“Organization Theory:  Genealogy and Neglected

Themes”

STEWART R CLEGG

Overview:The futures of power

• The end of history’

• Shrinking space: eclipsing time– Extending business globally– Anticipating resistance? Simulation

and identity in the electronic Panopticon

– Expanding identities filling space

• After 9/11– From a risk society to a state of

insecurity

• Elites in a shrinking space and an expanding state of insecurity

• Frameworks with which to think about the future of power

• The conceptual futures of power

• Resistance, political apathy, and transfers of power

• The future of legitimacy

• Research questions

The end of history

The neo-liberal projectionists

Goths

Shrinking space

1. The eclipse of time through virtual media. 2. Once there was a limited and secure set of

identities planted in firm hierarchies in the social space, these are now expanding, proliferating, and complicating the nature of the social space such that it becomes simultaneously shrunk by over-crowding and much more difficult to navigate because of increasingly confusing signs.

3. Social spaces that once were only colonized on the colonizers terms are now counter-colonized in ways that threaten the security of these spaces. The buffering spaces of the social have shrunk.

Dock disputes

Simulation of identity from data traces

• Social Security Number• Shopping preferences• Health information, including diet type, allergies,

arthritis, incontinence/bladder problems, diabetes, hearing loss, prostate problems, and visual impairment, birth defects

• Marital status• Financial situation (solvency, creditworthiness, loan

amounts, credit cards)• Date of Birth• Sex• Age• Household income• Race and ethnicity• Geography• Physical characteristics, such as height and weight• Household occupants (whether an individual has

children)• Telephone number• Utility usage (electric or gas usage, telephone usage,

cable or satellite usage, Internet subscription, celluar phone usage)

• Magazine subscriptions• Occupation• Level of education• Whether an individual is likely to respond to "money-

making opportunities"• Congressional district

• Size of clothes worn• Habits (smoking)• Arrest records• Lifestyle preferences• Hobbies (whether and what the individual collects)• Religion (affiliation and denomination)• Homeownership• Characteristics of residence (size, number of

bedrooms and bathrooms, sale price, rent and mortgage payments)

• Type of automobile owned• Characteristics of automobile owned (year, make,

value, fuel type, number of cylinders, presence of vanity or special membership plates)

• Whether the individual responds to direct mail solicitations

• Contributions to political, religious, and charitable groups

• Membership in book, video, tape, and compact disk clubs

• Mail order purchases and type• Product ownership (beeper, contact lenses,

electronics, fitness equipment, recreational equipment)

• Pet ownership and type• Interests (including gambling, arts, antiques,

astrology)• Book preferences• Music preferences• "Socialites"

What can profiling do?

• Companies collect information derived from a number of resources to build comprehensive profiles on individuals in order to sell dossiers on their behaviour. Companies also "enhance" dossiers that they already own by combining or "overlaying" information from other databases.

Drug surveillance

http://www.frontlinediagnostics.com.au/

Profiling is the recording and classification of behavioural traces

– Credit card transactions– Phone records (Customer

Proprietary Network Information or "CPNI")

– Credit records– Product warranty cards– The sale of magazine and

catalogue subscriptions– Public records– Online and offline

purchase data

– Supermarket savings cards

– White pages

– Surveys

– Lottery and contest entries

– Financial records

– Property records

– Census records

– Motor vehicle data

– Automatic number information

Genetic testing

• Issues– Safety of sampling– Reliability of predictions– Risks of misunderstanding implications– How extra information is handled– Third party interests

• Insurance companies• Employers

– Requirement of informed consent– Need for genetic counselling– What is ‘good enough’ to offer to patients?

Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe

Old times …

… new times

Global brands for symbolic identity

Geo-socio-political identities

War on terror

Suicide bombings

Minimalist agenda

Redistributive agenda

Developmental agenda

Structuralist agenda

Types of change Individualistic forms of ‘intrapreneurship‘

Morally-oriented conception and design of organizations

Shaping a true political communityOrganizations as polities

Creating organizations as powerful political subjects

Outcomes of political actions

Individual consentVoluntary contracts

Human and public welfare

Influencing the values, beliefs and identities of individuals

Institutional and constitutional engineering

Nature of Power Private interactionsPower as game

Regulating power resourcesEstablishing a ‘balance of power’

EducationalPower as virtue

Power as structure

Culture of Power Markets and possessive individualism

Consumer sovereignty

Letting better informed buyers beware

Increasing institutionalization of regulation by standards rather than the state

Political performance

Organizing bargaining and exchangeManaging coalitions

Offsetting inequalities

Establishing agreements on collective purposes

Inventing institutions

A framework with which to think about the institutional futures of power

Questions for the futures of power

• How will organizations preserve and enhance individual freedom and initiative while relentlessly engineering new managerial institutions that strengthen narrow circles of powerful individuals monitoring the organization from the top? How will they combine a structural and a minimalist agenda?

• How are organizational leaders going to embody the growing societal and political dimensions of their activity? Put differently, the transformation of leadership from a set of managerial practices and rules to a set of institutional capacities implies that we think about power in organizations as a means to educate, socialize individuals, to create and sustain identities … and to consider the role of elites as governing institutions instead of merely managing organizations.

Weber Simmel Foucault Future Power

Political structure of organizations

Regimes of domination

Forms of subordination

Systems of surveillance

Reflexive oligarchies

Power production Forms of legitimacy and their possible combinations

Forms of relationships between individuals and between individuals and principles (power is interactive)

Disciplinary practices and instruments of control

Interactions between ‘political niches‘ (collegial niches) and emergence of ‘organizational activists‘

Political performance Social fabric of efficiency

Social fabric of political communities

Pervasiveness of control and the embodiment of control

Fusing political and moral power

Obedience production Obtrusive and rational production of obedience by readable rules

Production of commitment through the quality of relationships

Production of allegiance through the embodiment of norms

Reflexive authority producing obedience through soft constraints and the power of morality

Concept of power Organizational power Relational power Conventional power Politically soft power

The conceptual futures of power

Research questions

• What will be the ways of binding the changing political commitment of individuals to new demands of power and of political communities in organizations that both colonize an increasing amount of their life-world and offer a diminishing sense of security?

• What will be the power of moral ‘things’ in the design of political structures and in the production of political leaders for organizations in the future?

• What will be the new balance between directive and soft power?• How will organizations act as increasingly political subjects in a

world where the changing relations between states and markets increasingly empower non-state actors and disempower individual consumers bewildered by the confusions of alleged choice?

Famous for ….?

More questions

• How can we reconcile the parameters of a Habermasian ideal speech situation as the form of democracy that respects the humanity of people with the functional necessities of divided, specialized labor and centralized administration?

• Can the political imagination usher in changes correlative with the new distributed forms of technology that are now available?

• The pen and the typewriter gave us bureaucracy; can virtuality give us democracy?

The emotion of the crowd

The state of insecurity stretches out ahead of us as far as the mind can envision. It’s organizational implications are not incidental, given existing tendencies to hyper-surveillance

Gated communities

“Custom wrought iron cattail inserted at gate opening for aesthetics, gold top and bottom finials. Solid picket construction, evelo finials.

Gate Style #16.”                                                                  

“Pebble Creek Gated Community, Davisburg Michigan. This gate services 320 homes, 24 hours a day 365 days a year. Operator configured as master/slave, operates solely on a entry/exit in ground loop system, photo eye for safety to reverse. Custom side fence to match the gate.

This is a slick entry!”

Some favourite classical theorists