Orion F. White

A Transformational Theory of Organizations

This paper describes the key concepts of a transformational theory of organizations and discusses its validity as a practical conceptual framework. The authors argue that transformational theory, based largely on the theories of the Swiss psychologist, Carl Jung, provides a way of conceptualizing organizational process by clarifying and grounding a number of critical innovations of organizational practice. The authors characterize transformational theorys basic assumptions—the ontological commitment, the epistemological commitment, praxis, the theory of social relationships-and highlight the distinctive nature of these assumptions compared to more traditional organization theories.

The Case for Lying, Cheating, and Stealing-Personal Development as Ethical Guidance for Managers:

The interpretivist perspective is rapidly growing in acceptance and influence in the feld of organization and management. This perspective has important implications for the field of administrative ethics that have not yet been sufficiently acknowledged. Traditionally, administrative ethics appears to have assumed an objectivist epistemological and legalistic ethical perspective, and interpretivism seems to imply epistemological subjectivism and ethical relativism as alternatives. Using Jungs theory of the unconscious as a foundation, an ethical perspective is developed indicating that through the vehicle of human relationship one can find stable points of reference for moral action in the requisities of the personal development of the actors involved in the situation, and hence, this perspective avoids the trap of ethical relativism to which interpretivism is vulnerable. Lying, cheating, and stealing are used as examples and the case of the Washington Post reporter Janet Cooke is presented as an illustration of how the approach applies in organizational situations.

Improving the Prospects for Heterodoxy in Organization Theory A Review of Sociological Paradigms and Organisational Analysis by Gibson Burrell and Gareth Morgan

Sociological Paradigms and Organisational Analysis establishes the legitimacy of heterodoxy in organizational research. Its careful examination of the ontological and epistemological foundations of disparate research traditions promises to initiate a new type of integrative theory dialogue.

Communication induced distortion in scholarly research -- the case of action theory in american public administration

The history of action theory in American Public Administration provides the basis for development of a conceptual scheme for understanding how the operating codes that define communication processes used by theorists can distort scholarship. Transaction is a mode that induces distortion; relationship is a mode that helps avoid it. Some suggestions for reissuing the current operating code -- in the direction of making it better fit the relationship model -- are presented.

Reason as a Homosocial Construct

The Stivers essay is a superb piece of theoretical critique and one that bears on what is perhaps the most important issue of the field at the moment. It should help reset the debate that seems perpetually to surround the identity of the field of public administration. It offers some truly original insights and perspectives, ones that might move the discourse on the identity of the field forward. The field of public administration, as well as academics generally, continues to be dominated by a masculine orientation. It, of course, does not see itself in this way, and Stivers’s article explains why. The defense men make toward the charge that they are denying access to something—such as (feminine) values like caring, intuition, and so on—is simply to find a way to incorporate it into the model of masculinity. The source of this impulse is the masculine idea of reason. Reason seeks to define itself as that mode of thought that is all inclusive, that misses nothing, and that therefore can understand and judge anything and everything. Employing this defense has two major consequences that are not realized by the male community. One is that it effectively makes the community of men, the community of reason, homosocial. (The recent Neil Labute film Your Friends and Neighbors convincingly states the truth of this point and in a not exaggerated way.) Stivers suggests for the case of public administration how this reality becomes hidden from the men who are participating in it. The general strategy taken in the male world is to employ the idea of male homosexuality, “queerness” or “gayness,” as a way of differentiating the modern idea of maleness—based as it is on reason—from anything feminine or female in much the way that the proponents of public administration as “management” and “administration” have done. The contemporary

Transfiguring the golem: technicism, human relations technology, and the human project

The original Minnowbrook perspective is described as part of a broader human relations technology movement in which the organization of human activity could be accomplished without the negative features of bureaucracy—routinization, rationalization, depersonalization, mechanization, computerization. But, the problem is really not bureaucracy, it is technicism—the technological imperative. The article contrasts masculine and feminine perspectives on organizations and the implications of this contrast for wars between nation-states, human and organizational communication, and human relations technology. In this technicism era, public administered institutions are the best bet to hold together the fabric of society.