- Email: [email protected]
Organisational analysis and development: A social construction of organisational behaviour
Euro[lenn Management Iournal Volume 6 No 4 @ European Management journal 1988 1SSN 0263-2373 $3.00
Books for Managers Organisational Analysis and Development: A Social Construction of Organisational Behaviour, Edited by Iain L. Mangham, John Wiley & Sons, 1987 f29.50 (U.K). Professor Mangham claims in his introduction that academics “will find a great deal in this volume to delight and/or to infuriate them”. This is undoubtedly true. What is puzzling is that the desire to delight and infuriate has taken precedence over the desire to inform. Practising managers will find that especially infuriating. This is unfortunate because Mangham and his coauthors are dealing with a vital problem in the analysis of organisations. Discounting the academic hype that these problems are new, never conceived by anyone in this form, the product of a desperately lonely embattled and isol‘ited group of renegade academics fighting against the unthinking orthodoxies of the intellectual establishment, etc. etc. the boy does deal with a central problem of organisational study. In t’act of course most organisation theorists are fairly familiar with the positions espoused in this volume which are neither especially revolutionary, original, or new to the discipline as the fourteen pages of closely printed bibliography reference bear witness. Wh.lt is dispiriting is that in a book which makes so much of the need to pay close attention to the practical knowledge of lay expert participants, so little heed should be taken of the need to make these pre:3entations comprehensible within those same participants’ own frame of refrence. In other words if an analysis which purports to pay great attention to Tvhat practical managers think and say about themselves and their work cannot be readily grasped by those practical managers themselves, what is the point of the exercise? So ‘&hat has gone wrong? A lot of the problem is that many of the contributors cannot apparently
write plain English. Take this for example “that research practice emerged in the effort to locate a methodological and theoretical approach that provided some satisfying scope for tackling phenomena at the level of meaning . . . ” The late C. Wright Mills once had fun trying to make sense of some of the more obscure effusions of Professor Talcott the above He might have translated Parsons. sentence as “I wanted to discover how managers made sense of things.“ But part of the problem is more fundamental. It is that these authors appear not to want managers to understand themselves. l?or them the aim of the exercise is for acndemics to understand what managers are about. But this vitiates some of the basic methodological precepts of the way of working they whether it be classed as themselves espouse, phenomenological, interactionist, frame analysis or whatever. For many of us, the founding father of this way of working was the philosopher/banker Alfred Schutz. The core of Schutz’s approach is summed up in his acount of the process of doing research in real social situations. Once the academic has made sense in general analytical terms of what the social practitioners are about, he then has to translate back to those practitioners own frame of reference in such terms that they can mutually agree on what it is has been discovered. It is that process of agreement which the phenomenon. It amounts to “understanding” was never his intention (or that of other founding gurus of this approach like W.I. Thomas) that the academics would take the knowledge and run off with it to their own burrows to chortle self satisfiedly over their sectarian squirrel nuts. The tragedy of the book is that these authors are at least half right. But they are in no shape to convince anybody who inhabits that part of the “real world” which they are aiming to corner for their methodology, that they are even that. Of course there are some reasons for this. Most of the articles in Mangham’s collection are undertaken
380
BOOKS
FOR MANAGERS
by junior researchers. Inevitably they have no understanding of what the organisation looks like from the boardroom, and no practical experience of management. This is evidenced in a lack of understanding of the limitations of the analysis presented and more fundamentally of a widespread hostility (possibly based on fear) towards the practice of management itself. Thus a presentation by a senior manager is not described as “professional” but as “slick”. Telling illustrations of this come in the article by Travers on social beings as hostages. When he discusses Japanese ritual heros, his analysis is rooted in secondary sources, is partial and unsympathetic. But when he discusses social practices of the hospital and of the public bar, his account works because he is talking of matters which he understands and therefore can communicate the general that significance of. The reader could conclude Travers might be a good companion for a boozy night out, but liable to get you into trouble with Japanese wrestlers. And that would be a useful conclusion, because managers don’t need just to know, they need to know what to do. Action is critical for knowledge, not vice versa. The index is hopeless. D. T. H. Weir Glasgow Business School
Helping Small Firms Grow: An Implementation Approach, Christopher J. Hull with Benny Hjern, Croom Helm, 1987, 228 pages E27.50 (U.K.). This book is definitely of interest to all those parties who are interested in the world of small business. For despite the amount of publicity surrounding this field it is seldom that strategies or policies are underpinned by rigorous research. For this reason Messrs Hull and Hjerns’ work is to be welcomed. It does not purport to be a tome from which all manner of conclusions and implications can be drawn. Rather it is a so called academic text which sets out to explore the factors affecting employment in small firms in 4 West German locations for the period 1970-1980. starts by acknowledging the The first chapter superior performance of small firms over larger ones in job creation. They then consider the magnitude and nature of the impediments to growth and develop a list of 8 factors including finance, purchasing, technological change and personnel. Moreover it is suggested that impediments are tackled in three phases_ namely: Problem Definition, Resource Identification, and Resource Mobilisation. They then
postulate that a gap exists between the firms and the external resource providers and that this gap is best filled through intermediation. The chapter closes with the hypothesis that more (effective) intermediation will result in higher employment. The research methodology employed is implementation theory. Hull and Hjern have entered the debate about the remit of this branch of research and its methodological requirements. Their position is comprehensively covered within the second chapter. The approach to the field work is particularly thorough. The study covers independent manufacturing firms employing between 10 and 200 persons. Four sites are chosen using an urban hierarchy and range from a rural periphery, through a “shire” town, an old industrial agglomorate to the city of Hamburg. Contact with the firms was first by postal survey and then followed by selective face to face interview. A major objective of these interviews was the identification of help agencies or actors. A representative sample were subsequently interviewed in depth. Chapter four begins the analyses proper by examining the differences between the four research localities in the job generation performance of the target firms. The value of primary data is emphasized in the analyses of individual level information using multivariate statistical techniques. These lead to the conclusion that the firms age not size is a major factor in job creation. Analysis is continued in the review of the key variables for distincuishing localities in terms of the assistance structures. The problem types, the actors contacted and the programmes of assistance are described in detail. However a provision of translations or other European equivalents for the assistance packages would have been welcomed. It is particularly interesting to note that actors capable of addressing the full range of problem steps (definition, resource identification and mobilisation) were found to be particularly rare. Chapter six analyses how actors in general and intermediaries in particular impact on employment. In addition factors such as investment and turnover are introduced and actors effects on employment through them evaluated using multivariate analysis. The major finding is that the effects are not constant across the four regions but that one in particular is outstanding. The reasons for this are explored in depth as are the three major local actors and their particular functions.
Books for Managers Organisational Analysis and Development: A Social Construction of Organisational Behaviour, Edited by Iain L. Mangham, John Wiley & Sons, 1987 f29.50 (U.K). Professor Mangham claims in his introduction that academics “will find a great deal in this volume to delight and/or to infuriate them”. This is undoubtedly true. What is puzzling is that the desire to delight and infuriate has taken precedence over the desire to inform. Practising managers will find that especially infuriating. This is unfortunate because Mangham and his coauthors are dealing with a vital problem in the analysis of organisations. Discounting the academic hype that these problems are new, never conceived by anyone in this form, the product of a desperately lonely embattled and isol‘ited group of renegade academics fighting against the unthinking orthodoxies of the intellectual establishment, etc. etc. the boy does deal with a central problem of organisational study. In t’act of course most organisation theorists are fairly familiar with the positions espoused in this volume which are neither especially revolutionary, original, or new to the discipline as the fourteen pages of closely printed bibliography reference bear witness. Wh.lt is dispiriting is that in a book which makes so much of the need to pay close attention to the practical knowledge of lay expert participants, so little heed should be taken of the need to make these pre:3entations comprehensible within those same participants’ own frame of refrence. In other words if an analysis which purports to pay great attention to Tvhat practical managers think and say about themselves and their work cannot be readily grasped by those practical managers themselves, what is the point of the exercise? So ‘&hat has gone wrong? A lot of the problem is that many of the contributors cannot apparently
write plain English. Take this for example “that research practice emerged in the effort to locate a methodological and theoretical approach that provided some satisfying scope for tackling phenomena at the level of meaning . . . ” The late C. Wright Mills once had fun trying to make sense of some of the more obscure effusions of Professor Talcott the above He might have translated Parsons. sentence as “I wanted to discover how managers made sense of things.“ But part of the problem is more fundamental. It is that these authors appear not to want managers to understand themselves. l?or them the aim of the exercise is for acndemics to understand what managers are about. But this vitiates some of the basic methodological precepts of the way of working they whether it be classed as themselves espouse, phenomenological, interactionist, frame analysis or whatever. For many of us, the founding father of this way of working was the philosopher/banker Alfred Schutz. The core of Schutz’s approach is summed up in his acount of the process of doing research in real social situations. Once the academic has made sense in general analytical terms of what the social practitioners are about, he then has to translate back to those practitioners own frame of reference in such terms that they can mutually agree on what it is has been discovered. It is that process of agreement which the phenomenon. It amounts to “understanding” was never his intention (or that of other founding gurus of this approach like W.I. Thomas) that the academics would take the knowledge and run off with it to their own burrows to chortle self satisfiedly over their sectarian squirrel nuts. The tragedy of the book is that these authors are at least half right. But they are in no shape to convince anybody who inhabits that part of the “real world” which they are aiming to corner for their methodology, that they are even that. Of course there are some reasons for this. Most of the articles in Mangham’s collection are undertaken
380
BOOKS
FOR MANAGERS
by junior researchers. Inevitably they have no understanding of what the organisation looks like from the boardroom, and no practical experience of management. This is evidenced in a lack of understanding of the limitations of the analysis presented and more fundamentally of a widespread hostility (possibly based on fear) towards the practice of management itself. Thus a presentation by a senior manager is not described as “professional” but as “slick”. Telling illustrations of this come in the article by Travers on social beings as hostages. When he discusses Japanese ritual heros, his analysis is rooted in secondary sources, is partial and unsympathetic. But when he discusses social practices of the hospital and of the public bar, his account works because he is talking of matters which he understands and therefore can communicate the general that significance of. The reader could conclude Travers might be a good companion for a boozy night out, but liable to get you into trouble with Japanese wrestlers. And that would be a useful conclusion, because managers don’t need just to know, they need to know what to do. Action is critical for knowledge, not vice versa. The index is hopeless. D. T. H. Weir Glasgow Business School
Helping Small Firms Grow: An Implementation Approach, Christopher J. Hull with Benny Hjern, Croom Helm, 1987, 228 pages E27.50 (U.K.). This book is definitely of interest to all those parties who are interested in the world of small business. For despite the amount of publicity surrounding this field it is seldom that strategies or policies are underpinned by rigorous research. For this reason Messrs Hull and Hjerns’ work is to be welcomed. It does not purport to be a tome from which all manner of conclusions and implications can be drawn. Rather it is a so called academic text which sets out to explore the factors affecting employment in small firms in 4 West German locations for the period 1970-1980. starts by acknowledging the The first chapter superior performance of small firms over larger ones in job creation. They then consider the magnitude and nature of the impediments to growth and develop a list of 8 factors including finance, purchasing, technological change and personnel. Moreover it is suggested that impediments are tackled in three phases_ namely: Problem Definition, Resource Identification, and Resource Mobilisation. They then
postulate that a gap exists between the firms and the external resource providers and that this gap is best filled through intermediation. The chapter closes with the hypothesis that more (effective) intermediation will result in higher employment. The research methodology employed is implementation theory. Hull and Hjern have entered the debate about the remit of this branch of research and its methodological requirements. Their position is comprehensively covered within the second chapter. The approach to the field work is particularly thorough. The study covers independent manufacturing firms employing between 10 and 200 persons. Four sites are chosen using an urban hierarchy and range from a rural periphery, through a “shire” town, an old industrial agglomorate to the city of Hamburg. Contact with the firms was first by postal survey and then followed by selective face to face interview. A major objective of these interviews was the identification of help agencies or actors. A representative sample were subsequently interviewed in depth. Chapter four begins the analyses proper by examining the differences between the four research localities in the job generation performance of the target firms. The value of primary data is emphasized in the analyses of individual level information using multivariate statistical techniques. These lead to the conclusion that the firms age not size is a major factor in job creation. Analysis is continued in the review of the key variables for distincuishing localities in terms of the assistance structures. The problem types, the actors contacted and the programmes of assistance are described in detail. However a provision of translations or other European equivalents for the assistance packages would have been welcomed. It is particularly interesting to note that actors capable of addressing the full range of problem steps (definition, resource identification and mobilisation) were found to be particularly rare. Chapter six analyses how actors in general and intermediaries in particular impact on employment. In addition factors such as investment and turnover are introduced and actors effects on employment through them evaluated using multivariate analysis. The major finding is that the effects are not constant across the four regions but that one in particular is outstanding. The reasons for this are explored in depth as are the three major local actors and their particular functions.