Organizing and Organizations, 2nd edition

Citation

Spicer, A. (2002), "Organizing and Organizations, 2nd edition", Personnel Review, Vol. 31 No. 3, pp. 386-394. https://doi.org/10.1108/pr.2002.31.3.386.1

The topics encountered in an organizational behaviour text are relatively predictable. The apparently tried‐and‐true narrative we find in organizational behaviour textbooks have one major problem – they simply do not reflect the situation’s people experience each day in organizations. The issues an actor within an organization faces are not arranged in the orderly fashion of an average organizational behaviour textbook. Rather, they appear as fundamentally disorganized, inter‐woven, and in process. If there is one lesson that many studies of organization during the last 15 years have taught us, it is that issues in organizations are not simply rational arrangements of resources. Rather, organizations are sites of continual human interaction characterised by a complex range of overlapping, intertwined, and hopelessly interconnected issues. Attempting to pick a particular issue within an organization such as personality (for instance) usually invokes the many other strands connected with issues of personality such as ethics, groups, culture and so on. Given the cross‐cutting and complex nature of organization, why is it that organizational behaviour textbooks are usually written as if organizations can be carved up in neat analytic divisions?

This is a question that seems to lie at the basis of the second edition of Organizing and Organizations. Instead of giving into the hopelessly outdated orthodoxy of the common organizational behaviour text, Organizing and Organizations attempts to present some of the intertwined complexities involved in organizational life. It then uses a cache of some of the most recent research in organization behaviour and organization studies to make sense of this complexity. This is a notable reversal from the common approach to textbooks, which usually begins with the theoretical tools, and then goes in search of issues within organizations to which these tools can be applied. The issues to which established theoretical tools are applied are usually rather artificial examples to prove the wisdom of the theories contained therein. They rarely aim to present the messy nature of organizational life with which organizational actors are faced.

Organizing and Organizations begins with the new orthodoxy among many researchers of organization today – that we should not look at an organization as a stable object, but understand organizations as a social process. The authors suggest that we should fix our attention on the process of organizing, rather than the object organization. In order to understand this complex and intertwined process of organizing, they examine a series of 19 issues that are commonly encountered in the process of organizing today. These chapters deal with issues including entering and leaving, rules, making deals, morals, greening, dealing with problems, learning, machines, leading and following, and judging others. A series of interesting and important issues encountered in this text, which are sorely lacking in other organizational behaviour texts, include feelings, sex, joking, “us and them”, diversity and difference, careers, consumption, working and living, and uncertainty in organizations. Each of these chapters can be read in any particular order, with the introduction and conclusion serving as the hub to the whole book. The complex links between each of the chapters are highlighted by cross‐references, and common theoretical tools are used to understand the differing issues in each chapter. A comprehensive “thesaurus” of the theoretical terms used throughout the text is included at the back of the book. Just like the organizational world that Organizing and Organizations examines, this book is a complex, intertwining process rather than a single, linear thing.

Organizing and Organizations is a refreshing change from the organizational behaviour texts commonly used, which amount to little more than a report on what North American behaviour scientists have learned from the reactions of a managerial élite in large North American corporations. What we have here are issues that cross a broader range of levels of the organization, and examine a more specifically UK or European context. Throughout the text we find a keen flavour of the impact that sweeping changes in organizations have had not just for top managers, but for many organizational actors from the call centre functionary to the police officer to the nurse. Engaging with Organizing and Organizations from the Asia‐Pacific, however, throws a slightly different light on the text. Although the issues dealt with present a significant insight into how organizing takes place in a (post)modern world, the text still falls prey to that most widespread of academic sins – Eurocentricism. Although Organizing and Organizations spoke about experiences of organizations shared by many of those who work in broadly modern organizations, wherever they may be in the world, it does not capture many of the significant issues that are faced in specific localities. To use the strictly Australian perspective as an example, this text does not deal with issues of indigenous ways of organizing (something quite different from diversity), social processes in family business, and small business. It would also be possible to advance the argument that many of the key issues dealt with here work very differently in a context outside the UK or Europe. If we take emotions, for instance, we could see quite clearly that differing cultural contexts would have very different experiences and regulation of emotions within the workplace. To be sure, Organizing and Organizations is not irrelevant beyond the European context – it does open up important issues in modern organizations. The answers given, however, may not reflect the experience in Melbourne, Calcutta, or São Paulo. This is a vital fact on which both teachers and students should reflect, given the international audience of organizational behaviour texts.

The key strengths of Organizing and Organizations – its complex and overlapping nature – are also one of its key weaknesses. In approaching each issue and highlighting the many other issues intertwined, the text may distract the reader from developing an understanding of the core theoretical concepts it is trying to communicate. This line between developing a mastery of the core theory and developing an understanding that organizations are complex and that many issues cut across our theoretical toolbox is tough to tread. It is a large risk to take in providing the reader with little more than a very superficial understanding of the core theoretical concepts. Also text does not succeed in explaining the significant tradition of scholarship that underpins each of the theoretical tools a reader is asked to use. It could be argued that the lineage of these theoretical tools is of no consequence to the practice of applying theoretical tools to complex situations within an organization. However, to be able to understand how and why one knows and may use a particular theoretical approach, it is vital to develop at least some understanding of the significant debates that lie behind each theory. By understanding at least the basics of these debates a reader is invited to understand why a theory is so, how other researchers have seen it, and see that it is possible to challenge these theories. The extensive and well‐crafted thesaurus towards the end of the book partially redresses this issue by providing an overview of a concept and key references, but it inevitably suffers the fate of being a marginal aspect of the core text.

Organizing and Organizations is an engaging, novel and interesting text. It brings into textbook form many of the lessons of contemporary organization studies and organization behaviour research. The text also highlights the important lesson that to understand organizational behaviour is not just to understand it from the perspective of managerial élites. Finally Organizing and Organizations treads a difficult line between highlighting the complexities and interconnections of contemporary organizational issues and the theoretical tools we can use to make sense of this world.