Interaction Theory Organizational Actors

Towards Interaction
an Theory of
Organizational Actors
Hans Geser
Abstract
Hans Geser Organizations can be conceptualized as social actors capable of interacting with
Institute of each other as well as with individual actors. A correlative interaction theory has to
Sociology, take into account the many ways in which organizations are different from human
University of individuals. First of all, organizations are constituted by actions; they have no
Zürich, existence and identity apart from their activities, and they are held strictly respon-
Switzerland
sible for almost everything they do.
Second, organizations are transparent actors; their internal structures and proces-
ses can be observed by outsiders so that they can be submitted to external
supervision and social control. Finally, organizations are differentiated actors;

they can make use of their internal segmentations by participating simultaneously
in many different interaction processes and by committing different sub-units to
contradictory values and rules.
Introduction
In public opinion as well as in the realms of law, history and the social
sciences, organized collectivities such as government, firms, armies or
universities are readily granted the status of autonomous actors. Very
little thought is usually given to the question of whether such anthropo-
morphic conceptions are justified and - if they are - how supra-
individual actors differ from human persons and how interrelationships
between different kinds of actors have to be conceived.
In law, most of the basic constitutional rights are unconditionally granted
to ’legal persons’, but it still remains unclear as to whether it is justified
and useful to treat organizations and individuals in a similar way, and how
individuals are affected by the fact that potent organizations are far more
powerful in making use of the rights to own property, to litigate in courts
or to exercise free speech (Dan-Cohen 1986: 14).
In economics, it is acknowledged that most market transactions and con-
tractual relationships imply interactions between corporations and
individuals or between different corporate actors; but it has never been
verified whether both are guided by the same kind of rationality
429-
principles and subjected to the same kind of ’laws’ (e.g. the law of
diminishing marginal utility) (Dan-Cohen 1986: 17).
In sociology, the last 20 years have witnessed an ever-growing number of
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430
serious studies about interactions between organizations and individuals

on the one hand (e.g. Rosengren/Lefton 1970; Danet 1971) and about
inter-organizational interactions on the other (e.g. Turk 1970; Negandhi

1980; Mizruchi and Schwartz 1987). Only very limited efforts have been
made to spell out the common factors and differences between human
and corporate actors, and conventional interaction theories have not
ceased to focus exclusively on relationships between human
individuals.
While there is a growing awareness that an interorganizational level of
analysis is indispensable in order to analyze modern processes of political
decision-making (e.g. Schmitter and Lehmbruch 1978; Hanf and Scharpf
1978) as well as processes of macro-economic coordination (Mizruchi and
Schwartz 1987, Baker 1984, Burt 1983), the very bases of such
endeavours are undermined by a considerable number of organizational
scientists, who cling to a ’reductionist’ point of view. Authors such as
Silverman (1972) or Cyert and March (1963) and Corwin (1987: 6) deny
the reality of organizations as autonomous institutional entities by stres-
sing how organizational processes are molded by individual leadership or
inter-individual coordination. Others insist that bureaucratic organiza-
tions are ’heterokephalous’ structures servicing the interest of exogenous
leaders or - in the case of privately owned economic enterprises - a
‘capitalist class’ (e.g. Weber 1972: 544; Palmer 1983; Zeitlin 1974).
In this paper, it is argued that by taking into account the theoretical and
empirical insights of organizational sociology, as well as impressionistic
everyday evidence, four different arguments make it reasonable to think
of formal organizations in terms of autonomous actors.
First, a multitude of studies relating organizations to their environments
support the view held by the ’resource dependence approach’. They have
shown that much organizational behaviour can be understood by taking
into account the internal structural and technological characteristics of
the organization on the one hand and its environmental conditions on the
other.
They have further shown that such factors on the emergent organizational
level may well override influences stemming from the characteristics of
owners, managers and employees. (e.g. Aldrich and Pfeffer 1976; Pfeffer
and Salancik 1978, Burt 1983; Pfeffer 1987: 25f.).
Second, even members of the highest hierarchical levels tend to experi-
ence their organization as conditioning the situations in which they act
and demanding submission to previously defined (although modifiable)
goals, plans, and rules. As a consequence, individual role behaviour is
usually attributed to the organization as a supra-individual social actor
(for example, when a member is authorized to sign contracts binding the
whole firm or public institution). In addition, most macro-actions (poli-
cies, programs, production lines) based on the coordination of many
specialized roles can only be attributed to the organization as a
whole.
Third, with its notions of ’legal actor’ or ’incorporation’, modern law
431
takes into account that organizations have an existence apart from the
private lives of any single individuals or groups. The national constitu-
tions of western countries usually go a long way to confer to legal persons
the same basic rights as individual citizens (e.g. to express free opinion, to
own property, to associate freely, etc.) and to give them the protection
they need for planning their long-term specialized activities. By address-

ing/more and more rules and duties to legal persons, modern law acts as a
very powerful attribution agency, forcing organizations to draw clearer
boundaries between individual and supra-individual levels of action and
to expand the realm of truly ’corporate action’ to ever new spheres (e.g.
Rohl 1987: 430f.; Coleman 1974, passim).
Finally, various informal attributions from the general public contribute
to the degree to which organizations see themselves as ’social actors’.
Because of their high societal visibility, organizations are ready targets
for all kinds of evaluations and responsibility attributions and an ever-
increasing variety of normative expectations (e.g. to behave according to
’corporate ethics’). For instance, no insurance company can ignore the
fact that the behaviour of its individual members affects the public image
of the firm as a whole. In trying to restitute its damaged reputation after
Bhopal, Union Carbide has been forced to behave as a single actor
because the public decided to attribute the responsibility for the event to
the encompassing corporation, not to its local branch.
Given that all formal organizations share certain basic traits and capabili-
ties that set them categorically apart from all human subjects, it seems
possible to sketch at least the bare outlines of an interaction theory
designed for organizational actors. By contrasting it with conventional
theories of human interaction, the way is free to look for similarities in
view of a more generalized social interaction theory encompassing both
kinds of actors, and to deal at a theoretical level with phenomena of inter-
organizational relationships, as well as with social relations between
organizational and individual actors.
Organizations as ’Action Constituted Actors’
Human beings are the ’primary actors’. They generate those ’basic
actions’ that cannot be decomposed into more elementary sub-actions,
but only into processes belonging to lower system levels. Each individual
can be viewed as an inter-systemic coordinating agency capable of syn-
thesizing physiological, senso-motoric and psychological processes in

such a way that ’actions’ are generated as emergent phenomena.
Human individuals are constituted mainly outside the sphere of action.
Their self-definition, as well as their social acknowledgment as being
’persons’, is sufficiently guaranteed by the fact that they are ’human
beings’ with the usual physical-biological and psychological character-
istics, especially with the capacity for conscious self-reflection. In the
legal as well as the moral sense, they do not lose their basic status as
432
’human subjects’when they are too young, too old, too tired, or too ill to
generate any kind of reasonable activity. If we say that somebody
’occupies a role’ or ’exercises a profession’, this only means that he or she
is generally disposed to engage in certain types of activities, even if he or
she is momentarily ill, on sabbatical or too absent-minded for doing the
job. If we identify individuals in terms of a status position, we often
define their social characteristics in terms almost completely independent
of concurrent actions, for example, as a ’child’, a ’woman’, a ’Jew’, or a
’Citizen of the United States’. Within inter-individual action systems the
status characteristics of participants usually have to be treated as
exogenously given conditions originating either in spheres completely
outside social actions (e.g. age and gender) or in the consequences of past
actions (e.g. academic degrees or organizational memberships).
If the concept of ’human individual’ may be defined without referring to
the category of ’action’, the same is certainly not true for the concept of
’organization’. Organizations are, by definition, action-constituted enti-
ties, in the sense that past actions were necessary in order to found them I
and to fix the parameters (e.g. charter, goals, roles, programs, technolo-
gies) that define their actual structure and activities, and continuous /
activities have to go on in order to secure their survival and to communi- ’
cate to their environment that they are still ’alive’. ;
Organizations then are ’secondary actors’ that rely on the capability of
their individual members to produce ’primary actions’. They usually
recruit individuals who have already acquired relatively sophisticated i I
primary action capacities in non-organizational contexts of socialization

(e.g. in families), and they tend to dismiss them into such contexts again
when these capacities diminish. Organizational actions, in this sense, are
’molar’ phenomena that can be decomposed into a multitude of constitu-
tive ’molecular’ elements belonging to the same category of objects as the I
whole arising from their composition. In other words, organizations are

I
objects that belong completely to the action sphere because they not only
produce action but are fundamentally constituted by action. i
Insofar as they exist, they exist as functionally specific actors that have a
firm commitment to specific courses of action and specific goals and I
outputs, and if they become inactive (e.g. by dismissing all their ;/

employees), they lose the very basis of their existence. ~
If we know that an organization is a school, a hospital, an army, or a ¡
labour union, such a notion always implies that many specific actions are
performed in a regularized way, and that certain invariant action outputs / I
are reliably produced. For instance to characterize an organization as a

shoe factory is to say three things at the same time: that it has the basic
status of being a formal orgarcization, that it fulfills the functional role of
I
producing shoes, and that it actually fulfills this role in terms of a huge I
number of very specified activities (e.g. buying leather materials, main-
taining production machinery, registering all commercial transactions by
accounting procedures, etc.).
Thus ’status’, ’role’, and ’action’ cannot be differentiated from each
433
other as three separate levels of specification, as is typically the case for

human individuals. Rather, they are highly fused because every organiza-
tion can only exist as a functionally specific organization and at a
relatively high level of regular activities. As a consequence, organizations
are quite rigid actors not only for reasons of bureaucratized routinization
and inflexible technologies, but for the more fundamental reason that
they have to cling to their specific courses of action in order to secure
their mere survival as a social system.
Given that they cannot retreat into a state of inactivity without ceasing to
exist, they do not have many alternatives as to how they relate to their
external environment and how they structure their own internal system.
This is seen in three points:
First, unlike individuals, organizations do not have the flexibility of free-
ing themselves from the ongoing course of action, going back to an
unspecified state of inactivity and then deciding what to undertake next.
Instead, they are prisoners of the specific action programs to which they
have committed their resources and structures. Consequently, they have
to implement changes in such a way that continuous activities can go
on.
Very rapid, discontinuous change in organizational actions usually

presupposes that old organizations are replaced by new ones, or that
existing organizations grow by adding new components. Otherwise,
incremental change by small, cautious steps is far more likely. For these
reasons, an organization is a far more reliable actor than an individual.
Looking at its physical technologies, the composition of its memberships,
and its explicit formal rules and goals, one can easily infer what it is
qualified and motivated to do.
Second, a constant high level of activity implies very rigid, specific
dependencies on the external environment: for example, on the regular
inflow of raw material, on the sales of products or the provision of
subsidies. Regardless of their gigantic size, huge property, or enormous
political influence, organizations are highly vulnerable actors because
their functioning (and therefore their survival) is easily threatened if
flows of strategic resources or communications are disrupted.
While individuals can easily adapt to their environments by varying the
frequencies, intensities, specific courses or goals of their actions,
organizations are far more inclined to either select those environmental
niches predictable enough to secure regular satisfaction of their rigid
systemic needs (e.g. economic firms), or to produce such stable condi-
tions themselves by exercising power or by allying with other actors
capable of controlling the environmental field (e.g. governmental
agencies).
In fact, it is highly unlikely that organizations do anything other than
simply ’solve given tasks’, ’satisfy given demands’, or ’adapt to the given
conditions’, because this would presuppose high flexibility in activity
levels, as well as the disposition to shut down if its performances are no
longer needed. Instead, organizational activities are always co-
434
determined by intrasystemic needs to secure their own survival and com-

municate to other actors that they are still functioning. So, ’goal shifts’
occur in social movement organizations when the problems originally
responsible for their founding have been solved (McCarthy and Zald /
1987). Plants with heavy technological equipment will seek out new
markets and/or induce additional consumer needs through advertising
rather than reduce their size and activity level to the actual ’
/
conditions.
Finally, because of their continuous action, organizations are incessantly
confronted with the contextual consequences of their activities and the
reactions evoked in other actors. Human individuals can always with-
draw into inactivity when they want to decrease their social visibility in
order to prevent attributions of responsibility and guilt. In contrast,
organizations cannot help being highly visible and exposing themselves
constantly to criticism and blame by simply continuing their usual
existence (for example by maintaining dirty production processes, the
environmental implications of which are being less and less tolerated, or
by demonstrating via their monthly payroll that they are not willing to
reduce the wage differential between males and females). While most
rules - moral as well as legal - directed at individuals simply demand
that certain kinds of deviant action (e.g. theft or murder) should be
avoided, most prescriptions addressed to organizations can only be fulfil-
led by producing often highly disciplined and demanding procedures of
ongoing action.
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Expanded ’Self Control’ and ’Responsibility’ a
.j;
/
As all human action remains embedded in the ’infra-actional’ processes /
of bodily perceptions, psychological experiences and unintentional kinds
of behaviour, individual interaction systems are constantly molded by i
I
many unpredictable factors. Participants usually have very limited control
over many kinds of stimuli they constantly emit (e.g. spontaneous !
gestures or expressive implications of their bodily appearance) and the

subjective cognitive impressions and emotional reactions they /
evoke. !
Unavoidably, a basic structure of cognitive typifications, affective rela-
tionships and normative expectations emerges unintentionally as the
result of spontaneous mutual perceptions and non-verbal communica-
/I
tions (Goffmann 1963; Luhmann 1972).
Relationships between organizations can be conceptualized to a far
higher degree as real interactions because most of the impressions con-
veyed, the behaviour displayed, and all the perceptions and reactive
responses evoked have the quality of intentional actions. For instance, I
the ’outward appearance’ of an organization is not based on a biological
organism affected by genetic heredity, growth, aging, or illness, but
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435
rather on its artificially created formal structure and ’corporate design’
(Humpert 1988).
Many important consequences also follow from the obvious fact that
organizations are not disposed to anchor actions in psychological emo-
tions. First, the absence of affective action orientations makes them more
prone to base their activities on goals, values, or traditions. In the
terminology of Max Weber, ’affektuelles Handeln’ is substituted by
’zweckrationales’, ’wertrationales’, and ’traditionales Handeln’ (Weber
1972: 12f.). For instance, the expectation that victimized organizations go
to court cannot be based upon their reacting to delinquencies with feel-
ings of rage and the wish for retaliation. Instead, it must be derived from
the assumption that organizations are, in principle, committed to the
norm that delinquents should be prosecuted (Hagan 1982).
A second consequence is that interactive relationships are likely to
remain loose and fragile because constant deliberate efforts are needed to
maintain a certain level of commitment. As the diffuse bonding effects
usually based on emotional commitments (e.g. feelings of sympathy,
loyalty, gratitude, etc.) are lacking, the motivation to continue a relation-
ship has to be reproduced constantly by functional considerations, e.g. by
recognition that ongoing exchange relationships are mutually profitable
or that cooperation is helpful to reach certain goals (Akinbode and Clark
1976; Davidson 1976; Sarason and Lorentz 1979; Gray 1985). Far more
than individuals, organizations are always free to decide anew which
relationships shall be continued, to which ends, and at which level of
involvement. Because unconditional and irreversible commitments
(based on socialization, psychological mechanisms of identification, etc.)
are lacking, members cannot be sure whether and to what degree they
can rely on their partners. Thus more external, objective stabilizing
mechanisms are needed in order to compensate for the lack of intra-

systemic stabilizers. Examples of such external mechanisms are factual
interdependencies resulting from competition and symbiotic complemen-
tarity of function, or guarantees provided by explicit contracts or legal
regulations. For organizations, legal litigation is therefore not the

abhorred ’ultimate ratio’ it is for most individuals, but an option easily
envisaged in order to enforce the fulfillment of contractual obligations
( Rohl 1987: 429f.).
Organizations are ’moral actors’ in a more radical sense than human
individuals, burdened with the full responsibility for all actions they com-
mit or omit. If a bank engages in illegal financial transactions, it can never
claim to have been ignorant of the law or to be a victim of deviant
socialization and pernicious ’seduction’. If an airplane crashes due to
deficient technical maintenance, the airline corporation cannot escape the
attribution of guilt by declaring it has been momentarily ’distracted’ by
other kinds of tasks, or that it is in a state of reduced self-responsibility
caused by juvenile immaturity, senility, psychological disorder, illness, or
fatigue.
If individual members responsible for these casualties suffer from such
436
conditions, the organization will be asked what is wrong with its recruit-
ment practices or its mechanisms of internal role assignment and super-
vision. Thus, when an organization is accused of delinquency or causing
damage by carelessness, no complicated fact-finding procedures are I
necessary in order to prove it has acted in a state of full self-responsibility
or not, and the courts are very prone to judge the organization guilty and
to burden it with high sums of compensation (Coleman 1974: 90). i
The range of normative expectations that can be addressed to human
individuals is highly restricted by the simple fact that humans are very I
heterogeneous and unreliable in terms of their action capacities (i.e. ;,
qualifications and resources), and that fluctuations of these capacities
(caused by age, health conditions, etc.) are largely outside their own
control. As a consequence, even under conditions of strict attitudinal
conformity, expected behaviour patterns often do not occur because the i
norm cannot include the prescription to acquire or maintain the capacities
required for certain types of actions. Norms directed at everyone are

successful only when they demand very simple types of behaviour. Fur-
ther, in most systematic conceptions of individual ethics (e.g. Kantian- ’,
ism) the standard of morality is defined by the quality of subjective
judgements and intentions (’Gesinnungsethik’), not by the characteristics
of concrete actions and their objective results (‘Verantwortungsethik’).
This high price must be paid for upholding the claim that ’to be good’ is a
condition universally accessible to everybody anytime, needing no other
prerequisite than a simple act of will (Jonas 1984: 24). ;
Normative expectations directed at organizational actors do not suffer
from these restrictions because norms can easily include the prescription
that the organization shall qualify itself for certain actions by hiring the
right kinds of experts, buying adequate technological equipment,
accumulating sufficient knowledge, or implementing effective procedures
of control. This makes it easy to understand why modern societies depend
far more on the normative behaviour of their organizations than on the
conformity of their individual members. Only organizations are able to be
highly reliable actors by fulfilling given behavioural prescriptions with
invariant regularity and precision and at the same time highly complex
actors by executing sophisticated action procedures that necessitate the
combination of many different role activities, technological tools and
cognitive qualifications.
The increasing proliferation of very detailed and rapidly changing legal
rules in highly developed societies can only be explained by the fact that
most of them are exclusively directed to organizations (e.g. firms,
schools, administration agencies). Human individuals could never be ;
expected (or even obliged) to acquaint themselves with this vast number ’,
of complicated formal prescriptions and to constantly keep up with ongo- i
ing legislation (Rohl 1987: 268). :
Organizational actors are also a prerequisite for a new, rapidly expanding I
kind of legislation that does not regulate specific actions, but prescribes i
the realization of certain goals within certain periods of time (e.g. the 1
437
reduction of pollution or the substitution of dangerous technologies or

raw materials by safer ones) (Ott 1972). They can be burdened with the
task of increasing their degree of self-responsibility, for example, by
finding ways to improve unhealthy workplace conditions or to eliminate
risks and inefficiencies.
When we still dream of a better future offering more welfare, freedom,
peace, personal security, or environmental protection, we do not usually
think - as our ancestors in the 18th century did - that a secular increase
in the morality and rationality of human beings is necessary to bring
about such conditions. Instead, we tend to base our optimism on the
belief that organizations are not only the most powerful and effective but
also the most perfectible of all social actors.
Self-objectification of Systemic Goals, Structures and Processes
Discounting rather marginal traditions of radical behavourism (e.g. Skin-

ner or Homans), all theoretical approaches designed to conceptualize and
explain human action and interpersonal interaction (e.g. Mead, Weber,

Parsons, Schutz, Goffman) have taken into account the hiatus between
the private inner sphere of each individual subject (constituted on the basis
of psychological processes and giving rise to a constant stream of con-
scious thoughts, feelings, and cognitions to which only the ego itself has
immediate access), and the intersubjective sphere of social relations (based
on completely different processes such as verbal and gestural communica-
tion and giving rise to supra-individual phenomena such as physical arte-
facts or symbolic culture).
As entities functioning simultaneously on completely different levels of
reality, individuals always remain outside the social sphere with most of
their internal processes, because their subjective experiences remain
invisible to others in so far as they are not expressed in terms of uninten-
tional gestures or intended acts of communication (Schutz 1974).
As a consequence, all social integration has to be actively produced by
processes of communication and by mechanisms of empathic identifica-
tion, socialization and social control. Social integration on the inter-
individual level is hampered by the fact that encoding capacities of the
actors as well as the decoding capacities of the recipients are so limited that
most intra-individual experiences cannot be transmitted. Because of their
mutual intransparency, human subjects initially confront each other as
unreliable, unpredictable, or even threatening interaction partners, and
interpersonal cognitions are usually not sufficient to produce high levels
of certainty in mutual expectations. Therefore, behavioural expectations
have to be based primarily on normative grounds: ’I cannot know what
you feel, think, or intend to do; but, regardless of all that, you will be
punished if you do not behave in the way prescribed’. The problem
remains that violations of expectations or rules can be identified
exclusively ev post because only overt behaviour can be observed, while
438
all the preparatory stages (e.g. focusing attention, evaluating alterna- <
tives, taking adecision) are invisible.

In the case of organizational actors, no
such fundamental discrepancies
between the inner and the outer world exist because intrasystemic struc-
tures and processes are based on the same mechanisms as external actions
and inter-organizational relations. For purely integrative reasons intra- i
organizational interactions have to rely heavily on explicit verbal com- I
munication (Barnard 1938), and normative structures have to be spelled
out in terms of precisely formulated written rules and regulations.
As a consequence of this ’self-objectification’, organizations are in ’,
principle transparent actors, whose internal states and events can be i
highly visible to outsiders. By looking at the processes and outcomes of
decision-making, the kinds of rules enacted, the reorganizational ’I
measures taken or plans and programs elaborated, many reliable insights
can be gained concerning what the organization ’intends to do’, what
priority it gives to various values and goals and to what kind of

environmental stimuli and development it pays critical attention.
In contrast to individuals, the primary relationship between an organiza-
tion and its environment then is a state of integration, while separation is a
secondary condition that has to be produced artificially and maintained
by different mechanisms, for example, by closing up documents, control-
ling access to plants, technological equipment and data files or by enforc-
ing norms of secrecy among the members. Intentional intransparency
can, in fact, be difficult to maintain because every individual member
constantly accumulates inside knowledge about the organization that he
or she can easily disclose to anyone else. ,
This condition of internal transparency is perhaps the most important i

single factor that makes a theory of corporate interaction very different
from conventional theories of interpersonal interaction. This can be seen
at three points.
First, the fundamental problem of interpreting the meaning of an action
(‘Verstehensproblernatik’) is greatly attenuated by the fact that the ’sub-
jective meaning’ of an organizational action is easier to identify than in
individual behaviour. In general, organizations have to explicate the
meaning they attribute to their own actions for internal reasons; for
example, in order to generate commitment and consensus or to install I
processes of goal-oriented co-operation. Thus, many self-referential
utterances (e.g. authoritative announcements, guideline decisions, writ-
ten plans and programs) are available to identify the organization’s ‘real
intentions’. Additional reliable insights are to be gained by inferring from
technological equipment or the qualification of employees what the !
organization is able to do, or by inferring from its resource dependencies
what are its most salient interests and most urgent needs.
Even if it is hard to identify the precise value preferences, goals, and
intentions of an organizational actor, such indeterminacy usually takes
the structured form of multiple goals or heterogeneous interests associ-
ated with the plurality of intra-organizational subunits competing for
439
organizational resources and decision-making influence. So, if we know

what type of occupational groupings coexist within the same labour
union, what goal priorities are maintained by the different divisions or
branches within an industrial firm, or which administrative agencies are
competing for more budget resources, we can easily predict what types of
goal conflicts (and related behavioural indeterminancies) exist in the
organization as a whole. As a result, when organizations are the targets of
behavioural expectations, these expectations can be based to much
greater extent on pure cognitive grounds than is the case with individuals,
where internal intransparency intensifies the need for normative
enforcements.
Second, because not only the final stages of overt behaviour, but also its
antecedent conditions and preparatory phases are visible to outside
observers, organizational behaviour can be influenced e.r ante instead of
simply criticized, corrected, or punished ex post. The effectiveness of
sanctions applied to individuals is greatly reduced by the fact that they
can be mobilized only after behaviour has already been enacted, in order
to apply punishment, or - in rare cases - to restore the previous status
quo.
In comparison, the external social control of organizational behaviour
can be much more effective because it can be directed to preparatory
intra-organizational processes, thus preventing intended ’unlawful

behaviour’ from actually being carried out, or promoting certain types of
intended actions by additional incentives (e.g. governmental
subsidies) .
For the same reason, control measures against organizations are often
highly generalized, as they are not applied to single deviant actions but to
deviant internal rules and practices that give rise to continuously repeated
deviant actions. In other words, while individual deviance can only be
defined in terms of actions inconsistent with social norms, ’organizational
deviance’ can also be identified as an inconsistency between two levels of
social norms (e.g. when recruitment and promotion rules are found to be
discriminative or technological security measures insufficient). The expli-
citness of intra-organizational norms makes them accessible to outside
regulation or even to complete incorporation in the encompassing sphere
of legal norms. A high ’strain towards consistency’ works to eliminate
discrepancies between intrasystemic and extrasystemic (i.e. societal)
formal rules because inconsistencies are highly visible and exposed to
widespread critical evaluations (Rohl 1987: 429).
Finally, organizations are better able to synchronize intrasystemic and
extrasystemic processes than individuals because both belong to the same
sphere of social interaction and are subordinated to the same types of
restrictions. For instance, bargaining processes between labour unions
and employers are often correlated with simultaneous negotiations within
the respective associations (Hyman 1972; Sabel 1981).
While individuals always have a ’surplus’ of purely subjective thoughts
and experiences not (yet) made available to interaction partners,
440
organizations are more likely to suffer from the opposite condition that
members engaged in outside interactions control a ’surplus’ of knowledge i
not (yet) made available to intra-systemic communication.
Growth, Interlocking and Merger as Functional Alternatives to

Social Interaction
Individuals are not only indivisible, but also unmergeable social actors. As
a consequence, all inter-individual relationships and all forms of collec-
tivization have to be generated by social interaction between discrete
I
units preserving their particular identity and their private world of I
psychological processes and senso-motoric coordinations.
In addition, social integration is limited by the fact that human individuals
have a rather limited capacity for functional specialization. Regardless of I
complementarities and symbiotic interdependences at the level of their I,
role behaviour (e.g. in occupational or intra-familial relationships), they
always remain involved in commensalistic relationships conditioned by
the basic similarity of their organisms and psychological needs and the
communalities of their experiences and cultural orientations. The
’organic solidarity’ produced at the level of functional roles is nearly
always counteracted by conflictual tendencies stemming from the fact that ;
human individuals are all eager to gain access to the same scarce goods ’~
(e.g. wealth, power, prestige), which are so unequally distributed in the !
stratification system. Consequently, a strong need is maintained to secure i
social integration by means of ’mechanical solidarity’: through implemen-
ting consensual value orientation and normative rules directed at restrain- !
ing individual behaviours and sanctioning deviant actions. i
In comparison, inter-organizational interaction is more likely to be based
on principles of ’organic solidarity’ because functional differentiation can ;
be so high that even basic needs of different organizations (e.g. needs for
input resources, technological equipment or clientele) are complemen-
tary, so that symbiotic relationships prevail. Commensalistic relationships
’
centred around consensually aspired scarce goods are usually restricted to

smaller subpopulations (e.g. competitive firms or political parties), so
that their conflictive implications remain encapsulated within narrow
boundaries and no encompassing ’inter-organizational stratification
system’ (comparable to that in which individuals are embedded) is likely ,
to come into existence. j

More importantly, organizations are not forced to base their social activi-
ties exclusively on mutual interaction because they have access to func-
tional alternatives that secure much higher degrees of social cohesion and
coordination. First of all, growth is a strategy by which organizations can
substitute social interaction with self-centred processes of internal expan-
sion, learning and differentiation. For example, external exchange rela-
tionships can be eliminated when objects or services needed are produced
within the system, and oligopolistic collusions become unnecessary when
441
one single firm has grown big enough to control the whole market. When
growth is a ready alternative, interactive relations among organizations
are characterized by a source of lability not known in inter-individual
systems, because actors have to envisage the risk that their partners may
discontinue the relationship not by changing to other partners, but by
freeing themselves from interactive needs as a consequence of internal
complexification.
Second, organizations can make use of human individuals as ’live linking
agents’, thus generating a mode of inter-organizational relationship medi-
ated by intrapersonal instead of interpersonal processes. By ’Interlocking
directorates’, for example, very diffuse channels of inter-organizational
communication and influence are established (Allen 1974; Pfeffer
1973 ) .
In a more general way, all individuals changing from one organization to
another (e.g. by occupational mobility or religious conversion, etc.) are
contributing to non-interactional inter-organizational integration, by
transferring value-orientations and goal priorities, knowledge and experi-
ence, behavioural habits, role patterns and normative expectations. The
empirical regularity that most formal inter-organizational interaction is
characterized by high functional specificity may well be due to the fact
that most informal and diffuse relationships between organizations are
generated primarily by co-memberships or subsequent memberships, not
by inter-organizational interaction.
Finally, organizations can substitute interactive relationships by more
’intimate’ modes of coalescence, making use of their capacity to inter-
penetrate, to fuse or to give birth to higher-order systems (Warren 1967).
While individuals can never escape from being insulated by a discrete
physical body, a private world of subjective experience and a particular
identity attributed to them, organizations can easily manipulate their
’degree of systemness’ and their distinctiveness as separate ’social
actors’. They can sacrifice their particular identity partially by combining
into coalitions or federations (Warren 1967). Further, they can give it up
completely by merging, or they can interpenetrate in such a way that new
actors (e.g. ’joint ventures’) are generated (Aiken and Hage 1968). Com-
pared with the almost continuous process of growth, such ’epigenetic
system building’ can bring about sudden leaps in the expansion of
organizational action capacities (Pfeffer 1972).
Considering all of this, three very general implications for a theory of
organizational action can be deduced. First, the concept of ’interaction’ is
likely to occupy a less central place than in the theory of individual action
because more non-interactional modes of behaviour have to be con-
sidered. Second, while the stability of interpersonal relationships is often
impaired by the availability of alternative partners, inter-organizational
systems have to face contingencies stemming from the availability of
functional eguivalents to social interaction. Thus, healthy competitive
activities may have completely vanished after the two newspapers in town
have merged, and advertising agencies may find themselves without
442
customers when producers decide to install their own marketing depart-

ments. Third, compared to inter-individual networks or groups, organiza-
tions are far more likely to maintain a high level of internal integration
and consistent action capacity, regardless of their size, without applying
measures of
repressive control.
This last regularity can easily be illustrated by the asymmetry between
’capital’ and ’labour’ in typical industrial relations systems. As labour is
segmented into small quantities owned and controlled by discrete human
individuals, all collective action remains completely dependent on proces-
ses of inter-individual association. The action capacities of the resulting
collectivities (i.e. labour unions) are then typically hampered by the fact
that many workers are not motivated to join, and that the members
themselves are weak in cohesiveness and heterogeneous in terms of
values, interests and capacity of articulation. As a result, continuous
processes of communication, deliberation, and decision-making have to
go on, in order to reach consensus and maintain at least a minimal
capacity for coherent action, and internal relationships are often strained
by conflicts between divergent subgroupings or tension between leader-
ship and common members. In contrast, capital is usually owned by
organizations, and unlimited quantities of it can be aggregated by growth
processes or mergers without a loss in coherence and action capacity on
the part of the owning agency. As a result, labour unions always find that
capital is collectivized even when associations of employers are very weak
or inexistent (Offe and Wiesenthal 1980: 67f.).
~ .
Differentiation of Interacting Sub-units and Graduation of

Interactional Commitments
As the term individual implies, human beings are holistic entities not
capable of dividing themselves into sub-systems having the same func-
tional capacities (e.g. of living, perceiving, thinking, acting) as the per-
sonality system as a whole. All their behavioural capacities are limited by
the basic fact that their bodily presence is restricted to a single place at
any given time. Whenever they intend to do something consciously, they
must focus their whole attention and direct all their major senso-motoric
processes on a single project of action (Geser 1986). Because it is very
likely that individuals are confronted with different alternatives or
demands of action simultaneously, they inevitably face two fundamental
problems that permeate their whole human condition. The first problem
stems from the inevitability of choice. At every moment they must make
up their minds about which action to select out of a multitude of mutually
exclusive alternatives. The second problem is the problem of diachronic
coordination, given that the only way conflicts between incompatible
action demands (e.g. ’role conflicts’) can be solved is by allocating dif-
ferent activities to different periods of time.
So human existence is fundamentally a biographic existence structured by
443
irreversible choices and sequential patterns of role engagement actions

and events. The more individuals expand and diversify their role sets and
activities, the higher is their demand for time, and the more likely they
are to clash with the hard facts that a day has only 24 hours, youth is
transitory, and the biological life span limited. In addition, the more
individuals enlarge their sphere of action (e.g. by adopting new roles),
the more they are forced to subordinate to given norms and practices,
because no time is left to discuss, criticize, or actively influence the rules
governing different social contexts.
.
In contrast, organizations are basically ’dividual’ actors capable of

.
executing simultaneously many different (even contradictory) courses of

action at the same level of complexity and conscious attention. By
establishing various semi-autonomous ’boundary roles’ or sub-units
cultivating their own environmental relationships, they can diversify into
.
a limitless number of social action fields and adapt to highly divergent,

even conflictive, performance pressures and normative expectations
(Evan 1966: 177f.). While the sales department may be extremely polite
.
and friendly to all people seen as prospective clients, the accounting

office may write very harsh and threatening letters to these same people if
- they fail to pay their debts (Rohl 1987: 430). The stock owners may well
be informed by management that everything is being done to keep pro-
duction costs very low, while the PR department is eager to convince the
public that all measures will be taken to reduce environmental
pollution.
When confronted with heterogeneous external adaptation demands and
conflictive normative expectations, organizations have to rely less than
.
individuals on the dimension of time in order to differentiate their activi-
ties, because they have more opportunities to differentiate it in space
’ ’
(e.g. by establishing additional branches, offices or roles). As Thompson

..
has stated,
’Under norms of rationality, organizations facing heterogeneous task environ-

’,
ments seek to identify homogeneous segments and establish structural units to
deal with each.’ (Thompson 1967: 70)
In order to understand and predict the actions of a human individual,

extensive information may be necessary about what he or she has done in
the past and intends to do in the future. In the case of an organization, it
.
is more helpful to get a cross-sectional view about the variety of its

simultaneous. regularly established activities.
’
.
By loosening the coupling among their subsystems or between different

.
system levels, organizations can reduce the ’strain for consistency’ and
even combine completely contradictory value positions and action strate-
.
~
gies. In the Netherlands, for example, employer associations and labour
unions seem easily able to combine co-operative relationships at the
meso-level with conflictive-antagonistic confrontations at the micro-level
(e.g. within firms) and at macro-level of political articulations (Was-
senberg 1982).
444
When organizations interact among themselves, they are far more dis-
posed than individuals to cultivate multi-layered relationships in which
co-operative and conflictive components can be present at the same time I
(Turk and Lefcowitz 1962; Turk 1977: 100). Thus, firms engaged in harsh
competition may unite in harmony against the same unions or co-operate
at the associational level in order to influence an important piece of
legislation, and social movement organizations may form tactical coa- I
litions even when conditions of hostility and bitter controversy prevail !
under ’normal circumstances’ (McCarthy and Zald 1987: 161f.).
While relationships between individuals are often ’monomorphic’ in the i
sense that the same diffuse subjective dispositions (e.g. sympathy,
’
respect, gratitude, distrust) pervade all interactions, inter-organizational
relations are more ’polymorphic’ and variable during time. Seeking the ,
’middle distance’ between complete intimacy and raging hostility,

organizations are likely to preserve a certain fluidity and reversibility in
their mutual commitments, so that their relationships can constantly be
respecified according to changing needs and situational conditions.
Organizations are also more likely than individuals to need such flexi-
bility, because they are often forced to get along with the same uneasy ’
partners (e.g. suppliers, clients or opponents) under all

circumstances.
’
A fortiori, multilateral inter-organizational networks are interaction

fields characterized by an extreme degree of polyvalence and volatility
because every actor can contact every other actor at various levels and in
an unlimited number of ways. They may constitute the most valuable and
potent source of structural flexibility in modern societies, where new

kinds of ’macro problems’ are constantly arising that necessitate the
formation of ’domain oriented’ inter-organizational cooperation struc-
tures, cross-cutting private and public spheres as well as different institu-
tional orders (Gray 1985).
Another source of interactional flexibility results from the capacity of ,
organizations to vary their degree of social participation and commitment

’
by deciding which and how many members or sub-units shall engage in a
certain field of interaction. When human individuals reflect on whether to
attend a conference or to enter into a negotiation, they are confronted
with the alternative of either being fully present (and thus expressing
their categorical willingness to participate and be exposed to all kinds of
communications and pressures), or of being fully absent (and thus show-
ing their categorical refusal to come and excluding themselves from all
interactions). Organizations, especially large ones, can choose among a
far broader variety of alternatives, especially by deciding at which hier-
archical level the external interaction should occur. When the president
himself or herself participates, surrounded by his or her staff and subordi-
nate directors, the organization communicates to its partners and to the !
public that it considers the interaction to be extremely important and is
expecting far-reaching results. If it is represented by members of an
inferior level, the organization indicates its intention to keep its involve-
445
ment low. When making such decisions, organizations are not only able,
but inescapably forced, to communicate ex ante to their interaction
partner which level of involvement they have chosen.
In general, organizations do not engage in many high-involvement inter-
actions at the same time because the interaction capacities of peak per-
sons is quite limited, and because unacceptable inconsistencies and
contradictions within the system would result if different representatives
were able to make commitments that bind the whole corporation. Even
when the load of simultaneous action is rather low, organizations may
cling to the principle of keeping external interactions at the lowest poss-
ible hierarchical levels, in order to free higher levels for corrective inter-
ventions when grievances occur. Whenever superiors conclude that the
behaviour of inferiors was ’mistaken’ and must be corrected, they
demonstrate to the outside world that intra-organizational controls are
still working and that ’the organization’ is still upholding its declared
value standards despite ’casual misbehaviour’ by relatively unimportant
members.
Recalling the fact that organizations are preferred targets of responsi-
bility attributions because most of their actions are considered to be
intentional (see Section 3), it is easy to see that such a condition would be
hard to tolerate if all actions, as well as all the unintended consequences,
were automatically attributed to the organization as a whole.
Fortunately, the freedom to manipulate responsibility attributions by
making use of internal structural differentiations acts as a tension-reduc-
ing mechanism. Typically, much of the responsibility can be
’marginalized’ by attributing it to defects of minor sub-units and/or the
qualificational or moral deficiencies of individual members. Only a
residual part has to be absorbed by the organization as a whole, insofar as
it is at least responsible for the recruitment or control practices that have
evidently not prevented the occurrence of individual deviant
behaviour.
Even if all decisions and actions are the result of collective cooperation,
the principles of formal hierarchy make sure that whatever happens, it is
always possible to find a single superior who can be burdened with full
responsibility. So, hierarchy provides organizations with the means of
self-purification by using the rather primitive social mechanism of ’scape-
goating’ (for example, by replacing a leader who symbolizes a disastrous
policy or by getting rid of a manager formally ’responsible’ for criminal
financial transactions).
Finally, internal structural differentiations provide organizations with a
third kind of interactional flexibility by increasing their capacity to partici-
pate in processes of norm-definition and norm-modification and to expose
their norms, rules, and other behavioural standards to continuous critical
evaluations.
On the one hand, organizations are better able to implement given
behavioural standards, norms, and rules in a highly consistent, uncom-
promising manner than individuals. They can do this by designing control
446
systems or technologies in such a way that practically no deviancy can
occur. On the other hand, committing their lower levels to such standards
does not prevent organizations from allowing staff at higher levels to
recognize and judge the effects of ongoing actions, to reflect about the
viability or the deficiency of actual procedures, to elaborate completely ~,
different rules and programs for future implementation, or to engage in
external interactions (e.g. negotiations) resulting in the modification of
old or in the generation of new normative regulations. ,
Thus, a typical administrative agency always has the double role of

executing established policies on the one hand and of influencing political
processes directed at policy change on the other. The reason is that as a I
result of its operative actions, it acquires more knowledge than anybody

else on what problems are still unsolved, what legal norms should be
changed, and in what respect administrative practices have to be
improved (see Scharpf 1973: 66f.). By committing whole sub-units or
roles to such non-operative activities, organizations can even have ’vested
interests’ to keep organizational programs, norm structures, and rules in
a fluid condition.
Industrial relations systems are typically designed to keep the normative
framework governing the relationship between employers and workers in
a state of incomplete institutionalization, so that the fully employed func-
tionaries on both sides can always keep themselves busy with processes of
negotiation and find enough opportunities to produce ’successful out-
comes’ useful for their personal reputation and career. In fact, a final
consolidation of traditionalized rules (e.g. distribution criteria for income
or fringe benefits) would destroy the raison d’etre of the whole system,
which is based upon the assumption that the endemic conflict between
workers and employers will never be definitively solved (Allen
1971 ).
Thus, inter-organizational systems of conflict resolution are especially
needed in those problem areas where an irreversible fixation of rules is
dysfunctional due to the intrinsically insolvable nature of the conflict and/
or due to changing situational conditions that continuously create a
demand for new kinds of solutions. (In industrial relations systems both
conditions certainly apply.) While interacting individuals may be more
prone to solve, eliminate, repress, or escalate a conflict, interacting
organizations are more disposed to ’institutionalize’ it, perpetuating it
infinitely while simultaneously regulating it through a structure of pre-
cisely defined and strictly enforced (but constantly modifiable)
rules.
I
Conclusions
To summarize the preceding argumentations, it may be stated that terms
such as ’social actor’ and ’social interaction’ apply in a more fundamental
and far-reaching sense to organizations than to human individuals.
1. While individuals are anchored in biological and psychological system
~
447
levels, organizations are fully constituted by actions; their survival as well

as their identities are bound up with their capacity to perform certain
kinds of actions and/or to reach certain goals.
2. As emotional reactions and other kinds of spontaneous, ’uncon-
trolled’ behaviour are largely absent, most activities of organizations
qualify as ’intended actions’: thus justifying the attribution of full moral
responsibility and the implementation of social control.
3. On a methodological plane, organizational actions are better objects
for empirical study than individual actions, because in addition to overt
behaviour, the constitutive antecedents (goals, intentions, normative
commitments, etc.) are also visible to outside observers (e.g. in terms of
written documents or explicit acts of decision).
4. Because intra-systemic and inter-systemic processes and structures are
constituted by the same mechanisms (of social communication), organiza-
tions are inclined to be fully socialized actors, not preserving an inaccess-
ible inner sphere of ’privacy’ comparable to the sphere of ’subjective
experience’ of human beings. Besides overt actions, internal activities can
also be submitted to external surveillance and social control.
5. Organizations are more disposed to assume an active role in defining
and revising the structural parameters of their societal environment and
their interactive relationships, and to maintain this capacity even when
they engage in different interaction processes at the same time. In a
deeper sense than average individuals, they can be ’role-making’ (instead
of ’role-taking’) actors: keeping inter-organizational fields in a state of
permanent fluidity and normative structures in a process of constant
evolution.
6. When actor-models are constructed in the social sciences, it is often
found that the idealized assumptions are fulfilled better by organizations
than by human individuals. For instance, organizations are far better
equipped to be ’fully informed’ about the economic market conditions
under which they operate, to have complete knowledge about the legal
rules, to reproduce given behavioural activities with almost perfect
regularity or to enforce norms of rationality in relating ends and
means.
On the other hand, the applicability of interactional theoretical frame-
works is hampered by the fact that it is often hard to identify the
boundaries of organizational actors and that growth or merger are ready
functional substitutes for interaction.
When all this is granted, new perspectives of sociological analysis are
opened, in which modern society is conceived as a field of co-existing,
competing and interacting individual and supra-individual actors.
First, many fascinating new developments are associated with the fact
that organizational actors replace individuals in many important fields:
e.g. as dominant economic shareholders, philanthropic donators, spon-
sors of artists and cultural institutions, or as participants in election
campaigns and processes of political decision-making. Based on their

specific action capacities and subsistence needs, corporate actors may be
448
disposed to articulate very different value standards and goals than I

previous societal elites, and to promote processes of widespread interac- I
tion and rapid social change discrepant with individual capacities and
needs.
Second, conflictive relationships between organizations and individuals
have to be considered: e.g. when they meet each other as competitors for
the same resources or clients or as litigant parties in court. For instance,
how can individual retail store owners or professional ’solo practitioners’
stand up against competing big corporations who control an incompar-
ably higher amount of resources, expertise and interactive capacities?
What provisions (e.g. on the legal plane) have to be made in order to give
individuals adequate protection?
In many fields, individuals may feel increasingly marginalized because
they are not able to compete successfully with the more potent organiza-
tions. New ways of collective action (e.g. social movement activities) may
be understood as attempts to restrict organizational action and to make
organizations more responsive to individual needs.
Third, complementary functional interdependencies have to be con-
sidered. For instance, the social world of individuals is increasingly
shaped by the fact that there are many powerful organizations which can
be made responsible for many unsatisfactory events and developments
and harnessed for various new values and goals (Geser 1982). As a result,
human individuals may experience a lessening of social constraints (e.g.
in the form of more liberal standards of morality and a higher variability
of life-styles), because the macro-order is less dependent on conformity at
the individual level (Geser 1989: 221f.).
There are sound reasons for the assertion that in modern societies, the
cleavage between ’individuals’ and ’organizations’ may replace older
cleavages between groups of individuals (e.g. between elites and lower
classes). This could explain the empirical finding that in modern societies,
political polarizations based on traditional class antagonisms are of
declining importance. Instead, many new conflicts are defined in terms of
’establishment’ vs. ’anti-establishment’: a polarity well apt to articulate
the growing hiatus between the Lebenswelt’ of human beings and the
exotic new world of ever-expanding corporate actors (Inglehart 1984:
256f.).
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Interaction Theory Organizational Actors

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Towards Interaction

supervision and social control. Finally, organizations are differentiated actors;

serious studies about interactions between organizations and individuals

inter-organizational interactions on the other (e.g. Turk 1970; Negandhi

they need for planning their long-term specialized activities. By address-

Organizations as ’Action Constituted Actors’

thesizing physiological, senso-motoric and psychological processes in

primary action capacities in non-organizational contexts of socialization

whole arising from their composition. In other words, organizations are

outputs, and if they become inactive (e.g. by dismissing all their ;/

are reliably produced. For instance to characterize an organization as a

other as three separate levels of specification, as is typically the case for

Very rapid, discontinuous change in organizational actions usually

determined by intrasystemic needs to secure their own survival and com-

gestures or expressive implications of their bodily appearance) and the

rather on its artificially created formal structure and ’corporate design’

mechanisms are needed in order to compensate for the lack of intra-

regulations. For organizations, legal litigation is therefore not the

required for certain types of actions. Norms directed at everyone are

reduction of pollution or the substitution of dangerous technologies or

Self-objectification of Systemic Goals, Structures and Processes

Discounting rather marginal traditions of radical behavourism (e.g. Skin-

explain human action and interpersonal interaction (e.g. Mead, Weber,

tives, taking adecision) are invisible.

priority it gives to various values and goals and to what kind of

This condition of internal transparency is perhaps the most important i

organizational resources and decision-making influence. So, if we know

intra-organizational processes, thus preventing intended ’unlawful

Growth, Interlocking and Merger as Functional Alternatives to

centred around consensually aspired scarce goods are usually restricted to

to come into existence. j

customers when producers decide to install their own marketing depart-

Differentiation of Interacting Sub-units and Graduation of

irreversible choices and sequential patterns of role engagement actions

In contrast, organizations are basically ’dividual’ actors capable of

executing simultaneously many different (even contradictory) courses of

a limitless number of social action fields and adapt to highly divergent,

and friendly to all people seen as prospective clients, the accounting

(e.g. by establishing additional branches, offices or roles). As Thompson

’Under norms of rationality, organizations facing heterogeneous task environ-

In order to understand and predict the actions of a human individual,

is more helpful to get a cross-sectional view about the variety of its

By loosening the coupling among their subsystems or between different

’middle distance’ between complete intimacy and raging hostility,

partners (e.g. suppliers, clients or opponents) under all

A fortiori, multilateral inter-organizational networks are interaction

potent source of structural flexibility in modern societies, where new

organizations to vary their degree of social participation and commitment

systems or technologies in such a way that practically no deviancy can

Thus, a typical administrative agency always has the double role of

result of its operative actions, it acquires more knowledge than anybody

levels, organizations are fully constituted by actions; their survival as well

campaigns and processes of political decision-making. Based on their

disposed to articulate very different value standards and goals than I

References Aiken. M., and J. Hage Aldrich, H. E., and J. Pfeffer

McCarthy J. D., and M. N. Zald

Mizruchi, M. S., and M. Schwartz R&ouml;hl, K. F.

1973 ’Size, composition and function of

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Mizruchi, M. S., and M. Schwartz Röhl, K. F.