Kenneth Benson highlights a trend in organizational analysis which has gathered pace in the past 20 years. Benson notes how, in 1977, there was `a vague sense of unease amongst organizations’s scholars’ Issues of meaning, power and reflexivity are now very much on the agenda. Take a look at recent issues of the journals Organization Studies and Organization to catch a sense of the shift (especially if you compare their contents with mid-70's issues of Administrative Science Quarterly, the single major journal in the field).

Benson pinpoints four areas where the shift is occurring : action, power, levels, process. Although these are presented as distinct, they overlap. For example, much of the discussion of (micro) `levels` and `process` could have been incorporated in the discussion of `action’.

`Action’. The complaint here is that orthodox accounts of `organization’ exclude a consideration of the actions of organizational members which (re)produce the realities to which orthodox analysis makes reference or seek to know.

`Organizational features (e.g. hierarchy, span of control, technology) are simply treated as objective realities having an unchallenged factual character’ (Benson, p. 7)

`Likewise, self-reports and rating scales completed by participants are accepted as indexes of objective facts’ (Benson, p. 7)

The action approach (see D. Silverman, The Theory of Organizations, London : Heinemann, 1971 for an elaboration of this perspective) attends to how organizational realities are generated and sustained through processes of social interaction. In Silverman’s words,

`Organizations do not react to their environments, their members do. People act in terms of their own and not the observer’s definition of the situation’ (Silverman p. 37, emphasis added)

If this is accepted, then to understand how organizational realities are produced and transformed it is necessary to study member’s definitions and negotiations of their situation.

`Power’. The observation about `negotiation’ indicates the relevance of `power’ in the process of defining situations (nb. power/knowledge). "He who has the bigger stick has the better chance of imposing his definitions" (P. Berger and T. Luckman, The Social Construction of Reality, Harmondsworth : Penguin, 1966 : 101, cited in Silverman, 1971 : 138).

Power is not just one possible `factor’ influencing organizational realities (and often in ways which are deemed to be informal if not irrational because they are "illegitimate" in terms of the formal, goal rationality ascribed to organizations). Instead, power `is increasing seen as the essential core from which other organizational features proceed’ (Benson, p. 10). Power is understood to be central to processes of generating/ reproducing/ transforming organizational realities; and, crucially, the realities of organization are `understood as an expression of the power of certain interests inside and outside the organization’s boundaries’ (Benson, p. 10). This connects with ideas about inequality re. class, gender,etc.

`Levels’. This follows on from the point about `...outside the organization...’ as it challenges the coherence of `treating the organization as a distinct, boundary-maintaining entity’ (Benson, p. 11). Likewise, it is argued that the realities of organization cannot sensibly studied independently of the micro-processes of negotiation between individuals and groups which constitute and transform these realities. See `Action’ above.

`Process’. Emphasises that organizational realities are continuously re-made from moment to moment and are subject to disruption and transformation. Benson also makes a connection to dialectical Marxism as another `process-oriented perspective’ where processes are understood to be riven with contradictions which occasionally erupt into crises. Organizations are then understood to be articulations of `complex interest structures’ in which the existence of shared goals is precarious and/or rhetorical.

Benson and WIS

There are strong resonances between key WIS ideas and Benson’s discussion of `innovation and crisis in organizational analysis’. Both are concerned with issues of meaning, power and process. Both reject the conventional division between levels of analysis (e.g. individual -group- organization- society) on the grounds that `the individual` is not separable from `society` and, indeed, is a construction of social relations.

There are also some differences.

WIS Semester Two Schedule

Semester 2 -  Examples of Exercise Sessions