Читать книгу Organization Development - Donald L. Anderson - Страница 74

The story goes that three umpires disagreed about the task of calling balls and strikes. The first one said, “I calls them as they is.” The second one said, “I calls them as I sees them.” The third and cleverest umpire said, “They ain’t nothin’ till I calls them.”

—Simons (1976; cited in Weick, 1979, p. 1)

A second view of organizations is a more recent evolution in organizational theory, and it offers a different perspective on change than the models we have just seen. The intellectual history of the idea of social construction in organizational studies is usually traced to Berger and Luckmann’s (1967) seminal work The Social Construction of Reality, and it has been particularly influential in organizational theory over the past 3 decades. Consider that in our everyday language, or even in texts such as this one, organizations are frequently personified as actors in their own right. We speak of working “in” an organization, thinking of an organization as a container or physical environment. We speak of organizations “adapting” to their environment, or the production department “deciding” to increase output. Classical organizational theory actually considered organizations to be “living things” with “a concrete social environment, a formal structure, recognized goals, and a variety of needs” (Wolf, 1958, p. 14). Yet organizations are not people, and a number of important ideas are obscured when we personify them.

The social construction view argues that organizations are not exactly things at all, but that the organization is really a concept developed out of our own actions and language. Some scholars suggest that the study of organizations is really the study of the process of organizing, with the verb form emphasizing the active role we take in creating our organizations. If you consider an organization that you know well and try to point to what “it” is, you may point to a building to show where it is located or show an organizational chart as an abstract representation of how that organization is structured, but you will not have pointed to the organization. (The building could still exist without the organization, for example.) Drawing boundaries between the organization and its environment can be an equally challenging exercise. Consider the city in which you live as an organization and try to delineate what is “inside” and what is “outside” it. There is city hall and its employees, but what about the citizens, or those who do business in the city but live in another, or the developers who built the local shopping mall? Are they to be considered part of the organization as well, or do they belong in the environment category? From this perspective, the boundary between the organization and its environment is not a sharp or easily defined one, and can even sometimes be fluid from interaction to interaction. Weick (1995) writes that “environment and organization conceal the fact that organizing is about flows, change, and process” (p. 187). The terms organization, boundary, and environment in systems theory become more complex and perhaps less meaningful when we start to delve more deeply into how to define them.

The view of organizations as socially constructed differs sharply from the systems theory perspective in many respects. It challenges the prevailing assumptions of systems theory that organizational environments, inputs, processes, outputs, feedback, and so on are self-evident concepts and categories with predefined singular meanings on which we all agree. Instead, it sees those concepts and categories as created, developed, and infused with meaning by organizational members. The quote above about baseball umpires illustrates the primary difference between systems theory and social construction. In systems theory, the process of pitching to a batter, calling balls and strikes, and tallying outs and so forth would describe a subprocess in a baseball game. While accurate on its surface, it omits the process of constructing meaning (defining what count as balls, strikes, and outs) from an umpire’s perspective that actually creates the possibility of the game existing (imagine if all umpires agreed to refuse to interpret a pitch!).

As a second example, let’s return to the illustration cited previously about the automobile factory and feedback processes, where information such as sales revenue figures fed back into the factory tells them to build more cars. The revenue figures themselves, as numbers, mean nothing on their own. Instead, they must gain meaning through the process of interpretation. An organizational member (a manager or executive, presumably) must interpret the sales figures and decide (based upon a preexisting agreement, past experience, or even just a hunch) that the numbers mean that enough cars have been sold that additional inventory will be needed. Here, it is the manager’s interpretation and judgment that give the data meaning for the organization. Indeed, an incredible amount of information exists in organizational environments that must be given meaning (think, for example, of the competitive landscape, Wall Street expectations, financial performance, past history of the firm, union agreements and employment conditions, customer expectations, and much, much more). To say, as systems theory does, that the environment specifies how the organization must act to achieve equilibrium omits the process of making and creating meaning, and developing and sharing interpretations, that explains how and why organizational members decide to take action. (Notice how few organizational members are mentioned in the descriptions of systems theory.) One could never gather all relevant information before a decision. Instead, information is selectively gathered, made sense of, and shared to create a socially constructed truth that organizational members will use for decisions and action (March, 1994). The category of “environment” is thus invented and invested with meaning by organizational members, and it does not exist outside of their interpretation. Weick (1995) calls this concept sensemaking, which he defines as “placement of items into frameworks, comprehending, redressing surprise, constructing meaning, interacting in pursuit of mutual understanding, and patterning” (p. 6).

Interactions and language are important areas of attention in the social construction perspective because it is through regular interaction and dialogue that organizations are developed and change can occur. As J. Kenneth Benson (1977) wrote, “People are continually constructing the social world. Through their interactions with each other social patterns are gradually built and eventually a set of institutional arrangements is established. Through continued interactions the arrangements previously constructed are gradually modified or replaced” (p. 3). Thus, sensemaking is an ongoing process, not something with a defined beginning or ending (Weick, 1995). (This idea reinforces the value of OD, discussed in the previous chapter, that organizations and individuals are always in process.)

The social construction perspective has become an attractive one for both researchers and practitioners because it resonates with what we experience in organizations as we make sense of our activities and the actions of others. It also respects the ambiguity and multiple meanings that many organizational members experience and the necessary interpretive processes that characterize much of organizational life. Decisions are considered and rationalized based on complex and contradictory facts. Roles are negotiated and enacted, not predetermined by job descriptions. Press releases and executive communications are scrutinized, debated, and examined for hidden meanings. We leave conversations with colleagues to begin other conversations, sharing information and interpretations in each conversation. Multiple contexts and facts can be brought to bear on any situation to result in ambiguous and inconsistent interpretations. For many students of organizational studies, the social construction perspective fills in the missing elements of systems theory to provide a richer and more dynamic view of how organizations work. It describes how members experience organizations as social environments where interaction is fundamentally how work is accomplished and sensemaking is how it is understood and experienced. Particularly in less mechanistic, manufacturing-oriented environments, in today’s knowledge-intensive organizations, the machine view of organizations assumed by systems theory seems less accurate when applied to the globalized and fragmented “postmodern” organization of the 21st century. Many believe that the social construction approach more effectively captures this new reality (Bergquist, 1993).