0 ~,fEG 4 The Int JI of Mgmt Sol ~,ol 10. No I, pp 7 Io 0 1982 0305-0483 ~32 010OO'~-03503.00 0 Printed ;n Great Br~atn Pergamon Press Ltd

FEEDBACK Paradigms, Gestalts and the Obfuscation

1 G R E A T L Y enjoyed Eilon's editorial "Paradigms, Gestalts and the Obfuscation Factor in Organization Theory" [1]. As always his ideas are provocative and incisive. In this particular case however. I think he may be chasing something of a paper tiger.

As he conceded, Organizat ion Theory is subject to a great many variables and it would be remarkable, there- fore. ira single unifying and comprehensive format could be devised. 1 agree entirely however, that the present state of Organization Theory is very unsatisfactory. There is too much emphasis on jargon and academic concepts and not nearly enough attention is paid to the practical problems facing people in modern organiz- ation.

1 would disagree with him when he argues that the subject of Organization Theory has no right to exist because it is presently divorced from reality. We all know that many of the important recent developments in mathematics and physics had their origins in the nineteenth century, when the scientists concerned at that time were clearly divorced from thier 'real world'. In any case, Organization Theory is too important a subject matter for us to ignore and wish away. I am afraid, therefore, that we must keep urging our col- leagues, who are involved in Organizat ion Theory, to come back more and more into the 'real world'.

One last thought, incidentally, regarding reality. It is highly possible that engineers and managers in British industry could pick on other areas of management studies and accuse them also of being unreal. This is particularly true, for example, in the field of operational research, where much of the mathematical reasoning and application has little to do with real problems facing the consumers of such research.

REFERENCES

1. EILON S (1981) Paradigms, gestalts and the obfusca- tion factor in organization theory. Omega 9(3), 219- 225.

Department of Mechanical Engineering Imperial College Exhibition Road London SW7 2BX UK

T O M H U S B A N D

To EILON'S editorial I say: AMEN! I agree with him entirely and wish I could put it as well.

My feeling is that Organization Theory suffers from the same critical and fundamental error as economics. An economy cannot be explained by using only economic variables, hence economics should not be a discipline. as it is, but a transdisciplinary field. Organizational structure and function cannot be dealt with indepen-

dently of the personalities of the people involved, the culture that is its environment, its own culture, the technology involved, competition, and so on. Therefore, I would add to Eilon's basic prescription that the study of organizat ion be rooted in reality and practice, the prescription that organizational properties be studied by transdisciplinary teams and not be taken to be either dependent or independent variables, but inter depen- dent. The focus should be on the interactions of vari- ables, not their actions or responses.

University of Pennsylvania 414 Vance Hall 3733 Spruce Street Philadelphia Pennsyh'ania 19174 USA

RL ACKOFF

MANY WRITERS concerned with Organizat ion Theory, and with more general issues of social science do dis- play a disturbing readiness to use unnecessary and con- fusing jargon, and in this sense there is an "obfuscation factor" in these fields. One can sympathize with the Editor's despair [2] about how he should handle some of the 'inexplicable verbosity' which he sees growing around him. Of course any specialist field develops for the sake of convenience, as well as for other reasons, its own language, its own shor thand which avoids the need to define every term in every sentence. But l am sure that Evan [3], whose sentences are singled out at the head of the editorial, is not the worst offender: even wrenched out of context, all of his sentences make valid points. The editor himself uses the terms "paradigm" and 'gestalt', so it cannot be these that he is objecting to. Is the question of academic jargon, then, the real problem?

The Editor also expresses concern about precisely the issue that Evan is a t tempting to deal with: organiz- ations have come to be studied by at least two fairly distinct groups of people- -academic social scientists and managemen t practitioners. Is it possible for their work and their findings to be brought closer together? These two groups have different concerns, use a differ- ent technical language and often come up with different conclusions. What they have in common is their in- volvement with organizations in one form or another. Evan is arguing (without, in my view, much hope of success) that the two groups ought to try to bring together their findings, to inform each other, and he rightly points to the problems of communicat ion between communi t ies whose basic assumptions differ radically, and to the problems of getting one com- muni ty to agree to the 'truth" of propositions which seem to be self-evident to members of the other com- munity. Only with such issues resolved could some c o m m o n cumulative development take place.

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The Editor, on the other hand, seems to feel that both communities of social investigators should agree to concern themselves with one set of issues, those "real', "problem-centred' issues which he sets out [2. p. 200], I hope that I may be forgiven for suggesting that this proposal is naive. It neglects the question of who decides what are the "real" issues, of who defines par- ticular topics as "problems'. It neglects, in fact, precisely those kinds of issues that Evan has been writing about. "'Without reality", the Editor comments "the subject has no right to exist" [2, p. 225], But this opens up the question, perhaps an uncomfortable one to be tackled in a journal of management science, of what reality is! Half a century ago, the American sociologist WI Thomas observed that "If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences'" [5]. People within organizations believe in different realities and questions about what are the 'real problems" can only be dealt with if it is clear which reality they relate to.

Even this relatively secure answer dissolves into further uncertainties, however, when we realize the in- finite series of circular social processes which Thomas's dictum reveals to us. The difficulties of going out to look at 'real problems" are minimised if we are dealing with, say, the problems of designing turbine bearings. And, insofar as organizations can be considered to be similar to pieces of machinery, the approach of simply getting out and studying the practical problems of mak- ing use of these 'social machines" raises few difficulties in principle. But to the extent that organizations do resemble physical machines, or machine-related control systems, they do so only because some of those who have created them have believed in a machine-based or a control-system-based model of reality which they have tried to bring into being. The social scientist is concerned with organizations as particularly complex kinds of social arrangements in which thousands of people in our society work, relate to each other and attempt to control each other: these arrangements do not have an independent physical reality, for they are types of social and cultural patternings. Those who design an organizational system may have an abstract, machine-like vision, but once human beings are called upon to realise this vision, the designers become com- mitted to all of the characteristics of the humans that they employ [6] and, willy-nilly, a social system is created which includes many properties not envisioned in the original design. Some of these properties will turn out to be very regular and very persistent, while others will be unstable and transitory. Questions about which organizational patternings display which charac- teristics are, in essence, sociological or anthropological questions. For precisely this reason, the organization theorist who ignores these issues can never produce worthwhile findings. If, however, he tries to deal with them, he is automatically propelled into the world of social science and into the disputes that have racked that world for the past two decades.

Social scientists have come to be familiar with the problems of dealing with alternative views of reality and with the need to recognize that in some circum- stances those with power use that power to define what may be accepted as truth in a given setting: "'He who has the bigger stick has the better chance of imposing his definition of reality" [1, p. 127]. And those sociolo- gists who have concerned themselves with the unfortun- ately named sub-specialism of 'ethnomethodology" have been concerned to point out that no social relation- ships, including those which constitute organizations, will automatically persist: in a strict sense there is no such thing as social inertia, for all social relationships

continue only if they are actively sustained. The main- tenance of a social patterning depends upon the willing- ness of e~,ery individual involved in it to work every day to reproduce and to recreate each social relation- ship. It also depends upon each individual's ability to do this according to the series of tacit, taken-for- granted rules which ethnomethodologists and others have started to uncover.

In the face of these complexities it sometimes seems to me that managers are in a position similar to that of the Queen of Hearts in Wonderland. She had organized herself to play croquet with mallets, balls and hoops. but her organizational design could only be successfully carried through so long as the flamingoes were willing and able to behave like mallets, the courtiers were pre- pared to behave like hoops and the hedgehogs were able to put up with acting as balls. When they do this, the game proceeds according to the designer's rules and a student of the scene could develop hypotheses about the relationships of bails, hoops and mallets. When they do not behave as planned, the designer's order disinte- grates into a series of competing plans for the future held by the various different parties concerned, as courtiers, hedgehogs and flamingoes wander off to pur- sue their own interests, and the observer's hypotheses become irrelevant.

Where, then, does this leave the field of organizational studies? It would be foolhardy to promise simple sol- utions to long-standing problems--some of those which the Editor mentions were raised by Henri Fayol at the turn of the century [4]. But this is not an argument that we should give up the attempt to understand the com- plexities of such important social phenomena as organ- izations, or that the efforts of practitioners to develop a craft of effective intervention should be abandoned. These inquiries should be pursued, however, with some sensitivity to those subtleties of social life which have been highlighted by recent debates in the social sciences. There is no excuse for lapsing into 'obfusca- tion', but it is clear that some of the issues which are raised by those who would understand organizations can only be answered by reference to sociology and its related disciplines, and at times it may be quicker to learn some of the technical terms from these fields rather than to request, in every conversation, that every term be translated.

REFERENCES

1. BERGER P & LUCK.MAN T (1967) The Social Con- struction of Reality. Allen Lane, London, U K.

2. EILON S (1981) Paradigms, gestalts and the obfusca- tion factor in organization theory. Omega 9(3). 219- 225.

3. EVAN WM (Ed.) (1980) Frontiers in Organization and Management. Praeger, New York, USA.

4. FAYOL H (1949) General and Industrial Manage- ment. Pitman, London, UK.

5. THOMAS WI (reprinted 1951) Social Behavior and Personality. (Ed. VOLKART EH). Social Science Research Council, New York, USA.

6. SELZNICK P (1949) TVA and the Grass Roots. Univ. of Carolina Press, California, USA.

Department of Sociology Amory Building University of Exeter Exeter UK

BARRY A TURNER

Omeqa. Vol. I~), .Vo, I 9

REFERntNG to Professor Eilon's editorial [1]. I believe that there is room for a wider range of interests than he suggested was appropriate in his recent editorial. People have different interests and can make different kinds of contribution. There is a necessary role to be performed by writers like Professor William Evan who seek to elucidate the paradigms that others are using, because there is always a danger that those who are primarily problem-orientated may not recognise and appraise their own starting point.

I agree that it is a pity that Professor Evan has. in this book unlike many of his others, used language in a way that will deter even many of the academics to whom the book is addressed,

I am one of those who are primarily problem- orientated but I have experienced the value of talking with Professor Evan, and people like him, who think about the reality of organizat ions from a different per- spective. I think that they are concerned with 'reality' too. the reality of how people conceptualize organiza- tional problems.

DR ROSEMARY STEWART Oxford Centre for Management Studies Kenningron Oxford OXI 5NY UK

R E F E R E N C E

1. EILON S {1981) Paradigms, gestalts and the obfuscation factor in organization theory. Omega 9(3), 219-225.

PROFESSOR EILON bemoans the obsfuscation oforgan- isation theory by a plethora of obscurant ism emanat ing from pos t -Kuhnian thinking on paradigms in science [5]. While I agree that some of the writings in question are hard to follow, I feel.that we mvst guard against two things. First, that some of the literature which may be implied may not be addressed to practising managers, nor even be concerned with the problems of management as conventionally understood, so that criti- cism could be misplaced. (Professor Eilon's examples are drawn from just two sources, so I can only guess at what other material he has in mind.) My second caveat is that if we are too hasty in our judgement then there is a danger that valuable insight into the methodologi- cal problems of management research could be ignored, simply because it is concealed in packaging which we are disinclined to unwrap.

At risk of oversimplification it is possible to divide the literature in question into two categories: social science generally, and managemen t theory specifically. While we may deplore jargon in any setting, it is obviously more acceptable in the context of the more esoteric social scientific material than it is in manage- ment theory, given the a s s u m p t i o n that this latter theory is intended for a more genera l - - tha t is, less aca- demically specialised--readership. Some of the work which could be implied in Professor Eilon's editorial. while passing under the label organisation theory, would fall into the social scientific category: it is explicitly unconcerned with the problems of management tra- ditionally defined, being devoted to the presentat ion of interpretive frameworks for understanding organis-

ations, sometimes from a radical perspective. Examples of edited collections in this vein are Clegg & Dunkerle? [3] and Benson [ l ] . while Burrell & Morgan E2] pro- vide one perspective on paradigms in social sc:ence generally and organisational analysis specificall3. Arguably such literature may be disregarded b5 tho~e practicing managers or management teachers who are concerned with operational problems of efficiency, and effectiveness rather than with problems of social po[ic~. but it does assume relevance as these less technical areas come into question, and the issues raised, con- cerning a range of values and social problems, demand that previously unchallenged assumptions be re- examined [4].

Theorists of this genre will disagree with manage- ment oriented writers on the ~purpose' of organisations and the role of organisation theorists as servants of an established order, so that criticism aimed in their direc- tion is likely to be disregarded if the basis of such criti- cism is the premise that organisat ion theory is meant to help managers solve their problems. As Burnell & Morgan explain, such v, riters are working out of a dif- ferent paradigm from management theorists.

The second category of organisational research is concerned with contr ibuting to the solution of prob- lems of control, efficiency and effectiveness. Howexer as Professor Eilon remarks, such theory is not without confusion, which stems from a diversity of approaches and assumptions . This diversity reflects different meth- odological and epistemological paradigms within the philosophy of social science. As Miller [6] observes with regard to contingency theory, inadequacies in theory very often result from adherence to assumptions characteristic of a particular paradigm. Unders tanding why people adhere to a theory despite its evident defi- ciencies, and why they fail to break through to more satisfactory theoretical positions, is facilitated b? analy- sis in terms of gestalts and paradigms, and by' an appre- ciation of the cognitive and other psychological factors constraining such possible changes in perception. Pro- vided that writers can avoid unnecessar? jargon there is much to be gained from rigorous analysis along these lines.

REFERENCES

1. BENSON JK (Eds! (1978) Organisational Anafssis. Critique and lnnocation. Sage Publications. Lon- don, UK.

2. BURRELL G & MORGAN G (1979) Sociological Paru- dignIS and Organisational Analysis. Heinemann, London, UK.

3. CLEGG S & DUNKERLEY D (Eds) (19771 Critica. Issues in Organisations. Routledge & Kegan Paul. London. UK.

4. DANDO MR & BENNETT PG (1981) A Kuhnian crisis in management science'? JI Opl Res. Soc. 32, 9t-103.

5. EILON S (1981) Paradigms, gestalts, and the obfus- cation factor in organization theory. Omega 913), 219-225.

6. MILLER D (198l) Toward a new contingency app roach - - the search for organisational Gestalts, J! Mgmt Stud. 18. 1 26.

Department of Operational Research

University of Hull "Hull Yorkshire UK

PATRICK MACLAGAN