Critical Analysis

Conceptual Overview

Notions of critical analysis in regard to organizations draw on a range of extant critical approaches in the social sciences, and more recently in cultural studies. Of central importance are approaches drawn from sociological and social theoretical traditions that take as their object of departure a critique of managerialist, bureaucratic, or ideologically embedded conceptions of organization and their analytical approaches. There are branches of critical analysis, such as feminist and postmodernist approaches, that emphasize particular dimensions of organizational conceptions, enactments, and effects. All of these seek to contribute to a widening of and comprehensive challenge to conventional organizational analysis.

Formal critical approaches to analyzing organizations emerged out of a long tradition of critical theory, especially that developed in Marxist sociological traditions, and importantly including what is popularly known as the Frankfurt School of critical theory, proposed by Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, which was especially influential in English-speaking academies in the 1960s. There have always been informal critical approaches to analyzing and understanding organizations, such as that evident in trade union and workers' association perspectives on production organizations. But these informal, organic criticisms are rarely accorded the status of critical analysis.

A significant orientation point of 20th-century critical analysis has been the idea and role of rationalization. [Page 314]Modern organizational analysis assumes that organizations, as sets of general rational principles operating in systems, are manifest agents of societal modernization. Critical views of organizations protest this view, seeing production organizations as sites of capitalist social relations and of class struggle rather than as agents of a universal, highly rational modernization. Critical organizational analysts, therefore, take the problem of rationalizing modernity as central to the context of organizational actions and analysis. In the critical analytical approach, the ways in which conventional organizational theory and analysis have developed and established boundaries of scientific inquiry are themselves part of the problem that limits a more comprehensive, unceasingly interrogative and dynamic analysis and understanding of organizations in practice and theory.

A prevailing view of organizations, derived from Durkheimiam sociology, describes them as social systems—as entities in which people and production are organized. This view has gained considerable practical appeal among organization theorists throughout most of the 20th century. It is the source of an enduringly appealing organization science and of a functionalist approach to organizations that continues to underpin the majority of organizational analyses today. For many organization analysts, a practical analytical concern assuming a systems framework and focused on solving functional systems and management problems is the commonsense task and method of organizational analysis. A socially critical interest in analyzing organizations as they are practiced, and as societal relations, is therefore beyond the business of organization studies for many organization academics and practitioners. For critical analysts, however, these mainstream approaches manifest a singularly privileged managerialist gaze and legitimacy. It is this ideological managerialism, and its congruent analytical methods and depiction of organizational problems, that is a principal target of critical analysis.

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