Abstract
What is the relation between conflict and organization studies? Is conflict theorized today and, if so, how? I look first at what students of management are taught about organizational conflict – the knowledge imparted to them, its assumptions and ethico-political consequences. By reactivating Mary Follett’s insight of conflict as ‘differences in the world’ I consider more broadly how organization studies, with its different theoretical apparatuses, treats conflict and in so doing participates in the co-constitution of the social order: what it means to work, to organize and to live specific ways of life. Organization studies attempts to domesticate conflict by reference to a fundamental fantasy that modulates, controls and stabilizes differences. Harmonious fantasies in the ‘functionalist perspective’ and the ‘behavioural theory of the firm’ are discussed. Special attention is paid to the ‘organizational economic perspective’ with its economist fantasy for the part it has played in cementing our contemporary hegemonic market governance. At present, cracks in the market governance are becoming glaring and differences are emerging that the specific apparatus of conflict domestication is struggling to accommodate. I suggest that organizational theorists rethink the theorizing apparatus of organization studies, and consider taking on a form of theorizing called ‘demiurgic theorizing’. This forwards a type of knowledge production that puts differences at centre stage and faces up to the contemporary conflict demands of our time with responsibility and accountability.
Keywords
Vignette 1 Working at Amazon
Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos believes that harmony is overvalued. Instead, Amazonians are instructed to disagree and commit (n.13 Amazon leadership principles) – to rip into colleagues’ ideas before lining up behind a decision. In the annual ‘rank and yank’ managers learn ‘to diplomatically throw people under the bus’ (New York Times, 2015) as part of normal managerial prerogative.
Vignette 2 Working in a British Business School
Business schools prepare managers and legitimize business values, practices and ways of life. This process happens also behind closed doors as exemplified in this following real-life anecdote: ‘The newly appointed Vice-Chancellor (VC) called me to our first meeting, as Business School Dean I attend: “Why all this teaching and research you are doing on climate change and sustainability? You need to concentrate on what is important. We need to go back to basics – the nuts and bolts of business.” I am taken aback: “because we are a public university and we have a social mission; because businesses, governments, the UN, everyone today is grappling with these issues”.’
The two vignettes above give us a glimpse of conflict. As Follett (1925/2013) put it: ‘At the outset I would like to ask you to agree to think of conflict as neither good nor bad’. Conflict, she says, is the appearance of difference in the world. Few organizations openly embrace conflict as a managerial tool in the way Amazon does. Yet, as Follett suggests, conflict is common, not only in the global political arena but also in the workplace. Conflict is rarely theorized as a key element of organization studies. 1 For example, an analysis of leading journals shows that ‘conflict’, unlike ‘performance’ or ‘strategy’, is not the subject of much new theorizing. 2
This essay explores the relation between conflict and organization studies by asking whether or not conflict has been theorized directly and, if so, how and with what assumptions and consequences? I first examine the received wisdom on organizational conflict theorizations, looking at the way they are taught to current and future practitioners in mainstream business school textbooks. Second, by following Follett’s insight that conflict is indeed endemic to organizations as it is the ‘emergence of difference in the world’, I scrutinize three organizational perspectives: the ‘functionalist perspective’, the ‘behavioural theory of the firm’ and the ‘organizational economics’ perspective, to identify what happened to conflict in their respective theoretical edifices. The dominance of these three perspectives in organization studies and the shift in dominance from the functionalist perspective to the economic perspective that we have witnessed in the past 30 years (Pfeffer, 2015) guided the selection and focus of these perspectives. I show that conflict is domesticated in all of these perspectives as a way to check and contain the emergence of differences in the world in precise ways and with precise consequences.
Why this return to conflict and organization studies? First, because conflict has been overlooked in our leading theory-oriented journals. Mannix (2003) invited more conflict theorizing since this has suffered an arrested (conceptual) development. Lately, Roche, Teague and Colvin (2015) confirmed that this is still the case. The field is growing but the knowledge base is unfocused, has an untested validity and is scattered in subspecialist areas. Mannix’s (2003, p. 543) call for a ‘return to theory’ to develop new insights about conflict is still valid. Indeed, my return here to conflict and organization studies goes, as she suggests, beyond the contributions of mid-range theories to higher-level meta-theorization (Mannix, 2003, p. 544). This leads me to the second reason for my return to conflict.
The ‘meta-theorizations’ Mannix refers to are defined as examinations of the epistemological and ontological standing of a specific knowledge, what purpose that knowledge has, its assumptions and its consequences (Knudsen & Tsoukas, 2005). This work produces new knowledge of an overlooked area. But it is significant also because its contribution is to provide organizational scholars and practitioners with insights on what our knowledge, in this case of conflict and organization studies, does with and in the world. This is accomplished by looking at what kind of ‘world’ this knowledge is proposing and legitimizing; and with what consequences. For example, the dominance of the ‘organizational economic’ perspective, which has conceived of ‘emerging differences in the world’, i.e. conflict, in interesting ways, has also been associated with the assurgency of values, skills and mindset of some of the maladies of contemporary capitalism (Lazonick, 2014). This at least partly accounts for why, as Pfeffer (2016) has colourfully put it, ‘the assholes are winning and money trumps all’. In other words, theories are not mere witnesses of organizations. They are performative, i.e. active co-participants in the co-constitutions of the processes, relations and objects and subjects of which they speak: ‘rather than mirror reality, our theories help generate reality’ (Van Maanen, 1995, p. 135).
This is why it is important to consider, with ‘meta-theorizations’, how organization theorists have dealt with ‘emerging difference in the world’ theoretically. And also how organization theorists are responding to current conflicts, as I do in the discussion, i.e. the contemporary ways in which differences are concretely emerging in the world. I trace some potential paths for a scholarly practice of theorizing that is faithful to performativity and the responsibility it calls for, therefore posing organizational conflict management as a possibility and impossibility of organizing. I call this demiurgic theorizing.
Organizational Conflict Theorizations
Textbooks are an ideal resource to identify the development of a specific knowledge and its distillation into something worthy of being passed on to current and future practitioners (Tsoukas & Cummings, 1997). Conflict might be marginal in the leading journals staging the theoretical developments in organization studies, but a mise en scene of organizational conflict has prevailed in management textbooks, with a typology of the main organizational conflict theorizations. Robbins and Coulter (2012), for example, identify three organizational conflict perspectives – (i) the ‘traditional’, (ii) the ‘human relations’ (HR) and (iii) the ‘interactionist’. 3 This often-repeated narrative, with some modification of the labels, 4 has become a traditional, sedimented narrative on the historical development and types of organizational conflict theorizations.
The traditional/unitarist perspective, Robbins and Coulter (2012) suggest, sees conflict as a problem to be eliminated (Hatch, 2012; Huczynski & Buchanan, 2010; Mullens, 2013). This is traced back to the ‘fathers’ of organization studies (e.g. Taylor, Mayo and Fayol) for whom conflict was a negative interference; an aberration in otherwise stable collaborative relations that has to be contained because it disrupts organizational equilibrium and frustrates goal attainment (Pondy,1992, p. 257). Individuals are assumed to each accept its function gladly and follow one source of authority and appointed leadership (i.e. management). Management’s prerogative is assured since management possesses the right knowledge to design the appropriate organizational systems (Fox, 1966). Aside from personal aberrations and errors, checked by control systems and training, with such knowledge it becomes possible to imagine and design a conflict-free organization. This perspective is the opposite of Bezos’ organizational philosophy where conflict is instead a managerial tool for Amazon’s success.
The HR/pluralist perspective and the interactionist perspectives propose a more realistic view, suggesting that conflict is indeed natural in organizations. This traces back to the early insight of organization studies’ ‘mother’, Mary Follett, for whom conflict is an endemic part of life. Later on, Coser (1956) developed the notion that conflict is functional to system maintenance and in organization studies conflict management became significant for organizational survival. The HR perspective is complex as it assumes that organizations harbour a plurality of goals, needs and wants and have ‘rival sources of authority and leadership and attachments’ (Fox, 1974, p. 249). This, as discussed later, also characterizes the behavioural theory of the firm. One of the key differences in organization is that between ‘managers’ and ‘employees’. The field of industrial relations is, of course, predicated on such a difference.
For the interactionist perspective, however, conflict is not only endemic. It is not only something that all different groups accept and mitigate by agreeing on individual and collective processes and procedures implemented by human resources and union officials (Roche et al., 2014, p. 3). Conflict is necessary for better decisions, for creativity and to avoid stagnation, groupthink and, subsequently, low performance. This is the perspective currently taught to managers as the best way to conceive of conflict. The Amazon vignette is enlightening. Conflict is the engine of organizational innovation, and helps generate and develop the best ideas.
Assumptions and Consequences of the Interactionist Perspective
The interactionist perspective suggests that there is an optimum for conflict, i.e. too little or too much conflict is destructive. Some intensity and types of conflict are functional to organizational success. This functionalist knowledge is managerialist as it aims to explain to managers how to exploit conflict, especially by reducing negative conflict and favouring task-oriented or other functional conflict. For example, based on recent management interactionist research (O’Neill, McLarnon, Hoffart, Woodley, & Allen, 2015), the Association for Psychological Science (APS, 2015) castigates Bezos for having misunderstood conflict and reminds him, and us all, that not all conflict is created equal and that high intensity is detrimental to effective performance.
A reverse-U curve links the level of conflict intensity to the level of organizational effectiveness (Hatch, 2012; Robbins & Coulter, 2012). This mathematical polish is not insignificant. Epistemologically, such theorizing is proposed as ‘scientific’ by claiming the same neutrality that reproduce the principles and processes of natural science (Miner, 2006) to identify, predict and control the right types and amounts of conflict. This is appealing as it promises the possibility of controlling and domesticating conflict to achieve a better organizational effectiveness.
To date, however, there is no strong support for the validity of such a relation. Rahim (2010, p. 50) suggests that empirical evidence of the inverted-U function is limited. It is difficult to obtain measures of this correlation that are valid and reliable; and until now no study of this function has satisfied the requirements of scientific control (Rahim, 2010, p. 50). Robbins and Coulter (2012, p. 355) acknowledge that ‘we do not yet have a sophisticated measuring instrument for assessing whether conflict level is too high’. Others, like Weingart, Behfar, Bendersky, Todorova and Jehn (2015), admit that it has been difficult to identify positive and negative results of conflict both theoretically and empirically. But rather than an utter rethinking of such knowledge, one notices a perseverance with its premises and foundations. The hope still remains that eventually all will be explained. For example, the reverse-U function is still reported in widely adopted management textbooks (e.g. Hatch, 2012; Huczynski & Buchanan, 2010) as if this was a solid and reliable piece of management knowledge on which management education and practice is to be based. What is happening with this knowledge?
The interactionist perspective builds on Follett’s original point that ‘conflict is the appearance of differences in the world’. This shift is important because it opens up to a knowledge that starts to posit the significance of difference in interests and opinions. Reasonably, then, one would think that this appreciation would call for a philosophical and scientific investigation of the origin of such interests and opinions, their constitutions and reproduction. But this is not what has happened with the interactionist perspective which never addresses fully how or why such differences are ‘in the world’.
The interactionist perspective treats organizational conflict as if it was an internal differentiation of opinions on tasks, processes or individual dispositions that are treated as external to the social world rather than being ‘in the world’. The ‘world’ is still only posited as an a priori defined set of features that are measured and measurable within given parameters (e.g. types of conflict, dispositions and satisfaction/dissatisfaction). Conflict is apprehended as a relational set of countable variations in order to work out what is functional to organizational success. Returning to our Amazon vignette, the notion of conflict that is supported is a limited one, i.e. the disagreement on ideas. After the disagreement everyone has to fall in line and commit. Conflict is an instrument for organizational success. The coordinates of such success are clear, i.e. to retain the ‘best’ employees and constantly innovate. It is a specific type of innovation that characterizes this success, one that converts to increased sales and higher stock valuation. From within the interactionist perspective, as indicated earlier through the APS (2015), the concern is that Bezos and his senior managers must be careful to modulate conflict exploitation in order to keep it at the ‘right’ level, even if, as clarified, there is no consensus on what this ‘level’ is in practice, and no instruments to measure and achieve such control.
Morrill (2000, p. 639) puts it incisively: the interactionist perspective treats conflict as if it was ‘isolated from ongoing organizational struggles, perceptions and values related to organizational change, control and justice’. Within such a perspective one does not formulate questions regarding the emergence of broader sets of differences in the world or the lack thereof. In other words, lacking are the connections with politics and the socio-historical context which frame and spur differences ‘in the world’; something instead explored within critical perspectives such as feminism, Marxism and race theories.
If the ontological enormity of an endemic view of conflict in the world and the epistemic deadlock of the interactionist knowledge were to be fully assumed, these would usher in deeper questions about, for example, the origins and reasons for such differences and their value. Gouldner (1973, p. 235) suggested early on that questions of exploitation, unequal value exchange, equality and justice are actually central to the issue of difference and differentiation but are ignored by this type of functional knowledge because they are seen as ideological (i.e. non-scientific), left-leaning critiques of modern capitalist societies. But, he added, the compulsive rejection of such questions about values, exploitation and justice is by no means less ideological, since it has precise political coordinates and consequences. Such interactionist theorizing of conflict is ideological because, while wearing scientists’ clothes to espouse neutrality and objectivity, it serves the interest of a particular class – that of capital and its main agents.
As Wright Mills (1959, p. 59) explained, this type of knowledge is associated with a conservative style of thinking since it reproduces the status quo. In our historical juncture the status quo is one where, as Pfeffer (2016) laments, ‘money trumps all’. Within the interactionist perspective one has not much opportunity to question the status quo and the type of differences, i.e. access, resources and values that it reproduces, nor to address different justice claims. The status quo, where companies like Amazon, and leaders like Bezos, are emblems of success are primarily, as Pfeffer (2015) put it, focused on economic performance at the expense of employee and societal wellbeing. As Pfeffer reports, the social costs of such workplaces are enormous and are becoming progressively evident as he says ‘there were approximately 120,000 excess deaths and $190 billion in additional health care costs annually in the US due to work-related stress’.
The interactionist perspective on organizational conflict ignores questions of values, exploitation and responsibility while differences are contained within specific parameters detached from the socio-historical context of their constitution. In Amazon, for example, the conflicting differences of ideas are always only debated among ‘similar’ rather than ‘different’ people. The technology industry is known for its lack of diversity (The Verge, 2015). Amazon is making positive strides by employing more people of colour, but these gains in diversity are mostly in Amazon’s warehouses and in low-skilled jobs. Hispanic and Blacks occupy just 10% of technical and executive jobs, and in such ranks women are also significantly underrepresented. The ranks and areas where conflict is elicited as a functional managerial tool remain predominantly white and male.
In summary, the interactionist perspective, by aiming to follow a science, presented as value-free and neutral, has been so far methodologically, philosophically and politically unable to deliver such a science. As we have seen, the coordinates of what differences ‘count’ (types, intensity, etc.) for studying conflict deliver neat typologies and functions. But, as indicated by its proponents (e.g. Rahim, Weingart), the key propositions of this knowledge still lack validity. The results confirming these propositions have been, on the whole, inconclusive. Even if we still teach such knowledge to present and future practitioners we are no closer to confirming incontrovertible laws (as promised) that allow for conflict exploitation to fulfil managerial prerogatives.
The interactionist perspective, and its lack of sociological imagination, has meant that theorizations that are directly of ‘conflict’ have mostly disappeared from the main stage of organization studies. They have moved to empirically based journals trying to confirm this knowledge and/or have been pressed into the conflict management and resolution specialism. The interactionist knowledge is not only instrumental but specifically managerialist, i.e. management-centred and always involved in supporting and forwarding managers’ interest, articulated in specific terms that tie the social form ‘organization’ to some specific ends, primarily to private economic gains. While widespread this assumption is hardly value-free. Overall, what is presented as the latest, most advanced perspectives of organizational ‘conflict’ in organization studies (i.e. the wisdom, encapsulated in textbooks, to be passed on to present and future practitioners) proposes a sanitized ‘conflict’ that is transformed into a benign force to be kept within specific limits (in themselves unclear), which is part and parcel of managerial control over performance, innovation and value.
Theorizations that are directly about organizational conflict, as they are presented in management and organization theory journals and textbooks, tell us only a half-truth about organizational conflict. Returning to Follett’s suggestion that conflict is the emergence of difference ‘in the world’, I submit that it is important to consider the assumptions about ‘the world’ and its emerging differences (i.e. conflict) in different organizational perspectives.
Conflict in the World and Organization Studies
It was during her lectures in the winter of 1924–25 to the Bureau of Personnel Administration in New York that Mary Follett talked of conflict as neither good nor bad, that conflict is not warfare but the appearance of difference, difference of opinions, of interests: for ‘difference in the world’ is what conflict means. For that very reason we should ‘use it’, she said. This might be the green light to the managerialist view of conflict developed in the interactionist perspective even if this is not warranted. 5 Let’s instead reactivate her assumption of conflict as difference ‘in the world’ 6 not by theorizing ‘the world’ in ways that start with assuming specific differences, for example in the relations of production, as endemic site of resistance and antagonism. This is what some critical perspectives mentioned earlier have already done. But, by exploring ‘meta-theoretically’ the connection between conflict and organization studies, let’s look at how significant theoretical perspectives in organization studies have actually posited the world and its differences (i.e. conflict), the fantasy that subtend these theoretical edifices and what consequences they have. Fantasy is defined as the specific scenario, the vision of what the world, our way of life, is and feels like and its potential identifications for us – our roles as subjects (see Contu, 2014; Contu & Willmott, 2006; Gabriel, 1999). I illustrate my analyses in a Jamesian fashion with reference to the two introductory vignettes to show what kind of practical differences these perspectives make to the lives of working people, and how they conceive of conflict in the world.
The harmonious family 7 in the corporatist world
The functionalist perspective has been one of the most dominant and stable set of assumptions in organization studies (Burrell & Morgan, 1979; Gioia & Pitre, 1990). As discussed earlier, this is also prominent in the theorizations of organizational conflict taught to management students. In the functionalist ontology (with its objectivist epistemology) the ‘world’ is given as a system where each part has its function. The coordination and integration of activities towards specific ends is what organizations do. Integration and coordination are necessary because growing social complexity requires differentiation that needs to be constantly directed to functional ends where each part must rationally fulfil its role in order to guarantee the survival of the social whole. The organization, with its mechanisms of coordination and integration, is designed to keep any emerging differences in check so as to eliminate any conflict that disturbs the smooth repetition of efficient work that guarantees organizational survival. The fact that work is organized within a specific economic order and social relations is a given since the political economy is part of the ‘environment’ to which organizations must adapt. The point is that this ‘organization’ facilitates the reproduction of that very order since an organization is like a mini-cosmos of broader society. Both are assumed to operate as a cooperative, harmonic whole akin to a ‘harmonious family’. Equilibrium is constantly checked and maintained (when conflict throws it off balance) by the rationally designed mechanisms and processes devised by management, i.e. those in position of authority in the hierarchy who therefore hold legitimate power.
This is largely a managerialist, patriarchal and paternalist fantasy 8 where management assumes its primary, legitimate role and everyone else fulfils their position in this (presumed) consensus-based way of life. The fantasy of the harmonious family is governed by the operations of the manager/father who, legitimized and supported by management science, looks after his family well. As Roberts (2005) puts it, management is endowed with an image of self, an ego who functions as the source of autonomous control where ‘the external world moves as “I” will it to move and which is populated by automata, or people, who through the black arts of administrative skill have been reduced to the status of pliant and predictable objects’ (Roberts, 2005, p. 630).
If we return to our Business School vignette, in the functionalist perspective there is no space for thematizing and exploring the origin and extent of the different ‘opinions’ our two managers have, and how they might conceive of the organizational ends differently. The two managers, however, do not have to agree. The role of the dean in the functional hierarchical whole is, in the final instance, to carry out the mandate of his VC. The idea is the same in the Amazon vignette even if the official doxa is different. Different managers are encouraged ‘to rip into colleagues’ ideas’. But this conflict is only associated with challenging ideas that serve innovation understood within the coordinates of commercial and financial success established by Amazon’s upper echelons. Once such innovation has been sufficiently assured (even as a forecast) everyone, as the leadership principles say, has to ‘fall behind and commit’.
The harmonious family in the pluralist democratic world
The fantasy of the ‘harmonious family’ also subtends the behavioural theory of the firm even if the official knowledge and doxa is different. The point of departure is not goal congruency (that conflict occasionally throws off balance) but a political coalition where conflict is always present because of a plurality of differences in the world, i.e. different goals and interests that meet in the constitution of any organized collective effort including that regarding organizing productive activities that produce, distribute and favour the consumption of valuable products and services. In such a pluralist world conflicting demands are handled through bargaining strategies by the executive whom, in a sequential manner, administers an array of side-payments. These keep the political coalitions, including the firm as a business organization, going (Cyert & March, 1992). This perspective systematizes insights of the American pluralist political tradition. It admits conflict is ever present because of different preference orderings in the world. But it also assumes that the executive is the natural political broker, the linchpin maintaining the system, making sure that the returns yielded by the system are positive in relation to the demands (March, 1962, p. 674).
This pluralist fantasy offers sources of identifications to different subjects and their interests, e.g. unions, workers, managers, investors and regulators; giving them all, from the outset, the legitimacy of the demand and the right to a ‘payment’. However, the assumption is that they all still benefit from the system itself. This system that assumes plurality is the way of life of the liberal capitalist democracy where the conflict that emerges with different interests is united with the hope or promise of the unquestioned/able benefits of the market economy and the possibility of administering, in a satisfactory manner, the emerging differences and their demands. As painstaking and subtle the negotiations to achieve a quasi-conflict resolution might be, the bottom line is that it is in the interest of everyone to make it work. This is the best possible system. In this theory the economy is openly posited as a market economy. The demands of the different groups are essentially the price required for participation in the coalition to operate in the market that subtends the organized reality (March, 1962, p. 673).
The notion of organizations as functional to the constitution of a harmonious, balanced world is still intact, not as a given (as in functionalism) but rather as an achievement (albeit a sequential and negotiated one). In our vignette the new VC is intervening in an established coalition. She might be re-opening the bargaining relations that keep the organizational goals of the university in a functional, working order. She would need to engage in bargaining processes and negotiations with the dean, his deputy, the different departments and units, the union, the students, etc. over a variety of side-payments. These political processes would allow the VC to accomplish a novel coalition as a quasi-resolution of conflict that establishes a new equilibrium among different goals and demands so that the university can continue to operate successfully.
This pluralist administration of things is enticing because it conceives of disturbances and frictions spurred by differences (of interests, for example) ‘in the world’. But it promises a respectful, workable organizational order where everyone wins; after all, one of the by-products of such behaviour is organizational slack (Cyert & March, 1992). Noticeably, Amazon spurs this view of the social world because the differences Amazon recognizes are only those that facilitate what they consider innovation within narrow parameters. Other differences are not included in the palette of options. Amazon, for example, does not support unions.
This version of a pluralist world is ahistorical and based on the assumption that power relations can be handled and transformed into administrative ones. The ‘world’, out of which the organization is made into a successful coalition, is posited as an even terrain where different groups have more or less equal power options (Fox, 1974, p. 265). To do what? one could ask. To engage in negotiations with the executive to become a successful collective actor (the firm) in the market that is now clearly in evidence. This notion of negotiation as important to market relations and organizations has become progressively significant and elaborated by organizational economics, which has become dominant in business schools and beyond. Let’s focus on it in some detail.
Organizational economics and the economist’s fantasy
Organizational economics, as elaborated by two of its most significant strands, transaction cost economics and agency theory, posits work organizations as firms. Their existence is based on the economic logic of efficient coordination of resources. Similar to its cousin, the behavioural theory of the firm, this perspective does not take equilibrium for granted. Equilibrium is an outcome since order is established out of an internal conflict of interests that generates disorder, i.e. inefficiency and problems (Cyert & March, 1992, p. 223). For example, in the case of agency theory, Jensen and Meckling (1976, p. 307) suggest that the relation between ‘principle’ and ‘agent’ is stimulated by the conflicting objectives of the individual participants to that relation, which need to be constantly brought into equilibrium so to yield favourable results. In transaction cost economics, Williamson (1979, p. 252) points out that parties in an exchange do not operate harmoniously. Rather conflict reigns sovereign with clashing differences of various kinds leading to delays, breakdowns and other malfunctions.
It becomes imperative then to limit such conflicts that disturb the system of exchange that primarily allocates resources efficiently – the market and the price mechanism. The firm, the work organization, provides an answer to such frictions, since it emerges as a governance system built on contracts and agreements establishing precise rational controls (e.g. monitoring systems, sanctions and incentives). The promise is to ‘contain’ the disturbances and frictions or, in other words, to domesticate conflict. The result is an efficient set of economic transactions.
In our vignette the VC (as the principal) will have to establish or activate a number of mechanisms to ensure and monitor agents’ cooperation (the dean and his deputy) in order to reduce the conflict and maintain efficiency. Her calculus will need to consider that these are additional transaction costs. In the long run lower costs might be generated by investing in a new dean chosen directly by the VC with a clear mandate to deliver on the wealth creation and ‘nuts and bolts’ agenda she favours. The point is that the reasoning informing practical and organizational decisions here is one of utility maximization and cost reduction.
In the organizational economic perspective, conflict is endemic and ‘in the world’. But the world is squeezed and reduced into an economist’s fantasy, merely a collection of agents with preferences that are rationally bounded and who act opportunistically, pursuing their own self-interest and maximizing their utility. Markets with the price mechanisms and firms as organized bundle of contracts and controls (attempt to) domesticate conflict, i.e. all the emerging differences that disrupt efficiency. The promise is that these two mechanisms provide a just and prosperous world characterized by freedom for all. This fantasy actively excludes the enemies of this promise, those with different demands that cannot be reduced to ‘preferences’, such as individuals who want (or support) ‘scroungers’ who exploit ‘advantages’, such as illegal immigrants, or those on benefits or inefficient state bureaucrats.
This specific economist’s fantasy with its theoretical apparatus has become the received wisdom and taught in business schools where the managerial elite is schooled and embedded into circuits of public and private managerial practices in the United States (and elsewhere) with deleterious consequences (see George, 2014; Kunda & Ailon-Souday, 2005). As Goshal (2005, p. 75) suggested, the promise of unlimited prosperity, with its doctrine, became dominant not only in business schools but ‘[it] has been in the air: legitimizing some actors and behavior of managers and delegitimizing others and generally shaping the intellectual and normative order within which all day-to-day decisions were made’. Rather than it being ‘in the air’ one might add that this has ‘became the air’, i.e. something transparent, taken-for-granted and absolutely necessary, a common sense. This is exactly what we are witnessing in the ‘there is no alternative’ mantra where alternatives to the economist’s fantasy with its vision of the world and our place in it are often framed (and policed) as irrational, inefficient and anti-liberty.
Scholars have identified this specific economist’s fantasy that subtends the theories, processes, values and norms of this formation that organization studies has helped perpetuate, as ‘market rationalism’ (Bloom & Cederström, 2009; Kunda & Ailon-Souday, 2005). This can be more accurately defined as ‘hegemonic market governance’ because it establishes the only and right way of desiring, being, and operating in the social formation of most, if not all, Western democracies and other social formations. 9 What have been the consequences of this hegemonic market governance?
In macro-economics hegemonic market governance implies progressive expansion of private property rights via marketization and privatization of the common. In micro-economics it implies the consolidation of the power of the corporation and, specifically, the transnational corporation which makes efficiency gains via broader strategies of downsizing, offshoring and outsourcing. In domesticating conflict, work has being increasingly individualized through the rise of HRM and the concomitant cooptation, hollowing and demonization (especially in the US) of unions, as in the case of Amazon. In the economist’s fantasy individuals enter their contract with their employers on a one-to-one basis, guided by the desire to maximize their own utility in a lean and ever-flexible manner as evidenced by such notions as the boundless ‘portfolio career’ and ‘gig economy’. This fantasy calls individuals to increase their ‘employability’, becoming self-entrepreneurial, committed to self-improvement, learning and optimization (Contu, Grey, & Örtenblad, 2003). As in the Amazon vignette, one is not just doing one’s job, but the job is to improve and perfect one’s work constantly. As Pfeffer (2015) put it, Amazonians willingly participate and rationalize their own subjection to this world. Moreover, the responsibility of being employable is pushed to individuals even if the cost of higher education is becoming prohibitive in many countries, and not only for the statistically poor, but also for the middle classes as wages have stagnated. In the US, for example, average college education costs have more than doubled in 30 years.
The identity of the employers has also been significantly rearticulated in such economist’s fantasy where shareholders are posited as the owners of the firm. As seen earlier their aim, as principles, is to carefully balance incentives and monitoring systems used to bind management (the agent) to shareholders’ interest, i.e. to maximize share value. Hefty and complex compensation packages have been instituted as part of these contractual incentives. These have favoured the skyrocketing compensation of CEOs and other senior management. These processes have participated in supporting an amoral, instrumental attitude towards doing business, short-termism and a shareholder maximization ‘fetish’ which has increased income inequalities (Lazonick, 2014): a world where, as Pfeffer (2015) put it, ‘money trumps all’.
The financial and economic crisis of 2008 multiplied emerging conflicting differences that are becoming more evident remainders that the economist’s fantasy of just prosperity and freedom might be losing its grip. Rather than delivering wealth benefits to all hard-working people, as promised, the hegemonic market governance has delivered an economic aristocracy (Kelly, 2013), and what Thomas Picketty called a new Gilded Age. Record levels of income inequality, dire working conditions, wage stagnation, a continuous stream of corporate scandals and, as evident in the US, corporate/business interest groups capturing the political democratic process (Gilens & Page 2014), cannot easily be integrated in the affirming economist fantasy with its promise of freedom and prosperity for all.
Conflicts are becoming more and more evident in the growing demands for economic and social justice, apparent in anti-austerity demonstrations and labour unrest (for example, in the US the struggles for a minimum wage for service industry workers); in the anti-establishment demands of the louder progressive voices; and the rise of xenophobic, white nationalist and authoritarian voices as substantiated by the election of Donald Trump to the US presidency. In other words, the global hegemonic market governance is showing multiplying cracks. The domestication of conflict while still present in theory is no longer as effective in practice. Now let’s pull together the threads of the overall excursus into conflict and organization studies and consider how we, as organization theorists, might face these conflicts in our theorizing.
Discussion
This essay looked at the connections between conflict and organization studies. It has examined whether and how conflict is theorized, and with what consequences. I have first examined the perspectives that are directly about organizational conflict; and then I have focused on mainstream perspectives in organization studies.
In an effort to understand the key assumptions and consequences I have retraced the dominant narrative of organizational conflict theorizations as it is played out in management textbooks. This narrative proposes a specific typology (and periodization) of organizational conflict perspectives. The first type in this narrative is the ‘unitarist’ perspective, where conflict is something pathological that disturbs organizational order, throwing it off balance. Conflict is therefore to be contained and eliminated. This narrative then includes other theories under the label of the ‘pluralist’ perspective that appreciates conflict as endemic and functional. The final set of theories included in the traditional narrative is part of the interactionist perspective. Conflict is a necessary resource for organizational performance to be managed so that its dysfunctional aspects can be reduced and functional aspects exploited. This interactionist view of conflict with its precepts and models is the current dominant perspective – the ‘normal’ science of organizational conflict taught to current and future practitioners.
As shown, since a clear function between conflict and performance and a benign, managerially pliable view of conflict was established in the interactionist perspective, theorists have been unwilling to ‘rock the boat’ (Pondy, 1967), and open up to other potential differences where and when conflict arises, nor to theorize their significance. Instead, they reduce differences to variations of types of conflicts and assume that conflict intensity is related to performance. I have suggested that, rather than being the heightened development of accumulated knowledge, this ‘normal’ science is more akin to the acceptance of a pacifying impasse due to the managerialist, conservative and objectivist features imbued in this interactionist perspective. This useful and sanitized/able organizational conflict retains the fantasy of managerial prerogative, legitimacy and role intact. It is still regularly taught to management students as a solid science despite this knowledge falling short of the rigour and validity to support its main propositions.
The second contribution of this paper has been that of mobilizing novel thinking on the relation between conflict and organization studies, specifically by reactivating the long-standing idea that conflict is endemic and is ‘in the world’, as Follett put it. The world is always crisscrossed by emerging differences that sometimes disturb the reproduction of the world as ‘we’ know it. 10 Conflict is the name used to capture the experience some people in some circumstances have in facing differences. Organization studies produces theorizations that, when not directly about conflict, in one way or another channel, control and modulate emerging differences in the world. In other words, organization studies produces theorizations that domesticate conflict that is generated when work is organized to produce, circulate and enable consumption of valuable products and services. As shown, they do so in particular ways by ineluctably linking and articulating (what are generally posited as) the ‘social’ and the ‘economic’ in a very precise manner. Sometimes in these theorizations the ‘economic’ dimension is more obvious, at other times it is the ‘social’ dimension. The two, however, are always intertwined in ways that are telling of the ontological, epistemological, political and ethical consequences these theorizations have; the kind of world, subjects and relations they purport, justify and reproduce.
The first two organizational studies perspectives share a fantasy of a harmonious world where organizations are ‘harmonious families’ – a fantasy that pacifies and domesticates differentiation and any potential clash. These perspectives have a different doxa and explicit theories. Functionalist theorizing is posited and supported (and in turn supports) a corporatist world, while the behavioural theory of the firm posits a liberal version of a democratic capitalist world. In the functionalist perspective the ‘economic’ is misrepresented as a subset of the social, while in the behavioural theory of the firm the ‘economic’ is more fully acknowledged as a market system. It is given as the actual context out of which, and in which, the achievement of an organization, i.e. the successful quasi-resolution of conflict, is realized.
The organizational economic perspective currently dominant in business academia has had, as we have seen, a significant impact in the co-constitution of the contemporary way of life. The ‘hegemonic market governance’ pro/poses a ‘world’ that is individualized, de-socialized, de-politicized and compressed as a function of the liberal market economy where price and the organization, i.e. the firm posited as bundles of contracts and control mechanisms, offer the domestication of conflict leading to efficiency, the maximization of utility and limitation of costs. This economist’s fantasy promises prosperity for all hard-working, self-interested, free individuals. As elaborated earlier, emerging differences are showing the cracks in this promise and the world it posits and legitimizes. What answers are organization theorists offering to such crises and the conflicts that are becoming increasingly evident in this way of life?
Possible answers and ways forward
Organization theorists, particularly in leading American journals, have identified practices, such as corporate social responsibility, ‘corporate citizenship’, ‘enlightened stakeholder theory’ and ‘shared-value’, designed to address some of the contemporary conflicts to create ‘good capitalism’ by limiting its more pernicious aspects. These moves are interesting and significant as they can have a positive local impact; however, as well documented (e.g. Crane, Palazzo, Spence, & Matten, 2014), they do not challenge the fundamental shortcomings and contradictions of the hegemonic market governance and do not dislodge its economist’s fantasy.
As indicated earlier, from its inception organization studies has also had in its midst critical ideas and interventions, such as Marxist and feminist inspirations and de-colonial theorizing. This work has revealed some of the deep problems embedded in organization and management theorizations and practices such as managerialism and instrumentalism as, for example, we have considered earlier when discussing the interactionist perspective. Such theorizations are important but have largely remained confined to niche academic debates and enclaves while the economic perspective has taken centre-stage, becoming a source of legitimization and ideological humus for the flourishing and support of the hegemonic market governance.
With the widening conflicts the quests for alternatives to go beyond the current status quo and calls for a viable democratic systemic change that seriously addresses economic and social justice are multiplying, so it might be useful to consider ways in which our work as academics contributes to such quest. At present organization theorists are increasingly coming to terms and grappling with the performativity of theorizations, including critical ones (see Human Relations special issue, January 2016). Given, as elaborated in this essay on conflict and organization studies, the epistemic, ontological and ethical, performative features that are intertwined with our theorizing, it is important to reassess the way we, organization theorists, conceive of our theorizing in ways that takes these features fully into account. I conclude this paper by offering four pointers that could help stimulate such a kind of theorizing, under the label ‘demiurgic’ theorizing (see Contu, 2018).
Demiurgic theorizing
Demiurgic theorizing is the description used to indicate the type of theorizing organization theorists might want to consider in facing up to the challenge of conflicting emerging differences that cannot easily be domesticated. The name ‘demiurgic’ theorizing is to capture the creative and performative role such a theorizing has. Theories, as discussed earlier, are not only witnesses of the social world and its relations. They are participating in the co-constitution of the world as we know it, even if our role as organizational theorists, and the consequences of our theories, are not necessarily obvious and calculable and predictable. The demiurgos in ancient philosophy was the entity that played a significant role in creating reality. This was not an all-powerful god, rather it was often represented as endowed with limited abilities and involved in a constrained process more akin to a craft than the omnipotent creation ex-nihilo of a god (O’Brien, 2015). In its usual Greek translation demiurgos means ‘artisan’. This captures the actual craftsmanship of theorizing and knowledge production more broadly, the relation with the materials, the taste and skilled work required. Listed below are some of the features of demiurgic theorizing (see also Contu, 2018).
First, if one takes as a useful starting point what elaborated thus far that (a) organization studies is a domain of theorization that is associated with the imbrication between the ‘economic’ and the ‘social’ which has specific ontological, epistemological and political/ethical consequences; and that (b) organization studies is historically and socially embedded in ‘the world’ and has a performative character, then such features (transposed at a subjective ‘level’) entail a demand to assume fully the consequences these very features bring about, i.e. theorists are responsible and accountable for the theorizations produced. This is regardless of the fact that we can never fully know those consequences. What might be called our collective and personal historical responsibility as organizational theorists is to assume these features fully with no bracketing or forgetting. This means to become responsible and accountable for the theorizations we produce, the research areas, questions, designs and methods we choose, the content and mode in which we transpose and disseminate research in our teaching and in consulting, media appearances and community outreach, etc. 11
Second, demiurgic theorizations, while staying fiercely rigorous, deepen permanent critique but are not muted by misplaced charges of romanticism, epistemological (or other) purity and cynical distancing. Too often these are intellectual ornaments of privilege. Demiurgic theorizations operate in a space of possibility and impossibility in as far as there is no forgetting or bracketing the fact that consequences cannot ever fully be known and power cannot ever be eliminated completely. Just as we have seen in relation to the way conflict has been theorized, conflict cannot ever be fully expunged or harnessed. Even if, as we have seen, different theorizations (and the socio-historical apparatuses they participate in legitimizing and reproducing) attempt to domesticate conflict by channelling and controlling emerging differences.
Returning to the theorization of organizational conflict one must stress that the management of conflict is not an ideal, or a presupposition, or something to strive for, but it is at once a possibility and an impossibility that always will be present when we try to organize work for the production, circulation and consumption of valuable products and services. The management of conflict is at once something that is ‘possible’, as it allows for a productive confrontation of different ideas, values, desires, interests and options. But these are not only enclosed in pre-decided variables (such as types of conflict and resulting performance measures). These include any emerging differences such as, for example, the question of who benefits from a reductive view of efficiency? Or what does it mean to organize efficiently, democratically and in ways that increase and foster self-determination, autonomy and equitable and fair relations, or, on the contrary squash them and, in a reactionary manner, maintain the status quo? Management of conflict is also something that is ‘impossible’. It is the index of an impossible final closure to firm the play of difference in the world once and for all to obtain total control, and therefore full predictability and control. Demiurgic theorizations never forget the working of power since the terrain of decisions is never simply evenly pluralist but, as seen earlier, is always criss-crossed by differences; open, antagonistic, susceptible to contestation and uneven. In practical terms this means that the decisions we take in our theorizing (as in all the various ways we produce knowledge) create sets of inclusions and exclusions for which we are responsible and that call for alert and attentive and sensitive judgement (Contu, 2018).
Third, demiurgic theorizing takes seriously and faces up to the emerging conflicting differences in the world. Currently, as we have seen, these involve demands based on economic and social differences since the status quo is generating deep injustices, for example keeping masses of people from enjoying sustainable, fulfilling lives by limiting systematically their freedom and opportunities in accessing and sharing material and symbolic resources. Organizational theorists (e.g. Parker, Cheney, Fournier, & Land, 2014) have started to study alternatives.But there is considerably more to achieve. It is time to move beyond recording and discussing to actively elaborating and advocating alternatives that deepen the democratic values of liberty, equality and solidarity, going beyond the limited and limiting economist’s fantasy of hegemonic market governance.
It is time for organization theorists to research, develop and theorize alternatives that reconfigure types of ownership, processes of decision making, communication and leadership, processes of capital formation, value creation and distribution, in order to better respond to the multiplying differences, especially the socio-economic justice claims and demands in which they emerge. I do not offer here such substantive theorization(s) as this is beyond the scope of this paper. But I want to suggest that this aspect of demiurgic theorizing that engages with studying and proposes new justice-oriented alternatives that face contemporary conflicts might usefully engage in what can be called a conjunctive strategy, i.e. a strategy that creates linkages, associations and new articulations (see Contu, 2017).
This is a strategy that aims to learn from, bridge and contribute innovatively to the change initiatives and the societal and organizational innovations unfolding all over the world, as currently theoretically elaborated, for example, in heterodox economics and political studies (e.g. Gibson-Graham, 2006; Kelly, 2012; Latouche, 2009; ; Wolff, 2012). This is a praxis that nurtures equivalences and linkages with distinct concrete experiences, experiments and social movements (e.g. the ‘new economy’ movement, the ‘ecological’ movement, the ‘cooperative’ movement, the ‘labour’ movement, the ‘anti-racism’ movement and the ‘decoloniality movement’). In such experiences, democratic values of liberty, equality and solidarity are played out in ways that go beyond the specific economist’s fantasy established within the coordinates of the current hegemonic market governance with its economist organizational perspectives. The authors mentioned above offer examples of this conjunctive strategy of demiurgic theorizing that is engaged with justice claims associated with contemporary conflicts, e.g. growing economic inequalities and diminishing options and opportunities. In the US, for example, demands are being voiced for fair wages in the face of stagnating salaries and dire working conditions (e.g. low employment security and no guaranteed weekly hours, lack of medical insurance, parental leave) associated with long-standing racialized inequities. Such writers also draw attention to the creative organizational and societal solutions that are emerging and delivering fairer relations and greater solidarity and freedom. Organization theorists might find mutual inspiration, guidance and support in these authors, organizers, managers, workers, lawyers, teachers and students, who in their diverse connotations, elaborate and answer concrete demands for justice (see Contu, 2018) and go beyond the logic of the hegemonic market governance and its economist’s fantasy.
Finally, since it assumes its own radical responsibility, demiurgic theorizing must focus on strong notions of freedom and equity that are always tested with the question of justice, practised, for example, by upholding the method and values of intersectionality (e.g. Hill Collins, 2000, 2013). One of the key points when considering this kind of demiurgic theorizing is that, with freedom, equity, redistribution and recognition must also constantly be reaffirmed and rearticulated. This is because sedimented power relations constitute privileges and penalties in systematic ways for different groups. So the salient intersections in a given situation must be addressed. A priority in such theorizing and knowledge production is that of fostering agential capabilities 12 to propose, learn and practise the values and the critical instruments to discern and judge the complex (and ever-changing) ways in which these are offended and denied so that better collective decisions can be taken (Contu, 2018). The aim is to make a positive difference in answering the concrete demands for fairness and justice we are facing.
My wager is that if we fully assume our historical responsibility and face the many oppressive relations in which we organize and manage our organizations (and societies), and the conflicts therein generated, then ‘we’, organization theorists, might become more open to consider theorizations as part of a praxis that promotes agencies and systems of accountability that foster more democratic, anti-authoritarian, caring and just organizational capabilities, instruments and structures.
Conclusions
In this essay I have returned to conflict by exploring the relation between conflict and organization studies. The first result of this return to conflict and organization studies has been a diagnosis of the arrested development of conflict theorization. Management textbooks posit the interactionist perspective as the latest development of organizational conflict theorizing. This normal science is experiencing the arrested conceptual development Mannix identified because it is focusing on the confirmation of its key assumptions and propositions. But such confirmation still eludes its proponents. The argument I have elaborated also responds to the invitation of Spicer, Alvesson and Kärrman (see Spicer, Alvesson, & Kärreman, 2016) to ‘clear out’ from leading management textbooks the pseudo-scientific statements that have little validity, such as the reverse-U function that links conflict intensity to performance. This reverse-U function could still be presented as a reasonable suggestion to be included in the toolkit for the art of managing, as opposed to a solid piece of scientific knowledge akin to the mathematical and empirical support enjoyed, for example, by the neutrino.
The second main outcome has been to revitalize and appreciate the significance of how conflict and organization studies ‘sit’ with each other, something that I have done by reactivating Follett’s point that conflict is the emergence of difference in the world. By delving ‘meta-theoretically’ into different perspectives, some directly and some indirectly about conflict, I have shown how their theoretical edifices propose a specific articulation of the world which (attempts to) domesticate conflict by controlling, in different ways, differences in the world. Such perspectives have an ontological, epistemological, pragmatic and political significance since they are performative: they literally in different ways ‘matter’ (Contu, 2017; Contu & Pecis, 2016).
The challenge to organization studies as a discipline is how it might now appreciate its role in responding to the emerging and multiplying conflicts of our time. The economist’s fantasy supported and legitimized by the organizational economic perspectives has favoured a world where the promise was that our societies could continue to grow and become wealthy and healthy through unfettered exploitation of natural and human resources. But the widening conflicts of our time confront us, challenging us to develop ways to organize our work and our societies more fairly and more sustainably. In many ways the challenge of demiurgic theorizing is how ‘we’, organization theorists, participate in making the social anew. ‘Anew’, at a time when ‘the assholes are winning and money trumps all’, means to go beyond the economist’s fantasy that has been hegemonic in the last 40 years or so.
The practical possibilities are many; in this essay I have offered some pointers on how to aim for such theorizations as part of an academic praxis (see Contu, 2018) summarized thus: (i) the appreciation and building of a historical collective responsibility and qua organization theorists accountability, (ii) the working in a space of impossibility and possibility, and (iii) the use of a conjunctive strategy. Finally, these all need to constantly reinstate and rearticulate the values of freedom, equality and solidarity, always developing a praxis that ‘passes’ the intersectional test of justice. This may sound difficult, and it is. But it is indubitably a key challenge of our times.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
For their precious comments on this paper I would like to thank the OS Editor Robin Holt, Hugo Gagiotti, Janice Goldman, Adam James, Monika Kostera, Tuomo Peltonen, Carl Rhodes, Bente Meier Sørensen, Bijorn Stengel, and Hugh Willmott.
Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.