Power Plays: Critical Events in the Institutionalization of the Tennessee Valley Authority - Review

Administrative Science Quarterly,  June, 1999  by P. Devereaux Jennings

Tags: Tennessee Valley Authority

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Richard A. Colignon, Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1997. 367 pp. $24.95.

Timely books are often those that find something new in something old and thoroughly studied. Dozens of authors have written about the history and politics of the TVA, but few have used the establishment of the TVA to gain insights into current issues in organization theory. In Power Plays, Colignon examines the creation of the TVA to illustrate how power theory, with a "narrative, events approach" from history, can address critical problems in neoinstitutional theory, such as change, agency, conflict, and evolution. As Colignon himself states, "the thesis of this book is that interests, agency, conflict and domination define an inherent - but neglected - route to institutionalization" (p. 43).

The theoretical blueprint for his approach is found in chapter 2, "Tennessee Valley Authority as a Contingent Event." Colignon argues that the researcher must move back and forth between institutional logics and competing sequences of events as well as back and forth between strategic action and meaningful interpretation of outcomes (p. 40). This dual dialectic requires, on the one hand, the description of logics and ideologies at the level of the organizational field and, on the other, the identification of competing sequences of events for the outcome in question. Then the researcher must move in from these two extremes and examine how interest and action in the field are shaped by logics and ideologies and how the material or "instrumental" expression of this action works through networks of collective action, in which individuals and groups exercise their interpretation and choice and leadership.

The next eight chapters deliver on this blueprint. Chapters 3 and 4 set forth the institutional logics, ideologies, and interests that precede and culminate in the 1933 TVA Act, a critical event. Chapters 5 and 6 detail conflicts among different national, regional, and local interest groups - and among the board members themselves - as they were expressed through the creation of the TVA, the TVA board's operations, and the gradual formation of the TVA's mandate relative to the utility industry. Chapters 7 and 8 examine the transformation of these conflicts during two new, contingent events: attempts at "power pooling" by the TVA with regional utilities and attempts to redefine the TVA with the 1937 Judiciary Act. Chapter 9 presents the final moments leading to the institutionalization of the TVA: the departure of TVA chairman Morgan and the sale of C&S Company utilities to the TVA. After that, the TVA became consolidated as a local monopoly, autonomous from direct control by departments in Washington but relying on a decentralized administration and local "grassroots" input, characteristics so lauded by Selznick (1966: 5).

In chapter 10, Colignon exits from his historical analysis and offers some final reflection on neoinstitutional theory and the TVA. He argues that his work "extends" neoinstitutional approaches to organization by reconnecting them to political sociology at several points: Power Plays introduces contradictions into institutional logics and ideologies; it expands the role of interest, agency, and strategic action; and it considers the contingent, not path-dependent, nature of events prior to institutionalization. The contradictions and conflicts themselves are generalizable to the era and to many other industries, even though the TVA represents an unduplicated organizational experiment.

Power Plays' contributions to organization theory and its empirical base are important, if a bit less singular than sometimes indicated. Like Dobbin's (1994) historical analysis of forging industrial policy in the railroad industry, Power Plays convincingly connects institutional logics to ideologies to interest to agency to action to event, particularly in chapters 3-6. Like Allison's (1971) and Selznick's (1966) works on bureaucracy, Power Plays does a fine job of showing the effects of politics at different levels of analysis on the construction and operation of particular organizations. The author is especially concerned with the struggle for ideological domination between public and private ownership interests, although less concerned with issues that have motivated many other studies - the maintenance of democracy and avoidance of the "iron law of oligarchy." Finally Power Plays reaffirms the historical portraits of the TVA painted by others (e.g., McCraw, 1971): contrary to Selznick's (1966) belief, the TVA was much more about electrical power than about farming and, contrary to the views of a few historians, more about large-scale policy debates than battles between individuals like Morgan and Lilienthal.

My only disappointments with Power Plays are based on issues unique to those working in the intersection between power and neoinstitutional theory. Many in this subfield have struggled to see where political theory ends and neoinstitutional theory begins, often pitting each explanation against the other in longitudinal studies of practices or forms or symbols to find out (e.g., Fligstein, 1990). Power Plays only highlights the intersection and utility of both, drawing freely on concepts from each, but does not convincingly discriminate between them. Furthermore, in recent work, researchers from diverse backgrounds have theorized about and presented data on the role of the individual as an actor in regionally bounded organizational fields, sometimes as interpreter and sometimes as creator of new forms and actions (e.g., DiMaggio, 1988; Christensen et al., 1997). Power Plays has little to say about the local communities and many individual members of the TVA, apart from its prescribed leaders, and not much to say about "meaning" or "value," apart from logic and ideology. Finally, in the last few years there has been at least as much interest in the deinstitutionalization or recomposition of organizational fields as in their creation (Oliver, 1992; Greenwood and Hinings, 1996). Power Plays offers little in the way of postscript on the TVA. It basically says that the TVA has been a political lightning rod since 1945 but has continued to exist (p. 278).