Organizational Perspectives: Unitarist and Pluralist views

• Unitarist view assumes employees' goals conform to and are compatible with those around them and that employees' actions are directed towards achieving these goals.
• The unitarist view is problematic because it fails to acknowledge power and politics and focuses only on managerial prerogative.
• Pluralist and radical views on power and politics take on a more complex perspective.

Pluralism

• The organization is a living organism, made up of various sub-systems.
• Emphasis is placed on the diversity of individual/group interests; the organization is a loose coalition with a passing interest in formal goals
• An acceptance of competing interests and politics is observed.
• Employees are given a place and voice in decision-making.
• The aim is for a "negotiated order that creates unity out of diversity" (Morgan, 2006).
• Conflict is inevitable, legitimate, manageable, and resolvable.
• Pluralism tends to assume a balance of power exists between parties with different interests (Burrell and Morgan, 1979).
• Pluralism aims to provide a more realistic outlook by acknowledging that power and politics have a place.
• Pluralism assumes that all parties are rational, work with a common interest, and are willing to trust and compromise.
• Pluralism also assumes that all conflict is manageable and resolvable.
• Only 'sanctioned' forms of resistance and conflict are acceptable within pluralism.
• An equal balance of power exists rarely.
• When pluralists refer to participation, it is often pseudo-participation.
• Lukes (1974) notes that management still has overriding power and can control the agenda through 'non-decision-making, including what items are unacceptable to address.
  • Talk, decisions, and actions are not always aligned (Brunsson, 2002).
  • Participation can be limited to unimportant issues, while more important issues can be removed from the agenda to keep potential conflicts off.
  • Power can set conditions and keep issues on or off the agenda.

Radical View

• Organisations are instruments of domination.
• A critique of pluralist accounts suggests that the assumption of organizations as level playing fields is, at best, optimistic.
• Organisations are deeply imbedded sites of domination.
• Less powerful groups are constantly outflanked by dominant managerial groups and the power to define social reality and conceal conflicts of power (Alvesson, 100 Fulop, and Linstead, 20).
• Power in organizations is seen as an exercise in maintaining the status quo of managerial control, directing employees to "deliver capital accumulation (Willmott, 1993: 519) and serving the means of privileged (Fulop and Linstead, 2004; Clegg and Dunkerley, 1980: 197-8).
• Managers create a culture shaping employee’s desires and beliefs, so conflicts of interest are obscured, and resistance is “eliminated, or never created first (Antonsen, 2007:186).
• Employees do not realize:
  • No alternative to managers
  • What managers do is beneficial
• Control and conformity are achieved through surveillance – The Panopticon & disciplinary power (Foucault, 1979).
• Power is embedded in all social relations, and all situations inhabited.
• Normalisation: “people accept as normal the expectations of those who govern them and comply with them" (Jackson and Carter, 2000: 105).
• Self-disciplining is the result.
• Radical views and accounts do not see employee resistance as irrational, pathological, and dysfunctional (Knights and Willmott, 2017).
• As long as we are working within a capitalist system, exploitation, asymmetrical power relationships, dehumanisation, oppression and resistance will continue to occur.
• Different forms of power give way to different forms of resistance.
• As control increases, "so too does [employee] resistance to the domination of capital, and with it, the necessity for capital to overcome this resistance by counter pressure".

Relational View

• Power is a relationship; it occurs 'a condition of social relations in the sense we are all capable of exercising power’ (McCabe, 2007: 228).
• Power is embedded in all social relationships between free people. Thus, everyone has power through the relationship, which may have built-in power inequalities.

Views of Power: Recap

• Unitarist:
  • Power is united in the hands of management.
  • Conflict or resistance is dysfunctional.
  • Misses the fact that there is a naïve expectation of conformity.
• Pluralist:
  • Diffused in coalitions.
  • Overt, manageable, and resolvable.
  • Misses that fact that there are power differentials between different groups and that power lies in the power of setting the agenada
• Radical:
  • Believes Power is invisible.
  • Conflict or resistance is inescapable.
  • It hides real issues (false consciousness), misses the fact that false consciousness is questionable.