Sociological Approach

Conceptual Overview

In the ASQ symposium, Greenwood and Hinings saw the key questions concerning organizations to be how [Page 1442]they pattern privilege and disadvantage in society. In retrospect, they looked back to the 1950s as a golden age, extending Weberian enlightenment when scholars such as Selznick, Gouldner, Etzioni, and Blau and Scott still asked important questions. At this time, they suggest, the sociology of organizations had not been wholly incorporated into an apolitical organization theory oriented to efficiency. Thus, they define the central concern of the sociology of organizations to be power while the central concern of management theory they define as efficiency: Power and efficiency are seen as the central terms of two opposing and antithetical discourses.

The separation between power and efficiency serves a rhetorical purpose in their essay. Power marks the center of gravity of the world we have lost, and efficiency is the fulcrum of the world we have gained. Generally, a concern with power marks the sociology department while a fixation on efficiency characterizes the business school scholar. The terms mark antithetical discourses between which scholars must choose. It appears as if one must either be for enlightenment and against efficiency or for efficiency and against power as the analytic through which bearings are pursued.

In their ASQ piece, Greenwood and Hinings cite Aldrich approvingly when he suggests that the growth of organizational society is one in which people are enslaved and dominated by organizations, in large part through the ways in which these organizations frame and institutionalize what is behaviorally normal and rational. In any process of institutionalization, meaningfulness is never given but has to be struggled for, has to be secured, even against the resistance of others. Systematic thinking rationalizes the image of the world through the theoretical mastery of reality by increasingly precise and abstract concepts. It was this aspect that Weber sometimes called the de-enchantment of the world. It is the process by which all forms of magical, mystical, and traditional explanation are stripped away from interpretation. The world laid bare is open and amenable to the calculation of technical reason. Calculable means are connected to given ends.

Uncertainty threatens calculability because it both defines and limits freedom. Where there is a rule, there is no freedom other than to obey or not obey, which is really no freedom at all. Uncertainty has the ontological and metaphysical status that it has in organization theory because rationality is a central assumption of the discipline. With rationality, however bounded it may be, the organization theorist will ward off evil, defend the faith of theory, and keep at bay the ever-threatening tide of chaos, undecidability, and indetermination that uncertainty represents. In organization theory, freedom is usually defined through posing the existential and environmental conditions under which rational action is possible. These conditions limit freedom by imposing an ethic of calculation, as totally objective rationality, upon a freedom to act.

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