Core task and organizational reality

Abstract

Reflecting a wider trend in the social sciences, the field of organization studies has adopted an increasingly general and metaphysical vocabulary to guide and frame its analyses of life and dynamics in organizations. Where classic organizational analyses would describe organizations in terms of core objects such as ‘task’ and ‘coordination,’ contemporary organization studies emphasize, much like other social science disciplines, broader topics such as ‘network,’ ‘identity,’ and ‘change.’ The paper argues that this altered focus and vocabulary is accompanied by a diminished ability to specify and intervene into the practical reality of organizations. It further argues that a discipline's core objects are not anachronisms to be discarded with, but crucial for specifying reality in ways that have proven practically relevant and still are.

KEYWORDS:

• management
• methodology
• objects
• organizations
• theory

Notes

1. This also applies to more economically inclined versions of organization theory, ‘organization science,’ and ‘strategic management theory,’ although for other reasons. In their uptake of economic theorization, they have developed a deep skepticism of ‘the organization’ as having a substantive reality in itself (Pfeffer 1997; Lopdrup Hjorth forthcoming).

2. The term 'metaphysical’ can be understood in several ways. Here, I use it in the sense of operating with underlying, absolute principles such as the way in which some literature on learning assumes a hierarchy of experience culminating in 'transgression’ or complete 'openness.’

3. Despite the centrality of the term ‘objective’ in Herbert Simon's theory on organizations, his contribution (in collaboration with James March) is today often represented as a ‘decision theory,’ and ‘decision as the most fundamental aspect of organization’ (Ahrne & Brunsson 2011, p. 85).

4. As Charles Turner (1992, p. 3) put it in another context: the declaration that a particular mode of human connection is not natural is no longer made to contrast it with the truly natural mode, nor out of a conviction that the achievement of the truly natural mode is the task of politics. Now, politics is that declaration, that predicative activity, the assertion that a state of affairs could have been and can be otherwise.