“Organization Theory: Genealogy and Neglected Themes” STEWART R CLEGG

Overview: Theories lost in action Reading Max Weber –Translations from America Situating Weber –Weber is not a classical management theorist –Weber’s obscurity Weber’s theory –Rationality –The will to power –Weber’s domination and Parsons’ authority Domination and organization The discipline of organization The absent Erving Goffman –Situating Goffman Total institutions Authority at work The absent Zygmunt Bauman Total institutions and genocide –Organizational efficiencies Gender and total institutions The Stolen Generation The German Democratic Republic Abu Ghraib

Max Weber

Reading Weber The importance of Talcott Parsons –Defining terms Weber is not a classical management theorist –Kantian & Hegelian auspices, rather than Utilitarianism Weber’s obscurity Weber’s theories of rationality Weber’s domination & Parsons’ authority Domination and organization –Thomas a Beckett as an example –Discipline & organization

Discussion issues What was Weber’s impact on the emerging organization theory in the 1950s and why and in what ways was it limited? Taylor, Follett, Mayo, Weber … do we need to be bothered with these ‘classical’ figures? If so, why? Why did Weber not figure in the emerging organization theory consensus about power from the 1950s onwards?

Erving Goffman The neglected importance of Asylums –Total institutions –Identity management

Goffman and Foucault: similar themes? Psychological experiments Milgram Zimbardo

Zygmunt Bauman

The Holocaust

Theorizing the Holocaust, organizationally The Holocaust as an example of bureaucratic rationality –The roots of evil –The Final Solution –Identity and Power –Expert knowledge –Efficiencies –An open system –Resisting the Final Solution –Organization overcoming humanity –Barbarism and modern organization

More total institutions Gendering the gaze –Comparing Foucault and Goffman on surveillance –The Magdalene Laundries

‘Race’ and totalization The Rabbit-Proof Fence

Totalizing a society: The GDR The Berlin Wall

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

Twenty ways to construct total institutional power relations 1. Construct an organizational politics premised on identity/non-identity 2 Concentrate and marshal bodies on the basis of clearly inscribed identities in a specific space 3. Delegate auhorities to enact centrally conceived power projects 4. Use expert knowledge to render power efficiently 5. Strip members of markers of individual identity 6. Pay systematic attention to means while accepting ends 7. Apply intrinsically instrumental and value-free science 8. Construct a factory flow of power – with efficiencies of scale in processing inputs and creating outputs 9. Have the highest authority sanction the organizational action in question 10. Routinize the actions that enact organizational power 11. Dehumanize those subject to power 12. Be selective in your mercies 13. Maintain a distance between the designated exercisers and subjects of power: divisions of labor in complex chains of power enable elites to maintain distance from power’s effects 14. Make technique paramount in the dispatch of power 15. Obedience to power is encouraged where organization work is a ceaseless round of activity with little room for reflection 16. Make those who are the subjects of power complicit in its exercise 17. Be convinced that the regime of the total institution is in the ‘real’ interests of both the other and the society at large. 18. Minimize the possibilities of escape attempts, by spying on everyone and making everyone aware that they may be being spied on and informed about. 19. Lock members inside, keep outsiders outside, and systematically misrepresent the reality of the situation 20. Reward the institution’s keepers with perks and benefits and keep them secret from other members.

Discussion issues What, if any, are the sounds of silence that a society such as Mexico has to confront in relation to the organization of its nation building past? Are total institutions merely a part of an unenlightened history that we have progressively transcended? Why are the ‘twenty rules’ important for all managers to be aware of?