Organizational Rules

Conceptual Overview

As a phenomenon, organizational rules are among the most underrated yet critical influences within organizational life. Centrally, rules are linked to various forms of power that serve not only to control behavior but also to provide a sensemaking framework that helps guide behavior and to make some behaviors more or less understandable and coherent.

In a foundational article, Stewart Clegg traced the influence of organizational rules to circuits of power drawn from and sustained by a series of relationships that exist across an organizational field. Those relationships reside in, and are solidified through, state rules (e.g., the influence of state intervention in an economy or through legislation that specifically controls what a company can and cannot do), strategic rules (e.g., the influence of multinational companies on organizational environments), reproduction rules (e.g., the role of management theory in influencing appropriate managerial behaviors), social regulative rules (e.g., forms of control that are embedded in dominant practices such as business process reengineering), technical rules (e.g., taken-for-granted forms of production that can blind people to alternative ways of producing), and extraorganizational rules (e.g., embedded social values about the relative worth of men and women, various ethnic groups, etc.). It has been argued that control simultaneously enters and creates a sense of organization through configurations of rules as those in charge recruit people to fulfill certain ends that are seen as important at a given time (e.g., profit margins, membership growth). This gives rise to a series of formal rules whose initial purpose is to control (e.g., hours of work), coordinate (e.g., lines of reporting, division of labor), and guide (e.g., job descriptions, mission statements) behaviors. Many, if not all, rules are formally established in written form (e.g., policy statements, rule books), but many are unwritten and are impressed on people through routines, practices, and a series of verbal and nonverbal communications that signal expectations.

Other rule sets that influence behavior arise informally (and usually in unwritten form) as members of an organization develop behavioral expectations that are not directly related to the formal activities of the organization: Rules built around socializing (e.g., an arrangement to have a beer fest every Friday) is one such example. Consequently, the behavior of people in organizations is influenced by a configuration of formal and informal, written and unwritten, moral, normative, and legalistic rules and also by the way those involved make sense of those rules.

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