Do Organizations Have Feelings?

Citation

Addleson, M. (1999), "Do Organizations Have Feelings?", Journal of Organizational Change Management, Vol. 12 No. 2, pp. 219-222. https://doi.org/10.1108/jocm.1999.12.2.219.1

These are some possible consequences of picking a new book, especially when the choice is based solely on its title and the reader does not have a foretaste of the author′s views: joy associated with new insights; pleasure at finding one′s own ideas supported; and dismay that the author′s interpretation is off track. The centerpiece of this book is the argument that organizations, and organizational life, are emotional (like reading). Martin Albrow′s point is that one would not know this either from reading most texts about organization or from a typical book review, especially of a scholarly text written for an academic journal. Let me add, then, that the book gave me a lot of pleasure!

This book represents a selection of the author′s writings, beginning in the 1960s. Albrow is a sociologist who paid attention to business organizations back then, when it was less fashionable to do so. He is also a Weberian of an interpretive persuasion. At the time, that combination of scholarly pursuits was probably not good for a sociologist′s career although, no doubt, the issues and perspective were a source of excitement in his research. If his work seemed unusual when he started more than 30 years ago ‐‐ and we can see in his critique of organizational theory from that time just how far outside the mainstream he was ‐‐ nowadays the approach, themes, and issues mix easily in the confluence of tributaries marking a growing interest in organizational discourse and languages of postmodern organization.

I should add that the author has also gone out of his way to integrate the different pieces, so this is not a collection of “old papers”. Some of the contributions are quite recent. The writings are organized thematically and Albrow has written an introduction to each section which contextualizes the theme and arguments against current perspectives and questions. He has included new chapters based on older published material, as well as references to newer work and cross‐references among the chapters. Because of the time‐span which the chapters cover, one gains a useful perspective on the way in which an interpretive social theorist′s interests have and have not changed in the second half of the century: from confronting questions of objectivity in the 1960s, to grappling with the practical organizational consequences of the absence of a grand narrative in the 1990s.

Do Organizations Have Feelings? is certainly a provocative title. For people with an interest in organizational discourse, including the interconnection between languages of organization and how we manage or organize, it is a title which will spark all sorts of associations, some of which may be a source of apprehension (and even dread). Can you literally associate an organization, an abstraction, with feelings? Is an organization an abstraction? How do people make meaning of the word “organization”? What are “feelings” in an organizational setting? Is the author speaking the language of those psychologists who, for a while, tried to maintain the pretence of a scientific language of feeling‐without‐emotion, a language of “motivation” and “productivity” without “enthusiasm” and “commitment”? What does it take to make feelings a part of the conversations about, as well as in, organizations? It turns out that, although the book′s title refers directly to the subject of only one chapter, the associations which the title provokes are the informing themes of the book. These are also key issues in contemporary shifts in thinking about organization, which is why the book is so worthwhile.

As indicated both by earlier chapters and the last one, one of Albrow′s main interests is methodology, understood in the broadest terms as ways of looking at the world and organizations. Getting to a point where it is possible even to discuss feelings and their relevance to our views on organization means breaking the spell of modernism that both reified the organization and objectified the “perspective” of the social theorist. The language of modernism separates theory and practice, ideas from experience, distancing the theorist, consultant, and manager from organizational issues, marking each as a careless “outsider” rather than as an engaged or caring participant, and making it almost impossible to think about feelings and emotions.

That Albrow is able to extend the discourse on organization and, it turns out, is able to participate in a different, postmodern story, is possible because he is not a modernist. From the perspective of an interpretive Weberian, he devotes much energy to encouraging others to draw away from conventional organizational thinking while, at the same time, “looking in”. What is worrying is that, 25 years on, Albrow′s critique of constructs that characterized organizational theory of the 1950s and 1960s, like systems theory, seems surprisingly novel because those ideas continue to shape organizational thinking. Adopting what now is called social constructionism and arguing that people have a choice about how they view organizations, he points out that theory reflects particular interests and the social discourse of the time. In this vein it is plainly ludicrous that many ideas and practices associated with contemporary management, including the idea of an organizational “structure”, are still deeply rooted in a view of the organization as a machine‐dominated, repetitive‐work environment where hourly output is a meaningful, measurable notion.

In the course of encouraging his readers to escape from conventional organizational thinking Albrow′s other task is to pull Weber out from under the shadow of modernism where he had been put by Talcott Parsons and others. Albrow′s object is to release Weber from the charge that sociology is a modernist, rational‐scientific endeavor, dealing only with rational aspects of social‐organizational life. No doubt Albrow is justified in this task. He is a Weber scholar of the first rank and he is certainly not alone in this endeavor since, following Peter Winch, many scholars have sought to draw a line between scientistic modernism and social science grounded in Verstehen. Unfortunately, while Albrow′s arguments about extending and recovering Weber′s ideas for contemporary analysis of organizations are enlightening, they generally did not excite me. It is one thing to interpret Weber′s position from a contemporary perspective and to appreciate the magnitude and enormous value of his contribution as a founder of interpretive sociology, in Albrow′s words (p. 100), “explain[ing] why people act as they do within the structures of meaning in which they find themselves”. Asking how Weber′s classificatory schemes might be amended in the light of contemporary ideas, however, is akin to asking how Gustav Klimt might be reworked as an abstract modern artist. Both questions seem to deny the idea of reflexivity.

I would like to return to the meaning of the title of the book (once provoked, some thoughts catch fire and will not easily be quenched). We live in an age where expressions like the “learning organization” and even the “knowing organization” are easily coined and can quickly gain currency. This may be because in the arena of organizational discourse, where ideas are aggressively marketed and there is a great deal of hyperbole, a fair amount of sloppy thinking is inevitable. I have yet to come across a compelling explanation of how organizations, as opposed to people, learn. That does not mean, however, that I am averse to the idea. Albrow′s question is stimulating but his affirmative answer is only half‐way compelling.

For years “scientific” explanations of how organizations work, referring to efficiency and productivity, have shied away from formal recognition of the sociality of organizations and with disastrous consequences. Many organizations are repressive. In some, people are treated inhumanely, literally sacrificed to appease the gods of the “bottom line”. Not only has care, concern for, or a sense of responsibility for others been absent, but also people who show these qualities have been regarded as unfit for organizational life. It is desirable that the discourse of organizations includes people′s emotions and feelings. These are integral to organizational life as they are to social life in general. From my perspective, an important aspect of admitting emotions is that in doing so we recognize the sociality of being. Feelings are shared with others, they are about others, they are learned and are expressed in ways which are meaningful to others (p. 106).

The question is, can we make sense of the idea that organizations themselves have feelings, especially because, for so long, making such an association was “unscientific” and also meant committing the sin of “misplaced concreteness”? Faced with this question, Albrow′s answer is “there can be as little objection to speaking of organizations having feelings as there is to speaking of them acting” (p. 106). It seems to me that this argument does not settle the matter but simply shifts the author′s responsibility, requiring him to account for how organizations can act.

There is a way of thinking about organization which offers a more satisfactory answer. It is one which appeals to social constructionism, with particular emphasis on the social, but it is not an argument that will be gleaned from the pages of this book. Throughout the book Albrow takes it for granted that “the organization” is a meaningful notion, even arguing in a passage which follows the one above that “[w]e can identify dominant emotions which characterize the organization as a whole”. For social constructionists, who might be happy with the idea of organizations as comprising a variety of “communities of practice”, any reference to “the organization” begs the question, whose organization? Whose perspective or position is this? Does it reflect the view of someone in the boardroom or someone in the mail room?

Increasingly, I believe, social constructionists are coming to regard organization in terms of relationships among people in groups. “The organization”, or “my organization” is given meaning by people interpreting their relationships or associations with others, in respect of matters like their common or different interests. On this reading, organizations “exist” in the narratives, or stories, of different, inter‐related communities. These communities are constituted and reconstituted in those narratives and, to the extent that they have “permission” to express their feelings in those narratives, the participants and therefore the organization have feelings. In this sense, too, organizations can learn, act, and share ideas. Of course the ideas are meaningful to people but they are shaped and understood in the context of the interplay among them and are expressed in their conversations with one another. The same considerations apply to the feelings of an organization. People′s emotions take on different meanings and are expressed differently in particular narrative‐organizational contexts. Their feelings are thus specific to, or belong to, organization.