SYSTEMS, NETWORKS AND STRUCTURES

An essay on organization theory as a strategy of representation

A dissertation submitted for the degree of Ph.D.

by

José Manuel Malavé Márquez

MBA, Instituto de Estudios Superiores de Administración (IESA), Licentiate

in Psychology (specialty Social Psychology), Universidad Central de
Venezuela, Caracas, Venezuela

University of Lancaster, July, 1992

 SUMMARY

This thesis discusses certain problems related to the concept of organization as a bounded entity, which
presupposes the existence of a boundary between the organization and the environment. It is argued that
the problem of defining and specifying organizational boundaries cannot be solved by simply 'inspecting'
an organization or a sample of organizations, for the problem refers to the concept of organization itself;
and, therefore, that the understanding of organizational boundaries requires an understanding of the
procedures followed in representing organization. The thesis' objective is to search for an approach to the
study of organizing processes, within the context of a discussion of organization theory as a strategy of
representation. The thesis consists of four parts: (1) an inquiry into the foundations of organization theory
as an application of the system approach in social science; (2) a discussion of the application of the
concept of network in the study of organizations; (3) an exploration of the concept of socio-technical
network as a way of developing an approach to the understanding of organizing processes; and (4) the
proposition and discussion of the concept of organizing as event-structuring, as a way of accounting for
the boundary condition from a process-oriented perspective. Based on the analysis of empirical cases and
historical materials, it is concluded that the reduction of the organization to the boundaries of a firm, or
any other example of bounded entities, produces an incomplete account of the phenomena involved in
social organizational processes, and that organization theory cannot rest on an a priori distinction
between organization and environment. A requirement for developing organization theory is an
understanding of the problem of boundaries rather than simply taking for granted their existence and
consequences. The thesis attempts to contribute to this exploration by proposing an approach to the study
of organizing processes which does not require the assumption of boundaries as a starting point of the
inquiry.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The philosopher Michel Serres has used a didactical way of formulating the problem of communication:
instead of an opposition between a sender and a receiver, the problem consists in their collaboration in
order to oppose a 'third man', i.e., in order to reduce noise. I should like to acknowledge, first and
foremost, Robert Cooper's efforts, as my supervisor, in fighting against a third man whose strength
derived not only from the difficulties inherent in the theme of this thesis but also, and perhaps mainly,
from my own inability to deal with such difficulties and to find ways of communicating at times subtle
and complicated ideas. Bob Cooper has been able to convert many enemies into allies, by highlighting the
best and suggesting how to transform the worst. Such is the ability of a first-rate thinker and of a
disinterested friend too. Of course, the persistence of noise, the sudden triumphs of the third man, is my
sole responsibility. This thesis would not have been possible without a long period devoted almost
exclusively to studying and thinking. Thanks to the Instituto de Estudios Superiores de Administración
(IESA), the British Council, and the University of Lancaster I have had the opportunity of pursuing a
doctoral degree. In fact, this thesis constitutes a good example of its own argument: how a flow of events
which involved material support, encouragement, academic environment, and resources of every kind,
took place and produced a tangible outcome through the boundaries of different organizations. Friends at
both IESA and Lancaster University deserve an especial mention for their intellectual and emotional
stimulus: Ramon Piñango, Janet Kelly, Colin Brown, Robert Chia, and Juan Mejía. Finally, my greatest
debt is to the love, commitment, support and patience of Adejanira Márquez and Elba Venegas: I dedicate
this thesis to them as an infinitesimal compensation.
 CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION .......................................................................................................................... 6
PART I. SYSTEMS ...................................................................................................................... 13
CHAPTER 1. THE MODERNIZATION OF SOCIAL THEORY .......................................... 14
Hobbes' Leviathan and the concept of system ...................................................................... 15
On Hobbes' approach ........................................................................................................ 16
The strategy of representation ........................................................................................... 17
Hobbes' concept of system ................................................................................................ 20
The system approach in modern social sciences ................................................................... 22
A programme for the social sciences ................................................................................ 23
On Parsons' social system ................................................................................................. 25
The objectification of the social system ....................................................................... 25
The role of values in the social system ......................................................................... 27
From watches to washing machines ............................................................................. 29
CHAPTER 2. ORGANIZING AS SYSTEMATIZING ........................................................... 32
On the foundations of organizing as systematizing .............................................................. 33
Weber's legacy and the tradition of systematizing ................................................................ 37
Further development of the system theory of organization .................................................. 40
A final comment on the boundary condition ........................................................................ 45
PART II. NETWORKS ................................................................................................................ 48
CHAPTER 3. NETWORKS IN THE SOCIAL SCIENCES .................................................... 50
Network analysis I: the social perspective ............................................................................ 51
Moreno's concept of network ............................................................................................ 51
The concept of network as a methodological tool ............................................................ 54
Network analysis II: the technical perspective ..................................................................... 58
CHAPTER 4. NETWORKS IN ORGANIZATION STUDIES ............................................... 59
Interorganizational networks................................................................................................. 60
Network analysis in a case-study approach ...................................................................... 61
Network analysis in statistical hypothesis testing ............................................................. 62
The study of interlockings ................................................................................................ 63
Intraorganizational networks................................................................................................. 66
Using networks to confirm contingency hypotheses ........................................................ 66
Operationalizing organizational drama ............................................................................. 68
A final comment on the reduction of networks to nets ......................................................... 69
APPENDIX TO CHAPTER 4. THE FIRM AS A NETWORK OF TRANSACTIONS ......... 71
A brief outline of the economic approach to organizing ...................................................... 72
The problems with organizing as economizing .................................................................... 74
PART III. SOCIO-TECHNICAL NETWORKS .......................................................................... 78
CHAPTER 5. TECHNOLOGY AND ORGANIZATION ....................................................... 78
The socio-technical approach: disclosing a basic problem in organization theory .............. 79
An exploration of a general concept of technology .............................................................. 82
Technology, organization and representation ....................................................................... 85
Introducing the concept of socio-technical network ............................................................. 87
 CHAPTER 6. THE SOCIO-TECHNICAL NETWORK APPROACH ................................... 89
Towards a definition of socio-technical networks ................................................................ 89
Methodological elements for an STN approach ................................................................... 91
The geometry of socio-technical networks ....................................................................... 92
On the specification of socio-technical networks ............................................................. 96
A general discussion of the STN approach ........................................................................... 99
CHAPTER 7. A CASE ILLUSTRATING THE STN APPROACH...................................... 102
A lesson of diagnosing and intervening .............................................................................. 103
A contextual analysis of the experience: the theatre of modernization .............................. 107
Two or more Venezuelas? .............................................................................................. 107
The framework of modernization ................................................................................... 110
PART IV. STRUCTURES ......................................................................................................... 114
CHAPTER 8. ORGANIZING AS EVENT-STRUCTURING............................................... 115
Basic concepts of event-structure theory ............................................................................ 116
The concept of structure.................................................................................................. 117
Ongoings and events ....................................................................................................... 118
The process of structural closure ........................................................................................ 120
The concept of closedness .............................................................................................. 121
Bounding and biasing ..................................................................................................... 123
From networks to structures ....................................................................................... 124
Structuring, interstructuring and destructuring ........................................................... 127
The boundary condition .............................................................................................. 129
The quantitative aspect of the structure .......................................................................... 131
A general discussion of event-structuring as a way of representing organization .............. 133
The problem of the event's place in nature ..................................................................... 134
Reconsidering the concept of event ................................................................................ 136
The event as appropriation .............................................................................................. 140
CHAPTER 9. THE STRUCTURING OF ORGANIZATION THEORY .............................. 146
Organization as appropriation ............................................................................................. 150
The appropriation of the networks of trade in Braudel's view of capitalism .................. 151
The appropriation of industrial networks ........................................................................ 154
The appropriation of innovation networks ...................................................................... 157
Cosmologies and ideologies: on the cultural matrix of organization theory ...................... 161
A typology of biased cosmologies .................................................................................. 162
A typology of ideologies of management ....................................................................... 165
Event-structuring as disciplining: organization theory as a discipline ............................... 169
On the professionalization of management..................................................................... 169
Disciplining managerial discourse .................................................................................. 171
The organization of writing ............................................................................................ 172
CONCLUSION ........................................................................................................................... 179
Decentring the organization .................................................................................................... 181
A final comment ..................................................................................................................... 185
BIBLIOGRAPHY ....................................................................................................................... 188
... there can be no absolute distinction between 'fact' and 'theorem'.
A fact has no finality and no authority over further adventures in
understanding: it is a first and conditionally acceptable
understanding of a 'going-on'. And a theorem is not an
unconditional terminus; it also is an understanding waiting to be
understood.

Michael Oakeshott (1975a: 1)

It all began with the first storyteller of the tribe... The number of
words was limited, and, faced with the multiform world and its
countless things, men defended themselves by inventing a finite
number of sounds combined in various ways... And the more
limited were the choices of phrase or behavior, the more complex
the rules of language or custom were forced to become in order to
master an ever-increasing variety of situations. The extreme
poverty of ideas about the world then available to man was
matched by a detailed, all-embracing code of rules.

Italo Calvino (1989: 3-4)

It is my opinion that theories are themselves narratives, but

dissimulated narratives; that one should not allow oneself to be
taken in by their pretension to omnitemporality; that the merit of
having produced a narration previously, even if it was in the form
of an unshakable system, never acquits one of the task of starting
again now...

J-F. Lyotard (quoted by Bennington, 1988: 111)

5
 INTRODUCTION
The creation of order out of chaos and the placement of a man, sometimes a woman or a small
group, at the centre of the created order has been a strategy of representation that can be found in
myths and scientific theories from ancient to modern times. The modern way of representing
order has achieved a high degree of elaboration and sophistication by means of the use of the
concept of system, in both its grounding in analogies with an assumed order of nature and its
formalization in mathematical expressions. A closer examination of this concept will reveal that
it is not, after all, as modern or novel as it is commonly presented. At least in ancient Greece
times, a concept of system was used in order to convey the idea of cosmic harmony centred on
one or more gods, and expressed in a mathematical language. At the inception of modernity,
Hobbes' idea of the commonwealth centred on the sovereign used a concept of system in a way
that inaugurated the contemporary idea of social system, including its mathematical
connotations. In fact, Hobbes referred to a modern, man-made world-picture in which creations
of order were acts through which men 'imitate' God. Thus, by defining the organization as a
system, current organization theory uses a well-established procedure: it produces order out of
chaos and places a manager at the centre of such an order. An important corollary of this
procedure of fixing and origin and a centre is that the system's existence implies the existence of
boundaries which specify what is inside and what is outside the organization. However, this part
of the theory has remained undemonstrated.

An inquiry into the definition and specification of organizational boundaries would find that
organization theory is struggling with an increasingly problematic criterion of membership (who
is and who is not an organization member) and that, instead of a consistent theoretical account of
the boundaries' existence, they are simply taken for granted or declared 'a matter of fact' and so
the problem becomes one of providing practical suggestions for the management of boundaries.
The present thesis takes the problem of the boundary condition (to borrow a term from
theoretical physics; see, e.g., Barrow and Tipler, 1989) in organization theory as a starting point
for an inquiry into the procedure of representation through which such a 'puzzle' has come about.
The thesis does not promise to offer a satisfactory solution to the problem of the existence of
boundaries, a solution coherent with prevailing metaphors and methods in the field of
organization studies. This is simply due to the fact that this problem is intrinsic to this way of
representing organization and, therefore, cannot be solved within the same framework. Nor does
the thesis propose a substitute to the system theory of organization, for any alternative would
resemble the system in one way or another.

The objective of the thesis is to propose a way of discussing this strategy of representation,
by showing how a particular discourse becomes articulated and elaborated, and deriving from
this discussion a way of approaching the process through which such a discourse becomes
established as a way of speaking (theorizing, teaching, investigating, managing, publishing). This
may provide us with an insight on how social organizational processes operate. This thesis has a
theoretical rather than empirical character, for these sorts of problems cannot be understood by
simply observing or inspecting an organization or a sample of organizations, no matter how large
the sample. The problem of boundaries refers to the concept of organization itself. Nevertheless,
the thesis has had a practical motivation related to personal experience in teaching and research
in this field. It might be worth recalling part of such an experience with the purpose, not of

6
presenting an autobiographical account of the tribulations of a scholar faced with a certain
academic puzzle, but of illustrating more general problems related to the need for giving answers
to situations involving organizations as bounded entities engaged in exchanges with 'their'
environments.

When I was completing my undergraduate studies in social psychology, the standard format
of a dissertation was centred on data collection via questionnaires, statistical analysis and
experimental design, and a short (rather than middle) range of theoretical enterprise. I was not
only supposed to follow such a model, but also whole-heartedly be in favour of it, as a means of
making social psychology into a serious discipline with something relevant to say about
important, acute social problems. Towards the end of the curriculum (three years of general
psychology studies plus two years of specialization in social psychology), and thanks to a course
on organization theory, I became acquainted with some of the subtleties of Parsons' system
theory; especially, those found in Parsons, Bales & Shils (1953). Such was the beginning of my
interest in problems of theorizing on social organization. Whilst looking for an empirically
plausible theme for my dissertation project, I was studying the case of a particular organization,
the Venezuelan telephone company, where I worked as assistant statistician for its Planning
Department. Later on, in line with my Parsonian mood, I found an acceptable hypothesis: the
system should show a relative emphasis on one of its four phases, due to the relative primacy of
one of its subsystems, and such a state should be reflected in its members' value-orientations.
Although Katz and Kahn and Lawrence and Lorsch had offered operationalizations of some of
Parsons' concepts, I decided to cleave my inquiry closer to Parsons' own work; particularly, the
rationale for classifying acts, according to the dimensions of the action-space. Having classified
the organization's activities, a greater emphasis on the goal achievement (gratification) phase, as
opposed to adaptation, integration or value-specification was found. That is, for example,
inaugurations of telephonic connections had a relative primacy over activities of research and
development. Then, organization members (those included in the payroll) were randomly
sampled, and semantic-differential formats were administered to explore their value-orientations.
In the scale groupings showed by factor analyses of the subjects' responses, two main factors
were easily identified: one comprising scales classified as evaluations related to
gratification/satisfaction, and the other one to more abstract qualities. The hypothesis was
supported by the finding of a dominance of the former factor.

The dissertation satisfied the examination requirements and was regarded as a good effort in
operationalization and measurement; later rethinking of this work made me feel less satisfied.
What was the nature of the link between classifications of activities and members' opinions? Was
it something simply spurious or purely artefactual? The theory was explicit: the members'
behaviour would be 'functional' as a result of their absorption and sharing of particular values
and expectations, a culture. But, even where it was easy to analyse the assumed socialization
process, it remained the fact that actual decision-makers were not included in the payroll. And, in
fact, the functionality of the members' behaviour was not clear at all. According to their
responses to the questionnaires, they did not seem to obtain enough satisfaction either from their
jobs or from the organizational outcomes. After that and some other experiences in
organizational studies, and then in research and teaching on organizations at the graduate school
of administration where I did the MBA, I have found myself looking for answers to similar
questions as those I made more than ten years ago.

7
 The assumption that a boundary between the organization and its environment is an essential
element for its definition imposes from the start a specific strategy in approaching empirical
cases: organizational phenomena should be delimited in order to distinguish the endogenous
from the exogenous, the controllable from the uncontrollable. The researcher or consultant thus
attains a workable, though often forced, account of problems. A common response to the failure
of noticing important influences, or of providing useful solutions to problems, is to blame the
researcher's or consultant's lack of skill in handling or interpreting the data. Less frequent is the
attempt to look behind the theory or starting point of the inquiry, e.g., the boundary condition, its
complex nature and peremptory force, and the peculiar character of organizations as bounded
entities. A question to begin with might then be why is the organization's existence so linked to
the existence of boundaries that, as Parsons and Bales (1953) would say, it would die without
them?

It seems that in speaking of organizations and organization theory, a basic dilemma must be
faced: either to accept the boundary condition and dedicate the study of organizations to find
solutions to the problem of how organizations can be internally managed to cope with
environmental threats and opportunities; or to reject the assumption of boundaries as mere
formalism and appearance, and denounce ideological tricks sold as theoretical developments. As
a way of putting aside this dilemma, an approach can be developed by pointing to a more general
process through which the real becomes transformed and represented, and creations of order out
of chaos emerge from everyday life. Thus, formal, managerial, and ideological issues, and the
very question of the possibility and implications of setting boundaries as an a priori condition in
organization theory, would be part of the same (organizing) processes through which social
organization becomes created, re-created and expressed in current language games. And this is
what this thesis is about.

Organization theory has become an increasingly active field. This fact is due not only to the
existence of a number of scholars needing to justify their academic positions and careers; but
also to a genuine recognition of demanding theoretical problems, and the need for integrating
different fields of social science in order to explain the phenomena of social organization. The
proposition to be developed throughout this thesis is that the existence of organizations as
bounded entities cannot be simply taken for granted, as a starting point of the inquiry, and that it
is possible to develop an approach to the study of the processes through which something like a
bounded organization comes into being, i.e., organizing processes. This requires an
understanding of certain historically influential theoretical tools devised to account for
organizational phenomena (systems, networks and structures), as well as an account of relevant
contributions to the field of organization theory. However, the thesis is intended less to provide a
review of the organization literature, or the history and the state of the art of organization theory,
than a discussion of organization theory as a strategy of representation by analysing its
procedures and products.

This discussion draws heavily on the work of analysis and critique of traditional
philosophical categories realized by such philosophers as Heidegger and Wittgenstein, and in
general on what has become a tradition in contemporary philosophy consisting of interpretations,
criticisms and/or elaborations of problems formulated or re-formulated by both of them. This

8
work also relies on the revision and critique of the traditional outlook of economic and social
history realized by such historians as Fernand Braudel and Sidney Pollard, as well as on Mary
Douglas' enlightening analyses of such phenomena as cultural bias and institutional thinking. In
this sense, the proposed discussion is based on examples drawn from historical experience and
on philosophical interpretations of such an experience which have contributed to the analysis of
strongly-held assumptions with important implications for social science; e.g., the idea of the
individual as an originating agent, or the 'centre' of a socio-historical order, with its
accompaniment of rationalism, anthropomorphism and psychological reductionism, or that of
society as a fully-fledged order consisting of a dynamics of bounded entities or complete wholes.

The thesis consists of four parts identified with different ways of articulating discourses
representing organization: systems (chapters 1-2), networks (chapters 3-4), socio-technical
networks (chapters 5-7), and structures (chapters 8-9). The first general part presents an inquiry
into the foundations of the concept of organization as a bounded entity which can be traced back
to Thomas Hobbes' use of the concept of system. It is suggested that Hobbes' Leviathan
inaugurated a tradition, which uses the concept of system in order to represent social
organization, a 'research programme' in which procedures and problems are rigorously
sanctioned. The discussion of twentieth-century representatives of this tradition focuses on the
works of: (1) Parsons, whose work illustrates both a contemporary reformulation of the
framework and a bridge from a general theory of society to a more specific organization theory;
(2) Selznick and Blau, who contributed two influential reformulations of the basic research
programme, including the kind of questions that should be pursued and the proper methods of
study (respectively, the case study and the comparative method); and (3) Katz and Kahn whose
model shows a further elaboration and articulation of the system theory of organization, by
adopting concepts and vocabulary from scientific and technological developments such as
cybernetics and the reformulation of thermodynamics.

Along this tradition, the strategy of representation ('enframing' in Heideggerian terms)

implies the assumption of boundaries as an intrinsic element for the objectification of the
organization as an entity, and the possibility of focusing the study of organization on an analysis
of this entity's properties. Thus, the discussion of the boundary condition becomes a secondary
issue, notwithstanding the recognition by these various writers of its importance. In more recent
expositions of the system-based theory of organizations (e.g. Scott, 1987), the problem of
definition and specification of boundaries is declared unsolved, though remedies are offered for
the management of boundaries.

The second part explores the possibility of developing an alternative to the strategy of the
system theory of organization: a network-based approach. A network approach provides an
alternative way of representing organization; for it does not require, in principle, the assumption
of an entity as a starting point and can thus bring some light to the understanding of 'the'
organization and 'its' boundaries. Two basic traditions of the network approach are discussed in
the third chapter: the tradition of social network analysis, dating from Jacob Moreno's work, and
the engineering approach to network analysis developed as part of the tradition of scientific
management. Chapter 4 presents examples of the application of a network approach in
organization studies. In this field, the social perspective (networks as sets of lines connecting
individuals) has been the dominant approach. In analyses of intra- and inter-organizational

9
networks, the concept of network has provided a tool for the treatment of informal aspects of
organizational functioning.

In this sense, instead of providing an alternative way of representing organization, the

network approach has become confined inside the system framework. It can be argued that the
abstraction of social phenomena, separated from a technical domain, produces a representation of
networks devoid of the process dimension. By leaving aside the work, the network becomes a
net, a purely spatial representation that is, precisely, the terrain of the system approach. A
reference to the economists' attempt to develop organization theory in terms of transactions,
because of its network-flavoured orientation, is included as an appendix to the fourth chapter.
However, in spite of developments in the economic theory of the firm in which the firm is
presented as a 'legal fiction' and the problem of the boundary as almost irrelevant since the
market provides discipline to behaviours both inside and outside the firm, the firm remains the
unit of analysis and its representation follows the system strategy of taking for granted the
existence of boundaries. Moreover, by taking as given initial endowments, the transaction cost
economics approach becomes a stylized psychological theory dealing with problems of bounded
rationality and opportunism which the problem of organization becomes reduced to (i.e., what
Hobbes would have called 'the ignorance and passions of men' as the intrinsic causes of the
commonwealth's destruction).

The concept of socio-technical network (Law & Callon, 1988) is explored in the third part as
a way of developing a network approach to the understanding of organizing processes. This
requires the recognition of the social-and-technical character of organizing processes; i.e., not
simply to look for a way of matching two separate aspects, but to understand what the social and
the technical share in organizational phenomena. A common feature of technique and language
suggests a way of understanding the basic character of organizing: a detached way of producing
an order and temporality (Castoriadis, 1984), by ensuring the possibility of endless repetition of
the representation, its repeated 'dramatization' (Serres, 1983). A socio-technical network is then
defined as a series of on-going processes formed by interlockings of repeatable actions (whether
performed by humans or non-humans) through which a way of representing becomes an
enduring feature of the real. According to Cooper (1992: 262): 'Organization as an active process
of displacement or transformation denies and defies such categories as inside and outside; it is
more like a process that travels along socio-technical networks'.

Some methodological elements are introduced: (1) socio-technical networks are not diagrams
with absolute beginnings or ends in any space-time sense. Any delimitation derives from a
particular analytical concern, or from the point of telling a particular story. (2) The forms
adopted by such diagrams require a topological rather than Euclidean geometric approach:
instead of a logic of distance and measurement (as in the traditional nodes and arrows of network
analysis), a logic of displacement and transformation is required where the emergence and
dissolution of forms (e.g., organizations as entities) become transitory foldings and unfoldings of
the historical field (Deleuze, 1988). In order to illustrate a way of tracing and following socio-
technical networks in the study of an empirical case, Foucault's (1988b) notion of 'regime of
practices' and Latour's (1988) 'network of gestures and skills' are referred to. Finally, a discussion
of an experience in organizational diagnosis and intervention in Venezuelan local government

10
agencies is included in order to illustrate the difference between a socio-technical network
approach and a systemic one.

The development of a socio-technical network approach to the study of organizing processes

leads the discussion to a certain dilemma: either organizations as bounded entities can be
dissolved as transitory and unessential instances of folding and unfolding of the socio-historical
field, or the approach lacks a consistent explanation of the presence of such objects (i.e.,
organizations) in the modern world-picture and simply neglects the problem of explaining them.
Does the former alternative mean the 'death' of organizations, firms or government bureaucracies
for instance, as objects or units of analysis? One possibility would be to regard this kind of
question as mere nostalgia for more static or rationalistic models. But, even in that case, a
problem subsists which should be accounted for: where do those objects come from that their
features so persistently appear in our current language and world view? The last part of the thesis
is devoted to a discussion of this problem and to show that such a dilemma can be regarded as
unnecessary, or even misleading, since it derives from an unanalysed 'realist' standpoint.

Chapter 8 presents an attempt to account for the boundary condition in which the hypothesis
of event-structuring is discussed as a way of producing a consistent explanation of the
organization's coming into existence as a bounded entity. The proposition of conceiving of
organizing as event-structuring in order to explaining the system's property of 'closure' is based
on Floyd Allport's theory of event-structure as a general formulation of the dynamic properties of
behaviour from a structural perspective. The closure of a structure is far from being a
deterministic problem: the transition from networks to structures requires a certain probability
density of events. In this sense, the achievement of a structural character cannot be assumed as a
definitive, once-and-for-all state. This is illustrated by historical experience, and is also a
consequence of the theory.

The setting of boundaries understood as a problem of 'bending' socio-technical networks is a

matter of (the possibility of) repeated exercise, not a condition which can be taken for granted.
However, the boundaries traced by adopting a realist or naturalistic approach do not necessarily
coincide with those of a firm, government bureau or any other example of organization. In this
sense, this hypothesis cannot explain the boundary condition of organization theory. Chapter 9
illustrates a way of modifying the original hypothesis of event-structuring in order to provide an
understanding of the traditional bounded entity, by bringing to light the historically folded, and
in a sense ungraspable, nature of the time-space coordinates in which such a structure occurs: the
'concealment' of the event of the organization's coming to presence, or event of appropriation in a
Heideggerian sense. Organization theory can then be regarded as a re-presentation or re-
construction of structuring events within a particular framework. That is, organization theory can
also be taken as an event-structure itself, as an instance of appropriation of socio-technical
networks and their re-presentation in the form of bounded entities. This is illustrated by means of
(1) historical examples of appropriation as a capitalist mode of organizing economic and social
life, (2) an analysis of the wider context (the cultural matrix) in which organization theory
becomes coherent with prevailing metaphors and justifications of a particular socio-historical
order, and (3) an exploration of the process through which such a coherence is attained: a regime
of practices (in Foucault's terms) associated with the movement of the professionalization of

11
management and managerial education, or the disciplining of the discourse of organization
theory.

Finally, though the thesis does not have a conclusion deduced in logical terms, it is argued
that rather than looking for a certain state of nature, the understanding of organizational
boundaries requires us to recognize that a certain language game is being played, as Wittgenstein
might have said. That is, the discourse of organization theory has in any case correspondence
with a certain way of representing a particular socio-historical order which has become
established as a way of speaking and doing things, as a form of life: the organization is a
bounded entity, an order created out of chaos, which has a manager at its centre. The socio-
technical network approach and the (modified) hypothesis of event-structuring are proposed in
order to develop ways of dealing with the problem of understanding this strategy of fixing an
origin and a centre to organizing processes in the study of particular, empirical cases.

This can be expressed in the form of two suggestions regarding organizational analysis: (i) to
move from traditional diagnostic approaches towards a certain genealogical approach as a way of
attempting to trace the development of organizing processes, and producing different renderings
of empirical materials and formulations of problems concerning organizational phenomena; and
(ii) to try to avoid the emphasis on explanations based upon individual decision-making and
choices, and include other features of organizing processes (such as transformations and
displacements) as a way of 'decentring' the discourse of organization theory, and understanding
the centring of the organization around the figure of the manager, with its constraints and
reductions, as part of the same construction process. In a sense, the problem to be addressed is
not the social construction of reality, but the construction of the social itself.

12
 PART I. SYSTEMS
'Picture' here does not mean some imitation, but rather what
sounds forth in the colloquial expression, 'We get the picture'
concerning something... 'We get the picture' concerning
something does not mean only that what is, is set before us, is
represented to us, in general, but that what is stands before us
—in all that belongs to it and all that stands together in it— as
a system.
Martin Heidegger (1977: 129)

From ancient times, the concept of system has provided Western civilization with a way of
introducing order into any realm conceived or presented as disordered or chaotic. In ancient
Greece, for example, music theorists used this concept to classify and arrange in hierarchies a
wide array of styles and rhythms, in accordance with the most general laws of universal harmony
(Henderson, 1975; Michaelides, 1978; Sachs, 1944). Now, almost any discipline uses the
concept of system as a way of representing and constructing the matter of its concern. It is indeed
a feature of our epoch, of our cultural world, that any piece of reality can be understood by
defining its boundaries with respect to a larger context, by analysing its internal and external
relations, and by establishing a more or less stable functioning as a basis for predicting its
behaviour. This procedure should ensure the attainment of control over the object so represented,
unless the specification of those conditions was mistakenly made. Thus, for instance, in the case
of a similarly isolated segment of social reality certain complexities and uncertainties might pose
difficulties to the specification of boundaries, relations, and stable functioning. The term system
approach has been used, in the social sciences, to refer to the project of solving these difficulties
by applying the concept of system to the analysis of social reality.

Organization theory, understood as a way of representing and constructing a class of

phenomena, can also be considered as an instance of application of the concept of system. In
fact, our current concept of organization is inextricably linked to this concept. The idea of
starting this discussion on organization theory by raising the role of the system concept is a
consequence of this recognition. This discussion is concerned with a particular, temporal rather
than absolute, meaning of organization: the modern meaning of organization, or the articulation
of a theory of organization in the modern world. The expression 'modern world' implies less a
chronological period than a particular way of representing. This sense is revealed in Heidegger's
(1977: 23) idea of modern technology: 'The essence of modern technology shows itself in what
we call Enframing... It is nothing technological, nothing on the order of a machine. It is the way
in which the real reveals itself as standing-reserve'. According to William Lovitt, translator of
this work of Heidegger (1977: 3), the word essence 'does not simply mean what something is,
but... it means, further, the way in which something pursues its course, the way in which it
remains through time as what it is'. The idea of essence (not to be reduced to that of 'whatness' or
quidditas) refers then to the way in which technology becomes an enduring presence: a particular
way of representing through which the real is made to appear as something immediately
graspable, orderable, storable. Thus,

13
 To represent means here: of oneself to set something before oneself and to make secure what has been
set in place... Representing is no longer the apprehending of that which presences... Representing is
making-stand-over-against, an objectifying that goes forward and masters. In this way representing
drives everything together into the unity of that which is thus given the character of object
(Heidegger, 1977: 149-50).

Heidegger distinguished two modes of representing: one which is content with the apprehension
of what is present, extant; and a mode through which 'extantness' itself is produced. This second
mode identifies the modern world: 'The fundamental event of the modern age is the conquest of
the world as picture' (p. 135). The modern meaning of organization should reflect this character
of enframing of modern technology: a way of representing in which the real reveals itself as
organized. And the concept of system should also reflect a change from an ancient apprehending
to a modern enframing, in order to enable the articulation of a theory of the organization as an
object, i.e., the modern way of representing organization. It should be made clear that the
objective of this discussion is not to criticize the system approach; but to understand this
approach, its enframing character.

This part consists of two chapters. The first chapter begins with a selective reading of
Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan, by focusing in its representational strategy and highlighting its
presentation of the notion of system, as an early antecedent of the attempt to 'get the picture' of
social reality, i.e., the modern way of representing. The following section illustrates the system
approach as a programme for the social sciences. In this context the work of Talcott Parsons is
selected as the outstanding example of the realization of this programme. The second chapter
leads to the development of organization theory through the application of the system approach:
the articulation of organizing as systematizing. The works of Selznick and Blau serve, in this
case, as a centre of gravity, so to speak, from which the discussion of the foundations of
organization theory leads backward to the legacy of Max Weber, and forward to a further
development of the system theory of organization illustrated by the work of Katz and Kahn.
Finally, a comment on the problem of organizational boundaries suggests the need for an
understanding of organization in terms of a different approach: one in which the definition of
organizations as systems does not constitute the starting point.

CHAPTER 1. THE MODERNIZATION OF SOCIAL THEORY

The objective of this chapter is to provide an introduction to the system concept of organization,
by discussing its historico-theoretical context. Without attempting to establish a chronological
priority, Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan serves to illustrate an early antecedent of the modern
concept of social system. The first section consists, then, in a study of Hobbes' work which
focuses on his formulation of the problem of representing social organization, his general
approach, and his use of the concept of system as a way of representing and dealing with
collectives. The second section refers to the contemporary application of the system approach in
social science, and consists of two parts: first, the conception of the system approach as a
programme for the social sciences; and, second, the illustration of a way of realizing this
programme in the work of Talcott Parsons which, at the same time, provides a bridge from the
general theory of society to the more specific field of organization theory.

14
Hobbes' Leviathan and the concept of system
The entry for system in the Oxford English Dictionary (second edition, 1989; OED for short)
presents the following definition: 'I. An organized or connected group of objects. 1. A set or
assemblage of things connected, associated, or interdependent, so as to form a complex unity; a
whole composed of parts in orderly arrangement according to some scheme or plan'.
Organization refers to: 'The action of organizing, or condition of being organized, as a living
being' and 'The action of organizing or putting into systematic form; the arranging or co-
ordinating of parts into a systematic whole'. It seems that the meanings of both system and
organization resemble and, moreover, help define each other. But the meaning of organization is
related to a specific referent: a living being. An interesting question would, then, be whether this
referent could be thought of in the same terms as a system, i.e., as a whole composed of parts
according to some scheme. Such a possibility would not only add to the confusion or conflation
of the meaning of both terms (system and organization), but lead directly to the problem of
representation: the referent needs to be re-presented in order to be able to support a meaning. An
illustration of such a possibility is the theme of this section on Hobbes' Leviathan (1991). It is
also interesting to note that the OED's earliest reference to the word system is a quotation from
Leviathan, a book originally written in English and published in London around 1650. According
to Richard Tuck (1989: vii), 'Hobbes created English-language philosophy. Before his work,
there was little written in English on the more technical areas of philosophy... his finest
achievement... was to produce, in Leviathan, the first unquestionably great philosophical work in
our language...'

Hobbes explicitly stated his purpose in writing Leviathan at the end of his book: to design a
scheme or plan convincing enough, and subject to the restrictions imposed both by nature and
God, for the attainment of order.

And thus I have brought to an end my Discourse of Civill and Ecclesiaticall Government, occasioned
by the disorders of the present time, without partiality, without application, and without other designe,
than to set before mens eyes the mutuall Relation between Protection and Obedience; of which the
condition of Human Nature, and the Laws Divine, (both Naturall and Positive) require an inviolable
observation (Hobbes, 1991: 491).

This section attempts to show how Hobbes employed the resources available in his cultural
world in solving this problem. His solution has become a landmark of political science. But it
also posited an object which would become the central focus of the social sciences in general.
Hobbes' solution was what we, as twentieth-century observers, would call a simulation model:

NATURE (the Art whereby God hath made and governes the World) is by the Art of man, as in many
other things, so in this also imitated, that it can make an Artificiall Animal. For seeing life is but a
motion of Limbs, the beginning whereof is in some principall part within; why may we not say, that
all Automata (Engines that move themselves by springs and wheeles as doth a watch) have an
artificiall life? ... Art goes yet further, imitating that Rationall and most excellent worke of Nature,
Man. For by Art is created that great LEVIATHAN called a COMMONWEALTH, or STATE, (in
latine CIVITAS) which is but an Artificiall Man... (1991: 9).

15
And Hobbes included a list of the elements to be simulated: soul (soveraignty), joynts
(magistrates and officers), nerves (reward and punishment), strength (wealth and riches),
businesse (people safety), memory (counsellors), reason and will (equity and laws), health
(concord), sicknesse (sedition), death (civil war), fiat pronounced by God in the creation (pacts
and covenants). Throughout the following discussion, it is necessary to keep in mind Hobbes'
observance (or rhetorical utilization at least) of a basic tenet of the Christian interpretation of the
world: 'for the Christian interpretation of the world, in conformity with the creation story of
Genesis, every being that is not God himself is created. This presupposition is simply taken for
granted' (Heidegger, 1988: 118). This explains why the existence of the commonwealth is to be
conceived as the product of an act by which men imitate God, i.e., as a creation.

On Hobbes' approach
Hobbes used a rational procedure in order to simulate his Man, a rational model: 'that Rationall
and most excellent worke of Nature'. His work follows the geometric method, the procedure of
deriving propositions from definitions and basic postulates: from natural and divine laws to the
needed laws for the government of people, expressed in abstract terms yet with a clear contextual
reference. As he explicitly stated (1991: 3): 'I speak not of the men, but (in the Abstract) of the
Seat of Power, (like those simple and unpartiall creatures in the Roman Capitol, that with their
noyse defended those within it, not because they were they, but there,) offending none, I think,
but those without, or such within (if there be any such) as favour them'.

Hobbes' resources were those of the traditions of which he was an inheritor, and in which he
was a participant. Though well-trained in the Scholastic tradition, he was not a scholar. His
career, as adviser or consultant as we would say, led him to a more worldly life, in which the
most recent discoveries, inventions, and controversies, had a more immediate resonance than in
the traditional and regulated life of the schools. He was well acquainted with Descartes' ideas,
and with Bacon's reaction against Aristotelianism. In fact, he acted as amanuensis to Francis
Bacon around 1623, and received the Discourse on method in 1637 (see Tuck's introduction to
Hobbes, 1991). And, last but not least, like many others of his time, Hobbes was attracted by two
important currents: scepticism regarding human nature and the praise of accounting as both an
exercise of reason and a way to counter the uncertainty that an unreliable human nature
introduces into daily affairs.

The first part of Leviathan —entitled 'Of Man'— contains the foundations from which the
basic argument would be elaborated in the rest of the work. In fact, since the task was to simulate
a Man, the first step was to expose its main features, based upon the knowledge available in
Hobbes' time. Let us quote some statements from the first part in order to illustrate Hobbes'
argument and the resources given to him by those traditions:

[Singly considered, the thoughts of man] are every one a Representation or Apparence, of some
quality, or other Accident of a body without us; which is commonly called an Object (p. 13).

Subjects to Names, is whatsoever can enter into, or be considered in an account; and be added one to
another to make a summe; or substracted one from another, and leave a remainder. The Latines called
Accounts of mony Rationes, and accounting, Ratiocinatio: and that which we in bills or book of

16
 account call Items, they called Nomina; that is, Names: and thence it seems to proceed, that they
extended the word Ratio, to the faculty of Reckoning in all other things (p. 29).

REASON, in this sense, is nothing but Reckoning (that is, Adding and Substracting) of the
Consequences of general names agreed upon... But no one mans Reason, nor the Reason of any one
number of men, makes the certaintie; no more than an account is therefore well cast up, because a
great many men have unanimously approved it. And therefore, as when there is a controversy in an
account, the parties must by their own accord, set up for right Reason, the Reason of some Arbitrator,
or Judge, to whose sentence they will both stand, or their controversie must either come to blowes, or
be undecided, for want of a right Reason constituted by Nature; so is it also in all debates of what
kind soever... (pp. 32-3).

Now Hobbes' problem and his solution can be easily understood. Men will be inevitably led to
controversy about their accounts. Against the alternatives of 'coming to blowes' or leaving the
controversies undecided (i.e., the state of nature), an agreement is needed to have an Arbitrator
or Judge, a Man. That such a man is artificial would be emphatically argued when the need of
securing its immortality were explicitly stated. But it has nevertheless a certain nature: 'the nature
of Justice, consisteth in keeping of valid Covenants: but the Validity of Covenants begins not but
with the Constitution of Civill Power, sufficient to compell men to keep them...' (p. 101).

Against a reduction of Hobbes' proposition to one of a contract, it should be noted that he

repeatedly stresses the need for a visible, coercive power, a terrour of power, that 'Covenants,
without the Sword, are but words', and that 'the question is not of promises mutuall, where there
is not security of performance' (p. 102). With respect to his concern with the problem of
visibility, Hobbes' words were explicit: 'of who is Soveraign, no man, but by his own fault,
(whatsoever evill men suggest,) can make any doubt. The difficulty consisteth in the evidence of
the Authority derived from him; The removing whereof, dependeth on the knowledge of the
publique Registers, publique Counsels, publique Ministers, and publique Seals; by which all
Lawes are sufficiently verified' (p. 189). Strangely, despite their enlightened reading of Hobbes'
Leviathan, Callon and Latour (1981: 284) wrote:

Hobbes omits to say that no promise, however solemn, could frighten the contracting parties enough
to force them to obey. He omits to say that what makes the sovereign formidable and the contract
solemn are the palace from which he speaks, the well-equipped armies that surround him, the scribes
and the recording equipment that serve him.

The strategy of representation

To say that Hobbes used a kind of biological metaphor to build his model would be, in spite of
his naturalistic rhetoric, inexact. The articulation of his argument did not use or require a
reference to a living being or its features. His Man, as a rhetorical artifice, was to play a role
(certainly, the starring role) on the stage at the time of the performance, not in the preparatory
phases. In a sense, Hobbes' metaphor was representation itself. This is evident in his appeal to
the tradition of the theatre (for an interesting account of the role of theatre or the 'spectacle of
power' in Leviathan, see Pye, 1988). Thus,

... Persona in latine signifies the disguise, or outward appearance of a man, counterfeited on the
Stage; and sometimes more particularly that part of it, which disguiseth the face, as a Mask or Visard:

17
 And from the Stage, hath been translated to any Representer of speech and action, as well in
Tribunalls, as Theatres. So that a Person, is the same that an Actor is, both on the Stage and in
common Conversation; and to Personate, is to Act, or Represent himselfe, or an other; and he that
acteth another, is said to beare his Person, or act in his name...

And then the Person is the Actor; and he that owneth his words and actions, is the AUTHOR: In
which case the Actor acteth by Authority... And as the Right of possession, is called Dominion; so the
Right of doing any Action, is called AUTHORITY and sometimes warrant (p. 112).

The sense in which Hobbes' solution is a simulation is now clear: his Man is not only a
simulation in the sense of a model, but also in the sense that it is able to simulate, to represent, to
act. In a strategic conflation of meanings Hobbes has shown a way of presenting authority as
something given to the actor, an authorization to act, by the very existence of a public; a public
which, in turn, is created by the same act. As Goldsmith (1968: 160) pointed out: 'Because the
creation of the community and the creation of the sovereign are accomplished by the same act,
the community only exists by virtue of the existence of the sovereign, and the community can
only act through its representative, the sovereign'. This is also the way in which power becomes
visible: on the stage. And it is by means of representation that a plurality of voices may be
reduced 'unto one Will', that 'Peace and Concord' may be attained and 'Discord and Civill Warre'
prevented.

As an exercise in rhetoric, Hobbes' solution seems to be perfect, 'wanting of nothing' like

those perfect systems of ancient Greek music. However, in spite (perhaps because) of their
perfection, such systems began to break down when faced with the vagaries and idiosyncrasies
of real musicians and real sounds (Henderson, 1975). And Hobbes was aware that something
similar could occur to the commonwealth.

The question, then, becomes one of how enduring this representation can be, or how long the
play can last. Hobbes' answer is that his artificial man should also have an artificial eternity, 'that
which men call the Right of Succession' (p. 135). But, at this point, it seems that the metaphor
begins to break down, the theatre seems no longer able to sustain itself. The artificial man seems
to suffer the weaknesses of the natural: 'not only subject to violent death, by foreign war; but also
through the ignorance, and passions of men, it hath in it, from the very institution, many seeds of
a naturall mortality, by Intestine Discord' (p. 153). It would seem that Hobbes used, after all, a
biological metaphor. But, again, this is a debatable point. Such a dramatic conclusion (the ever-
present possibility of death) is but another instance of the representation. Hobbes might have
been playing the role of a physician, able to determine the possible causes of death of his
artificial man. But the meaning of 'naturall mortality' could be anything but a natural event.

The utilization of the idea of order (health), and the opposition between order and disorder
(death), reveals Hobbes' strategy: to contrast a certain assumed state of nature (a chaotic original
state, and an ever-present possibility that should be terrifying for a modern, civilised man) with
the 'peace and protection' which could be attained through representation, through the
maintenance of a theatre of power or, it might be added, the power of the theatre. Incidentally, as
a contemporary observer of the popularization of the theatre in ancient Greece, Plato deplored
how the 'aristocracy of music gave way to a pernicious theatrocracy —for had it been a free
democracy, it would have been nothing to fear' (quoted from Laws by Henderson, 1975: 395).

18
 Instead of the 'substantive' solution of the so-called 'Hobbesian problem of order', what
interests us here is Hobbes' representational procedure. Hobbes used the state of nature as a
rhetorical tool and as a fact of experience (e.g., 'the savage people from America'), according to
the needs of the argumentation. The story of the covenant, as the emergence of order out of
chaos, the creative act by which men imitate God, is part of the theatrical apparatus rather than
an explanation. In the same way in which God must produce a theatre of miracles, Hobbes
advised the Sovereign that he must produce a theatre of terror. And, as Thomas (1965: 235) has
pointed out, referring to Hobbes' notion of voluntary act: 'A covenant made at the point of a
pistol is therefore as voluntary as one made out of friendship or generosity, and there are no
grounds for distinguishing between them'. It seems that the Hobbesian problem was not a
problem for Hobbes, or that his problem was not to explain how order really comes about. (It is a
'creation').

Hobbes explicitly stated Leviathan's purpose: 'that one time or other, this writing of mine,
may fall into the hands of a Soveraign, who will consider it himselfe, (for it is short, and I think
clear) without the help of any interessed, or envious Interpreter...' (p. 254). Thus Leviathan
attempted to call the Kings' attention; though in a subtler style than that of Machiavelli's Prince,
with the same result: disappointment. Hobbes' book was not able to reach the King's hands, due
to the interference of the latter's counsellors among which Hobbes was not precisely a favourite.
Interestingly, an instance of recognition of the rhetorical character of the whole procedure can be
seen in Hobbes' advice to the King against his 'counsellors':

And to the Person of a Common-wealth, his Counsellors serve him in the place of Memory, and
Mentall Discourse. But with this resemblance of the Common-wealth, to a naturall man, there is one
dissimilitude joyned, of great importance; which is, that a naturall man receiveth his experience, from
the naturall objects of sense, which work upon him without passion, or interest of their own; whereas
they that give Counsell to the Representative person of a Common-wealth, may have, and have often
their particular ends, and passions, that render their Counsells alwayes suspected, and many times
unfaithfull (p. 179).

Leviathan was less an academic exercise, a scholar's work, than an attempt to persuade and, by
the same token, to gain the favour of the King. But, beyond any simplistic attribution of
intentions or purposes to Hobbes as an individual, Leviathan is to be regarded as a model of
philosophical argumentation and of summary exposition of a system of ideas, or a myth in the
Platonic style, hence its persuasive power. According to Oakeshott (1975b),

... Hobbes's style is imaginative, not merely on account of the subtle imagery that fills his pages, nor
only because it requires imagination to make a system. His imagination appears also as the power to
create a myth. Leviathan is a myth, the transposition of an abstract argument into the world of the
imagination (p. 14).

The myth which Hobbes inherited was the subtle and complex interpretation of human life which,
springing from many sources, distinguished medieval Christian civilization. It is, moreover the myth
which no subsequent experience or reflection has succeeded in displacing from the minds of
European peoples. The human race, and the world it inhabits, so runs the myth, sprang from the
creative act of God, and was as perfect as its creator. But, by an original sin, mankind became
separated from the source of its happiness and peace (p. 151).

19
The representation of order emerging from chaos, the creation of a social order, has provided
academics with an object (a source of predicates for their propositions); notwithstanding the fact
that such a procedure of positing left the object undetermined, unless the act of creation by which
men imitate God were taken as a determination. As we shall see, this procedure of 'reification'
(according to the OED, the conversion of abstractions or concepts into entities or things, from
the Latin res) has provided a foundation for the formulation of problems in the social sciences,
especially those related to the existence and organization of society. For instance, faced with the
problem of accounting for the existence of the organization, organization theorists will resort to
some original act of creation or foundation. In addition, organization theory, and the social
sciences in general, are still struggling with one of Hobbes' legacies: a basic, agonistic distinction
between the artificially designed and the naturally emergent, the formal and the informal.
Though it might be argued that this theme is but the Old Testament's counterpoint of the fear of
God and the ignorance and passions of men, Hobbes deserves merit for its modernization.
Finally, Hobbes' introduction of the idea of a social system is sufficient to regard him as an
obligatory source for any attempt to understand the modernization of the theoretical reflection on
the phenomena related to social organization.

Hobbes' concept of system

The reader of Leviathan, looking for Hobbes' concept of system, may feel something of a
disappointment: no more than ten pages, a superficial description by contemporary standards
headed by a simple definition of system. But let us have a closer look at this definition, just in
case our reader may have overlooked certain details of Hobbes' concept of system:

Having spoken of the Generation, Forme, and Power of a Common-wealth, I am in order to speak
next of the parts thereof. And first of Systemes, which resemble the similar parts, or Muscles of a
Body naturall. By SYSTEMES; I understand any numbers of men joyned in one Interest, or one
Businesse. Of which some are Regular, and some Irregular... Of Regular, some are Absolute, and
Independent, subject to none but their own Representative: such are only Common-wealths... (p. 155).

And, introducing the following chapter,

In the last chapter I have spoken of the Similar parts of a Common-wealth: In this I shall speak of the
parts Organicall, which are Publique Ministers (p. 166).

Apart from the definition of system as a (rationalized) assembly of individuals, still the basic or
intuitive notion of social organization, it is interesting to note the distinction between 'similar'
and 'organic' parts of the commonwealth. The notion of organic parts relates to the old sense of
organ as an instrument (in the hands of the sovereign) translated into the metaphor of a man as a
compound of organs: the sovereign's hands, eyes, ears, organs of voice, nerves and tendons. But
the notion of similar is more interesting for us here.

In the extensive literature on Leviathan, this distinction between similar and organic parts of
a commonwealth has received no attention, as far as our review of this literature has been able to
discover (Baumrin, 1969; Bertman, 1981; Callon and Latour, 1981; Gauthier, 1969; Goldsmith,
1968; Hampton, 1988; Karskens, 1982; McNeilly, 1968; Mintz, 1962; Oakeshott, 1975b; Pye,

20
1988; Skinner, 1972; Strauss, 1966; Thomas, 1965; Tuck, 1989; Watkins, 1973); and this applies
also to the notion of system, perhaps with the exception of the statement by Goldsmith (1968)
quoted below. Thus, what follows is to be regarded as purely conjectural, a rhetorical device to
keep the discussion going.

To begin with, similar parts seem to refer to those parts which have the same nature and
functional character, hence the examples of muscles in a positive sense, and 'apostemes'
(Hobbes, 1991: 165) in the negative. Second, it seems also evident that similar might refer to the
fact that 'corporations' and other 'bodies politiques' have a common feature with the 'common-
wealth' as a whole: all of them consist of assemblages of people. In this sense, commonwealths
would be particular cases of systems: those systems which are 'absolute and independent, subject
to none but their own representative'. As Goldsmith (1968: 159) explicates: 'The theory of
personation provides a general explanation of "systems" —organized groups, or "bodies politic."
The unity of a system is the unity of its representative... The state is a special case of an actor or
representative, the case in which the authorization is general and unlimited'. In this sense,
Leviathan might well have been entitled: the social system.

There is still another possible interpretation. Similar is a technical term in geometry: similar
are triangles, for example, that are different in size but that have exactly the same shape. Thus,
Hobbes' concept of system may have had a mathematical sense. Though this is but a conjecture,
Hobbes' regard for geometry is well known. As Goldsmith (1968) has pointed out in commenting
on Hobbes' natural philosophy:

For Hobbes, the model of a demonstrative science was Euclidean geometry. It was the discovery of
geometry which set him off in quest of science (p. 10).

And civil philosophy is like geometry because we make both lines and figures and commonwealths
ourselves; correct political construction is entirely in man's power [quoted by Goldsmith, from
Hobbes' Six lessons to the professors of mathematics] (p. 11).

Lines, geometric figures, times, and velocities may be compared by the use of analogical calculations,
e.g., the proportions of distances to constant velocities and times are exhibited by the sides and bases
of similar triangles [quoted by Goldsmith, from Hobbes' De corpore] (p. 32).

The procedure of spatial representation and, in particular, the use of triangles as a device to
abbreviate and facilitate the treatment of different kinds of problems was another re-discovery of
the Renaissance. In fact, knowledge of mathematics and geometry was a definitive feature of the
'intellectual equipment' of Renaissance man.

These people did not know more mathematics than we do: most of them knew less than most of us.
But they knew their specialized area absolutely, used it in important matters more often than we do,
played games and told jokes with it, bought luxurious books about it, prided themselves on their
prowess in it; it was a more larger part of their formal intellectual equipment. In the second place, this
specialization constituted a disposition to address visual experience, in or out of pictures, in special
ways: to attend to the structure of complex forms as combinations of regular geometrical bodies and
as intervals comprehensible in series. Because they were practised in manipulating ratios and in
analysing the volume or surface of compound bodies, they were sensitive to pictures carrying the
marks of similar processes. Thirdly there is a continuity between the mathematical skills used by

21
 commercial people and those used by the painter to produce the pictorial proportionality and lucid
solidity that strike us as so remarkable now (Baxandall, 1991: 101-2).

Though Baxandall is referring here to the world of fifteenth-century Italy, the appreciation of
mathematics and geometry was so extended a feature of Renaissance culture as to make the point
illustrative of a general attitude; apart from the fact that the Renaissance in England and other
European countries was a delayed phenomenon.

The definition of systems as similar parts, with the suggestion of a spatial object like a
triangle for example, may have served Hobbes as a didactic way of indicating not only the
common character of the commonwealth and other 'unions of men', but also that their
construction and treatment requires attention to their properties (regularity, for example).
Hobbes' division of systems into regular and irregular thus resembles the treatment of triangles.
To be regular meant for Hobbes both the maintenance of shapes and the following of rules.
Regularity was a sine qua non condition. Apart from commonwealths, all regular systems were
subordinated, subjected to the sovereign who authorized them, and constituted with 'letters',
'patent that may be read' —e.g., those for the government of provinces, colonies, towns,
universities, colleges, churches— or 'for the well ordering of forraigne Traffique' (corporations).

Finally, if Hobbes' chapter on systems seems too short, we should not forget that what was
said of the commonwealth might be applied to other (similar) systems. Thus, for example, an
interesting question would be whether the following statement could be applied to any system, a
corporation for example: 'no great Popular Common-wealth was ever kept up; but either by a
forraign Enemy that united them; or by the reputation of some one eminent Man amongst them;
or by the secret Counsell of a few; or by the mutuall feare of equall factions; and not by the open
Consultations of the Assembly' (Hobbes, 1991: 182).

The system approach in modern social sciences

It might be said that an essential feature of Hobbes' concept of system is its spatial character as
representation, along with the Renaissance appreciation of proportion and regularity. As a
solution to the problem of representing social reality, the notion of system was thus articulated in
terms of both a formal object with certain geometric properties and the metaphor of a concrete
body. And as Hobbes remarked: 'The Word Body, in the most generall acceptation, signifieth that
which filleth, or occupyeth some certain room, or imagined place' (1991: 269). In this sense,
Hobbes advanced, if not inaugurated, a research programme (Lakatos, 1987) for the social
sciences. From then on, the definition of a system, which means the positing of an object by
following a procedure of spatialisation, would become the starting point of any social scientific
inquiry. When the task is not conceived of in such terms, the existence of a certain object (its
construction or objectification) is generally taken for granted. The rest of this chapter consists of
two parts: a general reference to this programme for the social sciences, and its illustration in the
work of Talcott Parsons, perhaps the most elaborated example of this procedure of
objectification.

22
A programme for the social sciences
The following statement, written in 1881 by Herbert Spencer (1978: 492-3), provides a good
illustration of the modern way of conceiving the task of the social sciences:

If we can frame a conception of the ideal social state, and of human conduct as carried on in it, then
we have a means of correcting whatever empirical guidance may be obtained by valuation of
pleasures and pains as now experienced; since, beyond the immediate effects of any course, we are
enabled to see whether the ultimate effects are such as to further or hinder the required remolding of
human nature [emphasis added].

Both earlier and later literature on social organization has been, more or less explicitly, devoted
to specifying and/or discussing the characteristics of a proper frame, through which the
elaboration of descriptions and prescriptions might be best rationalized. The application of a
system approach to the explanation of social phenomena constitutes an inherent characteristic of
our epoch rather than merely a matter of academic fashion or the adoption of a convenient image
by individual scholars. Such an approach is properly related to a particular form of life in which
boundaries, levels, compartments, functions, become 'natural' elements of the social order,
inscriptions which define horizons of meaning, and through which the urge for the control of
increasingly larger masses is properly expressed.

Theories of social organization can be viewed as modes of social reality revealing itself as
standing-reserve, e.g., organizations as containers of individual energies ready for application to
specific tasks. That is, organization theories can be seen as systems in themselves. This means
not only that they are internally arranged as systems, as logical structures, but, even more, that
there exists a correspondence between this very arrangement and the real as data, that the social
exists as a system. As Heidegger (1977: 141) suggested,

Where the world becomes picture, the system, and not only in thinking, comes to dominance.
However, where the system is in ascendancy, the possibility always exists also of its degenerating
into the superficiality of a system that has merely been fabricated and pieced together. This takes
place when the original power of projecting is lacking.

The expression 'world picture' does not mean, for Heidegger, a mere picture of the world; but
that the world becomes a picture, has been set up, re-presented, is conceived and grasped as a
picture. This way of representing is, precisely, what distinguishes the modern world. According
to Heidegger, the world could not become a picture in the Middle Ages, because God as creator,
as the highest cause, presented and ordered everything, and 'man' along with the rest of beings
occupied a pre-specified place in a hierarchy. In the Greek world, it was even more difficult for
the world to become a picture; since 'man' did not re-present but apprehended (beside or in
company with) that which came into presence, arising or opening itself. This does not deny that
Plato's eidos was 'the presupposition, destined far in advance and long ruling indirectly in
concealment, for the world's having to become a picture' (Heidegger, 1977: 131).

The distinction between two notions of system —(1) 'the artificial and external simplifying
and putting together of what is given', and (2) 'the unity of structure in that which is represented
as such' (p. 141)— is another way of expressing the above mentioned difference between
apprehending and enframing as modes of representing. But now the difference is formulated in

23
terms of the power of projecting by which this world as a picture appears as man's own work, not
as something simply given or taken for granted.

Modern social science and social scientists have been frequently criticized for their adoption
of the notion of system from physics as a model. But such a criticism overlooks what is in fact a
more general phenomenon concerning the formalization and institutionalization of rules for the
practice of science in general. As Anatol Rapoport indicated in his article on general systems
theory for the International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences: 'this word is used in science...
as a program or direction in the contemporary philosophy of science', with 'a common aim: the
integration of diverse content areas by means of a unified methodology' (1968: 452). Rapoport
makes a distinction between two kinds of system: those in which the important elements and
how they are related have to be discovered, and those (technological systems) whose structure 'is
completely known, since such systems are designed by men' (p. 457). The question now becomes
what kind of system is the social scientist dealing with? What kind of concept of system was
Hobbes using, for instance? Was Hobbes discovering or designing?

This distinction between discovering and designing seems to be another way of formulating
Heidegger's distinction between apprehending and enframing in order to distinguish the modern
from previous ways of representing. It might be argued that, in the modern world, all systems are
technological. In both discovering and designing, the system is the result of a work of
representing or enframing as a feature of modern technology. In fact, for Rapoport: 'General
systems theory contributes to the solution of such [technological] problems by placing them in a
general structural context abstracted from specific content'; and 'the task of general systems
theory is to find the most general conceptual framework in which a scientific theory or a
technological problem can be placed without losing the essential features of the theory or the
problem' (p. 457). In this sense, notwithstanding the distinction between technological and other
systems, the problem is the same: that of finding a framework. And, for social scientists, this is
familiar territory. For it is not too different from the programme suggested by Spencer. However,
it should be recognized that, in the very use of the words, Spencer's statement was more
explicitly modern: instead of 'finding a framework', he spoke directly of 'framing'. The idea of
finding, with its connotation of discovering and apprehending, might imply a pre-modern way of
representing, if not that 'degenerating' of the system which has lost its power of projecting when
the system is simply taken for granted.

The modernization of social theory —i.e., the realization of the programme of enframing
offered by the concept of system— achieved probably its highest level of elaboration in the work
of Talcott Parsons. And this work has also been one of the most influential in the contemporary
social-science scene, not only due to its large number of followers but even more to its critics.
The following section is not intended to discuss the whole of Parsons' work, but only those
aspects that might reveal his procedure of representation or objectification of the social system.
In general, the basis of the following discussion is his article from the International
Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences (Parsons, 1968). This is not only an accessible source, but
also a summary exposition of the general ideas. Of course, some references to his basic works
will also be made to clarify what is after all a rather complex argument.

24
On Parsons' social system
For Parsons, a system is a concept which refers to 'a complex of interdependencies', both internal
and external to such a complex, and around which 'all sophisticated theory in the conceptually
generalizing disciplines is and must be organized' (1968: 458). This notion of system presents in
abstract terms the procedure, mentioned at the beginning of this part, of isolating a piece of
reality and analysing its internal and external relations as a basis for establishing its characteristic
features. In addition, Parsons presents the concept of system in normative terms, as a programme
or 'commandment' for social theory. Parsons also introduces a distinction between two kinds of
system: theoretical and empirical. The first kind refers to 'a complex of assumptions', the second
to 'a set of phenomena in the observable world'. But there is yet a third element: the concrete
entity. He postulates, then, three instances: an abstract theoretical system which specifies what is
relevant to an empirical system for its selective organization of the properties of the concrete
entity.

These distinctions, and their remembrance of scholastic methods, provide the needed
preparation to understand the concept of social system: a theoretical system which specifies that
social interaction is the relevant 'class of empirical systems' to deal with the concrete 'human
social interaction, which is organized on the symbolic levels we call "cultural"' (p. 459). The
concrete entity is 'a late evolutionary product', to be distinguished from other relevant relations
between organisms; for example, those required for bisexual reproduction or those between
humans and domesticated animals. The social system is 'the core of the human action system',
'the primary locus of the "operation bootstrap" of human evolution'. This is due to the possibility
of each person becoming both actor and object to himself, as well as to others.

This property of human action has been the concern of modern philosophy, from Descartes to
later developments of German idealism, as the problem of 'self-reflection'. According to
Habermas, Hegel highlighted an 'authoritarian side of self-consciousness' in his comment on the
positivity of modern religion and the positivism of morality as representing the need of the times:
'in need, either man is made an object and is oppressed or else must make nature an object and
oppress it' (quoted by Habermas, 1992: 27). To this Habermas added: 'This repressive character
of reason is universally grounded in the structure of self-relationship, that is, in the relationship
of a subject that makes itself an object'. In view of the important role played by religion and
normative considerations in Parsons' social system, it is worth keeping in mind this consideration
around self-reflection as the relevant property of human interaction.

Symbolic interaction is, thus, singled out as the most relevant property of human social
interaction as a concrete entity: 'Interaction at the symbolic level thus becomes a system
analytically and, very appreciably, empirically independent of its pre-symbolic bases (though
still grounded in them), and is capable of development on its own' (p. 459). What Parsons is,
finally, specifying as relevant is the possibility of ordering the whole discourse of the social
sciences, transformed into a positive science, by positing an independent object (a system
'capable of development on its own'). But what kind of object is it?

The objectification of the social system

Parsons' procedure for the objectification of the social system begins with a kind of syllogism:
(1) living systems are open systems, (2) a social system is a living system, (3) a social system is

25
an open system. The acceptance of the second premise (a social system is a living system)
implies the acceptance of something like the basis for the ontological proof of God's existence
for Scholasticism (i.e., existence is an attribute of the most perfect being). In this case, the
conclusion is the ontological basis of functionalism: 'the dependence of the organism on its
physical environment for nutrition and respiration is prototypical. This is the essential basis of
the famous concept of function as it applies to social systems, as to all other living systems'.
Moreover, the concept of function 'is the only basis on which a theoretically systematic ordering
of the structure of living systems is possible' (p. 460). Hence, what follow is the modalities of
functional existence: functional problems, functional significance, functional references,
functional requirements.

But there is a problem in making functionality such a basic concept: there is the risk of
resorting to that kind of explanation according to which heavy things sink because they are
heavy. That is, any thing is that which has a function, and it exists to fulfil this function. But the
concept of function, Parsons explains, is crucial to understanding the process of internal
differentiation of a living system, in terms of the specialization achieved by its parts through the
interchanges between the system and its various environments. In the case of social systems, it
must be added, such environments consist of cultural objects, human artefacts. A social system
has no direct contact with the physical environment nor with the 'ultimate' or 'non-empirical'
reality, which are the concerns of other subsystems of the system of action: the organism and the
cultural system, respectively.

The notion of ultimate reality plays an important role in Parsons' system. It corresponds to a
general ordering of reality according to the cybernetic hierarchy of control (i.e., systems higher
in information control those lower in information): a modernized version of the hierarchy of the
theological interpretation of the world as divided into the sensory and the suprasensory, where
the latter is the master. In fact, for Parsons: 'Religion... remains the "master system" in the
cybernetic sense' (p. 468). Interestingly, Parsons' work has recently received renewed attention
from a postmodernist perspective:

We believe Parsons's sociology is directly relevant to the issues of a postmodern society, in so far as
we think of postmodernism in terms of fragmentation, complexity, diversity and difference.
Postmodernism is the effect of a high level of structural and cultural differentiation and pluralism,
which were clearly problems to which Parsons addressed himself throughout a long career (Robertson
& Turner, 1989: 554).

The objectification of the social system, then, depends on a process of functional

differentiation: any system is to be conceived as a differentiated subsystem of a larger system.
The famous four-functional scheme, a device for analysing systems and subsystems of action at
any level of reference or aggregation, is the tool developed by Parsons and his associates for
describing differentiation in social systems. The scheme is a complex set of categories which, by
means of the proper questions, enables the user to produce a classification of any set of
behaviours (according to their functional significance) in one of four subsystems: adaptation,
integration, goal achievement or maintenance. After such a classification is obtained, the user
may assign the names he or she considers more suitable to the situation at hand. For a social
system, the economy is the name for all those activities related to the procurement of the needed
level of input; it fulfils the adaptive function in contact with an environment defined in terms of

26
the combinatorial processes which transform physical objects into such categories as property
rights, contracts, employment. In a similar way (Parsons, 1960), an organization can be defined
as a system of action (for example, a firm as an entity in an economic subsystem), and all its
interactions can be classified according to their functional significance: production (adaptation),
marketing (goal-achievement), industrial relations (integration), and management or policy-
making (latency).

This ingenious device was initially born out of the search for a definition of an action-space.
Through a merger between the scheme of pattern-variables (Parsons and Shils, 1951; Parsons,
1951) and Robert Bales' (1950) categories for the analysis of interaction processes in small
groups, a fourth-dimensional yet 'Euclidean' space was produced: 'in the sense that, though it has
four rather than three dimensions, it is "rectilinear," that there is continuous linear variation along
each of the dimensions, and that time enters into the analysis of process in essentially the same
way that it does in classical mechanics' (Parsons & Bales, 1953: 85).

The action-space is defined in terms of the degree of 'nearness' to the solution of each of four
functional problems, hence the dimensions: (1) instrumental (degrees of motivation); (2)
expressive (emotional state); (3) adaptive (level of learning); and (4) integrative (valuations).
Each dimension would, then, provide a way of measuring the state of the system at any time, and
its characteristic or steady state would be given by the regularities observed through such
measurements. Process is defined in terms of movement: the change of location of the units in
terms of the four co-ordinates. To describe a process implies to locate the unit in the space
relative to a point of origin, and to other units, and then to describe changes in location.

The symbolic character of interaction is provided by the analysis of the communications

between participant individuals; e.g., asking questions, giving answers, showing feelings. The
phenomena of small, experimental groups categorized by Bales became the source for the
generalization of categories of interaction to wider social phenomena with the help of Parsons'
more abstract categories previously developed. By focusing on the symbolic character of
interaction, a society would thus be explained in terms of the features attributed to small group
interaction; though, obviously, with translations appropriate to particular subsystems or levels of
reference. Thus, for instance, money as a generalized media of interchange would provide a
specialized language, and transactions might be thought of as particular kinds of conversations.
Similarly, power, influence and commitment might function as specialized languages for,
respectively, the political system, the societal community and the cultural system (Parsons,
1968).

The role of values in the social system

There is, however, an important issue to which no attention has been paid here: the role played
by values in this approach. Parsons' concern with values is a fundamental element of his project.
In the account of social phenomena, Parsons attributes values a causal primacy over other
considerations. This is due, mainly, to his attempt to find a representation of the specifically
social. Of course, that was not an original enterprise of Parsons'. He recognized his debts to
Weber's work in charting the route towards this kind of theoretical inquiry. In Parsons' system
approach, the crucial role played by values can be ascertained in the meaning of functionality as
the achievement of a goal, which is but the realization of a value. The primacy attributed by

27
Parsons to the phase of latency in any system of action (the pattern-maintenance subsystem in
the social system, or the cultural subsystem in a general system of action) is given by its
functional significance: the specification and generalization of values.

The role of values is thus to ensure the generation and maintenance of the commitment of the
system's units, including the regularity of their behaviours due to the normative significance of
values. But, values also provide Parsons with a way of articulating the representation of the
social system as an object. The strategy of representation can be called, in this case, a self-
objectification of the system in so far as its existence is established in terms of the achievement
of a goal which is functional for a larger system to which it belongs. This, in turn, implies the
self-affirmation of the functional as a value in itself, because the achievement of a goal means
the realization of a value. Such a possibility of self-representation of the system and its
subsystems was, in fact, what Parsons expected from the coupling of functionality and values.
Thus,

There will then be a conception, generalized at the social level, of the desirable kind of social system,
in the presently relevant case, the society. This general conception will, however, be differentiated
with reference to the primary functional exigencies of the system other than the maintenance of its
own patterns. Thus there will be a value complex concerning desirable types of goals for the system
and attitudes toward goals of the system. There will be conceptions of desirable modes of adaptation
of the system to its situation and finally there will be conceptions of desirable modes of integration of
the system, of the relations of the units to each other in the perspective of this integration (Parsons,
1989: 588).

The representation of the system becomes so inextricably linked to the representation of values
that one cannot stand without the other. That is, the objectification of society as a system cannot
be based upon the merely functional, but requires the introduction of a further level of
objectification in the form of desirable ways of functioning: values re-presented as objects
themselves. A possible clue to understanding this result can be found in Heidegger's (1977: 142)
analysis of the (modern) world picture:

The representation of value is just as essential to the modern interpretation of that which is, as is the
system. Where anything that is has become the object of representing, it first incurs in a certain
manner a loss of Being. This loss is adequately perceived, if but vaguely and unclearly, and is
compensated for with corresponding swiftness through the fact that we impart value to the object and
to that which is, interpreted as object, and that we take the measure of whatever is, solely in keeping
with the criterion of value and make of values themselves the goal of all activity. Since the latter is
understood as culture, values become cultural values, and these, in turn, become the very expression
of the highest purposes of creativity, in the service of man's making himself secure as subiectum.
From here it is only a step to making values into objects in themselves. Value is the objectification of
needs as goals, wrought by a representing self-establishing within the world as picture. Value appears
to be the expression of the fact that we, in our position of relationship to it, act to advance just that
which is itself most valuable; and yet that very value is the impotent and threadbare disguise of the
objectivity of whatever is, an objectivity that has become flat and devoid of background. No one dies
for mere values.

Hobbes would have said straightforwardly: covenants without the sword are but words. But let
us try to understand Heidegger's argument on the relation between the representation of values

28
and systems, within the context of a way of representing through which the world becomes a
picture.

To begin with, it is not too difficult to find the sense of such a loss incurred through the
system as representation, if we remember the procedure followed to define the system: to single
out some relevant property from a selectively organized concrete entity to specify an empirical
system, according to the requirements of a theoretical system. The strategy of representation
implies a process of progressive cleansing of the real to attain an apprehension of pure relations;
in this case, symbolic interaction. The question is how values can be expected to compensate
such a loss. This problem seems to refer again to Hobbes, to a conception of reasoning as
accounting. The procedure of reduction through which values become objectified requires values
to be something accountable, regardless of their original reference (life, spirit, eternity). In fact,
as Heidegger (1977: 72) wrote: 'Value is value inasmuch as it counts. It counts inasmuch as it is
posited as that what matters'. Here there is a play on meanings which shows how closely related
are valuing and reckoning.

In a way that recalls Hobbes' awareness of the intrinsic weakness of his artificial man, due to
the ignorance and passions of men, perhaps what Heidegger is calling into attention, at the end of
the above-quoted passage, is the intrinsic weakness of any system which depends on the
objectification of values, in order to compensate for the loss incurred in the representation. Thus,
it seems that the fate of values is to become 'flat and devoid of background'. First, it might be
thought that the very sense of compensation is a flat one because what has been lost is per se
unaccountable, can neither be seen nor measured. But even in the case of the loss being
accounted for, the possibility always exists that controversies could arise around the account
itself, as Hobbes had suggested. And Parsons was aware of such a possibility: 'The basic
independence of the cultural-moral and the socially institutionalized systems, however, precludes
any social community from being completely immune to the kind of political opposition which
can lead to the disruption of its basic solidarity' (1968: 464).

But is this the possibility that Heidegger was referring to? Probably not. But let us recall that
Heidegger's example, in order to illustrate his point, was that of Nietzsche: 'Because Nietzsche's
thinking remains imprisoned in value representation, he has to articulate what is essential for him
in the form of a reversal, as the revaluation of all values' (1977: 142). In this sense, for
Heidegger, modern metaphysics is a metaphysics of subjectivity and/or 'subjectness', where the
idea of a subject becoming an object for itself means also to represent, to subject or make itself
secure of itself, which amounts to say that everything becomes significant in terms of value or
will, the 'will to power'.

From watches to washing machines

But, in the end, what kind of object is Parsons constructing to represent society? It should be
recognized that this is not immediately obvious. Parsons' theoretical system has specified
different relevant properties to be singled out from different empirical systems, which have
selectively organized different kinds of concrete entities. For instance, some properties of living
beings have been combined with some features of small group interaction, in terms of the general
framework of system theory, with a strong component of logical and mathematical reasoning.
We should ask: what was the problem Parsons was trying to solve, and what kind of solution did

29
he find? Unfortunately, Parsons was not as explicit as Hobbes, for example, in stating the nature
of his problem and his solution. But something can perhaps be gained by suggesting a
comparison. For example, by focusing on the substantive aspect of their respective problems, it
might be said that whilst Hobbes stated his problem as one of attaining peace, in Parsons' view of
society the problem is the attainment of self-sufficiency. This is not to say that Parsons'
formulation of the problem is necessarily more modern than that of Hobbes'. For the theme of
self-sufficiency can be traced back to classical tradition. Let us remember Aristotle's (1987: 105-
6) formulation of the relation between self-sufficiency and differentiation, in his critique of
Plato's Republic. Thus,

... a household is a more self-sufficient thing than the individual, the state than the household; and the
moment the association comes to comprise enough people to be self-sufficient, effectively we have a
state. Since, then, a greater degree of self-sufficiency is to be preferred to a lesser, the lesser degree of
unity is to be preferred to the greater.

But there are more differences between the two projects than those attributable to the political
differences between seventeenth-century England, in the middle of civil wars, and the United
States of the post-World War II. Let us now focus on their strategies and procedures of
representation.

In a sense, Parsons' procedure represents a further refinement of Hobbes' approach. For

example, though both of them used the mathematics and the natural sciences of their times, in
their strategies of representation, Parsons applied a more sophisticated procedure of spatialisation
by introducing a four-dimensional space and treating time in terms of classical mechanics, which
means the spatialisation of time as well (a linear magnitude with continuous variation). The
question is: what was Parsons simulating? It could be hypothesized that he was trying to simulate
a control system in the cybernetic sense. This is suggested by some of Parsons' (1966: 9)
statements, such as the following:

The self-sufficiency of a society is a function of the balanced combination of its controls... We have
referred to a hierarchy of control which organizes the interrelation of the analytically distinguished
systems. This includes the cybernetic aspect of control by which systems high in information but low
in energy regulate other systems higher in energy but lower in information... Thus, a programmed
sequence of mechanical operations (e.g., in a washing machine) can be controlled by a timing switch
using very little energy compared with the energy actually operating the machine's moving parts or
heating its water.

Thus, whilst in Hobbes' time the prime example of an automaton was a watch, and the regulated
motion of its parts, now we can refer to a formidable washing machine whose operations can be
controlled with a minimum of energy. And, since Parsons' system can be thought of as a device
for translating, unifying and ordering concepts, theories, that represent society rather than society
itself as Hobbes explicitly attempted, we would be tempted to say that whilst Hobbes offered a
watch to the sovereign, Parsons offered a washing machine to academia. But this would not do
justice to the complexities of both Hobbes' and Parsons' enterprises.

From another point of view, it might be said that Parsons' system represents a biological
model. In fact, the reference to living beings provides a ground for the definition of social

30
systems as open systems. In this sense, the metaphor of the organism plays the role of a
'founding analogy' (Douglas, 1987) through which a theory becomes coherent with other theories
and strategies of representation. That is, the use the organism as a rhetorical device in forging the
syllogism mentioned above makes the objectification of the system coherent with the
contemporary scientific discourse. According to Gadamer (1990: 14):

The role that statistics has begun to play even in these domains [physics and theoretical physics] and
increasingly affects our entire economic and social life lets new models of self-consciousness come to
the fore in contrast to mechanics and power-driven machines. Characteristic of such models is a type
of self-regulation that is conceivable less along the lines of the manipulable than of something living,
of life organized in regulated cycles.

However, a closer examination of Parsons' system would reveal that nothing of the order of an
organism enters into the articulation or the functioning of the system. Parsons' attempt to isolate
the specifically social, in the form of symbolic interaction, implies the possibility of abstracting
the system from any concrete instance, or from the subjection to any natural law. In this sense,
the social system would be subject only to the laws governing discourse, and those which
connect it to the ultimate reality (i.e., religion as the master system in cybernetic terms). Thus,
rather than an organism or a machine, the system would thus resemble a specialized language, a
software.

Parsons represented the social system as a software with its master system and different
levels of subroutines; hence his recognition of language as the matrix of symbolic systems. There
is a similarity between both Hobbes' and Parsons' procedures: both start by describing the
properties of an abstract rational model, whether the features of reasoning (as accounting) or
those of symbolic interaction (as self- and mutual objectification). And, at the end, something
similar occurs to both projects: the artificial man is not able to secure its own immortality and the
control system is not able to attain full command. Neither book-keeping nor cybernetics can cope
with man's unreliable nature. There is, however, an important difference.

Parsons was not, at least explicitly, trying to persuade, or to show how a concrete society
should be organized. Rather, he could always take any defect in his model as a new problem for
further research; hence his optimistic approach. For instance, the disruption of the basic
solidarity of the system is presented as an example of differentiation in the particular domain of
the political subsystem, rather than as a manifestation of the 'seeds of natural mortality' as in
Hobbes' case.

The question would be whether this optimism is due to the model's detachment from the
concrete entities, or to Parsons' genuine conviction that his society has attained the required level
of self-sufficiency so as to overcome any disruption. In a sense, both alternatives come to the
same, in this case. Parsons' approach resembles that of a mathematician, in the sense described
by Serres (1983: 68):

... [the mathematician] thinks inside a society that has triumphed over noise so well and for such a
long time that he is amazed when the problem is raised anew. He thinks within the world of 'we' and
within the world of the abstract, two isomorphic and perhaps even identical worlds. The subject of

31
 abstract mathematics is the 'we' of an ideal republic which is the city of communication maximally
purged of noise.

As we have seen in this chapter, social theory at least since Hobbes' times has found in the
concept of system a way of representing a desired state of order in analogy to mathematical
forms, which provides a certain detachment from concrete situations. And Parsons took seriously
the task of constructing an ideal republic where the disruptions of the order could always be
found to be functional in the last analysis.

CHAPTER 2. ORGANIZING AS SYSTEMATIZING

From the most abstract laws of universal harmony (the meaning of system in ancient Greece),
and the singing of the organum regulating everyday life in the Cathedral (the Medieval sense of
organizing), the words system and organization have become means of representing a certain
state of perfection and regulated order. According to the OED, the verb 'organize' derives from
the Latin organizare which meant 'the singing of the organum': the compendium of songs used in
the Medieval Cathedral (for account of this aspect of Medieval music, see Fuller, 1990; Gushee,
1990).

Organizing as systematizing is the representation of social organization within a system

framework, the way in which both system and organization complement each other in the
modern world picture. An important feature of this way of representing —i.e., organizing in a
world which has become a picture— is the attempt to translate any thing and event into spatial
terms. A second feature is the introduction of order into the picture. That the meaning of order
may have changed with history, or be different for different people, is an intuitive notion. At any
given time, when a painter, for example, finishes a picture, or at least stops working on it, it can
be said that a certain order has been attained. It is always possible to relate such a work to a
certain tradition or school which shares a more or less common idea of order. The task of the
critic or historian is to find clues as to what idea of order is expressed in a particular picture or, in
other words, what is the 'intention' of the work, as Baxandall (1989) would perhaps have asked.

The theme of this chapter can be, metaphorically, thought of as an illustration and discussion
of some representative works of a school of painters: a school which represents organizing as
systematizing. This school is part of a larger movement or tradition, as the last chapter suggested,
which provides materials, techniques, problems, and solutions. This is not to say that we should
adopt the approach of an art critic or historian. But, after all, we are dealing with a pictorial
tradition. As Wittgenstein (1988: 230) suggested: 'Compare a concept with a style of painting.
For is even our style of painting arbitrary? (The Egyptian, for instance.)'. As particular solutions
to particular problems, representations are representations of something, rather than, exclusively,
cognitions or states of mind. According to Heidegger (1988: 67): 'representations relate to
something represented; they point toward or refer to it, but not in such a way that this referential
structure would first have to be procured for them; rather, they have it from the start as re-
presentations'.

32
 In his Structure and process in modern societies, Parsons (1960) contributed two essays to
the problem of representing organizations as systems. He showed in those essays a way in which
previous literature on organizations (mainly, Barnard, Selznick, Simon, Blau) might provide raw
materials for the application of his own theoretical scheme: the four-function model of action
systems. The definition of organizations as collectivities, the units of analysis of the subsystems
of a social system, along with the notion of differentiation, led 'naturally' to a solution to this
problem of representation.

The definition of organizations as (differentiated) units of a larger system means that they are
themselves systems, and the formulation of the problem of interpenetration of subsystems in
terms of the management of boundaries illustrates the rationale (the pictorial technique we might
say) for solving subsequent problems of representing the dynamic features of organizing as
systematizing: a dynamics of bounded entities. Though we are concerned here with the work of
organization theorists in a somewhat restricted sense, as far as it is possible to limit a field, this
brief reference to Parsons' work shows a link between the general social theory and the specific
applications of the concept of system in the form of organization theory.

This chapter consists of four sections: (1) a reference to the foundations of organization
theory in the works of Selznick and Blau, who proposed two different though complementary
research programmes for organization theory as a discipline; (2) a brief comment on Weber's
formulation of concepts and categories of social science, by focusing on his legacy for the theory
of organization; (3) an illustration of the development of the system theory of organization in the
work of Katz and Kahn; and (4) a final comment on the problem of definition and specification
of organization boundaries which, by revealing a fundamental difficulty of the system approach,
suggests the need for a different approach.

On the foundations of organizing as systematizing

Philip Selznick's (1948) paper on the foundations of the theory of organization may be regarded
as a foundational exposition of the nature, the problems, and the possibilities of organization
theory, the new-born discourse of organizing as systematizing. It should be recognized, however,
that there are no explicit indications, in Selznick's exposition, of what an organization is, where it
has come from, or how it has come about. The intention of Selznick's paper was precisely
defined in the following terms: 'The problem of analysis becomes that of selecting among the
possible predicates set forth in the theory of organization those which illuminate our
understanding of the materials at hand' (1948: 31). This a way of stating the problem seems to be
the result of Selznick's recognition of an intrinsic difficulty in dealing with the notion of
organization in plain, common terms, which he defined as the organizational paradox, and
which required a revision of traditional concepts and an effort to construct and evaluate empirical
generalizations in such a complex field.

After introducing two, at the time, well-known definitions of organization (those of John
Gaus and Chester Barnard), Selznick summed up the current point of view in the following
terms: formal organization is the structural expression of rational action. For Selznick, the
problem of this way of defining organization is that it presupposes the possibility, or the
necessity, of reducing the uncertainty that individuals, and their differences, would introduce into

33
action. The paradox arises when it is recognized that —notwithstanding their problematic nature
as a 'source of friction, dilemma, doubt and ruin'— there are non-rational dimensions of
organizational behaviour which the formal structures 'never succeed in conquering', and which at
the same time are 'indispensable to the continued existence of the system'. In this sense, Selznick
is pointing to the problem of the loss incurred in representation discussed in the last chapter.
Thus,

The formal administrative design can never adequately or fully reflect the concrete organization to
which it refers, for the obvious reason that no abstract plan or pattern can —or may, if it is to be
useful— exhaustively describe an empirical totality. At the same time, that which is not included in
the abstract design (as reflected, for example, in a staff-line organization chart) is vitally relevant to
the maintenance and development of the formal system itself (1948: 25).

There seems to be here a certain inversion of Hobbes' way of formulating the problem of human
association. Now, instead of a starting point, the state of nature appears as a discovery or further
realization, after the framework imposed by the system's rationality, and as an element to be
accommodated within such a framework. This kind of inversion of the presentation of the
arguments can be illustrated with Selznick's discussion of delegation.

Delegation is an organizational act through which functions and power are assigned to roles
or official positions. But it is also an inherently hazardous enterprise, because 'individuals have a
propensity to resist depersonalization, to spill over the boundaries of their segmentary roles, to
participate as wholes' (p. 26), 'individual personalities may offer resistance to the demands made
upon them by the official conditions of delegation' (p. 27). This formulation of the problem also
reflects a change of focus: from the setting of boundaries at system level to the prescription of
boundaries at individual or personality level.

Selznick's solution of the organizational paradox was found in the discovery that irrationality,
or human nature, was not only a source of frictions but also the dynamic force of an emergent
structure; and that it was an essential though problematic feature of the organization as a system.
In this sense, the representation of the artificial man required a more complex outlook. As
Selznick put it:

The organic, emergent character of the formal organization considered as a cooperative system [the
term used by Chester Barnard (1975; originally published in 1938)] must be recognized. This means
that the organization reaches decisions, takes action, and makes adjustments... It is the nature of the
interacting consequences of divergent interests within the organization which creates the condition, a
result which may obtain independently of the consciousness or the quality of the individual
participants (pp. 27-8).

Thus, whilst in Hobbes' artificial man the ignorance and passions of men represented the seeds of
natural mortality, now Selznick's organization has become an adaptive system susceptible to
change and development because of, precisely, the dynamism induced by this very human
nature, the interdependencies or reciprocal influences of divergent interests. This reminds us of
Aristotle's argument in Politics (1987) against Plato's Republic, according to which the weakness
of the latter's solution would be its lack of differentiation. If Aristotle rhetorically exaggerated
this point, because Plato was not proposing a simple unity, it would also be an exaggeration to

34
reduce Hobbes' Leviathan to a kind of Platonic model or Selznick's theory of organization to an
Aristotelian reformulation. However, it might be worth keeping in mind this contrast for it
reveals basic methodological positions.

According to Selznick, a necessary condition for developing a solution to the paradox is the
availability of an analytical method through which the totality can be adequately accounted for:
'The organon which may be suggested as peculiarly helpful in the analysis of adaptive structures
has been referred to as "structural-functional analysis"'(Selznick, 1948: 28). The crucial feature
of this method is that it enables the user to represent a 'stable system of needs and mechanisms'
which can be empirically isolated, and that a set of imperatives may be derived to help 'setting
forth the type of analysis under discussion'. Such imperatives include: (1) security in relation to
social forces in the environment, (2) stability both of the lines of authority and the informal
relations, (3) continuity of policy and of the sources of its determination, and (4) homogeneity of
outlook with respect to the meaning and role of the organization.

This new artificial man is also more complex in psychological terms. By establishing
structural-functional homologies, it is now possible to devise a 'Freudian model of organizational
analysis' and detect the operation of such mechanisms as rationalization and regression.
Moreover, current individual attributes may be derived from those of the artificial man: 'Loyalty
and self-sacrifice may be individual expressions of organizational or group egotism and self-
consciousness' (p. 30).

Historically considered, Selznick's formulation of systematizing opened an important

theoretical and empirical line of research. This is not simply due to his application of the system
framework to the analysis of organizations, because it was a current, extensively-used resource
before Selznick's work. But he achieved a comprehensive formulation of organizing as
systematizing in terms of an internal logic or necessity. His formulation of the opposition
between the formal and the informal provided a kind of dialectical approach, through which the
oft-repeated criticism of the static character of the structural-functional approach could be
overcome. As he explicitly stated, the problem consisted of developing 'a theory of
transformations in organizations', by means of properly tested empirical generalizations about
organizational conditions, not of accidents or external conditions interesting only as historical
events.

Thus, for Selznick, it would be acceptable to state, as Barnard did, that the 'innate propensity'
of organizations to expand is a function of an inherent stability of incentives, because in this way
it would be the theory of organization itself which provided the terms. Selznick illustrated what
is expected from a fruitful generalization, by means of his from-then-on popular hypothesis of
cooptation as an organizational 'self-defensive' mechanism. The purpose was to 'advance the
frontiers of the theory of organization', to appropriate an area of relations provided by 'the frame
of reference', which amounts to an explicit call to action for a generation of scholars, a
strategically formulated research programme.

But the question of what an organization is and how it comes about has not yet been
answered in simple terms. It might be argued that this is not absolutely necessary because
everybody knows more or less what an organization is, and that the problem is rather what to do

35
with it. This would be a way out of the problem. But, then, to understand this what-to-do would
also require a certain representation of something (not only an experience, regardless of its
vividness), and it is precisely this something which is not clear. This would lead us back to the
starting point again. Blau (1968: 297-8) provided an answer to this question in the following
terms:

An organization comes into existence when explicit procedures are established to coordinate the
activities of a group in the interest of achieving specified objectives. The collective efforts of men
may become formally organized either because all of them have some common interests or because a
subgroup has furnished inducements to the rest to work on behalf of its interest. Factory workers
organize themselves into unions to bargain collectively with management, and management has
organized the worker's tasks for the purpose of producing goods marketable for a profit.

Based upon this definition, Blau discusses different theoretical approaches, and exposes his own
methodological contribution to the study of organizations: a comparative strategy which could
lead to a taxonomy of organizations (Blau, 1974). But let us try to understand this definition. It
seems that the crucial point, the meaning of organizing, is the establishment of procedures,
whether by a group for themselves or by one group on behalf of another. This requires the
assumption that there are groups doing something, and that there is an event which divides their
histories: before and after the establishment of the procedures.

According to Blau, before the coming into existence of the organization, what exists is an
emergent social structure, exchanges and competitions, forces, attempts to exercise power. After
the establishment of procedures begins the story of a deliberately established social structure:
'whenever groups of men associate with one another, social organization develops among them,
but not every collectivity has a formal organization. The defining criterion of a formal
organization —or an organization for short— is the existence of procedures...' (Blau, 1968: 298).
The task of research is one of describing organizations, where 'meaningful problems for
scientific inquiry' can be posed. A genuine theory of organizations is that which explains 'how
differences in some organizational characteristics lead to differences in others. Only the
comparative focus on variations among organizations can produce such theories' (p. 303). Such a
formulation of the problem of organization theory has, indeed, led to a whole current of research,
though of a different style from that prompted by Selznick's formulation.

Two main currents of organization studies may, thus, be illustrated in terms of these two
approaches: detailed case studies in Selznick's style, and statistically-based, comparative studies
in Blau's style. Nevertheless, both Selznick and Blau coincide in the identification of the source
of scientifically relevant problems: the relations between the formal and the emergent. Now the
question becomes how organization theory came to be focused in such a way, how it itself
became organized to pursue this accepted common goal. One possible answer is that this way of
positing the object of study is the result of a previous work of systematizing, from which old
discussions on social phenomena became translated into the problem of understanding social
action in terms of a certain dialectics of the formal and the informal, the rational and the
irrational. As we have seen, in Hobbes' Leviathan an early formulation of this way of stating the
problem of social organization can be found. However, since the work of systematizing the
whole of social theory has been generally attributed to Max Weber, and his attempt to classify
actions according the methodological criterion of rationality, what Selznick's and Blau's

36
formulations of the problem of organization theory probably share is a certain Weber's legacy.
The following section consists of a brief account of this legacy.

Weber's legacy and the tradition of systematizing

According to Weber (1947), the appropriate sense of 'intended meaning' (or purpose) requires a
departure from ordinary usage in order to understand the subjective meaning of action. In his
translation of this work, Parsons added a comment on this particular point which reveals not only
what presumably Weber had in mind, but also, what is more important here, the way in which his
ideas exerted their major influence:

Essentially, what Weber is doing is to formulate an operational concept. The question is not whether
in a sense obvious to the ordinary person such an intended meaning 'really exists,' but whether the
concept is capable of providing a logical framework within which scientifically important
observations can be made. The test of validity of the observations is not whether their object is
immediately clear to common sense, but whether the results of these technical observations can be
satisfactorily organized in a systematic body of knowledge (p. 96).

In fact, the reader of Weber's methodological work will probably have the feeling that Weber is
always redefining and reassigning names, producing a general classification of them, based upon
re-descriptions of the some cases or examples which have been previously classified under
different names. Weber's picture of the social resembles an immense bureau full of archives, and
he assumes the task of providing the correct key-words for arranging what would be a labyrinth
of files. For example, consider his definition of action: 'In "action" is included all human
behaviour when and in so far as the acting individual attaches a subjective meaning to it. Action
in this sense may be overt or purely inward or subjective; it may consist of positive intervention
in a situation, or of deliberately refraining from such intervention or passively acquiescing in the
situation' (1947: 88).

The problem faced by the sociologist is, for Weber, that 'the ideal type of meaningful action
where the meaning is fully conscious and explicit is a marginal case... But the difficulty need not
prevent the sociologist from systematizing his concepts by the classification of possible types of
subjective meaning' (p. 112; emphasis added). Systematizing meant for Weber the same as
constructing ideal types. 'Only in this way is it possible to assess the causal significance of
irrational factors as accounting for the deviations from this type. The construction of a purely
rational course of action in such cases serves the sociologist as a type ('ideal type') which has the
merit of clear understandability and lack of ambiguity' (p. 92).

Let us introduce a brief digression here. In Weber's time, as in Hobbes' and perhaps still
today, accounting (or, at least, the way in which Italian mathematicians and businessmen of the
Renaissance reshaped the ancient task of keeping 'books' or records of transactions) appeared not
only as a useful technique, but also, rhetorically, as a warranty against the ambiguity and
uncertainty inherent in human affairs, especially in the world of business. In a discussion of the
technical and rhetorical aspects of accounting, in historical perspective, Carruthers and Espeland
(1991) use Weber's praise of accounting's role in the development of capitalism to illustrate the
rhetorical aspect of accounting.

37
 The idea of accounting might also help us understand the general rationale of Weber's way of
displaying his concepts and categories. The task he assigned to the sociologist (to systematize)
might be understood as one of developing a detailed way of ordering human behaviour to
facilitate the keeping of clear accounts. The problem was that only that kind of behaviour
involving conscious and explicit meaning could be directly accountable; whereas other types,
almost all, require a codification (rationalization) to permit accountability. The inherent
difficulties of this strategy have been treated by Parsons from the perspective of his generalized
system approach, which enabled him to develop a presumably superior accounting procedure.
Parsons summarizes his point in the 'Introduction' to The theory of social and economic
organization (Weber, 1947) in the following terms:

Ideal type theory is, however, perhaps the most difficult level on which to develop a coherent
generalized system. Type concepts can readily be formulated ad hoc for innumerable specific
purposes and can have a limited usefulness in this way. This does not, however, suffice for a
generalized system. For this purpose they must be arranged and classified in a definite order of
relationship. Only then will they have highly generalized significance on either a theoretical and
empirical level. Such systematization cannot, however, be developed on an ad hoc empirical basis.
Logically it involves reference both to considerations of extremely broad empirical scope and to
comprehensive theoretical categories (p. 28).

Parsons' point refers not only to the need for a high level of theoretical elaboration in the
treatment of concepts and categories, but also to his concern for the way in which Weber's
general indications might be followed, left in less careful hands. The danger would be the
proliferation of additions and modifications of accounts without paying careful attention to their
most general consequences, and the risk of adding a confusion of levels, further ambiguity and
finally destruction of the required order.

Let us now focus on Weber's definition of organization: 'An "organization" is a system of

continuous purposive action of a specified kind' (p. 151). Under this heading might enter many
different kinds of entities. But the definition is to be understood in technical terms, not in terms
of ordinary usage. The term organization is being used in a specific context. Here Weber is
dealing with a particular kind of entity: 'corporate groups', or relatively 'closed' social
relationships. The term system refers here to a 'system of order' or legitimate normative codes;
specifically, an 'administrative order'. The possibility of closing a social relation, in the sense of
excluding, limiting or subjecting to conditions the participation of outsiders, depends on an act of
'appropriation', by which insiders enjoy appropriated advantages or rights, which is the sense of
being a member. Finally, it should be added that 'the administration of political and ecclesiastical
affairs and of the business of associations is included in the concept of "organization" so far as it
conforms to the criterion of continuity' (p. 151).

It is not difficult to appreciate the sense of Parsons' admonition that the construction of ideal
types should not be taken lightly. Such a complex web of definitions and specifications of
meanings requires careful attention and a clear frame of reference. Moreover, the possibilities of
misclassification and misinterpretation increase to the extent that the sociologist is led to
introduce additional specifications to account for particular cases, without a careful, technical
treatment of the terms and a clear specification of categories. For instance, in the context of the
economic division of labour, Weber defines an organization as 'a technical category which

38
designates the ways in which various types of services are continuously combined with each
other and with non-human means of production' (p. 221). In this case, Weber is trying to clarify
the distinction between organization and enterprise, to differentiate the sense of organization as a
technical category from the purely economic, profit-making orientation.

Organization is here made synonymous with 'plant', and then a number of separate
organizations may be combined in a single enterprise in so far as 'they are all controlled in terms
of some kind of consistent plan', i.e., what is now currently known as vertical integration and
multidivisional structure (Chandler, 1962; Williamson, 1975, 1985). Thus, organization refers in
this context to a technical arrangement: 'to the technically distinct unit consisting in buildings,
equipment, labour forces, and technical management' (p. 222). Later, in terms of the technical
division of labour, this sense is further explicated:

The combination of specialized functions is found all the way from the case of an assistant holding a
piece of iron while a blacksmith forges it, a case which is repeated in every modern foundry, to the
complicated situations, which, though not specific to modern factories, are an important characteristic
of them. One of the most highly developed types outside the factory is the organization of a
symphony orchestra or of the cast of a theatrical production (p. 227).

Finally, Weber did provide an answer to the question of what an organization is. This notion of
organization as a clearly (technically) delimited entity has become an intuitive or
commonsensical notion. It might be thought that the lack of definition in later theorists' works is
due to their taking for granted the obviousness of this concept. And Weber also provided an
answer to the question of how organizations come into existence: a certain act of appropriation is
necessary to close a social relation.

Weber's position with respect to the role of ideal types as a methodological device, so that an
actual predominance of rationality was not presupposed, leads to the recognition that the
situation in which the actor's behaviour is to be analysed is a construction, and that the
possibilities left to the actor are also constructed. This point has been recently highlighted in a
discussion of Popper's doctrine of situational analysis, according to which the source of such a
doctrine can be found in Weber's work, 'while it cannot be proven by any express
acknowledgement of Popper' (Jacobs, 1990).

Weber's idea of objectivity is particularly clear in his stressing of the difference between the
construction of ideal types and any psychological kind of search: the analysis should be
concerned with the objective situation and nothing else. For example, in the case of a 'money
economy', Weber stated: 'The "pure" expression of this situation leaves the individual trapped
within the market a choice between only... two alternatives: "teleological" accommodation to the
"market" or economic ruin' (quoted by Jacobs, 1990: 562). The rationale of constructing
situations consists in exhausting the possibilities, or degrees of freedom in statistical terms, of
individual action, and reducing them to some clear, unambiguous statements. As Selznick (1948:
31) remarked: 'the interesting problem in social science is not so much why men act the way they
do as why men in certain circumstances must act the way they do'.

Now the implications of the notion of appropriation through which Weber defined the
closing of a social relation can be more clearly seen. Appropriation gives a name to the event of

39
the constitution of corporate groups, from which the definition of organization would ultimately
become fully articulated. It is that event whose explanation was lacking in Blau's account of how
an organization comes into existence. Technically understood, as a feature of the constructed
situation, the basis for the procedure of objectification through which the (social) world becomes
represented in terms of bounded extensions is provided by the concept of appropriation. In such a
state of affairs, after the event of appropriation becomes part of the world picture, organization
theory takes for granted the existence of organizations and their boundaries. Consequently, the
explanations focus on individuals' decisions, values and (bounded) rationalities.

Let us remember, however, that, by following Weber's methodological advice, values,

motives or purposes would not be things possessed by the individual, or private in any significant
sense, but names of features of the constructed situations. The action's rationality is a
determination produced by the constructed situation. As Jacobs (1990: 562) pointed out, the
agent's action 'is rational in pursuing the aim or value depicted in the model'. In a sense, Weber's
leaving aside of value judgements in science can be understood as the recognition that values, as
purposes or rationality, are but constructions to classify and account for experiences, and that no
a priori meanings or foundational properties can be attributed to them. In a remarkable passage in
The protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism, Weber wrote:

Today the spirit of religious asceticism —whether finally, who knows?— has escaped from the cage.
But victorious capitalism, since it rests on mechanical foundations, needs its support no longer. The
rosy blush of its laughing heir, the Enlightenment, seems also to be irretrievably fading, and the idea
of duty in one's calling prowls about in our lives like the ghost of dead religious beliefs (1930: 182).

This amounts to a kind of nihilistic recognition. As Vattimo (1991: 177) has explained: 'If God is
dead, that is, if foundational thought has been dissolved by the experiences of philosophical
reason in the course of history, then the only way of "proving" a thesis is to appeal to these
experiences. In a sense, then, we have to conform to a "logic" which is inscribed only in the
course of events, to which we cannot object in the name of some different legitimacy'.

Further development of the system theory of organization

Historically considered, the articulation of a theory of organization required the possibility of
making a distinction between particular organizations and organization in general. In this sense,
it might be said that organization theory began when Max Weber explicitly defined an
organization as 'a system of continuous purposive action of a specified kind' (1947: 151). Later,
Parsons (1960) would define organizations as collectivities, as differentiated subsystems of a
larger system, i.e., as systems. But a difference between Parsons' and Weber's strategy of
representation should not be overlooked.

Parsons criticized Weber's 'inadequate attention to psychological problems', to the problems

of the interpenetration of personalities and social systems, due to his lack of a generalized system
model (Parsons' 'Introduction' to Weber, 1947: 29). Thus, notwithstanding Weber's clear
methodological position, the search for psychological aspects in the understanding of human
action came again to the fore. In addition, Parsons' reliance on the empirical generalizations of

40
group phenomena to support and expand his system model provides, finally, a clue to
understanding how organization theory became a kind of natural field for social psychologists.

It is, therefore, no surprise that a further significant development of Parsons' system theory of
organization appeared in a book entitled The social psychology of organizations (Katz & Kahn,
1966). In the opening programmatic statement of the book, the authors made explicit their basic
assumptions as to how organizations are to be represented:

Our theoretical model for the understanding of organizations is that of an energetic input-output
system in which the energetic return from the output reactivates the system. Social organizations are
flagrantly open systems in that the input of energies and the conversion of output in further energetic
input consist of transactions between the organization and its environment (pp. 16-7).

This statement is also a declaration of a methodological position. Their basic theoretical

constructs are those related to system functioning (input-process-output-feedback), though this
does not deny that the rational purposes of individuals play an important role in focusing 'sources
of data or as subjects of special studies' (p. 16). And, as we shall see, they become more and
more important when explicit explanations of the system's dynamics are needed. Apart from
adding a fifth subsystem to the original Parsonian system (through a rearrangement of functions
already contained in the four-functional scheme, without the methodological clarity of the
original), Katz and Kahn's development of the system theory of organization consisted, at least
from the perspective of our discussion, in a more elaborated application of concepts drawn from
cybernetics and thermodynamics, an explicit consideration of the nature of the system's
boundaries, and an attempt to incorporate Floyd Allport's ideas on the structural character of
collective behaviour into their analytical framework. The following discussion takes these issues
further.

Let us begin by briefly recalling some aspects of the development of the ideas of cybernetics
and thermodynamics in order to provide a context for their introduction into Katz and Kahn's
model. A key element in the development of a cybernetic-system thinking was the theory of the
neuron formulated by the Spanish researcher Santiago Ramon y Cajal (Nobel-prize winner with
Camillo Golgi in 1906). In 1893 Ramon y Cajal suggested the idea that learning occurs as a
result of increased connections between neurons, and in 1904, in his Textura del sistema
nervioso del hombre y de los vertebrados, presented the theory that the nervous system is
composed only of nerve cells and their processes. In the 1940s McCulloch and Pitts developed
the automata theory and the concept of feedback, based on the work of Ramon y Cajal. Their
basic model was called the neural net, defined as a system of input and output neurons. The next
step consisted in developing a general automaton which included feedback processes.

Self-regulation by means of feed-back processes became not only essential theoretical

elements for people working in computers or electronic signal systems, for example, but also a
common terminology for educated people in general. And the project of simulating brain
processes and architecture became a common endeavour, in both the natural and social sciences.
Perhaps the most influential expositions and developments of the new concepts of cybernetics
and system theory are the works of Ashby (1972) and Bertalanffy (1968). In the social sciences,
perhaps the most general and speculative utilization of system concepts is due to the economist
Kenneth Boulding (1956). In the field of sociology, Buckley (1967) applied cybernetic concepts

41
in developing and/or criticizing the models of Parsons and Homans. And Stafford Beer (e.g.,
1964, 1966, 1981, 1985) has produced probably the most popular application of these ideas in
the field of management.

A professor at Yale from 1871 until his death in 1903, Josiah Willard Gibbs also deserves
special mention in this context. His work created the bases for the extension of thermodynamic
concepts to, for example, social science. In 1873 Gibbs introduced geometric representations of
thermodynamic relationships in two dimensions; and, in 1878, developed the important concept
of entropy (originally a mathematical quantity in thermodynamics, then interpreted as a
representation of the degree of disorder of a physical system). Gibbs defined the maximum
entropy as an equilibrium state of isolated systems, thus expanding the possibilities of
application of thermodynamics. His book of 1902, Elementary principles in statistical mechanics
developed with special reference to the rational foundation of thermodynamics, contained the
basic idea of an ensemble of structurally similar systems (a large number of replicas), where the
distribution of energy depended on the degrees of freedom of the systems, and only a very small
fraction of the systems had energies appreciably different from the average. Gibbs put Carnot's
second law of thermodynamics (the law of entropy) within a systems framework, with which the
ideas of systems, information, organization and control took on a new significance, attracting the
attention of a number of other scientists. Christenson (1973) has highlighted Gibbs' achievements
and their importance for the development of the system theory of organization. Detailed
references to the works of Ramon y Cajal, Gibbs, and other scientists can be found in any history
of science, encyclopaedia or dictionary of science.

These developments opened the way to a more advanced and generalized utilization of the
systems approach in almost any scientific field. For example, the notion of self-regulation could
thus be expressed in terms of controlling the level of entropy (the level of disorder of the system,
or its capacity to do work) by means of a feedback mechanism. The famous second law of
thermodynamics (the first law is a principle of conservation of energy) states the general
tendency of the flow of energy within a closed system. Energy tends to flow until a uniform
distribution is attained: the state of maximum entropy, when all capacity to do work ceases. Katz
and Kahn would formulate the problem of organization theory in terms of the possibility of
maintaining the level of negentropy —or reversing that general tendency.

The solution consisted in introducing order. This presupposes that the organization as an
open system is contained within a larger system, which is necessarily closed. The meaning of
negentropy for an open system is the magnitude of the difference (the gradient) between the
energy density in the neighbourhood of its input and output terminals so that energy can flow
throughout the system, allowing it to do physical work. But, it can be argued, the tendency
towards maximum entropy applies to the closed system as a whole and, then, at the end, there
would be no energy available to the open systems contained within it. This is precisely the task
of organizing: to maintain the gradient which, in turn, means to avoid the uniformity of the
energy distribution inside the larger system. As an open system, the organization needs a
mechanism to monitor the level of entropy in its neighbourhood. Such is the role of the feedback
mechanism.

42
 A distinction between two kinds of feedbacks is made: there are positive and negative
feedbacks. The crucial mechanism is the negative feedback (a signal to decrease, to negate, an
activity by reducing the output), whereas the positive feedback indicates a self-reinforcing
condition. The problem of organizing is by no means a simple one. It implies the giving of
structure, systematizing not only the inside of the system but also the larger system. It is a kind
of inverse 'image' of that tendency suggested by Boulding (1956). Instead of explaining
survivability in terms of a tendency of the system to become isomorphous with its environment,
as Boulding proposed, the system's problem is to transform the environment into an image of
itself. Though it can be said that both versions come to the same thing, by emphasizing the
second alternative the point is raised that we are not dealing here with a simple machine.

The whole mechanism requires a greater complexity than the control mechanism of a
washing machine, for example, since the problem is not one of a simple adaptive system. The
question is: How will the system be able to do what is expected of it? At this point the socio-
psychological content of Katz and Kahn's system comes to the fore. To begin with, the problem
of the existence of the organization is stated through a merging of Parsons' theory of the social
system and the socio-psychological theory of perception. This can be appreciated in their
discussion of the system's boundaries. Though the boundaries are referred to in different ways
throughout the book (e.g., barriers to membership, energy differentials, or qualitative breaks in
activities), ultimately

... the boundary conditions which ensure that behavior patterns within a system are appropriate to that
system are largely psychological in character. The individual must not be confused about which
system he is psychologically in at any given moment... Organizations... consist of patterned behavior;
if members misperceive the organizational boundary and misbehave in terms of it, they threaten the
very life of the organization (p. 51).

By passing the boundary and becoming a functioning member of the organization, the person takes on
some of the coding system of the organization, since he accepts some of its norms and values, absorbs
some of its subculture, and develops shared expectations and values with other members. The
boundary condition is thus responsible for the dilemma that the person within the system cannot
perceive things and communicate about them in the same way that an outsider would... It is extremely
difficult to occupy different positions in social space without a resulting differential perception (p.
228).

Thus, the organization's existence depends on the perceptions of its members which, in turn, are
the consequences of the existence of the organization. That is, the psychological character of the
boundaries is a consequence of their very (psychological) existence. A certain process of
absorption of a way of perceiving is consequently postulated. This would be the psychological
meaning of systematizing: a process of absorption of a particular culture, through which the
system ensures order as its basic, thermodynamic condition. But what the boundaries consist of
is not explicitly determined; though it might be inferred that the boundaries constitute, primarily,
some kind of condition of membership. This would permit the accommodation of the notion of a
social space in which individuals occupy positions as members or not.

According to Katz and Kahn, organizations differ in terms of the degree of permeability of
their boundaries. There are organizations whose boundaries are so 'sharply defined, rigid' that it
is not a matter of individual decision to enter or to leave. But such definiteness of boundaries is
43
not a simple condition. It seems to be related to different features of organizations, like size and
self-sufficiency, as well as to the general assumption of the formal-emergent dichotomy in social
organization. Let us see how they explain this point.

Organizations by definition are specific arrangements of patterned behavior distinct from their social
environment, but they differ in the degree to which they are so differentiated... The primitive social
organization is rooted in a given area of social space such as the community, and its functioning and
survival are direct functions of this larger segment of social space. It has no resources or stored
energy of its own and little power over its own members or over the larger community. It is more an
aspect of community functioning than an independent organization. The large scale organization,
though dependent upon the social world, is also a force in its own right. It can influence the
surrounding social space and can store the money and the legal contracts which guarantee such
influence. It typically lacks the spontaneous or expressive motivation of the primitive organization (p.
122)

This remarkable passage shows how the thermodynamic requirement of organizing is supposed
to be satisfied (the maintaining of a gradient of energy, by influencing the surrounding space);
and, at the same time, synthesizes the main features of the modern world-picture, from the
perspective of the social sciences. The general background (the canvass of the picture) is the
assumption of extensiveness, the spatialisation of the representation, upon which the drama of
the transition from traditional to modern society is re-presented.

The self-objectification of organizations as systems is presented as a consequence of their

ability to appropriate the world and transform it in stored energy (i.e., standing-reserve). The
capability of organizations to differentiate themselves, to become forces in their own
(appropriated) right, includes also a loss: the loss of that spontaneity and expressive richness of
the poor and dependent. But such a loss is compensated for by their being secure inside sharply
defined boundaries, and being able to impose values, expectations, codes.

Katz and Kahn did not reduce their attempt to such a collage of elements of the modern way
of representing. We might be tempted to say that they wanted something more than a picture,
perhaps something like a film. This is suggested by their repeated and admiring references to
Allport's theory of event-structure. In fact, they dedicated their book to Allport. Using Allport's
terminology, they wrote: 'A social system is a structuring of events or happenings rather than of
physical parts and it therefore has no structure apart from its functioning'. But then they
recognized: 'It is difficult for us to view social systems as structures of events because of our
needs for more concrete and simple ways of conceptualizing the world' (p. 31). And finally
retreated into the Parsonian framework. A first reaction might be: is the above quoted passage an
example of more concrete and simple ways? But such a reaction would reveal that we have not
yet understood that when they say 'the world' they mean a clear, concrete picture.

Allport's theory probably needed another soil in which to germinate. Possibly, the
assumption that the system was unthinkable without a taken-for-granted boundary condition was
incompatible with the idea of ongoing processes and event-structures, whose closure might not
necessarily be in correspondence with a criterion of membership. And, probably, Katz and Kahn
found a way of justifying the translation of Allport's terms into more concrete and simple ones in
the following statement: 'a process of ongoing social interaction can be usefully described by

44
comparison with a hypothetical system in a state of moving equilibrium' (Parsons & Bales, 1953:
71). Perhaps a more thoroughly attempt to apply Allport's ideas in organization theory can be
found in Weick's (1979) Social psychology of organizing. However, in spite of the different
('phenomenological') language used by Weick, it might also be said that his view of
organizations remains within the system framework and its imperative of entropy reduction, as
the following statement suggests:

We are concerned with ways in which organizations make sense out of the world and of the fact that
they spend the majority of their time superimposing a variety of meanings on the world. It is virtually
impossible for one meaning to be imposed on the stream of experience and exhaust all of its
possibilities, and it is for that reason that we assume equivocality is a prominent component of an
organization's existence (Weick, 1979: 175).

A final comment on the boundary condition

Given the problematic character of the specification of the system boundaries, let us introduce
another extension of the system model, in which the notion of a qualitative break of a current of
activities as a way of specifying the boundaries is highlighted. According to Miller and Rice
(1973), if we conceive of the system as a system of activities —i.e., the activities required to
complete the transformation of input into output— the deduction that the system has a boundary
seems to be straightforward: 'the system as a whole is identifiable as being in certain, if limited,
respects independent of related systems...', and 'the work done by the system is therefore, at least
potentially, measurable by the difference between its intakes and its outputs' (p. 7). They noticed,
however, that the simple input/output ratio does not identify the boundaries of the system.
According to Miller and Rice, the boundary implies a discontinuity, 'a differentiation of
technology, territory, or time, or of some combination of these' (p. 7). But the definition of
boundaries is not as straightforward as it appears at first sight:

... difficulties arise if an organizational boundary is imposed at a point in a process which does not
satisfy these two criteria of the boundary of an activity system. Unless there is a discontinuity, there
can be no boundary region and thus no sense in which activities carried out within the supposed
system are insulated from other activities 'outside' (p. 9; emphasis added).

The source of the difficulties is the need to match the criterion of inclusion/exclusion (the
organizational sense of boundaries as membership of individuals) with that of a discontinuity in
an on-going process. But Miller and Rice did not solve the problem. A solution has been
suggested by Emery and Trist (1981: 325) who looked for a way of coupling the social and
technical components of systems: 'the materials, machines and territory that go to making up the
technological component are usually defined, in any modern society, as "belonging" to an
enterprise and excluded from similar control by other enterprises'. In this sense, the boundaries
of the input-output system would coincide with the criterion of membership. But this explanation
can be traced back to Weber's category of appropriation (and let us remember that Weber equally
included buildings and equipment in the definition of organization), and does not account for a
discontinuity in terms of a process, but simply formally locates the points of input and output in
the picture, as it were.

45
 Organizational literature contains a variety of strategies of boundary management which
have been grouped in two general kinds by Scott (1987): buffering (or protective artificial
closing) and bridging (or changing the boundaries). What those practical remedies suggest is that
there is something that cannot be easily contained within the spatial frame of the system, and that
a more general problem has to be addressed in the system theory of organization. After a
comprehensive review of the literature, Scott (1987) adopts a particular solution to the problem
of defining organizational boundaries. The notion of boundary is logically deduced from the
notion of collectivity: 'All collectivities —including informal groups, communities,
organizations, and entire societies— possess, by definition, boundaries that distinguish them
from other systems' (p. 171; emphasis added).

Scott refers to two kinds of criteria for the specification of boundaries: characteristics of the
actors (which emphasizes normative criteria of membership) or characteristics of activities or
interactions (which emphasizes behavioural criteria). However, Scott's indications with respect
to the second kind of criteria lead again to some assumption of a status of membership; whether
in the form of discretion over the members behaviours —by referring to Pfeffer and Salancik's
(1978) analysis of control— or in the form of physical barriers —by referring to Goffman's
(1961) analysis of total institutions. Finally, the boundary condition is to be regarded as a matter
of fact: 'Most groups, and particularly organizations, carefully differentiate members and
nonmembers, developing explicit normative criteria for determining who is to participate in
them' (p. 172).

As we have seen, when theorists refer to something as a fact or as a feature of the world, they
are usually referring to a certain representation or picture. The point is that a way of representing
is not simply a kind of psychological phenomenon. Representing is also a constructing. Different
representations, as particular solutions to particular problems, are subject to certain constraints
on which their own existence depends, e.g. the dialectics between the formal and the informal, or
the system's boundary-maintaining condition. It is a kind of irony that systematizing, in spite of
its power to bring about a coherent and consistent world picture, an all-inclusive way of
organizing, has to overlook what is precisely at the root of the very notion of system: its
boundaries.

Perhaps, as has been found in the study of myths, in its ability to maintain and conceal such a
mystery resides its power. Such an overlooking, or taken-for-grantedness, of the boundaries'
existence is what produces the independence and autonomy of the system. The boundaries can
always be logically deducted or established as a matter of fact. The discussion focuses, then, on
the problems of managing the boundaries. The boundaries cannot be explained within this way
of representing. For this would imply that they cannot be taken for granted, and without them no
picture would be possible. As Cooper (1990: 170) suggested, by commenting on the assumption
that the boundary belongs to the system and not to the environment:

The system (with its boundary) becomes conceptually detached from background or environment and
thus takes on a life of its own. This has the effect of diverting attention from the all-important
function of the frame... It is, we would claim, the frame which constitutes the relationship between
system and environment and consequently it is the frame which provides the key to understanding the
relationship between the two... The boundary or frame has now to be conceived not as a static

46
 concept, subservient to either term, but as an active process of differentiation which serves system
and environment equally.

Organizing in the mode of systematizing, in the case of Katz and Kahn for example, becomes an
attempt to produce detachment, by introducing order into the world as a requirement for the
continued existence of the system. In retrospect, it is the same attempt as Hobbes', contrasting a
desirable state of order and an undesirable state of disorder, both of them being representations.
This feature of systematizing is what Cooper has brought to light, by focusing on the role played
by the boundary: 'Attention to the divisionary nature of the boundary reveals that the work of
organization is focused upon transforming an intrinsically ambiguous condition into one that is
ordered, so that organization as a process is constantly bound up with its contrary state of
disorganization' (1990: 172).

Let us simply add that the state of disorder or disorganization is also a construction, a way of
representing introduced by the systemic attempt to introduce order. Thus, the question would
now be whether it is possible to attempt a different way of representing which requires neither
the setting of boundaries, nor referring to a contrast between order and disorder as its starting
point. Such a question constitutes the problem for the subsequent chapters of this work.

The development of the system theory of organization, and the adoption of openness as a
basic feature of systems, has undoubtedly revealed the real as a complex matter. But,
notwithstanding the recognized permeability, transitoriness and, even, fuzziness of
organizational boundaries, boundaries are indispensable in order to depict a clearly specified
object, lest the strength and coherence of the approach dilute into a solution of ambiguity and
vagueness. The tradition of systematizing, including the theoretical development of sophisticated
models of system equilibrium and dynamics, resembles the situation of the theoretical physics
branch of cosmology dominated by the 'big bang' approach, where the universe is presented as it
appears after the explosion.

In a sense, the system theory of organization is simply following Hobbes' procedure of

assuming or taking for granted a certain original act of creation. And, as Tuck (1989: 78) has
pointed out in commenting on Hobbes' religious ideas: 'he accepted the possibility of a really
existing first cause some unaccountable number of years ago, though what it might have been
like he could not say —modern astrophysicists' "Big Bang" might have played the same role as
"God" for him'. It seems that a different approach has appeared which proposes that the universe
is but the result of the vibrations of certain superstrings, whose existence escapes our space-time
frame, and promises explanation for almost everything. Without suggesting any correspondence
with this situation, nor even less the search for a 'theory of everything', the next part of this thesis
will deal with a possible, yet undeveloped approach, where the social universe can be explained
in terms of configurations brought about by movements related to some hardly visible networks,
without the need for an unquestioned origin, explosion or creation.

47
 PART II. NETWORKS
Science sets upon the real. It orders it into place to the end that
at any given time the real will exhibit itself as an interacting
network, i.e., in surveyable series of related causes. The real
then becomes surveyable and capable of being followed out in
its sequences. The real becomes secured in its objectness.
Martin Heidegger (1977: 167-8)

The increasing use of the word network to describe a variety of situations, in scientific
publications, business literature, newspapers and common conversation, seems to reflect the
awareness that new realities demand a new language. It seems that the contemporary world
exhibits certain features —e.g., connectedness and boundedness, transitoriness and mobility—
which distinguish it from any previous period. However, doubt might arise as to whether we are
really living a new world where old-fashioned compartments have become meaningless. A
complementary question would be whether it is possible to describe the world of the past in
terms of networks, connectedness, mobility. An interesting illustration of this last possibility is
provided by Braudel's (1982: 148-9) description of the world of commerce in the sixteenth-
century:

The networks of trade encircled the world. At every halt or crossroads we can assume that there was a
merchant, either settled or passing through. The role he played was determined by his position on the
map: 'Tell me where you are and I will tell you who you are'...

Any commercial network brought together a certain number of individuals or agents, whether
belonging to the same firm or not, located at different points on a circuit or a group of circuits. Trade
thrived on these communications, on the cooperation and connection which automatically flowered
with increasing prosperity of the interested parties.

Without significant changes, this passage might also describe the modern world of commerce.
Today, as in the past, it seems that the crucial problem for those agents is of being interconnected
in a network rather than one of belonging within certain boundaries. Moreover, a re-
interpretation of the whole of history seems to be possible through the use of the network
concept as a way of representing situations and processes. Thus, for instance, it has been
suggested that: 'Overlapping interaction networks are the historical norm... The rise of
civilization is explicable in terms of the insertion of alluvial agriculture into various overlapping
regional networks...' (Mann, 1987: 16-7).

These examples illustrate the possibility of using the concept of network as a way of
representing different features of the world in different historical periods. It should be
acknowledged, however, that this way of representing constitutes itself a more or less recent
feature of the world. These examples also illustrate, then, a certain philosophical change: the
picture of bounded entities (in which the world has been maintained) is changing or it is being
looked at in a different way, or both. This does not seem to be a change insinuated only in the
ideas advanced by certain philosophers, scientists or artists. A way of representing is also a way
of constructing. For example, as discussed in the second chapter, for Weber the market economy
left the individual with only two alternatives (accommodation or ruin). Likewise, the new

48
awareness expressed in the use of the concept of network might be understood as the recognition
of two similar alternatives: connection or penury.

To take but one example, the development of telecommunication networks is currently

revealing not only the crucial importance of connection but also the lack of understanding of the
phenomena related to networking processes. For instance, a new concept in telecommunication
technology, the intelligent network, promises a previously unthinkable degree of control and
expansion of the possibilities of creating new services. The expectations are described in terms
of 'universal interconnectivity' and the creation of 'a universal "networking" marketplace'
(Mansell, 1990: 512). Traditionally, the course of the evolution of telecommunications, in terms
of infrastructure and organization, has been regarded as a technical problem of the firms
involved; and, institutionally, as a matter of market forces under the loose control of international
organizations. Now, the questions around the social and economic implications of a 'global
networking economy' have begun to demand a network approach to the study of technical
change in the field of telecommunications: 'to unpack the telecommunication "black box" to
explore the sources of change in the technical and institutional matrix which influences the
evolution of networks' (Mansell, 1990: 503).

Thus, in this case, the development of telecommunication networks has begun to demand the
utilization of a network approach to understand and to deal with the complex economic, social,
and political processes that this development is unfolding. But, in fact, the systematic utilization
of the concept of network in social science is anything but new. At least from the beginning of
the present century, social scientists have been using the concept of network to analyse
phenomena of social organization. The question would be whether such analyses provide the
bases for developing the approach which seems to be now required. Two traditions of network
analysis can be distinguished: social network analysis, the approach developed by sociologists,
social psychologists and anthropologists, and network analysis as a tool employed by engineers
and practitioners of scientific management. Both approaches have coexisted in relative isolation,
and almost unnoticed under the cover of the system approach. But their time seems to have
come.

A network approach does not require, in principle, the assumption of a bounded entity as the
starting point of the inquiry; and thus it might bring some light to the understanding of
organization, and of the boundary condition as well. The objective of this part of the thesis is to
discuss the uses of this approach in social science in general, and in organization studies in
particular. The third chapter introduces the application of the network approach in social science.
This chapter consists of two sections: the first refers to the tradition of social network analysis
which, with respect to the development of organization studies, has been the most influential
tradition; and the second, to the tradition of network analysis, the technical perspective.

The application of a network approach in organization studies is the theme of the fourth
chapter, which is divided into the two sections that emerge 'naturally' from the organizational
literature: intra- and inter-organizational networks. A final comment in this chapter is devoted to
discussing in general terms the question of whether these applications of the network approach
illustrate the possibility of developing an alternative to the system approach as a way of
representing organization. Finally, in an appendix to this part, a further exploration of the

49
possibilities of a network approach is included, by commenting on the work of economists who
have been developing an economic theory of organization: the firm as a network of transactions.

CHAPTER 3. NETWORKS IN THE SOCIAL SCIENCES

Like systems, networks may be defined at a high level of abstraction and can be used to represent
a wide range of (from material to immaterial) things. In addition, the words network and system
are sometimes used synonymously: a system may be defined as a network, or vice versa.
Perhaps, the increasing use of the concept of network, and the now usual formulation of the
problem of organizing as one of networking, for example, is facilitated by this close affinity
between the concepts of network and system. However, it has also been recognized that, if not a
radical change of view, at least a certain reformulation of old problems is required for the
adoption of a network approach. Thus, for instance, by commenting on the future of general
systems theory, Rapoport (1968: 457-8) noticed that 'classical mathematics is not able to handle
complex structural features. Organization is best depicted as a network, and the mathematical
theory of networks derives largely from certain branches of topology and abstract algebra rather
than from analysis, which underlies classical mathematics'.

The concept of network might, then, be regarded as an aid to the understanding of some of
the complexities of systems, deriving from the interrelationships of their parts. For example, the
title of Whitehouse's (1973) textbook on operational research reveals this complementary role
assigned to the concept of network: Systems analysis and design using networks. But, as
Rapoport indicates, the representation of organization in network terms requires a not
inconsiderable change from analysis to topology as the basic mathematical theory. And such a
transition is still waiting. Textbooks on operational research, for example, present the theme of
networks in terms of linear programming, and other advanced analytical tools. Traditional
textbooks on operational research (e.g., Hillier & Lieberman, 1990; Levin, Rubin, Stinson &
Gardner, 1989; Taha, 1989) contain chapters on network analysis or network models, in which
instrumental accounts and practical exercises are provided.

In a sense, the concept of network seems to be subsumed within the system approach.
Moreover, the specification of boundaries, a basic feature of the system approach, has also been
prescribed as a requirement for a scientific application of the network approach in the social
sciences, in order to specify a relevant domain for network analysis. In a comprehensive review
of the state of the art in the methodological aspects of the application of the network approach in
social research, Marsden (1990: 439) explains that the specification of the 'boundaries on the set
of units to be included in a network... in some ways parallels the general problem of defining the
population to which research results are to be generalized'. And the programme for the social
sciences provided by the system approach might also be reformulated in order to include a
complementary role for a network approach. As Harary, Norman and Cartwright (1969: 4)
suggested: 'we must have adequate operational procedures for identifying relevant empirical
entities and relationships among them. If these are unequivocally identified, then digraph theory
specifies structural properties that must be found in the empirical world'.

50
 Thus, for example, the concept of network could contribute to the articulation and
elaboration of the notion of organization as a bounded entity. Nevertheless, in spite of the
conflation of the meanings of network and system and the current subsumption of the concept of
network within the system approach, the development of a network approach can certainly
provide an opportunity for accounting for the complex phenomena involved in the processes of
social organization in different terms from those of a system approach. For a network approach
the problem of analysing social organization would be defined in terms of the extension of
relations through a widely, or even fuzzily, defined domain rather than in terms of restricted
states of clearly delimited, bounded entities.

This chapter explores the use of the network approach to the study of social organization in
general terms. The first section, devoted to the social perspective of network analysis, uses
Moreno's concept of network in order to explore the general rationale of the approach. Then, by
means of examples taken from different disciplines, e.g., anthropology, social psychology, and
sociology, a discussion of the traditional use of the concept of network in social research is
offered. In general, the evolution of the approach shows a progressive utilization of the concept
of network as a methodological tool for the operationalization of variables concerning social
interaction. The chapter concludes with a brief comment on the technical perspective, or the
tradition of network analysis as a tool of scientific management. Notwithstanding its relevance
for a further development of the network approach to the study of organization, this tradition has
had considerably less impact than the social perspective on the application of the network
approach in organization studies.

Network analysis I: the social perspective

This section consists of two parts. In the first part Moreno's contribution to the development of
social-science thinking provides an opportunity for illustrating a general concept of network as a
way of representing phenomena of social organization. The discussion of this particular
conception of network, and its possibilities for providing a basis for developing a network
approach in the social sciences, leads to a consideration of the application of this approach, in the
second part of this section, based on examples drawn from the tradition of social network
analysis.

Moreno's concept of network

Perhaps the most imaginative and theoretically elaborated utilization of the concept of network
in the analysis of social organization can be found in the pioneering work of Jacob Moreno, in
the first decades of this century. Moreno's work Who shall survive? (1953; originally published
in 1934) contains a first-hand, autobiographical account of the author's main ideas and projects,
with an extensive exposition of problems and attempted solutions. A psychiatrist with a highly
developed concern with social problems of modern societies, Moreno began his work by
criticizing Freud's idea of therapy as lacking enough concern with action and commitment to
social problems. As he rhetorically wrote: 'If [God] had started with psychoanalysis he would
hardly have begun to create anything, the world might have remained uncreated. Therefore, I
conclude that God was first a creator, an actor, a psychodramatist. He had to create the world
before he had the time, the need and inclination to analyze it' (1953: xvii).

51
 The very title of this work is an abbreviated statement of his major problem: 'which are the
"social" laws of natural selection?' (p. 6). And it can be said that he found in the concept of
network a way of answering this question. By analysing the configurations drawn from the
sociometric study of group phenomena, Moreno arrived at the following way of stating the
problem:

The frequency distribution of choices shown by sociometric data is comparable to the frequency
distribution of wealth in a society. Extremes of distribution are accentuated. The exceedingly wealthy
are few; the exceedingly poor are many. The question can be raised whether the similar
characteristics of the economic and sociometric curves are accidental occurrences or whether they are
both expressions of the same law, a law of sociodynamics...
There are certain structural processes observable in the groups studied which are best explained if it is
assumed that networks exist. One of these structural phenomena is the chain-relation... This
phenomenon appears hand in hand with the maturation and differentiation of social organization. It is
a process of structural growth (p. 640).

The basic data drawn from the study of sociodynamics —i.e., of the expressions of attraction,
indifference and rejection among individuals in a group— took on a revealing significance when
portrayed in the form of 'sociograms'. Those socio-psychological phenomena appeared to have
structural properties; and the analysis could thus go beyond the static confirmation of a
distribution towards the dynamic apprehension of an evolving structure. The observation of
'chain-relations', by assuming the existence of networks, became the basis to explain why social
processes exhibited their peculiar independence from the particular motivations of the
individuals involved: they develop as chains that link individuals according to different criteria
(religious, for example) and spread without regard to the boundaries of any social aggregate.
These structures seemed to take on a life of their own, detached from the contexts of social,
political or geographical divisions.

The concept of network provided Moreno not only with a metaphor but also with a way of
attributing a certain degree of 'ostensivity' to his chain-relations in order to show their extension
and evolution. In fact, Moreno's social theorizing drew heavily on the possibility of graphic
representation. His analysis of a whole community begins with its physical geography, upon
which a sociometric geography is developed to account for its social structure: a map of relations
between 'social atoms' (the nuclei of relations around every individual which form the smallest
social structures). The concept of network can, then, be easily defined in terms of this mapping
of social relations. Thus,

Whereas certain parts of these social atoms seem to remain buried between the individuals
participating, certain parts link themselves with parts of other social atoms and these with parts of
other social atoms, forming complex chains of interrelations which are called, in terms of descriptive
sociometry, sociometric networks. The older and wider the network spreads the less significant seems
to be the individual contribution toward it (p. 53).

Moreno's networks had the character of relatively permanent structures which link individuals
across group or community boundaries through the transmission of affects and beliefs: 'the
psychological currents which flow through them' (p. 449). Moreno explained the existence of
networks both in sociodynamic terms (the effect of the formation of social atoms through

52
individual choices) and in economic terms: 'the economic principle of producing the greatest
effect with the least effort' (p. 447).

According to Moreno, there are two basic functions of a social network: (1) it provides
certain constancy to social organization, due to their structural character of supporting the
psychological currents; and (2) it has an 'architectonic function', in the sense of controlling the
development of the community, due to its shaping of public opinion. Thus, for example,

The local district or neighborhood is only physically one unit. This analysis shows that it is broken up
not, however, into small units, but into parts which have their corresponding parts in other districts
and neighborhoods. The local districts are, so to speak, transversed by psychological currents which
bind large groups of individuals together into units, irrespective of neighborhood, district, or borough
distinctions. These networks are the kitchens of public opinion. It is through these channels that
people affect, educate, or disintegrate one another. It is through these networks that suggestion is
transmitted. In one part of a community a person has the reputation of honesty; in another part of
dishonesty. Whatever the actual facts may be, this reputation is due to two different networks in
which travel two different opinions about him (p. 450).

As we can see, both functions are intimately related to each other. They are consequences of the
network's structural property, a crucial feature of Moreno's contribution. This is precisely what
the quoted passage shows in a remarkable way: the possibility of conceiving of a structure
which, related to a stable, physical space, becomes detached, adopts different forms, and
transforms the very sense of unity of that space without necessarily altering it in a physical sense.

It is not necessary to demonstrate that Moreno had a formal training in topology in order to
understand how he was able to produce such a topological representation of social phenomena. It
might simply be said that a topological culture has been evolving since the last century, and
Moreno's solution to the problem of representing complex social phenomena shows a possible
use of the resources provided by such a culture. As Baxandall (1989: 103), for example, suggests
in his explanation of the picture A lady taking tea (1735) by Jean-Baptiste Chardin (1699-1779):

... there was no need for Chardin to read Locke: the culture was Lockean. It is we, outside, who need
Locke, as a means of getting some sense of the pattern of the eighteenth-century mind. 'Lockeanism'
was necessary to articulate the pictorial deployment of Distinctness; on the other hand, Distinctness
was necessary to give the Lockean distinctions [between representation of substance and
representation of perception] specific pictorial presence.

In fact, in Moreno's work the possibility of translating social theory into the language of
topology is suggested by his use of the concepts of networks, boundaries, maps, surfaces,
traversability, permanence of structural form through change, and so on. Thus, social
organization might be understood by means of a representation of forms which escape Euclidean
geometry, and whose properties provide constancy and control over the uncertainties and
complexities of the 'real' world. Connectedness would become the key to understanding social
reality. But these forms in which connectedness can be properly portrayed are hard to visualize,
notwithstanding the efforts made by Moreno and some of his followers who attempted to
develop a topological approach to psychology and social psychology, e.g., Lewin (1936, 1951).
Moreno's networks, after all, are not 'visible' outside this (topological) language.

53
 This is perhaps the reason for the later reduction of the representation of networks to
communication networks in a certain physical sense, and their treatment to the frame provided
by Euclidean geometry and classical mathematics. This is not to deny the mathematical
developments in social network analysis. A good example of development in the treatment of
structural models is the work of Harary, Norman and Cartwright (1966), which has provided
mathematically-inclined psychologists with a rigorous language. But this is also a good example
of how the representation of social phenomena became accommodated within a logic of distance
and measurement, different from the logic of transformation of topology, and the understanding
of social organization maintained within the (strong) tradition of the system approach. Let us
illustrate this point with the strategy proposed by Harary, Norman and Cartwright (1966: 189-90)
for analysing status phenomena in organizations:

For any point u in this digraph [of delegated authority in an organization], a status measure s(u) is
wanted such that (1) s(u) is an integer, (2) s(u) is 0 if and only if u has no subordinates, (3) if the
subordinate vector of v is obtained from that of u by adding one subordinate (at any distance from v),
the status of v is greater than that of u, and (4) if the subordinate vector of v is obtained from that of u
by increasing the distance of any one subordinate, the status of v is again greater than that of u. In
view of these considerations, the status of person v in an organization may be defined as the number
of his immediate subordinates, plus twice the number of their immediate subordinates (who are not
immediate subordinates of v), plus three times the number of their immediate subordinates (not
already included), and so on. It can be shown that this particular definition gives the smallest possible
measure satisfying these four requirements and, in this sense, is a natural one.

Finally, the operationalization of the concept of network, in terms of communication networks,

has provided both a way of avoiding the difficulties of exposition, and a way of adding
complexity to the picture offered by the system approach without questioning it. The different
logic required by a topological representation would render meaningless traditional
measurement, because the possibility of structural transformation would undermine the
foundations of any measurement: the notion of distance. Thus, the story of the concept of
network in the social sciences might be thought of as a battle to expunge the 'work' from the
picture, in order to maintain a logic of measurement. The network would, then, become a net —
still a complex 'thing', but more easily grasped.

The concept of network as a methodological tool

From the second half of the present century onward, there has been both an increasing attention
to the mathematical properties of networks by social scientists, and an increasing application of
the network concept in different disciplines. In a comprehensive review of the field of social
network analysis, mainly in terms of the problems of empirical research, Marsden (1990: 436)
has formulated what might be taken as the general approach in the application of the concept of
network in the social sciences:

Moving away from the use of the concept of a social network as a sensitizing metaphor and toward its
development as a research tool, the approach seeks to describe social structure in terms of networks
and to interpret the behavior of actors in light of their varying positions within social structure.
Emphasis is on constraints placed by social structure on individual action and the differential
opportunities —known variously as social resources, social capital, or social support— to which
actors have access.

54
Likewise, in a discussion of the issue of holism vs. individualism in social science, it has been
argued that a social network analysis' key strength is: 'its ability to operationalize a relationist
methodology' and that 'social network analysis can provide a system-referenced conception of
structural constraint and methodology, in the techniques sense, for operationalizing the
relationist conception of the relationship between human action and social structure' (Haines,
1988: 179). In such a statement we can find not only a summary formulation of what is expected
from social network analysis, but also the above-noted conflation of the concepts of network and
system which, now, leads to the standard statement of the problem of social science,
methodologically speaking, in terms of 'the relationship between human action and social
structure'.

To illustrate an opposite line of thought, in which this emphasized distinction between action
and structure is regarded as untenable, let us quote Mann's (1987: 1-2) 'effectist' statement to call
for a network approach in social science:

Because there is no system, no totality, there cannot be 'subsystems,' 'dimensions,' or 'levels' of such a
totality. Because there is no whole, social relations cannot be reduced 'ultimately,' 'in the last
instance,' to some systemic property of it —like the 'mode of production,' or the 'cultural' or
'normative system,' or the 'form of military organization.' Because there is no bounded totality, it is
not helpful to divide social change or conflict into 'endogenous' or 'exogenous' varieties. Because
there is no social system, there is no 'evolutionary' process within it. Because humanity is not divided
into a series of bounded totalities, 'diffusion' of social organization does not occur between them.
Because there is no totality, individuals are not constrained in their behavior by 'social structure as a
whole,' and so it is not helpful to make a distinction between 'social action' and 'social structure.'

An important line of development of social network analysis has been prompted by the work of a
group of anthropologists who adopted the concepts and techniques of network analysis, mainly
as a rejection of the dominant structural-functional approach. According to Jeremy Boissevain,
one of the leading figures of this movement,

It has for long been a basic assumption of anthropology that where relations are multiplex, that is
where the relations between two persons derive from their activities in several institutional fields, the
different types of relations impinge on and influence the actors in the various roles they play. Indeed
it is a basic assumption of those ascribing to the network approach that behaviour cannot be explained
in terms of any one single activity field (Boissevain & Mitchell, 1973: xi).

The network approach would provide researchers with a way of getting rid of the assumption of
an 'abstract society', of understanding that the basic problems refer to the way people interact
with each other, 'and that the whole network of relations so formed is in a state of flux' (p. viii).
One of the pioneering works in this line of research was Barnes' (1954) study of a Norwegian
fishing community. By focusing on interpersonal relations, the network approach enabled him to
avoid the category of 'group membership' and the assumption of boundaries implicit in the
system approach. However, Barnes faced the problem of defining the boundaries of his
networks, and the need for distinguishing segments within the 'total' network.

This line of work illustrate the difficulties in the attempt to develop an alternative to the
system approach, i.e., to produce an account of an empirical situation in terms of networks,

55
without borrowing analytical categories and the general rationale from the structural-functional
framework. For instance, the idea of multiplexity, illuminating as it is, might lead the researcher
to account for a situation in terms of bounded entities corresponding to functional domains. The
observation of behaviours will necessarily assume the existence of a certain background against
which the meaning is inferred. In fact, the general assumption of functionality has become a
prerequisite of the modern way of representing social reality and, indeed, of our language. A
methodological way out of this problem has been formulated by Mitchell (1973: 34) in the
following terms:

... the opposition of networks and corporate groups (or institutions) must be a false dichotomy: they
are social phenomena at different levels of abstraction... Some types of field data may lend
themselves to summarization in terms of a few general abstract principles based on what we have
called the 'content' of social links, while others may be only inadequately encompassed in highly
abstract statements such as in terms of corporate groups and institutions.

But this solution is also illustrative of the fact that a basic problem has not been solved. To
translate the problem of representation into one of levels of abstraction means: the picture is the
same, but different accounts can be offered. The problem is that this difference between
networks and corporate groups in terms of level of abstraction is, after all, a matter of
presupposition. Moreover, this distinction and its possible implication, that those 'highly abstract
statements' refer to something less 'real' than social interaction, could be rather misleading. As
Callon and Latour (1981: 300) have pointed out: 'In a world already structured by macro-actors,
nothing could be poorer and more abstract than individual social interaction'.

Another interesting attempt to distinguish a network approach from a structural-functional

one has focused on the concept of role. By using the metaphor of the theatre, Banck (1973: 42)
suggests that 'If... the structural role concept may be compared with the prescriptions of classical
theatre, the role concept at network level ought to be compared with the modern "free theatre"
role improvisation and manipulation of the audience by the actors'. This is without doubt an
imaginative, and provocative, comparison. However, it suggests that the difference between both
approaches might be regarded as a matter of historical evolution or adaptive accommodation. It
might be argued that, by stating the difference in these terms, a basic similarity remains.

For instance, by maintaining the metaphor of the stage, the separation of the actors from the
audience, the representational strategy of a network approach remains under the general frame of
the system approach. We have seen how from Hobbes' time the metaphor of the theatre has been
a suitable artifice in the rhetoric of the construction of social systems. In fact, an enormous
change has occurred to the idea of theatre since Shakespeare's time. But to understand social
organization processes would require us to understand how the theatre itself comes about, and
how the changes in stage and performance occur rather than an appreciation of different styles,
attractive and useful as it can be.

Perhaps one of the most conspicuous examples of the application of the concepts and
techniques of network analysis in social science is the work of Everett Rogers on diffusion of
innovations. This brief reference is not intended to address the whole of this work, nor even
some of the developments it has prompted, e.g., the distinction between loose- and close-knitted
networks, whose implications have been widely used in operationalizing behavioural conjectures

56
in different disciplines. Rather, let us focus on the most general formulation of Rogers' use of the
concept of network, and its implication for understanding organization. He used the concept of
network as a 'communication network', a link between individuals, in order to predict the
influences of patterned flows of information on human behaviour.

Rogers succinctly defined networks as 'the invisible routes through which individuals make
things happen' (1983: 294). This definition, though retaining some of Moreno's idea of the
architectonic function of networks, reduces such a function to a certain instrumentality or
manipulability of networks. The network would become an instrument to control individual
behaviour within an organization; hence, Rogers' definition of organization:

An organization is a stable system of individuals who work together to achieve common goals
through a hierarchy of ranks and a division of labor... Organizations are created to handle routine
tasks and to lend stability to human relationships. Their efficiency as a means of organizing human
endeavors is in part due to this stability, which stems from the relatively high degree of structure that
is imposed on communication patterns (p. 349).

This definition illustrates not only the current understanding of organization, in line with the
tradition of organizing as systematizing, but also the utilization of the concept of network as a
complement to the general framework of the system approach. Networking is understood here as
manipulating a communication structure 'to make things happen'. After all, by assuming that
organizations are 'creations', it might also be assumed the existence of a subject who stands
'outside' the network, as it were, and is able to manipulate it. The instrumentalization of the
concept of network would, then, contribute to the articulation and elaboration of the organization
as a bounded entity, as a natural-created object in the modern, Cartesian-Hobbesian world-
picture.

The instrumental character attributed to the concept of network has also been used as a
possible way of explaining the emergence of organizations. According to Scott (1987: 151):
'another explanation for the emergence of the organization is its superior capacity to manage
flows of information'. Scott is referring to the classical Bavelas communication experiments,
which related the forms of the networks (e.g., degree of centralization) to the task performance of
small groups. In the same way as Parsons used inferences drawn from group experiments to
support his representation of the social system, the observation of group phenomena might be
used to support the representation of organizations as bounded entities, now via the recognition
of communication networks and their effects.

At this point, a convergence of disciplines becomes evident. In the explanation of social

organization in network terms, the lines of search of social psychologists (from sociometry to
group dynamics), anthropologists and sociologists (from the early departures from the structural-
functional approach to the studies on diffusion of innovation) seem to converge and adopt a
common limit (to use a mathematical metaphor): the boundaries marked by the system
framework. As we shall see in the fourth chapter, the application of the concepts and techniques
of network analysis in organization studies maintains the same basic concept of organization —
i.e., takes for granted its existence as a bounded entity— and operationalizes the concept of
network as communication links through which, in general terms, organizations adapt to their
environments.

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Network analysis II: the technical perspective
At the end of the second chapter, it was noted that Miller and Rice (1973) suggested the
possibility of conflict between two different ways of defining the boundaries of an organization
understood as a system: the organizational boundary (presumably membership) and the
operational (input-output) boundary. Though the organizational literature contains a wide array
of managerial strategies to cope with this problem in practice, it remains an unsolved theoretical
problem. A parallel situation might be found if a definition of the boundaries in network terms
were attempted; though it should be recognized that, as a theoretical problem, this hypothetical
situation has received even less attention than the case of the system boundaries.

The traditional way of looking at social networks consists in identifying who is connected
and who is not. In this sense, connectedness would become the equivalent of membership, in
social network terms. The boundaries of the network might be defined in terms of individuals
connected. The equivalent to the input-output criteria for specifying the boundaries of a network
would be one in which connectedness referred directly to activities (operations). And the
boundaries of the network would be given by the beginning and the end of a complex, divisible
activity. Though this is not the usual way of representing organization, such a possibility is
suggested in the literature of management science and represents, in practice, a problem for
managers and engineers when planning and making provisions to undertake complex, large-scale
projects. The difference between a project and 'an' organization would be the attribution of
beginning and end points in terms of the manager's concern, or a planning horizon. However, it
might be argued that this is not a necessary difference; since the formulation, implementation
and effects of a project have an organizational (social) character, and an organization might in
turn be conceived as a project, an enterprise.

Network analysis is a current technique along with a wide array of tools developed in the
field of operational research: the view of organizing as an engineering, technical problem. An
historical account of this tradition would lead to the pioneering work of Taylor, for example. But
let us confine our attention to the technique of network analysis as a particular development of
the concept of network to solve the problem of representing organization (understood, in this
case as a technical project). Thus, instead of individuals, the points, dots or nodes of the network
represent 'events'. An event is defined as a binary situation (Beer, 1964), which indicates the
accomplishment or not of an activity represented by the lines, arrows or arcs of the network. Two
or more activities 'meet' at an event when it is prescribed that the beginning of one (or more) of
them requires the completion of one (or more) of the others.

As a planning device, the best known applications of this way of defining a network have
been the Program Evaluation and Review Technique (PERT), developed for the U.S. Navy's
Polaris Fleet Ballistic Missile System in 1958, and the Critical Path Method (CPM), developed
by a subcontractor of DuPont for a construction project, at about the same time. According to
Archibald and Villoria (1967: 13-4), PERT was developed as an 'approach to the solution of the
fast-multiplying problems of large-scale projects in which technical innovation, complex
logistics, and concurrent activity must be integrated'.

58
 By using network analysis, complex projects may be graphically represented and critical
elements, such as deadlines and costs, easily taken into account. With the aid of computers, this
technique has been impressively improved and complicated, through the addition of different
constraints or contingencies (related to time, resources, performance), graphic possibilities and a
more explicit consideration of the probabilistic character of the whole deployment of resources.
In fact, the definition of nodes might be extended almost indefinitely, according to the
requirements of specification, and for each node a particular distribution of probabilities might
be defined to account for the conditions of risk and uncertainty at each stage of the project. In a
sense, the evolution of the technique of network analysis might be better described in terms of an
evolution of computer programmes, from the more deterministic to more stochastic treatments of
the representation of a project.

For an account of the evolution of the techniques of network analysis and the computer
programmes used in their applications, see Lee, Moeller & Digman (1982). For instance, the last
version of the planning technique devised at the time of this book was called the Venture
Evaluation and Review Technique (VERT). Originally developed for military project
applications, VERT has improved the mathematical capabilities 'to the point where flows can be
isolated, started, stopped, or altered in nearly any conceivable way... however, going beyond
three dimensions generally proves difficult for the manager' (pp. 33-4).

These applications and developments of the network approach have been realized by, and
constitute the field of work of, a rather small group of researchers and consultants (generally
engineers and mathematicians), due to their high levels of specialization and mathematical
sophistication. If these conditions were added to the separation between technical and social
domains, in terms of academic disciplines, it would be possible to account for the almost
insignificant impact of this tradition of network analysis on the development of organization
theory, mostly the domain of social scientists.

The problem is that the representation of a project as a purely technical problem is but an
artificial way of overlooking its social character and implications, just as the representation of
organization as a purely social problem is but an artificial way of overlooking its technological
content. In fact, the concept of network used in organizational studies corresponds to the
representation of abstract relations depicted by social networks (lines connecting individuals), as
we shall see in the next chapter. In the third part of the thesis (Socio-technical networks) an
analysis of the problem of the separation between the social and the technical, and an exploration
of the relations between both perspectives of network analysis, are offered. The concept of socio-
technical network is introduced as a possible way of further applying the network approach to
the study of organizing processes, which requires, in principle, questioning the traditional
separation between the social and the technical in the study of the phenomena of social
organization.

CHAPTER 4. NETWORKS IN ORGANIZATION STUDIES

This chapter explores a developing line of organizational research. The utilization of a network
approach for the formulation of problems related to organizational phenomena can now be

59
regarded as having a certain identity, if not tradition, though not as important or well-established
as that of the system approach. Whilst we identified the latter as 'organizing as systematizing', it
might be premature to speak of a tradition of 'organizing as networking'. It should be recognized
that, in comparison with the system theory of organization, a theoretical development based upon
a definition of the organization as a network is still lacking. In fact, reviews and references to the
concept of network within this field are still to be found within expositions of organization
theory from a systemic perspective (e.g., Scott, 1987; Perrow, 1986). Nevertheless, a growing
body of network-based empirical research is now available for conceptual development and
theoretical elaboration.

A recent book of readings (Thompson, Frances, Levacic, & Mitchell, 1991) collects
representative contributions to the literature on markets, hierarchies and networks, defined as
models of social coordination, along with an evaluation and comparison of these models. Each
model is defined in terms of its characteristic mechanism: prices (markets), administrative orders
(hierarchies) and trust and cooperation (networks). And, as we have seen in the last chapter, the
concept of network is used as a way of representing and/or methodologically dealing with
(informal) aspects of social interaction.

In general, the applications of the concepts and techniques of network analysis discussed in
this chapter share a system-based definition of organization as a certain bounded entity. The
chapter consists of two parts which reflect the various studies' foci either on social interaction
phenomena occurring inside the organization (intra-organizational networks) or on the links
between organizations (inter-organizational networks). A final comment on the reduction of
networks to nets relates the problem of developing a network approach to the study of organizing
processes to the work of abstraction or 'purification' of social phenomena, and their separation
from the technical content of activities.

Interorganizational networks
The studies grouped under this heading are concerned with problems defined in terms of the
relations between the organization and its environment: adaptation, survival, and the problem of
control, whether of the organization over the environment or vice versa. In general, these studies
adopt a social perspective of network analysis, i.e., networks defined in terms of lines connecting
individuals, even though the definition of a network in a particular case may not be completely
explicit in this sense. For instance, Scott (1987) refers to network analysis by discussing the
theme of institutional environments. For him: 'network elements consist of the connections
among organizations, whether expressed as flows or linkages, such as shared participants' (p.
129).

Scott divides the studies of interorganizational networks into two main groups: (1) the
'relational' approach, concerned with such properties of networks as multiplexity, connectivity,
density of ties, and other 'more conventional' structural variables (such as centralization,
formalization and loose coupling); and (2) the 'positional' approach, concerned with 'the extent to
which patterns of relations within a network are similar' (p. 130). In this sense, two organizations
may be in equivalent positions in a network structure (depending on the ties they have with other
organizations in the network), even without any significant interaction between them. A third

60
possible approach, on which Scott himself has worked, is concerned with the content of the
network, in terms of the types of resources exchanged (money, use of staff, clients, technical
assistance, goodwill) and the types of 'interpenetrations', i.e., interpenetrations of organizational
boundaries in the form of federations, joint ventures, and interlocking directorates.

This section briefly discusses three kinds of uses of the concept of network in organizational
studies: case study, statistical hypothesis-testing, and the study of interlockings which, though
basically a case strategy, represents a more complex kind of research design. Though in the
examples referred to here no difference can be found in terms of the way of representing
organization (they take for granted the notion of organizations as bounded entities provided by
the system approach), their methodological strategies provide an interesting illustration of a
range of possible applications of network analysis in the field of organization studies.

Network analysis in a case-study approach

A general perspective on interorganizational networks has been exposed by Perrow (1986: 192)
in the following terms: 'While still primitive, and possibly distorted by heavily borrowing from
the biological sciences, the concept of networks is the most exciting development in this new
preoccupation with the environment'. Unfortunately, he is not explicit as to what this borrowing
consists of in terms of the concept of network. Apart from his methodological considerations
about levels of analysis and certain antinomies of human action (e.g., change vs. development,
and rational vs. nonrational) to the elucidation of which 'networks does not signify any particular
progress' (p. 193), what might be more illustrative here is Perrow's own use of the concept of
network in the analysis of a particular case: a City Health Network. Thus,

The state agency becomes more understandable as an organization in itself if we know that it is cut
off from the patronage system, loosely tied to organized labor, loosely tied to most hospitals and
tightly tied to the municipal hospital, and cut off from all support groups. In another city or state, a
similar agency might be tightly linked to the dominant political party and the patronage system, to the
medical school and other support groups including the university; thus its power might be
considerable (p. 199).

Perrow's analysis illustrates what Scott calls a positional approach. But it is still a superficial
rendering, where the advantages of using a network approach, in comparison to a system
approach, cannot be fully appreciated. Perrow suggests that the advantage of the network
approach becomes more evident in a detailed analysis of interaction processes, when the
implications of network connections begin to appear. The analysis becomes richer and the
picture takes on a new significance.

In this sense, Perrow's study illustrates a refining of system analysis. We are still in a world
of bounded organizations depicted on a plane surface, but by following connections it is possible
to 'see' deeper. The task of the analyst resembles that of a good detective or a good journalist. As
Perrow indicates,

The analysis just presented bears a stronger resemblance to sophisticated muckraking journalism than
it does to conventional organizational analysis... Political reporters are concerned with how
organizations can be used in political and social struggle. They cast a larger net; doing so changes the

61
 picture... To summarize this lesson: only a network analysis, and one that reaches up into the national
system, can properly describe what happened to one of the organizations (p. 205; emphases added).

In terms of his pictorial metaphor:

A network analysis presents a figure, which is largely visible because of the background which it is
set off from; dissolve that background and the figure is no longer visible. The nature of the
background highlights the figure and thus suggests what we should examine. It should be the task of
the sociologist to examine the background as well (p. 206).

The question is what the background consists of. In this case, there are at least two possibilities:
either the sociologist has to construct the situation (in a Weberian sense) or simply take for
granted the existence of a certain background and interpret it. The only clue provided by Perrow
is his illustration of the idea of background in the case of the management of a social
programme, in which an 'institutionalized thought structure' is behind the superficial problems
and demands posed to the programme, so that: 'When more radical philosophies are occasionally
espoused, they are quickly made to conform to the institutionalized thought structure' (p. 208).
Unfortunately, the question of how this conformation is attained, which would have provided an
idea of what the background consists of, is left unexplained.

By following this metaphor, whatever the nature of the background, it is clear that it must
presumably be different from the figure. Otherwise, the visibility of the latter could not be
ensured. The metaphor also implies that the meaning of the figure has to be derived from its
background. In this sense, the network (figure) would not be a way of representing organization,
since its visibility presupposes the existence of an organized background. Then, network analysis
is not being used here to account for, or construct, the situation presented in the case studied.
Rather, any observed network is to be explained in terms of the background. In this world of
spatial representation, the role of the network concept seems to be reduced to a secondary or
complementary one, compared to the fundamental assumption of delimitation which provides the
discourse's coherence and limits. Moreover, if the sociologist attempted to focus on the network,
he or she would run the risk of seeing nothing; as Perrow asserted, 'dissolve that background and
the figure is no longer visible'. The question is how can figure and background be simultaneously
focused? In any case, it seems that to follow Perrow's command is not as straightforward as
would appear at first sight. After all, a good journalist seems to be as rare as a good sociologist.
But let us study other examples of interorganizational networks in order to explore how this
pictorial problem has been faced.

Network analysis in statistical hypothesis testing

Whilst Perrow followed a case-study strategy, other researchers have used the concept of
network in statistical hypothesis-testing strategies. Oliver (1991), for example, has studied the
relation between degree of organizational autonomy and interorganizational relationships,
motivated by the lack of research around the assumption that organizations will tend to avoid
external relations which lead to a loss of decision-making autonomy. She selected a sample of
voluntary social service agencies in metropolitan Toronto, Canada, and analysed different types
of interorganizational arrangements (network relations). The conclusion was:

62
 The propensity for organizations to enter into relations with one another was shown to be unrelated to
the degree of commitment or loss of autonomy required by these relationships. These results suggest
that organizational concerns about sustaining autonomy may, in fact, be less deterministic in shaping
the probability of relationship formation than resource dependence theorists suggest (p. 959).

This study illustrates the use of the concept of network as a tool to collect and present data in
order to study characteristics of organizations already conceived of under a system framework.
That is, the concept of network enabled the researcher to operationalize variables defined at
system level: in this case, the different types of interorganizational relationships which might
presumably reveal certain propensities of organizations, and involve potential losses of
autonomy. This is also a good illustration of work done in terms of the research programme
established for organization theory (the definition of organizational variables in order to
formulate theoretically relevant problems), as can be found in Selznick's and Blau's contributions
(see chapter 2). In a previous work, Oliver (1988) used network analysis, based on data drawn
from the same 'population of organizations', in order to operationalize and compare competing
hypotheses on the determinants of organizational isomorphism (population ecology,
institutionalization and strategic choice). Though the regression analyses offered support for the
hypothesis of strategic choice, she recognized 'limitations to its generalizability', and

... the wisdom of investigating further the issue of environmental determinism versus strategic choice.
The notion that organizational leaders possess omnipotent capabilities for subjugating the
organization's external context to their own survival strategies may be as unrealistic as the argument
that organizations are consistently powerless recipients of environmental effects (Oliver, 1988: 560).

Such a conclusion illustrates not only the kind of research programme which is prevalent in this
field, but also the potentially inexhaustible source of puzzles and problems that the system-based
notion of organization-environment interactions can provide.

But let us imagine another way of using the concept of network. For example, the
organizational arrangements might be studied as particular features of the process of organization
of the voluntary social service in Toronto. In this sense, the networks would not be the
operationalization of relationships but a way of representing organizing processes, and trying to
understand how such organizational structures adopt their particular forms. The propensities and
autonomy of the organizations would refer to characteristics of the work accomplished through
those arrangements. And thus the hypothesis would rather refer to the networks' provision of
consistency and architecture to, in this case, the whole activity of voluntary social service.
However, by adopting such an approach, the organizations themselves would appear as transitory
configurations, unable to ensure neither the stability of measurements nor even the meaning of a
statistical analysis. This, obviously, is not to criticize Oliver's work but only to try to foresee the
kind of implications of adopting a different approach to network analysis in the study of
organization.

The study of interlockings

Perhaps the most important line of research which applies the concept of network to the study of
interorganizational arrangements is known under the heading of interlocking or interlocking
directorates. Works in this tradition have been mainly concerned with the study of economic

63
power; for example, the study by Mizruchi (1982) of American enterprises, and the comparative
study of ten countries by Stokman, Ziegler and Scott (1985). Let us refer for illustrative purposes
to a study of interlocking directorates in the Netherlands, during the period 1960-1980, by
Stokman, Van der Knoop and Wasseur (1988). In addition, this work provides a review of this
field of study which includes not only the state of the art, but a reference to the tradition of
studies of interlocks in the Dutch case from 1913, inspired by a study of German banks in 1905.

In general, a social network consists of points representing individuals connected by lines. In

the study of interlocks, the lines connect companies through individuals who occupy positions on
the board of directors of those companies. Strictly speaking, the term 'interlock' refers to the
particular case in which the line connects the same individual in two companies. There are two
main classes of interlocks: primary and induced interlocks. For example, when an executive of a
bank becomes a member of the boards of two companies, the connection between the two
companies is an induced interlock, whilst those between each company and the bank are primary
interlocks. Primary interlocks reveal stronger connections, with long-term implications, than
those of induced interlocks.

Though in these studies, as in other examples of the application of a network approach, the
starting point is given by the same picture of organizations in their environments, a distinctive
feature of the studies of interlockings should be highlighted. Here the emphasis is on the study of
the network itself, its constitution and properties (mainly, in this particular case, its stability and
its relation to individuals' careers). The sample of organizations is a consequence of the
configuration of the network, i.e., the organizations are selected according to their participation
in the network. And, by excluding isolated cases, the resulting network represents the
connections between the largest and most powerful companies.

An important feature of the work by Stokman, Van der Knoop and Wasseur (1988) is its
longitudinal character. This permits the appreciation of the network's evolution and stability, e.g.,
permanence of lines, broken and reconstituted interlocks. Considerable possibilities for studying,
for example, the network's architectonic function might be revealed by following such a strategy.
For instance, the financial character of the connections might provide a clue to understanding the
work of the network: the processes through which particular configurations come about, change
or endure. As the authors recognized in their reference to 'the first major network study of
interlocks in the Netherlands', done in 1975:

All analyses indicated that the network of interlocks derived its structure mainly from the interlocks
of financial companies and institutions, particularly from those of commercial banks and insurance
companies. This interpretation was confirmed by a very strong positive correlation between financial
participations and interlocking directorships... and the disintegration of the network between
production companies after the elimination of persons with one or more positions in financial
companies (Stokman, Van der Knoop & Wasseur, 1988: 185).

However, this recognition of the relevance of financial connections did not lead to an inquiry
into the organizing process through which those changes occurred. Rather, the network became a
way of recording the changes. A certain ontological pre-eminence attributed to the organizations
transforms the network into a kind of secondary or derived phenomenon, at most a kind of
adaptive mechanism, as Selznick, for example, suggested with the notion of cooptation. In fact,

64
this notion provided the authors with a means of interpreting the results of the study according to
a system framework, as their conclusion shows:

Cooptation models are often classified in the category of models that interpret interlocks in terms of
specific interests supporting relations...: models in which companies try to acquire greater control of
their environments by recruiting leading persons of surrounding large firms in their board. Our
findings show that this indeed is the case: obviously executives of large firms possess special
expertise and information by which uncertainty can be reduced. But this process does not result in
stability of the diadic relations in the network because this expertise can be obtained from leading
persons in different companies, depending on the attractive power of the available persons. However,
this recruitment is too specific to justify the far-reaching conclusion of the 'solidarity of the capitalist
class'. A more plausible interpretation of the large part of the network centers around highly valuable
expertise and highly qualified information that is confined to executive positions in large companies,
in other words, personal expertise institutionally acquired in large firms (p. 205).

Interestingly, though with obvious differences, a certain resemblance can be found between the
use of the concept of network in this study and Perrow's. The network analysis provides a great
descriptive power. It enables the researcher to appreciate unexpected or none-too-obvious
relations, and the resulting analysis gains in depth and reduction of naivety. There is also implicit
in it a methodological advantage in terms of levels of analysis: a network approach avoids both
the constraints of the micro and the far-reaching conclusions of the macro approaches. Finally, a
certain institutional background appears also as providing meaning to the network as a figure.

Whilst Perrow suggested an institutionalized thought structure which explained the

attainment of conformity, in this case an 'institutionally acquired expertise' explains the
'attractive power of the available persons' to become the vehicle to connect companies to the
network. In both cases, the problem is one of making sense of a complex picture, and a good
journalist would have found interesting material in both cases to present a revealing report on
power and interests in modern societies.

The application of the concept of network in organization studies at interorganizational level

does provide a useful analytical tool to avoid simplistic conclusions: a suggestive refinement of
the picture provided by the system approach, in which the interpenetrations become more visible.
Yet it cannot be said that networking has already become an alternative to systematizing as a
way of representing organization.

It might be argued that these examples of network-based studies are not properly
representative. Of course, I cannot be absolutely certain that my selections from the literature are
representative (at both inter and intra levels), even though a computerized search was used. Since
the objective was not to present an exhaustive review of the literature, I can only hope that my
biases have left enough room for the reader to gain a schematic impression of this tradition. After
all, I have myself been guided by recent reviews and presumably representative pieces of
research which also contain extensive reviews of the literature. Let us now discuss other
examples of the application of the concept of network at the intraorganizational level which
reveal, even more clearly than those at interorganizational level, the social character of the
network or the tradition of social network analysis.

65
Intraorganizational networks
A visible trend in the studies at intraorganizational level follows a research strategy structured
around what has been called 'contingency theory': to study the relations between exogenous
variables (e.g., age, size, technology) and structural, endogenous variables representing different
aspects of social interaction within the organization. The concepts and techniques of the network
approach are used in this case to operationalize structural variables, in terms of interpersonal
relationships or informal, emergent structures.

In this section two examples of organizational studies are discussed which, though sharing
the paradigm of contingency theory, illustrate different uses of the network concept as a device
to operationalize categories of social interaction. The first example shows how a network
approach can be made coherent with traditional concepts and assumptions of organization
theory, by following a strategy of purification of the content of social interaction. The second
example further illustrates such a strategy, but adds a particular application of network analysis
as a way of dramatizing the account of a situation already constructed in terms of a system
approach.

Using networks to confirm contingency hypotheses

An illustration of the application of network concepts in organizational studies, by following a
contingency approach, can be found in the work of Shrader, Lincoln and Hoffman (1989) on 'the
determinants of organizational structure'. The study was motivated by the lack of (1) empirical
data gathered 'on a sufficiently large sample of organizations to permit a multivariate inquiry into
the principal relations among internal network structures', and (2) relevant variables 'to evaluate
some important propositions in organization theory which, because of the narrow conceptions
and operationalizations of organization structure guiding past quantitative research, had been
neglected or glancingly addressed' (pp. 62-3).

The language of social network analysis provided these researchers with a way of
operationalizing the Burns-Stalker mechanistic-organic dichotomy, which might be better fitted
to the contingency hypotheses 'than are the properties of centralization, formalization, and
differentiation measured in the Aston and similar large-sample organization-level survey studies'
(p. 63). In this particular case, an explicit attempt to translate traditional accounts of
organizational structure into network terms is made. For instance: 'organic organization is
manifested in networks characterized by high density, connectivity, and multiplexity combined
with low hierarchy and clustering' (p. 43). However, it is also asserted that the traditional,
'distributional' structure (defined in terms of centralization, formalization and differentiation)
takes precedence over the network structure. Thus,

... rather than conceiving of 'distributional' and 'network' structures as outcomes [of 'the contingencies
of size, technology, and environment'] of equal status, it is argued that the former is antecedent to the
latter... While a plausible case can be made for relations flowing the other way as well, from network
to distributional structure, network properties are seen as the more dynamic and malleable structural
properties; in the short run, they are at least more responsive to the formal configuration and design of
the organization than vice versa (pp. 49-50).

66
Now the architectonic function of networks has been definitively lost, being subjected to the
effects of the distributional structure which, in turn, reflects the changes in the exogenous
variables. The contingency hypotheses are based upon the observations that large size, routine
technology, and a low level of professionalization lead to mechanistic structures. The Burns-
Stalker categories, ideal types for classifying situations, are taken here as 'empirical
generalizations'. And the classification structure provided by the contingency hypotheses is
simply endorsed, without the general rationale under which Weber or Parsons, for example,
would have subsumed it.

Thus, a logical argument is substituted for what appears as a finding. This might be the
reason why these researchers find that 'the support found in favor of contingency hypotheses
pertaining to structure cast in network terms is really quite striking' (p. 63). For example, it is
assumed that increase in size leads to increase in differentiation, centralization and formalization
which, in turn, leads to decrease in density, connectivity and symmetry, and increase in
clustering. It is 'strikingly' found that the data support these hypotheses. It would have been
striking to find the opposite case. For such descriptions are translations of the same categories
intended to produce a rational account of a given situation. As Mary Douglas (1979) would have
explained, they are dealing with a coherent cosmology, 'rooted in nature and reason', which
expresses a coherent, controlled universe, where everything is naturally located in its right place.

The data were gathered by means of interviews and questionnaires from a 'population of
private, not-for-profit agencies providing services to troubled youth in a large midwestern
metropolis in the United States' (p. 53). And, in fact, the hypotheses found support in terms of
the correlations observed. There was, however, a small problem with the variable symmetry. It
was assumed that a hierarchical order implied 'asymmetric and unreciprocated' relations, hence
the operationalization of hierarchy as 'the degree of mutuality or reciprocity' (p. 49). It might be
thought that following orders is a kind of reciprocation, but the authors are again surprised:

The one surprising outcome here is a positive effect of centralization which is significant at the .10
level by a two-tailed test. This contrasts sharply with the nonsignificant negative coefficient on this
variable with respect to symmetry in the communication network. Again, a speculative interpretation
is offered; asymmetry in the referral network apparently is more prevalent where staff have greater
control over organizational affairs, including, presumably, referrals. In centralized structures, it may
be that referrals are reciprocated to a greater degree in order to maximize full utilization of the
organization's resources as perceived by top management (p. 62).

'Referral' is here a technical term. It refers to the activity of the human service agencies: the
referral of clients ('the raw material processed') by one section of the staff to another. The authors
distinguished two kinds of ties: communications and client referrals. Thus, they have two
different networks: 'client referral relations, to a greater degree than communications, will be
conditioned on the exogenously-determined attributes and needs of clients, thereby attenuating
the effects of organizational variables' (p. 54). Though they identify communications as work-
related communications, it is not further explained why they separate referrals from
communications. But it is evident that the attempt was one of analysing a purely social network,
uncontaminated by the technical aspects of the work, due to the fact that 'the communications
network would be conditioned to a greater degree than the referral network on the formal
structuring of the organization, since the latter should depend heavily on the characteristics of

67
clients' (p. 61). That is, by including the peculiarities of the work the contingency hypotheses
would have found a less striking support.

This case serves to illustrate the procedure of purification of the concept of network (the
reduction of the network to a net, where the work is eliminated by way of abstraction), in order
to represent what presumably is social interaction. What is interesting in this case is that
technology did not seem as easy to put aside as when it can be ostensively defined as machines.
In a similar contingency-oriented study, where the impact of technology on structure was
assessed by means of a network approach, this 'problem' was simply classified as one of
ambiguous terminology, and consequently avoided:

... if one were to ask individuals in organizations what technologies they use, they would undoubtedly
mention a machine or describe a technique. In both cases, the technology would have a name and the
informant could, at least in principle, point to an instance of its use. Because the criterion of potential
tangibility avoids a maze of analytic abstractions, it seems practical to confine the term technology to
specific tools, machines, and techniques that admit the possibility of ostensive definition (Barley,
1990: 64).

In the same way that the purely social is an abstraction, an ostensive definition of technology
would remain an abstraction, a detachment of individuals and things, through which the sense of
the ongoing activity is dissolved and substituted for relational categories, e.g., communications
and referrals. In this strategy, pure interpersonal relations become devoid of content. Another
pre-specified content is then introduced in order to strikingly support the hypotheses of a
contingency theory.

Operationalizing organizational drama

A different methodological approach to the study of intraorganizational networks can be found in
a study of the relations between technology and 'structure and power' (Burkhardt and Brass,
1990). In this case, the procedure of abstracting a social network has also led to surprising
results, though a different method was followed. The study was a longitudinal research on the
introduction and diffusion of computer technology in a government statistics office, a study of
the effects of a technological change.

The network approach provided a means to test hypotheses concerning the relation between
structural and technology-adoption patterns. By following Rogers' (1983) propositions on
diffusion of innovations, the position of early adopters in the network was used as the key
variable to describe the process of structural change. Early adoption was defined as a function of
individual characteristics: '(1) age, (2) education level, (3) previous computer training, (4)
attitudes toward computers, and (5) feelings of efficacy regarding computer use' (Burkhardt &
Brass, 1990: 110). Power was operationalized as responses to a 5-point Likert-type scale (1 =
very little influence, 5 = very much influence).

An expected result was that the individual characteristics related to early adoption were those
related to familiarity with computers: 'With the exception of age and education, the individual
attributes were positively and significantly related to early adoption' (p. 115). With respect to the
structural variables: 'As expected, centrality was significantly related to power at all four time

68
periods' (p. 117). It is interesting to note that early adopters were neither central nor powerful
before the introduction of the computer, therefore: 'the possibility for structural and power
redistribution on the organizational level was likely' (p. 120). And this was in fact what
happened: early adopters became more central and powerful. There was a 'structural and power
redistribution'. However,

... those employees who were powerful, central figures in the organization prior to the change (T1)
were not totally displaced by early adopters... One possible explanation is that those in power at T1
derived their influence from sources that were not affected by the change... The further possibility
exists that those in power prior to the change were responsible for making the decision to change the
technology (p. 120).

But, in any case, redistribution took place; early adopters became more central and powerful: 'In
establishing communication links with early adopters, late adopters became aware of the
expertise of the early adopters and rated the latter higher on influence (p. 120-1). The
restructuring, then, consisted in the early adopters becoming more central, before the power
redistribution. The problem is that previously powerful people conserve their power, and that
power and centrality were always significantly related. There is a possible solution to this
enigma:

... it is possible that organizational norms rather than technological discontinuities may be more
predictive of intraorganizational change (p. 124).

... adoption was not voluntary but mandatory. Although employees could choose not to use the
system and continue relying on previous work methods, there were clear expectations that the new
system be used. This may explain why we found very little evidence of organized resistance to the
change (p. 122).

Thus, again, the network approach is used to describe a situation which is finally explained in
traditional, system terms. This case illustrates how the abstraction of an assumed social process
leads to certain puzzles whose solutions have to be looked for outside their very formulation: the
powerful were after all those who made the decision, adoption was mandatory. And, finally, the
network structure was but a certain transitorily distorted mirror of the formal, stable structure.
But this case also illustrates another application of network analysis to organization studies.

By providing a means of operationalizing variables, the network approach enables the

researcher to dramatize the presentation of a case, in the terms institutionally sanctioned for a
respectable science: the theatre of measurement. In this case, the language of networks enabled
the researchers to describe a social situation in such a way as to create a crucial discontinuity, a
dramatic change, and then proceed to explain it. At the end, the norms, structures, and
distributions of power remain in their places, and the lights can be turned on again. The audience
will be aware that all this was a representation, that natura non facit saltum.

A final comment on the reduction of networks to nets

Based upon a discussion of a certain change in the way of representing the contemporary world
that argues for boundlessness and connectedness, and of the tradition of network analysis as a

69
way of explaining social organization, this second part of the thesis has tried to explore the
possibility of developing an alternative approach to the system theory of organization. One of the
obstacles to such a possibility has been found in the strict separation between the social and the
technical as domains of inquiry and professional commitment. For instance, the social network
analysis tradition, by attempting to produce a pure representation of the social, has been dealing
with an empty abstraction or at least an incomplete rendering of social relations. For the content
of the activities in which the individuals are engaged is left out of the picture by focusing, almost
exclusively, on sociopsychological phenomena. It may be worth recalling here an interesting
comment of Marcel Mauss (1979: 7) on McDougall's assertion that 'sociology or collective
psychology is only a chapter of psychology':

In consequence, it would not be very useful to construct a special science if it had no other object than
collective representations and even the multiplication of the facts of consciousness by the pressure of
consciousness on one another. If that was all there was in society, collective psychology would
suffice and we could stop there. But however excellent the description McDougall gives of the 'group
mind', it is insufficient. It derives from an unjustifiable abstraction. It separates the consciousness of
the group from the whole of its material and concrete substratum.

It seems, then, necessary, in order to develop a network approach, to elaborate a comprehensive

view, in which the separate terms of organization-environment and social-technical do not
constitute starting points of the inquiry, or are not simply taken for granted. However, it should
be recognized that the representation of both the social and the technical in network terms has
become a further step in systematizing, by sharing the same frame and the same kind of figures
in a plane: spatialized attitudes in a social perspective, and spatialized time in a technical
perspective. This strategy of spatialisation may be expressed as a reduction of networks to nets.

A network is generally defined as a relation where something is carried or going on: affect,
energy, time. There is something which works, something that is supposed to travel through the
net which in itself is but a set of points and a set of lines; each line is an ordered pair of points, as
explained in graph theory (e.g., Harary, Norman and Cartwright, 1966: 408; Verumi, 1978: 211).
The relevance of the distinction between network and net becomes evident when analytical tasks
reach a point where it is necessary to add a particular concrete meaning to connectedness,
beyond the elementary fact that a certain relation exists between two or more individuals or
events. The treatment of the network as a way of depicting a social situation or a project abstracts
or forgets the work, the sense that something is going on. At most, the work is represented in
terms of value (time, cost), measured as the distance between each pair of nodes.

According to the OED, the word 'network' refers to a 'work in which threads, wires, or
similar materials, are arranged in the fashion of a net'. In this sense, the net can be thought of as
the result of work. But the sense of work could be displaced by exclusively focusing on the
outcome; as the second meaning of network given by the dictionary suggests: 'A piece of work
having the form or construction of a net; a collection or arrangement (of some thing or things)
resembling a net'. In this sense the word network could become devoid of any reference to
process. Interestingly enough, in a discussion of the language of organization theory, Sandelands
and Drazin (1989) argue that current organization theory has been unable to account for
organizational structure, because the language used to explain the causes of structure does not
refer to specifiable processes but starts from unexplained results. Such a language, characterized

70
by the use of 'achievement verbs' (e.g., select, choose) has led scholars to an endless postulation
of entities. The field of organization theory could thus be described as a battlefield, where
exogenetic (environment selects) and endogenetic (manager chooses) explanations compete for
the status of truth, in terms that 'defy criticism and give rise to empty but indisputable
explanations' (p. 473).

The solution, according to Sandelands and Drazin, is to develop a language of 'task verbs and
descriptions of process' (p. 474). It might be argued, however, that this way of stating the
problem might lead to superficial attempts to translate traditional accounts of organizational
phenomena without a further inquiry into the boundary condition which seems to be at the source
of such a language game of unexplained achievements. Nevertheless, Sandelands and Drazin's
point contributes to the recognition that a process-oriented approach is necessary for the
development of organization theory. The question is whether such an approach can be developed
from the perspective of a network approach.

At the end of the first part, a rhetorical contrast was suggested between the system and
network approaches, as ways of representing social reality, in terms of two competing
approaches in cosmology: the big-bang and superstrings theories. But, after this second part,
such an analogy might hardly be maintained. Far from offering a competing approach, in which
the configurations presented by the system approach (the 'social universe') could be seen as the
results of the vibrations of some strings, we have observed that the network approach is used to
further describe the same configurations, a complement of the big bang. Having abandoned this
metaphor, in the following part of the thesis we are concerned with the problem of how a
network approach can be developed, in which the element of work is not abstracted or reduced to
a proxy for measurement.

APPENDIX TO CHAPTER 4. THE FIRM AS A NETWORK OF TRANSACTIONS

The development of the transaction cost economics approach has opened a way to a closer
interaction between economists and other social scientists in the search of explanations of
organizational phenomena. The objective of this appendix is to explore another possibility of
developing a network approach by discussing this development in economic theory. By means of
the concept of transaction, organizational economists have suggested that, instead of a bounded
entity, the firm might be conceived of as a network of transactions. The question is, then, what
kind of representation of organization can be developed in these terms; or, in other words, to
what extent can the general rationale of the economic approach facilitate or preclude the
development of an alternative to the system approach.

For instance, it might be argued that, by taking for granted the availability of certain
organizational forms (a range of institutional arrangements from markets to hierarchies) that can
be chosen in order to govern transactions, the economic analysis focuses on, or better reifies, the
abstraction of a social process strongly biased by individual cognitions and preferences. The
rationale of the economic analysis is, in fact, based upon a stylized theory of individual choice
which provides explanations for the building, extension, and change of this particular kind of

71
network. In this sense, the economic approach might be thought of as a variation, or a further
rationalization, of the strategy of social network analysis.

A brief outline of the economic approach to organizing

In 1925, John R. Commons analysed the object of institutional economics in terms of three
elements —viz., conflict, mutuality and order— and indicated that the basic unit of analysis
should be the transaction, since in it all three elements can be found in their entirety (Williamson,
1990b). In 1937, Ronald Coase's pioneering paper on the nature of the firm explicitly addressed
the problem of the boundaries of the firm. From then on a growing body of literature has been
devoted to advancing hypotheses about the economic causes of organizational structures. In
1975, Oliver Williamson's Markets and hierarchies offered a theoretical synthesis by devising an
analytical model of transactions: a tool to assess the relative advantages of different institutional
forms in economic terms. This work was a result of Williamson's collaboration with a
governmental commission charged with providing guidelines for the analysis of judicial cases of
possible violation of antitrust laws.

In 1976, Jensen and Meckling (1988) advanced the notion of the firm as a legal fiction, to be
substituted for the conventional treatment of the firm as a kind of individual with objectives and
responsibilities. The firm would rather be viewed as a nexus of contracting relationships and,
thus, the distinction between inside and outside of the firm would not be necessary. In 1980,
Eugene Fama (1988) further developed these ideas by defining the firm as a nexus of contracts.
The market itself would provide the discipline and the opportunities for individual behaviour,
both within and without the firm. More recently, Williamson (1990a) has proposed that we
should think of the firm as a nexus of treaties so as to avoid the legalistic view of contract. Thus,

The substitution of the term treaty for contract brings private ordering forcefully to the fore. The
limits of legal centralism being so transparent for treaties —since the parties may refuse a legal forum
and/or ignore legal sanctions— there is a clear need from the outset for the parties to craft specialized
governance structures within which to embed a treaty (p. 4).

The expression governance structure refers to the institutional arrangements between economic
units that govern the ways in which such units may cooperate and compete. In this sense,
organizational boundaries would be the consequences of treaties through which the parties craft
the needed arrangements to discipline their behaviours. What is not yet clear is the nature of the
crafting process. However, since an economizing principle guides individual behaviour,
structures would be the result of both environmental selection and managerial choice. In this
sense, the traditional way of looking for the cause of structure either inside or outside the
organization would not be necessary. Organizing here means economizing. The problem of
organizing is now translated into an analytical task: a comparison of governance structures
through which the best available alternative would be sanctioned and chosen.

Some difficulties have been found in this general rationale, its simplicity and clarity
notwithstanding. Gintis (1990), for example, has pointed out that the prevalence of externally
accountable political structures (i.e., those in which the decision-making power lies in the hands
of a small group unaccountable to the firm's employees, and to whom huge incentives are

72
offered) in contemporary capitalist economy enterprises cannot be explained either as a
consequence of a choice led by the economizing principle, or as a selection by the environment
of the most efficient alternative, since '... incentives and other enforcement rents represent pure
wealth transfers among agents, and hence involve no consumption of real resources. Thus
organizational choices based on 'economizing' such transactions do not entail an efficient
allocation of resources' (p. 291).

It seems that the separation of the political and the economic constitute a basic problem in the
explanation of institutional arrangements under a transaction cost economics approach. For
Schneiberg and Hollingsworth (1990), though able to explain the organizational development of
trade associations, the approach has been of limited use to account for the latter's initial
emergence and 'ongoing reproduction' because it ignores political factors and other non-
transactional relations. Lindgren (1990) has suggested that an historical analysis would show
'how identical objectives may be reached by different means, and also how differences in social
structure and institutional arrangements may decisively influence the choice of methods to reach
given objectives and even the choice of objectives themselves' (p. 263). But let us see
Williamson's answer to these sorts of questions:

That power does not play a larger role in the transaction cost economics scheme of economic
organization is both because initial endowments are taken as given and because the contracting
process is examined in its entirety. To be sure, taking endowments as given does not mean that initial
conditions are beyond question. But it is necessary to start somewhere (1990c: 10).

However, even if the reduction of the problem of organization to one of individual calculus were
accepted, doubts would arise with respect to the context and the very meaning of the calculus. In
other words, it would make little sense to speak in terms of a maximizing behaviour if the
feasible region were too narrow.

The adoption of the transaction —understood as an exchange between technologically

separable entities— as the key concept and the unit of analysis has important consequences.
According to Barney and Ouchi (1986), the fact that (1) transactions may become enduring and
cooperative, (2) each transaction may refer to a number of environments of completely different
kinds, and (3) transactions may be governed in, simultaneously, a wide variety of ways, renders
meaningless three traditional concepts of organization theory, respectively: boundaries,
environment and structure. It seems that some cherished concepts vanish once economic facts are
brought to light. But this is not to say that these concepts are discarded by organizational
economists, rather they are translated. For example, whilst organization theorists talk about
structures, organization economists use the expression 'hierarchical governance patterns'. And
with respect to the problem of boundaries, Williamson (1990b: 192) explains:

If the firm is a governance structure, then the boundary of the firm ought to be set with reference to
the capacity of the firm (compared with the market) to provide useful organizational functions.
Accordingly, an organizational theory of the firm needs to take its place alongside a technological
theory of the firm.

A similar claim for an operational definition of the boundaries, and the match between the
organizational and the technological, has been raised by organization theorists as we have seen in

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the arguments of Miller and Rice, and Emery and Trist discussed in Chapter 2. In a sense,
organizational economics adopts a technical or operational definition of boundaries by
formulating the problem of the limits of the organization in terms of two alternatives: buying or
producing. This implies an implicit adoption of a representation of the organization as an input-
output transformation system.

The question now is: what is the concept of organization in this perspective? The answer
given by Barney and Ouchi (1986: 435) is that a concept of organization is not even necessary;
but, simply, to specify a range of 'alternatives [any institutional form along the continuum
between hierarchies and markets] among which managers can choose when deciding how to
govern transactions'. Traditional organization theory has, in this view, artificially restricted
consideration to particular types of hierarchical responses and prematurely excluded markets and
quasi-markets. The focus should rather be on the comparative efficiency of different alternatives,
an economizing principle. The task is, then, to analyse the elements of a transaction, or
conditions affecting transaction costs: basically, bounded rationality and opportunism or, as
Hobbes would have said, the ignorance and passions of men.

The problems with organizing as economizing

This apparently straightforward research programme meets a major obstacle, according to
Barney and Ouchi, in the lack of empirical research, the lack of typologies of transactions,
sources of costs, structural differences, and so on. This lack of empirical research derives not
only from a lack of interest on the part of economists, but also from a very practical problem: 'A
firm very well may be a "legal fiction" or a "nexus of contracts" but data are collected and
available at the firm level' (p. 438). Thus, the adoption of the transaction as the basic unit of
analysis leads to a difficult situation:

... careful attention must be focused on important questions about: the process of aggregating
individual transactions into bundles of transactions to discuss groups; aggregating groups to discuss
intergroup relations (that is, transactions between groups); aggregating even further to focus on firms
and firm structure; and, finally, aggregating transactions to the point where interfirm relations can be
discussed (p. 434).

This troublesome problem of aggregation is the well-known consequence of adopting a micro

approach in social science. As Callon and Latour (1981: 300) have pointed out: 'The dreamers
who would like to restructure macro-actors on the basis of the individual will arrive at an even
more monstrous body for they must leave out all the hard parts which have enabled the macro-
actors to simplify their lives and to take over all the space'. Moreover, after having dissolved the
object of traditional organization theory, the economic approach runs the risk of losing sight of
its key concept. This is due not only to the lack of data collected at the level of transactions, but
to a certain vanishing character of the transaction itself.

Let us illustrate this point with the analysis, or perhaps deconstruction, of the notion of
transaction in the context of the discourse of economics as a narrative, the economic genre,
offered by Lyotard, the French philosopher. Thus,

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 Sentence 1: x (sender) gives up to y (addressee) the referent a, this (ostensible). Sentence 2: y (sender)
gives up to x (addressee) the referent b, that (ostensible). Economic genre: the giving up of that must
cancel the giving up of this. Sentences 1 and 2 are linked with a view (stake, finality of the genre) to
'liberate' the two parties, to unbind them... By sentence 1, x is immediately placed in the situation of
the creditor and y in that of debtor. Sentence 2 cancels out these situations, and this is the sentence
called for by sentence 1 in the economic genre. The linking of 2 onto 1 constitutes exchange itself. In
the absence of 2, 1 does not take place. Thus time t+1 (occurrence of 2) is the condition for time t
(occurrence of 1)... The economic sentence of giving up does not wait for the sentence of acquittal
(counter-cession), but presupposes it (quoted by Bennington, 1988: 169).

We have previously seen how network analysis, applied to project management for example,
implies a spatialisation of time, by establishing sequences of operations according to some
criterion of performance. The problem of representing a network of transactions seems to be,
according to Lyotard's analysis of the economic genre, that time collapses, so to speak, in an
ungraspable 'now' where the link is itself what liberates the parties. Thus, there would be no
possibility of capturing any connection, since the occurrence of the consequent is the condition
for the occurrence of the antecedent. The picture would appear, in any case, as a kind of cloud of
points, the individuals of a social network, without evident connection. In fact, some descriptions
of the pure market seem to present this image. But this extreme situation is far from the world-
picture within which economists work.

Economists in fact do not face this problem of representation since they are concerned with
ostensibles. That is, initial endowments are taken for granted because the analysis has 'to start
somewhere'; i.e., an already visible world, a ready-made picture. The analysis only requires the
economist to re-present this picture and find that there are assets, markets, hierarchies and so on,
among which the individuals choose according to an economizing principle. The economist will
discover the need for connections, the emergence of a network, because some transactions are
frequently repeated and involve the use of resources which cannot be easily used in other
transactions (specific assets). And, since transactions are subject to the ignorance and passions of
men, the economist will also discover the conditions of transactions that require a certain
structuring. These conditions will, finally, be established as the behavioural assumptions of
organizing in the mode of economizing:

(1) all complex contracts are unavoidably incomplete and many complex incentive alignment
processes cannot be implemented (because of bounded rationality); (2) to rely on contract-as-promise
is fraught with hazard (because of opportunism); and (3) added value will be realized by organizing in
such a way as to economize on bounded rationality and to safeguard transactions against the hazards
of opportunism (Williamson, 1990c: 7).

Whilst Hobbes recommended the visibility of the sword, now it is only necessary to invoke the
principle of economizing. From the ideal type of the pure market to that of the total hierarchy,
there is a basic rationale: reduce waste, attain the most efficient solution. Economists seem to
have found the route towards a 'theory of everything', as the following comment by Williamson
(1990c: 39) suggests:

What is missing in business strategy, but is desperately needed, is a core theory. To be sure, game
theory provides the requisite needs for the strategizing branch of strategy. But strategizing is pertinent

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 for only a small subset of transactions whereas economizing is relevant for all. A core theory to
anchor economizing is the pressing need (1990c: 39; emphasis added).

What kind of theory would this core theory be? The principle of economizing has been presented
as a general rule for individual choice. Then, it might be thought that such a core theory would
have the form of an abstract, stylized psychological theory, if not a theology. The principle of
economizing would have the role of creator and ruler.

Even the 'passions of men' would be, in principle, subjected to the government of
economizing. However, this idea has led some people, including economists, to express doubts.
Alchian and Woodward (1988), for example, do not believe that people deliberately decide not to
violate a contract after weighing whether or not the costs of the violation exceed the benefits,
that even when the net gains of free-riding or stealing are greater such behaviours are resisted,
and that, though still unknown, some 'moral forces' (ethics, etiquette, standards) exist and should
not be ignored. Let us, nevertheless, add a theoretic-methodological consideration on the
problem of understanding such moral forces. In his study of The civilizing process, Norbert Elias
(1982; originally published in 1939) made a revealing observation:

There is today a widespread notion that the forms of social life and particular social institutions are to
be explained primarily by the purpose they have for the people who are thus bound together. This
idea makes it appear as if people, understanding the usefulness of these institutions, once took a
common decision to live together in this way and no other. But this notion is a fiction and if only for
that reason not a very good instrument of research... In this matter the individual has little choice (p.
354-5).

And Elias' own work provides a good illustration of an attempt to understand the way in which
particular social forms relate to particular ways of behaving and thinking. Thus, for instance,

The moderation of spontaneous emotions, the tempering of affects, the extension of mental space
beyond the moment into the past and future, the habit of connecting events in terms of chains of cause
and effect —all these are different aspects of the same transformation of conduct which necessarily
takes place with the monopolization of physical violence, and the lengthening of the chains of social
action and interdependence. It is a 'civilizing' change of behaviour (p. 236).

At present we are so accustomed to the existence of these more stable monopolies of force and the
greater predictability of violence resulting from them, that we scarcely see their importance for the
structure of our conduct and our personality. We scarcely realize how quickly what we call our
'reason', this relatively farsighted and differentiated steering of our conduct, with its high degree of
affect-control, would crumble or collapse if the anxiety-inducing tensions within and around us
changed, if the fears affecting our lives suddenly became much stronger or much weaker or, as in
many simpler societies, both at once, now stronger, now weaker (p. 326).

Finally, let us recall Elias' advice to future researchers:

One of the tasks still remaining to be done is to explain convincingly the compulsion whereby certain
forms of communal life, for example our own, come into being, are preserved and changed. But
access to an understanding of their genesis is blocked if we think of them as having come about in the
same way as the works and deeds of individual people: by the setting of particular goals or even by
rational thought and planning (p. 355).

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Thus, the understanding of those moral forces which would explain why people do not simply
seize any advantageous opportunity requires us to view them in the context of the particular
practices to which they are related rather than in terms of codes or beliefs, or our attempts to
justify the existence of particular social forms according to certain rationality. For, according to
Elias (1982: 355), any consent and any justification would be necessarily 'retrospective'.

In this sense, the psychological, or even metaphysical, foundation provided by the principle
of economizing can be thought of as being at most a shortcut, or a strategic way of reducing the
problem of social organization to a matter of individual choices. Thus, by understanding
organizing as economizing (i.e., by drawing a network of transactions by taking for granted the
availability of assets, initial endowments and governance structures) we might think that the
problem of organization reduces to one of choosing the best available alternative. However,
since the very alternatives and our ways of dealing with them would simply reflect the existence
of an all-embracing principle of economizing, the possibilities of choice would be predetermined
so that, in the end, organizing as a problem would disappear amidst a cloud of economic
justifications.

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 PART III. SOCIO-TECHNICAL NETWORKS
... the relationship with tradition does not supply us with a
fixed point of support, but rather pushes us on in a sort of
return in infinitum to the past, a return through which the
historical horizons that we inhabit become more fluid. The
present order of entities —which in the objectifying thought of
metaphysics claims to be identified with Being itself— is
instead unveiled as a particular historical horizon.
Gianni Vattimo (1991: 120-1)

In the applications of the network approach discussed in the previous chapter (intra- and inter-
organizational networks), the concept of network has been reduced to a methodological device
for the treatment of social interaction by taking for granted the existence of the organization as a
bounded entity, i.e., the system frame. However, as we shall see in this part, there is a possibility
for developing a network approach to the study of organization in terms of processes without
starting from the concept of the organization as an already existing object or entity. This requires
us, in principle, to pay closer attention to some of the problems found in the tradition of network
analysis: particularly, the abstraction of the social and the technical as separated realms of
phenomena, and the pre-eminence of a spatial way of representing which reduces the process
dimension, and through which the networks become mere nets.

The concept of socio-technical network is examined in this part as a way of developing an

approach to the study of organizing processes which takes into account these problems and
requirements. The abbreviation STN will sometimes be substituted for the longer expression
'socio-technical network' throughout this part. The fifth chapter explores the relations between
technology and organization as an introduction to the concept of STN. The sixth chapter
proposes an outline of an STN approach to the study of organizing processes: a definition of
STN, some methodological elements, and a general discussion of the approach. Finally, the
seventh chapter presents a case study illustrating the application of the approach, by means of a
discussion of an experience in organizational diagnosis and intervention, in order to suggest the
difference between an STN approach and a system approach. In the most general terms, the point
is that organization can be fruitfully understood as a practice, or an assemblage of practices,
which evolves through multiple contacts, encounters and interconnections with other practices.
As Cooper (1992: 262) has remarked: 'Organization as an active process of displacement or
transformation denies and defies such categories as inside and outside; it is more like a process
that travels along socio-technical networks'.

CHAPTER 5. TECHNOLOGY AND ORGANIZATION

This chapter is devoted to exploring the relations between technology and organization. An early
antecedent in the attempt to overcome the separation between the social and the technical in
organization theory —the socio-technical approach of Emery and Trist— is first briefly
discussed. The section that follows proposes a search for a general concept of technology which
facilitates the recognition of the social-and-technical character of organizing processes. Third, an

78
outline of the basic character shared by technology and organization is offered, which provides
the basis for an introduction to the concept of socio-technical network in the final section.

The socio-technical approach: disclosing a basic problem in organization theory

Since the 1950s an important line of research in organization studies has been concerned with the
relation between technologies and social arrangements in the workplace (for a review of this
tradition and, in particular, the evolution of the socio-technical approach, see Trist, 1981). But it
was with the work of Emery and Trist that an explicit attempt to theoretically account for the
matching of both the social and the technical was undertaken. The sociotechnical perspective on
organizations is associated with the research programme developed by the Tavistock Institute of
Human Relations, founded in London in 1946. That was the period of reconstruction in post-war
Europe, and the main emphasis was on productivity, efficiency and technological development
of industrial enterprises. Such an emphasis was, however, balanced by a concern with socio-
psychological aspects of work and a broad notion of mental health.

The influential notion of open system became popularized in 1950 with a paper published in
Science by Ludwig von Bertalanffy on 'the theory of open systems in physics and biology'. For
Emery and Trist this notion provided the basic framework to develop the insights and
observations drawn from the field work: the famous projects in the British coal mining industry
(Trist, 1981). In fact, their paper of 1960 (Emery & Trist, 1981) begins with a claim for open
system thinking in organization theory. The transition from a closed to an open system, as the
basic model in a theory of organizations, would have strategic importance in defining the role of
technology:

... the technological component, in converting inputs into outputs, plays a major role in determining
the self-regulating properties of an enterprise. It functions as one of the major boundary conditions of
the social system of the enterprise in thus mediating between the ends of an enterprise and the
external environment. Because of this the materials, machines and territory that go to making up the
technological component are usually defined, in any modern society, as 'belonging' to an enterprise
and excluded from similar control by other enterprises. They represent, as it were, an 'internalized
environment.' The technological component has been found to play a key mediating role and hence it
follows that the open system concept must be referred to the socio-technical system, not simply to the
social system of an enterprise (p. 325).

In this formulation, the transformational role of technology also serves to solve a fundamental
problem of the system approach: the specification of the boundary condition. However, the
solution is not as straightforward as it appears at first sight, since the technological component
may play its role as belonging to an enterprise, i.e., after some boundaries have been set. It seems
that what explains the closure of the system, what produces such an internalized environment is
that usual definition of the elements which go to making up the technological component. What
appears as a consequence is, then, what explains the distinction between inside and outside, and
provides the background to the mediating role played by the technological component. But our
concern here is with the theory of Emery and Trist as an attempt to overcome the separation
between the social and the technical, rather than as another example of the system approach. Let
us focus then on this particular feature: the socio-technical character of the system.

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 A difficulty in completely understanding the concept of the socio-technical character of the
system is the lack of an explicit definition of the technological component. We know it from its
deeds, as it were, and from the assertion that 'materials, machines and territory go to make it up'.
The social component also lacks an explicit definition, though it might be assumed that its
meaning is clear when it is referred to as social system, internal organization, or work
relationship structure. In any case, the basic problem of the system relates to the accommodation
between the social and the technical, which enables the system to maintain its exchanges with the
environment.

Since the technological component has the mediating role, the changes in the environment
will be translated into requirements of the technological over the social component, and thus 'the
effectiveness of the total production system will depend upon the adequacy with which the social
system is able to cope with these requirements' (p. 328). But now the question is how the
separation between the social and the technical might be overcome, since they appear as two
independent realms. According to Trist (1981: 37), the answer was found by Emery. Thus,

... Emery reformulated the matching process, in terms of the more advanced systems theory that had
become available, as the joint optimization of the social and the technical systems. The technical and
the social systems are independent of each other in the sense that the former follows the laws of the
natural sciences while the latter follows the laws of the human sciences and is a purposeful system.
Yet they are correlative in that one requires the other for the transformation of an input into an
output, which comprises the functional task of a work system. Their relationship represents a
coupling of dissimilars that can only be jointly optimized. Attempts to optimize for either the
technical or social system alone will result in the suboptimization of the sociotechnical whole.

Now it seems that both systems will remain irremediably separated; they belong to different
orders of reality. The solution was thus looked for in a rather indirect way. The idea of joint
optimization represents a call to action, a way of emphasizing the need to take into account those
independent yet correlative systems in any attempt to optimize the whole system.

The fact that a basic theoretical problem persists in the separation of the social and the
technical has been recognized by a researcher associated with the Tavistock School, who
proposed a solution in the following terms: 'the problem requires the use of concepts that permit
the simultaneous representation of both social and technological facts... The basic concept
employed is that of an activity which may be analysed both with respect to its behavioural and
with respect to its technological components' (Herbst, 1974: 113-4). Let us follow Herbst's
definition and treatment of the proposed concept of activity:

An activity with respect to a production system can be defined as an operation carried out by a
person, by means of a tool or a machine on material, which results in some observable material
change. If activities are looked at from the point of view of who carries them out, and with whom, we
arrive at a representation of the roles, the relationships between roles, and the types of relationships
between persons which define the social system. If operations, independent of who carries them out,
are looked at in terms of their sequential and mutual dependence relationships, we arrive at a
representation of the production task structure. If activities are analyzed with respect to the sequence
and interrelation of material changes, we arrive at a representation of the material production process.
A record of events within a production system may thus be utilized to determine the characteristics of

80
 both the social-behavioural and the technological structure, depending on how the data are analyzed
(pp. 114-5).

This formulation of the problem certainly constitutes an advance in the direction of overcoming
the separation between the social and the technical, as well as in terms of the definition of
concepts. However, the separation between the two realms persists when they are reduced to
observable units: human behaviours and material changes. That the problem had not yet been
solved is revealed by the proliferation of analytical distinctions derived from different analyses
of the same data. This situation is paradigmatic: the attempts to overcome a particularly
constraining frame, without a closer attention to the source of the constraints (e.g., the
assumption of the organization as a bounded entity), seem to lead to the elaboration of different
images derived from different ways of reading the data, without paying too much heed to where
the data come from, in the first instance, nor to the possibility of producing different data.
Though the idea of a record of events which can be read in different ways is a way out of the
problem, it should be recognized that the problem persists and that what has to be looked for is
what the social and the technical systems have in common rather than a way of matching or
coupling them.

This is not to deny the relevance or the importance of this attempt. The advances brought
about by the socio-technical tradition in the effort to develop a theoretical approach in order to
analyse the observations derived from field work should not be underestimated; particularly, the
search for an explicit consideration of the role of technology in the system approach. The
difficulties seem to be related to the very nature of the system approach. Perhaps the assumption
of a bounded entity as the starting point of the inquiry is related, though it is not immediately
obvious, to the confinement of subsequent observations within rather narrow categories. In the
case of technology, the reduction is two-fold: it belongs within the boundaries of the system and,
at the same time, it is restricted to the realm of the natural sciences, to the domain of the machine
and its operations.

In order to illustrate this point on the relationship between the separation of the social-
technical and the bounded framework, Latour's (1987) proposition of two basic approaches to the
study of science is particularly relevant. According to Latour, the conclusions drawn from a
study of science might be radically different, depending on whether the approach used conceives
of science as a ready-made, decided knowledge (i.e., the accumulated results of experiments and
controversies) or whether science is studied as a practice in which knowledge is 'in the making',
'undecided'. Interestingly, this distinction resembles one of conceiving of organizations as
already existing entities or as on-going processes. Latour refers to the first approach as a
diffusion model, while the second corresponds to a translation model. Thus,

In the diffusion model society is made up of groups which have interests; these groups resist, accept
or ignore both facts and machines, which have their own inertia. In consequence we have science and
technology on the one hand, and a society on the other. In the translation model, however, no such
distinction exists since there are only heterogeneous chains of associations that, from time to time,
create obligatory passage points... Analysts who use groups endowed with interests in order to explain
how an idea spreads, a theory is accepted, or a machine rejected, are not aware that the very groups,
the very interests that they use as causes in their explanations are the consequences of an artificial
extraction and purification of a handful of links from these ideas, theories or machines (p. 141).

81
For example, the use of a diffusion model would lead one to account for the failure to adopt the
socio-technical concept, and a series of conflicts observed in one of the Tavistock mining
industry cases, in the following terms: 'Creativeness is apt to stir up jealous hatred of this kind,
and the creators all too often become the targets of destructive spite' (Trist, 1981: 29). In a
diffusion model of organization theory, then, we would have social and technical systems as
separate kinds of phenomena, as well as organizations and environments as separate kinds of
entities. In a translation model, such distinctions, rather than being starting points, would be the
results of the work of representation and transformation done by heterogeneous, organizing
processes whose trajectories may be described in terms of the paths followed by socio-technical
networks. To prepare the bases for an analytical model of organizing processes based on the
recognition of what the social and the technical share is the task of the following sections of this
chapter.

An exploration of a general concept of technology

To address the problems highlighted in the last section, it may be useful to start by paying closer
attention to the concept of technology. It seems necessary to think of technology in terms wider
than those of materials and machines employed in a delimited process of input-out conversion.
An interesting point for a reflection on the concept of technology is, precisely, the naturality with
which such an ostensive definition of technology (e.g., machines, techniques) is expressed, or the
familiarity with which we use this sort of language in everyday life (e.g., input-output
conversion). In fact, this language can itself be thought of as the result of a process through
which technologies are adopted, along with the appropriated terms. Let us illustrate this point
with an example from the field of linguistics, namely, a study of the decline of Scottish and Irish
Gaelic:

... where an ancestral occupation such as farming continues, new technologies from English-language
sources replace old, and Irish or Scottish Gaelic terminology gives way to English, with the result that
these realms of vocabulary are swept into oblivion while whole new lists of foreign words are
substituted. In eastern Ross-shire, for example, as elsewhere in Scotland and, indeed, in Ireland, the
traditional roofing material was a thatch of straw or bent-grass so that one normally spoke of roofing
the house as a' cur tugha air an taigh (literally 'putting a thatch on the house'). As thatching has now
become obsolete, it is the English word roof which appears to be most commonly used (Watson,
1989: 53).

Many other examples could be adduced to show how inextricably related are techniques and
language, technological changes and social arrangements, uses of technologies and ways of
representing the real. Hence, it would be a severe limitation to the understanding of technology
to reduce its concept to that of simply a tool, or as a realm of phenomena separate from the
human. Perhaps a way of understanding the implications of the concept of technology can be
found in Heidegger's (1977: 4) idea that 'the essence of technology is by no means anything
technological', in any instrumental or anthropological sense; but a way of 'revealing', a way
through which the real appears as what is at hand, ordered and orderable.

In a recent reading of Heidegger's work, the philosopher Gianni Vattimo indicates the
complexities involved in such a seemingly paradoxical formulation of the essence of technology,

82
and that Heidegger's notion of the connection between metaphysics, humanism, and technology
'is still far from being understood today' (Vattimo, 1991: 44). An exemplary case of
misunderstanding the essence of technology would result from a combination of a literal
rendering of Heidegger's text plus a humanistic standpoint which privileges the role of a subject.
For instance, according to Castoriadis (1984: 238): 'those who perceive that "the essence of
technique is absolutely not to do with technique", reimmerse at once this essence in an ontology
which removes it from the decisive moment of the human world —from making/doing'. Whilst,
as Vattimo (1991) explains,

Humanism, which is both a part and an aspect of metaphysics, consists in the definition of humanity
as subiectum. Technology does not represent the crisis of humanism because the triumph of
rationalization subverts humanistic values, as superficial analyses have led us to believe... (p. 41).

If the Heideggerian analysis of the connection between metaphysics, humanism and technology is a
valid one, moreover, then the subject that supposedly has to be defended from technological
dehumanization is itself the very root of this dehumanization, since the kind of subjectivity which is
defined strictly as the subject of the object is a pure function of the world of objectivity, and
inevitably tends to become itself an object of manipulation (p. 46).

It might be thought that the historical experience of the practice of organization, in the fields of
business and government for example, and traditional approaches in organization theory, offer an
interesting point of observation of the processes through which such a triumph of rationalization
has been taking place. In fact, according to Vattimo, rather than reducing it to anything
technological, technology should be viewed 'as a more general socio-historical fact involving the
technological organization of production and social life' (p. 97); and, in this sense, 'with its
global project aimed at linking all entities on the planet into predictable and controllable causal
relationships, represents the most advanced development of metaphysics' (p. 40). Let us explore
this global project, the metaphysical character of technology as a way of representing through
which the world reveals itself as a picture, and which Heidegger has referred to as the essence of
technology.

In the first chapter, it was suggested that Hobbes' use of the concept of system had a
geometrical character. His treatment of this concept resembled that of triangles, e.g., similar parts
of a commonwealth, regular and irregular systems. Hobbes' procedure can, therefore, be viewed
as a solution to a problem of representation which reveals, in turn, the way a tradition provides
the means and resources for its own perpetuation. In fact, the use of triangles as a way of
conveying a representation of order, and explaining how order is attained, has been a long-
standing feature of Western thinking. The following passage shows, for instance, the important
role played by triangles in Plato's account of the universe in the Timaeus (1977: 72-3):

There were, before the world came into existence, being, space, and becoming, three distinct realities.
The nurse of becoming was characterized by the qualities of water and fire, of earth and air, and by
others that go with them, and its visual appearance was therefore varied... they were all without
proportion or measure; fire, water, earth and air bore some traces of their proper nature, but were in
the disorganized state to be expected of anything which god has not touched, and his first step when
he set about reducing them to order was to give them a definite pattern of shape and number... In the
first place it is clear to everyone that fire, earth, water and air are bodies, and all bodies are solids. All
solids again are bounded by surfaces, and all rectilinear surfaces are composed of triangles... This we

83
 postulate as the origin of fire and other bodies, our argument combining likelihood and necessity;
their more ultimate origins are known to god and to men whom god loves.

Now we can attempt to understand this strategy of representation in more general terms. An
interesting question would, then, be how triangles became such a useful and convenient device, a
means of solving almost any representational problem. A possible answer is suggested by the
recorded history of science and technology: the enormous impact brought about by the
application of triangles in the ancient world in solving a variety of practical problems. But, it
could be argued, this explanation provides only a superficial rendering of the story, since it does
not reveal the process through which that logic of representation developed and had that impact.
The investigation of this process has been undertaken by historians and philosophers of science,
whose work provides us with clues to the understanding of this complex phenomenon, i.e., the
essence of technology. A revealing result of this investigation can be found in Serres' (1983)
account of the genesis and implications of Thales' theorem:

... Thales stops time in order to measure space. He stops the course of the sun at the precise instant of
isosceles triangles; he homogenizes the day to obtain the general case. And so do Joshua and
Copernicus. Hence it becomes necessary to freeze time in order to conceive of geometry. Once the
gnomon has disappeared, Thales enters into the eternity of the mathematical figure (p. 87).

Technique is the origin of man, his perpetuation and his repetition. Hence Thales repeats his very
origin, and our own: his mathematics, his metrics of geometry, repeats in another way (and as simple
as possible) and designates in another way the modality of our technical relationship to objects, the
homology of the fabricator to the fabricated... What [Thales' mathematics] announces, for the first
time, is a philosophy of representation, dominating both the pure diagram and its dramatization
beneath the torches of the solstice. From whence one returns to the size of the stones and to the
pyramid. The edifice is a volume of volumes, a polyhedron composed of cut-out blocks of stone. Now
how is one to study and learn about a volume if not by means of a planar projection? (p. 91).

This story provides, in fact, more than a chapter of the history of science, a single theme that
runs throughout the whole encyclopaedia of Western civilization: the project of mutual
substantiation of technique and philosophy, or the metaphysics of technology. But let us focus on
those elements by means of which the realization of this project took place: 'the diagram and its
dramatization'. The idea of a theatre brings to light a basic character of technology: to produce a
representation and re-produce the conditions of its repetition, its re-presentation. The eternity of
the diagram expresses the metaphysics of pure repeatability. The result is not only the freezing of
time, but the birth of a particular temporality, an enpresenting as Heidegger (1988) would have
said.

This story, the genesis of Thale's theorem and of a philosophy of representation that still
dominates our diagrams and dramatizations, illustrates in a synthetic way the convergence in a
single piece of work, at a single place and time, of technology, humanism and metaphysics, those
elements which will be differentiated in the modern world-picture. Perhaps technology,
metaphysics and humanism were simultaneously present in a single word in Ancient Greek.
Perhaps, for example, a word like techne conveyed a more complex meaning than our technique.
Perhaps what we are now trying to understand is that, after all, the meaning of technique is a
rather complex one, or that some forgotten meanings are still insistently resounding in our own
epoch.

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 To reduce the spatial representation of social phenomena or the separation between the social
and the technical to erroneous or misguided ways of representing would reveal, in turn, an
incomplete and misleading rendering of the philosophy of representation that dominates such
diagrams and their dramatizations. Moreover, it might preclude the understanding of the concept
of technology and its organizational implications. It hardly needs to be said that our problem is
not one of abandoning or overcoming a way of representing, a language or a metaphysics, as
they appear, for example in a boundary-based notion of organization, or in the separation
between the social and the technical. For this philosophy of representation, as Vattimo (1991: 46)
would say, 'is not something that can be simply shed like an old, worn-out garment'. But, since
the triumph of rationalization is far from complete, or absolute, it is possible to find some paths
through the fissures of the frames and categorical divisions, in order to appreciate how they come
about and develop.

Without referring to the different degrees of realization of this global project in its
geographical sense (i.e., the worlds of development and underdevelopment which are the theme
of the seventh chapter), we are witnessing, for example, how production technologies are
evolving from mass production to tailor-made production. Likewise, organizations are moving
from the allocation of people and things in precise, rigid places, to a scattering and networking of
activities. Recent developments in information technology and telecommunications have not
only brought to light the possibilities of such changes, but also the realization that there is
something more than a simple coupling, correlation or accommodation between technologies and
organization, and that this 'something' has to do with forms of representation which both the
technological and the organizational share.

Technology, organization and representation

'Everything is technology' (Braudel, 1985: 334). The generality of such an assertion reflects
Braudel's intention of emphasizing the relevance of the smallest details of everyday life in order
to understand how civilizations remain within constraining horizons by simply indefinitely
repeating successful ways of doing things. But, at the same time, Braudel's phrase relates to the
recognition that his attempt of exclusively focusing on the realm of material things could not be
carried further:

In fact, our investigation takes us at this point not simply into the realm of material 'things,' but into a
world of 'things and words' —interpreting the last term in a wider sense than usual, to mean
languages with everything that man contributes or insinuates into them, as in the course of his
everyday life he makes himself their unconscious prisoner, in front of his bowl of rice or slice of
bread (p. 333).

For a full understanding of the last point, it may be useful to add that the 'bowl of rice' and the
'slice of bread' refer to the comparison between Eastern and Western civilizations, in terms of
their different evolutions, which constitutes one of Braudel's major questions throughout his
book. Though interesting, this is not exactly our concern here. What is more relevant to our
argument is that complex phenomenon of the confinement of everyday life inside the walls, so to
speak, of things and words in which it indefinitely repeats itself, and through which at the same
time it changes.
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 As Castoriadis (1984: 229) suggests, we should begin by understanding the relationship
between words and tools, what they have in common: 'Both of these involve the same
detachment from the immediate context; in both cases a temporality and an order emerge which
are sui generis and which are superimposed on natural temporality and order, whose signs they
reverse....' In a sense, this is another way of expressing the point made by Serres in his story of
Thales' theorem. But the idea of detachment summarizes (with the advantage of an illustrative,
spatial reference) the effect attained by means of the representation: a way of acting at a distance,
as it were, while transforming the re-presented reality.

What is common to words and tools is, then, the introduction of a particular temporality and
order. What is not yet clear is, precisely, how the temporality and the order emerge and are
superimposed. It should be added that the idea of a natural temporality and order might be rather
misleading, since it calls up the possibility of an original state or, even worse, the traditional
representation of order emerging from chaos. It might be shown that any order and temporality
emerges and is superimposed over other orders and temporalities that have emerged and been
superimposed over others. In this case, it can be argued that a kind of infinite regress is present.
An answer would be that, precisely, what is looked for is an understanding of those processes
through which any arbitrary starting point might be adopted for the purpose of telling a story;
and that, finally, to run that risk would be a more fertile alternative than one of taking for granted
a foundation.

The answer can be obtained from Serres' idea of the theatre: the possibility of indefinitely
dramatization, the reproduction of the conditions of detached manipulation is what explains the
emergence and superimposition of a particular temporality and order, of organization in short.
Technology and language share this exercise of repeated detachment through which the real
reveals itself as what is at hand, ordered, ordinary. Interestingly, in Freud's (1971: 93) definition
of order, the idea of repetition plays a fundamental role, though in a restricted, psychodynamic
sense: 'Order is a kind of compulsion to repeat which, when a regulation has been laid down
once and for all, decides when, where and how a thing shall be done, so that in every similar
circumstance one is spared hesitation and indecision'.

Technology and organization might thus be thought of as two instances of the same
phenomenon: an enduring way of representing which reveals and imposes an order and a
temporality by ensuring the possibility of indefinite repetition of the revealing and the
imposition. 'The infinite things lack in progress they find in repetition', wrote Ferdinando
Galiani, the Italian economist (quoted by Marx, 1918: 131). The original phrase is: Questo
infinito che le cose non hanno in progresso, hanno in giro. We are exercising some violence to
this phrase by substituting the word repetition for the economic term 'circulation' which
translates the Italian giro. But the idea comes down, finally, to the same thing.

A revealing formulation of the relationship between technology and representation, which

draws on Heidegger's ideas and focuses on the conditions of detachment and repetition, has been
expressed by Cooper (1993: 1; page number of the original manuscript) in the following terms:

Technology and representation are immemorially connected. For the ancient Greeks, techne meant
the art of making present, of bringing something to realization: a chair, a coat, a field of corn, the

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 word of God. In these examples, techne brings a required object or event present to the human senses
and so makes it available for use and understanding; it gives clear form to what was formerly remote
or absent. The modern glossing of technology preserves this old meaning but gives it a curious twist.
Instead of the concern with making present, with the art of constructing something for the
apprehension of the senses, the modern interest in technology puts the stress on immediacy of use,
constant availability and the easing of effort.

Immediacy of use, constant availability and the easing of effort represent the features of modern
technology through which it has acquired its enduring presence as a way of representing, of
transforming the world into a picture. In another work, Cooper (1992) analyses the relationship
between organization and representation by highlighting these aspects of representation in the
form of remote control, displacement and abbreviation. According to Cooper, 'the conversion of
force or power into information' (p. 271) provides the required conditions of detached
manipulation. In this sense, technology and organization might be viewed and expressed in the
same terms: ways of acting in which results are achieved without immediate involvement with
the things themselves. The distant becomes the at-hand, the immovable movable, and the
complex reduced to a simple and manipulable expression: 'Administrators and managers, for
example, do not work directly on the environment but on models, maps, numbers and formulae
which represent that environment; in this way, they can control complex and heterogeneous
activities at a distance and in the relative convenience of a centralized work station' (p. 257).

The achievement of a particular form of detached manipulation is, of course, a matter of

historical contingency. Think, for instance, of the difference between the technology-and-
organization put to work in the Portugueses' development of oceanic navigation in the fifteenth
century (Law, 1986), and the current project of populating outer space with satellites, space
stations, and spacecraft. However, both projects reveal the achievement of a considerable degree
of remote control, displacement and abbreviation. In both projects, the unknown is transformed
into charted routes, the distant into the immediate, and the complex and indefinite into the simple
and measurable. But to figure out these achievements is not enough. A particular order and
temporality does not simply emerge but is the result of the repeated exercise of the possibility of
detached manipulation, until it becomes a routine matter of everyday life.

Introducing the concept of socio-technical network

This idea of a common, shared character of technology and organization (the possibility of
indefinite repetition of a way of representing and transforming the real) provides us with a basis
to think of organization in process terms. The concept of socio-technical network is a means of
representing the avenues along which organizing processes travel by imposing and extending a
particular order and temporality.

The concept of STN can be derived from the very fact of the repetition of ways of doing and
speaking: 'Material life... presents itself to us in the anecdotal form of thousands of assorted
facts... little facts which do, it is true, by indefinite repetition, add up to form linked chains. Each
of them represents the thousands of others that have crossed the silent depths of time and
endured' (Braudel, 1985: 560). Socio-technical networks can then be viewed in terms of these
chains which, formed by the repetition of everyday facts, link themselves and endure. What
endures is not only the chains themselves, but the order and temporality they give birth to and

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maintain. And it is precisely in this sense that organization can be understood in process terms,
as the development and the strengthening of those chains. It should be evident that the expression
network refers here more to a work, to a process, than to the resulting forms of a set of lines and
points, a net.

Let us illustrate this concept of STN, as enduring links through which organizing take place,
with a reference to a case study on the introduction of advanced materials (Willinger &
Zuscovitch, 1988). Japanese firms began to produce ceramics at a time when there was no
extended market for ceramics in thermo-mechanical applications (engines, turbines, etc.) and the
metal industry was still expected to maintain its dominant position. The strategy was to gain
industrial control of ceramics production through the acquisition of production-knowledge, i.e.,
by learning how to produce. The very introduction of the new materials and production processes
would sooner or later influence the path of technological development in this industry. As
Willinger and Zuscovitch (1988: 242) put it: 'It is a kind of self-fulfilling expectation in technical
progress'. The case shows the incremental process through which the introduction of the new
materials took place, along with its economic and/or institutional implications. Thus,

Given the high cost of the new elements, an incremental procedure is generally adopted. The designer
will typically insert a new piece made of new materials in existing technical devices and the new item
will have to match up to the old ones. For example, some parts such as piston heads will use new
ceramics in an otherwise metallic engine. Another example is the use of elements made of composite
materials in an aircraft within the existing aluminium design. This piece-by-piece substitution process
implies that the R & D will have to handle compatibility properties, and complementarity links are
created between old and new materials.

Through this incremental process learning occurs. As scientific and technical problems are
progressively solved, new processing techniques are elaborated and thus knowledge and know-how
are created, skill networks and industrial standards emerge, scale economies appear, and cost
reduction along with it...

During the 'step-by-step' substitution periods, firms search and, consciously or not, relax the technical
constraints of the 'old' optimal solution. As the process goes on, knowledge concerning advantageous
reconception opportunities is gained. When the field of such opportunities is sufficiently opened, a
qualitative jump becomes possible on the technical level as well as on that of economic performance
(Willinger & Zuscovitch, 1988: 242-4).

In this description the authors show, from the smallest details, how a socio-technical network is
progressively constructed and developed, by inserting itself within an already existing, ongoing
assemblage of processes formed by other STNs, until the conditions are created for the
emergence and imposition of a new order over existing orders. Interestingly, this is a
contemporary story whose end is still forthcoming. Whether the Japanese will control the market
for advanced materials or not is not our concern here. But what is certain is that they have been
developing the capacity, the skill networks, to ensure the conditions of indefinite repetition of the
representations achieved in laboratory work. A lesson from this story, not only for our immediate
theoretical concerns, is that STNs do not simply emerge, nor do so in a vacuum even less, but
result from a piece-by-piece process through which little facts add to each other to form enduring
chains, along with and often against other existing STNs. Today, as well as in the past, such
processes are not effortless or costless but require an accumulation of resources of every kind to

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construct and support those theatres in which the representations are to be produced and re-
produced.

CHAPTER 6. THE SOCIO-TECHNICAL NETWORK APPROACH

The concept of socio-technical network can be thought of as a way of representing what we find
beneath organization boundaries. If we lifted up the boundary condition, we would be faced with
an impure difference between organization and environment. And, instead of an idea of
exchange between both entities, we would rather need a notion of transformation, a way of
thinking of practices which transform and are transformed by other practices. Instead of absolute
objects which have to be designed and re-designed in order to standardize forms of social life
and enforce binding institutions, organizations would be better conceived as by-products of those
transformation processes by which social life becomes standardized and institutions enforced.

The relaxation of the boundary condition implies, then, a transition from a notion of
organizations as boundary-maintaining systems to one of organization as network-strengthening
practices. As Latour (1987) suggested,

From now on, the name of the game will be to leave the boundaries open and to close them only when
the people we follow close them (p. 175).

... every time an inside/outside division is built, we should follow the two sides simultaneously,
making up a list, no matter how long and heterogeneous, of all those who do the work (p. 176).

An approach to the study of organizing processes, based upon the concept of socio-technical
network and aimed at revealing the implications of this transition, is proposed here. This chapter
presents an outline of such an approach which contains a definition of socio-technical network,
an analysis of its methodological requirements, and a general discussion of the approach.

Towards a definition of socio-technical networks

The expression socio-technical network is used here in the sense suggested by Law and Callon
(1988) in an analysis of a project of technological change. The authors used the qualification
socio-technical as a way of 'underlining the simultaneously social and technical character of
technological innovation' (p. 285). Though not explicitly defined, the meaning of the concept of
STN is clearly indicated in relation to the concept of sociotechnical scenario. Thus, for instance,
an engineering project constitutes a sociotechnical scenario in the sense that it not only describes
a particular, technical objective and the way to reach it, as we usually think of engineering
projects, but also a representation of how the (social) world would look like through the
realization of the project.

The case studied by Law and Callon was the development of a military aircraft for the Royal
Air Force. And the concept of sociotechnical scenario permitted them to conceive of such a
project as 'a plausible proposal for a revised network of both social and technical roles that does
not rest on an a priori distinction between human beings and machines', a proposal for 'a

89
weapons system that might be built and a theory about how the political, bureaucratic, and
strategic world could be made to look five or ten years later' (p. 287).

A sociotechnical scenario constitutes, according to Law and Callon, a 'putative'

sociotechnical network: 'the design for an ideal world —and it is easy to design ideal worlds. The
problems arise when it becomes necessary to mobilize or create the actors that will play these
parts' (p. 287). The word 'putative' seems to indicate that an STN does not reduce to a design, a
drawing of a sequence of events, and that a network implies both the net and the work. The
putative character refers, in this sense, to the distance between the project and its realization. As
the authors suggest throughout their study, the difference between a failed project and a
successful one does not only reside in their formulation but, even more fundamentally, on the
way the projects insert themselves into heterogeneous streams of ongoing processes. For
example, as Latour (1988: 255) shows in his story of the pasteurization of France, the success of
Pasteur's project was the result not only of his 'genius', but also of 'the work of composition,
definition, aggregation, and statistics already done by the hygienists and their troops' which, in
turn, must be seen within the background of 'an earlier politico-scientific imbroglio'.

The concept of STN differs from the diagrams used in both the social and the technical
perspectives of network analysis. The sociological character of engineering work, pointed out by
Law and Callon, might be as striking for sociologists as for engineers; since both of them work
on abstractions which belong to completely different worlds. Interestingly, the fact that both
sociologists and engineers can use the same tool (though in different ways) indicates that they
both after all share the same world produced by the enframing work of technology. Moreover,
both kinds of networks might produce similar renderings of a given situation: individuals would
be in the nodes of a social network because of their attributed responsibility for the event of
accomplishing (or not) given activities represented as arrows connecting those individuals.
However, the diagrams currently used by engineers are nearer to the idea of a putative
sociotechnical network than those used by sociologists. For, in a social network, the abstraction
of the social produces a kind of pure phenomenon, where social interaction becomes removed
from the tools, materials and, even, the learning processes related to a concrete activity. In the
abstraction of an engineering project (represented as sets of activities connected by sets of
events), the actors can still be found in a state of heterogeneity, as Law and Callon would say, in
terms of their nature.

A socio-technical network can be visualized as a sequence of activities represented by lines.

But the reduction of such lines to a proxy for measuring the cost or the length of time assigned to
the activities would transform the representation into another exercise of plane projection: a
bounded figure. Certainly, an STN can be bounded but the setting of boundaries is always an
arbitrary imposition, since no absolute beginnings or ends can be assumed. Any boundary, in
terms of time or space, would result from the need to tell a story. Another difference between an
STN and an engineering diagram has to do with the nodes of the network. The engineering
diagrams not only specify in advance the possible paths, but also the best one. The nodes are
those places where an ongoing activity meets another one. In this world there is no place for
encounters. The nodes define when an activity has finished and when another may begin.
Though the most sophisticated versions of network analysis might relax some rigidities, the
principle must be the same in the second- or nth-best solution.

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 In a sense, as a putative STN, the engineering project is designed to re-present organizing, to
provide a tool which enables us to deal with the mobilization of resources at a distance, in a
simplified manner. They constitute an expression of that triumph of rationalization referred to in
the last chapter as the historical project of technology; in this case, the rationalization of
organizing. However, we should remember that another condition was required: the possibility of
a repeated exercise of detachment. Thus, such a rationalization cannot be taken for granted as a
matter of simply producing a diagram; as we, in general, take for granted that a phone call can be
made. To the same extent that a phone call cannot be made without the appropriate network, the
organizing technique cannot do its work without a certain kind of network. This kind of network
we refer to as an STN.

Finally, a socio-technical network can be defined as a series of ongoing processes formed by

interlockings of repeatable actions (whether performed by humans or non-humans) through
which a way of representing becomes an enduring feature of reality. This concept of STN does
not refer, then, to the following of any pre-established sequence. Rather, the description of a
sequence would be the result, not the starting point, of the story. The experience of historians
provides a good illustration of this point, as Pollard (1988) has remarked:

Historical chains are long and convoluted, and it is possible to start work on them at different points,
taking the preceding links for granted (p. viii).

... causes are themselves effects of earlier developments, while effects, no matter how derived and
dependent, take on some life of their own and become causes. Both play these dual roles
simultaneously, and which is which depends on the immediate context, the link at which one decides
to enter the chain (p. ix).

It should also be added that the aim of studying organizing processes is not to make a portrait of
an STN, since the effort in delineating and drawing a network could leave us with a net without
having understood the work. At this stage of our knowledge of organizing processes, our maps
can only provide a rather crude representation of those relatively uncharted territories.

Methodological elements for an STN approach

Let us begin with a familiar example. The experience of 'talking with' a computer is now a
common, everyday fact for many people around the world. But it would take on a revelatory
meaning when analysed as part of an STN. The analysis of this experience is not to be reduced to
an inspection of the interaction between an individual and a machine. After all, the individual is
not talking with the computer, but with an almost certainly unknown number of programmers,
designers, etc. This does not mean, however, that the crucial aspect of this experience is the
social form of a user-producer interaction, and that the machine is only the physical vehicle of
the interaction. Rather, this experience implies complex sequences of events and associations
from which the appropriated behaviours of both the individual and the machine result, and the
separation of social and technical aspects would add little to or even preclude its understanding.

According to Michael Oakeshott (1975a: 105): 'To understand a substantive performance in

which an agent discloses and enacts himself is to put it into a story in which it is recognized to be

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an occurrence contingently related to other occurrences'. Let us illustrate this point with an
example drawn from Latour's study of science:

If you proposed to build a 16-bit computer to compete with DEC's VAX 11/780 machine I'll know
who, when and where you are. You are West at Data General in the late 1970s. I know this, because
there are very few places on earth where anyone has the resources and the guts to disaggregate the
black box DEC has assembled and to come up with a brand new make of computer. I similarly learn a
lot about you if you explain to me that you are waiting for the repair man to fix your Apple computer,
or that you believe the moon to be made of green cheese, or that you do not really think that the
second aminoacid in the GHRH structure is histidine (Latour, 1987: 138-9).

A methodological implication of this story, and of Oakeshott's advice, is that the understanding
of an experience like that of talking with a computer, for example, would require an approach
sensitive enough to the way in which displacements of human and nonhuman actors occur along
certain networks or circuits of transformations. In addition, such an approach should enable us to
give an intelligible form to those displacements and transformations by translating them into the
narrative form of stories or processes. According to the OED, the word 'process' refers both to
'The fact of going on or being carried on, as an action, or a series of actions or events; progress,
course', and to 'A narration, narrative; relation, story, tale; a discourse or treatise; an argument or
discussion'.

This methodological implication is a prime requirement for an STN approach to the

understanding of organizing processes. In the same way that the strict separation of social and
technical aspects of a given phenomenon or experience might be overturned, so to speak, by
introducing those aspects into more general processes of displacements and transformations,
currently thought internal and external organizational phenomena might be studied as extensions,
intersections or interlockings of (socio-technical) networks, without limiting the study to the
boundaries of any particular firm or governmental agency, in any legal or geographical sense.
Let us analyse this methodological requirement for an STN approach by considering its
particular logic of representation, and the possibilities of specifying socio-technical networks in
the study of particular situations or cases.

The geometry of socio-technical networks

That character of 'sensitizing metaphor' which Moreno's concept of network still exhibited was
doomed to disappear when the concept of network became a research tool in the hands of social
scientists searching for a higher level of rationalization in their disciplines. In fact, Moreno's
language contains many metaphors, analogies, and neologisms, which reveal his effort to make
sense of rather elusive phenomena. One feature of such a sensitizing language is of special
interest here. In Moreno's method of describing and referring to networks, we can find the
presence of topological concepts: maps, surfaces, traversability, permanence of structural form
through changes, and so on.

There is now an increasing recognition that the study of practices, traditions, socio-historical
processes, requires a certain sensitivity to a different kind of logic of representation, compared to
the traditional logic of measurement, and that the language of topology can provide a way of
dealing with the complex forms that the representation of those processes might adopt. Cooper

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(1992: 270), in commenting on a point made by Michel Serres, has summarized the requirement
for a different approach to the study of organizing processes:

Serres goes on to argue that a topology of movement is required which recognizes that human actions
occur not in spaces but between them. As we have seen, this is exactly what the logic of
representation offers. It works on the boundaries or intersections of the inside and the outside,
between here and there, this and that. It displaces space (and time) through remote control and
abbreviation; it traverses a mobile space of non-localizable relationships.

This logic of representation implies, then, a change from a logic of distance and measurement
towards a logic of displacement and transformation. An STN might be represented by means of
a diagram. But its lines, as representations of on-going processes, lack an absolute place in time
and space. Obviously, the very attempt to introduce intelligibility will give the diagram a certain
form, including boundaries. But, as was indicated in the last section, any specific or decided
form constitutes the result of an inquiry, not its starting point.

Now it can be added that the analysis of the forms attributed to STNs as diagrams requires a
topological rather than Euclidean, a qualitative rather than a quantitative, approach. In fact, the
term topology was introduced in 1847 by J.B. Listing whose purpose was to emphasize the
qualitative rather than the quantitative in geometry. According to Nalimov (1981: 47), topology

... resulted from the desire to develop a study of continuous values not on the basis of measuring
distances, since in this case it is always necessary to introduce a definition of measure and to trouble
about scales, but on the basis of relations of mutual arrangement and inclusion. It turned out that the
notion of a 'neighborhood,' which is of great importance in mathematics, can be defined without
resorting to the notion of distance.

It should be recognized that the adoption of this logic of representation and the possibilities of
developing it face certain obstacles. As a branch of mathematics, the study of topology has been
largely neglected in the formal training of both social scientists and engineers, due to its
speculative character or its lack of concern with practice. The concern with measurement
problems and the spectacular achievements shown by the theatre of measurement, throughout the
history of Western civilization, have created conditions, indeed a world, in which the very idea
of speaking in different terms from those of measurement would appear as a deviation.
Interestingly, when it is necessary to deal with problems of uncertainty and ambiguity (i.e., with
some unexpected features, or the lack of completion and the fissures, of this real world), the
language used is precisely that qualitative, speculative and devious language of traversability,
inclusion and mutual arrangement. This situation resembles one of those paradoxical drawings of
Escher's, in which two features should not be shown by the same world but are, nevertheless. Is
it an illusion?

One of the curiosities that can be found in some topological forms (e.g., the Moebius strip) is
the fact that the object does not present a clear division between inside and outside. When we try
to follow a path which is clearly on one side of the object we, strangely, end up on the other. In
technical terms, the Moebius strip is a special kind of surface that may be obtained by
transforming (twisting) a rectangular strip so that, for example, 'an oriented circle [a pre-
specified sense of rotation] can be moved around the strip... and when it returns to its original

93
position the orientation will have been reversed' (Mendelson, 1990: 190). Probably we have been
always on the same 'side', which folds and unfolds in different ways producing an illusion of
inadvertently passing through boundaries.

But this illusion, as well as those associated with other impossible objects, may provide a
clue that something may be occurring in the real world that cannot be accounted for by the
conventional logic of measurement and distance. In terms of a different logic (one of
transformation and displacement) the boundary condition, for example, can be expressed as the
conversion of the inside into the outside and vice versa. As the following comment by Deleuze
(1986: 119) on Foucault's idea of 'the doubling or the fold' suggests:

If the inside is constituted by the folding of the outside, between them there is a topological relation:
the relation to oneself is homologous to the relation with the outside and the two are in contact,
through the intermediary of the strata ['historical formations' —i.e., those orders and temporalities
produced by organizing processes or, in short, organizations] which are relatively external
environments (and therefore relatively internal).

The representation of organizations as bounded entities would be transformed, in this logic of

representation, into one of folds, invaginations of the environment or, to use Cooper's (1989:
487) expression, 'pockets of externality folded in'. Cooper uses this expression in commenting on
Derrida's deconstruction of the Ancient Greek term pharmakon. Let us include here a brief
excerpt from Cooper's comment which might facilitate our understanding not only of this
expression, but also of the whole point of this discussion around the inside-outside problem. This
way of reasoning would undermine, for example, a simplistic definition of the organization as
that which is not the environment or vice versa. Thus,

The purity of the inside can only be attained, says Derrida, if the outside is branded as a supplement,
something inessential, even parasitical... Derrida emphasizes how the outside as the unwanted
supplement plays a necessary constituting role in the formation of the inside and, far from being a
mere accessory, is thus a central feature of the inside. To illustrate this, Derrida uses examples from
the human body whose innermost spaces —mouth, stomach, etc.— are actually pockets of externality
folded in (Cooper, 1989: 487).

The system-based notion of organizational functioning, as one of intra- and interorganizational

exchanges, would be substituted for one of organizing processes as the transformations through
which such doublings or foldings come about. Finally, the emergence and dissolution of
organizations as bounded entities would become transitory foldings and unfoldings of the
historical field or surface.

A logic in which the inside becomes a fold of the outside would distinguish an STN
approach, methodologically speaking, from a system approach. A clear illustration of the system
approach is provided by Parsons and Bales (1953: 92) in the following statement:

... a boundary-maintaining system may cease to exist in that it becomes assimilated to its
environment, that is the distinction between the phenomena within the boundary and those outside,
disappears. Disintegration of a boundary-maintaining system is precisely this disappearance of the
difference between 'internal' states and the environment. This is what is meant by death in the
biological sense (Parsons and Bales, 1953: 92).

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Let us analyse this position with respect to the inside-outside problem in terms of the topological
property of connectedness: 'A subspace of a topological space is "connected" if it is all "of one
piece"; that is, if it is impossible to decompose the subspace into two disjoint non-empty open
sets' (Mendelson, 1990: 112). The maintenance of the boundaries is achieved by avoiding the
disconnectedness of the system. Perhaps this explains why Parsons conceived of the survival of
the system in terms of the maintenance of a balance between differentiation and integration. The
problem is one of ensuring that the system's differentiated parts share something, i.e., that its
subsets are not disjoint. Perhaps also the emphasis in the preservation of a steady state reflects a
condition of connectedness. Let us remember that the expression 'steady state' is a technical term
in physics and, more precisely, in cosmology. According to Barrow and Tipler (1989: 601),

Steady-state cosmologies have a very strong intellectual appeal. If the Universe were not changing in
the large, it would not be necessary to address the questions of how the Universe began and how it
will end, questions which seem unavoidable in the context of evolving, Big Bang cosmologies.
Furthermore, many find the idea of evolutionary change abhorrent. Such people are attracted to a
steady-state cosmology because in such a universe Time is ultimately without meaning: on a
sufficiently large-scale view, no change occurs.

A 'non-constant' transformation would contradict the connectedness of the 'real line' (Mendelson,
1990: 116-7), along with the possibility of maintaining the condition of continuous linear
variation along each of the dimensions of the action-space, and of maintaining the representation
of the system restricted to a basically unchanging metric space. In fact, a non-constant
transformation of the space would render meaningless the measures of initial conditions and, in
general, any measurement of distance. The 'death' of the system, or the dissolution of its
boundaries, would thus express the loss of the conditions for reproducing the theatre of
measurement.

In a logic of measurement, then, the existence of a boundary between organization and

environment becomes a matter of life or death. For a transformation of the object implies a
dramatic loss of its properties. According to a logic of transformation, a case of systemic death
might be represented as an unfolding or a relaxation of a transitory loop, so to speak, in the
course of an on-going process. The notion of differentiation (or functional specialization of the
system units according to their particular environments) might be generalized in order to
conceive of organizing processes as differentially evolving practices or traditions, with contacts
and encounters with other practices or traditions, which transitorily adopt forms and places
identified by the imposition of a certain order and temporality. Thus, instead of a limit or
extreme differentiation, a case of disconnectedness could be analysed by identifying the changes
or trans-formations of those structures resulting from displacements, intersections, or inclusions
of organizing processes.

Let us illustrate this point with a common example. Cases of factory closures frequently
show how, after an immediate period of difficulties, many of those left without jobs find other
jobs and/or are retrained in other skills. Perhaps, it can be argued, in cases of obsolescence of too
specific assets there is no possibility of finding profitable alternative uses. However, there are
also good examples of transformation of industrial activities using quite specific equipment,
procedures and skills, as a consequence of a change in market conditions or a technological

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innovation. An interesting example of this kind of situation can be found in the experience of the
Swiss watch-makers who, facing the invasion of Japanese watches into their traditional industry,
successfully changed to producing a different product which required slightly different skills,
e.g., heart pacemakers.

Should these situations be analysed in terms of deaths, resurrections, agonies, and

recuperations? In this case, the starting point would be a population of entities and the problem is
to explain their health or lack of it, the causes of those 'natural' events. Another approach would
perhaps try to understand the (organizing) processes through which such changes of form
(folding and unfolding) occur, and which travel along STNs, as it were, like locomotives on their
railways.

On the specification of socio-technical networks

The point made by Parsons and Bales, that the existence of boundaries is a matter of life or
death, should not be simply disregarded. For it reveals the 'constructive' character of the system
approach as a way of positing entities. As Heidegger (1988: 64) noted with respect to the
separation between subject and object: 'in general, the distinction between inner and outer is
constructive and continually gives occasion for further constructions'. In this sense, a heuristic
question might be raised: what would happen if the organization did not exist? Which exchanges
would be lost and what would be lost with them?

An easy answer is that nothing would be lost since another organization would occupy its
place. It could be argued that precisely what is in question is the idea of place: how do we know
that there was such a place in the first instance. There is another simple answer: we can observe a
number of people going to their workplaces, suppliers looking for their customers and customers
for their suppliers. But now the problem has turned into one of tracing and explaining these
people's paths.

One difficulty is that these are not simply streams of people, nor is it clear why they meet in a
specific place. In some way such streams have had to be channelled or organized. Thus, the easy
answer might be the correct one: one organization will always occupy the place of another. It
should be added, however, that the existence of such a place can be seen as a result rather than a
cause of the meeting of those streams whose nature is still unknown; though, as we have seen in
Serres' story of the beginnings of the theatre of measurement, the very idea of place and surface
should be referred to the repeated exercise of a practice of representation.

The organization does not simply appear and create the place, but is also a consequence of
certain channelling or organizing processes. (For example, the rationalization of the decisions of
industrial location has become a particular discipline, combining the skills of ecologists,
geographers, economists and other social scientists, in order to provide clear guidelines as to how
a place should be selected). Thus, the researcher will be faced with the problem of understanding
these organizing processes through which organizations are constructed as folds of a surface, as
it were, that define a clearly delimited place. The only indication available to start such an
inquiry is that those streams can be conceived of as STNs, and that the work of organizing
cannot be made without them, as a phone call cannot be made without the proper network.

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 The researcher may now argue that a clear indication as to how the STNs can be followed or
traced is still lacking. This is difficult terrain, where an arbitrary reduction has to be made. But a
general, historical suggestion might help. Only when the exercise of a detached practice of
representation and transformation is achieved and the conditions of its reproduction ensured, can
it be said that an organizing process is going on, that an order and temporality (distribution of
space and serialization of time) is being imposed. This is the sense in which organization is
conceived of as practice, and the study of organizing processes as one of analysing practices. For
example, referring to his own method, Foucault (1988b: 102-3) explained:

... the target of analysis wasn't 'institutions,' 'theories,' or 'ideology,' but practices —with the aim of
grasping the conditions that make these acceptable at a given moment; the hypothesis being that these
types of practice are not just governed by institutions, prescribed by ideologies, guided by pragmatic
circumstances —whatever role these elements may actually play— but possess up to a point their
own specific regularities, logic, strategy, self-evidence, and 'reason.' It is a question of analyzing a
'regime of practices' —practices being understood here as places where what is said and what is done,
rules imposed and reasons given, the planned and the taken for granted meet and interconnect.

Thus, in order to approach the study of empirical cases of organization, the concept of STN
might be specified in terms of the meaning and requirements of a practice or regime of practices:
STNs can be thought of as leading to those places and maintaining their logic and regularity.
This implies a methodological strategy of rediscovering the connections, encounters, supports,
blockages, etc., that concur in the construction of such places. This also means the possibility of
studying organizing processes without confining the analysis to the boundaries of particular
organizations, institutions, or other targets as ideologies or theories, as Foucault suggests.

In a methodological reading of Foucault's work, Noujain (1987) offers an elaboration of

Foucault's genealogical approach to history, including a diagrammatic way of representing it and
its application to the case of psychoanalysis as a practice. Likewise, Latour, Manguin and Teil
(1992) have recently offered an attempt to operationalize the socio-technical approach in order to
provide a tool (viz., socio-technical graphs) for the analysis of scientific and technological
development. For the future methodological development of an STN approach, the search for
connections between both lines of work, and an evaluation of such attempts, should be an
important step.

Latour's (1988) case study of the pasteurization of France offers a good illustration of this
possibility of specifying STNs for the analysis of organizing processes as practices. The story of
the Pasteurian project, as mentioned earlier, refers not only to the work of Pasteur inside his
laboratory; but to a multiplicity of actions which Latour defined as a 'network of gestures and
skills' (p. 53), a movement, or collective enterprise in which the hygienists played an important
role along with other actors, including the microbes. As a preliminary attempt to specify a
research tool STNs might then be defined as networks of gestures and skills. In fact, Latour's use
of this notion constitutes an attempt to specify a concept for the multiple elements of a practice;
and, importantly enough, without reducing the explanations to the interests of actors or groups.
As he remarks: 'Interests cannot explain science or society; they are what can be explained once
the experiment is over' (p. 260). Let us examine some examples of those networks of gestures
and skills that led to the practice of pasteurization, in itself a notable case of social organization
in the French society of Pasteur's time.

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 Since we have already mentioned the work of composition and aggregation done by the
hygienists, and the whole social movement already going on, let us now focus on 'Pasteur' (the
label for the development of a scientific practice, rather than a particular surname):

1. 'Place a sterile pipette on Rosette's wound, take blood, place a few drops of it in urine' (p.
81);
2. '[inscribe] the answers [of microbes] in homogeneous terms, alphabets, and numbers' (p. 83);
3. the great moment, 'the theater of the proof...such dramatized experiments that the spectator
could see the phenomena' (p. 85);
4. '[use] statistical data... [compare] the rate of death of vaccinated animals with that of
nonvaccinated ones' (p. 91);
5. diffusion of antidiphtheria vaccination.

Along with this network, other heterogeneous gestures and skills must be added: disinfection of
midwives' hands, building of drains, sterilization of milk, vaccination; plus the hygienists'
'support of laboratories, and even the continual praise of the "great Pasteur"' (p. 52), and, finally,
legislation 'on the basis of advice given by this new profession, scientific hygienism' (p. 56). To
conclude this story, what came after that was the routine maintenance of a well-established
regime of practices, represented in the Institute Pasteur, sanitary organization, methods for
purifying water, supervision, regulations, policing, etc.

An important methodological lesson can be drawn from this story. The representation of
order as emerging from chaos is so often used that we tend to forget the fact that well-established
practices develop from other equally well-established practices. Thus, a prime requirement for an
STN approach is to start from current, on-going practices, no matter how primitive, humble, or
irrational they might seem. As Latour (1987: 161) pointed out: 'Order is extracted not from
disorder but from orders'. There is, however, another general methodological problem that
should not be simply overlooked. A charge of reification can be made against the specification of
STNs, conceived of as devices to analyse concrete or empirical cases, in the same way as
systems or the organization as a bounded entity can be regarded as examples of the conversion of
abstractions into things.

If our repeated clarifications of the aim of an STN approach (as one giving an intelligible
form, as processes or stories, to complex sequences of displacements and transformations of
human and non-human actors) and of the non-representational character of STNs (at least in the
sense of a logic of measurement), were not enough to rid STNs of the charge of reification, we
would do better by remembering that our problem is not one of discarding or prohibiting the use
of reifications, nor even simply criticizing this feature of the system approach for example, but
one of understanding such a procedure and its implications in the case of organization theory. In
fact, it can always be argued that, as Quine (1990: 181) wrote referring to the role of reification
in science: 'What may usefully be reified for this purpose depends on what complex predicates
may usefully be extracted'. Of course, any judgement in this sense will depend on how
usefulness is defined. The section that follows offers a general discussion of the STN approach in
which these problems are treated in more detail.

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A general discussion of the STN approach
As with any other tool, the concept of STN should be able to provide the possibility of a certain
detached manipulation of concrete things. Otherwise, we would be involved with the very real
world of subjects and targets of analysis constructed by the rationalizing project of social
science, and we would arrive at explanations in terms of system exchanges, decision-making,
states of mind or even the irrational tendencies of the human race. With respect to the criteria of
validity and reliability, contrary to the rational expectation of convergence of a logic of
measurement, every user is expected to produce not only different readings but also different
data, which might lead to unexpected questions.

This is not a call to disregard any generalization but to recognize that a generalization might
mean that a foundation (a way of representing) is being taken for granted and thus that further
analyses might be needed in order to reveal the tradition from which such a foundation derives.
And, finally, with respect to the possibility of ensuring the repeated exercise of the particular
way of representing suggested by the STN approach, it is not a matter only of the intrinsic
properties of the tool but mainly of its insertion in a movement.

The only message that an STN approach can offer is that of the intelligibility introduced in
each story. In Oakeshott's (1975a: 105) terms:

Such a story does not open with the unconditional, 'In the beginning...' but with a conditional, 'Once
upon a time....' And it has no unconditional conclusion; its end is the beginning of another story...
And the teller of such a story has no message for those who listen other than the intelligibility with
which he purports to have endowed the occurrences concerned by putting them into a story.

Rather than a way of solving a problem of spatial representation, the particular kind of
intelligibility proposed by an STN approach implies a particular concern with time: the historical
character of organizing. But this does not reduce to a chronological account. Order and
temporality are not emergent phenomena, or results of the chronological succession of time, but
have to be 'enpresented' as Heidegger (1988) would say. It is such an operation which brings
about a dating by which a now becomes a graspable present, and time serialized. For instance,
one important realization that archaeology recurrently brings to light is the fact that the past, as
well as the future, is a construction or, better, a re-construction. So what we call history, at any
given time, is the story of the development of one tradition and its encounters with other
traditions. In this sense, the approach proposed here would amount to considering organizing
processes as cases of developing traditions, ways of producing the particular orders and
temporalities we call organizations.

It might be objected, however, that an STN approach leads to a dissolution of the concept of
organization, amidst a series of processes or stories which lack a clear, more or less stable
structure which empirical organizations possess. It could be argued, on the contrary, that this
approach provides a better way of grasping reality; that, for example, information technology is
transforming organizations into networks where highly-skilled people work in relative isolation,
and displacing massive production towards a tailor-made, variety-oriented form of production.
Some implications of this kind of self-fulfilling prophecy (a dream or a nightmare, according to

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the point of view adopted) have been highlighted by Willinger and Zuscovitch (1988: 254) in the
following terms:

An IIPS [information-intensive production system] will certainly not have the same macro overall
adjustment properties as the standard mass-production regime. Severe segmentation of markets, of
labour and of goods would probably be less mean-dependent and more variance-dependent in all
respects. Unions rightfully dread a structural deterioration in their power but also, more importantly,
in the very capacity of workers to defend their basic rights once this segmentation is pushed too far.
The only guarantee against exploitation is that the human capital is an essential component of the
whole. In the same way that the product will be partly defined by the consumer, so that he can expect
to share consumer surplus, white- or blue-collar workers will also enter product definition.
Apparently partnership is the name of the new game and everybody should be happy —except for
those who are excluded, of course. The unemployed within and outside the developed countries will
still call for standard solutions, provided that there will be solutions. Variety is the rich man's
problem. Redistribution of resources will be even more needed than before in order to ensure minimal
social integration.

Hence, the traditional concept of organization as a certain bounded entity would be of no use in
this world. But this realist way of arguing, in the sense of claiming certain fidelity of
representation, would lead to other problems. To begin with, it would deny the very attempt to
understand organizing processes by taking for granted a certain state of affairs. The approach
would become a tool for mapping an already existing reality instead of a way of understanding
how this reality is represented and constructed. And this would, in turn, lead to a logic of
measurement and to the need to produce convergent stories, since any divergence would become
an error of observation or a theoretical deficiency. Finally, such a realist argument might even
lead one to overlook the practical need for a graspable object —the organization— through
which concepts, categories and theories become coherent with current practices.

Oppenheim, one of the Right Hegelians or Hegelians of the first generation as Habermas
called them, would say: 'How can one administer in common something that forms no finished
whole and is daily born anew and shaped anew in an endless and endlessly manifold production?'
(quoted by Habermas, 1992: 395). In the case of organizational economists, this problem has
taken the following form: 'A firm very well may be a "legal fiction" or a "nexus of contracts," but
data are collected and available at the firm level' (Barney and Ouchi, 1986: 438).

Let us introduce here a digression around this problem of the implications of adopting a
realist standpoint. In a recent, sympathetic though with reservation, appraisal of the philosophical
position of realism, Isaac (1990) reviews the work of a group of philosophers such as Bhaskar,
Harre, Manicas, and Margolis. In general, though sharing a 'non-foundationalist conception of
truth and an historical conception of existence' with philosophers such as Feyerabend, Rorty and
Foucault, realism holds against these views, according to Isaac: 'that the world has a definite
structure, and is not a free play of signifiers, texts, discourses, conversations or what-have-you;
and that scientific rationality represents a kind of disciplined, communal inquiry well suited to
efforts to understand such a world' (p. 9). In more general terms: 'Central to the critical realist
ontology is the concept of the pre-existence and causal power of the world, which is not
reducible, either ontologically or epistemologically, to the human experience of or engagement
with it' (p. 25).

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 And this is in fact a respectable and intellectually appealing position, since it provides
researchers with a ground for the search and construction of explanations. However, doubts
might arise as to whether the communal, inter-subjective and rule-governed, character of the
inquiry has become an undiscussable foundation for such a constructive ontology. For the idea of
a pre-existent world which has a definite structure implies that criteria for determining truth are
available. This would lead us to the question of where the communal comes from. As we have
seen, at least from Hobbes' time a typical answer invokes a certain act of creation. In any case, a
similarly arbitrary procedure is necessary in order to draw a line between what is due to human
experience or engagement and what is not. Something similar has been noted by Bernard
Williams (1991: 13) in commenting on Putnam's distinction between two kinds (internal and
metaphysical) of realism:

... Putnam implies that the vital contrast is between a standpoint inside human experience, and one
outside it. The outside standpoint is that which metaphysical realism tries to take... We seem to have a
boundary, but no conceivable idea of anything outside it. If we put it like this, however, and insist that
the only standpoint is 'inside' human experience, we are still, in fact, using the idea of the boundary:
we are claiming that there is a boundary, and that everything intelligible is on this side of it...
But as Wittgenstein insisted, there is no boundary —the very idea of it is unintelligible... An internal
realism must be inside something, but what we have learned is that there is nothing for it to be inside.
A distinction between metaphysical and internal realism makes sense only in terms of a diagram
drawn by metaphysical realism itself.

It seems that this discussion is doomed to revolve around the possibility of separating subjects
and objects as modalities of existence and that, in this sense, the construction of an objective
world implies leaving aside a subject which, strangely, is expected to suffer the effects of the
causal power of such a world. This is not the place to look for a solution to this problem. Our
intention is simply to indicate the difficulties of adopting an emphatic or definite position,
whether realist or relativist. Let us simply add that Heidegger has provided a clue to help us
understand this sort of problem with his insistence in the basic though oft-forgotten fact that,
whatever other features or modalities may be attributed to it, being means being in a world.

Heidegger (1985: 166) illustrates this point with a simple image: 'The snail is not at the
outset only in its shell and not yet in the world, a world described as standing over against it, an
opposition which it broaches by first crawling out. It crawls out only insofar as its being is
already to be in a world. It does not first add a world to itself by touching. Rather, it touches
because its being means nothing other than to be in a world'. Let us turn back to our concern with
a world in which we can elaborate stories by means of an STN approach, not only because this
world has such and such features but more importantly because we are in it.

An STN approach may in fact be thought of as a way of accounting for a world which, due to
the work of modern information technology, will no longer reveal itself as a world of
organizations, but as a world intrinsically or minutely organized through the control or
manipulation of the most elementary networks of activities. It could be argued that, in this new
world, organizations and groups will become decaying monuments to an outmoded way of
thinking. Traditional organization members will become increasingly isolated individuals,
located at the intersection of networks. The degree of rationalization of production and
consumption achieved by means of information technology will leave little room for a cherished

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feature of modern man: decision-making as an explanatory category might even disappear from
scientific discourse or survive in myths and legends.

But our problem here is not one of predicting the future, nor one of rationalizing an assumed
trend. An interesting question would be whether or not, in the present epoch, an STN approach
renders unnecessary such entities as organizations and groups, or such notions as decision-
making and goals. In the affirmative case, we would have the possibility not only of uncovering
illusions underlying current discourses but also of producing other fictions in which those
entities and notions would appear as remnants of past language games, without any authority to
guide contemporary life. In the negative case, we would after all be facing realities which the
suggested approach would not be able to explicitly account for.

The difficulty of providing a realist support to the justification of the usefulness of the STN
approach, against other supposedly erroneous or misleading ways of representing organization, is
that it would be necessary to assess the distance between the represented reality and its
competing representations. This requires a measuring tool which is lacking, simply because such
a tool would have to be constructed by following a logic which is not available in an STN
approach. Hence the question should rather remain undecided and we would better try to account
for this other elusive phenomenon through which a probably perishing object (a bounded entity)
comes into existence and acquires certain structural stability. Certainly, the objective of applying
an STN approach is not to provide a substitute, an alternative to the system or a competing
image. But, it does provide a ground from which an attempt to account for the boundary
condition, or to understand how those folds are produced, can be made.

This problem can be solved by neither simply dissolving current categories nor appealing to
some ability to see clearly or to get in touch with 'things in themselves'. Rather, the task is to
understand how structures appear by starting from a deconstructed organization, from a socio-
technical network. In a sense, this implies a return to a system model of organization. But two
differences should be highlighted: first, the starting point would be an on-going process instead
of an already existing entity and, second, the resulting boundaries could or could not coincide
with those of a firm, a government agency, or any other example of organization. The fourth part
of the thesis is devoted to outlining a way of accomplishing this task.

CHAPTER 7. A CASE ILLUSTRATING THE STN APPROACH

The outline of the STN approach presented in the last chapter constitutes an initial
approximation, a sketch to orient future work. Hence, an experience of field work conducted by
following such a strategy, or designed in its terms, cannot be shown. However, as mentioned at
the beginning of this work, the motivation to undertake the search for an approach to the
understanding of organizing processes derives from a practical experience, not only from a
theoretical concern. In this chapter, some lessons drawn from an experience of organizational
diagnosis and intervention in a group of Venezuelan local government agencies provide the basis
for a discussion of the applicability of STN ideas.

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 The objective of this discussion is to illustrate the implications of adopting an STN approach
in the analysis of empirical cases, and to contrast these implications with those derived from the
system approach originally used. In addition, this discussion is set against the background of the
problems of development and underdevelopment from the perspective of the social sciences.
Thus, apart from offering a context, the inclusion of these more general problems illustrates the
possibilities of widening the scope of the theoretical consideration of organizing processes in
terms of the STN approach. The presentation of the discussed experience is reduced to a brief
recollection of some issues that can provide a feeling for the situation rather than a detailed
report or a case study. This is due not only to lack of space. A detailed discussion might be an
interesting case of re-interpretation but it would require us to pay attention to the substantive
content of the case and so disperse the focus of the thesis. Our task here is, then, to discuss the
possibilities of using an STN approach in the study of organizing processes in the real world.

A lesson of diagnosing and intervening

This story begins in 1985, when the Instituto de Estudios Superiores de Administración (IESA)
in Caracas, Venezuela, and Petróleos de Venezuela, the holding company of Venezuelan oil
companies, signed a contract by which IESA would undertake the project of 'modernizing and
professionalizing' the administration of a group of local government agencies; particularly, those
located in the oil companies' main areas of operation. From the start, it was clear for us at IESA
that this was an ambitious project, that we were not dealing with a simple problem of improving
basic administrative techniques; and, finally, that a wide range of different resources and skills
had to be deployed.

According to one expert who acted as an advisor for IESA, rather than a case of consulting or
organizational development, the project resembled the international aid or population programs
carried out by United Nations' agencies as a way of aiding the development of poor countries.
This was due less to the intrinsic design of the project than to the kind of work it effectively
involved. In fact, this was an experience where managerial expertise or administrative training
played a minor role. It required the combined skills of anthropologists and social psychologists
(particularly, those working on community development projects) in order to understand and
deal with the problems of those almost unknown communities of regional political and business
leaders.

Venezuelan local governments are often accused of inefficiency, arbitrariness, corruption,

due mainly to their enormous and complex responsibilities and their inescapable visibility to
their local communities and, in general, to national public opinion. The same can be said of local
governments in other countries as well. An interesting account of the situation of local
governments in the British case is presented by Elcock (1986), where similar descriptions of
problems can be found, in spite of the obvious differences in both legal structures and socio-
economic conditions. The discussion generally turns on their degree of autonomy, the lack of
control mechanisms, the influences of political parties and other interest groups, the careers of
councillors and officials, and the need for introducing reforms in the electoral system; sometimes
invoked as 'the only way' to solve these problems.

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 Most of the problems and accusations reveal a basic condition of local government
organizations: the need for a permanent definition and re-definition of its boundaries. In order to
illustrate a basic feature of the functioning of a local government, let us briefly refer to one of the
most interesting processes: the budget formulation. No matter how routine it might be, each year
the task overloads the information processing capabilities of the administrative units. What
becomes clear after closer attention is that such capabilities play a minor role, sometimes as
scapegoats, in a more complex drama.

Each year the representation of a variety of interests has to be dramatized. The budget is
expected to show an adequate representation of those interests in terms of allocation of
resources. The problem is that the scarcer the resources to be allocated (or the greater the fiscal
pressure), the less incremental the process (or universalistic the criteria), and the more theatrical
the representation. In the British case, Greenwood (1983) has used the term 'Spanish Inquisition'
to describe the model of budgeting used by local governments under fiscal pressure: 'Its
particularly definitive feature is its emphasis on the use of private meetings outside of the formal
committee system' (p. 163). This implies that the introduction of universalistic criteria is less
probable under such conditions: 'The conclusion is that sustained fiscal pressure prompts
movements to a relatively less incremental position' (p. 167).

The theatre of collective decision-making produces a spectacular display of discussions,

negotiations and alliances, invocations of procedures and norms, capable of fascinating the most
sophisticated public (including sociologists and political scientists). However, the draft estimates
previously prepared in small groups are infrequently altered by the formal discussions. Typically,
these informal committees consist of organization members (top local government
representatives) and representatives of 'external' institutions like government party members who
suggest the appropriate figures.

This brief reference to the world of local government has simply the intention of suggesting
the environment within which the project had to introduce a certain improvement or
modernization of administrative practices. Let us now describe the evaluation of the project after
three years of operation. In general, the opinion of participants and observers was unfavourable
to the project: it did not achieve the expected results. In spite of the ambiguous and general
statements in which the objectives were expressed (e.g., contribute, professionalization,
modernization, administration), there was no lack of arguments to explain the causes of the poor
performance of the project: the possibility of producing any tangible result required an important
attitude change in councillors and officials, the bureaucracies were not sufficiently open to the
intervention, the politicians in the highest positions were actually not too interested in the
programme and did not give it sufficient support, many interests were opposed to changes, there
was a mutual lack of confidence and mistrust between the representatives of the oil companies
and the local government representatives that affected their receptivity to the project, etc. In
general, to achieve even a degree of success seemed to require not only administrative
knowledge and skills but also a special kind of alchemical ability to harmonize or articulate all
the interests, motivations, and their intermixing.

These opinions and arguments reveal the adoption of a framework in which the problem is
defined, from the beginning, in terms of the relations between a set of entities (organizations,

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institutions), whose behaviours depend on the decisions made by individuals and groups. From
such a framework, a deductive hierarchy would derive not only the formulation of objectives, but
also the detailed plan of activities. The language of the theoretico-methodological strategy
reflects this frame: diagnosis, intervention, implementation, evaluation. And the field work
consists in crossing the boundaries of different organizations to enter into contact with a different
culture. Moreover, the very attempt to modernize the administration of those local government
organizations presupposed a division between those who knew the right way of doing things and
those who did not, or at least were not willing to adopt it. Such an assumption would become
inextricably linked to the whole design of the project, thus precluding an understanding of the
situation at hand.

Let us contrast this approach with a different one in which the problem would, from the start,
consist in understanding regimes of practices, networks of gestures and skills, instructions and
specifications through which a way of doing things becomes acceptable, i.e., a municipal
technology, so to speak. This first requires the recognition that the situation at hand, far from
being a kind of original chaos, constitutes a particular order. The technology in use would be
thought of as a well-established practice, not as a kind of deviation from the right or rational way
of doing things. As the example of the case of budgeting shows, what would appear as corruption
and lack of modern, universalistic rules, is simply the consequence of constraints imposed, for
example, by the scarcity of resources. That theatre is in fact a dramatic expression of order. But
the scarcity of resources is still too general a condition to provide an explanation of the particular
practices adopted by local government organizations; apart from the fact that almost everywhere
such a condition could be invoked to justify particular ways of doing things.

It is necessary to focus on local (socio-technical) networks in order to appreciate the

singularities of organized practices. For instance, the repeated violations of administrative norms,
like those regulating the budgeting processes for example, and what in general is called
administrative corruption will remain misunderstood and uncontrollable, as in fact they are,
insofar as they are defined as defects of the whole design or simply as manifestations of the
irrational or criminal tendencies of individuals. Rather, by adopting an STN approach we would
try to understand the conditions for the repetition of such cases of corruption, which far from
being isolated events form a network with some regular features.

One of the most evident features of such a network (of gestures and skills) is that the links of
the chain take the form of informal favours or services, which range from small, insignificant, or
even acceptable, violations of the law and in which almost everybody is involved, to the more
notorious and scandalous cases of peculation and frauds in which only a reduced group is
generally involved. The uncovery of a case of the latter kind frequently offers an interesting
opportunity to trace a circuit of procedures which seems to conform to accepted or even
prescribed ways of doing things.

Closer inspection reveals that such procedures simply mimic the formally established ones,
that they perform a different representation though they use the same stage, and that they form
their own order or possess their own regularity nevertheless. Furthermore, they reveal the
theatrical character of the formally established or rationalized procedures in turn. It should be
made clear, however, that this does not imply that one is more or less real than the other, as is

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frequently assumed when the whole legal or administrative design is criticized for its lack of
contact with reality. Thus, for instance, it is sometimes assumed that there is an ideal type
(perhaps the French or English models) of local government which has become corrupted or
aborted in its implementation in the real world of Venezuelan councils. Such an assumption is
simply untenable when a perspective which tries to focus on practices is adopted.

As Foucault (1988b: 111) commented in answering a question about the unsatisfactory

situation of the prison system in France, with special reference to whether this situation revealed
a failure in the policy which guided current practices: 'These programmings of behaviour, these
regimes of jurisdiction and veridiction aren't abortive schemas for the creation of a reality. They
are fragments of reality that induce such particular effects in the real as the distinction between
true and false implicit in the ways men "direct," "govern," and "conduct" themselves and others'.

Finally, instead of formulating the task as one of modernizing local government

organizations, as if they were simply places where a certain level of inertia has led to deficient
administrative practices, the task could have been designed in terms of constructing or extending
a socio-technical network through which any other organizing process could have travelled. To
say that this requires a previous understanding of current practices, or the order imposed by
current socio-technical networks, is not a matter of advocating descriptive work guided by
abstract theories whose only aim is mere understanding. It might be argued that the adoption of
this way of stating the problem results from a very pragmatic recognition. As Latour (1987)
remarked:

... every time you hear about a successful application of a science, look for the progressive extension
of a network. Every time you hear about a failure of science look for what part of which network has
been punctured (p. 249).

Every time a fact is verified and a machine runs, it means that the lab or shop conditions have been
extended in some way (p. 250).

The situation is exactly the same for the sciences as for gas, electricity, cable TV, water supplies or
telephones. In all cases you need to be hooked up to costly networks that have to be maintained and
extended (p. 257).

It should be acknowledged that any attempt to transform a practice, to apply a technique,

requires a costly and effort-demanding work of constructing a network, of ensuring the
reproduction of the conditions of repeated exercise of a practice. One important lesson to be
drawn from this experience is that, whatever the explanations offered to rationalize the results of
the project, the transformation of those practices required that IESA and the oil companies were
able to construct and extend a network. In other words, organizing means introducing a particular
order and temporality, and this is not a matter of simply designing and implementing an
intervention programme (i.e., education and advice) and waiting for the people to realize that
other practices are better than those currently in use, i.e., what Latour would call a model of
diffusion. Notwithstanding the good intentions of such attempts, they would become other
theatres of modernization, dramatic expressions of an order in which IESA and the oil companies
would re-present the roles played by rich countries in their attempts to help the poor ones.

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A contextual analysis of the experience: the theatre of modernization
From the perspective of an STN approach, the discussion of this experience of organizational
diagnosis and intervention should not be reduced to the contrast between two possible strategies
of conceiving, designing and implementing a project. Whatever the usefulness, or pragmatic
relevance, of such a discussion, it would be limited to a narrow analytical scope, where the
project would appear, for example, as a case of misunderstanding of a situation or a theoretical
deficiency of the models in use.

This or any other similar project should not be analysed in isolation but as a part of a larger
socio-technical network, as yet another dramatization of the global project of modernization,
rationalization or Westernization of the world. In this sense, the failure of IESA and the oil
companies should not be analysed as an accident or an error of observation. For maintaining such
a reduced analytical scope would imply a way of speaking in which organizations behave in
certain ways, make mistakes, manage boundaries, or that individuals inside such organizations
believe in certain things or behave in certain ways.

This case shows, on a small scale, a repeated way of representing. The modernizing project is
inextricably linked to a framework in which the real reveals itself as the product of a rationalized
categorization. The absolute separation between modern and backward is but another instance of
the same work of enframing which produces organizations and environments, social and
technical, formal and informal. In this framework, the explanations turn around the exchanges
between separated entities: systems, societies, cultures, states of mind, etc.

From an STN approach, on the contrary, the failure of the project is but another repetition of
gestures which add up to produce a chain. And such repetitions or re-presentations of the
framework are the result of the reproduction of the conditions of repetition (of the accumulation
and allocation of resources in particular ways and not in others) rather than simply a
consequence of the persistence of certain beliefs in the individuals' minds. This section consists,
then, in an attempt to widen the scope of the analysis of this experience by linking it to a
discussion of the general framework of the theatre of modernization.

Two or more Venezuelas?

The previous discussion suggests that development, modernization, take-off, industrialization,
might be thought of as organizing processes, as complex phenomena which escape the attempts
of traditional conceptual tools to grasp and explain them. It might appear paradoxical that from
the perspective of an undeveloped country some light can be shed on the process of
modernization. Those places characterized by backwardness, poverty, and social conflicts can
hardly be thought of as privileged points of observation to account for the realization of the
project of Westernization. But a Latin-American country presents an opportunity to appreciate
the in vivo experiment of the attempt to extend the construction of Western civilization. As
Braudel (1988: 540) suggests:

... there is no great virtue in studying the example of the industrial revolutions in Europe and the
United States, which followed close on the heels of the British model. But the present day Third
World, which is still undergoing industrialization, offers the historian a rare opportunity to observe
something in action, something that can be seen, heard and touched. It is certainly no success story...

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 Can the reasons for the failure, or comparative failure of these experiments help to define a contrario
the conditions which brought about the exceptional success of the industrial revolution in Britain?

In this case, a Latin American country as a point of observation provides an interesting

opportunity to illustrate the failures, shortcomings, or disequilibria of those processes. Instead of
failures or abortive schemas we would better think of the implementation of projects in terms of
fragmentary effects which encounter multiplicities that resist homogenization, and survive
through the fissures and interstices of the global project of modernization. For example, in the
same way as a traveller can find throughout Venezuelan roads a modern motorway which begins
as inexplicably and abruptly as it ends after two or three kilometres, a learned sociologist will
probably be surprised by the complex mix of modern avenues and narrow and dusty roads he or
she can find in the institutional landscape.

The restriction of this discussion to a particular country does not imply that any kind of
specificity must be attributed to this fact. That is, it is not assumed that culture, national frontiers,
state, or society exert any kind of influence, nor is the discussion based, in principle, upon any
average, statistical description used to characterize the whole country. According to Pollard
(1988), the understanding of industrialization processes requires a different approach from the
current, nation-based one. Thus, for instance, 'industrialization in Britain was by no means a
single, uninterrupted, and unitary, still less a nation-wide process' (p. 3). In this sense, careful
attention should be paid to the use of national statistics, 'and the enormous weight which is
usually placed on them': 'a moderate rate of growth overall as measured conventionally may hide
either a moderate rate of widespread industrialization, or very fast and successful
industrialization limited to some key areas —two very different processes' (p. 39).

An interesting observation made by Braudel (1988: 63) can provide a good starting point for
this discussion:

No model completely and perfectly fits real life. I have several times pointed out the exemplary value
of the case of Venezuela. With the arrival of the Europeans here everything began again virtually
from scratch. In the middle of the sixteenth century, there were perhaps 2000 whites and 18,000
natives in this huge country. Pearl-fishing along the coast lasted only a few decades. The working of
the mines, notably the Yaracuy gold-mines, led to the first episode of slavery: a few Indians captured
in battle and Negroes shipped in from Africa, but the numbers were small. The first real success was
stock-raising, principally on the vast llanos of the interior, where a few white landlords and the Indian
herdsmen on horse-back combined to form a primitive society reminiscent of feudalism. Later, and
particularly in the eighteenth century, the cocoa plantations in the coastal zone led once more to the
use of imported black slaves. So there were two Venezuelas, one 'feudal', the other 'slave-owning', the
former having developed first. But it is worth pointing out that in the eighteenth century quite a
number of black slaves were also incorporated into the haciendas of the llanos. And it should also be
said that Venezuelan colonial society with its burgeoning cities and institutions cannot by any means
be wholly accounted for by this two-fold model.

Braudel's point refers to the difficulties of sociologists and historians in trying to produce an
account of a complex situation by means of the application of categories. Let us add that later
Venezuelan history from the beginning of the nineteenth century, after the independence wars
and the abolition of slavery, would also produce a complex picture, and not only for sociologists
and historians. According to the novelist Gabriel García Márquez (1991: 124), the Venezuelan

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Simon Bolívar (1783-1830), leader of South America's liberation movement, angrily replied to a
Frenchman: 'Damn it, please let us have our Middle Ages in peace'.

In Venezuela, it is commonly held that Venezuela's nineteenth century began in the 1820s
and extended until the 1930s, which identifies a period of relative stagnation, supported by
agricultural exports (mainly cocoa and coffee), and marked by a permanent state of war. In spite
of the chronological difference, the situation might be described by using the same words used
by Hegel (in his Lectures on the philosophy of history of 1822-30) referring to the whole of
South America: 'the republics depend only on military force; their whole history is a continual
revolution; federated states become disunited; others previously separated become united; and all
these changes originate in military revolutions' (1956: 84).

At the beginning of the twentieth century, an important change came about with the start of
oil exploitation. Until the beginning of the 1960s, this is a story of rearrangement or
modernization of the society and the economy, usually analysed in terms of changes from rural
to urban population, from primary to secondary and tertiary employment, from illiterate to
educated masses. From the sixties onwards, a modest process of industrialization and the
development of oil exploitation (sharpened by the episode of the oil crisis of the early 1970s)
have produced the contemporary image of Venezuela: a modernizing society and developing
economy. But this is by no means the complete story. To return to Braudel's point, it could be
said that Venezuela is still a good example of 'misfit' between models and real life. A recent
news report by the Financial Times (February 5, 1992) serves to illustrate the current Venezuelan
situation:

The failed coup in Venezuela yesterday took place in an economy that had just recorded its highest
growth rate in 27 years —at 9.2 per cent Latin America's highest— but was still unable to feed nearly
half its citizens more than one meal a day. It came with a balanced budget and foreign reserves of
$14bn. Inflation, which peaked at 89 per cent three years ago, has eased to about 30 per cent.

Now the puzzles are formulated in terms of the shortcomings and failures of industrial projects,
the constraints imposed by social and bureaucratic structures, the weight of interest groups and
the omnipresent political parties, and the original sins of lack of confidence and corruption. Now
sociologists and historians would find it difficult to accommodate a modern Venezuela and a
backward Venezuela in their traditional frameworks of explanation.

The failed project of IESA and the oil companies can thus be better understood against this
background. In this connection, it is hardly surprising that the project became a re-presentation of
the drama of the encounter of two cultures: a modernizing culture and a backward, resisting one.
It might easily have been seen from the start that the project faced an obstacle in its own way of
formulating the problem. It remained within the framework of a categorical thinking which
applies a simple model to a complex situation. Moreover, it might be argued that the very
possibility of the dialogue in its abstract form has been denied by the historical experience. Let
us introduce a brief digression here.

By commenting on a recent discussion of the formulation of philosophical problems in terms

of cultural anthropology, in terms of a discourse of the encounter and the dialogue with an
'other', Vattimo replies that in the contemporary world such a view will face the problem that the

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very condition of 'alterity' will have lost its absoluteness, not only due to the very attempt of
Westernization of the whole planet that is going on, but also to its shortcomings and fragmentary
outcomes.

For we are confronted by 'an immense construction site of traces and residues', not by the total
organization of the world in rigid technological schemes. The former, interacting with the unequal
distribution of power and resources at the global level, gives rise to the growth of marginal situations
that are the truth of the primitive in our world. The hermeneutic —but also anthropological— illusion
of encountering the other, with all its theoretical grandiosity, finds itself faced with a mixed reality in
which alterity is entirely exhausted. The disappearance of alterity does not occur as a part of the
dreamed-for total organization of the world, but rather as a condition of widespread contamination
(Vattimo, 1991: 159).

To illustrate this point, it might be worth recalling an experience related to IESA's project. One
of the cities included in the agreement between IESA and the oil companies was Caripito, a
typical case of explosive growth during the 1940s followed by an equally sudden decline after
the 1950s, when US companies (in this case the Creole Petroleum Corporation, a subsidiary of
the Standard Oil Company) reduced their activities or left the place. Caripito offered some
advantages for the installation of the industry, mainly related to its nearness to a navigable river
through which exports of oil and imports of goods could be directly transported. During one of
the visits to Caripito, the team from IESA and local government representatives were invited on
a short trip on the river in a motorboat owned by the now nationalized oil company. The most
interesting experience of this trip was seeing an almost naked Indian fishing on a shore of the
river in the same way and with the same tool his ancestors probably used in pre-Columbian
times: a stick with a sharpened end. It was explained by our hosts that in fact a small tribe
survived around the river with only sporadic contacts with civilization.

A categorical notion of alterity would then lead to distinguishing and classifying not two but
three or more Venezuelas. And a single criterion —e.g., geographical, economic, cultural,
occupational— or even a combination or factorial composite will be of little help in
understanding a phenomenon in which all of them are equally and inextricably involved. An
approach following the lines proposed here might help to shed some light on these complex
situations. For it does not require the adoption of previous categorical divisions which, in turn,
are precisely part of the problem to be understood.

A vast task for future research can be found in the study of the multiplicity of networks
which converge in a Third World country. An STN approach might be the proper tool to begin a
task of linking those conditions of marginality to wider organizing processes which have taken
different paths, being superseded or left behind, by the main current of Westernization. Let us
now briefly turn towards the theory behind the attempts to introduce poor countries into the
stream of progress; or, to use Serres' words the philosophy of representation which dominates the
diagram and its dramatizations.

The framework of modernization

Around 1500 the territory of what is today America was peopled by a mix of less developed
cultures, i.e., gatherers and fishermen, nomads and stockbreeders, and peasants with a primitive

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form of agriculture. By focusing on the agricultural technology, Braudel explains the
perpetuation of the primitive methods in the following terms:

... the labour of the peasant with a hoe was more productive (considering time and effort spent) than
that of the tillers in Europe or the rice-growers in Asia, but... it was not conducive to dense human
settlement. It was neither the soil nor climate that encouraged this primitive agriculture, but rather the
vast area of fallow land (available precisely because of the scattered population) and types of society
which made up a network of habits that were hard to break... (1985: 176; emphasis added).

Braudel's explanation of the technical backwardness of these cultures, in terms of a network of

habits, illustrates an approach closer to an STN approach than that of the traditional explanations
—in terms of the aborigines' laziness or weakness, the richness of the soil, the favourable
climate, or any other cause. From those origins to the contemporary scene, the discussion of
development and underdevelopment has turned around the traditional explanations (with obvious
modifications and reformulations). In fact, an approach which sees in current administrative
practices of Third World country bureaucracies only lack of competence, negligence or
corruption, is but a re-presentation of an analytical framework in which the questions and the
answers are known a priori.

The general framework of the traditional way of explaining the phenomena of development
and underdevelopment can be clearly seen in the discussion of the difference between North and
South America. This difference has provided a relevant problem to the debate on development
since in both Americas the construction of a New World began practically from scratch, their
territories were equally peopled by a less developed culture, and the results have been tangibly
different. In fact, an extensive literature has been devoted to the question of the difference
between the development of the United States and the underdevelopment of Latin America.
Certainly, this is not another attempt to provide an explanation, but a brief reference to the
general framework of this discussion might shed some light on the context of the experience
under study.

An early formulation of the traditional framework within which the difference between North
and South America has been stated can be found in Hegel's (1956) introduction to his Lectures
on the philosophy of history. In his summary exposition, Hegel articulated a formulation of the
problem that would appear in different guises in subsequent reformulations up to the present.
According to Hegel,

America has always shown itself physically and psychically powerless, and still shows itself so. For
the aborigines, after the landing of the Europeans in America, gradually vanished at the breath of
European activity. In the United States of North America all the citizens are of European descent,
with whom the old inhabitants could not amalgamate, but were driven back... (p. 81).

The more special differences between the two parts of America show us two opposite directions, the
one in political respects, the other in regard to religion... South America was conquered, but North
America colonized. The Spaniards took possession of South America to govern it, and to become rich
through occupying political offices, and by exactions... Since in England Puritans, Episcopalians, and
Catholics were engaged in perpetual conflict... many emigrated to seek religious freedom on a foreign
shore. These were industrious Europeans, who betook themselves to agriculture, tobacco and cotton
planting, etc... From the Protestant religion sprang the principle of the mutual confidence of

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 individuals... Among Catholics, on the contrary, the basis of such a confidence cannot exist; for in
secular matters only force and voluntary subservience are the principles of action... (p. 84).

This is not the place to start a discussion of the problems of underdevelopment, nor a criticism of
this framework, which would become a disproportionate endeavour for this brief point. For an
informed discussion of the assumed differences between the aborigines (or any other
disadvantaged group) and the Europeans, see Gould's (1984: 25) now classic essay on how
theories and measurement procedures have been elaborated and used 'invariably to find that
oppressed and disadvantaged groups —races, classes, or sexes— are innately inferior and
deserve their status'. With respect to the general, historical process, let us only recall a crucial
point from Braudel's (1988) study on capitalism:

The situation... cannot be adequately expressed in terms of the convenient distinction textbooks use to
make between 'settler colonies' and 'exploited colonies'. How could there be settler colonies where
there was not also exploitation, or 'exploited' colonies where there were not also settlers? More
appropriate perhaps than exploitation would be the term marginalization: the condition, within a
world-economy, of being condemned to serve others, of being told what to do by the all-commanding
international division of labour. For this was indeed the allotted role of Latin America (unlike North
America) —both before and after the gaining of political independence (p. 413).

England successfully carried out her industrial revolution when she was at the centre of the world —
when she was in fact the centre of the world. Today's Third World countries would like to do the
same, but they are firmly on the periphery. Consequently everything conspires against them: the new
technology, which they can only use under license and which does not always correspond to the needs
of their own societies; capital which they can borrow only from outside sources; shipping, which is
beyond their control; even their own surpluses of raw materials, which sometimes leave them at the
mercy of the purchaser (p. 542).

Let us simply add a brief comment on the later evolution of a tradition based upon this
framework. This way of framing the problem of the difference between North and South
America indicated the way of posing the questions and searching for the answers for a whole
tradition: the discourse of modernization.

One line of search is represented by the works of so-called Weberian inspiration, which find
the causes of development (or underdevelopment) in states of mind, entrepreneurial spirit,
achievement-needs, associated with a general, evolutionary process of modernization. The other
line, of Marxian inspiration, has produced the theories of imperialism, neo-colonialism,
development of underdevelopment, dependency theory. For an enlightened review of the theories
of development, see Larrain (1989). Clark (1985) presents an informed summary and discussion
of the theme, which focuses on the problem of technological development. A perhaps simplistic
distribution might be attempted, based upon Hegel's opposite directions: the first line puts the
emphasis on the religious theme, and the second on the political theme. This is not to say that
Hegel imposed this framework, but that he did formulate in a condensed way the general
rationale of the explanation of development and underdevelopment.

The perpetuation of this traditional analytical framework implies the repeated exercise of a
way of representing: what we are calling the theatre of modernization. The discussions and
explanations of development and underdevelopment represent the dialogues and written texts of

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the dramatizations. But a certain stage must also remain. Projects of modernization
(industrialization projects, population programs, or administrative modernization projects, like
that of IESA and the oil companies, for example) are repeatedly performed, in spite of the fact
that their evaluations show little or no effect at all.

Thus the conditions remain for a new re-presentation. When the discussion of development
and underdevelopment turns towards practical problems and realities, these conditions come to
the fore. For instance, Clark (1985) discusses the theories of development, along with some
statistics which show a huge and increasing difference in wealth between developed and
underdeveloped countries, at the beginning of the 1980s. [In 1990, the World Bank declared that
the situation of poor countries had worsened throughout the decade to an alarming point, and no
clear signs of improvement could be foreseen]. Clark's conclusion runs as follows:

My own position on these matters is that, on the whole, attempts to improve living conditions in the
LDCs are often frustrated by the limited imaginations and bureaucratic inertia of the governments and
agencies who have been entrusted with this task. No doubt there is usually a genuine desire to act,
although sometimes the strength of desire is questionable (1985: 177; emphases added).

This point does not require further comment. Let us simply add that the worst problem does not
seem to be the lack of solutions, but the search for solutions in places where they cannot be
found: the frameworks and approaches which repeat the same representations of the problems. It
is not the intention of this chapter to end on a note of pessimism. For its whole point is to
propose an approach to the study of complex organizing processes, of which processes of
modernization are a conspicuous example, that promise interesting ways of searching for
understanding, and hopefully solutions to, these problems. The opposition between optimism and
pessimism simply reveals that the immutability of a certain status quo is taken for granted.

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 PART IV. STRUCTURES
Structure [ad. L. structura, f. struct-, struere, to build]
1. The action, practice, or process of building or construction.
Now rare or Obs.
Oxford English Dictionary

... structure —or rather the structurality of structure— although

it has always been at work, has always been neutralized or
reduced, and this by a process of giving it a center or of
referring it to a point of presence, a fixed origin.
Jacques Derrida (1978: 278)

From the previous exposition of the STN approach some elements can be drawn for the
understanding of organizing processes: (1) the social-and-technical character of organizing,
understood as a process of production and re-production of the conditions for a repeated exercise
of a way of representing and transforming the real; (2) the chain-character of repeated practices
which bring about orders and temporalities (distribution of space and serialization of time), and
which impose themselves over previous orders and temporalities; and (3) the suggestion that the
representation of organizations as bounded entities, in a system theory of organization for
example, can be analyzed in terms of transitory foldings of the historical field, or loops described
by organizing processes when described as socio-technical networks. However, it was also
recognized that a further exploration should be attempted in order to account for the occurrence
and persistence of those folds or loops, so that the representation of organization becomes
intelligible and taken for granted in practice as a dynamics of bounded entities. In general, it can
be assumed that the basis for the persistence of a structural condition is provided by the
possibility of repetition of the processes through which such a condition is achieved. Thus, the
understanding of the structural outcomes or manifestations of organizing processes (or, in other
words, the possibility of accounting for the boundary condition in organization theory) requires
an analysis of the conditions for the repetition of practices.

This part of the thesis presents an attempt to understand the structural character of social
organizational phenomena by extending and deepening the analytical rationale of the STN
approach. In this sense, a different logic from that of the system approach guides the analysis
presented here. Instead of starting from the attribution of properties to already existing objects,
the starting point is given by the study of on-going processes. And, instead of a logic of
measurement and causality, based upon the correlations between some assumed key variables, a
logic of displacement and transformation is required in order to account for the assembling of
structures from other, actual or potential, structural elements. That is, a qualitative rather than
quantitative approach is, in principle, needed in order to understand the occurrence of the
structural condition. For any quantification or operationalization necessarily presupposes the
existence of a certain functioning structure, e.g., a social body from which certain behaviours or
quantitative variations are predicted.

This part consists of two chapters. Each one illustrates a way of understanding the structural
character of organization: a theoretical formulation of the problem of the closure of socio-

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technical networks through which structures come about (organizing as event-structuring); and
an inquiry into the problem of the persistence, the taken-for-grantedness, of the boundary
condition as a foundation of organization theory (organization theory as an event-structure).
Chapter 8 consists of an exposition, interpretation and discussion of Allport's theory of event-
structuring, based on a review of his main works on this theme from 1934 to 1967. This theory
has been found particularly suitable to the problems and objectives formulated here: (1) the
definition of the boundary condition in process terms (instead of using an a priori criterion of
membership for example); (2) the explanation of the structure's occurrence in terms of the
possibility of repetition of on-going processes; and (3) the understanding of the structure as an
assemblage of structures, which corresponds to the idea that order does not emerge from chaos,
but is constructed or assembled from other orders.

The objective of this chapter is to provide a basis for conceiving organization as a practice
which forms or structures assemblages of processes instead of assemblies of individuals. One
implication of such a concept of organization is that the resulting structure does not necessarily
coincide with the traditional object of organization theory. That is, the boundaries of an event-
structure do not, necessarily, coincide with those of a firm, a governmental agency, or any other
example of organization. And this also means that the boundary condition in organization theory
cannot be accounted for by simply studying empirical cases or examples of organizations. In
other words, the representation of the organization as a bounded entity should be studied as a
practice itself, and its persistence as a particular case of event-structuring.

Chapter 9 illustrates an attempt to apply the general rationale of organizing as event-

structuring to the particular case of the development and articulation of organization theory as a
discipline, i.e., organization theory itself as an event-structure. This chapter has an illustrative
purpose. It is not intended to be an exhaustive account of the history of organization theory (nor
of the whole of the field), but an analysis of some examples of the development and
institutionalization of the concept of organizations as bounded entities, and the boundary
condition as a status of membership of individuals.

Organization theory (including other related disciplines such as sociology of organizations,

organizational economics, organizational psychology, organizational behaviour, organizational
analysis) is related here to the general movement of the professionalization of management and
managerial education: a regime of practices through which the conditions for the repeated
exercise of a way of representing organization has been reproduced, and become an enduring
feature of the modern world. In this world, for example, the meaning of structure as a process of
building or construction has become rare or obsolete. In fact, as soon as the sense of process
disappears, structure simply refers to an outcome: an organized body, a pattern, a system, a
hierarchy.

CHAPTER 8. ORGANIZING AS EVENT-STRUCTURING

The image of a symphony orchestra is sometimes used to capture the idea of a well-functioning
organization. And it is, indeed, a very attractive metaphor. The problems with such a metaphor
begin when the orchestra is conceived as the harmonic whole that appears on the stage, when the

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magic of the concert transports us laymen to a sublime world of perfection, beyond the harsh
realities of the budget, the pressures of sponsoring institutions, rehearsals. The concert night
performance is an outcome of the process through which the orchestra evolves towards a
harmonic whole. Before this end-result is achieved, there is a rather loose network of people,
instruments and their makers and repairers, schedules, money and deficits. If the orchestra were
to be useful as a metaphor, the attention should also be focused on those processes through
which its existence becomes an enduring feature of the world.

An organization theory should, in this sense, be able not only to describe the successful, ideal
outcomes, but also to decipher how they come into being in a more or less enduring way. This
chapter presents a way of accounting for such kinds of outcome to which a structural character
can be attributed, by starting from on-going processes or networks and showing how they might
become transformed into relatively closed structures. The chapter consists of three sections: (1)
an overview of Allport's theory of event-structuring, in which the basic elements of the theory
are presented; (2) an analysis of the process of closure of structures, in which Allport's
theoretical statements are illustrated by means of some historical examples; and (3) a general
discussion of event-structuring as a way of representing organization. This last discussion
provides the occasion to show that, by following the theory of event-structuring the problem of
explaining the boundary condition in organization theory is not yet completely unsolved, and that
further reflection on the strategy of representation itself is required.

Basic concepts of event-structure theory

Social theory has been divided into two kinds of approach: the micro- and macro-perspectives. In
both cases the possibility of understanding the phenomenon of social organization is far from
realized. As Callon and Latour (1981) have suggested, it is necessary 'to slip between', on the one
hand, the reduction of such a phenomenon to micro-negotiations and the consequent need of
aggregating them, and, on the other hand, the attempt to establish a certain privileged relation
with an unknowable and mysterious macro-phenomenon, by attributing to it identities, purposes,
etc. In a similar vein, it could be said that Allport developed his structural approach as a means to
slip between two kinds of assumption: 'It has been assumed either that structures are fortuitous,
endlessly varied, and inexplicable, or else that the quantitative laws and equations will always
suffice, in principle, to explain them whenever they need explaining' (1955: 622).

Allport has forcefully argued about the insufficiency of quantitative aggregation as a way of
explaining structures. For quantities would be the amounts in which the structure operates and,
thus, presuppose its existence. He has also made a stand against another common procedure: the
use of the notion of agency. This procedure implies the postulation of some being that
teleologically uses some means in the process of achieving a goal, and/or takes for granted as the
starting point of the inquiry what is precisely to be explained, i.e. the structure. Hence, 'here we
are likely to fall back upon anthropomorphic descriptions or tautologies. Some of the concepts of
general systems theory are of this open-ended, linear, agentlike sort' (Allport, 1967: 2). In a way
that links both procedures, Allport explains:

One of the principal reasons why one clings to the belief that quantitative laws produce the structure
is that one tends to regard them as agencies... One is inclined to think of a 'force' not merely as a

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 mathematical equation, derived from mass and kinetic measurements, but as something that is
'forceful,' that has a 'potency' for separating things or bringing them together... (1955: 627).

He proposes, by following Einstein's theories, that a force can be thought of in terms of the
curving continuum of space-time. Thus, the resulting representation would acquire a geometric
character. And this is the distinctive feature of Allport's theory: the introduction of a qualitative,
geometric concept of structure. In this section a summary presentation of his concept of structure
and its basic elements (ongoings and events) is provided as a basis upon which the theory of
event-structuring as process is to be elaborated in the following section.

The concept of structure

To begin with, it should be recognized that Allport's concept of structure implies a certain
departure from traditional ways of representing: 'Thing, particle, organism, individual, and group
—these are all agent-like terms which, like the "corporate fiction" of jurisprudence, are used as
conveniences in our thinking' (1962: 18). These concepts do not provide a way of understanding
how these totalities come about, since they presuppose what is to be explained. Moreover, the
observations are reduced to the acts of such agents and their consequences: 'Thus the corporation
is said to pay its debts, the committee is said to decide a question, and a government or state to
agree to a treaty, adopt a foreign policy, maintain its honor, or declare war' (Allport, 1940: 417).

Another difficulty for the introduction of the concept of structure in social science is a
consequence of the traditional distinction between static and dynamics, or anatomy and
physiology, according to which structure is attributed the static character of a certain entity, and
function the dynamic one. Allport's solution consisted in attributing a clearly dynamic character
to the structure. This differentiates his strategy of representation from traditional simulations of
bodies or organisms. Thus,

We are not dealing with a structure composed of anatomical units or bodies, that is, of receptors,
neurons, and muscles. That would be a purely morphological and static conception. Instead, we are
dealing with dynamic elements, with ongoing processes and events. Events are given a relatedness, a
structure, by the ongoings that connect them —and so we have a 'structure of events.' Ongoings are
also connected by the events; the structure is really one of ongoings and events (Allport, 1955: 616).

One implication of this attempt to conceive of the structure in dynamic terms is that social or
collective structures, for example, are not to be thought of as assemblies or aggregates of
individuals, as the current notions of group, organization or community imply. Rather, in
Allport's 'kinematic' conception, the structure is to be conceived as organized patterns of
segments of the individuals' behaviours: 'the structure is one of "segmentalized" reactions and
not of anatomical persons' (Allport, 1962: 27). This would also imply a certain change in the
very notion of individual: 'Instead of saying that a group incorporates (or is composed of) many
individuals, we would do almost better to say that an individual incorporates many groups'
(1962: 25).

This idea of incorporation is related to Allport's concept of partial inclusion which has
become a popular theme in organizational literature. However, since the dominant paradigm in
organization theory has been the morphological representation of the organization as a group of

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individuals, partial inclusion has come to represent the pressures or influences upon the
individual's disposition to contribute to the organization's achievement of its goals, resulting
from the individual's participation in different groups. This twist of the original idea may be
regarded as a consequence of a partial or selective reading of Allport's works. For, as he
explicitly stated, from this perspective: 'The term group "influence," or the idea of the influence
of the group upon the individual, is therefore a misnomer or a misconception. The laws we are
concerned with, by this hypothesis, are laws of "structurogenesis" in the collective human
sphere, not laws of "social agency" or the "dynamics of groups."' (1962: 26).

With respect to its geometric character, Allport's concept of structure also implies a certain
departure, this time from traditional mathematics. The definition of structures, in terms of a
kinematic of on-going processes and events, requires the introduction of topological concepts;
especially, the concept of invariance of the structures through changes: 'If they exist at all, they
are invariant through changes of magnitude, number, or dimension. Neither can they, as such, be
teleologically or functionally defined, since they are invariant with respect to all changes of
purpose as well as the absence of purpose' (Allport, 1967: 16).

Let us illustrate these properties of the concept of structure defined in dynamic, process terms
by means of an example drawn from economic history. Braudel (1988) has referred to the
Mediterranean in the sixteenth century as a world-theatre or world-economy, in order to indicate
not simply the 'sea' itself but the structure resulting from trading activities, irrespective of
geographical dimensions or political and religious boundaries:

Such activity ignored the frontiers of empires... It also ignored the well-marked and strongly-felt
boundaries between the civilizations which divided up the Mediterranean... All the great battles
between Christians and Infidels were fought on this line. But merchant vessels sailed across it every
day... The economy, all-invading, mingling together currencies and commodities, tended to promote
unity of a kind in a world where everything else seemed to be conspiring to create clearly-
distinguished blocs (Braudel, 1988: 22).

Thus, what defined the existence of such a structure, or world-economy, was the repeated
commercial activity, of transport and transfer of goods, not any other principle of 'wholeness' or
static configuration. And it invariably operated, in spite of geo-political or cultural changes, for
an extended period. As Allport would say, this structure is really one of ongoings and events.

Ongoings and events

One important feature of Allport's theory, for our present purpose, is the possibility of thinking
of the structural character or consequences of organizing by starting from on-going processes
rather than from a pre-existing object or entity. In fact, the first type of element of Allport's
structural theory is constituted by ongoing processes, defined as

... some form of motion, an ongoing through space and during time... The other type of element, or
aspect, of structure consists of events. These are the 'junction points' of the format. They are the points
of 'contact' or 'encounter' between the ongoing processes just mentioned. Events, defined in this way,
are not extended or continuous either in space or time. They are 'dichotomies' that link an ongoing
process on one side with an ongoing process on the other; and they are also time-points that separate
what went before from what comes after (Allport, 1955: 615).

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Though careful attention is paid to both elements, what is new for us here and what provides the
distinctive or specific character of a theory of structures is the concept of event: a dichotomy,
discontinuity or encounter from which the patterning or articulation of processes arises. Thus, in
this section we shall be mainly concerned with the understanding of this concept.

Some methodological implications result from Allport's concept of event: (1) with respect to
the objective of releasing the explanation of the structure from any concept of agency, Allport
(1955: 616) stated: 'events are thus not to be thought of as "acts" of "agents"... which perform
them'. That is, events are facts not acts, and hence cannot be simply attributed to an agent. (2)
With respect to the insufficiency of quantitative or variational laws to explain the structure, the
definition of the event as a discontinuity, something that simply occurs and, therefore, cannot
have degrees, implies that: 'Something besides a quantity of an abstracted variable is necessary in
order to describe it; and in fact, the act of quantification itself could not take place without it'
(1955: 624). (3) Finally, the procedure of causal explanation, which requires us to start
somewhere and to take for granted certain aspects or features of the world, is then also
insufficient in order to account for the occurrence of the event: 'A certain part of the chain is
delimited as "belonging" to a particular behavioral act or other phenomenon; and the remainder
of the sequence is ignored. The fact that this can be done without being aware of any
arbitrariness is itself an evidence that some principle other than linear causation must be at work'
(1954: 285).

The concept of the event requires us, according to Allport, to adopt a probabilistic rather than
deterministic approach. But it is still necessary to introduce a further clarification of this concept
in order to fully appreciate the probabilistic character of the event. Though, for simplicity, we
refer to the event, in the singular, we are actually dealing with multiplicities of events, a variety
of possibilities of encounters of ongoings. A large number of these elementary events must occur
for a macroscopically observable event to be able to occur (Allport, 1954). The concept of event-
region, places in which events may or may not occur, is then introduced in order to convey the
idea of multiplicity and the need for probabilistic considerations. Thus,

There is a weighted probability, but not a certainty, that events will occur in what we have called the
event-regions. How many there will be depends in part upon the probabilities of encounter of a single
ongoing with another in the space and time theoretically chosen for the region concerned, and in part
upon the number of ongoings that enter the region. Statistical considerations and the notion of
'probable density' of events are here brought into play (1955: 641).

This expansion of the concept of event has important implications for the theory of event-
structuring. Since the structure is defined as a structure of ongoings and events, the very
existence of the structure becomes a probabilistic matter. Two kinds of probability can be
specified for the occurrence of a structure: (1) the probability of occurrence of events within each
event-region taken in isolation; and (2) the joint or combined probability of occurrence of events
in all the event-regions.

The possibility should also be allowed that event-regions differ from each other in terms of
their way of approaching the density required for the occurrence of the structure, and 'that some
of the event regions in the cycle may be more "readied" than the others' (Allport, 1954: 293). For

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example, according to Braudel (1988), the structure of a world-economy can always be thought
of as 'a sum of individual economies, some poor, some modest, with a comparatively rich one in
the centre' (p. 26). 'A world-economy always has an urban centre of gravity, a city, as the logistic
heart of its activity. News, merchandise, capital, credit, people, instructions, correspondence all
flow into and out of the city' (p. 27).

In general, the structure has a probability of occurrence which depends on the probable
number of encounters, or the density of events. The problem for a theory of event-structuring
can, then, be stated as one of showing how a certain density is achieved in order to exceed a
threshold, beyond which the structure can be said to occur and operate. The structure's
occurrence implies that randomness or indeterminacy of events is not absolute, and that certain
biasing conditions exist which increase the probable density of events at the event-regions. This
consideration leads directly to the problem of how the structures come into existence. And, as we
shall see in the following section, this question is the same as asking how closure occurs.

The process of structural closure

The idea that order does not simply emerge from disorder, but presupposes the existence of
previous orders, provides the key to understanding the coming into being of a structure. The
question is: 'how the structuring or aggregating process takes place... If structure is to be
conceived as organization, then organization has to be pervasive throughout all the parts or
"subwholes" of the aggregate' (Allport, 1955: 617).

A brief comment should be added in order to clarify the meaning of this point. Allport is
referring to theories of perception; and, thus, organization refers here to the formation of a
perceptual unit. However, apart from the fact that he attempted to formulate a general or abstract
theory of structure (and his review of the theories of perception had mainly an illustrative
character), a close affinity has existed between the language of social theory and that of the
theory of perception, e.g., between the field of perception and the social field. Hence, such a
discussion can be particularly relevant for our purposes. For instance, Allport's critique of Gestalt
theories such as field-theory and topological psychology suggests a limitation of accounting for
the boundary condition, in the case of social organization, in terms of the folding of a social
field. Thus,

In topological field theory a questionable strategy for solving the inside-outside problem was found to
be employed in the device of 'everting' the contents of the 'inside' field, thus avoiding the essential
structuring problem and producing a model that lacked consistency. In spite of its apparent agreement
with the phenomena of flexibility and configuration, field-theory does not seem to be the answer...
Yet because of these very limitations, we become the more clearly aware of the kind of aggregating
or structuring principle that is needed (Allport, 1955: 618).

Though, in a sense, the procedure used in Chapter 6 to approach the inside-outside problem
followed an inverse strategy, i.e., one of inverting the contents of the outside field, the result is
the same: the structuring problem was insufficiently explained. Thus, this argument reveals a
limitation of the socio-technical network approach to account for the boundary condition, or the
closure of organizing processes. Nevertheless, as Allport would have recognized, such an
approach enables us to appreciate the insufficiency of traditional explanations.
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 Allport's theory of event-structuring would then provide the required extension of the
analysis of organizing processes in order to include the consideration of their structural
consequences. This section consists of three parts: an elucidation of the concept of closedness as
the essential feature of the structure, compared to the potential indefiniteness of networks, an
analysis of the conditions for the occurrence and persistence of such a feature, and a note on the
quantitative aspect of the structure.

The concept of closedness

Let us begin by recalling some topological concepts which can provide a basis for understanding
the concept of closedness in Allport's theory. In mathematical terms: 'A path f in a topological
space X whose initial and terminal points coincide is called a closed path or a loop in X'
(Mendelson, 1990: 135). A topological space can be defined as a mathematical object, obtained
by 'discarding the distance function and retaining the open sets of a metric space...' (p. 70). In
this topological space, the event may be defined as an 'accumulation point'. The corresponding
concept of event in a metric space would be given by the familiar concept of the limit of a
function. As we shall see, similar notions of closedness and events play a fundamental role in
Allport's theory of event-structuring:

Let us think of the series [of ongoings and events] as always coming back upon itself and completing
a cycle. The cycle of ongoings and events can be terminated at the region from which it starts, or it
can be conceived as continuing, repeating itself indefinitely in circular fashion (Allport, 1955: 634).

Our interest in the cycles, as structural format, is not a metric one. Ongoing-event geometry is a
geometry of self-closedness, of the cyclical tendency or completion of ongoing-event series and their
tangencies and of that alone. The structures can be of any time-period or duration..., or of any type of
spatial deformation or distortion, so long as their fundamental property of self-closedness remains (p.
645-6).

In this theory, then, the concept of closedness is defined in terms of circularity, or repetition. The
cyclical character of the series of ongoings and events becomes the crucial feature of a structure,
its self-closedness. The process of closure can now be conceived as the completion of cycles of
ongoings and events. And the problem of order becomes one of building cycles of cycles in order
to produce structures at any level of aggregation.

The question is: 'Are the ongoing-event series of higher (more inclusive) orders... also
cyclical?' (Allport, 1955: 644). The answer is in the affirmative for both the including structure
and the included, single series or subcycle. 'The "higher" order consists merely of the structuring
of structures of the "lower" order into a more inclusive structure... The latter structure, however,
repeats, at its own order, the same type of kinematic geometry that was present in the component
structures' (Allport, 1955: 616).

It might be said that this solution to the problem of order, in terms of a recursive pattern, is
formally equivalent to that suggested by Hobbes' use of similar triangles, or Parsons' theory of
subsystems differentiation at any level of aggregation. The difference between those solutions
and Allport's is that the latter is based upon an explicit geometry of ongoing processes and

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events, without requiring the assumption of original creations, intervening agents, or teleological
functions. This requires us to show that the motion comes back to the starting region.

We tend to think of a process as a linear advance towards a goal, which 'seems more suited to
the paradigm of teleology' (Allport, 1967: 6). However, the reentrance is also a crucial aspect of
an ongoing. Think, for example, of the first manned lunar landing. The success of the whole
enterprise depended not only on putting the 'man' on the moon, but also on the possibility of
returning the module. It could not be simply taken for granted that the spacecraft would return
but this had to be ensured, as a condition of closure, or occurrence, of the structure. In Braudel's
analysis of the 'Mediterranean' as a world-economy, the structural condition was the return of the
trading vessels, or the completion of commercial circuits. Other common examples are the need
for a factory that workers return to every day at a precise time to repeat their jobs, or the church's
need that people return every Sunday to its service in order to ensure the occurrence of,
respectively, certain economic and religious structures. Two kinds of structure can be further
distinguished: structures characterized by a single cycle, which implies a consumption of energy,
so to speak, in the completion of the process; and structures in which the level of energy is
maintained so that the cycle can be indefinitely repeated. However, in both cases, as Allport
(1955: 644) puts it: 'The essential point is that they come back to the starting region'.

The difference between networks and structures, from the perspective of the theory of event-
structuring, has been stated by Allport in the following terms:

Of course, a network of single straight lines could be drawn, and one might attempt to call that a
structure. But it should be remembered that we are dealing with ongoings (motions)... If, then, we do
not bring the ongoing around to self-completion, as a cycle, we have to imagine that it is infinitely
extended. But structures, if they are anything at all, must be finite. One cannot build a true structure
out of linear, open-ended, or infinitely extended materials (1955: 637).

This means, for a structural theory of social organization for example, that a constraint in the
potentially indefinite continuity of socio-historical processes is required. That is, a structural
theory of organization requires us to account for discontinuities. However, this does not simply
mean that event-structuring implies the adoption of a synchronic approach; as opposed to a
diachronic one represented, for instance, by the socio-technical network approach. For, as we
have seen in Chapter 5, the concept of socio-technical networks, as enduring historical chains,
was based upon the possibility of the repeated exercise of a practice. Now, what is required for a
theory of structures is a closer look at the process through which the conditions for such a
repeated exercise are produced and reproduced, which implies both the synchronic and the
diachronic. In this sense, the dynamics of the structure exhibit a dual (simultaneously linear and
circular) character.

The concept of structural closedness implies, then, a consideration of both order and
temporality. The very concept of time would acquire, in this theory, a structural character: 'One
can think of time as the duration occupied by the successive ongoing processes and events of a
particular pattern that closes itself through a cycle of operation... If the cycle thus repeats itself,
that would represent another "round" of "structural time." Time is thus always of the structure'
(Allport, 1954: 288). Now the meaning of organizing as the imposition of an order and

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temporality through the repeated exercise of a practice can be fully appreciated as the structural
character of organizing.

Let us illustrate this structural character, the condition of closure, in terms of Allport's
analysis of the sociological notion of conformity or obedience to a norm: 'in every enduring
collectivity there are certain standards (or norms), arising through experience, obedience to
which is conducive to the self-closing sequence of events that constitute that structure's
operation, and violation of which tends to be destructive of that same cycle of events' (1962: 20).
However, Allport warned us against a misleading sense of the term conformity as implying
'some basic compulsion on the part of the individuals to do what other individuals are doing'
(1962: 17). The theory of event-structuring, as we shall immediately see, provides a different
kind of understanding of the process of closure.

Bounding and biasing

The process of closure of a structure can be understood as the transformation of networks into
structures. In graphical terms, this process would consist in bending or curving the potentially
straight lines of a network, in order to produce a loop or fold which represents the cyclical,
closing character of ongoings. Allport (1955: 647) illustrated this feature of structures in terms of
relativity theory:

The curving or self-closing character of the elementary ongoings, which, as will be seen, is suggestive
of the general theory of relativity and which, in accordance with that theory, is more curving in
regions of 'matter' or 'greater density of the field,' is a feature that is believed to bias the probability
toward a density of event-occurrence in the event-regions that is greater than that which would be
produced by randomness or chance.

The structure's occurrence is the outcome of a process through which certain (bounding or
biasing) conditions reduce or control randomness. This is not to say that the initial or original
condition from which the structure emerges is one of absolute randomness; but, on the contrary,
that the occurrence of the structure implies the existence of a certain order which ensures the
availability of a required density of events. As Allport (1955: 664) explicitly stated:

In order to have a structure come into existence there must be at the start something other than
randomness to work with. Some already existing structure must be present... The only alternative
would be to postulate some agency as a special 'higher-level' creator of structure, whose existence and
ways of working could not be submitted to any objective test.

In order to bring this point closer to our concern with the problem of organization, let us recall
Stinchcombe's (1986: 196; originally published in 1965) hypothesis according to which: 'The
organizational inventions that can be made at a particular time in history depend on the social
technology available at the time'. Thus, for example: 'The combination of the streetcar and the
railroad was at the back of the great reorganization of retail trade by department stores (Macy's,
1858; Marshall Field's, 1852), chain stores (A&P, 1901; Woolworth's, 1879), and mail-order
houses (Sears, Roebuck, 1886; Montgomery Ward, 1872)' (Stinchcombe, 1986: 198). In general,
Stinchcombe observed certain regularities in the occurrence of particular kinds of organizational
configuration, according to the availability of, and the conditions imposed by, certain 'socio-

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technical' organizing processes. His analysis of the case of the construction industry is
particularly illustrative of the idea that certain conditions must be present for the occurrence of
particular structures and their distinctive features:

... the unbureaucratized craft-subcontracting structure of the construction industry is particularly

suited to the highly variable work load of the industry, the varied nature of its products, and to the fact
that the work that has to be done at a particular site varies a great deal depending on the stage of the
process of building which has been reached. These conditions have been relatively uniform in urban
construction in capitalist societies for a long time. As soon as the social structure of early modern
cities was appropriate for the development of this form, special-purpose organizations for
construction were 'invented' (p. 206).

The problem is how to account for these regularities in general terms. According to
Stinchcombe, any explanation would be an approximation. And he suggested three lines of
inquiry into the complex set of conditions from which particular structural forms emerge or are
adopted, which follow traditional, teleological, agent-like frameworks: (1) a principle of
economic efficiency, which follows the kind of explanation we have discussed as the
representation of organizing as economizing in the appendix to Chapter 4; (2) a principle of
legitimacy which, in general, has been the line of research followed by what has been called the
institutional school (e.g., Meyer and Rowan, 1977); and (3) a kind of Darwinian struggle for
survival, which has been elaborated in the ideas of population ecology (e.g., Hannan and
Freeman, 1977). But let us now continue to pursue the explication of the structuring process
intrinsic to Allport's theory.

From networks to structures

To begin with, a connection can be suggested between Allport's use of Einstein's ideas on the
curvature of time-space in order to conceive of the structure's occurrence as the result of an
accumulation of matter at some points where the straight lines of networks become bent and
acquire a cyclical character, and the way in which Callon and Latour (1981) analyse the coming
into existence and the strength of macro-actors (the sealing of black boxes): the result of a
bending of time and space due to an accumulation process through which some operations
become the natural, taken-for-granted way of doing things. A close affinity between Allport's
concept of structure and the concept of 'macro-actor' elaborated by Callon and Latour can be
found in their definition of (macro) actor:

What is an actor? Any element which bends space around itself, makes other elements dependent
upon itself and translates their will into a language of its own... By stating what belongs to the past,
and of what the future consists, by defining what comes before and what comes after, by building up
balance sheets, by drawing up chronologies, it imposes its own space and time. It defines space and
its organization, sizes and their measures, values and standards, the stakes and rules of the game —the
very existence of the game itself (Callon & Latour, 1981: 286).

Another interesting instance of affinity between both theoretical enterprises can be found in
Allport's awareness of the need of 'putting human and non-human together', a point stressed by
Callon and Latour, in order to analyse social organization. Thus, for example, by using network
terms: 'It will be noted that in machine production individuals are not the only nodes in the
system. The successive parts of a machine are nodes which intervene between individual nodes'
(Allport, 1940: 427).
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 We can illustrate this point by means of a story of transformation and displacement drawn
from Latour's study of science:

No matter how the winds shift, no matter what the winds want, the whole windmill will act as one
piece, resisting dissociation in spite of/because of the increasing number of pieces it is now made of.
What happens to the people gathered round the miller? They too are definitely 'interested' in the mill.
No matter what they want, no matter how good they were at handling the pestle, they now have to
pass through the mill. Thus they are kept in line just as much as the wind is. If the wind had toppled
the mill, then they could have abandoned the miller and gone their usual ways. Now that the top of
the mill revolves, thanks to a complicated assembly of nuts and bolts, they cannot compete with it. It
is a clever machination, isn't it, and because of it the mill has become an obligatory passage point for
the people, for the corn and for the wind. If revolving windmills cannot do the job alone, then one can
make it illegal to grind corn at home. If the new law does not work immediately, use fashion or taste,
anything that will habituate people to the mill and forget their pestles (1987: 129).

The process of closure of the structure as one of biasing the probability (density) of occurrence
of events in the event-regions, can thus be expressed in Latour's terms as one of channelling
ongoings to pass through obligatory passage points, i.e., points of accumulation in topological
terms.

There should be no more mystery in the curving of the ongoings (or the increase in density at
the event-regions relevant for the structure's occurrence) than in that accumulation of elements
which made a structure out of a network of wind shifts, corn transformations, and people's
habits. And it is not necessary to start by looking for individuals' motivations, feelings, and
decisions in order to understand how the structure comes about. As Allport (1962: 14) remarked:
'Let the motives, interpreted consciously and teleologically, be what they will, let them be
manifest or latent —they all "feed into," or "eventuate in," the fact or existence of some sort of
collective structure that is being formed, and formed with all the greater inevitability, perhaps,
because its genesis is largely unconscious'. An interesting illustration of this point can be found
in Braudel's (1982) comment on certain taken-for-granted commercial advantages enjoyed by
sixteenth-century capitalists:

The higher reaches of the economy, being peopled by the owners of capital, did in fact create routine
structures operating to such men's advantage in everyday life, in ways they did not always fully
realize. In matters of currency for instance, they found themselves in the same happy position as a
possessor of a strong currency today travelling to a weak-currency country. For the rich were
practically the only people who handled and kept beside them large quantities of gold and silver: poor
people never came across anything but copper and copper-mixture coin. And these different coinages
operated in relation to each other much as if a strong and a weak currency were to co-exist in the
same economy with artificial attempts to maintain fixed parity —doomed to failure of course (p. 423).

... money was not the neutral liquid that economists still sometimes refer to. Money was indeed a
miraculous agent of exchange, but it was also a confidence trick serving the privileged (p. 426).

Psychological, agentlike or teleological concepts may help in justifying attributions of

responsibility once the structure's occurrence is a taken-for-granted fact, but they cannot show
how the structuring takes place. Convincing people to act in a pre-determined way, following

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Latour's ideas, is less the result of a formidable skill of leaders, or a cultural susceptibility, or the
presence of some kind of spirit than the outcome of a process of accumulation of resources and
efforts, which makes it possible to channel them through certain, specified, mandatory points.

Braudel's (1988) analyses of the formation and transformation of the structures he calls
world-economies provide us with illustrations of the process through which a structure's
occurrence is achieved by the curving of networks, resulting from an accumulation process or the
channelling of ongoings to pass through obligatory passage points, i.e., the city at the centre of
each world-economy, whether Venice, Amsterdam, or London, for example. Thus,

At ground level and sea level so to speak, the networks of local and regional markets were built up
over century after century. It was the destiny of this local economy, with its self-contained routines, to
be from time to time absorbed and made part of a 'rational' order in the interest of a dominant city or
zone, for perhaps one or two centuries, until another 'organizing centre' emerged; as if the
centralization and concentration of wealth and resources necessarily favoured certain chosen sites of
accumulation (p. 36; Braudel's emphases).

I mentioned the olive oil of Apulia, which Venice long monopolized. In order to do so, Venice had, in
the oil producing region in 1580, no less than 500 Bergamask merchants, Venetian subjects, occupied
in collecting, storing and organizing exports. The dominant economy thus embraced all production,
and directed it towards appropriate outlets (p. 38).

And if Amsterdam called the tune for European prices, as all the documents tell us, it was because of
the abundance of reserve stocks which the city's warehouses could at any moment release or hold
back... The Dutch system was built on a network of commercial relations of interdependence which
combined to produce a series of virtually obligatory channels for the circulation and redistribution of
goods (p. 239).

Europe sent very small groups of settlers out to Asia, where they were in a tiny minority it is true, but
it was a minority in direct contact with the most advanced capitalism in the western world... The
process has thus begun which was by the end of the eighteenth century to deliver more than 85 or 90
per cent of India's foreign trade over to the English monopoly. But it was only because the accessible
markets of the Far East formed a series of coherent economies linked together in a fully operational
world-economy, that the merchant capitalism of Europe was able to lay siege to them and to use their
own vitality to manoeuver them to its own advantage (p. 496).

These examples point to the recognition of the structuring process as one of creating biasing and
bounding conditions, in order to transform existing networks into included structures. This
process, as we have seen, is based on, and further develops, the accumulation of resources in
certain relevant regions or centres; i.e., a certain tendency to the increase in density, above a
threshold level, which is revealed in the quantities or amounts in which the structure is seen to
operate. Braudel (1988) provides a detailed analysis of a basic process operating at those
changing centres of the world-economies, the weapon of the centres: the ability to capture funds,
to issue loans, to promise profits, to transfer wealth. In fact, financial operations played a
fundamental role in channelling the flow of commercial activity, and in providing the required
density for the occurrence of the structure of a world-economy.

The contemporary world-economy, after the displacement of the centre from London to New
York, is not an exception to this rule. Though suggesting a certain ignorance of history, typical in
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the attribution of uniqueness or specificity to some features of the contemporary world (mainly
derived from the spectacular developments in information technology), a recent report on the
situation of the international economy provides a good illustration of an important feature of
contemporary world-economy:

Eurodollars represent the first truly supranational form of money... They are 'of this planet,' said the
economist Lord Nicholas Kaldor in a 1980 speech in the House of Lords, 'but... not really under any
country's rules of jurisdiction.' Spurred on by the revolution in information processing and
communications, what Kaldor calls this 'uncontrolled international credit creation in the world
market' circles the globe in a matter of seconds and roosts wherever the short-run returns are high
enough and the risks are acceptable. 'The world of stateless money,' writes the normally circumspect
Business Week, 'has in turn bred a stateless banking system in which national boundaries mean very
little... Now international commerce is totally dependent on this new supranational banking system'
(Wachtel, 1990: 92-3).

But, let us now translate into the language of the theory of event-structuring some implications,
or lessons, which can be drawn from these examples.

Structuring, interstructuring and destructuring

An implication of the idea that a structure cannot be produced except out of other structural
elements is that a structure cannot be defined in isolation, in a vacuum: 'There is always
"tangency" with other structures somewhere' (Allport, 1954: 289). The concept of tangency plays
an important role in the theory of event-structuring, since structures are not to be conceived as
'only comprising a circuital series of events, but presenting also the possibility of
interstructuring, through event-tangencies...' (Allport, 1955: 645). Let us pursue this concept of
interstructuring.

Since the structure's occurrence implies the closure of ongoings and events contributed by
other (tangent) structures of ongoings and events, its dynamics can be described in terms of the
positive (reinforcing) or negative (inhibiting) consequences of such contributions. That is, given
that structural tangencies are located at event-regions, the structures' 'kinematic arrangements
could be such that one would either contribute, at a common event-region, to the other's
probability of event-points (i.e., energies) or else detract from that probability' (Allport, 1955:
661). Current sociological concepts, for example, can be translated into this kinematic language:
'... "conformity to a standard" takes on a more intelligible meaning when we see norm
performance as a kind of behavioral structure or substructure that is, as it were, tangent to a
certain collective structure, and necessary for the continuation of that structural pattern among
the individuals concerned' (Allport, 1962: 19).

An example from another field, economics in this case, refers to a situation of negative
contributions through which a decrease in the probability density of tangency regions reduces the
possibility of accumulation of events and thus the possibility of the structure's occurrence. Thus,
'in the "economic" system, counters (money) are frequently stored (at times when there is object
and energy storage), a fact which is basic in our understanding of economic depressions'
(Allport, 1940: 436). An excellent illustration of a case of generalized inhibiting tangency
contributions in economic terms is provided by a recent analysis of the International Monetary
Fund's policies:

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 Every borrower from the IMF is told to reduce its imports and expands its exports, while at the same
time restraining purchasing power. If you stop and think for a moment, however, how can all
countries reduce their spending power, yet sell more to other countries? ... What may be good for one
country in the world economy adds up to bad policy for that country and all others if enough nations
follow the same policy. By restraining demand and purchasing power, the IMF has left the world
economy without the ability to grow, which is a precondition for solving the debt problem (Wachtel,
1990: 129).

But now it seems evident that, in the same way that randomness could not be regarded as an
absolute condition, the biasing or bounding conditions cannot be regarded as absolute or
immutable ones. That is, in the same way as we can define a structuring process the possibility
should be allowed of defining a destructuring process.

A destructuring process can be defined in terms of the same dynamics of ongoings and
events from which the structural format comes about. However, as we have seen, event-
structuring theory implies a certain principle of conservation. That is, the destructuring does not
simply mean a disappearance of the structural format in absolute terms; but, rather, a
transformation, the formation of other structures through structuring processes which proceed
from the tangencies at the same event-regions. In other words, destructuring processes can also
be thought of as those transformations and displacements through which, in the case of world-
economies analyzed by Braudel for example, the location of the centre has a changing instead of
fixed character. In this sense, a certain transfer of density occurs which precludes the closure, or
the completion of a cycle of ongoings and events, in one place and facilitates its occurrence in
another.

Processes of structuring and destructuring should not be assumed as being instantaneous or

automatic; but, instead, as slow trial-and-error processes. An illustration of a structuring process
was shown in Chapter 5 with the example of the Japanese's introduction of ceramics in
thermomechanical applications. Though used to illustrate the idea of the introduction of socio-
technical network as a costly, piece-by-piece process, this case is a good example of the more
general recognition of structuring processes as implying a destructuring of a previous order: the
destructuring of an existing metal-based industrial configuration and the structuring of a new
ceramics-based one. An illustration of the concurrence of structuring and destructuring processes
can be found in the analysis of the industrialization of Western Europe and the
deindustrialization of Asia and Africa offered by Goodman and Honeyman (1988: 211):

The productivity growth achieved by modern industrial methods, particularly in cotton, where
spinning became 300 or even 400 times more productive, meant that European manufactured goods
could be sold more cheaply than local artisanal and craft products; and because of the low wage costs,
distant markets remained profitable even allowing for transport costs and the profits of intermediaries.
The indigenous craft products were thus unable to compete with manufactured imports, and artisanal
producers were forced into specialization in primary production. During the second half of the
nineteenth century, therefore, industrial production using traditional methods, in what were soon to
become Third-World economies, declined absolutely and relatively, until by 1900, per capita output
was only 30 per cent of the 1750 level.

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Let us remember that the general principle is one of concurrence or encounter of ongoings, rather
than one of whole- or format-determination. This implies not only that a structure cannot be
defined in isolation, but also that it has no power or energy by itself; or, at least, as Allport
(1967: 18) would say: 'this is an academic question since such a quantity could not be
experienced'.

The boundary condition

There is an important relation between the definition of the structure as the outcome of processes
of structuring and interstructuring, and the notion of higher-order structures as the assemblage of
lower-order ones. In both cases the concepts of probable density of events, thresholds, and
tangencies at event-regions provide the bases for answering the question of how the structure
occurs. But it must be added that: 'When a higher order is thus attained, the lower-order "parts"
(substructures), which previously had only their own "inside" meaning, now acquire also an
"outside" meaning through their role within the larger, more inclusive, structure' (1955: 661).

The boundary condition can thus be defined in terms of the closure of cycles of ongoings and
events when the structure is analyzed from the perspective of a higher-order kinematic closure,
or the completion of an inclusive structural format. The search for this geometry, or kinematics
of ongoings and events would distinguish event-structuring from a system approach.

The system approach takes for granted the existence of the format —i.e., the boundary
condition is simply assumed— and states the structural problem as one of maintaining a
characteristic performance. This amounts to putting an emphasis on the quantitative aspect of the
structure, or the energetic closure which in Allport's terms: 'represents the coming of the cycle to
equilibrium at a certain energic level or the return to, and maintenance of, a steady-state' (1955:
652). Both kinds of closure are closely related. Moreover, the concepts of thermodynamics can
be used to analyse situations described in terms of a kinematic geometry. For example, the
concept of entropy can be used to describe some features of the structure's operation. Thus,

The cycle of ongoings and events could continue... even though the densities of the regions were
equalized. Such a situation would be realized when, in the order of a cycle of cycles, each subcycle is
passing on to the next subcycle, all around the total repeating cycle, exactly as much capacity for
event-points (energies) as it is receiving from the preceding subcycle. This state of affairs represents
the maximum entropy for the structure. But it also may represent a certain amount of negative-
entropy of the organismic structure as a whole if taken in connection with the adjacent out-structural
manifolds. In other words, it represents a steady state (Allport, 1955: 653).

However, as Allport has remarked, there is a difference between event-structure theory and
general systems theory: 'Though both are metatheories, they are based upon methodological
assumptions and postulates that are on the whole quite different' (1967: 18). Allport has even
suggested a certain precedence of the kinematic over the quantitative approach:

Energic closure means the 'equilibrizing' process or the steady state within the structure, which not
only proceeds by itself, but it is also complicated, as we have seen, by the kinematic relationships of
the structure to adjacent and tangent structural manifolds... The non-quantitative aspect of structural
format must, as we have seen so often, be present in order to give the quantitative law its full
meaning... there are assumed to be energic densities in the event-regions of a structure that indicate
some kinematic structurance above chance (1955: 653-4).

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In methodological terms,

We make no assertion about society as a whole, nor do we assume that it is all a grand event-system.
We assume, in fact, no ultimate unity of the social order... One thing is certain, we do have collective
end-events. Through their unfailing presence and definiteness of location we may be able, at least, to
find our way into the problem (Allport, 1940: 433).

Thus,

Instead of looking for a definite structure (or setting one up, by definition, through the concept of
society or institutions) and then trying to describe its operation in producing the end-event, we may
start with the end-event itself. We may then look back for the parts of the structure and discover them
one by one, through their in-series functioning. Last of all, we shall arrive at the completed structure,
and be able to chart or diagram the entire event-system (p. 425).

This strategy resembles in fact one of the methodological elements of the socio-technical
network approach: the possibility of drawing a particular network should be the result and not
the beginning of the inquiry. But let us further analyse this methodological implication of
adopting event-structure theory.

The concept of end-event can be clarified by means of the idea of negative causation
(Allport, 1940). That is, if the removal of an element (i.e., the occurrence of an event at a
particular tangency or event-region) is sufficient to reduce the probability of occurrence of the
structure below the threshold level, then such an element can be regarded as an end-event. And
the supplying or replacing of such an element is another way of referring to the process of
closure of the structure. For example: 'One worker, or a few, if absent from their machines would
not produce stoppage; but the entire body of workers (as for example in a strike) would be
effective for stoppage if replacement from the general population were impossible' (Allport,
1940: 442).

End-events can thus be regarded as the concrete expressions of what is commonly defined as
goals or purposes, and for the attainment of which rules and enforcing mechanisms are devised.
The difference between both kinds of formulations is that the latter requires the assumption or
the postulation of certain wholes, agents and other entities, as a starting point of the inquiry.
Such a procedure might be characterized as non-empirical, in the sense given by Dewey (1958)
to this term:

Non-empirical method starts with a reflective product as if it were primary, as if it were the originally
'given.' To non-empirical method, therefore, object and subject, mind and matter (or whatever words
and ideas are used) are separate and independent. Therefore it has upon its hands the problem of how
it is possible to know at all... Solutions are given up as a hopeless task, or else different schools pile
one intellectual complication on another only to arrive by a long and tortuous course at that which
naive experience already has in its own possession (Dewey, 1958: 9-10).

A typical example of such a procedure, in the field of psychology, is the invention of intervening
variables, cognitive processes, or other inner states which become then taken as given. As
Skinner pointed out:

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 ... both Tolman and Hull quickly became preoccupied with internal states and processes. Some such
move is inevitable so long as an effort is made to characterize the interchange between organism and
environment as input and output. Output can seldom if ever be related to input in any simple way, and
internal activities are therefore invented to make adjustments...
It is not surprising that modern cognitive psychologists should have been strongly influenced by
information theory, where a system is said to convert input into output by acquiring, processing,
storing, and retrieving information. Activities of this sort are modern versions of Tolman's substitutes
for mental processes (Skinner, 1966: xi).

Finally, the possibility of formulating the concept of a system, as an entity separated from an
environment, is a consequence of the achievement of a structural format, due to the repetition of
ongoings which provides the required density of events for the building of a closure. The
boundaries, or places defined by the setting of obligatory passage points in certain relevant
event-regions, are the result of a process of accumulation through which the tangencies become
assimilated, as it were, to an inside. The structuring of an inside space implies a restriction or
shortening of the cycles; and, therefore, a higher probability of encounters can be expected,
along with a decrease 'in the time, energy, and number of ongoings required' (Allport, 1967: 15).
But, again, such a condition is a consequence of the occurrence and the persistence of the
structural format. In the same sense, any quantitative analysis presupposes the existence of a
qualitative, geometric definition of the structure.

The quantitative aspect of the structure

The special geometry of event-structuring has, like any other geometry, both cartographic and
quantitative aspects (Allport, 1967). The first aspect, which has received more attention here, is
topological in the sense of admitting transformation of dimensionalities with the condition that a
property of closedness or circularity of ongoings be maintained. The quantitative aspect is,
therefore, different from a metric of dimensions. It consists of density counts, or numerations of
discrete units (events) which denote the availability of occurrences ensuring the closure of the
structure. We can illustrate this point with an example drawn from Braudel's work. In this case,
the question is: when can one say that a structure named market economy has occurred? As with
any other structure, the answer would require us to count the occurrence of certain events, and to
show that a certain density is achieved that suggests the closure of the structure. Thus, according
to Braudel,

Historically, one can speak of a market economy, in my view, when prices in the markets of a given
area fluctuate in unison, a phenomenon the more characteristic since it may occur over a number of
different jurisdictions or sovereignties... Prices have fluctuated since ancient times; by the twelfth
century they were fluctuating in unison throughout Europe (1982: 227).

Europe in the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, although far from presenting a unified
picture, was already clearly obeying a general series of rhythms, an overall order... At all events,
these prices that rise and fall in unison provide us with the most convincing evidence of the coherence
of a world-economy penetrated by monetary exchange and developing under the already directive
hand of capitalism (1988: 75).

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In this case the occurrence of the structure is revealed by the repetition of prices (a quantity of
money or any other counter) at which transactions are closed. The occurrence of such events in
sufficient number that enables us to speak of fluctuations in unison also reveals the existence of a
structure which presents certain topological properties. For Braudel is referring to the occurrence
of a phenomenon, irrespective of geographic or chronological dimensions. And money-counters
provide an easy way of representing the accumulation or density of events in a given region. Let
us now analyse the implications of Allport's idea of the quantitative aspect of the structure.

The quantitative aspect of the structure is a consequence of the accumulation of density of

events' occurrences above a threshold level: 'Beyond threshold density further increases of
density will provide variations... in the amounts in which the structure is seen to operate'
(Allport, 1955: 642). Allport (1934) has suggested that the lower limit of such a threshold might
be established at approximately 50 per cent. For below this limit no biasing condition might be
specified as supporting the probability of occurrence of the structure as a closed, repeated cycle.
Thus,

If a traffic ordinance, for example, exists merely on the statute books and is very loosely enforced, all
talk both of the law and degrees of conformity to it are purely academic matters without counterpart
in actual behavior. Almost any proportions of the varying degrees of compliance with this ordinance
may be expected according to the time and local circumstances. A rule is a rule in an effective,
behavioral sense only when a fairly large proportion of people obey it (Allport, 1940: 159).

By putting together the idea of the discontinuous character of the event of the structure's
occurrence and the possibility of specifying a biasing condition, the common idea that a normal
curve of distribution can be used to represent the statistical record of social phenomena becomes
untenable. A normal curve would be a representation of collective behaviours, when it is
plausible to assume that the only constraint upon individual behaviours is given by their
randomly distributed individual differences (of personality, intelligence or any other isolated
variable used as a continuum for measurement). And, if the occurrence of events were a matter
of absolute randomness, the distribution would not have the bell-shape of the normal curve, but a
continuously flat, rectangular shape, a scattering rather than a concentration.

But, for Allport, collective behaviour is defined, precisely, by the exercise of constraints over
simple chance and independently of individual differences. And, in this sense, not only the
assumption of certain forms of distribution in statistical treatment of data becomes a dubious
procedure, but also traditional explanations of social behaviour might become untenable, e.g.,
those based on a private, individual calculus or decision-making, or on unexplained, group
influences or pressures. As Allport has remarked with respect to the traditional concept of
conformity: 'Such conformity, ... in the primary condition, is merely the clustering of a statistical
distribution under the influence of a common variable and not a psychological fact or motive'
(1962: 17). The existence of such constraints produces what we generally call organized
behaviour: 'In collective or "institutionalized" action we do see individuals behaving in a fairly
stereotyped and functionally predictable manner... Workers come to a factory within a narrow
range of time. Drivers of motor vehicles stop at red intersection lights... The merchant orders
stock, or presents a bill in standardized terms' (Allport, 1940: 426).

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 An implication of event-structuring theory is thus that a normal curve, or any other
continuous function, cannot be simply assumed in order to represent the amounts of the
structure's operation and the distribution of event-points in the event-regions; even though,
traditionally, both economists and psychologists, for example, adopt mathematics and statistical
procedures which presuppose the existence of continuous functions. The occurrence of the
structure implies a discontinuity, a qualitative break of any empirical continuum around the class
of behaviours or the level of performance which ensures the closure of a cycle. Allport has
suggested that, in any case, what can be described is the juxtaposition of two positively
accelerated, J-curves 'placed back to back, with their modes coinciding in the single mode of the
entire distribution' (1934: 163):

In its establishment of the mean and mode through a balancing of factors occurring by chance
combination upon either side, the curve of normal probability differs in origin from the double-J-
curve of conformity. In the latter case the distribution is built up, from the start, about a mode which
is not established by probabilities, but is by its very nature highly selected, unbalanced, and
improbable in the usual course of events (1934: 171).

Such a (discontinuous, leptokurtic and asymmetric) distribution represents the effects of

tangencies adding or subtracting density to or from an event-region, described in terms of a
certain empirical continuum (e.g., money-counter, time of arrival, degree of acceleration or
deceleration of motor vehicles). Allport (1934) has analyzed the distributions of the time of
arrival of workers to factories, for example. In this case he analyzed the effects of different,
tangent ongoings —e.g., biological cycles, residential or family cycles, transport system cycles—
over the probability of closure of the structure of the factory's scheduled operation. In the
language of traditional social theory, the two slopes of the distribution denote the degrees of
acquiescence or rejection of a norm or rule. In terms of the event-structuring theory: 'The matter
can now be clarified by conceiving the J-curve of clustering (not "conforming") behaviors as
fitted into place at the appropriate "event-regions" of space and time that are the site of the
junctures in the collective structure concerned' (Allport, 1962: 20).

After more than fifty years, Allport's suggestion of this singularity of the quantitative
analysis of collective behaviour can still be regarded as a novel contribution to the discussion of
empirical social research. This brief note on this aspect of Allport's theoretical endeavour has had
the purpose not only of closing the exposition of event-structuring theory with a reference to the
quantitative aspect of event-structures but also of showing a further interesting implication of
adopting this way of representing organization.

A general discussion of event-structuring as a way of representing organization

Allport's theory of event-structuring provides the possibility of accounting for social organization
without resorting to the ubiquitous notion of agency. In this sense, traditional explanations of the
social order in terms of an original act of creation through which order emerges out of disorder
would constitute shortcuts or myths, without authority to guide research. Moreover, the very
search for origins would become a vain attempt. The question is now where should we look for
the structuring event. Let us recall some features of events in Allport's theory: (1) they 'are not
extended or continuous either in space or time' (1955: 615); (2) the event 'is not a break in any
physical continuance. It lies, rather, between the two [ongoings]' (1967: 4); and, (3) the event
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'though certainly a part of nature and capable of objective observation, therefore does not really
belong in the realm of variable or dimensional considerations' (1955: 624). The theory of event-
structuring implies a departure from traditional ways of objectifying entities, given the event's
extensionlessness, so to speak. However, Allport's statement that the event is 'a part of nature and
capable of objective observation' calls for a reconsideration of this theoretical enterprise.

This section consists of a discussion of the representational strategy of event-structuring. The

starting point of this discussion is given by the implications of the requirement of objective
observation of the event, and the difficulties it would pose for organization theory. That is, by
using an observational language (the language of representational thinking), event-structuring
theory is not able to provide a straightforward solution to the problem of accounting for the
boundaries of the traditional object of organization theory. Then, a reconsideration of the event
and its ungraspability in relation to the contemporary critique of traditional ontology is
presented. The point is that the event cannot be simply regarded as something observable, for
this would amount to a return to the traditional attribution of a fixed origin or centre to the
structure. However, the search for a pure event would lead to a discussion of the limits of
metaphysical thinking which is beyond the scope of the problem we are concerned with here.

Our problem can thus be stated as one of understanding the seemingly paradoxical result that,
though observationally unaccountable, a certain kind of event can be held to account for the
persistence of the object of traditional organization theory. By conceiving the event in
Heideggerian terms as an event of appropriation, the possibility arises of understanding a
particular event-structuring process through which clearly delimited objects called organizations
appear as parts of the world-picture. This amounts in fact to a certain transformation of the idea
of event-structuring. The only justification for such an attempt is the possibility it opens for
widening the scope of the hypothesis of event-structuring; by considering, for example, Allport's
theory as part of the problem to be understood rather than its solution. And, finally, this
possibility provides the basis for presenting in Chapter 9 an illustration of the process through
which organization theory itself has become an event-structure: the practice of representing
organization as a dynamic of bounded entities.

The problem of the event's place in nature

We can begin by reflecting on Allport's seemingly paradoxical conception of the event as 'a part
of nature and capable of objective observation' and, at the same time, something that 'does not
belong in the realm of variable or dimensional considerations'. According to Heidegger (1985;
1988), the idea of nature has provided since ancient Greek times a way of representing
everything that has become, potentially at least, ensured, at-hand or extant.

The objectification of nature has provided the canvas, so to speak, for the transformation of
the world into a picture, the background for the representation of the existing in terms of
objective relations and causes, i.e., the realm of variable or dimensional considerations. In this
sense, if the event were a part of nature it would inevitably have extension, would become a
matter of variational laws and dimensions, and would be subject to the logic of measurement or
the objectness required by objective observation.

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 But, for the purpose of this discussion, what is important is the comprehension of this
particular difficulty in Allport's theory as revealing that, perhaps, we are actually dealing with a
kind of phenomenon (viz., organization) whose understanding requires a departure from
traditional ways of representing. This also implies that some paradoxes or puzzles might have to
be faced. Thus, for example: '"Bodies" or "things," as such, disappear in event-structure theory;
we think, instead, with kinematic concepts that are abstract and geometric, but always denotably
testable in principle' (Allport, 1955: 664). It seems that the understanding of the structure
requires us to maintain a discourse within the traditional, objective, observational language but
without the help of traditional referents, i.e., bodies and things. In other words, we are required to
maintain a certain way of looking at nature, whilst trying to shake or remove its very
foundations.

In solving this problem of representation, Allport's theory found some support in theoretical
physics; particularly, in relativity theory. However, the solution implied the introduction of the
problem of the observer's position, and the problem of accounting for a phenomenal experience.
For instance, by discussing the problematic feature of the event as a discontinuity without a
break in any physical continuance, Allport referred to the observation that objects come to near-
points due to the curvature of space-time whilst continuing their trajectories. But the observer,
due to his frame of reference

... will see, at the 'turning point,' no continuity in space, time, or motion, but only a 'near point' of the
bodies, a dichotomy that separates the fact of approach from the fact of recession. Furthermore,
though Einstein's field is a true continuum of points in space-time, in order to have a phenomenally
experienciable event some physical, denotational encounter must occur at some point within it
(Allport, 1955: 624).

Now the possibility arises that the occurrence of the event, and with it the closure of the
structure, is relative to the position of the observer. In organization-theory terms, for example,
before a structural condition is attained, no boundaries can be specified between the organization
and its environment. For we are not dealing with a morphological structure (i.e., a structure of
anatomic units or bodies) where a criterion of membership would a priori define a boundary.
And, since no curving or bending of ongoings can be observed, what we have is a network of
straight lines. Now it is also possible that what looks like a network, from a certain position, is
really a part of a larger structure, but the point of encounter of the ongoings is not visible to the
observer. This would be the case when the study of a particular organizational process led the
researcher outside the assumed boundaries of a firm or governmental agency, for example. In
this case, a larger structure has to be looked for; and what appear as organizational problems —
e.g., slags or bottlenecks— may simply be features of the operation of such a larger structure
rather than the effects of some irrationality in the design or behaviour of the organization. Think,
for instance, of the cases of government agencies or state-owned enterprises subject to tight
control by a political party. In such cases, there is no single, easy way of defining the starting and
ending points of activities, or of attributing responsibilities for the success or failure to any
entity.

This situation would then call for a 'relativisation' of any organization theory. That is, an
organization theory would be a particular account of the structure relative to the position of an
observer. And, though Allport forcefully criticized the traditional socio-psychological

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assumption of group pressures and frames, it would be necessary to account for a certain frame
of reference. In addition, in order to avoid the Einsteinian assumption of a fixed field, which in
our case would be equivalent to assuming a fixed socio-historical field, it would be necessary to
relativize the very possibility of providing denotational encounters. In fact, as Heidegger (1985:
4) has pointed out:

Relativity theory is a theory of relativities, a theory of the conditions of access and modes of
conception, which are to be arranged so that in this access to nature, in a specific mode of space-time
measurement, the invariance of the laws of motion is preserved. Its aim is not relativism but just the
opposite. Its real aim is to find the in-itself of nature by way of the detour through the problem of
gravitation, concentrated as a problem of matter.

And, in this sense, the problem would become again one of accounting for the unavoidable
arbitrariness of the closure. This implies that we have returned to the starting point of our inquiry
into the structural character of social organization; and that, perhaps, it is necessary to attempt an
event-structuring analysis of the theory of event-structuring itself. That is, the search for the
event's place in nature, and the possibility of objective observation, become part of the problem
to be understood rather than its solution. For the proverbial Martian, able to produce the true
empirical record and to sanction the objectivity of our observations, is simply not available. As
we shall see in the next chapter, the solution offered by organization theory is simply to adopt a
notion of agency, or an explanation of the origins of the order, which amounts to taking for
granted the existence of a certain entity or adopting an absolute observer's position.

Reconsidering the concept of event

It seems that we are bound continually to resort to a certain notion of the origin of structures.
However, it might be argued that the search for a certain origin is not only unnecessary but also
misleading. And Allport was aware of this when he remarked that:

Mores, customs, and other social norms, are as a rule unwritten, yet they are followed. They are
sometimes considered by sociologists to go back to 'time immemorial,' and to be 'vestiges' persisting
by social inertia or lag. If our present view is correct, however, this is far from true. Instead, they
should be thought to arise spontaneously; and their origin is not ancient, in everything but a few
formal details, continually present and immediate (1962: 19).

A common procedure of searching for origins in the explanation of social organization has been
based upon the paradigm of evolution. The problem has thus consisted in specifying a
mechanism of selection. But it has proved to be a hard and often unrewarding task. According to
Skinner (1988a: 20): 'A possible explanation is that the effect of selection is somewhat delayed.
We see the product but not the process; hence, we are likely to attribute the product to a current
product of the selective contingencies rather than to the contingencies themselves'. In this case,
Skinner is proposing his own hypothesis, that emitted behaviour is a function of its
consequences, as a mechanism of selection: selection by consequences. Let us recall his
argument:

(i) Natural selection replaces a very special creator and is still challenged because it does so. (ii)
Operant conditioning provides a similarly controversial account of the ('voluntary') behavior

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 traditionally attributed to a creative mind. (iii) The evolution of a social environment replaces the
supposed origin of a culture as a social contract or of social practices as commandments (p. 15).

In spite of the evolutionary overtones of his argument, Skinner brings to light a way of
rethinking the problem of social organization. The resulting organized form or product is not a
matter of a certain determination by an assumed origin. Rather, the explanation should be looked
for into the contingencies of reinforcement which maintain a given behaviour. And this may also
imply that the assumed origin is less a cause than a structurally equivalent situation to that
currently observed. What they have in common is a set of contingencies, whatever the forms in
which they are expressed (norms, rules, customs), and the evolution would rather be the history
of the production and re-production of such contingencies. Now the problem of how the structure
comes about can be stated as one of specifying the contingencies which ensure the repetition of a
certain pattern or topography, by biasing the probability of its occurrence. Incidentally, let us
remember that Skinner's (1966) concept of operants (by contrast to respondents, or responses
elicited by an identifiable stimulus) is based upon the notion of event, and similar implications to
those found in Allport's theory are drawn. Thus,

An operant is an identifiable part of behavior of which it may be said... that no correlated stimulus can
be detected upon occasions when it is observed to occur. It is studied as an event appearing
spontaneously with a given frequency... appeal must be made to frequency of occurrence in order to
establish the notion of strength (p. 21).

At a qualitative level the definition of an operant depends upon the repetition of a sample of behavior
with greater or lesser uniformity (p. 37).

It might be argued, however, that such a solution does not bring us close to the event. In fact, as
Skinner recognized, we see the product rather than 'the contingencies themselves'. In addition,
the definition of the contingency is itself contingency-shaped. Skinner's own scientific enterprise
is a good illustration of this point. Thus the famous Skinner box, as a technique for the creation
of contingencies by changing the conditions of behaviour and reinforcement, constitutes an
instance of a general process of event-structuring in which not only the behaviours of the rat or
the pigeon are controlled, but also those of the researcher, the equipment, in order to ensure the
repeatability of the whole procedure, to produce a reliable structure. As Bateson (1972: 305) put
it:

We must now ask about the larger context of such sequences. How are such sequences generated?
The question is explosive. The simple stylized experimental sequence of interaction in the laboratory
is generated by and partly determines a network of contingencies which goes out in a hundred
directions leading out of the laboratory into the processes by which psychological research is
designed, the interactions between psychologists, the economics of research money, etc., etc.

Thus, far from solving the problem of gaining some acquaintance with the event, the introduction
of Skinner's hypothesis has added another problem. For now the event, understood as a
contingency which 'causes' the structure, has become something of which we can only see the
effects, and whose action is 'somewhat delayed', as Skinner said. In addition to this temporal
dimension should be added the difficulty of accounting for contingencies in a certain spatial
sense, which, as Bateson's point suggests, has an explosive character, leading to potentially
labyrinthine and reverberating sequences of interactions. In a sense, the application of Skinner's

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hypothesis to the analysis of social organization, and to his own kind of work, reveals the
difficulty or the arbitrariness of tracing the origin, centring the structure, or reducing the play of
structure to a presence, as Derrida (1978) would have said.

It could be shown that all the names related to fundamentals, to principles, or to the center have
always designated an invariable presence —eidos, arche, telos, energeia, ousia (essence, existence,
substance, subject), aletheia, transcendentality, consciousness, God, man, and so forth (Derrida, 1978:
280).

It may be helpful to recall Derrida's (1978: 280) formulation of the problem of accounting for the
structure in general terms, and his proposition for looking for 'a way out' of it.

... it was necessary to begin thinking that there was no center, that the center could not be thought in
the form of a present-being, that the center had no natural site, that it was not a fixed locus but a
function, a sort of nonlocus in which an infinite number of sign-substitutions came into play. This
was the moment when language invaded the universal problematic, the moment when, in the absence
of a center or origin, everything became discourse... (1978: 280).

The event cannot be taken as something present. For, according to Derrida (1973),

If such a presence were implied (quite classically) in the general concept of cause, we would therefore
have to talk about an effect without cause, something that would very quickly lead to no longer
talking about effects. I have tried to indicate a way out of the closure imposed by this system, namely,
by means of the 'trace' (p. 141).

The trace is not a presence but is rather a simulacrum of a presence that dislocates, displaces, and
refers beyond itself. The trace has, properly speaking, no place, for effacement belongs to the very
structure of the trace... In addition, ... effacement establishes the trace in a change of place and makes
it disappear in its appearing, makes it issue forth from itself in its very position (p. 156; emphasis
added).

Thus, instead of looking for a presence, the understanding of the structure requires us to conceive
of the event as the simulacrum of a presence, as something whose appearance is permanently
disguised in the form of disappearance, i.e., as displacement itself. The question is how can we
find a way of dealing with simulacra, since all our methods require a certain presence to start
with. A possible answer has been suggested by Foucault (1989a: 172-3), in commenting on
Deleuze's philosophical work: 'To consider a pure event, it must first be given a metaphysical
basis... Physics concerns causes, but events, which arise as its effects, no longer belong to it...
They form, among themselves, another kind of succession whose links derive from a quasi-
physics of incorporeals —in short, from metaphysics'.

It seems that what has been lacking is a general concept of the event. The logic of the
calculus of probability leaves untouched the problem of defining the event, by focusing on a
graspable outcome in absolute terms: presence or non-presence. A more complex logic is needed
since, as Foucault remarked: 'An event is not a state of things, something that could serve as a
referent for a proposition (the fact of death is a state of things in relation to which an assertion
can be true or false; dying is pure event that can never verify anything)' (p. 173). This sense of
movement and displacement beyond physical recognition implied by the concept of event has

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been expressed by Lyotard (in an interview published by Van Riejen & Veerman, 1988: 300) as
follows: 'the event... never stops retreating, because it is never there'.

It should be recognized —the appeal of this way of understanding the concept of event
notwithstanding— that here we are not searching for a metaphysics of the event. This is due not
only to the intrinsic difficulties of such a task, which is beyond the scope of the objectives of this
work (and indeed of our present abilities) but also to its potentially misleading character. The
search for the pure event, the departure from the philosophy of representation towards a
'philosophy of the phantasm', '...leads to thought in an absolute sense' (Foucault, 1988a: 178).
This would lead us far from our current concerns, from the more local problem of how certain
features of the world-picture appear and endure. Rather than attempting a departure towards
another world, what we need here is a way of understanding this very world, this 'vast
construction site of traces and residues' which, as Vattimo (1991: 161) has said: 'is neither the
"iron cage" of total administration and regulation, nor is it Deleuze's glorification of simulacra'.
According to Baudrillard (1990: 149):

In Deleuze's pure, nomadic chance, in his 'ideal game,' there is only disjunction and dispersed
causality. But only a conceptual error allows one to dissociate the game from its rules in order to
radicalize its utopian form. And the same intemperance, or the same facility, allows one to dissociate
chance from what defines it —an objective calculus of series and probabilities— in order to turn it
into the theme song for an ideal indeterminacy, an ideal desire composed of the endless occurrence of
countless series...
To generalize chance, in the form of an 'ideal game,' without simultaneously generalizing the game's
rules, is akin to the fantasy of radicalizing desire by ridding it of every law and every lack. The
objective idealism of the 'ideal game,' and the subjective idealism of desire.

Our problem is not to look for an opposite to a conception of this world as the complete
realization of traditional metaphysics, in the form of a dissolution of Being in a pure relativism
or radical metaphysics. Thus, whilst the search for the event's place in nature faced us with the
difficulties of representational thinking in trying to accommodate the elusiveness of the event
within an observational language, the search for the pure event would lead us towards an ideal
world where traditional metaphysical categories would become inverted, so to speak, e.g.,
instead of presence, simulacrum; instead of beings, mimes.

In any case, what contemporary philosophy seems to be facing is the weakening of

metaphysical categories faced with historical experience: 'This meaning of Being, which is given
to us only through its link to mortality and to the handling down of linguistic messages from one
generation to another, is the opposite of the metaphysical conception of Being as stability, force,
energheia. It is instead a weak Being, in decline, which discloses itself through a weakening and
fading...' (Vattimo, 1991: 121). The difficulty, in the case of the structure of social organizational
phenomena for example, seems to be in thinking of an incomplete whole but a whole after all.

Both event-structuring theory and the system theory of organization are parts of the problem
of understanding the structural character of social organization, not its solution. There is no need
(or even possibility, some might say) of assuming a fixed criterion of truth against which these
theories should be assessed, as Allport seems to imply when criticizing traditional sociological or
psychological explanations as being 'far from true'. For instance, the system theory of

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organization does not make a mistake in its starting from the assumption of a bounded entity nor
is it wrong in leaving the boundary condition unexplained. Rather, the referent from which a
predicate could be elaborated, or to which the origin or the closure can be attributed, is simply
lacking. Skinner's contingencies in themselves, like Derrida's traces, illustrate this problematic
'something' whose effects are invoked, but which in itself is a no-thing belonging to a no-place.
Hence, the familiar procedure consists in attributing the origin and the centre to some kind of
human agent, whether in the form of an individual or a group born from a social contract, and
thus the structure becomes an assembly of individuals instead of a kinematics of ongoings and
events.

It is this very procedure of attribution that demands understanding as a part of a general

process of event-structuring that we call social organization. This, however, is not an easy task.
As Skinner wrote, in the case of psychology: 'A proper theory must... abolish the conception of
the individual as a doer, as an originator of action. This is a difficult task. The simple fact is that
psychologists have never made a thoroughgoing renunciation of the inner man' (quoted by Zurif,
1985: 176). The attribution of the origin of the structure to the action of some kind of human
agent (as in the famous: 'men make history') endowed with particular abilities and goals might be
regarded as a way of 'stopping the discussion', as Rorty (1979) would have said. Let us now try
to keep the discussion going and look for a way of understanding the event within the context of
the procedure of positing the structure as an object.

The event as appropriation

By assuming that the event is a part of nature, event-structuring theory would become unable to
account for the structuring of the bounded entity of traditional organization theory. For, by
following Allport's own hypothesis of the J-curve of conforming behaviour, the existence of such
an object can be anything but a natural phenomenon. The 'behaviour' of representing
organization by taking for granted the existence of a clearly delimited object is a consequence of
the constraints imposed by the repetition of a way of objectifying entities rather than a matter of
individual differences or mere chance. Thus, it makes little sense to denounce such an
assumption as mistaken, false or erroneous. In any case, the structure's occurrence might be
thought of as a 'recurrence'. The repetition or cyclicality does not even require the introduction of
chance as an explanation. For recurrent, stereotyped behaviours, and rituals in general, represent,
precisely, the attempt to abolish chance (Baudrillard, 1990).

This section illustrates a possible way of expanding the idea of event-structuring by

conceiving of the event, according to Heidegger (1972: 19), as an event of appropriation: not
simply as an occurrence, but as 'that which makes any occurrence possible'. The concept of
appropriation (or the appropriation of the event) brings to light the possibility of understanding
the event and the problem of its ungraspability. The occurrence or presence of the structure can
thus be viewed as an instance of appropriation, and even expropriation, through which the event
itself vanishes. It may be worth starting by recalling Heidegger's idea of enframing as the
essence of modern technology. The assumption of the real as something graspable, orderable,
storable, calculable material is, according to Heidegger, a product of the way of representing
through which technology becomes an enduring presence and the world becomes a picture: the
work of enframing.

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 This work is therefore neither only a human activity nor a mere means within such an activity. The
merely instrumental, merely anthropological definition of technology is therefore in principle
untenable. And it cannot be rounded out by being referred back to some metaphysical or religious
explanation that undergirds it (Heidegger, 1977: 21).

Enframing becomes, in this sense, a way in which the real reveals itself. As revealing, it may
then provide us with a glance at the event, at the moment of appropriation or 'entrapping-with-
oblivion'. As Heidegger suggested: 'Enframing is, though veiled, still glance, and no blind
destiny in the sense of a completely ordained fate' (1977: 47). In order to illustrate this point, let
us remember how in some of Magritte's paintings the concealment of the landscape by means of
the frame and the canvass becomes, at the same time, a way of revealing what is presumably
concealed. In the case of the representation of organizations as bounded objects, the work of
enframing is bound to reveal what it presumably conceals: on-going processes. This kind of
paradox is what a naturalistic approach would purge from sight, as Magritte's paintings clearly
show. A possibility of uncovering the order of enframing can thus be found by means of an
inquiry into this way of representing characteristic of the modern world.

A distinctive character of enframing is the attempt to represent every thing and event in
spatial terms. This attempt can be appreciated in Heidegger's (1985: 234) reference to Leibniz's
definition of space: 'Space is the order of being present together, the order of being on hand for
those things which are simultaneous'. According to Heidegger, Leibniz's conception reveals how
space is constituted by time, by the present time of simultaneity. The basis for the constitution of
space is then a procedure of 'putting-together-at-hand' which produces the simultaneous presence
of things, and which Heidegger defined as enpresenting: 'Everything that is encountered in the
enpresenting is understood as a presencing entity —that is, it is understood upon presence...'
(1988: 307). The prefix 'en-' gives the sense of making present; in the same way as, in the OED's
example, 'enslave' means to bring into the condition of 'slave'. Thus, both the availability or
handiness of the present and the temporality of the existing come about as a projection of
enpresenting. This implies that the very familiar concept of time requires certain reconsideration,
as Heidegger noticed:

Time familiar to us as the succession in the sequence of nows is what we mean when measuring and
calculating time... But time cannot be found anywhere in the watch that indicates time, neither on the
dial nor in the mechanism, nor can it be found in modern technological chronometers (1972: 11).

Even if I were to reduce the now to a millionth of a second, it would still have a breadth, because it
already has it by its very nature and neither gains it by a summation nor loses it by a diminution
(1988: 270).

Where do we get the now from when we say 'now'? Plainly we do not intend an object, an extant
thing; instead, what we call the enpresenting of something, the present, expresses itself in the now...
The 'now when,' 'at-the-time when,' and 'then when' are related essentially to an entity that gives a
date to the datable (1988: 261-2).

The determination of an event (the now) by enpresenting thus brings about the possibility of
presence required by the spatial representation. In order to illustrate the arbitrariness of the
assumed identity between availability and temporality in enpresenting, Heidegger suggests that
we think of a trivial example of the use of language: 'we might read somewhere the notice: "The

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celebration took place in the presence of many guests." The sentence could be formulated just as
well: "with many guests being present" ... But the present understood in terms of the now is not
at all identical with the present in the sense in which guests are present. We never say and we
cannot say: "The celebration took place in the now of many guests."' (1972: 10). This reminds us
that, for example, the enpresenting of an origin which becomes the occasion for taking for
granted the presence of a structure, requires a certain imposition. Let us remember, again, that
this does not imply that a certain human agent is responsible for the imposition: 'Time is not the
product of man, man is not the product of time. There is no production here' (Heidegger, 1972:
16).

The occurrence of the structure, the setting of boundaries, or the presence of the organization,
can all be thought of as instances of enpresenting. Now, according to Heidegger, such arbitrary
impositions also constitute instances of appropriation: 'The gift of the presence is the property of
Appropriating' (1972: 22). Enframing itself is then to be understood as an instance of
appropriation. And, finally, let us propose that the closure imposed by event-structuring can also
be understood as appropriation: the occurrence of the structure would be an occurrence of an
event through which ongoing processes become appropriated. We can introduce the concept of
appropriation by means of an example drawn from Heidegger's analysis of science as ongoing
activity, and its institutional appropriation:

By this is to be understood first of all the phenomenon that a science today, whether physical or
humanistic, attains to the respect due a science only when it has become capable of being
institutionalized. However, research is not ongoing activity because its work is accomplished in
institutions, but rather institutions are necessary because science, intrinsically as research, has the
character of ongoing activity. The methodology through which individual object-spheres are
conquered does not simply amass results... Within the complex of machinery that is necessary to
physics in order to carry out the smashing of the atom lies hidden the whole of physics up to now.
Correspondingly, in historiographical research, funds of source materials become usable for
explanation only if those sources are themselves guaranteed on the basis of historiographical
explanation. In the course of these processes, the methodology of the science becomes circumscribed
by means of its results. More and more the methodology adapts itself to the possibilities of procedure
opened up through itself. This having-to-adapt-itself to its own results as the ways and means of an
advancing methodology is the essence of research's character as ongoing activity. And it is that
character that is the intrinsic basis for the necessity of the institutional nature of research (Heidegger,
1977: 124).

What Heidegger calls here 'necessity' may be understood as the end-result of the enpresenting of
respectable science as an institutionalized enterprise. As an instance of appropriation of an
ongoing activity, the institutionalization becomes another case of imposition of an identity
between extantness and temporality: science 'is' what the institution presents rather than an
ongoing activity. Thus, the analysis of this structure of modern science as appropriation would
reveal a certain tension between the ongoing and the institutional character of research, which is
solved in this having-to-adapt-itself that reveals how research becomes appropriated. The term
tension is not used here to refer to the notion of a tension, or a dialectic, between the formal and
the informal, or the planned and the emergent, in organization theory. For the latter sense
presupposes the existence of the object-organization which is affected by these tensions, and
such a presupposition is precisely what is under analysis here. But let us follow Heidegger's
analysis:

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 The university is real as an orderly establishment that, in a form still unique because it is
administratively self-contained, makes possible and visible the striving apart of the science into the
particularization and peculiar unity that belong to ongoing activity. Because the forces intrinsic to the
essence of modern science come immediately and unequivocally to effective working in ongoing
activity, therefore, also, it is only the spontaneous ongoing activities of research that can sketch out
and establish the internal unity with other like activities that is commensurate with themselves (p.
125-6).

There is not only a tension here, but also a certain irreducibility of the structure of ongoing
research activities to the boundaries of the university (a structure of bodies, or anatomical units).
Moreover, the essence of modern science (its way of enduring) is given, for Heidegger, by such a
structure of ongoings rather than by the university per se. In general, as we have seen, the
university, the firm, and the governmental agency, for example, as objects (or reifications) show
a limited usefulness as sources of predicates, when an analysis in terms of activities is required.
That is, the activities which are going on inside such objects —e.g., research activities,
production or commercial activities, governmental activities— cannot be understood without
relating them to what is going on outside them.

This is not to conclude that these objects (the enpresented structures) are less real than the
structures of ongoing activities. For the very possibility of discussing the theory of organization
based upon such objects as referents implies the recognition of their existence. As appropriation,
the organization occupies a place in the current world-picture; but a place, as we have seen,
subject to a permanent challenge to its very existence as a differentiated object by the
appropriated ongoings. A distinctive feature of the enpresented structure would be its instability
and lack of completion as a whole. However, another important character of the appropriation is
its peculiar uniqueness and persistence. These seemingly contradictory features of the
enpresented structure can be illustrated by means of an analysis of the ornament/monument
character of the work of art, and of the fact that art can no longer be defined in 'grandiose or
emphatic terms', offered by Vattimo (1991: 85) in his study of Heidegger's interpretation of art.
According to Habermas' (1992) critique of Heidegger's philosophy, its assuming of an aesthetic
view of the world, inherited from Nietzsche, led it to an empty critique of reason (including a
connection with fascism).

A discussion of these themes would lead us too far from our concern here. In Vattimo's
(1991) work a discussion of the philosophical problems of this question can be found. Let us
simply add that Habermas' own theory of communicative action, based upon the 'consensual
agreement' of individuals, and his claim that the problem of the modern world is a 'lack' (rather
than excess) of Enlightenment, represents another instance of the procedure of taking for granted
what is to be explained (in this case, the existence of a social order); apart from the fact that an
unqualified hope for the benefits of Enlightenment would be pure wishful thinking if not simply
a naiveté.

The peculiarly persistent character of the enpresented structure as appropriation might be

understood as a consequence of the fact that, like the work of art, it 'is realized not through a
harmonization and perfect matching of inside and outside, idea and appearance, but rather
through the persistence of the conflict between "world" and "earth" within the work' (Vattimo,

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1991: 80). Let us introduce a brief note here on the meaning of this distinction between world
and earth, drawn from Vattimo's (1991: 71) work.

While the world is the system of meanings which are read as they unfold in the work, the earth is that
element of the work which comes forth as ever concealing itself anew, like a sort of nucleus that is
never used up by interpretations and never exhausted by meanings. Like Zeigen, the earth too sends
us back to mortality. Erde is in fact a relatively uncommon word in Heidegger's work. It first appears
in the 1936 essay on 'The Origin of the Work of Art', and later figures as one of the 'four' of the 'four
fold' —earth and sky, mortals and divinities... Poetry can be defined as that language in which a
world (of unfolded meanings) opens up, and in which our terrestrial essence as mortals reverberates.

This conflict between world and earth reflects the weakening of metaphysical objects (the clearly
delimited, strongly placed elements of the world-picture, the thematizable) when faced with the
vagaries, the opening of the 'vast region of life and death' identified as the earth or the non-
thematizable. This conflict illustrates the tension between the enpresented structure and the
network of ongoing activities, in which the grandiosity of the former is constantly challenged by
the openness of the latter and through which the enpresented-structure's character, as that of the
work of art, becomes one of background, memory, ornament/monument. This conflict is also
another way of referring to the play of appropriation and expropriation through which the
traditional concept of truth, as evidence, correspondence and objective stability, becomes a weak
truth, but a truth nevertheless. The occurrence of the event of appropriation, as the occurrence of
truth in the work of art 'is an occurrence in a form which neither reveals nor conceals a kernel of
truth, but in superimposing itself onto other ornaments constitutes the ontological thickness of
the truth-event' (Vattimo, 1991: 87).

As we have previously noted, an important problem of contemporary philosophy seems to be

how to articulate a conception of a weak Being, neither the strong Being of traditional
metaphysics nor the simulacrum of Being of a radical metaphysics. In social science thinking
this problem would appear as the weakening of traditional ways of representing social
organizational phenomena: from strong solutions consisting of bounded objects constructed by
following a logic of distance and measurement to weak solutions illustrated in terms of the
concepts of socio-technical networks and event-structures which follow a logic of displacement
and transformation. In this sense, the opposite of the assumption of a complete, strong object
would not be another complete or absolute absence, but an incomplete and weakening presence.
The question is how this peculiar character of weakness and persistence is achieved. Perhaps the
answer to such a question in the case of the work of art may shed some light on our problem of
the persistence of the enpresented structure as appropriation. As Vattimo explains:

Even if the occurrence of truth in the work happens in the form of marginality and decoration, it is
still true that for it 'that which remains is established by the poets'... The techniques of art, for
example, and perhaps above all else poetic versification, can be seen as stratagems —which
themselves are, not coincidentally, minutely institutionalized and monumentalized— that transform
the work of art into a residue and into a monument capable of enduring because from the outset it is
produced in the form of that which is dead. It is capable of enduring not because of its force, in other
words, but because of its weakness (p. 86).

This means that we should look for certain techniques, stratagems, and ongoing activities
through which the appropriation takes place and endures in a way similar to that of monuments,

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as a memory. Thus, for instance, the peculiar character of the object of organization theory (the
firm, the university, the government agency) should be sought in the techniques and stratagems
which give the character of monument to the appropriation of ongoings, and through which its
occurrence becomes a graspable presence in a world that has become a picture.

This seemingly paradoxical result of a strength which derives from a weakness may perhaps
be better illustrated by means of Baudrillard's (1990: 83) analysis of seduction: 'To seduce is to
appear weak. To seduce is to render weak. We seduce with our weakness, never with strong
signs or powers. In seduction we enact this weakness, and this is what gives seduction its
strength'. In this sense, we might think of enframing and enpresenting (as instances of
appropriation) as seduction. Thus, the strength or the weakness would not be features of the
represented object, but of the way of re-presenting it, i.e., its power of seduction. For instance,
there is nothing stronger, or seductive, than the appeals to support or avoid the dissolution of a
weak object in the form of Hobbes' doctrine or myth of the intrinsic weakness of Leviathan
(intestine discord) due to the ignorance and passions of men (a transposition in fact of the
Christian myth, as we have seen in Chapter 1). Modern social theory will positively express
Hobbes' call in the form of attaining the required system's capability of boundary-maintenance in
order to avoid its death.

The probabilistic character of the occurrence of the structure in event-structuring theory

might now be thought of as indicating less a problem of calculus through which a feature of
nature can be established than as suggesting the peculiar character of weakness and persistence
of the structure as appropriation. For its non-deterministic character would reveal that the
existence of the organization, or any other similar object, is not a matter of necessity, that its
truth is a weak truth. As Dewey (1958: xii) had already suggested: 'when nature is viewed as
consisting of events rather than substances, it is characterized by histories... Owing to the
presence of uncertain and precarious factors in these histories, attainment of ends, of goods, is
unstable and evanescent'.

The existence of the organization can be interpreted in terms of a play between boundedness
and boundlessness, rather than as a stable state or a definitive solution. This does not mean the
death of the organization as a metaphysical concept. After all, our experiences are but the use of
a language made up of metaphysical categories and rationalizations.

The necessity for thinking to use models is related to language. The language of thinking can only
start from common speech. And speech is fundamentally historico-metaphysical. An interpretation is
already built into it. Viewed from this perspective, thinking has only the possibility of searching for
models in order to dispense with them eventually, thus making the transition to the speculative
(Heidegger, 1972: 50).

By conceiving of the object-organization as a weak or impoverished being a possibility arises of

accounting for its earthly or terrestrial existence which is inevitably one of decaying,
deterioration, and 'convalescence', as Vattimo would have said. The study of organizing
processes, whatever the pragmatic or utilitarian ends which can be pursued through it, reveals
itself also as a field for the (philosophical) inquiry into the modern way of representing the real.

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 Finally, neither networks nor structures can be assumed as the true or characteristic features
of social or historical reality. For social reality, whatever the referents included under such a
term, cannot be assumed as a certain definitive (nor even definite) state achieved in a once-and-
for-all way. In any case, such a state is a matter of provisional and tentative construction. It is
rather a for-a-while state.

To speak of organizations, groups, and collectivities is but a rhetorical way of accounting for
a situation, a process. For the condition of closure, the setting of the boundaries of assumed
systems or structures as a feature of an 'out-there-reality', is a matter of discursive elaboration. In
the next chapter a discussion of organization theory as itself a case of event-structuring suggests
the way in which the work of enpresenting organizations as clearly delimited entities provides
them with an enduring presence, by showing some of the biasing and bounding conditions which
ensure the occurrence of a structure called organization theory. This requires us to look at the
practices through which the objectification of the organization becomes founded in 'nature and
reason', as Douglas (1987) would have said.

CHAPTER 9. THE STRUCTURING OF ORGANIZATION THEORY

This chapter illustrates a way of interpreting the representation of organizations as bounded

entities in terms of the (modified) hypothesis of event-structuring studied in the last chapter. The
bounded entity which constitutes the object of organization theory can thus be conceived as an
enpresented structure: an instance of appropriation through which a (socio-technical) network of
ongoing activities becomes appropriated and re-presented in the form of an assembly of
individuals with boundaries defined in terms of membership.

A particular feature of such a process of appropriation and representation is referred to here

as the event-structuring of organization theory as an academic discipline: the disciplined
elaboration of a discourse in which 'organization' is represented as a dynamics of certain objects
called 'organizations'. The following statement is illustrative of this kind of discourse:
'Organizations in a structured field... respond to an environment that consists of other
organizations responding to their environment, which consists of organizations responding to an
environment of organizations' responses' (DiMaggio & Powell, 1983: 149). Now our problem is
not only to reveal the taken-for-granted character of such objects, but to study the structuring of
this field of objects in order to reveal the taken-for-grantedness itself.

The study of this case of event-structuring requires us to recognize the specific strategies
used in the construction of the object-organization. Let us begin by suggesting a possible
connection between the analysis of event-structures and the analysis of institutions offered by
Mary Douglas (1987). This can help us to introduce the analytical rationale of the hypothesis of
event-structuring as appropriating, and to bridge the gap between the general terms in which
such a hypothesis was discussed in the last chapter and the more specific terms required for the
analysis proposed in this chapter. Thus, for instance, we can now link our discussion of Weber's
concept of appropriation presented in the second chapter with Heidegger's idea of enframing as
an instance of appropriation studied in the last chapter. It can be argued that institutionalization

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constitutes a way of concealing the character of appropriation of institutions, under the cover of
legitimating principles or foundations, rather than of revealing such a character.

However, the analysis of institutionalization as a process can reveal the work of

appropriation by showing how institutions acquire their particular strength or persistence, i.e., by
revealing institutionalization as itself an instance of enframing. This possibility is suggested by
Mary Douglas (1987: 46) in commenting on the way she uses the concept of institution: 'What is
excluded from the idea of institution in these pages is any purely instrumental or provisional
practical arrangement that is recognized as such. Here, it is assumed that most established
institutions, if challenged, are able to rest their claims to legitimacy on their fit with the nature of
the universe'. Thus, the key to understanding the strategy supporting the appropriation is,
precisely, the way in which the institution responds to the challenges: by resorting to an
undiscussable foundation, whether God, nature or reason.

The way in which the institution responds to challenges gives a clue to understanding how
the institutional structuring operates. For example, we have discussed in the first part of the
thesis the procedure of representing organizing as systematizing. Now, from the perspective of
the analysis of institutionalization, the objectification of the organization as a system can be seen
in a different light. Douglas' analysis of the strengthening of institutions reveals the strategy of
representation through which enpresented structures endure by disguising the event of their own
constitution (the event of appropriation). Thus,

Before it can perform its entropy-reducing work, the incipient institution needs some stabilizing
principle to stop its premature demise. That stabilizing principle is the naturalization of social
classifications. There needs to be an analogy by which the formal structure of a crucial set of social
relations is found in the physical world, or in the supernatural world, or in eternity, anywhere, so long
as it is not seen as a socially contrived arrangement. When the analogy is applied back and forth from
one set of social relations to another and from these back to nature, its recurring formal structure
becomes easily recognized and endowed with self-validating truth (Douglas, 1987: 48).

... the effort to build strength for fragile social institutions by grounding them in nature is defeated as
soon as it is recognized as such. That is why founding analogies have to be hidden and why the hold
of the thought style upon the thought world has to be secret. But let us be disabused of the idea that
these analogies are based on haphazard resemblances. Their formal mathematical properties are the
basis for the rich variety of constructions put on them... By using formal analogies that entrench an
abstract structure of social conventions in an abstract structure imposed upon nature, institutions grow
past the initial difficulties of collective action (p. 52).

The procedure of strengthening fragile institutions (e.g., the enpresenting of the organization as a
system) may thus be thought of as a way in which the structuring event as appropriation
disappears from sight, and the institution becomes secure in its objectness. The question now is:
what do these founding analogies consist of; how are they able to effect the institution's
objectness.

From a cognitive perspective, a way of understanding the work of the founding analogies can
be found in a recent argument on the difference between 'metaphors' and 'similes' as ways of
attributing features to persons or things (Glucksberg & Keysar, 1990). For example, the
statements 'my job is a jail' and 'my job is like a jail' (or 'man is a wolf' and 'man is like a wolf')

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do not simply differ as ways of expressing a similarity, with greater or lesser force. The latter
case (a simile-like expression) amounts to suggesting a list of features shared by jobs and jails,
whilst the metaphor communicates in a more precise and efficient way the attribution of features.
This is due to the particular character of metaphors as class-inclusion assertions. The topic (my
job) is assigned to a diagnostic category (a jail): 'The grouping that is created by the metaphor
induces the similarity relation, and so the grouping is prior' (Glucksberg and Keysar, 1990: 16).

The metaphor would then produce an effect of displacement through which the grouping
takes precedence over the similarity and so supports, for example, the definition of an institution
as a legitimized grouping: a family, a firm, etc. A similar recognition seems to be present in
Douglas' recognition of the need for a cognitive device for the establishment of institutions: 'The
cognitive device grounds the institution at once in nature and in reason by discovering that the
institution's formal structure corresponds to formal structures in non-human realms' (Douglas,
1987: 55). However, Douglas recognizes as well that the founding of institutions cannot be
reduced to a cognitive problem. Thus,

When several things are recognized as members of the same class, what constitute their sameness? It
certainly seems circular to claim that similarity explains how things get classed together. It is naive to
treat the quality of sameness, which characterizes members of a class, as if it were a quality inherent
in things or as a power of recognition inherent in the mind (p. 58).

To recognize a class of things is to polarize and exclude. It involves drawing boundaries, a very
different activity from grading... The one activity can never of itself lead toward the other... (p. 60).

The whole approach to individual cognition can only benefit from recognizing the individual person's
involvement with institution-building from the very start of the cognitive enterprise. Even the simple
acts of classifying and remembering are institutionalized (p. 67).

As we have seen in the last chapter, in discussing the difficulties of accounting for the
boundaries of the traditional object of organization theory, the behaviour of representing the
organization as a bounded entity could not be explained naturalistically as a matter of individual
differences or mere chance. It was necessary to begin thinking that certain constraints might be
biasing the probability of repetition of such a stereotyped collective behaviour, or structure.
Now, a similar recognition seems to be at the basis of Douglas' argument that the work of the
founding analogies cannot be accounted for in cognitive terms only.

A possible connection between Douglas' account of the establishing of an institution and the
occurrence of a structure in Allport's terms can now be shown. Douglas' explanation of
institution-building can be understood in terms of the occurrence and maintenance of a structure
through the accumulation of a certain density of events: 'Our social interaction consists very
much in telling one another what right thinking is and passing blame onto wrong thinking. This
is indeed how we build institutions, squeezing each other's ideas into a common shape so that we
can prove rightness by sheer numbers of independent assent' (Douglas, 1987: 91).

The quantitative aspect in which the structure is seen to operate, and gives a convincing proof
of its existence, can be expressed in the case of institutions as the numbers of independent assent
which reveals the occurrence of rightness. But, as Allport would have said, an institution cannot

148
be understood as emerging or persisting in a vacuum. It is necessary to show the existence of
both processes of structuring and interstructuring through tangencies. In Douglas' terms: 'a theory
that is going to gain a permanent place in the public repertoire of what is known will need to
interlock with the procedures that guarantee other kinds of theories' (p. 76). Douglas called this
idea the 'principle of coherence', and elaborated the following implications:

The principle of coherence is not satisfied by purely cognitive and technological fit. It must also be
founded on accepted analogies with nature. This means that it needs to be compatible with the
prevailing political values, which are themselves naturalized (p. 90).

A thinker who classifies the phenomena to be examined according to known and visible institutions
saves himself the trouble of justifying the classification. It is already the normal conceptual scheme
for those who live in and think through similar institutions (p. 94).

And then,

To analyze our own collective representations, we should relate what is shared in our mental
furnishing to our common experience of authority and work (p. 98).

Thus the task of analysing the constitution of the object of organization theory as a case of event-
structuring can now be understood as one of analysing the processes through which this theory
becomes an institution. We should begin by looking at those common experiences of authority
and work related to the representation of organizations as delimited entities, so that the
appropriation of ongoing activities becomes disguised or hidden under a theory that is coherent
with a way of living, with the maintenance of a regime of practices.

This chapter begins with a recollection of some historical examples of those common
experiences of work and authority related to the constitution of organizations as bounded
entities: organizing as appropriating. This provides a background for the analysis of metaphors
or founding analogies in the second section, as an attempt to analyse the cultural matrix of the
discourse of organization theory. The task of elaborating an ordered, and we hope clear,
summary of the socio-historico-cultural context of this discourse has benefited from the use of
Douglas' (1979) classificatory scheme of 'cultural bias' in relation to Bendix's (1974) analysis of
'managerial ideologies'.

This presentation has the purpose of illustrating the complex of theories and strategies of
representation with which the theory of bounded organizations must be coherent in order to
become an enduring institution on its own. The third section presents then a perspective of the
structuring of organization theory as a discipline within the context of a more general movement,
or regime of practices, referred to as the professionalization of management and managerial
education. The objective here is, finally, to provide a view of the practice of squeezing, the
division of thinking into right and wrong that produces the required density of events (numbers
of independent assent) for such a structure as organization theory to occur and be seen to operate.

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Organization as appropriation
This section does not attempt to provide a history of the firm, or an account of the origin and
evolution of capitalist institutions, but a brief recollection of some historical examples of a
particular feature of capitalism: the organization of economic and social life through the
appropriation of ongoing (socio-technical) networks of productive and commercial activities. In
a sense, a history of the firm or the corporation would run the risk of starting by taking for
granted its coming into being as an event of appropriation, which is precisely what we are
concerned with here.

In other words, the objective is to illustrate the practices (or the experiences of work and
authority) related to the modern picture of organization through economic, technological and
institutional transformations that shape not only this particular way of representing and
constructing the real but also our remembering and/or 'dis-remembering' of its coming-to-pass.
To focus on capitalism does not mean that it constitutes a delimited sphere of phenomena or that
it provides a privileged perspective, but only that previous theory and research on such a subject
provides a way of illustrating our general point and concentrating the discussion. Finally, when
we refer to organization theory, or the representation of organization, we are not reducing the
discussion to a theory of the firm. In general, partial theories of bounded organizational
phenomena (e.g., firms, government bureaus, or any other entities) can be understood as
particular cases of a possible general theory of bounded organizations as appropriations of socio-
technical networks.

The search in historical experience for the context of the institutionalization of the boundary-
based concept of organization should not be confused with a search for origins. Thus, for
instance, whilst different historians locate the origins of capitalism in different periods and others
suggest that any origin can always be traced back to the most remote antiquity, we are more
concerned here with a certain continuity which has existed in the different forms of
institutionalization of ownership over different forms of profit-making activities throughout
history. For example, it is a remarkable fact that, in spite of important technological and
institutional changes, certain words, rhetorical figures and legal instruments have survived
through time and circumstances by playing a similar role, irrespective of their particular,
concrete contents. Such is the case of patents, for instance, designed to protect the rights and
privileges of the merchant from ancient times, which serve as well to protect the profits derived
from the commercialization of technological innovations in the contemporary business world.

By reducing the analysis of the source of profits to one crucial element, this story might be
didactically told as the development of institutional forms of appropriation according to the
changing role of time in profit-generation. Thus, for instance, there was a time when maritime,
long-distance trade was the main concern of capitalists, and the source of the largest profits lay
in the long periods of travel, due to the lack of communication and, consequently, the changing
prices of commodities and margins of benefit. As Braudel (1982: 405) explained: 'Long-distance
trade certainly made super-profits: it was based on the price differences between two markets
very far apart, with supply and demand in complete ignorance of each other and brought into
contact only by the activities of the middleman'.

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 In the industrial world time itself is also a crucial element in capitalist organization, as
Bennington's (1988: 170) reference to Lyotard's critique of Marx's theory of labour-time
suggests: 'The time involved is not essentially labour time, insofar as time spent after production
simply waiting for exchange also raise costs. This "lost time" is what has to be recuperated in the
exchange. When this rule of recuperating lost time is extended across other genres, then the
acceleration and saturation of time characteristic of capitalist organization results'. Finally, in the
contemporary scene of capitalist organization, the achievement of the largest profits depends on
the time of protection (warranted secrecy) over technological innovations. According to Dosi and
Soete (1988: 414):

The basic assumption of modern technology-gap trade accounts is that technology is not a freely,
instantaneously and universally available good, but that there are substantial advantages in being
first... A similar point is made in Freeman's case study of the plastic industry: 'Technical progress
results in leadership in production in this industry, because patents and commercial secrecy together
can give the innovator a head start of as much as 10-15 years'.

The possibility of attaining control over such a kind of time-related uncertainty is currently
regarded as the needed stimulus to capitalist development. In this section some examples drawn
from this historical experience will then help us to illustrate the idea of organizing as
appropriating: from the appropriation of the networks of commerce to the appropriation of both
industrial networks and networks of innovation.

The appropriation of the networks of trade in Braudel's view of capitalism

Capitalism, in Braudel's (1982) view, is less a phase in a certain evolution of economic practices
than an enduring feature of the world since ancient times; hence his threefold representation of
social life: material life, market economy, and capitalism. Braudel illustrates these 'levels' of
activity with the case of grain: consumed on the spot, it lay at the level of material life; marketed
in a regular way over short distances, or being the object of an occasionally speculative trade
between provinces, it entered into the market economy; and, finally, transformed into a highly
speculative commodity, due to famine crises and its transport over long distances, it moved to
the world of big business, to the level of capitalism.

This way of conceiving of economic activities might be traced back, at least, to Aristotle's
distinctions of different ways of acquiring goods in Politics (1987): the 'natural' productive
labour and the exchange, and the 'unnatural' trade or money-making 'as men become more
experienced at discovering where and how the greatest profits might be made out of the
exchanges' (p. 83). The unnaturalness of money-making represented the violation of the
teleology attributed to nature by Aristotle: 'courage, for example, is to produce confidence, not
goods; nor yet is it the job of military leadership and medicine to produce goods, but victory and
health. But these people turn all skills into skills of acquiring goods, as though that were the end
and everything had to serve that end' (p. 85). According to Aristotle, the principle of money-
making was shown by Thales' ingenious way of demonstrating that he was also able to make
money, though it was not his business: 'the way to make money is to get, if you can, a monopoly
for yourself. Hence we find states also employing this method when they are short of money:
they secure themselves a monopoly' (p. 95).

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 This does not mean that capitalism has not changed. Recorded history shows an increase in
the number of areas in which capitalism has progressively entered into and taken control of. But
only those areas which favour the reproduction of capital, as was the case of long-distance
trading for a long period, could offer a privileged site to capitalism's penetration. Thus, for
instance: 'Capitalism did not invade the production sector until the industrial revolution, when
machines had so transformed the conditions of production that industry had become a profit-
making sector. Capitalism would then be profoundly modified and above all extended' (Braudel,
1982: 372).

Perhaps one of the most persistent features of capitalism's organizing action has been the
institutionalization of firms and monopolies as means of ensuring the control or channelling (i.e.,
appropriation) of current, ongoing networks of activities. Since very early the existence of firms
has been, according to Braudel, 'at the very heart of capitalism':

There had been trading firms in ancient Rome... And commercial lawyers in the eighteenth century
resorted to the precedents, vocabulary and sometimes even the spirit of Roman law, without doing too
much violence to reality (p. 434).

[The company or 'compagnia' in thirteenth-century Siena] was a family firm —father, sons, brothers
and other relatives— and as its name indicates (cum= with, panis= bread) it was a close association in
which everything was shared —bread and risks, capital and labour. Later such a firm would be known
as a joint liability enterprise, since all partners were jointly liable in theory ad infinitum, that is not
only to the value of their holding but to the value of all their worldly goods. When we learn that the
compagnia was soon admitting foreign partners (who contributed both capital and labour) and money
from depositors (which, if one remembers the Florentine example, could run to ten times as much as
the firm's own capital) we can understand how such firms were potent capitalist instruments (p. 436).

The development of the different forms of firms described in commercial law soon appeared as
ways of overcoming the limitations of the family firm, and drawing money for investment from
increasingly extended and varied sources. For example, the first case of the 'limited partnership
firm' was located in Florence in the sixteenth century, allowing the realization of operations
similar to contemporary holdings. And in 1553-5 was recorded the first English 'joint stock
company', though earlier examples could be found by relaxing the strictures of legal historians
(Braudel, 1982: 439). But, in general, firms remained of small size and retained a family
atmosphere. The great change came around the seventeenth century with the intervention of the
state ('the most colossal of modern enterprises' in Braudel's terms; p. 443) and the creation of big
companies, such as the East India Companies for example, devoted to monopolizing long-
distance trade: 'The monopolies established by the big companies have... three characteristics:
they were expression of high-intensity capitalist endeavour; they would have been unthinkable
without the privilege granted by the state; and they appropriated for themselves whole sectors of
overseas trade' (p. 443).

However, earlier examples can be found. For example, according to Braudel, in the
fourteenth century the Venetian state devised institutional instruments in which such
characteristics (long-distance trade, state privileges and capital enterprise) were present in order
to face a recession. But what is interesting for us here is the fact that, as models for the
appropriation of networks of commerce, these institutional solutions became enduring features of

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the world up to the present time. That is, they constitute, from a world-historical perspective,
exemplary cases of persisting institutions. According to Norbert Elias (1982), the distinctive
feature of the modern state is its monopolization of force and taxation. And this fact indicates
that both the development of the modern state and that of modern capitalist institutions should be
understood in terms of mutual or reciprocal conditioning. Thus,

The development of money and exchange, together with the social formations carrying them, stands
in a permanent reciprocal relationship to the form and development of monopoly power within a
particular area. These two series of developments, constantly intertwining, drive each other upwards.
The form and development of power monopolies are influenced on all sides by the differentiation of
society, the advance of money use and the formation of classes earning and possessing money. On the
other hand, the success of the division of labour itself, the securing of routes and markets over large
areas, the standardization of coinage and the whole monetary system, the protection of peaceful
production from physical violence and an abundance of other measures of coordination and regulation
are highly dependent on the formation of large centralized monopoly institutions (Elias, 1982: 163).

These are not the only long-lived features of capitalist institutional ways of organizing as
appropriating. What has become known as the problem of organization, in the sense of industrial
relations and human resource management, began very early too:

From the very beginning, certainly earlier than is usually supposed [the first big printing strike
occurred in Lyons in 1539], Labour must surely have felt itself to be fundamentally different from
Capital. The precocious example of the textile industry, with its putting-out system and its abnormal
concentrations of workers, was obvious territory for these early and repeated outbursts of class
consciousness (Braudel, 1982: 499).

And wherever there was a certain concentration of workers, the work of organization became
one of defining and enforcing certain boundaries and compartments, as the story of the textile
industry in Leyden, Holland, in the seventeenth century shows:

So we must bow to the evidence: the working-class proletariat of Leyden was divided into functional
categories —the fuller was not the spinner or the weaver. It was partly governed by guilds lacking
any real solidity, partly organized as 'free' labour (a misnomer, as it was in fact closely supervised and
controlled)... But the dominant factor of textile organization in Leyden was undoubtedly the
implacable force of the means of coercion employed: surveillance, repression, imprisonment and even
execution were a constant menace. The regents of the town unrelentingly supported the privileged
class. And the manufacturers were united in a kind of cartel covering the whole of Holland and even
the whole of the United Provinces. They met every two years in a general 'synod' to eliminate any
damaging competition, to fix prices and wages, and on occasion to decide what action was to be taken
against workers' protests whether actual or potential... Any workers' organization officially devoted to
defending the interests of the labour force was prohibited (pp. 501-2).

There is perhaps no need to stress this widely recognized story. Let us only single out, for the
purpose of the following discussion, the fact that the setting and enforcing of organizational
boundaries has been a privilege of the owners to be imposed over the workers, though the latter
did not wait for Marx to show their understanding of the situation. The procedure of
appropriation and re-presentation of networks in the form of institutions produces, today as in the
past, unstable, subject-to-challenge outcomes, whose persistence reveals the work of actors
recruited from different realms such as the economic, political, technical, legal, social, devoted to
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producing ways of securing the objectness of the representation. Braudel's notion of capitalism
suggests a broad framework for analysing the capitalist way of organizing as appropriating, and
its endless process of shaping and re-shaping institutional forms. But let us now look at other
examples of such forms.

The appropriation of industrial networks

The word 'revolution' has been used to denote almost any social change, so that it is difficult to
specify the features of a change so denoted, or what kind of motion is suggested by this word.
Perhaps the difficulty lies in the fact that the original meaning —a circular movement— has been
eclipsed by that of a sudden discontinuity, the end of a world and the beginning of a new one
(Cohen, 1985). The case of the industrial revolution illustrates the difficulty of both describing
the motion and locating the discontinuity. An extensive literature covers a wide range of
opinions: from a clearly dated discontinuity to a simple cumulative model. An interesting
alternative image of the industrial revolution in which a circular motion becomes transformed
into a whirl or a maelstrom is provided by Perkin (1986: 141), in his history of modern English
society:

Instead of a comparatively static model of a new industrial system showering blessings

indiscriminately or in unchanging proportions —more at the top, less at the bottom— on an otherwise
stationary social pyramid, we should adopt a dynamic model of a new industrial system growing like
a vortex within the old, and gradually pulling into its orbit of production and demand circle after
circle of producers and consumers. Higher and more centrally placed circles, like the entrepreneur
and the factory workers themselves, and, perhaps surprisingly, the landowners and larger farmers,
were drawn in from the start, to enjoy higher incomes and spend an increasing proportion of them on
the new consumer goods. Lower and peripheral circles, like the farm labourers, were the last to be
affected, though even here there were gradations... In between, there were not only circles, like the
urban labourers or the miners, who were drawn in at varying times and speeds, but others, the
handloom weavers and the framework knitters, who early on were drawn into comfort and even, by
contemporary standards, luxury, only to be thrust out again by the inexorable whirl of technological
change.

It can be suggested that a kind of circular motion describing a placid orbit would correspond to
the beginnings of industrialization, when industry was not yet considered profitable enough for
capitalist intervention. Perhaps it was after the capitalist development of industry when the
representation of industrialization lost its orbital character and became a 'revolution' in the
modern sense of a radical transformation. And it was only when capitalism was able to discern,
develop and appropriate a network, a way of connecting industrial activities to the world of
maximal profits and workable institutions, that it came to the fore.

The beginnings of industrialization can be regarded as 'the work of amateurs or artisans of

slender means' (Bergier, 1980: 412). Early entrepreneurs introduced simple and relatively
inexpensive equipment to run their businesses: a small, home-made plant with a reduced labour
force. Such beginnings correspond to the extension of urban-rural networks of production and
consumption of textiles in a fundamentally agricultural world. In fact, as Bairoch (1980: 497)
explains:

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 ... a much greater amount of capital was needed to put a man to work in agriculture than in industry...
the sale of an average farm employing one labourer would produce enough capital to employ eight
workers in industry. This very value of industrial capital is to be explained... by the low level of
technical development at that time... This also means that the sale of a single-labourer farm with a
below-average income would produce enough capital to make possible a start in industry.

In this sense, the beginnings of industrialization cannot be neatly separated from the last phases
of the simple manufacture production system in which, as Braudel (1982: 265) has shown,
merchant capitalism was able to penetrate (and connect) both agriculture and the modest textile
industry 'by controlling the bottleneck of distribution'. Capitalism thus created and supported the
networks between both urban and rural worlds and progressively undermined from within the
medieval guild system by introducing the putting-out system, i.e., a merchant 'puts out' work by
providing the artisan who worked at home with raw materials, receiving the finished or semi-
finished product, paying the bill and running the whole operation. Let us briefly recall this story
as Braudel (1982) himself puts it:

The money was certainly there at any rate, showing that it could be accumulated, and that once
accumulated it could play its role. The unequal struggle had begun: some guilds were to become rich;
others, the majority, remained poor... The Arti maggiori [the Italian name for guilds organizing the
biggest textile industries] progressively fell into the hands of the wealthy merchants, as the Arti
system became no more than a way of controlling the labour market. The organization it concealed
was the system known to historians as the Verlagssystem or putting-out system. A new age had
dawned (p. 316).

These putting-out networks are the first hard evidence of a merchant capitalism which was to
dominate though not to transform craft production. What interested these merchants was undoubtedly
marketing. Thus conceived, the Verlagssystem might concern itself with any branch of production as
soon as a merchant could see any benefit to himself in controlling it (p. 321).

The new system was the beginning of enormous changes in the whole capitalist mode of
production.

It has become apparent that organizational systems could progress linearly, but that the pattern was
complicated and there existed other paths to development. The putting-out system, for example,
survived for far longer than is usually appreciated even within the most advanced industrial activities.
The system not only contributed significantly to the growth of the industrial economy, but also, in
organizational terms, proved to be a vital part of the industrial complex (Goodman & Honeyman,
1988: 208).

But it cannot be said that such was the 'intention' of merchant capitalists who were not concerned
with production methods or techniques. A sudden transformation could not be expected. And in
fact, by studying the beginnings of industrialization from a technical perspective, the emergent
image is one of continuity rather than of a sudden change or a technological break with the past.
As Lilley (1980) has pointed out: 'The early stages of the Industrial Revolution —roughly up to
1800— were based very largely on using medieval techniques and on extending these to their
limits' (p. 190). 'This is not a story of sophisticated inventions breaking through some critical
technological barrier, and so creating the conditions for expansion' (p. 195). This is not to
underestimate the role of technical change in industrialization, which so dramatically shaped

155
productive activities. Later history shows that the development of machines, power engines,
railways, produced an effect on productivity which was 'beyond the wildest dreams of the
inventors and innovators' (Lilley, 1980: 223), and which explains why inventions have been
regarded as 'the cause' of the industrial revolution.

A crucial role was also played by overseas commerce and colonial trade. Capitalism was
only mildly interested in industry, until the development of trade networks and the taking-over of
the existing Asian commercial networks gave an impetus to large-scale accumulation, and the
possibility of developing a financial system. It has been a rule that capitalists do not risk their
own money in any enterprise. It was then necessary to develop a financial system, a network of
institutions and techniques, devised to lead increasing flows of capital to industrial enterprises
from 'an ill-informed or uninformed public' (Gille, 1980: 265).

These developments would have been unthinkable without the intervention of another actor:
the state. In fact, a crucial role played by the state was to provide the bases for the expansion of
capitalist activities. And this role was not reduced to providing an institutional framework or
stability for the peaceful development of commercial activities. As Supple (1980: 316) notes in
describing the British case of state intervention: 'Perhaps the most striking indication of this is
the powerful role which the state played in the creation and defence of the Empire, in the
extension of an international trading network of which Britain was the centre, and in the
regulation of commercial and imperial relations so as to benefit the domestic economy and
British businessmen'.

An indication of the important role of the state and long-distance trade in industrialization
can be appreciated in the fact that shipbuilding, armaments, printing, and navigation were the
sectors to which technical innovation was primarily devoted (Goodman and Honeyman, 1988).
But another aspect of this complex of relationships and influences is particularly interesting for
us here: the development of a military industry and military principles of organization.
According to Goodman and Honeyman, the influence of the nineteenth-century trend towards
military concerns in European countries not only influenced technical development but also the
development of organizational and managerial techniques. The adoption of the military's design
emphasis on uniformity and order in non-military fields introduced the organizational changes
associated with modern rational management, by displacing artisanal practices in favour of large-
scale, standardized methods. Hence the persistence of military metaphors —span of control, task
units, strategy— in the language of management and organization is hardly surprising.

As we can see, the process through which the industrial world has been constructed is a
multifaceted one, with ruptures and continuities intermingling throughout. But a central problem
remains, today as in the past: how to interlock heterogeneous activities from local contexts to the
large- or world-scale contexts where the largest profits can be obtained. By using Braudel's
categories, this problem may be stated as one of discerning or developing links from material life
to the highest positions of command (those kept by capitalism) passing through the market
economy. In solving this problem, technical developments and social arrangements become
instituted, adjusted, sanctioned and, finally, taken for granted.

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 According to Goodman and Honeyman (1988: 208): 'even if there were an Industrial
Revolution, it emerged from an already highly successful capitalist system and took place
without any fundamental transformation of property ownership'. And it cannot be said that
capitalism attained its definitive state in the industrial world. As Braudel (1982: 381) noticed:
'When in the nineteenth century, capitalism moved so spectacularly into the new world of
industry, it did of course give the impression of specializing, and historians in general have
tended to regard industry as the final flowering which gave capitalism its "true" identity. But can
we be so sure?'

As we have previously seen, something like a principle of conservation seems to operate in

the processes of structuring and destructuring, according to which structures do not absolutely
disappear, nor can they be created out of nothing, but are rather transformed. However, particular
transformations are made to appear as creations out of nothing by powerful or omniscient
entities. Such constructions as the myths and cosmologies of ancient civilizations, legal
arrangements or rules, modern sociological or economic theories, are places in which, due to
dramatic violations of this principle of conservation, something or someone appears as a creator
and therefore the owner of its creations. These kinds of construction, as the following section
will show, are at the centre of the problem of capitalism at the present time.

The appropriation of innovation networks

It has been argued that the separation of the technical and the social should be overcome in order
to understand organizational phenomena. Now it may be added that, in accounting for historical
processes, an understanding of this separation as a crafted frame is crucial. Technology can be
conceived of as a separate realm from that of social relations only to the extent that an
appropriation is undertaken and that a work of enframing has produced a definite picture of such
a phenomenon. For example, an important feature of the contemporary world-picture is the fact
that technological innovation has become itself a commodity.

This is not surprising. The idea of invention as good in itself, as something that can be reasonably
undertaken even when the need is doubtful —this idea is one that could only arise in a world that has
passed through an industrial revolution and discovered (as in the case of television) that new
techniques, in sufficiently affluent societies, create their own demands (Lilley, 1980: 213).

The problem consists in isolating 'innovation' and devising the theory adequate to this fact in
order to account for the production of innovations and the ways of ensuring their appropriation.
This is not an easy task, as the following statement suggests:

In an essential sense, innovation concerns the search for, and the discovery, experimentation,
development, imitation, and adoption of new products, new production processes and new
organizational set-ups. Almost by definition, what is searched for cannot be known with any precision
before the activity itself of search and experimentation, so that the technical (and, even more so,
commercial) outcomes of innovative efforts can hardly be known ex ante. Certainly, whenever
innovative activities are undertaken by profit-motivated agents, they must involve also some sort of
perception of yet unexploited, technical and economic, opportunities. However, such perceptions and
beliefs rarely entail any detailed knowledge of what the possible events, states-of-the-world, input
combinations, product characteristics will be (Dosi, 1988: 222).

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But let us free ourselves from the idea that innovation is only a matter of particular individual
abilities and motivations. It should not be surprising that an attempt to account for innovation or
the behaviour of innovators in abstract terms must adopt certain metaphysical overtones, such as
the search for a certain a priori knowledge. Let us look at a formulation of the problem of
innovation which can be used to qualify Dosi's statement, by recalling Braudel's (1982) comment
on the merchant capitalist which can be applied to the present time without doing too much
violence to reality. Thus,

Even if there is a grain of truth in Schumpeter's theory of the spirit of enterprise, empirical
observation nine times out of ten shows that the innovator was borne along on a rising tide (p. 382).

Our capitalist, we should not forget, stood at certain level in social life and usually had before him the
decisions, advice and wisdom of his peers. He judged things through this screen. His effectiveness
depended not only on his innate qualities but also on the position in which he found himself, whether
at the intersection or on the margins of the vital currents of trade... Nor should we believe that the
profit maximization so frequently denounced entirely explains the behaviour of capitalist merchants...
They were undoubtedly in business to make money. But to jump to the conclusion that the advent of
modern capitalism is explained by a spirit of lucre, economy or rationality or by a taste for calculated
risks is another matter (p. 402).

In fact, Schumpeter's (1934; originally published in 1912) appealing image of economic

development as a break of the circular flow of normal economic dynamics, due to the innovating
action of profit-motivated and creative entrepreneurs, has contributed to framing the problem of
innovation in terms of a psychology of innovative behaviour rather than in terms of the more
general movements in which individuals, ideas, and motives coincide to form (socio-technical)
networks which enhance as well as constrain individual possibilities. Certainly, we should not
reduce the economists' attempts to analyse the basic character of innovations to a kind of
metaphysical disquisition. For the problem of accounting for innovations is rather one of
devising a framework for the design of institutional forms for the appropriation of the benefits of
innovations, and the analysis of the economic effects of such arrangements in terms of
development and competitive advantages of national economies.

In this sense, the language of individual behaviours, learning and dispositions, motives and
expectations, might also be interpreted as a rhetorical device related to the traditional, and even
legal, way of attributing ownership and assigning responsibilities to persons, whether individual
or collective, which is the same kind of strategy of representation we have been discussing
throughout this thesis. But let us focus on the organizational phenomena associated with
innovation processes and their appropriation. That is, our problem is how to discern the networks
through which innovations and their consequences impinge on levels of profits and how such
networks become transformed (institutionalized) into structures or parts of structures.

A way of understanding the present outlook of organizational phenomena requires us to pay

attention to the effects of developments in information technology on production and
commercialization activities. The theme of the changes prompted by developments in
information technology is now a commonplace in social science, business literature and public
opinion in general. Let us simply recall some features of these phenomena insofar as they
contribute to our discussion.

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 First, it should be recognized that we are dealing here not only with information in the sense
of a measurement of communication or a unit of decision in self-controlled mechanisms but with
information in the wider sense of representation (Cooper, 1992). Now it is possible, for example,
not simply to maintain the operation of machines within certain parameters, but even more to
obtain a detailed display of the components of the operation produced by the machine in the very
process. This enables the user not only to visualize previously unanalysed principles of the
operation, but also to attain a greater degree of control and to introduce changes in specific
routines or the whole process. These advances have had enormous economic consequences. The
development in the 1980s of computer applications such as CAD/CAM, robotics, flexible
manufacturing systems and artificial intelligence, added greater flexibility to production systems,
allowing the possibility of switching from one product to another without major cost increases
and of achieving a higher degree of product-variety. The organizational consequences of these
developments have been expressed by Willinger and Zuscovitch (1988) in the following terms:

... in the new economic system which is gradually emerging, the firm plays the role of coordination of
inputs and outputs properties through network management (p. 246).

In IIPS, in order to secure viability, firms have to create new relations with the outside skill network
in order to produce new and adapted solutions for evolving needs. This means that firms have to
develop organizational flexibility, i.e. the capacity to generate and organize new relations within their
environment and especially with the skill network (p. 250).

At first sight it would seem that we are facing a kind of Kuhnian situation of paradigm shift in
organization theory, due to the need to devise a conception of organization which allows
different solutions to the problem of the traditional rigid separation of organization and
environment. But it can also be argued that the need for flexibility and the ability to coordinate
networks is anything but new, and that current solutions, far from being a departure from
tradition, do not differ in practice from the logic of appropriation and the devising of institutional
forms in order to ensure control of the ongoing innovation processes and their commercial
consequences. That is, the separation of organization and environment, far from being
challenged, remains enforced.

A simple continuity cannot, however, be assumed. The contemporary emphasis on the cost
and uncertainty of research and development (R & D) projects reveals an important change: now
we have to deal with the problems of organizing (i.e., appropriating) skill networks, not only
commercial and production networks. This change has currently been interpreted as a
displacement of the key resource: from labour to knowledge. And the discussion of
organizational boundaries also reveals this change. The threats to profits are now derived from
the possibility of copy, imitation, or any other form of loss of control over innovations. The
problem now is how appropriate institutions can be devised in order to protect a stream of profits
and to control the possibilities of collaboration: 'Incumbent firms can thus be expected to display
permeable boundaries when technological regimes shift, unless of course incumbents have been
responsible for the shifts. However, if the know-how in question is not protected by intellectual
property law, then the collaboration at issue is likely to be more in the form of imitation rather
than in licensing' (Teece, 1988: 266).

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 A developed theory for the analysis of these situations of boundary fuzziness is, however,
still lacking. As Teece (1988: 268) notes: 'The literature linking the rate and direction of
technological change and the boundaries of the firm is still in its infancy'. His own analysis
follows the rationale of the transaction cost economics approach, and concludes that the problem
consists in one of devising mechanisms in order to control opportunism. The point remains that
boundaries are needed in order to protect the capture of larger profits, as an incentive to capitalist
development, though when needed they must be crossed or subsumed into wider boundaries.
That is, the solution of the problems of appropriation would consist in devising the rationale and
mechanisms for more extensive appropriation. Teece's (1988: 274) explanation runs as follow:

When property rights are difficult to establish and where imitation, either through 'inventing around
the patent' or reverse engineering or other activities is relatively easy (i.e. the appropriability regime
is weak), then the innovator needs to own or otherwise control the relevant cospecialized assets to be
able to impede the imitator's efforts to take the product/service to market on more advantageous terms
than the innovator... Since cospecialized assets in marketing, distribution and manufacturing are often
aligned vertically, vertical integration may be required in order to assist the innovator in capturing the
rent stream generated by the innovation.

Vertical integration is but another name, or analytical category, for the appropriation of
networks, or the extension of control through the interlockings of practices. In a sense, the
contemporary outlook of capitalist firms further illustrates the tendency manifest in the system-
based concept of organization: the entropy-reduction property requires an ability to impose order
throughout the organization's environment. And this means in economic terms a strategy of
vertical, and perhaps also horizontal, integration: control via ownership or any other form of
internalization of suppliers, clients, and even competitors.

A remarkable example of such a tendency has been brought to light by Freeman's (1988)
analysis of the Japanese case. Apart from other oft-referred-to aspects of the Japanese style of
organization (e.g., enforcement of long-term plans or strategies, educational development, long-
term careers, on-the-job training), Japanese success seems to be related to their adoption of a
definite integration strategy. As Freeman (1988: 338) indicates: 'The formation of large
conglomerates and of vertically integrated groups of companies is of course not confined to
Japan. But... they have a specially important role there particularly in relation to technology,
finance for long-term investment and world marketing strategies and networks'.

As we have seen throughout this section, it would be possible to trace the development of
institutional forms along capitalism's changes according to the changing sources of the largest
profits. Thus, to the old problem of appropriating the networks of commerce in large-scale terms,
industrialization added the problem of appropriating production networks in order to feed those
of trade. Now it should be added that the appropriation of techno-science networks is necessary
in order to ensure the possibility of obtaining the largest profits from commerce and production.
In this sense, in pre-, industrial, and post-industrial epochs, a common problem can be identified:
that of developing the means of appropriating existing profitable networks, by drawing
boundaries and devising institutions and justifications for them. The following section presents
an attempt to discern basic features of the discourses of appropriation, and their contingent
character in relation to particular socio-historical situations.

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Cosmologies and ideologies: on the cultural matrix of organization theory
The concept of the organization as a bounded entity shares a basic character with all other
classifications: it represents a certain (logical) order which is coherent with the cosmologies or
world views expressing a particular experience associated with a certain (socio-historical) order.
This way of stating the point for our discussion owes more to Douglas' (1979, 1987)
reformulation than to the original hypothesis advanced by Durkheim and Mauss (1963; originally
published in French in 1901). Let us, however, recall their basic argument:

... it is enough to examine the very idea of classification to understand that man could not have found
its essential elements in himself. A class is a group of things; and things do not present themselves to
observation grouped in such a way... Every classification implies a hierarchical order for which
neither the tangible world nor our mind gives us the model (Durkheim & Mauss, 1963: 7-8).

It is certainly not without cause that concepts and their interrelations have so often been represented
by concentric and eccentric circles, interior and exterior to each other, etc. Might it not be that this
tendency to imagine purely logical groupings in a form contrasting so much with their true nature
originated in the fact that at first they were conceived in the form of social groups occupying,
consequently, definite positions in space? ... Thus logical hierarchy is only another aspect of social
hierarchy, and the unity of knowledge is nothing else than the very unity of the collectivity, extended
to the universe (Durkheim & Mauss, 1963: 83-4).

It is not difficult to find illustrations for this hypothesis. For example, think of pre-Copernican
cosmology in which the universe, according to Koestler (1986: 96), '... was a walled-in universe
like a walled-in medieval town. In the centre lies the earth, dark, heavy, and corrupt, surrounded
by the concentric spheres of the moon, sun, planets, and stars in an ascending order of perfection,
up to the sphere of the primum mobile, and beyond that the Empyrean dwelling of God'.

The idea of the organization as a group of persons (teleologically using materials in pursuing
certain goals) offers an easy way of setting boundaries: who is or who is not a member of the
group. But, historically considered, inside-outside distinctions have also been related, at least in
Western culture, to claims of possession and dispossession, to a play of appropriation and
expropriation, from which changing images and metaphors spill over into cosmologies,
ideologies, literature, and science (Starobinski, 1975). In this sense, the concept of organization
as a bounded entity can be understood as a class of objects which re-present instances of
appropriation: the appropriation of ongoing (socio-technical) networks of activities in the form of
institutionalized or enpresented structures whose boundaries, centres and origins are attributed to
individual decisions or group consensual agreements, and which re-present assemblages of
practices in the form of assemblies of individuals.

This section presents a way of analysing the wider context of ideas and institutions within
which such a strategy of representation becomes meaningful and coherent as part of the
justification of a particular (socio-historical) order. The source of inspiration of this analysis can
be found in analyses done by Mary Douglas (1979) and Reinhard Bendix (1974). The general
dimensions for cultural analysis developed by Douglas seem to provide a wider context for
Bendix's analysis of the ideological framework of the relations between 'work and authority in
industry'. The formation, strengthening, and changes in justifications of authority in organized
settings can be related to wider cosmologies, which enable both the articulation of ideologies and

161
their foundation on well-established analogies. Such organized settings provide, in turn, the
model of those categories and classifications of social reality which has come to be known as
organization theory: the delimitation of behaviours and membership statuses, and the design of
hierarchical arrangements, along with the attribution of special individual capabilities to
individuals at the top of the hierarchies. As Bendix (1974: 1-2) cogently wrote:

Whenever enterprises are set up, a few command and many obey. The few, however, have seldom
been satisfied to command without a higher justification even when they abjured all interest in ideas,
and the many have seldom been docile enough not to provoke such justifications... Such ideas have
been expressed by employers, financiers, public-relations men, personnel specialists, general
managers, engineers, economists, political theorists, psychologists, government officials, policemen,
political agitators, and many, many others. All these men have had in common a direct concern with
the problems of industrial organization, whether or not they have worked in some managerial capacity
themselves.

A typology of biased cosmologies

Let us begin by recalling some basic features of Douglas' (1979) scheme for the analysis of
cultural bias: the grid-group dimensions. According to Douglas, the variety and complexity of
configurations brought about by social interaction can be analyzed in terms of two dimensions:
the extent to which individual behaviours are related to or depend on the individual membership
or belongingness to a collective structure (group, a dimension of inclusion), and the extent to
which the range of possible individual behaviours are prescribed or regulated by such a structure
(grid, a dimension of classification).

A great deal of discussion has been devoted to the precise nature of these dimensions and
their methodological implications (e.g., Douglas, 1982). But we are less interested in the
representational properties of these dimensions, in terms of a logic of measurement, than in
Douglas' enlightening illustration of the biased character of the 'cosmologies' or characteristic
discourses that can be found in different places of this hypothetical cultural cartography which,
according to Douglas (1979), do not represent a necessary or desirable trajectory and in which no
place is intrinsically better than any other. Let us present some examples drawn directly from
Douglas' (1979) characterization of each of the four extreme cases or combinations of grid and
group degrees (the labels attached to each of the four cases are taken from Douglas, 1982).

1. High group/low grid (Factionalism)

Main features:
 Individual behaviour is subject to controls exercised in the name of the group.
 Ambiguous relations between individuals, and difficulties about adjudicating rights which remain
implicit.
 Inadequate instruments for resolving conflicts; only the sanction of withdrawal of the privileges
of membership and resulting expulsion from or fission of the group can be effectively applied.
 Need to control admission and to strengthen boundaries against outsiders in order to avoid group
disintegration.

Cosmology:
 All human beings are divided into insiders and outsiders, the latter hostile and the former
continually disappointing expectations.

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  There is no need of elaborate theorizing or pressure for intellectual coherence.
 Action to solve disputes takes the form of unmasking wolves in sheep's clothing and expelling
spies from the ranks of the faithful. Nature is divided as is society itself into lambs and wolves,
along with other favourite metaphors of vulnerable 'us' and predatory 'them'.
 Ambiguity and openness are the prevailing conditions of social life, but the individual still has to
be defined as the unit of social intercourse, and since nothing else defines him, the model of the
village, fenced around, copied and recopied from larger to smaller contexts is an easy one on
which to establish a generalized individualism.
 Low grid ethic of individual equality is daily affronted by gross inequality generated in the heat
of competition. Low grid cosmology cannot understand how such inequalities come about; it
questions the statistical evidence.

2. High group/high grid (Ascribed hierarchy)

Main features:
 Organized internally into separate graded compartments, specialization of roles, and unequal
distribution of resources.
 Different solutions to conflicts: upgrading, shifting sideways, downgrading, re-segregating, re-
defining.
 The group can devolve, federate, become tributary to another, etc.
 It can make levies on its individual members to ensure capital investments to endow its posterity.

Cosmology
 Intellectual effort to elaborate a transcendental metaphysics which seeks to make an explicit
match between civilization and the purposes of God and nature. Synecdoche in metaphors of
society and nature shows their isomorphic structure and expounds their reciprocal support.
 Experience of organizing and reorganizing social relations and affirming them by means of ritual
dispensations and consecrations encourages a theory of an active ritual process for maintaining
proper harmony between nature and culture.
 Theories of natural law flourish, along with a full once-and-for-all historical incarnation theology.
 'Spare the rod and spoil the child' and 'Cruel to be kind' are maxims which can be heard.
 Attempts to justify inequalities would be part of the cosmologizing intellectual effort.

3. Low group/high grid (Atomized subordination)

Main features
 Minimal sphere of individual autonomy. In the extreme case, the individual has no scope for
personal transactions.
 The individual's behaviour is ordained by the classifications of the social system, fully defined
and without ambiguity.
 There are no rewards other than those for fulfilling the allotted station.
 The power which maintains the constraining insulations is remote and impersonal.

Cosmology
 People cannot be expected to show theoretical elaborations of the concept of nature in the
cosmos.
 The intelligibility of an individual's experience is very slight.
 Limited reflexiveness, in the sense of making explicit verbally the principles underlying object
and person relationships.

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  The cosmology is likely to be a 'things of shreds and patches' picked up eclectically from other
sectors. The most adaptive response will be a great passivity since there are no rewards and no
escapes.
 A continual social experience of punishment implies that there is no special theoretical problem
about training the young, any more than with anything else.
 The compartmentalism will be passively used and reproduced without special meanings accruing.

4. Low group/low grid (Individualism)

Main Features
 Strongly competitive conditions, control over other people, and individual autonomy.
 All the existing classifications are only provisional negotiable boundaries.
 Relations between individuals will be ambiguous, obligations implicit.
 Pressures for rules governing transactions to enforce the honouring of contract or to make
restrictive agreements.
 The big rewards go to the innovating individual who can spring a surprise on competitors.
 Any possibility of controlling the market depends on having allies who will enforce something
equivalent to company law or engage together in restrictive practices.
 No one can expect anyone else to support him if he fails to deliver or sets the wrong price on his
own services; the failures produce the casualties of the system.

Cosmology
 Society is an unremitting source of worry as well as of rich prizes.
 Corruption, self-seeking and aggression will tend to be seen as the characteristic features of
human social life; in contrast nature is idealized as good and simple. But a wishful sense of
alienation from nature never wins against the excitement and rewards of competition.
 Because of the continual selectivity, high levels of performance are demanded (in craftsmanship,
style and syllogistic argument).
 The theory of education does justice to the concepts of natural goodness and the evils of
civilization, that is, self-expressing and self-teaching. However, inhibitions prevent this doctrine
from being espoused wholeheartedly. For in the low grid environment there is much to teach
which cannot be imparted to little ones without contriving hidden controls and disciplines that
contradict the overt theory of education.
 The processes of screening out and selection push a mass of people up-grid where they are
insulated, have no autonomy or scope for individual transactions. This is just one more dilemma
of distributive justice, among many dilemmas in low grid. Rather than dismantle the institutions
which protect and promote the competition between individuals, a typical low grid solution to the
moral dilemma is to subscribe to a theory of unequally distributed native ability. And so the
pressures to exclude are justified.

Douglas (1979) has stressed that the application of these dimensions requires us to pay
careful attention to both the selection of adequate units of analysis (for example: 'A unit such as
"England" or "the Catholic Church" would not qualify as "group"'; p. 15), and the kind of
assumptions that can reasonably be made. Thus, for instance, the hypothesis of biasing 'is not
intended to imply that a causal relation exists between cosmology as effect and social context as
a cause. In any social context, it may be assumed that the chains of cause and effect between the
structures of social interaction and cosmological and cultural systems which are supporting them
are indefinitely interwoven and interdependent' (p. 53).

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 In what follows we are less interested in establishing correlations between both kinds of
variables than in the possibility of illustrating the biased character of certain specific
cosmologies expressing the relations between work and authority in industry, or ideologies of
management as Bendix called them: 'ideologies of management can be explained only in part as
rationalizations of self-interest; they also result from the legacy of institutions which is "adopted"
by each generation much as a child "adopts" the grammar of his native language' (1974: 444). It
should be noticed that, for this illustrative purpose, we shall not be concerned with the
methodological advice concerning the selection of units of analysis. In fact, we will refer to
grossly defined socio-historical situations, not to specific groups, in which grid-group
characterizations are to be taken as general indications. For example, it might be thought that
Aristotle's (1987) political discourse contains features characteristic of a low-grid cosmology in
dealing with the problem of justifying inequality and authority, by grounding in nature and
reason the differences between us and them, master/slave, male/female. Thus,

... the element that can use its intelligence to look ahead is by nature ruler and by nature master, while
that which has the bodily strength to do the actual work is by nature a slave, one of those who are
ruled. Thus there is a common interest uniting master and slave (p. 57).

For rule of free over slave, male over female, man over boy, are all different, because, while parts of
the soul are present in each case, the distribution is different. Thus the deliberative faculty in the soul
is not present at all in a slave; in a female it is present but ineffective, in a child present but
undeveloped (p. 95).

We are following Douglas' explicit aim which 'is therefore not to describe a causal model of
cosmological values, but to propose a typology which will be reflected in the different structures
of behaviour... The approach which is adopted here describes a structured typology, using the
grid and group dimensions to trace certain patterns of behaviour through the whole system of
social interactions, perceptions, values and justifications' (1979: 54).

A typology of ideologies of management

Bendix (1974) presented an outline of his study of ideologies of management which constitutes a
classificatory scheme: on the one hand, ideologies may be classified according to a historical
dimension (entrepreneurial ideologies or those corresponding to the early phase of
industrialization, and managerial ideologies or those corresponding to the phase of massive
production and big industrial enterprises); on the other hand, a sociological criterion
distinguishes two kinds of situation whether entrepreneurs and managers form an autonomous
class or are subordinate to government control. Significantly, Bendix's case studies (ideologies of
management prevailing in England at the inception of industrialization, in Tsarist and Soviet
Russia, and in the twentieth-century United States) corresponding to each of the four resulting
categories roughly resemble Douglas' typology based on the grid-group dimensions. Thus the
possibility arises of applying the general rationale of Douglas' hypothesis to the specific case of
ideologies of management and their corresponding socio-historical circumstances. Let us then
illustrate this possibility by presenting examples drawn from Bendix's (1974) analysis.

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1. England: Entrepreneurial ideology/autonomy of entrepreneurs and managers (high group/low
grid)
 Early phase of industrialization characterized by a rising entrepreneurial class, which fought for
social recognition and political power at the same time that it developed its enterprises, and
recruited and disciplined an industrial work force (p. 7).
 'Factory legislation' stipulated what employers cannot do and what workers can do. It typically
expressed an effort to balance the strength of the two parties by legislative means (p. 8).
 The traditional subordination of the 'lower classes' had always been attributed to forces beyond
human control; now, the worker was held personally responsible for the poverty from which he
suffered. Thus, the disruption of a traditional way of life coincided with the denial that the worker
had a legitimate place in society, for a poverty which resulted from defects of character rather
than from inscrutable forces tended to stigmatize the worker and undermine his self-respect (p.
16).
 ... the employer's authority was justified by oft-repeated references to his success, which was a
sign both of his virtue and of his superior abilities. Those who failed were believed to lack the
requisite qualities, and they were enjoined to obey the men whose success entitled them to
command (p. 258). And as leaders of industry were here likened to the great of the world in all
fields of endeavour, so their employees were assigned in perpetuity to the humble position to
which their modest talents entitled them (p. 259).

2. Russia: Entrepreneurial ideology/subordination of entrepreneurs and managers (high

group/high grid)
 Early phase characterized by the governmental promotion of enterprises and by the dependence
of many, mutually antagonistic groups upon the government in terms of administrative and police
measures which would aid their economic activities as well as the recruitment and disciplining of
the work force (p. 7).
 'External bureaucratization' stipulated the rights and duties of employers and workers not only by
prohibiting certain actions but also by ordering what should be done. And in addition the
government superimposed on the authority relationships between employers and workers
incentives and controls of its own (p. 8).
 If the actions of all men, as well as the relations among them, were subject to the Tsar's sovereign
will, then it was consistent for governmental officials to control the actions of employers as well
as of workers, and to do so from 'within' as well as from above (p. 190).

3. Soviet Russia: Managerial ideology/subordination of entrepreneurs and managers (low

group/high grid)
 Success is regarded as a collective accomplishment, in which managers as well as workers have
the right and the duty to participate, but which is attributed primarily to the leadership of the
party. Authority in industry is justified explicitly on the ground that the men who exercise it act
under orders and are responsible for the highest achievements. Only one goal is offered to the
individual as the ground for increasing his exertion: that he performs his work out of loyalty to
the cause. The nation is put on the basis of a continuous, military emergency, wherein the masses
bear the brunt of a nearly unparalleled extinction of privacy and personal freedom, not only in the
formal political sense but also in terms of an absence of material well-being (p. 12).
 Failure to fulfil the plan or the frequent occurrence of bottlenecks in production and distribution
becomes, therefore, the subject of detailed investigations by party and government authorities
whose aim is the detection of 'sabotage.' (p. 373).
 This is, indeed, a classless society in which a common social and economic position does not
enable a group of individuals to organize in order to implement their common interests. It is a
society of one-party rule that seeks to destroy all possibilities of independent group formation.

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 While that rule cannot directly control the interactions within a social group, it seeks to
accomplish that end by separating individuals from the group and by enlisting them within the
party's rank (p. 350).

4. United States: Managerial ideology/autonomy of entrepreneurs and managers (low group/low

grid)
 Authority in industry is justified on the ground that the man who already enjoys the good things
in life has earned them and is entitled to the privileges which they confer. In terms of ideology
little is done to spare the masses their frustrations or to equivocate about the privilege and power
of the few. Yet this rather basic division between the few and the many occurs in societies in
which the masses of the people enjoy a nearly unparalleled extension of personal freedom, not
only in the formal political sense but also in the sense of material well-being (p. 11).
 ... workers in Western Europe and in the United States accept the general idea that they owe a
'fair day's work for a fair day's wage.' True, this maxim does not mean to the worker what it
means to his boss, but it does imply a conception of minimum effort acknowledged as obligatory
by the worker... When managers make their appeals for cooperation, they automatically identify
themselves as persons in authority who formulate and who speak for the interests of the
organization they lead (p. 248-9).
 The man's wage, the employer's profit, the public's welfare due to increased production, and the
harmonious cooperation between capital and labour: all this came to depend in Taylor's view
upon developing the science of each trade and upon the employer's willingness to abide by the
laws which these sciences established (p. 280). 'Cooperation' sounded less harsh than 'absolute
authority' exercised by those who had succeeded in the struggle for survival. To employers,
however, cooperation did not mean 'adoption of scientific methods,' as it had to Taylor. To them
it meant the organization of committees representing the workers of an enterprise —under the
sponsorship and surveillance of the employer (p. 281).
 ... Mayo's view of the managerial task may be defined as the endeavour to provide an
organizational environment in which employees can fulfil their 'eager human desire for
cooperative activity.' The major objective of management is to foster cooperative teamwork
among its employees (p. 317). There are indications that many American managers have adopted
the language of the human-relations approach, whether or not they have adopted its practices or
its ideas (p. 326). And just as there was little tolerance of individualism in the enterprises of old,
so there is probably in the management of economic enterprises today much less group-
mindedness than the publicists would have us believe (p. 334).

Viewed against the background of Douglas' analysis of cultural bias, ideologies of management
can now be fully appreciated as specific aspects of more general cosmologies in which
particular, historical configurations of social life become expressed. Of course, the experiences
of work and authority can be regarded as crucial elements in the definition of any social order.
But, by analysing such experiences within a wider context, it is not necessary to assume the pre-
eminence of one form of experience over another. Moreover, in this sense, it is possible to define
in noncircular terms the meaning of the coherence between the ideologies (or cosmologies) and
the social order expressed by them, as Douglas (1979) would have advised.

Thus, for instance, the endless elaboration and re-elaboration of ideological justifications of
the authority of the few over the many in the capitalist world (in comparison with the
straightforward solution observed in Tsarist or Soviet Russia) can be regarded as a coherent
feature of low-grid situations in dealing with the fact of unequal distribution of resources rather
than as a consequence of the situation of work and authority itself or of the self-interest of

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capitalists. In low-grid cosmologies social life is represented as a kind of struggle in which the
fittest is entitled to enjoy the advantages of being gifted, or simply successful. Ideologies of
management in the capitalist world can be taken as cosmologies biased by a low-grid
configuration of social life. But such a low-grid configuration does not include the workers, in
general, who are assigned a higher-grid form of life, as a consequence of their unsuccessful
performance in the struggle for life.

In this world it cannot be a fortuitous occurrence that there exist elaborate scientific theories
to explain the representation of work, of ongoing activities, in the form of appropriated
structures, bounded entities, or, in short, organizations. That is, the fact that in a low-grid
condition the vast majority is to be subjected to a high level of prescription of individual
behaviour would pose the most intriguing puzzles and problems for scientific and philosophical
speculation. In this sense, Aristotle advanced a good deal of the still prevailing formulations and
discussions of the problem of organizing in technical terms:

... any piece of property can be regarded as a tool enabling a man to live, and his property is an
assemblage of such tools; a slave is a sort of living piece of property; and like any other servant is a
tool in charge of other tools. For suppose that every tool we had could perform its task, either at our
bidding or itself perceiving the need, and if —like the statues made by Daedalus or the tripods of
Hephaestus, of which the poet says that 'self-moved they enter the assembly of the gods'— shuttles in
a loom could fly to and fro and a plucker play a lyre of their own accord, then mastercraftsmen would
have no need of servants nor masters of slaves (1987: 64-5).

The discourse of organization theory can thus be thought of as a particular expression of a more
general cosmology, within which it plays the role of elaborating solutions to the problem of
representing instances of appropriation as classes of objects that form part of the 'natural'
landscape. And Bendix's scheme for the analysis and comparison of ideologies of management
provides us with a way of specifying the contingent character of organization theory in relation
to precise socio-historical circumstances. Thus, the distinctive features of the discourse of
organization theory, its founding analogies, are to be looked for in the problems faced and solved
by those specific low-grid cosmologies described by Bendix; instead of attempting to find a-
temporal natures or essences of human beings or societies which theories would be the
expression of. As Bendix (1974: 9) pointed out: 'In modern industry management has had to
concern itself, ideologically as well as practically, with industrial organization and labour
management as major problems over and above the technical, financial, and marketing aspects of
the enterprise. Managerial ideologies are a response to the problems of co-ordination and
direction in large-scale enterprises'.

In terms of the relations between managers and entrepreneurs and the state, the justification
of authority in capitalism does not require an all-embracing hierarchical ground. In this sense, the
discussion of the wider cosmologic-ideological context of organization theory can be focused on
the characteristics of the managerial discourse in modern Western Europe and, especially, the
United States which constitute the 'cultural matrix' of the contemporary way of representing
organization. Let us now explore the way in which the discourse of organization theory has
become coherent with the assumptions and theories prevalent in this context.

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Event-structuring as disciplining: organization theory as a discipline
Let us begin by correcting a potentially misleading impression that our use of Braudel's idea of
capitalism may have produced. By speaking of capitalism and its deeds, we may have given the
impression of referring to a certain kind of mysterious entity or force. But, in fact, for Braudel
(1982) that pinnacle of the 'pyramid of trade', that 'society within a society', could be easily
identified by analysing the conditions conducive to becoming a capitalist:

One condition towered above all others: a good start in life. Men who rose from rags to riches were as
rare in the past as they are today (p. 382).

But money meant other things besides the ability to invest. It meant social prestige and thus a whole
range of guarantees, privileges, connections, patronages. It meant being able to choose between the
available affairs or opportunities (p. 384).

Another precondition for merchant capitalism was some form of apprenticeship, previous instruction,
and an acquaintance with methods which were far from primitive. Secular education had been
organized in Florence from the fourteenth century (p. 408).

In short, one should not underestimate the competence that had to be acquired: the young merchant
had to be able to establish buying and selling prices, to calculate costs and exchange rates, to convert
weights and measures, to work out simple and compound interests, to be able to cast up a 'simulated
balance sheet' for an operation, and to handle the various instruments of credit (p. 409).

Nihil sub sole novum. It seems that capitalism has not profoundly changed since the early period
analyzed by Braudel: the conditions that produce the capitalist remain essentially intact,
notwithstanding the revolutionary changes in technologies and institutional forms. Perhaps, the
ancient sense of 'revolution' as a circular movement should not be discarded after all. This does
not mean that we are advocating a simple continuity in historical analysis or that we should
content ourselves with a kind of nihilism that sees nothing new under the sun.

On the professionalization of management

A particularly interesting possibility revealed by Braudel's point on the skills to be acquired by
the young merchant is the existence of something similar to our modern business schools since
the times of merchant capitalism. However, it should be recognized that the modern large-scale
effort to organize managerial education is to be found in the fast-developing industrial world of
the United Sates at the end of nineteenth century; and that such an organizing effort would not
only establish the model of managerial education, but also become an endless enterprise of
improving the skills of a new and increasingly important group of professionals: the professional
managers. Based on data from the United States Bureau of Census, Stinchcombe (1986: 204)
noted: 'After the beginning of the twentieth century, at least, half of the authority positions are
occupied by professionals'. Stinchcombe explained the ascendancy gained by professionals in the
following terms:

... in the railroad age, top managerial positions were differentiated from kinship institutions and made
into 'occupations' of employed career officials. Capital was now frequently recruited by the sale of
corporate securities on the open market, and the size of the business did not depend on the size of the

169
 family estate inherited by top management. Top managerial positions became a career stage in the life
of employed officials, rather than a prerogative of sons and husbands (p. 202).

According to Bendix (1974: 307): 'When A. P. Sloan writes that "the corporation [is] a pyramid
of opportunities from the bottom toward the top with thousands of chances for advancement," he
refers to the promise of a bureaucratic career, not to the earlier image of the individual
enterpriser'. This image of the pyramid of opportunities is a coherent expression of the kind of
analogies that we can expect within a low-grid cosmology, as we have previously seen. The
justification of authority and inequality could, and still can, be expressed in such terms as the
following: 'Here you have a ladder. All you have to do is to test yourself in climbing it. Top
places are reserved for the best'. And this implied that careful attention should be paid to
education and, of course, that a certain, specific education was available: 'As it became apparent
that the tasks of management were indeed complex and required uncommon skills, it also
became necessary to see to the training of future managers which implied, of course, that these
skills could be taught and learned' (Bendix, 1974: 299). Let us now explore certain specific
aspects of this process of professionalization and their relation to the production of the 'body of
knowledge' we are calling organization theory.

In commenting on the book The culture of professionalism by Burton Bledstein, Samuel

Weber (1982: 66) summarized the basic features of the professional in the following terms:

A professional was —and is— a specialist who lives from his work, who has undergone a lengthy
period of training in a recognized institution (professional school), which certified him as being
competent in a specialized area; such competence derives from his mastery of a particular discipline,
an esoteric body of useful knowledge involving systematic theory and resting upon principles.
Finally, the professional is felt to 'render a service' rather than provide an ordinary commodity, and it
is a service that he alone, qua professional, can supply. The latter aspect of professionalism lends its
practitioners their peculiar authority and their status: they are regarded as possessing a monopoly of
competence in their particular 'field'.

And this latter aspect, if we think of the manager as a professional, is precisely what was needed
in order to justify its authority and status. Now it is no longer necessary to invoke innate
qualities, nor any other pre-modern notion, in order to support the claims for advantages in the
struggle for life. The manager has simply gained the status reserved for those who can obtain a
certification of competence, the mastery of a discipline. But let us follow Weber's argument on
the peculiar character of professionalism: 'professionalism is construed not merely as "a set of
learned values", as an integral system, but also and most important, as a set of habitual responses'
(p. 66).

This disciplining condition of professionalism is what interests us most here, for it has a
direct relevance to the construction of the particular discourse which distinguishes each
particular discipline. This point can be illustrated with an example drawn from the practice of
managerial education, in which that character of institutionalization described by Douglas (1987)
as squeezing thinking and dividing right from wrong can be shown as a basis for the coherence
of organization theory as a disciplined discourse.

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Disciplining managerial discourse
Mintzberg (1990) has recently criticized an important tradition in managerial education —viz.,
the Harvard Business School's tradition of strategic management— which he referred to as 'the
design school'. An interesting point of his article is the relationship he noted between the model
of strategy formation and the case study method of instruction. In fact, there must have been a
certain match between both elements in order to reinforce the relevance and coherence of the
design school to become such a powerful tradition. It is not fortuitous that the design school, as
Mintzberg points out, provided the vocabulary and the definition of the problem of strategic
management as one of looking for congruence between the organization's external opportunities
and its internal capabilities. Mintzberg's (1990: 187) description of the instructional situation
illustrates the process of disciplining the discourse of professional management:

Bear in mind that time is short: the external environment must be assessed, distinctive
competences identified, alternate strategies proposed, and these evaluated, all before class is
dismissed in 80 minutes.

Anyone who has taken a course in a business school anywhere will be familiar with this.
Mintzberg criticized the 'oversimplification' of business situations prompted by the design
school's model. But the point here is that this tradition of theorizing and teaching is a good
example of a regime of practices, an ongoing process through which a certain framework
enforces, and becomes in itself, a particular world-picture. This tradition ensures the coherence
of the discourse with a general view in which the managers' distinctive competence is their
decision-making abilities, and that the managers' authority is to be justified in terms of their
comparative advantages (Alchian & Woodward, 1988) in making decisions. In his critique of the
pre-eminence of rational models of decision-making, March (1989: 262) has provided a good
illustration of the process of disciplining of habitual responses by linking it to a wider, cultural
context. Thus,

Individuals [in contemporary American society] who are good at consistent rationality are rewarded
early and heavily. We define it as intelligence, and the educational rewards of society are associated
strongly with it. Social norms press in the same direction, particularly for men. Many of the demands
of modern organizational life reinforce the same abilities and style preferences.
The result is that many of the most influential, best-educated, and best-placed citizens have
experienced a powerful overlearning with respect to rationality. They are exceptionally good at
maintaining consistent pictures of themselves, at relating action to purposes. They are exceptionally
poor at a playful attitude toward their own beliefs, toward the logic of consistency, or toward the way
they see things as being connected in the world.

This is also a good example of how organization theories become event-structures in themselves,
institutions, taken-for-granted facts which simplify life and appeal to common sense. The process
of event-structuring consists here in narrowing conceptual pathways towards certain obligatory
passage points: the principles of the discipline or the body of knowledge which distinguish the
practice of a particular profession. As Weber (1982: 68) remarked:

... the professional disposes over a body of systematic, esoteric knowledge, inaccessible to the layman
and yet in itself coherent, self-contained, reposing upon founding principles. These principles form
the cognitive basis of laws, rules and techniques, which constitute a discipline, and a praxis requiring
a long period of training and initiation. Although a specialized branch of knowledge, such a discipline

171
 is regarded as comprising a coherent, integral and self-contained domain, based upon an equally self-
contained 'natural' state of things. 'Nature', here designates above all the objective referent, the
fundamentum in re which guarantees the legitimacy of particularized knowledge and the efficacy of
its applications.

This remarkable commentary summarizes a good deal of our discussion. We may simply add
that, as we have seen in the introduction to this chapter, the coherence is not only an attribute of
the theory in itself, which depends on its own structuring process, but implies also a certain
interstructuring process through which it becomes coherent with other theories within a wider
context. In this sense, the coherence of organization theory is to be found not only in its internal
arrangement but, fundamentally, in a practice or play of appropriation and justification of such a
practice in the form of institutions.

The founding principles or analogies are those which relate the particular theory to more
general cosmologies and ideologies. Thus, the natural state of things (e.g., the existence of a
bounded entity whose behaviour is under the rule of the professional manager) which the body of
knowledge refers to is another instance of representation. In the case of the system theory of
organization as a natural state in which bounded entities are created by individuals or by the
consensual agreement of groups, we have seen how at least from Hobbes' times a work of
representation has been devoted to providing a referent for the elaboration of coherent discourses
in the form of system theories.

The organization of writing

Let us now address the problem of how the coherence of the discourse of organization theory is
attained. That is, we should now deal with what Weber (1982: 60-1) called 'conditions of
imposability':

... by focusing upon the conditions of possibility and impossibility of systems, what has been
neglected is what I would call the conditions of imposability, the conditions under which arguments,
categories and values impose and maintain a certain authority, even where traditional authority itself
is meant to be subverted.

Such conditions might be interpreted in terms of the hypothesis of event-structuring as the

biasing conditions which increase the density of events that make possible the occurrence of the
structure. In this case, the structure referred to is organization theory as a disciplined discourse,
and the events which reveal the occurrence of such a structure correspond to what Douglas called
the numbers of independent assent which make possible the persistence of a theory. In this sense,
we should now look at the process of squeezing thinking, particularly in the writing of
organization theory.

A clarifying formulation of this problem can be found in Cooper's (1989) comment on the
lessons that can be drawn from Derrida's work in order to analyse organizational analysis as a
discipline. According to Cooper, 'the "writing of organization" must be overturned in favour of
the "organization of writing"' (p. 501). Cooper explains the implications of this idea in the
following terms:

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 The function of the academic division of labour and its representational discourse is to police the
effects of writing —undecidability, metaphorization— by maintaining the distinctions between
disciplines and the order within them... Organizational analysis in the representational mode ['a
"metaphysics" of representation which gives priority to an unexamined, taken-for-granted model or
method which serves to "represent" the organizational reality'] is therefore fated to reproduce in its
discourse the very structures that give academic organization its communicative powers and this is
why one can describe systems theory as being tautological and criticize 'empirical' studies of
organization for merely 'mimicking' their subject matter (p. 495).

Writing is therefore viewed as performing the same function as Derrida noted in antiquity: the
preservation of a hierarchical order of 'a class that writes or rather commands the scribes' (p. 500).

The case of the concept of network, as we saw in Chapter 2, is a good example of such a policing
of writing: from the supposed character of a sensitizing metaphor in the early use of this concept,
it became transformed into a methodological tool which enable researchers to operationalize the
informal aspects of social interaction and formulate hypotheses on the relations between social
action and social structure. Hence, the representation of organization remained confined within
the framework of the system approach.

Let us now explore a different approach to organization theory in order to see whether the
pervasive constraints imposed by the organization of writing maintain their authority even over
the attempts to subvert them. In fact, the field of organization theory, like the managerial
literature more generally, is an example of prolific academic production where innovative and
sophisticated arguments are in permanent competition. It should be added that the spectacular
growth of managerial education has also revealed a huge market for textbooks, journals, and
publications of every kind, which demands ever-increasing production. And the business of
publishing also has its own rules which add to and also constrain the academic organization of
writing.

According to Marshall Meyer (1979), the evolution of theories of organizational structure has
followed three stages. The first two share the idea of a preeminent role played by rationality. But
the first stage was marked by the belief in managerial omniscience (Weber, Taylor), whilst the
second one can be identified by the recognition of constraints to rationality in the forms of
limited cognitive capacities (Simon), technological and environmental uncertainties (Thompson,
Emery and Trist) and transactional costs (Williamson). In Meyer's account what characterizes the
third stage is a rejection of rational models, and the adoption of alternatives such as those of the
garbage can (March and Olsen), enacted environments (Weick), myth and ceremony (Meyer and
Rowan). Meyer's summary of this evolution provides a good example of the play with images
and puzzles involved in explaining organizational phenomena in terms of a preeminent role
played by the manager of a bounded organization, as well as a further illustration of the changes
of managerial ideologies according to changing ways of representing socio-historical
contingencies.

Let us focus on the last of the approaches mentioned by Meyer which, in spite of the fifteen
years' period since the publication of (John) Meyer and Rowan's (1977) paper, remains one of
the most interesting and provocative approaches to the problem of organizational structures.
Perhaps the most extreme formulation of this approach can be found in the following statement:

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 According to the institutional conception as developed here, organizations tend to disappear as
distinct and bounded units. Quite beyond the environmental interrelations suggested in open-systems
theories, institutional theories in their extreme forms define organizations as dramatic enactments of
the rationalized myths pervading modern societies, rather than as units involved in exchange —no
matter how complex— with their environment (Meyer & Rowan, 1977: 346).

And it is indeed an extreme formulation. It reminds us of our discussion in Chapter 6 of a

possible implication of adopting a socio-technical network approach to the study of organization.
In that case organizations would disappear as soon as we focused on practices, and recognized
the character of dramatization (or theatricalisation) inherent in the metaphysics of representation
used to set-up the system-based notion of organizations as bounded entities. Such an argument
could even be realistically supported by the changes prompted by the developments in
information technology which would progressively reduce the role assigned to the traditional
representation of organization.

The alternative argument was that, in any case, the existence of such bounded entities
demanded an understanding that could not be simply avoided by dissolving them, i.e., it was
necessary to account for the structuring process. Now we might say, by following Samuel
Weber's idea of imposability, that the problem should not be reduced to a discussion of the
possibility or impossibility of systems. The question is how Meyer and Rowan solved the
problem of explaining organizational structures from an institutional perspective.

Meyer and Rowan based their argument in a critique of the prevailing assumption that formal
structures effectively control activities. By following the ideas of the formal-informal gap and
loose-coupling between organizational components, they proposed that the structural features of
organizations should be explained without assuming that they 'are implemented in routine work
activity' (p. 343). According to March (1989: 13):

In classical discussions of decision-making in organizations, a logic of causality connects policies to

activities, means to ends, solutions to problems, and actions in one part of an organization to actions
in another part. All of these linkages are seen as driven by a logic of causal connection. Actual events
in organizations appear to be much less tightly coupled.

That is, formal structures and actual activities should be independently analyzed. The
explanatory role in this theory is played by institutionalized myths: '(1A) As institutionalized
myths define new domains of rationalized activity, formal organizations emerge in these
domains. (1B) As rationalizing institutional myths arise in existing domains of activity, extant
organizations expand their formal structures so as to become isomorphic with these new myths'
(p. 345). Now the problem would be to explain this causal efficacy of myths so that they are able
not only to define new domains in which organizations emerge, but also to make isomorphous
organizations in existing domains. Unfortunately, an explicit definition of myths is lacking, apart
from the general assertion that formal structure is itself a myth. The second part of the
proposition (1B) would account for the complexity or elaboration of organizational structures,
which relates to the process of increasing rationalization of every domain of activity in post-
industrial society: 'the society dominated by rational organization even more than by the forces
of production' (p. 345).

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 As we have seen, Bendix had already noted that managerial ideologies would be concerned
with problems of co-ordination and direction, rather than with the more concrete, operational
problems entrepreneurial ideologies were concerned with. But in Meyer and Rowan's view a
further step of differentiation or detachment of managerial problems from actual activities seems
to have been reached. In fact, it might be said that this theory represents a post-industrial or,
perhaps even a postmodern, phase of organization theory. It might also be conjectured that, in the
same way as post-industrial developments (in computer applications for example) assume or take
for granted the existence of an industrial basis, a post-industrial theory of organization would
also take for granted the main features of prevailing, system-based representations of
organizations and proceed to explain the alterations of such a basic framework. The particular
character of Meyer and Rowan's reformulation of the institutionalized discourse of traditional
organization theory, in terms of the prevailing representation of the post-industrial world, can be
appreciated in their account of the conditions of organizational success and survival:

In institutionally elaborated environments, sagacious conformity is required: leadership (in a

university, a hospital, or a business) requires an understanding of changing fashions and
governmental programs. But this kind of conformity —and the almost guaranteed survival which may
accompany it— is possible only in an environment with a highly institutionalized structure. In such a
context an organization can be locked into isomorphism, ceremonially reflecting the institutional
environment in its structure, functionaries, and procedures. Thus, in addition to the conventionally
defined sources of organizational success and survival, the following assertion can be proposed:

Proposition 3. Organizations that incorporate societally legitimated rationalized elements in their

formal structures maximize their legitimacy and increase their resources and survival capabilities (p.
352).

This explanation contains basic elements of traditional (modern) organization theory (e.g.,
organization as a bounded entity involved in exchanges with an environment, and guided by a
decision-maker) within a pragmatic (postmodern) discourse which recognizes the
interchangeability, negotiability, or even disposability, of formal elements according to the
signals provided by a highly institutionalized, post-industrial environment.

A problem with this kind of explanations is its inability to recognize the mythological
character of its own elements. For instance, by maintaining the quintessentially modern
assumption of an agent which teleologically uses certain means to achieve certain goals, or
simply to accommodate itself within a given situation, the institutional approach would maintain
the discourse within the same framework of the institutionalized myths it is trying to reveal, and
its rendering of the situation would become a superficial description, if not a tautology or a
'mimicry', as Cooper has said. Or, using Samuel Weber's terms, the discussion of the conditions
of possibility or impossibility of systems, without paying attention to the conditions of
imposability of this very way of representing, becomes a mere rephrasing of traditional
explanations of managerial rationality in terms of 'sagacious conformity' or other abilities of
leadership, or a tautological explanation in which the organization (a myth?) survives by
legitimizing its legitimated formal structure by incorporating legitimated elements in it. It seems
that the separation of formal structure and activities, even allowing for the possibly didactical or
explanatory advantages of such a strategy, leads to a ceremonial discourse in which the actual

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activities play no role, since organizations gain legitimacy and resources 'independent of their
productive efficiency' (p. 352).

Perhaps this discourse expresses a realistic recognition that in this postmodern world
organization theory cannot be but a mimicry, since it refers to a myth which survives due to a
mimicking of performance: 'Further, the argument is that in such contexts [institutionalized
environments] managers devote more time to articulating internal structures and relationships at
an abstract or ritual level, in contrast to managing particular relationships among activities and
interdependencies' (p. 361). That is, not only are problems of coordination and direction
detached from concrete or operational ones but, even more, the particular content of the
coordination and direction has become irrelevant since rituals justify themselves.

A basic point of this chapter is simply that organization theory can be thought of as a part of
a wider cosmology, or ideology in Bendix's terms, which expresses the more general
justifications of a particular socio-historical order. We have seen, for example, how the discourse
of management has been changing, accommodating to circumstances, from the entrepreneurial
world or even before up to the present time. There has also been an obvious continuity: the world
represented in this discourse is an account of the problems faced by managers, and the solutions
found to these problems. Organization theory, as an organized writing, contributes to the
construction of such a world by rationalizing its particular order. Thus, for instance, in Meyer
and Rowan's approach we can find the rationalization provided by organization theory to the
representation of the post-industrial world, i.e., the expected manager's performance in this
world.

The point here is not whether Meyer and Rowan show a greater or lesser grasp of reality.
Rather, we are dealing with the way in which they represent organization (perhaps we should
speak now of organizing as systematizing in the postmodern mode as mimicking): there are some
entities which finally remain unquestioned (organizations and environments), whose particular or
concrete activities are somewhat irrelevant, and whose persistence depends on the abilities,
efforts and, finally, time employed by managers in mimicking a concern with prevailing
institutions and their changing fashions.

It might be said that this theory is a superficial rendering of the problem of organizing in the
real world. But this would amount to isolating this particular theory and contrasting it with an
assumed state of affairs, attributing a certain qualification to its proponents, and finally
neglecting the conditions which make this or any other theory possible, viz., conditions of
imposability. What this theory shows is, rather, the persistence of a structure: the institution of
organization theory as a discipline which is able to organize writing even in those cases in which
an attempt is made to subvert it or shake its foundations. This is precisely how an institution
gains in legitimacy, as Douglas (1987) has explained, by obtaining the largest numbers of
independent assent. It is not necessary to invoke a state of mind, a force, a powerful agent, to
explain in noncircular terms the occurrence of such a structure.

The event-structuring process seems to operate in a spirit of inviolable inevitability, as

Allport might have said, because of its unconscious character. This does not imply that we
should look for an explanation in terms of a compulsion, a habit or any other construct but,

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regardless of any explanation, recognize the repetition of a practice and the reproduction of the
conditions for its repetition. As Wittgenstein (1988: No. 654) remarked: 'Our mistake is to look
for an explanation where we ought to look at what happens as a "proto-phenomenon". That is,
where we ought to have said: this language-game is played'.

In general, the most realist explanation of organization would rely on a previous work of
representation (acts of creation and motivated agents) which produces the object whose
properties or behaviour are accounted for. Thus, what we are discussing here is not the
correspondence of a discourse to a certain reality, but its relation to other discourses. Instead of
attempting to deal with the contingencies themselves, as Skinner claimed, we are dealing with
representations which are contingent on, or coherent with, each other. Douglas' analysis of the
biased character of cosmologies illustrates a way of relating discourses and metaphors to
representations of particular configurations of socio-historical orders. This does not require us to
assume that grid/group dimensions express a certain true nature of society.

Douglas' point that her typology of cosmologies did not represent a necessary trajectory, and
that any place in the grid-group map could not be considered as intrinsically better than any
other, suggests a basic difference with respect to Parsons' model which, in fact, can also be
regarded as a way of classifying cosmologies or symbolic patterns. The rationale for classifying
acts (or the symbolic content of communication) according to their functional significance
presupposes a certain direction (the solution of systemic problems) or a normative implication:
that the modern discourse constitutes a superior way of speaking, or that modern Western
societies constitute the culmination of history. Douglas' model, in contrast, is not restricted to
such a Christian interpretation of history as a linear process but can admit the possibility of
recurrence or structural similarity of cosmologies in different periods or places.

The idea of cultural bias suggests a way of understanding cosmologies and justifications of a
social order, not only as metaphysical truths about human nature or society to be overcome but,
more usefully, as ways of speaking which are contingent on particular forms of life, i.e.,
language games. In this sense, grid/group dimensions provide us with a way of describing and
comparing language games, and inquiring into their similarities and differences without,
necessarily, drawing rigid boundaries between them. An illustration of such an exercise is the
arrangement of Bendix's analysis of ideologies of management previously presented. Thus, by
relating these ideologies to those more general cosmologies, their contingent character as ways
of speaking can be better appreciated.

Think, for instance, of the gross similarities between entrepreneurial ideologies in nineteenth-
century England and low-grid/high-group cosmologies. The entrepreneurs' discourse (a picture
of an autonomous group struggling for a preeminent place in society against other groups, whilst
justifying their own privileges in terms of fitness or simply success) can thus be understood as a
way of representing a particular socio-historical configuration, without reducing it to a self-
interested expression of class consciousness, a manifestation of a particular national spirit or
character, nor a metaphysical doctrine.

Likewise, the discourse of organization theory can be understood as a particular way of

speaking. The representation of organizations as bounded entities would be a way of speaking

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contingent on particular socio-historical conditions rather than an intrinsic feature of a certain
reality which can be better or worse grasped. In the contemporary scene, for example, the
discourse of organization theory might be expected to be coherent with wider low-grid/low-
group cosmologies and the prevailing representations of the post-industrial, or postmodern,
world, in which the focus seems to have shifted from the appropriation of commercial and
production networks to the appropriation of skill networks.

Perhaps the appropriate way of speaking in this postmodern phase of organization theory has
been advanced by Meyer and Rowan's approach, in which the traditional organizations' success
and survival depend on their managers' representing of rituals and ceremonies which mimic a
commitment to institutionalized practices and rules of rational behaviour. But, at the end, it
seems that this story has described a cycle, or a 'revolution', and returned to its starting point. For
was not theatricalisation Hobbes' solution to the problem of social organization? In fact, we
might say that whilst Hobbes provided the sovereign with a commonwealth as a stage for a
theatre of terror, postmodern organization theory provides the manager with an organization as a
stage for a theatre of rationality.

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 CONCLUSION
In his Speech Acts, John Searle (1990: 4) proposed the following distinction between 'linguistic
philosophy' and 'philosophy of language':

Linguistic philosophy is the attempt to solve particular philosophical problems by attending to the
ordinary use of particular words or other elements in a particular language. The philosophy of
language is the attempt to give philosophically illuminating descriptions of certain general features of
language, such as reference, truth, meaning, and necessity; and it is concerned only incidentally with
particular elements in a particular language...

Though we are not concerned here with the kind of problems Searle is dealing with, the formal
character of this distinction might help us to introduce certain problems we are interested in
when discussing organization theory. Thus, we have been concerned throughout this thesis with
problems of organization theory rather than problems of particular organizations. When we
referred to boundaries, structures, and processes we were concerned 'only incidentally' with
particular organizations. This does not mean to deny the reality or the existence of organizations,
in the same sense that a philosophy of language does not deny the existence of particular or
natural languages. However, this does mean that certain problems of organization theory cannot
be clarified by simply observing or inspecting an organization or a sample of organizations.

In this sense, for example, a conspicuous feature of organizations such as the existence of
boundaries which separate them from their environments is, as we have seen, particularly
resistant to attempts at definition and specification, not to say observation. This implies that the
understanding of such a problem is to be sought in the meaning of a concept such as bounded
organization, that is, in the very language used to refer to this object. Yet our search for the
meaning of organization has not been concerned with the structure or the uses of a natural
language, nor with the psychology of concept formation, but rather with the socio-historical
circumstances and the strategies of representation through which the use of such a concept has
become part of an established way of speaking.

As we have seen in the last chapter, the meaning of organization as a bounded entity is to be
sought less in a certain state of nature or in the intrinsic conceptual properties of the idea of
system than in the practices through which a particular way of speaking becomes established:
managerial education, organization studies, publication of managerial literature. It can be useful
to remember that, according to the OED, the word organizing derives from the Latin organizare
which meant 'the singing of the organum' in Medieval times. By searching into this story we can
easily find that singing the organum was also a means used in the Medieval Cathedral in order to
discipline and provide occupation to the increasingly growing staff that its wealth (mainly
derived from land possession) afforded it to maintain (Gushee, 1990). Now organization theory,
conceived as the body of esoteric knowledge and rules of the managerial profession, could then
be viewed as a certain kind of organum whose teaching provides discipline to managerial
discourse and whose compilation imposes the organization of writing over the writing of
organization, as Cooper (1989) would have said.

There is, however, a problem which should not be overlooked in an attempt to explore the
meaning of organization in general. The possibility of such a discussion implies that a difference

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has been established, or taken for granted, between particular cases or examples of organization
and organization in general, i.e., what Heidegger (e.g., 1988) has called the ontological
difference which implies the elaboration of a metaphysical discourse. Thus, for instance, by
taking for granted the concept of organization as a system and discussing the properties of such
an object we are inevitably using a metaphysical discourse: we are not talking about particular
organizations but about 'organization as such', so to speak. This is not to say that there is
something intrinsically wrong in that way of speaking. Rather, the recognition of the
metaphysical character of such a discourse implies that categories such as wrong or right, false or
true are of no use in dealing with the difficulties it poses, and that the problem is really to
understand how we end up speaking in that way and what kind of world we are referring to in
this discourse. In other words, rather than the conditions of possibility of such a discourse, we
should try to understand its conditions of imposability, to use Samuel Weber's (1982) expression.

This leads us again to an inquiry into the socio-historical circumstances and the strategies of
representation through which this metaphysical discourse becomes established as a way of
speaking. And in fact, in order to summarize the content of the thesis, it can be said that it
consists of an attempt to explore the discourse of organization theory, and to understand both its
conditions of possibility and imposability. The introduction and discussion of both the socio-
technical network approach and the hypothesis of event-structuring enabled us not only to
sharpen the analysis of such a discourse, by contrasting it with different and perhaps more
plausible ways of speaking, but also to suggest that the discussion should not be reduced to an
uncritical submission to the logic of representation of the system theory of organization or an
equally uncritical rejection of it, nor even less its banishment.

Perhaps the key to this discussion can be found in the idea that the recognition of the
metaphysical character of a discourse implies, instead of evaluation or judgement, an effort to
understand the world which it set forth from a historical perspective. Let us recall here Vattimo's
(1991) point that this world should not be reduced to an iron cage (a complete realization of the
metaphysical project of rationalization associated with Western civilization) or a simulacrum (a
complete dissolution of metaphysical presences associated with an assumed bankrupt of such a
project) but, rather, it should be recognized as an incompletely realized world of traces and
residues, fragmentation, contamination, marginalization. Accordingly, the discussion of
organization theory should not be reduced to a matter of choosing between presence or absence
of the traditional bounded entity we call organization.

The difficulty is, precisely, to conceive of organizations as incomplete instead of complete

wholes, weak and unstable instead of strong and stable entities. As a way of dealing with this
difficulty we have proposed the adoption of a process-oriented approach. But, again, the process
should not be reduced to a certain dynamics of clearly delimited objects whose behaviours and
properties provide the variables for a calculus of initial conditions and changes. Rather, the
process we need to study is that through which such entities come about and acquire their
properties. The point is that we cannot simply assume or take for granted the existence and the
properties of any entity as the starting point of the inquiry, for this is precisely what the inquiry is
about.

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 Throughout the thesis we have used the expression organizing mainly as a way of referring to
modes of articulating discourses of organization —e.g., organizing as systematizing, networking,
event-structuring, appropriating— and suggesting that it does not imply an abstract or universal
notion but admits a multiplicity of meanings, nor can it be reduced to particular, positive theories
(economic theory of the firm, theory of the state, theory of bureaucracy, group psychology, etc.).
It is obvious, however, that organizing, in comparison to organization, also brings a sense of
process, of something that is 'in the making' rather than finished or ready-made as Latour (1987)
would say. In this sense, by using organizing instead of organization, we can also suggest that we
are not dealing with systems, networks, structures or institutions as complete or stable wholes.

Then, from a methodological point of view, the thesis proposes a somewhat inverse task to
that of traditional organizational studies: instead of starting by identifying and delimiting an
organization and then studying internal and external interactions in order to diagnose problems
and suggest solutions, the starting point consists in identifying practices, or regimes of practices
as Foucault (1988b) said, conceived as socio-technical networks, no matter how heterogeneous
the actors involved are, and then tracing their connections and encounters with other practices in
order to account for the conditions of their repetition in the form of processes of event-
structuring (interstructuring and destructuring).

Only at the end of a study can a structure be visualized and its story told, which includes the
particular form of the appropriation through which it becomes re-presented in the guise of a firm
for example. That is, instead of adopting the approach of a physician (or meta-physician) who
requires a delimited body, perhaps it is necessary to adopt the approach of an archaeologist who
is permanently reconstructing the historical field. Finally, instead of an attempt to generalize, the
inquiry's aim is to show a singularity and the only message it tries to present is, as Oakeshott
(1975a) would say, an 'intelligibility' introduced in a story.

This thesis does not have a conclusion in the sense of a proposition deduced in a syllogistic
way. Nevertheless, it has a conclusion in some other senses. The most obvious sense is that it has
to conclude or end; though it cannot be regarded as a finished or complete task. In this sense, the
conclusion is an invitation to start again and to keep the discussion going. In another sense the
thesis has described a cycle, and thus a closure: starting from the concept of system as a general
or universal category we have returned to the concept of system but now as a singularity, a story.
And, in still another sense, the thesis has a conclusion, or better an epilogue, in the form of a
further reflection on the problem of the centring of the discourse of organization theory around
the figure of the manager. A brief final comment refers to a future task suggested by the thesis
and to a certain political implication underlying this discussion of organization theory.

Decentring the organization

The point of this reflection is inspired by Latour's (1987) discussion of the notion of science as a
body of knowledge instead of as a practice. We want to propose that the idea of adopting a
perspective in which organization is something in-the-making, instead of clinging to a concept of
organization as a ready-made object, suggests that organizing should not be reduced to a
problem of some individuals (managers) who decide and choose among design alternatives, and
who appear as the cause that carry out processes, activities, and projects, rather than people
striving to position themselves in current, ongoing processes carried out by many others.

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 Organizing is, instead, to be thought of as a collective-cumulative process through which a
particular shape of the real is made to endure, and in which the manager is another participant.
This does not imply neglecting the role of such notions as intentions, rationality, agreement,
decision-making. They play, in fact, an important role in telling stories, in making sense of the
rather complex and multifarious processes by which structures come into existence.

The concept of the organization as a bounded entity can be understood as a strategy of

representation in which a work of enframing has displaced the work of organizing by attributing
to it an origin and a centre. To set organizational boundaries also means to ascribe the cause of
the movement, the origin of the idea, to an individual or group (entrepreneurs, managers,
directors, shareholders). The bounded organization might in this sense be thought of as a package
made (crafted by spokespersons as Latour would say) in order to attribute responsibilities and
exclude the others' work.

Organization theory as a theory of bounded organizations provides then a body of esoteric

knowledge in which professional managers appear at the centre of a world where their decisions
and choices become crucial determinants of success and survival, or their opposites. This world,
like that of managerial education represents a fundamentally egalitarian game in which the
managers' task is to argue about what they think fits each situation best, and the results of the
competition depend on the managers' abilities at making decisions. In a sense, this is coherent
with what Douglas (1979) called a low-grid cosmology. This also reminds us of those idealized
descriptions of ancient Greek democracy where government is a matter of public discussion and
agreements reached by the people, whilst forgetting or neglecting the fact that the latter did not
include slaves nor even all free men.

This game has rules like any other game. And since the crucial feature of managers is their
decision-making abilities, the abilities of producing a coherent statement of the situation at hand
and reducing uncertainty, an important part of the rules is concerned with the correct direction of
the mind, in a Cartesian spirit. Pitfalls and tricks, deviations from the sure path of reason must be
avoided. Management education and literature would be in charge of providing the game's rules
and their rationale.

An important line of thought in management literature and organization theory has been
prompted by the recognition that human beings have limitations in dealing with complexity and
processing information. According to March and Simon (1958: 171): 'The "boundaries of
rationality" that have been the source of our propositions have consisted primarily of the
properties of human beings as organisms capable of evoking and executing relatively well-
defined programs but able to handle programs only of limited complexity'. This recognition
implied, for example, that the traditional idea of optimising ought to be substituted by a more
realist one such as 'satisficing', which did not imply, however, the wholesale renovation of
optimising procedures but the introduction of constraints into optimisation programmes in order
to take into account these limitations.

This recognition had another implication: managers would no longer be the omniscient,
rational decision-makers of the past, but had to be aware of their own limitations. This is a kind

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of tragedy that seems to be at the root of Western civilization, as Herodotus' lament suggests: 'Of
all the sorrows that afflict mankind, the bitterest is this, that one should have consciousness of
much, but control over nothing' (quoted by Thiele, 1990: 912). However, if the privileges and
authority of managers and leaders in general are to be justified in terms of their intelligence and
decision-making abilities, these masteries must be shown in action. This tragedy is what
Nalimov (1982: 17) has identified as 'a schizophrenic aspect of culture':

A schizophrenic aspect of culture is primarily revealed in the necessity to act. What makes people act
is the discreteness of good and evil, beauty and ugliness, truth and falsity. However, any action is
preceded by a decision. And this process is always trying; it always leads to bifurcation. Any decision
is, perhaps, absurd, since it is an attempt to represent discretely a fuzzy situation which is by no
means necessarily determined by a needle-shaped function of the distribution of probabilities. This
gives rise to all kinds of stipulations and corrections.

And these stipulations and corrections can be in fact of the most varied kinds, from scientific
formulae to the most esoteric and cabalistic prescriptions, insofar as they provide clear-cut
explanations or rules of thumb. As Skinner (1988b: 223) explained: 'The formula s = (1/2) gt2
does not govern the behavior of falling bodies, it governs those who correctly predict the position
of falling bodies at given times'. In a culture which puts a high premium on action and
competition, it is hardly surprising that students and professional managers develop superstitious
behavioural patterns in an effort to tame heterogeneity and uncertainty, and assure self-
confidence:

They behave like pigeons in a behaviourist experiment... who appeared to develop superstitions when
presented with food rewards on a random basis. So, too, do financial investors: empirical
demonstrations that stock markets behave in a random manner do not deter them from subscribing to
the services offered by those who, on the basis of a run of luck, appear to be able to predict the
market. Managers are also prone to make decisions on the basis of illusory feelings of control
produced by illusory correlations, the more so the lower their tolerance of ambiguity (Earl, 1990:
724).

This is, in fact, the kind of world described by Meyer and Rowan (1977), in which managers
devote most of their time trying to mimic the latest expert thinking, and showing a sagacious
conformity with rationalized myths and ceremonies.

The idea of bounded rationality has also led to a way of representing the organization's
coming into existence and its main features as the result of the need to overcome the individuals'
limitations in handling complex situations, and thus to displace the problem of social
organization towards to an inquiry into the individual's cognitive capabilities, and to conceive
'that rationality is a cognitive process which takes place "in the brain" and that its boundedness is
a function of the limited capacity of the human mind' (Cooper, 1992).

This way of formulating the problem constitutes a refraining from the recognition that
rationality is a construction, a methodological device to systematize the interpretations of the
meaning of action, as Weber (1947) clearly wrote, to a reified way of speaking in which
rationality, as intelligence or any other construct, becomes a thing to be measured, assessed, and
attributed in greater or lesser degrees to different individuals. And, as Wittgenstein (1988: No.
693) remarked: 'nothing is more wrong-headed than calling meaning a mental activity! Unless,
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that is, one is setting out to produce confusion. (It would also be possible to speak of an activity
of butter when it rises in price, and if no problems are produced by this it is harmless)'.

The idea of rationality and its boundaries as mental attributes can be thought of not as an
attempt to produce confusion but as a problem of the kind we have been discussing from the
perspective of Heidegger's (1977) idea of the work of enframing, or Douglas' (1987) institutional
thinking, or, more specifically, Cooper's (1989) overturning of the writing of organization in
favour of the organization of writing. In Douglas' terms, by relying on accepted analogies and
methods, a theory not only becomes coherent with prevailing institutions but saves its proponents
the task of justifying it.

In the case of a theory of organization and managerial behaviour, a theory becomes more
easily accepted if it is coherent with economic institutions, and relies on the idea of a world in
which those better gifted and successful deserve the authority and privileges they enjoy. For,
notwithstanding the boundaries, the managers' role is conceived as matter of decision-making
and their success depends on their abilities. Thus, a theory which puts an emphasis on such
conditions is coherent with a narrative that tells the story of business as a world of 'barons' or
'knights' and their deeds. It may be worth recalling here an interesting comment on Tolstoy's War
and peace, in which Isaiah Berlin (1988: 27) not only accounts for the work's intention, but also
sheds light on the general problem under discussion here.

Tolstoy's central thesis... is that there is a natural law whereby the lives of human beings no less than
those of nature are determined; but that men, unable to face this inexorable process, seek to represent
it as a succession of free choices, to fix responsibility for what occurs upon persons endowed by them
with heroic virtues or heroic vices, and called by them 'great men'. What are great men? they are
ordinary human beings, who are ignorant and vain enough to accept responsibility for the life of
society, individuals who would rather take the blame for all the cruelties, injustices, disasters justified
in their name, than recognize their own insignificance and impotence in the cosmic flow which
pursues its course irrespective of their wills and ideals.

It is not necessary to endorse Tolstoy's determinism, which as Berlin's rendering shows is subtler
than what can be inferred from this passage, in order to appreciate the central point that those we
call 'great men' are after all ordinary human beings involved in processes for which they are not
responsible but participants led, if not by cosmic or natural laws, at least by circumstances we
could call socio-historical, or simply on-going processes, which are beyond their control. Other
examples, in which power (another idea commonly used in order to assess the value of
individuals in terms of their abilities to influence the behaviour of other individuals) derives from
the particular situation in which the individual is involved rather from its intrinsic attributes, can
be found in Foucault's work. In fact, one of Foucault's main contributions has been to show how
power resides in concrete, everyday-life practices. Let us recall here a passage from Discipline
and punish, in which this idea is remarkably expressed:

Power has its principle not so much in a person as in a certain concerted distribution of bodies,
surfaces, lights, gazes; in arrangement whose internal mechanisms produce the relation in which
individuals are caught up. The ceremonies, the rituals, the marks by which the sovereign's surplus
power was manifested are useless. There is a machinery that assures dissymetry, disequilibrium,
difference. Consequently, it does not matter who exercises power. Any individual, taken almost at
random, can operate the machine: in the absence of the director, his family, his friends, his visitors,

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 even his servants... Similarly, it does not matter what motive animates him: the curiosity of the
indiscreet, the malice of a child, the thirst for knowledge of a philosopher who wishes to visit this
museum of human nature, or the perversity of those who take pleasure in spying and punishing
(Foucault, 1977: 202).

Foucault is describing here the surveillance-control device of the 'Panopticon', but we do not
need to think of organizations as carceral institutions in order to appreciate the point that power
is related less to particular attributes, abilities and motives of those individuals to which it is
ascribed than to particular features of the situation in which they are involved.

Rationality, power, courage, intelligence, are all after-the-fact rationalizations, reasons given
by individuals (or spokespersons), not descriptions of particular behaviours. In order to
understand a behaviour, Skinner would say, we should try to understand the contingencies of
reinforcement, and the history of such conditions. Weber would say that rationality is a feature of
a constructed situation in which the individual's possibilities of action are restricted to a
minimum of significant alternatives from which its meaning is inferred. And, interestingly, in
March and Simon's (1958: 170) work a similar recognition can also be found, according to which
the existence of organizational structures requires the existence of boundaries of rationality
understood as 'elements of the situation that must be or are in fact taken as given, and that do not
enter into rational calculation as potential strategic factors'. Notwithstanding this recognition, the
emphasis was put (mainly by Simon and his followers) on the 'properties of human beings as
organisms' of limited cognitive capacities to handle complex situations.

Finally, let us remember that the point here is not to call for a cleansing of language, a
policing of writing, nor a proscribing of any notion. Rather, any idea can be usefully introduced
into a narrative or story in which ongoing activities, languages and world views appear along
different traces, lines of transformation, technological developments, through which organizing
takes place and organizations become taken-for-granted objects. The call, if it can be so called, is
to adopt a non-emphatic approach to the study of organizing as a process in which any or all
elements can be important. And, if we cannot take for granted the existence of a delimited whole
as a starting point of the inquiry, for this is precisely what the study is trying to find, much less
can we assume that it has a centre from which the movements start and on which its success and
survival depends.

Thus, this is a call to substitute a kind of archaeological approach to the study of organizing
for a more restricted diagnostic approach, which takes the organization as its point of departure.
It should be added that there is no exclusive, true way of doing this. It is necessary to attempt
different descriptions of the same events, to produce different stories. Nevertheless, this task
requires, as Robert Graves (1988) has written with respect to the study of myths, careful
attention to details, to relatively hidden traces amidst 'temple walls, vases, seals, bowls, mirrors,
chests, shields, tapestries, and the like'. Such inscriptions would reveal not only aesthetic ideals,
psychological complexes, and technical developments, but also the structuring of social reality
through the regimentation of time and space, the appropriation of networks and events.

A final comment
The thesis' attempted contribution to the field of organization studies consists of two aspects: a
critical aspect constituted by the discussion of organization theory as a strategy of representation,

185
and a positive aspect constituted by the introduction and elaboration of the socio-technical
network approach and the hypothesis of event-structuring. Both aspects should now be qualified.
The discussion of organization theory does not represent a critique in a negative or destructive
sense, for this is not a matter of judging truth or falsehood, determining possibility or
impossibility, nor proposing an alternative. In this sense, the discussion cannot be regarded as
finished or in any sense completed.

There is no reason that could be invoked to stop the discussion by attributing a victory to one
side or the other: there are no sides in this discussion. With respect to its positive contribution,
the thesis has not attempted to posit an object or a theory. In this sense, its contribution can be
thought of as an invitation to a future work. A great deal of work is waiting for the application of
the ideas of socio-technical networks and event-structures, for the exploration of novel
statements of problems and hypotheses in dealing with different empirical cases. The future task
consists in challenging these ideas in looking for an understanding of demanding and pressing
problems and situations faced by real people working and living within and without real
organizations.

One of the major motivations behind the idea of undertaking this work may be stated at this
point. As a teacher and researcher in the field of organizational behaviour and design, I became
increasingly persuaded of the need to explore the assumed nature of organizations as objects
whose boundaries define what is and what is not inside the organization, what should and what
should not be done by organizational members. This is due not only to a genuine theoretical
interest, but also to a need for formulating or making explicit my doubts around current
descriptions and prescriptions derived from the organizational literature, which are frequently
uncritically applied or rejected in the case of undeveloped, Third World countries. In this sense,
the thesis has a political implication. As Lyotard said in an interview,

The real political task today... is to carry forward the resistance that writing offers to established
thought, to what has already been done, to what everyone thinks, to what is well-known, to what is
widely recognized, to what is 'readable', to everything which can change its form and make itself
acceptable to opinion in general. The latter, you understand, always works with what is taken for
granted and with what is forgotten as such —for it grants no place to anamnesis. It is prejudiced (Van
Riejen & Veerman, 1988: 302).

Let us illustrate this prejudiced perspective in the case of the teaching of organization theory, by
contrasting it to another common position: the relativist temptation. A perspective in which the
organization appears as a ready-made object, as a text, leads to the suggestion that different
readings are possible, and that the problem is to choose the fittest one. From a prejudiced, realist
stand a charge of irrationality could be addressed to those who fail to produce a particular kind of
reading; hence the efforts to teach reading skills, to 'mop up' any of those 'shocking pockets of
irrationality' (Latour, 1987: 196), and to channel managers and students towards the right path of
reason: 'You cannot say that a mechanistic structure can survive in a turbulent environment'.

Whereas someone from a relativist position would try to show —by means of re-readings,
inversions of arguments and contextualisations— that any reading is as plausible as any other
one, and that what is needed is a sympathetic approach. A relativist would say something like
this: 'They are not saying that a mechanistic structure can survive in a turbulent environment, but

186
that if everybody has a mechanistic structure you will probably have one, regardless of the
turbulence'. In both cases, the organization is a taken-for-granted entity which resists any
formula, a well-sealed black box, as Latour would say. The difference is that the realist has
forgotten how hard it has been to make the black box, the resources invested in its construction,
and that the associations it comprises are not a once-and-for-all state of nature. The relativist
simply ignores all that.

Finally, though this thesis might be regarded as a kind of superfluous or unnecessary

undertaking given the pressing need for alleviating dramatic realities of poverty and
backwardness of Third World countries, it has also been guided by the idea that much more
subtle understanding of such realities is also needed, that they cannot be taken for granted as
already known, and that this also implies a closer acquaintance with the general problem of how
organizational knowledge is produced and attained. For, as Bertolt Brecht (1980: 124-5)
dramatically remarked: 'The hardest time to get along without knowledge is the time when
knowledge is hardest to get. It is the condition of bottom-most poverty, where it seems possible
to get along without knowledge'.

187
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