"Lives in the balance": A comment on Hinings and Greenwood's "Disconnects and Consequences in Organization Theory"? - ASQ Forum

Administrative Science Quarterly,  Sept, 2002  by Stewart R. Clegg

Tags: American Society For Quality, theory

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Hinings and Greenwood's Proposition

In "Disconnects and Consequences in Organization Theory?" Hinings and Greenwood ask what is the point of organization theory today? They establish, early on in their essay, that when it was conceived as the sociology of organizations, the point was clear. It was to address the question, "what are the consequences of the existence of organizations?" The question has two elements: "First, how organizations affect the pattern of privilege and disadvantage in society; second, how privilege and disadvantage are distributed within organizations." The latter refer to central issues of power in relation to organizations. Their proposition is that the former question has all but disappeared from discussion in the ASQ in the '80s and '90s, while the latter receives only scant treatment.

The major difference characterizing the present day, they argue, is that for at least a decade or more, the ASQ has been largely a journal for professionals located in business schools, mostly North American ones. In the past, from its inception in the 1950s until some time in the 1970s, when the lens started to narrow gradually but inexorably, the journal was situated in relation to the sociology of organizations, focused on central questions of the societal consequence of organizational power. Now, they suggest, these questions have largely been abandoned.

Hinings and Greenwood note an institutional effect: when questions are asked from a sociological perspective, the focus is on control and its consequences; when asked from a business perspective, the focus is on the organizational design of efficient and effective solutions to the problems of business owners. One consequence of this shift in emphasis is the effective marginalization of a capacity to address questions such as the corporate collapses of Enron, WorldCom, and Arthur Andersen, among many others, as well as the ability to address the widespread disclosure of corporate malfeasance that has surfaced in recent months. But we shall turn first to more significant malfeasance, less historically recent in occurrence but no less resonant of contemporary events for that.

Organization Studies and Holocaust Studies

Zygmunt Bauman is one of the many great sociologists of modernity rarely cited by contributors to the ASQ, or many other organizations journals, for that matter, as a Web search will show. Given the nature of some of his work, especially Modernity and the Holocaust (1989), this is surprising. By any calculus, moral or otherwise, the efficient dispatch of millions of state-stigmatized people to their deaths by the German state during World War II was an enormous organizational achievement. It was so in two ways: first, through constructing an organizational politics of identity, whereby identities could be established through the use of various stigmatizing "membership categorization devices" (Sudnow, 1972), such as "Jews," "Gypsies," "homosexuals," and "the feeble." These are not "natural" categories but were organizationally produced by a vast organizational apparatus. Second, having used the devices to produce categories of people that fitted its membership, they could then be destroyed by an equally impres sive organizational apparatus. Crude organizational technologies assisted in this huge project. The Hollerith machine was used "to track the Jewish populations and accumulate information regarding the 'success' of the Genocide" (Leventhal, 1995). The machine was "a primitive calculating engine and precursor of the modern computer developed by the statistician and census taker, Herman Hollerith," and manufactured by the IBM subsidiary DEHOMAG (Deutsche Hollerith Maschinen Gesellschaft) (Leventhal, 1995). Equally, the destruction of those collected and defined in their identity as Jews and so forth would not have been possible without an intrinsically instrumental and value-free science. Bauman (1989: 8) cited Henry Feingold (1983:399-400) to establish the impact of value rationality with great clarity, when he referred to Feingold's argument that Auschwitz was an extension of the modern factory system:

Rather than producing goods, the raw material was human beings and the end-product was death, so many units per day marked carefully on the manager's production charts. The chimneys, the very symbol of the modern factory system, poured forth acrid smoke produced by burning human flesh. The brilliantly organized railroad grid of modern Europe carried a new kind of raw material to the factories. It did so in the same manner as with other cargo. In the gas chambers the victims inhaled noxious gas generated by prussic acid pellets, which were produced by the advanced chemical industry of Germany. Engineers designed the crematoria; managers designed the system of bureaucracy that worked with a zest and efficiency more backward nations would envy. Even the overall plan itself was a reflection of the modern scientific sprit gone awry.