Work, human agency and organizational forms: an anatomy of fragmentation

Abstract

This article is concerned with the changing premises of human involvement in organizations underlying current employment and labour trends. The appreciation of these trends is placed in the wider historical context signified by the advent of modernity and the diffusion of the bureaucratic form of organization. The article attempts to dissociate bureaucracy from the dominant connotations of centralized and rigid organizational arrangements. It identifies the distinctive mark of the modern workplace with the crucial fact that it admits human involvement in non-inclusive terms. Modern humans are involved in organizations qua roles, rather than qua persons. Innocent as it may seem, the separation of the role from the person has been instrumental to the construction of modern forms of human agency. An organizational anthropology is thereafter outlined based on Geilner' s conception of 'Modular Man'. Modernity and bureaucracy construe human beings as assemblages of relatively independent behavioural modules that can be invoked individually or in combination to respond to the differentiated character of the contemporary world. While the occupational mobility and organizational flexibility currently under way presuppose a model of human agency that recounts basic attributes of the modular human, they at the same time challenge it in some important respects.

Keywords: bureaucracy, contingency, employment and organizational forms, human agency, selectivity, work

Introduction

The shifts in employment forms that have been taking place during the past two decades or so bear increasing evidence that the very terms by which contemporary people are involved in formal organizations are irrevocably changing. Labour contracts other than the traditional, the flexibilization of work time and the dissociation of work from particular sites stand as the epitomes of these changing premises by which increasing numbers of people are currently tied to organizations (Beck 1992; Carnoy 2000; Rifkin 1995; Sennett 2000). Destandardization of labour, as Beck (1992) summarizes this tripartite development, impinges upon society as a whole. But it is unmistakably associated with major shifts in work habits and the institutional or organizational forms that have, during several decades, sustained lifetime employment and clear-cut job assignments. On the one hand, current changes in employment forms do challenge some of the older premises (for example, stability, continuity, career and loyalty) on which the making of an occupational and professional identity was based. On the other hand, they destabilize the institutional forms (that is, rights, commitments or obligations) and processes (that is, collective negotiations) that have shaped or regulated the terms by which individuals have traditionally been tied to organizations (Beck 1992; Rifkin 1995).

The developments in work and employment currently under way are commonly associated with the overall shifts in the modes of economic involvement that coincide with the emergence of the information economy in this late industrial age (Bell 1976; Castells 1996, 2000; Rifkin 2000). They are also related, albeit less often, with the overall cultural reorientation of contemporary societies, manifested, among other things, in growing individualism and the widespread distrust of social institutions (Bauman 1992; Beck and Beck-Gernsheim 1996,2002; Sennett 1992). Taken together, the current trends in employment forms suggest a conception of work that is predicated upon an understanding of human agency that puts a premium on the qualities of malleability, flexibility and adaptability. The terms by which people are currently involved in organizations seem to differ in some substantial respects from the stable forms of human involvement in organizations that have been dominant during the past 100 years or so (Beck 1992, 2000).

The present article sets out to address some of the issues associated with the mentioned developments. It is more precisely concerned with the changing premises of human involvement in organizations underlying the employment and organization trends described above and the very assumptions about human agency on which they are predicated. The very momentum of current developments suggests, however, that the emerging employment forms and the organizational changes with which they are associated need to be placed in their wider historical context and evaluated accordingly. The consideration of the models of human agency, underlying the constitution of the workplace during the past 100 years or so, seems to be essential to the project of understanding the key behavioural premises of current economic and labour developments. The rather broad orientation of the present work should make clear that its focus is on delineating a few basic ideas that capture the core terms by which contemporary humans are implicated in organizations. Despite its focus on forms of human agency, the article is not concerned with the subjective work experiences of particular persons or groups, but with the anatomy of the very terms governing human involvement in organizations. In other words, the focus is on the forms of human participation, which current processes of formal organizing admit, not on subjective experiences. Furthermore, the article aims at contributing to an understanding of contemporary modes of work and human involvement in organized systems. It is not concerned with advancing evaluative statements as to what is good or bad, though some judgements of this sort are by necessity involved in the course of developing the major claims of the present work.