Situating Weber

1. Weber is not a classical management theorist After the English translations were available, the organization scholars who read Weber largely worked outside of contemporary German scholarship. Few, if any, knew precursors such as Nietzsche, Hegel and Marx or contemporaries such as Simmel. And, to add a further barrier to the reception of his

Weber’s theory

1. Rationality Weber listed four forms of social action based upon the principle of rationalization. They are, first, Zweckrationalität, making decisions according to planned results. This is a form of decision making in which the social actor chooses both the means and the ends of action. In bureaucracy, one effect of this form of

Domination and organization

Domination and organization are inescapably mutually implicated. Domination requires organization – concerted action by a body of people employed as staff – to exe- cute commands; and, conversely, all organization requires domination in that the power of command over the staff must be vested in an individual or a group of indi- viduals, in

The discipline of organization

Although Weber’s interests were broad and many, for the contemporary organiza- tion and management theorist the most important types of power discussed by Weber derive from a constellation of interests that develops on a formally free mar- ket and from established authority that allocates the right to command and the duty to obey (Weber

Systemizing the world

1. First, the word: Vilfredo Pareto and Talcott Parsons It was the emergence of a common discourse of the organization as a social system that settled matters in favor of efficiency rather than a discussion of domination. The seminal figure in this conception was L. J. Henderson at Harvard, the central figure in the

Disrupting systems and organizing identity

Goffman and organizing identity Authority, with its assumptions of legitimacy, necessarily implies consent to the rule that is invoked. Erving Goffman makes this absolutely clear, writing in relation to the small things of everyday organizational life, which ‘provide instruction’ in the essence of the organization’s power: ‘For example, to move one’s body in response

Fixing the system

From the underlife of institutions to formal systems If one accepted the systems theory view of authority, given its acceptance of established claims to legitimacy, then it was evident that it had no place for power which did not serve organizational goals. Other forms of power could only reside in unruly spaces where the

Power and the metaphysic of uncertainty

1. Maintaining bounds A whole metaphysic of uncertainty was at work in these rediscoveries of power. What is uncertainty? In some general way it denotes a lack of assurance or convic- tion in what will transpire. Certainty, by contrast, represents a situation where one can predict with absolute surety what a future state of

Power, possession and causality

Systems theory used general attributes to explain phenomena, because the theory was supposed to function as a set of coherent and transcendental terms. Along with the key conception of power being an emergent property that appears at the limits of rationality, where there is uncertainty, some other key terms were imported from political science.

Clayton’s power: the kind of power you have when you’re not really having power

1. Is power a visible and deployable asset? What one can do and say with the causal conception of power, as something given by possession of resources, is very limited.5 First, it appears to be not a social rela- tion but a possession. One has power rather than being in a relationship of power.

Erving Goffman and Michel Foucault

1. Situating Goffman If Weber’s relative neglect is one curious absence in the annals of organization theory, then it is not the only one. The litany of unsung heroes must also include Erving Goffman, especially his work on total institutions,1 not least because he anticipated, in so many ways, themes that were later to

Total institutions

Goffman coined the term ‘total institutions’, to refer to a class of concentrated power. In many ways he anticipated the themes that were later to become popular in Foucault’s (1977) work – the power of incarceration, rules and surveillance – although instead of focusing on design he studied action, which undoubtedly gave greater acuity

Authority at work

Ordinary people can do extraordinary things when authority tells them to, as an experiment by Milgram (1971) demonstrated. Milgram’s research question was simply to ask to what extent ordinary individuals, people who are not authoritar- ian personalities but display all the signs of normalcy, follow the commands of figures perceived to be in authority.

Zygmunt Bauman: another curious absence

It is not only that Weber and Goffman have been written out of the history of orga- nization theory. Others were never written in. Zygmunt Bauman is one of the world’s most eminent intellectuals, notable for many outstanding contributions to social science, especially Modernity and the Holocaust (1989). It is a work of great

Total institutions as instruments of genocide in total war

1. The roots of evil Anti-Semitism was not a novel experience in German life. Weber, for instance, encountered it in his support of the academic careers of friends such as Simmel. Higgins (2004: 89) suggests that the Prussian elite had constructed the German project of modernity exclusively in terms of an ethnic nationalism. It

Marking identity in peaceable total institutions

1. Total institutions for marking life rather than creating death The focus switches now to less harrowing but no less total institutions. First, we shall consider the case of the Irish Magdalene Laundries, in which young girls were held captive in a kind of forced labor serving as a moral penance. Second, we shall

Washing away sin in the Magdalene Laundries

The Magdalene Laundries case presents an instance where the specificity of gen- dered power relations is only too apparent. The gaze that some young women of Eire were subjected to was not one that touched their boyfriends, their brothers, their priests and those others who may have contributed to their ‘fallen’ state. The Magdalene

The Stolen Generation

Australia is today a vibrant multicultural society, one that is highly inclusive of most of those who are its citizens.25 Its original peoples were deemed to exist formally in the 1960s when they were first included in national statistics and electoral rolls, having failed to be written out of history by death or breeding.26

The German Democratic Republic: a total society?

Next, we shall consider what happens when total institutions seek to impose total con- trol on a society. While such control is difficult to achieve organizationally it is almost impossible societally, where subtle forms of control have to be involved in the fabrica- tion of total – not just organizational – identities by the

An illegal and immoral war, betrayed by images that reveal our racism

That was the byline of an article that appeared in the respected UK newspaper The Independent, by Robert Fisk, on May 7, 2004.34 The reference was to the infamous photographs of Abu Ghraib. Apparently, the goal of the US forces in photograph- ing sexual humiliation was to blackmail Iraqi victims into becoming informants against