Summary
Contents
Subject index
A decade on after it first published to international acclaim, the seminal Handbook of Organization Studies has been updated to capture exciting new developments in the field. Providing a retrospective and prospective overview of organization studies, this Handbook continues to challenge and inspire readers with its synthesis of knowledge and literature. As ever, contributions have been selected to reflect the diversity of the field. New chapters cover areas such as organizational change, knowledge management and organizational networks.
Representation and Reflexivity
Representation and Reflexivity
When we wrote the original handbook in 1996, we asked: What is the world like today? How has it changed? What does it mean for the study of organizations? At the time, we cast our minds back to the mid 1960s, when The Handbook of Organizations edited by James G. March (1965) was published. We remembered that the Vietnam War had been starting to heat up during this period, while the Cold War was still frigid. In Europe the Berlin Wall had only recently gone up, while in Asia and the Caribbean, the dominoes were threatening to come down; in the USA, the civil rights movement was in full swing and the Berkeley Free Speech Movement was gaining momentum; in Asia, Mao's ‘Cultural Revolution’ was imminent; India and Pakistan were at war; in Africa, Rhodesia's ‘Unilateral Declaration of Independence’ broke colonial ranks, while to the south, Nelson Mandela had just started a prison sentence that would last a quarter of a century.
So much for the big picture history; in terms of organizations most were premised on instruction and surveillance through personal, written or verbal communication, and relied on professional discretion to monitor the less routine areas of organization life; hierarchies were the norm; personal computers had not been invented; the only mode of instantaneous communication was the telephone, and the new technologies that were to challenge accepted organization designs were largely unheard of.
In the intervening 30 years, communism imploded, neo-conservatism exploded, apartheid disappeared, feminism appeared, and organizations - and organization studies - continued to change. We noted that those 30 years had produced new approaches and concepts for the study of organizations. The ‘orthodox consensus’ (Atkinson 1971), premised on assumptions concerning the unitary and orderly nature of organizations, had been challenged and complemented by a panoply of other theoretical approaches drawing on both normal and ‘contra’ social science (Marsden and Townley 1996), a pluralism which many of the contributors to the original Handbook supported.
Changing and Questioning
The question for us now to consider is: What has changed in the last 10 years? And what do these changes mean for organizations and organization studies? What implications do changing conceptions of security and risk in the post-9/11 era have for how power shapes organizational space and access? In the wake of the many recent corporate collapses and scandals, will the ethic of success shift to one of responsibility? Will the heightened interest in identity lead to the rise of more identity-centered practices as organizations try to claim the hearts and souls of their employees, as some observers of change programs (Hardy and Clegg 2004) have noted? What role do emotions and compassion play in the ‘postmodern’ organization? Is dematerialization and virtualization leading to a re-enchantment of organization - a new gemeinschaft, as some commentators on Japanese organizations suggest (Kono and Clegg 2001)? Does the immediacy of time, where everything is always already present in a virtual world, mean the intensification of time - management at the speed of light, perhaps? Is the increased power of organizations leading to increasingly concentrated power in organizations? In a world where people think of themselves as team members or associates, rather than as solidaristic individuals defined in class terms, do the dynamics of power and resistance still mean the same? Can we speak of struggle in the old ways? Where boundaries of organizations, markets, customers, environments are dissolving, is the traditional conception of the organization as a clear locus of ownership and internal control also dissolving? In an era of knowledge management, will we see the emergence of new power/knowledge relations or will the normalization of management knowledge and its widespread distribution through organizational ranks simply produce greater conformity (Clegg et al. 2004)? These are some - but certainly not all - of the questions that we think will shape the research agenda for the next generation.
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