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Organizational Politics

Politics is the practice of power, and organizational politics the practice of power in organizations. This practice underlies and shapes the formal rationality and authoritative structures of organizational life. It occurs through the play of plural self-interested groups competing for resources; heavy-handed regimes of oppression imposed by dominant elites; insidious and subtle processes of establishing an unquestioned commercial hegemony over managers' and employees' hearts and minds; pervasive yet decentered sets of discursive practices and disciplinary powers constituting the subjectivity of organizational agents; and Machiavellian micropolitical strategies, tactics, and maneuvers.

Conceptual Overview

An Essentially Contested Concept

For some, organizational politics is a negative zerosum game in which individuals and groups seek to exert power over others in order to secure or obtain scarce resources. For others, it is a more positive and facilitative power to achieve outcomes in a non-zerosum environment. The negative zero-sum game has been taken by many to refer to the parochial, divisive, illegitimate, and nonsanctioned dimension of organizational life. For other zero-sum conceptions, the main game lies elsewhere, in the structures of power that seek to protect and perpetuate underlying inequalities by laying claim to legitimate and authoritarian rule. Power has also been viewed in positive non-zerosum terms as the production of intended effects, and politics primarily as the conscious manipulation of the informal organizational arena to “get things done” in organizations. For yet other advocates of a positive non-zero-sum view of power, the notion incorporates all the social relations involved in shaping such intentions, striving, and consciousness. For such a conception, not only is the personal the political, but it is also what is generally regarded as legitimate, authoritative, and true about self, organizations, and society.

Within the relatively rarified atmosphere of competing academic tribes, as well as common everyday uses of the term politics, the term appears as an essentially contested concept, that is, a historical term that is inherently ambiguous, value laden, and disputed. These are concepts about which reasonable people have legitimate grounds for disagreement. Consequently, given the value-laden nature of the term, the act of labeling some actions as political and others not is itself a political act. It will legitimate or delegitimate alternative points of view or forms of action.

Traditions

While an awareness and understanding of organizational politics date back to antiquity, its treatment within contemporary organizational studies has a number of different origins. One tradition stems from Max Weber's classical analysis of bureaucracy as a system of rational-legal authority. Neo-Weberian writers have documented in some detail how the rational rules and procedures of Weberian bureaucracy are regularly bent, broken, ignored, and selectively applied—groups mobilizing their power bases in the interests of getting things done or promoting the interests of their group or department above others. This list includes classic contributions from Robert Merton, Peter Blau, Alvin Gouldner, Philip Selznick, Charles Perrow, and others. Another tradition explores the tactics and strategies of organizational micropolitics and stems from the classic work of Melville Dalton in 1957 and Tom Burns in 1961. Burns observed the existence of a dual code, moral and linguistic, among managers—a public language encompassing what James March and Mancur Olsen later characterized as the rhetoric of administration, and a private language incorporating what March and Olsen called the rhetoric of realpolitik. Dalton paid great attention to how managers, in particular, worked on these two levels, one for the records and appearances, and one submerged—the latter associated with organizational politics. This latter is the arena of what Dalton termed the finesses of workable illegalities, such as losing records, manipulating accounts, colluding in banned activities, and so on. More recently, Robert Jackall provided us with a similar, albeit updated and more broad-ranging, image in his ethnography of “maze-bright” managers in a number of contemporary U.S. corporations.

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