Modernity

Conceptual Overview

Modernity begins with the irruption of specific ideas of change and new practices within particular social, economic, political, and cultural dimensions of European countries between the 17th and 18th centuries, and in its latest form, just as the 21st century begins, modernity persists as a rational and reflexive mode of interpreting the dynamics of global society. According to Stewart Clegg, modernity can also be identified with a distinct form of organization based on the Enlightenment project for imposing general law of reason. Because rationality is in the essence of early management and organization theory, the concept of modernity has particular importance to organization studies and is represented by positivist empiricism, by functionalist and scientific values, or by institutional forms of organizing society and economy.

To understand modernity, a review of selected thinkers is required. The most important conceptions about modernity come from historians, philosophers, and sociologists—the last have been the most integrally involved within organization studies. Max Weber contributed to the definition of modernity by providing the theory of bureaucracy and Jürgen Habermas continued the inquiry into modernity as an emancipatory project; Anthony Giddens furnished organization studies with a keen distinction of modernity based on modern institutions as opposed to traditional ones and on a particular concept of time and space.

A key contribution of Weber, as noted by Clegg, was articulating how rationalization threads diverse experiences (e.g., Germany's national formation, modernization, unification, industrialization, and secularization) into interlocking and contingent processes whose outcome is modernity. In order to solve the conflict between collective needs and individual wants, Michael Reed argues that a modern organization is rationally designed. As a result of the fusion of collective decision making and individual interests, it is supposed to act as a universal solution to the problem of social order. Modern organizations are rational organizations aimed to transform the irrational human nature into rational behavior. Clegg argues that modernity is characterized by bureaucracy and formalization, and its crucial hallmark is the process of differentiation. In this sense, modern organizations have been represented in many different terms: ideal types and their deviations, systems and throughput processes, organizations and their contingencies, markets structures and their failures, populations of organizations and their ecologies, and cultures and their institutionalized myths and ceremonies, including the real politics of power.

...