It is customary for the accepting editor of a Crossroads article to write a brief essay commenting on the piece. However, because Richard Weiss's paper and Stanley Deetz's rebuttal constitute distinct opinions-and because I accepted both articles, yet make no pretense of impartiality regarding my jaundiced stance on postmodernism-1 invited a colleague, Rose-May Guignard, who is a staunch advocate of postmodernism, to engage in an informal debate on the merits of Weiss's versus Deetz's positions. Of course, the views I express in this essay are mine, not Rich's, and Rose-May's are hers, not Stan's. Carroll Stephens
To describe human action as purely the product of rational calculation leaves unanswered the question of how human beings can act in the absence of any structure for calculating the likely outcome of their actions. If the answer is that they cannot, how can any such structure be stable and comprehensive enough to enable action without becoming either inert or deterministic? In this paper, we seek to understand how free will and social context can interact to produce both structure and action. This is accomplished through the development of a framework based on the notion of convention. Organizations, in this view, are grounded in “effort conventions” of what constitutes “normal” effort at work, that structure the action of those who work within the organization, and in turn reinforce these structures. We show how humans can calculate within a context of socially constructed beliefs, and how these beliefs can evolve, provided that they remain essentially nonjustified and beyond the reach of rational calculation. It is this mix of rational calculation and nonrational beliefs that form the core of our model. We begin by defining the nature of a convention and its properties. We then describe the evolutionary dynamics of conventions, and show that conventions exist in competition with other conventions and evolve over time. Our model of convention is then linked to other notions, advanced in the managerial literature, which point to a kind of ‘deep structure’ that lies at the heart of organizations. We conclude by outlining how this notion can shed new light on the analysis of organizations.
In this paper I claim that organizational routines have a great potential for change even though they are often perceived, even defined, as unchanging. I present descriptions of routines that change as participants respond to outcomes of previous iterations of a routine. Based on the changes in these routines I propose a performative model of organizational routines. This model suggests that there is an internal dynamic to routines that can promote continuous change. The internal dynamic is based on the inclusion of routine participants as agents. When we do not separate the people who are doing the routines from the routine, we can see routines as a richer phenomenon. Change occurs as a result of participants' reflections on and reactions to various outcomes of previous iterations of the routine. This perspective introduces agency into the notion of routine. Agency is important for understanding the role of organizational routines in learning and in processes of institutionalization.
Research in organizational communication has examined the structure and content of interaction, but has paid little attention to research traditions outside the organizational sciences that explore the social-psychological interconnections between relationship development and interaction. In this paper we draw upon and extend those traditions to develop a model of how communication relationships develop within organizational dyads. The proposed model examines organization-based communication relationships through a synthesis of theoretical perspectives on communication richness, relational communication, interpersonal attribution, and social expectancy. We also call upon precepts of structuration theory to embed these microlevel processes in an organizational context. The relational outcome in the model is “interactional richness,” a dyad-level construct that assesses the extent to which communication within the dyad is high in shared meaning. Model antecedents are aspects of interaction through which communicators reciprocally define their relationships, including relational message properties, message patterns that emerge over time, and relational perceptions. We propose that these communication properties and behaviors give rise to relationship attributions. We then incorporate processes of expectancy confirmation and violation to explain how specific communication encounters lead individuals to reformulate attributions regarding the status of a given relationship. Research propositions articulate how attribution/expectancy processes mediate between relational communication behavior and relationship development outcomes. We also develop propositions addressing how relational communication behavior is influenced by macrolevel factors, including hierarchy, structure, and culture. In a concluding section we discuss the model's potential contribution to research and practice, address its limitations, and offer recommendations for future research aimed at testing its embedded hypotheses.
Since the mid 1980s, organization theorists have highlighted the emergence of the networked model of organization as a response to global competition and pressures for increased market flexibility. Cultural industries have not been immune from this development. In this paper, we examine the shift from hierarchy to network in the U.K. television industry. We argue that an important result of this disaggregation is the emergence of latent organization, groupings of individuals and teams of individuals that persist through time and are periodically drawn together for recurrent projects by network brokers who either buy in programmes for publisher-broadcasters or who draw together those artists and technicians who actually produce them. In conclusion, we note how latent organizations may become increasingly important for effective cultural industry production, and in particular how they may provide stable points of reference and recurring work projects for those many individuals now working outside of large, vertically integrated producer-broadcasters.
In this qualitative field study, I explore how the construction of a cultural institution's identity is related to the construction of strategic capabilities and resources. I investigated the 1996 musicians’ strike at the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra (ASO), which revealed embedded and latent identity conflicts. The multifaceted and specialized identity of the ASO was reinforced by different professional groups in the organization: the ideologies of musicians and administrators emphasized institutional resource allocations consistent with the legitimating values of their professions, i.e., artistic excellence versus economic utility. These identity claims, made under organizational crisis, accounted for variations in the construction of core competencies. I propose a model that explicates how the construction of core capabilities lies at the intersection of identification and interpretive processes in organizations. Implications are discussed for defining firm capabilities in cultural institutions and for managing organizational forms characterized by competing claims over institutional identity, resources, and core capabilities.
Harmful interpersonal behavior at work has generally been studied from the perspective of perpetrators. In contrast, theories of victimization suggest that other factors may also determine why certain individuals are more frequently harmed than others. For example, there may be situational factors that contribute to an environment that allows or fails to inhibit harmful actions. Other incidents of workplace harm may be consciously or unconsciously influenced by the victims themselves. This empirical study extends previous research on harmful workplace behavior by examining whether the situational variable of job status and the dispositional characteristics of aggressiveness and negative affectivity predict self-perceived victimization. Based on research in criminal victimology, we hypothesized that an employee's job status would be significantly related to perceived victimization. Research on victims of bullying was the basis for the predicted effects of negative affectivity and aggressiveness. Data were provided by a randomly selected sample of employees from a city government who completed a survey as part of an organizational assessment. We performed exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses on employee responses to develop suitable measures of victimization. The analyses revealed that perceived victimization took either direct (e.g., name-calling) or indirect (e.g., sabotaging work) forms. Hierarchical regression was used to test the study hypotheses. Results showed that job status did not significantly influence perceived victimization. However, employees who were high in aggressiveness and negative affectivity perceived higher levels of victimization than those who were low in these traits. Implications for organizations are discussed and future research directions are offered.
In this paper we outline a key mechanism through which organizational fields are constituted. We suggest that in competitive fields, the market serves as a magnet around which groups of actors consolidate, and that cognition of markets occurs through the creation, distribution, and interpretation of a web of information about the “market.” To illustrate our theory, we present a case study of the Billboard music chart from the commercial music industry to show that changes in either scope, methodology, or political tone with which market information is presented can provide a major jolt to the participants' understanding of their field.
This paper seeks to engage the organization theory community in contemporary debates over the role of the corporation in American society by using the case of the Saturn corporation to develop and illustrate a stakeholder theory of the firm. One normative and three positive questions are posed for a stakeholder theory: The normative question is: Why should stakeholder models be given serious consideration at this moment in history? The positive questions are: (1) Under what conditions is a stakeholder firm likely to emerge in the United States, (2) what are the critical determinants of performance in a stakeholder firm, and (3) what will determine the sustainability and diffusion of this organizational form in the American environment? The history, design features, and dynamics of the labormanagement partnership at Saturn are used to illustrate and interpret a specific case of employees as stakeholders. Saturn's original mission, governance structure, and internal processes fit the characteristics of a stakeholder firm. Employees establish themselves as influential, definitive stakeholders by using their knowledge to improve organizational performance. The local union likewise contributes to firm performance by organizing workers into a dense social network that contributes to problem solving, conflict resolution, and quality improvement. However, the legal and political environment in which the firm operates produces considerable uncertainty over the sustainability and diffusion of Saturn's features in particular, and the stakeholder organizational form in general. Additional hypotheses and research questions are proposed to continue theory building around the more general model of the stakeholder firm. Researchers are encouraged to take up the analysis of stakeholder models and thereby contribute to the contemporary and future debates over the role of the corporation in American society.
Past research has established that large bureaucratic firms are less innovative than other firms. This reduced innovativeness is likely to be exacerbated when large firms engage in market control. In cultural industries, the effects can be especially pernicious, resulting in the failure to provide audiences with artistic quality or product diversity. We investigate the population dynamics of one cultural industry: the early American feature film industry. Specifically, we examine the hypothesis that concentration among large generalist firms will be associated with higher rates of foundings of specialist producers and specialist distributors. We also investigate the question of whether these specialists are more innovative. Specifically, we examine the hypothesis that specialists were more active than were generalists in the creation of new film genres in the early years of the American film industry. We find that increased concentration among generalists had a positive effect on foundings of specialist producers and specialist distributors, and that the specialists were more active in the creation of new film genres. Implications of these findings for future research, both on cultural industries and on the population dynamics of the founding of specialist firms, are discussed.