Organization Studies

This paper will focus on the problems and prospects for organization theory when some of its central concepts are in question under the 'weight' of the demise of an episteme of representation (Benhabib 1992). Fundamental con cepts such as 'action' and 'structure' have been examined critically over several years with the aim of removing either voluntarist or determinist and individualist or holistic tendencies (Giddens 1979; Knights and Willmott 1983, 1985). Though questioning the dualistic separation of these categories from a phenomenological or social constructionist perspective, these perspectives still presume an episteme of representation in which the categories of the dualism (subject and object) can be operationalized to represent phenomena with con crete existence in the world. Structure and agency remain in a relationship of exteriority with respect to one another (Game 1991). Organization theory, as conventionally constructed, can readily accommodate such a critique of dualism as long as the categories remain relatively durable, stable and in a relationship of exteriority to each other. However, the demise of an episteme of representation spells trouble for the durability and stability of these categories. Drawing on a range of discourses, the paper seeks to indicate a variety of solutions to the dualistic problematic ending with the work of the deconstruc tionist approaches of a limited sample of postmodern feminists.

This paper develops a critique of a number of highly influential theoretical interventions in contemporary organizational analysis that have collapsed structure into agency. It suggests that these approaches, which draw, in various ways, on the 'postmodern turn' in organizational analysis, have seriously weakened the explanatory power and political imagination of the latter. In direct contrast to theoretical approaches based on flat or compacted social onto logies, the paper supports a critical realist position as providing a layered or stratified social ontology on which a more structurally robust and inclusive explanations of organizational phenomena can be constructed. By adopting a realist ontology and methodology, organizational analysis will be much better placed to understand and explain the interplay between structure and agency, and its 'fateful' consequences for social actors.

This paper examines the place of the strategic choice perspective in the study of organizations and considers its contemporary contribution. The main fea tures of the original analysis are summarized, followed by a review of the key issues which arise from it. The paper discusses the integrative potential of strategic choice theory within organization studies and examines its contribu tion to an evolutionary perspective on the subject.

This article expresses doubts about the structure-action approach to the study of organizations and advocates a positivist approach instead. The interest in action is spurred in part by a belief that the study of action will lead to a greater appreciation of the breadth of choice about organizational forms that is available to human actors. However, work on organizational structure reveals that it is quite highly determined by material factors, such as size and diversification, with little strategic choice. This article discusses the implica tions of determinism for theories of strategic choice, moral accountability and managerial capriciousness. The programmatic implications for organization studies are examined by contrasting the positivist with the structure-action approach. The conclusion is that the positivist approach has proved itself fruit ful, whereas the structure-action approach is infeasible. Where action-level analyses are required, they are best conducted within the framework provided by positivist analyses.

Institutional theory and structuration theory both contend that institutions and actions are inextricably linked and that institutionalization is best understood as a dynamic, ongoing process. Institutionalists, however, have pursued an empirical agenda that has largely ignored how institutions are created, altered, and reproduced, in part, because their models of institutionalization as a pro cess are underdeveloped. Structuration theory, on the other hand, largely remains a process theory of such abstraction that it has generated few empirical studies. This paper discusses the similarities between the two theories, develops an argument for why a fusion of the two would enable institutional theory to significantly advance, develops a model of institutionalization as a structuration process, and proposes methodological guidelines for investigating the process empirically.

In this article we conjecture that organizational actors, through their actions, create their own context. Once initiated, the context tends to develop a dynamic of its own, which escapes the control of the organizational actors. In con sequence, the context becomes the determining factor of the actors' initiatives. Voluntarism has created its own determinism which will eventually shape the organizational actors' futures. To illustrate our view, we study a crisis which we believe may exemplify a situation induced and perpetuated by the same organizational actors who tried to handle it. To support this thesis, we attempt to show that the observed crisis is chaotic. Our results reveal that deterministic chaos cannot be rejected as an explanation of the dynamics of the situation. The crisis exhibits an apparently random behaviour which, we believe, is deter ministically created through tightly coupled actions and dynamic interactions among actors. Once in the chaotic state, actors cannot control the process they have contributed to create. The context becomes all powerful and determining.