Institutional theory: A Cautionary Comment

If one examines the grand march of ideas across the centuries, it is pos- sible to make a case for the regular repetition, and alternating domi- nance, of either more liberal or more conservative accounts of the human condition. Thus, for example, European intellectual circles dur- ing the 18th and 19th centuries experienced the

Institutional theory: A Brief Sermon

Some of us may prefer to go even further in advancing the cause of insti- tutional analysis. A productive model for doing so has been provided by the lifelong work of Philip Selznick. His work has been discussed in previous chapters, but few organization theorists have followed it beyond its early phases, in particular

Definition of power and its role

1. Three ways of fixing things The book that you have in your hands will fix some aspects of the terms ‘power’ and ‘organizations’, and we consider that fixing in three ways. First, we use ‘fixing’ as in fixing a hole where the rain gets in, that is repairing the fabric of a construction.

Power in organization and social theory

1. Investigating power In this book we will investigate various conceptions of power, focusing particularly on the intersection of these conceptions with that of organization in both theory and practice. Power is a difficult idea to pin down and has been very widely ignored, marginalized and trivialized in many discussions of organizations, for a

Modern organization theory as a science

1. Sketching the field The epitome of modern rational organization theory was the program institutional- ized as contingency theory. One reason why functionalist contingency theory became so widely debated was because the Aston Research Programme was so successful. Its findings dominated the pages of the journals, especially the Administrative Science Quarterly, during the 1960s

Sharpening the focus on power in organization theory

1. Fixing a focus Power is something that only came into sharp focus for much organization theory in the post Second World War era, when a hypothesis, that control over uncer- tainty bestowed power in otherwise rationalized systems, was widely elaborated. Organization science developed this way of addressing power in the 1950s; organi- zation

Programmatics and analytics

The logic of the book is constructed according to two principles: first, a principle of programmatics, and second, a principle of analytics.Where we address pro- grammatics we are focused on practices of power, rather more than their extant the- orization. We justify this logic in terms of the fact that the practices in question

Management and modernity

It is a truth universally acknowledged that an organization not in possession of good fortune must be in want of a good manager.1 What managers do has tradi- tionally been defined in terms of relations of handling, supervision and control.2 The precise unfolding of these relations, in part, is a charting of the forms

The emergence of modern management theory

1. Modern management As far as one is concerned with management, the maturation of modernity is marked, programmatically, by the work of F. W. Taylor, for he was responsible for creating the individual and responsible employee not just as a creature of religious imperatives such as the Protestant ethic – or habit – but

The political economy of the body

1. Efficiency at work The innovation with which Taylor is most associated is the linking of efficiency to power through the medium of the human body. At the core of the new meta-routines that systematic or scientific management ushered in was the efficient use of the human body. The program sought to drill efficiency

Power and the moving line

1. The slaughterhouse One thing that Taylor did not develop but which lifted the applicability of some ele- ments of his system to new heights, whilst seeing the abandonment of much that he held dear, was the moving production line. In 1913, 30 years after Taylor installed his first system, a revolution in manufacturing

Reforming efficiency

1. Efficiency reforming economy What we have been doing to this point is to investigate the ways in which, at a cru- cial point in its emergence, the idea of management was formed around knowledge of the individual that it produced, conceived in terms of a political economy of the body. On the eve

Community against efficiency

1. Power, community and democracy: Mar y Parker Follett Not everyone contributing to the imagination of futures at work in management theorizing shared the same dreams. There were signs that what for some augured a dream of efficiency, for others foreshadowed a nightmare of isolated sociability, alienated being, and wasted humanity. Additionally, it became

The Hawthorne experiments

1. The Fatigue Laborator y at Har vard Western Electric served as the manufacturing arm of the Bell System for more than 100 years in the United States. It produced many of the breakthrough technologies developed by scientists at Bell Laboratories. Inside the Hawthorne works, more than 40,000 people designed, assembled and tested a

Social and human problems: Elton Mayo

1. Situating Mayo While Roethlisberger and Dickson (1939) were to write up the Hawthorne research, they did not do so before Elton Mayo (1933) had leapt into print, causing some subsequent confusion about who actually conducted the studies. Mayo did not, but he used the research to mount a critique of scientific management’s tech-

Leadership and authority

1. Chester Barnard Chester Barnard joined forces with Mayo when he cited him to the effect that ‘authority depends upon a co-operative personal attitude of individuals on the one hand; and the system of communication in the organization on the other’ (1938: 175). What managers should communicate are strong moral values, which it was

The institutionalization of leadership

1. Phillip Selznick In one of the most sophisticated accounts, Phillip Selznick’s (1957) Leadership in administration explicitly divides the soul from the body. The organization is a cor- porate body, a tool or instrument rationally designed to direct human energies to a fixed goal, an expendable and limited apparatus. However, the body has a

The mind in the soulful machine

1. Incorporating knowing Fortifying the meta-routine of efficiency required perfecting supporting routines; thus political economy shaded into moral economy as the 1930s developed. Slowly, it became evident that efficient routines could only be founded on the social and cultural rehabilitation of the worker as a whole person rather than merely their perfection as an

Reading Weber

1. Translations from America While Taylor was prescribing how work should be designed in America, or at least the Midvale Steel works and one or two other establishments, that continent received a visitor from Europe. Max Weber, recovering from a prolonged period of intellectual inactivity associated with deep depression, attended the World’s Fair in

Situating Weber

1. Weber is not a classical management theorist After the English translations were available, the organization scholars who read Weber largely worked outside of contemporary German scholarship. Few, if any, knew precursors such as Nietzsche, Hegel and Marx or contemporaries such as Simmel. And, to add a further barrier to the reception of his