Organisations in Action. Competition Between Contexts. . - book review

Peter Clark: Organisations in Action. Competition Between Contexts

2000, London and New York: Routledge. 354 pages.

This is probably the most breathtaking book I have ever read. It covers an immense ground, its prose is incredibly dense, it brings together a vast array of ideas, findings, interpretations and cases. It really does not leave many stones unturned, in the areas of methodology, strategy and related industrial economics or political economy, organization and management theory, and comparative management and organization systems. It comes close to the character of a handbook by that token, but, on the other hand, it is more selective. Handbooks take a deep cut in every subject area, presenting the most important ideas, findings, or other ingredients within a longer tradition. This is not what the author has done here. He very much drives towards a topical and recent state-of-the-art rendering of what is important and well corroborated for the organizational theorist and researcher who is interested in the links between organizing and wider contextual settings.

The overall contents of the book are well summarized in the beginning, with a memorable billboard of: two themes, three disciplines, and five perspectives. This style is indicative of a persistently punchy way of luring the reader into rather complex argument and dense reasoning. Chapters start similarly, motivating the reader with provoking triads of terms and messages. Chapters then develop these in such a way that what at first appears like a nice, but bewildering, array of keywords, turns into a tightly interlinked and systematic argument. The didactic tack seems to be to let the reader savour the spicy lolly, presented at the beginning, long enough to take him or her through fairly dense and exacting prose.

The two themes mentioned are: organizations in action, and competition between contexts, repeating the title and the sub-title of the book. These serve to define the two major substantive fields in which the book is interested: On the one hand, we have organizations, as increasingly complex entities, within sectoral and network settings, making strategy, changing structures and processes, interacting with their environment. The other theme, of competition between contexts, bears regard to the phenomenon of the internationalization of business activity, whereby not only organizations compete within respective niches, but the institutional and societal contexts in which they are embedded. They do this across a wider range of niches, and in between, we see a grey area in which regional and sectoral forms of governance and organization not only define kinds of competition, but also compete one with the other.

The disciplinary rigourist would easily have detected one or two more disciplines in this array. But what is a discipline, the author would rightly ask, in a field which is disciplined by inter-disciplinary cooperation and competition? Then we get five perspectives: modern-positivist, post-modern, structuration and symbolic, the realist turn, and neo-modern political economy. Here again, rigourists would probably debate at length on whether justice is done to structurationism and symbolism by incoporating them within the same perspective. However, whatever the outcome, the author is surely right in presenting us with the fact that we have many more perspectives than themes, and more perspectives than disciplines, and perspectives cross-cut disciplinary boundaries, whatever these disciplines and perspectives may be.The disciplines (three this time) which the author elaborates on, are organization and organization economics, strategy and international business.

With such differentiated arrays, the curious reader then wants to know in which way the author confronts them: Will he knock certain disciplines or perspectives, and praise others? Will he try to bring together differentiated perspectives within an overarching system, define this system authoritatively, and then make things fall into place, in a new and more beguilingly integrated order? Or will he leave things standing alone or next to each other, isolated in cages so as not to do each other any harm, like species in a zoo that would otherwise devour each other?

None of these things happens. What we get instead, is a breathtaking ride, like on a helter-skelter, where you are low on the ground one moment, then up on top, pressed into your seat with the pull of acceleration in a curve one moment, then flung against the straps with negative acceleration the next moment. The only general rule is that what you get next cannot be well predicted on the basis of what you experienced just before. Of course, on a helter-skelter, this is what you are in for; this is why you go there. In methodological terms, the author is very eclectic. He manages to show the strong and the weak points of all the approaches with equal conviction. As soon as you have seen the sense in structuration and symbolism, you are flung into the 'realist turn', and that eases you into the 'neo-modern political economy', which goes against what was written on post-modernism a minute ago.