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Complex Organizations Still Complex

To cite this Article: Czarniawska, Barbara , 'Complex Organizations Still Complex', International Public Management Journal, 10:2, 137 - 151 To link to this article: DOI: 10.1080/10967490701323662 URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10967490701323662

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International Public Management Journal COMPLEX ORGANIZATIONS STILL COMPLEX BARBARA CZARNIAWSKA GO¨TEBORG UNIVERSITY

I wrote for the first time in 1992 about Charles Perrow’s Complex Organizations, beginning with an observation that the first edition of the book appeared in 1972. In my text, I relied upon Perrow’s autobiographical article, ‘‘‘Zoo Story’ or ‘Life in the Organizational Sandpit’’’ (1980;1983) for commentaries on the period between 1972 and 1986 that divided the two editions. Two decades have passed since that 1986 edition, and many things have happened, including Charles Perrow’s reinforcing and sharpening of his message in his 1991 article ‘‘A Society of Organizations.’’ Strangely enough, some of the points he made there have become more relevant and some conclusions are more convincing in 2006 than they were in either 1986 or 1991. But, as Wolfgang Iser (1978) pointed out in his reader-response theory, any interpretation involves a text, a reader, and the circumstances of the reading. The text may be the same, but the reader and the circumstances change from one reading to another; it is this triangle that produces a response. In what follows, I first examine Perrow’s primary metaphors in the light of the present day’s concerns, then remind the reader of the main thread of Complex Organizations and of Perrow’s work in general. Next, I recall Perrow’s methodological recommendations, discuss his version of power theory, and consider the possibility that organization studies go beyond organizations. The article ends with reflections produced upon a re-reading of Complex Organizations.

THE NATURE OF THE BEAST, OR ON METAPHORS Since we live in an organizational society, almost anything we can learn about them will help us survive among and in them . . . (272). But given our small population in the sandpit, our toddler age, and the variety and power of the beasts in the zoo, it would be unrealistic to expect much more than another unstable sandpile to emerge from all this work (Perrow 1980; 1983, 277). Throughout his work, Charles Perrow claims that contemporary societies, or at least the United States of America, are composed of organizations. In order to International Public Management Journal, 10(2), pages 137–151 DOI: 10.1080/10967490701323662

Copyright # 2007 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC ISSN: 1096-7494


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understand society, then, one must study organizations. Although sociologists seem to have changed their minds about this—the sociology of organizations no longer being in fashion—organization theoreticians with roots in various disciplines tend to agree more and more. The first step in studying a phenomenon is to conceptualize it, at least tentatively, which happens, more often than not, with the help of metaphors. Successful metaphors become labels. Perrow’s quote above offers a handful of metaphors. But are organizations beasts to be seen in the zoo? If so, and if societies are organized through and through, the zoo is the real world and the researchers, like everybody else, are in it. Here, the Weberian metaphor of iron cage as used by DiMaggio and Powell (1983; 1991) acquires many new meanings. An iron cage of institutions both limits and supports. Even in the zoo, the cages protect the viewers from the animals and the animals from the visitors. But the rest of Perrow’s reasoning indicates that organizations are beasts only as study objects. The allusion is surely to the well known story about the elephant and the blind men. Not for nothing has Dwight Waldo (1961) called the developments in organization theory an elephantine problem. Waldo claimed that organization theorists invented ‘‘organizations’’ as a study object to replace ‘‘administration,’’ in order to introduce insights stemming from systems theory, which was already fashionable in the 1950s. Perrow claimed that organization theorists turned to the study of organizations because they finally noticed a historical process that began in the 1820s in the USA: a conquest of society by organizations. Does it mean that the theory has instructed and changed, or at least facilitated practice, as the proponents of the performative view of science (see e.g., McKenzie et al. 2007) would have it, or, as suggested by Perrow, that the emerging practice has been more accurately described by theory? The circuit model of culture (Johnson 1986–87) combines the two suggestions, pointing out that the production, circulation, and consumption of cultural products constitute a loop, not a line. Theories inform and depict practices. But Perrow’s main metaphor for organization as a phenomenon is not a beast at all. It is a tool, an instrument for achieving goals: ‘‘organizations are tools for shaping the world as one wishes it to be shaped’’ (1986, 11). Since 1986, there has been a wave of culture studies in organization theory, of which I was a participant. Culturally minded scholars, led by Gareth Morgan (1986), ferociously attacked both mechanistic and organistic metaphors of organizations, the former with more vengeance, I would say. Not a beast, but certainly not a tool! In haste, we tended to forget that tools are cultural products. To our defense, I can say that it was happening during times when environments were divided into the institutional and the technical, as if there existed worlds without tools or without institutions. Twenty years later, I see clearly that formal organizations are tools, instruments for reaching collective goals. This is their legal definition: an organization can be registered as such when it specifies its goal. But we also know, thanks to such scholars as Elaine Scarry (1985), that an artifact’s ‘‘reciprocation’’ (the ways in which it can be used) always exceeds the designer’s projection. Tools have been used in many ways never considered by their designers, and quite often used against their designers. Contrary to what Audre


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Lorde said,1 the tools of the masters were often used to destroy the master’s house. But I will return to the issue of power. For now it is enough to note that the fact that organizations may be used for a great many other purposes than the goals for which they were formally created does not change the correctness of Perrow’s definition; it merely opens many interesting research vistas. In the same vein, I wish to emphasize the promising ambiguity of ‘‘one’’ in the quote above: ‘‘as one wishes it to be shaped.’’ Most likely Perrow had in mind the founders of an organization or, adhering strictly to the legalistic interpretation quoted above, whoever registered the organization as existing. But wishes to shape the world are many, and many of them are incompatible. Wishes also tend to change with time. Thus, on the one hand, there is a need for a theory of power to explain how collective action occurs, and, on the other hand, a necessity of historical approach to see how these tools were actually used, how goals changed, and how tools became redesigned and adapted. Perrow undertook both challenges.

HOW COMPLEX ORGANIZATIONS CONQUERED THE (US) WORLD In his 1991 article, Perrow called his inquiry ‘‘frankly imperialistic’’ (725). I beg to differ. Calling one’s own project ‘‘imperialistic’’ reveals, in fact, the awareness of its local character. The question is if anybody but US scholars ought to be interested in the history of complex organizations in the United States of America? The answer is a doubtless ‘‘yes,’’ for the simple reason that, as pointed out by such writers as Djelic (1998) and Shenhav (1999), contemporary management knowledge came to Europe from there, as a result of both the post-World War II enforcement of US models and a voluntary imitation that continues until today. Also, as demonstrated by Roy Jacques (1996), the US model of management is quite literally dated, and it is difficult to understand today’s complex organizations without knowing their history. Perrow’s thesis was that the advent of complex organization should be seen in the establishment of bureaucracies in the US landscape. He started with an example of General Gypsum Corporation, described by Alvin Gouldner in his Patterns of Industrial Bureaucracy (1954). Gouldner’s book began with his description of a disturbance in the existing social order, created by the not-so-sudden demise of a pre-modern, ‘‘organic solidarity’’ that previously ruled Gypsum Plant—a simple, traditional organization, community-oriented rather than profit-oriented. The times had changed, and the gypsum plant had to open its gates to the ‘‘rational-legal bureaucracy,’’ the elements of which we recognize so well by now: . . . .

Equal treatment for all employees. Reliance on expertise, skills and experience relevant to the position. No extra-organizational prerogatives of the position Specific standards of work and output.


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. Extensive record keeping dealing with the work and output. . Establishment and enforcement of rules and regulations that serve the interests of the organization. . Recognition that rules and regulations bind managers as well as employees; thus employees can hold management to the terms of the employment contract (Perrow 1986, 3). By the 1970s, all complex organizations in the United States of America had become bureaucracies. Their existence as bureaucracies is not unproblematic in Perrow’s view, however. Problems come from two different sources: the imperfect bureaucracy and the too-perfect bureaucracy. Perrow maintains that organizations are often not bureaucratic enough: extra-organizational actors, the unpredictable natural (and social) environment, and the bounded rationality of actors prevent achievement of the bureaucratic ideal. But insofar as this ideal can be attained, it constitutes another source of troubles: thus the traditional complaints of rigidity and stifled creativity. But Perrow has added a third: . . . [B]ureaucracy has become a means, both in capitalist and noncapitalist countries, of centralizing power in society and legitimating or disguising that centralization (1986, 5). This statement acquired a new irony in the present state of the world, where there are almost no non-capitalist countries left. The former Soviet bloc eagerly imitates the organization patterns of the USA. One result is that the previously existing centralistic bureaucracy has been replaced by a newly created centralistic bureaucracy, which operates almost identically, but under the banner of capitalism. Another, which becomes more obvious from the thesis of Perrow’s latest book, Organizing America (2002), is that one of the things imitated is corruption, which, in the light of Perrow’s analysis, may be seen not as a sediment of the communist past, but as the core of the emulation of US patterns. But I am jumping ahead. How did US companies become complex bureaucracies, and was that the only road they could have taken? Perrow converted the first question into a query of historical processes behind a new cultural formation, which continued his challenge to Chandler’s Visible Hand (1977). The ruling hand became invisible again, says Perrow, but this time by donning a glove. Complex Organizations is primarily dedicated to the analysis of this development, tracing it through changes in managerial ideologies, as reflected in organizational theory and against a background of historical changes. Another trend that contributed to the ubiquity of complex bureaucratic organizations is the use of rationalization as the main drive for many societal change programs, and formal rationality as the main value legitimizing this drive. Related to this trend are several others: centralization of control, legitimation of centralized control, and norm-building (which can be seen as a more economical form of legitimation). At present, its most visible expression can be found in standardization movements (Brunsson and Jacobsson 2000).



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These basic phenomena permit interpretation—from the outside—of a number of actions or processes that are visible in organizations: decision making, socialization, and motivation, for example. These are not categories to be completed with examples, but theoretical constructs giving meaning to a great variety of observations collected in accumulated research on organizations and societies. These are the results of the attempts of social science to make sense of social phenomena. They exclude the possibility of a tabula rasa access to the study site; they assume instead a generalized knowledge that researchers as competent members of modern western cultures quite naturally possess. But this does not necessitate an a priori structure to be imposed on the object in question. We may know all about legitimation as an important social process and still be curious about why some accountants indulge in double bookkeeping—one set of accounts in their computers and one in their old black notebooks. We know quite a lot about how complex organizations act in public, because we can all see this, but we still do not understand why. The problem is how to use existing knowledge to promote further knowledge without stifling it. There have been many attempts to ‘‘operationalize’’ concepts like power, rationalization, and legitimization, which all but ended in their reification. The task should be reversed by using our constructs in the hope that they might be of use in the everyday organizational construction of meaning. The next question is that of a method.

HOW TO STUDY COMPLEX ORGANIZATIONS Organization researchers, in Perrow’s eyes, build their theories like children build sand castles in sandpits (1980; 1983). This metaphor has many consequences. Although sand building has an enormous influence on children’s development and is of paramount significance in the world of children, it occupies little place in a wider scheme of things. One could ask whether the ‘‘performativity’’ of theories, postulated by scholars represented in McKenzie et al. (2007), is not limited to economic theory. Are organizations actually ‘‘performed’’ according to (at least some) precepts of organization theory? This is a fascinating question that may require another serious historical inquiry in order to be answered, however tentatively. Another reading could look for similarities in social processes: children tend to play in groups, and each group considers its castle to be truly beautiful. To a passerby, however, they are all mounds of the same sand, shaped somewhat differently. This insight, acquired by Charles Perrow in his long and fruitful career, led him to formulate three recommendations for the rest of us: relativity, pluralism, and modesty. Pictures of complex organizations change depending on the viewpoint. No matter how attached one is to one’s own viewpoint, it would be naive and arrogant not to acknowledge the usefulness of others as Perrow did. In Complex Organizations, Perrow approached methodological problems through a review of the main schools of thought in organizational theory. The Human Relations school of thought can now be seen as a historical event, but it has been translated in more current versions. Its focus on the experimental method—a change is introduced and resultant changes are expected—survived best


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in the Action Research tradition. However, now as before, the theoretical basis for action research is a source of difficulty. An answer to the question ‘‘what causes what?’’ is expected. Was it a better work organization or was it special attention that caused the increase in productivity in the Hawthorne plant? The first reaction is to search for labels, and this is how notions like ‘‘leadership,’’ ‘‘performance,’’ and ‘‘job satisfaction’’ were introduced. Although ‘‘performance’’ and ‘‘job satisfaction’’ were put on the shelf of antique objects—primarily because, in spite of many tries, there was no way to prove a connection between them—leadership is still one of the hottest issues in organization theory (Yukl 2001). Perrow quoted his teacher, Selznick, wondering at the latter’s easy enthusiasm: ‘‘Creative men are needed . . . who know how to transform a neutral body of men into a committed policy. These men are called leaders; their profession is politics’’ (Selznick 1957, 61; in Perrow 1986, 170). It is doubtful that it is ‘‘creative men’’ who transform a neutral body of men into a committed polity; it is even more doubtful that it is similar creative men who make organizations work. Henry Mintzberg (1973) attempted to show what managers really did—which had little if anything to do with leadership—but his results are inconvenient for the dedicated fans of leadership studies and so are ignored. Mintzberg persists, however, in his view of managerial realities. As recently as 1999, he argued for ‘‘managing quietly,’’ pointing out that it is collective effort that matters (1999). Perrow’s conclusion is still valid, although still not heeded: One cannot explain organizations by explaining the attitudes and behavior of individuals or even small groups within them. We learn a great deal about psychology and social psychology but little about organizations per se in this fashion (1986, 114). Another school of thought discussed by Perrow built organization theory around studies of decision making. According to this view, organization is a collective choice making, following a bounded rationality, a utility-maximization within the limits set by imperfect human cognition. All the principal concepts relate to cognition and information processing; studies varied from descriptive to simulative tests of the rational decision-making model. Although choice theory in economics proceeds basically unruffled, the notion of ‘‘bounded rationality’’ introduced by March and Simon in 1958 revolutionized organization theory. Further observations on the unruly character of organizational life led to the conclusion that not only do individuals suffer from bounded rationality, but that decision making as a group process suffers from conflicting goals, therefore resembling a garbage can event more than an orderly intellectual process. As Perrow noted, the introduction of the ‘‘garbage can model’’ was an important event of a deconstructive character (where deconstruction is seen as part of the construction of social reality). ‘‘Yet the theory remains a primitive digging tool,’’ says Perrow (1986, 138), meaning that it has neither been applied to ‘‘normal’’ organizations (it has been built as a description of a functioning of a university), nor applied on a macro-level.



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I would like to concur with his observation, but interpret it differently (Czarniawska 1999). I see the historical importance of the garbage can model, in that it reminded organization scholars of the importance of historical contingency (very much a Perrowian preoccupation). As a tool, however, it is meant not for digging but for constructing. Intentionally or not, the garbage can model mirrors the prescription for the successful emplotment of a drama (organizing can be highly dramatic) formulated by Kenneth Burke (1945). This US literary theorist introduced the idea of a pentad scene-act-agent-agency-purpose. A drama functioning in the eyes of the public is characterized by a consistency in the pentad. If a scene portrays an agora, we do not expect Roman gladiators to enter it and commence a fight. Similarly, if a scene represents a coliseum, we would be disconcerted to witness Greek citizens conducting a debate there. Some additional steps must be taken to explain the inconsistency, as in Woody Allen’s movie Mighty Aphrodite where a Greek chorus sings Broadway songs on a Roman arena (the explanation restoring consistency in this case is Woody Allen himself). The garbage can model can serve as a protoplot, like the dramatist pentad, for construction of organization studies. Plotting itself can be done either by organizational actors or by organization scholars. The general principle is still Aristotelian: disequilibrium has arisen in one of the three elements: choice opportunities (scene), purpose (problems), and agency (solutions). Participants=agents act=decide, thus reestablishing a new equilibrium. Whoever the plotter was, the author of the text must see to it that the elements of the pentad, or the ingredients in the garbage can, are consistent with one another according to the prevailing rules of consistency, in variation of the prevailing rules of consistency, or in a meaningful discord with such rules. Thus the emplotment of organization theory may proceed. Charles Perrow himself borrowed the loosened rationality model, enriched it with insights from technological contingency theory, and added political elements—in order to analyze high-risk technologies (Perrow 1984; summarized in Perrow 1986). I would claim that his emplotment also follows the pentad. Perrow’s model assumes satisficing individuals (agents) trying to shape the world (purpose) by handling complicated technologies (agency) within power-created social structures (scene) and analyzing the resulting processes (act). According to Perrow (1986), the institutionalist school assumed the strongest sociological perspective on organization with an approach that may be called ‘‘functional-evolutionary.’’ Perrow’s own approach to the study of large technological systems is close to the institutional school, but he explicitly rejected its functionalevolutionistic fundaments, which suggest that organizations are to be seen as structures that have emerged in order to fulfill certain functions, and their survival proves their utility. Some of Perrow’s criticisms of institutional theory have been incorporated into the new institutionalism. I would like to point out two things that have changed since 1986, but are not often noticed in the context of organization theory. One is the changed view of evolution theory. Biologists such as Stephen Jay Gould (1989) and Richard Lewontin (1995) have noted that, in the first place, Darwin never used the expression ‘‘survival of the fittest’’ (it was most likely Herbert Spencer’s reading);


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and in the second place, that this kind of reasoning is a tautology, because the only proof for the fitness is the survival. What if, as Gould (1989) has shown in his analysis of the Burgess Shale, there existed splendid forms, exquisitely fitted to their environment, that were wiped out by a random catastrophe (the Burgess animals) or by historical contingency pushing forward other forms, like bureaucratic organization? Perrow likes to consider alternative scenarios; and indeed, organization theory, just like economics (McCloskey 1994), would benefit from more studies of counterfactuals. One possibility exploited by Perrow is an increased interest in fictional works. Complex Organizations alludes to Thomas Pynchon and Joseph Heller, then bestselling authors; one wonders what would be Perrow’s opinion of works by William Gibson and Neal Stephenson, both of whom present the future economy as a composition of a few enormous corporations (Mafia, The Feds) and myriad single entrepreneurs. Counterfactual studies would also help to challenge structural functionalism—or what remains of it. The critique of structural functionalism, which has existed in economic thought from the time of Veblen, through Chandler, to our times, has been wide and loquacious. There is no reason to suppose that the existing structures survived because of their fitness. However, one baby got thrown away with all the water of this critique: ‘‘Structural functionalism’’ has been shortened to ‘‘functionalism’’ and the latter condemned wholesale. But as there was no reason to protest that organizations are, in fact, created as tools, I see no reason to protest that people, or at least some people in some situations, prefer that things function well. Acceptance of this fact will reconcile organization theory with design theory and the Functionalism schools in art, with no danger of pushing it back into structural functionalism. The fact that some people in some situations would want to create well-functioning things and that they take pleasure in the existence of such things (this is true not only of engineers) does not mean that the functional forms survive better. Forms may survive because of sheer inertia (something that functioned before does not function anymore, but there is nothing to replace it with); other forms may be functional but will be disposed of in the euphoria of a promised greater functionality; the definition of ‘‘well functioning’’ is itself a political process; and the concept of ‘‘function’’ can be extended to such features as symbolic functions, making practically anything functional for somebody in some meaning. So, yes to ‘‘functionalism’’ and to ‘‘evolution,’’ but not together.

THEORIES OF ORGANIZATIONAL POWER Having reviewed a great many phenomena and a large number of approaches, Perrow concluded that studies of complex organizations would result in a theory of power. His definition of ‘‘organization as a tool for shaping the world as one wishes it’’ (1986, 11; emphasis added) changed by page 260 into a tool that ‘‘masters use to generate valued outputs that they can then appropriate’’ (emphasis added). Are ‘‘masters’’ individual people? It does not seem so; rather the term represents a class or a stratum—of capitalists, or perhaps managers? Are they ‘‘the change masters’’ of Rosabeth Moss Kanter’s (1983) book, quoted by Perrow? It has been



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noted that, due to public ownership, the working classes own most of US industry, but certainly do not have control over it (O’Barr and Connelly 1992). Marx was wrong, but do managers do what they want? Perrow’s theory of power is a theory of power as oppression—an eclectic scheme, joining Weber’s theory of bureaucracy, Simon and March’s theory of bounded rationality, Pfeffer and Salancik’s theory of external control and Clegg and Dunkerley’s theory of internal control. Complex organizations under study should be analyzed within the contexts of their networks, the state, and the cultural system. It is difficult not to agree wholeheartedly with this postulate. However, what seems to be mortally possible is to trace some of the ties binding organization to the wider contexts in which it belongs. Analyses of whole contexts, if this is what Perrow meant, are possible only at once- or twice-removed levels of abstraction, and thus it is impossible to do such analysis within an organization study. Since 1986, an alternative way of studying power has emerged: as a process and a result, not as a structure and a cause. Although power has been defined in great many ways (see e.g., Lukes 1986), it almost invariably assumes some kind of property or potential attributed to some actors or group of actors. For Michel Callon and Bruno Latour (1981), however, power stands for the range of associations. Actors associate with other actors (including nonhumans—like technologies or abstract ideas—thus the term ‘‘actant’’ for anything that acts or is acted upon); and the more numerous, important, and stable their associations, the greater is the power of the whole network thus created, of a ‘‘macro-actor.’’ I believe that Charles Perrow would agree with this perspective: the difference lies in the method of deciphering such macro actors. Whereas Perrow claims (for example, when criticizing new institutionalists for their interest in ‘‘trivia,’’ epitomized, to him, in their case studies) that the inquiry must address macro actors as such, Callon and Latour claim that macro actors are, in fact, an optical illusion created by a network posing as one, and that the only way to understand their formation is to ignore this illusion and study macro actors as networks of actants of various sizes, to trace how they build their associations, and to discover how they keep them stable. In a historical case like that which interests Perrow (the emergence of corporate capitalism), a Foucauldian genealogy may be the most promising way to go. In the case of contemporary organization studies, much smaller (or rather shorter—in time) traces can be followed. A context, after all, refers to texts taken in consideration, together with the text under scrutiny. A holistic contextual approach, much favored by the Fathers of the Church2, required an inclusion of all events and texts from the beginning of the world. The world has become bigger and older, thus perhaps only the opposite strategy is possible: to follow connections and associations found in concrete places and times, much as in detective work.

IS THERE ORGANIZING BEYOND ORGANIZATIONS? . . . it is through organizations . . . that classes are constituted and reproduced, stratification systems created and stabilized (and changed in some


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cases), political processes tamed and guided, and culture itself shaped and molded (Perrow 1986, 278). I believe that this statement is correct: Large, complex organizations are the central phenomenon of our culture. As Rosabeth Moss Kanter noted in 1977, ‘‘. . . the corporation is the quintessential contemporary people-producer. It employs a large population of the labor force, and its practices often serve as models for the organization of other systems’’ (3). I have one question, however, albeit somewhat irreverent in the present context: Do organizations get anything done? My life experience and my 36 years’ experience as a fieldworker in organizations tells me that organizations are quite often an obstacle to the best way of doing something. Things get done between, beyond, and in spite of organizations—for example, in action nets. Karl Weick’s introduction of the term ‘‘organizing’’ (1979) was a leap towards an avoidance of the ‘‘organizations’’ trap. The difficulty in espousing his postulate in practice lies in the fact that, when studying ‘‘organizing,’’ researchers mainly encounter processes that have already come to a happy ending of some kind; that is, they became reified into ‘‘organizations.’’ Also, as Charles Perrow noticed, the change of perspective suggested by Weick—‘‘the idea that organizations may run backward much of the time’’ (Perrow 1986, 117) and that what is presented to the observers are but rationalizations of a messy process that actually took place—might be frightening for many organization scholars. Nevertheless, to study ‘‘organizing’’ is to point out that ‘‘organizations’’ are but temporary reifications, as organizing never ceases; to study only ‘‘organizations’’ is to deny this fact. An action net is a compromise devised to embrace both the anti-essentialist aspect of all organizing (organizing never stops) and its apparently solid effects (for a moment things seem unchangeable and ‘‘organized-for-good’’). The concept of action nets originates in a combination of new institutional theory and the sociology of translation, but is tailored specifically for organization studies (Czarniawska 2004). It is founded on the idea that in each time and place it is possible to speak of an ‘‘institutional order,’’ a set (not a system) of institutions (not necessarily coherent) prevalent right then and there. Such institutions shape organizing inasmuch as they dictate which actions should conventionally be tied together. In our present institutional order, the one who produces is supposed to try to sell her=his products; the one with money, to save or invest it. The concept of action net has no analytical ambitions, as its introduction is an attempt to minimize what is taken for granted prior to the analysis. A standard analysis begins with ‘‘actors’’ or ‘‘organizations’’; an action net approach permits noticing that these are products rather than sources of the organizing—taking place within, enabled by, and constitutive of, an action net. Identities are produced by and in an action net, not vice versa. ‘‘Organizations’’ become actors due to a repeated type of action legitimized by a ‘‘legal person’’ certificate. If we take a closer look at them, we see exactly what Perrow (1986) suggested: organizations are tools; they are machines, most closely resembling robots. An organization is a combination of a dispatcher (Latour 1998) and a translator—a machine that is given a legal personality, thus acquiring the right



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to an identity, a will, and an image. Humans are not ‘‘cogs’’ in this machine anymore than they are chips in their computers (although a poetically minded writer might choose to metaphorize them so); they constructed this machine, but once constructed, the machine continues to construct them. The two main parts, a dispatcher and a translator, are dependent upon one another. To be able to send objects and humans to the right places at the right time, the dispatcher must know how to contact them; the dispatcher depends on translator services. The translator is needed because there is a movement of people and objects: had they stayed at the same place, there would be no need for translation, as (supposedly) there was in the Tower of Babel before its fall. What is the relationship between the notion of action nets and concepts such as ‘‘organizational field,’’ ‘‘network,’’ or ‘‘Actor-Network’’? I begin by addressing the concept of organizational field. When DiMaggio and Powell (1991) compared the ‘‘old’’ institutionalism (Selznick 1949) to the ‘‘new’’ one, they pointed out that when Selznick talked about ‘‘an interorganizational field’’ he included all the actual interactions that the Tennessee Valley Authority had with other organizations. DiMaggio and Powell’s concept, borrowed from Bourdieu, has become slightly more symbolic, almost virtual as it were, as IT plays an important role in contemporary organization fields. The new institutionalists no longer talk about organizations actually interacting, but about their participation in a kind of network dealing directly or indirectly (as, for instance, consultants) with the same type of activities. The different actors need not know one another or meet, but may serve one another as role models, competitors, or dream figures. The enterprise of DiMaggio and Powell deserves praise (and Perrow praised them generously), as it is important to understand that organizing is accomplished with the assistance of such ideal, imaginary images. Nevertheless, they have lost that which Selznick was capable of capturing: actual interactions taking place in time and space. University buildings need cleaning, even though cleaning firms do not belong to the organization field of higher education in Europe. Yet a cleaning firm on strike may seriously obstruct the ‘‘real’’ work of the university. Such an entanglement can be captured in an action net. There is no reason to distinguish between virtual and actual contacts there, although the fact that both exist makes the study more difficult. The same goes for ‘‘networks,’’ although the problem with this concept relates not to space, as in the case of an organization field, but to time. Networks assume actors who make contacts, whereas action nets assume that connections between actions produce actors: one becomes ‘‘a publisher’’ by publishing books, but for books to be published, someone must write them. A ‘‘writer’’ is somebody who writes books, not someone who has a business card with this word printed on it. Action net, like actor-network theory, proposes a major reversal in the time under study: it suggests that actions—connected by translation—could produce actors, networks, and macro actors, i.e., actor networks. Actor networks are only one possible product of translation, however, and one that takes more time and effort


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than an action net. Studying action nets permits us to include failures in the study: in cases where no actor network emerged, because the associations were too few or too weak. In my studies of city management (Czarniawska 2002), I decided that even complex organizations cannot render the complexity of the phenomenon. I have tried to follow and describe such action nets—the ways (some institutionalized, some innovative) in which certain actions were connected. Such action nets usually transcended any given organization. The public marketing of a city-owned company requires connections to advertisement production, to finances, to street administration, and to publicity regulation, for instance. Such connections can assume a variety of forms: formal contracts and hierarchical subordination, but also friendship. As actions thus connected can differ, they require translation at connecting points. A given unit, with its own internal actors and artifacts, may be considered an entity unto itself in a legal sense, but many other actors and artifacts, including whole networks, are usually involved in an action net. Taking entire action nets as objects of study (constructed also by the study as such), rather than mere interorganizational contacts, unveils a more comprehensive picture of how organizations are formed, stabilized, dissolved, or relocated. In other words, it is easier to study organizations as products of organizing when they are not the study object in themselves. To study action nets requires one to answer a dual question: What is being done? And how does what is being done connect to other things that are being done in the same context? It is a way of questioning that aims at capturing the traces of the past but not permitting them to decide the future; action nets, even those strongly institutionalized, are constantly remade and renewed.

RE-READING COMPLEX ORGANIZATIONS In the preface to the 1986 edition, Perrow predicted that in 20 years the study of organizations will be at the core of all social sciences. This is not the case; as I mentioned previously. The sociology of organizations, for example, went out of fashion, to be replaced by the sociology of science and technology and cultural sociology. Important writers like David Silverman (1971) left the field for topical themes, for fashionable subdisciplines, or to create the most highly valued general social theory. What happened? One culprit, as I see it, is so-called managerialization—or rather its peculiar consequence for social sciences and academia. Wiped away by the conservative wave present in Western societies since the late 1980s, many sociologists and anthropologists were forced to seek employment in business schools, and to redefine themselves accordingly. Although they immediately formed a strong group of critical management scholars, who by now infiltrated even the Academy of Management, their colleagues who stayed in social science departments defined business scholars as inferior social scientists. If not outright ‘‘lackeys of capitalism,’’ organization scholars are too lowly to re-enter the high rooms of general social



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theory, which considers it denigrating to answer the simple question: social theory of WHAT? The second reason may be the marketization of Western society, originating in the same political climate, and re-directing the attention of organization scholars at things beyond and between organizations (my notion of action nets is but one example). Not that the scholars, and especially Charles Perrow, were unaware of the importance of such phenomena before; not for nothing had Roland Warren and his colleagues (Warren et al. 1974) coined the notion of ‘‘interorganizational fields.’’ But the impact of systems theory influenced the way of thinking about such phenomena. Organization scholars studied organizations from within, where the outside could be glimpsed only through half-opaque windows or perhaps entirely enacted according to the cognitive maps of organizational members (Weick 1988); or from outside, like many of the new institutionalists, where organizations are opaque objects, or even actors, whose inside doings are unknown or irrelevant for an observer of macro-phenomena. The new ways of looking at what happens between and beyond organizations perceive them as transparent—made of the same stuff as the ‘‘environment’’ (cut from the same tissue of institutionalized practices), and only temporarily separated from the rest by their borders that stabilize and protect them. One development signaled in Perrow’s book certainly did come to be: the growing interest in risk society, and in high reliability organizations. What seemed at the time to be a somewhat exotic interest of such scholars as Charles Perrow, Barry Turner, and Karl Weick has become an interdisciplinary movement with conferences, journals, and a steady stream of books. Indeed, the latest addition to this stream, Constance Perin’s Shouldering Risk (2004), is hailed by the anthropologist George E. Marcus as ‘‘a worthy successor to Charles Perrow’s pathbreaking Normal Accidents.’’ The book has not aged at all. Its reasoning is still fascinating, its examples colorful. Its additional attraction is, in fact, the information of a history of science character. The cast of authors, as it were, changed, but not simply by removing the oldest and replacing them with the new ones. Barnard, Dalton, and Selznick are still much read and commented upon; Barnard being now flanked by Mary Parker Follet. But Peter Blau, Fred Fiedler, Rensis Likert, Arnold Tannenbaum, Stanley Udy, and Victor Vroom can rarely be found in organization theory books. Could it be that many of them were psychologists, and that organization theory has become distinctly social? Just as Perrow suggested that it needs to be? And who will be remembered 20 years from now? My guess is James G. March, Charles Perrow, and Karl E. Weick.

NOTES 1. ‘‘The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house’’ (1979). 2. The early and influential theologians and writers in the Christian Church, particularly those of the first five centuries of Christian history.


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Barbara Czarniawska ([email protected]) is the Swedish Research Council & Malmsten Foundation Professor of Management Studies at Gothenburg Research Institute, School of Economics and Commercial Law, Go¨teborg University, Sweden. She recieved an MA in Social and Industrial Psychology at Warsaw University and a PhD in Economic Sciences at Warsaw School of Economics. Her research takes a constructionist perspective on organizing, most recently in the field of big city management and finance. She applies narratology to organization studies. She recently authored in English A Tale of Three Cities (2002) and Narratives in Social Science Research (2004), and edited Narratives We Organize By (with Pasquale Gagliardi, 2003), and Actor-Network Theory and Organizing (with Tor Hernes, 2005).