Jannis Kallinikos, Department of Information Systems, London School of Economics: Debatting emerging organization forms

This seminar will deal with emerging organizational forms in today's society. The seminar is based on two papers: The Social Foundations of the Bureaucratic Order (forthcoming in Organization) and Work, Human Agency and Organization Forms: An Anatomy of Fragmentation (forthcoming in Organisation Studies). The basic ideas behind the presentation is the questioning of popular ideas about the rise of network society and the death of the bureaucratic form. The organizational changes currently underway must be placed in a wider social and historical context that does justice to modernity's organizational diversity.

The Social Foundations of the Bureaucratic Order

Abstract.

This article views the bureaucratic form of organization as both an agent and an expression of key modern social innovations that are most clearly manifested in the non-inclusive terms by which individuals are involved in organizations. Modern human involvement in organizations epitomizes and institutionally embeds the crucial yet often overlooked cultural orientation of modernity whereby humans undertake action along well-specified and delimited paths thanks to their capacity to isolate and suspend other personal or social considerations. The organizational involvement of humans qua role agents rather than qua persons helps unleash formal organizing from being tied to the indolence of the human body and the languish process of personal or psychological reorientation. Thanks to the loosening of these ties, the bureaucratic organization is rendered capable to address the shifting contingencies underlying modern life by reshuffling and re-assembling the roles and role patterns by which it is made. The historically unique adaptive capacity of bureaucracy remains though hidden behind the ubiquitous presence of routines and standard operating procedures -requirements for the standardization of roles- that are mistakenly exchanged for the essence of the bureaucratic form.

Work, Human Agency and Organization Forms: An Anatomy of Fragmentation

Abstract

The 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 organizations. 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 Gellner's (1996) 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 underway 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.

Välkomna!
Mikael Wiberg