Formal organizations emerged as the strategic social units within industrial capitalist societies in the latter half of the nineteeth century as the scale and complexity of socioeconomic and political activity moved beyond the administrative capacity of more personal and direct forms of control. The former provided a social technology through which human, capital and cultural resources could be assembled and co-ordinated in such a way that they fulfilled the material and social needs of dominant groups within industrial capitalist societies. In this respect, formal organizations provided a set of structures and practices through which the requirements for efficient large-scale production and administration, and the power interests which they served, could be realized.
At the core of this set of structures and practices lay the principles of standardization and centralization. Standardization was provided for by the development of an extremely detailed division of functional and administrative tasks such that the routinization of work performance could be pushed as far as was practically possible under prevailing conditions. Centralization became enshrined in the hierarchical mechanisms through which overall strategic command could be concentrated at the apex of the organization, while operational decision-making authority could be delegated downwards in a highly controlled and regulated manner. Thus, the combination of standardized work performance and centralized administrative control established a generic organizational framework through which the rational management of socioeconomic and political activity could be realized on a continuous basis within industrial capitalist societies.
This framework became modified in various ways from the 1960s onwards in order to respond to and cope with the destabilizing impact of technological and economic innovations that required more organic organizational forms which departed from the inherent logic of standardized work and centralized control (Burns and Stalker 1961). Over time, the modifications to highly specialized and centralized organizational designs suggested by the ‘organic’ model—involving a move towards much more flexible and adaptive ways of working and managing—began to raise some very serious questions about the theoretical cogency and practical utility of the orthodox bureaucratic or mechanistic form.
Nevertheless, functionally specialized and hierarchically structured organizational designs dominated the economic, social and political development of capitalist and subsequently socialist societies for much of the twentieth century. Both systems came to depend on the administrative machinery which formal or complex organizations provided as a necessary precondition for the management of large-scale economic and political activity, as well as for the disciplining of their populations in anomic urban conurbations, where the maintenance of social order became more problematic for ruling elites and classes (Cooper 1992). Indeed, the technical and political indispensability of formal organization for the rational administration and management of social life in modern societies led some commentators (Presthus 1962) to argue that the latter were all ‘organized societies’—irrespective of their particular ideological features and historical trajectories. The twentieth century, it was argued, was the century of ‘organization’, in so far as modern indus-trial—or for that matter post-industrial (Bell 1973)—societies could not continue to exist in anything resembling their current institutional forms without the administrative mechanisms and techniques through which the rational direction and control of long-term socioeconomic and political development could be achieved (Kumar 1978). Formal organization provided the indispensable planning and steering mechanism which allowed modern industrial and post-industrial societies to exert a degree of self-control over their destinies which was simply inconceivable for traditional or, for that matter, ‘market’ societies.
However, later research and analysis suggests that the dominance of formal organization is at an end—or at the very least that its reign is in terminal decline. From the 1980s onwards, a number of highly influential studies have been published (Castells 1989; Lash and Urry 1987; 1994; Piore and Sabel 1984) which argue that a process of ‘disorganization’ has taken hold in all advanced industrial societies which fundamentally undermines the strategic role and significance of formal or complex organization. This is so to the extent that the underlying dynamic of late-twentieth-century technological, economic and cultural change is seen to push in the direction of ways of organizing that break with the standardizing and centralizing imperatives characteristic of earlier phases of capitalist-led development. Thus, the ‘disorganizing dynamic’ inherent in late twentieth-century capitalist accumulation seems to require much more flexible and fragmented forms of organizing, in which formalized administrative structures and practices give way to structureless flows of resources, people, ideas and technologies. As Castells puts it. ‘There is, in fact, a shift away from the centrality of the organizational unit to the network of information and decision. In other words, flows rather than organizations become the units of work, decision and output accounting’ (Castells 1989:142).
If this intepretation is accepted, then the continued relevance of organizations to our understanding and management of social change becomes much more questionable and potentially redundant—in both an intellectual and practical sense. The social engineering ethos which informed so much of the long-term development of formal organization now seems pretentious, not to say powerless, in the face of radical change which fundamentally undermines the rationale for standardized work and centralized control. Yet, the disorganization thesis is open to challenge on a number of grounds. First, it tends to treat organization as being synonymous with bureaucratic organization. While there is some justification for this view, it seriously underestimates the extent to which alternative organizational forms, that break with established practice, have always been available and used. Second, it tends to neglect the issue of how flows become organized and how organizational forms—whatever their particular configuration—structure the processes through which change occurs. Finally, it risks the acceptance of a rather naïve and over-optimistic interpretation of long-term socioeconomic, political and cultural development, in which the power struggles that drive both the dynamics and outcomes of change are conspicous by their absence.
In short, a systematic consideration of the plurality of organizational forms through which social life is co-ordinated is likely to remain a major focus for social scientific research as it struggles to understand and explain the dynamics, structures and outcomes of sociohistorical change in contemporary capitalist societies.
Michael I.Reed
Lancaster University
References
Bell, D. (1973) The Coming of Post-Industrial Society, New York.
Burns, T.K. and Stalker, G.M. (1961) The Management of Innovation, London.
Castells, M. (1989) The Informational City, Oxford.
Cooper, B. (1992) ‘Formal organization as representation: remote control displacement and abbreviation’, in M.Reed and M.J.Hughes (eds) Rethinking Organization: New Directions in Organisation Theory and Analysis, London.
Kumar, K. (1978) Prophecy and Progress: The Sociology of Industrial and Post-Industrial Society, London.
Lash, S. and Urry, J. (1987) The End of Organized Capitalism, Cambridge, UK.
——(1994) Economies of Signs and Space, London.
Piore, M. and Sabel, C. (1984) The Second Industrial Divide, New York.
Presthus, R. (1962) The Organizational Society, New York.
Further reading
Clegg, S. (1990) Modern Organizations, London.
Reed, M. (1992) The Sociology of Organizations, Hemel Hempstead.
Thompson, P. and McHugh, D. (1990) Work Organizations, London.
Orientalism is the extension and application to anthropology of the work of the literary and cultural critic Edward Said. His Orientalism (1978) describes how westerners have understood the Middle East, classically called the Orient, and particularly the understandings developed by the academic discipline called Oriental Studies. As a generic term in anthropology, orientalism refers to distortions in the perception and analysis of alien societies that resemble the distortions that Said discerns in Oriental Studies. These distortions, critics say, are found frequently in anthropology (see Clifford 1988; Fabian 1983).
One distortion is exaggerating ‘the difference between the familiar (Europe, the West, “us”) and the strange (the Orient, the East, “‘them”)’ (Said 1978:43). This is found in ethnography that focuses on the exotic in the societies it describes. More subtly, it is found in theories or models that compare the west and the alien and that portray the alien as little more than a mirror-image of the western. Examples include the comparison of hierarchic (India) and egalitarian (western) societies (e.g. Dumont 1970; 1977) and the comparison of gift (Melanesian) and commodity (western) societies (e.g. Gregory 1982).
A second distortion is treating a society as though it is an unchanging expression of some basic essence or genius, a distortion sometimes called ‘essentialism’. Here, social and cultural practices and institutions are portrayed or understood as being ‘what they are because they are what they are for all time, for ontological reasons that no empirical matter can either dislodge or alter’ (Said 1978:70). This refers particularly to anthropologists who seek to discern a stable and coherent social order that somehow simply inheres in the society being described as part of its essence. Closely related to this is a third distortion, portraying and analysing a society as though it is radically separated from the west. This occurs especially in ethnography that ignores points of contact between the society and the west, and so ignores the colonial relations that may have existed between the two societies, as it also ignores western intrusions in that society. These are ignored because they do not reflect what is taken to be the true essence of the society involved.
Although many condemn orientalism, it may be inescapable in anthropology. Groups commonly distinguish themselves from others by casting those others as exotic in some way, and there is no reason to expect that anthropologists are exempt from this tendency. Similarly, comparison is at the heart of anthropology, and to compare two societies is almost necessarily to stress their differences and slight their similarities, and to construe them in terms of fundamental attributes or essences.
James G.Carrier
University of Durham
References
Clifford, J. (1988) The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art, Cambridge, MA.
Dumont, L. (1970) Homo Hierarchies: The Caste System and its Implications, London.
—(1977) From Mandeville to Marx: The Genesis and Triumph of Economic Ideology, Chicago.
Fabian, J. (1983) Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object, New York.
Gregory, C.A. (1982) Gifts and Commodities, London.
