Perplexities
When I was invited to write a column for this journal, my mind was immediately filled with possibilities. There are so many things begging commentary, and advocacy or critique. Organizational studies is, after all, a messy, swiftly growing jungle of ideas, models and theories, techniques,practices, methods of data acquisition and analysis, research strategies,schools of thought, and paradigms as well as findings – there is much to think about! When overwhelmed, I tend to do two things. One is to remember why I became an organizational studies person, namely to continue to learn, to teach,to improve practice, and to contribute to knowledge. Calming myself with this credo, I then engage in the sorts of mental activities that lead to useful professional action: reframing something of interest either more narrowly or more broadly; applying familiar models to new data or new phenomena; trying to think dynamically about statistics; noticing statements that beg deglossing;wondering what is being assessed or ignored about something; borrowing theory from one field and applying it to another field or to my own experience;thinking something through either inside out or upside down; inquiring about assertions and aphorisms, and how they came to be known; and so on. These sorts of mental activities (you likely know of others) very often lead to perplexities– that is, the concerns and questions that puzzle and bother. Beyond being personally invigorating, the surfacing of perplexities, of course, is how our field progresses since they often stimulate further inquiry. With this column I will share several of my current perplexities – hoping to encourage your thinking about them as well as encouraging you to discover some of your own. Let me begin with three that I call collective ignorance, disjunction between rhetoric and reality, and unchallenged hypocrisy.
One of the few things I have come to firmly believe is that what we think we know is always conditioned by how we have come to know it. Hence, I am perplexed by our collective ignorance about the many ways of knowing as well as how little attention seems to be paid to the strengths and weaknesses of the many ways of knowing. Organizational scholars are, of course, properly skeptical about the mindless ways most people know most of the time, i.e. by overly relying on their physical senses, intuition, common sense, imitation, metaphors,and the specious claims of personal experience and “authorities.”They, however, seem to readily accept ways of knowing that produce agreements and typicality, i.e. the arbitrary mindsets of professional recipes (precedence,systematic diagnosis, the application of principles), polls and surveys, focus and nominal groups, Delphi surveys and dialectics, and the like. Much more rarely seen are ways of knowing complexity, i.e. using multiple perspectives,agent-based cause-maps, triangulated methodologies, modeling dynamic systems,assumption surfacing, syndrome based diagnoses, etc. Even the way of knowing commonly touted in organizational studies and sciences, is mostly thwarted in practice by ignoring its basics, i.e. seeking disconfirming data or testing competing models via strong inference. I cannot help imagining the potentials and the functionality for organizational studies when scholars possess a repertoire of ways of knowing, appreciating when to use them, and openly sharing their choices project by project.
Recently, while reviewing a journal article, I noticed that the authors were somewhat vague about how they characterized a change-project’s strategy and its conceptual basis. Trying to understand what was being claimed, I turned to my library on organizational change. The more I read, the more two notions seemed to be confirmed. One was that the organizational change literature was overwhelmingly just about how to manage planned change. The other was how very simplistic, linear, contextually light, diagnostically idiosyncratic, biased with success stories (and self-aggrandizing) even the academic change literature is. And, how largely atheoretical it is. All of this seems to mock the reality of the few richly descriptive change cases that exist, and, frankly, does not even begin to resemble my own experiences with organizational change. This disjunction between rhetoric and reality is perplexing. It seems like it would stultify both effective change practice and the advancement of our understanding of change phenomena. And some would say that this is the current state of the art.
This disjunction prompts many questions, for example: Why is the organizational change literature so narrowly focused just on planned change? Why are organizations portrayed as so tightly coupled, so over-determined and so strongly goal seeking (and their managers so prone to justify both choices and actions as rational preferences)? Why don’t we have (or strive to develop)a set of differentiated change models, e.g. by type of change, the mindset of change agents, internal circumstances as well as external environments, and bundles of processes? And why does the change literature say so little about organizational politics, culture, history, life cycle, member emotions, stress,symbolic meanings, secrecy, technological interdependencies, diffuse authority,and so on? If change is as ubiquitous as I believe it to be, it is perplexing that we seem to have settled for collective ignorance and unchallenged hypocrisy.
While chatting with a doctoral student recently, I was impressed with her grasp of the knowledge in her field, her enthusiasm for learning about research methods, and her expressed desire for a career as an organizational scientist. It was only later as I reflected upon our conversation that I began to wonder about her actual ideological allegiance – and, by extension, that of the majority of organizational scholars. If we define ideology as a relatively coherent set of beliefs and values that bind people together, unify their action, and explain their worlds in terms of cause and effect relations, then the student and most organizational scholars would claim allegiance to a scientistic ideology (where organizations and organizational behavior are evermore accurately described along the model of the natural sciences –not prescribed). However, a close reading of management texts and academic journals strongly suggests that organizational scholars have unwittingly adopted a managerial ideology, that is, an ideology that develops knowledge in the service of the managerial and capitalistic elite’s practical intervention in organizations to improve productivity, control profitability, and ultimately their own dominance and survival. Organizational scholars seldom seem to question the real complexities and uncertainties of organizations and managerial action that close observation reveals. Instead, they appear to assume, like managers, that goals, plans, systems, authority and hierarchy are the natural and desirable means for achieving a well-coordinated, highly ordered, efficient and effective organization. This is shown in the common use of surveys,averages, and typically thematic analysis and synoptic measures that smooth out the irregularities, discontinuities and complexities that permeate organizational life. Much organizational scholarship, therefore, appears to be devoted to justifying the choices and actions of managers (who couched their justifications as aphorisms, best practices, common sense principles, fads,etc.). The rhetoric of both managers and scholars, however, becomes specious even hypocritical when a manager’s behavior is studied closely. Then we see the degree to which the rhetoric of consequential action is undermined by habits, shifting attention, self interests, fears, whims, trial and error activity, defensiveness, busyness, fruitless activity, confusions and “unsureness,”situational demands, uncertain resources, and so on.
All of this is perplexing. Why do managers continue to kid themselves so convincingly? Why do organizational scholars so readily accept what managers do and say? And, most puzzling of all, why do so many of the inquiry procedures of scholars resemble the saticficing, problem-solving activities of managers?
I hope the above has begun to give you a sense of what I mean by “perplexities”and some hints of how I came to them. I do hope you will give them some thought.
More in future issues.
Craig LundbergCornell University, Ithaca, New York, USA
