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

Weber’s theory

1. Rationality Weber listed four forms of social action based upon the principle of rationalization. They are, first, Zweckrationalität, making decisions according to planned results. This is a form of decision making in which the social actor chooses both the means and the ends of action. In bureaucracy, one effect of this form of

Domination and organization

Domination and organization are inescapably mutually implicated. Domination requires organization – concerted action by a body of people employed as staff – to exe- cute commands; and, conversely, all organization requires domination in that the power of command over the staff must be vested in an individual or a group of indi- viduals, in

The discipline of organization

Although Weber’s interests were broad and many, for the contemporary organiza- tion and management theorist the most important types of power discussed by Weber derive from a constellation of interests that develops on a formally free mar- ket and from established authority that allocates the right to command and the duty to obey (Weber

Systemizing the world

1. First, the word: Vilfredo Pareto and Talcott Parsons It was the emergence of a common discourse of the organization as a social system that settled matters in favor of efficiency rather than a discussion of domination. The seminal figure in this conception was L. J. Henderson at Harvard, the central figure in the

Disrupting systems and organizing identity

Goffman and organizing identity Authority, with its assumptions of legitimacy, necessarily implies consent to the rule that is invoked. Erving Goffman makes this absolutely clear, writing in relation to the small things of everyday organizational life, which ‘provide instruction’ in the essence of the organization’s power: ‘For example, to move one’s body in response

Fixing the system

From the underlife of institutions to formal systems If one accepted the systems theory view of authority, given its acceptance of established claims to legitimacy, then it was evident that it had no place for power which did not serve organizational goals. Other forms of power could only reside in unruly spaces where the

Power and the metaphysic of uncertainty

1. Maintaining bounds A whole metaphysic of uncertainty was at work in these rediscoveries of power. What is uncertainty? In some general way it denotes a lack of assurance or convic- tion in what will transpire. Certainty, by contrast, represents a situation where one can predict with absolute surety what a future state of

Power, possession and causality

Systems theory used general attributes to explain phenomena, because the theory was supposed to function as a set of coherent and transcendental terms. Along with the key conception of power being an emergent property that appears at the limits of rationality, where there is uncertainty, some other key terms were imported from political science.

Clayton’s power: the kind of power you have when you’re not really having power

1. Is power a visible and deployable asset? What one can do and say with the causal conception of power, as something given by possession of resources, is very limited.5 First, it appears to be not a social rela- tion but a possession. One has power rather than being in a relationship of power.

Erving Goffman and Michel Foucault

1. Situating Goffman If Weber’s relative neglect is one curious absence in the annals of organization theory, then it is not the only one. The litany of unsung heroes must also include Erving Goffman, especially his work on total institutions,1 not least because he anticipated, in so many ways, themes that were later to

Total institutions

Goffman coined the term ‘total institutions’, to refer to a class of concentrated power. In many ways he anticipated the themes that were later to become popular in Foucault’s (1977) work – the power of incarceration, rules and surveillance – although instead of focusing on design he studied action, which undoubtedly gave greater acuity

Authority at work

Ordinary people can do extraordinary things when authority tells them to, as an experiment by Milgram (1971) demonstrated. Milgram’s research question was simply to ask to what extent ordinary individuals, people who are not authoritar- ian personalities but display all the signs of normalcy, follow the commands of figures perceived to be in authority.