The Oxford Handbook of Organization Theory: Meta‐Theoretical Perspectives

Citation

Jones, D. (2008), "The Oxford Handbook of Organization Theory: Meta‐Theoretical Perspectives", Personnel Review, Vol. 37 No. 2, pp. 238-240. https://doi.org/10.1108/00483480810850560

The subtitle of this handbook of organization theory is important: “Meta‐theoretical perspectives” This phrase signals that the book is not a collection of various types of organization theory (OT), or of various topics in organizational life and theories about them – but rather a series of reflections by scholars on “the status of OT as a social science discipline”. But the editors do link the more esoteric theoretical meta‐reflections in this book to issues of practice, in that they see such reflections as necessary to address a “crisis of confidence” related to the question “how good are we as a field to develop valid knowledge whose is of relevance to practitioners?” (p. 5). Answering this question requires “taking a step back” to look at what OT is all about.

The aims and structure of the book underscore the claim that OT is an academic “discipline”, and the book is in fact, above all, concerned with debates within that discipline. This claim could be debated – for whom is it useful to claim that OT is a unified “discipline” and why? However, I will give a brief overview of the handbook's aims and coverage, and then go on to focus on the aspects that are likely to be of most interest from an Human Resource Management (HRM) standpoint.

Although OT is described here as a “policy science” – “a science aiming at generating knowledge with the explicit aim that it be of direct utility to an identifiable body of practitioners” (p. 2) – the OT discussions in this book may not seem of immediate value to Human Resource management (HRM) practitioners or even HRM scholars. The editors specifically reject the conventional demarcation between Organization Behaviour (OB) and Organization Theory (OT) in favour of a broad notion of OT that covers both micro‐ and macro‐phenomena. In spite of this claim, the book covers little of what would typically be recognised as OB in standard texts, as much of the OB (and HRM) literature is drawn from social psychology.

The contributors are described as “leading scholars in OT”, all familiar in the academic literature (p. 1), and they engage in five sets of questions around which the book is organised. Briefly these are: What is the status of OT as a science? How has OT developed over time? How have major controversies in the field been dealt with? How is OT knowledge related to action and policy? And what is the future of OT? These questions are addressed primarily to academics, who are the handbook's key audience. However, some of the most challenging chapters in the handbook directly deal with questions of how OT is related to practice – who it is for; the language in which it is written; and the kinds of vital topics of contemporary life that it could address.

Many in the field of HRM will be familiar with the ideas of reflective practice, action research and organizational learning developed by Chris Argyris and his colleague Donald Schön (Argyris and Schön, 1974, 1978; Schön, 1983), and these are summarised and updated in Argyris' chapter in this handbook. Here he takes scholars somewhat to task for their failure to produce “actionable knowledge”, defined as knowledge “that actors can use to implement effectively their actions” (p. 424). He has no patience with scholars who tell practitioners who want advice that “the existing prescriptive data are inadequate to formulate prescriptions” (p. 449), and he sets out his own model of the action cycle for producing valid and actionable knowledge. In Argyris' world, organisational theory is produced collaboratively with practitioners, and knowledge is modified in relation to actions in organisations and their results. Three other contributors continue the themes of the theory/practice relationship in the same section of the handbook, called “Organization theory as a policy science”, and interestingly the final two focus on issues of ethics.

Another take on the academic/practitioner relationship is presented in Barbara Czarniawska's chapter on the language of organisational theory. She underlines the point that organisational theory is a certain kind of written style. In fact OT is a variety of styles, related to what she ironically calls organisational theory's “much lamented plurality” (p. 238). Unlike the editors, she is not keen on presenting organisational theory as a should‐be unified disciplinary field. Rather, she celebrates its range of styles, and by analysing a range of them she argues that organisational theory, like other academic writing, is not a matter of a self‐evident or “factual” scientific style, but rather a matter of persuasion and rhetoric. The “scientistic” style (p. 241) is just one way to persuade readers of the authority of its writing, but there are many others. Czarniawska gives examples of several styles that are more likely to appeal to practitioners. My own experience is that while academics may think they need to produce “scientistic” writing styles to persuade users of their validity, practitioners are often sceptical of scientific grand theory, and much prefer anecdotes and narrative ‐ thus the success of “management gurus” writing in a popular style. “Scientistic” approaches that seek to narrow down organisational phenomena to ever narrower operationalised variables risk meaningless results: Czarniawska cites Karl Weick's point that “theorists often write trivial theories because their process of theory construction is hemmed in by methodological strictures that favour validation over usefulness” (p. 244).

While Czarniawska draws attention to writing styles, Gibson Burrell asks “for whom” organisational theory is written (p. 527). He sets out four possible groups: “board members or their equivalent, middle management, the subordinate employee, or, of course, other academics (p. 525). He points out that there is “a view that … our status comes from what or with whom we [organisational theorists] usually interact. Our raw material designates our status” (p. 525). Strategic management writing, for example, is considered prestigious because it typically involves senior corporate levels. But Burrell argues that middle management is the group about which most organisational theory is written, and that most management students will in fact remain middle managers (in spite of claims that MBAs will shoot graduates to senior management). In direct opposition to Argyris, he does not see writing for other academics as an “introverted irrelevance”, but rather “the core of our professional identity and the sine qua non of university life” (p. 527). Within this context, he proposes that organisational theory should become much more interdisciplinary, and should go beyond what he calls the “North Atlantic Theories of Organization (NATO)” (p. 533), a proposition that acknowledges most organisational theory emanates from the traditionally dominant centres of Europe and North America. The academic publishing system tends to force any contributions from the margins of “the world economy or whatever other types of centre of power are relevant” into the same mould. We have very little sense of what organisational theory might be if it were openly located in particular cultural, geographical and historical contexts, instead of purporting implicitly to come from some universal nowhere/everywhere.

Burrell ends his chapter by remarking that the huge majority of the world's population and its work remains, regrettably, outside the range of organisational theory. Marta Calas and Linda Smircich take this change further in their chapter “At home from Mars to Somalia: recounting organisational studies”. They start with two examples: the crash of the Mars Polar Lander and famine in Somalia, both in 2000. Calas and Smircich ask what organisational theory might offer to understand these case studies, and present a range of possibilities from the organisational theory literature. The multiplicity of available perspectives – is not their key point. Rather, they argue that organisational theory has contributed little to actually changing these types of situations, yet keeps repeating the same old “common sense” solutions. In a sense, organisational theory has failed. Its modernist “dream of being able to separate facts from values, ends and means, things and people, while all the time always moving towards a better future” (pp. 604‐5) is an impossible one. Calas and Smircich propose instead that we re‐imagine the universities in which organisational theory is carried out as “more hybrid forums”, in which bigger organisational topics are co‐researched with those now “outside” universities, so that the scope of organisational theory includes than whole world and all its many problems and encounters. This is not just a restatement of the Argyris “actionable knowledge” position. Calas and Smircich, have a much more critical approach to the “common sense” of management practitioners, which tends to live within the modernist dream. Like organisational theory scholars, managers risk becoming “prisoners of our own productions” (p. 604). In the most radical challenge in (and to?) this handbook, instead of focusing on what (NATO) organisational theory has to teach the world, Calas and Smircich argue that the future for organisational theory should lie in what we have to learn from and with the marginal cases of the world.