From interpretation to representation in organizational analysis: postmodernism, ethnography and organizational symbolism

Organization Studies, Spring, 1994 by Paul Jeffcutt

(see Jeffcutt, 1993b, 1994).

Accordingly, throughout this paper, I have sought to argue that such 'canonized' hyper-modern positions in Organization Studies (exemplified by the heroic and romantic narratives of the organizational culture and symbolism literature) are indeed 'dominant but dead' (Smircich and Calas 1987). Moreover, I have also sought to indicate how (through the articulations of the 'carnivalesque') these oppressive hierarchies in both the theory and practice of organization are being interrogated and actively overturned. Yet, as organizational analysis turns away from commodifying elite heroics (within both academic and managerial work) and becomes concerned with exploring and representing the extraordinary qualities of Introduction

Fundamental transformations are taking place in organizational analysis due to the tensions between modern and postmodern approaches to knowledge. The primary objective of this paper is not to give a further account of these reorientations, but to offer a supplement to a number of papers that present admirable commentaries on this process in respect of the interpretive Social Sciences (Clifford and Marcus 1986; Marcus and Fischer 1986; Featherstone 1988; Clifford 1989; Harvey 1989; Rosaldo 1989; Spencer 1989; Lash 1990) and in the context of Organization Studies (Cooper 1986, 1989, 1992; Smircich and Calas 1987; Burrell 1988; Cooper and Burrell 1988; Arrington and Francis 1989; Linstead and Grafton-Small 1989, 1990a,b, 1992; Travers 1989; Daudi 1990; Power 1990; Jeffcutt 1991, 1993a,b, 1994; Gergen 1992; Parker 1992; Hassard and Parker 1993). The paper is thus primarily concerned with situating the tensions between modernism and postmodernism in terms of the understanding of significant problems within a particular arena of organizational analysis. The focus of this paper, organizational culture and symbolism, has been the site of considerable interest and debate in Organization Studies over the past decade, as well as having been the primary location of my own research activity (see Jeffcutt 1983a, 1986, 1988, 1989, 1990a,b). The argument developed throughout the paper is that the understanding of significant problems in this arena exposes fundamental tensions between the problematics of interpretation and the problematics of representation in organizational analysis (see also Jeffcutt 1991, 1993a,b, 1994).

Interpretation and Organizational Analysis

By way of introduction, it is first appropriate to briefly situate organizational culture and symbolism as a historical and philosophical episode in Organization Studies (i.e. the theory and practice of organization). Over the past decade in particular, there have been a considerable number of texts that have sought to legitimate this putative 'field' of organizational analysis (see Alvesson and Berg 1992, amongst many others). To this end, a common strategy has been to present accounts of the conditions of the fields' emergence and popularization, linked to reverse extrapolations to antecedent theorizing (e.g. Smircich 1983; Ouchi and Wilkins 1985). A recurrent theme in these numerous accounts is the significant conjunction of conceptual reorientations in the Social Sciences (symptomized by tension between the interpretative strategies of Structural-Functionalism and Interpretivism, see Morgan et al. 1983; Turner 1990) and the transformations of late or disorganized capitalism (symptomized by non-western economic and political assertions that questioned the pre-eminence of western industrial societies, see Alvesson 1987; Clegg 1990). Hence, we have the distinctive conjunction of fragmentation and incoherence; here characterizing both the theoretical and empirical base of Organization Studies, as well as the texts of the emergent 'field' of organizational culture and symbolism that have been attempting to give order to this apparent chaos. This particular paradox would appear to both embody and underlie the rapid development through the 1980s of this focus of activity in Organization Studies. As we shall observe, this emerging work has manifested a proliferation of multidisciplinary activity, whereby novel perspectives from arenas formerly remote from Organization Studies have become imported and re-described in the management of multicultural problems. However, this search to give order to theoretical and empirical disorders appears instead to have resulted in the production of a variety of inconsistent and contradictory narratives, with which we shall now be concerned.

These tensions between order and disorder in Organization Studies are most pertinent to the succession of accounts evolving over the past decade that have sought to map and review the treatment of the concepts of culture and symbolism in organizational analysis. Here, as we shall observe, the developing 'field' of organizational culture and symbolism has typically been stratified in terms of differentiations between interpretative strategies (e.g. Smircich 1983; Allaire and Firsirotu 1984; Sypher et al. 1985; Smircich and Calas 1987). Such accounts have become characterized by, on the one hand, the generation of a dense and at times seemingly trackless forest of attributions and citations from across the 'human sciences' (Marcus and Fischer 1986) and, on the other hand, by the elaboration of differentiations of the 'field' that have been exposed as contradictory, incompatible and inconsistent (see Smircich and Calas 1987; Jeffcutt 1989, 1994 for detailed and definitive expositions). The resultant methodological unorthodoxy and theoretical iregularity with which the 'field' has become identified (the so-called 'organization culture chaos', see Turner 1986, 1990), needs not only to be perceived as interesting (i.e. endearing as well as exasperating), but also as philosophically significant. In my view, the complex issues and debates that have structured and delineated this putative 'field' should be approached as articulations that expose the problematics of interpretation in organizational analysis. Accordingly, following Jeffcutt (1989, 1990a,b,), interpretative tensions as expressed in the organizational culture and symbolism literature can be summarized in terms of debates surrounding the following three interlinked themes: