Abstract
For the past forty years or so, the field of organizational theory has witnessed a sequence of ‘turns’. These include a practice turn, a process turn, a historical turn, a body turn, an emotion turn and, maybe above all else, a linguistic turn. The premise of the argument presented in this book is that these turns have drawn the discipline of organizational theory away from formal organization and the core assumptions, concerns and ethos of its founders. These are described here as the ‘classical stance’. In its place, a new ‘metaphysical stance’ has swept over all, whether viewing itself as mainstream, popular or critical. At the heart of this stance is a problematization of the core object of the discipline, namely the formal organization and its subsequent dissolution into a variety of discourses which deny its specificity. Organizations no longer serve as the unit of theoretical analysis or empirical investigation, replaced by all kinds of concepts such as institutional logics, dynamic capabilities, networks, transformational changes, sociomaterialities, leadership and so forth which draw the focus of attention away from organizations themselves towards the ‘outside’. Organization thus loses its theoretical autonomy, is shrunk to being derivative and secondary, always in the process of becoming and never actually existing. It is occluded, compromised and it all but disappears from theoretical discourses except as a construction, a fiction, an illusion or a historical relic. This is a state of affairs that the authors critique with energy and passion, seeking to restore formal organization as the central focus of the discipline.
The early organizational theorists (broadly, starting with Weber and Fayol, continuing with Chester Barnard, Mary Follett Parker and Human Relations and ending with contingency theorists, Perrow and middle period Tavistock Institute), argue du Gay and Vikkelsø, emphasized the practical concerns and the management of organizations. Many of them were practising managers or had direct experience of running organizations. They were acutely conscious of their responsibilities for delivering products and services, for maintaining the integrity of their organizations and for securing the livelihoods of their employees. The knowledge they sought to develop was profoundly practical and contextually rich. Contrary to fashionable and unjustified criticisms, they did not approach organizations in simplistic formal and rational terms. Instead, they saw a ‘need for establishing “administration” (the umbrella term deployed at the time) as a practical science in order to cultivate a broader recognition of its importance. For them, good administration was not an issue exclusive to the operation of an enterprise in a technically or instrumentally efficient manner, but a key ethico-political concern’ (p. 30). At the heart of their concern was the purpose or goal of an organization, its primary tasks, its authority structure and the formal operations and processes through which it achieved its purpose.
This has all gone hopelessly out of fashion, under the onslaught of what the authors call the metaphysical stance, consciously or unconsciously embraced by nearly all theorists of organization as well as business gurus since roughly the 1970s. This represents a particular disposition towards organization that underpins contemporary approaches whether they describe themselves as critical management studies, neo-institutional theory, process theory, agency theory, strategy as practice, leadership studies or whatever else. What unites these approaches is the conviction that in order to understand organizational matters one must look outside and beyond ‘organization’; what makes the stance metaphysical is a loss of interest in the practical concerns of running or managing organizations, of the organization of work and tasks, and its focus on increasingly abstract concepts and ideas, whether these are ‘logics’, ‘fields’, ‘rational myths’, ‘competencies’, ‘assets’, ‘action nets’, ‘nexus of contracts’ and other terms described by the authors as theoretical simulacra.
In a provocative chapter focusing on the process turn, du Gay and Vikkelsø examine the current scholarly fixation on flux, disruption and innovation, all of which problematize and render anachronistic the classical concerns for organizational purpose, core tasks, distribution of work and legitimate authority. Change is now viewed unproblematically as an organizational imperative that supersedes everything else. At the same time, it becomes a metaphysical idea that can be theorized with little concern for organizational specifics. Whether dealing with a hospital, a prison, a university, a start-up, a pharmaceutical conglomerate, a government department or a charity, change, innovation, entrepreneurship and so forth are addressed as processes that can be studied in the abstract and with no need for any organizational particularities. In a daring argument, du Gay and Vikkelsø match several strands of current theorizing on change, including organizational development (OD consulting tradition), Weickian subordination of organization to organizing and CMS denaturalization of the ‘change discourse’ to W. R. Bion’s (1961) theory of basic assumption, a tendency of a group, under conditions of extreme anxiety, to take flight into the realm of fantasy while losing sight of the core tasks that confront it. These basic assumptions which Bion observed in his clinical studies of therapeutic groups offer individuals a temporary solace against imaginary threats but at a cost of detaching them from reality in a quasi-psychotic manner. In a similar way, argue du Gay and Vikkelsø, current organizational scholarship has sought to escape the reality of formal organization and its attendant anxieties, or what du Gay and Lopdrup-Hjorth (2016) refer to as the ‘fear of the formal’, through various fantasies pursued with greater or lesser virtuosity, none of which deal with the actual challenges and tasks facing organizations today.
The fear of the formal does not merely deny the existence of formal organization but sustains the belief that were such organization to exist it would be hopelessly unable to allow for creativity, inventiveness, flexibility, speed that are deemed necessary for success today. This fear of the formal, I would add, is sustained by the profound narcissism of our times and its abhorrence for yesteryear’s ‘organization man’ (Whyte, 1956), the grey conformist, shorn of imagination, freedom and personality, that supposedly dominated the worldview of the classical stance on organizations. The consequence of all this, according to du Gay and Vikkelsø, is the gradual disappearance of organizational theory as a discipline with a clearly defined subject. Like the once vibrant discipline of industrial relations now reduced to a melancholy anachronism in the museum of HRM, the reader of this book can easily imagine Organization Theory (and, by implication, Organization Studies) reduced to a historical curiosity in various emerging fields like leadership studies, strategy, entrepreneurship and so forth.
This may not matter to anyone other than academics whose identity is coextensive with organization, but it does. To the degree that the fear of the formal suffuses various management ideologies and practices, its consequences are detrimental and even catastrophic for the running of actual business, government and other organizations. It is the reversal of this trend and the restoration of the formal organization, along with its concerns for purpose, task, legitimate authority, proper record-keeping, formal procedures, clearly delineated tasks and so forth that du Gay and Vikkelsø pursue with vigour as well as rigour. To this end, they build on du Gay’s earlier argument in his book In Praise of Bureaucracy (2000). Bureaucracy, du Gay had then agued, far from being a sclerotic leftover from earlier times, is a defence against a politicized managerialism that threatens good government and decision-making. Organizational disasters, including Enron, Arthur Anderson and those that precipitated the 2008 global financial crisis starting with the collapse of Lehman Brothers, are all consequences of the destabilization of formal organization and its reliance on carefully considered procedures, tasks and records. All these calamities ‘indicate precisely what can happen if bureaucratic formalities and procedures are viewed simply and irrevocably as tiresome and unnecessary constraints on “executive freedom to act”’ (p. 99).
In the realm of politics, running roughshod over formalities and procedures of administration resulted in Blair’s ‘sofa style government’, castigated by the Butler Report, in seeking to account for the disastrous disregard of the prudent warnings and information proffered by civil servants. Du Gay and Vikkelsø highlight how Blair’s shadow cabinet, even before coming to power, had imbibed the managerialist norms and techniques on change, delivery, leadership, performance and the like and its disdain for the official machinery of government in favour of advisors, informal networks and a ‘just do it’ ethic (pp. 167–9). The entire Blairite project of ‘modernization’ and New Public Management constituted an assault on formal organization. The authors’ analysis of the catastrophic consequences of by-passing formal lines of authority and responsibility and abandoning formal controls makes salutary reading for anyone socialized into uncritically accepting the dysfunctions of bureaucracy.
Readers will have gathered by now that this is an important book which pursues its thesis with passion, erudition and lucidity, seeking to restore formal organization as the proper object of our discipline and the guiding principle for organizational action. It demands to be read attentively and is the kind of monograph that restores one’s faith in the willingness of some scholars today to engage with the big questions facing the discipline. It especially demands to be taken seriously as an attempt to restore formal organization as a defence against arbitrary executive power, hype and pseudo-charisma. In doing so, however, I think that the authors may underestimate the extent to which the world has changed since the high noon of modernity. The world of Facebook and Google is not the world of General Motors and IBM; nor is the world of Modern Times the world of Uber and McDonald’s. Several scholars have gone so far as to argue that we are already witnessing the demise of the corporation (e.g. Davis, 2009, 2013) and the collapse of traditional organizational forms. Could the advocacy of formal organization put forward in this book be likened to King Canute’s resolute stance against the tide?
It seems to me that it is premature to compose a requiem for bureaucracy. In the university sector alone, we have witnessed a massive expansion of bureaucracy to the point where in two thirds of UK universities, administrators today outnumber academics (https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/academics-minority-more-two-thirds-uk-universities). The number of formal rules and regulations has burgeoned to the point where in this author’s institution marking a single student essay requires consulting a fifty-page document of procedures on assignments and assessments. It would be fair to say that many universities are currently choking in formality and it is doubtful whether this has added to their efficiency or has brought them closer to achieving their purpose.
I would also question the authors’ view that the Blair government and its modernization agenda were an unmitigated disaster. While guilty of one of the biggest strategic errors and political crimes in recent history (the war on Iraq) and partly responsible for the factors that precipitated the financial crisis of 2008, the Blair government achieved several policy objectives that put the current UK government to shame. In its first year alone, it signed the Good Friday agreement which brought peace to Northern Ireland; it introduced the national minimum wage and human rights acts; it made the Bank of England independent; it imposed a £5bn windfall tax on privatized utilities; it began devolution to the Scottish parliament and Welsh assembly; it stripped the House of Lords of most hereditary peers; it brought in a Freedom of Information Act; it lowered the age of consent for gay men; and it participated in an effective military campaign that put an end to the war in Kosovo. While social inequalities did not decline, during its ten years in power the Blair government removed a million children from poverty and oversaw the biggest injection of funds into the National Health Service (see https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/jul/11/theresa-may-first-year-brexit-europhobes-corbyn).
In conclusion, I would commend the authors for their attempt to restore formal organization at the centre of organization studies. I would also commend them for resisting the facile onslaught on bureaucracy and rightly arguing that bureaucracy is both a necessary and a precarious mechanism. It is also a pleasure to read a major work on organization without a single reference to Michel Foucault, as if to underline the fact that there was serious scholarship on organizations before (and even since) English and American scholars discovered French post-structuralism. All the same, I feel that in returning to formal organization, organizational scholars must also reconnect with the study of the numerous dysfunctions and contingencies that account for the diversity of organizational forms and experiences today.