Organized Worlds: Explorations in Technology and Organization with Robert Cooper

Citation

Land, C. (2002), "Organized Worlds: Explorations in Technology and Organization with Robert Cooper", Information Technology & People, Vol. 15 No. 1, pp. 74-86. https://doi.org/10.1108/itp.2002.15.1.74.4

In his introduction, Robert Chia positions this collection as a contribution toward the development of “a social theory of organization” where organization is understood as “a general logic applicable to the ordering and representation of all forms of social phenomena” (p. 6) rather than an exclusive concern with the concrete, discretely bounded entities that we usually call “organizations”. Such a concern is not entirely new, however, and an attempt to develop a general theory of the process of organization has been a dominant theme within those areas of systems theory influenced by cybernetics. Was it not Gregory Bateson who at the Macy conferences famously, if rather paradoxically, proclaimed “death to all nouns” (Hayles, 1999)? Of course, Chia is well aware that his approach has established precursors and antecedents. In his introduction he is careful to situate the work of Robert Cooper and those who have been influenced by him within a tradition of social theory that goes back at least as far as the Enlightenment. The list includes the likes of Max Weber, Michel Foucault and Emile Durkheim so we are clearly in good company as we embark upon our “explorations in technology and organization”. Nevertheless, the argument is that these traditions, coming primarily from philosophy and social theory, have been ignored by the mainstream of organization theory which has been dominated by managerialist and performative concerns and a taken‐for‐granted belief in the coherence of organizations as distinct and identifiable entities. It is Chia’s contention that not only has this narrow concern with organizations led to an unwarranted neglect of the processual complexity of organizing, it has also restricted our understanding of the implications and spread of technologies of organization for social life more generally. This collection of papers is an attempt then, to redress this imbalance[1].

The concern with technology in this volume is clear from the outset. As early as p. 4 Chia defines organization as “a generalized strategy of representation and control” and this theme of representation is continued throughout the collection. Although the logic of representation is traced back to the development of statistics, with its concomitant abstraction and simplification of a complex social reality in the name of manageability, the implications for contemporary studies of information technology are taken up explicitly in the third paper: Richard Sotto’s “The virtualization of the organizational subject”. In this paper, Sotto develops a theory of organizational subjectivity based in a reading of post‐structuralism, and considers the implications for this organizational subject of information‐technological innovations such as virtual reality and the virtual organization. After arguing that organization studies has traditionally been dependent on a uniquely modern conception of the subject inherited from the Cartesian tradition and premised upon a mind‐body dualism, Sotto goes on to consider how this duality is perpetuated through the separation of virtual subjectivities as they exist online from their material substrate in the human body. Playing this technological virtualization off against the post‐structuralist decentring of the human subject rehearsed in Cooper’s reading of Derrida, Sotto considers some limits to the codification of thought in organizational information systems and artificial intelligences. If we accept the idea that the subject is, or has become, decentred then the virtualization of this distributed entity seems only a short step away. In such a vision the knowledge management ideal of complete codification and distribution would have been realized. Nevertheless, despite this risk of humanized informational technologies becoming the driving force behind virtualized organizational subjects, Sotto retains a conception of thought that lies beyond the technological text. Developing Cooper and Lyotard’s idea that thought is driven by something beyond itself – the suffering caused by the unthought – Sotto suggests that this drive to overcome limits might provide even a decentred organizational subject with a sense of motivation not available to information technology. If we fail to recognize this potential, the danger that Sotto sees in the virtualization of the organizational subject is that technology will be put in the driving seat of subjectivization, a move that will further subject the subject to technological domination and control: the rule of the already thought.

In a rather short though extremely dense and difficult paper entitled “Diagrammatic bodies” Ron Day also takes up the question of information and the relationship between technology and the human body. In an argument that perhaps owes more to Gilles Deleuze than Robert Cooper, Day lays out a critique of the traditional bourgeois human subject as defined in opposition to an external object, the up‐shot of which is that we would be mistaken to simply privilege the body as a kind of naturalistic, post‐Cartesian foundation for the human sciences. Rejecting a logic of supplementarity that sees technological objects as compensating for a lack in a fixed, pre‐constituted body – the body – Day suggests that technologies as the extensions of man, should rather be understood as “sites for the mutation and construction of bodies according to various modes of production, expression and planes of meaning” (p. 98). In this sense we would be mistaken to take the body as a foundation for the study of production machines as it is these production machines that actually produce the conditions of meaning and action that enable the separation of bodies and technologies, subjects and objects in the first place. In further examining the relationships between abstract and concrete machines (Deleuze and Guattari, 1988), Day returns to Cooper’s ideas on the distinction between knowledge and information. In a rather more sophisticated argument than the usual hierarchical taxonomies that are asserted in lieu of an answer to this question, Day relates the distinction to the determination of regimes of production. Whilst knowledge is always already territorialized into a wider body of knowledge – say a discipline or other structure – information is characterized by a necessary degree of undecidability. Information, by its very nature, contains a novelty or difference that has the potential to disrupt or falsify the dominant knowledge paradigm. In this model, knowledge is conditioned by the imposition of an abstract order from above in a kind of hylomorphism, whilst information always arises from the concrete, from below or outside and so has the potential to produce a radical change. Rather than being a surrogate for organization, information has the potential to disrupt it entirely. As Day puts it: “There is always an ontological risk in becoming informed” (p. 105). Although it is not directly implicated in the current ordering of knowledge as power, neither is information strictly neutral.

Although the papers by Richard Sotto and Ron Day are the two that deal most directly with questions of information technology and people the rest of the papers in this collection are also highly relevant. In their paper “On metrics and fluids”, John Law and Annemarie Mol consider the apparent dichotomy between undifferentiated, fluid human experience and rational, ordered technologies of measurement and representation by comparing a Quaker meeting room in Shrewsbury with Daresbury Laboratories, a scientific research organization. In this analysis, their key structuring dualism is (ac)countability versus fluidity, and their argument is that each is necessarily implicated in, and dependent upon, the other. Hence neither the Quaker meeting, nor the board meeting at Daresbury laboratories can ever attain the purity it strives for. The Quaker meeting, for all its refusal to systematize the fluidity of the mystical, religious experience, is nevertheless dependent on a specific and measurable architecture, timetable and organization, all of which serves to create the space and silence within which the Quaker meeting can take place. The mystical is inseparable from this profane world of organization upon which it is dependent, and yet which it overtly rejects. Similarly the rational world of the manpower accounting system at Daresbury Laboratories with its attempts to rationalize, control and schedule labour time is ultimately shown to be dependent upon its irrational, fluid “Other” as the complex and shifting, indeterminate and heterogeneous activities of a scientist are translated into discrete, (ac)countable half‐days. Although the records thereby created make certain activities of the scientists at the laboratory visible to management, they nevertheless remain dependent upon an undifferentiated flow without which there would literally be nothing to measure and manage. In both cases apparently opposed conceptualizations – discrete metrication and undifferentiated fluidity – are shown to be dependent upon their other, a post‐structuralist insight that suggests we should be cautious about accepting such dichotomies without considering the labours of division that separate their parts. In this view, the attempt to represent and capture reality with an information system is doomed to failure, not simply because something of its fluidity always escapes, but because the fixed and measurable is as dependent upon the fluid as a fish is dependent upon the river in which it swims.

While all of the papers in this collection have something to offer the student of technology and organization, perhaps the two most valuable contributions come from Robert Cooper himself. In the final two contributions to the collection, Cooper speaks in his own voice, first in a new paper “Assemblage notes” and then in response to a set of interview questions put to him by Robert Chia and Jannis Kallinikos. In “Assemblage notes” Cooper considers the process of assemblage through which fixed objects and subjects are produced in‐between and argues for us to pay greater attention to the seam that produces as much as it joins seemingly separate parts, in a process of becoming. Along the way he considers questions as diverse as cyberspace, hypertext and biotech in order to both develop and illustrate the concept of assemblage. In light of the other papers in this collection, however, it is probably the concept of the seam that provides the most useful and original insight in this paper as it provides a way of thinking about the relationship between duality that neither privileges one side or the other, nor loses sight of the two sides interdependence. The seam here is similar to Ron Day’s production machines that distribute and separate subjects and objects by creating the very conditions through which this distinction can be articulated. As such, this idea goes a long way toward resolving the conceptual difficulty that Law and Mol’s paper leaves us with: how to think “duality” while keeping a sense of the incommensurability of “Otherness”.

A similar idea is taken up in Nick Lee’s paper, “Two speeds: how are real stabilities possible?”, where he considers the seam that separates and joins technology and the natural world. Lee argues that although the dominant conception of modernity’s progress is one of a continual subordination of disorder to the forces of order, a race in which technology can provide the critical competitive advantage against an unruly natural world. Theorists of this race can either be optimistic, believing that technology can ultimately control and subdue the forces of disorder, or pessimistic, recognizing that the disordered is a horizon that progress carries with it. While Lee is sympathetic to the second argument he suggests that both sides of the debate are premised upon the mistaken assumption that increased speed is the only means of achieving stability. Instead he offers us the possibility of creating local, temporary stabilities through a process of slowing. While the stability of an ordered reality, differentiated from its disordered other, is threatened by the ever‐present forces of increasing entropy, pockets of order, pockets of reality, can be generated by slowing down these forces of de‐differentiation. Where this happens, the possibility of differentiating between order and disorder is realized, at least for a time. Lee’s real contribution is the use of complexity theory to develop an immanent conception of the forces producing this differentiation, thereby overturning the theological and humanist traditions that attribute the establishment of all order to a transcendental figure such as God or the Word. The importance of this move for the development of a “modest” social science, simultaneously in tune with developments from the physical sciences and wary of universal grand‐narratives, should not be underestimated. By allowing for a local, contingent kind of realism, the paper also serves as an antidote to some of the excesses of anti‐essentialism recently witnessed in studies of technology proposing the linguistic metaphor of technology as a text (Grint and Woolgar, 1997).

The collection closes with Chia and Kallinikos’ interview with Cooper. At almost 50 pages this is the longest paper in the collection and sees Cooper responding to questions on topics ranging from: his earliest intellectual influences; his relationship with the French post‐structuralists; the value of postmodernism; whether bounded rationality applies to a decentred subject; the contemporary relevance of process philosophy in the social sciences; the links between cybernetics and deconstruction; the “Other”; information theory; and the continued centrality of the order/disorder duality within Cooper’s thinking. With such a breadth of topics it would be both futile and arrogant to even attempt a summary of this interview, though I can unequivocally recommend it, along with the rest of this collection, as essential reading for anyone trying to come to terms with the often complex, sometimes tangled, but always provocative thought of this “philosopher of systemness”.

As I suggested at the start of this review, Chia situates this collection of papers as a contribution to a philosophically aware social science of organizing in opposition to the mainstream theory of organizations, however this is not the only dualism to be found in the collection. Indeed, all of the papers deal in some way with dualisms of order/disorder, organization/disorganization, technology/nature. In doing so the collection seeks to turn our attention to what we might call the dark‐side of organization, an interest also taken up by Cooper’s erstwhile collaborator Gibson Burrell (Burrell, 1997; Cooper and Burrell, 1988). Rather than focusing on the stable, sanitized achievements of organization it draws our attention to that which escapes the dominant discourse of organization, in Cooperian terms “the un‐ready”. As this collection makes clear however, these are no marginal concerns. In considering the production of the order/disorder duality we find that one side is always dependent on the other. There can be no organization without disorganization, no representation without something that also always escapes. In drawing our attention to these issues, Chia’s collection of papers seeks to distract us from that which can be clearly seen in the full light of day under the scientist’s gaze, with the promise of that which can only be spied fleetingly from the corner of the eye in a glance (pp. 8‐9).

In this sense this collection’s emphasis on organization, representation and technology enacts a break with more conventional, clean‐cut writings on these subjects. Indeed, as early as page 2 we find ourselves pondering the centrality of sewerage and toilet training to the creation of modern man in a coprological turn rarely found in writings on information systems. Yet if we take these papers’ arguments seriously such topics are central to understanding contemporary organizations and technology. In this respect these “explorations in technology and organization” are also a trip into the heart of darkness where stable identities are dissolved in a “becoming other” reminiscent of Joseph Conrad’s trip up the Congo, recalled in his famous novel (Conrad, 1995). Indeed, Chia suggests of Cooper’s “Assemblage notes” that it is a “fascinating foray into the heart of modernity” (p. 17), but this is a modernity where our attention has been drawn to the dark‐side of Enlightenment with its concern to control, organize and separate off the messy, human world of bodies, excrement and fluidity in favour of – in fact precisely to produce – the appearance of a hermetically sealed and sanitized world: organization. That the “clean” and apparently disembodied technologies of information and communication should paradoxically lead us into this heart of darkness is not an entirely new insight (see for example Land, 1995), this collection of papers offers an interesting, and dare I say enlightening, series of interventions highlighting the complexity of the interrelations between self and other and their articulation along a common seam. For those of us concerned with the intersection of information technology and people, these explorations should prove both informative and potentially dangerous. At the limit they suggest that our central structuring opposition between people and technology may not be as stable as we usually assume. As Conrad’s Marlow discovered, the heart of darkness is also the most feared recesses of a disintegrating self – the horror, the horror …

Note

1. 1.

   1. Organized Worlds is the second of a pair of books edited by Chia and dealing with the work of his mentor Robert Cooper. The first of these Festschrift, also released in 1998, is entitled In the Realm of Organization: Essays for Robert Cooper and deals with a similar account of organization but with a less specific focus on the technologies of representation that will be of most interest to readers of this journal.