Lloyd E. Sandelands

On the Language of Organization Theory

Theories of organization rely upon verbs such as shape, determine, select, and choose. Although these verbs appear to depict processes of organization, instead they obscure organization processes behind empty and misbegotten abstractions. These verbs are shown to have the character of achievements; their grammatical form encompasses the very outcomes they purport to explain. The reasons why such verbs exist and are used so prevalently are explored and implications for revising the language of organization theory are considered.

International Review of Industrial & Organizational Psychology

The article presents a review of the book “International Review of Industrial and Organizational Psychology, 1987,” by Cary L. Cooper and Ivan T. Robertson.

Getting Right with Nature: Anthropocentrism, Ecocentrism, and Theocentrism

The past century has witnessed unprecedented economic growth and prosperity along with unprecedented depredations upon nature. To resolve these developments, there is debate between two moral postures. One takes a human-centered, or anthropocentric, view of our relationship to nature to emphasize the value of securing the resources needed for further development. The other takes an environment-centered, or ecocentric, view of our relationship to nature to emphasize the value of conserving her integrity and beauty. This article explores tensions underling these two views and finds that neither adequately reconciles us to nature. This article offers an alternative, theocentric view of our relationship to nature, founded upon Catholic Christianity, that reconciles in God our value for resources and nature and establishes a divine order of man and nature apart from human egoism and intentions. This article concludes with a discussion of the implications of this theocentric view for environmental policy and practice.

Reconceptualizing of the overjustification effect: A template-matching approach

The paper reviews traditional attributional explanations for the over-justification effect in task motivation, isolates their weaknesses, and proposes an alternative account based on the notion that individuals process task information schematically. It is proposed that task information relating to motivation is interpreted by cognitive schema or “templates,” which identify tasks as being either instrumental or expressive in nature. When the expressive template is evoked, the task is perceived to be playlike and is experienced as inherently motivating. When the instrumental template is evoked, the task is perceived as a means to an end and task motivation results from the perceived value of the task for attaining intrinsic and/or extrinsic rewards. Structural characteristics of these templates are proposed. According to this account, overjustification effects occur when the perceived characteristics of tasks change such that the expressive template is replaced by the instrumental template and expressive motivation is transformed into instrumental motivation.

The Problem of Experience in the Study of Organizations

This paper deals with the fact that we cannot experience large organizations directly, in the same way as we can experience individuals or small groups, and that this non-experientiability has certain implications for our scientific theories of organizations. Whereas a science is animated by a constructive interplay of theory concepts and experience concepts, the study of organizations has been confined to theory concepts alone. Implications of this analysis for developing a science of organizations are considered.

The play of change

Purpose – Two claims are made about play that bears on managing change in organizations. First, play is a creative dynamic of human community; and in particular, it is the form taken by love at the boundary of fantasy and reality. Second, play is known, not by analysis via the mind and reason, but by intuition via the body and feeling. To manage change as play is to call upon the possibilities of adaptation and development that lie at the creative edge of love.Design/methodology/approach – The arguments of the paper are not strictly rational (deductive) or empirical (inductive) but are based upon an “abductive” reading of the literatures on play and managing change.Findings – Play is key in managing change. Play is the creative enlargement of love involved in healthy and effective adaptation and development.Social implications – Change in organizations is best taken in the spirit of love that is play. As change calls to love, the greatest changes call to the greatest love of the divine in which all things...

The argument for god from organization studies

E very so often, truth carves a wrinkle in popular culture. Not long ago, such a wrinkle appeared as the 9th U.S. Circuit Court upheld a civil suit to bar the pledge of allegiance in public schools because it contains the phrase “one nation under God.” Ironically, the suit’s objection was not to the idea of pledging allegiance to a human institution but to the idea that the institution exists under God. According to the complaint, the pledge of allegiance injures those who choose to not believe in God. This flap reminds us that today’s postmodernism declares even the surest facts to be cultural franchises. Every group has its treasury of truth. And when one group figures that there is no God, fairness requires that God be a cultural figment rather than a fact to be decided. Today, God has become a cultured preemption, something that cannot be reckoned except as it appears in this or that culture. It is a measure of today’s timid cultural relativism that hardly anyone anymore speaks of God in public. To be sure, political candidates for president are careful to affect a religious posture; but they do so deliberately and without conviction. A truly God-fearing candidate would have to shade his or her belief from media scrutiny, no doubt under cover of high-sounding talk of separation of church and state. God is supposed to have no actual place in politics. More timid than the politicians are the many intellectuals who call university departments of humanities and social sciences home. Many of these hothouse flowers draw a bold line to distinguish their ideas about humanity from ideas about God. God, they suppose, is either a personal conviction of no social moment or, worse, a device used by powerful institutions to manipulate the masses (e.g., Wilson, 2002). In the postmodern era, there are only politics. In this essay, I hope to bring God to mind and in so doing turn the table on that contemporary relativism that puts statements for and against God on the same moral and factual footing. I hope to recall an old idea that we should never have lost—namely, that God exists and He matters. To do this, I look for God in a place that might impress even politicians and university professors—the business corporation. Where

Thy will be done

This essay is a meditation on the idea of power in contemporary writing about management. It finds power puzzling because people think about it in natural terms of forces and resistances rather than in moral terms of authority. Authority derives ultimately from the Divine, from the author of human being and all creation. To exercise power with authority is to serve the Divine in humility by serving the human person made in the Divine image. To lead is to serve. A few of the many implications of a theological concept of power for management are considered.

Task grammar and attitude

This paper investigates the ability of perceivers to form impressions of tasks as part of the process of forming a task attitude. This ability is described as being partly given by a syntactic grammar that specifies both the primitive elements of tasks and the rules that structure these elements to form meaningful task impressions. The proposed grammar is shown to generate representations of task structure that can be mapped readily onto task attitudes. The paper concludes with a discussion of the implications of task grammar for research on task attitudes.

Control Theory and Social Behavior in the Workplace

Recent theoretical statements by Lord and Hanges (1987) and by Carver and Scheier (1981) suggest that supervision in the workplace can be analyzed as a control system made up of supervisors and subordinates. Two experiments are described which raise doubts about this claim. Subjects were engaged as supervisors and asked to provide performance feedback to a subordinate. It was found that subjects did not respond to subordinate work performance in the straightforward way predicted by control theory, but instead responded based on analyses of the context-dependent meanings of that performance. Implications of these results for applying the control system metaphor to social behavior in the workplace more generally are discussed.