Meso Organizational Behaviour: Comments on the Third Paradigm

Introduction

In this quotation from her introduction to Macro-Micro Linkages in Sociology, Huber notes that which is implicitly understood by most organizational researchers - our models are simplifications of dynamic and interactive processes that are usually much more complex than we make them out to be. Whether it be the result of pragmatics or scientific purity, organizational research rarely models the richness of organizational processes. Recently, this observation that everything interacts with everything else has been a consistent theme in reviews of the organizational behaviour (OB) literature. Beginning with Cummings' (1982) Annual Review of Psychology chapter on the state of OB research, several commentators have suggested that the most significant impediment to the advancement of OB knowledge has been the failure to simultaneously incorporate individual and organizational influences interacting across levels of analysis.

The problem is that what has been called the micro-macro distinction has been institutionalized in OB with two parallel yet largely non-overlapping literatures (and some might argue journals) serving the separate disciplines (Staw and Sutton 1992; Schneider et al. 1995). Cappelli and Sherer (1991) argue that it is impossible to develop a common paradigm for organizational behaviour without incorporating multiple levels of analysis in our research. Who could disagree? Cappelli and Sherer (1991), Rousseau and House (1994) and House et al. (1995) offered the meso (literally meaning ‘between’) paradigm as a means to integrate micro and macro research and foster a common thematic focus. The focus of meso theory and research is the incorporation of multi-level and cross-level influences in research on and in organizations. We will show that this seeming institutionalization of the separation of the micro and the macro foci in OB is more apparent than real and that significant advances have been made, both conceptually and methodologically, to deal with at least some of the cross-level complexity that characterizes organizational life. While it is clearly not time to be sanguine, our review suggests that some progress has been made - and for a considerable period of time - in consciously entangling the micro and the macro. We suspect this would be truer if we were able to decide what meso is!

In preparation for this chapter, we conducted a very informal survey of a few colleagues (who would likely classify themselves as micro or macro and were both psychologists and sociologists) regarding the meaning of the term ‘meso’, specifically as it refers to organizational behaviour research. Our review of the literature had led us to anticipate there to be no clear consensus regarding the definition of ‘meso’ or those characteristics that delineate meso research, and our informal survey did not disappoint us. There were as many definitions of meso as there were colleagues asked, and there was little overlap in the defining characteristics mentioned.

In addition to the ambiguity surrounding the term meso, we noted a curious disjuncture in our colleagues' accompanying responses. That is, in addition to responding to the specific question about the meaning of ‘meso’ for organizational research, our colleagues made several observations [Page 150]about the current state of that research and these responses clearly fell into two categories. Some colleagues noted the relative absence of context in organizational behaviour research (‘the focus is so much on individuals’), while others noted the disappearance of the individual (‘the focus is so situational’). What, we asked, was left?

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