Organizational Theorizing: A Historically Contested Terrain

Organizational Theorizing: A Historically Contested Terrain

Organization studies has its proximate historical roots in the socio-political writings of nineteenth century thinkers, such as Saint-Simon, who attempted to anticipate and interpret the nascent structural and ideological transformations wrought by industrial capitalism (Wolin 1960). The economic, social and political changes that capitalist-led modernization brought in its wake created a world that was fundamentally different from the relatively small-scale and simple forms of production and administration which had dominated earlier phases of capitalist development in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries (Bendix 1974). The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries witnessed the growing dominance of large-scale organizational units in economic, social and political life as the complexity and intensity of collective activity moved beyond the administrative capacity of more personal and direct forms of coordination (Waldo 1948). Indeed, the rise of the ‘administrative state’ symbolized a new mode of governance in which rational, scientific organization transformed human nature:

Thus, the historical roots of organization studies are deeply embedded in a body of writing that gathered momentum from the second half of the nineteenth century onwards. This body of research and writing confidently anticipated the triumph of science over politics and the victory of rationally designed collective order and progress over human recalcitrance and irrationality (Reed 1985).

The growth of an ‘organizational society’ was synonymous with the inexorable advance of reason, liberation and justice and the eventual eradication of ignorance, coercion and poverty. Organizations were rationally designed to solve permanently the conflict between collective needs and individual wants that had bedeviled social progress since the days of Ancient Greece (Wolin 1960). They guaranteed social order and personal freedom by fusing collective decision-making and individual interest (Storing 1962) through the scientific design, implementation and maintenance of administrative structures that subsumed sectional interests within institutionalized collective goals. The perennial conflict between ‘society’ and ‘individual’ would be permanently overcome. Whereas Hegel had relied on the dialectic of history to eradicate social conflict (Plant 1973), organization theorists put their faith in modern organization as the universal solution to the problem of social order.

Viewed from the historical vantage point of the early twenty-first century, however, the practice and study of organization look very different today. The earlier meta-narratives of collective order and individual freedom through rational organization and material progress have fragmented and frayed into a cacophony of querulous ‘voices’ totally lacking in general moral force and analytical coherence (Reed [Page 20]1992). The once seemingly cast-iron guarantee of material and social progress through sustained technological advance, modern organization and scientific administration now looks increasingly threadbare. Both the technical effectiveness and moral virtue of ‘formal’ or ‘complex’ organization are called into question by institutional and intellectual transformations that push inexorably towards social fragmentation, political disintegration and ethical relativism. Who amongst us can afford to ignore Bauman's (1989: 75) argument that ‘the typically modern, technological-bureaucratic patterns of action and the mentality they institutionalize, generate, sustain and reproduce’ were the socio-psychological foundations of and organizational preconditions for the Holocaust?

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