Images of Organization. - book reviews

Whole Earth Review, Winter, 1991 by Dave Williams

Organization is the core collective human technology. People working together hove been the bedrock of human existence ever since a group was first recognized as such by its members.

As the groups got bigger and took on new identities and forms, such as global multinationals, the drive to understand them and moke them work better has been just as forceful as the parallel drive to understand and control the physical world through technology The difference is that people - the row material of organizations - change for more slowly and ore for less predictable than the technologies they use in their work.

This book explores the range of metaphors and models we use to understand and change the way people interact. It's also an insightful tour through the changing intellectual climate of the twentieth century.

The basic premise on which [this] book builds is that our theories and explanations of organizational life are based on metaphors that lead us to see and understand organizations in distinctive yet partial ways. Metaphor is often just regarded as a device for embellishing discourse, but its significance is much greater than this. For the use of metaphor implies a way of thinking and o way of seeing that pervade how we understand our world generally. For example, research in a wide variety of fields has demonstrated that metaphor exerts a formative influence on science, on our language and on how we think, as well as on how we express ourselves on a day-to-day basis.

We use metaphor whenever we attempt to understand one element of experience in terms of another. Thus, metaphor proceeds through implicit or explicit assertions that A is (or is like) B. When we say "the man is a lion," we use the image of a lion to draw attention to the lionlike aspects of the man. The metaphor frames our understanding of the mon in a distinctive yet partial way.

One of the interesting aspects of metaphor rests in the fact that it always produces this kind of one-sided insight. In highlighting certain interpretations it tends to force others into a background role. Thus in drawing attention to the lionlike bravery, strength, or ferocity of the man, the metaphor glosses the fact that the same person may well also be a chauvinist pig, a devil, a saint, a bore, or a recluse. Our ability to achieve a comprehensive "reading" of the man depends on on ability to see how these different aspects of the person may coexist in a complementary or even a paradoxical way.

It is easy to see how this kind of thinking has relevance for understanding organization and management. For organizations are complex and paradoxical phenomena that can be understood in many different ways. Many of our taken-for-granted ideas about organizations are metaphorical, even though we may not recognize them as such. For example, we frequently talk about organizations as if they were machines designed to achieve predetermined goals and objectives, and which should operate smoothly and efficiently. And as a result of this kind of thinking we often attempt to organize and manage them in a mechanistic way, forcing their human qualities into a background role.

By using different metaphors to understand the complex and paradoxical character of organizational life, we are able to manage and design organizations in ways that we may not have thought possible before. The following chapters illustrate how this can be done by exploring the implications of different metaphors for thinking about the nature of organization. While some of the metaphors top familiar ways of thinking, others develop insights and perspectives that will be rather new.

Thus Chapter 2 examines the image of organizations as machines and illustrates how this style of thought underpins the development of bureaucratic organization. When managers think of organizations as machines they tend to manage and design them as machines made up of interlocking parts that each play a clearly defined role in the functioning of the whole. While at some times this con prove highly effective, at others it can have many unfortunate results. One of the most basic problems of modern management is that the mechanical way of thinking is so ingrained in our everyday conceptions of organization that it is often very difficult to organize in any other way. In demonstrating this, the chapter helps us to become more open to other ways of thinking.

Images of Organization Gareth Morgan, 1986; 432 pp.

$19.95 ($21.45 postpaid) from Sage Publications, P.0. Box 5084, Newbury Park, CA 91359; 805/499-0721 (or Whole Earth Access)