ASQ Research Discussion - Volume 1, Number 4
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Volume 1, Number 4, September xx, 1995
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In this issue
- Question from Steve Barley (sbarley@leland.stanford.edu) regarding organizational society
1. Question from Steve Barley (sbarley@leland.stanford.edu)
In recent months I have found myself thinking about the claim that so many of us use to justify why we study organizations and why our students should too: we live in a world where organizations are the critical actors. Aside from our families, they have become the most important institutions in modern society. They affect almost every sphere of our daily lives.
What I find interesting is this: Given that almost all members of the organization studies community subscribe to this view, just how little research and theory there really is on the idea of an organizational society. In the 1950s and early 60s one can find a number of books that took the organizational society as their theme. One of the most important was Kenneth Boulding's, The Organizational Revolution. James Coleman wrote about the rise of corporations as legally constituted actors. And, even Parson's suggested in his essay in the first issue of ASQ, that organizational sociologists should focus on the systems created by organizations and their relations with each other. Yet, despite such beginnings, we really know very little, from a societal perspective, about how organizations form systems of action.
Of course, there is a considerable literature on interorganizational relations and networks, but most of these studies focus either on why ties form or what the consequences of having particular position in a network might be. Moreover, most of the studies are analytically oriented to the dyad. What seems to be missing are rich descriptions and substantive middle range theories of (1) how organizations of one kind or another affect the behavior of organizations of another type and (2) how the actions of interacting organizations affect the conditions of people's lives (aside from those who happen to work for the organization). One of the only examples of this kind of analysis that I comes to mind are studies of interlocking directorates that focus on the role that Banks play in the structuring the intercorporate networks (eg. work by Mintz, Swartz, Mizruchi and others). Most network studies focus on abstract processes like resource scarcity, power or status.
Yet it is reasonably clear that types of organizations do act on each other, that in some respect these relationships are structured, and that the outcomes are quite substantive. For instance, almost everyone understands that relations between organizations in the insurance industry and organizations in most other industrial sectors have (and are likely to continue to have) significant implications for the way hospitals and HO's operate (another set of organizations) as well as significant implications for how we receive medical care, what kind of care we receive, and who funds the care. Similarly, it seems pretty obvious that a network of organizations now plays an inordinately large role in shaping legislative agendas and social policy. (Here, Lauman's work and some recent studies of PACs begin to approach the issue but by and large, the political structure of an organizational society is an area that organizational theorists have pretty much ignored).
My purpose in submitting this musing to the listserver is (a) to determine if others also sense this hole in our research and theory, (b) to learn if there is a empirical literature (or literatures) on an organizational society that I am simply overlooking, and (c) to stimulate a discussion focused on how we might begin to conceptualize the organizational structuring of modern society in a way that enables us to understand substantive outcomes. I assume that network analysis might be quite useful in helping us model the phenomenon as might some of the ideas and techniques of population ecology, but to date I see little movement in either tradition to grapple with the larger structuring of organizational fields much less the dynamics of an organizational society.
Stephen R. Barley
Industrial Engineering and Engineering Management
340 Terman Hall
Stanford University
Stanford, CA 94305-4024
415-723-9477
