Rational vs Political organizations

• Lecture covers the rational vs. political nature of organizations.

Recap and Overview

• The unitarist view assumes employees have compatible goals and actions directed toward achieving them.
• The unitarist view fails to acknowledge power and politics and focuses solely on managerial prerogative, making it problematic.
• Pluralist and radical views on power and politics offer an alternative perspective.

Pluralism

• Pluralism views an organization as a living organism composed of various sub-systems.
• Pluralism emphasizes the diversity of individual/group interests, seeing the organization as a loose coalition.
• Aims for acceptance of competing interests and politics.
• Promotes accepting rival leadership sources.
• The goal is to maintain dynamic equilibrium.
• Employees are given a place and a voice in decision-making.
• Aims for a negotiated order that creates unity out of diversity (Morgan, 2006).
• Conflict, under pluralism, is inevitable, legitimate, manageable, and resolvable.
• Tends to assume a balance of power between parties with different interests (Burrell and Morgan, 1979).

Issues with Pluralism

• Assumes all parties are rational and willing to trust and compromise, working towards a common interest.
• Assumes all conflict is manageable and resolvable.
• Only sanctioned forms of resistance and conflict are acceptable.
• An equal balance of power rarely exists in a level playing field.
• Pluralist participation is often pseudo-participation.
• Management retains overriding power, controlling the agenda by deeming certain items unacceptable (Lukes, 1974).
• Talk, decisions, and actions are not always aligned (Brunsson, 2002).
• Participation may be limited to unimportant issues, with more critical issues removed to avoid conflict.
• Power conditions and agenda setting relate to keeping issues on or off the table.

Radical View

• The radical view sees the organization as an instrument of covert domination, critiquing pluralist accounts.

• Argues that organizations are not level playing fields.

• Organizations are deeply imbedded sites of domination, where less powerful groups are consistently outflanked.

• Dominant managerial groups define social reality and conceal conflicts of power (Alvesson, 1987).

• Power in organizations maintains managerial control and directs employees to deliver capital accumulation (Willmott, 1993: 519).

• Serves the privileged (Fulop and Linstead, 2004; Clegg and Dunkerley, 1980: 197-8).

• Managers create a culture shaping employee desires and beliefs through the 'invisible hand of power'.

• Conflicts of interest are obscured, and resistance is “eliminated, or never created in the first place” (Antonsen, 2007:186).

• Employees may not realize their real interests due to a lack of alternatives or perceiving current conditions as beneficial.

• Control and conformity are enforced through surveillance, as seen in the Panopticon and disciplinary power (Foucault, 1979).

• Power is embedded in all social relations.

• Normalization involves people accepting the expectations of those who govern them and complying (Jackson and Carter, 2000: 105).

• The result is self-disciplining.

• Resistance is not irrational, pathological, or dysfunctional (Knights and Willmott, 2017).

• Exploitation, asymmetrical power relationships, dehumanization, oppression, and resistance will continue within a capitalist system.

• Different forms of power lead to different forms of resistance.

• Increased control leads to increased employee resistance and the necessity for capital to overcome this resistance.

Relational View on Power

• Power is a condition of social relations where all are capable of exercising power (McCabe, 2007: 228).
• Power is embedded in all social relationships between free people, offering power through the relationship, even with built-in power inequalities.
• Unitarist: Power is united in management's hands, resistance is dysfunctional, misses the naive expectation of conformity.
• Pluralist: Power is diffused in coalitions, resistance is overt and manageable/resolvable, but power differentials exist.
• Pluralist: Misses power dynamics in setting the agenda.
• Radical: Power is invisible, resistance is inescapable/unresolvable (hides real issues/false consciousness), and questions false consciousness.