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.
Some Dare Call it Power
Some Dare Call it Power
Introduction
Power has typically been seen as the ability to get others to do what you want them to, if necessary, against their will (Weber 1978). This seemingly simple definition, which presents the negative, rather than the positive, aspects of power has been challenged, amended, critiqued, extended and rebuffed over the years but it, nonetheless, remains the starting point for a remarkably diverse body of literature. Behind it lies a series of important struggles, not just concerning different conceptualizations of power, and different traditions of social science, but also in the interplay between critical and managerialist thought as well as between academic and practitioner discourses. There are, then, a multitude of different voices that speak to and of power and a variety of contradictory conceptualizations result. The two dominant voices - the functionalist and the critical (to use simple categorizations) - rarely communicate with each other and refer to quite different lineages of earlier work. The former has adopted a managerialist orientation whose underlying assumptions are rarely articulated, much less critiqued. The result has been an apparently pragmatic concept, easy to use but also easy to abuse. The latter has confronted issues of domination and exploitation head on but, some would argue, in ways that appear to be increasingly less relevant.
The aim of this chapter is to explore these different voices and to reflect on the changes that have occurred since the last incarnation of this chapter, 10 years ago. The first section explores the historical development of functionalist and critical voices. It discusses the broader heritage of Marx and Weber concerning power, followed by early management work on power. The second section shows how subsequent developments built on these respective approaches, in many respects, pulling them further apart. An analysis of this work shows how the different voices have continued to follow divergent trajectories. The third section focuses on the insights provided by Foucault, and the supposed end of sovereignty, which had such an impact on this field of study in the late 1980s and early 1990s, radically changing our understanding of power. The fourth section revisits power and resistance in the light of Foucault's influence to discuss some of the developments in this area over the last 10 years, as well as to connect with some previously neglected streams around Goffman's ideas concerning ‘total institutions’, which we believe are particularly relevant for making sense of some of the events that have shaped our lives in recent years.
The Founding Voices
This section examines some of the key work that provided the foundations for the current work on power and politics in organizations. Broadly speaking, the impetus came from two, quite different directions. One tradition stems from the work of Marx and Weber. Obviously, with such a parentage, this body of work has focused on the existence of conflicting interests and has examined power as domination. As a result, it has addressed how power becomes embedded in organizational structures in a way that serves certain, but not all, interest groups. We then examine Goffman's work on total institutions. Finally, we examine the work developed more centrally within the field of management. Less interested in how power might be used to dominate and to serve specific interests, this body of work takes for granted the ways in which power is distributed in formal, hierarchical organizational structures and, instead, examines how groups acquire and wield power that has not been granted to them under official bureaucratic arrangements.
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