The institution as an ?Ideological system?: How morals maketh organization

Abstract

A dominant current view of institutions sees them as task-performing entities and hence views improvements and change as functional in nature. Systems views of managing change in institutions are particularly guilty of adopting this view. Recommendations for change take the form of improving the task and organization structures to make the functions more efficient and effective in performance. This paper argues that such a functionalist view of an institution is limited and can be dangerous when considering recommendations for change. A different view of an institution is proposed. This view is interpretivist and uses the notion of organizational culture to show how institutions may be usefully viewed through the notion of “ideological system.” The theoretical framework for this notion is that of institutional members sharing and developing a common interpretive schema and exploiting this in their making of judgments about appropriate and inappropriate actions and change. This framework is then developed into the view that ideologies express the morals of institutional life and that so-called functional activities can be seen as essentially moral in action and intention. It is the symbolic nature of such moralities that allows the institutional life to be understood by its members and decisions to be made about what is appropriate and inappropriate behavior. The argument is made that this view of organizations is fundamentally important in analysis so that prioritization decisions can be understood and appropriate recommendations for change can be made. This paper shows how systems approaches can be used from this framework but that a different notion of institution, and hence change, needs to be adopted. An interpretative approach to organizational analysis is then developed and presented. Reference is made to various cases to illustrate the argument.