introducing the field of managing and organizations

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INTRODUCING THE FIELDOF MANAGING AND ORGANIZATIONS

Managing, Organizations, Sensemaking

LEARNING OBJECTIVES

By the end of this chapter you will be able to:

■ Appreciate the meanings and complexities behind the words managing andorganization

■ Explain the relation between managing and organization

■ Understand why individuals and groups within organizations can be a challenge tomanage and that managing is a difficult job to do well

■ List the key changes occurring in the contemporary world and the impact that they arelikely to have on managing

■ Explain why issues of identity, hierarchy, and rationality are central to traditionalconceptions of organization and management

■ Explain why rationality is sometimes less rational than it seems

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BEFORE YOU GET STARTED . . .

A little Danish wisdom:

Life must be understood backwards; but … it must be lived forward.(Søren Kierkegaard, Danish existential philosopher, 1813–1855)

INTRODUCTIONThe book that you have started to read will be, for many readers, a firstintroduction to the theory and practice of managing and organizations.While every one of you may be familiar with organization practices ofmany kinds, you may not be familiar with the theories that may lie behindthose practices or that enable us to make sense of them. Thus, in this intro-ductory chapter we will do two main things:

1 Define the relation between our two key terms of ‘managing’ and‘organization’.

2 Stress the importance of ‘sensemaking’ and ‘rationality’ both for manage-ment practice and as central organization devices.

We will argue that while it is important to have management tools andtechniques in place to run organizations effectively, we should never losesight of the fact that it is people who are doing the managing. Howevermuch managers may believe that the management systems and tools thatthey have designed and adopted are well thought out, people still have touse them. In using them people will make different sense of these devicesand the contexts in which they are deployed – this is what we call sense-making. What connects the activity of managing to the structures, prac-tices, and processes of organizations is sensemaking. That is why we havechosen it as the central theme of this introductory chapter and why it willrecur so frequently as a theme in the book.

Let us begin with the subtitle first – with the theory word before wemove to consider practice.

WHY THEORY?You may find theory difficult and wonder why we have to have it. Thepoint is, however, that we are all tied up in theories of one kind of another.The way your university or college is organized is underpinned by a the-ory, just as much as is the McDonald’s that you might have worked inwhile at school, the production line that your grandfather may havelabored on, or the organizations in which your parents are employed. Howwe make sense of these things depends on the theory we use. It is oftenremarked, after the famous economist, Lord Keynes, that we are all

A theory is an account of howthings work, which is, at itsbest, coherent in its termsand applicable to phenomenathat it seeks to interpret,understand, and explain.

INTRODUCING THE FIELD OF MANAGING AND ORGANIZATIONS2


held captive by the ideas of theorists from the past. Keynes was refer-ring to economic theories; his insight is even more apt when applied tomanagement theories because we live within the designs and assump-tions of past theory every day at work. It may be the case that all theo-ries are partial, and we are all captives of past theories – but, at least, ifwe aware of the theories that hold us captive we have the chance tounderstand the ties that bind us, and, maybe, we might even be able tochange them.

You need to be clear about the theory that you are using just as much asyou need to be clear about the theories that frame the organizations inwhich you are working. Remember, theory makes sense of the world – andtheory need not be scary! Why, you can even go shopping for it! A theoryis an account of how things work, which is, at its best, coherent in its termsand applicable to phenomena that it seeks to interpret, understand andexplain.

WHAT’S PRACTICE?Practice is what connects disparate actors, material things, and ideas (seeAntonacopoulou (2008) for a much fuller analysis of the idea of practice).What managers do when they do managing is practice. In practice theysituate themselves and are situated within knowledge about managing asthey are involved in coordinating, controlling, and communicating withvarious others. These others may be thought of as stakeholders – peoplewho have an interest in the organization, such as employees, shareholders,

What is practice? Well, thisquestion is fairly easy toanswer. Practice is whatpeople – in our case,managers – do.

INTRODUCING THE FIELD OF MANAGING AND ORGANIZATIONS 3

IIMMAAGGEE II..11theory and shopping


customers, suppliers, and governments. In addition, they are interactingwith various things: with immaterial artifacts such as software, systems,models, and accounting principles as well as with material artifacts such asbuildings, computers, and machines. These relations often form routines inorganizations that are reflected in historically evolved collective patterns ofinterconnected actions, activities, and modes of knowing. These collectivepatterns are governed by a purpose, certain rules, formal and informal rou-tines – in short, organization – which are embedded in technological andsocietal contexts. Although not necessarily the most important part of thiscomplex scheme of things, these arrangements all depend on individualsdesigning, maintaining, and reproducing them. So let us look at individu-als next, before we get to the main title – Managing and Organizations.

INDIVIDUALS IN A SOCIET YOF ORGANIZATIONS

Individuals wrapped up in chainsIt was the French philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778), whofirst coined the phrase, ‘Man is born free, but everywhere he is in chains.’When he wrote these words in pre-revolutionary France in the late eighteenthcentury, in The Social Contract (2006), he had in mind the bonds of feudal,monarchical, and religious privilege in which the vast majority of ordinarypeople were oppressed and suppressed. Yet, if he were to be transportedinto the future and land in the developed world of today, shaped by theEnlightenment principles of liberté, égalité, and fraternité that he helpedforge, would he find that the chains binding individuality have beendissolved by more than two centuries of progress?

In the contemporary world the bonds of organizations shape our lives:from being born in a hospital, entered into the Registry of Births, Marriages,and Deaths – which tracks the whole population and changes in it – enrolledin formal schooling in kindergarten from an early age, proceeding throughprimary, secondary, and then higher education, to be employed by an orga-nization to earn a salary or wage, perhaps going to festivals, concerts, cine-mas, or joining clubs for recreation, being a member of various spiritual,social, and sporting organizations, checking train and bus timetables, flyingon airlines for holidays, having children of our own, enrolling them inschool, seeing them into work, growing old, looking forward to the pensionor superannuation, planning the retirement experience, perhaps moving intoa ‘sunset home’ in our old age, and then dying, and being re-entered for thelast time into that Registry of Births, Marriages, and Deaths.

Almost every aspect of our everyday life – and death – will be shaped byorganizations of one kind or another. Billions of individuals – all of whomcan lay claim to uniqueness – are every day being organized as members oforganizations – as employees but also as students, customers, clients. Whileeach of us is both alike and unique – our essential biology is remarkably



similar, irrespective of ethnicity, marked only by gender differences – is thisalso the case of the many organizations through which we pass?

Consider those organization types that you will not have avoided if youare reading this book. One, mentioned already, deals with your birth, mar-ital status, and death; the other with your education. The Registry of Births,Marriages, and Deaths and the university both chart individual progressthrough life through entries in databases. The university deals with a sliceof life while the Registry deals with the whole of life. Both employ manyexperts in different fields to enter and interpret the data. Each has quitesophisticated routines in place for registering the information that they thenattend to, from records of births signed by medical practitioners to class-room records of attendance, assessments performed, and grades recorded.

What are individuals?Being an individual means that each body – and all that it contains – is asunique as the fingerprints we leave or the DNA that constructed us. Youcan only really ever be you and not another person – although as an actoryou may assume the identity of another person. Identity is a concept thatcannot be defined easily, other than to say that identity refers to the way aperson constructs, interprets, and understands who they are in relation to


IIMMAAGGEE II..22Rousseau: ‘Man is bornfree but everywhere he isin chains’


others in their life world. Identity may be more or less stable, more or lessfragmented, more or less problematic, and more or less secure. The personalidentities that we emphasize in one space may be very different from thosethat we emphasize in another. Thus, the identity that we develop andproject at work may be very different from that which we project whenclubbing or playing a sport. We have multiple identities.

Not all acting occurs only on stage or on screen. In everyday life we oftenare said to be actors, acting out parts, learning to be siblings, lovers, parents,and members of many and various organizations. So our identity is not fixedbut fluid, within the genetic inheritance that defines our uniqueness. We mayhave a relatively fixed genetic appearance but exercise, diet, styling, ageing,and surgery can modify that quite markedly. We may have a definite person-ality, but, once again, ill-health, drugs, diet, and life experiences can reshapethe ways that we present ourselves to the world, often quite dramatically.Some celebrities in popular culture are famous for their shifting iconography,the way they style themselves and hint at their changing personality. Withinour unique bodies most of us like to think we have a uniquely free will. Onlywe are master or mistress of ourselves, a sentiment particularly strong in tod-dlers, but certainly not absent from more mature manifestations of will. Tothink otherwise is to accept that the fates, the stars, the gods, society, or someother transcendent entity guide our lives as preordained. Often, our glimpsesof celebrity seem to offer another, more exciting world than that which welive in. Perhaps one of the reasons why the lifestyles of the rich and famousprovide much of the fodder for everyday life’s background conversations isthat we can take a vicarious delight in reading accounts of them in the scan-dal sheets in waiting rooms with the result that lively tittle-tattle retailingthese stories can often illuminate a dull day elsewhere. But even celebritydoes not escape routine: rehearsals, performances, organizing glamour wed-dings in between checking in and out of rehab, the divorce courts, and thegym. As individuals we have power to shape organizational practice; wecan vote in elections or choose to support various products. Each time wemake a purchase we make a decision whether or not to support a particularorganization’s products. However, individual choice is constrained. Theseconstraints may be as obvious as a police officer forcing you to comply withthe rules imposed by the structure of the state, or as discrete as the behaviorencouraged by the language one uses in conversation with one’s peers.

When we become organization members each of us has to surrendersome of our autonomy to the control of others and other things such asschedules, machines, routines, and deadlines. In return we receive wages,salaries, or fees, identifying us as workers, staff, or independent professionals.Actually, we receive far more than that mere income. We are able to bask,as unique individuals, in the ambience of a unique organization. Its brandhelps define who we are: we are US Customs Officers, or Australian TaxOfficers, or London Police Officers; we are Oxford academics or polytech-nic and community college professors; we are Vogue models or Chelseafootball players. Sometimes we bask in a reflected light: we may be Chelseafootball fans rather than supporters of Arsenal, wear Armani rather thanDolce & Gabanna, or wear Nike rather than Adidas. We can attach ouridentities as individuals to organizations quite easily.



ENTREPRENEURS ASSUPER-INDIVIDUALISTSOrganizations, because of their many rules, are often thought of as structuresthat stifle initiative. The application of rules alone cannot produce compliance,otherwise there would be no deviance, no rule-breaking; anyway, as most of usknow, people can be very innovative in the way they by-pass rules. In businessleaders the ability to break rules is often admired for being entrepreneurial.

Rule-following has had a bad press recently. Politicians argue that dullbureaucrats in business and the public service should be replaced by entrepre-neurial characters whose will is embodied in an organization, often as a heroic,founding figure. The term, entrepreneur, came into English usage from theFrench in the mid-eighteenth century, to apply to an arbiter taking advantage ofdiscrepancies in supply and demand. Penrose (1959) defined entrepreneurs interms of extraordinary qualities of ambition, fundraising, versatility, and judg-ment. Entrepreneurs, such as Sir Richard Branson (below), are seen as the kindof character that captains of industry should aspire to be. An entrepreneur is thefounding figure behind a successful business idea, someone who is seen to havethe drive and determination necessary to lead others to success in the service ofan overarching business idea. Successful entrepreneurs are celebrated and theirexploits venerated and they have come to be seen as role models in society.

The term, entrepreneur(adjective enterpreneurial), isassociated with risk-takingactivity, where someoneseeks to innovate in a waythat is discontinuous withexisting ways of doing things.


Being an entrepreneur

Entrepreneurs can become famous figures andhousehold names. Think of some famous entre-preneurs from the past: people such as HenryFord, William Morris or Shoichiro Toyoda were allfamous as engineers – but also as entrepreneurs.Had they been just talented engineers the worldwould probably never have known the automo-bile companies they founded: The Ford MotorCompany, Morris Motors and Toyota. Each one ofthem went on to found major car-manufacturingcompanies, although William Morris is now long-forgotten with the demise of the cars that bore hisname. Entrepreneurs need not be engineers,however: think of the Virgin brand.

Richard Branson is virtually synonymous withthe Virgin brand, as fun, zesty, and youthful; eventhough Sir Richard is not as young as he used tobe, he maintains the illusion with carefully stagedPR shoots where he is surrounded by young,attractive female models. The Virgin brand belies

the complex organization and bureaucracy thatlies behind it, ensuring that planes and trains runto schedule and that mobile calls connect.

Entrepreneurs do not manage their organiza-tions through the projection of their unique indi-viduality – it would be too demanding, take toolong, and be too inefficient. So they managethrough organization. They develop organiza-tional designs and practices, hire managers todevelop them further and to manage those whoare hired to work within them, who generally for-malize and institutionalize these designs throughrules for governance of the many individual men-talities brought into coordinated unity in andaround the organization.

Organization is essential to any enterprise.Behind even the most exciting and glamorousbrands there will be an organizational apparatus.This connects to our previous discussion of organi-zations being repositories of rules. RichardBranson both employs and subverts rules toachieve his organizational goals.

WHAT’S THE POINT?


Despite the emphasis on entrepreneurialism, a powerful factor in bothfollowing and breaking rules is the power of imitation. Some of us will imi-tate the rule-followers, seeking to advance our careers and fit in, while oth-ers, perhaps the more risk-taking and entrepreneurial, or maybe those lesseasily led, will challenge and break the rules. In some cases, such as that ofSir Richard Branson, they will forge organizational identities that seemtightly coupled to their own identity. But where does that leave the vastmajority of employees who are not entrepreneurs? Where does that leavethose who are the managers and the managed?

MANAGING

Framing managingA key term in theory is the idea of there being a frame through which weunderstand things. We will use this introduction to develop some key termswith which to understand this book.

The frame hinges on the differentiation between managing as a practice,as something that we do, and organizations as a goal-oriented collectivity, inwhich we are organized. We begin with organizations and then move on tothe tasks of managing them, arguing that both are changing radically. Werelate the formal rationalities of management – the plans, design, and otherprocedures – to the necessity for individuals and groups within organiza-tions to make sense of them.

One thing that managers have to do all the time is to differentiate betweenthe relevant and the irrelevant, just as do the authors of textbooks, trying tomanage their expectations of their readers. To do this we, much as managers,frame some things as more relevant than others.

What do managers do?Managers use different technologies, knowledge, and artifacts such asLotus Notes, memos, or Microsoft Outlook to help frame what is relevantand then manage it. Diary appointments, to-do notes, agendas – these areall devices that frame the relevancies of the working day and enable us tomanage our time; however, we should never mistake the technical devicesthat management uses for management itself. For instance, using account-ing techniques or financial management programs is only a part, a smallpart, of what a manager does. Great managers are not merely good tech-nicians but also expert managers of social relations – between themselvesand others as well as between themselves, others, and things such as plans,documents, and data analysis.

Managing signifies being in charge of something, being responsible forits smooth running and its rational conduct, handling and controlling it asif it were a well-oiled machine; thus, it is a relational term. Managing isdone by individuals who are managers. Managing takes place in organiza-tions. In terms of everyday usage it means handling, directing, controlling,

A frame is a term that comesfrom the cinema: a directorframes a shot by includingsome detail and omittingother detail. A frame defineswhat is relevant.

Managing is an active,relational practice whichinvolves doing things.The things that managersdo are supposed tocontribute to the achievementof the organization’s formalgoals.

Organizations aresystematically arrangedframeworks relating people,things, knowledge, andtechnologies, in a designintended to achieve specificgoals.

To be organized thus meansbeing characterized by thesystematic arrangement ofparts into a unified, organicwhole.

Management is the process ofcommunicating, coordinating,and accomplishing action inthe pursuit of organizationalobjectives while managingrelationships withstakeholders, technologies,and other artifacts, both withinas well as betweenorganizations.



exercising skill in executive ability – the acts done by the person in chargeof controlling and directing the affairs of a business, institution, or agency ofsome kind. It entails framing.

Managers strive to be rational and much of organizational life consists ofroutines that make this rationality easier to enact; hence they practicemanagement. The term manager has its origins in English in the period1555–1565. It was used by Shakespeare in the late 1500s, in A MidsummerNight’s Dream, in the context of theatrical management. He talks of acharacter being a ‘manager of mirth’; to manage mirth you have to under-stand jokes – and jokes can often be very contextual. The same sense ofcontext dependence still applies to modern management. Managers alwaysmanage as interpretive individuals, as people who are trying to make senseof things – and sometimes these things may be confusing, ambiguous, andpuzzling. Things become even more puzzling and ambiguous at times ofrapid change. We will discuss the major trends shaping, and being shapedby, organizations and their impact on managing later in this introduction.We consider technological changes; the shifting international division oflabor; globalization; the compression of conceptions of time and space;and the emergence of new generational values.

Although the origins of the term manager are manual – the stress onhandling things – it would be quite wrong to think that management is ajob that is principally premised on manual labor. Instead, it is largely a jobthat involves interpreting, understanding, directing, cajoling, communicat-ing, leading, empowering, training, politicking, negotiating, enthusing,encouraging, focusing, explaining, excusing, obfuscating, communicating –a job full of action words that are all to do with the manager as a speakingsubject, a person who manages to shape and express directions, in writingand in speech. The mastery of different forms of meaningful expression, inwriting, talk, and images, is usually referred to as a mastery of discourse.

Frames enable us to doframing. They focus us in onspecific relevancies: byframing we decide on what isrelevant from the infinitenumber of stimuli, behavioralcues, sense data, andinformation that surround us.

Being rational meanssystematic application ofvarious techniques to achievesome given end or goal.

Rationality: Action that isproduced according to somerule; action that is not randomor unpatterned.


The etymology – theorigins in language – of thekey terms

In Italian, the terms manege, with maneggiaremeaning to handle, train (horses), with the stemderiving from mano, from the Latin manus, forhand, were well known from the seventeenthcentury; the terms management and managerbecame known by about 1600, although theterm manager did not enter into everydayEnglish use until the nineteenth century.

The root stem of the word, organization, is theGreek organum, meaning, in an archaic sense, awind instrument, but more recently, since aboutAD 1000, a mechanical device or instrument; it isclosely related to the Greek term órganon, mean-ing implement, tool, bodily organ, musical instru-ment, akin to érgon, the word for work. In generaluse since at least the late fourteenth century,when the archaic form was organizacion.Etymologically, organizations are therefore toolsdesigned for a specific purpose.

What words mean today often reflects long-forgotten usage.

WHAT DO YOU MEAN?


Central to discourse is rhetoric; indeed, a skilled master of business will bea master of rhetoric. Rhetoric means the tools of persuasion and argumen-tation, the ways of producing agreement and of making a point. Managershave to be skilled at talking because their expressive capabilities will be themost used and useful assets that they have. In a world of individuals, allcapable of going their own way, the manager’s task is to steer, guide, andpersuade people to pull together in a common enterprise – an organization –when this may not be the instinctive desire of those being addressed.

ORGANIZATIONS

Organization characteristicsOrganizations will have the following characteristics, according to rationalviews of them.

1 Purposes, objectives, and goals.2 The action that occurs within organizations will be oriented to achiev-

ing these purposes, objectives, and goals.3 These actions will be consciously shaped through the organization’s

design.4 Key elements in organizational design will be practices such as the

organization’s structure, culture, communication processes, andhuman resource practices.

5 Changes will occur as organizations revise their practices intermit-tently in the light of experience.

6 Much of what will be done in the organization will be future oriented,as the members of the organization act to achieve a desired and plannedfuture.

7 Typically, future-oriented action will be systematically ordered in ahierarchy of actions, each contributing to the achievement of some-thing bigger.

8 Actions will be assigned to roles; responsibilities will be defined forroles; and actions, roles, and responsibilities will be revised in the lightof experience.

9 The preferential weighting of these actions, roles, and responsibilitieswill be something that is systematically revised, often by programs ofchange management or organization reform.

10 Organizations are built on rules. Rules provide for rationality. A ruletells us how things have been done in the past and how they shouldbe done in the future. If we follow rules we will surely succeed in notbeing responsible for error. Rules protect us; they ensure rationality.

Brunsson (2006: 13), a leading European management thinker, suggeststhat organizational actions are not just guided by formal instructions anddirectives but also by informal rules. Additionally, as Brunsson (2006: 14)suggests, experience-based learning and imitation will also play a role. The

Institution: A recurrentpatterned form of activity thatfulfils basic functions for asociety. Examples includepolitical institutions, economicinstitutions, educationalinstitutions, and so on.Institutions define basicarenas in which organizationsoperate: such as government,banks, schools.

Agency: Anything that cancause effects, usuallydelimited to people, butshould not necessarily be so.Machines, viruses, animals,and many other non-humanactors can cause importanteffects.

Managers: The persons whodischarge the functions ofmanaging, in whom control,direction, responsibility forexecution is vested.



first often tells us how to short-cut rules that we find inconvenient. Wefollow the rule but, on reflection, think that there is a better way of doingit. Learning to drive is like this – when you pass the driving test you haveto ‘do driving according to rule’ in a way that you will probably never doas you become a more experienced driver, and your driving becomes morefluid. So you drive without risk or danger on a country road a little abovethe speed limit because you are an experienced and safe driver and thereis little traffic on the road. When the speeding ticket arrives in the mail afew weeks later you wish that you had followed the speed rules, or morelikely had seen that speed camera so that you could slow down until outof range. Rules, especially as they have legitimate authoritative sanctionsattached to them, which are then applied to you, can be a powerfulexperience – especially when rules are paired with punishment (you speed,you get a fine).

Organizations are huge repositories of rulesLet us take a closer look at what we mean by ‘rules’. Here are some commondistinctions:

1 Formal rules: You will arrive at a certain time and leave at a certaintime. This is often a really stupid rule as it slows everyone down as theroads clog with people all trying to get to the organization at the samenormal time – often making many people late. Should people be ableto come and go as they please at work?

2 Professional rules: These are the rules that you have internalized, per-haps as a result of a professional accreditation, achieved in, or in con-junction with, your higher education. But sometimes the organizationthat employs you will require things of you that simply cannot be doneas and when is required using the internalized rules. Which rules shouldyou follow – the professional rules or those of the employing organiza-tion, if there is a clash between them?

3 Legal rules: These may be directives that are explicit, compulsory, andhave a clear source and target within the organization. For instance,you shall not use organizational resources for personal purposes. Buteven a simple rule such as this can be difficult to follow. When Mary inPurchasing calls Harry in Sales with an innocent query and Harry sug-gests they talk about it over coffee after work and one thing leads toanother and they become intimate friends … well was Harry, or Mary,perhaps using organization resources – the phone and time – to advancea romantic interest? Would it matter? It might if the rule were strictlyapplied. But it would probably take a great deal of interpretive abilityand psychotherapeutic skill to work out what was really going on. Whocares? Is it important?

4 Standards: Many organizations do many things according to stan-dards authorized by explicit rules that are designed by independentstandard-setting organizations, such as British Standards, StandardsAustralia or the International Standards Organization. These may cover



many things from the correct lighting and plumbing standards,through health and safety standards, to quality standards or environ-mental standards. Standards can be very powerful devices in shapingsimilar behaviors in many organizations. What standards can you thinkof that shape organization behavior?

5 Informal social rules: For instance, about clothing. Men will wearjackets, shirts, and trousers and women may wear shirts, trousers, andskirts, but men usually do not because that would be ‘cross-dressing’. Inmost organizations it is OK for women to wear trousers but this wasnot always the case. What happens if the men are Scotsmen, or PacificIslanders? Is it then OK to wear ‘skirts’, if they are called kilts, sulu,pareau, lavalava, or sarong? If they are men in hot climates, are shortsacceptable? How long should they be? Should they be worn with socks?Should the socks be long or short? Should the shoes be white, black, orcan they be sandals? These informal rules can be quite complicated.

So, organizations can be thought of as huge repositories of rules. Theserules often have different origins and rationalities supporting them, and, asa result, they may often come into conflict. From the above examples it isalso clear that these organizational rules originate from both individualscomprising organizations as well as from the social relations and institu-tions embedded within organizations.


1 What essential features does a kindergartenshare with a university?

2 In what ways could a university be comparedwith a fast food restaurant?

3 In what ways might a McDonald’s be similarto a car factory?

QUESTION TIME

Organization goes on while members change Organizations have an embedded, structural reality that endures irrespec-tive of their members. People may come and people may go but the orga-nization retains an identity separate from the individuals who comprise it.Think of the educational institution in which you are reading this book:every year a new cohort of students enters, staff retire or resign, and newstaff are employed, but the university or college carries on regardless. Thesame routines – enrolment, lectures, tutorials, seminars, assessment – arecarried out year to year irrespective of who is doing them.

Organizations’ arrangements are usually thought of as attempts atsystematically rational approaches to goal achievement. Most organiza-tions strive to be rational – that is, to be consciously designed to achievespecific ends in an ordered and systematic way.

Check out the websitewww.sagepub.co.uk/managingandorganizations for freeaccess to an article by Parkerand David Jary if you want tolearn why some universities andMcDonald’s have some thingsin common.


All of these organizations are established to deliver something or other:fitness, punishment, and training – sometimes even in one organization,such as the military. Moreover, all are characterized by a strong sense oftemporal organization. Each of them works according to different time-reckoning systems; think of the complex scheduling of a hospital, airline,or railway. They all have hierarchies, some as complex as the rank struc-tures of the police, military, railways, and airlines. In all of them, differentroles are clearly distinguished and prescribed. All of them work accordingto rules and each of them has a clear differentiation between members andnon-members, whether the latter are defined as clients, customers, patients,civilians, non-team members, passengers, inmates, or students, with differ-ent rights and responsibilities assigned as a result.

Organizational identity Corporate organizations often strive to shape their organizational identities in waysthat reflect their conception of the corporate image. In addition, they oftenseek to present a coherent corporate identity to the world. That an organiza-tion should prove to be a source of identity is not so surprising. Since thelate nineteenth century it has been established that corporate bodies –organizations – have a distinct ‘legal personality’. Clear artifactual attributes,such as logos, specifically bounded sites in space and time, and familiar signs,symbols, and routines, all help to reinforce the brand. Most people have afairly clear idea quite quickly of what organization they work for or are visit-ing. Some of what these organizations do as everyday activity helps definethem: the accounts they keep, the orders they ship, the web pages they main-tain. Other, more intangible elements, which are often referred to as ‘organi-zation culture’, which we discuss in Chapter 6, are also important.

Brunsson (2006) suggests that identity, whether attached to the qualifier ofeither organizational or individual, is typically used to alert us to the uniqueproperties and characteristics with which individuals and organizations seekto differentiate themselves from others. All notions of identity are relational:distinguishing something means denoting a difference from something elsejust as much as it may be an affirmation of likeness and similarity with others.Organizational identities are becoming increasingly complicated: firms that

The notion of an organizationalidentity usually means thatorganizations are assumed tohave clear boundaries, alarge degree of autonomy,and distinctive characteristicsthat differentiate them fromother organizations.


What do the following organizationshave in common?

HospitalsCorrectional organizationsSchools Railways

The Police ServiceOrchestras and bandsMilitary organizationsBanksDisneylandAirlinesRock festivals

QUESTION TIME


enter into alliances to deliver products, projects, and services blur the bound-aries of their unique identity. Alliances are one of the most common of neworganizational forms (see Chapter 13), involving the forging of innovativecollaborations, partnerships, and networks. For instance, many companiessuch as Oracle have hundreds of licensing arrangements with other compa-nies as channels to market. Fashion leaders such as Benetton (Clegg, 1990)comprise a core firm that remains independent but linked to many suppliersand outlets by IT. The suppliers receive detailed small-batch orders for spe-cific models and sizes of garment, using information derived from the sophis-ticated IT that each franchised outlet uses to send sales data to Benetton HQ.


IIMMAAGGEE II..33Zara – Europe’s mostsuccessful fashion chain

Zara

The Benetton model has been picked up byother firms, and developed further. For instance,Zara operates a vertically integrated demandand supply chain – a network of organizationsthat collaborate to deliver a product or service toan end-user or market. Zara studies its cus-tomers’ demand in the stores and tries instantlyto modify just-in-time production schedules tomeet the shifting patterns of demand. Zara’sdesigners can ‘interpret’ the latest catwalk fashions

from Paris, London, New York or, Milan and havethem on the racks in five weeks. Zara uses IT tocommunicate directly with suppliers anddesigners in Spain. Shop managers use PDAsto check on the latest clothes designs and placetheir orders in accordance with the demand theyobserve in their stores. Zara’s speed is thesecret of their success.

•• What management and organization aspects ofZara’s business model help to make it so suc-cessful? Use the web to research the case.

MINI CASE


Many other firms, especially in high-technology organizations and inmajor project-based organizations, working on projects such as majorpieces of infrastructure, use alliances between different organizations toproduce a consortium of skills that in alliance can do what none of themcan do independently (see Pitsis et al., 2003). None of these types oforganizations are characterized by a clear-cut identity that maps easily toany one legal identity. Their identity is tied up with the networks that theyform and is indistinguishable from them.

Organizations as professional institutions

Especially in knowledge-intensive organizations that employ many pro-fessionals, such as universities, hospitals, high-technology firms, andR&D labs, it is often the professional boundaries and identities that aremost meaningful for the individual employee. Their identity is profession-ally based rather than being grounded in the organization, thus weaken-ing the identity of the organization because it is not necessarily the firstpoint of reference for influential members. Further, organizations aresubject to many institutional demands from their environment, and asmany organizations share the same environment of legislation andstandards, they end up looking very similar: they all have the same ISOstandards in place; they all have compliance with EEO (EqualEmployment Opportunity) legislation and OHSS (Occupational Healthand Security) laws. The big-four consulting companies offer similar solu-tions to the different problems that they face so they all end up withsimilar recipes: quality management, business process re-engineering, orknowledge management – whatever is the current fashion. As we willexplore in Chapter 12, the tendencies of institutions make organizationsless distinctive and more alike.

Institutions comprise one or other or a mixture of cultural–cognitive,normative, and regulative elements. If the emphasis is on the cognitivethen we tend to talk of common mental maps or archetypes amongst pro-fessionals; if the emphasis is more normative then we focus on the infor-mal rules and expectations that surround an institution, while regulativeelements usually refer to either state regulation, often coercive in kind, ormore subtle regulation by institutionalized standards, such as ISO 9000.These, together with associated activities and resources, provide stabilityand meaning in our sense of the organization of work, business, andeveryday life. Institutions are transmitted by symbolic and relational sys-tems of meaning, by organizational routines, and are often embodied inartifacts. Institutions may range from global phenomena such as the IMF(International Monetary Fund) to localized interpersonal relationships,such as the institution of marriage in a particular society. Institutions,while relatively stable, are subject to change processes, both incremen-tal and discontinuous. The agents of change are often referred to asinstitutional entrepreneurs, and may be either particular individuals ororganizations – for the latter, think of the contemporary role of privateequity funds.

According to Scott (2001),one of the main scholars inthe field, institutional tendenciesare social structures thatpersist and endure and indoing so strongly shape theway that people, especiallyprofessionals, inorganizations do the thingsthey do.



Any organization has many and varied mechanisms in place for ensuringthe continuity of its own identity. These mechanisms are usually embeddedin the organization’s pantheon of roles and responsibilities as managerialtasks: managing accounting, production, marketing, and so on. Chief amongthese is an organizational hierarchy.

The reality of complex organization means that hierarchy does notalways work well. Sectional interests often prevail. At the operational levelwhat it makes sense to do is what appears to be in a department’s bestinterests rather than that of the organization as a whole. Interestingly, thishas been a recurrent phenomenon in very hierarchical organizations, suchas military, intelligence, and government bureaucracies, where depart-ments and services have competed for political attention and resources,such as seeking funding for new battleships rather than new tanks, or fordomestic surveillance rather than foreign operations. Where the parts arecompletely coordinated and controlled from the centre then important cuescan be missed, ensuring a lack of flexibility and adaptability, as the behavioraltheorists of the firm realized (Cyert and March, 1963). It is at the boundariesand interface of the organization with other organizations – suppliers and cus-tomers, information analysts and service providers, other companies and civilsociety groups – that crucial behavioral cues can be enacted and shape action– but not if everyone is following central management dictate. In some man-agement textbooks the job of being a manager looks pretty simple: it is thetask of managers to have an overview of everything that is going on and steerthe organization accordingly. Of course, this is absolutely unrealistic in any-thing but a small business – and even there it is sometimes difficult to workout where one’s stock is being pilfered, or why customers are not returning.

Total control is a fantasy and one that rarely occurs in any organization –if not, there would be no need for the extensive literature on the gapbetween decision-making and implementation that we discuss in Chapter 6.As Brunsson (2006: 32) suggests, the implementation gap can be a good

Hierarchy is often seen as anecessary feature of anycomplex organization,involving delegation andauthority. Communication,coordination, and control:these were the three Cs oftraditional management. Whatheld communication,coordination, and controltogether was hierarchicalcentralization. Hierarchy wascentralized on the topmanagement team.


IIMMAAGGEE II..44W. Richard Scott,sociologist oforganizations


thing – it creates space for subordinate and marginal views to get ahearing. Also, it allows managers to talk the talk which people expectwithout the risks of walking the walk – the risk that their decisions willlead to action is minimized. As he says, this can be especially useful ‘whenorganizational action is expensive or awkward, or when organizationsencounter inconsistent demands from their environment’ (Brunsson, 2006: 32).Oftentimes, an organization’s managers will say one thing and do some-thing different. There can be several reasons for this. First, they are creat-ing cover for what they really want to do; second, they may be quite wrongin what they want to do and their subordinates or those on the margins aretrying to tell them so, because they are closer to the action and have a bet-ter insight into what can be done. Smart managers will listen and do some-thing different, accepting good advice in good spirit. Not so smart oneswill probably carry on regardless.

Smart managers know that their actions and those of the peoplearound them shape – or should shape – their preferences. Those whocultivate the illusion of acting emphatically, carrying a metaphorical bigstick, usually come unstuck. They seek to act out their projects but in away that can only be a kind of fantasy that does not connect with thereality in which they find themselves. Again, as Brunsson (2006: 33)suggests, if managers want to be able to implement decisions they arebetter making them in alignment with the preferences of their subordi-nates rather than against them.

Typically, managers report to a top management team, which in turnreports to an ultimate governing body: a Board of Directors, a UniversityCouncil, or a in government Cabinet, for example. In profit-orientedorganizations the crucial factor is to maintain a sustainable flow of earn-ings and profits; for other organizations, it is more complex. In not-for-profit organizations, such as most universities, there is a great dealmore to manage than the bottom line; in a university, for example, capital isbalanced not just in a profit and loss record, in terms of financial capitalto ensure it is a ‘going concern’, but is perhaps more importantlyexpressed in terms of social capital, above all that intangible thing called‘reputation’. Recently, it has become common to talk of other abstractconceptions of capital as such an asset: intellectual capital or social cap-ital. The former would be knowledge that is worth something, that canearn its owner a return on the investments made in acquiring it. Themost obvious example would be where one has intellectual propertyrights to benefit from a specific innovation or invention. Social capitalrefers to whom you know rather than what you own or what you know;social capital is the set of relations and knowledge embedded in thoserelations that you are able to mobilize.

Top management teams are supposed to set a common frame withinwhich organization members, customers, suppliers, investors, etc., canmake common sense of the organization – what it is and what it does.Organization and management theorists term those processes that peopleshare in making a degree of sense together, sensemaking.

The top management teamcomprises the seniorexecutives in anyorganization, the people whoset strategy, direction, andpurpose.

Capital is an abstract conceptthat might take many materialforms. Traditionally, it wasthought of purely in economicterms, as wealth invested inan asset with the intention ofits delivering a return to theowner of that asset. As such,capital implies complex setsof relations of ownership andcontrol of the asset andemployment in its service.



SENSEMAKING

What is sensemaking?We all make sense of everything around us all of the time. Organizationand management theorists refer to this as sensemaking. One way to think ofsensemaking is to compare it with driving: as you drive you interpret andtry to make sense of other road users’ and pedestrians’ intentions andbehaviors, as well as of all the traffic signs around you. You are constantlymaking sense of a mass of detail, data, and interpretation.

Much of what happens in organizations entails a constant process ofsensemaking. Organizations are a little like a busy intersection throughwhich a great deal of traffic is moving. Managers may be thought of as‘drivers’ – they seek to steer things, make things happen as they areintended to. Some managers are driving for performance, such as forinstance production managers; others are driving marketing or sales; someothers are driving human resource management.

Sensemaking characteristicsWhat are the characteristic activities that bind such different kinds of man-aging together? Let us return to the definition of sensemaking and exploreeach of its terms in a little more detail:

Sensemaking: Managers haveto be highly skilled andcompetent in managing tomake sense of what they do.In management, the keycompetency has becomeknown as sensemaking,which has been defined byWeick (2008) as the ongoingretrospective development ofplausible images thatrationalize what people aredoing.

Check out the websitewww.sagepub.co.uk/managingandorganizations for freeaccess to an article by KarlWeick if you want to learn moreabout sensemaking.


IIMMAAGGEE II..55Karl Weick – theorist ofsensemaking


1 Ongoing: We are always making sense – we never stop doing so, even whenasleep – our dreams are ways of making sense of deep issues that we mustdeal with, according to Freudian theory. However, leaving Freud aside, inour wakeful moments our sense of what we are experiencing is always ofthe moment – fleeting, experiential, changing, and contextual.

2 Retrospective: We make sense of something as it is elapsing and we areconstantly reviewing the sense we make in terms of additional sensedata. Even when they are forecasting, people will examine the future inthe future perfect tense as if it had already been accomplished (see Pitsiset al. (2003) for a good example of future perfect thinking).

3 Plausible: We never make perfect but always provisional sense, sensethat is good enough for the matter and people at hand. It allows us togo on with what we are trying to do. While accuracy may be desirable,reasonable constructions that are continuously updated serve better asdirectional guides when things are changing fast.

4 Images: We often work with representations of things – models, plans,and mental maps – as we navigate our way around unfamiliar territory.We hear what the other is saying and try to accommodate it to thingswe already know and carry round with us as our stock of knowledge.

5 Rationalize: We rationalize the meaning of things that are confusing tomake them clearer and justifiable.

6 People: Although organizations contain many things that act which arenot people – such as computers and keypads – it is people who do thesensemaking.

7 Doing: We do things through thinking and action, which define one another.Weick uses a rhetorical question, ‘how can I know what I think until I seewhat I say?’ The point he is making is that when people act they discovertheir goals, which may be different even when we think we are dealing withthe same cues.

We all make sense of things all the time and sometimes the sense that wemake may be quite different from another person’s – even though wemight think we are dealing with the same cues. In organizations, managerswant to try and have their employees make the same sense.

We make individual sense of what’s happening around us. We use our sensedata – sight, sound, touch, taste, and smell – to assemble impressions of unfold-ing events and then we use our cognitive capacities to make a pattern from thedata. The sense we make is always our sense – you make the sense – but younever do so in isolation. You use many cues to make sense: past experience;what others say they think is happening; likely stories that you are familiarwith that seem to fit the pattern that appears to be forming; and so on. Peoplewill not use these cues in a uniform way, because they are individuals and, asa result, people can make wildly different senses from the same set of cues.

Why are organizations interested in sensemaking?Organizations have a considerable interest in their members making com-mon sense. Any organization appears to be only as good as its people,



products, and services, and if these people are consistently ‘on message’,making a sense that is common across customers, suppliers, shareholders,and employees, then this is a vital factor in assisting the organization toproduce consistent products and services. Common sensemaking is impor-tant for organizations.

It is because common sensemaking is important for organizations that avital part of the management task is to try and produce many cues for com-mon sensemaking. An important part of the manager’s job is to create,adapt, and use common frames of meaning that characterize the organiza-tion and its members. However, making sensemaking common is no easymatter in a world of individuals. We are all, in principle, free to interpretthings as we please. But of course, practically, we usually try to obey thelaw when doing so; we follow habits and routines; we interpret using familiarcategories and concepts that are customary in our language. Managers alsoemploy many different tools to help develop common sense. Have youever received or experienced any communications from your university,old school, sporting club, or favorite shops that could have shaped yoursensemaking practices?


IIMMAAGGEE II..66Stop!

As we have said, management is not dissimilar to driving. Driving is not onlya complex activity in itself, involving acute hand, feet, eye, and brain coordina-tion, but it takes place in a complex environment of signs. Some of these signsare advisory; others are prescriptive. These signs are cues for you to use tomanage your flow in the traffic on the road. When you drive, you immediatelyenter into a complex system – the car – of whose workings your knowledgeis likely to be less scientific and more a matter of ‘know-how’. Once you are


driving the car you are interacting with a great many other road users as wellas interacting with the environment that they share with you. As you share thisenvironment you also constitute it because the sense that you make of the roadbecomes a factor for the sensemaking of all those other drivers in proximity toyou. You constitute a part of the environment for these others as they consti-tute a part of it for you. You cannot control what these other drivers do butyou can signal your intentions in many subtle ways such as the way that youdrive and the traffic signals that you give. Meanwhile, your driving is framedby all the prescriptions that surround you: Slow Down! 50 km zone! Stop!

Road signs are visible cues and artifacts that provide prescriptions fordriving. They seek to shape the environment in which we do driving.When we drive we make sense of the signs and cues that surround us.Managing is similar. Organizations want their members to drive in unisonand harmony, with a common understanding, and no nasty accidents. Theyprovide many cues and artifacts that try and frame this common sense. Themost obvious ones would be uniforms, which visually position the individ-uals they employ as members. Hence, many organizations, such as large-scale bureaucracies, including the churches, police, military, hospitals,railways, and airlines, dress their members in uniforms. Thus, we may saythat organizations often reinforce the way that they shape the identity oftheir members by dressing them up in uniforms. Probably the first uni-forms were military ones – it helped to distinguish who was friend andwho was foe on the field of battle – but we find uniforms today in manywalks of life, from small settings such as car rental counters or restaurants,to large complex organizations such as hospitals or armies. In some ofthese organizations the subtle distinctions between gradations of rank areencoded in uniform: take a look at the images overleaf – can you see anysigns of different status in common identity?

The uniforms are sometimes more symbolic and culturally valued than theyare functional; the soldiers in the picture guard the Royal Palaces in Copen-hagen and, rather like the guards at England’s Buckingham Palace, have towear a uniform and headgear that is neither comfortable nor practical – butit has enormous symbolic value, denoting them as Royal Guardsmen. Moreoften than not the function of uniforms is as much symbolic as functional; theother photo shows bar and restaurant staff in a corporate uniform. When wesee people wearing clothing that identifies them corporately as members ofan organization we know that management is positioning them not just asemployees but as employees who ‘belong’ to the organization.

Management seeks to establish rules and rational routines that will makeindividual sensemaking predictable. Uniforms help to do this because theycode in a shorthand way what rank people have, what they might knowand do.

Tools and sensemakingMost managers try to be people who are not just managing but doing thebest that they can with the best tools and advice available. Just like drivers,they are trying to follow the signs, interpret the complex situation, make



sense of it all, and get somewhere – that is their goal – as they do so.Drivers do so using a tool – the car – and their capacity for sensemaking.

Managers also use tools to get things done: accounting systems; resourceplanning models; and so on. These tools are designed to be rational instru-ments to aid managing. But, just as the car is a tool, and will not go any-where if it is not driven, so it is with management tools. They only workinsofar as they are made sense of and driven. Managers are the drivers and


IIMMAAGGEESS II..77 && II..88Being clothed in andby organizations


those people with whom they interact in and around the organization arethe sensemakers.

Tools do nothing on their own; they have to be used; they have to bemade sense of in terms of the specific context of their application, the timeavailable to do something, the information that is at hand, the skills andcapabilities that are available. Thus, managing is actively constructed –made sense of – by ordinary people going about their everyday organiza-tional life, using such resources as come to hand – including rational tools,instruments, and designs. But the important thing is the use to which theyare put – not that they merely exist – and that there is a distinct individualwho is the user and who is making sense of the context and situations ofuse. A number of factors thus enter into sensemaking.


Karl Weick sees the simple businessof making sense as quite complicated!

These are all the things that he thinks will enterinto sensemaking:

•• Social context: Sensemaking is influenced bythe actual, implied, or imagined presence ofothers. If other people think that a particularinterpretation makes sense then you are morelikely to do so as well.

•• Personal identity: A person’s or group’s senseof who they are is important in sensemaking.Certain situations may subvert or reinforcethis sense of identity. Think of yourself readingthis book. By now you should be thinking thatmanaging – which might have seemed such anew idea – is now more familiar because youare able to relate it to your identity as a driver.

•• Retrospection: Sensemaking is influenced bywhat people notice in elapsed events, how farback they look, and how well they remember thepast. Organizationally, this is extremely impor-tant because, sometimes, the most importantdecisions are often the least apparent: decisionsmade by minutes secretaries – what to keep andwhat to discard – can provide the basis for anylater sense that can possibly be made by orga-nization members. While these are not strategicor conspicuous decisions they construct theorganizational past.

•• Salient cues: When we read detective novelsand try to work out ‘who done it’ we are doing

sensemaking. Managers will use sketches ofwhat is going on and who is who in makingsense, which they have derived from theirpast experiences; thus they project their pastsonto their futures.

•• Ongoing projects: Stuff is always happening.We provide structure to divide the unfolding ofevents into different patterns. Often situationsare structured in such a way as to assistyou in doing this: for instance, football is agame of two halves; symphonies have differ-ent movements. In a football game, for ex-ample, one goal can change the whole meaningand tempo of a game.

•• Plausibility: To make sense is to answer thequestion, ‘What’s the story here?’ Sensemakingis about creating meaning that is sufficient tocarry on with current projects.

•• Enactment: Actions can modify that which isbeing observed. Something seems to beoverheating and you take steps to cool it. Youraction enacts your understanding of thesituation – it’s overheating – and what you dochanges the situation – now it’s cooling down.

•• Drafting: Sensemaking involves redrafting anemerging story so that it becomes more com-prehensive as events unfold and are interpreted.

•• Doing: Sensemaking involves framing detailsas relevant, to isolate particular themes in anemerging story and provide an answer to thequestion, ‘What’s going on?’

(Adapted from Weick, 1995; 2008)

WHAT DO YOU MEAN?


Organizations are full of plausible stories – rumor, gossip, official state-ments, business plans, and websites – each sensible in its own way but nonenecessarily coherent with the others. People talk all the time at work. Muchof what they say is formal: the transmission of instructions and information;the making and taking of orders; the analysis of data and artifacts; debatingissues in meetings; or making speeches and presentations. Yet, even more isnot formal, which is to say that it is neither constitutive of, nor mandated by,the occupational and organizational roles that organization members fill.

Everyday talk in organizations engages an infinite variety of topics as mat-ter for discourse. Some of these relate to the currency of intimacy: talk ofone’s appearance, family, friends, and significant others, while others dealwith more generalized others to be found in sports, media stories, politics, ora new movie. Sometimes this talk makes a difference to the formal organiza-tional world: the resignation due to stress, illness, or the holiday necessary torecuperate from a gruelling project. Mostly it is just about being at work.

Multiple sources of sensemaking in organizationsOrganizations often have multiple sources of formal meaning regarded asofficial. For instance, many organizations contain members who are repre-sented by unions, which will formulate views on official policy of the orga-nization that is equally formal and official but may well conflict with thatof management. In a pluralist organizational setting, it is recognized thatmanagement and the unions will often hold competing but legitimateviews on an issue. Unions are formal organizations that need to be man-aged; just as other organizations they use IT, maintain websites, and offerbenefits and services to members.

Some people consider unions which seek to bargain collectively for thebetterment of the rights and conditions of their members as illegitimate rep-resentations of irrational interests queering the pitch for the rationalemployer and loyal employee to collaborate harmoniously. Unions are sec-ondary organizations because they can only ever organize in a space alreadyorganized by employers. To the extent that these employment spacesbecome increasingly global, the creation of solidarity by the union becomesfar more difficult to manage.

Unions are sensemaking devices that many employers and conservativepolitical parties are antagonistically opposed to because they regard the sensethey make as a restraint on the free market. From this perspective labor is acommodity to be bought, sold, and used (or not used) just as any other com-modity, and it should clear at a market rate that should only be determinedfor individual cases, rather than at some collectively bargained price.

Management, employers, and the political parties that seek to representtheir interests often regard unions with hostility, despite the many positivethings that unions can achieve, such as legitimate grievance resolution,which can often minimize turnover with all its attendant costs, or obligingemployers to be more innovative in the use of capital because the price oflabor cannot be pushed lower. They want to exclude union sensemakingfrom the picture. Often employers, managers, and the parties that seek to

Unions are organizations thatformally organize as anassociation of wage-earningemployees mobilized torepresent their constituents’interests which will oftendiverge from those intereststhat their employersrepresent.



represent them have a unitarist frame of reference which espouses what istermed managerialism. The belief in management as a means capable of solv-ing any problem elevates the necessity of management into an ideology ofthe modern world.

Where the owners are shareholders then the assumption is that the deci-sions that management makes can always be rationalized by reference tothe maximization of shareholder value. In such a conception of the orga-nization, resistance to management decisions is regarded as illegitimate andirrational.

In recent years managerialism – or new public management as it isknown in the public sector – has come to pervade most aspects of organi-zational life. Managerialism involves the attempt to remake organizationsin an idealized image revolving around a strong corporate culture, entre-preneurialism, quality, and leadership, and focused on achieving targets.The targets are often measured through audits – of culture, quality, job sat-isfaction, customer satisfaction, etc. – that then rank organizations on arange of different criteria, which Power (1997) argues are signs that we livein an ‘Audit Society’ in which league tables determine the sense that ismade of organizational performance.

How organization relations actually pan out will always depend on thespecific sensemaking that we find in local situations, discourses, and prac-tices. For instance, Scandinavian managers would expect to be union mem-bers; British and other English-language managers would not. Theirattitudes to unions will differ in consequence.

When managerialism is expressed politically at the national level it cantake the shape of a systematic mobilization of bias against collective repre-sentation, contracts, and rights, stressing instead the individual nature ofemployment contracts and effort bargains. When it is expressed politicallyat the organization level it is usually through the discourses of humanresource management (HRM) in which mechanisms that create employeecommitment to the organization are stressed, such as performance-relatedpay, regular performance appraisals, teamworking, empowerment and,skill development programs (see Chapter 4).

Managerialism is the view thatorganizations should benormatively integrated byshared values expressedwithin a single source ofauthority, legitimacy, anddecision-making embeddedin the managerial hierarchyand serving the interests ofthe owners of thatorganization.

An ideology is a coherent setof beliefs, attitudes, andopinions. The meaning isoften pejorative, with acontrast drawn betweenideology and science.


National systems of industrial relations

Use the Internet to search for websites that areeither pro-employee (e.g. unions) or pro-employer (e.g. business councils and employers’associations); be creative in the search termsyou use. How do these obviously biased sitesdiffer in their representations of core issues suchas wages, contracts, labor laws, striking, and

so on? Once you do this, visit some governmentwebsites, such as those that deal with industrialrelations issues, and also visit the sites of yourmain political parties.

•• How are biases for and against labor, and forand against employers, enshrined within yournational institutions?

QUESTION TIME


Among the major sensemaking tools in use in organizations are rationalmanagement plans, designs, structures, and theories – it is these that providethe categories and labels with which managing is done. Sometimes thesework smoothly and paper over the little cracks that may occur in our under-standing of the situation. We should expect to find a great deal of manageri-alism and rational planning in the organizational world. For one thing, tryingto fix everyone’s sensemaking on management’s terms is a powerful devicebut, equally, we might also expect that some people might have a fair degreeof cynicism and contestation about managerial interpretations.

Different types of sensemaking occur especially where things are uncertainor where things are not as we would have expected them to be, when sensejust breaks down, or cannot be made, and normal expectations just do notwork. The computer messages that the system transmits are just plain puz-zling and seem wrong; your colleagues are acting strange (what do theyknow that you don’t?); and so on. When we make sense of breaches in every-day understanding, suggests Weick (2008), we look first for reasons that willenable us to keep on doing whatever it was that we were doing – we are averseto change. We make sense using devices such as what everybody knows, orapply rational analysis, or we ask others what they think is going on.

Sensemaking can be a matter of life and deathOrganizations are often difficult places to make sense in, especially as wecross their rational boundaries. One reason why hospitals are dangerousplaces to be in as a patient is not only because if you were totally OK youprobably wouldn’t be there, but because your body becomes the point ofintersection of many different professional practices, such as radiography,anaesthetics, operative care, post-operative care, and so on. At each hand-over point there will be inscriptions – readings, charts, data printouts,briefings – that are passed from one team to another. Unfortunately, thesepresent lots of opportunities for people to make different sense of the sit-uation that is your body. Sometimes inscriptions will be misunderstood,sometimes improperly read or communicated, sometimes they will befaulty, and sometimes they just get it wrong. Organizations are full ofhandoff situations: when inspection comes into play; when training takesover; when memos are sent and instructions issued from one subunit toanother. All of these offer ample opportunity for recipients to make plau-sible sense of incomplete details – and hopefully, not have to be account-able subsequently for the sense that they did, or did not, make at the time(Weick and Sutcliffe, 2003).

Sensemaking produces what we take to be rationalSo, sensemaking is what all people in organizations will do routinely whilethey go about their busy organizational lives. Essentially, it is a process ofpattern-making. We fit clues and cues together and make meaning out ofthem. We trace a frame, enabling us to connect things together and make a



coherent and connected picture, a metaphor. Once we have the frame thenwe can make sense. Metaphors frame understanding to produce rationality.

One metaphor has long been dominant where management is con-cerned: the metaphor of engineering. The idea of there being a specificmanagerial rationality first emerged in the 1880s in the USA (Shenhav,1999) from which early management writers created a new language ofrationality, one that American engineer Frederick Taylor (1967 [1911])popularized in the famous Principles of Scientific Management.

The father of modern management, Taylor insisted that under rationalmanagement ‘all of the planning which under the old system was done bythe workman, as a result of his personal experience, must out of necessityunder the new system be done by management’ (Taylor, 1967 [1911]: 38).Here decision-making is taken to be the domain of the superior intellect ofthe manager such that the manager (usually) can deploy a scientific ratio-nality in order to find the ‘one best way’ proposed by Taylor’s approach.

The divorce between decision and execution has been a central tenet ofmanagement science. Usually, the model of decision-making is describedas a perfectly well-organized, rational, and logical process. Problemsare defined, the relevant information is analyzed, possible solutions aregenerated, and the optimal solution is decided upon and implemented.Deming’s ‘plan–do–check–act’ (PDCA) cycle is an excellent example ofhow this is done in many contemporary organizations (see Deming, 2000).Organization members become disciplined and reflexive extensions of thecorporate mind, able to exercise discretion, but in corporately prescribedways. Much of modern management thinking follows this vector. It isframed by a simple assumption that what management does is nearlyalways necessarily and inherently rational.

METAPHORS FRAMING RATIONALIT YWhile the essential tool of the driver is the car, the essential tool of themanager is often said to be rationality. However, while cars are very tangi-ble and real, rationality is always a metaphor. A metaphor cannot be pointedto as if it were the new BMW in the street outside, although when askedabout the car, the owner might use a metaphor to describe it, such assaying it is a ‘dream-machine’.

Creating a metaphor always involves the literal meaning of a phrase orword being applied to a new context in a figurative sense, says Grant(2008: 896). Metaphors influence the way we describe, analyze, and thinkabout things. As Morgan (1986) has argued, it is the metaphor of themachine that is most preponderant in its application to managing andorganizations. So when rationality is attributed to managers and organiza-tions it is often done so in terms of machine-like properties, such as ‘theorganization runs on clockwork’. We will look at three influentialmetaphors used in thinking about managing organizations as rationalenterprises:

Metaphors use terms otherthan those of the subjectunder discussion to describeit. ‘Dream-machine’ is arecognizable metaphor.

Check out the websitewww.sagepub.co.uk/managingandorganizations for freeaccess to an article by Joep P.Cornelissen, Mario Kafouros,and Andrew R. Lock if you wantto learn more about metaphors.



■ Rational division

■ Rational organ

■ Rational choice (and bounded rationality)

By doing so, we will see the ways that assumptions of rationality dissolvewhen the metaphors are interrogated. In fact, we will find that rationaldivisions of labor produce irrational employees; that the organization con-ceived as a rational organ stultifies innovation; and that rational choicesare sometime irrational.

The metaphor of rational division

A key term in the conception of efficiency, as far as managing organizationsis concerned, is the division of labor. The importance of the division of laboris a folk-tale that stretches back at least to Adam Smith (1723–1790), withhis praise for the rationally divided pin-factory and its labors in The Wealthof Nations (1961 [1776]). Economic growth, according to Smith, is rootedin the increasing division of labor.

Where there is a division of labor each employee becomes an expert inone task, saving time in task-switching and thus increasing efficiency. Inmost organizations people do not attempt to do more than they aretrained for. The organization divides all its tasks in terms of different rolesand responsibilities and assigns these to different occupational titles. Inturn, these titles describe in shorthand the jobs that people are supposedto do. Often the division of labor will be supported by a complex set ofposition descriptions, which are especially useful when the organizationwants to hire someone for a specific task in the division of labor. Thesedescriptions tell the organization’s representatives what to look for in acandidate; tell the candidate how best to present themselves; and are apoint of reference for the future if there is any ambiguity or controversyabout what the job is supposed to entail. Karl Marx, who was whollyfamiliar with Smith’s work, was impressed by the fact that the division oflabor developed first in the army in wartime before it did in times ofpeace or in enterprises.

Smith pointed out that no matter how efficient the division of labormight appear to be as a plan, when individuals ceaselessly perform mun-dane and repetitious tasks, it will in all probability bore them, make themirritable, and generally dissatisfied. However, where employees havegreater education then you can make their jobs more interesting anddemanding and they can rise to the challenge. So although it might seemrational to have an extensive division of labor in theory, in practice thevery thing that makes it rational – extensive division – can undermine itsefficacy. What is seemingly rational can be in fact the source of irrational-ity, as disgruntled employees strike, sabotage, or become sick, fatigued, andtake absences.

A very specific idea of rationality became embedded as the common sense-making of modern management. It connected with many ideas that werealready in current use in the US, the home of modern management. In the

Efficiency means the mosteconomical use of resourcesto achieve ends.

The division of labor producesa more specialized laborforce. Instead of everybodytrying to be a jack of alltrades and a master of none,capable of doing everythingin an organization, laborbecomes more specialized bybreaking down large jobs intomany tiny components.



military, especially strong after the US Civil War, West Point engineers werevery influential in promulgating efficient engineering solutions to many prob-lems. In the south, many of the practices used to manage slaves were basedupon the erroneous idea that the people being managed were basically stupidand that therefore the means of control and direction needed to be very sim-ple. One man, in particular, F. W. Taylor, fused the two streams: he sought todesign efficiently engineered solutions for designing and managing workbased on the assumption that employees were not to be trusted and wereprobably not too bright at much other than cheating on their employers.

The metaphor of the rational organPutting the organ into organization, some people like to think about orga-nizations as having brains and other organic characteristics. The brains areusually seen to be in the ‘head quarters’ (headquarters), the hands on thefactory floor, and so on, all working in a harmony and unison designed bythe brain. Such metaphors are essentially organic – they assume that theorganization is akin to an organism – and have been around for a longtime. They are especially popular with top management teams who thinkthat they are the brains of the organization.

The problems with conceiving of organizations as if they were an organ areevident. Only the top management team is allowed to have ideas; everybodyelse has to follow these. Thus, there is little scope for innovation to arise fromanywhere other than the top. If good ideas emerge from elsewhere the oddsare they will not be captured. Often they are not sought. A desperate HenryFord asked why he always got stuck with the whole person rather than witha pair of hands. Hands were what he hired, but troublesome bodies withquerulous minds were what he so often got, despite many systematic attemptsby the Ford organization and the agencies it hired to screen out troublemakersand those morally unfit and insufficiently temperate in their habits for theregime on Ford’s production line. The metaphorical body corporate easilyreduces the literal body of the worker to be considered only as exemplary ifthe worker behaves as a puppet to the commands issued through the manage-rial pulling of strings (ten Bos and Rhodes, 2003).

The metaphor of rational choice andbounded rationalitySometimes it is assumed that everyone who works in whatever job they dodoes so because of a rational choice, otherwise they would exit. Of course,this is to deny the many ways in which opportunities are structured histor-ically, economically, socially, culturally, religiously, and so on.

Rational choice theories, beloved of economists, assume that individualshave an established preference or utility order. The rational person, it isassumed, will always maximize individual benefits and reduce costs in thechoices that they make. There are many things wrong with the assumptionthat individuals exercise rational choice. The criticisms all relate to themodel of the person, which neglects that:

Another key metaphor formodern management andorganizations is theassumption that organizationsare a collective body in whichall the component partsshould function much as dohealthy organs in a human oranimal body.

Rational choice is a theory thatadopts the view that all socialinteraction is a basicallyeconomic transactionundertaken by self-interested,goal-oriented individuals whoexercise choice amongalternative known outcomesthat are based on theirknowledge of, and theincentives that exist in, theirimmediate environment.



■ Individuals’ ideas and preferences are always socially and organization-ally formed and cannot be treated as independent and voluntary casualvariables. You are Jewish or Muslim and abhor pork, for example,while I am Hindi and cannot bring myself to eat beef.

■ Individuals are not motivated purely by self-interest, but often by interestfor particular and sometimes generalized others.

■ Individuals often act from rational motives that are not economicallyself-interested.

■ Individuals rational preferences are frequently shaped by irrational factors,such as emotions.

■ Individuals never have perfect knowledge of alternatives and thus cannotweigh up preferences rationally.

■ Individuals do not have an economic calculus for every action; someactions have value that is expressed morally, ethically, and sociallyrather than economically and many actions are considered very poorly,or very quickly, as matters of instinct or habit.

■ Individuals’ choices made in the spirit of self-interest do not necessarilymaximize the collective benefit; poor managerial choices can destroythings of great value, such as employment, careers, shareholder value, theenvironment, and social harmony. Indeed, if one takes a longer term per-spective, choices made in the spirit of self-interest in the short run maynot be of benefit over a longer period, for example burning fossil fuelscan further climate change or using common land to feed one’s animals,because it is a free resource, leads to the depletion of the resource.

Social scientists are skeptical about the capacity of human decision-making to be utterly rational. Instead they prefer to see people as onlyever rational within the bounds of their knowledge and ignorance. Theysee people as characterized by bounded rationality.

From a bounded perspective, rationalized practices are seen as essen-tially cultural, expressed through managerial talk and writing (Dobbin,1994). Fligstein (1985) showed how different managerial groups sought topromote their own expertise as the basis for organizational rationality in theemerging multi-divisional form of organizations that superseded bureaucracy,as we discuss in Chapter 13. The crucial thing is to appear to be rationalby having all of the symbols of rationality in place.

WHY ARE ASSUMPTIONS OFRATIONALIT Y SO INFLUENTIAL?Rationalist views are attractive to many managers. They place them in con-trol. They tell them they know what they are doing. They make them feelauthoritative. They place them clearly in the centre of their own frame.

To talk of bounded rationalitymeans accepting that thereare limitations and constraintson human behavior. Peopleare cognitively limited,producing ‘satisficing’ ratherthan optimally rationaldecisions (March and Simon,1958; Simon, 1957).Individuals act inconsistently(and therefore irrationally)under conditions ofuncertainty, which arecharacteristic of anydecision-making situation.Satisficing means acceptingdecisions that are bothsufficient and satisfying.



They legitimate these frames. They make them feel important – big menand tough women in business – even as their pretensions may be mockedby their subordinates, contradicted by their failures to make the world ofwork correspond to the ideal model, and compromised by the endless waysin which they have to ad hoc and cobble together compelling accounts ofwhat they have been doing that they know do not correspond with thereality that they have lived.

Sometimes, as some feminist critics suggest, managerial rationality seemsa peculiarly masculine view of the world (Freeman, 1984), which we discussin terms of gendered communication in Chapter 7. The rational attributes ofdecision-making are equated with male characteristics by contrast to the waythat women have been represented as being emotional, capricious, unsystem-atic, and irrational (also see Calás and Smircich, 2006).

To maintain a rational model of organization would mean being able toclosely control events and people, according to a tight script, even at adistance. As we will see in Chapters 10 and 11, this is the very essence ofbureaucracy. But any organization that ran like this would be not only adisaster in any environment subject to change but also impossible. It wouldbe a disaster because there would be no deviance, no opportunity for learn-ing or innovation (see Chapters 8 and 9), just a kind of Stepford Wivesrationality (Oz, 2004). It would be impossible because we cannot helpmake sense, and we cannot help but make sense using a plurality ofdevices, as social beings. It takes a lot of training to have total tunnelvision, although many failed organizations seemed to have thought itworthwhile to attempt it in pursuit of rationality.

How do organizations’ managers know that they are being rational?Brunsson (2006: 34) suggests that they can do so by following rules, orimitating the ways in which other organizations operate, or through exper-imenting. Following rules is a sure-fire way of keeping out of trouble, evenif the results are unfortunate, as we will see in Chapter 12. In reality, rule-following is usually less about getting things done and more to do withkeeping out of trouble. Similarly, if managers imitate what other managerswho are perceived as being successful do, they can claim legitimacy fortheir actions – even if they fail – while experimentation may mean thatthey hit on something that they could never have arrived at intentionally(see Chapter 8).

Rational models are best thought of as descriptions of action that willusually be compelling for most organizational audiences – thus they are ahandy tool with which to provide accounts of action – but they are notnecessarily the best basis for determining what managing actually consistsof. The metaphors of rationality have great legitimacy – in part becausethey have been around for a long time and in part because they have beenassociated with strong programs for reforming organizations.

The opposite of rationality is irrationality. Given that the most powerfulpeople in any situation usually get to define what rationality is, then it is notsurprising that they also define what rationality is not, what is irrationality.Irrationality usually looks a lot like what the powerful oppose or that whichopposes them. Managers implementing reforms, when they encounter

Irrationality in managementusually means opposing ornot agreeing with, or doingthe opposite to what it is thatmanagement desires.



widespread resistance to change, tend to see the resistance as irrational.Resistance then serves as additional evidence for managers of the rightnessof the reforms being resisted. Rationality thus becomes a self-fulfillingprophecy: if it is implemented it is, by definition, correct; if it is resisted thenthe resistance simply shows the irrationality that has to be reformed(Fleming, 2008). There are no singular reasons for resistance to change;explanation must always be sought in the local circumstances, often in thedeep political structures of preceding events. Typically, management writersand managers will often stigmatize what is, on reflection, entirely explicableresistance by transforming the expression of local politics into some form ofpsychological pathology on the part of the resistors, or a failed communica-tions strategy on the part of those who would be agents of change.

Resistance to change can be classified as being one or other of two types:

■ Resistance by omission: Passive attempts at undermining what is beingpresented as rationality by withholding consent or support, demon-strating a lack of legitimacy of the rationality in question.

■ Resistance by commission: More active attempts at blocking, thwarting,or otherwise sabotaging what the organization is trying to position asits rationality (Fleming, 2008).

Resistance can sometimes be thought of as an attempt to assert an alterna-tive rationality. Claims to management knowledge that position it as ratio-nal often assume all other claims are merely the promotion of sectional,self-interested, and irrational strategies. Such views presuppose a unitaryframework: that there is one correct way of seeing things. The unitaryview of organizations is a major strategy in promoting managerial rational-ities. Often, the argument is that where there is resistance then more workmust be done in building commitment on the part of HRM (see Chapter 4);otherwise, people would not resist! If reason prevailed there would betotal commitment and never be resistance, according to this view.

Resistance to change is a widelyobserved phenomenon inorganizations. The resistancecan be overt, in the form ofwildcat strikes, campaigns, orother forms of collectiveaction, or it can be covert,through attempts atundermining changeprograms throughwidespread adoption ofcynicism, irony, andambivalence.


Having all of the symbols ofrationality in place

At the end of the twentieth century, most of themajor European airlines were involved in either theOne World or Star Alliance. However, some, such asSwissair, were not. Advised by the consultants,McKinsey & Co, the top executives at Swissairdecided to found their own alliance, buying upmany small airlines that were not represented in theexisting alliances. After spending 2 billion US dollarsdoing this, the airline was bankrupt and was liqui-dated. The strategy appeared rational – it was thebasis of success for airlines such as BA and Air

France. But the home base for Swissair was Zurich,a small city of 350,000 people, in a small country,Switzerland, well located in the heart of Europe andwith a great many excellent rail connections as wellas many wealthy business people who could affordto fly in private jets if they wanted to. Creating a fur-ther alliance was a simulacrum of rationality – itlooked just like the rational thing that BA had done –but the field was already carved up and Swissairworked from a small city base in a small country.

•• How rational was Swissair’s strategy? •• Who was responsible for its failure? •• Were they following rules, imitating, or being

experimental?

QUESTION TIME


Many social scientists suggest that rather than restrict the category of ratio-nality to plans that rarely work out in practice we should instead study thepractical, situated rationality that people display in their everyday life – whatis sometimes referred to as mundane reality. Hence, there are rationalities,rather than rationality per se. People make sense through their understandingof the world, their interpretations of other people and those things thatpopulate their world. They have many categories and devices for making senseof this world; some of these will be shared with other members of the organi-zation and some will not. Some will be regarded as legitimate by the organi-zation while others will not. What people will build their practices on asorganization members are their understandings.

We should not just study the formal rationality that characterizes mod-ern organizations – the plans, documents, and devices of the top manage-ment team – but we should look at what people actually do with and tothese. In other terms, rationalities will be plural, they will consist of boththe words and the deeds that are done – and sometimes not done – in andaround organizations.

Many of the strategic errors that managers make can be attributed to thefact that they manage as if the world depicted and represented in theirtools and plans was actually as controlled and controllable as these makeit appear to be. Rarely, given the ingenuity that we all bring to sensemak-ing, can this illusion be sustained, because we rarely use a shared commonsense to make sense. We work from different interests, different disci-plines, and different knowledges, with different power relations, strivingto make sense using those terms that make sense to us. Of course, if we areall doing this, then we should expect managing to be a highly politicizedand contested activity – which is precisely what management is.

THE CHANGING CONTEXTS OFSENSEMAKING IN MANAGINGAND ORGANIZATIONSWe all learn to make sense of the situations we are in. However, just like afast-flowing river, these situations are often changing in imperceptible ways.Before too long we find that the ways we have been using to make senseleave us out of our depth! Managers find that what they took for granted nolonger helps them survive as well as it did in the past. Well-established directtechniques of the past, such as management by rules and instructions, byoversight and surveillance, by command and control, on the part of hierar-chical managers, are changing. Today, what they seem to be changing to isuse of more indirect techniques, such as managing in and through vision,mission, culture, and values, leading to a lot less imperative instruction andcommand and a great deal more dialogue and discussion.

Many surprising and useful things can happen in organizations. Forinstance, all those things which do not unfold according to plan, thosethings that are slowly falling to pieces or emerging from the margins, thosethings that come uncoupled, that fail to make sense across the borders and



boundaries of organizational life, those moments of indetermination,undecidability, conjecture, and interpretation that produce new and excit-ing stories, that remake careers, launch splendid enterprises, and some-times sink them, create change that systematically challenges accepted waysof doing things. When everyone can be connected to anyone everywhere,when the value basis of employees is shifting radically, and when the orga-nization laces itself over the globe and employs many of the diverse peoplesthat the globe has to offer, the old certainties are harder to hold on to.

In the section that follows, we will investigate some of the big-picturefactors that are changing the nature of managing and organizing today. Wewill first look at the generic changes that we think are important; then wewill look at their impact on managing and organizations, relating them tospecific chapters later in the book. The reasons why paradigms for manage-ment are changing are several. We need, however, to distinguish betweenacademic paradigms and business paradigms. The former are ways of the-orizing about an activity; in the case of the latter they would be the activ-ity itself. For something to be a paradigm it must be accepted as an idealexample and exemplar, something that shows people how to practicesomething.

Organizations and technological changesThe shift to a digital world means that digital capabilities enable organiza-tion to be moved offshore – hence the spectacular rise of Bangalore inIndia as an IT and call center ‘district’ – a region of the global economy inwhich a particular part of organizational activity is often done for manyfirms, using the English-language skills of Indian graduates, as well as thoseof the many fine computer and engineering graduates produced in this vastsub-continent. Of course, the main reason is that wage costs in India arefar less than, say, Indiana or Aberdeen. Since it is much cheaper to livethere, employers pay far less.

Outsourcing involves contracting the provision of certain services to a third-party specialist service provider rather than seeking to deliver the service fromwithin one’s own organization. Usually, outsourcing is entered into to savecosts and to deliver efficiencies and productivity benefits. By not concen-trating on services and tasks that are peripheral to the main business, anorganization can better focus on those things it needs to do well while leav-ing the peripheral tasks to organizations that specialize in the delivery ofthose services. Often, areas such as HRM, catering, IT, and equipment andfacilities maintenance are outsourced.

Outsourcing is not a new phenomenon: in major production industriessuch as automotives, the outsourcing of initially non-core and latterly corefunctions and services has been progressively used since the 1930s(Macaulay, 1966). The development of outsourcing, burrowing away atthe innards of organizations, hollowing them out, and networking theminto other organizations’ capabilities and competencies, is often regardedas being a part of a shift that has been underway in organizations sincethe late twentieth century. The outsourcing of sectors such as IT and

Check out the websitewww.sagepub.co.uk/managingandorganizations for freeaccess to an article by JamesG. March if you want to learnmore about how the study oforganizations and organizinghas changed since the SecondWorld War.

Paradigm: A coherent set ofassumptions, concepts,values, and practices thatconstitute a way of viewingreality for the community thatshares them, especially in anintellectual discipline, in whichthe views are widely sharedas a result of training andinduction into the methods ofthe discipline. In more maturedisciplines, there is usually asingle dominant or normalparadigm, whereas lessdeveloped disciplines arecharacterized by a plurality ofparadigms because there is alack of shared agreement onwhat the discipline entails.

Outsourcing occurs when anorganization decides tocontract a service providerwho specializes in a particulararea of service provision to domore economically andefficiently something that itpreviously did itself, such ascatering, cleaning,maintenance, or IT.



telecommunications, and business processing, occurred with the dawningof advanced digital telecommunications services. The imperative to outsource –as distinct from the opportunity to do so – was a result of other dynamicsof the digital age, which we will shortly consider: primarily globalizationand increased competition, leading to a continual need to improve effi-ciency from productivity and to increase service levels. Thus, verticallyintegrated services ceased to be seen as the best organizational arrange-ments for gaining competitive advantage. Extending the organization’scapabilities, whether core or non-core, to a third party, became synonymouswith efficient and effective management.

Many new industries have developed on the back of the digital revolu-tion, often referred to as knowledge-intensive industries, those which wefind at the forefront of contemporary global competition, such as Google,IBM, Microsoft, and Dell. In these organizations we find new organiza-tional forms which challenge the older, more bureaucratic structures of thepast, structures that we will explore in Chapter 13.

Digital capabilities have transformed the world – some journalists suchas Friedman (2005), of the New York Times, suggest that digital capabili-ties have made the world ‘flat’ – by which he means that advances in tech-nology and communications now link people all over the globe. This mayexplain the rapid development of India and China, and the growth ofglobal businesses that exploit the opportunities of the Internet to createand design goods and services on a 24/7 cycle – globally – taking advan-tage of different time zones to work on accounts, data, and designs seam-lessly. The world has speeded up to a state of immediacy: any reader of thisbook would know how to find the authors in a matter of seconds and sendthem feedback immediately. (We would like you to let us know what youthink about the book – we like to hear from our customers!)

Managing technological changes Shorter life cycles, virtual connec-tivity, and dissagregation spell many changes in ways of managing. Thedominant trend is that there has been an increasing separation of routineprocesses from more essential work, which is often reflected in a spatialdivision of labor. Thus, for instance, as we will see in Chapter 13, in callcenters the work is as routine and scripted as in any work processdesigned in an early twentieth-century bureaucracy by one of F. W. Taylor’sscientific managers (see Chapters 11 and 12). The means for storing therules may have shifted from paper to software and the nature of the workmay be less physical, but there are still essential similarities.

There are consequences for other jobs when much of the routine isextracted and repositioned elsewhere. The staff that remain core – ratherthan peripheral – will need to be more skilled than before. They will beworking in technological environments subject to rapid and radicalchange. New competencies and skills will be required. Managing will meanmore developmental work oriented to renewing staff ’s specific skills andgeneral competencies rather than seeing that they follow the rules, issuingimperative commands, and generally exercising authority. Managing willmean negotiating the use and understanding of new technologies, contexts,



and capabilities, and facilitating the understanding of those who will beoperating with the new tools and environments. As Sandberg and Targama(2007: 4) note, citing Orlikowski’s (1993) influential work on Japanese,European and US firms, many technology implementation projects failbecause of what the employees do – or do not – understand. Changingtechnological paradigms mean that managers must be able to make senseof the new technology for all those who will use it.

Traditionally, organizations were neither very responsive nor flexiblebecause of their bureaucratic nature as we will see in Chapter 11. They hadtall hierarchical structures, relatively impermeable departmental silos, andmany rules. Such organizations offer little incentive for innovation and,typically, innovation was frowned on because precedents went against therules. Such organizations could hardly be responsive – they were notdesigned to be.

More responsive organizations should have employees who are capableof problem-solving rather than having to refer any problem, deviation, orprecedent to a higher authority. Such people need to be trained and engagedin styles of managing and being managed that reinforce empowerment,using far more positive than negative approaches to power, as we will seein Chapter 6.

New technologies attach a premium to a flexible, timely approach tocustomer requirements. In order that such flexibility can exist in an orga-nization it has to be premised on ways of managing employees that allowthem to be responsive to customer requirements in developing productsand services. As we will see in Chapter 12, the critique of bureaucracy hasbeen particularly acute in the areas of public sector management.Especially in the Anglo-Saxon countries, from the 1980s onwards, theextensive adoption of strategies of deregulation, privatization, and con-tracting out, often on the back of significant changes in technology, haveled to profound changes in the nature of public sector work. Somethingknown as new public management (Osborne and Gaebler, 1992) has had aprofound impact on the public sector, in the public (or civil) service, edu-cation, universities, and health care, especially. The clarion call has beenfor more entrepreneurial managers and less rule-following. Whether this isa good or bad thing has been the subject of lively debate, which we discussin Chapter 12.

Changing relations of service and productionLook at your computer; check the clothes you are wearing; what aboutyour shoes? Where do your things come from? Bet they were made in sev-eral countries and none of them may be where you live. Bet also that Chinawas one of the countries. Today, ‘Made in China’ is a ubiquitous label – wefind it on virtually any manufactured product that we are likely to wear oruse in the office or home.

Supermarkets such as Wal-Mart represent the end of a supply chain thatinvariably starts somewhere in China. The concentration of much globalmanufacturing in China is a relatively recent phenomenon, which really



gathered pace in the 1990s. Just as much of service work has been disag-gregated into lower value-adding elements such as call centers that can belocated anywhere, much of what was once produced by a domestic blue-collar labor force in then heartlands of Europe or the USA, is nowproduced globally, often in China.

One consequence of the shifting international division of labor is thatthe developed world is increasingly based on the production of servicesrather than goods. Material things – such as computers, clothes, householdgoods – are increasingly being produced in the developing world. Oneconsequence is that the nature of work and organizations is changingrapidly in both worlds. In the developing world peasants are rapidlybecoming factory workers; in the developed world there has been anexplosive growth in what is referred to as knowledge work, done byknowledge workers in knowledge-intensive firms. Chief amongst these areIT firms (Alvesson, 1995; Starbuck, 1992), global consultancy, law, andaccounting firms, as well as the universities, technical colleges, and schoolsthat produce the new knowledge workers.

Shifting locations; shifting managing An increase in knowledge-intensive work means that organizations have to employ – and manage –different kinds of employees. Brains not brawn, mental rather than man-ual labor, are the order of the day. Employees need to be capable ofworking with sophisticated databases, software, and knowledge manage-ment systems. These have to be related to customer requirements oftenon a unique and tailored basis that deploys a common platform whilecustomizing it for specific requirements. Thus, technical and relationalskills will be at a premium. Knowledge-intensive work, according toAlvesson’s (2004) research, depends on much subtle tacit knowledgeas well as explicit mastery. In such a situation, working according toinstruction and command will not be an effective way of managing orbeing managed, especially where the employee is involved in design andother forms of creative work on a team basis, often organized in projects.In such situations, increasingly common in contemporary work, ‘becauseof the high degree of independence and discretion to use their own judg-ment, knowledge workers and other professionals often require a leader-ship based on informal peer interaction rather than hierarchicalauthority’ (Sandberg and Targama, 2007: 4). As we will explore inChapters 3 and 4, some of the old theories and approaches to leadershipand project work need updating.

Going globalDigital technologies, together with a growing international division oflabor between economies specialized on services and production, make theworld economy increasingly globalized. Competition is based less on tra-ditional comparative advantage as a result of what economists call ‘factorendowments’, such as being close to raw materials, and more on competi-tive advantages that arise from innovation and enterprise. IT means that



enterprise and innovation can now be globally organized. No industry ismore indicative of this than the financial services industry, where firmssuch as American Express, Citicorp, and HSBC span the globe. Thesemultinational behemoths operate as integrated financial services providersalmost everywhere. Global competition goes hand in hand with outsourc-ing in industries such as these, as such firms exploit technology to disag-gregate ‘back-office’ routine functions and locate them in cheaper labormarkets, as we discuss in Chapter 14.

Managing globally Doing business internationally in real time,enabled digitally, produces ample opportunity for cultural faux pas andmisunderstanding. Work groups may be working in serial or in parallelwith each other on projects that are networked globally. Global organi-zation means managing diversity: it means developing appropriate waysof managing people who may be very different from each other – fromdifferent national, ethnic, religious, age cohort, educational achievementlevels, social status, and gender backgrounds (Ashkenasy et al., 2002).One consequence of globalization and diversity is that HRM must beboth increasingly international and equipped to deal with diversity, as wewill see in Chapter 4.

Diversity is increasingly seen as an asset for organizations: people withdiverse experiences can contribute more varied insights, knowledge, andexperience than a more homogeneous workforce. In the terms that we usein Chapter 9 we can say that it is a good thing to introduce more polyphonyinto organizations. An evident reason is that if a business wishes to sellglobally it must understand all the specificities of the local markets intowhich it seeks to trade. One good way of doing this is to ensure that theorganization has employees that understand that market. Moreover, in cer-tain markets, such as the Middle East, where etiquette and rituals are ofconsiderable importance in everyday interactions, then it is enormouslybeneficial to have employees who do not have to learn through makingcostly mistakes because they have an intuitive understanding. Moreover, aswe will see in Chapter 10, organizations whose members are not represen-tative of the populations the organizations draw on and serve risk beingseen as discriminatory in their recruitment policies. There are ethical issuesconcerned in managing diversity as well.

Changing conceptions of time and space Technological developments such as the Internet and other telecommuni-cations seem to make the whole world something that can be present hereand now – as users of Google Earth no doubt know. An e-mail can flyaround the world in seconds, as quite a few people can testify who havepressed the send button inadvertently on something they might have preferrednot to share globally.

While time and space are two fundamental coordinates of the way werelate to the world, the ways in which we make this representation are notfundamental but socially constructed. The earliest concerns of modern



global management were with the centrality of clock time in the time andmotion studies of F. W. Taylor. Indeed, in these studies the central motifwas that of time–space relations, as we will see in Chapter 11. Time wasmeasured by stopwatches in terms of microseconds to prescribe ways ofdoing tasks. Space was rigidly defined in order to maximize the speed ofwork. These notions of space and time as phenomena under strict organi-zational control are hardly relevant in the age of the Internet. With a com-puter, camera, and broadband connection any organization member cansimulate immediacy with anyone anywhere in the world similarlyequipped. In such a situation time and space are eclipsed. Organizationscan be global, navigating anywhere.

Managing time and space Immediacy through the eclipse of spacepresents problems. Work is much more accountable and transparent asothers can be online anytime, anywhere, challenging the understandingsthat the other has developed. Often these understandings will be embed-ded in a sense made in a cultural, linguistic, religious, ethnic, and age andgendered context that is simply foreign to partners elsewhere. Greatcultural sensitivity, as well as a capacity to handle circadian rhythms, isneeded in the interest of global business. In such contexts there will be agreat deal of doing by learning as managers seek to make sense of otherswhose cues are not only unfamiliar but often mediated by the limitationsof Internet communication. Managing communication in these circum-stances poses especial challenges, as we will see in Chapter 7.

Changing demographics; changing valuesThe era from the 1960s onwards has been dominated by the ‘boomer’ gen-eration, who are now slowly moving out of the workforce, to be replacedwith people drawn from Generation X and Y. Generation X, broadlydefined, includes anyone born from 1961 to 1981. In the West, GenerationX grew up with the Cold War as an ever present backdrop. During theirchildhood they saw the dismantling of the post-war settlement and theadvent of neo-liberal economics (such as Thatcherism) and the collapse ofcommunism. They often grew up in single-parent households, without asingle clear or guiding moral compass. They had to negotiate the hardyears of global industrial restructuring when they were seeking their firstjobs; they experienced the economic depression of the 1980s and early1990s; and saw the decline of traditional permanent job contracts offeringclear career structures. Instead of careers they were invited to accept inse-cure short-term contracts, unemployment, or junk jobs in McDonaldizedorganizations, or get educated. Many of them ended up overeducated andunderemployed, with a deep sense of insecurity. Not expecting that orga-nizations will show them much commitment, they offer little themselves.

Generation Y includes anyone born in the late 1980s and 1990s, some-times to professional boomer couples who left childrearing later thanprevious generations or, as a result of boomer males mating with muchyounger women, maybe were entering into it the second or third time



around. Young people born in this bracket are the first digital generationfor whom the computer, Internet, mobile, iPods, DVDs, and the Xboxwere a part of what they took for granted growing up. While GenerationX was shaped by de-industrialization in the West and the fall of commu-nism globally, Generation Y developed into maturity during the War onTerror, grew up reading Harry Potter, and has enjoyed relatively prosper-ous economic times, in part because of the success – for the West – of glob-alization. If you want to know more about the generations and thedifferences they are inscribed in you could talk to your parents or grand-parents – if they haven’t already talked to you about these things!

Managing changing values The employment of Generation X mem-bers offers real challenges for managers seeking to motivate and gaincommitment from employees. As we will see in Chapter 2, the issues ofcommitment and motivation are increasingly central to managing. The Xgeneration will be more cynical than its predecessors and less likely toaccept rhetoric from management that is not backed up by actions. ForGenerations X and Y, according to Sennett (1998: 25), there is a predis-position towards high uncertainty and risk-taking as defining features ofthe challenges they want from work because they do not expect commit-ment. In part this is because they do not expect anything solid or perma-nent: they have seen casino capitalism at close quarters as brands theygrew up with moved offshore or were taken over, or radically changedby new ownership, and so tend to distrust prospects of long-term or pre-dictable futures. Using traditional management control and commanddevices to manage people who desire to explore is not appropriate.Instead, the emphasis will have to be on creativity and innovation, as weexplore in Chapter 9. If there is one value that binds these disparate gen-erations together it is the sense that the previous generations have reallymade a mess of the planet; green values are very strongly held, andsaving the environment through sustainability is high on the list of valuepreferences. Consequently, as we discuss in Chapter 10, issues of corpo-rate social responsibility, especially those addressed to sustainability, arehigh on the values agenda. Such changes pose major implications forhow organizations attract, select, retain, and treat employees, as we seein Chapter 4 on HRM.

USING MANAGING ANDORGANIZATIONSThe basic argument of this text is now established. In this book, as we haveforeshadowed, we will introduce you to the main lines of management andorganization theory, and we will situate these in the major changes mark-ing the present-day world. These, we will argue, make the ideal of thewholly rationalistic organization evermore difficult to believe in principleand secure in practice. However, most of what you will learn as a management

Check out the websitewww.sagepub.co.uk/managingandorganizations for freeaccess to an article by RonaldPaul Hill if you want to learnmore about how generationsshould make a difference to theways that managers learn andare taught.



student makes assumptions about the rationality of organizations andmanagement. We will outline these assumptions, and the associated argu-ments, in each case.

We will not assume that there are two types of entity involved in orga-nizations: the organization’s (objective) systems and the (subjective) peoplewithin it. This kind of thinking, often called dualistic in the social scienceliterature, leads to the view that if you change the objective systems thenthe subjects framed within these systems will change in ways that the objec-tive changes should predict. If you start from these premises then theappropriate strategy is to seek relationships between changes in the objec-tive conditions and the effects of these on organizational behavior – whatthe people in organizations actually do.

By contrast we argue that if we do not understand the sense that the sub-jects make of objective changes we will understand and manage very little.What people choose to do will depend on their understanding of the con-texts and the resources that they find at hand. The choices are theirs andtheir choices are grounded in their understanding, in their stocks of personalknowledge, in the way that they socially construct reality, as well as in theway that they are constrained by other people’s social constructions.

Managing will rarely if ever correspond with the management presumedin rational plans and principles. Management consists of a series of devicesand resources for making sense while managing. Managers seek to berational but they can never be sure that they will be. As the old phrase hasit, even the best laid plans can go awry as the immutable individuality ofdifferent ways of making sense, of interpreting and making meaning of theworld, intervenes. Managers use sensemaking to construct the situationthat they are in. They draw on professional disciplines, organization rulesand routines, as well as everyday stocks of knowledge, to make this sense.Even though organizations have hierarchies that seek to sustain top man-agement’s ways of making sense as the natural attitude of those who aresubordinate, there are so many competing sources of sensemaking that thesocial construction of a shared reality is always an enterprise that is likelyto crack up and break down.

People who share only organization membership, but neither gender,ethnicity, age cohort, religion, families, interests, friends, pastimes, noranything else, are hardly likely to find it easy to make common sense inother than a superficial way, without rational designs, plans, and structuresbinding them together.

Organizations go to great lengths to try and ensure that stocks of know-ledge are shared as widely as possible within the organization, as we willsee in subsequent chapters, and do so in ways that are reflected in each ofthe subsequent chapters:

1 Creating induction programs (Chapter 1), which socialize individualsinto an organizational frame of reference; they train individuals inteamwork and groupwork (Chapter 2).

2 Hosting leadership development, coaching, and training for commonunderstanding (Chapter 3).



3 Building highly rationalistic HRM plans and seeking to implementthem (Chapter 4).

4 Emphasizing strong, common cultures (Chapter 5).5 Designing lots of rules to frame everyday behavior in the organization

(Chapter 6).6 Managing power, politics, and decision-making so that plans are

implemented, not resisted, and so sectional and specific interests arewell aligned with rational plans (Chapter 6).

7 Communicating these rational plans, their culture, and other messagesto organization members (Chapter 7).

8 Capturing all of what their members know and embedding it in manage-ment systems as they try and practice organizational learning (Chapter 8).

9 Managing change, introducing and effectively using new technologies,and ensuring innovation (Chapter 9).

10 Incorporating new mandates arising from social issues and concernsarticulated by new stakeholders and influential social voices, such assustainability, ethics, and corporate social responsibility (Chapter 10).

11 Implementing global management principles in the organization(Chapter 11).

12 Adjusting the structure of their organization to fit the contingencies ithas to deal with, be they size, technology, or environment (Chapters11 and 12).

13 Managing to manage globally, to manage globalization, and to dealwith the added complexities that managing in a global world entails(Chapter 14).


SUMMARY AND REVIEW

In this chapter we have introduced some keyideas as well as many of the topics which willframe the remaining chapters.

We have introduced the two key terms thatcomprise the title of the book: managing andorganizations. We chose to begin with organiza-tions, as this is the more conventional point ofdeparture. Next, we considered ‘managing’, theother key word in the title of the book. Managingis an activity, something that we all do. We allmanage our everyday lives, more or less com-petently. While managers are specialists inmanaging – it is the job that they are paid todo – this does not make everyone else they workwith a non-manager. They do not give up man-aging their affairs because someone called a‘manager’ has come on the scene.

The core competency of managing is sense-making: making sense of others, of situations, ofmaterial things and immaterial ideas, plans, anddocuments. It is possible to make sense onone’s own but it is not advisable. Sensemakingis what we do when we make sense of situations,people, and things. Most of what is importantabout situations, people, and things is the sensethat others are making of them, and if we do nothave a good grasp of the range of sensemakingthat is going on we cannot begin to act as effec-tive managers. Being an effective managermeans getting things done, and to get thingsdone we have to act with and through others: wemust form alliances and coalitions, use power,build relations, develop cultures, and so on.

Whatever managing we do never takes place ina metaphorical ‘green field’. There is always toomuch history, too much past sense that people


have made of the same situation or situationsthat they define as being similar. That’s how peo-ple make sense – they make comparisons usingwhat they know. People bring past experience tobear on the situations in which they find them-selves. Different people often make differentsense of what appears to be the same situation.Managing has to deal with these different defini-tions of the situation.

Organization is, in many ways, a prescribedstate, and a great deal of management and orga-nization theory seeks to prescribe its states. Butmanaging is never static, always dynamic.Managing means accomplishing organization inaction. If rules are not followed, if routines are notrepeated, if standards are not reproduced, then theorganization is not being achieved in the terms thatthose who seek to control think it should be.Contrary to much conventional thinking, lack ofcontrol may not be such an error. Creativity andinnovation rarely come only from following rules ororders: it is often the exclusion of error, accordingto plans, that makes organizations more fallibleand likely to fail, precisely because they have mini-mized opportunities for learning.

For the individual, becoming an employee in anorganization means renouncing some degree offreedom of choice and freedom of sensemaking.As the old adage has it, you have to fit in – andorganizations will go to great lengths to try andensure that you do, from selection, through train-ing, to performance-related pay. Much of HRM isoriented to achieving desired organizational behav-ior. As an employee, you have to make sense onterms that are largely prescribed for you – and forthose who are managing you and those whom youare managing. There will always be areas of agree-ment and areas of conflict and some things thatjust do not make much sense.

Managers use many artifacts with which tomanage: organization charts, standards, rou-tines, rules, technologies, and, above all, for-mally planned and prescribed ways of relating toand using all these devices. Because of sense-making they may actually use these devices increative and different ways. The devices used bymanagers do not prescribe what managementdoes: managers choose how they will use whatthey use and what they seek to position it asmeaning, just as do all those other people inand around their organizations – subordinates,

colleagues, rivals, suppliers, customers, etc.,who have an interest in the situation beingdefined and managed.

Sensemaking is always more problematic whensituations are changing rapidly and their definitionis contested or unclear. The world of organizationsis changing rapidly at the present time such thatever since the development of new digital tech-nologies, particularly the Internet in the mid-1990s,writers have been noting that paradigms of man-agement were changing (Clarke and Clegg,1998). In this book we focus not only on new tech-nologies but also on changing international divi-sions and specialization in the production ofgoods and services, and the skill implicationsof these for managers; we also look at the effectsof globalization and the increased diversity thatthis creates for organizations to manage; also, weconsider the role of changing values, particularlythose concerning corporate social responsibilityand sustainability, values often held dearly by theyounger generations, and consider what it meansto manage in a world that is not only speeding upbut becoming evermore integrated. All thesetrends are deeply corrosive of traditional modes oforganization.

EXERCISES

1 Having read this chapter you should be ableto say in your own words what each of thefollowing key terms mean. Test yourself orask a colleague to test you.

■ Managing ■ Identity ■ Technologies ■ Rationality■ Values ■ Hierarchy ■ Organizations ■ Metaphors■ Sensemaking

2 Think about the Second Gulf War. AfterSaddam’s statues had been toppled andPresident Bush landed on USS AbrahamLincoln to be photographed against a bannerthat read ‘Mission Accomplished’, how plau-sible was the sensemaking that lay behindthat claim? What sensemaking, on whosepart, might have been missed?

3 What major changes are shaping the contem-porary world and what impact do they haveon management?



4 What happens to one’s sense of individualityin organizations?

5 How is your world flat?6 Where did you last buy some fashionable

clothes in a chain store? Using the web, tryand determine what kind of business modelthe chain uses to organize itself.

ADDITIONAL RESOURCES

1 If you want to find out more about ‘sensemak-ing’, then the key resource is Weick’s (1995)book, called Sensemaking in Organizations. Itis not an introductory book, though, and maybe hard going if you are new to this subject.

2 Three excellent books on problems with therational model of organizations have been writ-ten by the Swedish theorist, Nils Brunsson.These are The Irrational Organization (1985),The Organization of Hypocrisy (1989), andMechanisms of Hope (2006). Together theyform a remarkable trio of organization analysisat its best. Again, however, they are not for theintroductory student. There is also an interviewwith Nils Brunsson on www.sagepub.co.uk/managingandorganizations.

3 Rational choice theory is dissected economi-cally and clearly by Zey (2008a).

4 If you want to know more about the majorchanges shaping the contemporary world ofbusiness you could take a look at Clarke andClegg’s (1998) Changing Paradigms. It isdated now, but still has several interestingpoints to make about globalization, digitaliza-tion, and so on. This book is not too difficultfor the introductory student.

5 A good overview of approaches to understand-ing and sensemaking in organizations is pro-vided by Sandberg and Targama (2007), intheir excellent book Managing Understandingin Organizations.

WEB SECTION

1 Our Companion Website is the best first stopfor you to find a great deal of extra resources,free PDF versions of leading articles pub-lished in Sage journals, exercises, video and

pod casts, team case studies and generalquestions, and links to teamwork resources.Go to www.sagepub.co.uk/managingandorganizations.

2 A great resource site is www.criticalmanage-ment.org/. It is packed with useful andsearchable bibliographic references and linksas well as pod casts.

3 A good site for the fashion retailers, Zara, is tobe found at: http://www.ifm.eng.cam.ac.uk/ctm/idm/cases/zara.html.

4 There is a good interview with ThomasFriedman, held at Yale University and to befound on YaleGlobal, at http://tinyurl.com/2fu7ez, in which he outlines and defends hisviews on The World is Flat.

5 Good pages on sensemaking are to be foundat http://tinyurl.com/2588n8.

6 Dan Russell, who works for Google, hasstarted a blog on sensemaking, which lookslike it might develop in some interesting ways –he certainly raises some interesting ques-tions. You can find it at http://headrush.type-pad.com/creating_passionate_users/2007/01/sensemaking_1.html.

7 Finally, there is a special issue of the journalOrganization Studies, one of the consistentlybest journals in the field, on ‘Making Sense ofOrganizing: in Honor of Karl Weick’, which isavailable at http://oss.sagepub.com/content/vol27/issue11/, if your institution has viewingrights. Otherwise, the issue is Volume 27,Number 11, 2006.

8 An important research article on sensemak-ing and organization by Karl Weick, KathleenM. Sutcliffe, and David Obstfeld is availablefrom http://tinyurl.com/2dsopq.

LOOKING FOR A HIGHER MARK?

Reading and digesting these articles that areavailable free on the Companion Websitewww.sagepub.co.uk/managingandorganizationscan help you gain deeper understanding and, onthe basis of that, a better grade.

1 Universities are similar to McDonald’s – or atleast, some are! This is the conclusion thatParker and Jary come to in a 1995 paper on




‘The McUniversity: organization, managementand academic subjectivity’, Organization 2 (2):319–338.

2 In an article highlighted in the chapter, by KarlWeick (2006), titled ‘Faith, evidence, andaction: better guesses in an unknowableworld’, in Organization Studies 27 (11):1723–1736, there is a good and accessibleaccount of his approach.

3 The paper by Joep P. Cornelissen, MarioKafouros, and Andrew R. Lock (2005)‘Metaphorical images of organization: howorganizational researchers develop andselect organizational metaphors’, HumanRelations 58 (12): 1545–1578, is a usefulplace to extend your knowledge.

4 How management ideas are used in manage-ment practice is a topic of perennial interest,given the role of business schools and

subjects such as the one that you are probablydoing now! Andrew Sturdy’s (2004) ‘Theadoption of management ideas and prac-tices: theoretical perspectives and possibili-ties’, Management Learning 35 (2): 155–179,is a good place to get an overview of somecurrent views.

5 Of all the significant contemporary manage-ment thinkers, James March stands out forthe elegance of his ideas and expression: seeJames G. March (2007) ‘The study of organiza-tions and organizing since 1945’, OrganizationStudies 28 (1): 9–19.

6 Generations do make a difference in manage-ment, according to Ronald Paul Hill (2002). Seewhat he has to say in his article ‘Managingacross generations in the 21st century: impor-tant lessons from the ivory trenches’, Journal ofManagement Inquiry 11 (1): 60–66.


introducing the field of managing and organizations

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