Organizations as structures of domination

Organization Studies, Wntr, 1996 by Xavier Leflaive

My purpose is to investigate the political dimension of organized collective action, where political merely refers to those activities involving administrative power. I will argue that power is a phenomenon particular to organizations. As such, it resists any embodiment in sovereign power, and sovereignty claims have to be critically deciphered to reveal the collective founding of political processes. Moreover, power escapes accounts based on a societal level of analysis, for it is articulated to local, organizationally specific contexts of action. Finally, power cannot be understood using Gergen's postmodern relational theory (Gergen 1992), because as an organizational phenomenon, it is articulated to frameworks of action worked out by people who want their actions to be meaningful.

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Consequently, organizations are best portrayed as structures of domination, where power and domination refer to a collective capacity to act. They are fragile, transient accomplishments, momentarily concentrating resources for collective action. As such, they exclude and disclose, thus providing the means for their continuation and potential transformation. Organizational studies, either empirical or abstract, which presume a fixity, or a structure of political relationships, are suspect: they fail to take into account the continuous foundation of organizations - which is essential to their pragmatic and theoretical relevance - and are unable critically to reveal the hidden dynamics that organizations have to operate to mask these foundings.

It should be noted that this paper is part of a wider project which conceptually defines organizations as reflexive social systems. According to this definition, organizing is best conceived as the production of a narrative history: in the course of their operation, organizations gather information and articulate a discourse about their operations which is referred to in the course of their constitution. The notion entails that organizations cohere through a comprehensive self-examination, whereby they constitute themselves as significant objects of social inquiry and practice. Consequently, organizational analysis is chiefly concerned with the mechanisms and narrative strategies whereby organizations are produced in particular societal contexts, and by the consequences of these strategies for organizational practice itself.

Indeed, not just any narrative will do as an organizational discourse. Successful narratives connect organizational practice with the institutional characters of the societies in which they operate. This connection can be analyzed along the structural features of contemporary societies, as identified by Giddens (1984), namely signification, domination, and legitimation. Thus the production and articulation of organizational narratives are consequential to the constitution of organizational beings and organizational societies as well. This exemplifies what I shall call the ecological dimension of organizations, namely, that (a) organizations can only exist as individuated social systems if they are collectively given an autonomous existence as a class of systems, and (b) organizations only exist when they are reproduced by organizational beings in organizational societies: their constituent parts and their environment are constituted through organizational processes.

In this paper, I shall insist that such a mode of constitution is not a politically neutral phenomenon: it entails processes of power and domination. The relationship between power and domination in organizational contexts is well established in the critical tradition. Organizations are the locus of power struggles which originate in wider processes of domination, such as an underlying political economy (Clegg and Dunkerley 1980; Benson 1977a) or in lifeworlds colonized by instrumental reason (Habermas 1987; Forester 1983). Thus the thrust of the critical endeavour is to resist this wider process of domination by recourse to ideological critique.

In contradistinction to these perspectives, I emphasise the empowerment dimension of the process, and the fact that power and domination are essentially involved in the constitution of organizations. It does not necessarily follow that organization theory is conservative in character. Indeed, the position proposed below opens possible directions for a contemporary critical organization theory. Now, I argue that ideological critique is inadequate because processes of domination in organizational contexts of action have more to do with discursive closure than with false consciousness (Deetz 1992). As a consequence, organization theory has been thus far unable to acknowledge that processes of domination provide organizations and members with opportunities to constitute themselves as agents in the context of contemporary societies. To overcome this lacuna, I shall focus on approaches to the study of power which preserve its inherently social dimension, and which account for its productive and constitutive aspects, stressing the works of Castoriadis (1975, 1990a, 1990b) and Ricoeur (1991). The paper may be regarded as an opportunity to explore the utility of these recent trends in French political philosophy in forming a sociological approach to organizational politics.

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Organizations as structures of domination

Organization Studies, Wntr, 1996 by Xavier Leflaive

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