Organizations in Society

289 Pages·1990·25.583 MB·English

by  Glenn Morgan (auth.)

Organizations in Society
ORGANIZATIONS IN
SOCIETY
Glenn Morgan
Macmillan Education
© Glenn Morgan 1990
Softcover reprint of the hardcover I st edition I990
All rights reserved. For information, write:
Scholarly and Reference Division,
St. Martin's Press, Inc., 175 Fifth Avenue,
New York, N.Y. 10010
First published in the United States of America in 1990
ISBN 978-0-333-43855-8 ISBN 978-1-349-20779-4 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-20779-4
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Morgan, Glenn.
Organizations in society/Glenn Morgan.
p. em.
Includes bibliographical references.
1. Organization. 2. Organizational behaviour. I. Title
HM13l.M644 1990
302.3'5---dc20 89--70084
CIP
For my mother
Contents
~u a
Introduction 1
1 Work in Organizations 17
2 Management and Bureaucracy in Organizations 63
3 Rational Calculation, Professional Power and
the Managerial Division of Labour 94
4 Rationalization and Institutionalization in the
State and Civil Society 121
5 Organizations and Environments 155
6 Organizations in and across Societies 195
7 Conclusion: Organizational Futures,
Organizational Dilemmas 235
Bibliography 254
Index 274
Vll
Preface
This book has been a long time in the making. It derives essentially
from ten years' experience of teaching courses on the BA in
Organization Studies at Bradford and Ilkley Community College.
My first debt, then, is to all the students at Bradford who have had
to listen and struggle to understand the early formulation of these
ideas. My period at Bradford has also been noteworthy for the
opportunity to work with people from a wide variety of disciplin
ary backgrounds. In particular, I would like to thank the following
for their friendship and intellectual support over many years: David
Hooper, Tom Johnston, Albert Mills and Liz Shorrocks.
This book would probably still not be finished if I had not been
granted a year's study leave by the Governors of Bradford and
Ilkley College in 1987-8, and for that reason I owe them a debt of
gratitude. In relation to this, I would like to thank Professor David
Hickson of the Management Centre at the University of Bradford
who helped me get study leave by arranging for me to be a Visiting
Fellow at the Management Centre during this period.
David Dunkerley in his role both as External Examiner for the
BA in Organization Studies and as reader of this book has been a
continuous source of help and encouragement.
Finally, my thanks go to Susan, Ryan, Spencer and Kate for all
they have endured over the time of writing this book.
GLENN MORGAN
lX
Introduction
Our society is an organizational society. We are born in orga
nizations, educated by organizations and most of us spend most
of our lives working for organizations. We spend much of our
leisure time paying, playing and praying in organizations. Most
of us will die in an organization and when the time comes for
burial, the largest organization of all - the state - must grant
official permission. (Etzioni, 1970, p. 1)
Since Etzioni wrote these words, the power of organizations over
life and death has continued to increase. In the same period that
revolutionary new techniques in medicine have developed which
can save, prolong and improve life, the potential for planetary
destruction has also increased, both through nuclear warfare and
through the damage (both anticipated and unanticipated) inflicted
on the earth's ecological system by industrial expansion. These
developments are only the latest in a long line which have arisen
because of the way in which human beings have learnt how to
organize rationally vast social and physical resources across time
and space.
The simplest aspects of life in Western industrial societies are
dependent upon complex organizations which would have defied
the imagination of human beings less than 200 years ago. Take, for
example, the activity of shopping. The commodities we in the
West purchase will often have been produced or harvested
thousands of miles away: oranges from Israel, bananas from
Guatemala, tea from India, coffee from Kenya, toys from Singa
pore, shirts from Taiwan, videotapes from Japan-the list is almost
endless. Each of these products has to be produced and then
1
2 Organizations in Society
transported through a variety of links to the point of sale. They will
be touched by many human hands before they end up in our
shopping basket. Each time we purchase these everyday commod
ities which we take so much for granted, we become the final link
in a chain of complex relationships which stretches across many
organizations in different parts of the world. The degree of
co-ordination of human energy and physical resource which main
tains this chain is peculiar to the last two centuries of human
development. Whilst there have often previously been empires in
which international trade has played a central part (see, for example
Wallerstein, 1974, 1980, on the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century
European empires, and Perlin, 1980, on trade in seventeenth
century India), at no previous phase of history has this become so
essential to the everyday life of society as it has in current Western
economies.
Another way in which our lives are linked to the worldwide
system of organizations derives from our sense of citizenship. Our
life today is so inextricably bound up with our sense of citizenship
in a particular state that we tend to take it for granted. My identity
as a British citizen places me as part of a set of relationships which
make up the British state. This state in turn has relations with other
states at a variety of levels - as a member of the European
Community, NATO, the West, the Commonwealth. Each of
these relationships is reinforced through our learning in school,
in the media, and in our personal lives. Not insignificant in this is
the growth in Western societies of tourism, through which we
familiarize ourselves with concepts of difference and similarity
between peoples, as well as the international sporting occasions
which are now so much a part of many people's lives. In the course
of an ordinary day, then, I may reproduce my understanding of
myself as 'British' in many ways e.g. through watching television,
reading the newspaper, going to the cinema, arranging my summer
holiday, learning French at night, going to the 'British' Museum or
the 'National' Gallery. At the economic level, I pay my taxes to the
British state, which ensures that, among other things, it can buy
the latest military technology and support British troops in North
ern Ireland, West Germany and the Malvinas/Falklands, as well as
contribute to the maintenance of NATO and the possibility of
nuclear war. None of these activities could be possible without
organizations.
Introduction 3
In eighteenth-century Britain the situation would have been very
different. Although there might have been some international trade
in commodities like tea and silk, for the vast majority of people
outside London, markets were primarily local. Food and clothing,
together with all the other necessities of life, were produced and
purchased within small local areas. Only gradually during the
eighteenth century did anything like a national market emerge
(Malcolmson, 1981; McKendrick et al., 1983; Mathias, 1969).
Political life was also highly localized for the majority of people,
and the state at national level consisted of barely a handful of men
(the gender is appropriate). As one recent commentator has said
regarding eighteenth-century England:
What impact did the organs of the Georgian state have on society
at large? To twentieth century eyes, the things it didn't do are
very conspicuous. Kings and their ministers did not set out to
implement manifestos of social justice or interest themselves in
reform. They didn't pursue comprehensive and long-term in
dustrial and agrarian policies or promote programmes of educa
tion and welfare. 'Providence has so organized the world,' said
Lord Shelburne, 'that very little government is necessary' ...
Above all, it was the local offices (the Lord Lieutenants, the
Sheriffs and the Justices of the Peace), hogged by the regional
elite and backed by law, which dictated the destinies of com
munities. (Porter, 1983, pp. 131, 138)
Even warfare, a perennial activity in human societies, had had a
limited impact on people as a whole. The British Isles had not
suffered invasion since 1066, and although there had been out
breaks of war between England and Scotland as well as the Civil
War, English soil had rarely been the scene of pitched battles in the
900 years after Hastings. The armies and navies of the period before
the nineteenth century were small in comparison to those of the
twentieth century. The nationalist outpourings associated with the
period of Victorian empire-building and then the First World War
drew on ideas of citizenship and nationhood which were only
gradually created and reproduced through the late eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries. Before this, for the majority of people their
involvement in politics and issues of state was highly circums
cribed. Their knowledge of other societies was very limited. People