Punishment and Violence in Organizations

Conceptual Overview

In making the above observations, two broad approaches to the study of punishment and violence in organization may be identified. The first is those that focus on acts of violence within organizations, such as the growth in the reporting of violent acts in organizations, the depressing frequency with which reports of homicide in organizations make the headlines in national and international news media (for example, the slaughter in a school of an Amish community in the United States in the Autumn of 2006; the Dunblane, Scotland, tragedy of 1996, when a lone gunman took the lives of 16 children and their teacher; or the brutality exhibited by United States coalition forces on Iraqi prisoners in Abu Ghraib prison). The second approach is that which considers the embeddedness of violence within the process of organization itself, an approach that argues for an understanding that violence is a sine qua non of organization. These two approaches in themselves reflect competing metatheoretical approaches to the study of organizations and organization, which see organizations either as entities, the entitative approach, or see organization as a process.

Carter and Jackson (2000) and Hosking and Morley (1991), inter alia, are useful essays in defining these competing approaches. The metatheoretical approach adopted in the study of organizations informs the understanding that one develops of organizations. A functionalist approach, as defined by Burrell and Morgan in 1979, to the study of punishment and violence in organizations may view violence as a problem that hinders productivity and must be addressed as something that should be reduced or eliminated. Likewise a functionalist approach may view punishment as something that serves a useful purpose in regulating behavior in organizations. A critical approach views as problematic the taken-for-grantedness of [Page 1335]functionalism and thus renders the conventional understanding of punishment and violence (in organizations) as problematic. From a metatheoretical perspective students of organizations are themselves violated by not being exposed to the foundations of these and other approaches to the study of organizations; that is, the knowledge that they seek may at best be partial and, in all likelihood, ideological. All knowledge claims are contestable.

In the social and behavioral sciences generally, approaches to the study of work, occupation(s), and organization(s) can justifiably be viewed as problematic, for as Hollway argued in 1991, with specific reference to work and organizational psychology, much of the output in these areas has been produced and not discovered. Thus the myths of the value-freedom and “scientific” objectivity of work conducted by “social scientists” may itself be understood as a form of violation. In organization in its broadest conceptions, it appears that violence and violation wait in every nook and cranny.

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