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Organization, Society and Politics

‘Organization’ is a term that is used very widely here, consistent with its
use in the leading journal in Critical Management Studies (CMS), itself
titled Organization. A recent editorial in this journal embraces a gener-
ous usage conceptualizing ‘organization’ ‘as noun and verb, accomplish-
ment and process’ (Parker, 2010: 5). Since ‘organization’ is so often used
to refer to a place of work, or business, re-describing it in these broader
terms is an act of politics. This is because the narrow and broader defi-
nitions of organization are expressions of inclusion and exclusion, of
privilege and deprivation. Before elaborating on this and on the senses
of organization as noun and as verb, it is helpful to restate the defini-
tion of organization that was developed in the introductory chapter, as
an extension of the Fact that a human being is zōon politikon:

Organization as verb describes the activities of humans as political

animals. As noun, ‘organization’ describes the groups and places
within which such activities take place, but these groups and places
result from acts of organization. As groups and places, these organi-
zations in turn structure acts of organizing.

To reframe ‘organization’ in far wider terms seems important in a time

of global financial crisis. This is because we must revisit organization in
order to challenge the occasional unspoken assumption that relations
in society in general (the more generous sense of organization) and
relations in certain kinds of firms (an impoverished sense of organiza-
tion) are necessarily comparable, or even equivalent. If we understand
‘organization’ as the firm, as business, or as enterprise, we are never
more than one move away from capitalism as a way of seeing. This can
contaminate understanding of other social forms and relations.

K. Morrell, Organization, Society and Politics

© Kevin Morrell 2012
6 Organization, Society and Politics

Organization as noun
In the wider sense, as a noun and descriptive category, ‘organization’
can refer to a vast variety of social forms, not restricted to: corporations,
public sector organizations, charities, societies, trades union and work
associations, political parties, hospitals and schools, religions, sects
and churches, sports teams and community groups, prisons, gangs,
cults, terror cells, armies, even – perhaps more contentiously – families.
Continuing with this sense of organization-as-noun, and being more
generous still, we can challenge the implicit idea that organizations
need to be in some senses permanent, or enduring. Then, for instance,
we might begin to question whether audiences, mobs, groups of fans
or crowds can also be understood as organizations. In the wake of the
August 2011 riots across London, Birmingham, Manchester and else-
where, the following chapter discusses whether we can interpret a riot
as comprising organizations and involving acts of organization.
One explicit and intended consequence of these more generous uses
of organization-as-noun is that this term does not just refer to a place
of work. Subtlety and care about this point marks out some writers on
organizational behaviour who emphasize ‘work’ in the titles of their
texts (e.g. Watson, 2006; Wilson, 2010). Another consequence of leav-
ing ‘work’ behind in the wake of a more generous definition of ‘organi-
zation’ is that the term is not restricted to groups that have definite
boundaries, or that have explicit and formal criteria determining mem-
bership. Organizational members do not have to share the same goals,
nor do they have to accept the same basis for authority. This is contrary
to some of the most popular, and also potentially problematic, defini-
tions of ‘organization’, which are not only often restricted to the world
of work, but also tend to assume that by virtue of being in an organiza-
tion, organizational members have common goals.
The members of an organization such as a sweatshop, criminal gang
or even more ordinarily many workplace teams, do not need to be mem-
bers voluntarily, but can be co-opted. They can remain at the core of an
organization whose espoused or actual goals they despise, while desper-
ately wishing for an alternative. They may choose to stay in an organi-
zation purely for some of the benefits that it affords them and not out of
any notionally shared, normative purpose. Or, they may remain part of
an organization not because of the goals that others within the organi-
zation have, but out of an impulse to belong and to associate.
The more generous uses of organization-as-noun do not commit us to
pessimistic or cynical accounts of organization. More generous uses can