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Introduction Transcending Structure-Agency in the Study of Organizations

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Introduction Transcending Structure-Agency in the Study of Organizations Introduction Transcending Structure-Agency in the Study of Organizations Vita Peacock and Philip Kao What is the relation between our own daily perspectives of two foundational fi gures in activity and the organizations that almost all the study of organizations: Émile Durkheim of us are members of? This seemingly simple and Max Weber. For Durkheim, an analysis question has dominated the social study of of social structure was the key to understand- organizations for over a century, and the re- ing individual behaviour. The family, the law, sponses to it can be very broadly parcelled religion, and economic and political life con- out into three alternative perspectives. The stituted such ‘structures’, enforcing their col- fi rst argues that this organization, (whether lective will through ‘social facts’ (Durkheim a school, a university, a corporation, a union, 1982: 50), which produced the social being of or any other substantial social group) has a their members. These structures and their ma- determinate relationship to our activity within terial expressions produced the relationship of it, being larger and more powerful than we human beings to one other: their ‘solidarity’ are as individuals. The second maintains that (Durkheim 1997). One’s relative ‘integration’ through our activity and exchange with other into, and ‘regulation’ by, these structures could individuals within them, we in fact co-consti- even determine diff erent forms of suicide, tute such groups. The third perspective seeks previously conceived to be the most unam- to get around the predominance of one over biguous case of individual choice (Durkheim the other, by asserting that both elements of 1952). For Durkheim, the ‘thoughts to be found this relationship are in dialectical synthesis. in the consciousness of individuals’ were ir- Welcome to the Möbius strip of the so-called relevant (1982: 54). When individuals became ‘structure-agency problem’, which continues part of social groups they were helplessly to drive organizational theorists in dizzying transformed: becoming part of a qualitatively circles. Emerging from a workshop hosted by distinct unitary mass, which guided their ac- the Department of Anthropology at Univer- tions accordingly. sity College London in July 2012, we ask in Weber, meanwhile, took a diff erent tack; this Special Issue: has the ‘structure-agency his emphasis on interpreting the ‘actions’ of problem’ itself become a problem? Is the time ‘agents’ was in fact almost antithetical to Dur- for ‘rethinking’ this binary fi nally past (Reed kheim’s structure (Runciman 1993: 7–42). The 1997)? Is now the moment to snip the strip to a priori existence and determinacy of supra- see in which directions its severed ends might personal entities were no longer to be taken lead us? for granted, but rather ‘all events or states Before reaching for the scissors, a brief and of aff airs … remain meaningless if no agent schematic synopsis of the problem – as defi ned has consciously endowed them with mean- by its most infl uential intermediaries – will be ing’ (ibid.: 10). For Weber, collectives had to necessary.1 The story begins with the divergent be constituted by the discrete social actions Anthropology in Action, 20, no. 2 (Summer 2013): 1–5 © Berghahn Books and the Association for Anthropology in Action ISSN 0967-201X (Print) ISSN 1752-2285 (Online) doi:10.3167/aia.2013.200201 AiA | Vita Peacock and Philip Kao of its individuals, who elected to accord them the agent’s class location) which produced signifi cance or otherwise. No bonds of ‘soli- the habitus (ibid.: 54), as well as the habitus darity’ were presumed in advance; and any itself as an ordering principle – his emphasis abstract formation such as ‘state’, ‘church’, is wholeheartedly placed within the body of or ‘marriage’ – some of the central tenets of the actor. To exist, organizations had to be Durkheim’s structure – were regarded as reifi - inhabited by individuals so inscribed. It was cations, which only became relevant for the so- the habitus that enabled them to ‘att ain full re- ciologist if actors considered them to be (ibid.: alization’ (ibid.: 57); contra Durkheim, organi- 30). The work of abstraction for Weber was not zations possessed no sui generis extrinsic life. to understand individual behaviour through Giddens, meanwhile, was more change- the lens of structural determinants – as Dur- oriented in emphasis, as opposed to Bour- kheim apprehended diff erent forms of suicide dieu’s orientation towards reproduction. Like – but to uncover collective logics through an Bourdieu, Giddens’ agent is one who acts in interpretation of individual actions, such as his the world (‘Agency refers to doing’) (1984: famous descriptions of various forms of ‘au- 10); yet while ‘habitus’ reiterates dispositions thority’ (Weber 1979). Weber’s methodological learnt in childhood and beyond, Giddens’ individualism placed the ‘actor’ or ‘agent’ at agent is one who decides – in his words – to the centre of the social universe. ‘make a diff erence’ (ibid.: 14). Agency is thus It is Weber’s proposition that human be- inextricably linked to power, the causal start- haviour is irreducibly ‘stochastic’ (Hacking ing point in a chain reaction which may lead 1990) and so the ‘agent’ should come fi rst, to historical change. Structure, meanwhile, is that essentially came to defi ne organizational a purely abstract formation: a ‘virtual order’ of analysis as the twentieth century marched transformative relations (ibid.: 17). It consists on. While Durkheim’s structure – particularly of rules of morality and conduct that can only in its later metaphysical expression (2008) – be approximated by acting subjects. According found favour with subsequent generations of to Giddens, the dualism of ‘agency’ and ‘struc- anthropologists, Weber’s ‘interpretive sociol- ture’ is a fallacy, as both are part of the same ogy’, which he argued could only be applied duality: ‘the duality of structure’ (ibid.: 25). His to what was culturally familiar and therefore solution, ‘structuration’, takes the same line as capable of comprehension (Runciman 1993: Bourdieu in its emphasis on practice, but plays 19), shaped the latt er discipline under which upon the paradox that actors may be both organizational analysis largely fell (Scott 1959; enabled and constrained by the Janus-faced Parsons 1968). quality of such duality. In the 1970s and 1980s – emblematic of the Finally, in the 1990s and beyond, holistic no- postmodern taste for antinomies – two infl u- tions of constraint have appeared to evaporate ential social theorists sought to resolve the entirely. Bourdieu and Giddens’ focus on the opposition between ‘agent’ and ‘structure’ by indeterminacy of action, opened the doors to asserting the inextricability of their union. The elaborations of ‘agency’ and ‘creativity’ which more well-known of these is Pierre Bourdieu defi ed structural explanation (Law 1994; Rap- and his theorization of the embodied accu- port 2009); members of organizations were mulation of inherited dispositions he called purported to inhabit a hyper-immanent world the ‘habitus’ (1990: 54). While much of his of constant happenings (Kondo 1990; Zaloom discussion revolves around structure – which 2006). Such conceptual moves have eff ectively through his Marxist lens meant the ‘deter- ‘collapsed structure into agency’ (Reed 1997: minate class of conditions of existence’ (the 21); thus Weber’s perspective won out, while social and material circumstances arising from Durkheim’s disintegrated into disrepute. Al- 2 | Introduction | AiA ways a reliable source of contemporary doxa, there are other dynamics and social facts that undergraduates are now outraged at the re- can speak truth to power. morseless collective bias of the latt er’s orienta- Like Bashkow (2004), we fi nd it produc- tion, appalled by his neglect of ‘the individual’ tive to reanimate a Boasian conception of and their independent activity. boundaries, especially those that are erected The current state of play can be illustrated and dismantled by people inhabiting par- by the comparatively long reign of ‘actor-net- ticular organizations. By shift ing the focus work’ analysis (Law and Hassard 1999). Bruno towards boundaries, ethnographers can show Latour – its most vociferous advocate – drew how certain contexts lead to action and mean- his scholarly genealogy from Gabriel Tarde ing that is not always given nor foreclosed in instead of Durkheim (interestingly Weber was various institutional/bureaucratic orderings. also infl uenced by Tarde), and pronounced the This perspective does not necessarily amount death of ‘the social’ as Durkheim understood to delimiting freedom in action, creativity or it (Latour 2005). In Latour’s materialist view, resistance, but rather illuminates the inter- the social only becomes real if actively traced, faces that mould the processes and histories and so the work of the social analyst should be of organizations and organizational ‘selves’. ‘a sociology of associations’ (ibid.: 160) – one The concept of boundaries is fruitful as it which ignores abstractions and focuses instead demarcates types of relationships, and con- on the way ‘actors’ forge and interact with textualizes claims of ownership, belonging, ‘networks’. He thus applied this methodology authority, legitimacy, and accountability. By to the organizations he has examined (Latour doing so, we can improve our study of organi- and Woolgar 1979; Latour 2010). Latour’s most zations by recognizing the relational nature of radical proposition was that there are eff ec- decision-making, interaction and other aspects tively no value-laden milieu which prefi gure of organizational work and life that are op- the ways these ‘actor-networks’ emerge: in erationalized both across and because of them. his words ‘we have to try to keep the social Likewise, exploring the eff ects of boundaries domain completely fl at’ (Latour 2005: 171). rather than those of ‘structures’ or ‘agents’, Thus for Latour the ‘structure-agency prob- may generate pragmatic solutions to forms of lem’ is resolved through the total rejection of dysfunction, ineff ectiveness or malaise which structure, and its substitution for a universally can permeate organizational life.
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