has apparently made Eastman Kodak, McDonald’s, Texas Instruments and other companies successful (see Chapter 13 for a full discussion). The magic formula may differ, but the framework of rational action = efficiency remains the same.

Rationality and efficiency are legitimate aspects of organisational analysis. But in mainstream theory they are presented largely in neutral terms, as if rationality was a simple determinant of organisational structures, processes and goals. Processes are reduced to a matter of technique: devising the appropriate kind of structure, or best fit with a particular environment. A cosy picture is developed of a functional relationship between rational organisations and a rational society. This perspective removes issues of politics, power and control from organisational choices, and critical questions concerning means and ends. Donaldson (1985: 101) tries to get round this by separating the latter: ‘The concern with rational means rather than values is part of what makes such studies apolitical’. But there are as many contestable choices to be made about how to design jobs or authority structures as there are about the ends to which they are put.

A rational model emphasising features such as calculability is further confused with rationality or reasonableness as such. As Fischer and Sirriani put it:

For the critical theorist, mainstream writers have confused the rational model of efficient administrative behaviour with organisational rationality itself...organisations must be conceptualised as tools for the pursuit of personal, group or class interests. (Fischer and Sirriani, 1984: 10–11)

Furthermore, traditional notions underestimate the role of rationality and efficiency as ideological constructs that help to legitimise the positions, rewards and activities of dominant groups (Salaman, 1979: 177–82). For example, when changes take place such as mergers or closures, they are often described in terms of rationalisation, as if the decision of managers or boards of directors are inevitable and the only way of doing things. It is important to acknowledge the contested nature of rationality,