Mainstream Organization Theory Research Articles

Beyond Risk and Anxiety: New Directions in Psychodynamics and Organization Theory

Given the resonances between psychodynamic approaches and issues of current concern in organization studies, we believe it is time for a re-assessment of the core assumptions of psychodynamic approach to ask where we can push the theory to account for a wider array of organizational phenomena; and in turn to ask how wider conversations in mainstream organization theory can be enriched by a psychodynamic approach. To that end, this symposium aims to present three papers that use empirical case studies to push the bounds of psychodynamic theorizing and put that theorizing in dialogue with existing conversations in organization theory. Through each paper, we inquire into the opportunities of using a psychodynamic approach and point to places where both psychodynamic theory and mainstream organization theory can benefit from a deeper dialogue between the two. Trust in Systems that Oscillate Between Face-to-Face and Networks Presenter: Thomas N. Gilmore; Center for Applied Research The Psychodynamics of Organizations: Theorizing Danger and Excitement Presenter: Larry Hirschhorn; Center for Applied Research Organizational Identity and Social Defenses Against Decision-Making Presenter: Elizabeth Hansen; Harvard U.

Surfacing Perversions of Democracy in the Workplace: A Contemporary Psychoanalytic Project

Can democratic institutions contain conflict, division, and uncanny emotions with cultures of management that are frequently undemocratic? What distinguishes those institutions and organizations capable of containment from others? And, what are the psychodynamics at work in the perversion of democratic processes inside organizations? In this paper, we explore the psychodynamics of democracy in the workplace with a particular focus on unconscious and collusive forms of perverting democratic processes at work. We suggest that interpersonally and collectively the dialectical interplay between (1) autistic–contiguous, (2) paranoid–schizoid, and (3) depressive modes of experience and organized perceptions, which are necessary to the containment of divisions and conflicts in democratic organizations, is vulnerable to stress, anxiety, and psychological defenses that foster regression and collapse into more oppressive, authoritarian, and sadistic political cultures. With the objective of understanding perversions to democracy in the workplace, we find that a contemporary psychoanalytic view of organizations is more instructive than mainstream organization theory or that found in Foucault's writings on power and institutions.

Beyond the mainstream: foucault, power and organization theory

While mainstream organization theory has contributed to making organizations a productive part of society, they have simultaneously contributed to the creation of a “dark side” of organizational existence that stifles the individual, frustrates the attainment of desired social ends and distorts many core values of democratic societies. Mainstream theory recognizes this “dark side,” but has been unsuccessful at suggesting how it might be ameliorated or avoided. The writings of Foucault, however, reveal not only how the “dark side” arises but also how it might be avoided so that organizations may develop and pursue interests in common with both society and the individual.

Bringing Space Back in: Organizing the Generative Building

In this article, we re.ect on architecture and management and organization theory, in terms of their mutual implications. We focus especially on a tacit implication in mainstream organization theory, which has an architectural genesis. In the past, management has been largely undergirded by a Cartesian rationality, one seen most clearly in the argument that structure follows strategy. Architecturally, this Cartesianism is present in the injunction that form follows function. Criticizing this point of view, we argue that organizations should be thought of as material, spatial ensembles — not just cognitive abstractions writ large. Linking space and organization in this way, we re.ect on the power that every spatial organization necessarily implies, both in negative and positive terms. After examining existing approaches to this issue, we discuss some positive power implications for management. We introduce the concept of the generative building that, instead of being a merely passive container for actions happening in it, contributes positively towards an organization’s capacities. We conclude with a re.ection on the impact of the generative building on management and processes of organizing.

Decisionism and action: changing perspectives in organization theory

The neglect of moral discourse in mainstream organization theory during the past four decades may be attributed to the dominance of the “decision,” popularized by Herbert Simon, as the field's primary unit of analysis. Underwritten by an epistemology derived from the logical positivists’ analytical distinction between value and fact, the idea of decision has come to be uncritically accepted as a morally neutral and empirically self-evident beginning point for organizational analysis. The ethnomethodological writings of Harold Garfinkel, coupled with insights from contemporary philosophy of language, radically challenge the value-fact distinction, pointing to an epistemology of everyday life in which value and fact are initially fused. The inherent fusion of value and fact provides the basis for an alternative epistemology for organization theory—termed the “action” or “process” perspective—which fundamentally alters the empirical understanding of organizational life and, consistent with the writings of Mary Parker Follett, enables the recovery of organization theory's moral center. Commenting on the effects of technology on modern consciousness, Manfred Stanley has noted that: Of all the upheavals of history and culture, it is difficult to imagine any of greater scope than the decline and fall not of some one vision of the good, but of the good itself. The rise of the notion that there is no such phenomenon as the good in the objective nature of things must be the most ironic anticlimax possible to centuries of bitter conflict between those who felt themselves empowered to define it.(1) For Stanley, the problem is not technology as such, but “technicism”: the implicit, even unconscious, belief that the humanly possible is synonymous with the technologically available. In technicist consciousness, technology is no longer a means for attaining the good, because “means” presupposes a prior moral or practical end in whose service that means is applied. Should any conception of the good be embraced at all, he argues, it ironically can merely be an artifact of what has been made available by technology. Technicism has become the predominant attribute of modern consciousness, producing what William Barrett, speaking in a slightly different context, calls “the illusion of technique.”(2) In the collective infatuation with technology, Barrett argues, ... we have come to regard it [technology] as the source for the discovery of human meaning. The tragic consequence of this is the inevitable alienation of man from himself and his estrangement from others. The irony of technicism to which Stanley alluded earlier may be summarized as a reversal of a familiar aphorism—invention has now become the mother of necessity—albeit one devoid of moral content. Stanley sees the rise of technicism as concomitant with the emergence of liberal society, whose institutions have achieved coherence and legitimacy explainable in terms of three themes that have dominated Western thought since the seventeenth century. The first is the general desanctification or secularization of the political economy exemplified ... in the transformation of human skills and the earth itself into objective commodity resources for commercial production.(3) The second theme is the ascendancy of the market principle as the chief basis of socioeconomic organization, wherein interests are privately held by individuals rather than shared by communities or other larger collectivities. Finally, there is the theme of pluralistic representation in political decision making, where the expression of individual (and group) interest is tolerated in the hope of achieving a balance among them. Taken together these themes have produced a pervasive sense of nihilism in Western society insofar as they seem to exclude the possibility “of grounding collective standards of value priorities in anything more transcendent than the simplest shared utilities like power, wealth, and the security of one's immediate personal circumstances.”(4) The consequence of the three themes of liberal society, profoundly abetted by technicist consciousness, is nothing less than the loss “of a sense of common human community in the West”(5)and also of the moral possibility of a common, transcendent good.

Essai : Thirty Years On: From Organizational Structures to the Organization of Thought

The Aston Studies have proved a seminal reference point for the development of mainstream organization theory. This essay examines and critiques the meta physical underpinnings of positivism as well as attempts to show up the inad equacies of other recent alternatives such as epistemological realism for the development of organizational analysis. It maintains that common organiza tional attributes which positivists and realists claim to discover are in fact mirror images of their own deeply-entrenched thought structures. It therefore proposes that commitment to an alternative process-based becoming ontology opens up the possibilities for rethinking 'organization' as first and fundament ally a process of 'world-making'. The modem world that we find so immedi ately necessary and familiar is one such outcome of organization and it is the analysis of this logic of organization, rather than the current preoccupations of mainstream organization theory, which will provide truly useful insights to management practitioners and to leaders of society. Understood thus, organiza tional analysis becomes a form of metaphysical inquiry.

A theory of the temporary organization

The idea of the firm as an eternal entity possibly came in with the era of industrialism. In any case, the practical consequences of this idea contrast sharply with many ideas about projects and temporary organizations. Mainstream organization theory is based upon the assumption that organizations are or should be permanent; theories on temporary organizational settings (e.g., projects) are much less prevalent. In this article, we address the need for a theory of temporary organizations, thus seeking to supplement traditional project management wisdom. We also suggest some components of such a theory by elaborating on certain ideas about projects. “Action”, as opposed to “decision”, is one such component which is central to a theory of the temporary organization. In some respects we are thus dealing with antipoles, in other respects with concepts similar to those in established mainstream organizational theory. The role of “time” in the firm is different as compared to its role in the temporary organization. The differences have several important implications and we are able to suggest a coherent outline of a theory which we believe could be useful and which also covers several important aspects of temporary organizations.

Explaining the Variable Utility of Disjointed Incrementalism: Four Propositions

Much of mainstream organization theory has been concerned with the implications for organizational design and policy process of high levels of uncertainty or complexity in task environments. Decentralization, disjointed incrementalist decision strategies, and quasi-market coordinative mechanisms have been advanced as rational responses to the complexity of most problems in the socio-political sphere. This article presents and illustrates four conditions which reduce the relative utility of this approach as a means of coping with uncertainty. The propositions are shown to be implicit in the logic of “muddling through,” and are used to help explain/predict the evolution of relatively centralized and planned organizations in certain types of complex task environments.