Abstract
There is no doubt that this is an ambitious book. In the introduction, Professor Grey makes it clear that he has two concerns. The first is to analyse and explain the organization of Bletchley Park: the British Intelligence and cryptography centre popularly credited with bringing World War II to an early conclusion by decoding German communications. The second is to cure a rot that has set into the discipline of organization studies. Like a modern-day Marcello, Grey pronounces that ‘something has gone badly wrong with the field of organization studies’ (p. 5), supporting this verdict with the obligatory string of reference to such luminaries as Starbuck, Weick, Greenwood, Czarniawska, Gabriel, Suddaby, Hinings, McKinlay and Hardy. This ‘something’ is a loss of relevance. Setting himself against both the North American dominated, neo-positivist orthodoxy of the Academy of Management, and the more Eurocentric tradition of Critical Management Studies, Grey calls for an organization studies that de-familiarizes, but still speaks to, organizational experience, combining fine-grained empirical analysis with a theoretical eclecticism that resists dogmatism to embrace whatever is useful in explaining ‘organization’.
Anyone who has ever attended a meeting of the Academy of Management can surely attest to his observation that ‘much academic work in the field has become highly specialised, quantified and abstract, seeking to identity statistical relationships between different, artificially isolated variables’ (p. 6). Participation in the Critical Management Studies conference, or even selected streams at EGOS, should substantiate his assertion that ‘some parts of the field … are concerned with extremely arcane debates in social theory, and scarcely refer to concrete human experience at all’ (p. 6). The result of this two-pronged desertion of the real, Grey argues, means that organization studies succeeds in de-familiarizing lived organizational experience but at the expense of relevance and fidelity to the complex messiness of organization, which is sacrificed in favour of neat theoretical abstractions.
Decoding organization thus has two objectives. First, it claims to be ‘the first social-scientific account of [Bletchley Park]’ (p. 246), reflecting the intrinsic interest of the case organization, which invented contemporary signals intelligence, played a pivotal role in the course of the Second World War, and was home to luminaries such as Alan Turing, popularly credited with the invention of the programmable computer. Second, the book is an ‘experiment’ in organizational analysis (p. 269): an attempt at a new way to analyse and represent organization. In terms of the themes of this special issue, Grey is using the study of a ‘new site’ to offer ‘new sight’ into organization. As he acknowledges in his conclusion, while such experiments may be necessary, they always carry a risk of failure. To evaluate Grey’s experiment, a review of the structure of his argument is followed by a discussion of its achievements and shortcomings.
Structure, Culture and Work
In terms of ‘new sights’, the main themes of the book are fairly well-established topics of organization studies and most of the points of theoretical reference are classics in the field. The book has three parts – structure, culture and work – each comprising a pair of chapters framed through the metaphor of ‘decoding’. Paralleling the work conducted at Bletchley Park, Grey suggests that doing organizational analysis is a form of ‘decoding’. This ‘should not be taken to imply discovering the “hidden truth” but, rather, providing an interpretation of that which might otherwise be hidden’ (pp. 10–11). Challenging the popular conception of the site as home to a handful of male Oxbridge mathematicians organized like a chaotic but convivial academic common room, Grey presents a much more complex, hidden tale, culminating in an organization with almost 9,000 members, three-quarters of whom were women, engaged in everything from hairdressing and motorcycle dispatch riding (p. 204) to signals interception, translation, cryptanalysis, signals traffic analysis, indexing and, finally, intelligence analysis itself.
The history of Bletchley Park is certainly an interesting one. In 1939 the British Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS) was moved to Bletchley Park with a staff of around 200 and an operating budget (for 1940–41) of £79,000. By 1944 there were 8,743 people working around the clock on rotating 8-hour shifts and commanding over £1.3 million (pp. 53–55). Such rapid growth presented significant challenges, and Part 1 of the book details the restructuring of the organization as it negotiated with its institutional stakeholders in the armed services and government, and managed relationships between military and civilian personnel.
Throughout Grey is insistent upon treating organization as a verb so his concern is with how activities were structured and organized, rather than identifying a fixed organizational structure. In this process of organizing, Grey is careful to maintain an appreciation of both agency and structure. Bletchley Park is not simply determined by contingencies such as technology or task, or by the institutional environment that the organization inhabits. Rather, there is a ‘contingency to contingency’ (p. 255) so responses to contingencies are mediated by a wide range of factors. The analysis shows outcomes are ‘under-determined’ and shaped by a complex array of factors, including the distinctive personalities, career histories and leadership styles of different managers. Following Giddens, Grey adopts a non-dualistic position on structure and agency where the two interact in complex and site-specific ways, contrasting this with ‘the actual practice of organization studies’ where there has been a ‘bifurcation of bloodless accounts of organization as if there were no real, recognizable people in them and highly individualized accounts of, especially, leadership as if there were no structural context to their actions’ (pp. 49–50).
In Chapter 2 Grey extends this hostility to dualism, challenging the distinction between organization and environment. The functional environment in which Bletchley Park operated was Signals Intelligence – or SIGINT 1 – but, rather than assuming this as a starting point to explain the organization’s structure, this chapter carefully lays out the ways in which SIGINT itself was actively constructed at Bletchley Park through its restructuring, which brought together what had previously been separate functions, and still were in the USA and Germany. By combining everything from interception of messages to the distribution of intelligence, Bletchley Park did not simply adapt their structure to fit the contingencies of their environment but actively constructed both in a mutual twisting together of structure and environment.
Part 2 deals with what has become a staple of organization studies: culture. Following Parker’s (2000) advice to view organizational culture as a ‘continual contestation between difference and similarity’ (p. 109), Part 2 is split into two chapters. The first – ‘pillars’ of culture – analyses what united Bletchley Park culture 2 : the national context of a total war, the overriding imperative of secrecy, and its recruitment methods. The second – splinters of culture – explores fragmentations in Bletchley Park culture: gender, age, educational background, and distinctions between civilian and military personnel or between different services. These threads of difference and similarity are twisted together throughout the analysis. For example, in the early days, recruitment was mainly through personal recommendation and Oxbridge networks, contributing to the ‘dons and debs’ image of Bletchley Park as populated by tweedy professors and rich, socialite girls. This image inflected the culture throughout the war, even when almost half of the staff were WRENs who did not usually come from this more privileged social background and so were not full participants in this aspect of the culture (p. 151).
Perhaps the most interesting theme in Part 2 of the book is secrecy. Given the nature of its business, secrecy was an essential part of daily life at Bletchley Park, whose main task was intercepting and decoding communications that Britain’s enemies wanted to keep secret. This culture of secrecy extended deep into Bletchley Park itself. Personnel were expected to sign the Official Secrets Act and were forbidden from talking to anyone about the work they did. This was hard on organizational members, who could not even explain to close family and friends what they did for a living or refute allegations that they were not contributing to the war effort. This secrecy extended well beyond the end of the war as it was not until the 1970s that Bletchley Park’s existence was publicly acknowledged.
While this sense of a shared secret bound people together, it also functioned to separate them from each other. Those working in one hut, or section, would have no idea of what other sections were doing, or how the organization as a whole functioned. This secrecy led to a compartmentalization of both experience and function, simultaneously dividing and uniting Bletchley Park culture. As well as splintering culture, this compartmentalization led to a range of organizational dysfunctions, with some huts working on codes that had been cracked in other parts of the organization months earlier, or with efforts replicated, unwittingly, in different sections.
This functioning is taken up in terms of ‘work’ in Part 3 – chapters 5 and 6 – in which Grey promises to respond to Barley and Kunda’s (2001) call for a return to work in organization studies. Chapter 5 explores how the work of Bletchley Park was organized through informal, personal social networks, through a variety of management styles ranging from the informal to rigid factory discipline, and through formal coordination mechanisms such as meetings and committees. Chapter 6 returns the focus to well-established organizational theory motifs by considering whether Bletchley Park was a bureaucracy or a post-bureaucratic, knowledge-intensive organization. Pivoting around themes of formalization and centralization, the chapter brings us full circle to matters of organizational structure introduced in Part 1.
In many ways Part 3 is the most disappointing in the book. While promising to bring work back in, the only ‘work’ we really get a sense of is the work of organizing: what others would call management. Where there is any indication of the ‘concrete lived experience’ promised in the introduction, it is of the lived experience of managers and administrators. There is almost no sense of what work was really like for the dispatch riders, the hairdressers, caterers, or the almost 3,000 WRENs working on fairly routine work. Just as chapter 4 neglects class as a key social division, preferring the surrogate of educational experience (and taking an Oxbridge education as the norm), this chapter implicitly privileges the experiences of the predominantly male, administrative ‘Chiefs’.
Relevance for Whom?
Returning to the question of relevance that Grey raises in his introduction, we might ask: ‘relevant for whom?’ While he avoids addressing this directly, Grey clearly has ‘management’ in mind. In the introduction he notes that one of the consequences of academic obscurantism in organization studies has been to ‘create a vacuum which has been filled by the proliferation of “airport lounge” business books’ (p. 7). Obviously these are not books that speak to the ‘lived experience’ of your average cleaner, miner or call-centre operative looking for something to read while going on holiday to escape their working reality. These are targeted at managers and prospective MBAs looking for something to fill the suspended animation of yet another business flight. When citing exemplars of relevant organization studies, Grey also focuses on studies of management, citing the work of Kanter, Jackall, Pettigrew, Kunda and Watson, rather than the voluminous tradition of shop-floor studies, from Beynon, Braverman and Burawoy to Kondo, Collinson and Ngai. This bias carries over into his own analysis of ‘work’ which focuses on administration, coordination and management, only gesturing at other forms of work.
Part of the reason for this neglect is methodological. Working with written archives, only occasionally supplemented with interviews, Grey is drawn toward the kinds of work that leave a written record, reproducing the phallogocentric bias of both administration and the archive. This limitation is acknowledged in the conclusion of the book, where Grey notes that ethnography might be better able ‘to convey the more embodied and experiential sense of organizational life’ (p. 270). Clearly an ethnographic study of an organization that existed some 70 years ago is impractical, but ethnography doesn’t have a monopoly on lived experience. As historians such as Marcus Rediker and Peter Linebaugh have clearly demonstrated, a history ‘from below’, attentive to what is absent as well as present in the historical archives and following the traces of lived culture that persist in other accounts, can capture and represent the experiences of even the most marginalized, challenging rather than reproducing the political-economic biases of the archives and the administrative classes that produce them.
This limitation to Grey’s historiographic imaginary is reinforced by the almost cavalier way in which he distances himself in this work from CMS’s foundational concern with some form of emancipatory project (p. 267). To give an example of this implicit managerialism, when discussing the use of personal networks to recruit workers to Bletchley Park, Grey refers repeatedly to how these networks created a base upon which trust could quickly be established and subsequently developed. As an essential lubricant to any kind of knowledge work, trust was engendered through this homo-social form of organizational reproduction and was thus functional for the organization, enabling easy communication across organizational and disciplinary divisions (p. 182). To balance this functional interpretation, Grey offers no discussion of how this process reinforced broader social hierarchies, forms of class privilege, actively blocking inclusivity and diversity. While it may well seem inappropriate to judge the past by current standards, a failure to at least explain the consequences of these power relations in the ongoing reproduction of organization at Bletchley Park, and in the wider society, is notable. In a book-length study, authored by one of the luminaries of critical management studies, at a time when the dominance of social elites had been popularly problematized in terms of the 1%, it is particularly notable and falls well short of Grey’s stated intention in this history to uncover the ‘subaltern experience’ and ‘give voice to those who are otherwise marginalized by received accounts’ (p. 254).