Organizational Symbolism

Conceptual Overview

Organizational symbolism arose at the end of the 1970s—almost simultaneously, but independently, on the two sides of the Atlantic—as a marginal and anticonformist movement that radically contested the subject and method of the rationalist and positivist paradigm then dominant in organization studies. Historically, two events, one in the United States and one in Europe, marked the origin of the movement and shaped its essential features.

In May 1979, scholars from a variety of academic backgrounds attended an informal conference held at the home of Louis Pondy in Urbana, Illinois, to explore the implications of symbolism for the study of organizations—a theme unacceptable to official academic conferences at the time. The Urbana conference gave rise to the first academic monograph on the topic (Organizational Symbolism), edited by Pondy in 1983, which then became a reference text for the movement's members. In June 1981, during the annual conference of the European Group for Organizational Studies, a group of attendees, disappointed by the hostile reception accorded a paper presented by Per Olof Berg on “Emotional Structures in Organizations,” gathered in a Glasgow pub to found the Standing Conference for Organizational Symbolism. In the following decade, this group played a decisive part in the movement's growth and institutionalization in Europe by promoting international conferences, seminars, and publications.

The symbolist movement pursued largely identical purposes in the United States and Europe. Under the dominant paradigm, organizations had hitherto been generally equated to machines, organisms, or economies and studied exclusively in terms of their pragmatic, formal, explicit, and therefore observable aspects. The aim of organizational research was to uncover empirically verifiable relations among behavioral, structural, and environmental variables, for which purpose it used measurement methods and statistical techniques considered proper to scientific research. Vice versa, according to the advocates of the symbolist approach, organizations are fundamentally cultures where instrumental behaviors governed largely by rationality subtly interweave with behaviors expressing feelings, values, and ideologies. The analyst of organizations should therefore not only examine objectively observable events, structures, and processes but also pay attention to the meanings subjectively attributed to them by the members of the organization, and generally to the implicit, informal, and nonrational dimensions of organizational life. If organizations are not social artifacts constructed according to universal principles of rationality, but rather symbolic fields and systems of meaning generated by specific experiences and local cultural dynamics, their study requires the use of qualitative methods and holistic and interpretative models.

If symbols ambiguously stand for a multiplicity of meanings, evoke emotions, and impel action, the essential task of researchers engaged in the analysis of organizations qua symbolic fields is to recognize symbols, decode their meanings, and explain their functions. On the basis of a classification originally proposed by Dandridge and colleagues in 1980, organizational symbols are generally grouped into three categories, to which correspond the three main systems for the expression of cultural values and beliefs: verbal language, the language of behaviors, and the language of artifacts.

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