From modern to postmodern organizational analysis

Organization Studies, Fall, 1995 by Robert Chia

`A work can become modern only if it is first postmodern. Thus understood, postmodernism is not modernism at its end, but in a nascent state, and this state is recurrent.' (J. F. Lyotard: The Postmodern Explained)

The terms `modern' and `postmodern' have become common currency in intellectual debates within organization studies. The postmodern is variously interpreted as an `epoch', a `perspective', or a new `paradigm' of thought. In this paper the author argues that what distinguishes the postmodern from the modern is a 'style of thinking' which eschews the uncritical use of common organizational terms such as `organizations', 'individuals', `environment', `structure', and 'culture', etc. These terms refer to the existence of social entities and attributes within a modernist problematic. This is because a modernist thought style relies on a `strong' ontology (the study of the nature and essence of things) of being which privileges thinking in terms of discrete phenomenal states', static 'attributes' and sequential `events'. Postmodern thinking, on the other hand, privileges a `weak' ontology of becoming which emphasizes a transient, ephemeral and emergent reality. From this thought style, reality is deemed to be continuously in flux and transformation and hence unrepresentable in any static sense. Debates about modernism and postmodernism which do not address this ontological distinction miss critical insights which postmodernism brings to the study of organization. Adopting a postmodern mode of thinking implies radical consequences for rethinking organization studies. Instead of the traditional emphasis on organizations, organizational forms and organizational attributes, what is accentuated is the importance of examining local assemblages of `organizings' which collectively make up social reality. A postmodern style of thought, therefore, brings with it a different set of ontological commitments, intellectual priorities and theoretical preoccupations to bear on the study of organization.

Descriptors: ontology of being, thought style, fallacy of misplaced concreteness, heterogeneous engineering, micro-logics of organizing

Introduction

Two contrasting yet interdependent styles of thinking are discernible in contemporary theorizing within the human sciences. These have been called `modern' and `postmodern' (Cooper and Burrell 1988), `strong' and `weak' (Vattimo 1988), `downstream' and `upstream' (Latour 1987), `systematic' and `edifying' (Rorty 1980), 'representational' and `anti-representational' (Rorty 1991) and `representing' and 'intervening' (Hacking 1983). These attempted distinctions allude to a straining towards an, as yet, inadequately elaborated cognitive style and discursive logic that can better express and elaborate the complex, paradoxical and ephemeral aspects of the human condition which has been denied legitimacy within the dominant codes of expression that continue to circumscribe contemporary social scientific thought. Although the modern and postmodern can only be expressed through the hegemony of modernist discourse, their ontological commitments, intellectual priorities and theoretical preoccupations should not be mistakenly conflated. In this regard, it is more fruitful to conceive of the modern and postmodern not in traditional oppositional terms but rather in terms of a logic of supplementarity (Derrida 1976) whereby the presence of the Other is implicitly recognized as the very condition for the articulation of the One. The postmodern, therefore, is articulatable only through the modern. Yet the modern can only be defined and given expression as a fleeting moment of the postmodern.

Thus understood, the `post' of postmodernism instantiates a procedure of analysis that elaborates an 'initial forgetting' in modernism (Lyotard 1992: 80). In other words, the postmodern is the modern in a nascent state. It is not located nor locatable through the framing of a simple succession of historical periodizations, since this latter idea is itself a pivotal feature of modernist discourse. Rather, modernism is better construed as a consequence or outcome of the systematic suppression and consequent `forgetting' of its other term (i.e. the postmodern) through the cumulative effects of more than three centuries of privileging a dualistic mode of thought.

Although the modern and the postmodern are clearly inextricably intertwined, it is nevertheless possible to accentuate their contrasting cognitive styles', intellectual priorities and theoretical foci and thereby to articulate their implications for organizational analysis. In this regard, a postmodern style of thinking (as opposed to the more prevalent modernist style of thought) generates its own problematic for organizational studies; one that accentuates the significance, ontological priority and analysis of the micro-logics of social organizing practices over and above their stabilized 'effects' such as 'individuals', `organizations' and `society'.

Within organization studies and the broader human sciences, the modern and postmodern have been variously interpreted as signifying different 'cultural conditions' (Lyotard 1984; Hassan 1987; Lash 1990), 'historical periodizations' (Bauman 1988; Harvey 1989; Clegg 1990; Gergen 1992), 'theoretical perspectives' (Grint 1991; Parker 1992) and `epistemological priorities' (Rorty 1980, 1991; Margolis 1989; Cooper and Buffell 1988, 1989). In this paper I argue that what distinguishes the modern from the postmodern is best understood as differences in styles of thinking, each with its own set of ontological commitments, intellectual priorities and theoretical preoccupations. The consequences of a postmodern mode of thought for organizational analysis are then explored in some detail.