If food dropped off trees, the climate was temperate all year round, and nothing tried to kill us, we might get by with only those forms of organization required to amuse or enlighten, such as art, religion, and philosophy. But resources have always been limited. Life pressures us to compete, whether that competition is over food, territory, desirable mates, or jobs. Individuals compete within their groups over status and position, and groups compete with each other in their quest to dominate. Thus competition is always part of organizations even though organizations depend upon cooperation to realize their goals.
Economies depend on trust between people. This trust in turn depends upon experiences of stable, successful exchange. To appreciate what this means in organizational terms requires another concept: institution — a time-honored activity or organization that addresses what would otherwise be a persistent social problem by encouraging behavior that stabilizes society.
Examples of institutions include the handshake, money, banking, marriage, the family, religion, and government.
Known as the stakeholder perspective, this view holds that anyone whose life is affected by the activities of an organization has a stake in that organization, and thus a right to influence its decisions and actions.
Four metaphors in particular have proven their worth helping people to form images of organization: the machine, the organism (or living system), culture, and psychic prison.
Nowadays, the machine metaphor encourages managers to design all aspects of their organizations to maximize efficiency.
But although culture provides stability, it also offers continuity in the face of unavoidable or irresistible change. It takes the confidence of knowing who you are to face a threatening environment or new opportunities that demand taking risk.
Culture and the unconscious can be regarded as opposite sides of the same coin. Freud considered culture a collective phenomenon arising from the unconscious dynamics of its members. Jung’s idea of the collective unconscious took the opposing view that our cultural past provides a reservoir of experiences and memories that we tap as our psyches develop.
When they finished, she told me she was amazed by how much faster the work progressed than it would have if workers had assembled entire windows individually. But she also confessed that nobody had as much fun doing the work or as great a sense of accomplishment at its conclusion.
Organizations pay a human price for treating people like machines.
Henry David Thoreau claimed that disconnection from society caused by the division of labor made the average person in “civilized” society less wealthy than one in “savage” society. This is because “savages” treat one another as whole persons whereas the “civilized” act like cogs in a machine.
Almost every organization develops bureaucracy as it grows. Bureaucracy is characteristic of most governments, nearly every university, established religious orders, and large corporations the world over. According to Weber, it emerged from the Middle Ages as a response to rampant nepotism and other abuses of power occurring throughout feudal societies. Heralded at the time as morally superior to the available alternatives such as fiefdoms, bureaucracy relies upon rationality (e.g. optimizing decisions for the sake of goal achievement) rather than favoritism to govern the fair distribution and use of resources and authority.
Bureaucracy emerges when systems are large, rely upon recognized technical expertise, or continue indefinitely, as government agencies and large businesses often do. It is characterized by a fixed division of labor, a hierarchy of bureaus with their own well-defined spheres of governance, and a set of rules governing performance. Those appointed to work for a bureaucracy are selected on the basis of their technical qualifications and promotions are based on seniority or achievement as determined by superiors operating within the rules of their office. Strict discipline and control is expected throughout.
Ideally, bureaucracy is a system for turning employees of quite average ability into rational decision-makers able to serve their constituencies, clients, or customers with impartiality and efficiency. The bureaucratic form promises reliable decision-making, merit-based selection and promotion, and the impersonal and, therefore, fair application of rules. When organizations are large and operate routine technologies in fairly stable environments, bureaucracy will generally produce these benefits, though not without some negative consequences.
As other critics have since noted, bureaucracy defines tasks so narrowly and renders organization so complex that its participants ultimately lose sight of their larger purposes. Regardless of what it was originally designed to do, they say, bureaucracy ultimately only perpetuates itself.
Nor can bureaucracy accommodate constant and rapid change. Change requires rewriting policies and rules and disseminating revisions to decision-makers who must then remember them or constantly refer to manuals and memos to implement them properly. Thus, whenever flexibility is a primary consideration, bureaucracy becomes a hindrance.
Churchill once observed: “We shape our buildings and afterward our buildings shape us.”
Thinking you might be watched at any time creates pressure to behave as if you are watched all the time. Self-monitoring by the prisoners cuts down on the actual monitoring needed and thus on the number of guards required.
Believing the map represented the terrain in which they were lost helped the soldiers orient themselves and take action. Their action, an enactment of the belief that they possessed a map of the Alps, led them out of danger.
You can think of legitimacy as a social resource in contrast with capital or raw material resources on which organizations also depend. Without legitimacy it is difficult for an organization to thrive because it has to work so hard to justify its existence in the eyes of stakeholders such as regulators, investors, media, and the public. A bank has to look like a bank or people won’t trust their money to it. Conversely, online universities have to work extra hard to convince prospective students and employers that they are legitimate alternatives to traditional institutions of higher learning.
Externally, organizations compete to control the resources that ensure their survival, while internally, individuals compete for top jobs, lucrative wages, and the status and power that these provide. Competition to determine control over power sources leads to political behavior.
A personality or physical appearance attractive to others produces personal power. The possession of skills, knowledge, or information that others need provides expertise power. The power of coercion derives from a threat of force strong enough to compel others to take actions they otherwise would not take, or to espouse attitudes they do not really hold. Control of scarce and / or critical material resources such as budgets, raw materials, equipment, the supply of labor, and physical space produces resource-based power over those who desire or need these resources. Controlling the access others have to powerful persons or information gives opportunistic power to those who control access.
Power relationships are often complex. For example, even those with the most formal authority (e.g. a king or queen, the president of a nation, a CEO) depend on the expertise of their advisors who, in turn, use their access to the powerful to gain advantages over others. And while authority may seem to grant total control to those at the top of a hierarchy, it must be weighed against the power lower-level participants hold. For example, workers who maintain the equipment that drives production can use their knowledge to counteract the power of those in charge.
Using formal authority has fewer costs than does using informal power. Exercising informal power usually requires an expenditure of resources such as knowledge or personal attention, or making commitments or concessions regarding one decision in exchange for support on another. One expended, informal power is depleted and power holders must renew it or suffer the erosion of their influence. For example, a person with control over the assignment of office spaces gleans power from the control of this resource only until they make the assignments. A person who overuses their personal attractiveness comes to be seen as manipulative with a consequent loss of personal power.
By comparison, the exercise of formal authority is not diminished by use and can even be enhanced by it. Power that is institutionalized in formal authority creates expectations such that not exercising formal power may provoke questions about the powerholder’s hold on his or her power. “Use it or lose it” applies particularly well here.
Many people consider politics to be inappropriate in organizations because political processes undermine rationality, thereby creating suboptimal decisions. Nevertheless, spending time in pretty much any organization will reveal undeniable evidence of political behavior. One of the naive mistakes rookie managers make is to present a “rock solid” (i.e. irrefutably rational) case for a decision, only to have it denied by those who later will advise the newcomer how to work the system to achieve a better outcome in the future. This phenomenon is called bounded rationality.
Decision-making is only rational under highly restrictive conditions that rarely occur in organizations, namely that known problems have unambiguous solutions. When these conditions do not hold, bounded rationality prevails. This is a phenomenon in which, while still holding rationality as an ideal, decision-makers “satisfice” (a blend of the words satisfy and suffice) by seeking a solution that is adequate rather than optimal.
Bounded rationality politicizes decision-making processes when less influential decision-makers align their interests behind a jointly favored alternative in order to offset the influence of more powerful decision-makers, who, in turn, are forced to align themselves to retain their political dominance. The realignment continues until the decision can be made. This is known as coalition-building, and its result is the support of a decision favoring one set of aligned internal interests over others.
Because new problems constantly arise, political maneuvering in organizations is endless. When coalition-building becomes an everyday occurrence, it is hard not to see organizations primarily as arenas for power and politics where everyone constantly barters their support to get decisions made.
A popular idea among feminists is that work in private life is associated with the feminine ideals of caring and community, while work in public life is rational and competitive, characteristics long associated with the stereotypical male. A number of feminist scholars have argued that this public / private separation of male and female domains reinforces a dualistic view of gender that helps to define the identities of men and women and shapes interaction between them.
Whereas the male candidates were never described by the word “aggressive,” all the women were, and what is more, each woman was described as either too aggressive or not aggressive enough.
The best strategy to combat the need to deal with a strong female is to prevent her from taking a role in the “pack” and, if feasible, not allow her to have any children. This can be symbolic, in the sense of not allowing her to have subordinates by blocking her promotion, or literal in the sense of being rejected by potential mates. If the strong woman does not submit to the expectation of being “properly” female, she will be isolated in one or all of the available ways. Once isolated, it is nearly impossible for her to act as a role model for others, rendering her powerless in the eyes of others and, de facto, subordinated, even when she continues to behave in her dominant fashion toward men.
Lyotard referred disdainfully to the Enlightenment as a failed project fueled by the progress myth, namely that science will save us from any problems we face and lead us to universal truth and justice. He described the perpetuation of the progress myth as a grand narrative, the story of scientific achievement based in the application of reason and of authority legitimized by expertise.
Attacking some of modernism’s most cherished beliefs by referring to them as the Enlightenment project and the progressive myth, Lyotard argued that our unexamined belief in reason and the expertise and progress it brings disguises the latest version of totalitarianism — the unlimited authority to impose one set of ideological beliefs on all members of a society. He described the masquerade perpetuated by institutions such as education, government, and business by showing how the expert knowledge from which they are created masks its own political motivations while legitimizing particular ways of thinking, talking, and acting.
Foucault claimed that by defining insanity and delinquency as problems society needed to address, psychiatrists and social workers established powerful social positions based on their self-proclaimed ability to protect society from those deemed dangerous or otherwise socially unsuitable. All this came about, Foucault explained, by an insidious shifting of public discourse within which terms such as insanity and delinquency are defined and debated. The public always turns to experts for guidance on these matters.
Just as Neo’s consciousness evolved as he confronted his fate, so must ours if we are to survive. Postmodernists do not claim to know the way exactly, the just provide an escape hatch to take us beyond the ideologies of the past. If this produces chaos, so be it.
The term “organization” is most often opposed to chaos: organizations create order, whereas chaos brings disorder. The order organizing brought to humankind produced welcome stability and, thanks in large measure to the widely emulated examples of Rome’s army and the Roman Catholic Church, bureaucracy became one of modern society’s most prevalent features. While leadership was seen as essential to bringing order to these early times, its alter ego, management, as both a profession and an institution, evolved much later, tracing back to the 18th-century England and its industrialization textile factories, both products of the Enlightenment.
What was once an undifferentiated group of 3 people making belts around a kitchen table had become a technical core of workers specializing into cutting, tooling, punching, dyeing, and buckle-attaching tasks. This core was supported by a purchasing and sales function that brought in raw material, made sales, and distributed product to customers.
Ironically, Orion’s Belts was turning into the kind of corporate enterprise the founders had hoped never to work for!
Orion’s Belts suffered as hand-tooled leather goods lost popularity. As sales fell, they kept cutting back until there was nothing much left. In spite of the managing director’s good intentions to do so, they let new opportunities to pursue the old business get in the way of their development. They had failed to fully develop the adaptive function that might have allowed them to anticipate the market shift and reposition the business in time to save the company. Never mind, it was time for the friends to take those corporate jobs. And, with their background running their own business, they easily found lucrative positions.
For instance, relationships built on friendship, reputation, shared culture, identity, or a corporate brand, enjoy greater cooperation and trust, and fewer attempts at domination. Thus one of the challenges in managing network relationships is building organizational cultures and brands to provide a shared sense of purpose and community without losing the benefits of diversity, overly restricting individual self-expression, or denying self-interest.
As it turns out, the politics of human behavior require carefully balancing networks between too much closure and so much openness that their identity become incoherent. Tight networks comprised of people who interact mainly with each other (e.g. cliques) differ from larger networks with looser ties that open themselves more readily to outside influence. There appears to be a tradeoff between the benefits of tight an open networks. Trust may be higher with those who do not surprise you, but innovation will be lower. Compared to members of tight networks, members of open networks enjoy a greater amount of new information, opportunity, and innovation due to their wider exposure to the ideas of others and open networks are also more likely to enjoy the advantages of diversity.
In psychology, empathy refers to tapping into someone else’s emotional state, literally feeling what they feel. Directed toward an entire organization, empathy would need to resonate with the collective experience of a group of people or society as a whole, rather than that of one individual. It is a capacity of the best artists of any generation seem to master and it is probably what allows us to see ourselves in and thus appreciate great art.
For me, organizing resonates more with the arts than does organization because institutions are too rigid to support the revolutionary change that the best artistic practices celebrate. This is why many artists resist all form of societal expectation and often do their best work before they come into contact with museum and other arts establishments. Nonetheless, organizing is what artists must do to create art, whether it involves assembling material in the visual arts, movement in dance, sound in music, or all three in theatre. As these artistic examples suggest, organizing is performing.
When they are playing well, jazz musicians listen and respond to one another each and every moment they perform. The feat of jazz performance, given all the organizing required both before and during the gig, makes jazz music an example for organizations faced with continuous rapid change. Moreover, improvisation opens a space for the fluid and emergent properties of organizing to achieve satisfaction and value for those who participate in its transitory forms.
Before the Enlightenment, nearly all music was improvisational.