CHAPTER 20 MANAGING ORGANIZATION FUTURES INA CHANGING WORLD OF POWER/KNOWLEDGE STEWART CLEGG [Ar rie coe of management is the lgitimatin, extension, and normalization of dominant propery rights, the practical disciplining ofthe everyday organizational lie of member, andthe framing of knowledge that ean be asribed a key role in extending limiting, and otherwise shaping these rights. call his the discourse of Povei/knowledge—a discourse that in academic tems, fnetions as a surrogate for discussion of sovereignty. Ikisa schizoid discourse. On the one band, the issues of sovereignty are largely ceraded or avoided—even where one might expect to find them—sich as in {would eto akong the hlfil coments mde ona xfer vs of thst by Jn Gri, Aled Kier Der Dunphy dy Gordon tighten eposbleb he ‘eta dibtdige Benenden fae Tomer luo br atough econ sy Ua he en epedes y own, No one else is responsible for them. “ a MANAGING ORGANIZATION FUTURES 537 discussions of power by significant theorists, including Pfeffer (1981 1992) and Mintaberg (i985). These deal with power merely as a matter of, respectively, strategic resource control or illegitimate moves in the legitimate organization same. Neither of them addresses the already deeply embedded and power-saturated context within which any specific episodes of power might occur as, itself, = constitutive part of power. In fact, the organization theory debate is marked most significantly in many areas by its absences and silences, its elipses and prevarica- tions. Thus, Cynthia Hardy and Ionceionically termed a piece that we wrote onthe topic, ‘Some Dare Call it Power'—because most did not dare address ita all. On the other hand, the broader debates in social science theory, as they have developed from Lakes (1974) and Foucault (1979), where the issues are more adequately addressed, remain barely acknowledged. Look in vain in the bibliographies of almost all the standard OT texts and you will find no awareness of a debate ‘that dominated late twentieth-century social theory and socal science. Looking at the standard Business Studies degree curriculum, it would seem that most ‘organization and management theory seems to have effectively inoculated itself against being a broader part of the academy of socal sciences. While power may hhave a central role to play in areas such as political theory, sociology, political science, public administration, and macroeconomics, it rarely seems to feature ‘much in the standard organizations curriculum—at leat if one looks as the usual textbooks. ‘What might be meant by power? In brief ll forms of organization are forms of “organization of socal relations, All social relations involve power relations. Power is ‘evident in these relations as relations not only of ownership and control but also of structuration and design, These relations may take many forms. They may be ‘embodied as financial capital, intellectual capital, or socal capital, for instance. Such relations are likely to be both differentially distributed and socially con- structed as well as exist in differential demand in differentiated markets. Power is also evident in the various forme of knowledge that constitute, structure, and shape these markets and organizations Tt is these power/knovledge relations that 1 wish to adéress—especally as they are likely. to shape the future of our practice. Our practice, I take it, is to address analytically the methods of managing and organizing that members of ‘various organizational bodies and communities find conventional to use and to detail something more to members accounts than they might be able to tell us themselves 1 shall begin by addressing ‘Managing’ * the flowing ae rerant bt ot complete references tomy evolving views on power les, (sooo gpm sor 95 gps wos: oe 8b a7 95: 979197173, Clegg an lion (og) and Hazy an Ce (39) Pramevors of Power (98) the mt complete atement, one would no wi oie signa538 srawarr cues 20.1 MANAGING ‘Managers, above al, are practical people who have to manage extremely difficult and challenging tasks: they are beset by many contingencies on a dai basis, some routine, others not. If Mintzberg (1973) isa reliable guide, they need to find solutions to new problems every ten minutes or so, Not surprisingly, they have lite time for other than the most local, contextual, and bounded working know. ledge. From an academic point of view, managing involves creating an ordered ensem: ble of relations between past histories and future ations as strategies that construct the present. Managing means creating nexi of peoples, materials, and technologies that can act semi-autonomously in pursuit of these strategies, Managing enables people, materials, and téchnologies—bound together through ideas about theie Interrelation—to traverse spaces and times. Managing makes knowledge work to ‘constitute specific spaces and times into patterned locales and arenas in which people make sense of and transform materials and technologies Sending ideas out into the wide world, to traverse space and time, has always been destructive of local cultures. Weber (1976) recognized this explicitly at the outset of modern organization studies when he represented the battle thatthe ‘Protestant ethic’ fought with other rationalities. These involved the replacement of the rhythms of a rural and Catholic past of holy days, saints days, name days, ‘with a more disciplined regime of rational management of time (see also Thomp. son 1968). The Protestant Ethic overlaid and rationalized the traditions of the past. Modern managing still involves the creative destruction of existing recipes and practices in order to reinvent the world of organizations, Such managing means disorganizing and deconstructing the routines of the past, retaining some while changing others, melding them to new technologies, devices which the workforce ‘experience as new rhythms of work. Management has always pursued this project: litle has changed today other than the tempo, and the global reach, of the reorganization that contemporary management knowledge requires. ‘Knowledge always has a provenance, or, as one might sa, exists within a discur. sive realm. The bulk of management theory originates inthe United States. Conse- ‘quently, in many other places, spaces, and cultures, managers will struggle to make sense of organizations and politics through theories overwhelmingly produced and reproduced elsewhere, under different assumptions, from different realities. For ‘non-English speakers, language and culture are large part of the problem: outside ‘of the English language, what one regards a familiar attributes of managing and ‘organizing, such as a shared sense of time, turn out to be quite unfamiliar. For instance, there are stil many locales where concepts of time have not been instita- MANAGING ORGANIZATION PUTURDS 539 ‘tionalized by the factory; where the rhythms of religion, agriculture, family, com- ‘munity, or political obligation are much more powerful (Child and Rodrigues 1996). ‘In practice, how do managers make sense of the experience of managing? It is not ‘quite a rational a process as management academics would prefer to think. Let me begin with some famous high-profile managers. The ex-President ofthe United States, Ronald Reagan, consulted the scripts of films that he knew, such as ‘Star ‘Wars his First Lady, Mrs Nancy Reagan consulted her astrologer. Don't mock: the predictions of astrologers, or feng shui practitioners for example, are at least as important as those of econometicians or management consultants for many sg- nificant economic actors in some highly sucesstul economics such as Hong Kong, (eshould be noted that, while one finds the rituals of fong shui more charming than those of econometricians, one leaves it to others to judge thei relative reliability) Some other managers, trained in Business Schools, may seek to apply some models ‘that they dimly remember from their MBA. Sill others wil think of the most recent colurnns they readin the press or that last book they bought at the airport on a business trip, or how their mother or father brought them up, or how a winning football team is managed. Manager in various contexts will have different relevan- cies guiding their managing, ‘Thus, we may say tht, in historical and comparative practice, managers have drawn on many forms of knowledge. ‘Consequently, there are many sources from which orientations to practice might develop: not only from university courses but aso from popular books, training sessions, magazines, websites, the popular press, as well as the usual friendship networks. In practical terms, university academics enjoy neither an exclusive nor a privileged role: they are not legislators of management knowledge but are simply ‘among its many interpreters (Bauman 1967). Thus, our power is very limited and ‘our knowledge is in no way legislatively mandated. However, many university academies continue to practic their craft as ifthey were powerful legislators rather than particular interpreters. Its, of course, largely a myth. The institutionalized norms of journal production support this myth, Hiow do the various sources of management knowledge relate to the work that ‘management academies do? There isa range of views on this central question. For some colleagues, such as Donaldson (1992: 464) a clear relation exists, It should be “the moral project advocated by Popper (1945) for social science: by use of the critical method of theory construction and testing to dispense with bogus ideolo- gies and thereby to ground social discourse in actualities so that policy choices could be made in a clearer ight? Well, moral projects are all very well but are not necessarily descriptive of what ordinarily occurs. If they were, they would hardly be ‘considered necessary, Moreover, as Latour (1993) suggested, Popper did not even ‘capture what scientists actually did when they did science so one should not easly assume that his representations will prescribe the relation between the hard-pressed540 STawanr cise ten-minute managers and a body of evidence taught and published elsewhere in rather abstracted conditions. Astley and Zammuto (1992) saw the relation between managers and academics as metaphorical: sometimes managers and academicians play coincidental meta- phorical language games; sometimes they do not. IF uility is a criterion then it ‘managers who should set the terms of trade, they suggested. Beyer (392) stuck. a mid-point: it is the operationalzation of metaphors and testing them against empirical reality that is important. If academicians are serious about ‘rade with managers, then they should commit resources to mechanisms designed to maximize the trade, on the model of the successful diffusion of innovation by the US agricultural extension service (Rogers 1995)- What may be requized is a cadre of academics who specialize in translation into field settings: knowledge out-workers refabrcating scientific knowledge by shaping it to applied purposes. Each of these acounts seems to characterize managers as what Garfinkel (1967) fonce referred to a5 ‘cultural dopes: actors unable to write or mouth their ‘own scripts but subject only to those foisted on to them by analytic outsiders—in this case organization scholars. What is clear is that while Donaldson (3992) and Beyer (1992) see the role of organization science as something that should be the source of management practice Astley and Zammuto (1992) sw the possibilty oof management practice as an autonomous sphere. For the former, organization science stands asa causal grammar underlying what managers do or should do; for the latter, the accounts of managing that managers have available are not causal springs of their actions. Instead, Astley and Zammuto (1992) tend to see practical management actions as something that may be dicursively legitimated by abstract management knowledge, in another version of ‘lective affinity, where practitioners choose the affinities. No necessary relation exits between the words and the deeds: managing means being discursively creative in justifying situational For managers, the craft of academia, at best, provides a set of popular recipes and tools. These can be useful in trying to find solutions to the problems of managing ‘modern organizations; with such guidelines and tools, managers are abe to create order out of potential chaos, are able to be seen to be managing rather than merely coping. In fact, most of what is borrowed lacks scientific proof and is often used retrospectively to legitimate decisions made and actions taken on grounds that are mote personal or politica ‘Thus far T have assumed, on the one hand, an autonomous and coherent sphere of management practice and, on the other hand, a coherent and autono- ‘mous sphere of management Knowledge. In neither case is coherence or autonomy necessarily the case, as I shall explore next. Thus, I address the status of ‘paradigms 20.2 PARADIGMS (One Knows the term ‘paradigm’ in the social sciences principally from Thomas ‘Kulhn (i962), the historian of scence, Applying his ideas about the constitutive truth-framing roe of paradigms, one may note that paradigms define the key terms oftheir own discourse. Thus, in science they define what motion is, what gravity is; in social science they may define differently, and at various times, what eficiency is, what property is, what excellence is, and s0 on. The socal science concepts are clearly ‘constructs in us’ for the primary actors—managers—as well as for those secondary actors—social scentists—who observe them. And therein lies the ub. ‘What is critical to the legitimacy of such second-order constructs is either that ‘managers see themselves within and thus act in terms of these paradigmatially constitutive definitions and images, or that what managers might think and do is irrelevant for academic practice. (Clegg, and Hardy (1996) have described the ‘paradigm wars’ of Organization Studies. But the concept of paradigm at issue in these wars to this point has been ‘applied only to academic social scientists not to managers as actos. In Orgeniza- tion Studies, the paradigm wars sparked off by Burrell and Morgan (1979) were @ debate almost entirely confined to academics, the community within which the Astley and Zammuto/Donaldson/Beyer interchange occurred. Elsewhere however, consultants were getting in on the act and in the process the ‘meaning in use’ of the term ‘paradigm’ changed (Barker 1992). While the concept of managers using different organizations studies paradigms to think “with has been translated into the paradigms idea of frames’ or images’ (Bolman and Deal 195i; Morgan 1986), these academic concerns with paradigms still remain separate from the concerns of practitioners. Meanwhile, practitioner concerns had gained support in a more general literature (soe the overview by Clarke and Clegg 1998), in a conception of ‘business paradigms: These were not the models that academicians used to make sense of organizational reality but those that the “organizational sensemakers themselves use Inthe academic sense, they would be firstorder meta-constructs. Such constructs are clearly not only of rhetorical signficence but also of practical relevance in the way that businesses are run, relating not to academics meta-frameworks for understanding organizational life ‘but to the frameworks that managers use in ther ordinary understandings of what they do. Business paradigms, asthe sensemaking methods in use of everyday business people, may be seen as an example of what Foucault (1979) termed the pastoral guidance of each epoch; they represent the changes in the imaginary’ of managers between one epoch and another. These imaginaries define who one is by showing fone hovrto construc reality, what place one has isin it, as wells the place of others