Critical Analysis of Organizations

Critical Analysis of Organizations Theory, Practice, Revitalization CATHERINE CASEY SAGE Publications London • Thousand Oaks • New Delhi © Catherine Casey 2002 First published 2002 Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form, or by any means, only with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction, in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers. SAGE Publications Ltd 6 Bonhill Street London EC2A 4PU SAGE Publications Inc 2455 Teller Road Thousand Oaks, California 91320 SAGE Publications India Pvt Ltd 32, M-Block Market Greater Kailash - I New Delhi 110 048 British Library Cataloguing in Publication data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 0 7619 5905 X ISBN 0 7619 5906 8 (pbk) Library of Congress Control Number available Typeset by SIVA Math Setters, Chennai, India Printed and bound in Great Britain by Athenaeum Press, Gateshead In Memoriam Christopher Lasch Vivit etiamnunc ingenii afflatus. Contents Acknowledgements vi Introduction 1 1 Organizational Analysis Now 8 2 The Modern Heritage: Philosophy and Sociology 27 3 Classical Traditions of Organizational Analysis 63 4 Counter-Movements: Criticism, Crisis, Dispersion 88 5 Postmodernism and Organizational Analysis 115 6 After Postmodernism 143 7 Revitalization 173 References 195 Index 212 Acknowledgements I extend my heartfelt thanks to Philip Wexler for his personal and intellectual inspiration and encouragement, and for his friendship. The book is greatly indebted to his critical and generous discussion of ideas over the years. I thank, with much love, Judy Robson for her support and understanding throughout the writing of this book, and much else. My graduate students at the University of Auckland, especially Joe Beer and Tricia Alach, contributed much through their lively interest in discussing many of the ideas in this book. I thank them and others I haven’t mentioned by name. To Margaret Tibbles, librarian par excel- lence, I extend many thanks for her careful reading of the draft manu- script, and to Chris Rojek my thanks for his quiet support of the project. My thanks to Brett Warburton, Nicola Gavey, Maeve Landman and Gill Denny, especially for their encouragement at timely moments. I acknowledge my research grants from the University of Auckland which enabled the empirical part of this research, and I thank all the people who kindly shared their stories. And I remember, with love, Christopher Lasch, critic of modernity, and my teacher at the University of Rochester. Introduction As the crisis in modernity deepens, a network of markets ascends in the place of modern society and institutions. Among the social fragments of a liberal marketization, two conflicting tendencies are clear – one of a heightened individualism of the rationally choosing consumer, and the other of a cultural current of identity and communalism. Both are anti- thetical to the idea of society. Now, in weakened confidence, after classical sociology, critical theory, and postmodernism, sociology turns, more than ever, to a profound reflexivity. Amid the myriad uncertainties, there is little question that the privileged place given to rationality in classical social theory is rescinded. It is also clear that social theorists are strug- gling with far more questions raised by their reflexivity, and by a frag- menting modernity, than they have answers for. The grand project of modernity is now thoroughly epistemologically undone, and its social practices found gravely lacking, even as it delivers a measure of what people want. Many theorists declare their ambivalence as though a final word on the matter. Some sociologists, it appears, now shy away altogether from theorizing society and seeking its revitalization. They avoid, too, many of the central problematics of modern sociology, includ- ing institutions and organizations. But organizations, as social relation- ships, are immensely affected by, and constituent of, these vast changes in modernity. For many, the cultural turn to the postmodern takes centre stage in intellectual debate and analysis in the West. As social analysts discern patterns of technological, economic and political change manifesting a condition of late or postmodernity, many theorists welcome the disruption and affirmation of difference enabled by postmodern fracture and epistemological alternatives to modernist formalism and reified instrumental rationality. Postmodern theories in their various ways express our experience of the decomposition of the world. They have widened the negative space in which regenerative criticism might be sought. But their alternatives to rationalizing modernity ultimately deliver little more than quietism or fetishized identity pursuits. Indeed, postmodernism’s inability to pose a regenerative imagination for transforma- tion of social practices which continue to produce social, and personal, 2 Critical Analysis of Organizations consequences of disparate value or irrefutable repugnance bespeaks its failure as critical theory. Even as the earlier popular, celebratory embrace of the postmodern has passed, so too have the critical possibilities portended by postmodern theorizing quite typically found accommodation with long-standing powerful interests in the utilization of knowledge products. Now a pre- ference for cultural theory shaped by prevalent notions of the postmodern as ironic, deconstructive and indeterminate displaces social theory. Social theory as critical, socially transformative practice is relegated – as though it is ineluctably culpable with the imperatives and outcomes of a mono- logical rationalizing modernity – to a relative isolation. Postmodern problematics have generated important questions and chal- lenges to conventional sociological and organizational theories and modes of analysis, as well as a plethora of interpretations of contemporary organization practices. But a more serious concern with the limits of modern reason and the rationalized, economistic culture of commodity capitalism as the context of organizational practice scarcely appears in postmodern analyses of organizations. Moreover, sober and serious engagement with its implications and the moral and practical dilemmas to which postmodernism has given rise are systematically ignored by most advocates of postmodern ideas in organization studies. Indeed, these very notions are rejected by some postmodern analysts as modernist illusions which, in the words of one, ‘the postmodern analyst refuses to take seriously’ (Rouleau and Clegg 1992: 18). Many invoke postmodernism as affirmation and legitimation of quite diverse new organizational practices. For the more pragmatic, postmodern ideas and approaches provide access to dimensions of organizational life not yet fully utilized by instrumentally rational approaches, and which are arearable to strategic managerial interven- tions. In the everyday world of organizations, it is difficult to discern signs of structural and political alteration, beyond expected neo- rationalist restructurings and realignments of dominant power relations in changing social conditions, inspired by postmodern organizational analyses. Discursive undecidability, as the abstract antidote to subjecti- fication and governmentality, evidently has more appeal in the aca- demy than it does among strategic rationalists in organizational practice who are quick to decide their preferences and to assert foun- dations where there are none. Of course, many organizational analysts, especially economic and management science analysts, have disdainfully rejected or avoided postmodernism, as they did earlier forms of criticism. But conventional organizational analysis barely conceals its deepening inadequacy to the Introduction 3 task of socially analysing organizational practices in manifestly altering postindustrial conditions. A heightened focus on micro, frag- mented and socially abstracted issues of organization and economy, typical of positivist and functionalist social science, is an impove- rished, ideological response. The privileging of the most utilitarian forms of knowledge refuses reflection on the ends to which such knowledge is put. The perdurability of functionalism and its many derivatives, despite considerable empirical sociological evidence since the mid-20th century disconfirming its practical operation, now aligns with the moral eclipse effected by a dominant instrumental reason. Even though many critics endeavour to describe the limitations and immense risks posed in modern technical rationalities, the imperatives of instrumental rationality continue to feed an assumption of inex- haustible planetary resources fuelling economic production and growth in conventional terms. Consequently, much modern organizational analysis provides little answer to the postmodern theoretical disruption, other than more of the same grossly distorted and unreflective rationalizing modernity. Critical analysis of society and of organizations in contemporary conditions confronts complex, multilayered problems and dynamics. Many social theorists feel isolated in their attempts to think about contemporary society. They feel caught between those who

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