David Courpasson

Dissolving the Iron Cages? Tocqueville, Michels, Bureaucracy and the Perpetuation of Elite Power:

Modern management theory often forgets more than it remembers. ‘Whats new?’ is the refrain. Yet, we suggest, there is much that we should already know from which we might appropriately learn, ‘Lest we forget’. The current paper takes its departure from two points of remembrance that bear on the sustained assaults on bureaucracy that have been unleashed by the critiques of recent years. These critiques include the new public management literature as well as its inspiration in the new literature of cultural entrepreneurialism. Both promise to dissolve bureaucracys iron cage. We explain, using the classical political themes of oligarchy, democracy, and the production of elite power, why we should consider such transubstantiation alchemical by confronting contemporary discussions with the wisdom of an earlier, shrewder knowledge, whose insights we need to recall to understand the complexity of the hybridizations between supposedly opposite models of organizations.

Organization Studies on the Look-out? Being Read, Being Listened to

Publishing is an industry, and a very competitive one. Today more than ever, academic journals strive to be recognized as the most influential in their area, and this is shaped by somewhat strange, and often perverse, measures such as citation indexes and impact factors. Organization Studies plays this game: to be read, to spread the ideas expressed in the articles we publish; as well as to broaden the scope of our readership and to make sure that the most influential scholars and institutions see the journal as a key player and a necessary outlet for great research.

On the Erosion of ‘Passionate Scholarship’

Let me reflect for a short while on what several years of editorship at Organization Studies ‘taught’ me about the dynamics of the collective scientific enterprise in organization and management theory. In this farewell note, I will aggregate subjective impressions, everyday editorial experience and scholarly work to stimulate reflection about the possible ‘crisis’ of social sciences disciplines and the consequences of this crisis on organizational research. Nothing less. It is modestly intended to share thoughts, disappointments and hopes. The dynamics of organization studies are characterized, as in all types of scientific fields, by the configuration and the binding of its boundaries. Therefore, it partly depends on what boundaries scholars wish to establish and, subsequently, on what they wish to substantially address, on what is deemed to be legitimate research. But that is obviously not the whole story. I would even suggest that it is not what triggers changes and dynamics in this field. Those dynamics are also strongly related to the behaviours of individual members and how these behaviours influence the nature, the content and the ‘style’ of research that is going to be published and acclaimed. And that is obviously not finalized: educational and research institutions exert more and more influence, through their managerial practices and policy decisions, on what is going to be submitted to journals. A point I wish to quickly highlight here is that the present compulsion for individuals to compete for jobs and status could well be now more influential than individual willingness to tackle difficult ideas and subjects, partly because difficult ideas lead to writing complicated papers that journals do not have time to handle and are therefore inclined to neglect and reject. The outcome of that tendency is that the field of organization studies is, I am afraid, replete with low-influence and low ‘idea-intensive’ scholarship. I suggest that it is both a matter of topics and underlying ideologies, and a matter of individual and institutional behaviour. I am not going to repeat a (relatively) well-known diagnosis, although certain things should be said several times. And we also need to convey some understanding of the situation of many scholars, especially junior scholars, facing the power relations now embedded in academic careers. That said, I will rather rapidly offer a direction to move away from what I see as an erosion of what I call in this short note ‘passionate scholarship’. Passionate scholarship refers to commitment to a personally meaningful and socially relevant topic, ‘close to the heart’ (Heinrich, 2010). It is the recognition that intrinsic interest in a topic might help to break through institutional and competitive pressures to study or not study certain issues.

Politics of place: The meaningfulness of resisting places

The meaningfulness of the physical place within which resistance is nurtured and enacted has not been carefully considered in research on space and organizations. In this article, we offer two stories of middle managers developing resistance to managerial policies and decisions. We show that the appropriation and reconstruction of specific places by middle managers helps them to build autonomous resisting work thanks to the meanings that resisters attribute to the place in which they undertake resistance. We contribute to the literature on space and organizations by showing that resistance is a social experience through which individuals shape physical places and exploit the geographical blurring of organizations to develop political efforts that can be consequential. We also suggest the central role played by middle managers in the subversion of these meaningful places of resistance.

The Polyarchic Bureaucracy: Cooperative Resistance in the Workplace and the Construction of a New Political Structure of Organizations

Many bureaucracies still exist, and not just in the public sector. Increasingly, however, we would argue that they are more likely to evolve towards polyarchic forms because of the growing centrality of stakeholder resistance, especially that which is premised on empowerment of key employees. We suggest that managerial responses to this resistance are transforming bureaucracies through process of accommodation: upper echelon managers invent responses to contentious acts and voices so as to reintegrate ‘resisters’ while rewarding them for contesting decisions in a cooperative way. Understanding these processes help us understand why traditional bureaucracy is currently transforming itself as a result of the emergence of new forms of resistance in the workplace.

Organizational Entrepreneurship as Active Resistance: A Struggle Against Outsourcing

This paper aims to contribute to the emerging perspective on organizational entrepreneurship by outlining how resistance to managerial policies and decisions can give birth to alternative organizational styles. Drawing on an in–depth analysis of a personal narrative of an R&D team manager opposition to hierarchical decisions, we link studies on resistance and organizational entrepreneurship to suggest that active resistance, which we define as the capacity to live beyond managerial control to create spaces of creativity and solidarity and alternative modalities of work in an organizational context, can actually contribute to the entrepreneurial process.

Rethinking Power in Organizations, Institutions, and Markets: Classical Perspectives, Current Research, and the Future Agenda

Power and domination once occupied center stage in organizational sociology. But as the field developed, the concept of power was marginalized and its overall significance for the drama of organization life neglected. Normative critiques of domination were recast as puzzles of obedience to authority, while scholars wishing to study the concrete workings of power regimes found themselves groping in the shadows. In this introduction, we advocate putting power and domination back on the agenda. Following the lead of classical theorists of power, we argue that organizations should be seen as scenes of struggles and as political projects to be constantly achieved and reconstructed. We critique structural and abstract perspectives that neglect the constant engagement of people in the negotiation of rules, meanings, and destinies. And we survey novel ideas that can help us to see power not as an abstract entity but as a pattern of interactions and social relationships that is instantiated in specific projects of domination and resistance. It is through this lens that power studies can be reinvigorated.

Impactful Resistance: The Persistence of Recognition Politics in the Workplace

Contrary to an ontology of defeatism that permeates scholarship on resistance, this paper suggests a perspective through which resistance can lead to hope and the unlikely victory of the powerless against the powerful. We offer an example where resisters develop specific activities that substantially modify a power relationship, thus showing the persistence of a recognition modality of impactful resistance on today’s workplaces. The paper engages with recent accounts of post-recognition politics that largely deny the willingness of workers to struggle about issues related to work.

The Politics of Everyday

Stealing, doing something unauthorized, occupying places, feeling silly and on the edge… how can we account for these practices that make the everyday? Why would the notion of everyday be interesting for understanding people’s experiences at work? How can we make sense of the myriad of disconnected actions, gestures and encounters that make the everyday? This essay takes its inspiration from Henri Lefebvre and Michel de Certeau’s specific investigations of everyday life to draw a picture of current workplaces; it aims to capture some particulars of symbolic and material life at work, as well as some representations of lived experiences that are shared by people at work. We defend a dialectical view of the everyday by showing the link between forces of alienation and forces of emancipation. We draw from interviews to suggest the extraordinary influence of the ordinary actions over our lives.

The end of history and the futures of power

The paper reviews, briefly, debates about power in their social context from the 1970s to the present day. It relates theory to changing political practices from Thatcherism to the War on Terror and suggests some new ways of thinking about power and identity in the present conjuncture. The paper provides an analysis of present and forthcoming social tendencies affecting the nature of power, both conceptually and in practice, especially with respect to the post-9/11 expansion of anxiety, which has seen the risk society expand to also become a state of insecurity. Political and organisation agendas are changing in tandem in the 21st century, emphasising crucial issues that we think will shape the future conceptual landscape of power.